The Dictator's Dotage
LENZNER, STEVE
The Dictator's Dotage Vargas Llosa's novel about the conspiracy against General Trujillo. BY STEVE LENZNER Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat portrays in stark terms the thirty-one-year...
...Urania's story is connected to the two other plotlines only insofar as the traumatic event she wrestles with occurred in the months in which they are set...
...Long forced to keep away from Peru, he returned to run for president in 1990, promising to bring capitalist and democratic reforms to a country torn by struggles between the army and the Marxist Shining Path...
...Indeed, Vargas Llosa's own portrait of Trujillo undermines his thesis, for by far the most heinous act in the novel—and in Tru-jillo's rule—occurred not at the end of his career, but near the beginning...
...If it were not for the feckless-ness of a general at the moment of execution, it would have had (in Machiavelli's terms) a "happy" end for the conspirators, most of whom suffered painful deaths in the turmoil that followed immediately upon Trujil-lo's assassination...
...The second takes up Trujillo and his inner circle...
...But it does point to some of the novel's conceptual shortcomings...
...The Feast of the Goat opens in 1996, with Urania returning to Santo Domingo for the first time since 1961, determined at last to confront her Steve Lenzner is a research fellow at the New Citizenship Project in Washington, D.C...
...Vargas Llosa allows us to understand why he was the man who in the years to follow brought a measure of stability and moderation to the Dominican Republic...
...They become monsters because they accumulated such power that it transformed them into monsters...
...Trujillo, or Hitler or Stalin or Mao—dictators are human beings...
...The handful of white survivors would be serving the blacks...
...As for the third story, the anti-Trujillo conspiracy, it would be comic if it were not so grim...
...Yet in Vargas Llosa's rendering, the conspiracy against Trujillo was formed over years and extended to an indefinite number of people inside and outside the government, including the CIA...
...If I hadn't, the Dominican Republic would not exist today...
...For the sake of this country, I have stained these with blood," emphasizing each syllable...
...As an observation of political things, this is not promising...
...Though defeated, he did surprisingly well and introduced into South American politics for the first time an intellectual counterweight to the cycles of military dictatorship and radical revolution...
...In choosing to turn his story in this direction, Vargas Llosa blurs the question of the effect Trujillo's rule had on his subjects at large—and thus does not permit the raising of the troubling question of the relation between tyranny and progress that might have made the novel a powerful political study...
...In 1937 Trujillo cemented his rule by slaughtering thousands of Haitians...
...Vargas Llosa describes Trujillo reflecting on this deed a quarter-century later: Hieratic and theatrical, the Generalissimo raised his hands and showed them to his guests...
...Balaguer served Trujillo for thirty years, consistently giving him prudent advice in a spirit of benevolent diffidence: "Unlike the other men in his intimate group, whose appetites [Trujillo] could read like an open book in their behavior, their initiatives and their flattery, Joaquin Balaguer always gave the impression of aspiring only to what he wished to give him...
...Instead, Vargas Llosa focuses chiefly on the manner in which Trujillo enjoyed preying upon the insecurities of the yes-men with whom he surrounded himself...
...Machiavelli taught that for a conspiracy to be successful "it should never be communicated unless necessary...
...There were tens of thousands of them, and they were everywhere...
...In alternating chapters, the novel presents three stories...
...The first is the story of Urania, the daughter of a leading Trujillista, and her long struggle to come to grips with an unspeakable act of betrayal she suffered in the days leading up to Tru-jillo's assassination in 1961...
...One sees less a monster than the petty soul of a once-vibrant tyrant in his dotage...
...But I wanted very much to show this transformation of the human being to monster...
...The central story, Vargas Llosa's account of Trujillo's rule and its excesses, is graced by a brilliantly rendered portrait of his chief counselor, Joaquín Balaguer...
...By appearing content to remain in a low place, Balaguer rose to a high one...
...In a recent interview in the New York Times Sunday magazine, Vargas Llosa said of The Feast of the Goat, "I didn't want to present Trujillo as a monster—I think this is false...
...At the outset, all we know is that those demons are somehow connected to her father—and to the Trujillo regime, which she has spent her adult life obsessively trying to understand...
...It is a chilling if somewhat misleading picture of tyrannical decadence exacerbated by physical and mental decline...
...BY STEVE LENZNER Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat portrays in stark terms the thirty-one-year reign over the Dominican Republic by General Rafael Trujillo, the man known as the Goat...
...demons...
...Unfortunately, this massacre is merely a footnote to the story told in The Feast of the Goat...
...The third story revolves around the chief conspirators responsible for Trujillo's assassination...
...After some journeyman work earlier in his career, he produced a pair of novels—Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter in 1977 and The War of the End of the World in 1981—that were astonishingly fresh and powerful, placing him in the first rank of the Latin American writers who were, in those years, taking the world by storm...
...Born in 1936, Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru's most distinguished novelist...
...The reader should not be deceived by the promise on the dust jacket that the novel depicts "a Machiavellian revolution...
...The entire island would be Haiti, as it was in 1840...
...To keep the blacks from colonizing us again...
...To the extent The Feast of the Goat has a hero, he is it...
...Balaguer was nominally president of the Dominican Republic, and as the novel proceeds, he emerges as a man of genuine—if somewhat Machiavellian—virtue...
...Mario Vargas Llosa remains an important writer, but The Feast of the Goat is a minor entry in his bibliography...
...That was my most difficult decision in thirty years of government...
...When you add in the unattractive-ness of the character of Urania—a woman trying to understand the conditions that led to her unhappiness without trying to overcome them—the result is a very uneven book...
Vol. 7 • December 2001 • No. 14
