Mario Vargas Llosa
La Festa del Caprone

THE REVIEW

The Dominican Republic, a Caribbean paradise favored by Italian vacationers, in its recent history, like much of Latin America, experienced a period of military dictatorship. Between 1930 and 1961, the country was completely at the mercy of the grand generalissimo Rafael Léonidas Trujillo.

Mario Vargas Llosa, in just under 500 pages, reconstructs, in his own way, the assassination in which el Chivo (the Goat) loses his life and, through numerous flashbacks and using the personal story of the novel's protagonist, rebuilds the police state and the oppressive political climate established by Trujillo during the thirty years of his absolute rule. Santo Domingo, at the time Ciudad Trujillo, sold out and corrupted its best men and allowed the rape of its young virgins to appease the sexual frustration of the Chivo. Like all dictatorships, the Dominican one was dominated by corruption and absolute power, but its main characteristic was its ability to concentrate all aspects of life, from the economy to media, in the dominant figure of Trujillo. A figure who used sex as a tool of subjugation: not just for pleasure, but as a means to humiliate and test his collaborators. Allowing one's woman, wife, sister, or daughter to the Father of the Nation was, for every Dominican, a source of pride.

The entire novel focuses on three different points of the same story: Urania Cabral, a career woman working at the World Bank, who left Ciudad Trujillo when she was still a teenager, and returns to Santo Domingo under the pretense of visiting her now gravely ill, immobile, and speechless father. Urania is an accomplished woman, and the hatred she harbors towards her country and her father, who, unconditionally submissive to Trujillo, will be dethroned from his position as President of the Senate not before proving his loyalty to the grand generalissimo, gives the journey the connotation of a settling of accounts with the past and her memories, until the last chapter of the book, when Urania's attitude is finally understood. 

Apart from Urania's recollections, Vargas Llosa dedicates part of his novel to reconstructing the daily life of the dictator Trujillo, humanizing him through memories, habits, obsessions, weaknesses, and illness at the time when everything is about to collapse on him; but the author also follows the thoughts, projects, hopes, and fears of the material authors of the attempt on the dictator's life (the killing of Trujillo, in fact, is the result of a conspiracy by the Dominican hierarchy), Antonio Imbert, Antonio de La Maza, Pedro Livio, Huáscar Tejeda, Estrella Sadhalá, Salvador, and Amadito, from the motivations that drove these men to murder to the unbearable torture following the attempted assassination on May 30, 1961. The military leaders who, after the dictator's death, were supposed to form the junta and democratize the country, indeed, take a step back and, to erase traces of their participation in the conspiracy, initiate a period of persecution that leads to terrible torture and, finally, the murder of those involved in the plot.