The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat

Mario Vargas Llosa

It took several days and some hundred odd pages, for me to reach where the Caribbean crashed on the reefs. Once there, I couldn't leave. I time travelled to thirty five years back, and lingered around Ciudad Trujillo, Santo Domingo, San Christobal, around the mahagony and palm trees and along the the Malecon. Urania Cabral pulled me back to the present, time and again.

The day the Goat- the Chief, the Generalissimo, the Benefactor , the Father of the New Nation, His Excellency - Dr. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina was assassinated, I watched him walking along the beach, with his entourage walking behind at a respectable distance, waiting to be called for the honour of walking with him. I could see his piercing gaze that could unsettle anyone who came face to face. Yet, the ugliest and pathetic picture of the erstwhile dictator was revealed by Urania, only towards the end.

The story unfolds through the minds of the Chief and his assassins on that fateful day of May 1961. The Chief took a break, twice or thrice in a week from hectic political business to be recharged being in the company of young girls. They managed to shoot and kill him on his way to the rendezvous, the Mahagony House. Only two of the conspirators survived to see the country being led from chaos towards democracy by the President of the nation, Dr. Joaquin Balaguer.

The Feast of the Goat, woven with history, and imagination, present and past, produced an amazing design, that only a master weaver can create.

Preetha Raj

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