Antonio de la Maza recalls how his brother, a loyal Trujillista, was murdered and defamed by the regime. Amadito, one of Trujillo’s bodyguards, remembers how he was denied permission to marry the woman he loves and forced to execute her brother, a Communist. In turn, they remember the events that lead them to kill the dictator. The third narrative follows four assassins on the night of May 30th as they wait for Trujillo on a sea-side road. Lunchtime is the most graphic chapter, as Trujillo gives a speech recalling his massacre of Haitian immigrants in 1937, congratulating himself for what he sees as saving the Dominican Republic. The novel also reveals his struggles with another enemy: his bladder, which he has lost control over. He dismisses warnings about a potential conspiracy, but the memories of the girl keep intruding on his thought. As the day progresses, Trujillo meets with several of his closest lieutenants.

Trujillo worries about a conflict between the dictatorship and the Catholic Church, the sanctions imposed by the OAS after his failed attempt to assassinate the President of Venezuela, and above all, a memory of a skinny girl who the novel hints he slept with. While the novel depicts his strict daily routine, it also gives the reader access to the dictator’s thoughts. Simultaneously, the novel follows Trujillo’s actions on the fateful day of his assassination. Along with her own past, Urania remembers some of the violence of the Trujillo regime, such as the rapes committed by Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator’s son.

In the meantime, she has harbored a deep anger towards her father and a deep-seated but unnamed trauma that has prevented her from having relationships with men. Through Urania’s one-sided dialogue with him, the novel reveals bits of her past we find out that she fled the country in 1961, the year of Trujillo’s assassination, and that she has not been in contact with any members of her family since. Without knowing why, she goes to visit her father whom she has not seen in 35 years and is now in advanced states of cognitive decay, unable to speak or feed himself. A successful lawyer, she is still haunted by memories of her childhood under the Trujillo Era and spends most of her free time reading about the history of the time period. In 1996 Urania Cabral, daughter of Agustin Cabral, high-ranking Trujillista, returns to the Dominican Republic. Here, the individual stories are summarized, but the novel alternates between telling a chapter of each. Three separate stories make up its narrative. The Feast of the Goat uses this historical event to create a subjective history of the horrors of Trujillo’s regime through the perspectives of both its victims and the dictator itself. On May 30th, 1961, Rafeal Leonidas Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, was shot after 31 years of rule characterized by violence and oppression.

The feast of the goat