71 pages • 2-hour read
The Feast of the Goat
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Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
A bell rings downstairs; Urania’s cousin Lucinda has arrived, in disbelief that Urania has returned. Lucindita was “the enthusiastic one, the inventive and playful one. The cousin she always liked best”; she is now “a stout matron, her face taut and smooth with no sign of a facelift, wearing a simple flowered dress. Her only adornment is a pair of long, flashing gold earrings” (145). Lucinda tells Urania how good Urania looks, saying it must be because Urania never married.
Urania explains that “the foolishness of youth” kept her away (146); she lies and says that she wanted to surprise her cousin, which is why she didn’t inform her of her visit. The family has followed her career from afar, and Urania “detects an acid note” of jealousy in her cousin’s stated happiness for Urania’s success (146). Lucinda tells Urania that she understands why she left but doesn’t understands why Urania left as though running away, a statement that Urania ignores.
Lucinda discusses the aftermath of Trujillo’s assassination. She shares the rumor that Agustín sent Urania away because he knew bad things were about to happen; Urania goes along with it. Lucinda had begged her own father to send her to the United States as well, but that fell through after the assassination—“Nobody remembered that at the end Trujillo treated [Agustín] like a dog” (149). The Cabral family paid for it, including Lucinda’s father, who lost his job at the Tobacco Company and never found another, solely because of his relation to Agustín. Agustín also never recovered, although Urania continued to support financially him from afar.
The nurse arrives to help Agustín go to the bathroom, so Lucinda and Urania continue their conversation downstairs. Urania tells Lucinda that she doesn’t believe her father recognizes her, and Lucinda disagrees, arguing that Agustín understands everything even though he can’t speak to anyone. Urania expects a “string of reproaches” (150), but none come.
Lucinda asks why Urania never married; she herself married, but her husband left her with two daughters, and she believes Urania made the right decision by staying single. She suspects Urania has affairs, and when Urania blushes, she takes this as confirmation, which forces Urania into a lie about an older, married man. Privately, Urania thinks about her real life in the United States: earlier years filled with studying and forced socializing, and later years at Harvard with no social life whatsoever. She only found excitement in studying, which “was not only therapy but a joy, the most glorious of diversions” (153).
Urania asks if her father had been jailed by Abbes following the assassination. Lucinda affirms that he was, but says that she doesn’t know the details of Agustín’s experience. She knows only that he was hurt that anyone could think he’d betray Trujillo. Urania mockingly calls him Trujillo’s most loyal servant: “For a man capable of committing monstrous crimes for Trujillo to be suspected of complicity with his assassins—that really was an injustice!” (155). Lucinda seems astonished that Urania would suggest that her father behaved monstrously, arguing that Agustín served Trujillo in good faith. Urania replies that serving Trujillo as a true believer, not out of self-interest, made Agustín even worse.
The nurse reappears and begins to prepare Agustín’s lunch. She asks if she should prepare something for the two of them, as well, but Urania says she’s going to return to the hotel to shower and change. Lucinda invites her over for dinner, then leaves to prepare lunch for her own mother, Aunt Adelina. After Lucinda leaves, Urania returns to her father’s bedroom, considering her relationships with men after leaving the Dominican Republic. She feels cold—“an iceberg” (159), as one man told her—but she believes she only acts cold toward men who show romantic interest in her.
Urania tells her father she would have liked for them to talk about love, women, and sex. She says she never noticed whether her father had affairs after her mother died, and she asks if power satisfied him so much that he didn’t need sex, as happened with others, such as President Balaguer. Tired, she lays down on the bed and falls asleep.
Chapter 11 Summary
Trujillo attends a luncheon in honor of Simon Gittleman, the American Marine who trained Trujillo and remains his most ardent American supporter. Simon asks Trujillo which of the steps he took “to make this country great […] was the most difficult?” (163). Trujillo responds that ridding the Dominican Republic of Haitians was the most difficult, but that if he “hadn’t, the Dominican Republic would not exist today” (163).
In 1937, Trujillo ordered Chirinos and Agustín Cabral to assess the situation on the border, where they had observed thousands of Haitians working for food rather than wages, displacing Dominican workers. They claimed that plantation owners showed no willingness to change as they benefited from cheaper labor. Trujillo’s government made further claims of cultural displacement and argued that the Dominican Republic had lost its way of life along the border. “We have lost our language there, our religion, our race. It now forms part of Haitian barbarism” (165).
Trujillo tells Simon that he wanted proof, so he traveled the border himself. As he describes his trip along the border, he references earlier conflicts with Haiti and claims he worried what would happen if he allowed Haitians to remain. After this trip, he ordered the military to “exterminate without mercy every person of Haitian nationality who is in Dominican territory illegally, except for those on the sugar plantations” (167). He tells his guests that his hands “never trembled […] because [he] gave the order to kill only when it was absolutely necessary for the good of the country” (168). Simon asks where Agustín is. After a long, awkward silence, Trujillo responds calmly but coldly that Agustín “is alive, but as far as this regime is concerned, he has ceased to exist” (170).
The conversation turns to the recently failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Simon claims that it failed because Kennedy decided at the last minute not to provide the same level of support he had promised. Simon then becomes emotional thinking about the possibility that President Kennedy might invade the Dominican Republic, as well. Trujillo believes that Kennedy will not send troops, but if he does, the United States will suffer another defeat. Trujillo says he has no intention of doing anything but dying defending his rule.
Simon asks Trujillo about tensions with the Catholic Church. Trujillo downplays the situation, claiming that everything will be straightened out. Simon insists that it would be prudent to resolve tensions quickly. As Simon continues talking, Trujillo’s mind drifts to his earlier question about Cabral and wonders why Simon would have asked. He grows irritated, but convinces himself that Simon is a true, loyal friend, and wouldn’t have asked in order to irritate him. As his frustration grows, he feels urine leaking out and freezes. Typically, he would rely on Virgilio Álvarez Pina, whose primary function was to “act quickly when one of these acts of incontinence occurred, to spill a glass of water or wine on the Benefactor and then beg a thousand pardons for his clumsiness” (177). This time, the Gittlemans are seated next to him, but when he looks at his pants, he sees that they remain dry, to his immense relief.
Chapter 12 Summary
Turk’s family hails from Lebanon; as he and his co-conspirators wait in the car, Turk feels depressed that he may never visit his family’s homeland. Growing up, he heard stories of his family’s homeland, and “he had dreamed of visiting the mysterious Basquinta that he never found on maps” (179). The Lebanese government expelled Turk’s family for being Catholic, and his ancestors wandered the world until they ended up in the Dominican Republic, where they “became prosperous and respected again in their adopted country” (179).
Turk is the oldest member of the group, but “his strength was still as remarkable as it had been when he was 30 […] The power of his muscles was legendary, and known by all those who had put on gloves to box with him in the ring” (180). Until recently, Turk felt wary about assassinating Trujillo; however, he believes he received a sign from the nuncio, the papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic. During his conversations with his priest, Turk had frequently expressed frustration that the Church sheltered a man like Trujillo, to which his priest offered unconvincing arguments. On January 24, 1960, however, priests read the now-infamous Pastoral Letter in every church in the Republic, denouncing Trujillo and kicking off the current tensions between Trujillo and the Church.
Following the letter, Turk felt once again proud of his Church; he returned to his priest and gave him a long embrace. Following the reprisals, which focused on two foreign priests, Turk began to consider “the need to kill Trujillo” (183). Frustrated, he expressed, to his priest, a desire to assassinate Trujillo. His priest calmed him down, then a week later, got him an audience with the nuncio, Monsignor Zanini. After confessing his plans, he broke down, but the nuncio handed him a book by St. Thomas Aquinas and pointed him to a passage: “God looks with favor upon the physical elimination of the Beast if a people is freed thereby” (185). Turk felt confident that the Church would forgive him if he killed Trujillo.
Trujillo’s car finally appears. The assassins’ Chevrolet Biscayne, imported especially for this task due to its speed, pulls onto the highway to race after Trujillo’s car. As they catch up to Trujillo, they realize they never signaled their companions further up the highway. They begin shooting; when Trujillo’s car comes to a stop, they pull around, get out, and continue shooting at the car. In the crossfire, one of them is wounded. They check in the car and confirm Trujillo is dead. Turk hears someone running from beyond the car and fires without thinking, only afterward realizing that he has hit his own friend and co-conspirator, Pedro Cedeño.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
When Urania moved to the United States, she cut off all contact not only with her father but also with the rest of her family. Naturally, Agustín became the family’s only source of information, never revealing that Urania left because he offered Trujillo her virginity to regain his position in his government. In the absence of the truth, the Cabrals see Urania as a villain who, despite financially maintaining Agustín, cruelly abandoned him with no explanation. Just as Dominicans viewed Trujillo as a savior thanks to the way he kept his story tightly controlled, Urania’s family sees Agustín as a victim, since his crimes have stayed hidden.
Although Agustín was “in disgrace” when Urania left, the family was still well off and stable, and Chapter 11 hints that Agustín would have eventually been allowed back in Trujillo’s good graces had Trujillo lived. Shortly after Urania departed, and when the Chief died, the family’s fortunes changed: Because Agustín remained in disgrace, Abbes and the others viewed him as a suspect in the assassination. Later, when a new regime emerged, the Cabrals suffered because of their closeness to Trujillo. Urania had turned her back on her family during their most trying times, both offending her family members and violating established cultural norms.
Trujillo’s lunch in honor of the Gittlemans highlights the brutality and bigotry of his regime. Trujillo describes the Haitian genocide, although at the time the term did not exist (the term genocide was coined in response to the Holocaust, which occurred several years after the Haitian massacre). Trujillo describes the Haitian “threat” and claims that drastic action needed to be taken, but his descriptions shift and contradict one another. He describes Haitian border dwellers as both He describes Haitians in the Dominican Republic alternately as violent and peaceful, both working for no wages and growing prosperous enough to gobble up Dominican land. His arguments parallel other historical race-based campaigns of violence: Haitian language displacing the Dominican language; their pagan, barbaric ways supplanting the Dominicans’ God-fearing, Catholic lifestyle; Haitians taking—or, it’s suggested, raping—Dominican women. Trujillo and Ramfis’s horrific treatment of women make their “concerns” all the more ironic. Trujillo claims that his campaign against Haitians was the hardest decision he had to make, but as the luncheon group celebrates the decision two decades later, it reveals the extent to which Trujillo has deceived not only his people but also himself.
Chapter 12 explains Turk’s motivations for joining the assassination plot, suggesting that powerful individuals within the Catholic Church, like the nuncio, used their spiritual influence to anoint those under their spiritual care to commit murder. The assassination plot goes forward, succeeding in killing Trujillo but wounding one of its own.
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