Vargas Llosa introduces the reader to the story with Urania’s story-line, set in the present tense. The action is immediate; ‘está esperando…lo ve’ and the narrative simple. However, within a page Urania’s memory takes over – ‘La memoria le devuelve aquella imagen’ and the reader along with Urania is in the past with her father in ‘el Hotel Jaragua’. This first flash-back is only an introduction to Urania’s memory which will govern the majority of her story-line within the book. The second chapter pushes the reader back into the past with Trujillo, after Urania’s arrival at her father’s house. Vargas Llosa orders his chapters immaculately in the time frames, writing in strict pattern for the first half the book and shifting between three story lines – from Urania to Trujillo to the conspirators.
As the reader gets used to these shifts however s/he is more aware of the ephemeral nature of time in the book – the characters do not seem mortal and a certain age but exist constantly in the memory of others. This is clearly demonstrated in chapter fourteen, just after Trujillo’s death. Despite the cry in chapter twelve of ‘La Bestia, muerta’, the first words of chapter fourteen are: ‘El Benefactor entró’. Trujillo is still alive in the consciousness of the book and literally re-enters the story, penetrating the writing despite his death. In this way Vargas Llosa removes yet another physical marker by which to judge in the novel.
Although the novel at first reading would seem to be full of action and written at a high pace, the actual events of the story are very few. The story-lines chiefly revolve around two actions – the death of Trujillo and the rape of Urania. These actions in themselves also do not carry the suspense that actions would carry in a historical novel or thriller. The reader is given all the clues that they will happen before they occur. In this way Vargas Llosa takes away the emphasis from action and places it more on the results of this action in the minds of the people they affect; both the lasting and short-lived reactions. This importance on psychology is signalled to the reader from the beginning with the vantage point from which Vargas Llosa starts his story – from the future and from a place in which the important events of the story have already happened.
The main events of the story repeat themselves without respite in the narrative, related from different viewpoints. From his first chapter Trujillo is violently angry at the thought of ‘la flaquita’ and ‘la muchachita esqueleto’, the girl who has made his worst fears of impotency and sexual failure a reality. The memory constantly invades his thoughts and mind and shows his obsession with physical prowess in relation to power and his ability as dictator. Urania however remembers the same scene very differently, her rape being the cause of her return to Ciudad Trujillo and thirty years of remembering and suffering. Although the references to Urania’s rape occur within the first two chapters of the book, the actual event provides a climax and end to the story in chapter twenty-four; the incident of her rape has control over Urania’s memory, governing and pushing her story forwards and thus is always present in the narrative.
The many different story-lines within the novel highlight the lack of an omniscient narrator and force the reader to reach his own judgements concerning facts and events. Each character has a different story and different drives in his/her life. These drives govern his/her narrative and the reader’s response to it. However, whilst these different story-lines could allow the reader to form an overall picture of the novel and the actions and reactions within it, Vargas Llosa does not give the reader the most basic fact from which to start, making it difficult, especially on a first reading, to draw conclusions. Deeply involved in the psychologies of the characters the reader is also helpless in his conjectures; when Pupo Román does not fulfil his part of the deal and mobilise the army the reader knows as much as the conspirators as to why. This forces the reader to suspend judgement until the end of the novel when s/he has all the strands of the different psychologies that eventually create a whole and common psychology.
This common psychology reflects the atmosphere in society during the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Whilst in a first reading of the book the main characters seem diverse and wide-ranging, in a closer analysis they are curiously two-dimensional. All the characters are governed by their past and memory, whether it is to as large an extent as Urania who has suffered for thirty years, or as small as Trujillo who remembers ‘la flaquita’. The conspirators are paralleled exactly, the first four chapters of their story-line devoted to telling their individual stories and why they are now going against Trujillo. The stories are identical – each conspirator has reached a breaking point in his life in which he cannot continue collaborating anymore with Trujillo, whether it be because of an action he was forced to commit, a loved one who was hurt or his conscience that was touched.
Vargas Llosa does not put so much emphasis on the individual stories as on how they contribute to the common theme and come together as one to show the oppression suffered in Ciudad Trujillo by the people. In this way each character the reader comes across exists only in terms of the link to his suffering and psychological scarring and not as a real person. The psychological scarring of the past is demonstrated as an obsession in the character’s present life in the book. For the conspirators it is their need to avenge their past, looking for a cathartic release for their deeds as collaborators. Urania is dominated by her father’s betrayal and the way in which he sacrificed her to Trujillo. Trujillo is obsessed with his physical power and his frustration at his prostate cancer – his lack of control concerning urination and ejaculation angers and shames him. These obsessions form the flash-backs in the characters’ narrations and unite the characters rather than separating them as people with different tragedies and torments.
Merging both story-lines, characters and time-frames, Vargas Llosa creates a time, a place and a people who remain static in the novel, despite the passage of time and events that follow the dictatorship. By using Urania Cabral as a vehicle in which to involve the reader psychologically and emotionally in the story from the first chapter, Vargas Llosa places memory as the governing force in the novel. He examines Urania’s suffering and thoughts, in which Trujillo is still alive, the city ‘mejor dicho’ Ciudad Trujillo and her pain still present after the gap of thirty years. Urania however is only a symbol of the masses. Vargas Llosa does not write a story chiefly about characters and events but rather removes the labels of person, time and place to show the psychology of the Dominican republic as a whole under Trujillo.