“A shudder runs the length of her body. Urania, Urania! What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?” 

The tension between calm composure and passionate emotion recurs throughout the novel. Urania considers passion to be a Dominican cultural trait, but she positions herself in opposition to this trait, viewing it as potentially problematic.

“Animated chaos, the profound need in what was once your people, Urania, to stupefy themselves into not thinking and, perhaps, not even feeling. An explosion of savage life, immune to the tide of modernization. Something in Dominicans clings to this pre-rational, magical form: this appetite for noise.” 

Urania equates passion and exuberance with primitiveness, although the novel does not necessarily reach the same conclusion. Though Balaguer’s coolness ultimately proves useful, the conspiracy and assassination would not have taken place without passion and anger. 

“Anxiously he inspected the sheets: the ugly grayish stain befouled the whiteness of the linen. It had leaked out, again. Indignation erased the unpleasant memory of Mahogany House. […] This wasn’t an enemy he could defeat like the hundreds, the thousands he had confronted and conquered over the years, buying them, intimidating them, killing them. This lived inside him, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. It was destroying him at precisely the time he needed to be stronger and healthier than ever.”

As a man of action, Trujillo forces whatever he wants on people. He speaks elsewhere of diplomacy and strategy, but for him, those are only stopgaps; when he doesn’t get his way, he eventually turns to force. No amount of force can reverse his own body’s betrayal, made all the more frustrating as it suggests a loss of manhood. It’s an internal enemy that symbolizes the enemies in his own inner circle that plot to bring him down.