Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

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‘Letras Terribles’: Mourning and Reparation in Two

Poems by Augusto Roa Bastos

Jennifer L. French

To cite this article: Jennifer L. French (2019): ‘Letras Terribles’: Mourning and Reparation
in Two Poems by Augusto Roa Bastos, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13569325.2018.1532877

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2018.1532877

Published online: 31 Mar 2019.

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2018.1532877

Jennifer L. French

‘LETRAS TERRIBLES’: MOURNING AND

REPARATION IN TWO POEMS BY AUGUSTO
ROA BASTOS

This essay is intended to open new lines of inquiry in the work of one of Latin
America’s most important writers, Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, 1917–2005). To
begin, I address – respectfully, but explicitly – the inconsistencies in Roa Bastos’s
personal and professional record, a matter that has been something of an open secret
among the Paraguayan intelligentsia for many years. Keeping this knowledge at bay,
however necessary or expedient it may have been during the Stroessner dictatorship
(1954–1989) and its aftermath, has prevented scholars from addressing what is
arguably one of the most personal and pressing issues in Roa Bastos’s work: his tireless
efforts to intervene in Paraguay’s cumulative history of trauma, which stretches back at
least as far as the Triple Alliance War of 1864–1870. This article uses Melanie
Klein’s theories of mourning and projective identification to examine these efforts in
two little-known poems from the 1940s and ’50s: ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ and
‘Cerro Cor
a’.

Keywords: Augusto Roa Bastos; Paraguayan literature; psychoanalysis;

trauma; mourning; memory; Melanie Klein

I. A puzzling missive: ‘Cerro Cor
a’

In 1957 Augusto Roa Bastos, forty years old and leading an exile’s precarious
existence in Buenos Aires, sent a puzzling missive to Paraguay’s long-standing
Academy of History: a poem entitled ‘Cerro Cor
a’. A decade had passed since the
Civil War, an uprising of Liberales, Febreristas, and Paraguayan Communists that
led, in its brutal and systematic repression, to the consolidation of Colorado
hegemony, initially under Higinio Mor
ınigo and eventually – beginning in 1954 –
under Alfredo Stroessner. The members of the Academy, for the time being, were
mostly Colorado moderates and Liberales like Roa Bastos himself; as historians,
their work generally avoided direct confrontation with the nationalist historiog-
raphy promoted by the dictatorship, especially the glorification of Marshal-
President Francisco Solano L
opez, who led Paraguay during the catastrophic Triple
Alliance War of 1865–1870 and died in its final battle.1 Roa’s poem, in contrast,
enters the ideological ground claimed by the dictatorship: ‘Cerro Cor
a’, as every
Paraguayan knows, refers to the location of the final battle of the war, in the
# 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

densely forested Amambay Cordillera near the Brazilian border. It is the locus of
Paraguay’s great national trauma, its most sacred and significant lieu de m
emoire.
The opening stanzas describe a fugitives’ stronghold hidden deep within a ver-
dant mountain pass, a place where human and natural history seem to fuse:
Este es el nudo p
etreo
El pared
on boreal del Paraguay,
La muralla del tiempo,
Con el sol en sus v
ertebras y la noche en sus hombros;
Esta es la luna arrodillada
cordillera de Amambay
Con su matriz de piedra verde
Donde gest
o la raza, entre rel
ampagos
de huesos y entre espasmos de muerte, el nacimiento
De su hijo
Inmortal.2

The language of the verses is rich and complex, reminding us that Roa Bastos
was an accomplished poet well before the publication of his early works of fiction,
El trueno entre las hojas (1953) and Hijo de hombre (1960). In these opening lines the
topography of the Cordillera – lush semi-tropical forests, dramatically punctuated
by sandstone outcroppings – enables him to invoke conceits familiar to readers of
nationalist historiography, in which the Paraguayan soldiers’ supposed intimacy
with the flora and fauna of the region implicitly affirms the justice of their cause,
including Marshal L
opez’s role as the legitimate leader of the Paraguayan people,
while distancing himself somewhat from the nationalists’ claims about the transpar-
ency of the historical past and its continuity with the Stroessner regime. The dia-
lectical interplay of contrasting terms introduced by the first chiasmus (nudo
p
etreo/pared
on boreal) suggests at once the horrific death toll of the five-and-a-
half-year struggle against the combined armies of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay
and the way that the shared memory of a genocide barely endured signifies in the
present, as the hard kernel of a racialized and intensely cathected collective iden-
tity. The rocky peaks of the Cordillera are the backbone of a submerged maternal
figure from whose womb of moss-covered stone the reborn ‘race’ emerges, but
they are also a ‘wall of time’, an insurmountable divide between the autonomous
prewar republic and its dependent, neocolonial modernity: a wall that makes resti-
tution all but impossible and the past itself practically unknowable.
This concern with the ossification of memory continues in the verses that fol-
low, as the poet contemplates the difficulty of his task of revivifying the memory
of a struggle that over time has cooled and hardened into stone:
>C
omo volcar en el papel
Este volc
an sagrado de la patria,
Con su erupci
on de espadas y de rostros de fuego,
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 3

De infortunios y ruinas, su silencio de fuego,

Su m
usica de fuego,
Este volc
an purp
ureo ya engastado en los siglos
Como un cometa inm
ovil en la noche de Am
erica?3

The poet asks, in the lines quoted above, how the written word can adequately
convey the violence and suffering that took place in the historical past, to com-
memorate the courage and endurance of previous generations but also to recreate,
in the present moment, their lived experience: the din of combat and the silence
of death, the heat of rage and destruction, the creative, generative impulses that
emerge. Is it possible, Roa Bastos seems to ask, for writing to revivify an event
that has been rendered solid, crystalline, gem-like in the memory of a people? The
answer is clearly yes, but the risks are very high: as soon as the question is formu-
lated he draws back from it, suggesting in a series of more cryptic lines the danger
that the reanimation of Paraguay’s memory of fire will be – has been – for the
tender organic life beginning to stir:
M
as que su planeario [sic for ‘planetario’] panal o el rutilante
Peso de su corona de rumor y roc
ıo,
Golpea en m
ı su rama de enlutado silencio,
Su estambre gorjeante de arteriales latidos,
El alba ensangrentada bajo el cielo de marzo.
La historia de aquel d
ıa tiene letras
Terribles,
P
arrafos como dientes
Y follajes de
P
aginas que nos queman la mano hasta la ra
ız.4

‘Letras terribles’: the phrase conveys, inevitably, the violent events of the day –
the death of Marshal L
opez and his sons at the hands of Brazilian soldiers; their
hasty burial in graves dug, according to witnesses, by Madame Lynch herself; doz-
ens more dead and wounded Paraguayans; and the surrender of the two hundred
and fifty emaciated soldiers who made up the remnants of the Marshal’s army
(Whigham 2017, 405–412). As the metaphor unfolds, however, a more literal
interpretation emerges: ‘P
arrafos como dientes/Y follajes de/P
aginas que nos que-
man la mano hasta la ra
ız.’ These ‘letras terribles’, arguably, are also a reference
to the nationalist historiography of the Triple Alliance War, dozens if not hundreds
of volumes of writing produced since the turn of the twentieth century by Juan E.
O’Leary, Natalicio Gonz
alez, and other Colorado ideologues whose idealized
account of the war emphasized the courage and self-sacrifice of Marshal L
opez and
the unequivocal, exemplary heroism of the loyal Paraguayans who followed him to
the bitter end. As sociologist Peter Lambert has recently written, in the 1930s and
’40s the story of the Paraguayan defeat became the justification for the Colorados’
extreme hostility against all political opposition, which was represented as a threat
4 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

to the very survival of the nation. Thus the Liberales, in Juan Natalicio Gonz
alez’s
book, El Paraguay eterno, became the direct descendants of the infamous Legionarios
of the Triple Alliance War, Paraguayan exiles who formed a special contingent
within the Argentine army against L
opez and his defenders. As Lambert comments,
historical revisionism provided the Colorados with ‘a hegemonic discourse, born
from violence and that, in turn, justified violence’ (Lambert 2006, 188), particu-
larly during the 1947 Civil War and its aftermath.
Nevertheless, as ‘Cerro Cor
a’ extends over its 104 lines its similarity to the his-
torical narrative made popular by O’Leary, Gonz
alez, and other Paraguayan nation-
alists becomes all but undeniable. Not only does Roa Bastos avoid the Liberales’
traditional interpretation of the war, which was set down by Cecilio B
aez in La
tiran
ıa en el Paraguay (1903) and other works that excoriated L
opez as a corrupt
and brutal dictator who almost singlehandedly brought about the devastation of his
country, he in fact appears to espouse the secular mythology that represented
L
opez as Paraguay’s maximum hero, a Christ-like figure whose immolation at
Cerro Cor
a resulted in the nation’s glorious rebirth (‘el nacimiento/de su hijo/
Inmortal’). While the first section offers a kind of meditation on the subject of
landscape, trauma, and national identity, the second and third sections move from
an evocation of the heroic defence of liberty and national self-determination
effected by the ‘Paraguayan Christ’ and his army (II) to the pronouncement of
Paraguay’s postwar regeneration and triumphant future (III):
La historia est
a en su sitio,
Los hombres en su sitio,
Y la naci
on navega como un arca de fuego
Sobre el r
ıo del tiempo.
Porque la patria vive
Como una gigantesca mano color de tierra;
Porque la tierra vive
Como una gigantesca llama color de sangre;
Porque la sangre vive
Como una gigantesca llama color de aurora.
Y en esta luz el Paraguay, mi pueblo,
Con los pueblos del mundo,
Se levanta y camina vivo y majestuoso
Llevando una aureola de fulgor en las sienes
Como un ala inmortal.5

The poem is perplexing, not least of all because it flies in the face of everything
we seem to know of Roa Bastos’s artistic and intellectual commitments – his
relentless critique of literature’s ‘intrinsic complicity’ with social, political, and
economic power (Legr
as 2008, 1), his cultivation of a poetics of immanence, based
on a notion of ‘life as a critical (and of course historical) concept: what remains
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 5

when specialized activities are eliminated, what escapes, the remainder, the unreal-
ized, the sediment, what is said with a language in which there is nothing true or
false, no universals or transcendence’ (Ludmer 1991, 113), in short, his reputation
as the most postmodern, Deleuzian, and radically anti-authoritarian writer of Latin
America’s boom generation (Beasley-Murray 2016).
‘Cerro Cor
a’ belongs to an obscure period in Roa Bastos’s life, the first decade
of the more than forty years he spent in exile. Today anyone who looks for it will
find the poem online at the virtual library known as Portal Guaran
ı; the creased
and dog-eared photocopies that sit on my desk as I write these pages, however,
were given to me in 2005 by a Paraguayan acquaintance who, like a number of
other individuals, was troubled by certain inconsistencies in Roa Bastos’s personal
and professional record. Years earlier, information that appears to contradict Roa
Bastos’s claims to having eschewed public sinecures and diplomatic posts during his
long exile in Argentina (1947–1976) and France (1976–1989) had surfaced in the
Paraguayan press. According to documentation found in the Official Registry, Roa
Bastos received government funding at least three times in the 1940s and ’50s,
starting with his appointment as secretary to the Paraguayan embassy in Buenos
Aires in October 1946, and including a ‘cultural mission’ approved by Alfredo
Stroessner on 25 January 1955, which ostensibly sent the young writer to Europe
in order to study ‘los modernos m
etodos y modos de difusi
on y extensi
on cultural
y de propaganda’.6 In addition to ‘Cerro Cor
a’, Roa Bastos also seems to have
produced a poetic homage to Per
on and Stroessner that was published in El Pa
ıs
on the occasion of Per
on’s 1954 visit to the Paraguayan capital, when the
Argentine leader returned the Triple Alliance War trophies that had remained in
his country until that time. Like the work of O’Leary and other nationalist ideo-
logues, ‘<Eternamente hermanos!’ explicitly represents Stroessner as the heir and
inheritor of L
opez’s glorious mantle.
These documents complicate the dramatic account of his expulsion that Roa
Bastos would tell in later years (Bareiro Saguier 2006, 67–86; Mart
ınez 2011,
20–21). More context is provided by Saturnino Ferreira P
erez’s compilation of
Paraguayan journalism in Proceso pol
ıtico paraguayo 1943-1947. Una visi
on desde la
prensa, which includes both an impressive selection of Roa Bastos’s op/ed work as
editorial head of the prominent Liberal paper El Pa
ıs and the official notice of his
diplomatic appointment in Buenos Aires. The tenor and content of the work col-
lected by Ferreira P
erez suggest that the dictatorship had good reason to want Roa
Bastos out of the country as the crackdown became increasingly violent, and the
diplomatic post may have provided a mutually acceptable way to remove him.
This interpretation is consistent with Roa Bastos’s insistence, in a number of inter-
views, that there was nothing ‘heroic’ about the conditions of his 1947 exile, as
well as his equivocating statements about whether his initial departure was volun-
tary or forced.7 As for the poems, which date from 1954 and 1957, we can’t rule
out the possibility that Roa Bastos may have sincerely believed, in those early
years, that Stroessner would have a positive effect on the country, restoring order
after the political and economic chaos that followed the Civil War.8 But it also
seems reasonable to assume that Roa Bastos may have found himself pressured,
financially or in other ways, to produce work that enhanced the prestige of the
6 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

new head of state, who had come to power through a military coup against
President Federico Chaves.
I have found it necessary to delve into this strange and, for some, disconcerting
story in order to begin to make sense of ‘Cerro Cor
a’, and it goes without saying
that if the account presented here contains errors of either fact or omission, I
would very much like to see them corrected and clarified.9 I am not going to
argue that the poem should be read exclusively or even primarily as propaganda,
although an impressive rendition of the nationalist mythology, published in the
venerable Anuario and signed by one of the country’s most eminent intellectuals
and an erstwhile critic of Colorado authoritarianism, could certainly be construed
as contributing to the legitimacy of the Stroessner regime. Unlike ‘<Eternamente
hermanos!’, a concatenation of clich
es that says practically nothing of substance
about either Stroessner or Per
on, ‘Cerro Cor
a’ contains lines of much more inter-
esting writing – lines that suggest it may have been something other than a com-
mand performance.
In Paraguay today, the consensus on this material seems to run along the lines
of ‘the less said, the better’: this is a matter that is generally not spoken of, at
least not openly. I am arguing, instead, for an empathic and psychoanalytically
informed approach to ‘Cerro Cor
a’. This approach will show us that Roa Bastos,
conflicted and self-contradictory as he was, was nevertheless attempting to inter-
vene in what he correctly understood as a deeply ingrained culture of political vio-
lence in Paraguay. In the pages that follow, I use Melanie Klein’s theories of
mourning, reparation, and projective identification to explore that intervention in
‘Cerro Cor
a’ and then, in closing, I offer some comments connecting the poem to
the cycle of prose works on the Triple Alliance War that Roa Bastos produced in
his final years, particularly his 1993 novel El fiscal. Before we can make any more
progress with ‘Cerro Cor
a’, however, we need to shift gears and consider another,
more explicitly subversive poem that Roa Bastos wrote in the immediate aftermath
of the Civil War but withheld from publication until many years later: ‘Nocturno
paraguayo’.10

II. Exile and ambivalence in ‘Nocturno paraguayo’

Nearly twice the length of ‘Cerro Cor
a’, ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ deals with the
Triple Alliance War only obliquely, that is, through two references to the melan-
choly verses of Carlos Guido y Spano’s ‘Nenia’: ‘Llora, llora, uruta
u/En las ramas
del yatay./Ya no existe el Paraguay,/donde yo nac
ı, como t
u.’11 The true subject
of ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ is instead the conflagration of 1947, the misery of exile,
and the longed-for resurgence of resistance to the dictatorship. Like the Neruda of
‘Explico algunas cosas’, Roa Bastos struggles to articulate the terrible contrast
between present and past:
c
omo decir, contar o responder
A preguntas vac
ıas
entre el exasperado desorden
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 7

y el inaudible grito que a
un nos hiela

la sangre,
que hubo una vez entre palmares y siglos
y jazmines
un pa
ıs de roc
ıo, una isla de tierra
rodeada de tierra,
el coraz
on purp
ureo de Am
erica
del Sur.12

Despite the chronological shift, phrases that would resurface practically verbatim
in ‘Cerro Cor
a’ appear in ‘Nocturno paraguayo’, including, for example, this sug-
gestive evocation of the almost tender intermingling of human and vegetal life
amidst the chaos and destruction of war:
M
as que su planetario panal
o el rutilante peso
de su corona de rumor y roc
ıo,
golpea en m
ı su rama de enlutado silencio,
su estambre gorjeante de arteriales latidos,
su serpiente son
ambula de azulado metal.13

The two poems speak in dialogue with each other, one positioned at the site of
Paraguay’s catastrophic defeat in 1870 and imagining the Triple Alliance War’s long-
term ramifications for the collective psyche, the other emanating from Argentina at
the time of the 1947 Civil War and looking backwards to understand the historical
and cultural factors that may have influenced or informed the uprising.
We see this in ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ in the thematic emphasis, however ambigu-
ous, on the deep psychological connection between violent events of the past and
the violence of the contemporary moment, and the political and ethical challenge
that connection presents to the poet as such. In this context the now-familiar
phrase, ‘letras terribles’, appears:
Lo que agoniza y sufre tiene letras terribles,
entra~nas como dientes
y follajes de nervios,
p
aginas que nos queman la mano, el ojo,
el
anima.

C
omo escribir entonces un reflejo sombr
ıo,

dibujar una boca
que hable y diga y cuente desde el fondo
del pecho
8 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

lo que est
a all
ı enterrado

bajo espesas cordilleras
de blasfemia y suspiro.14

The poet wrestles here with poetry’s primordial ambition, to name and repre-
sent the anonymous dead of history: the dead are figured as a somatic feature,
buried deep within the survivors’ bodies under decades of vitriol and suffering, a
reference to the political turbulence that in its way has become as much a natural
feature of Paraguay as the cordillera itself. These buried objects threaten to con-
sume the survivors from within, with the destructive rage of myriad internal perse-
cutors. The poet’s task, therefore, is not merely to remember and record the
past, but to do so in such a way that it will become less deadly, less likely to burn
the hand, the eye, or the spirit.
Among the major psychoanalytic thinkers of the twentieth century, Melanie
Klein was the most explicit in conceptualizing the human body as a repository of
memory, harbouring ‘internal objects’ that can be reassuring or profoundly dis-
turbing. Today Klein’s work is generally marginal to the study of trauma and post-
dictatorial literature in the Latin America, despite her very considerable import-
ance in the historical development of psychoanalysis in Latin America, and particu-
larly in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.15 If Klein has become increasingly
peripheral over the years, she remains a crucial, if idiosyncratic, component of the
psychoanalytic canon, one whose work provides a lexicon and a theoretical frame-
work that enable us to consider the ways that the so-called ‘primitive emotions’ of
aggression, rage, and paranoia may link back to trauma and loss. Klein can help us
understand the shifting, uncertain movement in Roa’s poems as an effort to miti-
gate and redirect these painful, potentially destructive affects.
As Juliet Mitchell writes in her brief introduction to Klein’s ‘Mourning and Its
Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, ‘Freud stresses the severance of the subject’s
ego from the dead, loved object; Klein emphasizes the complexity of the inner
world in which eventually the dead person is restored as a good object within’
(Klein 1987, 147). For Klein, the loss of a loved object returns the subject, at any
age, to the painful struggles of early infancy, when the infant’s ego begins to estab-
lish itself by projecting the destructive, aggressive feelings associated with the death
instinct out of itself onto a familiar object, most typically the mother or her
breast, which is divided or split between the good, loving breast that meets the
child’s needs and the bad, hated, and hateful breast that frustrates them, both of
which are then reincorporated into the child himself. The infantile ego develops
certain psychic mechanisms in order to defend itself against the internalized perse-
cutors that now exist in its unconscious phantasy, among them ‘[o]mnipotence,
denial and idealization, closely bound up with ambivalence, [which] enable the
early ego to assert itself to a certain degree against its internal persecutors and
against a slavish and perilous dependence upon its loved objects, and thus to make
further advances in development’ (152). Over time, Klein writes, the love and
comfort the baby receives from his mother and others build up his confidence in
his own goodness and other people’s such that ‘his hope that his “good” objects
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 9

and his own ego can be saved and preserved increases, at the same time as his
ambivalence and acute fears of internal destruction diminish’ (148).
The loss of a loved object destabilizes the good internal objects and returns the
subject, at any age, to the persecutory feelings associated with the paranoid-schiz-
oid position of early childhood. The infant’s defence mechanisms of splitting, pro-
jection, introjection, and mania are all once again set in motion, creating a vicious
circle of paranoia, aggression, and guilt that can only gradually be overcome:
The objects which were to be restored change again into persecutors, and in turn paranoid
fears are revived. These fears reinforce the paranoid defence mechanisms (of destroying the
object) as well as the manic mechanisms (of controlling it or keeping it in suspended
animation, and so on). The reparation which was in progress is thus disturbed or even nullified
– according to the extent to which these mechanisms are activated. (152)

Mourning, according to Klein, is a vacillating, one-step-forward-two-steps-back

process in which the subject oscillates between remorse and the pain of pining for
the lost object and the terror, anxiety, and aggressive phantasies associated with
the paranoid-schizoid position, which can only be gradually, painfully, and of
course temporarily overcome.16 These processes take place in the complex internal
world of phantasy, a world that has been built up over time and in which whole
and part objects ‘are felt to be in a dynamic relation to each other and to the ego’
(Segal 1973, 127).
‘Nocturno paraguayo’ seems to enact this complex process that Klein under-
stands as the uncertain progress of the mournful subject, whose experience of pin-
ing, sorrow, and remorse is intermittently disrupted by the reassertion of
terrifying part-objects that threaten to destroy him from within. The poetic subject
seems to recognize this danger and resigns himself to counteracting it by means of
a struggle to create a meaningful cultural inscription of the faces of the dead, a
creative act that would presumably play some part in restoring the inner equilib-
rium of the subject, and perhaps of the larger group with which he identifies
(‘Como escribir entonces un reflejo sombr
ıo/dibujar una boca/que hable y cuente
desde el fondo del pecho/lo que est
a all
ı enterrado’). But the effort apparently
fails; rather than serving as a source of comfort and strength, the dead are instead
perceived as draining away the vitality of the living:
Y esta resina fresca de los muertos
que aprenden a beber a sorbos largos
su lenta eternidad de ra
ıces calladas
chupando en nuestras llagas
su vid de vida, su hiel infiel,
nutriendo en nuestros ojos
su mirar necesario
y final.17

Roa Bastos borrows here a metaphor deployed by his famous ‘precursor’ Rafael
Barrett in the 1907 chronicle ‘Las autoridades’, in which Barrett describes the nation
10 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

as a plant nourished by its subterranean roots, the dead. The ‘calamities’ of the pre-
sent, writes Barrett, are the ramification of much older calamities, which could not
be ended or altered in their earlier emergences (Barrett 1978, 97). Barrett is talking
specifically about state-sponsored terror, the collective ‘sickness’ of cruelty that has
plagued Paraguay ‘through a terrifying succession of tyrannies and catastrophes’
(98). Barrett – a depressive-position writer if ever there was one – says that
this ‘sickness’ cannot be cured by revolutions and coups d’
etat, but rather through a
slow evolution requiring ‘all of our patience, all of our courage, and all of our
tenderness’ (98).
That admonition, from one of the writers he most admired, must have struck a
chord with Roa Bastos as he pondered the unravelling of the 1947 uprising against
Mor
ınigo. In a context of escalating violence, Roa Bastos seems to follow Barrett’s
lead in perceiving Paraguayans’ cult of their heroic and bellicose ancestors as a
dangerous and self-destructive pattern. But whereas Barrett advocates an alternative
ethos of love and compassion, Roa Bastos explores, as if at first hand, the feelings
of guilt and paranoia inspired by that cult, representing the dead as ghoulish corp-
ses that parasitically affix themselves to the open wounds of the living. The incom-
plete internal rhyme in the subsequent line – ‘Su vid de vida, su hiel infiel’ –
creates a kind of sensory discomfort in the reader as the ‘wine of life’ becomes
‘faithless bile’, as the living, in other words, are accused of betrayal even as their
lifeblood paradoxically sustains the dead. The vampire gaze, meanwhile, interpel-
lates the living in a nightmarish culture of guilt and obligation. It is a bizarre and
chilling evocation of the nation.
The third and final section of ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ opens with a reference to
Guido y Spano’s ‘Nenia’ and, by extension, to the historical tragedy of the Triple
Alliance War:
Canta el uruta
u,
conozco bien su queja solitaria
que hace entre las maderas su aposento,
en el t
ımpano denso de la noche,
detr
as del tiempo, de espaldas
a la luz.18

The allusion to Guido y Spano more explicitly sets the present moment within
the long history of violence and political upheaval that begins with the Triple
Alliance War of 1864–1870. The bird’s mournful song is not an occasional pres-
ence in the Paraguayan forest; instead the bird ‘makes its home there’, deep within
the ‘eardrum’ of the night. With its back to the light like Klee’s famous Angelus
Novus, the bird is a mournful witness to the desolation that history produces. The
image – given its symbolic association with the Triple Alliance War – destabilizes
the idea of a clear before and after conveyed by the Nerudean lines I quoted a
moment ago, or at the very least pushes the moment of historical rupture – the
contrast between ‘el exasperado desorden’ of the present and the ‘pa
ıs de palmares
y siglos y jazmines’ – further back in time, to the cataclysm of 1870.
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 11

In what immediately follows, however, the poet abruptly changes course, sug-
gesting that the ones most to be pitied are those who like himself have gone into
exile, because they will miss the resurgence of the revolutionary forces, particu-
larly the uprising of workers in the agricultural sectors of yerba mate and tannin.19
In contrast to the grim botanical imagery of the poem’s second section, in which
the parasitic, zombified dead sap the vital energies of the living, this resurgence
emerges through an ‘ancestral breath’ that works ‘to assemble or “repair” the mur-
derous part-objects’ (Sedgwick 2003, 128) by sewing meteorites into their husks
before placing them in the night sky like constellations:
Un h
alito ancestral anda y recoge labios,
anda y recoge pulsos hendidos en la arena,
cose entre las cortezas meteoros ca
ıdos
y sobre el terciopelo de la noche
junta estas joyas,
estos eslabones sagrados
que arman la cegadora certeza del triunfo.20

We are reminded that the tragedy of 1870 is both the turning point of
Paraguayan history – the fall of the independent antebellum republic – and the
source of potentially revolutionary fervour in the form of a collective memory that
has the ability to inspire extraordinary levels of sacrifice in the popular struggle
against oppression. The final line of the stanza, with its reference to ‘la cegadora
certeza del triunfo’, nevertheless undermines the growing optimism, as Roa Bastos
seems to suggest that the very force that inspires the revolutionaries to struggle on
– perhaps the memory of their heroic ancestors, perhaps something more mysteri-
ous – blinds them to the reality of their situation.
That moment of circumspection continues through the antepenultimate stanza of
the poem, in which the poetic voice declares the need for new minds and new
visions in the space that his own generation has occupied:
La Cruz del Sur est
a en su sitio,
sube y decora el cielo
desde su empu~nadura de miradas y manos;
la sangre combatiente est
a en su sitio,
el tiempo est
a en su sitio
y el espacio que falta a nuestros hombros
se llena ya de nuevas frentes
y claridades.21

An attempt at reparation is made in these final stanzas, beginning with the

ancestral breath that collects the broken and scattered pieces of the dead. It is an
attempt that seems to recognize, appropriately, the need for dissenting or at least
12 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

dialogic voices, perhaps in response to the guilt and ambivalence that surface in
the second section of the poem. It is all the more striking, therefore, that the rich
and ringing telluric metaphors of the final crescendo – which would be repeated
verbatim in ‘Cerro Cor
a’ – confer a dubious and transcendent unanimity on the
popular will:
Porque la patria vive
como una gigantesca mano color de tierra;
porque la tierra vive
como una gigantesca llama color de sangre;
porque la sangre vive
como una gigantesca llama color de aurora.

Y en esta luz un pueblo l
azaro

se levanta y camina.22

In Kleinian terms, the forced grandiosity of the final lines would almost certainly
points to the manic defences of the paranoid-schizoid position.
‘Nocturno paraguayo’ might be summarized as a psychological journey of loss,
guilt, evasion and insight that ends not in reparation so much as an equivocal and
equivocating triumphalism. Instead of certainty, the poem presents unresolved
questions: what is the duty of a twentieth-century Paraguayan, as a member of a
nation that has endured a catastrophic history only to be caught in seemingly end-
less cycles of violence and oppression? Is it to fight on, hoping for victory, or to
somehow distance oneself from the national cult of obligation and self-sacrifice?
The questions remain unanswered at the end of ‘Nocturno paraguayo’, but they
return to animate ‘Cerro Cor
a’, this time grafted onto a poetic arc provided by
the narrative of national defeat, humiliation, and resurgence through the
Paraguayan Christ, Francisco Solano L
opez.

III. A sword of diamonds: ‘Cerro Cor
a’

In ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, written some six years after the essay
on mourning and manic defences I discuss above, Klein returns to the subject of
the early depressive position, which she had begun to see as pivotal for the onset
of certain adult psychoses (Klein 1987, 176–200). She elaborates here the mechan-
ism known as projective identification, through which the subject takes its own
destructive impulses (death instinct) and projects them out onto some other per-
son, prototypically the mother. In psychotic disorders, according to Klein, the pro-
jection of the hated parts of the self has the effect of intensifying the subject’s
hatred of other people, while ‘[a]s far as the ego is concerned the excessive split-
ting off and expelling into the outer world of part of itself considerably weaken it.
For the aggressive component of feelings and of the personality is intimately bound
up in the mind with power, potency, strength, knowledge and many other desired
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 13

qualities’ (Klein 1987, 183). Since the 1940s Kleinians have linked this description
of projective identification to the cult of personality in fascism, particularly as it
developed in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War, where crushing
defeat, loss, and humiliation produced what Freud in another context referred to
as a ‘pure culture of the death drive’.
I would suggest that ‘Cerro Cor
a’, reread now in conjunction with ‘Nocturno
paraguayo’, is a self-conscious citation of Roa Bastos’s own earlier work and an
ambivalent pastiche of the national cult of L
opez; but it is also a second acting out
of the intricate psychodynamics of mourning, paranoia, and manic reparation that
in this iteration manifests itself as projective identification and a loosely qualified
participation in that very cult. In the rich and densely written first section, as we
have seen, the poet identifies the problem – a culture dominated by the death
drive has developed in Paraguay, and it is dangerous for the individual and collect-
ive life that has attempted to grow, and has grown, in the aftermath of the devas-
tation. In this context, the phrase ‘letras terribles’ refers almost inevitably to the
nationalist historiography that enshrined Marshal L
opez as Paraguay’s ‘Maximum
Hero’ while instituting a national cult of self-sacrifice and unquestioning obedience,
but it also invokes Roa Bastos’s earlier use of the phrase in ‘Nocturno paraguayo’
(‘lo que sufre y agoniza tiene letras terribles … ’). This willingness to enfold his
own idiosyncratic and deeply ambivalent response to the losses incurred in the
1947 Civil War into a larger historical dynamic, however invisibly, seems quite
remarkable, and I think we should take this moment as Roa Bastos’s recognition of
the risks that inhere when political discourse privileges the memory of the dead
over the emancipation of the living. The second and third sections of the poem
reveal – with what degree of self-awareness, it is impossible to tell – more pre-
cisely what is at stake, as Paraguay’s foundational trauma demonstrates once again
its ability to capture and feed the paranoia (fear of further persecution and destruc-
tion) and the dangerous defences it produces in the mournful subject.
In the second section of the poem Roa Bastos deals most directly with the tow-
ering figure of Francisco Solano L
opez, the ‘indomitable Marshal’ who was
‘crucified’ like a ‘warrior Christ’ on Cerro Cor
a. This language repeats a trope
that was introduced during the final months of the war by the priest Fidel Ma
ız;
during the early twentieth century it would become a commonplace of Paraguayan
nationalism through the efforts of O’Leary and others. In the poem ‘Cerro Cor
a’
the phrase seems to convey the exemplary status of L
opez’s willing self-sacrifice
for the good of the nation as well as the perceived link between that sacrifice and
the spectacular, transcendent rebirth associated with Paraguay’s victory over
Bolivia in the Chaco War, his ability to inspire heroism in his own time and
among subsequent generations, and the world-changing nature of Paraguay’s
final defeat:
Aqu
ı crucificaron como a un Cristo guerrero
Al indomable Mariscal,
Que empu~nando su pueblo como un arma
Cumpli
o su juramento
14 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

De “VENCER O MORIR”,
Sobre el
ultimo campo de batalla,
Junto a los
ultimos soldados espectrales
De la gesta sin par,
Con el trueno en su boca de
“<MUERO CON MI PATRIA … !”23

The most intriguing line in this passage is the moment of self-citation Roa
Bastos adds to the account of L
opez’s famous last words: a reference to his 1953
story, ‘El trueno entre las hojas’, about the cycles of repression and rebellion at a
sugar mill in the remote town of Tebicuary-Costa. One of the instigators of the
revolt is the heroic Solano Rojas, who returns from jail, blind and maimed, to
lead the workers in exacting the revenge that brings them a short-lived control of
the mill; even after his death the music of Solano’s ghostly accordion may be
heard, ‘viva y marcial’, still playing ‘Campamento Cerro-Le
on’ from 1865. It is
worth recalling as well the Guaran
ı legend that serves as epigraph: ‘Thunder falls
and remains among the leaves. Animals eat the leaves and become violent. Men
eat the animals and become violent. The earth eats the men and begins to roar
like thunder.’ The phrase conveys a physical ingestion of a rage that does not ori-
ginate with the subject, but that infiltrates the organism and either threatens or
inspires it from within. If the story’s epigraph seems to ask whether cycles of vio-
lence seemingly endemic to Paraguay serve any human purpose, the final lines
unequivocally insist that they do: ‘Monta guardia y espera. Y nada hay tan poder-
oso e invencible como cuando alguien, desde la muerte, monta guardia y espera’
(‘He sets himself up to guard and waits. And there is nothing so powerful and
invincible as when someone, from death, sets himself up to guard and wait’; 184).
The intertextual relationship between the poem and the narrative would seem to
suggest that the chain of contaminating/animating ire now descends from Solano
L
opez to Solano Rojas, and from him to the generations that come.
As the poem continues the reader remains in the position of spectator, observing
the scene of L
opez’s death, urged by the poet to notice certain elements of the
scene. The imagery is reminiscent of the first section, which describes the cooling
of the glistening blood and viscera into a glittering and permanent, jewel-
like substance:
Ved la lanza incrustada en sus entra~nas
Como en un meteoro ensangrentado
Goteando luz y gloria;
Ved al buitre imperial
Desvistiendo su esp
ıritu,
Tratando in
utilmente
De arrancar de sus manos el acero invencible
En que la patria toda, la Naci
on soberana,
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 15

Como el le
on y el sol de nuestro escudo

Corporizaron su materia pura,
Su m
edula estelar y su infinita
Pasi
on de Libertad y de Justicia.24

In these lines the sense of ambivalence and associated guilt that emerged earlier
are projected onto an external enemy: Brazil, tormentor and executioner of a
now-idealized L
opez. For Paraguayan readers, the ‘buitre imperial’ is immediately
legible as the Brazilian army. The poem emphasizes, strikingly, the passivity of the
Paraguayan people, whose intense devotion to Freedom and Justice forms the
‘invincible steel’ of the sword Marshal L
opez will brandish against his enemies
while proclaiming his famous last words. The nation is characterized by unanimity
in life and in death. This section captures and feeds into the paranoia (fear of fur-
ther persecution and destruction) and the manic defences it produces in the
mournful subject, especially splitting and projective identification, in which
Marshal L
opez becomes the terrifying fixation point of a depleted ego.
At the end of the second section Roa Bastos incorporates a crucial fragment
from the earlier poem, ‘Nocturno paraguayo’, which brings the nationalist narra-
tive of Paraguayan history back to the problematic he had first introduced in
response to the uprising and Civil War of 1947:
Al pie de este volc
an tocan mis venas
La resina inmortal de nuestros muertos
Que aprenden a vivir a sorbos largos
Su lenta eternidad de ra
ıces calladas,
Chupando en nuestra sangre, nutriendo en nuestros
Ojos
Su mirar enterrado, su pan de sombra,
Su espaciosa grandeza sin sue~no.25

As in ‘Nocturno paraguayo’, a diagnosis of sorts is being offered – the poetic

voice distances himself from the cult of ancestral debt and obligation, if not com-
pletely, then at least significantly enough to acknowledge the detrimental effects of
a national culture that emanates from underground, and whose most compelling
force is that of the ‘spacious dreamless grandeur’ of the dead. This is not a vision
of the future or an inspiring nostalgia, only the terrible gift of the past (Simon
2006, 117).
The first line of the third section indicates an abrupt reversal, the movement
out of the place of guilt and the acknowledgement of guilt into what will swell
into the crescendo of the final lines: ‘Pero el tiempo y los hechos probaron nuestra
raza.’ In the third section an attempt at reparation is made, closely following the
movement of ‘Nocturno paraguayo’, but in this version the passage seems to
describe the demographic and spiritual regeneration of Paraguay, first through the
tenacity of the women, and then further when intimations of war set off the
16 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

‘ancestral breath’ that once again gathers together the broken bits and pieces and
sews meteors, suns, and moons inside them. This time the lines we have already
seen in ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ are integrated with references to L
opez and the
Triple Alliance War, which (as during the Chaco War against Bolivia in the 1930s)
inspire the living to rise up to defend their nation’s territory:
Junta estas joyas, estos
Eslabones sagrados
Que arman la cegadora presencia
del triunfo.
Sobre Cerro Cor
a,
Pedestal de la patria,
Est
a el Guerrero de fuego;
Su espada de diamante
Fulgura con su lema, sube y decora el cielo
Desde su empu~nadura de miradas y manos;
La sangre combatiente est
a en su sitio,
Junto al acantilado del coraje,
La historia est
a en su sitio,
Los hombres en su sitio[ … ]26

In this case, the firmament is adorned with the dazzling figure of Francisco
Solano L
opez, the ego ideal that enables everything else to emerge from the land-
scape and assume its rightful place: men, blood, and history.

IV. The return (El fiscal)

Roa Bastos was little more than thirty years old when he wrote ‘Nocturno para-
guayo’; he was approximately forty when ‘Cerro Cor
a’ appeared a decade later.
After that, as we know, he wrote little or no poetry, but followed the critical and
popular success of El trueno entre las hojas with two novels – Hijo de hombre and Yo el
Supremo – that in their pure aesthetic achievement are practically unmatched in the
Latin American canon. During the 1970s and ’80s, while Stroessner continued to
define himself as the worthy successor of Francisco Solano L
opez, Roa Bastos openly
embraced the leftist historical revisionism of many prominent intellectuals in the R
ıo
de la Plata region, who tended to idealize pre-war Paraguay as a proto-socialist alter-
native to the widespread pattern of forced economic dependency and to view the
Triple Alliance War as a terrible proxy war carried out by Argentina, Brazil, and
Uruguay on behalf of the leading colonial power of that time, Great Britain.27 While
much of the historiography on which that position was based has been called into
question in the intervening years, neither Roa Bastos’s stance on Francisco Solano
L
opez nor his interpretation of the Triple Alliance War was particularly unusual at
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 17

the time.28 As Guido Rodr
ıguez Alcal
a (1995) put it, ‘With different aims,
Stroessner and his enemies declared themselves the heirs of Marshal L
opez (1995).
The claims of historical revisionism saturated the political discourse’ (49).
Stroessner would formally expel Roa Bastos during a visit to Paraguay in 1982,
and from that time on Roa Bastos was much more open and explicit about his
opposition to the Paraguayan dictator. Both before and after that watershed event,
Roa Bastos would return repeatedly – I am tempted to say, obsessively – to the
story of the Triple Alliance War. Over the years he produced an extensive body
of work on the subject: El son
ambulo (1976), the fictional confession of an ageing
veteran who claims to have betrayed Marshal L
opez in the final days of the war,
with marginal notes by an acerbic Liberal judge who finds the veteran’s compunc-
tion misplaced; then a revised version of Hijo de hombre (1960, 1982), which incor-
porates a substantial amount of material dealing with Father Fidel Ma
ız, one of the
judges who presided over the infamous ‘blood tribunals’ of 1868; ‘El ojo de la
luna’ (1991), which reimagines both Sir Richard Burton’s Letters from the Battlefields
of Paraguay and the paintings of C
andido L
opez; El fiscal, which deals with both
Stroessner and Solano L
opez and is the third volume of Roa’s great trilogy on the
‘monotheism of power’ in Paraguay; and finally the multi-authored novel Los con-
jurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco (2003) (Roa Bastos et al., 2001) and a posthu-
mous opera named after the two women L
opez is believed to have loved, Pancha
Garmendia y Elisa Lynch.
To date, the limited secondary literature on this material has focused primarily
on its intensely reiterative nature, with some critics disparaging all or most of it as
vastly inferior to Roa Bastos’s major novels, while others argue that it is not ‘“a
pointless rehashing of his previous work”’ so much as ‘a creative process that in its
self-referentiality seeks to attain a synthesis or overall fictional coherence’
(Guerrero 2010, 190), while ‘exposing the subjectivity of history and the perhaps
impossible task of unearthing an absolute truth’ (Weldt-Basson 2010, 20). The lat-
ter formulation, offered by Helene Weldt-Basson, is telling, inasmuch as it encap-
sulates much of what has traditionally absorbed readers of Roa Bastos’s work: his
willing, even exuberant subversion of literary conventions and his relentlessly poly-
semic representation of history. But it also suggests, perhaps unwittingly, the infre-
quency with which psychoanalytic methodologies of any kind are brought to bear
on Roa Bastos’s works. This is a remarkable lacuna given his pointed intervention
in Paraguay’s history of cumulative traumas.
The person most responsible for the protocols that dominate the study of Roa
Bastos is, of course, Roa Bastos, whose eloquent essays of cultural criticism dove-
tail with the theoretical concerns of post-structuralism, postcolonial criticism, and
the subaltern studies project. Roa Bastos’s theoretical writings enabled a generation
of critics to understand his work in terms of its intense engagement with the twin
institutions of elite culture, literature and historiography, both of them ultimately
subordinated to the power of the State they serve. That work has been enormously
productive in the area of Latin American literary and cultural studies. One of its
effects, however, has been the foreclosure of approaches to Roa Bastos’s work that
were not sanctioned by Roa Bastos himself, most obviously psychoanalysis. At the
same time, Roa Bastos’s critical and theoretical production – and I am thinking
18 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

specifically of the famous ‘polemic’ surrounding his 1989 declaration that ‘there is
no Paraguayan literature’ (Legr
as 2008) – has had the unfortunate effect of dis-
couraging scholars from examining the dialogue that exists between Roa Bastos’s
work and that of other Paraguayan writers. As a result his work is often seen as
speaking for the cultural field, rather than within it.
One notable exception is John Kraniauskas’s discussion (2012) of El fiscal, which
draws out certain subterranean linkages between the Triple Alliance War, the cult
of Marshal L
opez, and the culture of ‘voluntary servitude’ that would reign in
Paraguay throughout much of the twentieth century, particularly during the long
years of the Stronato. El fiscal is the story of F
elix Moral, an exiled Paraguayan
intellectual working at an unnamed university in France, who returns to Paraguay
and carries out a bizarre plot to murder the country’s dictator, a monstrous char-
acter modelled in obvious ways on Alfredo Stroessner. The plot fails, inevitably,
and Moral is ultimately murdered by a government death squad. Moral tells us in
an early chapter that his revolutionary fervour was galvanized by the scene from a
film about the last days of Francisco Solano L
opez, which Moral helped to create
when he was a young screenwriter in Paraguay. The scene in question harkens dir-
ectly back to the poem ‘Cerro Cor
a’ in that it represents the apocryphal crucifix-
ion of Francisco Solano L
opez. Moral’s response to the sight begins with an angry
apostrophe directed at L
opez himself, but as the scene progresses the spectacle of
the crucifixion becomes the vehicle for a kind of spiritual transformation that ends
with Moral declaring his ‘loyalty’ to the dead dictator: ‘S
olo quedaron en m
ı el
horror y el furor. Arroj
e la pluma contra la pared y me lanc
e con los
ultimos sol-
dados a defender a ese Tit
an ya muerto, suprema encarnaci
on de la raza’ (‘Only
horror and fury remained within me. I dashed my pen against the wall and threw
myself in with the last soldiers defending that dead Titan, supreme embodiment of
the race’; 33). Later Moral travels to Alsace to visit Matthias Gr€unewald’s 1516
Isenheim Altarpiece, one of the most gruesomely realistic representations of the
crucified Jesus. These tremendously powerful images stay with Moral during his
self-imposed return to Paraguay, where he bides his time rewriting the history of
the Triple Alliance War in a letter to his lover, Jimena.
El fiscal is often described as a semi-autobiographical novel, and it is true that
there are a number of significant parallels between the author and his narrator,
F
elix Moral. But it is worth emphasizing the obvious fact that the trajectory of
Moral’s life is radically different from that of Roa Bastos’s. The fictional character,
F
elix Moral, is imprisoned after the film he is working on becomes corrupted by
its American producer, who jettisons the national epic in favour of a sensationalist
love triangle among L
opez, Elisa Lynch, and Pancha Garmendia. The film offends
the current Paraguayan dictator, troops are sent in, and the Americans are flown
to safety while the Paraguayan nationals, Moral included, are taken away to the
clandestine detention centre known as ‘La T
ecnica’. There he will be tortured for
a year: beaten, submerged in pools fetid with excrement, stung with electric cattle
prods. Soon after his release, Moral slips away into exile. When he finally returns
to Paraguay, many years later, plastic surgery has rendered his face unrecognizable;
he is bitter, solitary, and sexually obsessed with a misogynistic hallucination.
Moral’s mission, however nobly intended, is tantamount to suicide, and when he
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 19

dies at Cerro Cor
a, on the anniversary of Lopez’s death, the reader is forced to
confront the profitless end that comes from giving in to the discourses that compel
political martyrdom in Paraguay. That sterile, alienating gesture – political martyr-
dom – is precisely the gesture that Roa Bastos himself managed to avoid.
Undoubtedly, the intertwined issues that I have presented in these pages – the
ambiguities in Roa Bastos’s biographical record and his vacillating, ambivalent
response to the figure of Marshal L
opez, among others – warrant a more extensive
treatment than a single article can provide. I offer it in the spirit of initiating an
important and pressing conversation. Nevertheless, it is necessary to reiterate that
the critical and the fundamental theoretical problem is trauma, specifically the long
aftermath of the massive collective trauma that was the Triple Alliance War: this
is the problematic Roa Bastos explored in ‘Cerro Cor
a’ and ‘Nocturno paraguayo’,
and to which he returned decades later in El fiscal. The questions he presented in
the poems – what are the implications of Paraguay’s violent history for individual
and collective subjectivities in the twentieth century, and how can literature work
to redress or repair that history? – are questions that would continue to haunt him
throughout his writing life. How can literature tell the story of a historical injust-
ice – a story that has never been rectified or even fully recognized by the outside
world – without perpetuating a culture of guilt and obligation at home? How can
the legacy of cycles of violence ever lead to a future of emancipation, and not
merely further repression? Or to put the same question in Kleinian terms: how
can the vicious circle of paranoia, projective identification, and pathological vio-
lence – a full-blown culture of the death drive – ever be overcome?

1. The Triple Alliance War of 1864–1870, which Paraguayans also refer to as the ‘Great
War’, be it in Spanish (Guerra Grande) or in Guaran
ı (Guerra Guas
u), was fought against
the combined armies of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. The war began over Paraguay’s
objections to Brazil’s interference in the civil war between Uruguay’s Blanco and
Colorado parties. The Blancos quickly collapsed, leaving the Paraguayans embroiled in
what would eventually become a gruelling war of attrition against its more powerful and
populous neighbours. When the death of Paraguay’s Marshal-President Francisco Solano
L
opez brought the war to an end on 1 March 1870, the country’s population had been
reduced by over 60% due to famine, epidemic disease, and combat injuries. Important
reconsiderations of the Triple Alliance War have been published since the end of the
Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay, especially the work of Francisco Doratioto (Maldita
Guerra: Nova hist
oria da Guerra do Paraguai, S~ao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002) and
Thomas L. Whigham (The Paraguayan War, Volume I: Causes and Early Conduct, Lincoln,
Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 2002 and The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay vs. the
Triple Alliance, 1866-1870, Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary, 2017).

2. This is the petrified knot,

Forested wall for Paraguay’s execution,
The wall of time,
With the sun on its vertebrae
And the night on its shoulders
These are the moon-bowed mountains of Amambay
With their womb of green rock
20 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Where the race undertook, amid spasms of death,

The birth
Of its immortal Son. (CC I, l. 1–11)
Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
3. How do you pour onto paper
The sacred volcano of the nation,
With its eruption of swords and faces of fire,
Of misfortunes and ruins, its silence of fire,
Its music of fire,
This purple volcano set in the centuries
Like a comet immobilized in the night of America? (CC I, l. 16–22)
4. More than its planetary beehive or the sparkling
Weight of its crown of rumour and dew,
I am struck by its branch of mournful silence,
Its warbling stamen of arterial beats,
The blood-stained dawn beneath the March sky.
The history of that day has
Terrible letters
Paragraphs like teeth
And folios of
Pages that burn our hand to the root. (CC I, l. 23–32)
5. History is in its place,
The people are in their place,
And the Nation sails like an ark of fire
Upon the river of time.
Because the nation lives
Like a giant hand the colour of earth;
Because the land lives
Like a giant flame the colour of blood;
Because the blood lives
Like a giant flame the colour of dawn.
And in this light Paraguay, my people,
With the peoples of the world,
Rises and walks alive and majestic
Wearing a brilliant crown upon its temples
Like an immortal wing. (CC III, l. 33–47)
6. Guido Rodr
ıguez Alcal
a, ‘Diplom
aticos y escritores’, ABC 20 October 1997, 12.
7. In 1976, for example, when asked by Joaqu
ın Soler Serrano, host of the Spanish
television program A Fondo, to explain whether his exile from Paraguay had been
‘voluntary or forced’, Roa Bastos answered that ‘the only reason’ for his departure from
Paraguay was ‘having been editor-in-chief of an independent newspaper and having taken
a confrontational attitude, within the limits of the possible – no provocation, no
journalistic derring-do, only a vigilant presence with regard to the national laws. When a
violent uprising occurred, since I don’t have a heroic character, I was the first to flee’
(‘Como no tengo pasta de h
eroe, yo fui el primero en huir’]. On other occasions Roa
Bastos would refer to his departure from Paraguay as ‘an expulsion’ and call himself ‘un
proscripto’, an outlaw or banished person (Roa Bastos 1983, 8; Bareiro Saguier, 2006).
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 21

The interview on A Fondo is available on YouTube.com, accessed 20 March 2019:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query¼alþfondoþroaþbastos.
8. A comic book version of Roa Bastos’s life story, Augusto Roa Bastos. El Supremo escritor,
written by Andr
es Colm
an Guti
errez and illustrated by ADAM (Daniel Ayala), was
published in 2017 by the Paraguayan publishing house Servilibro. Colm
an Guti
errez and
ADAM include the dramatic account of Roa Bastos’s 1947 expulsion found in the 1983
Fragmentos de una autobiograf
ıa novelada, but they also mention the 1954 poem
‘<Eternamente hermanos!’, which they describe as ‘An impulse he would come to regret
when he realized that they [Stroessner and Per
on] were both authoritarians’ (33).
Colm
an Guti
errez and ADAM also note, a few pages later, that Roa Bastos refrained
from publicly criticizing Stroessner until Roa Bastos was ejected from Paraguay during a
1982 visit (15).
9. In her doctoral dissertation, Mar Langa Pizarro claims to have seen dispositive evidence
that Roa Bastos worked for the National Department of Propaganda (DENAPRO) under
Mor
ınigo, but I have neither seen such evidence nor seen it independently corroborated
elsewhere (Langa Pizarro 2002, 110 n. 1).
10. ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ is part of the poem-cycle El naranjal ardiente. Nocturno paraguayo.
1947-1949, which was first published by Di
alogo (Asunci
on, 1960). The actual poem
entitled ‘Nocturno paraguayo’ did not appear in print until 1983, however, when
Alc
andara published a new edition of El naranjal ardiente with a preface by the author. In
that preface, Roa Bastos notes that he decided, soon after the 1947 Civil War, to destroy
nearly all of his unpublished poetry, which he deemed of insufficient quality; but he
spared El naranjal ardiente and tucked the poems away, ‘along with the “fistful of soil”
they contained, and the ashes of a time of blood and death for our society fighting for its
freedom, a time that would lacerate us all in one way or another’ (7–8).
11. ‘Weep, weep, uruta
u/In the branches of the yatay./Gone is Paraguay,/Where I was
born, like you.’ Carlos Guido y Spano, Argentine poet (1827–1918).
12. How can I tell, explain or respond
To the empty questions
Between the exasperated disorder
And the inaudible shout that still freezes the blood,
That there was once among palm trees and centuries and jasmine
A country of dew, an island of land surrounded by land,
The purple heart of South America. (NP II, I. 3–13)
13. More than the planetary beehive
Or the sparkling weight
Of its crown of sound and dew,
I feel the blow of its branch of mournful silence,
Its warbling stamen of arterial beats,
Its sleepwalking serpent of blue metal. (NP I, l. 3–8)
14. What agonizes and suffers has terrible letters,
Innards like teeth
Folios of nerves,
Pages that burn our hand, eye, soul.
How then to write a sober reflection,
To draw a mouth
That speaks and says and tells from the pit of one’s chest
What is buried there
22 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Under thick cordilleras

Of blasphemy and sighing. (NP II, l. 29–40)
15. Analysts based in Buenos Aires and Montevideo engaged in a long and influential series of
conferences, seminars, and symposia involving British Kleinians from the mid-1920s on.
See R. Horacio Etchegoyen and Samuel Zysman, et al., ‘Melanie Klein in Buenos Aires:
Beginnings and Developments’. International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2005) 86, 869–94.
16. It may be helpful to keep in mind here the work of Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham
on the distinction between introjection and incorporation. As Torok points out, Klein’s
good internal object is ‘the fantastic pole of the introjective process’, whereas the
complementary term, imago, represents ‘precisely all that resisted introjection and that
the ego took possession of through other means, namely through the fantasy of
incorporation’. As Torok points out, Klein’s clinical work ‘seems to have focused,
justifiably, on cases in which [there exists a] type of fixating imago’ that comes into being
precisely because the subject has been unable to mourn the lost object openly (Torok
1994, 121).
17. And this cool resin of the dead
who learn to drink in long sips
their slow eternity of silent roots
sucking from our wounds
their wine of life, their faithless bile,
nourishing in our eyes
their necessary and final
gaze. (NP II, l. 49–56)
18. The uruta
u sings
Well do I know his solitary complaint
That makes its home among the woods,
In the dense eardrum of the night,
Behind time, with its back
To the light. (NP III, l. 1–6)
19. As Carlos G
omez Florent
ın notes in his recent history of the Guerra Civil, the workers
of the yerba mate and tannin industries were excluded by the military leadership of the
thwarted revolution against Mor
ınigo. See G
omez Florent
ın 2013, 197.
20. An ancestral breath wanders around, gathering lips,
Gathering pulses buried in the sand,
Sews fallen meteors into the husks
And upon the velvet of the night
Assembles these jewels,
These sacred links
That build up the blinding certainty of triumph. (NP III, l. 27–33)
21. The Southern Cross is in its place,
it rises and decorates the sky
from its hilt of gazes and hands
the combatant blood is in its
place,
time is in its place
and the space that our shoulders
lack is filling up with new foreheads
and clear visions. (NP III, l. 34–41)
 ‘L E T R A S T E R R I B L E S ’ 23

22. See note 5 for translation. (NP III, l. 42–49)

23. This is where they crucified like a warrior Christ
The indomitable Marshal
Who brandishing his people like a weapon
Fulfilled his oath of
‘VICTORY OR DEATH’,
Upon the last battlefield,
Together with his last, spectral soldiers
Of the unparalleled act
In his mouth the thunderous words,
‘I DIE WITH MY COUNTRY … !’ (CC II, l. 1–10)
24. See the lance incrusted in his guts
Like a blood-stained meteor
Dripping light and glory;
See the imperial buzzard
Stripping clean his spirit,
Trying in vain
To wrest from his hands the invincible steel
In which the entire sovereign Nation,
Like the lion and the sun on our shield
Incorporated their pure matter,
Their stellar marrow and their infinite
Passion for Liberty and Justice. (CC II, l. 11–22)
25. At the foot of this volcano my veins touch
the immortal resin of our
dead who are learning to live with long sips
the slow eternity of silent roots,
sucking in our blood, nourishing in
our eyes
their buried gaze,
their shades’ bread,
their expansive and sleepless greatness. (CC II, l. 23–29)
26. It gathers these jewels, these
sacred links
that build up the blinding
presence of triumph.
Upon Cerro Cor
a,
pedestal of the nation,
stands the Warrior of Fire;
his sword of diamonds
glows with his slogan, rises and decorates the sky
from its hilt of gazes and hands;
the combatant blood is in its place
Beside the cliff of courage,
History is in its place,
The men are in their place … (CC III, l. 21–34)
27. In his well-known essay ‘La escritura: Una met
afora del exilio’, written a few years after
the publication of Yo el Supremo, Roa Bastos describes the War of the Triple Alliance as
24 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

follows: ‘Los intereses econ
omicos, la penetraci
on y dominaci
on del imperio brit
anico en

aquella parte del mundo no pod
ıan tolerar que la peligrosa utop
ıa de la auto-
determinaci
on cuajara como un mal ejemplo en el peque~no y aislado pa
ıs mediterr
aneo.
Con su instigaci
on y apoyo los centros financieros del imperio del Brasil y las oligarqu
ıas
del R
ıo de la Plata, dependientes de Inglaterra, tramaron la guerra llamada de la Triple
Alianza.’ ‘Economic interests, the penetration and domination of the British Empire in
that part of the world, could not allow the dangerous utopia of self-determination to
form an example in the small and isolated inland country. With their instigation and
support from the economic centres of the Brazilian Empire and the oligarchies of the R
ıo
de la Plata, the so-called Triple Alliance War was plotted’ (3).
28. The classic study of nineteenth-century Paraguay by a left-wing historian is Richard Alan
White’s Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution, 1810-1840, which focuses on the dictatorship of Jos
e
Gaspar Rodr
ıguez de Francia. White’s interpretation was disseminated more broadly by E.
Bradford Burns in The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century. The idealized
depiction of pre-war Paraguay set down by White and Burns has been widely discredited,
perhaps most notably by Paraguay’s Milda Rivarola (1994) in Vagos, pobres y soldados: La
domesticaci
on estatal del trabajo en el Paraguay del siglo XIX. On left-wing authoritarian
movements in the R
ıo de la Plata region in the 1970s and ’80s, see Idelber Avelar (1999),
The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning.

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Jennifer L. French is professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Williams

College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She is the author of Nature, Neocolonialism
and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Dartmouth/University Press of New England,
2005). Her current work in progress uses object relations psychoanalysis to examine
Paraguayan literature and other cultural texts produced in the aftermath of the Triple
Alliance War (1864–1870).