Augusto Roa Bastos: outwitting reality.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Paraguayan author

Augusto Roa Bastos, Paraguay's preeminent writer, is one of the most complex and gifted writers of the post-Boom generation of Latin American novelists. An unassuming individual who has labored much of his career in relative obscurity, he characterizes himself, without rancor, as a perpetual exile, having lived half a century outside his native country for both political and personal reasons. Although his short stories and novels focus mostly on the tragic, fascinating history of his native land, ultimately they transcend locale and culture and speak to us all.

His masterpiece, Yo el Supremo [I the Supreme], is an intricate but balanced and immensely rewarding meditation on the theme of power. El Supremo the self-assigned epithet of Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, declared himself perpetual dictator of Paraguay, which he ruled as a hermetic fiefdom during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is no accident that the author assigns himself a similar perpetuity of status. He came to identify strongly with Francia's sense of isolation and solitude: the writer locked out of his homeland much like the tyrant was locked in.

Although Roa Bastos has lived in Toulouse, France, since 1976, dividing his time between writing and teaching at a local university, the trajectory of his life began nearly eighty years ago in the little town of Iturbe, east of Asuncion. His father, Lucio Roa, was a very severe man from an old-line Spanish family. He worked as a manager at a local sugar refinery, serving his son his first helpings of totalitarianism, which would preoccupy the author all his life.

"The theme of power, for me, in its different manifestations recurs in all of my work, whether it manifests itself politically, in a religious form, or in a parental or familial context. Power is a tremendous stigma, a kind of human pride that needs to have control of the will of another. It's an antilogical condition that produces a sick society. Repression always produces the counter-stroke of rebellion. Ever since I was very little I felt a need to oppose power, the fierce punishment for little things the basis for which was never conveyed."

In contrast, the writer remembers his mother, Lucia Bastos, of Portuguese background, as a counterpoint to her husband: cultivated for a member of the petite bourgeoisie, she was a good singer and possessed a modest library, including a Spanish-language edition of Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare. It was her son's first exposure to literature.

At age eight the future writer tasted his first bit of exile, an agreeable experience for the most part, residing for several years in Asuncion with his uncle, a prelate named Hermenegildo Roa. "For me, he was my real father. He was a very serious, austere priest, but he supported the education of all of us nephews and nieces living in the interior. He had books that were prohibited, especially for a kid of my age: Rousseau, Voltaire. He said, `I want you to read these with great care.' But at least he let me because he was reasonable, intelligent."

In time the youth learned ideas could be subversive. It was also the beginning of a lifelong interest in French literature, especially the writers of the Enlightenment, another trait shared with Francia.

In 1932, with the outbreak of war between Paraguay and Bolivia over control of the barren Chaco region, Roa Bastos, at age fifteen, enlisted as a field hospital orderly. He saw no action on the front lines, but the human carnage he witnessed nonetheless left deep emotional scars. The war truncated the young man's formal education, but after the cease-fire he began an apprenticeship in journalism working for El Pais, an Asuncion daily. He wrote short stories and poetry on the side. In 1941 he completed his first novel, Fulgencio Miranda, which won a local literary prize, although it was not published. Voraciously he read Rilke, Valery, Cocteau, Eluard, Breton, and Aragon, also some of the North American masters. "Especially Faulkner," Roa Bastos recalls. "I would say he had a major influence on the majority of Latin American writers of my generation: Onetti, Garcia Marquez. We all passed by the house of William Faulkner! There were others, like Hemingway, Hawthorne, Melville, who helped liberate us from the heaviness of the Hispanic style."

As a rising star within his country's literary establishment, Roa Bastos received a travel fellowship from the British Council to travel throughout England, as well as to develop program materials on Latin America for the British Broadcasting Company. "It was 1945. I was there for a year as the war came to a close. I took a Liberty ship carrying wheat from Buenos Aires, a nightmare, eighty to one hundred ships in convoy via the polar route, stopping in Iceland. It was impressive that they worried about bringing foreigners to England at such a time. It was an initiation rite for me, as von Braun's V-2 rockets were landing on Manchester and London."

While in England, Roa Bastos continued to file stories with El Pais, especially...