A Show of Heads

• I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated by Helen Lane
  Faber, 433 pp, £9.95, March 1987, ISBN 5 7114 6261 X

In the autumn of 1967 in London, I coincided with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. We had both read, recently and with admiration, as well as a touch of envy, Edmund Wilson’s masterly portraits of the American Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Sitting in a pub in Hampstead, we thought it would be a good idea to have a comparable book on Latin America. An imaginary portrait gallery immediately stepped forward, demanding incarnation: the Latin American dictators.

Individuals such as Mexico’s Santa Anna, the peg-legged cockfighter who lost the South-West to President Polk’s Manifest Destiny; or Venezuela’s Juan Vicente Gomez, who announced his own death in order to punish those who dared celebrate it; or El Salvador’s Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, who fought off scarlet fever by having street lights wrapped in red paper; or Bolivia’s Enrique Peñaranda, of whom his mother famously said, ‘If I had known that my son was going to be president, I would have taught him to read and write’ – all of them pose a tremendous problem for Latin American novelists. How to compete with history? How to create characters richer, crazier, more imaginative?

Vargas and I sought an answer by inviting a dozen Latin American authors to write a novella each – no more than fifty pages per capita – on their favourite national tyrant. The collective volume would be called Los Padres de las Patrias (‘The Fathers of the Fatherlands’), and the French publisher Claude Gallimard took it up instantly. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to co-ordinate the multiple tempi and varied wills of a wide variety of writers who included, if my recall is as good as that of Roa Bastos’s El Supremo, Roa Bastos himself, Argentina’s Julio Cortazar, Venezuela’s Miguel Otero Silva, Colombia’s Gabriel García Marquez, Cuba’s Alejo Carpentier, the Dominican Republic’s Juan Bosch and Chile’s José Donoso and Jorge Edwards (one of them promised to take on a Bolivian dictator). When the project fell through, three of these authors went on to write fulllength novels of their own: Carpentier’s El Recurso del Método (Reasons of State), García Marquez’s El Otoño del Patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch) and Roa Bastos’s Yo el Supremo (I the Supreme).

Carpentier chose to dwell on a mixture of Venezuela’s Cipriano Castro and Guatemala’s Estrada Cabrera, re-creating the figure of the ‘enlightened despot’ who liked to spend most of his time in Paris at the opera, but would come back home and squash military rebellions without missing a beat of Rigoletto: he ends his life in a Right Bank apartment which he has filled with orchids, hammocks, potted palms and monkeys. García Marquez’s Patriarch is a sum of characteristics drawn from Venezuela’s Gomez, Bolivia’s Peñaranda, Santo Domingo’s Trujillo, and, especially, from the contemporary Iberian tyrants, Spain’s Franco and Portugal’s Salazar, who took so long in dying that their deaths seemed longer than their lives: were they, after all, immortal?