/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/BOOKS-MERCOSUR: War of the Triple Alliance, Literary Atonement

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2002 (IPS) - Mercosur (Southern Common Market) now has a regionally integrated work of literature, a collective effort about a historic tragedy involving Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, the four countries of the decade-old trade bloc.

The novel titled “Los conjurados del Quilombo del Gran Chaco”, in Spanish, and “O Livro da Guerra Grande”, in Portuguese, with the participation of an author from each country, is an atypical book that blurs the borders between fiction and reality in recounting the War of Paraguay, also known as the War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870).

Augusto Roa Bastos, of Paraguay, Alejandro Maciel, of Argentina, Omar Prego Gadea, of Uruguay and Eric Nepomuceno, of Brazil, in that order, have written the four parts of the book, which naturally eschews consistency in structure or style.

The story takes off from a little-known event of the war that pitted Paraguay against the alliance of three countries that are now its partners in Mercosur, as told by Richard Francis Burton, the itinerant English consul who translated “1001 Arabian Nights” and “Kama Sutra”.

Burton wrote that on the other side of the Paraguay River, in Gran Chaco, a large settlement of fugitives had been established where Brazilians, Argentines and ‘Orientales’ (Uruguayans) and Paraguayans coexisted in mutual friendship and in enmity with the rest of the world and the war.

These were deserters who had grown tired of the senseless massacre and who gathered in a village in late 1867 or early 1868 to live in total equality and democracy, under the slogan “Peace in peace, and war against war.”

This “quilombo” was revealed to the world in the betrayal of an Argentine Catholic priest, and then the Brazilian troops destroyed it in July 1868, according to the story by Alejandro Maciel, written in the form of a diary allegedly left behind by an Argentine captain who had been a leaders of the anti-war “republic”.

Brazilian author Nepomuceno points out that quilombo was the name given to the enclaves in Brazil where African slaves sought refuge, while in the River Plate region, the word is used synonymously with brothel.

The book begins with two chapters by Paraguay’s greatest author, Roa Bastos, author of “Yo, el Supremo” and recipient of Spain’s prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1989.

Roa Bastos portrays the political, literary and philosophical concerns of Argentine general Bartolomé Mitre, chief of the Triple Alliance armies, using a poetic dialogue between him and his subordinate and compatriot, the painter Cándido López. The conversation is written without punctuation to separate the words of one from the other.

Mitre, a warrior with intellectual anxieties, translated – in the middle of the war – Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” and “Divine Comedy”, while López, having by then lost one of his hands in battle, documented the war scenes in his paintings, criticising the government and the war.

The final days of Paraguay’s president Francisco Solano López, who died with sword in hand during a battle in March 1870, are reconstructed in a literary style in the second chapter by Roa Bastos, who came up with the idea for the book.

The Paraguayan author used portions of the 27 letters that Burton wrote between August 1868 and April 1869 “from the battlefields of Paraguay” and published in late 1870, in which he highlights the stoic figure of Solano López, and his haughty lover, the Irishwoman Elisa Lynch.

Terrible and symbolic is the mutilation of yet another painter, a Paraguayan named Cándido López who draws and paints the destruction, the panoramas of the defeated in the war.

The Paraguayan López, after his right arm is torn off, learns to paint with his left hand, which is later destroyed by an ammunition shell. But he continues painting, using his feet, until the war claims those as well, and he is left “painting with the brush clenched between his teeth.”

An emotional encounter between the two painters named López, tragic witnesses to the war that “exterminated almost an entire generation of Paraguayans and mortgaged the future of a ruined nation,” is the work of Maciel in the book.

Then, the gaze of Uruguayan journalist and novelist Prego Gadea, also based on the letters and writings of a general who supported the quilombo, introduces the February 1868 assassination of Uruguayan president Venancio Flores as a dramatic event related to the War of the Triple Alliance.

In the final portion of the novel, by Nepomuceno, an author and translator of literary works by other Latin American writers, including Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, treats Brazil’s participation in the war and in the quilombo with sarcasm and humour.

To do this the author creates, for example, a character who joins the army to avoid paying his debts and uses his ability to establish friendships in order to became a messenger between commanders. He enjoys the chaos of the war and fathering children everywhere he goes, including one who leads to the suicide of a Uruguayan general.

This innovative novel is a symbol of Mercosur, but it is also an attempt to promote an exorcism or reflection about the war that resulted in Paraguay’s profound under-development in comparison with its partners in the bloc.

The history of the War of the Triple Alliance, for which death toll calculations vary dramatically, has been undergoing revisions since the 1960s, overcoming and replacing the exceedingly patriotic versions that dominated prior to then.