“Tyranny is not a matter of minor theft and violence, but of wholesale plunder, sacred and profane, private or public,” says Socrates to his listeners in the ninth book of Republic. “And yet, the real tyrant is enslaved to cringings and servitudes beyond compare, a flatterer of the basest men, and so far from finding even the least satisfaction for his desires, he is in need of most things, and is truly a poor man, as is apparent if one knows how to observe a soul. Throughout his life he teems with terrors and is full of convulsions and pains; in fact he resembles the condition of the city which he rules, and is like it.” And he concludes: “There is no city more wretched than that which a tyrant rules.”
Though Socrates’s tyrant is a universal species, alive in every age and every country, Latin America seems to have been particularly propitious to his development (Africa in recent times and the Soviet bloc before the fall of the Berlin Wall are close contenders). Why one particular and vast chunk of the earth should display, over barely two centuries, such a catalogue of infamy is perhaps an unanswerable question. In a letter written in 1830, the liberator Simon Bolívar foresaw this state of affairs but did not explain it. “America [Bolívar gave Latin America the name of the entire continent] is ungovernable for us. Those who serve the revolution plow the sea. The only thing to do in America is to emigrate. This country will infallibly fall into the hands of an unbridled crowd of petty tyrants almost too small to notice and of all colors and races.”
The fulfillment of his prophecy allowed Carlos Fuentes, less than a century and a half later, to suggest to his Latin American writer friends that they should each write a novel about their national tyrant and call the series “The Fathers of the Homeland.” Fuentes realized that each of the twenty-seven countries of Latin America could boast (if that is the right word) of at least one tyrant; several had the pick of two or more. The project, unfortunately, never came to be realized, though it produced several other masterpieces: in Colombia, Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch; in Guatemala, Miguel Ángel Asturias’s El Señor Presidente; in Paraguay, Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme; in Peru (though set in the Dominican Republic) Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. Fuentes himself had published, in 1962, the now classic The Death of Artemio Cruz. To all five Socrates’s definition can be applied.
The murky figure of the Latin American tyrant attracted writers from Europe as well. Beginning perhaps with Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, and continuing with Herbert Read’s The Green Child, Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, and, more recently, Daniel Pennac’s The Dictator and the Hammock, European writers have seen perhaps in the tyrants across the sea foreign versions of others closer to home. Among them, perhaps the most complex, the most puzzling is Tyrant Banderas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán.
Born in one of the poorest districts of rural Galicia in 1866, Valle-Inclán managed to enter the University of Santiago de Compostela and, after graduating, began work as a journalist in Madrid. Under the influence of the modernist poets (notably Rubén Darío, then living in Spain), his first publications were, as one critic called them, “lyrical effluvia,” describing a world made for human enjoyment, subject to human will, in which the hero is the soldier-lover, a cross between Nietzsche’s Superman and Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan. It was perhaps during his 1916 journey to France as a war correspondent for El Imparcial that Valle-Inclán radically changed his views on war and the uses of violence. From conservative aristocratic sympathies (he had presented himself as a right-wing candidate for the Cortes, the people’s chamber, in 1910, and failed), the fifty-year-old writer switched his allegiance to the left (again he presented himself as a candidate, this time for the other side, and failed again). To depict the world as he now saw it, Valle-Inclán developed instead a harsh and unadorned prose in which he wrote his best-known plays and novels. He called these pieces esperpentos, that is to say, “grotesque and horrible things,” the deformed reflection of the classic motifs of European literature. The first of his esperpento novels (and the best) was Tyrant Banderas.
Tyrant Banderas is set in the imaginary Latin American country of Santa Fe de Tierra Firme, inspired by Valle-Inclán’s experience of Mexico, which he visited first in 1892 as a thirty-four-year-old incipient writer, and then again in 1921 as a recognized author. After suffering censorship under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who ruled Spain from 1923 to 1930 (Valle-Inclán was briefly imprisoned for his anti-Rivera opinions), he decided to transfer his depiction of Rivera’s tyranny to the wilder Mexican landscapes he had known, in part to use elements of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, in part to feel free from documentary constraints when speaking about his homeland. Not only Primo de Rivera and Porfirio Díaz served to create the character of Santos Banderas. In a letter to the scholar Alfonso Reyes, Valle-Inclán explained that it was “a novel about a tyrant with traits borrowed from Dr. Francia, Rosas, Melgarejo, López, Porfirio,” all Latin American dictators. In any case, whatever his sources, the experiment was immensely successful. “What I’ve written before Tyrant Banderas is fiddle music,” Valle-Inclán confessed in an interview. “This novel is my first one. My work starts now.” He was by then sixty years old.
Tyrant Banderas is made out of fragments, snatches of dialogue, short scenes of action, but the patchwork effect is framed by a mathematically tight structure. Like Dante’s Commedia (which Valle-Inclán read in his youth and greatly admired) the novel is constructed around the number three: seven sections divided into books, seven books in the case of the central section, three in each of the remaining six. The total number, including the prologue and the epiglogue, is twenty-seven (three times three times three). Furthermore, the story takes place over three days and is marked by three determining moments: the first in the prologue, the second halfway through the novel, the last in the third book of the third section.
This numerical insistence may be a reflection of Valle-Inclán’s fascination with the occult in which the numbers seven and three carry a particularly numinous charge. His main characters are believed to possess superhuman powers. Tyrant himself is supposed to have a pact with the devil: he never sleeps, he has no intimate friends, he seems capable of the most incredible deeds. His opposition, Don Roque Cepeda, is also touched with a mysterious aura, but in his case his “occult” leanings come from his studies in theosophy, the ancient system of belief according to which the “seeker” was able to discover the working of all things visible and invisible, and communicate with ghosts. The entire atmosphere of the novel is imbued with a sense of the fantastic. Though nothing of this is made explicit, the uncanny, the otherworldly is constantly hinted at in local superstitions, in the commentaries of the indigenous people, in the depiction of the landscape itself.
Though the main characters detach themselves from the narrative as complex, many-faceted beings, it is the swarming crowds around them that are most powerfully present in the novel. Soldiers, natives, prostitutes, servants, prisoners, peasants, diplomats, and politicians constitute an organic monster ever-present in the narrative. In a multitude of tongues and for a large variety of reasons, this kaleidoscopic mass is the real protagonist of Tyrant Banderas. And like Socrates’s tyrant, Santos Banderas resembles it in all its many ancient vices and perverted virtues.
To translate Tyrant Banderas is a task that seems impossible. To render the different tones and social strata of one language into another is difficult enough, so as not to have, for instance, Dickens’s cockneys or Mark Twain’s southerners sound, when translated into Spanish, like truants from Madrid or ruffians from Andalusia. But in the case of Tyrant Banderas, which interweaves not only many strands of Castilian Spanish but also various native tongues of Latin America, especially from the local dialects of Mexico, the difficulties seem insurmountable. Tyrant Banderas is not easy to read, even for a native Spanish speaker: most Spanish editions carry a glossary that is anything from seventeen to twenty-five pages long. However, proof of Valle-Inclán’s narrative genius is that a reader in the original does not need to refer to the glossary constantly. After a few pages, the context lends meaning to the unknown terms, the gist of the dialogue is understood, names of plants and animals become recognizable in a landscape of words brought to life through the sheer vigor of the telling.
It is this driving verbal force that not only carries the action forward but also fuels the characters. As the narrative progresses, the mass of minor figures multiplies and coheres, and acquires the quality of a Greek chorus, punctuating and commenting on the action, while the individual characters grow in tragic force and become archetypal, larger than life. The second-to-last paragraph of the novel, in which the soul of Tyrant is finally laid bare (the reader must earn the horrific thrill of reading it), is one of the great moments of Spanish drama. It alone would serve to call Valle-Inclán the most important Spanish writer of the first half of the twentieth century.
—ALBERTO MANGUEL