_Rubén Bareiro Saguier
published in Antique Children (Sacramento, CA) 2 (2010)
Writer, researcher, cultural activist against the Stroessner dictatorship, Rubén Bareiro Saguier (Villeta del Guarnipitán, Paraguay, 1930) lived for some thirty years in his Parisian exile before the new democratic government in his country named him Paraguayan Ambassador to France in 1994. He has had a singular literary life, while he taught and then worked as a researcher in cultural matters, above all on bilingualism as an integral reality of his native land. After finishing his diplomatic activity in 2003, he returned to settle in Asunción. The following interview took place in Paris, on July 9, 1997, in the Paraguayan embassy. Among his many books are: poetry, Biografía de ausente (1964), A la víbora de la mar (1977), Estancias, errancias, querencias (1982); short stories, Ojo por diente (1972), El séptimo pétalo del viento (1984), La rosa azul (2005); several anthologies; as well as cultural and literary studies such as Tentación de la utopia, la república jesuítica del Paraguay (1988) and Augusto Roa Bastos (1989).
How have you felt the irony of your present situation, now that you are Paraguay’s Ambassador to Paris?
I see my condition as ambassador as part of a democratic process, with the object of affirming that process, of broadening it. One objective that we always fought for, those of us who were against the dictatorship, was having the right to represent the country, and above all to exercise our duty as citizens after so much struggle. It’s a natural consequence for me, and even a vindication in a sense, after the long years of exile. So, I see that as a symptom of what we want for a pluralist country, and that’s why I am here. It’s not easy for a writer who was always against a dictatorial regime. Fortunately, that’s changed, and so I accepted this task. I say it’s not easy because Paris is a sort of great octopus, from the point of view of the activity one develops in this marvelous city. I’ve been in Paris since 1962. For the first ten years, I was an exile in fact, with sporadic return trips to my country. In ’72, on a return trip, I was thrown in prison. I had already been in prison before ever coming here. After a very intense campaign by writers from all over the world, from Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, the entire Latin American Boom, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and the assistance of the French government, even the Vatican—I was accused of being a communist, which was absurd, if I had been I would have admitted it, but I never was—I stayed four months in prison, then I came here. Consequently, for almost twenty years as an exile, I couldn’t go back there. In ’89, I returned, but on a mission for the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Aside from being a professor, since ’82 I have been a researcher at the CNRS, a privileged position, shall we say.
In ’89, there was the coup d’état.
Yes, a change on the military level, but with popular pressure Stroessner was overthrown, fortunately—after nearly thirty-five years, the longest dictatorship in Latin America. Okay, looking forward now. There I worked half and half, I returned to Paris for at least six months, and it was like that each year until ’94. In ’94, I was nominated for the embassy in France. And sometimes, I speak sincerely with nostalgia for when I was a professor or a researcher at the CNRS, because now I’m much busier. I can’t even take my siesta! As a Paraguayan originally from the country—I was born in a town in the interior—I like my siesta. It’s part of my ancestral habits.
Will you stay in your post after the elections, if you can?
I want to return to my country to work, there is a lot to do. During that interim, from ’89 to ’94, I worked on educational reform. Especially on the part concerning bilingual teaching. I was lucky to be a representative at the convention for reforming the new constitution, where I was a proponent of bilingual teaching throughout the country and of making Guaraní an official language on the same level as Spanish.
So Guaraní wasn’t being taught?
It was being taught on the secondary level, which was already late. Because then those who could reach the secondary level, people from comfortable families, would rage against a language they didn’t know and which was being taught to them by compulsion. It was a demagogic, deceitful argument made by the dictatorship, and I always criticized that.
It was away to scorn the language.
Exactly. Deep down, it was scorn and a way to cause the ruling class to be even more against the language. It’s a struggle that I have always taken on, because I’ve been bilingual since I was a child and I saw my classmates’ sadness from not understanding what was being taught in a language that they didn’t know, since their own was forbidden to use in the classroom.
But almost everyone spoke it, right?
Of course. This was the remarkable thing. They punished us in class, but the same teacher who had punished us, on going out to recess she too would speak with us in Guaraní. It was very peculiar for a country that was clearly bilingual, where even though the indigenous language, Guaraní, was marginalized from teaching, despite that it survived as a living language, evolving and adapting. The amazing thing was the popular mestizo fervor. Above all, the task of the mother who was originally the indigenous one who taught her language, Guaraní, to the child, because she was the one who took care of that. And this was a constant in our history, the maternal language in the literal and figurative sense.
As ambassador, have you still managed to keep writing?
I write a lot, but reports, notes, speeches . . . But no, I have imposed a schedule to preserve time for my own personal writing. So, I get up early, and from six, six-thirty, until ten when the office job begins, I’m always writing. I’m working on a book of stories and another of poems, the two genres I practice most.
You’ve always written both.
Always. That is, I began with poetry—and essays, literary criticism—but then, preoccupied by my opposition to the dictatorship, I needed a more direct discourse which narrative gave me, the short story in this case. The proof is that I was imprisoned for a book of stories, Ojo por diente, the last time I was in prison, in ’72. “Author of a book of stories awarded a prize by Fidel Castro who spreads international communism”—an absurdity of the police.
Was that the reason?
It was one of the reasons. The main one was to intimidate Paraguayan intellectuals within the country. “If this gentleman who is outside, teaching at the university in Paris, can be imprisoned, watch out!” And it was wonderful for me, very moving, to see the reaction as well of my Paraguayan colleagues—at great risk, they held demonstrations, published things, and some were expelled from the places where they taught.
To cover some biography from before Paris, at what age did you arrive in the city after living in the country?
I went to primary school in the country, in the town where I was born, Villeta del Guarnipitán, beside the river, a mythical place in my imagination, whose history is very tied up with my own and nourishes my writing essentially, above all the narrative. At the age of eleven, I went to the capital to go to secondary school, because there was none in my town, and I felt like I was in a strange city. But then I stayed, I did my schooling there, I studied law afterwards, because literature was not a serious profession at that time. Besides, my father had started with law and didn’t finish, he wanted me to have a career—it was somewhat in homage to that great gentleman, my father was much admired, he was an upright man and a fighter, from whom I learned dignity. I finished law, but at the same time I had already started studying literature. So, I am a lawyer as well, but I practiced very little, under a dictatorship a lawyer almost can’t do anything. I taught literature there, including at the university, and when I could no longer breathe, when I saw that they were placing plainclothes police in my classes to spy on me, that’s when I came here on a small grant. Because that whole period of my university activity in Paraguay was very nice, I learned a lot. In the jails, above all. My opposition was cultural, in fact—culture, for a regime like the one we had, is precisely subversion. And they’re right. So, I was a university leader and because of that, my long imprisonment—more than thirty times I was imprisoned in the most horrible jails or in police stations around Asunción.
Where did your sensibility for literature and the desire to write come from?
It’s been with me my whole life. Since I was a child, including the little notebooks I had during my siestas, the intense heat with the sound of the cicadas, I was already taking notes there. Naturally at school, and later (in 1955) with a friend my age we founded a journal that lasted for many years, Alcor, which published the work of my generation. Alcor had 52 issues, not very regular but it was an adventure, a beautiful adventure, and it became the longest lasting journal in history. Even after I came here, the journal continued, I edited it from here with a team back there, so it was very nice, an expression of strength, of rigor, of cultural resistance against the indignity of an atrocious dictatorship.
Was it in Spanish or bilingual?
In Spanish. We had things in Guaraní, but sporadically.
Was there a family aspect to your interest in literature?
Yes, at least as a stimulus. My father and mother were proud knowing that I wrote, I always felt very much accompanied and encouraged there.
Did you have a sense of yourself as someone different before coming here?
When I came I was already a professor. But I came on a grant, I took classes at the Sorbonne, above all to learn a bit about French methodology in the analysis and explanation of texts, and all of that was very useful for me. In France I learned the Cartesian rigor of thought and expression. I learned a lot about being more rigorous, more economical in my writing. And more effective, as a result.
Before living here, what made you think of France?
On my mother’s side I am Saguier, a very French name, from the man who was the first consul on the Río de la Plata. Pierre Saguier. Later, I had a great-great uncle, Cándido Bareiro, who was ambassador here in 1864 to ’68. So, I had two antecedents therefore and I had the opportunity to learn French in high school. Well, all that, my family was very Francophile on the Saguier side, my mother was an admirer of Ruben Darío, a great Francophile. So, that tradition marked me a lot, and then here I had the good fortune to live through a golden age of Latin American literature and to be a personal friend and fellow adventurer with them all.
And did the famous myth of Paris play a part in your imagination before coming?
How could it not? Above all, before coming. After, I lived it. That’s what’s interesting. I didn’t feel that sort of devout admiration here, singing of Paris just for the sake of doing so. I felt good in Paris. It was also a favorable scene for coming into my own as a writer, as a man of culture. And then, it’s a beautiful city with a climate of freedom and spiritual encouragement that helped me a lot, that inspired me a lot.
What was it like when you first arrived here in 1962?
I was one more student, nearly anonymous, but very realistic. For example, I went to the Institut des Hautes Etudes d’Amérique latine and I said, “I’m the editor of the journal . . .” “Ah, it’s you, great!” So, with the innocence of the time, a young person who comes along, I go without an appointment to see the director of the Collège de France, Marcel Bataillon, a great gentleman. “And you, who are you?” the secretary asks me. “I am a Paraguayan writer.” “But, did you ask for a meeting with Monsieur Bataillon?” “No, I live nearby here.” “All right, I’ll go ask him.” Marcel Bataillon received me for nearly an hour. For me, it was a real lesson finding out later who was that personage, and how difficult it was to meet with him! So, little by little doors began opening for me. I was lucky to be in a country that never asked me to be French in order to earn a space for myself. And Guaraní helped me in a sense, due to my contacts with Professor Bernard Poitier who was a great specialist in Amerindian languages, the one who initiated those studies in France. There I started with Guaraní: I brought him a series of recordings—by chance, they were given to me for him, and then when he went to the University of Paris X, Nanterre at the time, he invited me to help him. And that’s how I entered the university system—first as a lecteur (reader), then after ’68 when the campus at Vincennes was created, Paris VIII, I was an assistant, then I became a maître de conférences, and I returned to Paris VIII as a professor. And there, I applied for a post at the CNRS and I got it.
So, you were teaching here nearly the whole time?
I taught until ’82, and after I was a researcher. Which is a privileged position—I had neither an office, nor a boss, nor fixed hours. I worked at home on my research projects.
What were you doing from that time on?
I devoted myself to that work, but I held seminars. For example, for doctoral students on Latin America and others. An intense labor, because that also entailed being a thesis advisor, as well as participating in colloquia and conferences.
So then, what was the nature of your own research?
I finished my doctorate on Guaraní literature and Paraguayan literature, a colonial process, that was the theme. My research was on that, for the bilingual option, to have Guaraní as the national language along with Spanish.
You have also edited several anthologies of literature here. What are they?
There are two anthologies in French of Latin American stories. Then there is an anthology of Paraguayan poetry in the twentieth century, in Spanish. And now, a trilingual anthology of Guaraní poetry is just about finished [Poésie guaraní, 2000]. I did the translation with a friend from my generation, Carlos Villagra Marsal; we translated it into Spanish, and it will be in French as well. But I also did a compilation for the Caracas publisher Ayacucho, Literatura guaraní del Paraguay (1980). These were part of my work, essentially to show the existing values of a predominantly oral culture, but which cannot continue being oral because orality is always a very rich but fragile dimension. So, we must leave a testimony.
And how was that work received here?
Above all, on the university level, but afterwards it also spread beyond. Because precisely with Professor Poitier, at the University of Paris VIII, we created a chair of Amerindian languages. I taught Guaraní, and there was also Nahuatl and Quechua. They still have the chair, but since I entered the CNRS I could no longer teach on a regular basis. So, the person who was my assistant, he did a thesis on Guaraní in Paraguay, now he has the chair. There have been many theses on Guaraní since then.
In the 1960s and later, you had many friendships among Latin American writers. Did your friendships develop in a particular way, starting with Paraguayans, for example?
Of course, with Paraguayans it was natural, that was the shortest step with my compatriots on the cultural level. But with those who were living here, or who came for a while, I remember that one of the first people I met, through friends in common, was Vargas Llosa. We struck up a nice friendship, and I’m still friends with Mario. With Cortázar, we were good friends right up to his death. We called each other often, a group of us Latin Americans would spend time in a beautiful region, in Provence, where he had a house in Saignon. We would get together, have big barbecues . . . With Carlos Fuentes, with Gabriel García Márquez whom I first met in Caracas but he came here a lot later, and especially one summer we saw each other every day because there weren’t many people around. With Severo Sarduy. Well, with the whole group of the so-called Boom, the new narrative, and with poets as well.
The experience of being a foreigner, an outsider, you already felt that a little when you moved to the capital, to Asunción. But how did you feel it coming here to Paris?
I’ve always said that for me the fact of leaving my native town to go to the capital was my apprenticeship of exile. Because later it helped me a lot here. But Paris has that miracle of not rejecting those who choose to come or who adapt, so it was not a dépaysement, a way of losing what was my own, but rather of going deeper into what was my own. I cited the case of Professor Bernard Poitier who was a linguist, but there was a great anthropologist who died young, Pierre Clastres, who studied Guaraní culture, and his thesis was on the system of state, the society versus the state. He published two or three books that were quite important, and there too, his work reconfirmed my pride in being bilingual, bicultural. All of that made me feel comfortable in this environment.
As a writer, how was it getting published from here or even having a sense of your readers?
I admit that I was lucky. For example, that book of stories, Ojo por diente, for which they put me in prison, because it had won the Casa de las Américas prize in ‘71, so that was very prestigious. That book came out first in French translation. Because when I won the prize there, shortly afterward was the imprisonment of Padilla. And so, we signed a letter, a series of Latin American writers, asking for his freedom. So, my book ended up . . . the first edition in Spanish was in Venezuela, with Monte Avila.
It never came out in Cuba?
Yes, it came out three years later. After the Padilla case was sorted out.
But they didn’t resent you for signing the letter?
At first, yes, the book was set aside. I said no, I’m against the repression of culture, of a writer. Later, an edition came out with Plaza y Janes, and then there was an Uruguayan edition. Now it’s going to come out in Paraguay.
For the first time.
Sure, the book was cursed. But still, it was encouragement.
The fact of being here, did that produce any changes in your writing?
Yes, in the aspect that I was speaking of, in gaining a certain rigor. That helped me a lot. And for publishing as well: in Paraguay it’s very difficult to get published, that was especially so under the dictatorship. I began to publish books here. My first book appeared when I was already here, Biografía de ausente (1964).
Speaking of exile, one thinks eventually of nostalgia. How have you experienced that?
I’ve often felt nostalgic. On afternoons when the grayness of autumn or winter in Paris made me think of a certain song, I’d feel like I was going to cry. That nostalgia is a dangerous element in writing, because it blurs our reality a little. There is a tendency to idealize. I know that was an element I had to contend with sometimes, if I was aware I tried to prevent it from interfering with my writing. Whether I succeeded or not, that’s up to the critics to say. At any rate, it compelled me to recapture many experiences, in the stories especially—most of my first book, Ojo por diente, is very involved with the whole element of my childhood that is brought to life there.
That backdrop of your childhood, has it always been an important source for you or was it more so at that moment?
It becomes stronger in absence. Especially when one realizes that . . . the early years I could return discreetly. But when they took away my passport, then I traveled with documents that the United Nations provided, which were valid for every country except Paraguay. So, that was a kind of confirmation of my exile, the impossibility of returning. And that played a big part, how could it not, especially in someone for whom the piece of paper and a little phrase symbolically signify too much.
Do you think it’s possible to distinguish between different exiles? For example, your case was more or less voluntary at first, and later it became compulsory. But the fact is that for many years, most Latin Americans were here voluntarily.
That’s true. But the political conditions during those hard decades of dictatorship helped make the exile less voluntary. Cortázar, for example, who had come here voluntarily, became a person who was totally prohibited in his country. I think there is a difference and I felt it. Because when I could no longer return to my country, and I had to go look at it from the opposite shore, from Argentina, I swear to you that those were very difficult moments, very painful and intense. That exile which Plato spoke about, as a penalty harder than death, I think he’s right. Because it’s like a legal death, a death that’s imminent and day to day and permanent. When I went back in February of ‘89, eight days after the tyrant in my country was overthrown, I was reborn. Because the perfection of the punishment is that one dies far away, ex-ilo, outside of the place, of one’s own place. And so really I was reborn, I was euphoric. In the airport of Asunción, there were something like three hundred people, to my great surprise—cousins, lifelong friends, relatives, but also young new friends, unknown to me, who were in the resistance against the dictatorship. It was very moving.
Did you stay in contact with many people in Paraguay?
Very often, because I represented Paraguay’s dignity here, including politically—there was a national accord, an alliance of four democratic parties against the dictatorship, and I was the representative of that accord in Europe. And with that I met French political figures—Mister Mitterand, Mister Chirac, to give two significant names, and everyone around them.
And how did they receive you?
Well. When I presented my credentials as ambassador, Mitterand was still alive—already quite ill, but he received me for more than half an hour. He knew very well who I was and he knew about Paraguay, where it is. So, he was very kind to me, he accompanied me to the door, something he didn’t normally do, and there he gave me his hand in a warm gesture that was very Latin American, but not French, it was very nice. With President Chirac, we had already met before when he was mayor, and then last year, in ‘96, there was a colloquium of indigenous leaders, so we ran into each other there. He saw that I was perhaps the only ambassador who spoke with his country’s indigenous people in their language; afterwards, I wrote him a letter sincerely appreciative of his participation and his speech. And when he made his trip I accompanied him, we talked a lot there.
To return to the matter of bilingualism, you’ve spoken of the fact of coming from a “society that favors one language to the detriment of the other, that sort of recrimination for linguistic reasons.” Was that why you once said that you felt yourself to be a colonized writer?
Yes, because I almost never wrote in Guaraní. But I recognize the subterranean presence of Guaraní in my writing in Spanish. That’s very powerful, as for every Paraguayan writer, and the founder of that current, who is a writer of three borders, is Horacio Quiroga. He lived in Misiones in Argentina, facing Paraguay, in the region of Guaraní culture—when I re-read Quiroga, I was astonished by the force he had in his writing, how he had assimilated it not being a Guaraní speaker. I published an article on that subject. He was the first to introduce elements of the culture and the language. In the second decade of the century, when indigenismo was coming into being, which is a completely extremist and self-willed form of expression, he was doing it from within.
published in Antique Children (Sacramento, CA) 2 (2010)
Writer, researcher, cultural activist against the Stroessner dictatorship, Rubén Bareiro Saguier (Villeta del Guarnipitán, Paraguay, 1930) lived for some thirty years in his Parisian exile before the new democratic government in his country named him Paraguayan Ambassador to France in 1994. He has had a singular literary life, while he taught and then worked as a researcher in cultural matters, above all on bilingualism as an integral reality of his native land. After finishing his diplomatic activity in 2003, he returned to settle in Asunción. The following interview took place in Paris, on July 9, 1997, in the Paraguayan embassy. Among his many books are: poetry, Biografía de ausente (1964), A la víbora de la mar (1977), Estancias, errancias, querencias (1982); short stories, Ojo por diente (1972), El séptimo pétalo del viento (1984), La rosa azul (2005); several anthologies; as well as cultural and literary studies such as Tentación de la utopia, la república jesuítica del Paraguay (1988) and Augusto Roa Bastos (1989).
How have you felt the irony of your present situation, now that you are Paraguay’s Ambassador to Paris?
I see my condition as ambassador as part of a democratic process, with the object of affirming that process, of broadening it. One objective that we always fought for, those of us who were against the dictatorship, was having the right to represent the country, and above all to exercise our duty as citizens after so much struggle. It’s a natural consequence for me, and even a vindication in a sense, after the long years of exile. So, I see that as a symptom of what we want for a pluralist country, and that’s why I am here. It’s not easy for a writer who was always against a dictatorial regime. Fortunately, that’s changed, and so I accepted this task. I say it’s not easy because Paris is a sort of great octopus, from the point of view of the activity one develops in this marvelous city. I’ve been in Paris since 1962. For the first ten years, I was an exile in fact, with sporadic return trips to my country. In ’72, on a return trip, I was thrown in prison. I had already been in prison before ever coming here. After a very intense campaign by writers from all over the world, from Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, the entire Latin American Boom, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and the assistance of the French government, even the Vatican—I was accused of being a communist, which was absurd, if I had been I would have admitted it, but I never was—I stayed four months in prison, then I came here. Consequently, for almost twenty years as an exile, I couldn’t go back there. In ’89, I returned, but on a mission for the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Aside from being a professor, since ’82 I have been a researcher at the CNRS, a privileged position, shall we say.
In ’89, there was the coup d’état.
Yes, a change on the military level, but with popular pressure Stroessner was overthrown, fortunately—after nearly thirty-five years, the longest dictatorship in Latin America. Okay, looking forward now. There I worked half and half, I returned to Paris for at least six months, and it was like that each year until ’94. In ’94, I was nominated for the embassy in France. And sometimes, I speak sincerely with nostalgia for when I was a professor or a researcher at the CNRS, because now I’m much busier. I can’t even take my siesta! As a Paraguayan originally from the country—I was born in a town in the interior—I like my siesta. It’s part of my ancestral habits.
Will you stay in your post after the elections, if you can?
I want to return to my country to work, there is a lot to do. During that interim, from ’89 to ’94, I worked on educational reform. Especially on the part concerning bilingual teaching. I was lucky to be a representative at the convention for reforming the new constitution, where I was a proponent of bilingual teaching throughout the country and of making Guaraní an official language on the same level as Spanish.
So Guaraní wasn’t being taught?
It was being taught on the secondary level, which was already late. Because then those who could reach the secondary level, people from comfortable families, would rage against a language they didn’t know and which was being taught to them by compulsion. It was a demagogic, deceitful argument made by the dictatorship, and I always criticized that.
It was away to scorn the language.
Exactly. Deep down, it was scorn and a way to cause the ruling class to be even more against the language. It’s a struggle that I have always taken on, because I’ve been bilingual since I was a child and I saw my classmates’ sadness from not understanding what was being taught in a language that they didn’t know, since their own was forbidden to use in the classroom.
But almost everyone spoke it, right?
Of course. This was the remarkable thing. They punished us in class, but the same teacher who had punished us, on going out to recess she too would speak with us in Guaraní. It was very peculiar for a country that was clearly bilingual, where even though the indigenous language, Guaraní, was marginalized from teaching, despite that it survived as a living language, evolving and adapting. The amazing thing was the popular mestizo fervor. Above all, the task of the mother who was originally the indigenous one who taught her language, Guaraní, to the child, because she was the one who took care of that. And this was a constant in our history, the maternal language in the literal and figurative sense.
As ambassador, have you still managed to keep writing?
I write a lot, but reports, notes, speeches . . . But no, I have imposed a schedule to preserve time for my own personal writing. So, I get up early, and from six, six-thirty, until ten when the office job begins, I’m always writing. I’m working on a book of stories and another of poems, the two genres I practice most.
You’ve always written both.
Always. That is, I began with poetry—and essays, literary criticism—but then, preoccupied by my opposition to the dictatorship, I needed a more direct discourse which narrative gave me, the short story in this case. The proof is that I was imprisoned for a book of stories, Ojo por diente, the last time I was in prison, in ’72. “Author of a book of stories awarded a prize by Fidel Castro who spreads international communism”—an absurdity of the police.
Was that the reason?
It was one of the reasons. The main one was to intimidate Paraguayan intellectuals within the country. “If this gentleman who is outside, teaching at the university in Paris, can be imprisoned, watch out!” And it was wonderful for me, very moving, to see the reaction as well of my Paraguayan colleagues—at great risk, they held demonstrations, published things, and some were expelled from the places where they taught.
To cover some biography from before Paris, at what age did you arrive in the city after living in the country?
I went to primary school in the country, in the town where I was born, Villeta del Guarnipitán, beside the river, a mythical place in my imagination, whose history is very tied up with my own and nourishes my writing essentially, above all the narrative. At the age of eleven, I went to the capital to go to secondary school, because there was none in my town, and I felt like I was in a strange city. But then I stayed, I did my schooling there, I studied law afterwards, because literature was not a serious profession at that time. Besides, my father had started with law and didn’t finish, he wanted me to have a career—it was somewhat in homage to that great gentleman, my father was much admired, he was an upright man and a fighter, from whom I learned dignity. I finished law, but at the same time I had already started studying literature. So, I am a lawyer as well, but I practiced very little, under a dictatorship a lawyer almost can’t do anything. I taught literature there, including at the university, and when I could no longer breathe, when I saw that they were placing plainclothes police in my classes to spy on me, that’s when I came here on a small grant. Because that whole period of my university activity in Paraguay was very nice, I learned a lot. In the jails, above all. My opposition was cultural, in fact—culture, for a regime like the one we had, is precisely subversion. And they’re right. So, I was a university leader and because of that, my long imprisonment—more than thirty times I was imprisoned in the most horrible jails or in police stations around Asunción.
Where did your sensibility for literature and the desire to write come from?
It’s been with me my whole life. Since I was a child, including the little notebooks I had during my siestas, the intense heat with the sound of the cicadas, I was already taking notes there. Naturally at school, and later (in 1955) with a friend my age we founded a journal that lasted for many years, Alcor, which published the work of my generation. Alcor had 52 issues, not very regular but it was an adventure, a beautiful adventure, and it became the longest lasting journal in history. Even after I came here, the journal continued, I edited it from here with a team back there, so it was very nice, an expression of strength, of rigor, of cultural resistance against the indignity of an atrocious dictatorship.
Was it in Spanish or bilingual?
In Spanish. We had things in Guaraní, but sporadically.
Was there a family aspect to your interest in literature?
Yes, at least as a stimulus. My father and mother were proud knowing that I wrote, I always felt very much accompanied and encouraged there.
Did you have a sense of yourself as someone different before coming here?
When I came I was already a professor. But I came on a grant, I took classes at the Sorbonne, above all to learn a bit about French methodology in the analysis and explanation of texts, and all of that was very useful for me. In France I learned the Cartesian rigor of thought and expression. I learned a lot about being more rigorous, more economical in my writing. And more effective, as a result.
Before living here, what made you think of France?
On my mother’s side I am Saguier, a very French name, from the man who was the first consul on the Río de la Plata. Pierre Saguier. Later, I had a great-great uncle, Cándido Bareiro, who was ambassador here in 1864 to ’68. So, I had two antecedents therefore and I had the opportunity to learn French in high school. Well, all that, my family was very Francophile on the Saguier side, my mother was an admirer of Ruben Darío, a great Francophile. So, that tradition marked me a lot, and then here I had the good fortune to live through a golden age of Latin American literature and to be a personal friend and fellow adventurer with them all.
And did the famous myth of Paris play a part in your imagination before coming?
How could it not? Above all, before coming. After, I lived it. That’s what’s interesting. I didn’t feel that sort of devout admiration here, singing of Paris just for the sake of doing so. I felt good in Paris. It was also a favorable scene for coming into my own as a writer, as a man of culture. And then, it’s a beautiful city with a climate of freedom and spiritual encouragement that helped me a lot, that inspired me a lot.
What was it like when you first arrived here in 1962?
I was one more student, nearly anonymous, but very realistic. For example, I went to the Institut des Hautes Etudes d’Amérique latine and I said, “I’m the editor of the journal . . .” “Ah, it’s you, great!” So, with the innocence of the time, a young person who comes along, I go without an appointment to see the director of the Collège de France, Marcel Bataillon, a great gentleman. “And you, who are you?” the secretary asks me. “I am a Paraguayan writer.” “But, did you ask for a meeting with Monsieur Bataillon?” “No, I live nearby here.” “All right, I’ll go ask him.” Marcel Bataillon received me for nearly an hour. For me, it was a real lesson finding out later who was that personage, and how difficult it was to meet with him! So, little by little doors began opening for me. I was lucky to be in a country that never asked me to be French in order to earn a space for myself. And Guaraní helped me in a sense, due to my contacts with Professor Bernard Poitier who was a great specialist in Amerindian languages, the one who initiated those studies in France. There I started with Guaraní: I brought him a series of recordings—by chance, they were given to me for him, and then when he went to the University of Paris X, Nanterre at the time, he invited me to help him. And that’s how I entered the university system—first as a lecteur (reader), then after ’68 when the campus at Vincennes was created, Paris VIII, I was an assistant, then I became a maître de conférences, and I returned to Paris VIII as a professor. And there, I applied for a post at the CNRS and I got it.
So, you were teaching here nearly the whole time?
I taught until ’82, and after I was a researcher. Which is a privileged position—I had neither an office, nor a boss, nor fixed hours. I worked at home on my research projects.
What were you doing from that time on?
I devoted myself to that work, but I held seminars. For example, for doctoral students on Latin America and others. An intense labor, because that also entailed being a thesis advisor, as well as participating in colloquia and conferences.
So then, what was the nature of your own research?
I finished my doctorate on Guaraní literature and Paraguayan literature, a colonial process, that was the theme. My research was on that, for the bilingual option, to have Guaraní as the national language along with Spanish.
You have also edited several anthologies of literature here. What are they?
There are two anthologies in French of Latin American stories. Then there is an anthology of Paraguayan poetry in the twentieth century, in Spanish. And now, a trilingual anthology of Guaraní poetry is just about finished [Poésie guaraní, 2000]. I did the translation with a friend from my generation, Carlos Villagra Marsal; we translated it into Spanish, and it will be in French as well. But I also did a compilation for the Caracas publisher Ayacucho, Literatura guaraní del Paraguay (1980). These were part of my work, essentially to show the existing values of a predominantly oral culture, but which cannot continue being oral because orality is always a very rich but fragile dimension. So, we must leave a testimony.
And how was that work received here?
Above all, on the university level, but afterwards it also spread beyond. Because precisely with Professor Poitier, at the University of Paris VIII, we created a chair of Amerindian languages. I taught Guaraní, and there was also Nahuatl and Quechua. They still have the chair, but since I entered the CNRS I could no longer teach on a regular basis. So, the person who was my assistant, he did a thesis on Guaraní in Paraguay, now he has the chair. There have been many theses on Guaraní since then.
In the 1960s and later, you had many friendships among Latin American writers. Did your friendships develop in a particular way, starting with Paraguayans, for example?
Of course, with Paraguayans it was natural, that was the shortest step with my compatriots on the cultural level. But with those who were living here, or who came for a while, I remember that one of the first people I met, through friends in common, was Vargas Llosa. We struck up a nice friendship, and I’m still friends with Mario. With Cortázar, we were good friends right up to his death. We called each other often, a group of us Latin Americans would spend time in a beautiful region, in Provence, where he had a house in Saignon. We would get together, have big barbecues . . . With Carlos Fuentes, with Gabriel García Márquez whom I first met in Caracas but he came here a lot later, and especially one summer we saw each other every day because there weren’t many people around. With Severo Sarduy. Well, with the whole group of the so-called Boom, the new narrative, and with poets as well.
The experience of being a foreigner, an outsider, you already felt that a little when you moved to the capital, to Asunción. But how did you feel it coming here to Paris?
I’ve always said that for me the fact of leaving my native town to go to the capital was my apprenticeship of exile. Because later it helped me a lot here. But Paris has that miracle of not rejecting those who choose to come or who adapt, so it was not a dépaysement, a way of losing what was my own, but rather of going deeper into what was my own. I cited the case of Professor Bernard Poitier who was a linguist, but there was a great anthropologist who died young, Pierre Clastres, who studied Guaraní culture, and his thesis was on the system of state, the society versus the state. He published two or three books that were quite important, and there too, his work reconfirmed my pride in being bilingual, bicultural. All of that made me feel comfortable in this environment.
As a writer, how was it getting published from here or even having a sense of your readers?
I admit that I was lucky. For example, that book of stories, Ojo por diente, for which they put me in prison, because it had won the Casa de las Américas prize in ‘71, so that was very prestigious. That book came out first in French translation. Because when I won the prize there, shortly afterward was the imprisonment of Padilla. And so, we signed a letter, a series of Latin American writers, asking for his freedom. So, my book ended up . . . the first edition in Spanish was in Venezuela, with Monte Avila.
It never came out in Cuba?
Yes, it came out three years later. After the Padilla case was sorted out.
But they didn’t resent you for signing the letter?
At first, yes, the book was set aside. I said no, I’m against the repression of culture, of a writer. Later, an edition came out with Plaza y Janes, and then there was an Uruguayan edition. Now it’s going to come out in Paraguay.
For the first time.
Sure, the book was cursed. But still, it was encouragement.
The fact of being here, did that produce any changes in your writing?
Yes, in the aspect that I was speaking of, in gaining a certain rigor. That helped me a lot. And for publishing as well: in Paraguay it’s very difficult to get published, that was especially so under the dictatorship. I began to publish books here. My first book appeared when I was already here, Biografía de ausente (1964).
Speaking of exile, one thinks eventually of nostalgia. How have you experienced that?
I’ve often felt nostalgic. On afternoons when the grayness of autumn or winter in Paris made me think of a certain song, I’d feel like I was going to cry. That nostalgia is a dangerous element in writing, because it blurs our reality a little. There is a tendency to idealize. I know that was an element I had to contend with sometimes, if I was aware I tried to prevent it from interfering with my writing. Whether I succeeded or not, that’s up to the critics to say. At any rate, it compelled me to recapture many experiences, in the stories especially—most of my first book, Ojo por diente, is very involved with the whole element of my childhood that is brought to life there.
That backdrop of your childhood, has it always been an important source for you or was it more so at that moment?
It becomes stronger in absence. Especially when one realizes that . . . the early years I could return discreetly. But when they took away my passport, then I traveled with documents that the United Nations provided, which were valid for every country except Paraguay. So, that was a kind of confirmation of my exile, the impossibility of returning. And that played a big part, how could it not, especially in someone for whom the piece of paper and a little phrase symbolically signify too much.
Do you think it’s possible to distinguish between different exiles? For example, your case was more or less voluntary at first, and later it became compulsory. But the fact is that for many years, most Latin Americans were here voluntarily.
That’s true. But the political conditions during those hard decades of dictatorship helped make the exile less voluntary. Cortázar, for example, who had come here voluntarily, became a person who was totally prohibited in his country. I think there is a difference and I felt it. Because when I could no longer return to my country, and I had to go look at it from the opposite shore, from Argentina, I swear to you that those were very difficult moments, very painful and intense. That exile which Plato spoke about, as a penalty harder than death, I think he’s right. Because it’s like a legal death, a death that’s imminent and day to day and permanent. When I went back in February of ‘89, eight days after the tyrant in my country was overthrown, I was reborn. Because the perfection of the punishment is that one dies far away, ex-ilo, outside of the place, of one’s own place. And so really I was reborn, I was euphoric. In the airport of Asunción, there were something like three hundred people, to my great surprise—cousins, lifelong friends, relatives, but also young new friends, unknown to me, who were in the resistance against the dictatorship. It was very moving.
Did you stay in contact with many people in Paraguay?
Very often, because I represented Paraguay’s dignity here, including politically—there was a national accord, an alliance of four democratic parties against the dictatorship, and I was the representative of that accord in Europe. And with that I met French political figures—Mister Mitterand, Mister Chirac, to give two significant names, and everyone around them.
And how did they receive you?
Well. When I presented my credentials as ambassador, Mitterand was still alive—already quite ill, but he received me for more than half an hour. He knew very well who I was and he knew about Paraguay, where it is. So, he was very kind to me, he accompanied me to the door, something he didn’t normally do, and there he gave me his hand in a warm gesture that was very Latin American, but not French, it was very nice. With President Chirac, we had already met before when he was mayor, and then last year, in ‘96, there was a colloquium of indigenous leaders, so we ran into each other there. He saw that I was perhaps the only ambassador who spoke with his country’s indigenous people in their language; afterwards, I wrote him a letter sincerely appreciative of his participation and his speech. And when he made his trip I accompanied him, we talked a lot there.
To return to the matter of bilingualism, you’ve spoken of the fact of coming from a “society that favors one language to the detriment of the other, that sort of recrimination for linguistic reasons.” Was that why you once said that you felt yourself to be a colonized writer?
Yes, because I almost never wrote in Guaraní. But I recognize the subterranean presence of Guaraní in my writing in Spanish. That’s very powerful, as for every Paraguayan writer, and the founder of that current, who is a writer of three borders, is Horacio Quiroga. He lived in Misiones in Argentina, facing Paraguay, in the region of Guaraní culture—when I re-read Quiroga, I was astonished by the force he had in his writing, how he had assimilated it not being a Guaraní speaker. I published an article on that subject. He was the first to introduce elements of the culture and the language. In the second decade of the century, when indigenismo was coming into being, which is a completely extremist and self-willed form of expression, he was doing it from within.