RAMÓN DEL VALLE-INCLÁN (1866–1936) was born into an impoverished aristocratic family in a rural village in Galicia, Spain. Obedient to his father’s wishes, he studied law in Compostela, but after his father’s death in 1889 he moved to Madrid to work as a journalist and critic. In 1892 Valle-Inclán traveled to Mexico, where he remained for more than a year. His first book of stories came out in Spain in 1895. A well-known figure in the cafés of Madrid, famous for his spindly frame, cutting wit, long hair, longer beard, black cape, and single arm (the other having been lost after a fight with a critic), Valle-Inclán was celebrated as the author of Sonatas: The Memoirs of the Marquis of Bradomín, which was published in 1904 and is considered the finest novel of Spanish modernismo, as well as for his extensive and important career in the theater, not only as a major twentieth-century playwright but also as a director and actor. He reported from the western front during World War I, and after the war he developed an unsettling new style that he dubbed esperpento —a Spanish word that means both a grotesque, frightening person and a piece of nonsense—and described as a search for “the comic side of the tragedy of life.” Partly inspired by his second visit to Mexico in 1920, when the country was in the throes of revolution, Tyrant Banderas is Valle-Inclán’s greatest novel and the essence of esperpento.
PETER BUSH is an award-winning translator who lives in Barcelona. Among his recent translations are Juan Goytisolo’s Níjar Country and Teresa Solana’s A Shortcut to Paradise. He is currently translating Quim Monzó’s A Thousand Morons and Josep Pla’s The Gray Notebook (forthcoming from NYRB Classics).
ALBERTO MANGUEL is an Argentinian-born Canadian essayist and novelist. He has written twenty works of criticism, including The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (with Gianni Guadalupi), A History of Reading, and The Library at Night; edited more than twenty literary anthologies; and is the author of five novels, including News from a Foreign Country Came, which won the McKitterick Prize in 1992. An Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), he has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
TYRANT BANDERAS
RAMÓN DEL VALLE-INCLÁN
Translated from the Spanish by
PETER BUSH
Introduction by
ALBERTO MANGUEL
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
Part One: A Symphony from the Tropics
Book One: Icon of a Tyrant
Book Two: The Minister for Spain
Book Three: Slot-the-Frog
Part Two: Bellyaches and Fracas
Book One: Iberian Quartz
Book Two: The Harris Circus
Book Three: The Ear of the Fox
Part Three: A Night on the Tiles
Book One: The Green Boudoir
Book Two: Illumination from the Spirits
Book Three: A Touch of Guignol
Part Four: A Necromantic Amulet
Book One: The Escape
Book Two: The Pinchbeck Ring
Book Three: The Little Colonel
Book Four: Honest Whitey
Book Five: The Rancher
Book Six: The Lasso
Book Seven: Necromancy
Part Five: Santa Mónica
Book One: Seats in the Shade
Book Two: The Number Three
Book Three: Prison Pack
Part Six: Honey-Nut Tarts and Poison
Book One: Loyola’s Lesson
Book Two: Human Frailty
Book Three: The Note
Part Seven: The Green Grimace
Book One: Tyrant at Play
Book Two: The Terrace at the Club
Book Three: A Time for Buffoons
Epilogue
Introduction
“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
Tyrant Banderas
Prologue
I
That night the Creole rancher Filomeno Cuevas had armed his peons with rifles stashed by a jungle creek. Now Indians of the glebe advanced through Ticomaipú’s murky swamps. A bright moon and whispering horizons echoing deep into the night.
II
The boss reached Jarote Quemado with a posse of henchmen, reined in his steed, and called the roll by lantern light.
“Manuel Romero.”
“Here!”
“Step forward. My advice to you is go easy on the grog. The first stroke of twelve is the sign. Many lives are in your hands. Enough said. Shake!”
“Boss, we were born to this kind of bellyache.”
The boss studied his list. “Benito San Juan.”
“Here!”
“Old China gave you your orders?”
“Old China said gallop hosses into the fairground and turn everything upside down. Blast bullets and kill any dummies in sight. No big deal.”
“On the stroke of twelve!”
“On the dot of midnight! I’ll be there under the cathedral clock.”
“Stealthy as can be. Remember to conduct yourselves like peaceful fairgoers up to the very last minute.”
“That’ll be us to a tee.”
“Then play it like that. Shake!”
And the boss placed his piece of paper under the cone of lamplight, straining his eyes. “Atilio Palmieri.”
“Here!”
Atilio Palmieri was a cousin of the rancher’s wife—a fair-haired, stocky, cocky fellow. The rancher tugged his goatee. “Atilio, I’ve got a high-profile mission for you.”
“Heartfelt thanks, cousin.”
“Figure out a way to set fire to the nunnery, herd the nuns in their nightgowns out into the street, and cause total mayhem. That’s your mission. If a nun catches your eye, look the other way. Keep your men off the hard stuff. Be ruthless, but keep cool. Good luck, Atilio. The last stroke of midnight is your signal.”
“Count on me, Filomeno. I’ll take this avante.”
“I hope so. Zacarías San José.”
“Here!”
“For you, nothing special. I mean, it’s up to you. Say you and a few men pitch into Santa Fe tonight: Where do you think you’d hit the jackpot?”
“Give me one good man and there’ll be chaos in the fairground. I’ll bowl over the tent with the menagerie and fling open the wild animals’ cages. What do you reckon, boss? Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Give me five brave souls and I’ll set fire to all the whiteys’ stores. Give me twenty-five and I’ll take out the praetorian guard.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“That, and I’ll bleed Tyrant Banderas dry, too. Boss, I’m carrying the bits and pieces of my kid in this saddlebag. Out in the swamp the pigs chewed him up! But with him in this bag, I won big at cards, bought me a hoss, and dragged whitey through the streets behind me on a rope, befo
re dodging the gendarmes’ bullets. They didn’t even touch me. Tonight everything’s gonna be all right.”
“Scarface, take as many men as you need and raise Cain. Shake! But tomorrow morning, bury those remains. That sort of thing doesn’t make you lucky in war. Energy and intelligence win the day. Now shake!”
“Boss, this fair will go down in history!”
“That’s what I think. Crisanto Roa.”
“Here!”
Roa was the last on the list. Now the boss blew out his lamp. Again the Indians marched in the moonlight.
III
Little Colonel de la Gándara, a deserter from the federales, jeered at the rancher’s military pretensions. “Filomeno, don’t be a fathead and try to leap over canyons when you don’t have the legs! Your big problem is not to lead your Indians straight to slaughter. You hold forth like a general but you can’t even read a battle map! Well, I can, plus I have a military school diploma. Common sense dictates that I should command, right? Is your stubbornness pride—or stupidity?”
“Dear Domiciano, war is not a textbook affair. You must be born to it.”
“So you’re predestined to be the next Napoleon?”
“Perhaps!”
“Filomeno, don’t be such a fool!”
“Domiciano, draw up a plan of attack that’s better than mine, and I’ll put you in charge. What would you do with two hundred rifles?”
“Keep adding to them until I had an army.”
“And how would do you do that?”
“By levying men from the mountain villages. The revolution has few friends down in Tierra Caliente.”
“So that’s your plan?”
“Yes, more or less. The game board for the campaign must be the sierra. The plains are for big troop movements, but guerrillas and other light forces work best in mountainous terrain. That’s military science: ever since wars have been fought, the lay of the land has determined tactics. Two hundred rifles on the plain would be madness.”
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