The Mirage of All That Was Beyond Saving
Colonization is as much about spiritual aggression as it is material acquisition, as motivated by the allure of conquering hearts and minds as by the prospect of reaping territory and resources. In the early 1600s, around the same time that English Pilgrims and Puritans were landing in what would become the Northeastern United States, Spanish Jesuits began fanning out across the Guayrá, a region that today is largely contiguous with the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. At that time, the Indigenous Guaraní population were subjected to Spanish control thanks to the Treaty of Tordesillas, which in 1494 had divided the world along a meridian some 1,200 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, giving Spain claim to everything west of the line and Portugal everything to the east. (The line cut directly through the part of South America that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, which is why Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in otherwise Spanish-speaking Latin America.)
One of the first Jesuit missions in the Guayrá was San Ignacio Miní. Founded in 1610, the community was uprooted some two decades later and remained on the move until near the end of the seventeenth century, when its members established a lasting home along the Paraná River in what today is the Argentine province of Misiones. Argentine author Marina Closs was born in that region, and her 2022 novel La despoblación is set in and around the original historical San Ignacio. Thomas Bunstead’s new English-language translation of the novel, titled The Depopulation, follows a Guaraní community run by Father Antonio Ruiz and his sidekick, Father Jesús Maceta, as it’s first upended by the arrival of an Indigenous man claiming to be the Son of God and then displaced by marauding Mestiços from the Portuguese-controlled territories to the north. (The novel uses the Portuguese spelling of the more familiar Spanish word mestizos and capitalizes it like the Métis of North America.) Bunstead does an impeccable job keeping readers cognizant of the novel’s competing cultures, maintaining the presence of the Guaraní language and beliefs in the face of Jesuit dominion and allowing for the unsettling appearance of Portuguese speakers late in the story. This balancing act is critical to the success of a translation so concerned with philosophical and martial clashes born out of the stark differences in what these three groups value spiritually, materially, and existentially.
Fathers Ruiz and Maceta—names surely inspired by the real-life Jesuits Alberto Ruiz de Montoya and Simon Maceta, both of whom were among the first Spanish missionaries in the Guayrá—differ in their approach to their community and their faith. Ruiz is the more zealous and fatalistic of the two. He’s a big fan of the benefits of bodily mortification and suffering, and is always conscious that his own martyrdom has already been prophesied. He documents his efforts at converting the Guaraní; he’s desperate for them to develop a fear of not only the damnation but the physical privations of hell. The extreme nature of Ruiz’s devotion can often be poignantly amusing, whether it’s the time he is “removing some imaginary thorns from his neck . . . stuck there by Jesus and the Holy Spirit” or when he awakens shouting:
“Jesus!”—ill at ease and with pains all across his body.
What will happen to me this day? he wondered as he lay there. Am I to be set on fire? Suffocated? Who will come and shoot me full of their arrows?
For Maceta’s part, he has “lost enthusiasm” for the missionary life, though he remains committed to the Jesuits’ overall project. He sees Ruiz as going about things a bit aggressively, meaning Maceta is more willing to listen when Overá arrives, albeit not ready to accept the man’s blasphemous claims. And those claims are certainly blasphemous, as the twenty-four-year-old Overá announces himself as the younger brother of Jesus, adding that he was born from a ray of sunlight that was trapped in a clay jar. Ruiz is aghast at these assertions, and dismayed when Overá starts riding around on the back of someone referred to as “the Mule”—a man whose real name “the Son of God” doesn’t even bother learn until late in the novel. Overá, despite his pride, is openly curious about the Jesuits’ God and seeks Ruiz’s assistance in becoming a priest, submitting to his demands but never fully buying into them.
The Jesuits try to stamp out sacred Guaraní customs, like placing bones of the deceased in forest reliquaries where mourners can leave flowers and other offerings. But not all the Guaraní cooperate with the Jesuits, and the Spanish (at least, in the novel) never forcibly convert anyone. As the omniscient narrative voice explains, “Not everyone could tolerate mission life, and many of them very soon took themselves away. They could not get used to the schedule of the sundial. To the effusiveness of Mass and the drudgery of chores.” At one point, Ruiz even walks away from his guide and scribe after the men decide to remain with a tribe that rejects Ruiz’s recruiting visit.
The Depopulation examines many cultural differences through the dichotomy of Ruiz and Overá. The two have dogmatic disputes (for example, over the proper names and roles of the Guaraní gods) and practical disagreements (as with the roll of dance in prayer: Overá finds “it an unbearable sadness to pray sitting down,” while Ruiz sees dancing as the province of shamans and witch doctors). The biggest impasse for the men can be seen in their overall approach to life. Ruiz wants his potential acolyte to “find sadness in [his] heart for the sins of all mankind.” Overá is “tired of all that indulgence, of the profound and sickly sadness of which Ruiz could never let go.” Overá is full of wonder and joy, whereas Ruiz sees laughter as “injurious,” and even believes that music should be listened to only out of reverence and never “for mere enjoyment.” When Ruiz instructs Overá during the third week of his informal catechism to temper his desires and even his nourishment in service to God, the Guaraní man has heard enough, telling him, “Father, if this is what life is like, I want to die.”
A critical component of Overá’s growth comes via his relationships with women. While he starts out claiming that women “bring sadness and fear,” he changes his tune, much to Ruiz’s delight, after finding a stolen comb with some long black tresses in it. The rightful owner of the comb is a virgin and would be an ideal partner in the eyes of the Jesuits, but Overá desires only to be with the thief whose hair he finds so attractive. That criminal is Anastasia Tatí, who hails from the Cayú, an “ungoverned and out of reach” tribal area where women can go out at night and men kill themself because they’re broken down by life. She atones for her sin, per Ruiz’s instructions, and marries Overá, but her love remains “always trained on something far more ill-defined and distant.”
Only by accepting Anastasia’s eventual betrayal does Overá earn the path to his true love, the Portuguese-speaking Bei Jasmim das Chagas Santos. The Mestiço daughter of a Portuguese father and a Tupí mother, Bei Jasmim arrives as a messenger from Anastasia and soon shows herself no less independent than the Cayú woman. Bei Jasmim is also extremely liberated when it comes to satisfying her physical desires, and, perhaps in a riposte to the triune God of the Jesuit colonizers, the novel’s ultimate leadership configuration is a throuple of Bei Jasmim, Overá, and “the Mule.” It’s Bei Jasmim who finally asks the Mule his name, which is Zanta, and his devotion to her—on top of that he’s already shown toward Overá—reveals him as the one selfless servant in the novel, but a servant nonetheless. In one of the narrator’s rare direct addresses to the reader, Zanta’s singularity is emphasized: “And it truly was a great loss to the world that nobody ever asked him anything.”
Guaraní remains one of two official languages in Paraguay and is still spoken widely in and around what was once the Guayrá. Throughout the novel, Bunstead retains Guaraní words, whether referring to their gods, like Ñanderú Papá, the creator; or their occupations, like tapererepurá, meaning “messenger.” When a malevolent spirit infects Overá with a venom to test him, much like Christ in the desert, he enters “into a kerandú,” which is immediately explicated when the Guaraní observer adds, “Now the world of dream is over him.” This straightforward, contextual approach to handling multiple languages in translation is also employed with Bei Jasmim, who speaks only Portuguese at first. “[She] gave the same answer as before, ‘Morreu no redemoinho’—she died in a whirlpool—but also now added, ‘e logo virou barca.’ ‘She turned into a boat?’ ‘Sim,’ meaning ‘Yes.’” In addition to these in-line definitions, Bunstead also will have the reader suss out meaning along with the novel’s Spanish-speaking characters: “Procuro, they knew, was ‘I am looking for.’ Filho de Deus was clearly ‘Son of God.’”
Closs never becomes didactic or preachy in her prose, allowing the merits and failings of the novel’s three cultures to emerge organically from her narrative. The Mestiços are the clear villain, murdering or enslaving the Indigenous people in the territories they seek to conquer. The Guaraní aren’t perfect, but Closs interrogates their flaws and has them learn from their errors. A group of Guaraní invite Overá to participate in a cannibalistic feast; he rejects them with a warning that “Father Ruiz will burn you on a pyre!” Late in the novel, Overá tries to save his people himself, with tragic results, and it’s only when he lets go of his ego that he finds success spiritually and romantically. The abuses and moral failings of the Jesuits are clear from the start, but their hypocrisy only increases throughout the novel. Some of these moments are small, as when a visiting Spanish official claims a Guaraní child’s art project so he can take it back to Spain. And some are broader failings of character, as with Ruiz’s increasing desire for vengeance and his obsession with gunpowder, “a gift from God in times of hate,” once San Ignacio has been displaced. Ruiz also insists on preserving earthly items, such as the wooden statute of the Virgin Mary that he makes the fleeing Guaraní carry, despite preaching the insignificance of worldly concerns in light of one’s spiritual journey.
Historically, of course, the Spanish don’t go away. But Closs gives the Guaraní a version of independence in a touching conclusion that has a bit of a magical realism twist. Even Ruiz has a moment where he perhaps regrets his role in the course of events, writing feverishly in a belated attempt to preserve “the ravaged lands of the Guayrá,” “the mirage of all that was beyond saving.” Closs’s novel, too, is now part of the historical record of that which is gone, and another reminder of the important role that fiction can play in portraying cultures that have been lost to aggressions of the past.
Cory Oldweiler is an itinerant writer who focuses on literature in translation. In 2022, he served on the long-list committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s inaugural Barrios Book in Translation Prize. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Star Tribune, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, and other publications.
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