What do we know about someone when we know everything about their public life and almost nothing about their private life? What happens when the discipline that sustains a career coexists with an emotional world that seems impossible to govern? Those questions run through Jealousy. The Bullet That Murdered the Statesman, the ninth novel by Carlos Mateo Balmelli, focused on the figure of Paraguayan former president Eligio Ayala.
Fascinated by that man of peasant origin who built a distinguished political career, the writer approaches, through fiction, the less-known territories of his life: loneliness, desire, pride, and his relationship with Hilda Diez. There, where documentation leaves open questions, Balmelli imagines voices and explores the tensions between loving someone and wanting to possess them.
“I did not write this novel to justify nor to condemn,” he says. His quest is literary: to give human depth to a historical figure and let the reader build their own interpretation. In conversation with Para Ti, he speaks about relationships, the autonomy of his female characters, and that capacity of fiction to view reality through the eyes of imagination.
–What led you to choose Eligio Ayala as the protagonist of your ninth novel, and what did you discover in his story that you felt needed to be told through fiction?
-The character Eligio Ayala, in itself, is a figure modeled on the archetype of the man who seeks self-improvement, the man who attains a higher form of humanity, let’s say, somewhat inspired by the idea, in my interpretation, of Nietzsche’s Übermensch. Ayala seeks to better himself and to surpass higher goals. He aims to transcend the human condition in some way and become a superman.
In a sense, he clears the field for action of the bushes, of prejudices, or the comforts of ease, of comfortable living. Ayala was a man who lived with the truth, a close friend of his own truth, of his own life, of his own circumstances. And I think that makes him different from many human beings. I have always been interested in how a man of peasant origin, a child of the postwar era, learned three European languages—the local one, Spanish, and Guarani… So he is a mysterious character who organized the Paraguayan public sector, a visionary who foresaw a war, who participated in revolutions.
He is a man who understands his existential time. That is why Ayala has always fascinated me as a historical figure, beyond the fact that his work as president of the Republic and as Minister of Finance is a futuristic one. He was a visionary in every sense. He handled logistics by building the only two warships we have to this day. And he was a man of an incredible austerity and honesty, I would say even pathological—something that Paraguayans are not used to.
-How did you navigate the boundary between documented facts and imagination, especially when reconstructing his privacy and the circumstances of his death?
-The truth is that my novels tend to be very psychological, exploratory, because I believe that modern literature can fade away if we only describe and recount events, actions. Today, literature competes with the camera and with media that can invent anything. That is why I try to plunge into the interior of souls.
I am heavily influenced by Dostoevsky in the sense of understanding the psychology of a man who was as lucid as Ayala, but who also, in some matters, was excessive, especially in his loss of patience. He was irascible, a man with little tolerance. But I think it is important to emphasize that the camera will never be able to probe the human psyche as letters and words can.
Ultimately, I always define that a literary work seeks an aesthetic truth. The word allows a depth that image does not, happening in a broader context. Literature lets us explore, imagine, dream, and it lets us look at reality with the eyes of imagination.
I also wanted to probe that whole aspect, even though there are no historical data. That is why the novel is polyphonic: it has an omniscient narrator and, toward the end, other voices appear. Ayala tells his version of the facts; Tomás Bareiro, his; and Hilda Diez, who did not witness what happened because she hid in the room, contributes her view and judgment about what occurred. Three psychologies, three versions that had to be invented, fictionalized.
Ultimately, we must not underestimate the influence that fiction has on reality. I believe fiction is not in a tense relationship with reality: it ends up modifying it.
That is why the book ends with a narration by Ayala that, I think, reflects what he understands by the Übermensch. At the beginning, the narrator says that he did not have Ayala’s legacy or inheritance; yet the book closes with that text, after reading Parallel Lives, by Plutarch. I think in those final words of the epilogue the ideal of Ayala is defined: the superman, the statesman, the man of storms, the one who climbs the heights of history.
-As you approach the man behind the statesman, what contradiction did you find most fascinating?
-I don’t know if there is a contradiction. The man gathers many destinies, and those destinies can be contradictory. But one must see what communication existed between the public man and the private life. I think personalities can be fragmented, cracked. Perhaps the public man spoke better to himself than the private man.
Human beings, like Ayala, are often far from themselves. Perhaps we are all, if we consider that there are elements that turn us into alienated beings: dogmas, prejudices, social structures.
I don’t know if Ayala was contradictory. I think his public life was very predictable: everyone expected his reactions. People did not know his private life; that is why what happened was a surprise or, apparently, a contradiction. Perhaps no one knew Ayala’s private self. Maybe not even he himself knew him in those spheres, in those more hidden corners of the soul.
I think, to speak of contradiction, there has to be some awareness of it: to know how one acts in the public sphere and in the private one. Unless one is broken, in the sense of being split into two spheres that cannot communicate. I think the human being is not master of his own soul.
I deliberately stepped away from historical research. I read about some of Ayala’s government actions and some history books, but little was known about his private life: he was a very hermetic man. I did not want to write a historical novel.
At first, I thought I was writing a novel closer to those about adultery, such as Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Rector’s Wife or Effi Briest, by Theodor Fontane. But in those four novels the husbands are characters who dissolve: they are not firm or brilliant figures, but rather traversed by a certain mediocrity. In Jealousy, by contrast, Ayala’s figure prevents placing the novel within that model, because he occupies a leading place in Paraguayan society and she has humbler origins.
I built Ayala from a series of objective facts: his trajectory, his studies, the hermetic nature of his private life, his marksmanship, his habit of crossing the Parana River by swimming. All of that is true. From there, I developed the character as I imagined him. I did not want to delve too deeply into research for fear of getting trapped in the genre of historical fiction.
–Jealousies appear as the engine of tragedy. How did you explore that boundary where the desire to be loved becomes the need to possess the other?
Jealousies allow us to explore how a man and a woman interact in a romantic relationship with an age difference of more than twenty years. I recommend reading it from those different perspectives, though I deliberately stepped away from the historical format.
–In what way does power cross the intimate bonds of the characters? What happens when someone accustomed to deciding in public life cannot control what happens in private life?
-I think that, in many relationships, the beloved becomes someone one desires to possess. In Ayala’s case, infidelity also carried that meaning: he felt that the person he loved had slipped from his hands.
Perhaps, for a man used to political power, it seemed natural to consider the people around him as part of a realm over which he could also exercise some control. He had allowed Hilda to enter his garden, as Goethe would say, into his fortress, into his intimate circle. I think that idea also conditioned his way of understanding betrayal…
Ayala was a man who built barriers and borders in his human relationships. I think his most honest connections were with his mother, his half-sister, and his twin brother.
He established a distinction between public life and private life. He had rationalized his public life: he knew how to relate to politicians, he knew about betrayals and ingratitudes, so common in politics. He also knew he provoked irritation in many people, but that did not bother him.
In love, however, I think loving meant possessing, something that today might be considered pathological. The relationship deteriorated over those four years: Hilda showed her wear, and he showed his fear of entangling himself more with her. I think they were both accomplices, complementary, to a relationship that increasingly took on a pathological tint.
–What role do women play in this story, and how did you work their voices, desires, and capacity to decide within the conditions of the era?
-I think Ayala understood politics as a stage configured by other elements. Where he did not have things so clear was in his private life. Perhaps he recognized a lack in himself: reaching the age of 49 or 50 after a successful career and feeling that existential void.
In that sense, I think the power dynamics did not cross the intimate life of the character, nor did his private life interfere with his attitude toward power. He kept those spheres very well separated. He was a man of state, educated for the state, who subjected himself to enormous discipline. I don’t think there was a single gesture or attitude in his public life that was colored by his emotional state.
Perhaps that existential fatigue paved the way for him to fall in love with Hilda Diez, to feel the desire to possess her, or to experience that wounded pride. He could have sensed the betrayal of a lover, the loss of someone he wished to possess, or the pain of not feeling loved.
I think several things converge: wounded honor —don’t forget that he was the son of a Spaniard and the product of a machismo society in which he had learned to maneuver—, pride, the loss of what he considered the beloved object, and, simply, the pain of not feeling loved.
In all my novels, the women have a strong personality. In this case, Hilda Diez also appears as a woman of strong character. I don’t know if she was like that in reality, but I think only a woman with that personality would dare to do what she did.
She was socially condemned, discredited. No one defended her. She was detained for thirty days and then, for political reasons, sent into exile, to Buenos Aires.
In the novel she has autonomy because I believe that, even though male-dominated societies relegate the social role of women, the world of the couple has its own dynamics. When we talk about romantic relationships, we enter a treacherous terrain.
Public life has its rules. Private love, sexual, and erotic life are governed by other rules that cannot be generalized. The game of love, “the commerce of the flesh,” as Borges would say, has its own rules: those of two people who must find a way to complement each other.
Social and public life respond to a certain rationality and even to dogmatic religious or metaphysical principles, to collective beliefs and myths. Private life is different.
I think Hilda Diez demonstrates character, personality, and autonomy in that intimate relationship. In public and social life, on the other hand, she sought advancement. She was a woman with her own ambitions who also desired a secure bond, be it matrimonial or companioned: a stable relationship
–The novel approaches a man through empathy, despite his being overwhelmed by his passions. How is that closeness built without justifying his decisions or idealizing him?
-Closeness with Ayala does not imply, at any moment, justification. A novel constructs a historical truth, but it is the author’s truth. Readers can rewrite it based on their own interpretation.
I did not write this novel to justify nor to condemn. I wrote it so that readers may read it, reinterpret it, entertain themselves, savor it, and also reflect. I want it to challenge them in the realm of thought and abstraction.
Through words and the work with form, literature seeks to create an aesthetic truth. The essence remains the same; the form is what we can modify to create new truths, nourish new criteria, spark new illusions, and find another way to make the light glitter to impress the reader’s mind. I think that’s what it’s about.
Under no circumstances does this novel seek historical justification or absolution. In fact, when Ayala, the character, reaches his last moment, he knows he is not seeking God’s pardon. He acts without seeking that pardon, without thinking that he is renouncing the bronze, as the novel says, by throwing a ring into the river.
Here there is no desire to justify: there is a literary project that pursues an aesthetic truth.
–Was there any finding during the research that changed your view of Ayala or forced you to alter the course of the novel?
-The idea is not to idealize Ayala or anyone, but to show his human side. Many times we think that extraordinary beings stand above the human condition. Ayala was not, and the novel demonstrates it. I do not seek to justify his decisions or idolize him. If at times I write with some frenzy, it is to capture the reader’s attention.
There is no attempt to evoke empathy. Nor did Ayala live seeking the empathy of people: he lived imposing his will.
I don’t think one should write seeking that empathy, because one runs the risk of ceasing to be oneself as a writer and becoming the writer that readers want. That is where the inner voice is lost.
Every writer must find their own voice. For me, that has to do with feeling oneself, feeling expanded while writing and also, why not, with establishing a dialogue with a hypothetical reader. In this case, it is the first novel I write thinking of the Paraguayan reader as the primary reader
–What questions about love, masculinity, and violence would you like this story to awaken in readers today?
-I believe questions about love, masculinity, and violence will always be present, because they are part of human coexistence. What changes is the way they are approached and judged according to the moral values of each era.
Moral values are established, but their permanence is not guaranteed. Nietzsche argues in The Genealogy of Morals that those values change from one era to another. That is why I don’t think all of them are immutable. There are permanent values which, as Kant claimed, human reason can discern; but, in terms of coexistence, historical and cultural contexts define a set of values.
There is also a tension between moral values and the practical criteria of a society. Practical needs do not always coincide with what is considered morally right. That tension between the ought and the reality will always exist.
Values also transform, are reexamined, and are overturned. There is a transvaluation, as Nietzsche would say: they do not remain forever the same
–After writing it, what do you feel literature can reveal about a historical figure that a biography or a political essay could hardly show?
-A novel opens up possibilities. A history book or a political essay about Ayala, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Domingo Perón delineates the field in which the protagonist is analyzed. Literature and fiction, by contrast, broaden the horizon of a character, to the point that neither his historical era nor his own materiality can limit the exploration of his soul and his psychology.
I think literature is oceanic: in its depth, in its breadth, in its possibilities to explore light and darkness. History and essay, by contrast, resemble more the contained water of a lake, within a demarcated space. They are different ways of approaching a character.
History sets limits because it examines what someone did, their deeds, and those deeds shape, in some way, a personality. In the essay there is also a relationship between the object studied and the subject who studies it. In the novel there can be a total separation from reality, and that opens the floodgates of imagination to a torrent of possibilities. That is why I insist: fiction is oceanic.
Fiction looks at reality through the eyes of imagination. History works with fact, with data, although narration also intervenes and can distort it. There are two instances of the same process: the fact itself and the way it is told.
Fiction, on the other hand, can do without reality. In Jealousy, it does not fully do so, because Ayala existed as statesman, as a man, as a lover, and as a murderer. But it is the novel that allows us to investigate all those dimensions of his psychology.
Historical rigor demands analyzing the facts objectively. Here, the facts are at stake: they are not judged. The novel does not constitute a plea or an indictment against anyone.
