It’s an ordinary portrait of a man wearing a duckbill beret, a small piece of luggage in each hand, and he’s leaving. You wouldn’t think it’s a portrait. It looks like a picture you took by mistake, or a figure in the background of somebody else’s picture. In fact, that man has his back to the camera. He’s facing left, like he’s looking before crossing the street. He is walking across a concrete esplanade, and beyond him are an electrical tower, a patch of grass, a blurry sign, and a brick wall.

It is one of the most famous photographs in the history of a small nation.

Augusto Roa Bastos is considered, by wide consensus, to be the greatest writer that the Republic of Paraguay has ever produced. “Roa Bastos was Paraguay’s entry into universal literature,” a child might hear in school. He is that man, off in the distance, his back to the camera, walking and looking around. He’s probably nervous in the photograph, because he has just been told by agents of the dictator to leave the country. The concrete esplanade is part of the border crossing that connects with the Argentine city of Clorinda, across the river from the Paraguayan capital of Asunción. He is about to begin a period of exile that will last for eight years.

Photograph by Jesús Ruiz Nestosa. Used by permission.

In fact, this will not be Roa Bastos’s first exile. At age thirty, he had fled the country after the failed revolution of 1947, which tried to overthrow the eight-year dictatorship of General Higinio Morínigo. Hundreds of revolutionaries had crossed the border to avoid arrest or execution. Roa Bastos went to Buenos Aires and eventually settled in France.

I came across this photo this past summer in Asunción, while I was spending a month with family, in the place I was born. There, I read Roa Bastos’s autobiographical novel, The Prosecutor, about the life of a political exile who plots to assassinate the dictator who exiled him. And while I was there, I visited bookstores in search of another book: my great-uncle’s memoirs of the 1947 revolution.

Like Roa Bastos, Colonel Alfredo Ramos participated in the 1947 revolution. He had fought in the successful war against Bolivia, between 1932 and 1935. In 1947, he was summoned by a military faction stationed in the northern city of Concepción, where he was asked to join the revolt against Higinio Morínigo. Ramos analyzed the situation and concluded that the revolt had a small chance of success. He said no. But the next day, after the faction succeeded in taking Concepción, he was summoned once again, and this time the colonel accepted. He led the revolutionaries in a key battle in the town of Tacuatí, and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. The revolution did not succeed, which is why the cover of his memoir, Concepción 1947, refers to his pre-revolutionary rank; he would die a colonel. Like Roa Bastos, the colonel escaped: he crossed the border into Brazil and then settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Concepción 1947 is hard to find. I remember seeing it around the house as a kid in Asunción. But several moves later, it was nowhere to be found in my parents’ home in the United States. I remember the glossy cover – it must have been printed in the 1980s or ’90s. As far as I can tell, the book’s publisher no longer exists. None of the bookstores could find the title in their inventory. I don’t trust the computer information systems in Paraguay, so I made sure to visit several stores from the biggest corporate chain – El Lector – but found nothing. It didn’t occur to me to check used book stores until a week into my search.

“Paraguayans don’t read” is a refrain I had heard since I was a child. Official statistics estimate that the average Paraguayan reads 0.25 books per year. I do not blame Paraguay for this. A founding father and first dictator of the nation, Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia closed the Catholic seminary and discouraged higher education generally. Even though de Francia was a man of the Enlightenment, a lapsed Catholic, and a reader of Voltaire, he made sure that literature was censored in the nascent republic.

Subsequent dictators followed suit: they ruled by treating the people as illiterate children. Where would the used books come from? Who would have used them? The only used book store in Asunción that I knew about, the once-famous Comuneros bookstore downtown, had closed years before. To my surprise, Google Maps was able to find several others in the city. On a Sunday afternoon, I walked to one of them.

The professional signage at the front door was the only indication that I was entering a place of business, but it was really a house – in fact, somebody’s home. Today, Asunción is a city of high-rises and shopping malls; the houses of the wealthy are surrounded by brick walls or electrified fences. This little house was from an earlier time. A maze of bookshelves of varying height and length carved out random spaces under the high colonial ceiling. Above, on the roof, the weather had turned the aged, orange earthenware tiles black and green. Below, the air was thick with dust and mildew. It was an old house, and an old man was living in it. He had two assistants. One was manning a small register perched on a tall wooden table. Another was rummaging around the store, his neck long and arched forward, as if before a book. He looked at me suspiciously both times I came to the store. I believe he was the son of the owner of the store, the old man who sat on a chair, several books resting on the half-globe of his abdomen. He stood up when I arrived. Not too many people must visit the store on Sundays. Then he started asking me questions. Asunción is a small town, and most people have one or two degrees of separation from each other.

“Where do you come from?” You can ask probing questions in Paraguay without sounding rude. After a brief exchange, he had enough data to announce: “I know your father. I sold him books.”

Don Brabant, as the old man was called, was a bookseller by vocation. He was also a courageous man. While my father was a high-school and university student in the 1970s, when books were harder to come by, Don Brabant was his go-to guy. More importantly, the seventies were the time of the worst repression by the government of General Stroessner. This was the decade of Operation Condor: the CIA-backed coordinated effort by the secret police of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay to root out all leftist elements, real or imagined, in southern South America. These efforts succeeded, but not without disappearing thousands of people and torturing and incarcerating many more. During this time, Roa Bastos and many other writers either fled the continent or lived in fear.

Photograph by Vadim Yerofeyev (AdobeStock). Used by permission.

I now had two requests for Don Brabant. First, do you have a copy of Colonel Alfredo Ramos’s memoirs about the revolution, Concepción 1947? Second, I am a journalist: may I interview you about what it was like to be a bookseller during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner?

In response to the first request, Don Brabant began combing his bookshelves, looking up and down, pointing at the extreme top and bottom of several shelves so his son, the silent swan-necked man who had stared at me since I entered the place, could reach for books he suspected might be what I was looking for, but he could not find it. “I know the book,” he told me, and soon enough, the man showed me a picture of the book on his cellphone. “I don’t think we have it here – I thought we had it here,” said Don Brabant. He found another book about the 1947 revolution, and several books by a historian named Ramos, who was not the colonel. “I will find it and let you know on WhatsApp. When you come to pick it up, we can do the interview.”

The man at the register added, “We will find the book. Don Brabant has done interviews for the radio before.”

In The Prosecutor, Roa Bastos has his exiled protagonist wonder whether books were being written in Latin American nations under dictatorship. His best bet, he thinks, is to dream them into being:

I knew nothing of what was currently being written in Latin American countries, most of which were subject to dictatorships, persecutions, and repressions of all kinds. Their cultures of resistance, struggling to survive, could do little for an art and a literature that served only as entertainment for girls from the well-off classes. They had no immediate practical use. They did not exist. I invented those books by contemporary authors that I was obliged to read, but that I would probably never read, and that would never be written. Some names, some books, reached me. I did not know who they were. I did not touch those books that stank of internal exile, of repressive suffocation.

In fact, writers and artists flourished during the Stroessner era. Today those same writers are largely forgotten outside a small circle of devoted readers. The liberal José Luis Appleyard wrote modernist poetry while making a living as a newspaper editor. Elvio Romero, a great communist poet, wrote from exile. Josefina Plá wrote histories and fiction, becoming (among other things) the great historian-critic of Paraguayan letters. Carlos Colombino painted abstract, neo-cubist renderings of the faces of power – of the general himself, even. Magazines mattered, ideas mattered, even poetry mattered – at least in Asunción, where a higher literacy rate than the rest of the country and relative freedom of communication allowed culture to flourish. This is why the prospect of an interview with Don Brabant became more exciting for me than finding my great-uncle’s memoirs. What is another war book compared to an interview with a humble servant of the Republic of Letters, whose silent sacrifices and fearful trade nurtured the minds of intellectuals during the darkest days of a thirty-four-year-long military dictatorship?

I heard a story from my father which, to me, encapsulated the absurd little regime of the 1970s. It is March 1970 or ’71, the end of summer, and students everywhere are starting their semester. The Catholic University of Paraguay sits next to the cathedral, separated by a narrow passageway. In front of the university and cathedral is a vast plaza, and adjacent to these is the Paraguay River. It is humid and hot. Nine students assemble in a classroom with high ceilings, three ceiling fans, and tall open windows. The professor enters and writes his name on the board. The course is a seminar on the philosophy of religion, or modern philosophy (the narrator, my father, can’t remember).

The professor and the students discuss the readings for the seminar. The Catholic University of Paraguay is, at that time, one of two institutions of higher learning in Paraguay, the other being the National University. The dictatorship controls the National University, but the Catholic one maintains a modicum of independence from the regime. The professor assigns a book by British philosopher Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian.

What is another war book compared to an interview with a humble servant of the Republic of Letters?

Like most works of European philosophy, at least ones from the twentieth century, Russell’s book is not available in Asunción, a city of less than a million people, relatively isolated from the other great cities of the region. (Roa Bastos described the landlocked state of Paraguay as “an island surrounded by land.”) So how could they get the book? One student says he is making a trip over the weekend to Buenos Aires – a much bigger city, connected to the rest of the world by the Atlantic Ocean – and that he might be able to pick up ten copies for the class.

A week passes and the class meets again. The student isn’t there. The professor asks his students if they know where he might be. No one has heard from or seen him since before he left for Buenos Aires. Oh well, he must be sick or something. Another student, Pablo, let’s call him, says that he will look for him after class.

Another week passes, and the student is still nowhere to be seen, and Pablo is gone now too.

Strange. But these were times when people could not be reached easily as they are today. Not everyone had a telephone. If someone went out of town for something, you would not hear from them before they returned home. Class carried on with other readings and discussions.

The following week, neither the first missing student nor Pablo shows up. And now a third student is missing.

The professor surveys the classroom. He squints. “I think our students are getting arrested,” he says. And it so happens that they are. The professor talks to the dean of students, who contacts the archbishop of Asunción. The archbishop pays a visit to the chief of police who, at first, does not want to release the students. Why would the archbishop defend students who are smuggling a book titled Why I Am Not a Christian? Does he not know what happens to priests in Cuba? Is this archbishop in fact a communist? A follower of liberation theology? But eventually he lets the students go, and the semester continues without another incident.

I entered Don Brabant’s bookshop with great excitement. An interview that would serve as a soliloquy in the great drama of life under the dictatorship. The tender rose of liberty under the bookseller’s cupped hand, during a rainstorm. The fire of liberty, never burning more brightly than when threatened by the policeman’s water cannon. I would be the humble scribe.

Don Brabant asked for a couch to be brought for me. I sat before him. The assistant stood next to Don Brabant, examining me. I started asking him about his work with Don Brabant. “What do you enjoy reading?” I asked him.

“Paraguayan history … the Chaco War. Triple Alliance.” Terse replies.

“I distributed the World Literature series to the major high schools,” Don Brabant explains, “Christ the King, the International School, San José. The major literary academies. I was a young man. I got into this business through friends. I was not linked to the political side of things. It was another time. I was involved in the book business.”

“During this time – the 1970s – there were a lot of protests,” I offered.

“Yes, a lot of protests. Very violent.” The old man looked up at the assistant. Before he said anything, the man at the cashier piped in: “Bring some cornbread and beer.” The assistant did as he was told, but while he was away in the kitchen, the old man added that he preferred rum.

“Was the book business dangerous?”

“It had its dangers.”

“Was there censorship?”

“Some books were explicitly banned, yes. Paloma Blanca Paloma Negra [white dove, black dove]. Books by Elvio Romero and Rubén Bareiro Saguier.”

Photograph by vipman4 (AdobeStock). Used by permission.

“My grandfather has a vinyl album by Atahualpa Yupanqui. He was a communist. I asked him, ‘How did you buy that in Paraguay? It was printed in the 1970s.’ And he said, ‘I went to the store.’”

“Yes, there were many books you could get.”

“Even Herbert Marcuse’s books? I saw Marcuse on his bookshelf.”

“Yes. Books by Marx or Lenin were banned. But you could get Marcuse.”

“Where?”

“In a bookstore. There were bookstores.”

At this point the cashier was at the liquor store and he called the assistant, who was sitting next to Don Brabant. “He wants to know what kind?”

“Peach rum. Peach.”

A minute later another call: “They are out of peach.”

“They have peach everywhere.”

“They’re out, he says.”

“Passionfruit then.” The old man turned toward me. “There was censorship that was half-hearted and ambiguous.”

“Do you think it’s ironic that people read more and writers were more important during the dictatorship than after 1989, when democracy came?”

“There were more cultural events back then for sure.”

“In a strange way,” I was fishing for a quote here, “was it better back then, to be a writer, I mean?”

“Some things were better and some things were worse.” The rum arrived. The three of us drank for the next few hours, pacifying my frustration at the lack of drama I had uncovered.

If Don Brabant’s life, as he told it, was lacking in dramatic material, Roa Bastos’s had more than enough. Exiled in Buenos Aires during the 1960s, Bastos made his name as a writer with a collection of stories, Thunder Among the Leaves, and a novel, Son of Man. In 1974, he published his masterpiece: I, the Supreme. The novel is a portrait of the nineteenth-century dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The critics called it a postmodern historical novel that blended historical documents and narrative fiction. General Alfredo Stroessner, who was the dictator of Paraguay at the time of the book’s publication, believed it to be about himself – that is, a thinly veiled critique of his own regime.

Why did Bastos get kicked out of Paraguay in 1982? There was no official judicial process through which he lost his passport and citizenship. The decision was taken by the dictator himself. General Stroessner already knew about Bastos. No doubt I, the Supreme factored into his decision. So did a few columns Bastos had written in an Argentine newspaper, critical of his regime. The ambiguity that Don Brabant had talked about played out to Bastos’s detriment. He had returned to Paraguay thinking his exile was over. He wanted to register his newborn son as a Paraguayan citizen, and that was something you were legally required to return to Paraguay to do. No sooner did the last exile end than a new one began.

The professor surveys the classroom. He squints. “I think our students are getting arrested,” he says. And it so happens that they are.

But most of the stories of censorship and persecution are low-key, banal. A friend of my father’s freaked out when, as a kid, he left a copy of Che Guevara’s memoirs in the bottom of a trunk, which was about to go through customs. (The policeman missed it.) My uncle wondered why so-and-so could get away with playing leftist songs in public, on his guitar after school. (The kid was well-connected in the government.) Don Brabant was right: in the ambiguity of unfreedom, only the courageous or the clever could navigate.

But Don Brabant himself could not supply me with even a minor censorship tale. Eventually, two rums deep, we talked about Paraguayan history – the default topic of all bookworms in the country. I looked around: most of the books around me were histories. A big chunk of those histories, in turn, were military memoirs or narratives of war. Lots of lists of names of who did or did not participate in this or that battle. Histories or – I slowly noticed – rows and rows of copies of the civil code. Law books. Law students would always make good customers. Red or blue, drab, binders of civil codes and photocopies of civil codes. And it slowly dawned on me that almost every single book around me had been published in Paraguay. Almost nothing from Argentina or Mexico or Spain. Everything was Paraguayan and at least a quarter of a century old. This was less a bookstore than a time capsule. No book seemed younger than the country’s democracy, and no one born under democratic rule seemed to have any need for books.

Photograph by spaxiax (AdobeStock). Used by permission.

Sadly, one book was nowhere to be found: my great-uncle’s memoirs. The cashier broke the news. “We can’t find the book,” he told us. “I looked for it everywhere. I think I know where I can get a copy, but it is out of town. I will let you know.”

A few days later, I got a call from the assistant. They had the book. They offered to deliver it to me. I told them I would pick it up myself the next day, as I had to travel to that part of town.

Shortly after the liberation of France in World War II, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in The Atlantic Monthly:

Never were we freer than under the German occupation.… The more the Nazi venom crept into our thoughts the more each precise thought became a conquest. The more the omnipotent police tried to enforce our silence, the more each of our words became a precious declaration of principle. The more we were pursued, the more each one of our gestures took on the nature of an engagement. The frequently atrocious circumstances of our struggle made us at the same time live – without any deceit, nakedly, in this torn and untenable situation which one calls the state of man. Exile, captivity, above all, death, which one easily shies from during happier times, were then our perpetual worry, and we were to learn that they were not avoidable accidents, not even constant or objective threats, but that we must discover in them our lot, our fate, the deepest source of our being.

Writers living in a democracy are not so lucky. They have to deal with penury and apathy. Sometimes, floods. The day I was supposed to pick up the book, I called ahead of time, because it was raining. Asunción lacks proper drainage infrastructure; the place floods every time it storms. The bookstore, being in a low corner of town, got inundated with six inches of water that had accumulated in the blind alley in front of the house. “Don’t come today, it’s a mess,” the cashier told me in a voice memo.

If you want to think freely but you’re surrounded by informants, it is not a bad idea to do so on the page, in meter and rhyme, or telling a story, or painting a picture.

I was annoyed. A city needs infrastructure. Why can’t I have my book? I thought about that passage from Sartre, and about the famous Roa Bastos photo. The story of crossing customs with ten copies of Bertrand Russell, or one stray copy of Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries. Could it be that these people all lived in a reality where the very act of writing carried a weight and meaning lacking in our own time? Was it fair to compare our boredom and apathy with their suffering? But I was enjoying the very freedom that they suffered for and wrote about. So what is writing for?

Perhaps Don Brabant’s book collection reflected his own particular tastes, or his niche in the market. The dozen locales of El Lector throughout the city – many more stores than an American city the size of Asunción would have – carried books from other Latin American countries, and Europe. Maybe the reading habits of the people around me were richer than I was judging them to be.

Or maybe there was something about art and literature that made it the fitting way to oppose dictatorship and nurture freedom. If you want to think freely but you’re surrounded by informants, it is not a bad idea to do so on the page, in meter and rhyme, or telling a story, or painting a picture. The dictatorship can’t reach into the paper while it sits between you and the desk. But the Paraguay of the post-dictatorship era of economic growth and democracy has a new center of power. I do not know what it is; I know it by its fruits. It is not a general. It is not even a person. The Colorado Party – Stroessner’s party – still runs the government. It still wins elections. But they are in charge of the state, not of the destiny of the nation as a whole, which appears to be carried by a strange current.

Those who lived under Stroessner did not grow up with high-rises, glamorous shopping centers, McDonald’s franchises, highways, or the Southern Cone Common Market trade agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, which would facilitate economic growth and labor mobility. I remember once talking about the lack of good public education in Paraguay with an uncle. “It is a disgrace, the quality of public schools in the interior of the country,” he said.

“Yeah … you know, every Paraguayan kid has a human right to read Don Quixote.”

“What are you talking about?” he said. “They need computers. They need math.”

I thought about my great-uncle, Colonel Ramos, writing his memoirs in exile, his revolution a failure, and his life saved by a lucky, timely plane ride out of the country.

The day after the rain, the sky was blue, but Colonel Ramos’s book was lost again. The cashier called: “I don’t know what happened to it.”