Republic or Death! (42 page)

Amaral did not know his parents had been murdered, of course. He was three at the time of their abduction and he started being brought up in Argentina by the very member of the Argentinian secret service who had infiltrated his parents' group. He was renamed Juan and he lived as Juan, loved and cared for (‘I won't deny I loved my new family dearly') until he was fourteen, when Uruguay's dictatorship collapsed and his parents' families were able to trace him. He had spent much of his early life in Argentina confused, he said, sure that he remembered his original parents. ‘Every time I asked my stepmother about them, she told me it was a dream. But I thought it wasn't. Every time I brought them up, I could see in their faces, they were worried: what should they tell this child?'

As soon as Amaral found out who his parents really were, he of course asked what had happened to them; who had killed them and why; how had those people been punished; were they in jail; if not, what could he do to put them there? He didn't get any answers and he probably never will – a few years after the dictatorship ended, Uruguay passed an immunity law pardoning anyone who had committed crimes during the dictatorship. This was something it felt it had to do, since so many people had been involved with the dictatorship and so many others had been victims (one in fifty Uruguayans having been locked up at some point) that many felt it was better to pretend it never happened. Amaral said he feels lucky in some respects. ‘My parents are dead; they are not missing. I don't have that double pain where you don't know.' But then he told me that some days he was still overcome thinking about them and who pulled the trigger. ‘I don't go around asking people, “Did you murder my father?” But it could have happened that at one time I helped someone cross the street and that person was my father's murderer. Sometimes I want to know. Sometimes I ask myself, “Do I really need to know?” It's crazy.'

I asked Amaral about Uruguay's anthem, and he explained how it was used during the dictatorship. ‘It's meant to be the most sacred song in terms of nation, country, culture, so if a military cop was beating you, you could start singing it and they had to stop,' he said. ‘It had to be respected.' He started laughing at the image, before checking himself, worried that I might not share his dark sense of humour. ‘Yes, some didn't give a fuck about it and kept beating the shit out of people even when they were singing at the top of their voice, but it did become this tool to try and fight aggression.' People also used the anthem to show their hatred of the dictatorship, he said. At any event where they were made to sing it, they would do so quietly until they got to the words ‘
Tiranos, temblad
' – ‘Tyrants, tremble' – then they would scream that line, three times, as if hoping their very voices could bring an end to the regime.

I asked how he feels about the song now, when he sings it on the marches for the disappeared. If he were your traditional activist he would say how it moved him, that at those moments he remembers his parents and knows that even if the government doesn't want to give him justice, there are thousands calling for it with him. But things are never so simple. ‘Yes, I sing the anthem,' he said. ‘There are people on those marches who inspire me and I love those people and I don't want to disrespect them. And I feel that by singing I help them feel like we're not alone in this. But, well, the people who were in favour of the dictatorship also sang it and just as loud, so then what's the point?

‘
Himno e hypnosis
,' he added – ‘anthem hypnosis' – as if that was the best way to describe the effect of these songs. I got his point – that what anthems do is fool people into believing in something for a short space of time; that they lead people into negative nationalism just as much as they can make people act positively; that in themselves, in his country at least, they don't change anything. But at the same time I wanted to tell him I didn't see that entirely as a bad thing. I wanted to tell him that in Paraguay I had met people who genuinely believed in the message of ‘República o Muerte' – a song they could not even understand the grammar of. I had even met people who told me they were willing to die for their country, and they meant that in a good way, to improve their country's situation, not a bad one.

In fact, worryingly, I felt that despite all the stories I had heard like his, of lives destroyed under regimes, the one thing I had really learned about anthems in South America was that the continent had actually got them right. It had decided to make them over-the-top, in both music and lyrics, to focus on people's enjoyment of them above anything else, and in that sense people were more likely to find something in them than they would in the anthems of, say, Europe or Africa, even if it was just a chance to jump up and down while shouting their introductions. In Uruguay, everyone I had met before Amaral had enjoyed singing their anthem for me, no matter whether they believed it meant something or not.

A few days later, Amaral sent me an email. He'd been thinking about a question I asked: what song he would choose to be Uruguay's anthem if he had to? He had chosen a ‘somewhat hilarious' Uruguayan rock song from the mid-nineties. I gave it a listen. The final lines are:

If there's no other choice than liberty or death,

I'll be the first deserter.

*

Mariano González Parra doesn't seem to want to let go of my hand at the entrance to the
Armada Paraguaya
in downtown Asunción. He just keeps on shaking it, as if he can never thank me enough for giving him the chance to speak about how much he loves his country and its anthem. He makes me promise I'll return; a poor naval cadet is made to take photos; another is sent off to try to find something to give me as a gift, coming back, slightly embarrassed, with a Paraguayan navy pen. It feels like I'm never going to be allowed to leave, so when I finally do manage to extricate myself and get into my part-time interpreter Silvia's car, I start to joke about it – until I realise she's crying. So much so, in fact, that she seems to be having trouble even getting the key into the ignition.

‘I'm sorry,' she says. ‘I can't help it. They're happy tears, I promise. It's just you don't know how much I'm enjoying my job right now. I find it so inspiring meeting someone like that, someone who cares so much for this country. This place is filled with so much corruption and we should be so much better than we are, but most people don't seem to care, so to meet someone like him, who does care, who is patriotic …' She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, managing to start the car at last.

‘I had an argument last night with my flatmate about you,' she says as she pulls out into the road. ‘She said, “Why's he coming here? The people who that anthem's about – the Lópezes, Dr Francia – they died a hundred years ago. Doesn't he realise there are no heroes any more? No one believes in that message.” And I said to her, “What do you mean? I'm a hero. Every day, I die a little bit for this country. I could be working abroad, but I choose to work here as a teacher and every day I go to school and it's hard, but I want to improve this country; I want it to meet its potential. So the anthem might not mean something to you, but it does me.”' She pulls up to some lights and I reach into my bag. ‘It's okay, I don't need a tissue,' she says, and I have to stumble out an apology as I wasn't ever reaching for one, but for a notebook so I could write down everything she just said: that national anthems do still mean something; that every day Silvia dies a little for the Republic of Paraguay.

 

I DIDN'T APPRECIATE
quite how hard it is to write a national anthem until I tried it for myself. The nation (un)fortunate to be my subject in this was Switzerland, a place I had, up until that point, spent all of a week in, most of it falling face first into snow.

I hadn't just picked it at random; on 1 January 2014, the Swiss Society for Public Good had launched a search for a new anthem, having decided that the country could go on no longer with the ‘Swiss Psalm'. That song was written in 1841, and it says absolutely nothing about Switzerland today, the society said. They had a point – the ‘Psalm' sounds more like a biblical weather forecast than anything else, being filled with lines like, ‘When the Alps grow bright with splendour, / Pray, free Swiss, pray.' Someone at least needs to write new words to the old tune, the society said, and so it set up a competition to pick some.

Since by then I probably knew more about national anthems than most of the people who wrote them, I decided to give it my best shot. So I sat down, pen in hand, and tried to think of something – anything – original to say about Switzerland's scenery: those mountains that you never seem able to lose sight of; those lakes that seem to beckon you to run off the nearest pier and jump straight into them. What's a good word for those? I asked myself. ‘Glistening'? ‘Luminescent'? I flicked through a rhyming dictionary, stared at a thesaurus, but after three hours, I had got nowhere. I just had a page of clichés – words like ‘glistening' and ‘luminescent' – with ‘THIS IS RUBBISH' scrawled across them.

In the afternoon, I gave up on that approach and decided to try to conjure a few lines based on the life of William Tell, the only legendary Swiss figure I could think of – the man who shot an apple off his son's head, then promptly shot another into an Austrian bureaucrat, single-handedly creating Switzerland in the process. His was a story so filled with drama it could surely inspire anyone, so I started trying to turn it into a call to arms for the Swiss today, urging them to ‘grab their crossbows' and fight for his ideals. A few moments later, I realised that most Swiss couldn't grab a crossbow even if they wanted to, but I persevered. About five hours after that, I looked at my pad. There, in poor French, was the result of a day's work. It amounted to three lines:

We no longer have crossbows,

And our names aren't Tell,

But his spirit's in us until the end.

I read it again. It didn't get better.

*

I put myself through this ordeal partly, as you would hope, to better understand the world's anthem composers and what they had achieved. But, let's be honest, I also did it for the prize money; 10,000 Swiss francs was on offer to the winner – a fortune in anthem terms, given that most composers get nothing. The competition's entry form didn't make writing an anthem sound too difficult, either. Anyone could enter, whether they were a Swiss goatherd or an Angolan fisherman, it said. All they had to do was conjure a song that was easily singable in French, German, Italian or Romansh – the last a language spoken by only 60,000 people in the south-east of the country. It had to be based on the values in the Swiss constitution, such as respecting diversity and realising that ‘the strength of a people is measured by the wellbeing of its weakest members'. Oh, and it had to be ‘stylistically and artistically timeless'. I decided I'd jump that final hurdle when I came to it.

I didn't take the task of writing this anthem lightly. After my first appalling attempt, I travelled to Switzerland so I could get a better idea of what the country was like and ask the competition's judges exactly what they were after (‘We'll consider anything as long as it's not racist, sexist or too nationalist' was the slightly unhelpful reply). I also spoke with people in the street there to find out just what they wanted in a new anthem. When I asked a teacher in Zurich what he most liked about his country, he stared out over the city's lake for such a long time I thought he'd forgotten the question. But then he finally turned around, inspired. ‘I really like this lake,' he said, proudly.

‘So how would you get that into an anthem?' I asked. ‘What would be its first line?'

‘Er … “Oh, lovely lake”?' he said. ‘Would that work?'

However, none of that research seemed to help when, a few weeks later, I sat down to try writing the anthem again. I stared at the blank screen on my laptop and it stared back, the cursor flashing impatiently. The biggest problem was that there seemed to be nothing dramatic in the Swiss constitution to write about. I read and reread it and couldn't find anything to latch on to. I mean, an anthem about the Swiss being ‘resolved to renew their alliance … in a spirit of solidarity and openness to the world' or being ‘conscious of their responsibility to future generations'? Where's the fun in that? Where's the excitement? Where are the wars, the blood? That is what all the best anthems are about. It's hard to rally a people together when there's nothing to rally against. Why can't the Swiss dump their blessed neutrality and be a bit more aggressive?

And then it hit me – that frustration is exactly what I should put into the song. I immediately started typing. ‘
Vous avez vos guerres, / Vous avez votre sang
,' I wrote, almost without thinking. ‘
Mais nous sommes la Suisse. / Nous sommes la Suisse!
' You've got your wars, you've got your blood, but we are the Swiss. We are the Swiss! All right, it wasn't much better than what I'd written before, but at least with a bit of tweaking I could make it fit the tune and it did say
something
about Swiss values, namely that they don't like killing people. I could even picture crowds screaming, ‘We are the Swiss!' at sports events. It was a shame there were five more lines to go.