Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (52 page)

Does the Yankee take pride in his Brooklyn Bridge? Well, Paris allows the black skeleton of the monstrous Eiffel Tower to humiliate that Gothic jewel, the great H of Notre Dame.

Wise was that author who declared the Eiffel Tower to be the spire of a temple consecrated to the worship of gold, whose mass is read by the American pope Jay Gould, who would raise in his hands, to the sound of electrical doorbells, the host of the check.

For you, Greek, celestial Apollo, marble; for your churches, Holy Mystical Christ, stone; for Pluto, houses of iron, cellars of iron, strongboxes of iron.

And this is true in all the world, from New York, which is Rome, to the Great Republic of La Plata, which is the Promised Land.

One cannot complain about Buenos Aires. A splendid chapel dedicated to its worship has been dedicated on Calle Piedad—a grandiose chapel, which honors Buenos Aires’ trade, thanks to Messrs. Staud and company.

Which of our great-grandchildren will engender the architect who will decide that it is
marble
that the Athenaeum—or the place, call it what you will, consecrated to Art and Letters—will be built of?

The universal credo rings out, and all of us repeat it:

“I believe in Gold Almighty, god of earth, and in Iron his son....”

THE TRIUMPH OF CALIBAN

No, I cannot and will not be a part of those buffaloes with silver teeth. They are my enemies, they abhor the Latin blood, they are the Barbarians. And thus shivers every noble heart today; this is the protest of every worthy man in whose veins there still runs a drop of the she-wolf ’s blood.
⁶⁵

I have seen those Yankees, in their overwhelming cities of iron and stone, and the hours I have lived among them, I have spent in a state of vague dread and anguish. I seemed to feel the oppression of a mountain upon me, I seemed to be drawing breath in a land of Cyclops, eaters of raw meat, bestial blacksmiths and ironmongers, inhabitants of the houses of mastodons. Red-faced, corpulent, gross, they make their way down their streets pushing and shoving one another, brushing against one another like animals, on a hunt for the mighty dollar. The ideals of these Calibans are none but the stock market and the factory. They eat and eat and eat, and calculate, and drink whisky, and make millions. They sing “Home, Sweet Home” and their home is a checking account, a banjo, a black man, and a pipe. Enemies of all idealism, in their progress they are apoplectic, perpetual mirrors of expansion, but Sir Emerson, rightly classified, is like the moon to Carlyle’s sun; their Whitman with his hatchet-hewn verses is a democratic prophet in the service of Uncle Sam; and their Poe, their great Poe, a poor swan drunk on alcohol and pain, was the martyr to his dream in a land where he will never be understood. As for Lanier, he is saved from being a poet for Protestant ministers and for bucaneers and cowboys by the drop of Latin blood that gleams in his name.

“Ours,” they say, “is the biggest in the world”—no matter what they are talking about. And indeed, one feels oneself in the land of Brobdingnag: they have Niagara Falls, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, twenty-story boxes, dynamite and cannons, Vanderbilt, Gould, their newspapers—and “they’ve got a nerve,” as they themselves put it. From their towering heights (they stand head and shoulders above us, physically), they look upon those of us who do not wolf down beefsteak and do not say “all right” as inferior beings. Paris is a
grand guignol
for those gigantic
enfants sauvages.
⁶⁶
They go there to “have fun” and leave their dollars, for among them, even amusements are hard, and their women, though very beautiful, are of elastic rubber.

They imitate the English like
parvenus
imitating gentlefolk with generations of noble breeding.

They have temples to all the gods, but believe in none; their great men are named Lynch, Monroe, and that Grant whose figure my readers may find in Hugo, in
l’enfant terrible.
In art, in science, they imitate everything, twist and deform everything, those enormous red gorillas. But all the winds of the centuries will not be able to polish the enormous Beast.

No, I cannot and will not be a part of them; I cannot be a part of the triumph of Caliban.

 

That is why my soul was filled with joy the other night when three representatives of our race went to a solemn though receptive gathering to protest the Yankee’s aggression against noble and now-exhausted Spain.

One of these men was Roque Sáez Peña, an Argentine whose voice in the Pan-American Congress, unlike the boasting “slang” of Monroe, took an elevated tone of continental grandeur, and showed the redskin in his own house that there are those in our own Hispanic republics who stand as sentinels against the ravenous maws of the Barbarians.

Sáenz Peña spoke movingly of Spain on that night, and one could do no less than dream of his triumphs in Washington. It must truly have surprised that Blaine of the political confidence games, that Blaine and all his cotton-growers, bacon-makers, and railroad-builders.

In his speech at this gathering, the ever-cordial Sáenz Peña stood and spoke as a statesman. He repeated what he has always spoken of—his conception of the peril presented by those boa-constrictor jaws, ready to swallow still more, even after the enormous dinner it made of Texas; the greed of the Anglo-Saxon, the appetite the Yankee has shown, the political infamy of the government of the North; and how useful, how necessary it is for the Hispanic nationalities of the Americas to be prepared for the boa constrictor’s next strike.

Only one soul has been as farsighted in this matter, as farsighted and persistent, as Sáenz Peña, and that soul was—time’s strange irony!—the father of free Cuba, José Martí. Martí never ceased urging the nations of his blood that they be careful with those men of prey, that they not be lured into those pan-American schemes, but rather look to the Yankee businessmen’s traps and snares. What would Martí say today when he saw that under the colors of aid to the troubled Pearl
⁶⁷
the monster was swallowing it, oyster and all?

In the speech I have referred to, I have said that the man of cordiality and the statesman were arm-in-arm. That Sáenz Peña is both things is attested to by his entire life. Such a man should appear in defense of the noblest of nations, fallen into the booty-sack of those Yankees, in defense of the unarmed gentleman who accepts the duel with the dynamite-carrying, mechanic-overall-wearing Goliath.

On behalf of France, Paul Groussac. A comforting spectacle, the sight of that eminent, solitary man emerging from his book-filled cavern, from the scholarly isolation in which he lives, to protest against injustice and against the material triumph of Power. The great writer is no orator, but his reading moved the audience and filled the intellectuals among it, especially, with enthusiasm. His address, couched in the periods of high literary decorum, like all his writings, was vigorous and noble Art coming to the aid of Justice. And it gave pleasure to hear him say “What? Is this the man that eats nations alive? Is this the butcher that cuts his prey into pieces? Is this the constable of cruelty?”

Those of you who have read his most recent work—concentrated, metallic, solid—in which he judges the Yankees, their adventitious culture, their civilization, their instincts, their proclivities and tendencies and danger, would not have been surprised to hear him at this gathering, after the playing of the “Marseillaise.” Yes, France must be on Spain’s side. The vibrant Gallic lark cannot but curse the hatchet that chops at one of the finest vineyards of the Latin vine. And Groussac’s emotional cry—“
¡Viva España,
with honor!”—never inspired a finer response from Spanish throats than this one:
“¡Viva Francia!”

For Italy, Signore Tarnassi. In thrilling, fervent, Italian, Manzonian music,
⁶⁸
he expressed the vow of Latius;
⁶⁹
the ancient mother Rome spoke in him and through him—warlike, the decasyllables of her clarions sounded, with bravura. And the large audience was stirred by this fiery
squillo di tromba.
⁷⁰

All of us who listened to these three men, the representatives of three great nations of the Latin race, thought and felt how right this unbosoming was, how necessary that attitude, and we saw a palpable manifestation of the urgency to struggle to ensure that the Latin Union is no longer a fata morgana of the kingdom of Utopia—for when the moment comes, and the politics and policies and interests of another species rear their heads, our peoples feel the rush of common blood and the rush of common spirit. Do you not see how the English enjoy the triumph of the United States, locking away in the vault of the Bank of England their old rancors, the memory of past struggles? Do you not see how the democratic, plebeian Yankee throws up his three
hurrahs!
and sings “God Save the Queen” when a ship flying the Union Jack passes by? And together, they think: “The day will come when the United States and England own the world.”

And that is why our race must unite, as body and soul unite, at moments of tribulation. We are the sentimental, feeling race, but we have also been masters of power; the sun has not abandoned us, and the renaissance is ours, by ancestral inheritance.

From Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, there is an immense continent in which the ancient seed has been sown, and the vital sap, the future greatness of our race, is about to begin once more to run. From Europe, from the universe, there comes a vast cosmopolitan wind, which will help to invigorate our jungle. And yet still the North extends its tentacles of rail lines and locomotives, its arms of iron, and opens its many greedy mouths. It will not be the buccaneer Walker that those poor republics of Central America will have to wrestle, but rather the canal-building Yankees of Nicaragua. Mexico’s eye is peeled, for it still feels the sting of mutilation; Colombia has its isthmus larded with U.S. coal and iron; Venezuela allows itself to feel the fascination of the Monroe Doctrine and what happened in that recent emergency with England, not realizing that Monroe Doctrine and all, the Yankees allowed the soldiers of Queen Victoria to occupy the Nicaraguan port of Corinto. In Peru there are demonstrations of fellow-feeling upon the triumph of the United States, and Brazil—sad to say, sad to watch—has shown more than visible interest in the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours policies of Uncle Sam.

When the perilous future is laid out for all to see by leaders and thinkers, and when the greed of the North is there for all to see, one can do no less than prepare a defense.

But there are those who will say to me: “Do you not see that the Yankees are the strongest? Do you not know that there is a Law that says that we are bound to be swallowed or crushed by the Colossus? Do you not recognize their superiority?” Yes, of course; how can I not see the mountain formed by the mammoth’s hump? But no matter what Darwin and Spencer say, I am not going to docilely put my head on the block so that the Great Beast can crush it.

Behemoth is huge, but I am not going to throw myself under its enormous feet. And if it catches me, at least my tongue shall give one last curse, with my last breath of life. And I, who have always favored a free Cuba—if only so that I might share the dream of so many dreamers, share the heroism of so many martyrs—am nonetheless a friend of Spain’s when I see it attacked by a brutal enemy whose ensign is Violence, Force, and Injustice.

“But have you not always attacked Spain?” Never. Spain is not all priestly fanaticism, and stiff pedantry, and the wretched
domine,
disdainful of a Latin America that it does not know. The Spain that I defend is a Spain of Nobility, Ideals, Chivalry; its name is Cervantes, Quevedo, Góngora, Gracián, Velázquez; its name is The Cid, Loyola, Isabella; its name is Daughter of Rome, Sister of France, Mother of the Americas.

Miranda preferred Ariel; Miranda is grace of spirit; and all the mountains of rock and iron and gold and bacon shall never make my Latin soul prostitute itself to Caliban!

THE HIPPOGRIFF

Everyone has been mad these days—madder than usual—on account of the newest automobile craze, the Paris-Madrid race. Newspapers have given over long columns to it;
camelots
⁷¹
have sold thousands of programs and maps; those who attended the trial have been much more numerous than ever before; the names of Michelin, Mors, Mercedes, Panhard, Renault, and other marques of swift machines are on everyone’s lips. It is a time when a skilled and daring driver enjoys ovations that a Berthelot, a Pasteur, an Anatole France would never be accorded. The madness of speed, which I believe has already been studied by physicians, has invaded, rather alarmingly, the city of young and old walkers. And now the women are mixing in. Yesterday it was a former café
chanteuse
who occupied the reporters’ pens; today it is Mme. Du Gast, the
dame au masque
of the echoing, worldly process, for whom the hand of a certain French nobleman struck the cheek of an old attorney—Mme. Du Gast, who is going to drive for kilometers, at more than a hundred thirty-some per hour, in her “auto” decorated with her colors, yellow and red:
“Vive l’Espagne, olé!”
And a huge crowd has gotten up at some ungodly hour of the morning to go see the racers depart, and has launched cries of enthusiasm never heard by swift-footed Greeks and lyrical charioteers sung by Pindar. Frightful collective delirium, a madhouse without walls . . .

Even before the first stage, there have been seven deaths, among them wealthy sportsmen, and many injuries. Aside from the madmen at the wheels, the victims have been poor souls standing along the roadways, eviscerated by the swift, heavy iron-and-rubber cockroach. Adulators of industry
à outrance
say that the accident is insignificant, that business is business, and that “to make an omelette, one has to break eggs.” And when the Cabinet here [in France] decided to suspend the race on French soil, it appears that young Alfonso of Spain did everything in his considerable power to ensure that the fearsome race continue on the Spanish portion of the course. Why? Aside from his adolescent caprice and curiosity, because there had been
expenses
paid out . . . to greet the automobiles, and because there, like here, a certain part of the public was beside themselves with happiness. A certain part of the public, which is “the people,” in some places received the hippogriff with stones: