The Writer and the World (63 page)

Perón, Rega said, couldn’t do it all, and he shouldn’t be expected to. “The philosophy of Justicialism isn’t only a matter of shouting
Viva Perón.
It means taking to heart the meaning of this philosophy, which is simply that we should all, without question, comply with the objectives of greatness and fulfillment so that we might have a happy nation.” Meaningless words—the translation is the best I can do; but after the identification of enemies, it was perhaps the only way Peronism could be defined.

The wife had spoken, the secretary had spoken. The next day Perón himself spoke. Abruptly, at a meeting where he had been expected to talk of other things, he announced that he was fed up and disheartened, and that if he didn’t get more cooperation he was willing to hand over the government to people who thought they could do better.

The trade unions responded immediately. They asked their members to stop work. In the Córdoba Hills, where I was, the bus drivers didn’t even know what it was all about or where the action was; they only knew, strike-hardened union men, that the buses weren’t going to run after midday. The action, as it turned out, was confined to Buenos Aires, where in the Plaza de Mayo a great union rally was swiftly conjured up. Perón addressed the rally and received their applause; he pronounced himself satisfied, and it was assumed that he wasn’t after all going to leave the country to stew in its own juice. The whole cabinet resigned that evening; one or two ministers gave grave interviews. It seemed at least that some treachery was going to be exposed and that some heads were going to roll. But no heads rolled; the whole cabinet was reappointed.

It was a curious event: so well prepared, so dramatic in its effect, and then entirely without sequel. The newspapers, full of crisis one day, reporting the entire republic in a state of tension, the next day quietly forgot about it. Newspapers are like that in Argentina. It was Perón’s last
demagogic act, his last political flourish. And no one will know what, if anything, lay behind it, whether illness and death put an end to some new development, something that was going to make clear the purpose and plans of the new government. It was what people were waiting for. No one knew what was happening in Argentina; and some people were beginning to feel that there might be nothing to know.

The mystery isn’t the mystery of Perón alone, but of Argentina, where the political realities, of plunder and the animosities engendered by plunder, have for so long been clouded by rhetoric. The rhetoric fools no one. But in a country where government has never been open and intellectual resources are scant, the rhetoric of a regime is usually all that survives to explain it. Argentina has the apparatus of an educated, open society. There are newspapers and magazines and universities and publishing houses; there is even a film industry. But the country has as yet no idea of itself. Streets and avenues are named after presidents and generals, but there is no art of historical analysis; there is no art of biography. There is legend and antiquarian romance, but no real history. There are only annals, lists of rulers, chronicles of events.

T
HE SHARPEST
political commentator in Argentina is Mariano Gron-dona. He appears on television, and is said to be of a good Argentine family. At the end of May,
Gente
, a popular illustrated weekly, interviewed Grondona and asked him to analyze the events of the past year: the year of the disintegration of Peronism as a national movement, the year of the detection and casting out of enemies.
Gente
considered Gron-dona’s views important enough to be spread over five pages.

To understand Argentine history, Grondona said, it was necessary to break it up into epochs,
épocas.
Since independence in 1810 there had been seven epochs. Seven republics, almost: Argentina had to be seen as having a French-style history, a Latin history. The Latin mentality worked from principles; it exhausted one set of principles and moved through upheaval to a new set. Anglo-Saxons, more pragmatic, didn’t define their principles. They were therefore spared periods of chaos; but at the same time they didn’t enjoy “those magnificent moments in which everything is remade
[esos instantes magníficos en que todo recomienza].”

The fifth epoch of Argentine history, from 1945 to 1955, was the epoch of Peronism. The sixth epoch, from 1955 to 1973, was the military
epoch, the epoch of the exclusion of Peronism. The seventh epoch, beginning in 1973, was the epoch of revived institutions, the epoch of the return of Peronism. This last epoch, though only a year old, had been confusing; but it would be less so if it were divided into
etapas
, stages. Perón, like Mao, lived “in stages.” Peronism had first to pass through a “smiling” stage, when it was looking for power, then an embattled stage, when it was fighting for power, and then an apparently established stage, when it had achieved power. A number of Peronists had remained stuck at the second, embattled stage; that was why they had to be got rid of.

There is no question, in Grondona’s analysis, of people either acting badly or being badly treated. The people who had come to grief during the Peronist year simply hadn’t understood this Argentine business of
épocas
and
etapas.
Some of them had got their
etapas
badly mixed up—like the dentist who had become President as Perón’s nominee, but had then been deemed a traitor and dismissed.

Other difficult events of the year became clearer once it was understood that an
etapa
itself consisted of great days,
jornadas
; and there were
jornadas
, apparently chaotic, that could be broken up into phases,
fases.
“We are accustomed to this pattern of
épocas and jornadas …
There will be other epochs and other great days. I am convinced of that. All that we can ask of this one is that it should fulfil its historical duty.”

This is how Grondona ends, fitting a sentence of Argentine rhetoric to an account of a year’s murderous power struggle. To the outsider, Grondona, with his nimbleness and zest, is curiously detached: he might be speaking of a country far away. It is hard to imagine, from his account, that people are still being killed and kidnapped in the streets, or that in June the army was fighting guerrillas in Tucumán, or that newspapers, under the general heading
“Guerrillerismo,”
carry reports of the previous day’s guerrilla happenings. There is detachment and an unconscious cynicism in Grondona’s chronicle. The political life of the country is seen as little more than a struggle for political power. There seems to be no higher good. And—what is more alarming, more revealing of Argentina—the chronicle is offered to the readers of
Gente
as to people who know no higher good.

So Perón and his legend pass into the annals. The legend is admired now; in time it will almost certainly be reviled. But the legend itself will not alter: it will be all that people will have to go by. It is how history is
written in Argentina. And perhaps a people who had learned to read their history in another way, who had ceased to accept the politics of plunder, might have spared themselves the futility of the last year of Perón.

But the history, as it is written, is of a piece with the politics. And the politics reflect the people and the land. There are Argentines who feel that their country deserved better than Perón. They feel that their country was ridiculed and diminished by the Peronist court rule of the last year: Perón the derelict macho, Isabelita his consort and Vice President, López Rega the powerful secretary-soothsayer—sultan, sultana and grand vizier.

But Perón was what he was because he touched Argentina so closely. He intuited the needs of his followers: where he appeared to violate, there he usually triumphed. He went too far when he made war on the Church in his second presidential term; but that was his only error as a people’s leader. He brought out and made strident the immigrant proletarian reality of a country where, in the women’s magazines, the myth still reigns of “old” families and polo and romance down at the
estancia.
He showed the country its unacknowledged half-Indian face. And by imposing his women on Argentina, first Evita and then Isabelita, one an actress, the other a cabaret dancer, both provincials, by turning women branded as the macho’s easy victims into the macho’s rulers, he did the roughest kind of justice on a society still ruled by a degenerate machismo, which decrees that a woman’s place is essentially in the brothel.

Still, it remains odd about Perón: he spoke so much about the greatness of the country, but in himself, and in his movement, he expressed so many of his country’s weaknesses and revealed them as irremediable.

T
HE AEROPLANE
, coming down to land at Ezeiza Airport outside Buenos Aires, flies over the green land of Uruguay, once so rich and now, like Argentina, a land of disorder and sorrow; and then over the wide, chocolate-coloured estuary of the Río de la Plata. Quite abruptly on the tawny flat land south of the estuary the white and grey buildings of Buenos Aires are seen to arise: a city of inexplicable size that seems arbitrarily sited at the very edge of an empty continent, along that expanse of muddy water. The aeroplane shows it all: the great estuary, the sudden city of eight million, the outer rim of the vast, flat, empty hinterland—the simple geography of a remote southern land with a simple history of
Indian genocide and European take-over. Not resettlement: resettlement would have created a smaller city, might have peopled and humanized the Indian hinterland.

There is as yet in Argentina no myth of the noble Indian. The memory of the genocide is too close; it is still something to be dismissed in a line or two in the annals. In Argentina the detestation of the vanished pampa Indian is instinctive and total: the Argentine terror is that people in other countries might think of Argentina as an Indian country. Borges, who is very old, has often told his foreign interviewers that the Indians of Argentina couldn’t count. And to a forty-year-old artist of my acquaintance, the pampa Indians were “like grass.”

From the great town, highways push out in all directions through the once-Indian hinterland. The town dies hard; low, boxlike brick houses straggle beside the highways for miles. At last the land is clear; and very quickly, then, the flatness of the pampa, the height of sky, the distances and the emptiness numb response. No trees grew here. But in the unused rich soil trees grow fast now, and occasionally tall eucalyptus trees screen a park and a big house. The land is full of military names, the names of generals who took the land away from the Indians and, with a rapacity that still outrages the imagination, awarded themselves great portions of the earth’s surface, estates,
estancias
, as large as counties.

It was the time of the great imperialist push in many continents. While President Roca was systematically exterminating the Indians, the Belgians were opening up their brand-new Congo. Joseph Conrad saw the Belgians at work, and in
Heart of Darkness
he catches their frenzy. “Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers; it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.” The words fit the Argentine frenzy; they contain the mood and the moral nullity of that Argentine enterprise which have worked down through the generations to the failure of today.

The great private domains have split, but the
estancias
are still very big. The scale is still superhuman. The
estancias
are mechanized and require little labour; the landscape remains empty and unhumanized. There are little towns, sitting fragilely on the pampa, but they provide only the bare necessities: the stupefying night-club, which enables people who have said everything already to be together for hours without saying
anything; the brothel, which simplifies the world even further; the garage. Away from the highways there is a sense of desolation. The dirt roads are wide and straight; trees are few; and the flat land stretches uninterrupted to the horizon. The sense of distance is distorted: things miles away seem close—an
estancia
workman on horseback, a clump of trees, a junction of dirt roads. The desolation would be complete without the birds; and they, numerous, unusually big, and gaudily coloured, emphasize the alienness of the land and the fewness of men. Every morning on the pampa highways there are dead brown owls.

The land here is something to be worked. It is not a thing of beauty; it has not been hallowed by the cinema, literature or art, or by the life of rooted communities. Land in Argentina, as I heard a South American banker from another country say, is still only a commodity. It is an investment, a hedge against inflation. It can be alienated without heartache. Argentina’s wealth is in the land; this land explains the great city on the estuary. But the land has become no one’s home. Home is elsewhere: Buenos Aires, England, Italy, Spain. You can live in Argentina, many Argentines say, only if you can leave.

The Argentina created by the railways and President Roca’s Remingtons still has the structure and purpose of a colony. And, oddly, in the manner of its founding and in its implied articles of association, it is like a sixteenth-century colony of the Spanish Empire, with the same greed and internal weaknesses, the same potential for dissension, the cynicism and sterility.
Obedezco pero no cumplo
, I obey but I don’t comply: it was the attitude of the sixteenth-century conquistador or official, who had a contract with the King of Spain alone, and not with the King’s other subjects. In Argentina the contract is not with other Argentines, but with the rich land, the precious commodity. This is how it was in the beginning and how, inevitably, it continues to be.

There is no king (though Perón was that, a man in whose name everyone acted). But there is a flag (the colours, blue and white, honour a saint, but Argentines are taught that they are the colours of their sky). And people who feel that the land has failed them wave the flag: the workers in the cities, the young men in new suits, immigrants’ sons who have become doctors or lawyers. But this patriotism is less than it appears. In Argentina, unmade, flawed from its conception, without a history, still only with annals, there can be no feeling for a past, for a heritage, for shared ideals, for a community of all Argentines. Every Argentine wants
to ratify his own contract with the God-given land, miraculously cleansed of Indians and still empty.