The Writer and the World (69 page)

But then, when he was only in his early forties, the Peronist upheaval had occurred; and the country, hardly created, had begun to unravel. Borges had been humiliated in the Peronist period; he had been made to give up his modest job in the municipal library. Now, twenty years on, Peronist guerrillas were active in the city, armed policemen were in the streets; and Perón was about to return. The only way Borges had of coping with this new twist in Argentine history was to ignore it. The very name of Perón, he said, was too shabby to be used in public, “the way in poetry one avoids certain words.” His work was his consolation. “We can look forward to a Trojan ending.”

Some of his sadness came out in a short poem he addressed in this year, 1972, to the writer Manuel Mujica Lainez—a distant relation of Father Mujica’s. Mujica Lainez (1910–1984) lived in English country-house style in a small town in the Córdoba Hills. His large, gloomy, well-furnished house in a damp little valley had something of the atmosphere of Stephen Tennant’s Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire. The Conquest of the Desert, and the prodigious expansion of Argentina in the late nineteenth century, had brought wealth, education, and even a kind of old European style to a number of old colonial families, together with an idea of Argentina as something achieved, something correctly celebrated in the public statuary of Buenos Aires.

In 1934, in a poem in English, Borges had written about the public statues of his ancestors: “I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in bronze.” Now, in 1972, the poem Borges wrote to Mujica Lainez ended: “Manuel Mujica Lainez, we both once had a country—do you remember?—and we have both lost it.”

Two years later, in 1974, the other Mujica, the Third World Priest in the Palermo shantytown, expiating guilt and (as Ricardo said) the old idea of Argentine history, had been shot dead. He, too, had been on someone’s list. Perón by this time had come back; he was very old and about to die. He had turned against the guerrillas who had helped to bring him back; so at the end the Peronism he—and his terrible court—had brought back was as plundering and murderous as it had been twenty
years before. For a day or two, perhaps for a week, no more, posters gave the name of the killed Mujica. It was hardly honour. The walls of Buenos Aires were scrawled over with many different names and slogans. Those walls were the visual equivalent of a constant public din. There were too many martyrs now, too many enemies; the revolutionary causes had become indecipherable.

Two years later, the army was to take over again. They were to tear down all the posters and whitewash all the walls, and they were to start killing the guerrillas. Within a year they had destroyed the various movements; and the white walls of the city—old scrawls showing faintly through—were to speak of an eradicated generation, educated people who had, like their patron Mujica, converted high religious and political ideals into elemental Argentine-Spanish ideas of the enemy, and physical punishment, and blood.

A
FTER
fourteen years, I went again to Salta. I flew from Buenos Aires to La Rioja, and from there went on by bus, over two days, up and down the mountain passes and through the wide sugar-cane valleys.

In 1972 Borges, a man of Buenos Aires, had told me that when he was with Salta people he felt he was with foreigners. In the province of Buenos Aires, Borges said, a gaucho was a horseman of the flat pampas; in Salta a gaucho was a rider in the mountains. A different landscape, a different history: Buenos Aires lived by its Atlantic port, while Salta and all that northern part of Argentina had been colonized from Peru and the Pacific.

What distances—from Spain to the Caribbean, the portage to the Pacific, and from there to Peru and points south! Salta was at the end of an imperial route that Spain had protected and kept secure for more than two centuries. Spain felt unimaginably far away. Yet to be in the main square of Salta—laid out all at once, as the Spanish custom was, on a day in 1582—was to have a strong sense of Spain, the Spanish empire, the Spanish conquest. A government building was in the Paris style of Buenos Aires; the 1941 Hotel Salta, for holidaymakers, carefully “colonial,” spoke of the last days of old Argentina, just before Perón. But nearly everything else in that square, the great church, the bell-towers, the arcaded pavements, the tall and rich green garden, spoke of Spain. The monument that marked the four-hundredth anniversary of the city
was not—as it might have been in Buenos Aires in its more confident days—a tribute to Argentina, but a bust of the Duke of Lerma who, all that distance away in Spain, had sent out orders for the founding of a city at that spot. Whatever course history had taken elsewhere, whatever the present condition of Spain itself, Spain here continued paramount.

It was Easter. Loudspeakers attached to poles in the central garden amplified the singing in the church, but not too loudly—a woman’s voice, alone, and pure, that seemed to add to the blessing of the green garden, a green so rich and deep it seemed to cast a cool green light all around. People sat on benches in that light, or walked, or sold or bought things. Some people stood on the steps of the church; some went and stood inside. The church, plain outside, glittered above the altar. You had to go quite far up, through the people standing, before you saw that the woman with the pure voice was a young Indian nun, short, her head covered, with the skirt of her modern habit falling not far below the knees of her bow legs. And with everything that one felt here about the wonder of Spain, and the Spanish civilities of Salta, from waiters and others, there came, at the sight of the young Indian nun, who had made peace with the world in her own way, a contrary judgement about the enduring cruelty of the Spanish conquest.

Of that cruelty of the sixteenth century, living on at the end of the twentieth, there was always an intimation in the north: in the sugar-cane fields, the Indian faces, the Indian houses. Gold and slaves,
encomiendas
, “grants” of Indians from the Spanish crown—that was what drove the first Spaniards down from Peru.

And there was cruelty in the other Argentinas that came after. Cruelty is really the theme of the gaucho folk epic,
Martín Fierro
(first part 1872), which is the nearest thing Argentina has to a national poem. In Buenos Aires buckskin-covered editions of this book are sold as keepsakes. In the Argentina imagination the poem—by José Hernández (1834–1886), known for nothing else—is a memorial of a better and purer time, when the gaucho, a free man, rode over the unfenced and limitless pampa, and the land was bright with possibility. But the Argentina of the poem, wild though it appears, is already corrupt, without justice. The gaucho hero is really a man on the run, caught between barbarisms, Indian and Argentine. He is in constant danger of being impressed—and robbed of his pay, and flogged for misdemeanours—to fight the Indians on the frontier, to win the land for others.

There is a similarity between
Martín Fierro
and a Russian novel of adventure, published just a few months later, Nikolai Leskov’s
The Enchanted Wanderer
(1873). Leskov (1831–1894) is almost the coeval of José Hernández; his tale, coming at a time of Russian expansion, is of a simple Russian caught between Russian and Tartar barbarisms. Leskov is at his best when he has a strong story to tell; and his best stories are his most painful ones; his underlying subject, pointed up by his religious obsession, is Russian cruelty. Leskov’s enchanted wanderer, when he becomes a prisoner of the Tartars, is like the gaucho Martín Fierro as a prisoner of the pampa Indians: they are both men in hell, and they both have little to run back to. The true Conquest of the Desert came immediately after the publication of the second part of
Martín Fierro
(1879). There was no valour in this conquest; with the help of the railways and the Remington rifle, President Roca, in six campaigns, wiped out the pampa Indians. A vast new territory, flat and fertile and tree-less, never used for cultivation, was shared out among a handful of people. It was as though, as with the first Spanish conquest, people who had been poor for generations, never knowing that human needs were assuageable, had, with opportunity, discovered in themselves only a boundless greed. Immigrants were brought over from Europe to service, but not to settle, this conquered Desert; and the new Parisian city of Buenos Aires was built. The “Paris” was not for everyone: in the dark and minute and shaming “maid’s rooms” of the new apartment buildings may still be seen an important idea of the new Argentine wealth: other people had to be poor, nothing was to be shared. People who required nothing less than the sky and the horizon of the conquered Desert for themselves and their sheep and cattle, offered very little, offered nothing, to everybody else.

In 1972 the rage about this still flowed. A journalist who grew up in a small pampa town said, “I saw them cheating the workers who worked by the hour—they turned the clocks backward.” That was hard to believe, but it was the kind of story people told. I heard that in the old days, before Perón, the maids who lived in those tiny rooms never had a day off; that some worked only for their keep. And there were stories that working people and Indians were not allowed to walk in the Barrio Norte, the upper-class area.

They sounded like stories, legends to keep the rage up. But then sometimes I wondered; when, for example, in an important provincial town, in an oily shed of a factory, where the floor was of earth, I saw this
sign—in 1972, twenty years after the death of Eva Perón, and with the guerrillas campaigning for Perón’s return—“If you work for a man, work for him. Speak well of him on every suitable occasion. Remember: an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of intelligence.” This statement was attributed to San Martín, honoured in Argentina as the Liberator, the winner of the country’s independence from Spain.

The attitude, the simple obedience required (with very little offered in return), seemed to take one back very far, beyond the frontier cruelties of
Martín Fierro
to the tyrannies of the warlords like Rosas (Borges said he used to have executed people’s heads spiked and displayed, “to give the others fair warning”); and even beyond that back to the Spanish conquest. In the tracing of Argentine attitudes, of rage and counter-rage, action and reaction, you go back always to the Spanish conquest, as to original sin.

It was Perón’s gift or genius to tap all that rage, the rage not only of the European immigrants and their children, most of them workers, some of them educated people, a few of them entrepreneurs—not only that European rage, but the rage also of the dispossessed Indians in the north, the dispossessed in the regions that were not serviced by the new wealth: the
cabecitas negras
, the “blackheads” he brought into Buenos Aires to march and demonstrate. That rage he scratched into a national sore; and it still festers, though Perón and his court (with no other example in Argentina of wealth and style) were as plundering as any of the old oligarchy, and by nationalizations, gifts and rewards, made money and endeavour worthless.

I talked this year to a man of the Anglo-Argentine community whom I had talked to in 1972. He had then, in the midst of the movement for Perón’s recall, said, “I’m beginning to feel completely at sea. Perón destroyed all my feeling that he stood for anything. Anything could be changed at any moment. And then here you really have no say in deciding who’s going to rule. So in the end here you do become sheep. You lose confidence in politics, you lose confidence in the military, and there’s nothing left.” Now—when they were no longer a threat—this man spoke of the guerrillas with something like sympathy. He said, “Most normal people in this country have wanted to shoot the lot at the top. You see, nobody here gets punished; once you’re at the top you’re safe. It was very easy for the guerrillas to cash in on this frustration.”

It was the trap of the situation, the Trojan ending Borges had prophesied
four years before the dirty war began: the educated guerrilla generation, grandchildren of immigrants, could hold on to the good abstract ideas they had been educated into—the development of the human spirit, the New Man confronting injustice—only by adding the old Argentine-Spanish idea of blood, the enemy.

T
HERE
are some stanzas in
Martín Fierro
where the gaucho overhears the local judge scheming with another man to make money by pushing the Indian frontier back. Impressed soldiers will do the actual fighting; and the gaucho’s heart “grows small” as he listens to this talk of “settlements and roads and raking in thousands,”
proyetos/de colonias y carriles/y tirar plata a miles.
If things go on like this, the gaucho thinks, the pampas might soon become “a desert, with nothing but the whitening bones of dead men.”

This has a parallel in the Joseph Conrad story,
Heart of Darkness
(1902), which is about Belgian empire-building on the other side of the Atlantic, in the Congo, and refers to events which would have occurred only some twenty years after the events of the Argentine poem. The Conrad narrator, making his way inland to take charge of a river steamer, finds himself in a rough station on the Congo River with sixteen or twenty Belgians of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. Unspeakable things are happening all around; men are wasting away and dying. But the Belgians don’t notice.

“The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh, no … Their talk … 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 that these things are wanted for the work of the world.”

The narrator is led to reflect on the idea of work. It is the missing moral idea. “No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”