Like a Blue-Eyed Horse

by María Rosa Lojo

(Translated by Brett Alan Sanders)

La Rioja, 1826 (2)

Young (3) María del Carmen is completely bewitched, Justina thinks. Neither the best doctors nor the most experienced of folk healers (4) have been able to cure her.

Two blue eyes — washed almost clean like a sapphire stone, yet shining at a distance like crystals of mica — are what drown her amidst nightmares and soak her embroidered shift in hot, scented sweat. Those eyes, alluring like little magnetic marbles, are what lift her up and set her to walking — half asleep but moaning — toward the dark grille where only the nocturnal flowers called “ladies of the evening” (5) continue to beckon.

Those eyes are what María del Carmen keeps seeking in vain when Justina returns her to bed, tucks her in, and pats her on the back, as if she were still the child whose hand she used to hold after bad dreams, returning her to the security of the known world. But María del Carmen is no longer a child, and that is the problem.

It is also a problem that the eyes should be so uncommonly blue, so offensively blue. And in particular, that they should be the eyes of a heretic.

Nevertheless, María del Carmen finds good answers for all objections.

“And what of it, if he's blue-eyed? Isn't Angel Peñaloza too, General

Quiroga's right-hand man? Isn't Brizuela? (6) And don't call him a heretic! Since he's been around here he hasn't missed a single Mass. He's always at the entrance, next to the stoup, to offer me holy water in his hand.”

“And why wouldn't he be? The devil himself, if he could, would burn his fingers with holy water to woo a girl like you. The worst will come later, when you see him in his underwear and his tail shows.”

“What tail? That's the stuff of ignorant blacks. Of course he has no tail. He might be real white, but no, he won't have a tail.”

“You're so well acquainted with him so's to know that for sure? And I don't know what you see in a man the color of butter.”

María del Carmen's face has become as red as her pale brown skin can be: almost the deep red of a federalist flag (7):

“But how can you say such things, you insolent woman? I've scarcely seen him in church, and at the Dàvilas' dance, and at the Villafañes'. I don't care to speak of these things anymore. If only my mother were alive!”

“She'd tell you more or less the same as me, you ungrateful child, and you wouldn't be able to call her an ignorant black,” Justina thinks, while she watches young Carmen withdraw, enveloped in a fury of muslins. She will go to take shelter beneath the immense algarrobo (8) tree in the orchard, the same one which has welcomed with invariable patience her tantrums, those of an only daughter who believes herself, since she lacks a mother, to deserve exaggerated pampering and compassion.

Justina is certain that she has not gone alone. In her bag of yarn and lace she always carries one or two little books, bound in red morocco leather and whose golden letters weaken the fragile morality and incite the febrile imagination of marriageable maidens. Justina has been told, by a reliable source, that such trashy publications are called “novels” and that they tell stories of rebellions and sins. The blame lies with the girl's cousins, who spend their winters in Buenos Aires, and bring back all sorts of novelties; and with the indulgence of the boss Don Robustiano, who, if he has not brought the moon down from the sky, that's only because Carmencita hasn't yet thought of asking for it.

Everything is tolerated, until, as always, something irremediable comes up.

The irremediable something has a name that Justina has still not managed to pronounce (although, perhaps to accommodate him to the common rung of mortals, society ladies magnanimously call him “Don Carlos”), and a notorious, scandalous visibility. It is impossible not to notice, from far away, that head, as yellow as if some eccentric artist should have intentionally painted it for him, and which stands out at least by a hand's width among the other heads, black or brown, of normal people. From close up, one must be very well-mannered to contain the laughter when the gringo (9) opens his mouth and starts to speak in a Spanish plagued with errors that would be delightful in a little child just learning to speak, but prove ridiculous in a man of his size and aspect, wearing a frock coat and a top hat which he never fails to lift as soon as a lady passes (there will always be one to pass in front of him as many as three or four times, just to see him bend forward in bow after bow, as if he were a puppet whose strings someone was pulling).

If that were the whole of it, the gringo — who is not even a Monsieur, or a Mister, but who belongs to another even rarer species — would be only one more of those “nations” dressed like the fashion-plates of Parisian dandies which they bring her every summer from the Port City (10).

But if Justina does not like the suitor's appearance, much less does she approve of his activities as the head of a strange caravan which has recently arrived at Chilecito (11), armed like a band of outlaws, with rifles and carbines, and equipped with insolent instruments for scrutinizing and eviscerating the most private entrails of the Earth, which is, like Eve, the mother of all mortals. If at least they had been sent by General Quiroga, he would have his reasons. But Rivadavia has sent them, the atheist who goes into partnership with gringos in order to better and more quickly fill his own pockets and the insatiable coffers of Buenos Aires. (12) Only a bunch of heretics, in league with the Devil himself, could with impunity face the wrath of the hill of Famatina, where the suffering souls of the Incas still wander through its tunnels to protect the last treasures of their lost Empire. (13)

Beneath the little cambric handkerchief, in the box where he keeps his snuff, the gringo hides the magic words that effortlessly open to him the gates of Salamanca and grant him the mountain's treasures in exchange for a kiss on Beelzebub's arse. It is the Enemy who fits him with fine lambskin shoes (or perhaps they are made with the even more tender skin of a suckling child), it is the Unnameable who embroiders his silk gloves with cryptic signs, who dresses him with fabrics of a delicacy that is unknown not only in the salons of La Rioja, but also, from what one hears, in those of Buenos Aires.

Justina gets herself worked up when she thinks of the small army of naked men who drag themselves through the subterranean galleries during entire days of labor, depriving themselves of seeing the natural sovereign faces of the Sun and the Moon, only in order to catch their brilliance, minted and fixed, in blocks of gold and silver. Whoever is capable of thus exchanging the elevated lights of the sky for the dubious glow of the earth's center, can well bend the blossoming will of an innocent girl.

But the father's consent is still lacking. And that very afternoon the battle will be waged. Justina orders that the drawing room be prepared, that the yerba máte (14) and other drinks be ready for when Dr. Don Segundo Ortiz (the emissary chosen by the gringo to ask formally for the hand of Carmencita) sits down to talk with Don Robustiano. Then she burns beneficent incenses in the four corners of the room, furtively places sprigs of bitter wormwood beneath the cushions and tapestries. She prays, without once breathing, an entire rosary. Whatever she does seems little to her if she is to erase from the house and from the girl's memory the evil light of two blue eyes.

Guaco and Malanzán

Province of La Rioja, 1829

The engineer Karl von Phorner crushes the paper. Tears of rage jump to his eyes like sparks from a foundry. He again opens and spreads out on the table the crumpled sheet and once more reads the order that confiscates his cattle — the cattle of the flourishing ranch of Guaco – in the name of the High Provincial Government. The ominous cause of all his misfortunes, since he set foot on these lands of riches which, like illusions, are scintillating and ultimately unattainable, seems to be reduced now to one single name: Juan Facundo Quiroga.

On a piece of furniture with a display case, in front of his desk, are lined up — representative and useless museum pieces — the mineral specimens that he took from the Famatina mine no more than three years ago, though it all seems as distant and unimaginable as if it belonged to a previous life. There are the green stone and slate-clay, the quartz veined with gold, the iron oxide, the white and red silver sulphate, the muriate and the copper. There, enclosed in test tubes, quicksilver and cinnabar sleep an unstable, glimmering slumber.

All for nothing! His journey from Hamburg to that southern river which, despite its name, has no silver save in the reflections of its waves beneath the moon, (15) has been for nothing. For nothing, also, the interminable journey by coach from Buenos Aires to the provinces of Cuyo (16), passing through a hostile territory where the air trembles, pierced by shouts of war and by spear points, where the shadows of naked, greased horsemen buck against the fragile calm of the pampean night. Also the anguish on the back of a mule to the lower slopes of Famatina, watched like an invading war party, and forced to pay absurd prices for any provision. For the country folk try at least to make a good profit on their occasional dealings with “those devils”, who — according to them — don't even know how to speak a human language and instead express themselves in barbarous gibberish which are called, by those acquainted with the languages of Hell, “English” and “German”.

The securities and guarantees that the presumed President of the presumed republic, Bernardino Rivadavia, had offered to the operations of the River Plate Mining Company had been no use. General Juan Facundo Quiroga and his voucher (17), Governor Villafañe, have refused to recognize Rivadavia's powers, have not agreed to turn over to the supposed national government and its partners the working of La Rioja's mines. They don't lack some extremely weighty reasons, such as that they, and the wealthy contractor Don Braulio Costa, by now have their own company, the Famatina Mining Company, whose profits are bound to stay in the province and, above all, in the bank accounts of some of its most distinguished sons.

Karl von Phorner is little concerned with the quarrels of unitarists and federalists, or of provincials and Porteños (18). He only knows that Quiroga has kept him from exercising his profession, and restoring luster to his ancestral coat of arms with a good coat of fresh gold. Of course he could have continued on to Chile — to the mines of Copiapó, where good engineers are needed — carrying his instruments on his back. A good number of his companions have done so. But a pair of dark eyes beneath a white mantilla, at High Mass one morning, had kept him from doing that. And Karl von Phorner does not want to blame those eyes. A happy fault, in any case (he thinks), as happy as that of our father Adam, without which Christ should never have come to save us. Like a good miner, Von Phorner would rather have plunged into the empty well of desperation, provided that he then be hauled up to the rich veins of happiness that those eyes promise him, despite all obstacles. Because from the beginning there have been no shortage of obstacles, although the lovers continue artfully to evade them, with distant glances and white-hot encounters, brief and clandestine.

For love of those eyes Karl von Phorner, an enlightened and progressive university graduate, has left his books and his experiments to study the rhythms of the fattening of livestock, to cure them of fevers and to kill the insects that afflict them. For love of those eyes, he, who considers himself highly educated, has suffered the most iniquitous racial and religious discrimination and the mockery of illiterate country folk. And even worse, the brazen insult of the man who refuses to be his father-in-law.

His sensitive cheeks still burn, prone as they are to blush under the effects of love, rage, and good beer, when he remembers the answer that Don Robustiano Vera has given him after the long discourse with which his mediator has attempted to hold up his merits as a matrimonial candidate:

“How many mules, how many cows does your gringo have? Never will I give my daughter to a heretic with no brand of his own and whose eyes look like those of a Quitilipe horse.”

Von Phorner can hardly challenge to a duel the father of the woman he seeks to marry. He decides to tolerate — like a Christian, even though they brand him a heretic — the humiliation of being compared to a horse because of the color of his eyes. If there is no other solution, he will become a rancher. Thus he devotes himself, with methodical discipline, to the labor of building up his own “brand” of cattle and horses; and he buys, thanks to his savings and to some credits, the property of Guaco, on the outskirts of La Rioja. Meanwhile his intended bride awaits him, with impassioned patience, although at twenty-one, by local criteria, she is already almost on her way to being an old maid. She threatens to enter a convent if they don't let her marry her belovèd. In his moments of low spirits, Phorner imagines that perhaps her father would sooner see her become a nun than to have poor grandchildren, who might even inherit eyes of so inhuman a color.

His beginnings have not been easy. He has had to overcome the suspicion and the disdain of his own farmhands. He has in his favor two great virtues: he is a good horseman, and he is brave. From time to time he treats himself to dazzling the gauchos with some equestrian feats that he learned during a rigorous training in the Viennese school of Lipizzan horses, and which earn him reticent praises: “the gringo is strange, but he can ride a pretty trot.” He has also resigned himself to the definitive vernacular transformation of his noble surname. Whether for sonorous affinities, or for reminding them of the fires that melt metals, the German nobleman Karl von Phorner has descended from the Almanach of Gotha (19) to be universally known among the inhabitants of La Rioja as “the gringo del horno, or “of the oven”, not just among shack-dwellers but even in the gossip of drawing rooms.

But this last blow is excessive, intolerable. When the yields of his livestock seem to draw the desired consent nearer and nearer, the hand of Quiroga and his warlike zeal intervene once more to discourage all hope. Karl von Phorner decides to behave according to the loftiness of his ancestry and gamble all for all. He will go looking for the Tiger of The Plains (20) of La Rioja in his own lair. He knows that Quiroga, before leaving for Córdoba to engage in combat with the unitarist forces of the one-armed Paz (21), will spend a few days at his house at San Antonio de Malanzán, and it is there he heads, decked out in his best trappings as a country magnate. He has tucked into his belt an Argentine dagger and a pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle inherited from his grandfather, which fired its first shots in the Bengalese jungles. Perhaps it will fire its last ones against this other Tiger.

The truth is he has seen Quiroga very few times: some entrance of the caudillo into the city of La Rioja, bewhiskered and triumphant, at the head of his montoneras (22); a proclamation on the balconies of the Government House — image and sound exaggerated by their echo and by the prestige of distance. Now he will have him face to face, at the house of stone that he is already starting to discern among the forests of tala, algarrobo, and quebracho trees that dot the Plains. Night has already begun to fall, and the dusk, though golden, is light and cool: a flaming globe from which only the splendor spreads out, not the fire. He dismounts and ties his horse to the hitching post. In front of the great house which was already near, engraved in the stone itself, is a coat of arms, worn out at the edges. At first he is surprised, but then he thinks he remembers — someone has told it to him — that the Quirogas proceed from an ancient Visigothic lineage, in the Spanish Kingdom of Galicia.

Having duly responded to the ritual invocation of greeting — Ave María Purísima (23) —, they open the door to him and invite him into the drawing room, where two women are doing embroidery next to the window, taking advantage of the last rays of light. Phorner admires the Spanish furnishings, ponderous and dark but finely carved and stitched, the oriental reception area heaped with large cushions, themselves covered with elaborate embroidery. In a strategic place, beneath an imminent splendor of candelabra, there stands a clavichord. Jugs and dishes — of Peruvian or Bolivian silver — reflect the forms of everything in the sinuous path of their arabesques. They reflect his own face, which seems more and more surprised. The barbarian's cave appears to be a courtly drawing room, scented with lavender and benjamin. Although perhaps those aromas proceed from the clothing of the beautiful woman who has the courtesy to stand up and greet him.

Phorner pauses, fascinated, on the perfect oval of her face: a refined and mature beauty that could be that of his María del Carmen within a few years. Doña Dolores Fernández, the Tiger's wife, invites him to sit next to her and the other lady — Doña Juana Argañaraz, Quiroga's mother. They treat him to máte and puff pastries with syrup. They draw him into conversation, and Phorner realizes that they are already familiar with the history of his arrival at La Rioja.

“Wouldn't you be willing to convert, Don Carlos? Carmencita Vera is well worth any number of Masses, (24) ” the older woman suggests to him.

“I don't doubt it, ma'am. But to what should I convert? Not all of us Germans became Reformists. In my family we have been Catholics for as long as we can remember.”

“Good Catholics?”

“As good as we have been able and as the Lord's grace has cared to grant us,” Phorner answers, noticing at the same time (not without a shiver) the inscription “Religion or Death” that the skillful fingers of the Tiger's wife have just finished embroidering in silver over a black banner of silk. The smoke of inquisitorial fires begins to blend with the aromatic herbs and mixtures of Lima (25) which enrich the room's air.

The entrance of a man dressed as a gaucho breaks the tensions and the enchantment.

“Madame has sent for me?”

“Yes indeed, Funes. Accompany the gentleman Don Carlos to the orchard. He has come to see my husband.”

In an aside, the woman communicates something (a secret bit of information?) into the emissary's ear, and he makes a gesture of assent.

Phorner follows Funes through the little paths of the orchard. Fruit trees, tunnels of grapevines, curbstones that gather the water of arbitrary rains. Roses and jasmines — the same ones that feign to continue blooming in the vases of crystal or German silver that he saw in the drawing room. The orchard, no doubt, is the territory of Doña Dolores much more than of General Quiroga. Soon they run into Quiroga himself, dressed like any countryman. He is shorter than he appears to be at a distance, and above all, on horseback, but at close range the refulgence of his eyes — powder flashes of silver in the black depths of a mine — compensates for what he might lack in stature. He is not alone. He is carrying on his shoulders a girl about two years old, with a straw hat on her little head whose dark curls reproduce, exactly, those that cover the great brown head of Facundo.

Karl von Phorner does not know which way to turn. He has not come to kill the owner of this peaceful rural mansion, nor the husband of Dolores Fenández, nor the father of that little girl who is tugging at the caudillo's beard and hair without the least deference. The truth is, it also wouldn't do him much good to kill him. If he were to commit that vilest of murders, firing a sudden shot into the heart of an unarmed man in his own home, he would only, at best, have his throat slit instantly by Funes, and at worst, be pilloried, staked out, hung, and then meticulously flayed by small strips.

At the distance of a few paces, Funes announces him.

“General, the gentleman here wants to see you.” Then he adds, in a perfectly audible voice: “Missis Dolores says to tell you this is the gringo del horno, the one she and your lady mother have spoken of to you.”

That's all that's missing! For Phorner to know that he has become (even under that peculiar nickname) a frequent topic of family conversation. How can he now successfully broach the delicate matter that brings him, on which depends, not just his fortune, but his happiness? But suddenly all the pieces of the puzzle seem to fit in a single vision, clear and concentrated. The coat of arms denoting nobility at the front of the property; the ladies of the castle embroidering banners and standards in the drawing room with flowers; the diligent squire, perhaps dull-witted or perhaps mocking; the man who calls his retinues of soldiers to combat and confiscates cattle and harvests to provide them with supplies. Wars for religion and local rights. Spoils that will be spread out among his faithful vassals. Yes. Karl von Phorner has already read that book. His own people have read it and performed it for generations, even if in Mother Europe those things might no longer be in fashion. He would laugh from pure relief, were he not afraid of breaking the necessary solemnity of the occasion.

“Speak up, friend,” Quiroga smiles, not recalling anything about the gringo del horno, although he has been reminded of the talk of his women, always prone to favor petitioners, and whom he does not like to contradict on the few occasions when he is able to enjoy his home.

“The truth is,” he adds, kissing the little girl and handing her over to the nursemaid who has come out to meet her, “that I'm only receiving you because my wife and mother recommend you. I come to San Antonio to rest, and I don't like to deal with business here if I can avoid it.”

“You are entirely right, General. But I'm not facing you to conduct business. I, Sir, have the honor to challenge you to a duel, until death take pity on one or the other of us.”

Quiroga fixes his eyes on Phorner. For being a gringo, the young man seems to have a pleasant bearing, and does not — aside from his incredible words — show any sign of madness.

“Do you know who I am? Do you know that at this very moment I could order your throat slit and your body cut to pieces, and that my order would be obeyed?”

“Yes, Sir. But General Quiroga wouldn't give that order.”

“Ah, no? And why not?”

“General Quiroga wouldn't order a man killed who has come in good faith to challenge him. He would fight with him.”

“And you pretend that we should fight within my home, in front of my wife, my mother, and my children?”

“By no means, Sir. I am at your disposal to set whatever time and place you will. But I had no other way to contact you; that's why I've come here.”

“If it's not too much to ask, before measuring off against each other I would like to know the motive.”

“General, you are an oppressor of the freedoms and rights of individuals. I will rid this province of your tyranny.”

Quiroga looks closely at the gringo, who also studies him with his eyes which are quiet, tranquil, transparent.

“Look, friend, you're a foreigner, and you naturally understand very little of our concerns. In these lands there's no lack of clever fellows, quick to fill the heads of young, courageous people with ideas that they themselves don't dare to carry out. Don't let them deceive you. There are always those who disagree, but the people, who enlist voluntarily in my armies, aren't the ones who want me thrown out. And if in spite of everything you don't approve of how these provinces are governed, what's to stop you from going back to your country, where no doubt you will live better? You haven't covered so many leagues by sea and land just for the pleasure of being oppressed by me, have you?”

Quiroga pauses, thoughtful. He starts to remember, vaguely, shreds of the story of the “gringo del horno”. A confused matter of mining, love, and cattle.

“Now tell me the truth. You must surely have a more personal reason for challenging me to a duel.”

“Yes, Sir. I'm not concealing it. I came with the River Plate Mining Company, as the captain of mines, and within little time you left me without work. I could have gone away, but I had fallen in love with Miss María del Carmen Vera. Her father rejected me because I had no cattle, because he believed me to be a heretic, and because the color of my eyes seemed to him better suited to a Quitilipe horse than to a human being. I am not a heretic but a Catholic, like all of you, and I can show my baptismal certificate, though no one could convince that gentleman. The color of my eyes I cannot change, and even if I could I wouldn't while that color is, as it seems to be, pleasing to my belovèd. But I bought a ranch with cattle at Guaco and set myself to improving it. And now that I have almost managed to have a respectable brand, you confiscate it from me for your wars. Does that strike you as little motive?”

General Quiroga bursts out laughing. He laughs and slaps his thighs. He laughs so much that he frightens the few birds thereabouts, and attracts the curiosity of Funes who is keeping guard at a few paces' distance. Phorner has become rigid, perplexed. Should he place Quiroga's unexpected laughter on the growing list of his offenses?

But the general has already grown calm. He pats the German's shoulders and speaks.

“Don't think that I'm mocking you. On the contrary. Your intended can be proud. You can't count even on the fingers of one hand the number of men from La Rioja who would have dared to do what you've done. I know your future father-in-law, and I can assure you that even if you were a Mohammedan and had purple eyes, he would accept you as his son-in-law all the same, so long as you satisfy him as to the number of your cows. But I can't lift the confiscation, above all for your own good. More must be asked of those who have more. People like you, especially, are obligated to contribute, and if not, you would risk reprisals that perhaps not even I could control. But don't worry! When the war is over, count on me to restore your cattle. I'll open up my personal credit to you.”

Phorner and Quiroga return to the house together. The gringo del horno accepts the invitation to supper, and then to sleep. That night he sinks into a white and exquisite rustle: sheets of starched linen, which give off an aroma of verbena. Before dawn, as if they had the power to touch him, he is awakened by the vigilance of a pair of gray eyes. It is a forest owl, which is watching him through the grilles of the window. Phorner has never seen one from so close, although he knows by heart the outline of that image which is repeated in all of the artistic labors of the land: blankets, tapestries, tobacco boxes and pouches, indigenous ceramics. He resigns himself to thinking, almost joyously, that he will never return to his own forests of the North, and he allows himself to go back to sleep, sheltered by those wise eyes.

Happy peoples have no history, good news is no news, hard-to-win happiness is as imperceptible and paradoxical as “natural art”. Perhaps that is why, from here on, the features of Karl von Phorner become shaded, contradictory, and at last lose themselves in the annals of La Rioja. Not just because he did not kill the notorious Quiroga, the Tiger of The Plains, but perhaps because he himself achieved a basic, moderate happiness.

Footnotes

(1) Lojo cites Dávila's account “Mineral de Famatina. Rápida ojeada sobre el origen, descubrimiento y trabajos de este mineral desde el tiempo de la conquista hasta nuestros días”, La Revista de Buenos Aires. Historia Americana, Literatura, Derecho y Variedades [“Famatina Mine. A Quick Overview of the Origin, Discovery and Labors of This Mine Since the Time of the Conquest Until Our Day”, The Buenos Aires Review. American History, Literature, Law and Miscellanies ], Volume XXIII, Buenos Aires, 1870. Back

(2) Province and city of north-western Argentina, in the region of the Andes.
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(3) In the Spanish text, niña , “child” or “girl”; as Lojo points out in her critique of an early draft of this translation, the word is a bit difficult to translate since it was used to refer to single women of any age and even for married women of the servant class.Back

(4) Curanderas Back

(5) Damas de noche : Lojo clarifies to me that the reference is to these flowers, which only bloom at night. Back

(6) Juan Facundo Quiroga (1793 - 1835), federalist caudillo or strongman in the perpetual post-Independence conflicts with the unitarist political party in Buenos Aires, known widely as “ El Tigre de Los Llanos” (The Tiger of “The Plains”). His posthumous fame would be cemented by future president and ideological enemy Domingo F. Sarmiento's book Facundo . Angel Vicente Peñaloza (1797 -1863) was executed after a later rebellion against the national government; the circumstances of Quiroga's earlier assassination are more mysterious, though they may have been ordered by Juan Manuel de Rosas, federalist dictator (from 1835 - 1852, when unitarist forces ousted him) to whose power Quiroga was a rival. Tomás Brizuela, twice governor of the province of La Rioja, was loyal to Quiroga but alligned himself with the unitarist general Lavalle against Rosas. He died, defeated, in 1841.
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(7) As opposed to the blue and white of the unitarist (and ultimately the present-day Argentine) flag. The federalists' ubiquitous use of its emblematic scarlet became an outward sign of fidelity to the cause (as well, in some cases, of self-preservation). For a brief explanation of federalism versus unitarism in the Argentine context, see note 18. Back

(8) "An algarrobo is, in South America," Eva Gillies writes in a note to her translation of Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles , "a tree of the genus Prosopis that bears edible fruit. Both Prosopis alba and P. nigra are common in central Argentina, and the fruit of both is fermented" ( A Visit to the Ranquel Indians , University of Nebraska Press, 1997, pp. 392). Back

(9) Disparaging term, in Latin America, for foreigners, particularly blond-complected or from England or the United States. Back

(10) Buenos Aires, whose inhabitants are thus nicknamed Porteños . Back

(11) Town in the province of La Rioja. Back

(12) Bernardino Rivadavia (1780 - 1845), first president of the Argentine Republic. He was a unitarist, with a unitarist's typical Europeanizing tendencies, but oddly enough (given the general political / social divisions of the day) distinctly dark-skinned, hence Hispanicist John A. Crow's mistakenly writing the he was a mulatto ( The Epic of Latin America , 1946, Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, p. 565). Perhaps Crow's error is owed to some prejudice among his fellow unitarists, who may have sought to disparage him, but Lojo points out in her critique of an earlier draft of this translation that he had no proven African ancestry: “He was the legitimate son of a good Spanish family (his parents were both Spaniards from Galicia and he married the daughter of a Viceroy; that wouldn't mean, of course, that in his background there might not have been some adultery … as in the children of royal families).” Back

(13) This so-called “hill of Famatina” is part of the Sierra Famatina, which contains the highest peaks (at over 6,260 meters) in the pampean sierras. (See note 1.) Back

(14) The national drink, sometimes called “Paraguayan tea”. (In English dictionaries it is generally spelled yerba maté , but since the stress is actually on the first syllable in mate , I have placed the accent mark on the a as a pronunciation aid for the English-language reader.) The drink is made by adding almost-boiling water to the rough leaves and is drunk, from a common gourd or cup, by means of a metal sucking tube with a filter for separating out the leaves. New water is added after each individual has had a turn. Back

(15) The River Plate, or in Spanish, Río de la Plata : literally, “River of Silver”, so named because it was hoped to yield a short route to the silver mines of Potosí in Bolivia. Back

(16) The region of northwestern Argentina encompassing the present provinces of Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luis, adjoining La Rioja roughly to the south. Back

(17) Testaferro : Eva Gillies informs me that this is a legal term of Italian origin, literally “iron witness”, in other words, someone who lends his name to a contract, claim, or business venture that is not his own. Back

(18) Roughly speaking: unitarists, centered in the city of Buenos Aires, were Euro-centric and “civilizing”, while federalists, based in the provinces, favored provincial rights and the interests of the less educated inhabitants of the countryside (see notes 6, 7, and 12 above); for porteños , see note 10. Back

(19) A publication (originally in French and German) that lists, among other things, the geneaolgies of all of the royal families and nobility of Europe. It first appeared in 1763 in the German city of Gotha and remained the indisputable proof of royal lineage until World War II, when its archive copies were destroyed and publication ceased. However, enough private copies remained in circulation to preserve its encyclopedic knowledge. In 1999, a new Almanach was published in London to answer the needs of East European aristrocrats after the fall of Communism. Back

(20) Los Llanos, referring not to the whole plains or pampas but to his estate at San Antonio de Malanzán, province of La Rioja. Back

(21) A career general, born in Córdoba in 1791. He fought in the war of independence and lost an arm in the battle of Venta y Media, after which he was known as “el manco Paz” (like Cervantes who, having lost the full use of one arm in the battle of Lepanto in Turkey, became “el manco de Lepanto”). During the civil wars, Paz was a chief figure in the unitarist campaigns against Quiroga, Rosas, and Estanislao López. He died in 1854, shortly after being elected a legislator for the Province of Buenos Aires. Back

(22) In South America, troops of mounted rebels against any constituted government authority. Back

(23) The standard signal, in the Argentine countryside of the day, that one is approaching in peace and with due respect. To the visitor's “Hail most pure Mary”, the hosts reply: “Without sin”, short for “Conceived without sin” ( Sin pecado concebida ). The allusion is to the Catholic dogma that Mary, after Adam, was the only mortal who arrived on earth without the burden of original sin. Back

(24) Allusion to the famous words of Henry IV of France, explaining his politically expedient conversion to Catholicism: “Paris is well worth a Mass.” Back

(25) Lima, Perú Back