An Exiled Daughter and Her Bound Bullby Brett Alan Sanders
The house, inside and out, was beautiful and elegant in the modest Spanish style. It was the same house which María Rosa's father had had built for his family, which she grew up in as the “exiled daughter” of a Republican partisan in the Spanish Civil War, living in the shadow of the mythical Galician landscape of his memory and imagination—which was represented tangibly by the chestnut tree that he had planted in the garden out back (“his founding tree, after all,” she writes in her “Minimal Autobiography”, “a true 'mother tree': tree of life, tree of the world, cosmic axis capable of supplying the needs of a whole family, and by extension, the human species”). While, outside of its natural environment, it never produced edible fruit, it only died after his death, and after María Rosa's “return” to the green Galician territory that she had never seen except through his eyes—as if “it had simply fulfilled its earthly mission, that it had always been there only to embody the force of desire, the powerful throbbing of nostalgia, the first commandment imposed on the exiled child.” It was that same house, though the mother tree was gone, and Oscar and María Rosa had completed some remodeling projects that her father had been unable to get to. When I entered into my first correspondence with her (I sent a letter; she sent a personalized copy of La pasión de los nómades [The Passion of Nomads]), they had tarp over the house, their planned remodeling held captive by the economic collapse of January, 2001, by the fact that no one could get to the money they had placed in banks: consequently they could not pay the laborers to continue their work. During this period, there were terrible sufferings among the general populace, and an unprecedented succession of interim Presidents. There were protests and rushes on food. Local currencies arose, and communities (tired of relying on the government to do its job) established systems of barter and mutual help. The nation had still not recovered, despite the relative stability of Néstor Kirchner's current Presidency which eventually took hold. Marisa Presti, in her novel Ana Frank es argentina [Anna Frank is Argentine], writes movingly of this period of time, though the central emotional struggle of her narrative has to do with events that had transpired over twenty years earlier, during the generals' infamous “dirty war” against its own population. In those days, perhaps even darker than the bloodbath of the tyrant Rosas's day, thousands of citizens disappeared into secret prisons, sites of torture and brutality that in the novel are compared to the so-called “concentration camps” in which, in the Nazi Germany of the second world war, millions of Jews were imprisoned and killed, their bodies incinerated. Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who perished in one of those camps, had left behind the now-famous diary that she wrote while in hiding with her family. Presti, aside from a psychological portrait of her country two decades later, offers a critique of Argentine journalism—which even after so long was largely still looking the other way, in the name of objectivity. If her journalist protagonist and narrator is right, his own profession's present dysfunction may all be caused by the evils of that earlier time, about which Argentina remains sharply divided. Be that as it may (the argument begs the question of the deeper historical roots of that relatively recent tragedy), it is the novel's present moment that interests me here. In the passage that I'm going to quote to you, that same first-person narrator is reading the morning paper. “The country's stage seemed surreal,” he writes, “as if what was happening were part of a nightmare. Something deep inside wouldn't let one believe that it belonged to reality. How could one digest the fact that a group of people, hungry in the extreme and armed with knives and long-bladed daggers, had killed and quartered young bulls from a ranch truck that had over-turned on the highway, carrying away with them, amidst fighting, enormous pieces of the animals slung over their backs. It was difficult to assimilate this fact as true.” Yet this is no flight of Presti's authorial fancy; I remember reading similar reports, at the time, in the international press.
Leonor was a pretty and energetic girl, a student of las artes plásticas. When I asked her if she had any samples of her art at home, she set busily to work at locating some. Frustrated in her attempts to turn up the variety of work that she knew was lying about somewhere, she did, nevertheless, find a few loose water colors and a stack of sketchbooks. I had just begun examining them when it was time to eat. I continued after the meal, which featured a lovely (and succulent!) dish of ravioli and a bit of Oscar's tinted wine. Her artistic sense was unique, intriguing. I found myself a bit disoriented at first, trying to establish the nature of the “reality” that I saw reflected before me. Yet the connection to real images was always there, like a word that remains forever on the tip of one's tongue, at once perceptible and inexpressible. I told her that I found myself in awe of this remarkable ability of hers, that for my part I couldn't draw but only write. She commented that the “sensual arts”, as she calls them, demand a whole different set of skills. I was struck by the phrase, and had to admit that she was right. Still, I am occasionally jealous of those writers who, effortlessly navigating both right and left sides of their brains, by some mystery of giftedness and talent, manage to call up the complementary images of words and pictures; who can illustrate, for instance, their own books, never having to rely on the competing visions of others. Leonor's art, as far as I had glimpsed it, was of the sort that makes the viewer take hold of the bits of reality that are presented and piece them back together, in a sort of creative collaboration with the artist, reshaping that former perception with new eyes. I was reminded (with the vague imprecision of a generalist) of the major revolutions of the twentieth-century art world: the Cubist art of the Spaniard Picasso, the Surrealist creations of his compatriot (the Catalonian) Dalí... The period that spanned the two world wars, whose cruelty seemed to mark the death of both God and science, of any shred of Enlightenment faith in the progress and perfectibility of humankind, was characterized in both plastic and literary arts by an increasing fragmentation of reality. You might understand it, I suppose, as a natural enough outgrowth of the fragmentary and epistolary style of your “Generation of '80”, which was caught between old and new ways of perceiving and arranging that larger reality, no longer possessed of the massive omniscience of a Dickens or a Tolstoy. The reality-shattering, startling juxtapositions of the Ultraistic images of Borges and Güiraldes in Argentina, of Alberti and Jiménez in Spain, replaced the idealized Modernist images of Darío in Nicaragua and of Martí in Cuba. All of which is not to say, simplistically, that Leonor Beuter Lojo's art was derived from her predecessors the Cubists, the Surrealists, and the Ultraists, but just to give you (without the pictures themselves) a way of thinking about it. A more immediate influence, I suppose, would be the cartoon art of recent generations, which is gaining increasing recognition as a serious literary and art form. You might even recognize a distant echo of the caricaturists of your day, the ones who took you to task for the unfortunate military decision (which you relate in the Excursión and, again, in one of the Causeries) to execute a horse—with the worthy intention of winning your men's awe and unquestioned obedience. A lover of horses yourself (you would rather, you wrote, have executed the roguish sutler who was the cause of the dispute over this one), it gave you great pain to make that order. You had it shot, without ceremony, in the instant of your judgment. You had it disposed of, then, again without ceremony, merely dragged into the countryside to become fodder for buzzards and the ravages of nature. But aside from the obedience that you did win for yourself on that frontier, you were heartily lampooned by the Buenos Aires elite, who (as political cartoonists are inclined to do) deliberately misrepresented your command as the act of a madman: the famous caricature, in a series of frames, showed the horse being executed and laid to rest with all the pomp of military style; and then the horse, ghoulishly resurrected, avenging himself on you in like manner. I was perhaps most intrigued, among the larger quantity of her sketches (cartoons, caricatures, portraits, landscapes: rough drafts of an artist's disparate ideas), with the image—variously repeated and revisited—of a bull, tied up and bound by rope. Beside or above it the legend: “Bodega del Toro Atado” (Cellar of the Bound Bull). I thought it a mere whim of Leonor's, briefly wondering about its origins. Only later, that night, would I be reminded of the tale (which our mutual friend Eva Gillies had undoubtedly once told me) of the actual Bodega del Toro Atado. I will tell it to you now as it was told to me by María Rosa and Oscar. This “Cellar of the Bound Bull”, as I came to know, was Oscar's wine cellar. Aside from his daily labors as an engineer, and his practical-creative handiwork around the house (remodeling the antique Mercedes that over twenty years ago took the family on its own excursión a los indios ranqueles; building from scratch, entirely from scrapped parts, a travel-trailer such as are pulled nowadays behind trucks or automobiles, for wilderness “camping” adventures), Oscar made his own wines. The name was immortalized on the wooden sign—a gift from María Rosa's father and Eva's husband Mick, both now deceased—that greeted all visitors to the cellar, which was located (Oscar would give me the tour of it that night) at the extreme back of the back yard or garden, past the engineering wonder of his trailer at left and, further back, on an elevated spot at right, the swimming pool. The history behind that legend (finally I get to the promised tale!) had to do with an old family joke with its basis in an Argentine idiom: in this national jargon, when things are going very well, one speaks of having “ la vaca [the cow] atada ”; María Rosa chanced to use the expression, on one occasion, in reference to herself; Oscar, archly suggesting his own state of being happily bound to her feminine will, replied: “No, you have el toro atado.” Suddenly I understood the look of contented and serene drunkenness on the face of the bound bull of Leonor's drawings.
In the morning, I took the quick jaunt with Oscar to the neighboring town of Morón, seat (if I am understanding this correctly) of the municipality of the same name, of which Castelar is also a part—a “municipality” being, in the context of metropolitan Buenos Aires, an incorporated yet independent governing body, something like any one of the five “boroughs” that constitute New York City. As it turns out, and as both Oscar and María Rosa had suspected might be the case, the only buses going from Buenos Aires to Córdoba traveled through the night, thus ennabling travelers to sleep while it was dark, conduct their business in the light of day, and return home the following evening. Instead of leaving in the morning, then, spending another night in Castelar, I would be leaving that very night. At least I would pull out late enough, at just past nine-thirty, to allow a full day and evening of visiting. Back at home, while Oscar set to work on his asado, I set off on foot with María Rosa and Federico on a tour of Castelar. After having walked some distance we found a tiny, turn-around plaza and sat down for a few moments to catch our breath. A mule-drawn cart, with an old man atop it and a grinning boy beside him, turned the corner beside us drawing the load of abandoned miscellanea and trash that contributed to their meager and precarious living. Later, before turning home for lunch, we passed by the school that Federico attended and that his mother once attended, the Sacré Coeur or Sagrado Corazón—the Sacred Heart—of the French nun Madeleine Barat. But the not-so-well hidden poverties of this marginal, Third-World nation that are suggested in that other image remained ever-present. Even within the walls of the Sacred Heart (where in her own childhood María Rosa's mother and maternal grandmother had conspired to send her; as an antidote to the Spanish-Republican atheism of her father) those poverties must be noticed and interpreted: María Rosa was indoctrinated there with a sense of liberality and social responsibility by her teachers; a couple of whom—during the government of the generals—were unceremoniously “disappeared”. The relative prosperity of the surrounding neighborhoods was marked—as was not uncommon in Buenos Aires since the latest economic collapse and the ensuing social chaos—by zonas de vigilia or neighborhood-watch areas. Castelar was known for its attractive houses and patio-gardens in the antique Spanish style, a hold-out against the encroaching high-rises of Buenos Aires proper. At the corner near the Beuter-Lojo residence, as on numerous other corners, there was a little watchman's booth with a security guard on duty, hired by the neighbors' pooled resources in the absence of a reliable police presence. These guards, María Rosa told me, did not carry guns, but would phone the police when any criminal activity was suspected to be underway or brewing. That added vigilance, and perhaps the slightest easing of national suffering over time, must have helped to at least partially alleviate the crisis of break-ins and theft that had become increasingly rampant. The nation's police force, though, riddled by decades of corruption and criminality of its own, continued to struggle against the open distrust of the citizenry. A police-related television drama in which the cops are the good guys, María Rosa told me, would not fly in Argentina, where it would simply not be believed. Hence the continued popularity of outlaw types like the perennial gaucho Martín Fierro, who had traditionally been protected and even admired since it was generally assumed that their delincuency was owed, in no small part, to the depravations of an abusive government. At home—after that wonderful roast, complete with potato and lettuce-and-tomato variety salads, and a glass of sherry from the Bodega del Toro Atado—we piled in, the four of us, to the newer of their two cars and headed for the proverbial Feria de Mataderos, the fair that takes place on every Sunday afternoon and includes everything from performers on horses to singers of tangos and demonstrations of indigenous craftsmanship and dance. The flea market of traditional goods and crafts was as immense as the throng of people that jostled each other to walk through it. The closest thing to it that I had seen, for sheer variety and native spectacle, was a North-American Indian powwow, though it also contained elements of our county fairs and Western rodeos. Mataderos merits a substantial mention in Alvaro Abós's literary guide to Buenos Aires, by virtue of its indirect association (for it didn't exist as such at the time) with the sanguineous subject matter of Esteban Echeverría's polemical short story “ El matadero ”. A matadero, as I certainly don't need to tell you, Mansilla, is a slaughterhouse, bloody site of the butchering of cattle. Mataderos is such a place, at least it was in its heyday, but in Echeverría's day Buenos Aires's slaughterhouses were all in different locations. Still, it affords Abós the excuse to mention, almost in passing, that vitriolic allegory in which the whole of federalist Buenos Aires, in the lamentable times of the dictatorship of your uncle Rosas, becomes a slaughterhouse for the “savage unitarists” of his political opposition. I do not wish to dwell on this unpleasant bit of your family history. Certainly you know better than anyone, as you relate it yourself in the Causerie called “The Seven Plates of Rice Pudding” (or: of arroz con leche), the madness as well as the tenderness in that man's heart: “the strange, mysterious personality of Rosas,” as you wrote; “the figure of a man as much loved as execrated.” In your essay, if you don't mind my telling it, you relate, in much richer detail than I have room to imitate, the story of your encounters with him as a boy not yet twenty years old, after your hearing (while abroad in London) the ominous tale of the “mad traitor” and “Savage Unitarist” Urquiza's uprising against him. You rushed home at once, anyway, your political understanding of the nature of his reign not yet matured in you, and went next day of your arrival to call on him, in the splendor of that old Palermo that no longer properly exists. He kept you waiting until quite late at night, while you, conscious of your mother's awaiting you for dinner, declined all invitations to eat with your cousin Manuelita and those others there gathered. Finally, summoned to see him, you were presented with a voluminous “Message” that in all patriarchal arrogance he proceeded to read to you. But not too much before asking if you were hungry, inviting you to a plate of that famous and mouth-watering arroz con leche. As the reading continued to drag on, the plates continued to come, gigantic plates as was the custom in Palermo and particularly in that house, plate after plate even after you had protested that the second or third plate was quite enough, until you had finished your seventh, your stomach fit to burst, when he finally handed you the mammoth anti-Unitarist diatribe that he had been reading to you and urged you to finish it at home. Darkly comical incident that becomes macabre when you and your father visit him later, in his exile in England, and he remembers to you the incident with the exact words—which had been spoken afterwards, in private—of your father to your mother: “Didn't I tell you that your brother is mad?” I thought you would be gratified to hear that the story as you tell it has remained quite famous, and is, in fact, the title of the paper copy of the first volume of your Causeries that I am just now, as I write these lines, reading for the first time. It appears in an edition that is no longer in print, only available in the rare used copy such as I was fortunate enough to find. Aside from the ever-popular Excursión, never out of print since you originally published it, your writings and your good sister Eduarda's are almost impossible to buy. If I can find a way to change that, Mansilla, I certainly will, but for the moment be comforted by the fact that even these traces of you are not wholly forgotten, discovered afresh in this decades'-old edition. As I was saying, anyway, before launching myself on this incredibly lengthy digression, Mataderos does figure in Abós's book, where he refers to it as “el far west de Buenos Aires ”, the place where city meets the pampa upon which it was raised. Echeverría is not the only writer he evokes; there were others who wrote (like Chicago's great son Carl Sandburg) of the place itself. And this last allusion is not a careless one: Mataderos's industrial zone was once called Chicago; one of its streets still is, and Nuevo—or New—Chicago the name of its thriving nightclub. Sandburg's Chicago, like Mataderos, was a rugged place, worthy of the scathing pen of an Upton Sinclair, who in his polemical novel The Jungle declaimed against the filth and inhuman squalor of the city's slaughterhouses and meat-packing industry, where its largely immigrant population grunted and sickened and died. One would like to think that, since Teddy Roosevelt read Sinclair's book and rallied his Progressivist movement to address its revelations, such horrors have been eliminated, but that would not be entirely true. The slaughterhouses of that Middle Western metropolis have only changed their guise and moved to other frontiers—further up-country but still firmly on those same North American prairies, or pampas, where the exploited laborers who work themselves to death in them now are largely Mexican and Central American immigrants: the proof is in the contemporary reporting of Eric Schlosser, among others. My favorite part of Abós's entry on Mataderos concerns the Monumento al Resero, because on this visit (perhaps a week ahead of that reading) I had already seen and admired it. The resero, in Argentine parlance, is the herder of reses, or cattle. He is a gaucho, like the rugged and bearded figure of this statue, mounted confidently on his horse. He stood, that day of my visit, on the small square where in front of it, on a raised platform, another man stood in flesh and blood, also bearded and bedecked in the peculiar attire of the gaucho, reflection of the stone memorial behind him, talking and joking with the constantly changing and morphing audience before introducing the next singer. The statue, the work of the Argentine sculptor Emilio Sarniguet, was erected in 1934, and according to Abós (in my limited experience, I have to agree) “is one of the most beautiful in the city.” The horse races and displays of equine feats were just wrapping up as we arrived. The singer onstage as we first approached it was good, and the tango singer who followed was, in my inexpert opinion, unimpeachable. His series of songs were a tribute to the ever-memorialized Gardel, who was still all over the radios and news kiosks a week after my arrival in the country, at the beginning of the long memorial to another anniversary of his myth-making death. We looked around at about that moment and realized that Federico had gotten away from us, disappearing into the mass of humanity that was all around. After a moment or two he re-surfaced, brimming over with boyish enthusiasm for the adventure. We moved on again, María Rosa and Oscar slightly ahead, while Federico, ever distracted, stopped to watch what was going on beside him, at the beginning of the long row of flea marketers. Dropping back to see that we didn't lose him again, I found him intent on the movements of a silver-haired artisan who was skillfully carving names and messages into the surfaces of the shiny silver máte cups that were his specialty and trade. When María Rosa and Oscar re-joined us, becoming captivated themselves by this remarkable display of agility, precision, and speed, they determined to make a gift of one of those cups to Anita. It became, instead, a gift to the two of us, sympathetic reflection of the bond between el toro atado and his bride, the legend of Anita's and my own love inscribed indelibly in a flash of hammer on steel. It occurs to me that I have not yet explained to the curious reader the nature of this phenomenon of máte drinking (which I had indulged in many times in the past seven or eight days), only in my first letter a passing allusion to you and your men preparing to go at it. But I am long for digressions and shall save this point for later, in the context of my reunion with three old friends in Córdoba. Here let me just clarify what has undoubtedly been bothering you, Mansilla: the capricious placement of a rogue accent mark over the a, which I do quite intentionally, stubbornly, as a pronunciation aid to my English-speaking audience who otherwise, I fear, will be tempted to pronounce it with the long English a of mate—as in, “Ahoy, matey!”: the word in English is an equivalent, in this context, to “friend”, “buddy”, “pal”, “companion”. Turning right, over against the building at left of the plaza, partially obscured from my view by other watchers and by the columns that support its roof, were a group of traditional dancers, in the gauchesque tradition of South American zapateo, or Spanish-style clogging. I had witnessed something quite similar with two different groups of students in Louisville and Owensboro, Kentucky, performed by a dance troupe of mostly Argentine dancers called the Alejandra Dondines Dancers of the Americas. Those dancers, with whom the first time (much to my students' wonderment!) I spoke fluently in their Argentine-flavored Spanish, were spectacular! Their finale, danced feverishly to the rhythms of the clicking of the dancers' boleadoras, to the constant and dizzying flashing on and off of a modern type of lighting that we call “strobe”, was absolutely astonishing! The boleadoras, or bolas, sometimes called los tres marías or “three marys”, are (as you well know, Mansilla) the gaucho's lariat, with three stones attached to its end for throwing at wild game or cattle, entangling them with the animals' feet and bringing them swiftly to the ground. It was incredibly moving, now, to watch these local artists practice, with the occasional flash of boleadoras but simply right there, at your level, without the slightest artifice of stage or pyrotechnic lighting. These were simply country folk, this one a mere schoolboy, scarcely eight or ten, zapateando like an Argentine Fred Astaire—like my own students whom I have sometimes watched at their North American style zapateo. These and others like them just come every week, because they love it, donating their effort to keep old customs alive. Like them, at only a few paces distance, were other dancers, just anyone who wanted to participate could join in, who to the sounds of a crackling phonograph danced the beautiful folkloric chacareras, waving in the air their blue and white pañuelos, or handkerchiefs. I was reminded of the beautiful Andean courtship dance, the zamba, which I had seen danced, a quarter century earlier, on an old black-and-white television set, while I was seated with the Karcher kids and their mother on the bed that several of them slept on, in the main room of their little shack in Santa Fe. At a different spot, further along the route of the flea market, there was another musical performer, a man plucking gracefully at a harp, lovely folkloric melodies that truly captivated. He was dressed in casual elegance, as is the Argentine standard: black shoes; perfectly ironed slacks, off-white in color; a long-sleeved shirt, white with purple and lavender stripes, a hint of blue, buttoned carefully in front. His eyes were closed, contemplative look on his evidently serene face. Across from him, no less serene, stood another man, angular face and mustache, left leg extended and arms crossed in front of him in a pose that gave me the impression that he was only awaiting a cue: that had he already sung, he would surely sing again; and had he not, he surely would. We did not stay to find out, but continued our walk along the other side of the market, Federico still deciding on how he was going to spend the bit of money that his father had given him. As we walked away, through the streets which (at least to this visitor) were no less charming for their post-industrial decline, he thanked his parents more than once for having taken him: he had liked it immensely. Once we found the car, Oscar tipped the woman who had presented herself with the neighborly offer of keeping an eye on it for him. Back in Castelar, my visit was winding down with an appropriate mix of camaraderie and melancholy. María Rosa and Oscar sat me down to watch the video of their own family's decade-old adventure into the heart of what used to be Ranquel country, in search of any traces of the trail that you had once followed. María Rosa was frustrated by the inexplicably poor quality of the film, which just recently had been impeccable, but I was thrilled with that glimpse of the evolving scenery of that deep and varied pampa, which my readings of your account had only imperfectly called to mind for me. Also it was exciting just to hear María Rosa's voice, petite and authoritative, narrating the present adventure and evoking yours. And then there were the scenes of that old Mercedes, working its way through the mud and the muck, coming to rest at this camp or another while Alfonso and Leonor, younger than Federico is now, poured out of it to run through the pampas grass and water. Alfonso, watching from his viewpoint of self-assured young adulthood, smiled bemusedly at the vision of his younger self. On the way out, I swallowed a couple of empanadas to brace myself for the trip. Oscar drove the old Mercedes; María Rosa and Federico tagged along to see me off. “Parting is such sweet sorrow,” as the great English bard wrote in a more amorous context, but in this case we were at least confident of seeing each other again rather shortly, having offended neither Capulet nor Montague and not fearing imminent death. If Federico could only manage to make some respectable scores this week at school, he would get to miss Thursday's and Friday's classes to accompany his parents on the journey to Córdoba—where (at that glorious congress being assembled in your honor) his distinguished mother would be presenting the keynote address, and I my modest offering of historical fiction
The End. |