Civilization and Barbarism/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III.
ASSOCIATION.
"The gaucho lives on privations, but his luxury is freedom. Proud of an unrestricted independence, his feelings, though wild as his life, are yet noble and good."—Head.
LA PULPERIA (THE COUNTRY STORE).
In the first chapter we left the Argentine rustic, at the moment of his arrival at maturity, in the possession of such a character as had resulted from the natural circumstances about him, and from his want of any true society. We have seen that he is a man independent of every want, under no control, with no notion of government, all regular and systematic order being wholly impossible among such people. With these habits of heedlessness and independence he enters on another step of rural life, which, commonplace as it is, is the starting-point of all the great events which we are shortly to describe.
It is to be remembered that I am speaking of the essentially pastoral part of the people, and that I select for consideration only their fundamental characteristics, neglecting the accidental modifications they receive, the partial effects of which will be indicated separately. I am speaking of the combination of landed proprietaries which cover the surface of a province, four leagues, more or less, being occupied by each.The society of the agricultural districts is also much subdivided and dispersed, but on a smaller scale. One laborer assists another, and the implements of tillage, the numerous tools, stores, and animals employed, the variety of products and the various arts which agriculture calls to its aid, establish necessary relations between the inhabitants of a valley and make it indispensable for them to have a rudiment of a town to serve as a centre. Moreover, the cares and occupations of agriculture require such a number of hands that idleness becomes impossible, and the men of an estate are compelled to remain within its limits. The exact contrary takes place in the singular society we are describing. The bounds of ownership are unmarked; the more numerous the flocks and herds the fewer hands required; upon the women devolve all the domestic duties and manufactures; the men are left without occupations, pleasures, ideas, or the necessity of application. Home life is wearisome and even repulsive to them. They need, then, factitious society to remedy this radical want of association. Their early acquired habit of riding gives them an additional incentive to leave their houses.
It is the children's business to drive the horses to the corral before the sun has quite risen; and all the men, even the lads, saddle their horses, even when they have no object in view. The horse is an integral part of the Argentine rustic; it is for him what the cravat is to an inhabitant of the city. In 1841, El Chacho, a chieftain of the Llanos, emigrated to Chili. "How are you getting on, friend?" somebody asked him. "How should I be getting on?" returned he, in tones of distress and melancholy. "Bound to Chili, and on foot!" Only an Argentine gaucho can appreciate all the misfortune and distress which these two phrases express.
Here again we have the life of the Arab or Tartar. The following words of Victor Hugo might have been written in the pampas:—"He cannot fight on foot; he and his horse are but one person. He lives on horseback; he trades, buys, and sells on horseback; drinks, eats, sleeps, and dreams on horseback."—Le Rhin.
The men then set forth without exactly knowing where they are going. A turn around the herds, a visit to a breeding-pen or to the haunt of a favorite horse, takes up a small part of the day; the rest is consumed in a rendezvous at a tavern or grocery store. There assemble inhabitants of the neighboring parishes; there are given and received bits of information about animals that have gone astray; the traces of the cattle are described upon the ground; intelligence of the hunting-ground of the tiger or of the place where the tiger's tracks have been seen, is communicated. There, in short, is the Cantor; there the men fraternize while the glass goes round at the expense of those who have the means as well as the disposition to pay for it.
In a life so void of emotion, gambling exercises the enervated mind, and liquor arouses the dormant imagination. This accidental reunion becomes by its daily repetition a society more contracted than that from which each of its individual members came; yet in this assembly, without public aim, without social interest, are first formed the elements of those characters which are to appear later on the political stage. We shall see how. The gaucho esteems skill in horsemanship and physical strength, and especially courage, above all other things, as we have said before. This meeting, this daily club, is a real Olympic circus where each man's merit is tested and assayed.
The gaucho is always armed with the knife inherited from the Spaniard. More fully even than in Spain is here realized that peninsular peculiarity, that cry, characteristic of Saragossa war to the knife. The knife, besides being a weapon, is a tool used for all purposes; without it, life cannot go on. It is like the elephant's trunk, arm, hand, finger, and all. The gaucho boasts of his valor like a trooper, and every little while his knife glitters through the air in circles, upon the least provocation, or with none at all, for the simple purpose of comparing a stranger's prowess with his own; he plays at stabbing as he would play at dice. So deeply and intimately have these pugnacious habits entered the life of the Argentine gaucho that custom has created a code of honor and a fencing system which protect life. The rowdy of other lands takes to his knife for the purpose of killing, and he kills; the Argentine gaucho unsheathes his to fight, and he only wounds. To attempt the life of his adversary he must be very drunk, or his instincts must be really wicked, or his rancor very deep. His aim is only to mark his opponent, to give him a slash in the face, to leave an indelible token upon him. The numerous scars to be seen upon these gauchos, accordingly, are seldom deep. A fight is begun, then, for the sake of shining, for the glory of victory, for the love of fame. A close ring is made around the combatants, and excited and eager eyes follow the glitter of the knives which do not cease to move. When blood flows in torrents the spectators feel obliged to stop the fight. If a misfortune has resulted, the sympathies are with the survivor; the best horse is available for his escape to a distant place where he is received with respect or pity. If the law overtakes him he often shows fight, and if he rushes through soldiers and escapes, he has from that time a wide-spread renown. Time passes, the judge in place has been succeeded by another, and he may again show himself in the township without further molestation: he has a full discharge.
Homicide is but a misfortune, unless the deed has been so often repeated that the perpetrator has gained the reputation of an assassin. The landed proprietor, Don Juan Manuel Rosas, before being a public man, had made his residence a sort of asylum for homicides without ever extending his protection to robbers; a preference which would easily be explained by his character of gaucho proprietor, if his subsequent conduct had not disclosed affinities with evil which have filled the world with terror.
With respect to equestrian sports, it will suffice to point out one of the many which are practiced, that the reader may judge what daring is required of those who engage in them. A gaucho rides at full speed before his comrades. One of them flings a set of bolas at him so as to shackle the horse in the midst of his career. Issuing from the whirlwind of dust raised by his fall, appears the rider at a run, followed by the horse, the latter carried on by the impulse of his interrupted career according to the laws of physics. In this pastime, life is staked, and sometimes lost. Will it be believed that these displays of valor or skill and boldness in horsemanship are the basis of the great exploits which have filled the Argentine Republic with their name and changed the face of the country? Nothing is more certain, however. I do not mean to assert that assassination and crime have always been a ladder by which men have risen. Thousands of daring men have remained in the position of obscure bandits; but those who owe their position to such deeds are to be counted by larger numbers than hundreds. In all despotic societies, great natural gifts tend to lose themselves in crime; the Roman genius which could conquer the world is to-day the terror of the Pontine Marshes, and the Spanish Zumalacarreguis and Minas are to be met by hundreds in Sierra Morena. Man's need of developing his strength, capacity, and ambition, requires him, upon the failure of legitimate means, to frame a world, with its own morality and laws, where he shows complacently that he was born to be a Napoleon or a Caesar.
In this society, then, where mental culture is useless or impossible, where no municipal affairs exist, where, as there is no public, the public good is a meaningless word, the man of unusual gifts, striving to exert his faculties, takes with that design the means and the paths which are at hand. The gaucho will be a malefactor or a military chief, according to the course which things are taking at the moment when he attains celebrity. Such customs need vigorous methods of repression, and to restrain hardened men, judges still more hardened are required. What I said at the outset, of the captain of the freight-carts, is exactly applicable to the country justice. He wants bravery more than anything else; the terror of his name is more powerful than the punishments he inflicts. The justice is naturally some one of former notoriety recalled to orderly life by old age and his family ties. Of course, the law he administers is altogether arbitrary; his conscience or his passions determine it, and his decrees are final. Sometimes justices officiate during their whole lives, and are remembered with respect. But the consciousness of these methods of administration and the arbitrary nature of the attendant penalties, produce among the people ideas of judicial authority which will have their effects hereafter. The justice secures obedience . By his reputation for formidable boldness, by his force of character, his informal decisions, his decree, the announcement "such are my commands," and the forms of punishment which he invents himself. From this disorder, perhaps long since inevitable, it follows that the military commander who reaches distinction during rebellions possesses a sway, undisputed and unquestioned by his followers, equal to the wide and terrible power now only to be found among the nations of Asia. The Argentine chieftain is a Mohammed who might change the prevailing religion, if such were his whim, and contrive another. He has power in all its forms; his injustice is a misfortune for his victim, but no abuse on his part; for he may be unjust, still more, he must be unjust, for he has been a lawless man all his life. These remarks are also applicable to the country commandant. This personage is of more importance than the former, and requires in a higher degree the combination of the reputation and antecedents which distinguish him. Far from being lessened, the evil is even aggravated by an additional circumstance. The title of country commandant is conferred by the rulers of the cities; but as the city is destitute of power, influence, and supporters in the country, the administration lays hold of the men it most fears, and confers this office upon them in order to retain their obedience—a well known procedure of all weak governments, which put off the evil of the moment only to allow it to appear later in colossal dimensions. Thus the Papal government has dealings with banditti, to whom it gives offices in Rome, encouraging brigandage by this means, and making its continuance certain; thus did the Sultan grant Mehemet Ali the rank of Pacha of Egypt, having afterwards to purchase the continuance of his own reign by recognizing his vassal's title to an hereditary throne. It is singular that all the chieftains of the Argentine revolutionary movement were country commandants: Lopez and Ibarra, Artigas and Guemes, Facundo and Rosas. This is the constant starting-point of ambition. When Rosas had made himself master of the city, he exterminated all the commandants to whom he owed his elevation, intrusting with this influential position commonplace men, who could only follow the path he had traced. Pajarito, Celarragan, Arbolito, Pancho el ñato, Molina, were among the commandants of whom Rosas cleared the country.I assign so much importance to these lesser points, because they will serve to explain all our social phenomena, and the revolution which has been taking place in the Argentine Republic. The features of this revolution are distorted because described in words from the political dictionary, which disguise and hide them by the mistaken ideas they call up. In the same way that of the Spaniards gave familiar European names to the new animals they encountered upon landing in America; saluting with the terrible name of lion, which calls up the notion of the magnanimity and strength of the king of beasts, a wretched cat called the puma, which runs at the sight of the dogs, and naming the jaguar of our woods the tiger. Evidence will soon be brought to show the firm and indestructible nature of the foundations upon which I assert the civil war to be based, however unstable and ignoble they may appear. The life of the Argentine country people as I have exhibited it is not a mere accident; it is the order of things, a characteristic, normal, and in my judgment unparalleled system of association, and in itself affords a full explanation of our revolution.
Before 1810, two distinct, rival, and incompatible forms of society, two differing kinds of civilization existed in the Argentine Republic: one being Spanish, European, and cultivated, the other barbarous, American, and almost wholly of native growth. The revolution which occurred in the cities acted only as the cause, the impulse, which set these two distinct forms of national existence face to face, and gave occasion for a contest between them, to be ended, after lasting many years, by the absorption of one into the other.I have pointed out the normal form of association, or want of association, of the country people, a form worse, a thousand times, than that of the nomad tribe. I have described the artificial associations formed in idleness, and the sources of fame among the gauchos—bravery, daring, violence, and opposition to regular law, to the civil law, that is, of the city. These phenomena of social organization existed in 1810, and still exist, modified in many points, slowly changing in others, and yet untouched in several more. These foci, about which were gathered the brave, ignorant, free, and unemployed peasantry, were found by thousands through the country. The revolution of 1810 carried everywhere commotion and the sound of arms. Public life, previously wanting in this Arabico-Roman society, made its appearance in all the taverns, and the revolutionary movement finally brought about provincial, warlike associations, called montoneras, legitimate offspring of the tavern and the field, hostile to the city and to the army of revolutionary patriots. As events succeed each other, we shall see the provincial montoneras headed by their chiefs; the final triumph, in Facundo Quiroga, of the country over the cities throughout the land; and by their subjugation in spirit, government, and civilization, the final formation of the central consolidated despotic government of the landed proprietor, Don Juan Manuel Rosas, who applied the knife of the gaucho to the culture of Buenos Ayres, and destroyed the work of centuries of civilization, law, and liberty.