The New York Review Abroad

by Robert B. Silvers

  So the truth begins to disappear; it is not relevant to the legend. Masses are held in Eva Perón’s memory, and students now turn up in numbers; but her life is not the subject of inquiry. Unmarked, seldom visited (though a woman remembers that once some television people came), the one-room house in brown brick in Los Toldos crumbles. The elderly garage-owner next door (two vehicles in his garage, one an engineless Model T), to whom the house now belongs, uses it as a storeroom. Grass sprouts from the flat roof, and the corrugated-iron roof collapses over the patio at the back.

  Only one biography of Eva Perón has been attempted in Argentina. It was to be in two volumes, but the publisher went bankrupt and the second volume hasn’t appeared. Had she lived, Eva Perón would now be only fifty-three. There are hundreds of people alive who knew her. But in two months I found it hard to get beyond what was well known. Memories have been edited; people deal in panegyric or hate, and the people who hate refuse to talk about her. The anguish of those early years at Los Toldos has been successfully suppressed. The Eva Perón story has been lost; there is now only the legend.

  One evening, after his classes at the Catholic University, and while the police sirens screamed outside, Borges told me,

  We had a sense that the whole thing should have been forgotten. Had the newspapers been silent there would have been no Peronism today—the Peronistas were at first ashamed of themselves. If I were facing a public audience I would never use his name. I would say el prófugo, the fugitive, el dictador. The way in poetry one avoids certain words—if I used his name in a poem the whole thing would fall to pieces.

  It is the Argentine attitude: suppress, ignore. Many of the records of the Peronist era have been destroyed. If today the middle-class young are Peronists, and students sing the old song of the dictatorship—

  Perón, Perón, qué grande sos! Mi general, cuánto valés!

  (Perón, Perón, how great you are! How good and strong, my general!)

  —if the dictatorship, even in its excesses, is respectable again, it isn’t because the past has been investigated and the record modified. It is only that many people have revised their attitudes toward the established legend. They have changed their minds.

  There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives, there are only graffiti and polemics and school lessons. Schoolchildren in white dustcoats are regularly taken round the Cabildo building in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to see the relics of the War of Independence. The event is glorious; it stands in isolation; it is not related, in the textbooks or in the popular mind, to what immediately followed: the loss of law, the seeking out of the enemy, endless civil wars, gangster rule.

  Borges said on another evening, “The history of Argentina is the history of its separateness from Spain.” How did Perón fit into that? “Perón represented the scum of the earth.” But he surely also stood for something that was Argentine? “Unfortunately, I have to admit that he’s an Argentine—an Argentine of today.” Borges is a criollo, someone whose ancestors came to Argentina before the great immigrant rush, before the country became what it is; and for the contemplation of his country’s history Borges substitutes ancestor worship. Like many Argentines, he has an idea of Argentina; anything that doesn’t fit into this is to be rejected. And Borges is Argentina’s greatest man.

  An attitude to history, an attitude to the land. Magic is important in Argentina; the country is full of witches and magicians and thaumaturges and mediums. But the visitor must ignore this side of Argentine life because, he is told, it isn’t real. The country is full of estancias; but the visitor musn’t go to that estancia because it isn’t typical. But it exists, it works. Yes, but it isn’t real. Nor is that real, nor that, nor that. So the whole country is talked away; and the visitor finds himself directed to the equivalent of a Gaucho curio shop. It isn’t the Argentina that anyone inhabits, least of all one’s guides; but that is real, that is Argentina. “Basically we all love the country,” an Anglo-Argentine said. “But we would like it to be in our own image. And many of us are now suffering for our fantasies.” A collective refusal to see, an absence of inquiry, an inability to come to terms with the land: an artificial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths.

  To be Argentine was not to be South American. It was to be European; and many Argentines became European, of Europe. The land that was the source of their wealth became no more than their base. For these Argentine-Europeans Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata became resort towns, with a seasonal life. Between the wars there was a stable Argentine community of 100,000 in Paris; the peso was the peso then.

  “Many people think,” Borges said, “that quite the best thing that could have happened here would have been an English victory [in 1806–7, when the British twice raided Buenos Aires]. At the same time I wonder whether being a colony does any good—so provincial and dull.”

  But to be European in Argentina was to be colonial in the most damaging way. It was to be parasitic. It was to claim—as the white communities of the Caribbean colonies claimed—the achievements and authority of Europe as one’s own. It was to ask less of oneself (in Trinidad, when I was a child, it was thought that the white and the rich needed no education). It was to accept, out of a false security, a second-rateness for one’s own society.

  And there was the wealth of Argentina: the British railways taking the wheat and the meat from all the corners of the pampa to the port of Buenos Aires, for shipment to England. There was no pioneer or nationmaking myth of hard work and reward. The land was empty and very flat and very rich; it was inexhaustible; and it was infinitely forgiving. Dios arregla de noche la macana que los Argentinos hacen de día: God puts right at night the mess the Argentines make by day.

  To be Argentine was to inhabit a magical, debilitating world. Wealth and Europeanness concealed the colonial realities of an agricultural society which had needed little talent and had produced little, which had needed no great men and had produced none. “Nothing happened here,” Norman di Giovanni said with irritation one day. And everyone, from Borges down, says, “Buenos Aires is a small town.” Eight million people: a monstrous plebeian sprawl, mean, repetitive, and meaningless: but only a small town, eaten up by colonial doubt and malice. When the real world is felt to be outside, everyone at home is inadequate and fraudulent. A waiter in Mendoza said, “Argentines don’t work. We can’t do anything big. Everything we do is small and petty.” An artist said, “There are very few professionals here. By that I mean people who know what to do with themselves. No one knows why he is doing any particular job. For that reason if you are doing what I do, then you are my enemy.”

  Camelero, chanta: These are everyday Argentine words. A camelero is a line-shooter, a man who really has nothing to sell. The man who promised to take me to an estancia, and in his private airplane, was only doing camelo. The chanta is the man who will sell everything, the man without principles, the hollow man. Almost everybody, from the president down, is dismissed by somebody as a chanta.

  The other word that recurs is mediocre. Argentines detest the mediocre and fear to be thought mediocre. It was one of Eva Perón’s words of abuse. For her the Argentine aristocracy was always mediocre. And she was right. In a few years she shattered the myth of Argentina as an aristocratic colonial land. And no other myth, no other idea of the land, has been found to take its place.

  —August 10, 1972

  4

  Sad Brazil

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Ernesto Geisel was by no means the worst military strongman in the history of Brazil. The son of German Lutherans, Geisel—white hair, big glasses, benign smile—looked more like a bank manager in a provincial German town. He promised to restore Brazil to democratic rule and to stop torturing political opponents. Although a staunch enemy of communism, Geisel established relations with China.

  Geisel came to power in 1974, the year that Elizabeth Hardwick visited. It was not an especially good time. For the oil crisis, sparked
by US support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War, put a severe damper on Brazil’s remarkable economic growth, from more than 10 percent a year to half that. This made for a melancholy mood.

  Not that Hardwick found the combination of stern paternalism and economic boosterism—ever bigger, ever richer, ever more—any less melancholic. The gulf between aspiration and reality, between super-rich and dirt-poor, was too glaring. And so she turned for solace to that masterpiece about the biggest country in Latin America: Tristes Tropiques.

  —I.B.

  LARGENESS, MAGNITUDE, QUANTITY: it is commonplace to speak of Brazil as a “giant,” a phenomenon spectacular, propitiously born, outrageously favored, and yet marked by the sluggishness of the greatly outsized. And so the giant is not quite on his toes, but always thought of as rising from the thicket of sleep, the jungle of rest, coming forth from the slumbering dawn of undisturbed nature. This signaling, promissory vastness is the curse of the Brazilian imagination. Prophecies are like the fall of great trees in a distant forest. They tell of a fabulous presence still invisible, scarcely audible, and yet surely moving amid the waving silence of real possibility.

  Brazil—remember the opening of Tess of the D’Urbervilles? The D’Urberville father with his rickety legs, his empty egg basket, his patched hat brim, is addressed on the road as “Sir John” because the parson has discovered that he is a lineal representative of the ancient, noble family of the D’Urbervilles. Brazil is a lineal representative of Paradise, the great, beckoning garden of delicious surfeit—a sweet place, always to be blessed. In Brazil the person stands surrounded by a mysterious ineffable plenitude. He lives in a grand immensity and he partakes of it as one partakes of thereness, of a magical placement in the scheme of nature. Small he may be, but the immensity is true. His own emptiness is close to the bone and yet the earth is filled with the precious and semi-precious in prodigious quantity, with unknown glitters and granites, with sleeping minerals—silvery-white, ductile. These confer from their deep and gorgeous burial a special destiny. This is the land of dreams.

  Think of the words and their resonance—grande, grosso, Amazonia. Numbers enhance, glorify, impress: larger than the continental United States, excluding Alaska, and slightly larger than the great bulk of Europe lying east of France. Its borders flow and curve and scallop to the Guineas, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela. Out of this expanding, encroaching, bordering, nudging sovereignty, life reaches for a peculiar consolation and hope. Where there is isolation, loneliness, and backwardness, where the tangle of life chokes with the complexity of blood and region, where torpor, negligence, and a strange historical lassitude simply and finally confuse—there even the worst is thought of as an unredeemed promise, not an implacable lack. Delay, not unalterable natural deprivation, is the worm in the heart of the rose.

  Growth is mystical. The ignominious military rulers carry it as a banner. They kill, torture, repress in the name of the great, floating, swelling, primordial dream. The jungle, the historic, romantic coffee and sugar plantations, the crazy rubber Babylon of Manaus falling into ruin way up the Amazon, the marble shards of its opera house: all of that, the military seems to say, is folly, a siesta slump of some nodding mestizo, the old tropical slack.

  A beggar, bereft, a leprous bundle of ancient Brazilian backwardness, a tatter of the rags, an eruption of the sores of underdevelopment: there he sits against an “old” 1920 wall of Sao Paulo. Without a doubt, he, shrunken as he is, salutes the punctured skyline, salutes the new buildings that from the air have the strange look of some vibrating necropolis of megalomaniac tombs and memorial shafts—all, like our own, enshrouded in a thick, inhuman vapor. Around the somnolent beggar the cars whir in a thick, migrating stream. And there it is, magic visible, vastness palpable, quantity realized, things delivered.

  Yes, all will be filled, all will be new, tall, thrusting, collective, dominating, rapid, exhausting, outsized like the large, stalky watercress, the big, round tasteless tomatoes grown by the inward, enduring will of the Japanese farmers. It is an emanation, sacred; and yet, of course, a mean, mocking paradox, for this “growth” now seems an anachronistic mode—embracing late what has elsewhere been created early and has turned into a puzzle and challenge and menace. Poor Brazil: the beginning and the end meet in a tragic collusion and collision. Still it must be as it is. There is indeed no other way. No one will consent to turn back.

  In Brazil the presence of a great, green density makes the soul long to create a gray, smooth highway. Thus Corbusier in 1929 saw Rio, radiant, and said, “I have a strong desire, a bit mad perhaps, to attempt here a human adventure—the desire to set up a duality, to create ‘the affirmation of man’ against or with ‘the presence of nature.’ ” The affirmation was to be a huge motor freeway. Underdevelopment, rest, nature turn the inspiration to engineering. Glory in Brazil is glory elsewhere, a vast junk heap of Volkswagens, their horns stuck for eternity. The new world rises from the hole in the ground where once stood a mustard-colored, decorated stucco with its little garden. Buildings, offices, hotels: in the swimming pools beautiful butterflies float in their blue-tiled graves. The mellifluousness of the tropics—birds, hammers, the high hum of traffic.

  The endless, aching shore lines. Life under the Great Southern Cross. Cruzero du Sul: under the blazing sky or the hanging humidity a resurrection of steel, stones; the transfiguration of metals, of dollars and yen. And death to students, to culture, to the young, the teacher, the writer, the priest, the radical, the democrat, the guerrilla, the humorous, the theatrical, the mocking, the generous, the reporter, the political past. The pastoral, romantic world of Gilberto Freyre, with the masters and slaves in a humid comingling, the old stately prints of the family and servants trailing, single file, in dramatic dresses and hairbands, to the plantation chapel. The land and its murky history are buried under the devastation of death squads with their motorized units, their electric prods, their “methods,” their Nordic interrogations, DOPS (Department of Public Order and Safety), decompression. Words fill a vacancy, the hole in the heart of the Brazilian government. No desire to heal, to warm, only to rule without pity.

  I had been here for some months in 1962 and now in 1974 I returned—to see what? It was a time of celebration for the military regime. They had ruled for ten years and yes his time had come. Geisel, the new president, stands in the pictures; he is colorless, as ice is colorless, a white, still representative of the Will. No need to seduce, attract, or solicit; this Will has been chosen by the previous Will. He moves into his spot, as a large block of ice shifts in the floe. Glacial emptiness, oppressive, his wife and daughter, impenetrable, large, no claim to please. There only the arctic will, its white face shielded by dark glasses, as if to filter, darken, shadow the tropical light and the color of its multitudinous, chaotic, brazen hoard of persons, insects, slums, its alive sufferings. This country with its marvelous people, its mad cars, its noise, its insane building, its amorous languors, its sinuously rich chic, its longings, its poverty: before the dark glasses of Geisel all seems to pass as before the blind. Prosperity flows to the chosen and to those who have more shall be given.

  For the rest, the huge remainder, their time has not yet come. History still will not consent to touch so many ignorant, hungry, dying-early persons of this land. Those who are moved to concern and pity glow in the white military coldness with menacing fire—they must be destroyed. But then it is not uncommon to hear that torture has become “boring.” One brave old lady predicted that it would be replaced by murder, disappearance, gun shots in the streets. So it has proved to be. The idea of human sacrifice—a profane and secular purification rite, practiced in the name of progress, investment, and the holy “Growth”—has left the country a ruin. The land is rich in heroes created by the military Will.

  A small card sent out by the family of a young student killed by the police:

  Consummatus in brevi, explecit tempora multa

  Tendo vivido po
uco, cumpriu a tarefa de una longa existencia. Profundamente sensibilizada, a familia de JOSE CARLOS NOVAIS DA MATA-MACHADO agradece a solidariedade recebida por ocasian da sua morta.

  (Having lived little [1946–1973] he accomplished the task of a long existence.)

  The beautiful Rio landscape: thick, jutting rocks, which Lévi-Strauss thought of as “stumps left at random in the four corners of a toothless mouth.” Tristes Tropiques is to me the second most interesting book about Brazil.* Like the first, Os Sertoes (Rebellion in the Backlands) by Euclides da Cunha, it is scientific, philosophical, personal, a quest for the past, the country, for oneself, for Brazil, a quest carried out with an intense and almost painful concentration. The late (Lévi-Strauss) surely learned from the early (da Cunha).

  The pictorial in Brazil consumes the imagination; leaf and scrub, seaside and backlands long for their apotheosis as word. Otherwise it is as if a great part of the earth lay silent, unrealized. Your own sense of yourself is threatened here and, thus, speculative description seizes the mind and by surrender to it a sort of tranquility comes. Strange that the landscape should be so drenched in philosophical questions.

  Speaking of the towns in the state of Paraná, Lévi-Strauss writes:

  And then there was that strange element in the evolution of so many towns: the drive to the west which so often leaves the eastern part of the towns in poverty and dereliction. It may be merely the expression of that cosmic rhythm which has possessed mankind from the earliest times and springs from the unconscious realization that to move with the sun is positive, and to move against it is negative; the one stands for order, the other for disorder. It’s a long time since we ceased to worship the sun; and with our Euclidean turn of mind we jib at the notion of space as qualitative.