“The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account—but as to effectually lifting a little finger—oh, no … Their talk … was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware that these things are wanted for the work of the world.”
The narrator is led to reflect on the idea of work. It is the missing moral idea. “No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”
This is almost religious. It lies on the other side, as it were, of the colonial darkness. This high idea of human possibility can arise only in reasonably free and reasonably creative societies. It was the opposite of the idea behind the first Spanish conquest, the opposite of the idea behind the Conquest of the Desert. Such an idea might have driven some of the immigrants to Argentina, as it drove some to the United States; but Argentina would have frustrated the people it attracted.
In Argentina the missing moral idea has had other consequences. The great fortunes that came with the Conquest of the Desert haven’t all lasted. Argentines will tell you that in Argentina there has been constant change at the top. A man of old family said in 1972, “In Peru you have the real aristocracy. They have a tradition of two to three hundred years. If you mention the names of the Argentine aristocrats between 1850 and 1900, today no one in Argentina knows them. Their descendants were weak, and the whole thing began to crumble.” One of the few industrialists of old family put it like this, “Below the Belle Époque façade in Buenos Aires you must remember we had the tango man. Today the tango man has taken over.”
I went this year to an estancia in the south of the province of Buenos Aires. Beyond the eucalyptus and other roadside trees, and the roadside puddles, the flat, brown-green grass went back to the horizon and seemed to swallow up the heads and legs of cattle, reducing them to the black or dark-brown dashes of their backs. This large piece of the Conquered Desert had long ago passed out of the hands of the family who had first been granted it; and twice since then it had gone derelict, once in the Depression, and later, after the wartime boom, in the time of Perón. The man who inherited it in 1960 found there wasn’t even enough money for the upkeep of the homestead. He was an educated man; he decided to give his life to his estate, and he had brought it back. Not everyone was like him.
“We have next door an old Spanish family, friends. They are the biggest landowners in the district. They probably received the land way back, from Roca. They can’t afford to go to Europe very often now. They haven’t been able to adapt. They haven’t changed the structure of their business. They still have their house and social life in town, in B.A., and they try to run things from there. They survive by selling off bits of capital. I know a big house, forty rooms, which now has only one hundred and thirty hectares to keep it up. It can’t be done. But the old lady won’t sell, though she has no hot water. Yet there are beautiful bath-rooms, with lovely taps, designed in the art-deco style by an English architect in the 1920s. Cobwebs in most of the rooms, and leaks in the roof.”
Susana came from a family like that, a family that had lost much of its money. She had married a professional, middle-class man, and still thought of herself as having done a bold thing. She still had the manners of her upbringing: the security, the pride, the curious innocence. She didn’t know exactly how her family had lost their land. She didn’t think Perón had anything to do with it; but her husband later told me that Susana’s family, panicking about the new taxes when Perón came in, had taken bad advice and sold up.
Susana said, “What happened to my family didn’t start with Perón. It goes back further. When Father was eighteen—this would have been in 1930 or thereabouts—he wanted to study. He wanted to be an architect. Father was charming, rather shy, extremely polite. A very weak character. He talked to his stepfather, and his stepfather advised him not to study, saying, ‘Why study?’ For his stepfather, if you had beautiful manners it was enough. Then a little bit later my father again felt he wanted to study. He wanted to study law this time, and again his stepfather said to him, ‘Why study?’ And so my father didn’t study.
“For my father, too, you know, if you had beautiful manners, it was enough. Money was important—that went without saying: it was assumed that you had money. But there had to be the manners. If you went to my father’s house and said hello beautifully, stood at the right moment, sat at the right moment, and said the right things, if you appreciated my father’s furniture and silver, it was enough for him. I must tell you that I myself can still feel dazzled by beautiful manners. Our manners were very formal. As children we would be called into the sitting room sometimes, and we went in and said hello. But we didn’t talk if weren’t asked something directly. If we were sitting down we had to get up if someone came in. Sometimes we went to the dining room, to have dinner with father and mother and their guests, and I remember thinking on those occasions, ‘What beautiful people, what beautiful manners.’ But we weren’t so beautiful. None of the daughters learned to do anything. Even now, you know, they talk of the old days. Days of having, of going to Europe, travelling, bringing back lovely things. But not days of doing.”
This wasn’t the only flaw in this Argentine aristocracy based on new land. Its language was Spanish; so were its attitudes and its deeper culture. That ideal of not working, of not talking about money—that was Spanish. (As Spanish as the inch-long nail on the little finger of the middle-aged gentleman I met in a café in La Rioja in 1974. We both had time on our hands, and he drove me about the countryside for half a day. His fingernail proclaimed him a man of leisure: it was a half-cylinder in shape, hard and horny-looking, striated, yellow, the colour of a very dirty tooth, oddly disagreeable to look at.) But Spain was known to be backward, the source of the poor immigrants known collectively in Argentina as gallegos.
Susana said, “Those beautiful manners of my father were an aspiration towards the idea of the gentleman. They were thought to be English manners. Father, all his education was looking to England. When my mother and father went to Europe they never went to Spain. Spain was—” and Susana made a gesture of disregard. The disregard for Spain contained a disregard for Spanish-speaking Argentina. “They had no pride in being Argentine. They thought they were English. They said este país, ‘this country,’ not my country. They would say, ‘The people here are awful.’ Not, ‘We are awful.’ My husband says a lot of the problems here have to do with that este país attitude.”
And perhaps, with a different idea of their aristocracy, the Argentine upper class might have sought to come terms with Perón, a man of their country; and the country would not have started unravelling with the revolution.
I wondered whether the formal manners of Susana’s parents didn’t also hold an element of stoicism or protecting ritual, enabling them to put up with the hard times that had come to them. I didn’t make myself clear. Susana thought I was asking about the attitude of her family to the hardship of others. And she said, “No. When November, our summer, came, and we were very hot, my mother would point to the tenement behind our apartment and say, ‘Think of them.’ But I never thought she really cared.”
When Susana understood the point about stoicism, she said, “Mother was very structured [estructurada]. They made her like that. I thought when I was young that Mama had the solution for everything. But when she had a grief in her family, Mother just collapsed. There was no substance in her.”
THE INDIAN land, used prodigally, as though nothing had gone before and nothing was to come after, already has its ruins, of buildings and peoples. Like so many tracts of the New Worl
d, like the Guianas and the Caribbean islands, the Argentine pampa appears to have swallowed up its history; it is a place of disappearances. The pampa Indians have disappeared, and the gauchos. The Africans, descendants of slaves from the Spanish time, have disappeared. In Martín Fierro they are still very much there, in the Argentina of the 1860s, black and mulatto, men and women, stylish, not negligible, speaking the Spanish of the gauchos. And when Borges was a boy, in the first decade of the century, black people were still to be seen in Buenos Aires.
Borges said in 1972, “When I was a child if I saw a Negro I didn’t report it at home. I don’t know what happened to our black men. Our family wasn’t wealthy. We only had six slaves.” There is a reference in one poem to the slave quarters of the family house in the city. “They were quite unaware that their forefathers had come from Africa. They spoke a kind of singsong Spanish. They couldn’t manage the R: they made it an L. But they were not regarded as different. In fact a Negro was as much of a criollo”—someone of old colonial Argentina, before the immigrant rush—“as everybody else. Here they were cooks, maids. You thought of a Negro as being a townsman. Many fine infantry regiments were made up of Negroes. One of my great uncles led a famous bayonet charge against the Spaniards in Montevideo—it would have been in 1815 or 1816—and all the soldiers were full-blooded Negroes from the south side of the town, near the National Library.” That was where we were talking. Borges in 1972 was director; his salary had dwindled with inflation to the equivalent of $70 a month.
So Africans had fought for Argentine independence. If Borges hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have guessed: a hundred years later their descendants had vanished like magic into the new European population, and there was now no living memory of them.
In the shuffling about of peoples, the Spaniards of the old colonial north also suffered. They had been economically dependent on Peru. Now—after independence, and after the destructive civil wars, “the sword and danger and hard proscriptions” of a Borges poem, la espada y el peligro, las duras proscripciones—they had to look south. Once they had been at the end of a very long imperial route from Spain; now—at least until the railways came—they were at the end of a very long cart track from Buenos Aires. They had little to offer. The region ceased to have an economic point; the people had finally fallen off the rim of the world into wilderness.
They became pensioners of the government in the south. And so they have remained. It is said that the entire province of La Rioja (its chief town founded in 1591) now lives off the state. The money isn’t simply offered to people as a dole: they have to take government jobs. Politicians looking for public favour invariably offer to create more public jobs. Mr. Luria, a lawyer and local historian, told me that between 1983—when military rule ended—and 1987 the number of government employees in La Rioja more than trebled, to 44,000. That number, quite high for a total provincial population of about 250,000, had since risen even higher, to 55,000.
These government jobs are not really jobs. There is nothing or very little to do, and it might seem that to get regular money for doing nothing is a kind of old Spanish dream come true, almost as good as the grant of Indians people once pined for. But this largesse comes with a touch of Spanish-Argentine cruelty. There is nothing to do, but people have to attend; they have to be present throughout the working day in the government office to which they are theoretically attached. At any moment a boss or head of department might order a spot check, might send out a planilla volante, a “flying roll-call,” and then every man or woman on the pay list has to answer up.
Mr. Luria said, “This is a very serious matter. It results in La Rioja in what I call the culture of tedium.” He was pleased with the words: la cultura del tedio. “Because these people are condemned to seven hours of desperation every day, pretending to do a job that doesn’t exist.” At the end of every day at the office these public employees, Mr. Luria said, are “tired, frustrated, fed up, enraged”; and then the families as well felt the effects of the accumulated tedium of the day. “I don’t know what your own observations are, but this is a sad town, without heart, without initiative.”
Mr. Luria spoke with feeling. He was a man of La Rioja through and through, partly of Indian ancestry. To him La Rioja was a land of the nineteenth-century warlords and hardy, valiant men. Government jobs, the culture of tedium, had broken the spirit of the people; they didn’t even know their history now. Three attempts, Mr. Luria said, had been made to get the government employees into productive work in an industrial park; but the people who took those jobs invariably drifted back to the government offices, though the pay was lower. Mr. Luria said, “They prefer the illness.”
Within the large cruelty of compulsory attendance, and the constant terror of the planilla volante, there were subtler forms of torment and control: the politicians who gave the jobs always wished to make their power felt. There were twenty-four grades of public employee. Most people started at Grade Six; only people put on the post office rolls started, for some reason, at a lower grade. Thereafter you worked your way up. But since no one did anything there was no way of measuring merit. It all depended on the politicians. They had to be kept sweet. You could keep them sweet by daubing their names on walls or—going far out of town—on rock-faces or tree trunks; you showed yourself energetic in their cause at election time, and generally grateful at other times. If you didn’t, if you thought you had got your government job and that was that, then you had to take the consequences.
There was a woman who had been seventeen years in the government service. In that time she had moved only from Grade Six to Grade Nine, and that had happened only because one politician, on taking office, had—like a sovereign decreeing a general pardon to state prisoners—granted a rise of three grades to all government employees. This Grade Nine lady was famous in La Rioja. I was even taken to see her one morning in her office: short and plump, unmarried, but with a full and well-tended head of hair, and perfectly ready to tell her story all over again. As a Grade Nine she got $120 a month. The difference in pay between Grade Six and Grade Eighteen was only about $30. The difference, she said, became important only at Grade Twenty. But still.
There was a Grade Twenty-four lady present while the Grade Nine lady complained. She was thin and small and, though deprived-looking, not at all defensive about her Grade. She had a degree, she said, and in her second job (which perhaps she did in the afternoon) she was a professor. As a Grade Twenty-four she got about $400 a month; but then she looked after her family of sixteen brothers and sisters.
There was a smiling boy in a patterned shirt moving lightly in and out of the room while we talked. I asked about him. He was a special case. He had entered at Grade Twelve. How had he done that? Nobody could say; and the boy just smiled, going out of the room and then coming back again, while the others talked of money and politicians and inflation and prices and the Grade Nine lady said she hadn’t been to a restaurant. They were not allowed to leave their offices; they were as people hemmed in by an invisible fence: confined and complaining, but timid, like a group of shades waiting for religious burial in a Virgilian netherworld.
At dusk, after the heat, the tedium of the day exploded: on unsilenced motorbikes the young men and their girls rode round and round in the streets off the main square in a blue-brown smoke haze, like people now accustomed to doing nothing.
ARGENTINA has consumed the people whom it has attracted; and the last twenty years have been particularly hard.
Jorge, an Anglo-Argentine, who worked as economic adviser to a large company, had said in 1972, “We could be on the verge of a real crisis.” Inflation, running on an average at 25 per cent since the Perón years of the 1940s, had risen in that year to 60 per cent; and the colonial agricultural economy of the country hadn’t really been altered. There was an industrial sector, but it ate up imports, which had to be paid for by agricultural exports.
Jorge said, “Perón precipitated this vicious circle. He didn’t start bas
ic industries. He had to be popular, so he did the light stuff, and distorted the economy further. Industrialization was an emotional response; there was no industrial policy.” Argentine industrial goods were protected; they cost twice as much as equivalent goods abroad; and the average wage in 1972 was $50 a month. Perón had done much for the workers, but their wages could never keep up with the inflation that Perón’s policies, and policies like Perón’s, had produced.
The year before, Jorge had bought a flat. Prices were rising so fast that a week’s indecision had cost him $200—his salary at that time was $400 a month. But already—less than a year later—his flat had appreciated 80 per cent. Nineteen years on, in 1991, that purchase seemed an even better bargain.
“I bought it with a twelve-year mortgage from the bank. A fixed price, the only variable thing being the interest payable on the balance. As from 1973, when John Sunday came back”—John Sunday: the Anglo-Argentine translation of Perón’s given names, Juan Domingo—
“inflation rose even higher, and eroded the debt. So who paid? The rest of the community, the people who were not in debt. The terrible thing is that for the last forty-five years inflation has been growing steadily, month by month, with oscillations. Very few countries have been able to withstand this sort of inflation over such a long time. This is like the German experience of the twenties in slow motion.
“Things got really out of hand in 1974, after John Sunday’s death, when his widow Isabelita and her astrologer–witch doctor took over. An ex-corporal in the police. There was a sudden burst of inflation. I remember this: I had paid down for a suit—say $200 in pesos—and the tailor had taken my measurement. Such was the convulsion at the time, the peso lost half its value in a month. I didn’t feel I could hold the tailor to his price. And he preferred to forget about it. When we met we never talked about the suit. The stillborn suit: it was too embarrassing. He still owes me a suit—in today’s currency it would be about ten cents.