The Writer and the World (64 page)

T
HERE
are many Argentinas, and they all exist within that idea of the richness of the land. In the north-west there is an older Argentina, settled by Spaniards spreading down south from Peru. At the foot of the Cordilleras is the city of La Rioja, founded nearly four hundred years ago by a Spaniard looking for gold. It is distinctive; its people are of the land, and half Indian. It has a completeness not found in the cities of the newer Argentina, from which it is separated by the waterless flat wilderness of the
llanos
, bisected to the very horizon, as it seems to the passenger in a bus, by the straight black road, whose edges are blurred by drifting sand.

But at the end of that road, and among the Córdoba Hills, where imported cypress and willow create irregular little Mediterranean patches on the barren hillsides, there is an English-style boarding school, recently founded. It is successful and well equipped; the headmaster, when I saw him, had just stocked the library with an expensive uniform set of the world’s best books.

The school might seem an anachronism, the headmaster says; but the aim isn’t to create English gentlemen; it is to create gentlemen for Argentina. There is rugger on Sunday morning. A school from Córdoba is visiting, and the school servants are grilling thick thongs of red meat over an enormous barbecue pit. “Just like Anglo-Saxons to make up a game like rugger,” says the young teacher, fresh from the constrictions of London, and flourishing in the atmosphere of freedom and fantasy which the emptiness of Argentina can so agreeably suggest to people who have just arrived.

At the local church the elderly British residents, retired people, had that morning prayed for both Perón and the Queen. The previous evening they had gathered at a hotel to see the film of Princess Anne’s wedding.

Half an hour away by bus there is an Italo-Spanish peasant town: low houses, cracked plaster, exposed red bricks, pollarded trees, dust, Mediterranean colours, women in black, girls and children in doorways. Water is scarce. There is a big dam, but it was breached two years ago. The people grow cotton and olives and consider their town rich.

The ten-hour bus drive from the industrial town of Córdoba, where
they make motorcars, to the city of La Rioja is like a drive through many countries, many eras, many fading ancestral cultures. The ancestral culture fades, and Argentina offers no substitute. It offers only the land, the cheap food and the cheap wine. To all those people on the road from Córdoba to La Rioja it offers accommodation, and what had once seemed a glorious freedom. To none does it offer a country. They are, by an unlikely irony, among the last victims of imperialism, and not just in the way Perón said.

A
RGENTINA
is a simple materialist society, a simple colonial society created in the most rapacious and decadent phase of imperialism. It has diminished and stultified the men whom it attracted by the promise of ease and to whom it offered no other ideals and no new idea of human association. New Zealand, equally colonial, also with a past of native dispossession, but founded at an earlier imperial period and on different principles, has had a different history. It has made some contribution to the world; more gifted men and women have come from its population of three million than from the twenty-three millions of Argentines.

Two years ago, when I was new to Argentina, an academic said to me, during the Buenos Aires rush hour: “You would think you were in a developed country.” It wasn’t easy then to understand his irony and bitterness. Buenos Aires is such an overwhelming metropolis that it takes time to understand that it is new and has been imported almost whole; that its metropolitan life is an illusion, a colonial mimicry; that it feeds on other countries and is itself sterile. The great city was intended as the servant of its hinterland and it was set down, complete, on the edge of the continent. Its size was not dictated by its own needs nor did it reflect its own excellence. Buenos Aires, from the nature of its creation, has never required excellence: that has always been one of its attractions. Within the imported metropolis there is the structure of a developed society. But men can often appear to be mimicking their functions. So many words have acquired lesser meanings in Argentina:
general, artist, journalist, historian, professor, university, director, executive, industrialist, aristocrat, library, museum, zoo;
so many words need inverted commas. To write realistically about this society has peculiar difficulties; to render it accurately in fiction might be impossible.

For men so diminished there remains only machismo. There is the
machismo of the football field or the racing track. And there is machismo as simple stylishness: the police motorcyclist, for instance, goggled and gloved, weaving about at speed, siren going, clearing a path for the official car. But machismo is really about the conquest and humiliation of women. In the sterile society it is the victimization, by the simple, of the simpler. Women in Argentina are uneducated and have few rights; they are reared either for early marriage or for domestic service. Very few have money or the means of earning money. They are meant to be victims; and they accept their victim role.

Machismo makes no man stand out, because every man is assumed to be a macho. Sexual conquest is a duty. It has little to do with passion or even attraction; and conquests are not achieved through virility or any special skills. In a society so ruled by the idea of plunder, the macho’s attractions, from the top to the bottom of the money scale, are essentially economic. Clothes, reflecting the macho’s wealth or “class,” are an important sexual signal. So is the wallet. And the macho’s keys, symbols of property, have to be displayed. The symbolism is crude; but the society isn’t subtle. The bus driver, a small-time macho, hangs his two keys from his belt over his right hip; the right hip of the “executive” can be positively encased in metal, with the keys hanging from the belt by heavy metal loops. Money makes the macho. Machismo requires, and imposes, a widespread amateur prostitution; it is a society spewing on itself.

The thing has been institutionalized; and the institution is served by a gigantic brothel industry. There are brothels everywhere, open night and day. Enormous new buildings, their function proclaimed by neon signs and a general garishness, are strung along the Pan American Highway. In the heart of the city, behind the Recoleta Cemetery, where the illustrious are buried, there is an avenue of tall brothels. The brothels charge by the hour. In the dim lobby of such a place a red spotlight might play on a crude bronze-coloured woman’s bust: the bad art of Argentina. Every schoolgirl knows the brothels; from an early age she understands that she might have to go there one day to find love, among the coloured lights and mirrors.

The act of straight sex, easily bought, is of no great moment to the macho. His conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her. This is what the woman has it in her power to deny; this is what the brothel game is about, the passionless Latin adventure that begins with talk of
amor. La tuve en el culo
, I’ve had her in the arse: this is how the
macho reports victory to his circle, or dismisses a desertion. Contemporary sexologists give a general dispensation to buggery. But the buggering of women is of special significance in Argentina and other Latin American countries. The Church considers it a heavy sin, and prostitutes hold it in horror. By imposing on her what prostitutes reject, and what he knows to be a kind of sexual black mass, the Argentine macho, in the main of Spanish or Italian peasant ancestry, consciously dishonours his victim. So diminished men, turning to machismo, diminish themselves further, replacing even sex by a parody.

The cartoonist Sábat, in some of his Grosz-like drawings, has hinted at the diseased, half-castrated nature of machismo. In Buenos Aires the other day a new film opened and was a great success:
Boquitas Pintadas—Little Painted Mouths—
made by Argentina’s most famous director and based on a novel by an Argentine writer, Manuel Puig. The film—clumsy and overacted and without polish—is the story of the life and death of a tubercular small-town macho. An aimless film, it seemed, a real-life chronicle on which no pattern had been imposed. But the Argentine audience wept: for them the tragedy lay in the foreseeable death of the macho, the poor boy of humble family who made his conquests the hard way, by his beauty.

To the outsider the tragedy lay elsewhere, in the apparent motiveless-ness of so much of the action. No relationship was hinted at, and no comment seemed to be offered by writer or director: it was as though, in the society of machismo, the very knowledge of the possibility of deeper relationships had been lost. After the macho’s death one of his women had a dream: in bleached colour, and in very slow motion, the macho rose from his grave, in his pretty macho clothes, lifted her in his arms, flew with her through a bedroom window and placed her on a bed. On this necrophiliac fantasy the film ended. And the audience was in tears.

To go outside after this, to walk past the long queue for the film, to see the lights of packed cafés and bars, the young people in flared jeans, was to have the sharpest sense of the mimicry and alienness of the great city. It was to have a sense of the incompleteness and degeneracy of these transplanted people who seemed so whole, to begin to understand and fear their violence, their peasant cruelty, their belief in magic, and their fascination with death, celebrated every day in the newspapers with pictures of murdered people, often guerrilla victims, lying in their coffins.

A
FTER
the genocide, a great part of our earth is being turned into a wasteland. The failure of Argentina, so rich, so underpopulated, twenty-three million people in a million square miles, is one of the mysteries of our time. Commentators like Mariano Grondona, unravelling chaos, tying themselves up in
etapas
, will try to make sense of irrational acts and inconsequential events by talking of Argentina’s French-style history. Others will offer political explanations and suggest political remedies. But politics have to do with the nature of human association, the contract of men with men. The politics of a country can only be an extension of its idea of human relationships.

Perón, in himself, as folk leader, expressed many of his country’s weaknesses. And it is necessary to look where he, the greatest macho of them all (childless and reportedly impotent), pointed: to the centre of Buenos Aires and to those tall brothels, obscenely shuttered, that stand, suitably, behind the graveyard.

I
N
A
RGENTINA
the killer cars—the cars in which the official gunmen go about their business—are Ford Falcons. The Falcon, which is made in Argentina, is a sturdy small car of unremarkable appearance, and there are thousands on the roads. But the killer Falcons are easily recognizable. They have no number plates. The cars—and the plainclothesmen they carry—require to be noticed; and people can sometimes stand and watch.

As they stood and watched some weeks ago, in the main square of the northern city of Tucumán: the Falcons parked in the semi-circular drive of Government Headquarters, an ornate stone building like a nineteenth-century European country house, but with Indian soldiers with machine guns on the balcony and in the well-kept subtropical gardens: a glimpse, eventually, of uniforms, handshakes, salutes, until the men in plain clothes, like actors impersonating an aristocratic shooting party, but with machine guns under their Burberrys or imitation Burberrys,
came down the wide steps, got into the small cars and drove off without speed or sirens.

The authorities have grown to understand the dramatic effect of silence. It is part of the terror that is meant to be felt as terror.

Style is important in Argentina; and in the long-running guerrilla war—in spite of the real blood, the real torture—there has always been an element of machismo and public theatre. In the old days policemen stood a little way from busy intersections with machine guns at the ready; at night the shopping streets of central Buenos Aires were patrolled by jackbooted and helmeted soldiers with Alsatian dogs; from time to time, as a dramatic extravaganza, there appeared the men of the anti-guerrilla motorcycle brigade. The war in those days was in the main a private war, between the guerrillas on one side and the army and police on the other. Now the war touches everybody; public theatre has turned to public terror.

Style has been taken away from all but the men in the Falcons. The guerrillas still operate, but the newspapers are not allowed to print anything about them. They can print only the repetitive official communiqués, the body counts, and these usually appear as small items on the inside pages, seemingly unrelated to the rest of the news: in such a place, on such a date, in these circumstances, so many subversives or
delincuentes
were killed, so many men, so many women. The communiqués are thought to represent only a fraction of the truth: too many people are disappearing.

In the beginning—after the chaos and near-anarchy of the Peronist restoration—the killings were thought to be good for the economy. War was war, it was said; the guerrillas—now like private armies, with no recognizable aims—had to be rooted out; the trade unions and their leaders had to be disciplined after the licence and corruption of the Peronist years. (No more free trips to Europe on Aerolíneas Argentinas for those union men, flashy provincial machos requiring attention from the crew, each man, after supper, settling down with his pile of comic books and photo-novels, light reading for the long night flights, the tips of ringed fingers wetted on the tongue before the pages were turned.) Another, more becoming, Argentina was to be created; the country (as though the country were an economic abstraction, something that could be separated from the bulk of the population) was to be got going again.

And while wages were kept down like sin, the banker-saints of
Argentina worked their own inflationary miracles. They offered 8 per cent a month or 144 per cent a year for the peso, and momentarily gave back faith to many good Argentines who had for years been praying only for the water of their pesos to be turned into the wine of dollars. During the early months of the terror the stock market boomed; fortunes were made out of nothing; Argentina seemed to be itself again. But now—even with that 144 per cent—the terror is too close.