By EDWIN WILLIAMSON
FIRST CHAPTER
Family and Nation
The ancestors of Jorge Luis Borges were among the first Europeans to arrive in America. Explorers, conquistadors, founders of cities, and rulers of provinces, they were builders of the vast empire that Spain was to establish in the New World. Gonzalo Martel de la Puente followed Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, Domingo Martínez de Irala won Paraguay for the Spanish Crown, Jerónimo de Cabrera founded the city of Córdoba in Tucumán, while Juan de Garay secured the settlement of the remote township of Buenos Aires. However, Borges himself was indifferent to these connections: "The Iralas, the Garays, the Cabreras and all those other Spanish conquistadors who founded cities and nations, I have never dreamed about them.... I am quite ignorant about their lives. They were people of very little intelligence-Spanish soldiers, and from the Spain of those times!"
The ancestors Borges dreamed about were the men who had broken with Spain and had fought to create the Argentine nation. On his mother's side, Francisco de Laprida was president of the congress that declared the independence of the "United Provinces of South America." General Miguel Estanislao Soler commanded a division in the patriot army that the great Argentine liberator, San Martín, led across the Andes to free Chile and then Peru from the Spanish yoke. On his father's side, Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur was one of the first poets of Argentina and a friend of Manuel Belgrano, a founding father of the nation. Among Borges's papers there survives a postcard depicting Lafinur (proudly identified with a cross by the young Jorge Luis) standing in the foreground of the picture as General San Martín is being received by the National Assembly of the new republic.
The most romantic of all Borges's ancestors was undoubtedly Isidoro Suárez, a great-grandfather on his mother's side. At the age of twenty-four, Suárez led the cavalry charge that turned the tide of battle at Junín, the second-last engagement in the liberation of South America. The battle took place on August 6, 1824, high up in the Andes of Peru, and the lofty silence of the snowcapped peaks was broken only by the clash of lance and sword, for no guns were used in combat by either army, and the patriots defeated the Spaniards in little under an hour. Suárez's heroism won the praise of Simón Bolívar himself, who declared that "when history describes the glorious Battle of Junín ... it will be attributed to the bravery of this young officer." And it was Bolívar who promoted Suárez to the rank of colonel after the young officer again distinguished himself at Ayacucho, the battle that finally put paid to the rule of Spain in America.
Borges conceived of the War of Independence as a "rupture in the continuity of the bloodline," a "rebellion of sons against their fathers." His family, after all, took great pride in being criollos, people of pure Spanish descent born in America, but the meaning of independence, in Borges's view, lay in the fact that the criollos had "resolved to be Spaniards no longer:" they had made "an act of faith" in the possibility of creating a national identity distinct from that of Spain, and it followed that if the Argentines did not persevere in the struggle to forge this new identity, "a good many of us" would "run the risk of reverting to being Spanish, which would be a way of denying the whole of Argentine history."
The movement toward independence in the area now comprising modern Argentina was spearheaded by Buenos Aires. An important reason for the city's historic role is to be found in the strategic position it occupies on the estuary of a mighty river system that reaches right up into the heart of South America. This huge estuary was first discovered by Spanish explorers searching for a westward passage to Japan. In 1536 the first settlement, called Santa María de los Buenos Aires, was established on its right bank, but it succumbed to Indian raids, and it was not until 1580 that the town was founded on a permanent basis by the conquistador Juan de Garay. By this time the estuary was known as the Río de la Plata, the "River of Silver" (distorted since in English to "River Plate"), thus called because the Spaniards believed that deposits of silver could be found on its shores. No silver was discovered, however, and for the next two hundred years, Buenos Aires was to languish as an outpost of empire in a forgotten corner of the Americas.
The tiny settlement was all but engulfed by vast plains, empty save for herds of wild cattle and horses that roamed the pampas, as these plains were called. These herds were hunted by tribes of nomadic Indians and plundered for their meat and hide by freewheeling horsemen of Spanish descent called gauchos. Otherwise the colony subsisted on the illegal exchange of silver from Peru for African slaves imported from Brazil. Only in the late eighteenth century, when advances in shipbuilding made it economical for Spain to communicate directly with the region, did it become possible to exploit the strategic position of Buenos Aires, and in 1776 the city was made the capital of the new viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. This relatively sudden promotion of Buenos Aires transformed the geopolitics of South America-all the Spanish territories (except Venezuela) that lay to the east of the Andes were obliged to sever a connection with Peru that went back 250 years and deal thenceforward with the upstart port city to the south. In this historic wrench lay the fundamental cause of the bloody conflicts that would bedevil the area for most of the nineteenth century.
After the first revolt against Spain in 1810, Buenos Aires would struggle to maintain its authority over the provinces comprising the former viceroyalty. It failed to prevent Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay from going their separate ways, and even though the remaining provinces came together to declare independence from Spain at the Congress of Tucumán in 1816, there followed a long period of instability as the interior provinces continued to challenge the authority of Buenos Aires. The basic dispute was between the liberal unitarios, who sought to create a centralized state led by Buenos Aires, and the more conservative federales, who favored a confederation of provinces that would preserve as much local autonony as possible. The lack of effective nationwide institutions led to endless power struggles between caudillos, or provincial chieftains, of both conservative and liberal persuasion, who employed gaucho cavalry (montoneros) to further their own ends. Both sides of Borges's family were unitarios, and in his celebrated "Conjectural Poem," he recalled the murder of his ancestor Laprida, onetime president of the Congress of Tucumán, by the montoneros of Felix Aldao, a caudillo of the province of Mendoza.
Eventually there appeared a caudillo strong enough to impose some order on this chaos. In 1829 Juan Manuel de Rosas, a wealthy landowner and a strong advocate of federalismo, became governor of the huge province of Buenos Aires, and over the next six years he acquired enough power to become the effective leader of the "United Provinces." In the city of Buenos Aires, a bastion of liberalism, Rosas instituted a reign of terror designed to wipe out the unitarios. He created a secret organization known as La Mazorca that recruited servants to spy on their masters and formed death squads to root out opponents. Rosas also enlisted the support of the clergy, who preached blind loyalty to the caudillo and allowed his portrait to be displayed in the churches. He gained immense popularity with the lower classes, and a hysterical personality cult came into being-the color red, the color of the federales, was worn on sashes and banners, and slogans such as "Long live the Federation! Death to the filthy, savage unitarios!" became tokens of loyalty to the supreme leader. After Rosas achieved total power in 1835, those liberals he did not manage to eliminate he drove into exile abroad.
The privations endured by Borges's family under the dictatorship of Rosas were indeed horrible and outrageous. Colonel Suárez, the "Hero of Junín," was forced into exile in Uruguay, where he died in 1846. One of the colonel's brothers was shot against the wall of the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires by agents of the Mazorca. The man's eleven-year-old son was forced to watch the execution, after which the boy had to find work in a tavern, since there was no one to look after him. Thanks to Rosas, the family of Borges's grandfather, Isidoro Acevedo, lost their estates in the north of the province of Buenos Aires near the town of Pergamino. Isidoro's father joined a rebellion against Rosas but was taken prisoner and put to work in the tyrant's stables for nine years. One night the Mazorca raided the family home, horsewhipped Isidoro's mother and sacked the house. The two oldest daughters managed to escape but lost touch with their family for several years and ended up living in Brazil. Isidoro's mother took her three remaining children to Buenos Aires, where she was forced to earn a living as a seamstress mending trousers for Rosas's soldiers. Grandfather Isidoro used to tell a gruesome story about how, as a boy of ten, he came across a cart covered by a tarpaulin and, taking a peek inside, found the bloody heads of dozens of men killed by the Mazorca. He was so shocked that he was unable to speak for several hours after he got home. When he grew up, Isidoro became an unitario like his father and joined the struggle to overthrow Rosas.
The tyrant was finally deposed in 1852, when his many enemies united to defeat him at the Battle of Caseros. But the victor of Caseros was yet another caudillo, General Urquiza, the boss of the rival province of Entre Ríos, who managed to topple Rosas with the support of Brazil, Uruguay, and the exiled unitarios. Being himself a federal, Urquiza passed a new constitution providing for a confederation of provinces, though under a strong presidentialist regime. The unitarios refused to accept this federal arrangement, but they were defeated by Urquiza at the Battle of Cepeda in 1859. Two years later the unitarios rebelled again, and this time their leader, Bartolomé Mitre, overthrew Urquiza at the Battle of Pavón, and Buenos Aires was at last accepted by the provincial caudillos as the de facto capital of the nation.
With Buenos Aires at its head, Argentina was set upon the road of stability and modernization. In the course of the 1860s and 1870s, successive liberal presidents, Mitre, Sarmiento and Avellaneda-all former unitario leaders-put in place the machinery of a modern nation-state: an integrated judicial system, a central bank, a professional army, a system of public schools and libraries, an academy of science and other technical institutions. The Argentine economy was geared toward the export of wool, meat, and wheat for the industrial centers of Europe, and this required the progressive privatization and enclosure of land in the pampas. Successive governments actively promoted European immigration with the aim of developing a rural middle class to replace the gauchos and the Indian hunters on the open range. Foreign capital was invested in the construction of a modern infrastructure of communications and transport. The British in particular would build new docks in Buenos Aires and a railway network across the pampas designed to consolidate the export economy by linking up the hitherto fractious provinces to Buenos Aires and, through the port city, to the world outside.
Domingo Sarmiento, who became president in 1868, was a prominent liberal intellectual and the author of one of the most influential books in Argentine history, Facundo: or, Civilization and Barbarism, a book in which the liberal vision of the nation's destiny was most fully expressed. Originally published in 1845, at the height of the struggle against Rosas, Facundo takes the form of a biography of Facundo Quiroga, a famous caudillo who pursued a violent career in the aftermath of independence until he was killed in 1835, almost certainly on Rosas's orders. Sarmiento argued that Argentina could be saved from this chaotic "barbarism" only by adopting the modern "civilization" of the European Enlightenment.
By "barbarism" Sarmiento meant the lack of stable government based on legitimate authority. He argued that barbarism was rooted in the pampas because the great plains were so underpopulated that the people who lived there lacked the habits of social coexistence that provide the basis for civilized values. In this sense the gaucho was a barbarian because he led a life of anarchic individualism in which he resorted to force in order to assert his will. This made him the ideal tool for the ambitions of regional caudillos, whose power struggles had led to the anarchy that had engulfed the entire viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata in the aftermath of independence.
How could this barbarism be tamed once more? There were two forms of civilization available to the rulers of Argentina: there was the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain, which had been successful in ensuring order during the colonial period, and the civilization of the Enlightenment. The former, in Sarmiento's view, was incapable of turning back the tide of barbarism. He portrayed the inland city of Córdoba, a bastion of Hispanic traditionalism, as a somnolent relic, its venerable buildings reflected on the stagnant waters of an ornamental lake. By way of contrast, he described the vitality of Buenos Aires, standing at the mouth of the river system of the Plata, a thriving port equipped to trade in goods and ideas with the world at large. Having initiated the wars of independence, Buenos Aires could claim a historic right to lead the nation toward modernity.
The plight of Argentina was encapsulated by Sarmiento in the vivid image of a gaucho's dagger stuck in the heart of liberal Buenos Aires. But even in Facundo one encounters an ambivalence toward the gaucho, for when Sarmiento wrote about the gaucho's skills as horseman, tracker, and wandering troubadour, he could not help but display a certain admiration for this authentic son of the native soil. The fact was that even though the gaucho might have been a "barbarian," he also represented whatever distinctive identity the young republic could claim to possess in relation to Spain. And yet, by the logic of his own argument in favor of progress and modern civilization, Sarmiento had to accept that the gaucho's traditional way of life was condemned eventually to disappear.
It was during Sarmiento's term of office as president that a book appeared which was to become the other great classic of Argentine literature.
Continues...
Continues...
Excerpted from Borges by Edwin Williamson Excerpted by permission.
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All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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