(113)
1850: San Francisco
The Road to Development
The Chilean Pérez Rosales is looking for luck in the mines of California. Learning that, a few miles from San Francisco, fabulous prices are paid for anything edible, he gets a few sacks of worm-eaten jerky and some jars of jam and buys a launch. Hardly has he pushed off from the pier when a customs agent points a rifle at his head: “Hold it there.”
This launch cannot move on any United States river because it was built abroad and its keel is not made of North American wood.
The United States had defended its national market since the times of its first president. It supplies cotton to England, but customs barriers block English cloth and any product that could injure its own industry. The planters of the southern states want English clothing, which is much better and cheaper, and complain that the northern textile mills impose on them their ugly and costly cloth from baby’s diaper to corpse’s shroud.
(162 and 256)
1850: Buenos Aires
The Road to Underdevelopment: The Thought of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
We are not industrialists or navigators and Europe will provide us for long centuries with its artifacts in exchange for our raw materials.
(310)
1850: River Plata
Buenos Aires and Montevideo at Mid-Century
From his seat in the French Academy to the River Plata docks, sails the poet Xavier Marmier.
The great European powers have reached an agreement with Rosas. The Buenos Aires blockade has been lifted. Marmier thinks he is on the Rue Vivienne as he strolls down Peru Street. In the shop windows he finds Lyons silks and the Journal de Modes, the novels of Dumas and Sandeau and the poems of de Musset; but in the shade of the City Hall’s porticos saunter barefoot blacks in soldiers’ uniforms, and the pavements ring with the trot of a gaucho’s horse.
Someone explains to Marmier that no gaucho dispatches anybody without first kissing the blade of his knife and swearing by the Immaculate Virgin; and if the dead man was a friend, the killer mounts him on his steed and ties him to the saddle so that he may enter the cemetery on horseback.
Further on, in the suburban plazas, Marmier finds the carts, ships of the pampa, which bring hides and wheat from the interior and on the return trip take cloth and liquor which have arrived from Le Havre and Liverpool.
The poet crosses the river. For seven years Montevideo has been under siege from the rear, harassed by General Oribe’s gaucho army, but the city survives, facing the river-ocean, thanks to French ships which pour merchandise and money onto the docks. One Montevideo newspaper is Le Patriote Français and the majority of the population is French. In this refuge of Rosas’s enemies, Marmier notes, the rich have gone poor and all have gone mad. A suitor pays an ounce of gold to stick a camellia in his girl’s hair and the mistress of the house offers the visitor a bouquet of honeysuckle held by a ring of silver, rubies, and emeralds. For the ladies of Montevideo, the war between vanguardists and conservatives seems more important than the war against the Uruguayan peasants, a real war that kills people. Vanguardists wear their hair very short; conservatives, luxuriantly rolled.
(196)
1850: Paris
Dumas
Alexandre Dumas rolls up his cuffs of fine batiste and with a stroke of the pen writes the epic pages of Montevideo; or, The New Troy.
The novelist, a man of fantasy and gluttony, has priced at five thousand francs this professional feat of the imagination. He calls Montevideo’s humble hill a “mountain” and turns the war of foreign merchants against the gaucho cavalry into a Greek epic. The hosts of Giuseppe Garibaldi, which fight for Montevideo, fly not the flag of Uruguay but the classic pirate skull and crossbones on a black field; but in the novel Dumas writes to order, only martyrs and titans take part in the defense of the almost French city.
(101)
1850: Montevideo
Lautréamont at Four
Isidoro Ducasse has been born in the port of Montevideo. A double wall of fortifications separates the countryside from the besieged city. Isidoro grows up dazed by cannon fire, with the daily spectacle of dying men hanging from their horses.
His shoes take him to the sea. Standing on the sand, face to the wind, he asks the sea where music goes after it leaves the violin, where the sun goes when night arrives, and where the dead go. Isidoro asks the sea where his mother went, that woman he cannot remember, nor should name, nor knows how to imagine. Someone has told him that the other dead people threw her out of the cemetery. The sea, which talks so much, does not answer; and the boy flees up the cliff and, weeping, embraces an enormous tree with all his strength, so it won’t fall.
(181)
1850: Chan Santa Cruz
The Talking Cross
Three long years of Indian war in Yucatán. More than a hundred and fifty thousand dead, a hundred thousand fled. The population has been reduced by half.
One of the captains of the rebellion, the mestizo José María Barrera, leads the Indians to a cave deep in the jungle. There, a spring offers fresh water in the shade of a very tall mahogany tree. The tree has given birth to the little cross that talks.
Says the cross, in the Maya language: “The time has come for Yucatán to rise. I am falling hour by hour, they are cutting me with machetes, stabbing me with knives, poking sticks into me. I go about Yucatan to redeem my beloved Indians …”
The cross is the size of a finger. The Indians dress it. They put a huipil and skirt on it; they adorn it with colored threads. She will unite the dispersed.
(273)
1851: Latacunga
“I Wander at Random and Naked …”
Instead of thinking about Medes and Persians and Egyptians, let us think about Indians. It is more important for us to understand an Indian than Ovid. Start your school with Indians, Señor Rector.
Simón Rodríguez offers his advice to the college of the town of Latacunga, in Ecuador: that a chair be established in the Quechua language instead of in Latin, that physics be taught instead of theology; that the college build a pottery factory and a glass factory; that it offer degrees in masonry, carpentry, and smithery.
Along the Pacific shores and through the Andes, from town to town, Don Simón makes his pilgrimage. He never wanted to be a tree, but the wind. For a quarter of a century he has been raising dust on America’s roads. Since Sucre ousted him from Chuquisaca, he has founded many schools and candle factories and published two books with his own hands, letter by letter, since no typographer can cope with so many brackets and synoptic charts. This old vagabond, bald and ugly and potbellied, tanned by the sun, carries on his back a trunk of manuscripts condemned by lack of money and readers. He carries no clothing. He has only what he wears.
Bolívar used to call him, My teacher, my Socrates. He said, You have molded my heart for the great and the beautiful. People clench their teeth to keep from laughing when mad Rodríguez launches into his perorations about the tragic destiny of these Hispanic-American lands.
“We are blind! Blind!”
Almost no one listens to him, no one believes him. They take him for a Jew, because he goes about sowing children wherever he passes, and does not baptize them with Saints’ names, but calls them Corncob, Calabash, Carrot and other heresies. He has changed his surname three times and says he was born in Caracas, but also that he was born in Philadelphia and in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. It is rumored that one of his schools, in Conceptión in Chile, was destroyed by an earthquake which God sent when he learned that Don Simón taught anatomy parading himself stark naked before the students.
Each day Don Simón grows more lonely. The most audacious, most lovable of America’s thinkers, every day more lonely.
At eighty, he writes: I wanted to make the earth a paradise for all. I made it a hell for myself.
(298)
The Ideas of Simón Rodriguez: “Either We Invent or We Are Lost”
Look at the way Eu
rope invents, and look how America imitates!
Some see prosperity in having their ports full of foreign ships, and their homes turned into warehouses for foreign effects. Every day brings a shipment of ready-made clothing, even caps for the Indians. Soon we shall see little gilded packages, with the royal coat of arms, containing earth prepared “by a new process,” for the lads accustomed to eating earth.
Women making their confessions in French! Missionarees absolveeng seens een Spaneesh!
America should not servilely imitate, but be original.
The wisdom of Europe and the prosperity of the United States are, in America, two enemies of freedom of thought. The new republics do not want to admit anything that does not carry a pass … To form their institutions, the statesmen of those nations consulted no one but reason; and this they found on their own soil. Imitate originality, since you try to imitate everything!
Where shall we go in search of models? We are independent, but not free; masters of our soil, but not of ourselves.
Let us open up history; and for that which is not yet written, let each read it in his own memory.
(285)
1851: La Serena
The Precursors
Misery is not being able to think or store in the mind any memory except pain, says Francisco Bilbao, and adds that the exploitation of man by man leaves man no time to be man. Society is divided into those who can do everything and those who do do everything. To revive Chile, giant buried under weeds, an end must be put to a system that denies shelter to those who toil to build palaces, and dresses in rags those who weave the best clothing.
The precursors of socialism in Chile are not yet thirty years old. Francisco Bilbao and Santiago Arcos, tuxedoed young men cultivated in Paris, have betrayed their class. Searching for a society of solidarity, they have in the course of this year set off various military rebellions and popular uprisings throughout the country, against the wig-wearers and the monks, and private property.
On the last day of the year the last revolutionary bastion falls, in the city of La Serena. Many reds also fall—before firing squads. Bilbao, who on another occasion escaped disguised as a woman, this time has fled over the rooftops and gone into exile with cassock and missal.
(39)
1852: Santiago de Chile
“What has independence meant to the poor?” the Chilean Santiago Arcos asks himself in jail.
Since independence the government is and has been of the rich. The poor have been soldiers, national militias, have voted as their employer told them, have worked the land, have dug ditches, have worked the mines, have carried on their backs, have cultivated the country, have kept on earning a penny and a half, have been whipped and pilloried … The poor have enjoyed glorious independence as much as the horses that charged against the king’s troops in Chacabuco and Maipú.
(306)
The People of Chile Sing to the Glory of Paradise
Saint Peter, the patron of me and of you,
sent an acolyte out for some sausage and wine
and a nice side of bacon and pigs’ feet fine
to go in the pot for a succulent stew,
with a good heady punch, the way earth folks do;
and, not to be supercilious,
a basket of tortillas
so that little angels all
could out of heavenly boredom fall
and have themselves a genuine ball.
Saint Anthony, when the hour was tardy
swayed to his feet and said “Well, sirs,
damn all the devils in hell, sirs,
isn’t this quite a party!
To no one’s abuse
it’s time to let loose
with an innocent ruse:
I’ll go up to Saint Clara
and before she’s aware-a’
her plump little bottom I’m going to goose.”
(182)
1852: Mendoza
The Lines of the Hand
Even the little altar angels wear red sashes in Argentina. To refuse challenges the fury of the dictator. Like many enemies of Rosas, Doctor Federico Mayer Arnold has suffered exile and prison.
Not long ago this young Buenos Aires professor published a book in Santiago de Chile. The book, adorned with French, English, and Latin quotations, began this way: Three cities have expelled me from their bosoms and four jails have received me to theirs. I have, however, thrown my thoughts freely in the despot’s face. Now again I launch my ideas into the world, and await without fear what Fate has in store for me.
Two months later, on turning a corner, Doctor Federico Mayer Arnold falls in a spray of blood. But not by order of the tyrant: Federico’s mother-in-law, Doña María, an ill-humored woman from Mendoza, has paid the knife-wielding thugs. She has ordered them to kill her son-in-law because he does not please her.
(14)
1853: La Cruz
The Treasure of the Jesuits
She knows. That’s why the crow follows her, flies behind her every morning, on the way to Mass, and waits for her at the church door.
She has just had her hundredth birthday. She will tell the secret when she is ready to die. If not, Divine Providence would punish her.
“Three days hence,” comes the promise.
And after three days, “Next month.”
And after the month, “Tomorrow we’ll see.”
When people pester her, her eyes go blank and she pretends to be dazed, or explodes with laughter moving her little legs, as if being so old were something naughty.
The whole town of La Cruz knows that she knows. She was just a little girl when she helped the Jesuits bury the treasure in the Misiones woods, but she hasn’t forgotten.
Once, taking advantage of her absence, the neighbors opened the old chest which she spent her days sitting on. Inside there was no bag full of gold pieces. In the chest they found only the dried navels of her eleven children.
Come the death throes, the whole town is at the foot of her bed. She opens and closes her fishlike mouth as if trying to say something.
She dies in the door of sanctity. The secret was the only one she had in her life and she goes without telling it.
(147)
1853: Paita
The Three
She no longer dresses as a captain, nor fires pistols, nor rides horse-back. Her legs don’t work and her whole body is distorted with fat; but she sits on her invalid’s chair as if it were a throne and peels oranges and guavas with the most beautiful hands in the world.
Surrounded by clay pitchers, Manuela Sáenz reigns in the shaded portico of her house. Beyond, among mountains the color of death, extends the Bay of Paita. Exiled in this Peruvian port, Manuela lives by making sweets and fruit preserves. Ships stop to buy. Her goodies enjoy great fame on these coasts. Whalers sigh for a spoonful.
At nightfall Manuela amuses herself by throwing scraps to stray dogs, which she has baptized with the names of generals who were disloyal to Bolívar. As Santander, Páez, Córdoba, Lamar, and Santa Cruz fight over the bones, her moonface lights up, and, covering her toothless mouth with a fan, she bursts out laughing. She laughs with her whole body and her many flying laces.
Sometimes an old friend comes from the town of Amotape. The wandering Simón Rodríguez sits in a rocking chair, beside Manuela, and the two of them smoke and chat and are silent together. The persons Bolívar most loved, the teacher and the lover, change the subject if the hero’s name filters into the conversation.
When Don Simón leaves, Manuela sends for the silver coffer. She opens it with the key hidden in her bosom and fondles the many letters Bolívar had written to the one and only woman, worn-out paper that still says: I want to see you and see you again and touch you and feel you and taste you … Then she asks for the mirror and very carefully brushes her hair, in case he might come and visit her in dreams.
(295, 298, and 343)
1854: Amotape
A Witness Describes Simón Rodriguez’s Fa
rewell to the World
As soon as he saw the Amotape priest enter, Don Simón sat up in bed, waved the priest to the only chair in the room and started making something like a speech on materialism. The priest sat there stupefied, and scarcely had the heart to pronounce a few words trying to interrupt him …
(298)
1855: New York
Whitman
For lack of a publisher, the poet pays out of his own pocket for the publication of Leaves of Grass.
Waldo Emerson, theologist of Democracy, gives the book his blessing, but the press attacks it as prosaic and obscene.
In Walt Whitman’s grandiose elegy multitudes and machines roar. The poet embraces God and sinners, he embraces the Indians and the pioneers who wipe them out, he embraces slave and master, victim and executioner. All crime is redeemed in the ecstasy of the New World, America the muscular and the subjugator, with no debt to pay to the past, winds of progess that make man the comrade of man and unchain virility and beauty.
(358)
1855: New York
Melville
The bearded sailor is a writer without readers. Four years ago he published the story of a captain who pursues a white whale through the seas of the universe, bloodthirsty harpoon in pursuit of Evil, and no one paid it much attention.
In these times of euphoria, in these North American lands in full expansion, Herman Melville’s voice sings out of tune. His books are mistrustful of Civilization, which attributes to the savage the role of Demon and forces him to play it—as Captain Ahab does with Moby Dick in the immensity of the ocean. His books reject the only and obligatory Truth that certain men, believing themselves chosen, impose on the others. His books have doubts about Vice and Virtue, shadows of the same nothingness, and teach that the sun is the only lamp worthy of confidence.