The Writer and the World

by V. S. Naipaul

  Twenty years after her death she found legitimacy. Her small embalmed body—she was five feet two, and at her death she was wasted—now rests at the Duarte family vault in the Recoleta Cemetery, the upper-class necropolis of Buenos Aires. The stone and marble avenues of the mimic town are full of the great names of Argentina, or names which, if the country had been better built, would have been great, but can be seen now only as part of a pretentious, failed past. This legitimacy, this dignity, was all that the girl from Los Toldos wanted; it has taken her an insurrection, an unravelling of the state, to achieve it.

  In the early Peronist days she was promoted as a saint, and she is now above Peronism and politics. She is her own cult; she offers protection to those who believe in her. Where there are no reliable institutions or codes or law, no secular assurances, people need faith and magic. And Nature in Argentina is overwhelming: men can feel abandoned in that land of great mountains and big blank spaces. (What desert and scrub and mountains separate the northern province of La Rioja from the softer but still limitless land of the pampa: La Rioja, site of old, lost hope, the town founded in sub-Andean desolation late in the sixteenth century, after Mexico and Peru, as another of the Spanish bases for the search for El Dorado.) Desolation always seems close in the Argentine vastness: how did men come here, how have they endured?

  In that desolation cults grow, and they can have a feel of the ancient world. Like the cult of the woman known as La Difunta Correa, The Deceased Correa. At some undated time she was crossing the desert on foot. She was starving; there was no water in the desert; and she died. But her baby (or the baby she gave birth to before she died) was found alive, sucking at the breast of the dead woman. Now there are little roadside shrines to her memory, and in these shrines people leave bottles of water. The water evaporates: it has been drunk by the Difunta Correa. La Difunta Correa tomó el agua: the simple miracle is ceaselessly renewed.

  Eva Perón is that kind of figure now, without dates or politics. And offerings are made at the Duarte vault in the Recoleta. The sarcophagus cannot be seen, but it is known to be there. On the morning I went, white lilies were tied with a white scarf to the black rails, and there was a single faded red rose, unspeakably moving. On the ground, unprotected, was a white mantilla in a plastic wrapper. A woman came with a gift of flowers. She was a woman of the people, with the chunky body of someone whose diet was too starchy. She had come from far, from Mendoza, at the other end of the pampa.

  (Mendoza, the wine region at the foot of the Andes, where in the bright southern light and clear air the imported trees of Europe, the willow and the plane, grow gigantically; and the view on one side is always bounded by the grey-blue wall of the mountains. Not the true snowcapped Andes, though: these will appear one day, very far away, apparently unsupported, like a faint white overprinting in the middle sky, giving a new idea of size, awakening wonder not only at the sixteenth-century conquistadores who came this way, but also at the Incas, who, without the wheel, extended their rule so far south, and whose irrigation channels the cultivators of Mendoza still use.)

  The lady from Mendoza had a sick daughter—a spastic or a polio sufferer: it wasn’t clear. “Hace quince años hice la promesa.” “I made a vow fifteen years ago.”) In 1962, that is, when Eva Perón had been dead for ten years and Perón was still in exile, with no hope of return; when the embalmed body of Eva was presumed lost. Now the miracle had occurred. The body was there; the daughter was well enough again for the vow to be fulfilled.

  She placed the flowers on the ground; she went still for a little while, contemplating the rails and the blank vault; and then she became herself again, brisk and ready to go. She said, “Ya cumplí. There, I’ve done it.”

  6 ARGENTINA AND THE IDEA OF BLOOD

  IN ARGENTINA in March 1977, at the time of the military government’s “dirty war” against the guerrillas, I found myself taken off a long-distance bus by the police one day, and held for some hours as a suspected guerrilla.

  This was in the far north of the country—an older, more tropical Argentina, deep in the continent, and still with the feel of the Spanish empire: wide valleys beside the Andes, miles and miles of sugar-cane, an Indian population. While in Buenos Aires I was an obvious stranger, here in the north I could pass. (And sometimes more than pass. Once, in a small town in the Córdoba hills, during an earlier trip, a middle-aged, Spanish-looking man had called out with great seriousness to me across a café: “You! You look like a pistolero.” A gangster.)

  I was staying this time in the old colonial town of Salta. One morning I took a bus for the town of Jujuy, in the province to the north, on the border with Bolivia. Just outside Salta the bus stopped, perhaps at the provincial boundary. Indian policemen in dark-blue uniforms came in and asked for identity papers. Argentines are trained from childhood to carry their papers. I had none; I had left my passport in the hotel in Salta. So—with my gangster’s face momentarily of interest to the other passengers, mainly Indian, before the bus went on—I was taken off.

  I went with the two policemen to the small white concrete shed or hut at the side of the road. This shed was plain outside and inside. A third policeman was there, standing behind a chest-high counter; and I could see, on a table on his side of the counter, and close to his hand, the black-and-grey metal of a machine gun lying flat. There was nothing else on that table.

  I was with serious people. They listened, but without much interest, to what I had to say. They talked among themselves; then they held consultations with someone else on the telephone or on a radio system. After a while I was taken—in what vehicle or by what ways I cannot remember: I made no notes about the events of this day—to a small low building standing by itself in a sunstruck patch of bush somewhere. This, though it didn’t look it, was a police post or sub-post.

  The men who had brought me there went away—rather like the morning bus to Jujuy. Salta began to feel far away. My idea of time changed; I learned to wait. I gave my details once again. The policeman who wrote them down then began to telephone. This wasn’t easy; the Argentine telephone service was very bad. Telephone lines, legitimate and illegitimate, hung over the streets and Belle Époque buildings of central Buenos Aires like gigantic cobwebs; the Indian policeman was trying to tap into the cobwebbed city, from a patch of bush a thousand miles away. He dialled and dialled, sometimes talking, sometimes not. His companion never took his eyes off me: smiling eyes, civil now, but biding their time.

  I sat on a bench against a smooth plastered wall. I looked at the bush and the light outside. I smoked the pipe I had brought with me. After some time I wanted to use a lavatory. I was told there were no facilities in the little building. The policeman with the smiling eyes pointed to a spot in the bush some distance away: I was to go there. He said, “If you try to run away, I’ll shoot you.” With the smile, it sounded like a joke; but I knew that it wasn’t.

  And then—unexpectedly—a call came through on the telephone: no one of my description was on any guerrilla list. I could go. The senior policeman said, with something like friendliness, “It was your pipe that saved you. Did you know that? That pipe made me feel that you really were a foreigner.”

  It was an African pipe, a small black Tanganyika meerschaum I had bought in Uganda eleven years before: I had noticed that it had interested them. But all the time I had been trusting to my appearance, my broken Spanish, my Spanish accent. It was only now that I understood that to these Indian policemen of the far north Argentina would have been full of foreigners. So it was only at the moment of release, coming out of the slight shock, my disturbed sense of time, that I began to understand how serious my position had been. In the city of Tucumán, just a few days before, I had stood with a small group of townspeople watching policemen with machine guns below their raincoats getting into their unmarked cars. Like a kind of country-house shooting party; but in Tucumán the dirty war was especially dirty, and Tucumán was just to the south of Salta.

  I was free,
but I had no idea where I was. Some little feeling was with me that the policemen should take me back to where they had picked me up, but I didn’t put it to them. They showed me where the road was. I was walking in that direction when it occurred to me that I still had no “papers,” and could be picked up again. I went back to the little building and asked the senior policeman for a certificate of some sort. He understood at once; he was almost pleased to be asked. He sat down at his table, put a narrow sheet of headed paper in his heavy old typewriter and began to type, at a speed which surprised me, a constancia policial, a police “certification.” The language was formal: bearer had been detained, but had “recovered his liberty,” because his detention was “not of interest,” por no interesar su detención. With this I went and waited on the road. A young Italian immigrant driving a white pick-up truck gave me a lift back to Salta.

  I gave up the idea of further travel in the north. The next day I started back for Buenos Aires; within a few days I had left the country. Over the next two or three weeks I wrote the article I had gone out to Argentina to write. But I was unhappy with the shape of what I had written; and then for three or four weeks more, trying to put it right, I found myself writing the same article again and again in more or less the same way. I became fogged, and laid the article aside.

  Two years later, when I looked again at what I had written, I found it fair enough, and wondered at my confusion. It was as though, at the time, some writer’s instinct had wanted me to keep the emotion of that day to myself, and not to expose it even indirectly in an article. Later that year I began to write a long imaginative work set in a country in Central Africa. I transferred, when the time came, the emotion of Argentina, and even the isolated police building in the bush of Jujuy, to my Central African setting. When the book was finished, the unpleasantness at Jujuy dropped out of my consciousness; I forgot about it; though it had marked the end of a five-year period of intermittent travel in Argentina, and though I wasn’t to go to Argentina again for fourteen years, the day in Jujuy formed no part of my Argentine memories.

  But, just as sensation returns to a jaw when a local anaesthetic wears off, so, more than ten years later, when the African book had worked itself out of my system and I could no longer be sure of details of a narrative I once knew by heart, so the day at Jujuy began to come back. And—without the shock of the day itself, and the disturbed sense of time, which kept me quite calm right through—I can be sickened at the thought of how close I was then to the dirtiness of the dirty war. Thousands of men and women were disposed of at that time. Torture was routine: it was there in the smiling eyes of the junior policeman. Only my little African pipe raised a doubt in the mind of the senior policeman—and by the end of the year, when I was deep in my Central African book, I was to stop smoking, and lay aside that pipe and all the others.

  AND I NEVER thought the Argentine guerrillas had a good enough cause. Some were people of the left; some were Peronists, campaigning for the return of the corrupt and old Perón; some wanted Peronism—a mixture of nationalism and socialism and anti-Americanism—without Perón. Some I thought had no cause at all; and some were simple gangsters. They were a mystery to me in 1972, when I first went to Argentina. They were educated, secure, middle-class people, perhaps the first full generation of secure and educated people after the great migrations from Europe earlier in the century, and after the depression of the 1930s. Yet, barely arrived at privilege, they were—as it seemed to me—trying to pull their world down. What had driven them to their cause? There would have been the element of mimicry, the wish not to be left out of the political current of the 1960s. “What the students say in America, they want to make concrete here”—I was told this in 1972 by a woman whose guerrilla nephew had been killed by the police: the young man had taken his revolution more seriously than the American students whose equal he wanted to be. Another, younger woman told me how a friend of hers had made his decision. They had gone to the cinema to see Sacco and Vanzetti; afterwards her friend had said, “I feel ashamed at not being a guerrilla.”

  There was also the old Argentine idea of revolution. This held much more than suggestions of upheaval and chaos. It was the idea that it was always possible to put an end to any particular political mess and make a fresh start. Sábat, the Buenos Aires cartoonist, put it like this: “Every time a president is deposed they raise the flag and sing the national anthem.” Robert Cox, the editor of the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, said, “When there is a coup everyone is exhilarated and walks the next morning with a spring in his step.”

  For a film-maker of Italian origin this idea of revolution went back to the early nineteenth century and the bloody wars of independence. He didn’t think it was funny; he thought it contained “the mystical Spanish idea of blood.” I thought the words were too grand; but I felt after some time in the country that they went some way to explaining the Argentine obsession with torture.

  Before I had gone to Argentina I had been sent gruesome documents about torture. But some of the people I went to see in Buenos Aires didn’t seem as frantic as the messages they had sent out; some seemed rather surprised that I should be taking the matter so seriously. A young Trot-skyist lawyer said in a matter-of-fact way, “Torture is pretty important here.” When he saw that I thought his tone too casual, he said, with a little reflex of irritation, like a parent wearily encouraging a difficult child, “Torture will disappear only with a workers’ government and the downfall of the bourgeoisie.” A Peronist trade union leader, sitting in his well-appointed office, said in the soft and reasoned way for which he was known, “A world without torture is an ideal world.” Torture was going to continue; but there was good torture and bad torture. Bad torture was what was done by the enemies of the people; good torture was what, when their turn came, the enemies of the people got from the protectors of the people.

  This was in 1972, when almost everyone was Peronist, and people were shouting about bad military torture, and keeping quiet about the good torture they were looking forward to when Perón came back.

  Robert Cox said, “You can be fooled. You can run a campaign about someone represented to you as an innocent victim of the police. And then, at his graveside, there are great tributes paid to all the acts of violence he took part in.”

  Even with the element of mimicry, the guerrilla idea in Argentina had little in common with the student theatre of Paris and the United States. If revolution in Argentina didn’t absolutely contain the mystical idea of blood, it held the idea of physical punishment for people on the wrong side. High political principles ran into this simpler idea of personal outrage, the personal quarrel, the blood feud: the denial first of the other man’s cause and then of his humanity.

  IN 1880 THERE would have been open sewers and unpaved streets in central Buenos Aires. The population then was 300,000. By 1915, after “the Conquest of the Desert,” the wiping out of the pampa Indians and the seizure of their immense territory, and after the great European migration, the population of the city was 1,500,000; and the great Belle Époque Parisian city had been built, with the names of architects and engineers carved in stone or set in metal letters to one side of tall doorways. The elegance barely lasted. Just thirty years later, in 1945, the Per-onist revolution began; and twenty-five years after that, the guerrillas appeared.

  By 1977 the guerrillas had been all but destroyed. Now, fourteen years on, in a city showing the signs of many years of neglect, I went to talk to Ricardo about the movement. Ricardo had been a sympathizer.

  He lived in an apartment in a run-down pre-1914 block in a central area. The flat was of its period, with a separate servants’ entrance and minute servant rooms; the front rooms were light, the back rooms were very dark. Ricardo kept no servant. He was like a man camping in the old apartment. Layers of paint had coarsened the detail of ceilings and architraves and skirting boards.

  He was in his early forties, middle-class by education. He seemed still disturbed by his coun
try’s recent history and was as yet without a settled profession. He was of the generation of the guerrillas, and had in fact gone to the school where some of the more important guerrillas had been educated. He had known them from a distance: when he was fifteen, they were seventeen.

  The school, the National College of Buenos Aires, was famous; it was, Ricardo said, the best school in the country. It had been started by the Jesuits in the eighteenth century, and run by them until they were expelled from the Spanish empire. “When modern Argentina started, the school was reshaped by a Frenchman according to the French encyclopedic education of the times.” In 1966, at that school, Ricardo heard some of the senior boys singing “the fascist hymn, the Mussolini hymn,” in the changing room after the swimming period. “They were pretty serious about it.” This was at the time of another military take-over: the internal, back-and-forth Argentine conflict going on, after the populism and economic mess of the Perón revolution.

  Ricardo began to understand that in Argentina he had a fight on his hands. Something else added to his political education. “In the late fifties and sixties there was in Argentina this movement called Catholic Action, Acción Católica. It was a militant organization within the church. Two priests from Acción Católica were counsellors at our school. They were just two blocks away from the school. The Montonero guerrillas, the Peronist guerrillas, started because of the influence of those two priests. One of them was called Father Mujica. He was killed by para-military forces some years later, in 1974.”