The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  The businessman: “Utopia is the worst thing for a man. He is old at thirty. That happened to us.”

  The banker: “All the productive infrastructure was built between 1850 and 1930 and was based on existing British investments. Very little was done afterwards. A power plant was finished after 1945; that was the most important addition. No new roads, no new bridges. The country was living like a retired person on a pension.”

  And with the new state, a new glory. Football, introduced by British railway workers, became the Uruguayan obsession. Sábat: “Our provincialism was backed up by our football—a proof of greatness that had no relation with reality. In 1924 in Paris and in 1928 in Amsterdam we were the Olympic champions. We were the world champions in Montevideo in 1930 and in Rio in 1950. And we thought: If we are world champions in football, then we must be world champions in everything.”

  In the park named after Batlle, the great football stadium, built in 1930 (together with the Legislative Palace) for the centenary of Uruguay’s independence, and named after Batlle, still draws the crowds. The newspapers still devote half their news space to football. But football has decayed with the economy; and now, like the cattle, the better footballers have to be sold off to richer countries as soon as they are reared.

  THERE are many jokes in Uruguay about the bureaucracy; and they all are true. Out of a workforce of just over a million, 250,000 are employed by the state. PLUNA, the Uruguayan airline, used to have one thousand employees and one functioning airplane. The people at ANCAP, the state oil company, tried to get to the office before it opened: there were more employees than chairs.

  In 1958 the Ministry of Public Health recruited fifteen hundred new staff. In 1959 in Public Works there was one messenger for every six civil servants. In Telephones and Electricity there are forty-five grades of civil servants. Nothing is done by post; everything requires a personal visit. The service is slow; but the public, scattered among the messengers and the sleeping police dogs in the foyer, is uncomplaining: many of them are civil servants from other departments, with time on their hands.

  It is a kind of ideal: government offices that are like clubs for public and staff, a whole country living the life of a commune, work and leisure flowering together, everyone, active and inactive, a pensioner of the state. But Uruguay still lives off meat and wool; and Montevideo, which contains more than a third of the country’s population, is an artificial metropolis. The padding of the civil service, which began thirty years ago, in the time of wealth, disguises unemployment and urban pur-poselessness. Everyone knows this, but too many people benefit: the whole state has been led into this conspiracy against itself. “Everyone is pension-minded,” the businessman says. And even the left-wing slogans of protest against the military government can be cautious and practical: Paz Salario Libertad [Peace Wages Liberty].

  The girls in blue nylon coats in Telephones and Electricity earn about 120 dollars a month. In summer, from December to March, they work from seven to one. They go off then to a second job. Or they go to the beach. Montevideo is built along a beach; all roads south end in white sand and a bay.

  And this is where Uruguayans regularly lose all sense of crisis, and the will to action is weakened: on the too accessible beach, in the resort developments just a few minutes outside Montevideo where many modest people have summer houses amid pines and dunes, and in Punta del Este, one of Uruguay’s economic disasters, built mainly in the 1950s with loans from the Mortgage Bank, the satellite resort town of the artificial metropolis.

  Everyone rejects Batllismo, but after sixty years everyone in Uruguay has been made by it. The resort life is all they know; its crumbling away leaves them confused. “Spiritually,” the journalist said, “we feel we have gone back.” Spiritually? “I don’t like to be stressed permanently.” He was a two-house man; but he had to do two jobs, one with the government; and his wife was doing two jobs. And cars were expensive, because of the 300 per cent tax. A new Volkswagen cost 8,000 dollars; even a 1955 Rover cost 3,500 dollars. “We won’t progress. What’s progress, though. America? That’s consuming and stressing, keeping up with the Joneses. We don’t have that kind of shit here, if you pardon the expression.”

  But there was the high price of cars.

  “I’ll tell you about Uruguay in one sentence,” the architect said to me on my first evening in Montevideo. “The last Jaguar was imported in 1955.”

  These are withdrawal symptoms and they add up to a kind of spiritual distress: Montevideo, spreading along its beach, needs the motorcar. Without the motorcar, tracts of the city will have to be abandoned, as the Prado park has been abandoned. All that resort life, all that modernity of which the Uruguayans were until recently so proud, depends on consumer goods which Uruguay bought from more “stressed” countries and—wasting the talent of two generations in a padded civil service—never learned to make.

  The antique cars of Montevideo—pre-1955, Citroëns, baby Morrises and Austins, Fords and Chevrolets of the 1930s, and other names now abandoned or superseded: Hupmobile, Willys-Overland Whippet, Dodge Brothers, Hudson—are not as gay as they first appear, part of the resort life. The country is under siege. The simplest things are smuggled in by lorry from Argentina; the supplies of modern civilization are running out.

  Uruguayans say that they are a European nation, that they have always had their back to the rest of South America. It was their great error, and is part of their failure. Their habits of wealth made them, profoundly a colonial people, educated but intellectually null, consumers, parasitic on the culture and technology of others.

  THE TUPAMAROS were destroyers. They had no programme; they were like people provoking a reaction, challenging the hidden enemy to declare himself. In the end they picked on the armed forces and were speedily destroyed. “The Tupamaros were not the beginning of a revolution,” Sábat says. “They were the last whisper of Batllismo. They were parricides, engaged in a kind of kamikaze. In Uruguay now, everybody, whatever slogans he shouts, is either a parricide or a reactionary.”

  There is no middle way. Political attitudes have grown simpler and harder; and it is impossible not to take sides. On the last Saturday in October a student in the engineering faculty of the university blew himself up while making a bomb. The army closed the university—independent until that day—and arrested everybody. Parricide or reactionary, left-wing or right-wing, each side now finds in the other the enemy he needs. Each side now assigns a destructive role to the other; and, as in Chile, people grow into their roles.

  Those who can, get out. They queue for passports at the rear entrance of the pink-walled Foreign Ministry, formerly the Santos Palace (built in 1880, the basin of the fountain in the hall carved from a single block of Carrara marble). In October there were reports of people queueing all night. At Carrasco Airport the other day someone chalked on a wall: “El último que salga que apague la luz.” (“The last person to leave must put out the light.”)

  4 THE BROTHELS BEHIND THE GRAVEYARD

  May–July 1974

  THE PROPHECY—according to some old Argentine book of prophecies, which I often heard about but never saw—was that Perón would be hanged by his followers in the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in downtown Buenos Aires. But Perón died with his legend intact. “MURIO”: “He is dead.” The headline filled half the front page of Crónica, a popular Buenos Aires newspaper; and there was no need to give the name.

  He was in his seventy-ninth year and in the ninth month of his third presidential term; and his legend had lasted for nearly thirty years. He was the army man who had moved out of the code of his caste and shaken up the old colonial agricultural society of Argentina; he had identified the enemies of the poor; he had created the trade unions. He had given a brutal face to the brutish land of estancias and polo and brothels and very cheap servants. And his legend, as the unique revolutionary, survived the incompetence and plunder of his early rule; it survived his overthrow in 1955 and the seventeen years of exile that
followed; it survived the mob killings that attended his triumphant return last year; and it survived the failure of his last months in office.

  The failure was obvious. Perón could not control the Argentina he had called into being twenty years before. He had identified the cruelties of the society, and yet he had made that necessary task seem irresponsible: he had not been able to reorganize the society he had undermined. And perhaps that task of reorganization was beyond the capacities of any leader, however creative. Politics reflect a society and a land. Argentina is a land of plunder, a new land, virtually peopled in this century. It remains a land to be plundered; and its politics can be nothing but the politics of plunder.

  Everyone in Argentina understands and accepts this, and in the end Perón could only offer himself as a guarantee of his government’s purpose, could only offer his words. In the end he had become his name alone, a presence, above it all, above the people who acted in his name, above the inflation and the shortages and the further steep decline of the peso, the faction fights, the daily kidnappings and guerrilla shoot-outs, the strong rumours of plunder in high places: above the Argentina whose brutality and frenzies he had divined and exploited, the Argentina he had returned to save, and which he now leaves behind him.

  He was very old, and perhaps his cause had become more personal than he knew: to return to his homeland and to be rehabilitated. He made his peace with the armed forces, who had previously stripped him of his rank. He made his peace with the Church, against whom, in his second term, he had warred: he was to die holding the rosary given him by Pope Paul. He came back from exile a softened man, even philosophical, with ideas about ecology and the environment and the unity of Latin America (“By 2000 we shall be united or dominated”). But these ideas were remote from the anxieties of his followers and the power conflicts of the country. And towards the end he seemed to have recognized that the country was beyond his control.

  Two years ago, when the military still ruled, everyone was Peronist, even Maoist priests and Trotskyist guerrillas. Perón, or his name, united all who wanted to see an end to military rule. But, inevitably, when Perón began to rule, it became necessary to distinguish the true Peronists from the “infiltrators.” And the man who had returned as a national leader, as the “conductor” of all the warring elements of the movement that carried his name, began once again, like the old Perón, to detect enemies. There were enemies on the Left, among the guerrilla groups who had helped to bring him back to power. There were enemies on the Right. So many people were seen, as the months passed, “sabotaging the current political process.” Week by week the semi-official El Caudillo identified new enemies. So many enemies: towards the end it was possible to detect in Perón’s words the helpless, aggrieved tone of his writings after his overthrow in 1955.

  On June io, Perón’s wife, the Vice President, in a speech printed the next day in full-page advertisements in the newspapers, spoke of the speculators and hoarders and other “executioners of the nation” who were responsible for the shortages and the high prices. Perón couldn’t do it all, she said; and she wondered whether the country wasn’t failing Perón. On June n, Perón’s former secretary, companion and soothsayer, López Rega, now Minister for Social Welfare, spoke more clearly. He told a group of provincial governors: “If General Perón leaves the country before his mission is accomplished, he won’t be going alone. His wife will go with him, and your humble servant [este servidor].”

  Perón, Rega said, couldn’t do it all, and he shouldn’t be expected to. “The philosophy of Justicialism isn’t only a matter of shouting Viva Perón. It means taking to heart the meaning of this philosophy, which is simply that we should all, without question, comply with the objectives of greatness and fulfillment so that we might have a happy nation.” Meaningless words—the translation is the best I can do; but after the identification of enemies, it was perhaps the only way Peronism could be defined.

  The wife had spoken, the secretary had spoken. The next day Perón himself spoke. Abruptly, at a meeting where he had been expected to talk of other things, he announced that he was fed up and disheartened, and that if he didn’t get more cooperation he was willing to hand over the government to people who thought they could do better.

  The trade unions responded immediately. They asked their members to stop work. In the Córdoba Hills, where I was, the bus drivers didn’t even know what it was all about or where the action was; they only knew, strike-hardened union men, that the buses weren’t going to run after midday. The action, as it turned out, was confined to Buenos Aires, where in the Plaza de Mayo a great union rally was swiftly conjured up. Perón addressed the rally and received their applause; he pronounced himself satisfied, and it was assumed that he wasn’t after all going to leave the country to stew in its own juice. The whole cabinet resigned that evening; one or two ministers gave grave interviews. It seemed at least that some treachery was going to be exposed and that some heads were going to roll. But no heads rolled; the whole cabinet was reappointed.

  It was a curious event: so well prepared, so dramatic in its effect, and then entirely without sequel. The newspapers, full of crisis one day, reporting the entire republic in a state of tension, the next day quietly forgot about it. Newspapers are like that in Argentina. It was Perón’s last demagogic act, his last political flourish. And no one will know what, if anything, lay behind it, whether illness and death put an end to some new development, something that was going to make clear the purpose and plans of the new government. It was what people were waiting for. No one knew what was happening in Argentina; and some people were beginning to feel that there might be nothing to know.

  The mystery isn’t the mystery of Perón alone, but of Argentina, where the political realities, of plunder and the animosities engendered by plunder, have for so long been clouded by rhetoric. The rhetoric fools no one. But in a country where government has never been open and intellectual resources are scant, the rhetoric of a regime is usually all that survives to explain it. Argentina has the apparatus of an educated, open society. There are newspapers and magazines and universities and publishing houses; there is even a film industry. But the country has as yet no idea of itself. Streets and avenues are named after presidents and generals, but there is no art of historical analysis; there is no art of biography. There is legend and antiquarian romance, but no real history. There are only annals, lists of rulers, chronicles of events.

  THE SHARPEST political commentator in Argentina is Mariano Gron-dona. He appears on television, and is said to be of a good Argentine family. At the end of May, Gente, a popular illustrated weekly, interviewed Grondona and asked him to analyze the events of the past year: the year of the disintegration of Peronism as a national movement, the year of the detection and casting out of enemies. Gente considered Gron-dona’s views important enough to be spread over five pages.

  To understand Argentine history, Grondona said, it was necessary to break it up into epochs, épocas. Since independence in 1810 there had been seven epochs. Seven republics, almost: Argentina had to be seen as having a French-style history, a Latin history. The Latin mentality worked from principles; it exhausted one set of principles and moved through upheaval to a new set. Anglo-Saxons, more pragmatic, didn’t define their principles. They were therefore spared periods of chaos; but at the same time they didn’t enjoy “those magnificent moments in which everything is remade [esos instantes magníficos en que todo recomienza].”

  The fifth epoch of Argentine history, from 1945 to 1955, was the epoch of Peronism. The sixth epoch, from 1955 to 1973, was the military epoch, the epoch of the exclusion of Peronism. The seventh epoch, beginning in 1973, was the epoch of revived institutions, the epoch of the return of Peronism. This last epoch, though only a year old, had been confusing; but it would be less so if it were divided into etapas, stages. Perón, like Mao, lived “in stages.” Peronism had first to pass through a “smiling” stage, when it was looking for power, then an embattled sta
ge, when it was fighting for power, and then an apparently established stage, when it had achieved power. A number of Peronists had remained stuck at the second, embattled stage; that was why they had to be got rid of.

  There is no question, in Grondona’s analysis, of people either acting badly or being badly treated. The people who had come to grief during the Peronist year simply hadn’t understood this Argentine business of épocas and etapas. Some of them had got their etapas badly mixed up—like the dentist who had become President as Perón’s nominee, but had then been deemed a traitor and dismissed.

  Other difficult events of the year became clearer once it was understood that an etapa itself consisted of great days, jornadas; and there were jornadas, apparently chaotic, that could be broken up into phases, fases. “We are accustomed to this pattern of épocas and jornadas … There will be other epochs and other great days. I am convinced of that. All that we can ask of this one is that it should fulfil its historical duty.”

  This is how Grondona ends, fitting a sentence of Argentine rhetoric to an account of a year’s murderous power struggle. To the outsider, Grondona, with his nimbleness and zest, is curiously detached: he might be speaking of a country far away. It is hard to imagine, from his account, that people are still being killed and kidnapped in the streets, or that in June the army was fighting guerrillas in Tucumán, or that newspapers, under the general heading “Guerrillerismo,” carry reports of the previous day’s guerrilla happenings. There is detachment and an unconscious cynicism in Grondona’s chronicle. The political life of the country is seen as little more than a struggle for political power. There seems to be no higher good. And—what is more alarming, more revealing of Argentina—the chronicle is offered to the readers of Gente as to people who know no higher good.