The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  I said, “I met Mujica in 1972. I didn’t know he was so important. I thought he was a very vain man.”

  Ricardo said, “Vanity plays a big part in this story. There is a word in Spanish, soberbia. It doesn’t strictly mean pride. ‘Arrogance’ is better. Mujica had this soberbia. He came from an old Argentine family. Everybody knew that, and he did live in a good area. But sometimes arrogance and shame are brothers. Or arrogance and guilt. Many people who participated in this movement we are talking about felt guilt about the part played by their families in the version of Argentine history that was fashionable at that time.”

  When he was twenty, Ricardo managed to travel out of Argentina for some months.

  “I left the country working on a cargo ship, looking for adventure, looking for trouble, trying to shape a personality.” He got to Paris in May 1970. The evening he arrived he went for a walk, and he found he had walked into a riot. “Those people were celebrating May 1968, and there were policemen on one side and rioters on the other. It was very surprising to me.” It made him more aware of his rage and frustration and passivity in Argentina. A short time afterwards he read in the newspaper of the kidnapping (and subsequent murder) by Montonero guerrillas of former President Aramburu, the Argentine general who had deposed Perón and had ruled as president from 1955 to 1958.

  He went back to Argentina a changed man. The military were still in power, and he was ready then to be on the side of the guerrillas.

  What did the guerrillas want?

  He said, as though surprised that I should ask, “To destroy the army. Peripheric countries like ours receive very clearly what is thought in the northern hemisphere. ‘Liberation’ was the word. Cuba was recent. Chile was going on, Allende ’s Chile. Vietnam was going on too.”

  But why, since they wished to destroy the army, did they complain so much abroad that the army wanted to destroy them?

  After all these years, his passion was still the passion of the feud, in which the other side had no cause at all.

  He said, “They were using guns acquired with taxpayers’ money. And they were using torture illegally. They were delinquents, in fact, delinquents protected by the state.”

  “Delinquent”—the military used this word as well, to describe the guerrillas.

  But then, in spite of what he felt about the Argentine army, Ricardo began to have doubts about the Montoneros. They wanted Perón, the revolutionary of the 1940s, to come back; but Perón was now very old and surrounded by crooks.

  “Their idea of Perón was not precise. The second point that was hard for me to swallow was they said they represented the interests of the working class, with which it was evident they had very little contact.” But he didn’t give up the guerrillas right away. “They were not trying to fool you. I think they were honest people. They were people I trusted because I knew them. And at the same time they had success. They had succeeded in building an organization out of nothing, and they had defied the police and the army, and they were there. So they must have had something right: they had not failed. Faced with that success, all I had were my intellectual doubts, which seemed not very relevant.”

  And there was the excitement of action itself, of secret meetings, of running away in a dozen different directions when the police appeared, and coming together again according to a pre-arranged plan somewhere else. Still, his doubts about the Montoneros grew.

  “When we were in the crowds sometimes—in fact, every time—they showed pride in their own crimes.” Kidnapping and murder, and bank robberies. The ideology wasn’t always clear. The Montoneros said they were Peronist. Why, then, did they murder Rucci, the Peronist trade union leader? “That was one crime they had problems with. They could hardly tell people they had done it.”

  Paris in 1970 had given Ricardo, passive and frustrated, an idea of the possibility of action. But the conflicts of Argentina were not as formal and regulated as the celebratory riots of Paris, with the police on one side and the students on the other, and everybody going home afterwards. Argentina was full of hatreds that weren’t all clear, couldn’t always be reduced to principles. Argentina was much bloodier, full of real murder. Ricardo felt himself sinking into a moral and political mess. He had not yet undertaken any big action; he hadn’t been compromised in that way; and it was possible for him to detach himself from the guerrillas.

  He said, “Argentina made people dream too much. When the dreams fell apart the response was anger and looking for the guilty. Many of the guerrillas were grandchildren of immigrants. And the army men, too. There were many family links between the two sides, because it was basically a fight within a certain social segment of society. They were not big landowners; they were not working-class. They were people who expected a certain social development based on education, and they were beginning to feel that for various reasons the doors were closing.”

  There was a time, hard to imagine now, in the early part of the century, when Argentina, with all its rich, empty land, its conquered “desert,” all its new pampa wealth, thought itself the equal of the United States; and it drew the same kind of European immigrant. But Argentina was a cheat; it was never a land for pioneers; it was a colonial agricultural economy on a vast scale, built around great estancias or estates. Argentina didn’t require pioneers; it required only hands. In the United States in the late 1960s the grandchildren of immigrants, playing at revolution, were really only making their way in an open and rich and many-sided country. In Argentina the revolt of that same generation, of more or less similar antecedents, was more desperate.

  The revolt had a religious side. I wanted to know more about that, and early one morning Ricardo took me to see a survivor of the 1970s. We met in the man’s office in central Buenos Aires, before it opened for business. The lift didn’t work; the turn-of-the century panelling was dim and tarnished. Like Ricardo’s apartment, this business suite from a grander time seemed to be a place that was being camped in.

  The man we had come to meet was biggish, in his forties, plump now. He was in a brown suit. Just as Ricardo gave off melancholy, so this man suggested heaviness and dullness. He did a dull job in his dim office; he had a white, expressionless face. It was hard to imagine him as a man with a gun.

  His talk was abstract from the start.

  He said, “The idea of bearing witness, of organizing a way of life [un proyecto de vida] around one’s concern for others, that doesn’t come only from a Catholic source. It also comes from the tradition of the Left.”

  The Catholicism was in his background. At his public school, where there were nationalist and fascist and leftist ideas, he found his Catholic instincts coinciding with the ideas of the Left. What ideas, especially? “The idea of the New Man, the idea of the revolutionary as an identity, the revolutionary confronting injustice. If in the Judaeo-Christian culture it’s one of the commandments to love your neighbour—which also means that God is in the other man—then I cannot be indifferent to the miseries of this man, and I mean not only his material miseries, but also his cultural and spiritual miseries. That’s part of the Gospel. It coincided at that moment with left-wing ideology—Che Guevara, the New Man, the Cuban revolutionary tradition, the Marxist revolutionary tradition. The New Man is a cultural attitude. It detects, opposes, and denounces the prevailing culture”—the words came out like that: the musical sounds of Spanish can beguile people into using more words than they need, and more and more musical words—“when that culture is seen as a mechanism of domination.”

  I wanted to know the stages by which his Catholic and New-Man faith, so large and abstract, had narrowed down to guerrilla actions. These actions were specific; they could sometimes appear—even to someone like Ricardo—to be a matter of mysterious enmities.

  He didn’t give the kind of answer I was hoping for. He said, “It’s like a process of conversion, conversion in a political way. And it goes very fast. You arrive at a vision that you can alter history, that history doesn’t follow its ow
n fixed course. And I made my commitment. I gave up my career, my family, my social life, and began doing what I had to do. You also develop the clear sense of belonging to a group, a new group, different from the one you were given by your parents. Though my family were tolerant and very supportive.

  “The idea of commitment contained the idea of physical risk. It’s simple. If you are doing what is correct, you think that you are being correct, and you have a regard for what you do. At a certain level of action you are trying to cope with your own anguish and solitude. But in my case what was most important was not the action itself, but the self-esteem that came to me from the action. The self-esteem came to me from doing the correct thing.”

  I said, “This is a religious attitude. It’s almost priestly.”

  The man in the brown suit said, “It was.”

  Ricardo said to me, “You find it strange? That’s because you are not a Christian. The psychological scenario had links with this cultural tradition.”

  Footsteps sounded on the solid marble steps, and a woman came into the outer office: a secretary, getting ready to start the working day.

  The man in the brown suit said, “Our Catholic upbringing made us militant. That’s where it started, in the idea of service and discipline.” And then—someone else coming into the office, and Ricardo and I getting ready to leave—he stood up and said, “What resulted was sometimes a perversion.” It was, at last, like an acknowledgement of the confusion, and the calamity, that had befallen his cause.

  When we were in the street Ricardo said, “The guy”—Ricardo used the word neutrally—“was presenting himself to you as a defeated man, part of a defeated generation.”

  I wished, though, I could have got him to talk in a more concrete way. Perhaps, because his cause had failed so completely, he didn’t want to talk of real people and real events. But it was also possible that his abstractions represented the way he thought. The principles by which he had tried to live were his own and were what he had to hold on to. The action (protagonismo, protagonism, was the word he used) into which those principles had led him had been worked out by others, to whom he had entrusted himself, and was incidental to his higher cause.

  Ricardo and I had coffee in a students’ café.

  Ricardo said, “I am seduced by rigorous ideas when I can reach them. The lack of rigour is something we have paid heavily for.”

  The avenue we came out into was very wide: the turn-of-the century city had been planned for great things. Black smoke poured out of the exhausts of small and noisy Argentine-built buses, grating away between traffic lights. Above, the Belle Époque buildings were extravagantly cobwebbed—with the black telephone lines of a system that had been nationalized by Perón in 1945, at the start of his revolution, at great cost, a system that ever since then had been less of a public utility than a telephone workers’ racket: the big black webs spun, as it were, out of the entrails of the city and hanging over it like an emblem of nearly half a century of revolutionary plunder and waste.

  The guerrillas of the 1970s, educated men and women, grandchildren of immigrants, had carried on Perón’s revolution. Twenty years on, they (with the repression they had provoked, and everything that had followed the repression) could be seen to have further impoverished and stultified the country.

  Nearly everyone in that avenue would have been obsessed with money: not just with earning a living, but with maintaining the value of money. To ignore your money for a week was to lose it. The inflation that had started in Perón’s time had raced away in the last twenty years. In 1972 I had been excited by bank advertisements offering 24 per cent a year; since then inflation had sometimes reached 100 percent a month; now, with the new stringency, it was, officially, about 4 per cent a month.

  Ricardo said, speaking of the guerrillas of the 1970s, “Only a part of the intelligentsia was involved, but they were all massively attacked. Being an intellectual was risky at the time. The repression became massive.” Just as in Argentina there was good torture and bad torture, depending on your side, so, still to Ricardo, there had been the good war, fought by the guerrillas, and the bad war, the “repression” by the army. “A good part of the intelligentsia had to flee, and this is something the country is paying for even now.”

  He began to project his own melancholy on to his vision of the future. There would be more guerrillas one day, he said. They would be without the “elegance” of the guerrillas of the seventies; they would be more like the Sendero Luminoso of Peru, animated by blood and rage.

  “The guerrillas of the seventies tried to have some ethical attitude, some ethical advantage over their enemies. Sendero has given that up. They don’t play the good guys anymore. That could happen here. You go out to the suburbs by train now, and you get into contact with people you wouldn’t know how to reintegrate into the society of the future. They are not conceivable to us as human beings. They are mestizos.” People of the old Indian north. “They are appearing like mushrooms in those suburbs.”

  What Ricardo said was true: in those suburbs the Parisian city seemed to be reverting to its South American earth.

  “The feudal system of their origins, the system their parents came from, no longer wants them. It doesn’t include them, or content them, anymore. And the capitalist system of the city has no place for them. So they are born outlaws. The Sendero-style guerrilla has some kind of appeal for that kind of person. So do some religious groups. That’s an important new phenomenon, by the way: those American preachers on TV, they have begun to come here.”

  WHEN I MET FATHER MUJICA in 1972 I didn’t know that he was one of the patrons of the guerrillas. I am sure now that Daniel, who took me to meet him, knew. Daniel very much wanted me to meet Mujica; but he told me only that Mujica was one of the “Priests for the Third World,” and that Mujica was of the Argentine upper class. Daniel was a respectable middle-class businessman; and even at the time I thought his interest in what he had given as Mujica’s cause a little strange. It showed to what extent in 1972, before Perón came back, and before things got really nasty, the guerrillas were operating from within the society and—in spite of the police dogs on the streets and the policemen with machine guns at street corners—were really protected people.

  Mujica was running a church in a villa miseria, an Indian shantytown, in the Palermo district. Palermo is to Buenos Aires what Kensington Gardens are to London, or the Bois de Boulogne to Paris. Palermo has a great park. (And a fair amount of patriotic public statuary: too Paris-like for the local history: the park itself was laid out on the Buenos Aires estate of the rancher-warlord Rosas, who came to power some years after independence and then ran Argentina in his very rough way for nearly a quarter of a century, until 1852.)

  The Palermo villa miseria, which was about fifteen years old, was hidden away. You could drive through on the wide, roaring avenues without seeing it. It was just next to the river, and it was unexpectedly large and solid and settled-looking. As soon as you came to it you felt you had left Palermo and Buenos Aires. The people were Indians from the far north, from Salta and Jujuy; Daniel said that some would have been even from Bolivia. The lanes were unpaved and muddy; the small buildings were low and cramped, but they were of brick, with here and there an upper storey. With its early-evening busyness and the softness of its electric lights, dim here as elsewhere in the city, it didn’t look at all bad; in India this Argentine villa miseria might have passed as the well-off bazaar area of a small town.

  Mujica’s church was a big, unheated concrete shed. It had no overt religious emblems, or none that I remember; and there was nothing ecclesiastical in its divisions of space. It offered music: an amplified Argentine song—no hint of God or religion in that, either.

  Mujica was there in his shed, and he seemed to be very much part of the same production. He was a big man, busy and serious and frowning. The black leather jacket he was wearing bulked out his arms and chest. He had a full head of hair and his eyes were angry. Daniel, w
ho had met him before, at once fell into an attitude of deference, going quiet and still and keeping his eyes fixed on the great man. Mujica was pleased to be sought out; but I felt he was a bit of an actor and—to prove himself in front of Daniel—was going to make trouble.

  Soon enough I gave him cause. I asked about the Priests for the Third World. He said, with some irony, that he also “happened to be” a Pero-nist; and then he added, irony quite overtaking him, touched at the end with a little rage, that as a Peronist he was not as concerned as some people were with economic growth.

  I asked how many people there were in the villa miseria. He said, in his oblique way, that for every one who left, two came. I pressed him to give a figure. He said a few years ago there were only forty thousand; now there were seventy thousand. (Daniel had told me thirty thousand.) Because of the folly of the government there was no work in the interior, Mujica said; that was why the Indians kept coming down from the north.

  I wondered how he could square this with his rejection, as a Peronist, of the idea of economic growth. I wasn’t making a debating point. Argentina in 1972 was confusing for a visitor; and I didn’t know what Peronism meant.

  Mujica became enraged. He said he had better things to do, and he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to a norteamericano, an American. He turned away from Daniel and me and, switching from rage to upper-class affability (as if to show us what we had missed), he walked towards a black-caped, frightened-looking Bolivian family group, no one more than five feet tall, who had just come into the concrete shed. He opened his arms as though he was about to crush them all to his leather-jacketed breast.

  If I had known—what Daniel knew—that Mujica had guerrilla links, I might have approached him differently. As it was, I thought I had come to the end of this particular Priest for the Third World. It was, besides, cold and damp in the shed. It was late May, the Argentine winter; the evening mist from the River Plate was beginning to be noticeable in the dim electric light. And the Argentine song on Mujica’s sound system was really very loud. I told Daniel we should leave. He looked unhappy. He was more on Mujica’s side than mine. He said I should at least stay and tell the Father that I wasn’t an American. I felt that if I didn’t do as Daniel asked I would be damaging his credit with Mujica. So I waited. When Mujica was finished with the Bolivians, they went and sat meekly on a bench and looked down at the concrete floor, praying in the faint mist.