The Empire of Necessity (15 page)

The London weekly magazine
Household Words
, edited by Charles Dickens, described the scene by first asking its British readers:

Whence come the thirty-five thousand tons of ox-hides annually imported into this country? Whence a large proportion of the seventy thousand tons of tallow? Whence the twenty thousand tons of dry bones (for sugar-refining, ornamental turnery, and fancy articles)? Whence the millions of horns? Whence do the great slave populations of Brazil, Bahia, Pernambuco, and Cuba obtain the dry and salted beef which is their staple food?

The answer was a Río de la Plata
saladero
, explained the magazine, in an essay that was anonymously written yet Dickensian in style. The workday starts, it said, with the cowboys

pushing, and goading, and hallooing with might and main, till the beasts are wedged together as tightly as people at the pit-door of a theatre on the night of a popular play; but, unlike the pit entrance, the door of the vreté or smaller inclosure is of the portcullis kind; and when the performances inside are to commence, it is lifted up. The bovine victims rush in; but the moment they enter, they encounter sights and smells portentous of their coming fate, which impel them to make a sudden retreat. Alas! The instant the last tail has passed under the opening, down falls the door to oppose all egress; and the unhappy oxen find themselves as completely imprisoned as rats in a trap.
⁸

Slavery wasn’t fully abolished in Argentina until 1853, a few years after this description was written. Until then, the kind of operation the article was describing relied heavily on enslaved labor. The personnel of the first modern salting plant, for instance, set up on the Montevideo side of the Río de la Plata in the late 1780s, consisted entirely of slaves who worked every part of the line.
⁹

Saladeros
were early factories, combining new and old. They operated with near-assembly-line coordination, synchronizing the movements of workers toward a common goal (as opposed to the old craft method of one artisan working on one thing start to finish): men herded cattle into a corral, where they would be lassoed by a horseman, slaughtered by a knifeman, hauled off by trolleymen, trimmed by butchers, boiled by cooks, and so on.

Saladeros
didn’t eliminate artisan expertise, as would modern factories, but rather harnessed it—especially the use of lassos and the
facón
, or long butcher knife—to mass production. Once the animals were herded into a smaller corral, a very “ingenious process” would take place. A man stood on a raised platform holding a rope, tied on one end to a lasso. The other end of the rope was wound around a wheel and latched to a horse. With “unerring aim” he’d throw his noose and, after hitting his target, yell
¡Déle!—Go!
—to the horse, which would move forward until the cow’s head was braced against the wheel. In one motion, the man would draw his
facón
and plunge it into the exposed neck, between skull and spine. “Death is instantaneous.” Thus the industrialization of Argentine gaucho skill: “so dexterously and rapidly is this sort of battue kept up, that during the twelve hours from four to five hundred animals are daily disposed of,… killed, skinned, dissected, salted, and distributed to every commercial quarter of the globe.”
¹⁰

Where in the past the bodies of oxen, cows, and horses were left to decay in the sun, under the new system—created by the demand for salted meat to feed slaves and the use of hides and tallow to buy slaves—even the “meanest bit” of the carcass was used. Butchers cut the flesh into two-inch pieces, pickled them in brine, layered them in salt, and then laid them on the ground, over a dried hide used like a tarp. As the pile reached higher, pressure from its weight forced liquid out of the meat. When the strips were sufficiently dry, they would be placed on racks in the sun until they turned into hard, imperishable dark jerk.
¹¹

Trimmers scraped off all the remaining skin and fat from the hides, which then were either stretched out on the ground with stakes to dry in the sun or salted in layers of brine. Scrap meat, along with bones, fat, and viscera, was taken to the boiling room and thrown into large vats, where the mix would be steamed into tallow. Wood was at a premium, coal even rarer, so thistle harvested from the pampas was used to boil the water to make the tallow. Waste from this reduction would be thrown in the fire, along with the carcasses of old horses and sheep, to help it burn a little longer and save thistle. Like the tryworks made famous by Melville, where pieces from the whale were used to keep the flames going, the livestock provided the fuel for its own rendering, like a “plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope.”

Defective hides were used for glue stock, and at the end of the day bone ash was collected for road pavement. The tripe was fed to pigs, jawbones were sent to Europe to make combs, and hoofs were used to make gelatin, oil, and glue.

About the only thing not used was runoff blood. Each salting plant gushed red into the Río de la Plata. The noise was hideous. Charles Darwin, who visited a
saladero
before his trek over the Andes, described a “death” bellows that came out of the plants, “a noise more expressive of fierce agony than any I know.” And the smell was unbearable.

Darwin thought the “whole sight” was “horrible and revolting.” The “ground is almost made of bones and the horses and riders are drenched with gore,” he said. “A thousand horrible butcher’s shops pervading everything,” wrote another visitor, each sending columns of soot and smoke rising above the city’s skyline.
¹²

The primary products—dried hides, salted meat, horns, and tallow—would be loaded on vessels. Some of these ships set out for Cuba or Europe to trade the hides, meat, and grease for goods like rum, guns, and textiles, which they would then bring to the coast of Africa to exchange for captives bound for Río de la Plata. Other merchantmen made straight runs to Brazil, the Caribbean, or Africa to buy slaves.
¹³

*   *   *

Juan Nonell did well with the liberalization of slavery. Others found breaking into the trade more difficult. A Montevidean named José Ramón Milá de la Roca jumped in after Spain announced that colonials could skip the middleman and sail straight to Africa to buy slaves. But he lost one shipment after another to piracy, war, and at least one slave revolt. He came close to “near total ruin,” he said, looking back on his venture. Certainly compared with the tight regulations and restrictions on the trade in the past, there was now more room for midlevel merchants and ranchers like Nonell to make money—and for men like Milá de la Roca to think that they could make money. But it was Río de la Plata’s already established large merchants who were best positioned to take advantage of deregulation, to pay the freight on large shipments, to shield themselves against frequent loss, shipwrecks, or revolts, to pay taxes and duties, which, even though they had been greatly reduced, still added up. By the early 1800s, about two-thirds of the exploding trade was controlled by a handful of extremely powerful men based in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
*

It was especially hard for provincials like Alejandro de Aranda, from Mendoza, to succeed in the commerce. The residents of Mendoza practically lived under the long shadow cast by Potosí, the storied silver mountain in what is today Bolivia, the main source of the famed Spanish dollar, or piece of eight, then among the world’s most circulated currencies. Yet actual cash was hard to come by. Most of the minted coins were sucked up by Spain to cover its ballooning military budget to fight its endless wars. Trade was conducted almost exclusively through loans or promissory notes. Well-established Buenos Aires businessmen could negotiate credit from financiers in Cádiz and London, but even they complained about the terms. Traders in hinterland cities like Mendoza were several links down the chain, with each deal pushing them further into debt.
¹⁴

Even before purchasing the West Africans from Nonell, Aranda was already fairly deeply in arrears from past transactions. He had bought Africans in Buenos Aires before, but only one or two at a time, bringing them over the pampas and reselling them in Mendoza or Santiago. But now he was beginning a new stage of life. He had just gotten married and was starting a family and he hoped his large deal with Nonell might get him out of debt and improve his position—or at least steady it.
¹⁵

10

FALLING MAN

Among the stories that Jorge Luis Borges’s grandmother used to tell him, one that Borges himself enjoyed sharing in the many interviews he gave in his later life, had to do with where she bought her slaves. “The slave market, my grandmother used to tell me, was in Plaza El Retiro,” Borges once said. “That’s where they sold slaves.” By Borges’s time, in the mid-twentieth century, El Retiro, laid out in Parisian style, was one of Buenos Aires’s most elegant parks. The wealthy set up their town residences here in stately four- and five-story apartment buildings overlooking ornamental ponds and hundreds of shade trees.

Borges didn’t keep bringing up the fact that Plaza El Retiro was once the city’s principal slave market out of sympathy or solidarity; he was known to hold exceptionally negative opinions of Argentines of African descent. He was, rather, carrying on a family grudge.

The Argentine writer could trace his family’s lineage back centuries to the first days of the Conquest. His ancestors included royalists—the men who founded and built the Spanish empire in the Americas—and republicans who fought to break from Spain and create the new Argentine nation. But Borges’s family, especially his mother’s side, had largely let the market revolution pass them by. They weren’t able to convert their reputation into financial success and they repeatedly found themselves on the losing side of political conflicts. Dispossessed by merchants and cattle ranchers and persecuted by politicians, the family had become fallen gentry.

Having lost her wealth, Borges’s grandmother passed down to young Jorge tales of her family’s golden age like jewels. One of her favorite stories had to do with her parents’ slaves: where they got them, how many they had, and how often the slaves came to visit after they were freed. Borges, in turn, liked repeating the anecdotes, a wry way of reminding the city’s nouveau riche—nouveau, anyway, during his grandmother’s lifetime—that much of their money could be traced back to slavery and that the parks they liked to stroll through on Sundays were built over the bones of enslaved Africans. “Members of our gentry,” he said in one interview, “administered El Retiro’s slave market.” As to the park’s luxury apartment buildings, “the first tall building ever put up there,” he said, was “a bunk house for slaves.”

Some of Borges’s distant cousins grew prosperous off slavery. “Among those who enriched themselves by selling slaves were relatives of mine,” he said.
*
“Wealthy households” were able to hold “thirty or forty” slaves. Others, like the Borges family, were able to keep only a few as their luster faded. “In the house of my great-grandparents, there were just five slave servants,” Borges said, which didn’t represent any “great fortune.” And once slavery was finally abolished, downwardly moving families would hold on to their memory of slavery: Borges often talked about how the descendants of the slaves of his grandmother kept her surname and how, when he was a child, they used to call on his family home to pay respects.

Many in Buenos Aires’s elite liked to claim contrived coats of arms and flaunt aristocratic-sounding Spanish family names. So Borges would repeat the story of how he once picked up a newspaper that was published by Afro-Argentines and was surprised to see “all of Buenos Aires’s great surnames” on its masthead. “Except they belonged to blacks.” He singled out one in particular, Alzaga
,
the name of descendants of slaves who had been owned by Martín de Alzaga (the importer of perhaps the most lethal slave ship to have ever harbored in Río de la Plata, the
Joaquín
). “Around here not too long ago,” Borges recalled, speaking of his own neighborhood, “there lived a number of very snobbish blacks”—
muy snobs
, he said, using the English noun as an adjective. “They were named Alzaga, and had been for many generations the slaves of the Alzaga family.” Like their Spanish namesakes, these black Alzagas were also very conceited, he remembered, “looking down” on those with more plebeian names, such as Gómez or López.
¹

*   *   *

Alejandro de Aranda was born in Mendoza, on the far side of the Argentine pampas, though he called himself Spanish. His real surname was Fernández, but he came from a line of men who preferred to use, generation after generation, de Aranda, reportedly inherited from a distant aristocratic ancestor from Andalusia. He was a year old in 1769 when his father, who came to Argentina from Spain hoping to reverse what had been a precipitous decline in his family’s fortune, died. He was eight when his widowed mother, Rosa Ventura, remarried into one of Mendoza’s wealthiest and most politically connected families.
²

Born into fading prestige, wedded into money, Alejandro lived on the margins of advantage. Having acquired a vineyard outside of Mendoza, his father had left the family land rich but worse than cash poor, passing on his debts to his widow, who couldn’t pay them off until she married Alejandro’s stepfather, José Clemente Benegas. After Alejandro and his older brother, Nicólas, moved into Benegas’s well-accommodated home, a compound really, they were attended to in all the genteel comfort that their times allowed.