The Writer and the World (68 page)

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.”

W
HEN
I
MET
F
ATHER
M
UJICA
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, who 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.

Daniel, overcoated, standing still, his eyes now fixed on Mujica’s back, said to me, “Go and tell him.”

I went and said to the leather-jacketed back, “Father, I am not an American.”

He turned around; he was abashed. His eyes softened; but then, as we talked again, and I asked a little more about Peronism, his angry manner returned.

He said, “Only an Argentine can understand Peronism.” Peronists weren’t only the middle-class people I had been meeting: all the Indians in the Palermo
villa miseria
were Peronists. “I can talk to you for five years, and still you wouldn’t understand Peronism.”

As he explained it, Peronism contained both Castroism and Maoism. In Mao’s China they had turned their backs on the industrial society and were more concerned with “the development of the human spirit.” That was true of Castroism as well, and Peronism in Argentina had a similar goal. But there were enemies. He recited them (while his black-clad Bolivians prayed in his sanctuary): the oligarchy, the military, and American imperialism, expressed in Argentina through its economic control. These enemies were sucking the country dry.

From the abstraction of “the development of the human spirit” as a goal, which could forgive itself anything, Mujica had no trouble making a leap to the idea of the enemy, someone just there, and the very concrete idea of physical punishment. In this, Mujica was like the Jewish Peronist lawyer I had met who could categorize the enemies of the Argentine people in an almost Aristotelian way. “Fundamentally,” the lawyer said, “the enemies are American imperialism and its native allies. These allies are: the oligarchy, the dependent bourgeoisie, international Zionism, the sepoy Left. By sepoys I mean the Communist Party and socialism in general.”

Many people had little lists of enemies like this, and if you put a few of the lists together, then nearly everybody in Argentina turned out to be somebody’s enemy.

A woman friend of Daniel’s wife had a racial list. She said to me one evening at dinner, “If only we had more Nordic blood, more people from Europe—I don’t mean Poles. If only we had more Germans, more English people, more Dutch, to renew and improve the race. In Buenos Aires and Rosario we have a good-looking race. But the people of the north, who are pure Indian, they are not good-looking. They are tiny. Horrible.”

This woman’s group was itself on the racial list of a man of remote Irish origins—an ancestor would have come out early in the nineteenth century as a shepherd or ditcher. He spoke only Spanish now, and worked in a provincial university. He was in no doubt about where the calamity of Argentina lay. Whispering one day in the library, he told me the story of former President Roca, the conqueror of the desert, visiting Buenos Aires towards the end of the nineteenth century and seeing a shipload of Italian immigrants. “My poor country,” Roca said, “it will be a sad day for you when you are governed by the children of these people.” And now, the unlikely Irishman said, in his penetrating Spanish whisper, that day had come.

“In Argentina,” Sábat said in 1972, “there is a formal racial prejudice against everybody
[un perjuicio racial integral contra to Jos].
What we are seeing here now is a kind of collective frenzy. Because it was always easy here before to get money. There is a saying here that the final revolution will come the day you can’t get a beefsteak, the so-called
bife de chorizo.”

The immigrant society was being atomized, and Argentina was becoming as invertebrate as the Spain Ortega y Gasset had written about in the early 1920s. Disparate peoples, Ortega had written, come together not simply for the pleasure of living together, but in order to do something together tomorrow. That hope, necessary in the formation of an immigrant country, had gone, and in its place was a deepening cynicism and demoralization.

The young film-maker I had met defined this cynicism well. “I am an Italian myself, but many of the things I dislike here I relate to Italians—a kind of watching things happen, and taking advantage of the situation that results. It’s a middle-class attitude, but I suppose you start being cynical when you take advantage of your own scepticism to make profit out of things.”

To be without cynicism was to be without a kind of protection; it was to feel pain. The poet Jorge Luis Borges felt this pain. His ancestors went back to colonial Spanish times. Some had fought against Spain in the war of independence, and in the civil wars that had followed. Borges was born in 1899; he had memories, from his childhood, of the building of the great new city of Buenos Aires. His early poetry had been about his ancestors, and death, and the creation of a country. As a young man he had been an Argentine patriot, he said in 1972, much more of a patriot than his father. “We were taught to worship all things Argentine.”