Floriston and Gretna, still prevails in the little castellated towns,
which snarl at one another across the Minho, just as they did of old.
“Those people in Valenza would steal the sacrament,” says the street
urchin playing on the steps of the half fortalice, half church that is
the cathedral of Tuy on the Spanish side.
His fellow in Valenza spits towards Tuy and remarks, “From Spain come
neither good marriages nor the wholesome winds.”
So on to Salvatierra and Monzon, or any other of the villages or towns
upon the river, and in the current of the native speech there still
remains some saying of the kind, with its sharp edges still unworn after
six centuries of use. Great is the power of artificial barriers to
restrain mankind. No proverb ever penned is more profound than that
which sets out, “Fear guards the vineyard, not the fence around it.”
So Portuguese and Spaniards in their peninsula have fought and hated and
fought and ridiculed each other after the fashion of children that have
quarrelled over a broken toy. Blood and an almost common speech, for
both speak one Romance when all is said, have both been impotent against
the custom-house, the flag, the foolish dynasty, for few countries in the
world have had more foolish kings than Spain and Portugal.
That this should be so in the Old World is natural enough, for the dead
hand still rules, and custom and tradition have more strength than race
and creed; but that the hatred should have been transplanted to America,
and still continue, is a proof that folly never dies.
In the old towns on either side of the Minho the exterior life of the two
peoples is the same.
In the stone-built, arcaded plazas women still gather round the fountain
and fill their iron-hooped water-barrels through long tin pipes, shaped
like the tin valences used in wine-stores. Donkeys stand at the doors,
carrying charcoal in esparto baskets, whether in Portugal or Spain, and
goats parade the streets driven by goatherds, wearing shapeless,
thickly-napped felt hats and leather overalls.
The water-carrier in both countries calls out “agua-a-a,” making it sound
like Arabic, and long trains of mules bring brushwood for the baker’s
furnace (even as in Morocco), or great nets of close-chopped straw for
horses’ fodder.
At eventide the girls walk on the plaza, their mothers, aunts, or
servants following them as closely as their shadows on a sunny afternoon.
In quiet streets lovers on both sides of the river talk from a
first-floor balcony to the street, or whisper through the window-bars on
the ground floor. The little shops under the low arches of the arcaded
streets have yellow flannel drawers for men and petticoats of many
colours hanging close outside their doors, on whose steps sleep yellow
dogs.
The jangling bells in the decaying lichen-grown old towers of the
churches jangle and clang in the same key, and as appears without a touch
of _odium theologicum_. The full bass voices boom from the choirs, in
which the self-same organs in their walnut cases have the same rows of
golden trumpets sticking out into the aisle.
One faith, one speech, one mode of daily life, the same sharp “green”
wine, the same bread made of maize and rye, and the same heaps of red
tomatoes and green peppers glistening in the sun in the same
market-places, and yet a rivalry and a difference as far apart as east
from west still separates them.
In both their countries the axles of the bullock-carts, with solid wheels
and wattled hurdle sides, like those upon a Roman coin, still creak and
whine to keep away the wolves.
In the soft landscape the maize fields wave in the rich hollows on both
sides of the Minho.
The pine woods mantle the rocky hills that overhang the deep-sea lochs
that burrow in both countries deep into the entrails of the land.
The women, with their many-coloured petticoats and handkerchiefs, chaffer
at the same fairs to which their husbands ride their ponies in their
straw cloaks.
At “romerias” the peasantry dance to the bagpipe and the drum the
self-same dances, and both climb the self-same steep grey steps through
the dark lanes, all overhung with gorse and broom, up to the Calvaries,
where the three crosses take on the self-same growth of lichen and of
moss. Yet the “boyero” who walks before the placid oxen, with their
cream-coloured flanks and liquid eyes of onyx, feels he is different,
right down to the last molecule of his being, from the man upon the other
side.
So was it once, and perhaps is to-day, with those who dwell in Liddes or
Bewcastle dales. Spaniard and Portuguese, as Scot and Englishman in
older times, can never see one matter from the same point of view. The
Portuguese will say that the Castilian is a rogue, and the Castilian
returns the compliment. Neither have any reason to support their view,
for who wants reason to support that which he feels is true.
It may be that the Spaniard is a little rougher and the Portuguese more
cunning; but if it is the case or not, the antipathy remains, and has
been taken to America.
From the Laguna de Merin to the Cuareim, that is to say, along a frontier
of two hundred leagues, the self-same feeling rules upon both sides of
the line. There, as in Portugal and Spain, although the country, whether
in Uruguay or in Brazil, is little different, yet it has suffered
something indefinable by being occupied by members of the two races so
near and yet so different from one another.
Great rolling seas of waving grass, broken by a few stony hills, are the
chief features of the landscape of the frontiers in both republics.
Estancia houses, dazzlingly white, buried in peach and fig groves, dot
the plains, looking like islands in the sea of grass. Great herds of
cattle roam about, and men on horseback, galloping like clockwork, sail
across the plains like ships upon a sea. Along the river-banks grow
strips of thorny trees, and as the frontier line trends northward
palm-trees appear, and monkeys chatter in the woods. Herds of wild
asses, shyer than antelopes, gaze at the passing horsemen, scour off when
he approaches, and are lost into the haze. Stretches of purple borage,
known as La Flor Morada, carpet the ground in spring and early summer,
giving place later on to red verbena; and on the edges of the streams the
tufts of the tall Pampa grass recall the feathers on a Pampa Indian’s
spear.
Bands of grave ostriches feed quietly upon the tops of hills, and stride
away when frightened, down the wind, with wings stretched out to catch
the breeze.
Clothes are identical, or almost so; the poncho and the loose trousers
stuffed into high patent-leather boots, the hat kept in its place by a
black ribbon with two tassels, are to be seen on both sides of the
frontier. Only in Brazil a sword stuck through the girth replaces the
long knife of Uruguay. Perhaps in that one item all the differences
between the races manifests itself, for the sword is, as it were, a
symbol, for no one ever saw one drawn or used in any way but as an
ornament. It is, in fact, but a survival of old customs, which are
cherished both by the Portuguese and the Brazilians as the apple of the
eye.
The vast extent of the territory of Brazil, its inaccessibility, and the
enormous distances to be travelled from the interior to the coast, and
the sense of remoteness from the outer world, have kept alive a type of
man not to be found in any other country where the Christian faith
prevails. Risings of fanatics still are frequent; one is going on to-day
in Paraná, and that of the celebrated Antonio Concelheiro, twenty years
ago, shook the whole country to its core. Slavery existed in the memory
of people still alive. Women in the remoter towns are still secluded
almost as with the Moors. The men still retain something of the Middle
Ages in their love of show. All in the province of Rio Grande are great
horsemen, and all use silver trappings on a black horse, and all have
horses bitted so as to turn round in the air, just as a hawk turns on the
wing.
The sons of men who have been slaves abound in all the little frontier
towns, and old grey-headed negroes, who have been slaves themselves,
still hang about the great estates. Upon the other side, in Uruguay, the
negro question was solved once and for all in the Independence Wars, for
then the negroes were all formed into battalions by themselves and set in
the forefront of the battle, to die for liberty in a country where they
all were slaves the month before. War turned them into heroes, and sent
them out to die.
When once their independence was assured, the Uruguayans fell into line
like magic with the modern trend of thought. Liberty to them meant
absolute equality, for throughout the land no snob is found to leave a
slug’s trail on the face of man by his subserviency.
Women were held free, that is, as free as it is possible for them to be
in any Latin-peopled land. Across the line, even to-day, a man may stay
a week in a Brazilian country house and never see a woman but a mulata
girl or an old negro crone. Still he feels he is watched by eyes he
never sees, listens to voices singing or laughing, and a sense of mystery
prevails.
Spaniards and Portuguese in the New World have blended just as little as
they have done at home. Upon the frontier all the wilder spirits of
Brazil and Uruguay have congregated. There they pursue the life, but
little altered, that their fathers led full fifty years ago. All carry
arms, and use them on small provocation, for if an accident takes place
the frontier shields the slayer, for to pursue him usually entails a
national quarrel, and so the game goes on.
So Jango Chaves, feeling inclined for sport, or, as he might have said,
to “brincar un bocadinho,” saddled up his horse. He mounted, and, as his
friends were looking on, ran it across the plaza of the town, and,
turning like a seagull in its flight, came back to where his friends were
standing, and stopped it with a jerk.
His silver harness jingled, and his heavy spurs, hanging loosely on his
high-heeled boots, clanked like fetters, as his active little horse
bounded into the air and threw the sand up in a shower.
The rider, sitting him like a statue, with the far-off look horsemen of
every land assume when riding a good horse and when they know they are
observed, slackened his hand and let him fall into a little measured
trot, arching his neck and playing with the bit, under which hung a
silver eagle on a hinge. Waving his hand towards his friends, Jango rode
slowly through the town. He passed through sandy streets of flat-roofed,
whitewashed houses, before whose doors stood hobbled horses nodding in
the sun.
He rode past orange gardens, surrounded by brown walls of sun-baked
bricks with the straw sticking in them, just as it had dried. In the
waste the castor-oil bushes formed little jungles, out of which peered
cats, exactly as a tiger peers out of a real jungle in the woods.
The sun poured down, and was reverberated back from the white houses, and
on the great gaunt building, where the captain-general lived, floated the
green-and-yellow flag of the republic, looking like a bandana
handkerchief. He passed the negro rancheria, without which no such town
as Santa Anna do Libramento is complete, and might have marked, had he
not been too much used to see them, the naked negro children playing in
the sand. Possibly, if he marked them, he referred to them as
“cachorrinhos pretos,” for the old leaven of the days of slavery is
strongly rooted in Brazil. So he rode on, a slight and graceful figure,
bending to each movement of his horse, his mobile, olive-coloured
features looking like a bronze masque in the fierce downpour of the sun.
As he rode on, his whip, held by a thong and dangling from his fingers,
swung against his horse’s flanks, keeping time rhythmically to its pace.
He crossed the rivulet that flows between the towns and came out on the
little open plain that separates them. From habit, or because he felt
himself amongst unfriendly or uncomprehended people, he touched his knife
and his revolvers, hidden beneath his summer poncho, with his right hand,
and with his bridle arm held high, ready for all eventualities, passed
into just such another sandy street as he had left behind.
Save that all looked a little newer, and that the stores were better
supplied with goods, and that there were no negro huts, the difference
was slight between the towns. True that the green-and-yellow flag had
given place to the barred blue-and-white of Uruguay. An armed policeman
stood at the corners of the main thoroughfares, and water-carts went up
and down at intervals. The garden in the plaza had a well-tended
flower-garden.
A band was playing in the middle of it, and Jango could not fail to
notice that Rivera was more prosperous than was his native town.
Whether that influenced him, or whether it was the glass of caña which he
had at the first pulperia, is a moot point, or whether the old antipathy
between the races brought by his ancestors from the peninsula; anyhow, he
left his horse untied, and with the reins thrown down before it as he got
off to have his drink. When he came out, a policeman called to him to
hobble it or tie it up.
Without a word he gathered up his reins, sprang at a bound upon his
horse, and, drawing his mother-of-pearl-handled pistol, fired at the
policeman almost as he sprang. The shot threw up a shower of sand just
in the policeman’s face, and probably saved Jango’s life. Drawing his
pistol, the man fired back, but Jango, with a shout and pressure of his
heels, was off like lightning, firing as he rode, and zig-zagging across
the street. The policeman’s shot went wide, and Jango, turning in the
saddle, fired again and missed.
By this time men with pistols in their hands stood at the doors of all
the houses; but the Brazilian passed so rapidly, throwing himself
alternately now on the near side, now on the off side of his horse,
hanging by one foot across the croup and holding with the other to the
mane, that he presented no mark for them to hit.
As he passed by the “jefatura” where the alcalde and his friends were
sitting smoking just before the door, he fired with such good aim that a
large piece of plaster just above their heads fell, covering them with
dust.
Drawing his second pistol and still firing as he went, he dashed out of
the town, in spite of shots from every side, his horse bounding like
lightning as his great silver spurs ploughed deep into its sides. When
he had crossed the little bit of neutral ground, and just as a patrol of
cavalry appeared, ready to gallop after him, a band of men from his own
town came out to meet him.
He stopped, and shouting out defiance to the Uruguayans, drew up his
horse, and lit a cigarette. Then, safe beyond the frontier, trotted on
gently to meet his friends, his horse shaking white foam from off its
bit, and little rivulets of blood dripping down from its sides into the
sand.
VIII
EL TANGO ARGENTINO
MOTOR-CARS swept up to the covered passage of the front door of the
hotel, one of those international caravansaries that pass their clients
through a sort of vulgarising process that blots out every type. It
makes the Argentine, the French, the Englishman, and the American all
alike before the power of wealth.
The cars surged up as silently as snow falls from a fir-tree in a thaw,
and with the same soft swishing noise. Tall, liveried porters opened the
doors (although, of course, each car was duly furnished with a footman)
so nobly that any one of them would have graced any situation in the
State.
The ladies stepped down delicately, showing a fleeting vision of a leg in
a transparent stocking, just for an instant, through the slashing of
their skirts. They knew that every man, their footman, driver, the giant
watchers at the gate, and all who at the time were going into the hotel,
saw and were moved by what they saw just for a moment; but the fact did
not trouble them at all. It rather pleased them, for the most virtuous
feel a pleasurable emotion when they know that they excite. So it will
be for ever, for thus and not by votes alone they show that they are to
the full men’s equals, let the law do its worst.
Inside the hotel, heated by steam, and with an atmosphere of scent and
flesh that went straight to the head just as the fumes of whisky set a
drinker’s nerves agog, were seated all the finest flowers of the
cosmopolitan society of the French capital.
Lesbos had sent its legions, and women looked at one another
appreciatively, scanning each item of their neighbours’ clothes, and with
their colour heightening when by chance their eyes met those of another
priestess of their sect.
Rich rastaquaoures, their hats too shiny, and their boots too tight,
their coats fitting too closely, their sticks mounted with great gold
knobs, walked about or sat at little tables, all talking strange
varieties of French.
Americans, the men apparently all run out of the same mould, the women
apt as monkeys to imitate all that they saw in dress, in fashion and in
style, and more adaptable than any other women in the world from lack of
all traditions, conversed in their high nasal tones. Spanish-Americans
from every one of the Republics were well represented, all talking about
money: of how Doña Fulana Perez had given fifteen hundred francs for her
new hat, or Don Fulano had just scored a million on the Bourse.
Jews and more Jews, and Jewesses and still more Jewesses, were there,
some of them married to Christians and turned Catholic, but betrayed by
their Semitic type, although they talked of Lourdes and of the Holy
Father with the best.
After the “five-o’clock,” turned to a heavy meal of toast and buns, of
Hugel loaf, of sandwiches, and of hot cake, the scented throng, restored
by the refection after the day’s hard work of shopping, of driving here
and there like souls in purgatory to call on people that they detested,
and other labours of a like nature, slowly adjourned to a great hall in
which a band was playing. As they walked through the passages, men
pressed close up to women and murmured in their ears, telling them
anecdotes that made them flush and giggle as they protested in an
unprotesting style. Those were the days of the first advent of the Tango
Argentino, the dance that since has circled the whole world, as it were,
in a movement of the hips. Ladies pronounced it charming as they half
closed their eyes and let a little shiver run across their lips. Men
said it was the only dance that was worth dancing. It was so Spanish, so
unconventional, and combined all the æsthetic movements of the figures on
an Etruscan vase with the strange grace of the Hungarian gipsies . . . it
was so, as one may say, so . . . as you may say . . . you know.
When all were seated, the band, Hungarians, of course,—oh, those dear
gipsies!—struck out into a rhythm, half rag-time, half habañera,
canaille, but sensuous, and hands involuntarily, even the most
aristocratic hands—of ladies whose immediate progenitors had been
pork-packers in Chicago, or gambusinos who had struck it rich in
Zacatecas,—tapped delicately, but usually a little out of time, upon the
backs of chairs.
A tall young man, looking as if he had got a holiday from a tailor’s
fashion plate, his hair sleek, black, and stuck down to his head with a
cosmetic, his trousers so immaculately creased they seemed cut out of
cardboard, led out a girl dressed in a skirt so tight that she could not
have moved in it had it not been cut open to the knee.
Standing so close that one well-creased trouser leg disappeared in the
tight skirt, he clasped her round the waist, holding her hand almost
before her face. They twirled about, now bending low, now throwing out a
leg, and then again revolving, all with a movement of the hips that
seemed to blend the well-creased trouser and the half-open skirt into one
inharmonious whole. The music grew more furious and the steps
multiplied, till with a bound the girl threw herself for an instant into
the male dancer’s arms, who put her back again upon the ground with as
much care as if she had been a new-laid egg, and the pair bowed and
disappeared.
Discreet applause broke forth, and exclamations such as “wonderful,”
“what grace,” “Vivent les Espagnoles,” for the discriminating audience
took no heed of independence days, of mere political changes and the
like, and seemed to think that Buenos Aires was a part of Spain, never
having heard of San Martin, Bolivar, Paez, and their fellow-liberators.
Paris, London, and New York were to that fashionable crowd the world, and
anything outside—except, of course, the Hungarian gipsies and the Tango
dancers—barbarous and beyond the pale.
After the Tango came “La Maxixe Brésilienne,” rather more languorous and
more befitting to the dwellers in the tropics than was its cousin from
the plains. Again the discreet applause broke out, the audience
murmuring “charming,” that universal adjective that gives an air of being
in a perpetual pastrycook’s when ladies signify delight. Smiles and sly
glances at their friends showed that the dancers’ efforts at indecency
had been appreciated.
Slowly the hall and tea-rooms of the great hotel emptied themselves, and
in the corridors and passages the smell of scent still lingered, just as
stale incense lingers in a church.
Motor-cars took away the ladies and their friends, and drivers, who had
shivered in the cold whilst the crowd inside sweated in the central
heating, exchanged the time of day with the liveried doorkeepers, one of
them asking anxiously, “Dis, Anatole, as-tu vu mes vaches?”
With the soft closing of a well-hung door the last car took its perfumed
freight away, leaving upon the steps a group of men, who remained talking
over, or, as they would say, undressing, all the ladies who had gone.
“Argentine Tango, eh?” I thought, after my friends had left me all alone.
Well, well, it has changed devilishly upon its passage overseas, even
discounting the difference of the setting of the place where first I saw
it danced so many years ago. So, sauntering down, I took a chair far
back upon the terrace of the Café de la Paix, so that the sellers of _La
Patrie_, and the men who have some strange new toy, or views of Paris in
a long album like a broken concertina, should not tread upon my toes.
Over a Porto Blanc and a Brazilian cigarette, lulled by the noise of
Paris and the raucous cries of the street-vendors, I fell into a doze.
Gradually the smell of petrol and of horse-dung, the two most potent
perfumes in our modern life, seemed to be blown away. Dyed heads and
faces scraped till they looked blue as a baboon’s; young men who looked
like girls, with painted faces and with mincing airs; the raddled women,
ragged men, and hags huddled in knitted shawls, lame horses, and taxi-cab
drivers sitting nodding on their boxes—all faded into space, and from the
nothing that is the past arose another scene.
I saw myself with Witham and his brother, whose name I have forgotten,
Eduardo Peña, Congreve, and Eustaquio Medina, on a small rancho in an
elbow of the great River Yi. The rancho stood upon a little hill. A
quarter of a mile or so away the dense and thorny monté of hard-wood
trees that fringed the river seemed to roll up towards it like a sea.
The house was built of yellow pine sent from the United States. The roof
was shingled, and the rancho stood planked down upon the plain, looking
exactly like a box. Some fifty yards away stood a thatched hut that
served as kitchen, and on its floor the cattle herders used to sleep upon
their horse-gear with their feet towards the fire.
The corrals for horses and for sheep were just a little farther off, and
underneath a shed a horse stood saddled day in, day out, and perhaps does
so yet, if the old rancho still resists the winds.
Four or five horses, saddled and bridled, stood tied to a great post, for
we were just about to mount to ride a league or two to a Baile, at the
house of Frutos Barragán. Just after sunset we set out, as the sweet
scent that the grasses of the plains send forth after a long day of heat
perfumed the evening air.