IT may have been the Flor de Mayo, Rosa del Sur, or Tres de Junio, or
again but have been known as the Pulperia upon the Huesos, or the Esquina
on the Napostá. But let its name have been what chance or the
imagination of some Neapolitan or Basque had given it, I see it, and
seeing it, dismounting, fastening my “redomon” to the palenque, enter,
loosen my facon, feel if my pistol is in its place, and calling out
“Carlon,” receive my measure of strong, heady red Spanish wine in a tin
cup. Passing it round to the company, who touch it with their lips to
show their breeding, I seem to feel the ceaseless little wind which
always blows upon the southern plains, stirring the dust upon the pile of
fleeces in the court, and whistling through the wooden “reja” where the
pulpero stands behind his counter with his pile of bottles close beside
him, ready for what may chance. For outward visible signs, a low, squat,
mud-built house, surrounded by a shallow ditch on which grew stunted
cactuses, and with paja brava sticking out of the abode of the
overhanging eaves. Brown, sun-baked, dusty-looking, it stands up, an
island in the sea of waving hard-stemmed grasses which the improving
settler passes all his life in a vain fight to improve away; and make his
own particular estancia an Anglo-Saxon Eden of trim sheep-cropped turf,
set here and there with “agricultural implements,” broken and thrown
aside, and though imported at great trouble and expense, destined to be
replaced by ponderous native ploughs hewn from the solid ñandubay, and
which, of course, inevitably prove the superiority of the so-called
unfit. For inward graces, the “reja” before which runs a wooden counter
at which the flower of the Gauchage of the district lounge, or sit with
their toes sticking through their potro boots, swinging their legs and
keeping time to the “cielito” of the “payador” upon his cracked guitar,
the strings eked out with fine-cut thongs of mare’s hide, by jingling
their spurs.
Behind the wooden grating, sign in the Pampa of the eternal hatred
betwixt those who buy and those who sell, some shelves of yellow pine, on
which are piled ponchos from Leeds, ready-made calzoncillos, alpargatas,
figs, sardines, raisins, bread—for bread upon the Pampa used to be eaten
only at Pulperias—saddle-cloths, and in a corner the “botilleria,” where
vermuth, absinthe, square-faced gin, Carlon, and Vino Seco stand in a
row, with the barrel of Brazilian caña, on the top of which the pulpero
ostentatiously parades his pistol and his knife. Outside, the tracks led
through the biscacheras, all converging after the fashion of the rails at
a junction; at the palenque before the door stood horses tied by strong
raw-hide cabrestos, hanging their heads in the fierce sun, shifting from
leg to leg, whilst their companions, hobbled, plunged about, rearing
themselves on their hind-legs to jump like kangaroos.
Now and then Gauchos rode up occasionally, their iron spurs hanging off
their naked feet, held by a raw-hide thong; some dressed in black
bombachas and vicuña ponchos, their horses weighted down with silver, and
prancing sideways as their riders sat immovable, but swaying from the
waist upwards like willows in a wind. Others, again, on lean young
colts, riding upon a saddle covered with sheepskin, gripping the small
hide stirrup with their toes and forcing them up to the posts with shouts
of “Ah bagual!” “Ah Pehuelche!” “Ahijuna!” and with resounding blows of
their short, flat-lashed whips, which they held by a thong between their
fingers or slipped upon their wrists, then grasping their frightened
horses by the ears, got off as gingerly as a cat jumps from a wall. From
the rush-thatched, mud-walled rancheria at the back the women, who always
haunt the outskirts of a pulperia in the districts known as tierra
adentro (the inside country), Indians and semi-whites, mulatresses, and
now and then a stray Basque or Italian girl turned out, to share the
quantity they considered love with all mankind.
But gin and politics, with horses’ marks, accounts of fights, and
recollections of the last revolution, kept men for the present occupied
with serious things, so that the women were constrained to sit and smoke,
drink maté, plait each other’s hair (searching it diligently the while),
and wait until Carlon with Vino Seco, square-faced rum, cachaza, and the
medicated log-wood broth, which on the Pampa passes for “Vino Francés,”
had made men sensible to their softer charms. That which in Europe we
call love, and think by inventing it that we have cheated God, who
clearly planted nothing but an instinct of self-continuation in mankind,
as in the other animals, seems either to be in embryo, waiting for
economic advancement to develop it; or is perhaps not even dormant in
countries such as those in whose vast plains the pulperia stands for
club, exchange, for meeting-place, and represents all that in other lands
men think they find in Paris or in London, and choose to dignify under
the style of intellectual life. Be it far from me to think that we have
bettered the Creator’s scheme; or by the substitution of our polyandry
for polygamy, bettered the position of women, or in fact done anything
but changed and made more complex that which at first was clear to
understand.
But, be that as it may and without dogmatism, our love, our vices, our
rendering wicked things natural in themselves, our secrecy, our
pruriency, adultery, and all the myriad ramifications of things sexual,
without which no novelist could earn his bread, fall into nothing, except
there is a press-directed public opinion, laws, bye-laws, leaded type and
headlines, so to speak, to keep them up. True, nothing of all this
entered our heads as we sat drinking, listening to a contest of
minstrelsy “por contrapunto” betwixt a Gaucho payador and a “matrero
negro” of great fame, who each in turn taking the cracked “changango” in
their lazo-hardened hands, plucked at its strings in such a style as to
well illustrate the saying that to play on the guitar is not a thing of
science, but requires but perseverance, hard finger-tips, and an unusual
development of strength in the right wrist. Negro and payador each sang
alternately; firstly old Spanish love songs handed down from before the
independence, quavering and high; in which Frasquita rhymed to chiquita,
and one Cupido, whom I never saw in Pampa, loma, rincon, bolson, or
medano, in the Chañares, amongst the woods of ñandubay, the pajonales,
sierras, cuchillas, or in all the land, figured and did nothing very
special; flourished, and then departed in a high falsetto shake, a rough
sweep of the hard brown fingers over the jarring strings forming his
fitting epitaph.
The story of “El Fausto,” and how the Gaucho, Aniceto, went to Buenos
Ayres, saw the opera of “Faust,” lost his puñal in the crush to take his
seat, sat through the fearsome play, saw face to face the enemy of man,
described {170a} as being dressed in long stockings to the stifle-joint,
eyebrows like arches for tilting at the wing, and eyes like water-holes
in a dry river bed, succeeded, and the negro took up the challenge and
rejoined. He told how, after leaving town, that Aniceto mounted on his
Overo rosao, {170b} fell in with his “compadre,” told all his wondrous
tale, and how they finished off their bottle and left it floating in the
river like a buoy.
The payador, not to be left behind, and after having tuned his guitar and
put the “cejilla” on the strings, launched into the strange life of
Martin Fierro, type of the Gauchos on the frontier, related his
multifarious fights, his escapades, and love affairs, and how at last he,
his friend, Don Cruz, saw on an evening the last houses as, with a stolen
tropilla of good horses, they passed the frontier to seek the Indians’
tents. The death of Cruz, the combat of Martin with the Indian chief—he
with his knife, the Indian with the bolas—and how Martin slew him and
rescued the captive woman, who prayed to heaven to aid the Christian,
with the body of her dead child, its hands secured in a string made out
of one of its own entrails, lying before her as she watched the varying
fortunes of the fight, he duly told. La Vuelta de Martin and the strange
maxims of Tio Viscacha, that Pampa cynic whose maxim was never to ride up
to a house where dogs were thin, and who set forth that arms are
necessary, but no man can tell when, were duly recorded by the
combatants, listened to and received as new and authentic by the
audience, till at last the singing and the frequent glasses of Carlon
made payador and negro feel that the time had come to leave off
contrapunto and decide which was most talented in music, with their
facons. A personal allusion to the colour of the negro’s skin, a retort
calling in question the nice conduct of the sister of the payador, and
then two savages foaming at the mouth, their ponchos wrapped round their
arms, their bodies bent so as to protect their vitals, and their knives
quivering like snakes, stood in the middle of the room. The company
withdrew themselves into the smallest space, stood on the tops of casks,
and at the door the faces of the women looked in delight, whilst the
pulpero, with a pistol and a bottle in his hands, closed down his grating
and was ready for whatever might befall. “Negro,” “Ahijuna,” “Miente,”
“carajo,” and the knives flash and send out sparks as the returns de tic
au tac jar the fighters’ arms up to the shoulder-joints. In a moment all
is over, and from the payador’s right arm the blood drops in a stream on
the mud floor, and all the company step out and say the negro is a
“valiente,” “muy guapeton,” and the two adversaries swear friendship over
a tin mug of gin. But all the time during the fight, and whilst outside
the younger men had ridden races barebacked, making false starts to tire
each other’s horses out, practising all the tricks they knew, as kicking
their adversary’s horse in the chest, riding beside their opponent and
trying to lift him from his seat by placing their foot underneath his and
pushing upwards, an aged Gaucho had gradually become the centre figure of
the scene.
Seated alone he muttered to himself, occasionally broke into a falsetto
song, and now and then half drawing out his knife, glared like a
tiger-cat, and shouted “Viva Rosas,” though he knew that chieftain had
been dead for twenty years.
Tall and with straggling iron-grey locks hanging down his back, a
broad-brimmed plush hat kept in its place by a black ribbon with two
tassels under his chin, a red silk Chinese handkerchief tied loosely
round his neck and hanging with a point over each shoulder-blade, he
stood dressed in his chiripa and poncho, like a mad prophet amongst the
motley crew. Upon his feet were potro boots, that is the skin taken off
the hind-leg of a horse, the hock-joint forming the heel and the hide
softened by pounding with a mallet, the whole tied with a garter of a
strange pattern woven by the Indians, leaving the toes protruding to
catch the stirrups, which as a domador he used, made of a knot of hide.
Bound round his waist he had a set of ostrich balls covered in lizard
skin, and his broad belt made of carpincho leather was kept in place by
five Brazilian dollars, and through it stuck a long facon with silver
handle shaped like a half-moon, and silver sheath fitted with a catch to
grasp his sash. Whilst others talked of women or of horses, alluding to
their physical perfections, tricks or predilections, their hair, hocks,
eyes, brands or peculiarities, discussing them alternately with the
appreciation of men whose tastes are simple but yet know all the chief
points of interest in both subjects, he sat and drank. Tio Cabrera (said
the others) is in the past, he thinks of times gone by; of the Italian
girl whom he forced and left with her throat cut and her tongue
protruding, at the pass of the Puán; of how he stole the Indian’s horses,
and of the days when Rosas ruled the land. Pucha, compadre, those were
times, eh? Before the “nations,” English, Italian and Neapolitan, with
French and all the rest, came here to learn the taste of meat, and ride,
the “maturangos,” in their own countries having never seen a horse. But
though they talked at, yet they refrained from speaking to him, for he
was old, and even the devil knows more because of years than because he
is the devil, and they knew also that to kill a man was to Tio Cabrera as
pleasant an exercise as for them to kill a sheep. But at last I, with
the accumulated wisdom of my twenty years, holding a glass of caña in my
hand, approached him, and inviting him to drink, said, not exactly
knowing why, “Viva Urquiza,” and then the storm broke out. His eyes
flashed fire, and drawing his facon he shouted “Muera! . . . Viva
Rosas,” and drove his knife into the mud walls, struck on the counter
with the flat of the blade, foamed at the mouth, broke into snatches of
obscene and long-forgotten songs, as “Viva Rosas! Muera Urquiza dale
guasca en la petiza,” whilst the rest, not heeding that I had a pistol in
my belt, tried to restrain him by all means in their power. But he was
maddened, yelled, “Yes, I, Tio Cabrera, known also as el Cordero, tell
you I know how to play the violin (a euphemism on the south pampa for
cutting throats). In Rosas’ time, Viva el General, I was his right-hand
man, and have dispatched many a Unitario dog either to Trapalanda or to
hell. Caña, blood, Viva Rosas, Muera!” then tottering and shaking, his
knife slipped from his hands and he fell on a pile of sheepskins with
white foam exuding from his lips. Even the Gauchos, who took a life as
other men take a cigar, and from their earliest childhood are brought up
to kill, were dominated by his brute fury, and shrank to their horses in
dismay. The pulpero murmured “salvage” from behind his bars, the women
trembled and ran to their “tolderia,” holding each other by the hands,
and the guitar-players sat dumb, fearing their instruments might come to
harm. I, on the contrary, either impelled by the strange savagery
inherent in men’s blood or by some reason I cannot explain, caught the
infection, and getting on my horse, a half-wild “redomon,” spurred him
and set him plunging, and at each bound struck him with the flat edge of
my facon, then shouting “Viva Rosas,” galloped out furiously upon the
plain.