Estas cosas pense en la Recoleta
en el lugar de mi ceniza.
These thoughts came to me in the Recoleta
in the place where my ashes will lie.
Jorge Luis Borges
In the early hours of October 22, 1976, an Argentine army truck loaded with well-armed troops drove out through the gates of the presidential residence in Olivos and headed towards Buenos Aires, a few miles away. It was followed by an ambulance, which in turn was followed by another truck. The convoy drove through the still dark streets of the capital to Recoleta Cemetery, a little city of the dead where the bodies of presidents, generals, and other illustrious Argentines are housed in rows of opulent, mansion-sized vaults along avenues lined with cyprus trees. It is the place to be buried in Argentina, the most fashionable necropolis in a country where the dead, like the living, are judged by their houses. Thirteen of the country's presidents are there. So is Luis. Angel Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, who earned his place in the national pantheon with a punch that knocked Jack Dempsey out of the ring, although Dempsey climbed back in to beat him. Outside his vault stands a bigger than life size bronze statue of the 'Bull' in his dressing gown and fighting boots. Around him, in the cemetery's bleak, grassless chaos of marble and granite, soaring spires and domes cast shadows on generals on horseback and politicians exhorting invisible crowds. Bronze scrolls on the vaults list the inhabitants' honours. Inside, ornate coffins are draped with lace, lined with candles, and decorated with flowers. There are chairs for living visitors. Circular stairways wind down into the earth where other family members are buried. The place is full. There's an Argentine saying: 'It's easier to get into heaven than into Recoleta.'
Understandably, it is one of the most popular attractions in Argentina. More than a thousand people stroll down Recoleta's cold streets every day - not only the old women, the regulars at every cemetery with their bunches of fresh flowers, but also the tourist groups from the provinces with cameras and school children in white smocks on their class outing stare at the houses of the famous dead.
But there were no visitors on that chill morning of October 22. It was too early for the old women, and, anyway, the cemetery was ringed by policemen carrying sub-machine guns to deter the curious as the convoy of army trucks and ambulance ground to a halt outside the doric portico of Recoleta's front entrance. Two cemetery workers, called in for special duty, helped unload a coffin that was covered by a mattress so that no one, not even the soldiers, could take a peak at the face of the woman who lay serenely beneath the glass top. Surrounded by their military guard, the workers carried the coffin along one of the avenues, then down a narrow side street, stopping in front of a black marble crypt belonging to the 'Familia Duarte'. They carried it inside. There was no ceremony. The workmen removed the mattress and quickly left, slamming the ornate steel gate locked behind them. 'The soldiers were nervous and in a hurry,' said one of the workers later. 'They just wanted to plant her and get out of there.'
The nervousness of the soldiers was understandable. They had just 'planted' Eva Perón, the long dead wife of former President Juan Perón and the beloved Saint Evita of millions of adoring Argentines. It was the second time in almost quarter of a century that the military, who so often rule Argentina, had hurriedly disposed of Eva's body in a desperate effort to purge their country of the turbulent passions inspired by her name. During her lifetime, at the height of her career in the late 1940s, Maria Eva Duarte de Perón was one of the most loved and hated, powerful and capricious women in Argentina and the world.
When she died in 1952, her widower, President Perón, was never able to persuade his people that he was now the substance and she the shadow. Within three years, Perón had been overthrown, fleeing into exile aboard a Paraguayan gunboat. Argentina's long-repressed anti-Perónists erased every physical vestige of Evita. Bulldozers tore down her monuments. Her pictures, books, personal papers were burned in public bonfires. Even her body disappeared from the Confederation of Labour headquarters where it had been kept to await the completion of a multi-million dollar mausoleum, which was to be taller than the Statue of Liberty.
For sixteen years the body of Evita Perón was missing. But in Argentina, the cult of Saint Evita flourished, dooming every attempt by the nation's generals to return the government to stable civilian rule. Posters of an ethereal Evita plastered the walls of every town and village in the country. Terrorists killed in her name. The president who had taken power soon after Juan Perón was overthrown was kidnapped and murdered in an unsuccessful effort to make him tell where Evita's body had been hidden. Finally, however, the Argentine Army capitulated. In Lot 86, Garden 41 in Musocco Cemetery in Milan, Italy, the body of Maria Maggi, an Italian woman who had died in Argentina, was exhumed. The coffin's wooden casing was rotting. But the coffin itself, of silver with a glass window, was in excellent condition. So was the corpse. It was the embalmed body of Evita Perón.
Over two decades, she travelled far and wide - a macabre odyssey across five countries of two continents. Now that she has been interred in Argentine soil, perhaps her fellow countrymen will let her rest in peace. But it is doubtful. There is a macabre, almost necrophiliac love of the dead in the soul of the Argentine people. Famous cadavers have often stood for national causes in the years since the country won its independence from Spain in 1810. It is as if the body had become the flag of political battle. Possession is everything, in a way it is like owning a splinter of the True Cross. There is also the terror of it falling into the hands of the enemy - the fear of defilement. In the early days of the nation when a provincial caudillo (dictator), General Juan la Valle, was shot dead by his enemies, his friends dug up the body and carried it on horseback out of the country to Bolivia for safe-keeping. When it began to decompose on the trail, the funeral escort dismounted, skinned and eviscerated the corpse and carried on, packing the relics in saddlebags. Even today, the battle over the bones of another nineteenth-century dictator continues as fiercely as ever. Posters plastered on city walls proclaim that 'Rosas Lives'. But, in fact, Juan Manuel de Rosas, a fierce, throat-cutting gaucho (cowboy) has been dead for over a hundred years. He created the first secret police in South America and ruthlessly forged the country's quarrelling provinces into a single nation before he was overthrown. He lived out his remaining years in Southampton, where he is buried. But in Argentina, the question of whether his bones should be brought back to his homeland still provokes controversy among pro- and anti-Rosas factions.
But Argentina is not just a land in love with the heroic dead. Grotesque death in every conceivable form is a ritualistic everyday business in Argentina, where left-wing guerrillas kidnap, torture, and murder, and, in turn, are themselves captured, tortured, and then often taken out of their cells and machine-gunned or dynamited together in bundled groups. Perhaps it is something in the character of the people who inhabit this remote, empty, desolate land of a million square miles - five times the size of France - a brutish land of plunder, virtually peopled in this century. In 1850, there were fewer than a million Argentines, and Indian territory began less than a hundred miles from Buenos Aires. Those Argentines were the descendants of the hardy soldier-adventurers of Spain who first colonised the land in the early 1500s. They became the gauchos, the cowboys who pushed out into the vast Indian-infested grazing lands called the pampas, rolling plains which stretch from the sweltering jungles of the Chaco on the Bolivian border in the north to the freezing antarctic wastes of Patagonia in the south, from the snow-capped Andes in the west to the Atlantic in the east.
'It was the gaucho who made Argentina,' wrote John White in his Life Story of a Nation. 'First, he helped the Spaniards win the country from the Indians by providing an effective barrier between the civilised towns and the raiding savages. Later, he formed the mounted militias which won freedom from Spain, not only for Argentina but for Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia and Peru. Then, after many years of civil war, he finally forced the City and Province of Buenos Aires to join the Federation. It was then, and not until then, that Argentina became a nation.' So the gaucho is the national hero of Argentina, immortalised in a long epic poem, El Gaucho Martin Fierro. Most Argentines can recite a few verses of the poem in which the gaucho extols liberty, manhood, and justice. But Walter Owen, Martin Fierro's English translator, took a clearer-eyed view of the gaucho in his introduction, one that could just as easily apply in many ways to the present day Argentine.
He was, wrote Owen, a 'strange mixture of virtues and vices, of culture and savagery. Arrogant and self-respecting, religious, punctilious within the limits of his own peculiar code, he was yet patient under injustice, easily led and impressed by authority, ferocious, callous, brutal, superstitious and improvident.' He was as 'pitiless as the savage Guaycurus (Indians) of his native plains, who as an old chronicler says, were "the most turbulent of heathen, who extract their eyelashes to better see the Christians and slay them."…In no country and at no time, perhaps, has a race existed among which physical courage, intrepidity, indifference to suffering and endurance have been held in such high esteem.' The gaucho's law was his knife, or facon, a short sword with a double-edged curved blade. His poncho wrapped around his left arm and used as a shield, he fought, whirling his facon, waiting for an opportunity for a sweeping blow that would lay his opponent's throat open. To the gaucho, throat-cutting was the only satisfactory way of killing an enemy. W. H. Hudson, the English naturalist and novelist who was born and grew up in Argentina in the middle of the 1800s recollected in his book Far Away and Long Ago listening as a child to groups of gauchos as they sat around and yarned at the close of day in the pulperia, the village store, bar, and general meeting place.
Inevitably, the talk turned sooner or later to the subject of cutting throats. Not to waste powder on prisoners was an unwritten law and the veteran gaucho clever with the knife took delight in obeying it. Remembered Hudson: 'It always came as a relief, I heard them say, to have as a victim a young man with a good neck after an experience of tough, scraggy old throats: with a person of that sort they were in no hurry to finish the business; it was performed in a leisurely, loving way…He did his business rather like a hellish creature revelling in his cruelty. He would listen to all his captive could say to soften his heart - all his heartrending prayers and pleadings; and would reply: "ah, friend," or little friend, or brother - "your words pierce me to the heart and I would gladly spare you for the sake of that poor mother of yours who fed you with her milk, and for your own sake too, since in this short time I have conceived a great friendship towards you; but your beautiful neck is your undoing, for how could I possibly deny myself the pleasure of cutting such a throat - so shapely, so smooth and soft and so white! Think of the sight of warm red blood gushing from that white column!" And so on, with wavings of the steel blade before the captive's eyes, until the end.'
It was a cruel, brutal country out there on the plains in noman's land beyond the frontier posts of the Argentine army. For the settlers, pushing west and south in their bullock-wagons, the greatest terror was reserved for the Indians, who bitterly resisted the encroachment on their ancestral hunting grounds. Even the tough gaucho felt a fear and respect for them. It was a similar story of course on the North American plains, thousands of miles away. In both countries, encroaching white settlers viewed the embattled Indians as savage beasts-
'Those horrible howling bands,' wrote the gaucho Martin Fierro
That fall like a swarm on town and farm;
Before the Christian has time to arm,
They have seen the sign; they have sniffed the wind
And they come like the desert sand…
The only thing in his savage creed
That the Indian's sure about
Is this: that it's always good to kill,
And of smoking blood to drink his fill:
And the blood he can't drink when his belly's full
He likes to see bubble out…
Like ravening beasts on the scent of blood
They come o'er the desert broad,
Their terrible cries fill the earth and skies
And make every hair on your head to rise,
Every mother's son of their howling horde
Seems a devil damned by God.
In 1832, when Rosas was busy trying to wipe out the pampas Indians, his camp was visited by Charles Darwin during the British naturalist's historic voyage in HMS Beagle to Latin America. Darwin described the place as looking more like the hide-out of brigands than the headquarters of a nation's army. Guns, wagons and crude straw huts had been formed into a sort of compound, 400 yards square. Encamped within it were the general's gauchos. The young Englishman was fascinated by them - their mustachios, long black hair falling down over their shoulders, their scarlet ponchos and wide riding trousers, white boots with huge spurs, and knives stuck in their waistbands. They were extremely polite and looked, Darwin said, 'as if they would cut your throat and make a bow at the same time.' He got the same feeling about their general - extremely courteous but capable of ordering a man to be shot on the slightest whim.
Rosas's campaign strategy against the Indians was simple. He rounded them up a hundred or so at a time and slaughtered them without compunction or mercy - men, women and children. In fact, while Darwin was in the camp, a company of gauchos rode off on an Indian hunt. They spotted a party of Indians crossing the open plain, and after killing a few who fought when cornered, they finally rounded up 110 men, women, and children. They shot all the men except three who they kept for interrogation. The better looking girls were set aside to be distributed among the gauchos. But the older women and the uglier girls were also killed immediately. The children were kept to be sold as slaves. The three surviving Indians were then shot in turn as they refused to divulge the whereabouts of the rest of the tribe, the third of them pushing out his chest proudly as he told his captors, 'Fire, I am a man. I can die.'
To the horrified Darwin, it was the Argentines who were the savages, not the Indians. But then he was a genteel young man from the peaceful Shropshire countryside. While his voyage led him to a revolutionary concept of the evolution of life, he was incapable of understanding the basic facts of life in a raw, brutal land. It was win or die. Prisoners always had their throats cut after battle. It came as no surprise to them. As for the charming Rosas, he ruled through terror and repression. He allowed no constitution or parliament. He banned books and newspapers. But he enjoyed wide support among the people who counted for nothing in Argentina - the poor, the gauchos, who worshipped him. He could throw the bolas, break horses, and cut throats with the best of them.
He once explained to a friend how he held on to power. Although he was a landowner, he said, he knew and understood the lower classes. 'I know and respect the talents of many of the men who have governed the country…But it seems to me that all committed a great error; they governed very well for the cultured people but scorned the lower classes, the people of the fields, who were the men of action. I believe it is important to establish a major influence over this class to contain it and direct it, and I have acquired this influence. I am a gaucho among gauchos. I talk as they do. I protect them. I am their attorney. I care for their interests.'
The Indians of the Argentine plains were doomed by the hatred and terror they inspired. For a large part of the last century they held back the white tide with their raids on isolated farms and military outposts, armed with nothing more than their eighteen-foot lances tipped with a foot-long blade, their bolas, three heavy metal balls attached to ropes which were whirled and thrown to upend their enemies, and their bows and arrows. But eventually - and less than one hundred years ago - the Argentine cavalry swept through the pampas. Unlike the United States, where the Indian survivors were rounded up and herded into reservations, in Argentina the slaughter was total. Indian settlements were razed to the ground. The few remnants of a proud and skilled people were sent to Buenos Aires as captive servants. Even rebellious gauchos, known as montoneros, who on more than one occasion had taken on the national army in open battle, were exterminated or brought to heel. The vast lands of the pampas, ripe for exploitation, disappeared into the hands of generals, the land-owning aristocrats of colonial descent, and speculators. British-built railways probed out into the empty land, carrying hundreds of thousands of Spanish and Italian immigrants to work as peasants on the land, living in mud and straw huts, transient hovels for men who felt no kinship to the rich, black pampas soil but dreamed of earning enough from it to take back to the land of their birth.
Not even the estancieros, the wealthy ranchers who owned hundreds of thousands of pampas acres - estates as large as English counties - sank any roots in this desolate, monotonous land. To them it was a commodity. The railways carried their grain and cattle to the port city of Buenos Aires. From there the wheat and meat were shipped on to the booming markets in Europe. Overnight, the cattle ranchers from Argentina became the world's newest nouveau riche. They owned mansions in Buenos Aires, Paris, and London. On their lands in the pampas they built French chateaux and gabled English country homes, surrounded with eucalyptus groves, lawns and rose gardens, which they visited on the occasional weekend. But the wealth of the land was such that it could support those who milked it with such abandon (there is an old Argentine saying which has stood the test of time - no matter how hard Argentines try they can never bankrupt Argentina).
The land could also support the thousands of immigrants pouring into the port of Buenos Aires every week. They came in such numbers that the population soared from nearly 2 million in 1869 to 4 million in 1895 and 8 million in 1914. By then three out of every four adults in Buenos Aires were European born. The vast majority of the nation possessed no ties that bound them together as one people with a feeling and understanding for one another - outside the family the lack of tolerance of Argentines towards one another has haunted the nation down to this day. At the turn of the century, at the critical moment of nation-building, the only bond among the thousands of new Argentines pouring into Buenos Aires was that in building a new city in place of the old-fashioned, large village (la grand aldea) between the River Plate and the pampas, they, as labourers on the building sites, in the cattle slaughter houses, and on the dockside, and the carpenters, grocers, milkmen, butchers, servants, householders, and peddlers, all owed their livelihood to the vast, empty hinterland beyond the city.
It was a land, wrote American poet Archibald MacLeish, 'in which the distances from house to house are too great for the barking of dogs on the stillest night; a country in which the cock crows only twice because there is no answer…a country so level that even time has no hold on it and one century is like another; a country so empty that the watches at night put their eyes along the ground to see the circle of the horizon; a country in which the sky is so huge that men plant islands of eucalyptus trees over the houses to be covered from the blue. It is a country of grass, a country without stone, a country in which the women are always together under the dark trees in the evening, their faces fading into the loneliness with the night.'
It was on the pampas, near the village of Los Toldos in the Province of Buenos Aires, some 150 miles west of the Argentine capital, that Maria Eva Ibarguren was born on May 7, 1919, in a ramshackle farmhouse built of mud bricks and roofed with tiles of red clay and corrugated iron.
