Autumn

Juan José Saer
Translated by Will Noah

Busy insulting their political adversaries, attempting to pass for Europeans, and modeling themselves in their imaginations after archetypes that they consider the height of perfection, many Argentine writers of the nineteenth century, when they speak of the landscape and its inhabitants, are more concerned with their rhetorical gestures than with the relevance of their observations. Opening a parallel path after 1815, gaucho literature, which culminated masterfully in the seventies with Martín Fierro, introduced a bit of reality. But many highbrow writers looked down on it. Those cultured writers were stubborn idealists: for instance, the first author to systematically take up the Paraná delta, Marco Sastra, in his book Tempe argentino, says that the delta contains ferocious animals, but when he later describes them, he declares that they’re harmless. The book’s obtuse dialectics are those of a man untroubled by doubt: “Observe, then, how science’s own conclusions come to dispel the supposed antiquity of deltas; because if theology demonstrates anything, it is the briefness of the human race’s history on the Earth.” In addition to obscurantism, among the author’s chief characteristics is bad luck, given that he made this affirmation in 1858—that is, one year before the appearance of On the Origin of Species. 

Almost three decades earlier, Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, had refuted this drivel with his superb observations. Of the book’s twenty-one chapters, seventeen are dedicated to South America, and of those seventeen, eight are concerned exclusively with the Río de la Plata and Argentina. The first thing one notices in the Voyage’s thrilling pages is that no fact is a matter of indifference to its author and that everything demands an explanation—even certain aspects of political life mentioned in passing, in remarks still valid 160 years later, not just in reference to events contemporary to his journey but to the present moment: “With this entire want of principle in many of the leading men, with the country full of ill-paid turbulent officers, the people yet hope that a democratic form of government can succeed.”

Darwin is known for deciphering the past of living species; the future wasn’t foreign to him either: “This gives one a grand idea of the immense territory over which the Indians roam: yet, great as it is, I think there will not, in another half-century, be a wild Indian northward of the Rio Negro. The warfare is too bloody to last; the Christians killing every Indian, and the Indians doing the same by the Christians. It is melancholy to trace how the Indians have given way before the Spanish invaders.” Exactly fifty years later, his prophecy had come to pass. Just like the priest Cattáneo one century earlier, Darwin observed that, at a certain point in the Río de la Plata, the banks disappear. The frequent disappointment of travelers who, after dreaming in front of a map, must confront the region’s true, banal geography struck him too when he penetrated the estuary’s muddy waters. 

When he began his voyage on December 27, 1831, he was twenty-two years old, and he had abandoned his medical studies due to his hypersensitivity; in addition to practicing chemistry, geology, and the natural sciences in general, he occasionally wrote poetry and painted. He returned from his five-year journey with his health somewhat ruined and settled in the countryside, not far from London, to classify the information he had collected and work out his theory of evolution. FitzRoy, the captain of the Beagle, was barely twenty-five years old. In short, they were two young Englishmen from respectable families who set out to travel the world, FitzRoy as a sailor skilled in chronometry and meteorology and Darwin as a naturalist. The strong friendship they struck up during the voyage didn’t withstand the appearance of On the Origin of Species; initially humiliated by the success of The Voyage of the Beagle, which had overshadowed his own account of the expedition, FitzRoy later became outraged by the theory of evolution, which undermined his religious convictions, and he committed himself, monomaniacally, to refuting them; he became a vehement conservative, while Darwin, gentle and measured, became more and more liberal. 

There’s something euphoric, festive, in Darwin’s always-alert curiosity. The word naturalist never described anyone more aptly: the book of the world, which for Diderot was more interesting than any other volume, absorbed him on every single one of its pages: from the sea’s phosphorescence to the ignorance of ranchers, who doubted that it was cold in the northern hemisphere, to the duels fought between gauchos to first blood, the height of thistles, wasted cattle meat, the southern Indians’ sacred trees, the vitrified pipes formed by lightning bolts when they penetrate sand, the many aspects of Argentine society and the psychology of men who live in the countryside, not to mention the apparent nearness of the horizon on the plains (I’ll return to this point), as well as his specific interests as a professional naturalist, geologist, paleontologist, and botanist. For someone who comes from the plains, reading The Voyage is a way of putting in order, revivifying, and understanding not just the laws that govern the world, but intimate sensations that seemed inseparable from one’s own being and which now unfold externally, at the same time autonomous and familiar. 

In 1989, on a plane returning from Europe, I opened a Buenos Aires evening newspaper, a popular daily that used to be among the city’s best-selling, and, on the cultural page, if you can call it that, there was a long article combatively arguing that Darwin had been a spy of the British Empire. Reading it generated indignation and sadness in me. Once more, a nationalist scribbler had allowed himself, out of ignorance and resentment, to demagogically distort facts and texts that in no way justified that slander. To label as foreign anything that puts up any resistance is of course a common reflex: the famous international Jewish-Marxist lobby is the war horse of fascism everywhere, and our dictators, usually cavalry officers, haven’t resisted mounting it. But the slander against Darwin is part of a more serious conviction, which consists of believing that there’s an Argentine essence so specific that everything outside it is necessarily intractable, an unreality so rarified that it borders on the inhuman. When existentialism was in fashion, for example, some intellectuals, instead of noting with good cause that many people claimed to be disciples of Sartre merely because they had read about him in the papers, preferred to wield the surprising argument that anguish was a foreign concept, that anguish could never affect an Argentine. Ernesto Sábato made a mockery of these thinkers in his time.

These absurdities are particularly ridiculous in light of how many of the best pages ever written about Argentina are by foreigners. In many of the world’s languages, there exist excellent texts about our landscape, our customs, our society, as well as about negligible but deeply significant events that, if they hadn’t transpired at the moment those foreigners were present, in a brief and happy coincidence, would have been lost forever. A native, too accustomed to those details, wouldn’t have perceived them; only the unprejudiced, virgin gaze of a traveler could notice them. The French consider themselves Cartesians and the English believe they know what it is to be a gentleman; in the latter case, it goes without saying that the first condition is to be English, and if the word is applied to a foreigner, it’s because he’s considered someone who behaves like an Englishman. One need only pass a week in Paris or London to perceive the naivete of this mythology. National archetypes dissolve into the savage irrationalism of contemporary society. To describe an object, it’s best not to have any prejudice about it in the moment of description; and, given that that’s a nearly impossible condition, it remains true that it’s only when prejudices, confronted with the facts, begin to dissipate that a text starts to become interesting: thus, when Ulrich Schmidl attests to the fighting valor of his enemies, an emotion stronger than mere historical curiosity invades us as we read. 

The list of authors who have written about the Río de la Plata is astonishing: objects of veneration and study for our sociologists, ethnologists, and historians, who have put many of them in circulation in excellent critical editions, their texts are generally unknown to the wider public. Merchants, ambassadors, soldiers, naturalists, globetrotters, journalists, engineers, and exiles, as well as professional writers, lecturers, clergymen, philanthropists, philosophers, adventurers. From Pigafetta to Gombrowicz, including Schmidl, the priests Falkner and Cattáneo, and father Florian Paucke, who lived for seven years among the Mocoví Indians and left behind magnificent illustrations, naturalists like Félix de Azara, Darwin, and D’Orbigny, engineers like Alfred Ebelot, explorers like George Chaworth Musters, journalists like Albert Londres, writers like Ortega y Gasset and Roger Caillois, who had an adventure similar to Gombrowicz’s, given that he had traveled to Buenos Aires to give a series of lectures only to be surprised by the German occupation, unable to return. In 1910, Clemenceau, a guest at the Centenary festivities, wrote enthusiastic pages upon his return. We Argentines have been objects of reflection for André Maurois, Drieu La Rochelle, Graham Greene, Waldo Frank, and Rabindranath Tagore. Eugene O’Neill spent a year as a worker in the port of Buenos Aires, and wrote a few plays there. Graham Greene, who visited several times, wrote one of his novels about Argentina, The Honorary Consul. The Frankfurt School existed thanks to Argentine wheat: Félix Weill, born in Buenos Aires in 1898, son of a German immigrant who made a fortune exporting cereals, provided an institutional frame for the group, and convinced his father, Hermann Weill, to finance the Institute. A friend of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, Weill earned a doctorate in political science in Frankfurt, where his father had sent him to study, and his dissertation dealt with the practical problems of achieving socialism. When the rise of Nazism forced the members of the Institute to emigrate in the mid-thirties, Weill returned to Argentina. 

These accounts are obviously not infallible, and many of them can be forgotten without regret. The geologic and pseudoethnographic frenzy that overtook Europe midway through the nineteenth century, at the height of colonialism, and which began to subside around 1930, furnished reams of abominable pages. Every antiquarian bookstore in London or Paris abounds with volumes about The Pampas, The Río de la Plata, and South America, all equally insipid, and in many cases a glance is enough to discern that their authors either never left Buenos Aires except to eat an asado at a neighboring ranch, or only made a forty-eight-hour stop on some cruise, or, in extreme cases, never even left Paris. In those books, the predominant themes are generally the beauty of porteña ladies, the ferocity of the gauchos, the infinite number of cows, or how well Tom, Dick, and Harry speak English or French. Any old ambassador, or ambassador’s wife, would kill time writing a book about Las pampas, always plural. The most discerning ones tended to copy Azara, Darwin, or D’Orbigny. In 1948, André Maurois offered up, not without a touch of self-satisfaction, a Journal d’un tour en Amerique Latine, the feeble result of an official assignment to evaluate France’s spiritual influence on the continent in the face of the surreptitious advance of the cultural advisers of the English embassy, which, incidentally, would later install in Argentina one of its brashest agents, Lawrence Durrell. Maurois describes such thrilling moments as these: “At the Hotel Alvear, I find my room full of red and white roses.

“We didn’t know what to do, my hosts tell me; in Whatever Gods May Be, your hero only likes white flowers; in Promised Land, he has a fetish for red roses. Just to be safe, we laid out both . . .

“I don’t know about my heroes, but I like roses. Red and white.” The next day, we remain stunned by the magnitude of his revelations: “My guests have put at my disposal, for the duration of my stay, a car and a driver, Antonio, who is a surprising creature. Though he is Spanish, he speaks French well …”

When I speak of foreign authors, I’m referring, of course, to another kind of literature—though literature probably isn’t the appropriate name for the texts they left behind. Entering unexplored places, even in the heart of the big city, as with Gombrowicz, they were able to illuminate and name things that, before they visited, were blurred in an undifferentiated magma. Chaworth Musters’s Tehuelche Indians, Darwin’s Calandria mockingbird (Mimus orpheus), and the impoverished, somewhat venal adolescents frequented by Gombrowicz, who saw them as the country’s only aristocracy, were captured by that external gaze, at once impartial and benevolent, that assigned them their precise place in the world. 

In many cases we have the impression, wondrous and sharp, that these things are being perceived and named for the first time since the world began.

In the Río de la Plata, and in the Americas in general, toponymy oscillates between the symbolic and the sensory. The religious names of the Spanish and the feminine names of nineteenth-century immigrants alternate, on our maps’ colored surfaces, with those that evoke the immediacy of the senses. This tendency is strongest when it comes to the names of rivers. In the indigenous toponymy, often the sensory and symbolic planes mix together: the name Paraná means father of rivers, evoking the supremacy of that powerful current as well as describing its tortuous course and the numerous streams and creeks that it engenders as it flows down to the estuary. The symbolic or commemorative names summon up the past, history, or tradition, while the sensory place names, above all for rivers, seem to resound in a constant present, and merge with what they name. This aquatic toponymy arose gradually, from human movement, and in its repetitive simplicity, its limited variations correspond to the limited contrasts that arise from the most elemental sensations.

Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell served to permanently classify most bodies of water. Even the Río de la Plata was named the “Sweet Sea” by Solís, who identified it via sight and taste before history and tradition took over, labeling it first with the name of its discoverer and correcting his visual impression caused by the absence of banks (“the Solís River”), and then with the illusion of the precious metals it supposedly gave access to, the Argentine River, which would later come to name the entire territory. Sometimes these sensory denominations are a matter of pragmatism, not only providing orientation, but also distinguishing potable from saline water for the sake of cattle. But in most cases it’s pure sense impression, stylized to the point of emblematic simplicity, that establishes the naming. The Río Negro, the Colorado, the Auburn, the Río Verde, the Blanco, the Grande and Chico Rivers, as well as the Dry River and the Small Sea Lake, all perpetuate visual impressions; the Sweet, Salty, Salted, Bitter, Sour Rivers do the same for taste: on their empty banks it’s not hard to imagine the man who, collecting a bit of water in his cupped hand, leaned over intently to sample it. Foul Water Mountain, on the other hand, in the province of San Luis, calls to mind travelers who, distressed, hurried on ahead to escape the reeking odors; sometimes the temperature of the water suggests the name, and often the sound that its flowing makes. The First, Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Rivers in the province of Córdoba simply mark, from north to south, the linear advance of their discoverers. The conventional order with which they’ve been named, rather than classifying the outer world, merely suggests the chronology of their perceptions. 

This empirical method makes repetition, as one would expect, unavoidable. Within a radius of some five hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires, leaving Uruguay aside, there number at least fourteen rivers and streams labeled Salty or Salted; together with the rest of the republic, there must be at least thirty or forty. There are fewer Sweet Rivers, but even so they’re not far behind. The province of Santiago del Estero is considered one of the country’s most arid, and yet somehow, among the three most important rivers that furrow it, one is the Salty, another the Sweet, and the third the Salted, which flows, apparently to little effect, into the second of these. Nearly within the same radius, and still on the plains, there are two lakes called Small Sea; and of course the smaller lakes named La Salada that don’t appear on maps are innumerable. South of Rosario there’s a stream called Saladillo; symmetrically, north of Santa Fe lies another Saladillo stream; and between the two, the lengthy Río Salado, which crosses various provinces and flows into the Paraná in the city of the same name.

This decidedly reiterative tendency, along with genuine subtleties of observation, has led to certain analytic combinations intended to specify perceptions and avoid confusion. Santa Fe’s Saladillo stream, therefore, is formed by two tributaries: the Sweet Salted and the Bitter Salted, which, upon joining, curiously cancel each other out, since, once they become a single stream, the modifiers vanish. Sometimes the adjectives Grande and Chico are used so frequently that, though they’re intended to clarify, they end up doing the opposite. Just a few kilometers south of Buenos Aires lie, in the form of creeks, streams, and lakes (not far from a Salado stream, a Quequén Salado River, and a third Small Sea), the Tunas Grandes and the Tunas Chicas, a Grande stream, a Quequén Grande River (near a Sweet stream), a Grande ravine next to a Salada Grande lake, a stream called Napostá Grande, as well as a Small Willow River, a Great Willow River, and, unexpected but dazzling, the Short Willow River, which seems to suggest that, for the first two, the adjectives Small and Great refer not to the willow but to the river.

It’s clear that this empirical toponymy extends across the entire territory of the republic, and that Dulce, Salado, Chico, Grande, Colorado, and Negro reappear and repeat, interspersed with each region’s indigenous names, across all latitudes. The commemorative names that, as they do all over the planet, recall men, dates, and events, sometimes have surprising resonances. In the province of Río Negro, for example, there’s a mountain called Caín across from another called Two Brothers, and both form a triangle with a third named, as if by coincidence, Two Friends. Something mysterious seems to emanate from those names. Even for those who don’t speak Indigenous languages, the sounds of Indian place names alone carry the unmistakable flavor of each region. And for those who do know something of them, those names evoke legendary characters, animals, and sites. Many visitors, missionaries, engineers, and scientists have given their names to a mountain, a port, a glacier, a bay. Bougainville, Darwin, FitzRoy, Musters, Falkner, Magallanes mingle with unknown figures, of whom there now sometimes remains nothing more than a generic mention, obscure, circumstantial, like Don Cristóbal, for example, even his surname unrecorded, or Negro Muerto, or el Tío, or The Drowned. The bestiary is endless, comprising domestic and wild animals, birds, mammals, and reptiles, species local and exotic, living, extinct, and even incongruous, like a mountain in the south of Patagonia called the Crocodile. But without a doubt the most evocative are those that refer to the territory’s empty immensity, or suggest it through etymological confusion, as occurs with the marvelous El Nochero, which the dictionary defines as a night watchman, but which on the pampa refers to a horse trained for darkness, and which the imagination, quicker than any dictionary, interprets as “friend of the night.” The same confusion enriches El Pensamiento (“Thought”), which likely refers to the flower of the same name, but in which we feel, above all, a meditative solemnity, or Soledad (“Solitude”), which surely commemorates a woman with that name, though we immediately attribute it to the extreme isolation of the town’s location. That isolation and that emptiness are frequently the sources of the toponymy: names like El Perdido (“The Lost”) therefore appear multiple times, and others like Malabrigo (“Unsheltered”), or Pozo Borrado (“Vanished Well”) evoke them as well. But it’s only when the distance, the solitude, the remoteness, and the desert become indefinable and immeasurable, erasing everything but an unlikely series of internal shudders, that names start to appear that reflect not the contours of the outer world, but moral or emotional states: the Bay of Deceit, Disappointment Point, the Bay of Sleeplessness or the Longed-For River. Until we reach, at the country’s far south, in Tierra del Fuego, the name par excellence, reduced to its minimal expression, the most abstract of all, located near other abstract objects like the Pyramid and Conical mountains, the extreme generic denomination, which merely makes the stylized gesture of naming the nameless, without recourse to any inner or outer point of reference: the cape Name. 

In its essence, toponymy represents the first verbal constellation to spread over the tortuous surface of the universe, verbal projectiles that are launched by man’s codified breath and become lodged not in places themselves but in the maps that serve as their emblems. Places are of course mute and neutral, essentially in conflict with their names, and, just as Darwin was disillusioned by the muddy waters and flat banks of what was pompously named the Río de la Plata on the map’s idealized diagram, so were those who gave it that name, substituting it for the Sweet Sea or Río de Solís, by the indigent land that they believed to be full of treasure and which didn’t award them anything more than death and disappointment. That mirage they sloshed around in still managed to give the entire country its name, la Argentina, thanks to a poetic slippage, more neoclassical than classical, that consisted in first naming the turbulent waters, making use of an epithet, el argentino río, feminizing it a bit later, las argentina aguas, and finally applying it to the surrounding territory, la argentina tierra. The May Revolution, in 1810, which began the process of separation from colonial Spain, and which occurred in the midst of poetic neoclassicism (the national anthem, written in 1811, is an academic example of this school), could only institutionalize this rhetorical gesture, probably one of the most deceptive in the entire repertory of toponymy around the world. The United States of America really does possess a political organization that corresponds to its name, and in Brazil it’s indisputable that the eponymous timber once abounded, just as it’s unfortunately inarguable that Rhodesia was visited by Cecil Rhodes, but the name of the Argentine Republic and that of the Río de la Plata constitute a flagrant abuse of language, because, in the entire nation’s territory, there was never even a single gram of that metal that, according to Sherlock Holmes, when it’s not just of the first, but of the very finest quality, should be polished with the tips of one’s thumbs rather than a piece of cloth. 

The denomination Sweet Sea had some correspondence with empirical truth, and the subsequent Río de Solís had its commemorative logic, but the definitive name Río de la Plata expresses only a fantasy. Names, as laconic and even penetrable as they may be, are the first texts that we read on—and the preposition has never been more literal—any country, and often names are all that exist for many things, as is the case not only for the inaccessible stars, but above all for the inner part of our own bodies, reticulated by a minuscule toponymy that refuses to leave even the most obscure nerve ending anonymous:

There, in the narrow pass of my nerves …!

as César Vallejo softly keened, comparing his moods to a Greek military encampment before battle. That realist reduction of a thing to its mere name is the starting point for a persistent official rhetoric that confuses, knowingly or not, a long-dated poetic figure with the reality of the country. Though no one thinks it’s possible to sit in the Turkish saddle of the sphenoid bone, nor that there’s really a guard dog at the point on the map of the heavens where the word Cerberus appears, there are still many people who pretend to believe, or, even worse, who really do believe that the name Argentina synthesizes true riches and transparency.