Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [49]
Darwin needed Rosas’ help in traveling through the country. He wanted a passport and permission to use government horses to travel between checkpoints established by Rosas—as part of his campaign, Rosas had established twelve armed outposts, or postas, between his camp on the Colorado River and Buenos Aires, and Darwin intended to follow the trail left by these small forts back to the capital. He didn’t say much else about his conversation with Rosas, but he received both passport and permission “in a most obliging manner.”
“My interview passed away without a smile,” Darwin dryly concluded, declaring himself “altogether pleased with my interview with the terrible General. He is worth seeing, as being decidedly the most prominent character in S. America.”
It later turned out that even the fact of the meeting itself was useful. At the end of his long ride Darwin tried to enter the city of Buenos Aires only to find it blockaded by revolutionaries allied with Rosas. He was barred from traveling overland, and there were embargoes on all the ports—until Darwin mentioned his meeting with Rosas. Instantly, the leaders gave him permission to pass. “Magic,” Darwin wrote, “could not have altered circumstances any quicker.”
My interest was in culture more than politics. Rosas was the unofficial king of the gauchos, and Darwin had met with probably the world’s most powerful cowboy until Ronald Reagan. The general was famous for his feats of horsemanship, his traditional dress—he once called on the British minister to Buenos Aires in full gaucho regalia—and his reputation as a practical, no-nonsense man of action. With his downfall and eventual exile to England in the mid-1850s, gaucho culture lost its most visible embodiment. By the end of the century, as private landowners increasingly forced the gauchos to abandon their wandering lifestyle and settle on the ranch, the culture of plains-roaming, free-spirited, egalitarian nomads had all but vanished.
I wondered what that meant now. The gaucho endures in Argentina and Uruguay as a kind of tourist icon, something found on postcards in Buenos Aires. For reasons I never quite fathomed, it’s also the athletic mascot of my undergraduate alma mater, the University of California Santa Barbara. I was curious to find whether anything beyond that had actually survived. Was there anything to the gauchos today, except for a pleasing set of values, a historical idea, and a Zorro-masked mascot?
I took a bus to Bahia Blanca, the next town north of Rosas’ post on the Colorado River, and arrived at 3 A.M. I slept four hours on a bench in the bus terminal and then staggered downtown to see a city that had grown by leaps and bounds since Darwin visited and reported, “Bahia Blanca scarcely deserves the name of a village.” It was afternoon by the time I made it to the heart of the city, a leafy plaza surrounded by cafés and shops. In the middle of the plaza, old men sat around stone tables and played cards while families picnicked and young couples groped each other in the shade. Wandering down one street, I came to El Matrero—a veritable gaucho emporium. Leather saddles and halters, colorful ponchos, and paintings of romantic gauchos jammed the dark walls. Display cases full of maté gourds and silver knives took up all the space in the middle of the store. Everywhere I stood I felt in the way, bustled and pushed by busy store clerks searching for gaucho relics. The jostling pushed me toward the back of the room, where a wrinkled, silver-haired leather smith stood, smelling of leather and glue and working on a worn saddle blanket. He smiled as I approached.
“You put this under the saddle,” he explained in Spanish, holding up the edge of the blanket, “and tie a belt around the horse here. The buckle on the belt rubbed against this and broke the stitching.” He pointed out where the yellow stitches had snapped and poked a four-inch needle into the blanket.
I asked the man working the saddle what he thought. Was gaucho culture dead?
“Gaucho culture dead?