CHAPTER XVI
LIFE IN THE “CAMP” AND THE PROVINCIAL TOWNS
To the European imagination, the Argentine gaucho typifies the rural life of the country. And a fine figure he cuts in his showy poncho (a shawl with a slit in the centre to thrust the head through), the graceful folds of it, with fringed edges and embroidery, falling as low as his top-boots with their jingling spurs. On his head he wears any variety of soft felt hat, but never the “Panama hat” of popular imagination. He is more inclined to cultivate a beard and fierce moustache than to shave, and above his poncho, which covers a complete suit of “store” clothes, he usually wears a black or white silk handkerchief tied loosely around his neck. On horseback, an admirable figure, the poncho serves also as partial covering for his steed, which he rides with unrivalled grace and confidence.
He has a soul for music, too, this rough and somewhat villainous-looking knight of the Pampa. The guitar is his favourite instrument, and he is no gaucho who cannot strum a tune thereon, or improvise some lines of verse, the old Spanish custom of singing a couplet to the accompaniment of the guitar still retaining high favour in the Argentine Camp, to such an extent, indeed, that a weekly paper, La Pampa Argentina, exists for no other purpose than to collect and circulate the latest efforts of the coplistas and reprint famous couplets of the past. His sports, too, are rendered picturesque by the part which his horse, almost inseparable from himself, performs in them.
An agreeable sense of old-fashioned courtesy still clings to him, and while I fear his morals will not bear too close an inspection, nor are his habits of life quite as cleanly as domestic legislation has contrived to make those of most European and North American people, the gaucho is by no means unlikable, although I never felt quite so kindly towards him in the flesh as I have done imaginatively through the pages of Mr. Cunninghame-Graham and Mr. W. H. Hudson. For all his courtesies, his nature retains much of the old Spanish cruelty. To see him bury his spurs in the flanks of his horse with a vicious dig, and pull the animal up on his haunches by throwing his whole weight backwards on the reins, that are fixed to a long and brutal curb bit, is not a sight that makes you long to go up and take him by the hand as a man and a brother.
His origin is the mixture of Spanish and Indian blood, in which it is not improbable that some of the worser qualities of both races may have been retained, along with a curious strain of sentimentality. That he is a veritable devil of cruelty I cannot assert from anything I have witnessed, but from much that I have read and heard from eye-witnesses, he seems no person to quarrel with. “A merciful man is merciful to his beast.” If this be any true test, then the gaucho is not a merciful man. One of the most disgusting performances it has ever been my lot to witness was one of a series widely advertised in Buenos Ayres, and patronised by the Spaniards and natives with high approval. It took place in the grounds of the Sports Club, near Palermo, and consisted of exhibitions of gauchos breaking in supposedly wild and savage horses (potros). As a matter of fact, the horses were poor, spiritless creatures, that could be made to buck only by the riders gashing them with their cruel spurs in the tenderest parts of their bodies. A more degrading or beastly exhibition I have never seen, yet it amused the Spanish-Argentine audience vastly. No, among the gauchos there is nothing of the Arab’s traditional attachment to his horse. His horse is to him a brute that has cost a few pesos and may be ridden to death with no great loss. Here, however, it is not my intention to enlarge on this subject, which I am reserving for more specific treatment in a later chapter, and I shall merely record one instance of gaucho brutality, as described to me by an Argentine lady.
It dates back some eight or ten years, when, together with her husband and a party, she was on the way to a very remote settlement on the Andine frontier, where her husband had taken over a large estancia. The diligence was driven by a team of six or eight horses, and while going along, a gaucho who accompanied the driver and assisted him in the “care” of the animals, managed, by his skill in throwing the lasso, to capture a wild mare, whom they surprised in the solitude of the pampa. More as an exhibition of the driver’s power to control the animals than out of need, this wild thing was harnessed up with the others and attached immediately to the coach. It very soon became unmanageable, and presently in its struggles fell down, the heavy coach rolling over it and breaking its hind legs. Quick as a flash, the gaucho who had captured it, leapt to the ground, and before any of the travellers realised what he was doing, he was dangling in front of them the mare’s tongue, which he had cut out by the roots with his long-bladed knife, the animal being still alive! The husband of the lady who related to me this pleasant little episode of native life, immediately shot the animal dead, and would willingly have done the same to the man, but that his services were essential to their journey. Mare’s tongue is considered among the gauchos a great delicacy, and they are evidently not particular about waiting for the mare to be done with it.
I have no wish whatever to blacken the character of the gaucho, nor yet have I come to praise him, for I found myself but little in touch with his class, and such as I met I shall hope were not the finest specimens. Later, however, I did meet an old German who had lived among them for some thirty years, and still had his home in a lonely corner of the Andes. When I encountered him he was carrying what seemed an unusually large revolver of an antique type, and I asked him if he could count up how many people he had killed with it, living all those years where the arm of the law can scarcely reach out. “Never once in my life have I had to use it against a human being,” was his surprising reply, and with that must disappear some of our boys’ book fictions of gaucho ferocity.
Teams of Oxen Ploughing in the Argentine Pampa.
The gaucho is to South America what the cowboy is to the North, and so far as life in the larger towns is concerned, the one is as seldom seen as the other, where streets are paved and electric trams are running. If anything, I should suspect the gaucho of entertaining a greater dislike for town life than does his counterpart of North America. He is essentially a child of nature, delighting to be in the saddle, roaming the plains, rounding up the cattle, living to the full his outdoor life, eating enormous quantities of beef and mutton, sipping his mate and strumming his guitar at eventide by the open door of his rudely furnished rancho. It seems to me that his opportunities for scoundrelism are somewhat limited by nature, and if there is no denying his cruelty, that is no more than acknowledging his origin. He seldom owns property of much importance, and there are not many families of gaucho origin who have risen to wealth, although one full-blooded member of the race, the ever notorious Rosas, who held the Argentine in an iron grip as dictator from 1833 to 1852, has left his mark on its history. It is more than likely that he is fated to disappear in the onward march of the Republic. Nowhere has he the field to himself, as he had say thirty years ago, for, as I have already pointed out, the Italian, the Russian, and indeed the labourers of all nations, have spread throughout the country to such extent that there is probably no estancia where the newcomers do not outnumber the gauchos. Proud of his national origin, he does not mix readily with them, and this self-isolation will surely have but one result, although the time may still be distant for the passing of his picturesque figure from the Argentine scene.