'The Insufferable Gaucho' is available to read online at the New Yorker
“The cemetery I’m talking about, said Pereda, is an exact
copy of eternity.” (26)
The Patagonian Mara.
Manuel Pereda, the titular insufferable gaucho, is not a
gaucho. He is a lawyer and an ex-judge, but also a wearer of environment; he
breaks the borders between environs and wears their characteristic like a
veneer. The environments at hand are simple; nation (Argentina), country (the
Pampas) and city (Buenos Aires.) Pereda outlines the three accordingly:
Argentina’s like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best.
Buenos Aires is full of Crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to
recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but
the Pampas- the Pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that’s what they’re
like. (26)
City and country are aliens to
each other, but both share a bond with the nation; Pereda’s Buenos Aires is the
hub of the political uprising of General Perón and the collapse of the
Argentinian economy, while the country shoulders the image of nation, the
hardened and skilled gaucho’s of an idyllic Argentinian widerness. Much to
Pereda’s lament, images are static, while reality is transitional.
The
wasteland feel of the story has strong similarities with works of J.M Coetzee
that are purposefully displaced, with certainties and realities kept well away
from the reader, most notably in Waiting
for the Barbarians and The Childhood
of Jesus. But Bolaño’s story is set in a real place, in Argentina, but
Bolaño lets the reader witness displacement and dislocation occur. All of the
gauchos, and Pereda for that matter, are elderly, suggesting a decay, added to
by the aimlessness and lack of skill the gauchos show. The train that reaches
the wasteland sometimes doesn’t even come, “as if that part of Argentina had
been erased from memory as well as from the map.” (28)
As a result of hardships, the
gaucho’s of the Pampas have sold their cattle and horses for slaughter, giving
up the action (ranching & horse-riding)
that made them gauchos, leaving them with the image; everyone in Capitán
Jourdan wears bombachas, the baggy
trousers typical of a gaucho. Pereda adopts this style on arriving in the
Pampas, and slowly builds up a ‘gauchoness’; he buys a horse that he rides
everywhere, even into stores, and daydreams of riding into Buenos Aires on it.
He eventually buys two cattle. As the hardships of the nation forced the
country dwellers to give up their cattle and horses, the environment reacted,
and, free of large herbivores, is now rampant with rabbits (more likely
Patagonian mara) which add to the homogeneity that the country seems to suffer
from. The food and work that this monocultural environment offers do not fit
with Pereda’s image of the valiant gaucho, leading him much anguish (“Rabbit
hunting! What sort of job is that for a gaucho?”) (24) Pereda thinks that “the
shame of the nation or the continent had turned them into tame cats. That’s why
the cattle have been replace by rabbits, he thought.”(35) Here he sees the
environment as a reflection of people and nation, not something that can be
viscerally imprinted upon by occurences from both forces. Pereda’s wearing of
the environment veneers eventually leads to the ending farcical confrontation,
wherein he, as the countryside gaucho, pricks the groin of an over-excited
literary socialite in a café in Buenos Aires. Pereda’s affinity for and desire
to use his knife and to start a fight is a residual machoism from gaucho
culture, which is alien both to the people of the Pampas and the people of
Buenos Aires, apparently to Pereda’s lament.
He is confronted with a final choice
about his visit to Buenos Aires; “stay in Buenos Aires and become a champion of
justice, or go back to the Pampas, where I don’t belong, and try to do
something useful… [with the locals and the gauchos.]” (40-41) The fact that
Pereda chooses the less appealing of the two, the Pampas, shows him heading back
to an environment where he can live in fantasy as a macho countryside gaucho,
instead of engaging with the reality of the times in Buenos Aires. The story
ends in signature Bolaño style; a non-ending, a middle of a story, but
understandable in some way. In some way, this is the end of Pereda’s story for
his colleagues in Buenos Aires, as he returns to the Pampas, dislocated from
national time & space, while a real political emergency emerges before
them, widening the trifecta between city, country and nation out of view.
Although, it is not clearly stated which path Pereda chooses; does he go ‘back’
to the Pampas, or ‘back’ to his life in Buenos Aires? The final line can be
understood casually as the former, as a narrational direction; he is leaving
Buenos Aires to go back to the Pampas; or deeper as the latter; he is in Buenos
Aires, but is giving it up, this farce of being a swaggering gaucho, to resume
his previous life in Buenos Aires.
