DEAR MANSILLA

            Perhaps it will strike you as fitting, Mansilla, that in these final moments before launching my second Argentine journey, and at precisely the moment that I am turning the last page on a volume of Mary Mann’s letters to your nation’s great Educator-President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, I direct myself in epistolary mode to you, whom I have only known from your famous letters to Santiago Arcos – while you will only know me from a perusal of these new pages. Allow me to introduce myself, so that hereafter we may consider ourselves old friends. I have known you for some time, since after my last journey to your pampas a quarter of a century ago, more than a full century after the composition of those letters of your Ranquel excursion. It may flatter you to know that, since then, you have been inordinately influential in my life as a writer, that I consider you something of a mentor, you and Cervantes, though of course there have been others closer at hand and less phantasmal.  

            I am a North American of predominantly German extraction, from the Swiss-German settlement of Tell City in southern Indiana. Beyond that, I will not trouble you here with an account of my birth or my early life. As for Mary Mann, whose letters I have been reading, she may be of primary interest to you as the translator of Sarmiento, father of your own common schools (he was influenced, you may recall, by Mrs. Mann's more famous husband and educator Horace). In any case, she was the first translator of a large portion of Sarmiento's most renowned and celebrated literary work, to which your own great work is both political response and literary antithesis: the at once brilliant and polemical Facundo: o, Civilización y barbarie, which in her version would be re-titled (tactically) Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, and which would be influential in gaining Sarmiento the North American aid and support that would give him added stature and clout at home in his bid for the Presidency. All of this was part and parcel to Mrs. Mann’s tireless championing of the educational platform at center of his politics. The United States has perhaps never known an “education President” of the stature of your Sarmiento, unless it was Lincoln, and Lincoln’s Presidency was so tragically consumed by the specter of Civil War that almost nothing else was possible from it.

            Your Argentina and Sarmiento’s certainly knew its share of civil unrest. As a veteran of the Paraguayan War, which Sarmiento brought to a close during the first leg of his Presidency, you are well acquainted too with the ingratitude of governments toward those who have most valiantly served them; your narrative of Corporal Gómez, though only the most dramatic of many, is sufficient in itself to make the point – and this without touching on your own insults suffered, on the fact, for instance, that after you had worked so enthusiastically for Sarmiento’s election, he demoted you to that remote service on the frontier, where nevertheless you accomplished a singular understanding with (and appreciation of) the Ranquel Indians which, had his and subsequent administrations known how to value it, should have signaled an era of peace and progress on that southern frontier to redound forever in their honor; yet for all your trouble that great Schoolmaster only censured you, charging you with abuse of authority, relieving you of even that marginal post on the fringes of civilization! In any case, you will surely appreciate this tribute of Mary Mann’s to one “Reinhold Solder, Esq., a very scholarly German gentleman, a man who was of very signal service to the country” in the anti-slavery movement and in the campaigns, focused around the elections of 1856 and 1860, to elect a republican President and to establish republican values in the land. Together with the more renowned Carl Schurz, as Mrs. Mann tells it, he “traversed the country from East to West to make speeches to the German population every where, to assure them that their interests were identical with the interests of liberty – For his great services the ungrateful republic tried to make slight compensation by giving him an office in the treasury department. Two years ago [1863] he was struck down by paralysis, and is but slowly recovering speech & activity – his lovely little wife has been obliged to exert herself by taking boarders ...”

            This is from a recent volume by a North American professor, published in Buenos Aires by the Instituto Cultural Argentino Norteamericano (ICANA), which owes its existence to the same ecumenical interest, embodied in Sarmiento’s short-lived educational journal Ambas Américas with its aim of bridging both American continents with a common politics and pedagogy.

            I wonder whether Reinhold Solder and Carl Schurz ever made it to nascent Tell City with their message of democracy and common purpose between the emigrant and so-called “native” populations?

            As a child my maternal grandmother, Mary (Holtzman) Kroessman, attended one of the last bilingual German-English primary schools in the United States, that supremely democratic institution that would give way, by shortly after the first “world war” against Germany, not long after your death in 1913, to a combination of German-American patriotism and the larger community’s isolationist and xenophobic fear-mongering.

             I wonder what form a bilingual Argentine-Ranquel common school might have taken in your republic? Alas, as in our America, Argentina very quickly chose a course of annihilation and forced assimilation of a shattered remnant of Indian survivors. And as you wrote in the epilogue to those collected Ranquel letters: “There is no greater evil than civilization without clemency.”

            I come to you now, Mansilla, rather circuitously and in fact quite by accident, through my reading of that Excursión a los indios ranqueles, which you had first published serially, between May and September of 1870, in Buenos Aires’s Tribuna, and subsequently in book form by December of the same year. Since that time it has never been out of print in the Spanish language. It is available now, for the first time in at least a century, in two separate versions in English. I was a third of the way through my own now-abandoned translation of it when word came to me of the publication of those others.

            I went to Argentina the first time in December of 1978 and left two years later in October. On the way out, to remember the country and its music by, I took some long-play recordings of largely folkloric music, in particular a sultry-voiced Mercedes Sosa singing (among other things) the legend of one Dorotea Bazán, who had been captured by Ranquel Indians and years later, when “redeemed” by her former countrymen, balked at that tardy favor, pleading to be allowed to remain in that barbarous land with her adopted family. This, though you might not recognize it, is the kernel of story that brought me to you, since the blurb accompanying the song erroneously attributed it to your book. In fact, as I learned years later, a more probable source is José Daza’s more prosaic military memoir Episodios Militares, which related the similar tale of a distinctly surnamed Dorotea, whom he encountered, in Quixotic dalliance, approximately a decade after your excursión – or “visit”, as Eva Gillies's translation ultimately renders it – , when the Ranquels’ dye was definitively cast (Daza's Dorotea has been given new life in a story by María Rosa Lojo in her collection of historical fictions Amores insólitos [Singular Loves] – more on María Rosa later).

            The rest of the story, in the form of my essay “In Search of Dorotea Bazán”, has been floating about in the universal ether, as it were, published and archived on what in these wondrous times we call the “World Wide Web”, where its first publication in a “paperless” or “electronic” journal attracted the admiring attentions of another editor who asked to re-publish it. A dizzying prospect to you, I imagine; perhaps it will help to think of this new technology as an extension of Alexander Graham Bell’s work with the telephone, though in fact it has more to do with other advances with which you are less likely to be familiar. Anyway, to make a long story short, while initially I was frustrated at the absence of Dorotea’s story from your book – which at first I impatiently skimmed, mildly cursing your long-windedness –, I soon became so enamored of your central narrative and its deceptively artless digressions that I wanted nothing more than to translate it. Then, frustrated in that design by the simultaneous publication of one authoritative and another slightly abridged English version, I turned back to Dorotea and determined to write you into my imagining of her story. Taking a common page from you and from Cervantes, multiple lives and narratives artfully crafted and woven at Quixotic inn or Mansillan campfire, I set Dorotea down at the old lake that you called La Verde, where on your way out of Ranquel country you had your men conjure a roast and yerba máte, and in that setting I let her tale emerge. The result, after more drafts and more excisions than I care to admit, is my novella A Bride Called Freedom, which a young Argentine man (Sebastián Bekes, of Entre Ríos) translated into the Spanish (or castellano, as your countrymen prefer to call it these days, in fanatical or half-hearted repudiation of all things español) most appropriate to the historical place and time. It is this work, with other literary associations that it has engendered, that brings me on this much-delayed second of my Argentine journeys: on July 1 or 2, 2005, at a conference convened (in the colonial city of Córdoba) in the name of you, Lucio Victorio Mansilla, and of your sister Eduarda, I will be privileged to read from the translation of my fiction.

            Imagine, if you will, the convergence of constraint and free will that has led to this most unlikely and (to me) remarkable of moments! I know that the common enthusiasm of your romantic era was firmly on the side of the perfectibility and intrinsic nobility of humankind, an enthusiasm that we are reluctant to part with even in this post-modern and cynical era (rent by a century of apocalyptic rigor that makes your Paraguayan and internecine wars, by comparison, mere walks in the park). Mary Mann, for instance, writing to your friend and occasional nemesis Sarmiento, goes on about a force of “moral power” that “once established” cannot be stemmed, and in a subsequent letter proclaims that her distant interlocutor is in absolute “harmony with the Universe,” that “therefore there is every thing to be hoped.” Cervantes, speaking through his mad knight, preaches the sublime doctrine that we are hijos de nuestras obras, or as I prefer to various published translations: “children of our works.” For I like to suppose that, in some small way, we still are. Though the weight of Tolstoy’s more nuanced judgment in War and Peace lies heavy.

            In another life, as it were, entranced by the literary prowess of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I fancied that I would learn Russian and travel to Russia. Constraint, that complex of Tolstoyan necessity and interlocking wills, brought me instead to Argentina, and at this end of an indecipherable chain of causation, I am to present this literary reading. I no more chose or set out to do it than you did to write your most famous and defining work on the Ranquel Indians: happy accident that you owe, after all, to the whim and the ingratitude of Sarmiento, your unwitting benefactor.

* * *

            “Man proposes and God disposes,” as you wrote at the beginning of your tenth letter to your friend Santiago and an eagerly awaiting public; or, in other words, “the best laid plans of mice and men are bound to go astray.”

            So it was for you when inclement weather kept you from moving on from Coli-Mula, or Red Mule in the Ranquel language, at nine o’clock as you had intended. And so it was for me as I set off on this second journey to Argentina with the grand illusion of sticking to a pre-arranged schedule. While you and your men traveled on ground by horse and by mule, feeling your way in the dark and mist, trying to keep from falling into unsettled, shifting bogs, I traveled in the air by plane, a technology that has come a tremendous distance from the architectural designs of Leonardo da Vinci and the rugged 1903 flight of Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But not so far as haughty civilization would like to suppose. You (tongue only partially in cheek, I must suppose) once criticized Europe for fancying herself so advanced yet having not managed to invent a new source of energy to replace the sun. Well, the first rung of nations today – including Europe but centered on what may be the last imperial power, the United States – have not only failed at that task but have created a series of holes (in ever increasing size and numbers) in the protective layer that surrounds the earth and guards it, among other things, from the sun’s most harmful rays. That vanishing shield we have come to call the “ozone layer” and the resultant increase in our planet’s calefaction the “greenhouse effect”. What’s worse, as if our wreaking this climatological mischief weren’t enough, is the incredible lethargy of our response, and most shamefully, the absolute refusal of this greatest of super powers to even acknowledge the existence of a verifiable problem.

            But I digress. I was discussing the vagaries of travel and how governments in all their might have still not managed to make it follow even our best laid plans, our most cautious proposals. In my case the reservations had been made months in advance. I arrived on time at the Louisville, Kentucky airport and only fifteen minutes late to Orlando, Florida, where I still had plenty of time to switch planes to Miami. But the same weather pattern that caused my originating flight that slight delay, and that almost forced us to land in Tallahassee for refueling, delayed the incoming pilot and crew that was supposed to take us on to Miami. Finally the crew arrived, and we boarded the plane, but almost immediately we were asked to get back off. Due to a mechanical problem we would have to board a different plane. By the time we left Orlando, my flight to Buenos Aires should have already left Miami some five minutes earlier. It was while sitting in Orlando that I opened your book to chapter ten and read those words about man proposing and God disposing. The synchronicity of our thoughts and our experiences was striking. I must thank you too, Mansilla, because reading those words at that time made me laugh, and laughing relaxed me. Who knows what state of nervous tension and collapse you might have kept me from?

            As long as we’re dealing in clichés, here’s another one: “If God closes a door, He also opens a window.” In this case it was just the same door, delayed, since the flight that was supposed to have left Miami at 8:40 in the evening had still not left and was now scheduled to leave no sooner than 11:15. By that time, limping and gasping pretty much the whole length of the terminal, I was in the right place and ready to board. Once boarded, the plane waited for better than an hour before taking off. We were not in the air before 12:30 the next morning; our arrival at Ezeiza Airport on the outskirts of Buenos Aires was nearly four hours late.

            If I remember, I'll tell you some other time about the reasons for the limping and gasping for air. For now let’s just say that I arrived, relatively safe and sound, a bit nervous after a quarter century of infrequent and (compared to your case, certainly) modest travel, ready nonetheless for whatever might come of this much-pondered return to the southern hemisphere.

            I was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which I moved through Customs and into the airport proper. The official whose duty it was to examine my passport scarcely looked up; he merely stamped it with dull precision and handed it back, leaving unuttered on the tip of my tongue a prepared apology for the number of my books that I was bringing into the country for the precise purpose of selling, though because of the vagaries of moneys and exchanges, at a bit of a loss to me. Beyond that, no one paid the slightest interest in my bags, let alone deigned to open and rummage through them. I do not hope to be so fortunate on my return northward to the proverbial “land of the free and home of the brave”, where in a vain quest for absolute security on our own turf, while once again at war in a foreign and occupied territory, the forces of “homeland security” are an ever-increasing menace to terrorist and civilian alike. There are those among us who feel ourselves to be in greater peril of losing our liberties from within than from without.

            It is almost four years since foreign terrorists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, flew a pair of hijacked airplanes into the “twin towers” that represented the economic might of the United States of North America, in the process killing thousands of civilians and attracting world-wide sympathy to our afflicted nation. Our President’s response has been the unleashing of all of his country’s military might – in an all-out, and one can only suppose interminable, “war on international terrorism” – first on the fundamentalist Muslim nation of Afghanistan, where the perpetrator was hiding, and then, while said perpetrator was allowed to slip away, on neighboring Iraq, which had long suffered under the barbaric dictatorship of Saddaam Hussein, but which had no direct connection to the atrocity committed on our homeland. Beyond that, the current administration has enacted legislation allowing unprecedented powers of search and seizure, of covert and coercive maneuvers on its own shores; persons suspected of the slightest connection to terrorist organizations can now be arrested and held incommunicado, without access to a lawyer, without any relation or friend being made aware of even the fact of their being held, for an indefinite amount of time. Opponents of this American regime have been showing up on government “lists” without any recourse for discovering the reasons or clearing their names – all this in the name of national security and a strategic need for secrecy. How do I know that I am not on such a list? How do I know that, while no one tried to stop me from leaving, I won’t be stopped from returning to my country?

            This is a vainglorious thought, of course. You who once dreamt of being an emperor to the Ranquel Indians will certainly understand the temptation to melodramatic self-exaltation. In any case, while I have penned some words that have been critical of this government, neither has their tone been so strident nor their publication sufficiently prominent as to make it likely that they have been noticed in high places. Our President, for his part, far from the enlightened educator your Sarmiento visibly was, has publically admitted to not much caring to read the newspapers, let alone anything of a literary or intellectual nature, preferring instead his counselors’ briefings. None of them, it strikes me, are the sort to read the obscure and ephemeral journals that I publish in.

            Anyway, there I was, slipping almost unnoticed through Customs, opening onto the dizzying freedom of the wider terminal. At first I just stood there and got my bearings. No one was waiting there to gather me up and take me where I had to go, as they had been when I was a much younger and “greener” young man, “wet behind the ears”, in my land’s regional parlance. It was up to me alone to get to where I was going. First things first. I needed initially, as Cervantes has put it, to do for myself what no one else could do for me. Once emerged from that place of prosaic and necessary repose, removed from that porcelain goddess on which those of us with means are bound to sit at least once daily (for others, if they are fortunate, there is a less comfortable hole in the ground, tightly bound by a makeshift structure to keep out rain and keep in generations of natural biological aroma), I looked around again, considering to where I should next address my attentions. Just then a well-dressed gentleman with thick gray hair, whom I would later know as Rodolfo, asked me if I needed a taxi. I had passed by the initial clamor of such voices, but sizing this fellow up as a worthy candidate I said that I would, but that first I needed to exchange some money. He directed me upstairs to the Banco Piano, whose melodious name seemed to resonate of the pleasant journeys and fair rates of exchange that my moment’s guide promised. At 2.7451 pesos per U. S. dollar, I received 274.51 pesos for 100 dollars. As I exited the little branch’s door, there was Rodolfo awaiting me, anxious to take my bags and guide me outside into the brisk autumnal air of Buenos Aires and to his non-descript, unmarked Rocinante.

            Rodolfo was a talker, quick to establish his reputation as an honest dealer, determined to give you an excellent service for a reasonable price, a price which nevertheless would remain unstated until journey’s end. As we chatted I was also happy to inform him of the complex of reasons for my journey, and of my previous stay (primarily) in the province of Santa Fe. I had come this time, I suppose, from among the many reasons that you innumerate for which people travel, to become instructed, only modestly to make money (I will likely end up giving away as many books as I sell), again moderately to make myself (and my work) known. I also came to renew friendships, old and new, with people I had seen and others with whom I had only corresponded. I could only hope that I hadn’t come, in order to bring back knowledge and materials to enrich my teaching, only, as you suggest has happened, to die in the journey. Or more likely, in my case, as vaingloriously suggested above, to be kept from returning by the caprice or the paranoia of my government.

            I asked Rodolfo to take me to the Estación Retiro, where my friend Sebastián, whom I had only seen in a single photo, advised me to take the bus to Concordia. Instead, we ended up at the Estación Liniers, if I am remembering the name correctly. This station, whatever its name, was located in a picturesque neighborhood inhabited predominantly by Bolivians. The only bus to Concordia left at 5:00, and it was now approximately 11:00, so he took me to Retiro where we should have gone in the first place – “at the same rate”, he assured me, though I would have nothing to compare it to. At Retiro we found a bus leaving at noon, in ten minutes, and I had scarcely time to attempt a phone call to Sebastián who might already have been worried about me since I was supposed to have called hours ago. No one was home at that moment, so I would worry through the six-hour drive that I hadn't been able to put him and his family at ease. At the door to the bus I would learn the price of Rodolfo’s ample services and shell out eighty pesos, which on the bus I would painfully calculate (my mathematical skills somewhat rusty) to be the rough equivalent of twenty-nine dollars. The bus trip only costs thirty-four pesos, or rather, between twelve and thirteen dollars. Tell me, Lucio: was I “taken to the laundry”, as the English expression goes, by my amiable Rodolfo?

            If so, the tale is hardly remarkable. Stories of being cheated by taxi drivers and used-car salesmen are legion. Almost unheard of is the contrary tale I am about to relate to you, the story of the proverbially non-existent “free ride” once given to a group of four or five young gringos (on their several-hour wait for a flight out of the country) through the bustling city of Buenos Aires, by a young taxi driver who just took a liking to us. His hair was blond like ours, blonder than mine. He drove us past the Casa Rosada, the pink Presidential palace, flanked (as I recall) by soldiers bearing sub-machine guns, as so many government and non-government buildings in the Argentina of the generals’ dictatorship (which you may or may not have heard of, and which I was so uninformed of at the time). He drove us past numerous other sites, the Teatro Colón, no doubt, beyond that I can’t remember which ones. At last he dropped us off at the Calle Florida, the section still reserved for pedestrian and (more to the point) consumerist traffic. He asked us what time we wanted to be picked up; at the stated hour, there he was, ready to take us back to the airport for our flight. Though at the time you remained essentially unknown to me, Mansilla, I had heard much of your friend and contemporary José Hernández, and I came away from one of that famous street’s bookstores with a leather-bound tourist edition of his renowned Martín Fierro poems.

            On I went to Concordia. The weather, as we left Buenos Aires, was brisk but comfortable, only slightly overcast, temperatures at about ten degrees Celsius, or hovering just below fifty degrees Fahrenheit, comfortably springlike. As night fell and we approached my city of destination, the skies clouded and a cold rain was falling. I would learn from Sebastián’s mother, Hilda, that it had been raining thus for the past two weeks, fourteen days, a meteorological fact unheard of in Entre Ríos, not only in your day, but in very recent years. As I waited for Sebastián, after a brief phone conversation with Hilda at shortly after six that evening, that light but persistent rain kept falling. I stood under the partial cover of the tarp outside of a bar across from and behind the terminal, further protected by my impermeable hat (in the fashion of tango singers or adventurers, like the cinematic hero of twenty or thirty years ago known as “Indiana Jones”, whom I would hear for the first time in Spanish later this very night). After a few minutes, somewhat befuddled by the fact that the bar supposed to exist within the terminal itself was no longer operating, I saw Sebastián’s ragged, faded-blue 1980s-era Fiat pull up, and emerge from it a young man who from a distance looked suspiciously like the photo I had seen of him. Unsure, I hesitated. Not seeing me, he ran across the way to the terminal where he thought I might be wandering, then just as I was considering going after him, he approached me from the other direction. I mistook him for his brother Pablo, since his mother had said he was the only one home at the moment, and since it seemed likely that they would resemble each other. In a few moments we would be at home, discussing, among other things, the sad state of global weather patterns, contemplating the precipice of climactic change that as a species we seem unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to face up to.