ALBERTO MANGUEL
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businesses or became manual workers. And yet, for almost all,
Argentina was emblematic of the promise of the New World in contrast
with the betrayal of the Old . A vast optimistic vocabulary appears in the
political discourse of the thirties and forties: "vision," "horizon," "new
beginnings," "golden future." But by then, the future had already been
corrupted, and the language attempted lamely to dress up the begin–
nings of the chaos. In
1930,
the Argentinean landowners set up the first
of a series of military governments to serve their own interests, during
what came to be known as "the infamous decade." When Per6n
appeared, he seemed to be the only hope for the workers to obtain fairer
work measures and social benefits. They were wrong. Some of these
benefits they obtained, but at the cost of a further loss of freedom.
Per6n's political movement, the
justiciaiismo,
co-opting the word for
justice, merely changed one nefarious reign for another, oligarchy for
demagogy.
And yet, even, by the end of Per6n's regime, the qualities that defined
Argentina'S spirit were not lost. They certainly survived throughout my
schooling, from
1955
to
1966,
and I believe they could have allowed for
a change towards democracy.
It
is not out of nostalgia that I mourn for
those lost capabilities; it is out of the belief that they could, indeed,
would have flourished, had they not been poisoned by successive ban–
dits who took over the government of the state. Sometime in the forties,
Witold Gombrowicz, who lived in Argentina for more than twenty
years, wrote this in his journal:
What is Argentina? Is it perhaps a dough that has not yet become
bread, is it simply something that has not quite succeeded in coagu–
lating, or is it a protest against the mechanization of the soul, a dis–
dainful and angry gesture of someone who refuses the hoarding
become too automatic, the intelligence become too intelligent, the
beauty that is too beautiful, the morality that is too moral? In this
climate, under this constellation there might come into being a truly
creative protest against Europe.
If
the softness found a way to turn
hard.
If
the lack of definition might become a plan, that is to say, a
definition.
What happened? Essentially, in the midst of the economic rampage
fostered by the United States, the European banks, and the International
Monetary Fund, Argentina, as a society, stopped believing in itself.
Every society is an invention, a combination, according to Ernest
Renan, "of memory and amnesia" {"every French citizen has to have
