The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad by V. S. Naipaul

Author:V. S. Naipaul [Naipaul, V. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Revolutionaries, Biography & Autobiography, Women, History, General, Reference, Quotations
ISBN: 9780394746753
Google: 7RPYCBmFeI0C
Publisher: Vintage Books/Tlön
Published: 1981-03-12T05:00:00+00:00

Perón, Perón, que grande sos!

Mi general, cuánto vales!

Perón, Perón, how great you are!

How good and strong, my general!

—if the dictatorship, even in its excesses, is respectable again, it isn’t because the past has been investigated and the record modified. It is only that many people have revised their attitudes toward the established legend. They have changed their minds.

There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives; there are only graffiti and polemics and school lessons. Schoolchildren in white dust coats are regularly taken round the Cabildo building in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to see the relics of the War of Independence. The event is glorious; it stands in isolation; it is not related, in the textbooks or in the popular mind, to what immediately followed: the loss of law, the seeking out of the enemy, endless civil wars, gangster rule.

Borges said on another evening: “The history of Argentina is the history of its separateness from Spain.” How did Perón fit into that? “Perón represented the scum of the earth.” But he surely also stood for something that was Argentine? “Unfortunately, I have to admit that he’s an Argentine—an Argentine of today.” Borges is a criollo, someone whose ancestors came to Argentina before the great immigrant rush, before the country became what it is; and for the contemplation of his country’s history Borges substitutes ancestor worship. Like many Argentines, he has an idea of Argentina; anything that doesn’t fit into this is to be rejected. And Borges is Argentina’s greatest man.

An attitude to history, an attitude to the land. Magic is important in Argentina; the country is full of witches and magicians and thaumaturges and mediums. But the visitor must ignore this side of Argentine life because, he is told, it isn’t real. The country is full of estancias; but the visitor mustn’t go to that particular estancia because it isn’t typical. But it exists, it works. Yes, but it isn’t real. Nor is that real, nor that, nor that. So the whole country is talked away; and the visitor finds himself directed to the equivalent of a gaucho curio shop. It isn’t the Argentina that anyone inhabits, least of all one’s guides; but that is real, that is Argentina. “Basically we all love the country,” an Anglo-Argentine said. “But we would like it to be in our own image. And many of us are now suffering for our fantasies.” A collective refusal to see, to come to terms with the land: an artificial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths.

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