As Mallea searches for his concept of truth, he creates an image of the physical reality of Argentina and another of the moral reality of her «submerged» inhabitants -a profound moral reality of values which must guide both individual and national existence.
Mallea does not see the nation as an abstraction or a mere geographic fact. He conceives of man as being rooted in his land; and his country is «la raíz de mi carne, la tierra carnal»108. He imbues the physical reality of Argentina with life, usually in the form of a woman. The country's geography is rich; she is a strong woman, with her head near the Tropic, her matrix in the estuary, and her feet resting on the Straits of Magellan109. The same comparison is employed in reverse: various individual women represent the nation. In Meditación en la costa (pp. 103-123), Mallea tells us that he first recognized the beautiful interior physiognomy of his country in a woman of unique beauty and in tense life, majestic yet natural, with eyes seemingly hard and penetrating, yet profound and desolate. Her beauty is, in a way, cruel, like that of the country; and representing justice, haughtiness, and solitude, she is «la antiburguesa, la gran auténtica». In La bahía de silencio (p. 561), the Señora de Cárdenas, the woman to whom Tregua «confesses» his story, is a symbol of Argentina:
Gloria Bambil, in the same novel, has a symbolic quality, embodying in her serene elegance «ese país digno y silencioso y orgulloso y sombrío y sobrio»110.
While the nation is most often compared by Mallea to a woman, he sees it also as an animal or a song of many parts111. Elsewhere he presents Argentina as the harmony of her many winds: the wind of the Andes, the wind of Cape Horn, the slow wind of the provinces, the wind of the tropical North112. And he conceives of his country as a process, an epic process of construction113.
Buenos Aires, the locale of most of Mallea's narratives, is personified also. Mallea compares it to a woman who reserves herself for her chosen one and remains cold to the outsider; he sees in its shape the profile of a child's head114. Like the nation, Buenos Aires is a potential, a voice seeking to express itself115. Within the personification of the country, it is «la hirviente matriz, el sexo de la nación»116.
This Buenos Aires presents, like Argentina as a whole, a dual reality: the surface of cold and tasteless stone, and the substratum of in tense vitality, of unexpressed authenticity. Architecturally, it has only a few pure remnants of the old Argentina; the rest is new, vulgar, monotonous, and uninspired, lacking the harmony of European cities. It is the product of the ambition of the newcomer117. Under this surface lives the man who seeks expression; his external loquacity masks an inner silence. Within him grows the new man of America and the song that is to redeem the world118. This dual nature of the city explains Mallea's ambivalent attitude toward it, and makes him exclaim lyrically: «¡Ah, Buenos Aires; ciudad muda y gran extensión de piedra blanca; roca nueva y tantas almas!»119 For him, Buenos Aires is the result of an unauthentic morality; yet, in spite of its ugliness, he loves it for its hidden and quiet life120. With an exasperation born of love, he scourges it mercilessly, yet passionately:
|
¡Oh, la ciudad monstruosa y gris tendida sobre la tierra como una mujer escuálida! Acostada, pasiva. Las avenidas rectas y sepulcrales encerrando vivos temperamentos secretos; las plazas áridas, cuadradas; los vehículos veloces; los vivaces semblantes de raza nueva -desnudos de odios, de fe, de pasiones, vírgenes, maduros para recibir la siembra de la pasión, de la fe, de todas las afecciones del alma!121 |
In Buenos Aires, then, Mallea finds the same hidden authentic life as in the rest of the country. He must excoriate the inhibiting surface and bring the capital to authenticity with cajolery and appeal, and, if necessary, with the whip.
Mallea never gives an accurate physical description of Buenos Aires. His approach varies between the lyrically vague (the city as a woman or a child, or as a desert of souls) and the microscopically minute. His characters like to walk along the city streets, particularly at night; yet these streets serve only as a fleeting background for the dialogue and monologue. They are seen in a flash, as rain-streaked roads are glimpsed from the steamy windows of a fast-moving car. They are empty streets, or they swarm with a nameless and faceless crowd. Mallea gives us the spirit of a city, not street plans and details. Any physical elements in his portrayal of Buenos Aires only complete the city's presentation as a problem.
In dealing with the rural Argentina, Mallea stresses the Pampa, which impressed him in his youth: «Yo, ensimismado, no veía más que la tierra desnuda, la tierra nuestra, la inmensa, vastedad limpia y austera, la argentina llanura»122. The plain has a personality of its own; in La torre (p. 85), Roberto Ricarte sees the soil as the permanent factor and its ownership as a passing illusion -the earth owns the men who hold title to it. Through Roberto, a cultured man of the city, Mallea expresses his full appreciation for the land; and he does so far more effectively than would be possible with straightforward description or a filtering through a character less refined and more primitive. La torre contains some of Mallea's finest lyrical passages, evoking the sights and sounds and smells of the land, its people, its spirit and character. The descriptions are not static; they are joined in a living organism, the earth; and the earth and all on it are a continual expectation, an awaiting of fruition123. The land, which in Todo verdor perecerá acts as a hostile force, the relentless enemy of Ágata and Nicanor Cruz, serenely triumphs in La torre over the presumptuous efforts of a false civilization: «La casa estaba vencida; pero el campo, triunfaba. Después de la agonía del invierno, todo cuanto del suelo surgía se levantaba igual que un canto: el verde al sol era la risa de la tierra; los cereales vecinos eran un himno; las madrugadas eran activas»124. The permanent and primitive values of life have overcome the new and unauthentic.
The literary ancestors of some of Mallea's rural characters are to be found in the novels of Lynch and Güiraldes. Two guitarists, echoes of Don Segundo Sombra, make a fleeting appearance in Todo verdor perecerá (p. 70); yet only in La torre does Mallea, who usually avoids «local color», present any number of such types. Here appears old Sinapismo, the payador, who refuses to admit that his music and indeed his whole way of life belong to the past. Juan Mota, Cande, and Morera the rematador are other examples, not yet anachronistic but «typical», whom Mallea has made into living persons. Even a momentary glimpse of a character -a woman standing outside her house- can be made revealing and can leave a lasting impression125. Nor are the lesser details of Argentine rural life forgotten: the mate and the teros, tordos, and cuís of the plains.
The Pampa, for Mallea, is the central fact of Argentine geography from which the rest of the country emanates. The River Plate is a prolongation, in a different element, of the plain126. Like the Pampa, it is unique. It is the «río oscuro»127; but primarily it is the river which appears in one of Mallea's earlier titles, La ciudad junto al río inmóvil. The adjective is not chosen haphazardly: the Plate is «el río, el río inmóvil, plano, taciturno y extenso como el sueño del país adolescente»128. By its vast flatness it recalls the Pampa. The Plate seems immobile as it goes to meet the sea; nevertheless it is a river, a moving force symbolic of the nation that hides a rich inner life beneath its stagnant surface.
Another aspect of Argentine geography, the South, the region of Mallea's birth and childhood, provides the setting for Los enemigos del alma and Todo verdor perecerá. He sees it as a harsh area of elemental conflict: «... al este, helado grito, lloraba su perenne nostalgia de tierra la costa árida constantemente comida por el hambre oceánica»129. Struggle and hardships have driven out all thought of softness and luxury in this gray land of sand and wind. The wind is the leitmotiv of Mallea's presentation of his own country, connecting the desolation, the monotony, and the harshness of the South in winter130.
Mallea does not describe the physical details of his landscapes, but he selects them for their meaning in the totality of his work. He ignores the mountains of the West and the picturesque smaller towns and cities. With the exception of a few touches of local color, which are far from costumbrista in intent, the picturesque has no place in his descriptions. The landscapes he presents -plain, river, and windswept coast- are all bare, stripped to their basic elements of earth, water, or air. It is when they are combined with the fire of a creative and authentic humanity that they beget the greatness of a nation; in themselves they are raw materials. For Mallea, the various aspects of Argentine geography form a harmonic whole, a song of many parts; yet this song can reach its maximum articulation only with the addition of man, of man in conformity with his land.
This is an important point: «man in conformity with his land». Ultimately, history is built on the land; and greatness must come from communion with the land131. Mallea demands conformity to a spiritual geography; like Ganivet, he believes in an «espíritu territorial», unchanging and atemporal132. He bases this concept on a physical reality, particularly that of the Argentine plain, suggesting openness and freedom. He believes that «esta tierra, esta Argentina se proporciona secretamente con el suyo y no es desolación, ni angustia, ni usura, ni imperio, ni comarca de regateos y hegemonía, sino el clima real de una pródiga y fértil movilidad de naturaleza»133. As the ascetic harshness of the Castilian plain is modified in the richness of the Pampa, so are the traditional values of Spain:
|
No es ya la honra española, se trata de un rasgo mucho menos vehemente e impulsivo, de una fuerza más discreta y afinada. Y, así, esa independencia íntima y pronta a comunicarse, esa noble y espontánea libertad, junto con la fluida presencia de ese original decoro, son elementos principales de nuestro clima, categorías de nuestro espíritu territorial.134 |
This concept of the relation between the physical and the spiritual country explains Mallea's approach to physical description. The slums of the capital, the minutiae of life in the provinces or on an estancia, have no bearing on the Argentine spirit as Mallea sees it. He is a writer interested primarily in man, not in nature. The land is important because the national spirit results from a conjugation of man and the land. The land offers a challenge in its savage extension, a challenge that can be met only by a moral force as strong and definite as itself, an idea, a passion, a feeling135.
There must, therefore, be a type of man corresponding to the physical and spiritual geography of Argentina. Living in harmony with the soil, even though he may not be living on it, he is the authentic Argentine. The freedom and generosity which characterize the Pampa are his characteristics also, and he alone can bring the land to full fruition. His exact nature is not fully known as Mallea begins his explorations. All that is known is that this man is submerged; the direction of the country is not in his hands but in those of men who, consciously or unconsciously, have denied the spirit of their land.
The search for the submerged inhabitant is the keynote of Mallea's works, and the chief concern of his characters. The search is born of dissatisfaction with the apparent reality of metropolitan life and the conviction that underlying it there must be an invisible, «authentic» reality. Thus the approach is at the same time constructive and destructive: the submerged inhabitant must be found, and the formless rubble that overlies him must be removed. The nation, at one point, is conceived of in terms of architecture: Tregua, in La bahía de silencio (p. 34), shows Dr. Dervil the variety of porteño architecture and demands in its place «algo único, verdadero, sólido, definido... algo nuestro». And Tregua's young friends declare that the national edifice in which they are living is carelessly built. It must be destroyed and replaced by a new construction (p. 51). This youthful group is eager to arouse the dormant country and find the men who have already awakened; they decry the general desire to resemble Buenos Aires, «un mundo blando y confuso» (pp. 24, 32). The search is both personal and national in its scope. For those whose concern is only beginning, the problem is one of personal reality, as it is for Solves, who decides to withdraw in order to know himself136. Others, already living authentically, seek primarily to discover the underlying bases of Argentinity, to effect a moral elevation of the country. Or again, it is a search for the submerged Argentines who grope in solitude toward expression; these must be found and integrated into a national whole. And it is also a search for the land, an effort to identify oneself with it137.
The inquiry conducted by Mallea and his characters is not passive and scholarly. On the contrary, vitally active, it penetrates to the most intimate areas of sensitiveness: «en este país no he querido más que a una especie de almas: aquellas que estuvieran tan desolladas y sensibles que acercárseles fuera como oír un grito puro»138. Since the land is «la raíz de mi carne», the effort to return to it is an attempt to restore a fundamental unity; and Mallea's striving toward the authentic Argentina is as intense and absorbing as a passionate love. Consummation is approached only in La torre; and it is not the only possible outcome, as Mallea well realizes. In La bahía de silencio, a fragment of «Las cuarenta noches de Juan Argentino» shows us a poet who, despairing of the country he is trying to reach (in the moral sense), commits suicide139. And the novel itself ends on an ambivalent note of courage in despair: the characters may have been mistaken or ineffectual; but nothing is in vain except that which compromises with falsehood, and this they have not done -they are not failures because they did not sell their consciences (p. 565).
In all his works, Mallea is driven to seek out the authentic Argentine, the individual who is true to himself, who is the necessary basis for national greatness; and this compulsion motivates almost all his characters. The results of the search remain subjective. They are nowhere stated in black and white; in fact, there is no reason to believe that the search is actually ended. Even if the authentic Argentine is intuitively found, intelligible definition remains a problem. The outsider's picture of the «invisible inhabitant» must therefore be based on gleanings from Mallea's several works, which reflect his struggle to comprehend and communicate. Frequently, the author and the «inhabitant», in a sense that, artistically, has not escaped Mallea, are one and the same person140.
The «invisible inhabitants», the «authentic Argentines», as envisioned by Mallea, cannot be reduced to a single type: they are the men of the soil, of the people; the aristocrats; the authentic intellectuals -all of them repositories of the true national tradition, or searchers for it. Mallea, like Ganivet and Dostoevski, considers the people as the preservers of authentic national values. He draws a careful distinction, however, between the people and the masses, between pueblo and plebe. In Lugones, for example, he finds affinity for the popular and an emphatic rejection of all that is plebeian, «como verbigracia el tango y el falso folklore, cultivado hasta la industria -como la tesis indígena- por cuanto hay de menos genuinamente argentino en la constitución de nuestra tierra»141. The people, in fact, are the opposite of plebeian; they alone are capable of true nobility
|
El pueblo, creen muchos que es la masa, la turba, la multitud. No: el pueblo es esencialmente... aristocrático... Me refiero a las facultades del alma, a las potencias platónicas, ya que no al uso político y social de aquellos términos magníficamente expresivos... Yo he conocido a mucha gente de blasón, pero no he conocido más nobles que aquellos cuya eminencia era una suerte de ultra refinada humanidad, esto es, pueblo mismo hecho genio y quintaesencia.142 |
To be of the people, then, is not so much a matter of social or economic situation as of attitude toward life, and, in a sense reminiscent of Mallea's call for order and his admiration for the structure of medieval society, of an integration into the life of the community: «Eran pueblo. Tenían esa actitud limpia y sana ante las cosas de los que nunca han traficado, de los que no han hecho nunca más que aplicarse a hacer mejor lo que están destinados a hacer en la comunidad»143.
The man of the people is primarily a man of the land; and Mallea discovers that life in the country, in the provinces, is more authentic than in the capital. Even in its simple and dignified architecture, Jujuy shows the character of the country man, just as the cosmopolitan pastiche of Buenos Aires typifies the city man144. In the provinces Mallea can say: «Vi al hombre de la provincia y al hombre que trabaja la tierra; vi al argentino que lo es, que lo es en verdad»145.
Purity, Mallea believes, is obtained from contact with the soil146; and in the habitante de la tierra he finds «hombría, es decir; humanidad substancial, substancia humana en libertad»147, as well as the other qualities of the «authentic Argentine». Compared with the «visible Argentine», the campesinos are the great auténticos -«en éstos, por lo menos la vida salía a la epidermis de cada uno íntegra, no escondida detrás de un "accionar", de un "representar"»148. Mallea's peasants have great dignity. His campesino is not a benighted being who must be elevated and educated, like the characters of Erskine Caldwell. Rather, he has a keen vision of life and is fundamentally aristocratic. The gesture of Juan Mota and his wife, in La torre, in refusing to eat with Roberto Ricarte, their master, indicates not servility but respect for an order, a conviction of the dignity of their appointed station in life, similar to the greatness achieved by Sancho Panza after his «governorship of Barataria». This is not the attitude of a «climber», but the democratic Spanish acceptance of one's position, knowing that individual worth is measured not by a rise from one class to another but by the total fulfillment of what a man essentially is.
But if greatness comes from the union of man and the land, this union, the birthright of the campesino, is not his exclusive possession and, indeed, yields its richest fruits to the outsider, the city man, the intellectual. Refusing to consider the man of the land as a purely physical phenomenon, Mallea prefers to define him as a man spiritually identified with the land and the nation, not necessarily a gaucho, an estanciero, or an actual tiller of the soil149. This identification is often achieved only after a struggle, such as Roberto Ricarte's in La torre. The same communion of man with his land is reached by Mallea, as he tells us in Meditación en la costa (pp. 95 ff.).
Man and land thus form a harmony, and the dissonance of unauthenticity is a human, not a political, problem150. For this reason, Mallea's search for the authentic Argentina is inseparable from his quest for the authentic individual; and, as Roberto Ricarte realizes, the national problem can be solved only in the individual soul:
|
Pero ahí, entre los bejucos y la ampelopsis, él, por lo menos, podía reconstituirse. Podía juntar fuerzas para negarse a las corrupciones exteriores armadas como ejércitos en un instante en que el mundo pugna por dejar a todos los hombres sin intimidad, sin casa última, sin amparo, sin reflexión propia, sin deliberación honrada y personal. «Sí; en el tiempo en que todo pugna por invadirnos, había que salir sin molicie a evitar invasiones, había que salir a fortalecer en uno la voz que luego pasaría a los otros para que algunos, unos cuantos, tal vez muchos más, se opusieran a dejarse invadir. ¿Qué vamos a defender si no defendemos lo mejor que tenemos: la facultad de gobernar nuestros propios designios y de dar a nuestra alma hondura y espacios libres?»151 |
In speaking of the people as the authentic Argentines, Mallea implies a national tradition, the criollo element, as distinguished from the later immigration and the denationalized cosmopolitanism of Buenos Aires. Since this tradition is a development of Spanish or at least Hispanic civilization, it is only normal that Mallea should view the old Creole families as its repository, «la custodia, la defensa final contra un profundo mestizaje»152. Not only are these families diminishing, but many have been untrue to their mission in the building of a strong new nation. They have not imposed their inherited values on the immigrant in search of material advancement, and are therefore more blameworthy than he. Mallea does not condemn the immigrant as such, and he makes it clear that the newcomer who accepts lo argentino is more authentically Argentine than the cosmopolitanized Creole. To Mallea, mestizaje signifies not only mixed blood (though that must be taken into account), but the dilution and ultimate extinction of a pure national tradition153. And what, precisely, is this tradition of the familias criollas? We can begin to judge from what Mallea has to say about Lugones:
|
Tenía algo de lo señorial del criollo -que insisto en no ser de ningún modo calidad endosable a lo español, sino algo de estirpe hispánica, sin duda, pero mucho más humanizado, afinado y prodigalizado, valga el verbo preciso, debido a quién sabe qué delicada esencia o estacionamiento moral de una historia sin miseria.154 |
The same refinement is indicated in another passage:
|
Si nos volvemos, avizores, a nuestra propia literatura veremos crecer el ritmo donde vienen a enriquecer esa generosidad y esa misteriosa alegría [of the American] las cualidades españolas, pero afinadas y ya diferentes. Lo argentino les impone un matiz de cardinal afinación. Nuestra tierra da otro producto. No digo que sea mejor, no digo que sea más intenso; digo que está mucho más delicadamente entonado por una suave poesía de la tierra. En el color resultante entran elementos de una cortesía especial; y no cortesanía, sino la natural cortesía de las almas jóvenes, todavía pura de los diferentes tipos de abismo.155 |
Mallea here seeks to evoke a way of life that found and, to a certain extent, still finds expression in the provincial towns of Argentina. Only a generation or so ago, in the youth of Román Ricarte, the traditional Creole architecture prevailed in Buenos Aires. Education and upbringing, if unscientific, were at least morally and spiritually sound156. It was a stately manner of living, proper to the argentinos profundos (i. e., auténticos):
|
la mejor gente de su pueblo, entre los ricos y entre los pobres, naturalezas de natural hermosura y reserva, afinadas, refinadas, profundas, tácitas, y nada teatrales. Naturalezas de sobria, orgullosa hondura, dignas y humanas, dotadas de una especie de altivez o arrogancia que no era más que una forma de su noble y callada -nada quejosa, secreta, aristocrática- melancolía. Y esto lo veía [Roberto Ricarte] en el pueblo, en el hondo y no en la plebe, y en los pocos antiguos señores verdaderos, en las viejas cepas de la nación. Era una especie de ciencia espiritual nativa, anterior a las degradaciones que en muchos casos operó después la peor inmigración; una actitud que, muchas veces, por quienes la desconocían en la belleza de sus resortes, fue tomada como avilantez, dureza o menosprecio, siendo en verdad lo contrario, o sea suave timidez escrupulosa, una especie de varonil fervor varonilmente gobernado y moderado.157 |
Mallea believes that «todo pueblo auténtico es señor por antonomasia»158. At the same time, he admires certain noble natures -noble not primarily by birth but by virtue of their attitude toward life. They usually come from old and well-established Argentine families, and mature in an isolation born of their spiritual superiority. Perhaps the outstanding example is the Señora de Cárdenas, the «Usted» of La bahía de silencio, who recurs in the background of the work like a musical theme, reaffirming the authentic Argentina in her highest and most señorial expression. Mallea gives us glimpses into this lady's childhood and youth, and her ill-matched marriage. We sense his admiration for aristocracy that is not parvenu, that is accustomed to quality, sure in its tastes and dislikes, with an innate instinct for the genuine. In Los enemigos del alma, Consuelo Ortigosa typifies a woman married to an inferior man, «successful» in the vulgar and superficial sense of the word. Historia de una pasión argentina, also, portrays youthful isolation and sensitivity, a sensitivity growing until it sets the character (in this case Mallea himself) completely apart from what appear to be the main streams of national life. For Mallea, this isolation, due to superiority, is more indicative of true aristocracy than heraldic adornments: «Entonces sentí que la pequeña aristocracia consiste en un juego de reacciones de conservación, pero que la gran aristocracia consiste en un gran desapego de lo material y en una gran vocación de decencia y de simplicidad»159. And this aloofness from the struggle for existence is basic to the Argentine character:
|
Sólo una elegancia me importaba, sobre cualquier otra, y era la elegancia del alma, esa forma de dignidad, esa forma de desprecio por la parte vil y predatoria de la vida, ese señorial desinterés en la lucha por la vida. Pero esta aristocracia, cuesta hallarla. Un poco de ella, sin embargo, me parecía constituir, a través de nuestra historia, la base del carácter argentino. Cierto señorial desprendimiento, cierto coraje sin gula, cierta fuerza inteligente y sin bajeza veía yo en el fondo de la historia de este pueblo joven, cuya expresión militar más alta se llamó a sí mismo no un conquistador, ni un triunfador, ni un César, sino «un fundador de libertad».160 |
This «expresión militar más alta» is San Martín, the highest form of the Argentine patrician. For Mallea, San Martín represents not only feeling but also creativeness and imagination161. His self-abnegation and modesty, his refusal to arrogate to himself imperialistic titles, his emphasis on the gift of liberty which he made to the nations of southern South America -all these qualities are indicative of the Argentine genius at its best, of the «ánimo de donación» which marks the country's finest history. Nothing could better illustrate Mallea's concept of true nobility and greatness than this man of dignity, talent, heroism, and illustrious birth, who chose freely to give to others the freedom which he had won. Mallea has no admiration for self-styled Caesars or demagogues. In rejecting the gaucho ideal in favor of the patrician, he once more avoids limitation of the «authentic Argentine» along strictly geographic or class lines. The patrician may be a member of a class; but his validity lies in his values, which are viable in any geographic or social position.
The «authentic Argentine» is the man of the people, the man of the soil, the «criollo auténtico», the patrician who makes aristocracy come true literally. All these are established in their system of life, in their values; formerly they were able to coexist in a perfect structure, each partaking of the nature of the others, and each striving only for personal fulfillment. But, Mallea tells us, this hierarchical society, in which each individual was a perfectly functioning entity, is no longer intact. First among the upper layers, and then spreading down into the pueblo and turning it into plebe, traditional values have been abandoned, the sense of continuity and community have been lost, and the national fabric has, in consequence, been destroyed.
Because of this crisis, the «authentic Argentine» now includes an other type of man, not necessarily or specifically belonging to any of the groups already mentioned -a man whom we might call the preocupado. Mallea himself is an example, as are many of his characters: Roberto Ricarte, Martín Tregua, Adrián, Lintas- to name only a few of the outstanding162. In La bahía de silencio we meet a group of such individuals who are talking, writing, and feverishly planning the salvation of their country. Most of them are city men, yet Mallea finds the same ferment in the interior of the country163; and Tregua's friend Acevedo remarks that such men, with their elemental cravings, are to be found everywhere:
|
En el hondón más profundo de la Argentina se come otro pan, uno que no traiciona, el pan del que está construyendo lo que le ha salido del alma, el pan con que un hombre nutre las hambrea y las fatigas de una aspiración fundamentalmente moral, no política ni pecuniaria; fundamentalmente moral. De ese pan honrado, de ese pan inspirado, de ese pan de preocupación, de ese pan de espera y de inquietud se están alimentando, a esta hora, las partes más olvidadas de esta tierra; y así se va organizando en la sombra una sinfonía cuyo crecimiento es como la forma del cono invertido: de un punto se va haciendo el todo; de una semilla rica, el árbol central del bosque entero. ¡En quién sabe cuántas estancias recónditas, cuartos pobres de ciudad, campos andinos, selvas septentrionales, planicies australes, pampas escasamente habitadas -no se come hoy otra cosa que ese buen pan, el no traidor...!164 |
The preocupado cannot, then, be defined by geographical location or social class. He is the individual who has become increasingly sensitive to his surroundings, an intellectual who is not attuned to the materialistic civilization flourishing in his country, a man who is perturbed by a spreading chaos of values and seeks to establish or re-establish an order which will make possible the harmonious development of all elements of the national structure. He is concerned, personally and intensely, with the role of the individual, with the apparently catastrophic course of the world, and with the part to be played by his nation in that world -in other words, with Mallea's own concerns. He approaches these problems with an anguish born of his own inadaptability to the «visible Argentina» and his need for a faith and a system of values. Believing, with Ganivet and Unamuno, that fulfillment can come only through the ultimate development of what already is, he seeks his values in what he calls the authentic Argentine tradition. And since he has already rejected his unauthentic and fraudulent surroundings, his problem is twofold: to discover what is authentically Argentine, and to work for its restoration, not in a reactionary sense but in the sense of revitalizing it and projecting its full development.
Martín Tregua remains throughout at what we might call the first stage, the stage of search; Roberto Ricarte reaches the second stage. In Las Águilas and, indeed, in the earlier part of La torre, he, too, is seeking to understand his own roots, the bases of his nationality; and, particularly in the earlier novel, his attitude is marked by discontent. Toward the end of La torre, we feel that he can touch what before he knew only intuitively, and that his problem has become less one of discovery than of expression and implementation.
The object of this feverish search is the construction of an order, a city in the Augustinian sense, a civitas in which each individual can feel himself to be a cives. This order is to be all-pervading: «city» implies not only a unified organic architecture but also an integration of many individual existences into one communal life of purpose, attuned to the physical surroundings165. Mallea admires such an order in Europe; he wishes to establish it in his own country, using as a basis the native, «authentic» Argentine tradition.
This way of life, a modification of the Spanish one, has been so refined that its essence has changed and it has become peculiarly national166. But when we try to define authentic Argentinity, the concept remains vague. Mallea repeatedly complains of the difficulty of expressing the Argentine, and American, reality. In fact, he declares that precisely this is one of the characteristics of his people: they are made of fine and delicate shadings167. Obviously there is a fallacy inherent in any attempt to portray the character of a people, which after all consists of individuals. At the same time, cultural traditions do exist, and they do differ from one country to another. Mallea attempts to portray his cultural tradition as a distinct and almost personified entity. We cannot pass on the accuracy of this portrait, nor is it essentially germane to a study of Mallea as a novelist. Nothing, however, is gained by denying all validity to his approach; his message is of more far-reaching import than the psychological make-up of a single nation; and the values which he seeks and tries to express are, regardless of the propriety of their application to Argentina, of undeniable importance.
Fundamental to these values and to the character of the «authentic» Argentine are, in Mallea's opinion, a deep-seated dignity168 and a sense of decency, in its most elementary meaning. Mallea desires that his people should be able to say that «somos los argentinos un modo rotundo de decencia del corazón»169. Dignity, decency, cleanness -these are the bases of the character of the man who lives close to the soil, the man who is young in his outlook on life, with the hope, the faith, and the frank openness of youth. To this type of man Mallea directs his message and dedicates La bahía de silencio: «Dedico este libro a los habitantes jóvenes -hombres y mujeres- de mi tierra que, viviendo en la zona subterránea donde se prepara toda fuente, llevan de su patria una idea de limpia grandeza, y a quienes alguna vez rebeló la indignidad de quienes la engañan y trafican»170.
Together with a dignified and clean approach to life, Mallea finds in the Argentine a spirit of generosity, an «ánimo de donación». He considers this basic to the Argentine, who, engaged in a colossal struggle with matter and forced to create his own instruments, will seek only to share his victory171. Self-abnegation will lead Argentina to spiritual hegemony and a greatness that can never result from imperialism and material conquest172.
If giving is to be anything but an empty gesture, however, a people needs faith173. In Argentina, in America, this is a faith in a reality as yet unexpressed, not yet discernible in its full form, yet felt by those who believe in it. This sort of faith eventually animates Roberto Ricarte, who thanks Providence for having permitted him to understand «que vale más el sueño alzado y puro que se abre camino por sí solo sin temer perderlo todo, que las prisas contaminadas y las ambiciones dementes y petulantes»174. Mallea's characters, believing in spiritual values, regard life as affirmation and as a work of art, a creation to be worked on and made into an expression of their ideals175.
The concept of life which Mallea ascribes to the «authentic Argentine» is Christian, but without the other worldly aspect of Christianity. It parallels Senecan Stoicism, with its emphasis on the complete living of the earthly life to a fulfillment purely individual, independent of surrounding circumstances. In the man of the Argentine soil, Mallea finds that transcendental concept of life which he identifies with the Hispanic tradition and which he sees in the thought of Seneca as expressed by Ganivet: that you must never allow yourself to be conquered by anything outside your own spirit and must always maintain yourself «de tal modo firme y erguido, que al menos se pueda decir siempre de ti que eres un hombre»176. This way of life Mallea calls «la exaltación severa de la vida». Exaltation is elevation, and it is proper to man, not the animals; it is «severe» because it is stripped of all triviality. Mallea defines it as «un estar particular del hombre en el espacio que abarca la terrestre realidad, las contingencias y la aspiración hacia Dios»177. And this he finds in the «invisible», the «authentic» Argentine:
|
... grave sin solemnidad; silencioso sin resentimiento, alegre sin é[n]fasis; activo sin angurria, hospitalario sin cálculo de trueque, naturalmente pródigo; amigo de los astros, las plantas, el sol, la lluvia y la intemperie; pronto a la amistad, difícil a la discordia; humanamente solidario hasta el más inesperado y repentino sacrificio; lleno de exactas presciencias y zumos de sabiduría, simple sin alarde de letras; justo de fondo, más amigo del bien directo, de la ecuanimidad de corazón que del prejuicio teorizador; viril, templado en su vehemencia, tan morigerado en la vida morigerado en su codicia -que no le espanta con su ademán la muerte- pues nada le arrebata que él no haya ofrecido antes con humana dignidad-...178 |
Mallea gives us specific examples of what he means by «exaltación severa de la vida». Juan Mota, in La torre (p. 24), old and tired after a struggle of decades with the soil and the elements, asks of life only a few more years during which he can go on fighting, side by side with his wife. In the same novel we witness a rural wake, a scene drawn in the simplest black and white, depicting the stoic heroism of the Argentine campesino, silent in the face of death as in the face of life. In La bahía de silencio (pp. 501-513), an excerpt from the hero's novel «Las cuarenta noches de Juan Argentino» shows another peasant whose crops have been ruined by continual rain and whose wife is delirious after childbirth, with no medical care available. Fighting against despair and exhaustion, the man feels a flash of hatred for the world; but he realizes that he must endure it against all odds. The morning, after a night of agony, brings the end of the rain and the recovery of his wife; and the man falls into a deep sleep, having conquered life and its crudest realities.
The title of Tregua's work recalls the forty days of Lent, days of fasting and preparation, as well as the forty days and nights of Christ's temptation in the wilderness. Its episodes show the «invisible Argentine» as he awaits his resurrection and fulfillment. These «submerged inhabitants», particularly the preocupados, live in an anguish born of the falseness of the «visible Argentina» and their own impotence. They scarcely differ in appearance from all the other Argentines-
|
¡Pero qué diferentes a los otros, éstos que llevaban adentro el grito, que estaban llenos de miedo ardiente y hambre cordial y preocupación y a veces árido y triste espanto por su suerte y la del mundo! Erraban, entre otros. Y eran la inmensa familia gris. ¿No constituían, sin embargo, la tierra espiritual? ¿No constituían el fondo de dolor, la honda, dramática corriente humana que irriga la propia tierra?179 |
They try to return to the land by renouncing the self in its artificially exalted forms, by renouncing all contact with the world that surrounds them, with its passions and desires. Before they can look upward to scrutinize the mystery of man's destiny, they must find their roots in the soil180. Suffering and self-abnegation are, for Mallea, the seeds of national greatness.
The authentic Argentine is Mallea's answer to the national problem; but the authentic Argentine is not a man of any class, type, or locality. He is, in a not entirely illogical petitio principii, the man who is profoundly true to what is profoundly Argentine, to what he profoundly is. He is thus intensely national (not nationalistic) and, at the same time, universal in the sense that all authenticity and all truth are universal. For nationalism, as Mallea preaches it, is also the broadest humanism: it means the total fulfillment of his people and every other people, each developing along its own lines of authenticity. It is individualism transplanted to the national level in its true form, not in the perversion of self-aggrandizement. And submission to an ontological order will give the nation a maximum of freedom through the full development of its potentialities. Mallea thus attempts to define nationality by transcending it, by assigning it a functional place in a universal structure of values. He does not, however, clearly express the bases of nationality (and this is one of the problems he openly recognizes); rather than present an a priori solution, he stresses the process of seeking a solution -a process in which he invites and expects his readers to take part.