107 - Liberate under the sky of the Pampa (article for the magazine Lonely Planet)
LIBERATE UNDER THE SKY OF THE PAMPA
The traditional life of the gauchoes keeps on beating strongly in one of the most fabulous flatness of the world
The route 7 was interrupted at a height of Jump, where in October there is celebrated the Holiday of the Creole Horse. The route 8 was cut in San Antonio of Areco, where in November it takes place the Week of the Tradition. A little more to the north, the freeway that joins Rosary with Buenos Aires across some of the most fertile fields of Argentina had been taken herds of horses, cows and tractors. Towards the south, the route 3 was cut close to Blue … In April, 2008 this image was repeating itself in Bolivar, Chivilcoy, Gritty and almost all the peoples of the Pampa.
The proposal of the Argentine government to increase to 40 % the tax on the production of the ground had infuriated not only the small and medium agricultural producers, but also it had managed to extract of his haunts to the invisible gauchoes, this convinced pragmatic majority that the world already has no return, that the wire-fenced Pampa never will be the free ground on which the first jeans of America galloped again.
Recluses of another epoch
There were, mixed, silent and joined, tanned men who go unnoticed for the travelers of the principal routes, dressed like 150 years ago, shirt with handkerchief to the neck, hat of wing and pants bloomers gathered inside old boots of leather. The most sensitive to cold were showing a poncho, a blanket woven to hand with a hole to the way to spend the head. Any of them, with his wide woolen belts under another belt of leather adorned with coins, were not even bending the horse.
The injustice feeling had given so strongly that very few had continued with his routine of calm mate. The animals remained locked up, the arrangement of the stable was suspended and the yerra, the ironwork of the horses, stayed for another moment. The rest of the life continued like every day, listening to the news for the radio: field inside does not come the sign for the mobile phones.
The barricades were a good meeting point. The mate was circulating without fear, the flu pandemic A still had not come untied, and only it was missing that someone carneara a steer to do a roast on the skeleton of a bed of iron turned into broiler. Up to the most pacific gauchoes they were recovering the original rebelliousness and were joining the cut of the routes of access and supply of Buenos Aires, which was remaining without meat. And that, for an Argentinian, that is hard. This is to press really.
The history of the gaucho begun being written about 1586, when an Andalusian soldier called Alejo Godoy sent a letter to the king of Spain complaining about the maltreatment and awful living conditions in the newly founded town of Santa Maria of the Good Ayres. The man was asking for help for the godforsaken colonists who were living far, in the end of the world. When he got tired of waiting for an answer it galloped up to the empty area of the Biggest Square (the current Square of May) and after shouting: Felipe II dies!, it gave turned average and went away to live to Indians ground. To the pampa.
This was the baptism, the origin of the most typical being of Argentina, the gaucho, a free and independent man who crossbred the American Indian customs with the European horse to survive without owner or boss in a ground rich in wild animals. Of the Guarani it took the mate that it was cheating to the stomach. Of the pampas, tehuelches and ranqueles it remained with the poncho to wrap itself up, the headband to hold the long hair and the boleadoras to connect the paws of the meat that was running about round there. Less horses, dogs and cats, everything was eatable.
The gauchoes always lived a day. When they were hungry they were hunting a veal of the one of that they were making use only the piece of meat that they were putting to the fire and the leather, which they were drying to change in the local stores for cookies, dull grass or gin. Immediately the gauchoes adopted the Spanish guitar like partner to survive in the vast solitude of the Pampa, an immense area of 700.000 square kilometers as smooth as a table of billiards. As the Iberian peninsula and the south of France together, but without the Pyrenees, without the Cantabrian mountain range, the Alps, Guadarrama and the Sierra Nevada. An ocean of green color, without trees and full of unconscious cows of his slaughterhouse destination. The infinite on horseback.
Slow conversations
Today the Pampa is marked out of peoples in which it is easy to begin a conversation with the strangers who rub your life. The proprietor of the store where you buy a cookies bundle, the woman whom you ask about a direction, the seller of newspapers who wants to confirm the news about Spain … they All have a relative who lives close to our house. It is very possible that a question that it is possible to answer in ten seconds entertains you happily during half an hour. “There is no drama”, they will say to you, “I have time. In what can I help you?” Then you found another gaucho.
Because gaucho is not only that that dresses to the traditional way of the field. In Argentina, gaucho also is the one that worries for the others, the united one, which does ‘favors‘, favors, without waiting for anything in return. Simply because a friend or a just cause needs it. The real gaucho knows that if it can help it has no alternative. That's why the declarations in the routes had filled with men gone out of the most distant green corners, dressed with his clothes of task as in the big meetings of Areco.
San Antonio of Areco, in the province of Buenos Aires, is a calm people, a gaucho enclave surrounded with historical stays, writers' inspiration that immortalized the original life of the pampa in essential books like Martín Fierro, the Argentine Quixotic. It is the perfect place to move back or to change life. His ancient center keeps houses with proper biography, old bars and stores renewed like the Local store of Areco, where anyone can take down a guitar of the wall and throw itself to sing. There the friends always have time for another mate, a coffee, a beer or a wine. Buenos Aires is to 113 kilometers, the madness of Buenos Aires is not contagious at this distance.
The Areco life only falters about November 10, when it turns into the heart of the Pampa. In this date the Week of the Tradition is celebrated, one of the holidays of taming, yerra and ridden more important than Argentina, which congregates to thousands of proud gauchoes for showing itself and Ricardo Güiraldes is defied in the Creole Park and Gaucho Museum. Coming is easy, with so much roast is necessary only to continue the smoke.
The happiness is so contagious that they all end mixed earlier, during and after the careers cuatreras and the bullfights of rings, consistent in threading a small ring with a leader and to stretched gallop. Because you are not in a stage, you are in the real place, along with the historical large house surrounded by a water pit, opposite to the local store where the gauchoes were joining to touch the guitar, to be played to the letters, to be bet to the horses, to drink gin and to be defied with his sharp gaucho knives. And not necessary in this order.
Aside of the old helmet there is a group of men practising the toad, a popular aim game, while in a nearby field there is organized a spontaneous exhibition of duck, a sport similar to the pole invented by the gauchoes in the century seventeen. Under a tree, along with a seller of stuffed cakes of cornstarch of sweet of milk, two payadores begin a duel of guitars, an improvisation full of humor in which it gains the most ingenious or the most shameless. In any moment, someone will throw himself to give a few slow steps of folk dance or a few taconazos of malambo.
Most of the foreigners assumes that Argentina is like the city of Buenos Aires, that the Argentinian is like the of Buenos Aires one. The Week of the Tradition of San Antonio of Areco, with his heat, his humanity and his parade of more than 1.500 gauchoes decked with his best pilchas arreando his tropillas, is an unforgettable claim. Argentina is much more than Buenos Aires.
The progress forgot the gauchoes
The original gaucho life, celebrated in San Antonio of Areco, suffered a serious thrust about 1860, when the parcelación of the flatness began pampeana in preserves of private ground. Proprietor put the 'progress' to the herds of wild cows and it limited the nomadic life of the gauchoes, leaving few alternatives: the army or a work evil paid like field farmhand. Without money, education or proper grounds, the gauchoes who were not joining to the system were staying out of the law.
The majority joined the struggle of the commanders of the interior of the country against the decisions taken in Buenos Aires, how in the routes cut against the impuestazo. Others moved away with his horse towards the borders, towards the grounds without law where no boss might say to them how to live. Where the farmers were paying the pair of ears of Indian in pounds sterling and bandits as Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid was assaulting Argentine banks in the style of the Distant West.
Here and now, the only ones that were not appearing in the declaration that was cutting the route were the big landowners, these illustrious surnames of the Argentine field, the Anchorena, the Martínez of Sickle, beneficiaries of the immoral share-out of the ground snatched from the Amerindians at the end of 1800. The same ones that had shut the flatness up pampeana after thousands of kilometers of barbed wire ilegalizando the life style of the gauchoes.
Then, if the pampa had turned into a gigantic corral: where did the free life of the gaucho go to stop? The answer there me gave Adolfo Caballero, president of the Gaucho Confederacy Argentina: the gauchoes do not live only in the pampa. Between Jujuy and Tierra del Fuego there are more than hundred sixty thousand gauchoes.
Gauchoes as the seated solitary muleteers concerning a bonfire under the frozen sky of the Patagonia, far from his house, rubbing the hands to banish the cold of the steppe. Gauchoes, which push the cows herds towards the winter season fields for the dirt roads of the mountain range of the Andes. There, far from the asphalt and the serviceability, there kept on beating the original and austere life of the jeans of the south. The same life that was multiplying in the uproar of the horse racings and ring in Yavi Chico, Jujuy, to 3000 meters high or in the proud parade of the gauchoes salteños that were invading the avenues of the Argentine northwest with his spears and his legs of leather that protect them from the thorny shrubs. And to another side, close to Brazil, in that store - bar of Missions that in fact keeps on being a local store, where a group of gauchoes plays the trick and shares wineglasses.
The gauchoes were still alive, the cuts in the route were the best testimony. Gauchoes for united, gaucho for fighters, surviving and free gauchoes like Paw of Sandpaper Anderson, baqueano in the south of Tierra del Fuego, further impossible, which invited us to a roast of newly connected meat and cuereada. Still lukewarm meat of the last wild animals, in the last corner of Argentina, opposite to the Channel of Beagle.
