Martín Fierro

From this city armies went forth that seemed great and afterwards were great as their glory was magnified. Years later, a few of the soldiers returned and, with a northern lilt, recounted tales of what had befallen them in places with names like Ituzaingó and Ayacucho. Today it's as if none of these things had ever happened.

We Argentines have suffered two tyrannies. During the first, a couple of men seated on the driver's box of an oxcart coming from the Plata market, were hawking white and yellow peaches; a boy, lifting a corner of the canvas that covered the fruit, saw Unitarian heads with blood-stained beards. The second tyranny, for many, meant imprisonment and death; for all of us it was a time of unease, a grinding humiliation, which gave everyday acts a taste of shame. Today it's as if none of these things had ever happened.

A man who knew all the words studied the plants and birds of this land and, with painstaking love, described them perhaps for ever, setting down in enduring metaphors the vast chronicle of tumultuous sunsets and the phases of the moon. Today it's as if none of these things had ever happened.

Here, too, generations have known those common and in some way eternal vicissitudes that are the fabric of art. Today it's as if none of these things had ever happened, but in a hotel room at a certain point in the 1860s a man dreamed a fight. A gaucho wielding a knife lifts a black off his feet, throws him down like a bag of bones, watches him suffer and die, crouches to wipe the blade, unties his horse, and mounts slowly so that no one will think he's running away. This, which happened once, keeps happening again and again; the armies themselves have gone but that humble knife fight remains. One man's dream is part of all men's memory.

[1957]