He waits for you in the half-moon shaped park that surrounds La Portena, his blonde hair turned to the colour of ash by time, his legs bent after a life spent in the saddle. The horses are grazing, like the cattle, and the only noise is that of the birds, deafening when you lay down under a tree: cypresses, oaks, cedars.
“The central wing of the house has not changed” he says “with the open veranda and the study on the first floor. No one called in architects in those days. A relative more skilled in drawing would make a sketch according to the instructions received, then the walls were pulled up and the new room that was needed. See that cornice that stops and then starts again?
That was an Italian decoration. The window that breaks it up was opened afterwards”. On the left is the polo field and, alongside the fogon, the stone chimney for the ashes, is a large room dominated by a sort of mechanical harness for learning movements.
“It isn’t hard”, he tries to convince me: “you just have to be all one with the horse”. His name is Manuel José G”uiraldes: it was here that his grandfather wrote “Don Segundo Sombra”, the book that embodies the gaucho and the Argentine soul. A little further away is the shady trunk of the ombù, under which the novel took shape, and the tank where the first, unsold copies of “Cuentos de muerte y de sangre” ended up. His uncle, Juan José, is the president of the Argentine Gaucho Confederation and one of the show pieces of the house is “Gauchos” (Sessa Editores), the extraordinary photographic book conceived, designed and prefaced by him, the monument to an idea and to an age. Because Argentina is this as well. Perhaps more than anything this.
La Portena is about one hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires, only a short distance from San Antonio Areco, the capital and memory of the pampas. You leave the modernity of the sky-scrapers and large roads full of traffic and people, with the TV images of the New York disaster still in your head, and ask yourself whether, deep down, it’s not all a big mistake and what metropolises, technology, progress, human and economic concentration, stress and heart attacks have to do with a life lived at the natural pace of things and human beings, the seasons, open spaces, physical effort, the pleasure of manual labour, the works and days of another idea of civilisation. With the capital behind you, you head for a countryside dotted with green, where the eye becomes confused. “It looks like the pampas”, Guiraldes has one of his gauchos say when they reach the sea. For them, that was immensity. “Don Segundo Sombra” was written in 1926. The author was just forty, had been to London and Paris, spoke perfect French and was a friend of writers and men of letters on both sides of the Atlantic.
For him however, La Portena seemed the navel of the world and gauchos the very essence of human beings. The Argentine had been an independent nation for just a century, and the gaucho had already been sentenced to decadence, and finally extinction. He had been killed off by the extensive merging of estates, which prevented his freedom of movement, the rationalisation of herds, with restriction of use, the industrialisation of agriculture, and the competition of new types of salaried labour. As often happens, the gaucho entered literature when he had just been expelled from history. The G”uiraldes were part of the country’s landed aristocracy. Ricardo’s great grandfather has been a friend and soldiering companion of General San Martìn, the liberator of Argentina. The children were sent to study in Europe, old European origins and renewed friendships were a source of pride. The brutal aspect of a proud nation, with its huge open spaces, without roots or culture, primordial in its appetites, in its claims and in its revenges, was a source of increasing embarrassment. This was an élite that was somewhat ashamed of its past. When its members realised that this was nonetheless where they came from, that they were marked by soil and blood, loneliness and independence, distances and huge open spaces, dexterity, sombreness and pride, it was too late and nostalgia was all that was left, acute, irremediable, incurable. “Don Segundo Sombra” (of which Adelphi published a beautiful edition twenty years ago, now out of print, “the most beautiful of foreign language editions” says Manuel G”uiraldes’ wife) represents the written testimony of this, a novel of initiation and training, a hymn to the gaucho way of life. “To the gaucho I carry within me, with devotion, like the host in its ciborium”, is the opening dedication in the book. In San Antonio, preparations are already under way for what in November will be the Fiesta de la Tradiciòn: horse-riding trials, folkloristic dancing, conferences, meetings, guided visits. The G”uiraldes Museum has undergone renovation, with its rooms dedicated to the writer and literature on the subject. At the entrance to the park where it is located, a pulperia, the saloon of the pampas, conveys an ideal of alcohol and knives… La Porten~a is one of the hundreds of estancias dotted all over Argentina. It is not the largest, thirty hectares of land, but it is the most literate. “We have been here for the past six generations”, says Manuel Guiraldes . “With a little sacrifice, we shall still be here I hope for another six”. The animal and crop raising part has now been joined by a small farm tourism business: four rooms accommodating at most eight people. They are not the only ones. El Ombù, which is just six kilometres away and where General Ricchieri, the man who introduced obligatory military service to Argentina, buried his favourite horse, has nine rooms and can serve up to 100 meals. El Rosario is surrounded by 80 hectares of estate where polo ponies are trained and which features tennis courts, 16 rooms, two swimming pools…All established around the mid-19th century, they were the reflections of dreams and mirages of grandeur, mimetic syndrome, anxiousness to become civilised. Dos Talas, one hundred kilometres further north, has a chapel that is a replica of that of Notre Dame de Passy, La Candelaria is in Louis-14th style, while La Horqueta is in Tudor style… This is the other Argentina, 55 million head of cattle, 25 million sheep, two million horses and 4 million square kilometres of land of which 25% is pampas, like this, inhabited by 150 thousand gauchos, out of a total population of 34 million. It is the memory of the “granary of the world”, when nomadic life was still practised, “el andar perpetuo” and conversation was “el soliloquio”. In the evening, when you come back to the chaos and noise of Buenos Aires, with its thousand lights and contrasts, you go to sleep to the images of the CNN that brings to your room a world immersed in a war without frontiers, your head lost in a sea of grass where you saw horses swim. And you understand that a big mistake has been made. And you realise there is nothing you can do about it.

(trad. Interpres sas Giussano)