The South

The man who landed in Buenos Aires in 1871 bore the name of Johannes Dahlmann and 
he was a minister in the Evangelical Church. In 1939, one of his grandchlidren, Juan 
Dahlmann, was secretary of a municipal library on Calle Cordoba, and he considered 
himself profoundly Argentinian. His maternal grandfather had been that Francisco 
Flores, of the Second Line-Infantry Division, who had died on the frontier of Buenos 
Aires, run through with a lance by Indians from Catriel; in the discord inherent betweeh 
his two lines of descent, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps driven to it by his Germanic blood) 
chose the line represented by his romantic ancestor, his ancestor of the romantic death. 
An old sword, a leather frame containing the daguerreotype of a blank-faced man with a 
beard, the dash and grace of certin music, the familiar strophes of Martin Fierro, the 
passing years, boredom and solitude, all went to foster this voluntary, but never 
ostentatioous nationalism. At the cost of numerous small privations, Dahlmann had 
managed to save the empty shell of a ranch in the South which had belonged to the Flores 
family; he continually recalled the image of the balsamic eucalyptus trees and the great 
rose-colored house which had once been crimson. His duties, perhaps even indolence, 
kept him in the city. Summer after summer he contented himself with the abstract idea 
of possession and with the certitude that his ranch was waiting for him on a precise site 
in the middle of the plain. Late in February, 1939, something happened to him. 
  Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. Dahlmann 
had succeeded in acquiring, on that very afternoon, an imperfect copy of Weil's edition 
of The Thousand and One Nights. Avid to examine this find, he did not wait for the 
elevator but hurried up the stairs. In the obscurity, something brushed by his forehead:
a bat, a bird? On the face of the woman who opened the door to him he saw horror 
engraved, and the hand he wiped across his face came away red with blood. The edge of a 
recently painted door which someone had forgotten to close had caused this wound. 
Dahlmann was able to fall asleep, but from the moment he awoke at dawn the savor of all 
things was atrociously poignant. Fever wasted him and the pictures in The Thousand and 
One Nights served to illustrate nightmares. Friends and relatives paid him visits and, 
with exaggerated smiles, assured him that they thought he looked fine. Dahlmann 
listened to them with a kind of feeble stupor and he marveled at their not knowing that 
he was in hell. A week, eight days passed, and they were like eight centuries. One 
afternoon, the usual doctor appeared, accompanied by a new doctor, and they carried 
him off to a sanitarium on the Calle Ecuador, for it was necessary to X-ray him. 
Dahlmann, in the hackney coach which bore them away, thought that he would, at last, 
be able to sleep in a room different from his own. He felt happy and communicative. 
When he arrived at his destination, they undressed him, shaved his head, bound him 
with metal fastenings to a stretcher; they shone bright lights on him until he was blind 
and dizzy, auscultated him, and a masked man stuck a needle into his arm. He awoke 
with a feeling of nausea, covered with a bandage, in a cell with something of a well 
about it; in the days and nights which followed the operation he came to realize that he 
had merely been, up until then, in a suburb of hell. Ice in his mouth did not leave the 
least trace of freshness. During these days Dahlmann hated himself in minute detail: he 
hated his identity, his bodily necessities, his humiliation, the beard which bristled up on 
his face. He stoically endured the curative measures, which were painful, but when the 
surgeon told him he had been on the point of death from septicemia, Dahlmann dissolved 
in tears of self-pity for his fate. Physical wretchedness and the incessant anticipation of 
horrible nights had not allowed him time to think of anything so abstact as death. On 
another day, the surgeon told him he was healing and that, very soon, he would be able to 
go to his ranch for convalescence. Incredibly enough, the promised day arrived.
  Reality favors symmetries and slight anachronisms: Dahlmann had arrived at the 
sanitarium in a hackney coach and now a hackney coach was to take him to the 
Constitucion station. The first fresh tang of autumn, after the summer's oppressiveness, 
seemed like a symbol in nature of his rescue and release from fever and death. The city, 
at seven in the morning, had not lost that air of an old house lent it by the night; the 
streets seemed like long vestibules, the plazas were like patios. Dahlmann recognized the 
city with joy on the edge of vertigo: a second before his eyes registered the phenomena 
themselves, he recalled the corners, the billboards, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In 
the yellow light of the new day, all things returned to him.   Every Argentine knows that 
the South begins at the other side of Rivadavia. Dahlmann was in the habit of saying that 
this was no mere convention, that whoever crosses this street enters a more ancient and 
sterner world. From inside the carriage he sought out, among the new buildings, the iron 
grill window, the brass knocker, the arched door, the entrance way, the intimate patio.
  At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled 
that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an 
enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He 
entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the 
sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he 
smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, 
man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, 
while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.
  Along the next to the last platform the train lay waiting. Dahlmann walked 
through the coaches until he found one almost empty. He arranged his baggage in the 
network rack. When the train started off, he took down his valise and extracted, after 
some hesitation, the first volume of The Thousand and One Nights. To travel with this 
book, which was so much a part of the history of his ill-fortune, was a kind of 
affirmation that his ill-fortune had been annulled; it was a joyous and secret defiance of 
the frustrated forces of evil.   Along both sides of the train the city dissipated into 
suburbs; this sight, and then a view of the gardens and villas, delayed the beginning of 
his reading. The truth was that Dahlmann read very little. The magnetized mountain and 
the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are - who would deny it? - marvelous, but not 
so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being. The joy of life 
distracted him from paying attention to Scheherezade and her superfluous miracles. 
Dahlmann closed his book and allowed himself to live.   Lunch - the bouillon served 
in shining metal bowls, as in the remote summers of childhood - was one more peaceful 
and rewarding delight.   Tomorrow I'll wake up at the ranch, he thought, and it was as 
if he was two men at a time: the man who traveled through the autumn day and across 
the geography of the fatherland, and the other one, locked up in a sanitarium and subject 
to methodical servitude. He saw unplastered brick houses, long and angled, timelessly 
watching the trains go by; he saw horsemen along the dirt roads; he saw gullies and 
lagoons and ranches; he saw great luminous clouds that resembled marble; and all these 
things were accidental, casual, like dreams of the plain. He also thought he recognized 
trees and crop fields; but he would not have been able to name them, for his actual 
knowledge of the country side was quite inferior to his nostalgic and literary knowledge. 
  From time to time he slept, and his dreams were animated by the impetus of the 
train. The intolerable white sun of high noon had already become the yellow sun which 
precedes nightfall, and it would not be long before it would turn red. The railroad car was 
now also different; it was not the same as the one which had quit the station siding at 
Constitucion; the plain and the hours had transfigured it. Outside, the moving shadow of 
the railroad car stretched toward the horizon. The elemental earth was not perturbed 
either by settlements or other signs of humanity. The country was vast but at the same 
time intimate and, in some measure, secret. The limitless country sometimes contained 
only a solitary bull. The solitude was perfect, perhaps hostile, and it might have occurred 
to Dahlmann that he was traveiling into the past and not merely south. He was distracted 
form these considerations by the railroad inspector who, on reading his ticket, advised 
him that the train would not let him off at the regular station but at another: an earlier 
stop, one scarcely known to Dahlmann. (The man added an explanation which Dahlmann 
did not attempt to understand, and which he hardly heard, for the mechanism of events 
did not concern him.)   The train laboriously ground to a halt, practically in the middle 
of the plain. The station lay on the other side of the tracks; it was not much more than a 
siding and a shed. There was no means of conveyance to be seen, but the station chief 
supposed that the traveler might secure a vehicle from a general store and inn to be 
found some ten or twelve blocks away.
  Dahlmann accepted the walk as a small adventure. The sun had already 
disappeared from view, but a final splendor, exalted the vivid and silent plain, before the 
night erased its color. Less to avoid fatigue than to draw out his enjoyment of these 
sights, Dahmann walked slowly, breathing in the odor of clover with sumptuous joy. 
  The general store at one time had been painted a deep scarlet, but the years had 
tempered this violent color for its own good. Something in its poor architecture recalled a 
steel engraving, perhaps one from an old edition of Paul et Virginie. A number of horses 
were hitched up to the paling. Once inside, Dahlmann thought he recognized the 
shopkeeper. Then he realized that he had been deceived by the man's resemblance to one 
of the male nurses in the sanitarium. When the shopkeeper heard Dahlmann's request, 
he said he would have the shay made up. In order to add one more event to that day and to 
kill time, Dahlmann decided to eat at the general store.   Some country louts, to whom 
Dahlmann did not at first pay any attention, were eating and drinking at one of the 
tables. On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an 
object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations 
of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up , diminutive, and seemed outside time, 
situated in eternity. Dahlmann noted with satisfaction the kerchief, the thick poncho, 
the long chiripa, and the colt boots, and told himself, as he recalled futile discussions 
with people from the Northern counties or from the province of Entre Rios, that gauchos 
like this no longer existed outside the South.   Dahlmann sat down next to the window. 
The darkness began overcoming the plain, but the odor and sound of the earth penetrated 
the iron bars of the window. The shop owner brought him sardines, followed by some 
roast meat. Dahlmann washed the meal down with several glasses of red wine. Idling, he 
relished the tart savor of the wine, and let his gaze, now grown somewhat drowsy, 
wander over the shop. A kerosene lamp hung from a beam. There were three customers 
at the other table: two of them appeared to be farm workers; the third man, whose 
features hinted at Chinese blood, was drinking with his hat on. Of a sudden, Dahlmann 
felt something brush lightly against his face. Next to the heavy glass of turbid wine, 
upon one of the stripes in the table cloth, lay a spit ball of breadcrumb. That was all: but 
someone had throuwn it there.   The men at the other table seemed totally cut off from 
him. Perplexed, Dahlmann decided that nothing had happened, and he opened the volume 
of The Thousand and One Nights, by way of suppressing reality. After a few moments 
another little ball landed on his table, and now the peones laughed outright. Dahlmann 
said to himself that he was not frightened, but he reasoned that it would be a major 
blunder if he, a convalescent, were to allow himself to be dragged by strangers into some 
chaotic quarrel. He determined to leave, and had already gotten to his feet when the 
owner came up and exhorted him in an alarmed voice:   "Senor Dahlmann, don't pay 
any attention to those lads; they're half high."
  Dahlmann was not surprised to learn that the other man, now, knew his name. But 
he felt that these conciliatory words served only to aggravate the situation. Previous to 
the moment, the peones' provocation was directed againt an unknown face, against no 
one in particular, almost againt no one at all. Now it was an attack against him, against 
his name, and his neighbors knew it. Dahlmann pushed the owner aside, confronted the 
peones, and demanded to know what they wanted of him.
  The tough with a Chinese look staggered heavily to his feet. Almost in Juan 
Dahlmann's face he shouted insults, as if he had been a long way off. He game was to 
exaggerate constituted ferocious mockery. Between curses and obscenities, he threw a 
long knife into the air, followed it with his eyes, caught and juggled it, and challenged 
Dahlmann to a knife fight. The owner objected in a tremulous voice, pointing out that 
Dahlmann was unarmed. At this point, something unforeseeable occurred.   From a 
corner of the room, the old ecstatic gaucho - in whom Dahlmann saw a summary and 
cipher of the South (his South) - threw him a naked dagger, which landed at his feet. It 
was as if the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel. Dahlmann bent 
over to pick up the dagger, and felt two things. The first, that this almost instinctive act 
bound him to fight. The second, that the weapon, in his torpid hand, was no defense at 
all, but would merely serve to justify his murder. He had once played with a poniard, like 
all men, but his idea of fencing and knife-play did not go further than the notion that all 
strokes should be directed upwards, with the cutting edge held inwards. They would not 
have allowed such things ot happen to me in the sanitarium, he thought.
  "Let's get on our way," said that other man.   They went out and if Dahlmann was 
without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in 
a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a 
liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they 
stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream 
his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt. Firmly 
clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out 
into the plain.