Ecstatic Gaucho

Why, you will be asking your self, is this blog called ‘ecstaticgaucho.com’? Well, possibly anyhow…

A gaucho is a cowboy of the South American pampas, they are generally associated with Argentina. But an ‘ecstatic gaucho’ is more than this…

If you’ve ever seen the cult British hippy film Performance, which you might say is the British Easy Rider, there’s a scene in which the star of the film – Mick Jagger reads a passage from a book. The excerpt includes mention of an “old, ecstatic gaucho”.

I’ve seen the film a few times and became curious about the passage. After a bit of research, I found the piece comes from a short story called El Sur or The South by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (pron. Hor-hay Loo-ees Bor-hes). Around this time, I saw a friend of mine had a copy of the famous anthology of Borges’ writing Labyrinths. It was obviously time to read some Borges. He went straight to the top of my list of favourite writers.

J.L.Borges, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died in Geneva in 1986. He lived a slightly solitary and melancholy life, tied to his mother’s apron strings. In fact, he lived with her until she died, when Borges was in his sixties.

The good thing about Borges from a reader’s point of view is that his literary output was entirely composed of short stories, essays and poems. This makes getting familiar with his work less of a strain, there’s no hard slog through fat and impenetrable tomes. Some, however, might find his style less than light and breezy.

‘The South’ starts in Buenos Aires, where a man (Dahlmann) becomes afflicted with a fever after a mysterious incident whilst climbing the stairs. After a period of illness in which he feels as if he is in hell, the man is released from the sanatorium to which he has been taken. Dahlmann travels to the agricultural badlands to the south of the city in order to convalesce at the family ranch. He gets off his train prior to the expected stop and somehow finds himself in a general stores.

In the shop, Dahlman see the gaucho who is introduced as “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.” The man is primitive and authentic, age and life have effected him profoundly.

The other men in the general stores pick a fight with Dahlmann, and the “old, ecstatic gaucho” in whom he sees “a summary and cipher of the South (his South)” throws him a dagger. Dahlmann picks up the dagger which he feels binds him to fight and justifies his murder. The gaucho is the agent of the death for the hero.

Finally, Dahlman goes out to his meet his end – but his attitude is not what we might expect. “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.”

Borges said of ‘El Sur’ that the whole drama could have been the fevered imaginings of a dying man. This is evident in the feeling of unreality pervades the story, and the events in the southern badlands that echo Dahlmann’s earlier sickness. If this is indeed the case – the gaucho, perhaps, acts as Charon ferrying Dahlmann from the land of the living to death.