SOURCE: Donghi, Tulio Halperín. “The Old Order and Its Crisis as Theme of Recuerdos de Provincia.” In Sarmiento and his Argentina, edited by Joseph T. Criscenti, pp. 17-34. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993.

[In the following essay, Donghi analyzes Recuerdos de Provincia, focusing on its intent and themes, while also comparing it to Facundo.]

What is the intent of Recuerdos de Provincia?¹ Since its publication, readers have refused to believe what Sarmiento stated in the introduction, that it is addressed “Only to my compatriots.” In fact, it was difficult to take seriously his claim that the presence in Santiago of an agent of the government of Buenos Aires, empowered to seek his extradition (something everyone knew had little prospect of success), represented a threat to his future in Chile. Those readers doubted that this laughable threat could force Sarmiento, already a successful public figure, to repeat the defense that he had offered in his first biographical sketch in 1843, when he was a newly arrived individual in the small journalistic world of Santiago. Discarding that scarcely believable justification, they preferred to see in Recuerdos a tremendous self-portrait with which Sarmiento was inaugurating the political campaign that, he was sure, would carry him to the pinnacle of power in the post-Rosas epoch—an epoch he thought was just about to begin in Argentina.

But the book itself is not organized along the lines that could be expected if its theme were the glorification, and not the defense, of its author; only half-way through it does Sarmiento begin to concern himself with himself. Unkind readers easily ascribed even that incongruence to his megalomania. They saw in it instead an exaggerated pause before he glorified his lineage in an excessively thorough evocation of the outstanding figures who had adorned it since the sixteenth century. Still, the version Sarmiento offers of “the colonial history of my family” does not accomplish particularly well the task that those unkind readers assigned to it.

To grasp this one needs only glance at the so-called “Genealogical chart of a family of San Juan de la Frontera, in the Argentine Republic.” This “index to the book,” which follows the introduction, succinctly presents the trajectory of the Sanjuanino lineage, founded at the beginning of the colony by Bernardino Albarracín, “Maestre de Campo.” The family was currently represented, on one side, by Paula and Rosario Sarmiento, “workers in embroidery, textiles, etc.,” and on the other, by Procesa Sarmiento, “artist, disciple of Monvoisin”; Bienvenida Sarmiento, “director of various girls' schools”; and, of course, Domingo F. Sarmiento, member of learned societies and public service associations of the Old and New Worlds, director of and contributor to newspapers, and author “of a series of works on elementary education adopted by the University of Chile.”²

This summary of three centuries of family history does not invoke enjoyment of the pride derived from an exalted ancestry. Rather, it clarifies the problems produced by a trajectory that started at the summit of San Juan society and that at present dangerously approaches its most intimate fringes.

Thus, it is not necessary to conclude that those readers had erred in recognizing among the central objectives of Recuerdos the exaltation of the figure of its author. This objective would be achieved less obviously precisely by exploiting the problem that, though revealed through his family history, does not affect it alone. The very title of the genealogical chart—presented not as the author's, but as that of “a family of San Juan de la Frontera”—regains for Sarmiento that broader significance.³Recuerdos is an unceasing defense of the “memory of his kin who deserved the gratitude of the fatherland,” his province, and the “humble home in which he was born.” It is also—as the last pages affirm—an example of the biographical genre to which Facundo belongs. The fact that the principal biographee is this time the author himself does not establish a difference in essence between the two works.⁴

Saying that Recuerdos and Facundo are two examples of the same genre does not do complete justice to the extremely complex relations between the 1845 work and the 1850 one. This is not surprising, given Sarmiento's disinclination to spend time critically examining his own work. He shows little interest in its literary quality, as can be observed in his commentaries on its successes. These commentaries are characterized by a conciseness entirely anomalous with him. (Thus he limits himself to mentioning in passing that his Apuntes biográficos of Father Aldao is a “little work very well liked by the intelligent as a literary composition.”)⁵ He does not even occupy himself with providing an adequate account of the motivations and justifications that underlay it. Among the reasons Sarmiento gives in the introduction to Recuerdos for prefering the biographical genre is that biography is “the most adequate cloth on which to print good ideas” and whoever writes one “exercises a type of judgship, punishing triumphant vice, encouraging hidden virtue.”⁶ This characterization, valid for the one on Aldao, but already inadequate for Facundo, once more defines very poorly the purpose of Recuerdos.

The function of the biographical narrative is, in reality, quite different in Sarmiento's two major books. Both deal, by means of a character or group of characters, with unlocking a totality of feeling that is the creation of a collective historical experience. But it is not only the ultimate goal of Recuerdos that puts it on the same level as Facundo. In the latter, Sarmiento had elaborated an entire set of expository resources suitable to that goal, which revealed an unexpected literary skill, quickly appreciated as such by his readers. Sarmiento does not fail to notice that, although he sees himself primarily as a political publicist, many of his readers regard him above all as a producer of literature, and he glories in that in Recuerdos. That public offers him not only applause but also indications about which features of his work it best appreciates. Among these is the evocative force that Sarmiento gives to the description of an individual or collective way of life and to the setting in which it unfolds.

In fact, it would be dangerous to ignore what Sarmiento tells us about his relations with the public (and, in particular, the Argentine) just because what moves him to say it is the desire to exalt himself. Thus, his claim that Don Pedro de Angelis, the erudite Italian in Rosas's service, was proclaiming his admiration for the precise description of the pampas in Facundo, becomes more credible when one learns that the young Doctor Bernardo de Irigoyen was trying to obtain from Mendoza a copy of Recuerdos in order to send it to that other promising member of the rosista intelligentsia—his then-friend Rufino de Elizalde, an official in the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Buenos Aires.⁷ Sarmiento was more disposed to continue producing the descriptive and evocative pezzi di bravura that the public admired mainly because these offered the best vehicle for the historicosocial vision he wished to communicate to them. In this way, the prestige that Facundo acquired as a literary model in the eyes of its author is confirmed in its role as a model for Recuerdos at levels that now are no longer those of literature.

But the weight of that model does not prevent the exploration undertaken in Recuerdos from traveling a very different road from that of Facundo. This is reflected in the different way in which they each work to combine an eminently practical objective, that make them both instruments of the fight against the rosista dictatorships, with the theorist ambition of uncovering the secret of what the first work had called the Argentine sphinx. In both, the articulation between those two objectives is not free of problems. However, in Facundo they originate in the unresolved contradiction between the announcement of universal reconciliation inscribed in the third part (which has the eminently practical purpose of persuading those who support the regime that Sarmiento opposes that they have nothing to fear from its downfall) and the grand evocation in the two first parts of a reality split down to its roots into irreconcilably hostile hemispheres. In Recuerdos it is less easy to mark the precise point at which the problem becomes evident. More than by any contradiction, the relation between those two objectives seems affected here by the doubtful relevance that the knotty problem explored in the new work presents for the obligations of political battle.

This discontinuity between Sarmiento's practical and theoretical objectives occurs in part because the latter do not appear in Recuerdos as clearly as in Facundo. It is perhaps revealing that the 1850 book lacks something equivalent to the invocation of Quiroga's shadow that opened Facundo and that had hidden under its excited oratorical flight a coherent “idea of the book.” This announced the precise itinerary of the exploration undertaken in it to uncover the secret of the Argentine sphinx.

True, attenuated and unconnected echoes of the interpretive effort so vigorously sketched and justified in Facundo crop up again in Recuerdos. They appear in excessively concise sentences like the one in which Sarmiento points out that “the appearance of the soil has shown me at times the physiognomy of the men, and these almost always indicate the road that events have had to take.” Notations like this seem to forecast the return to the route followed in 1845. Beginning the book with the description of a specific place (that corner of semidemolished houses, dominated by a few giant palms, stronghold in the past of the “first families which made up the old colonial aristocracy”) reminds us of the descriptive and evocative techniques of Facundo and seems also to promise a route parallel to the one followed then.

But it is a promise destined not to be fulfilled. This time geography makes only a fleeting appearance in that initial picture, to yield the foreground immediately to history. In fact, the very brief evocation of a place leads to a summoning of the now almost-erased footsteps. In these we can trace a vanished past, from the palm trees themselves, brought from Chile by the first conquerors, to “a broken down … door … where there were once encrusted lead letters, and in its center the sign of the Company of Jesus,” and in the nearby house of the Godoys, equally ruined, a folder whose label reads: “This file contains the ‘History of Cuyo’ by the Abbé Morales, a topographical and descriptive map of Cuyo, and the testimonies of Mallea,” though it now contains only the latter.⁸

In Facundo the evocation would have served as a point of departure to explore the configuration of an equally precise way of life. In Recuerdos it gives way immediately to the complaint about the damage done by time, reflecting very well all that will separate the dominant perspective in Recuerdos from that of Facundo. In Facundo the literal and metaphorical keys referred to a spatial key. Even when the conflict that was tearing apart the Rioplatense provinces was presented as being that between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries, those two periods designated two historical configurations that were strictly contemporaneous in Argentina. They were rooted, in turn, in two rival places, and were understood in a totally literal sense as two spaces in which the very body of the nation was divided: the city and the rural interior. This conception of a spatial key to the conflict will never lose its importance for Sarmiento. Even in his writings at the end of the decade, from Viajes to Educación popular, he resorts to the metaphor of the siege of the fortress of civilization that is the city by a barbarous mass settled in the outskirts (whether it is the ever swelling ocean of the poor in a rapidly growing Santiago or of the then submissive droves mobilized by the Industrial Revolution in Europe).

Alongside this interpretative perspective it is possible to discover at a second level another—one that sought its clues to the same problem on a temporal rather than a spatial axis. Thus, Facundo does not avoid the theme of the decadence of the city of La Rioja. But in Facundo this decadence is the unfortunate result of the defeat of a historical subject rooted in a space—the city, the territory of civilization—in its battle with another subject that is its irreconcilable rival, the other space, that of the rural interior, the redoubt of barbarism.

It is precisely this relationship between these two interpretative outlooks that has been inverted in Recuerdos. The theme elicited by the destroyed and fragmented testimonies of a brilliant past with which the work opens is again that of decadence. Now, however, decadence is not the result of external defeat, but the punishment that time implacably inflicts on those who do not know how to go forward with it. In this way, an aspect of the Argentine catastrophe that certainly had been considered in Facundo, but was decidedly relegated to second place, comes to the foreground. In Facundo, Sarmiento deplored the opposition in the very bosom of the cities that arose in response to the innovations introduced during the revolution and he deplored the reforming fickleness of the Unitarian party. But he then had reproached that opposition less for its misoneistic orientation than for the factious obsession that had made it initiate a suicidal alliance with the barbarous besieger.

In Recuerdos the decadence is not the result of a defeat from ambushes from outside, and Sarmiento is so persuaded of the validity of this perspective that he does not notice that the first example he offers to validate it is inappropriate. The example is that of the Huarpes, an “important and large” nation of indigenes, that inhabited the valleys of Tulum Mogna and Jachal and the Guanacache lakes.

The historian Ovalle, who visited Cuyo sixty years after [the conquest], speaks of a grammar and a book of Christian prayers in the Huarpe language, of which the only vestiges that remain among us are the cited names, and Puyuta, name of a neighborhood, and Angaco, Vicuña, Villicún, Huanacache, and a few others.⁹

In order to deduce from the Huarpes' history the moral that already can be guessed, Sarmiento is willing to forget the role the Spanish conquest played in their ruin. It is not surprising that in exploring San Juan's decadence he does not attribute the decisive role in the city's conquest that he had assigned in the past (and would assign again in the future) to Quiroga's guerrilla plainsmen. On the contrary, this decadence acknowledges the same roots as its predecessors who controlled the land of San Juan, and the book states further:

Ay to the nations that don't progress! They do not only stay behind! Three centuries have been sufficient for the Huarpes to be erased from the catalogue of nations. Ay to you, colonists, backward Spaniards! Less time is needed for you to have descended from a confederated province to a hamlet, from a hamlet to a vineyard district, from a vineyard district to an inhabited forest. Before you had wealthy people among you. … Now you are all poor! Wise men … theologians … politicians … governors … today you do not even have schools, and at the top the very people who govern you parade their own barbarism. Down from general ignorance there is another step, general poverty, and you already have taken it. The step that follows is into the shadows, and peoples disappear at once, without it being known where they went and when they left!¹⁰

This was not the first time that Sarmiento found that this hard corollary of his faith in historical progress required incorporation into its constantly more frenetic rhythm a condition of collective survival. In 1843, he had commented on Research on the Social Influence of the Conquest and the Colonial System of the Spaniards in Chile, by his friend, J. V. Lastarria. Sarmiento was convinced that progress occurred in accord with “immutable laws.” In obedience to these laws, through countless crimes and injustices, “the strong races exterminate the weak, the civilized nations supplant the savages in the possession of the land.” This did not prevent Sarmiento from proclaiming the spectacle, whose gloomy underside he did nothing to dissemble, as “providential, sublime, and grand.”¹¹

That vision, at once desolate and enthusiastic about the march of history, is again dominant in Recuerdos de provincia. It offers a central argument for a work that is nostalgic about a dead world, which seems paradoxical at first sight. As soon as one examines how that attitude is articulated in Recuerdos, with this passionately futurist argument, it is clear that both reciprocally support each other. The old San Juan had been the victim of its inability to change as rapidly as the new times demanded. It is undeniably a fault, but any alternative explanation of the decadence that Sarmiento proposed to explore would have required a confrontation with San Juan's other more serious failings.

That nostalgic ambiance makes Sarmiento's resistance to criticizing the descendants of the now abolished San Juan entirely understandable. It is apparent in one of the first chapters of Recuerdos, entitled “The Sons of Mallea.” In it is a narrative of the history of old Don Fermín Mallea and his clerk, “the young Oro … so honest and laborious that Mallea … had to make him a partner in his business.” After ten years, during which Don Fermín withdrew funds without counting them, and his partner “had touched nothing,” a balance sheet reveals that all of the business now belonged to the former clerk. Don Fermín, desolate and furious, began an interminable suit against his former protégé, whose “suave and loveable nature could not resist such a difficult test”; “the sad [one] died of sorrow seeing the injustice done to him by his friend and protector,” who for his part found in insanity a refuge against remorse. Sarmiento believes he knows who is to blame for the tragic conclusion of that provincial tragedy—the courts of justice: “in them, in the general ignorance, in the torpor of the judges, in the unbridled passions that a system of iniquity which has crime written on its forehead, starting all of its acts with the ritual mueran …, incites instead of containing.”¹²

This scarcely convincing conclusion doubtless reflects the already noted distance between the practical political purpose and the theoretical ambition of Recuerdos. It makes it more difficult for Sarmiento to find good maxims to be thrown in the face of the enemy in the polemics of the day. But the aprioristic decision to blame political enemies is outweighed by the need to defend at any cost the innocence of a descendant of old San Juan. To proclaim Mallea's innocence, Sarmiento will assert unconvincingly that Mallea possesses certain generic qualities in his heart that his behavior fails to confirm: he is (as he does not hesitate to tell us) “of gruff character and unbearable temper,” and “he had made it obvious in his youth.” Sarmiento refuses to see in the stubbornness with which the irascible old man rejects the rendition of accounts presented by his former clerk and later very honest partner anything worse than “the obstinacy of character and unrestrained passions that the injustice and ineptitude of the judges he did not know how or wish to restrain.” Sarmiento even limits the significance of these more attenuating negative features by presenting them as “temperamental characteristics that did not go as far as tarnishing some very laudable endowments of the heart,” again not a very convincing conclusion but not for that less significant.

This is not the only occasion in which such personal traits are invoked to dispel shadows on the portraits of survivors of the colonial elite. (They occupy an even more prominent place in the more detailed portraits of Don José and Don Domingo de Oro.) The price is that it reduces the most characteristic features of an individual to mere eccentricities. Such arbitrary irrationality makes the characters inaccessible to the analytical focus that in Facundo had permitted reading in them the revealing signs of the peculiarities of the historicosocial context in which they had been forged. Nothing less than this renunciation of the most powerful hermeneutic tool that Sarmiento relied upon to unveil the mystery of the Argentine sphinx was required to secure the monolithic innocence of the heirs of the San Juan of yesterday in the misfortunes that followed its decline.

Sarmiento's refusal to interpret the characteristics that define the Sanjuanina elite who survived the revolutionary torment from a historicosocial perspective has more limited consequences than that which equally hobbled the exploration of colonial San Juan. Sarmiento did not give it the same scrutinizing look he directed at post-revolutionary Argentina in Facundo because his beloved San Juan was branded by the iron of Spanish colonization. Sarmiento had always condemned the colonization and in Recuerdos it is still the object of a decidedly negative judgment. In its pages, as in those of Facundo, a preferred argument presents rosista Argentina as the revenge of the colony, the legacy of which the revolution has not been able to eradicate.¹³

To protect this golden isle of memory from a determined attempt to trace the roots of its present degradation to the Spanish past is less easy than to present its surviving heirs in the abominable Argentina of 1830 or 1850 as misguided innocents in a world whose intrinsic iniquity they have the good fortune of not understanding. The accomplishments of colonial San Juan, which Sarmiento evokes nostalgically, are those of a civilization upon which he continues to cast his condemnation. Thus, his impassioned identification with a founding elite composed of landowners, encomenderos, and theologians can only be maintained by enveloping in a charitable cloud features that he has used to build images more filled with historical substance than when he focuses on realities with which he feels less tied. It would therefore be useless to look in Recuerdos for a picture of the old San Juan—like that of Córdoba in Facundo—without failing to do justice to the prodigious and articulated complexity of the object that Sarmiento evokes. He maintains a punctilious critical distance, which makes it less surprising to see him burst into a passionate appeal for its destruction. He invokes all of this with an intuitive immediacy that is capable of giving the reader the illusion of reliving it from within.

To elude a similar exploration, which might reveal to him what he perhaps would prefer not to find out, Sarmiento will take a path that is somewhat different from the one based on a personal, nontransferable arbitrariness. This explains the conduct of Don Fermín Mallea and is especially clear in the discussion of the episode that dragged Friar Miguel Albarracín to the courtrooms of the Inquisition of Lima. The episode opens with a rich and precise description of a historical frame presented now as absolutely relevant. Friar Miguel, pride of the maternal family of Sarmiento, is a son of that “Middle Ages of the colonization of the Americas [in which] the letters were sheltered in the monasteries.” As might be expected, the characterization of his dreaded antagonist, the Tribunal of the Holy Office, is less cursory. Long paragraphs examine the role it filled in cloistering the Hispanic world from foreign influences as well as the weight that its legacy maintains in the Hispanic America of 1850, especially in rosista Argentina.

Sarmiento looks at that tribunal with the eyes of a fervent believer in the liberal civilization of the nineteenth century. As such, he emphasizes it so as to condemn both the role it performed as the agent of the colonial regime and of Spanish xenophobia:

The Inquisition of Lima was a phantom of terror which Spain had sent to America to intimidate foreigners, the only heretics it feared … among whom there is a Juan Salado, French, who was burned without any other rational cause than the novelty of being French.

The tribunal's role was revealed by the pompous cruelty of its spectacles, marked with the stamp of “the horribly puerile customs of that epoch.”¹⁴

Even in this presentation, however, we see gradually emerging dissonances from the somber and pathetic tone preferred in the middle of the nineteenth century for evoking the Holy Tribunal and its victims. These will come together at the end in an arrangement, as a sort of sarcastic counterpoint to the contrite recreation of the crimes of fanaticism. As Judaizing and heretical foreigners were not abundant, Sarmiento tells us,

the Inquisition fed itself from time to time on some old pious woman who sought communication with the Virgin Mary, through the intermediation of angels and seraphims, or some other less delicate type who preferred to deal with the fallen angel. … When the reputation of holiness or devilry reached its peak, the Holy Tribunal fell on the unhappy wretch, and after a long and erudite process, made of her thin body an agreeable and lively nourishment for the flames to the great contentment of the populace, employees and high clergy, who attended the ceremony by the thousands.¹⁵

This ironic language reflects a rejection of what Sarmiento now presents as a ludicrous exercise of gratuitous cruelty rather than as a crime of fanaticism. It does not prevent Sarmiento from slipping from one to the other interpretive key as he did when he postulated personal character as the basic reason for certain characteristics of the San Juan elite that he found difficult to justify otherwise. He again refuses to look for the key to that capricious cruelty in the secret rationality of the historical setting. Only when Sarmiento's subtle labor has deprived a good part of the Spanish historical background of much of its clarity does he decide to introduce into his narrative the encounter of Friar Miguel Albarracín and his inquisitorial judges.

In presenting the reasons that brought Friar Miguel to the attention of the fearful superior Lima tribunal, Sarmiento displays an attitude that is even closer to the one that dominated the history of Don Fermín Mallea and his clerk. Sarmiento again explicitly considers the presence in the historicosocial field of an area of stubborn arbitrariness impenetrable to the hermeneutic instruments masterly employed in Facundo.

There are rare manias—we read in the passage that introduces us at last to the episode—that trouble the human spirit in certain epochs; curiosities of thought that come without one knowing why, as if in the presence of events was indicated the ability to satisfy them. The philosophers' stone, which chemistry produced in Europe, was followed in America by the famous question of the millennium, in which even a Saint Vincent Ferrer had been left bewildered.

Friar Miguel himself had “applied his sagacity to solve so arduous a problem,” in a folio whose “daring doctrines” he now had to defend in the courtrooms of the Holy Office.¹⁶

What follows suggests that what is important here is Sarmiento's disinclination to analyze the sudden rebirth of speculations about the millennium. True, he stresses that “a few years after the appearance of the millenarians, the revolution for the independence of South America appeared, as if that theological longing had been only a presage of the next commotion,”¹⁷ but the path that this observation invites taking will not be followed. Sarmiento is not interested in unveiling the secret rationality perhaps hidden behind that rare mania, since he discards the idea that it would have enlightened the protagonists of the episode or endowed their conduct with meaning. Only retrospectively, in fact, would the ties between those ravings about the ultimissima and the crisis of the Spanish empire be made evident.

Sarmiento admits that in the intensity of the debates about the millennium a symptom of the future revolution can be recognized. However, he insists that in spite of that the rivals in those debates were disputing about what was for them pure nonsense. In the case of Friar Miguel, “according to what I believe,” Sarmiento tells us, “neither he nor the Inquisition understood above all one iota about all that medley of conjectures.”¹⁸ That does not prevent him, though, from including the victory achieved by Friar Miguel on the terrible stage of the Lima tribunal in that inventory of family glories that Recuerdos de provincia wants to be.

If the inclusion is not strictly justified, it is because it need not be. It is as if—thanks to the replacement of an authentically critical distance by another very different distance that protects him under the double veil of nostalgia and irony—Sarmiento had succeeded in seeing the episode with the eyes of the protagonists and their contemporaries. It is the criteria that they share that he invokes to explain the triumph that Friar Miguel reaped in Lima: “Fortunately, they say, the friar was as eloquent as a Cicero, whose language he possessed without rival; profound as a Thomas, subtle as a Scotus.” Notice how that nostalgic identification, far from renouncing ironic distance, is built on it. The readers of Recuerdos did not need to be reminded that Sarmiento did not appreciate any more than they the subtlety of Duns Scotus or the profundity of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Further, he had never concealed how completely he considered it noxious to waste effort in learning dead languages. But this ironic distance, rather than opening the way to a critical attitude, becomes an effective barrier against it. That is apparent as soon as one examines the point at which Sarmiento judges it necessary to assume an explicit distance in the face of the collective pride inspired in his family by the memory of the great Friar Miguel.

Sarmiento's family was convinced that the San Juan region had been fraudulently deprived of the leading role in the rebirth of millenarian speculations by the exiled Chilean Jesuit Lacunza, whose Return of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty had been published in London. Recalled Sarmiento,

My uncle Friar Pascual, seeing me an able child and anxious for knowledge, explained the work of Lacunza to me, telling me with indignant pride: “Study this book, which is the work of the great Friar Miguel, my uncle, and not of Lacunza, who stole the authorship, taking the manuscript from the archives of the Inquisition, where it remained deposited.” And then he showed me the allusion which Lacunza makes to a work about the millennium by an American author that he did not dare to cite. Afterwards I have come to believe that family vanity made my uncle unjust with poor Lacunza.¹⁹

The most notable aspect of this distance taking is the firmness with which Sarmiento refuses to submit to a historicocritical perspective the material that family tradition has fashioned to augment its own glory. That perspective would have been less concerned with knowing whether those apocalyptical commentaries were Lacunza's or Friar Miguel's and more in explaining how it was possible that, in a country that ten years earlier had adopted the political language of the representative republic, and where for a quarter of a century the intellectual elites had begun to articulate a new vision of society under the notion of the nascent political economy, those texts could have been recommended as valid objects of study for a boy “able and anxious for knowledge.” The counsel of Friar Pascual is based on criteria that lend themselves admirably to examination from a perspective analogous to the one that dominated the description of Córdoba presented in Facundo, but of course they were not so examined.

If the description of the encounter of Friar Miguel with the Inquisition still requires an ironic distance, in the passages that follow in the chapter entitled “The Albarracines,” admiration now overcomes all reticence. The discussion is that of the wealthy Doña Antonia Irarrazábal and her incomparable life-style, which shows her surrounded by a

covey of Negro slaves of both sexes. In the gilded bedroom of Doña Antonia two young slave girls slept to watch over her sleep. At meal time, an orchestra of violins and harps, composed of six slaves, played sonatas to enliven the banquet of their masters. … [She] frequently rode horseback, preceded and followed by slaves, to look over her vineyards. … Once or twice a year … the great patio [was] covered with hides on which thick layers of blackened pesos fuertes were put out in the sun, to clean the tarnish from them, and two old Negroes … walked from hide to hide carefully turning over the clinking silver grains.²⁰

Here Sarmiento appears to anticipate that his reader may find shocking what he himself finds admirable. Without taking explicit responsibility for the skeptical reactions that his idyllic portrait of an order based on slavery might provoke, Sarmiento answers them implicitly in his commentary on that incongruous scene in which slaves grown old in servitude still devote themselves to restoring luster to the wealth of their mistress. This invites admiration for the presence of the “patriarchal customs of those times in which slavery did not debase the good qualities of the loyal Negro!”

The refusal to take any critical distance is also maintained in the face of the economic criteria that underlay the life-style of Doña Antonia. Once more her capricious arbitrariness makes them impenetrable to any historical analysis. (“It was the mania of the colonists to hoard peso upon peso and to be proud of it.”²¹) That impenetrability makes it impossible, and therefore unnecessary, to explore the possible nexuses between the modalities of past opulence and the recent fall into the most extreme penury, such as had already begun to appear in some examinations of the problems of independent Hispanic America. Rather than exploring possible continuities between colonial splendor and a present of ruin and decadence, Sarmiento prefers to underline the contrast between both. They are symbolized by him in the homes of the Dulce nombre de María, which offered “sumptuous lodging to the rich and powerful Doña Antonia,” and are “degraded today by necessity to being used, because of their large size, as barracks for the troops.” This permits repetition of a moral that we have already heard: “What has happened, oh settlers, to that wealth of your grandfathers? And you, federal governors, military executioners of the people, could you gather by crushing, torturing, an entire town, the amount of pesos that no more than sixty years ago was contained on just the patio alone of Doña Antonia Irarrazábal?”

Common sense suggests why Sarmiento refused to examine historically (that is, critically) the family legacy that unites him with the Albarracines, Oros, and Irarrazábales. Together with an affective identification too deep to permit it, the least tolerant readers of Recuerdos could not fail to notice Sarmiento's wish to wrap himself in his inherited glitter. This wish is reflected in the tone of dynastic pride that stands out in passages like this:

The heads of this family [the Albarracines] founded the monastery of Santo Domingo in San Juan, and even up to today has maintained its patronage and the feast of the Saint, whom we all have been accustomed to call Our Father. There is a Domingo in each of the branches in which the family is subdivided … and until the closing of the monastery in 1825, there was among its choristers a representative of the patron family of the order.²²

Here is a conclusion that would be inconvertible evidence, were it not that it is precisely in the passages dedicated to his parents that this bond reaches its maximum intimacy. At this point, Sarmiento suddenly abandons the reticence that had prevented him from paying fuller attention to the historical context of his family story.

The discontinuities in this attention are incomprehensible when one seeks to explain them exclusively by basing them on the sentimental identification with that past that Sarmiento would retain, or of how he uses it to develop the image of himself presented in Recuerdos. But they are better understood when one remembers what aspects of his legacy are protected by such reticences from any historicocritical scrutiny. Under its cover will remain, as already indicated, all that makes San Juan a typical example of Spanish colonization in America. Because he speaks of old San Juan with the voice of the family tradition that he had sucked in his infancy, Sarmiento can present an out-of-focus image made from those controversial aspects of the colonial experience of San Juan. It is an image by someone who views it from—if one can put it that way—too close up.

That image of colonial San Juan does not sketch in those characteristics of the civilization forged by Spain in the old land of the Huarpe that the new liberal civilization would most quickly find upsetting. Thus, Sarmiento can identify himself unhesitatingly with a prominent lineage. He sees its eminent position in the hierarchical and unequal society of the Old Order reflected as much in the somewhat tenuous ties of the exploits of the Great Captain, General José de San Martín, in Italy, as in the immense deserted latifundias and the encomiendas of Indians that brought luster at the onset of the San Juan phase in his family history and the civil and ecclesiastical prebends accumulated later.

In such a way the image of the setting that would have made this trajectory of his lineage historically intelligible was corroded. It offers only the gorgeous, ennobling backdrop for a family that only reached the real level of history when it was integrated into the context of the final crisis of the Old Order. In that context, finally explored in all of its ambiguity and contradictory richness, we now look for the key to the complex equilibrium that reigns in the home founded by Paula Albarracín and José Clemente Sarmiento. Sarmiento describes the equilibrium as the tension between the still firm colonial heritage and the fragmentary outlines of a new way of living together that appears fugitively throughout the revolutionary storm. Sarmiento explains that he was attracted simultaneously in his childhood by “contradictory impulses”; “through my mother … the colonial vocations; through my father the ideas and preoccupations of that revolutionary epoch slipped in.” While she expected to see him become a “cleric and priest of San Juan, in imitation of my uncle, [I saw on] my father uniforms, galloons, sabers, and other trifles.”²³ Those two rival influences are far from being of equal force in Sarmiento's immediate surroundings. On the contrary, the short text cited here anticipates what Sarmiento's story of his childhood and youth will confirm: that he is above all the son of his mother.

In a world divided by the revolution into irreconcilable hemispheres, the predominant maternal influence had inscribed him in that of the colony. Sarmiento's recognition of this is prepared by, and made less disagreeable to a public little disposed even in its most conservative fringes to receive any open apology for the colonial order, the examination (performed now with the same hermeneutical instruments employed in Facundo) of the impact that the crisis of the Old Order had produced on his most immediate family, even before the revolution itself would impose a violent outcome on it. In “The Story of My Mother,” this perspective, fully historical for the first time, will dominate the exploration of “the genealogy of those sublime moral ideas that were the wholesome atmosphere that my soul breathed while it was developing in the family home.”²⁴

Sarmiento wanted to find out “who had educated his mother,” and he was going to find the answer to that question in “the history of a man of God,” Don José Castro, Sanjuanino cleric and author of a “religious reform attempted in an obscure province, where it is still well preserved in many privileged souls.”²⁵ That reform was not only religious. This “ascetic saint,” adorned with “the piety of a Christian of the most beautiful times” was at the same time a philosopher, the nature of whose conversations leads Sarmiento to suspect that he knew “his eighteenth century, his Rousseau, his Feijóo.” Castro, while he purified the life of the devout of “absurd, cruel, and superstitious practices,” resistant until then to “sane reason,” also swept away the superstitious beliefs “pursuing them with ridicule and patient, scientific explanation, made from the pulpit, of the natural phenomena that gave rise to those errors.” Castro's action even extended to other spheres: “Perhaps with Emilio hidden under his cassock, he taught mothers how to raise children, the practices that were harmful to health, the way to care for the sick, the concerns that the pregnant women should keep in mind.” The miracles of this saint were those of science. In a scene that evokes the resurrections referred to in the Gospel, he ordered a magnate at whose solemn funeral he was officiating to rise up, because he trusted in the correctness of the conclusions that “his knowledge of the art of healing” suggested to him upon examining the face of the supposed cadaver.

In Recuerdos, the Old Order only begins to be seen historically when it undertakes, under the aegis of Rousseau, its own redemption in the crucible of the reform in whose “healthy atmosphere” Sarmiento's soul is going to be formed. This Old Order therefore contains its own revolution within itself, and through it has validated the legitimacy of the life-style forged by colonizer Spain. Perhaps for this reason Sarmiento, who wants to be a man very much of his time, will lavish in this chapter allusions to behaviors that are part of that style. When the premonition of his mother's death struck him on his trip to Vesuvius, he tells us, he bought “in Rome a requiem Mass,” so that it would be sung in her honor by “my pupils, the boarding students of Saint Rosa,” whose school had its headquarters in the old convent where his family had exercised the patronage in colonial times. And when—after telling how he found a way of pouring out his pain and his filial piety in ways prescribed by the Old Order—he asks for a posthumous recognition of the Socrates of San Juan, he again proposes a way of honoring him that is very much in the same line: “I recommend to my uncle, the bishop of Cuyo,” Sarmiento in fact says upon concluding his evocation of Don José Castro, “to get hold of this relic and keep it in a place of worship.”

Surrounded now by a devotion born of the most traditional piety, Castro also deserves to receive the devout homage of the combatants for the new liberal civilization. (Without perceiving any irony in it, Sarmiento notes that Castro's sister has been exhibiting the remains of the disciple of Rousseau “to people who obtained so much grace” and edified themselves by confirming that “the action of the tomb [had] respected his body, as it usually does with the bodies that had sheltered the soul of a saint.”²⁶) The moral genealogy that Sarmiento has constructed thus suggests a continuity between an Old Order in the process of self-regeneration and the future Argentine regeneration of which the author of Recuerdos presents himself as leader.

That continuity has been broken, however, and what broke it was the war of independence. The story of the priest Castro, whose preaching of a peaceful revolution of the spirits was brutally interrupted by the less peaceful political revolution, threatens to cast an ambiguous light over the latter. Sarmiento tells us that

when the revolution broke out in 1810, still young, liberal, well-educated as he was, [Don José Castro] declared himself openly in favor of the king, excoriating from the pulpit that had been his instrument for popular education, against disobedience to the legitimate sovereign, predicting wars, demoralization and disasters, which unfortunately time has confirmed. The patriotic authorities found it necessary to impose silence on that powerful counterrevolutionary; the persecution fattened on him; for his obstinacy he was exiled to Brucas of sad memory, and from there he returned to San Juan on foot, and there, in poverty, in obscurity, forsaken and ignored by all, he died kissing alternatively the crucifix and the portrait of Ferdinand VII, the Desired.²⁷

It is that neglect that Sarmiento invites his uncle the bishop to remedy by giving a place in his cathedral to the remains of the Sanjuanino saint, “so that his ashes receive reparation for the offenses that the fatal necessities of the times made to his person.”

This long passage, which culminates in the vindication of a posthumous triumph for an enemy and victim of the revolution, appears even more significant because it is the only one in Recuerdos that confronts the central knot of the conflict that ended the Old Order. Should it be therefore deduced that Recuerdos contains a secret counterrevolutionary moral? This was clearly not Sarmiento's intention. Even more than the polemic against the federalism in power, which by denouncing federalism as responsible for the postrevolutionary decadence of Argentina distracts attention from the search for any other less obvious source of blame the irreversibility of the revolutionary process (the incontrovertible point of departure and term of reference for any viable political enterprise in independent Hispanic America) prevents such a counter-revolutionary moral. It is not surprising that Sarmiento, in order to justify his resistance to undertake a different type of exploration that might also open him up to some not very pleasant surprises, once more invokes the presence in the sociohistorical reality of a zone of capricious arbitrariness for which it would be idle to look for any hidden rationality. He only mentions the antirevolutionary position of Castro—he assures us—“to point out one of the rare combinations of ideas.”

By underlining the hesitations and contradictions present in the image of the Old Order that Recuerdos offers, and the image it suggests of the revolution, is not to suggest that these corroded images poorly conceal the power of another image that Sarmiento did not perhaps dare confess even to himself. In this image, nostalgia for the colonial past would have found its corollary in identification with the Old Order. It is more likely that the confusion that these images reflect expresses the frustration awakened by everything that the first retrospective look at the revolutionary epoch discovers. It reveals equally the ambiguities of the emancipating process and those of its relation to an Old Order, the memory of which is still capable of being recalled as quite different from those of the brutally simplified portraits offered by the publicists of the cause of independence.

But it does not seem sufficient to conclude that Sarmiento has resigned himself to the presence of an uneliminable element of ambiguity in both his image of the Old Order and the revolution. It could better be said that he treasures this ambiguity. And it is understandable: Recuerdos de provincia is simultaneously the introduction of a candidate and of a program for action. Because it is the former, it dedicates so much space to exalting the legacy that Sarmiento has received from the Old Order and from the revolution. As for the latter, it is precisely the contradictions that tear at each one of them and the absence of a reconciliation between them that open a wide field of action to the one who offers himself as a future protagonist of the history whose threshold Argentina is about to cross, once the prehistoric phase evoked in Recuerdos is closed. The role that Sarmiento demands for himself is that of purifying and then reconciling those traditions of which he is equally an heir. In Facundo he had taken de Tocqueville as a model; now he was taking Lamartine, “that last scion of the old aristocratic society who, under the maternal wing, is transformed well afterwards into the angel of peace who was to announce to anxious Europe the arrival of the Republic.”²⁸ The insufficiencies of the historical legacy with which Sarmiento identifies himself are revealed as being as necessary as its accomplishments in order to justify the protagonistical ambition that makes him offer himself to his compatriots through Recuerdos de provincia.

Notes

1. This paper was presented at the Symposium on Domingo F. Sarmiento held at Harvard University, 14-15 October 1988. It later was published in the Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “El Dr. Emilio Ravignani,” 3d Ser., 1 (1989): 7-22. An English translation of it is published here with the permission of that journal's editor. In addition to the editor, Kristin L. Jones was involved in translating the article into English.

2. Domingo F. Sarmiento, Recuerdos de provincia (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1979), 10-11.

3. That this decline of the first families is general is affirmed explicitly in ibid., 39. “Carriles, Rosas, Rojos, Oros, Rufinos, Jofrés, Limas, and so many other powerful families, are living in misery and descending day by day to the level of the destitute rabble.”

4. Ibid., 9.

5. Ibid., 216-217.

6. Ibid., 9.

7. Bernardo de Irigoyen to Rufino de Elizalde, Mendoza, 8 November 1850, in Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani,” El doctor Rufino de Elizalde y su época vista a través de su archivo (4 vols., Buenos Aires: University of Buenos Aires, 1967-1974), 2:304. The passage in which Irigoyen informs Elizalde of this aim reads: “This miserable reprobate has put out a new publication titled Recuerdos de Provincia; I will try to send you one if I obtain it; so far I only have had a copy I sent to the minister. Let us hope that this publication becomes well-known, because [this] means that this crazy man, [a] ridiculous mixture of all that is repugnant, becomes known.” The reason for sending it to Elizalde is, of course, not very convincing. In view of the polemical uses it suggests, the by now habitual practice of publishing in the rosista press the passages that best suited it seems much more reasonable than the massive diffusion of the exiles' publications. The reasons why Irigoyen uses this argument also are not mysterious: he has been sending Elizalde materials published by the exiles in Chile, in addition to sending them to Minister Arana, and it evidently makes him somewhat uneasy. In his previous letter of 8 February, Irigoyen writes Elizalde: “I am surprised to learn that you have not received the packet of printed matter which included the ‘Crónicas’ [the newspaper that published Sarmiento's articles on Argentine politics] and the letter of Arcos: … I repeat try to inquire into the whereabouts of the ‘Crónicas’ that I sent you by the November mail, without mentioning the name of the newspaper, because you can ask about a package and nothing more.” Ibid., 2:303.

8. Sarmiento, Recuerdos, 12.

9. Ibid., 17-18.

10. Ibid., 18.

11. Domingo F. Sarmiento, Obras completas, vol. 2, Artículos críticos y literarios (53 vols., Buenos Aires: Editorial Luz del Día, 1948-1956), 220-221.

12. Sarmiento, Recuerdos, 27.

13. After evoking the condemnation and posthumous rehabilitation of Juan de Loyola, falsely accused of Judaizing, Sarmiento again emphasizes the tie between the Spanish past and the Argentine present by pointing out that “Colonel Ramírez has called me Jew to flatter the Argentine inquisitor.” Ibid., 33-36.

14. Ibid., 34.

15. Ibid., 32.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 37.

18. Ibid., 36.

19. Ibid., 37.

20. Ibid., 37-38.

21. Ibid., 39.

22. Ibid., 31.

23. Ibid., 152.

24. Ibid., 119.

25. Ibid., 122.

26. Ibid., 125.

27. Ibid., 124.

28. Ibid., 118.