SOURCE: Spell, Jefferson Rea. “Ricardo Güiraldes: Stylistic Depictor of the Gaucho.” In Contemporary Spanish-American Fiction, pp. 191-204. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

[In the following essay, Spell examines Ricardo Güiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra, a book he believes to have achieved its popular acclaim through its accurate depictions of gaucho life and vernacular.]

The most distinctive of all Spanish-American literature—the literature linked most directly with the country and the people—is the so-called “gaucho” literature of the River Plate region. Pioneers of this type of literature were three long narrative poems—Ascasubi's Santos Vega, 1851, Estanislao del Campo's Fausto, 1866, and José Hernández's Martín Fierro, 1872—all of singular merit. Worthy writers of prose inspired by the gaucho did not appear until the turn of the century. Of these, two deserve mention: Roberto Payró, an Argentine, celebrated for his novelette El Casamiento de Laucha, 1906, and a volume of sketches, Historias de Pago Chico (Stories of Pago Chico), 1908; and Carlos Reyles, a Uruguayan, who, although he knew Europe thoroughly, owes his distinction to his realistic as well as naturalistic depiction of the rural life of his country in such novels as Beba, 1894, El Terruño (The Home Place), 1916, and El Gaucho Florido (Florido, the Gaucho), 1932. Two other writers of the present century have cultivated successfully this type of literature: Benito Lynch, who has written novels somewhat in the conventional style on Argentine farm and ranch life; and Ricardo Güiraldes, who, cosmopolitan like Reyles, is generally conceded to have written most artistically about his native surroundings.

Although born in the capital of Argentina, on February 13, 1886, of a very distinguished family, Güiraldes knew country life intimately, for during both his youth and manhood he spent much time at “La Porteña,” a large estancia which his family owned in the province of Buenos Aires. Also, from infancy, he spent long intervals in Europe, particularly in Paris, and in 1910 with his bride he visited the Orient, which had for him a singular fascination. While writing was merely a diversion for Güiraldes, as he was wealthy, and his literary work is very limited in extent, it is of a very superior type. Most of it was published during his lifetime: El Cencerro de Cristal (The Glass Cowbell), a volume of verse, and Cuentos de Muerte y de Sangre (Stories of Death and Blood), a volume of sketches, in 1915; Raucho, a novel, in 1917; Rosaura, a novelette, in 1922; Xaimaca (Jamaica), a travel account, in 1923; and Don Segundo Sombra (Shadows on the Pampas), a novel and also his masterpiece, in 1926. In 1924 he was associated with Jorge Luis Borges in the establishment of a literary periodical, Proa. After his death in Paris on October 8, 1927, three very slender volumes were published: Poemas solitarios (Poems of Solitude), Poemas místicos (Mystic Poems), and Seis Relatos (Six Stories), whose content, except five stories in the last, was hitherto unpublished.

Güiraldes reveals himself both as man and writer in his very first work. Although a cosmopolite, his creative impulse springs entirely from the Argentine. Of the first nineteen prose sketches in Cuentos de Muerte y de Sangre, four relate incidents in the life of its military chieftains; three recount happenings in the wars of independence; and some twelve narrate occurrences in connection with Argentine ranch life. Of particular interest among these are “Al Rescoldo” (“Embers”), in which Güiraldes's celebrated character, Don Segundo Sombra, appears for the first time and narrates one of the tall tales for which he is famous; and “La Estancia vieja” (“The Old Ranch”), based on an old theme—the punishing of the image of a saint for refusing a request. In this case an old rancher brought a downpour by punishing an image of Our Lady after she had steadfastly failed to bring rain during a long drought. A group of four stories, entitled “Aventuras grotescas” (“Grotesque Adventures”), deals with Argentine urban life. Three of them—“Máscaras” (“Masks”), “Ferroviaria” (“A Train Trip”), and “Sexto” (“The Sixth”)—are notable for their salaciousness, not a striking element in Güiraldes's works but one that particularly appeals to the Argentinean, as Manuel Gálvez comments in his Hombres en Soledad. The last three stories in the collection, “Trilogía cristiana” (“Christian Trilogy”), deal, as the title suggests, with the Christian religion and are noteworthy for their rhythmic flow of language. Quite sincere in tone, “Güele,” one of the stories, tells of the miraculous conversion of an Indian chieftain of the Argentine; the two remaining stories, one caricaturing a scene in Heaven (“El Juicio de Dios”) (“Divine Judgment”) and the other portraying the struggles of Saint Anthony against the flesh (“San Antonio”), are quite in the spirit and manner of Anatole France and thematically quite at variance with the general tone of the collection.

Two stories from Cuentos de Muerte y de Sangre, “Al Rescoldo” and “Trenzador” (“A Leather Worker”), are reprinted in Seis Relatos. The remaining four, thoroughly Argentine in background, are: “Diálogo y Palabras” (“A Dialogue and Words”), which exemplifies in a dialogue between two ranch workers Güiraldes's mastery over dialectical peculiarities of the River Plate region; “Esta Noche, Noche Buena” (“This Christmas Eve”), an amusing tale that portrays certain Christmas customs among the lowly folk of the Argentine; “La politiquería” (“The Knack of Politics”), an account of a peon that had a charmed life; and “Telesforo Altamira,” a story of a down-and-out individual in Buenos Aires that had once been somebody.

In general, however, in these early cuentos Güiraldes does not appear in the light of a teller of stories, but rather as an artificer in words. Tropes abound, many of which strike the reader for their surprising air of freshness. A winding road is compared to a lasso that has been carelessly cast aside; the travel of gossip is likened to the spread of grease in a hot frying pan; and the nimbleness of a pig's snout is compared with the quickness of an eye. Some of the figures are very poetic, for instance the metaphor in “Al Rescoldo” in which embers are described as velveting themselves in ash. But his poetic fancy takes at times a Gongoresque turn, as the conceit in the description of a young girl in “Arrabalera” (“Suburban”):

On her neck she wore a ribbon of black velvet, and, harmonizing in color with it, down near her mouth, was a mole of surpassing beauty, which was black—perhaps from striving to be the pupil of an eye, in order to contemplate in ecstasy the coquettish passing of her little moist tongue over her lips.

Quite different from the Cuentos is Rosaura, which comes nearer to meeting the standards of the short story of Poe or Maupassant than anything else that Güiraldes wrote. The setting is a small town in the Argentine pampas, Lobos, in the early years of the present century. When the story begins, the railroad, which had recently connected Lobos with Buenos Aires, had already jarred the town from its long, peaceful slumber. Infected with idle curiosity, if not absolute restlessness, many of the townspeople had acquired the habit of gathering at the station each day at train time in order to catch a glimpse of the outside world.

Among such was the young and pretty Rosaura Torres, who, one day, in company with two girl companions, attracted the attention of a very handsome young man on the train. When they stared at him, he was irritated by their rudeness and attempted to shame them by fixing his gaze intently upon Rosaura, who remained completely unperturbed. Recovering his good humor as the train was leaving, he bowed pleasantly to the girls, evidently dismissing them from his mind. Rosaura, however, unmistakably affected by the stranger, returned home somewhat in a daze. In the weeks that followed she saw again and again the same young man on the train, and her love increased, for although he made no advances, he showed clearly an interest in her. If he came near her, as he sometimes did when he got out of the train and walked up and down the platform, poor Rosaura almost swooned, so great was her emotion.

Still greater was her concern when she discovered that he was far above her socially. She was in very comfortable circumstances—her father was the owner of the best livery-stable in Lobos—but Carlos Ramallo was the son of an extremely wealthy landowner and had been educated in Europe. Self-conscious, by nature quiet and unassuming, Rosaura bore her anguish silently. Finally, at a dance given in the town to honor Carlos, Rosaura met him formally; and he showed clearly that he preferred her to all the other girls in Lobos. Their acquaintance improved, for when he stopped in Lobos, as he frequently did, the two saw each other and talked. Although poor Rosaura was now considerably occupied with dress patterns and the fashioning of new clothes, her mind was in a constant swirl, so possessed was she by her infatuation for Carlos. A fatal day it was for her when he told her he was going to spend six months in England, where his father was sending him to study certain methods in farming.

How slowly those months dragged by for Rosaura! Then one day when she and her dearest friend, Carmen, were at the station, they saw Carlos again. A woman, evidently his wife, was with him on the train. He saw Rosaura, but bowed very coolly to her. In deep despair, she returned home. A few days later, accompanied by Carmen, she went again to the station. She was wearing the dress she wore on the night she met Carlos at the dance, and in her bosom she had tucked a brief note that he had written to her at one time; Carlos was on the train and with him was the same woman. Visibly moved, Rosaura walked away along the track; but when the locomotive neared her, she uttered a scream and threw herself under its wheels.

In Rosaura the various narrative elements are exceedingly well developed and unified. One tone, that of tragedy, dominates the plot, which moves swiftly and without interruption, incident by incident, to its tragic culmination. But by far the outstanding quality of the story is its portrayal of the modest, sensitive village girl Rosaura under the spell of a great love, which she repressed and yet inwardly nourished until the realization of the utter futility of her dreams broke the barriers of her will and led her to destroy herself. Güiraldes proceeds impressionistically in sketching in the background against which the tragedy is enacted. Without actually saying much about Lobos, with only a remark here and there about any of its inhabitants—such as Doña Petrona, who sometimes spoke to Rosaura as she was on her way to or from the station—he succeeds in leaving a very definite impression of the town and its people. A very important element of the setting is the train itself; the locomotive appears as a sinister force from the beginning of the story to the end. It is to be regretted that Güiraldes, with the inimitable style that characterizes everything he wrote and the mastery of the technique of the modern short story that he exhibits in Rosaura, did not write other stories like it.

The main characters in Güiraldes's longer works are, as in his Cuentos, distinctively Argentine. Represented as well-to-do ranch owners, the Galváns, who might very well be Güiraldes's own family, appear in all of his longer works. In Xaimaca the central figure is Marcos Galván; and in Don Segundo Sombra Leandro Galván and his son Raucho appear as minor characters. These last two characters figure largely in Raucho. The story itself begins with the sorrow of Don Leandro over the death of his wife, but it soon centers about Raucho, whose life might be regarded as typical of a wealthy young Argentine. In a magically poetic style, Güiraldes recreates the scene of Raucho's childhood, the headquarters of the Galván ranch, with its family residence, its stables, other outhouses, and corrals; and he animates that scene with descriptions of the activities of the workers on the ranch, of the pastimes of Raucho and his brothers, and of such incidents as the arrival from time to time of peddlers with wares to sell. Then follows an account of Raucho's schooldays in Buenos Aires, attended with love affairs and his first acquaintance with prostitutes. Those days over, Raucho returned to the ranch, with whose activities he had long been familiar; there, for some months, freer than ever in his life from the authority of his father, he was very active, helping with the management of the property. Particularly impressive, in this part of the book, are poetic passages descriptive of the four seasons of the year, and the realistic touches that color the rounding up and branding of the cattle, the shearing of the sheep, and the invasion one year of the entire countryside by great swarms of locusts.

Then, little by little, Raucho grew weary of the country. He began to read, especially the French writers—Lorrain, Maupassant, Verlaine. He went frequently to Buenos Aires to talk to French women about Paris; finally he went to live there permanently, joined the Jockey Club, and took a mistress. Not until the eve of his departure for Europe did he return to the ranch, where for a few days he amused himself with a buxom girl of the countryside, and with shooting birds out on the edge of a lake, a spot that fascinated him peculiarly, for there—with only wild birds of all sorts about—he felt quite removed from the rest of the world.

Then came at last the long anticipated journey to Europe; and with it his impressions of the sea, of Río, of Lisbon, of Paris, which he already knew thoroughly from his reading. There, he abandoned himself to all the sensual pleasures the city afforded; and when his father commanded him to return home, he refused, his mind being deranged by drugs and drink. When Raucho finally fell sick, his brother made the trip and brought him home. Whatever love Raucho had had for Paris, faded gradually away as he neared America. His joy on the way from Buenos Aires to the ranch was unrestrained; but he was not entirely at peace until he went out and sat down under a willow near the river bank, where “the whistling duck pierced the night with his shrill cry,” and then on his own native soil he “fell asleep, flat on his back, his arms outstretched—crucified thus by the calmness that had pervaded and possessed his soul.”

Even more convincing than Raucho that the experiences it records are absolutely genuine is Xaimaca, Güiraldes's second novel and his most poetic work. This sense of reality arises from the fact that Xaimaca is a travel book—one of the most delightful in Spanish-American literature—in which, even to the names of boats and hotels, there is a scrupulous regard for fact. Entirely in keeping with the exaltation of the central figure, Marcos Galván, who jots down his impressions while on a journey, is the highly imaginative treatment of the material.

Scarcely had Marcos begun his journey by train from Buenos Aires to Peru when he became interested in a young woman, Clara Ordóñez, who was accompanied by her brother, Peñalba. The places through which the travelers, who soon become friends, passed are poetically described: the Argentine plains, the city of Mendoza, the Andes, and the city of Santiago with its lofty, picturesque mound of Santa Lucia on which the three travelers took tea. Journeying by automobile from Santiago to the port of Valparaiso, they were forced by an accident to spend a part of the night in a Chilean village, where they witnessed native dances and other quaint rural customs.

The bond that united the three travelers grew stronger. Clara responded to the interest Marcos had taken in her, and his love for Kipling endeared him to Peñalba. Consequently, shortly after they had embarked for the voyage northward along the west coast of South America, Marcos decided to abandon his plan of stopping in Peru and to continue with his friends to Jamaica. He was delighted with all that he saw from the boat—a shoal of fish, a shark, a whale, and the interesting birds of the region; the Pacific itself awakened in him all that he had read, probably in Loti, of the distant Orient, which is repeatedly brought to mind. Wherever the boat stopped, Marcos and his friends went ashore: in Iquique they ate crabs; from Arica they went by train to Tacna, where they ate river-shrimp; and at Paita, Peru, Marcos was charmed by the Indian venders, descendants of the indigenous race, who swarmed with their wares into the boat.

For Marcos all of these sights and experiences were highly colored by his intense emotional state—by his love for Clara, for between the two there already existed a very intimate, personal relationship. Of a very rich Argentine family, she had married according to dictates of her parents for money and position, and the marriage had turned out badly. Genuine and without restraint, however, was her love for Marcos, whose account of the ecstasy into which he was transported by his passion is truly a glorification of carnal love.

In time the travelers came to Panama, with its lighthouse and beautiful bay; they suffered from the heat as they passed through the Canal; in Colón, whose negroes and Oriental shops fascinated Marcos, they spent several days at the Washington Hotel; and then in a few days reached their destination, Jamaica. The beauty of the tropical region struck them all, especially Marcos, who, “his mind carbureting perfectly,” likened the island to an immense avocado on a great blue tray, the botanical garden to a piece of the forest that the English had disciplined and shaved, and the sound of the impact of the rubber tires of the automobile against the wet pavement as “a sticky, whistling” noise.

All went gloriously for Marcos and Clara until Peñalba discovered the relation that existed between them and forced him to leave Jamaica. Dejected, truly lovesick, Marcos set out for Buenos Aires by the same route he had come. His melancholy was apparent to the passengers, particularly to a North American girl who became enamoured of him and would have given herself to him; but, romantically true to Clara, he declined her love.

Episodic, and in this respect like Raucho and Xaimaca, Güiraldes's masterpiece, Don Segundo Sombra, consists of a series of incidents that trace the development of an Argentine boy to early manhood. His name is never mentioned, but the reader suspects from the very outset that he is the illegitimate son of Fabio Cáceres, a rich ranch owner, who had sent him to a small country town to be educated. Already weary of school when we see him for the first time, and weary, too, of Cáceres's two maiden sisters with whom he lived, the boy had become a loafer about the public places in the town. He came to admire intensely an individual he saw from time to time—a roaming ranch worker, an expert breaker of horses, Don Segundo Sombra by name, a man of great courage, physical strength, and probity. One evening in a tavern the boy rendered Don Segundo a service that probably saved his life, and the two became friends. It was then that the boy decided to run away from home, to attach himself in some way to the man he admired; and the next morning he set out on his pony for a ranch to which he knew Don Segundo was going.

When the latter arrived at the ranch, he took the boy, who had already found employment there, definitely under his protection. For five years he was directly under the tutelage of Don Segundo; at the end of that time he was an expert cowboy and horse-breaker; he was proficient in leather work and in the treatment of the diseases of livestock; he knew how to play the guitar and to dance the popular dances; and, from the standpoint of moral conduct, he had learned to show “endurance and fortitude in the struggles of life; to accept fatalistically and without grumbling whatever happened; to have moral force in sentimental affairs; to distrust women and drink; to be prudent among strangers; and to be true to his friends.”

Even after his probationary period the boy continued with his mentor. The two went to work on a ranch on the seacoast, the owner of which was half-crazed; here the boy saw strange sights, among them an enormous colony of crabs that filled him with awe. In the same neighborhood, in a great round-up in which the two took part, the boy's horse was gored and he himself suffered a broken collar bone. After attending to his protégé's injury, and placing him in the home of a rancher in the district, Don Segundo left to follow his work elsewhere. But a fight with a jealous suitor over a girl, both of whom lived at the ranch where he was recuperating, soon terminated the boy's stay there. He joined Don Segundo again, but ill fortune continued to pursue him, for at a horse race he lost both his money and several of his horses. Other experiences as a cowboy followed. At a ranch where he took a job of breaking horses, the owner took a fancy to him and invited him to remain; at a country tavern he witnessed a brawl in which a man was killed; and on the pampas at night he was faced with a stampede of the herd of cattle he was helping drive to market.

Then one day while he was reflecting on the adverse fortune that had lately attended him, he received a letter from a lawyer in the town where he had lived as a young boy informing him that his erstwhile protector, Fabio Cáceres, recently dead, had acknowledged the boy in his will as his legitimate son and left him a large estate. Irritated by the deference all his friends began to show him, he would have refused the property, but for the advice of Don Segundo. After he assumed his new rôle as proprietor, he acquired through the influence of Raucho Galván, the son of his guardian, a taste for literature, and frequent visits to Buenos Aires transformed him in a measure into a cultured person; but he did not lose his democratic attitude toward those of lower social rank. Don Segundo remained with him for more than three years; then, feeling that his work of moulding a man had been completed, restless again for his old life, he took leave of his protégé and returned once more to the pampas.

The two main characters, like the tale itself, are a bit romantic. Somewhat shadowy, as befits his name, Don Segundo Sombra, who possesses so many virtues—courage, endurance, moral and physical strength, leadership, the art of entertaining in various ways, and unusual skill in the work in which he made his living—and none of the vices which afflict humanity, is an idealized rather than a real character. We know him only through a source that is prejudiced in his favor, his protégé, who tells us what he is and what he does. The boy is also idealized, but he is less of one cloth than Don Segundo. Skilled, first of all, in everything that pertains to life on the plains, finally a cultivated man with a love for reading, he stands as an exemplar of Güiraldes's own ideal of a man. Of him there is, too, a side that we never see of Don Segundo, and that is his inner world, his thoughts and reflections on life, which in his rôle of autobiographer he constantly reveals.

The very effective portrayal of the background for these Argentine characters has contributed probably more than any other feature to winning for the book the high praise that has generally been accorded it. When Don Segundo's ward takes stock of himself at the end of five years, he enumerates a long list of towns and ranches, all of the province of Buenos Aires, which had seen them pass many times, “covered with dirt and mud, behind a herd of cattle.” Of the appearance of this region, with the exception of the dunes and crab-infested bogs of the seacoast, there is in the book practically no description. Certain phenomena of nature, on the other hand, particularly in reference to their effect on the teller of the tale, are frequently commented upon: the cold; the heat of the summer's sun; the rain, as he is driving a herd of cattle; or the night, as he is sitting with others by the campfire.

The part of the setting, however, that is really striking is the varied panorama of rural and small-town life in the province of Buenos Aires. While there is some detailed description of places, the salient characteristic in nearly all of the various scenes is the human element, which imparts, through its lively, natural vernacular, a decidedly animated tone—whether it be the coarse joking in the tavern where we first see the hero of the tale; or the bantering of the cowboy at the ranch where he obtained his first job; or the raillery of the “tape” Burgos when he tried to pick a quarrel with Don Segundo; or the love-making between Paula and our hero, when he was recuperating at the ranch. In this connection, too, mention must be made of two tales that Don Segundo tells in quaint, dialectical language: one, a supposed incident in the life of our Lord when He was on this earth; the other, a veritable fairy tale of demons, witches, enchantments, and disenchantments.

In addition to vernacular speech the author attains local color through the description of certain manners and customs with which Don Segundo and his pupil come in contact in their wanderings. Some of these portrayals are veritable essays in themselves: the account, for instance, of a country dance, which among a diversity of details includes certain popular songs as an accompaniment to the dances; the description of a cock-fight, at which our hero had the good fortune to bet on the winner; and, later, of a horse race, at which he lost almost everything he had; the account of a Sunday spent at a country saloon, where a friend was forced in self-defense to kill a man; and the portrayal, probably the most masterful in the book, of a great round-up, which is made so vivid that one almost smells the dust, hears the lowing and bellowing of the cattle, and sees the cowboys, in mad pursuit, racing after and lassoing them. Many passages in the book, such as the following, reveal the keenness of Güiraldes's observation in regard to cattle:

Without moving, I let the herd of cattle pass. Some, as they looked toward the ranch houses, bellowed. Weary, the yearlings went by slowly. From time to time, when one would hook another, a hollow space for some meters about would form; but it would soon fill up again, and then the march would go on, slowly, relentlessly.

In a measure this passage reveals how the chief aesthetic value of the book is attained—by rendering into poetry, through the use of rhythmical and figurative language, experience which is generally regarded as common, prosaic, or even sordid.

Güiraldes, however, with all of his excellent qualities as a writer—now that we have come to a final evaluation of him—is not the truly great novelist that some enthusiastic critics would have us believe. His novels, after all, are limited in scope, rather one-sided. For, while his style is poetic, while his sharp-toned pictures of certain strata of Argentine society remain with one long after his books are read, he is sadly lacking in two essentials of a great novelist: he gives no evidence of ability to develop character or to weave a plot that is much beyond that of the picaresque novel.

In spite of these shortcomings, Don Segundo Sombra has entered the ranks of international literature in both German and English translations and has received high praise from other than Argentine and Spanish critics.