The great Rosas himself I did not see, but it was something to have
had this momentary sight of
General Eusebio, his fool, on the eve of
his fall after a reign of over twenty years, during which he proved
himself one of the bloodiest as well as the most original-minded of
the Caudillos and Dictators, and altogether, perhaps, the greatest of
those who have climbed into power in this continent of republics and
revolutions.
CHAPTER VIII
THE TYRANT'S FALL AND WHAT FOLLOWED
The portraits in our drawing-room - The Dictator Rosas who was like an
Englishman - The strange face of his wife, Encarnacion - The traitor
Urquiza - The Minister of War, his peacocks, and his son - Home again
from the city - The War deprives us of our playmate - Natalia, our
shepherd's wife - Her son, Medardo - The Alcalde our grand old man -
Battle of Monte Caseros - The defeated army - Demands for fresh horses -
In peril - My father's shining defects - His pleasure in a thunder
storm - A childlike trust in his fellow-men - Soldiers turn upon their
officer - A refugee given up and murdered - Our Alcalde again - On
cutting throats - Ferocity and cynicism - Native blood-lust and its
effect on a boy's mind - Feeling about Rosas - A bird poem or tale - Vain
search for lost poem and story of its authorship - The Dictator's
daughter - Time, the old god.
At the end of the last chapter, when describing my one sight of the
famous jester, Don Eusebio, in his glory, attended by a body-guard
with drawn swords who were ready to cut down any one of the spectators
who failed to remove his hat or laughed at the show, I said it was on
the eve of the fall of the President of the Republic, or Dictator,
"the Tyrant," as he was called by his adversaries when they didn't
call him the "Nero of South America" or the "Tiger of Palermo" - this
being the name of a park on the north side of Buenos Ayres where Rosas
lived in a white stuccoed house called his palace.
At that time the portrait, in colours, of the great man occupied the
post of honour above the mantelpiece in our _sala_, or drawing-room -
the picture of a man with fine clear-cut regular features, light
reddish-brown hair and side-whiskers, and blue eyes; he was sometimes
called "Englishman" on account of his regular features and blonde
complexion. That picture of a stern handsome face, with flags and
cannon and olive-branch - the arms of the republic - in its heavy gold
frame, was one of the principal ornaments of the room, and my father
was proud of it, since he was, for reasons to be stated by and by, a
great admirer of Rosas, an out-and-out Rosista, as the loyal ones were
called. This portrait was flanked by two others; one of Dona
Encarnacion, the wife, long dead, of Rosas; a handsome, proud-looking
young woman with a vast amount of black hair piled up on her head in a
fantastic fashion, surmounted by a large tortoiseshell comb. I
remember that as small children we used to look with a queer, almost
uncanny sort of feeling at this face under its pile of black hair,
because it was handsome but not sweet nor gentle, and because she was
dead and had died long ago; yet it was like the picture of one alive
when we looked at it, and those black unloving eyes gazed straight
back into ours. Why did those eyes, unless they moved, which they
didn't, always look back into ours no matter in what part of the room
we stood? - a perpetual puzzle to our childish uninformed brains.
On the other side was the repellent, truculent countenance of the
Captain-General Urquiza, who was the Dictator's right-hand man, a
ferocious cut-throat if ever there was one, who had upheld his
authority for many years in the rebellious upper provinces, but who
had just now raised the standard of revolt against him and in a little
while, with the aid of a Brazilian army, would succeed in overthrowing
him.
The central portrait inspired us with a kind of awe and reverential
feeling, since even as small children we were made to know that he was
the greatest man in the republic, that he had unlimited power over all
men's lives and fortunes and was terrible in his anger against evil-
doers, especially those who rebelled against his authority.
Two more portraits of the famous men of the republic of that date
adorned the same wall. Next to Urquiza was General Oribe, commander of
the army sent by Rosas against Montevideo, which maintained the siege
of that city for the space of ten years. On the other side, next to
Dona Encarnacion, was the portrait of the Minister of War, a face
which had no attraction for us children, as it was not coloured like
that of the Dictator, nor had any romance or mystery in it like that
of his dead wife; yet it served to bring all these pictured people
into our actual world - to make us realize that they were the
counterfeit presentments of real men and women. For it happened that
this same Minister of War was in a way a neighbour of ours, as he
owned an estancia, which he sometimes visited, about three leagues
from us, on that part of the plain to the east of our place which I
have described in a former chapter as being covered with a dense
growth of the bluish-grey wild artichoke, the _cardo de Castilla_, as
it is called in the vernacular. Like most of the estancia houses of
that day it was a long low building of brick with thatched roof,
surrounded by an enclosed _quinta_, or plantation, with rows of
century-old Lombardy poplars conspicuous at a great distance, and many
old acacia, peach, quince, and cherry trees.
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