With A Person
Of That Sort They Were In No Hurry To Finish The Business; It Was
Performed In A Leisurely, Loving Way.
Darwin, writing in praise of the
gaucho in his _Voyage of a Naturalist_, says that if a gaucho cuts
your throat he does it like a gentleman:
Even as a small boy I knew
better - that he did his business rather like a hellish creature
revelling in his cruelty. He would listen to all his captive could say
to soften his heart - all his heartrending prayers and pleadings; and
would reply: "Ah, friend," - or little friend, or brother - "your words
pierce me to the heart and I would gladly spare you for the sake of
that poor mother of yours who fed you with her milk, and for your own
sake too, since in this short time I have conceived a great friendship
towards you; but your beautiful neck is your undoing, for how could I
possibly deny myself the pleasure of cutting such a throat - so
shapely, so smooth and soft and so white! Think of the sight of warm
red blood gushing from that white column!" And so on, with wavings of
the steel blade before the captive's eyes, until the end.
When I heard them relate such things - and I am quoting their very
words, remembered all these years only too well - laughingly, gloating
over such memories, such a loathing and hatred possessed me that ever
afterwards the very sight of these men was enough to produce a
sensation of nausea, just as when in the dog days one inadvertently
rides too near the putrid carcass of some large beast on the plain.
As I have said, all this feeling about throat-cutting and the power to
realize and visualize it, came to me by degrees long after the sight
of a blood-stain on the turf near our home; and in like manner the
significance of the tyrant's fall and the mighty changes it brought
about in the land only came to me long after the event. People were in
perpetual conflict about the character of the great man. He was
abhorred by many, perhaps by most; others were on his side even for
years after he had vanished from their ken, and among these were most
of the English residents of the country, my father among them. Quite
naturally I followed my father and came to believe that all the
bloodshed during a quarter of a century, all the crimes and cruelties
practised by Rosas, were not like the crimes committed by a private
person, but were all for the good of the country, with the result that
in Buenos Ayres and throughout our province there had been a long
period of peace and prosperity, and that all this ended with his fall
and was succeeded by years of fresh revolutionary outbreaks and
bloodshed and anarchy. Another thing about Rosas which made me ready
to fall in with my father's high opinion of him was the number of
stories about him which appealed to my childish imagination.
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