Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

civilized folk marry the barbarians 207
Bárbara? It will just reappear under another name. The really necessary
thing is to change the circumstances that lead to these evils, to populate
the country. But before you populate, you must have sanitation, and before
you have sanitation, you have to populate. It’s a vicious circle.”
But a single incident, his meeting with the Wizard and the words of the
riverman warning him against crossing the path of the dread Doña Bárbara,
had roused his impulse to struggle. It was the same aggressiveness
which had ruined the Luzardos; but here it was subordinated to an ideal.
To struggle against Doña Bárbara, symbol of the times, was not only to free
Altamira, but to destroy the forces which were holding back the Plain. And
he decided to throw himself into the task, with the impulsiveness of the
Cunavicheros, men of a vigorous race, and also with the ideals of a civilized
man, in which they had been lacking [. . .].
[On Doña Bárbara]
As for the tales of her powers as a sorceress, neither was all here the mere
fancy of the Plainsman. She really believed herself endowed with supernatural
powers, and often spoke of a “Partner,” who had saved her life one
night by blowing out the lamp to wake her just as a peon paid to assassinate
her was entering her room, and who had appeared since then to counsel her
in difficult situations or to acquaint her with such distant or future happenings
as might interest her. She said that he was the Nazarene of Achaguas
himself, but she called him simply and naturally “my Partner”—and from
this arose the legend of her compact with the devil.
Whether god or tutelary demon, it was all the same to her, for religion
and witchcraft, incantations and prayers were in her mind all changed and
confounded into a single mass of superstition; so that scapulars and the
amulets of Indian medicine men hung on her breast in perfect harmony, and
the mantel of the room where the “Partner” appeared was occupied by holy
pictures, crosses of blessed palm, alligators’ teeth, fl ints, curvinata stones,
and fetishes from the native settlements, all sharing the same votive lamp.
In the matter of love, the ogress was no longer the wild mixture of lust
and hatred. Her appetites were strangled by her greed, and the last fi bers
of femininity in her being were atrophied by the habits of the virago—she
personally directed the labor of the peons, tossed the lasso, and could bring
down a bull out in the open as well as her most skillful cowboy. She was
never without her lance-head dagger and her revolver, nor did she carry
them in her belt as a mere threat. If reasons of pure expediency—such as
the need of a docile henchman, or in the case of Balbino Paiba, of a personal