What Would San Martin Do?

The other one, the one called San Martin, is the one who conquers and monumentalises. I gallop through the Andes and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the stonework on a bridge (erected in my honour) or the engraving on a plaque (erected in my honour); I know of San Martin from the internet and see his name on lists of liberators or in a biographical dictionary. I like cheese, wine, biscuits, and Belgian saddlebags; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that San Martin may liberate, and this liberation justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid conquests, but those conquests cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the continent and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in San Martin, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his statues than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the old world to the battles with stirrup and saber, but those battles belong to San Martin now and I shall have to vanquish other enemies. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

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