Word: gaucho
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Borges may baffle readers by being so many different persons in his stories and parables-an Irish revolutionary, a paralyzed Gaucho, a Nazi fanatic, the Minotaur. But all these characters relay a similar message: honor the moment, however fleeting; honor the human being, however humble...
...Division met the Minas Gerais troops, it promptly switched sides. The outlawed Communist-controlled General Labor Command tried to stage a general strike in Goulart's favor, with only spotty success. Goulart's leftist, Yankee-hating brother-in-law, Congressman Leonel Brizola, tried to mobilize peasant and Gaucho guerrillas he had armed, but they just stayed home...
...Italian families set up a silk-spinning industry in Chaco province; later they began a cotton industry. When Argentina constructed a new Congress building, it was an Italian architect who designed it, an Italian company that built it. And who became the incarnation of the Argentine tango and Argentine Gaucho? None other than the handsome young Italian boy Rudolph Valentino...
...they are machos. Whether involved with a mistress, a mishap or an election, the Latin American male is constantly forced to prove his aggressive masculinity by a compelling phenomenon called machismo. In its simplest form, machismo is the gaudy bravado of the bullfighter, the outdoor he-manliness of the gaucho, the straightforward heterosexuality of the playboy. "The kind of man that men follow and women chase" is how one Peruvian woman defines it. But the trait goes farther than simple male ego. It turns arguments into blood feuds, business dealings into tests of strength, and heroic revolutionaries into ruthless tyrants...
...another story, a gaucho is confined to bed for the rest of his life after being thrown by a horse. He hardly cares. The fall has miraculously sharpened his perception so that his memories are boundless: "He knew by heart the forms of the Southern clouds on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising." Borges contrasts this world...