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Juan José Draghi is of average height and build for the slightly above-average sized Argentines. He has the filled-out physique of a successful man entering the advanced ages known in these parts as the "third age" (senior citizens, elsewhere). His skin is fair and his hair a whiter gray that's thinning, but still covers the round crown above his round blue eyes and round jowls.

Tonight he's working on a mate. To do the fine chiseling, he dons a pair of pull-down lenses that give him the semblance of an ER surgeon.

"This job is brutal on the eyes," he says. "I think I'll need to get that laser eye surgery if I'm going to keep working down the road."

"Oh yeah?" I reply.

"Vamos a ver," he says, (we'll see) and winks to signify that the pun was intended.

His thick, round fingers and thumb tips are stained from working so long with fire and metals. They're flattened, too, like a partly deflated basketball, the result of everyday depressions that over time lose the will to bounce back. The soles of his shoes, however, are as good as new. Looking around, all of the workers wear shoes that look brand new.

Martín brings a rough-looking piece to Juan José's attention and he blasts it a few times with his hammer. How can he pound silver with such abandon? It's not abandon; it's ultimate precision. He will be here until around 10pm working. Just like every night.

"If you could describe your work in one word," I ask Juan José, "what would it be?"

"Cansa," he says. (It's tiring.)

José and I talk politics. His family line is Italian, like the majority of Argentines.^[4] The rest of the country descends from a mottling of European countries and even a few Asian ones. Since the port town of Buenos Aires didn't really boom until the mid-19th century, even the oldest families of Argentina have lived there for only a few generations. The result?

"Argentines have no identity," José says. "They don't know who they are. They're Italian or German or Chinese, but being Argentine doesn't mean anything to them. Not yet."

"Not yet? So, what does it take?" I ask.

"What we need is a great sacrifice—like a war—that brings us together. Not that I want a war, but that's what it's going to take."

His son, Maríano, has his own opinions, which he speaks frankly and with all the braggadocio of a TV Italian (he lived and studied in Italy under an Italian master silversmith).

"It's because [Argentines] come from Spanish and Italian races and honestly, they're shit," Maríano says to me while chiseling. "The United States matured quickly because it's an Anglo-Saxon race. But Argentines are still children. Spain and Italy only survive because they're tolerated and tempered by the rest of Europe. I know because I lived there. Don't look at me like that, I love Italy, but it's true.

"Argentina was like a summer home for the first generations who came here. Not like in the United States where the colonists came to stay. Argentina was never really home for the Europeans—it wasn't where their fathers and mothers were buried—so they never invested in it. And they still haven't. Not like in the United States. The people there have an identity."

"Perhaps," I reply. "But it's not the most popular identity in the world right now. Not among its own citizens. Not down here."

"That's because the United States is setting the example right now," Maríano says. "Everyone always wants to see the example fall. Down here the world is screwed up, so people want to take the United States down to their level. That way they feel better.

"Why do you think they're electing Fidel? Evo? Hugo?^[5] People resent the world. They resent it. Action and excitement to them are better than the same routine."

The dignified Gardel tango playing on the radio competes with the workroom sounds of chiseling, sanding, filing, and the intermittent creak of a worker adjusting on his wood stool. The desks are covered with files of all sizes, sandpaper, saws, and pliers. Silver dust piles everywhere, the result of so much filing. It looks like glitter, or stardust. A central drawer in each desk is designed to collect this dust, and after projects the beautiful waste is melted down for re-use.

No employee works without a mate gourd at hand. The kettle is kept always handy, its water kept always shy of boiling (the ideal temperature for steeping yerba mate). The center aisle of the workshop is lined with vices, molds, and anvils.

I wish I could pull up a chair and set to work, too. I wish I could make something solid, delicate, and beautiful. The tap-rap pounding is getting into me. After a few days in the workshop, I start to listen for it, even as I lie down to sleep. How must it be for the workers? Is there a twitch in your thumb that remembers the flick of the file? Soon the silver dust gets on your fingers, in your hair, in your pores, and—in a sense—you are what you make. Artists become their work just as surely as their work is an incarnation of their minds, energies, and limits.

"[Sharing my craft] is like sharing myself," Maríano tells me. "And when you write, Aarón, it's the same, no? You learn to do something and then try to make something positive out of it. And, in the same way, out of yourself."

A librarian in the Biblioteca Belgrano on the main plaza befriended me when I first came to Areco. I told her about my travels, that I was a writer, and interested in staying to learn more about the gaucho and the town. She went that night to the Draghis and arranged a week's stay in their hotel at no charge (of course, I offered to help them translate their website).

Compared to the hostels of Peru, Paradores Draghi is the very lap of luxury, and I am its grateful—somewhat guilty—recipient. The Draghis' friendship lasts my entire stay in Areco: They invite me to join the family for Sunday lunches and I am always welcome in the workshop. Maríano invites me to play soccer (I score my first header goal) and to watch movies with his friends. Later, when I find a room to rent, he gives me temporary employment helping to sand down a concrete fountain he has built in the Draghi courtyard. Best of all, the Draghis share their stories with me and I get to feel the warmth of family again, which makes me miss my own.

In a separate room off the Draghi complex, I sit sometimes in Alejandro's leatherwork taller as he works. Alejandro is Juan José's son-in-law. He doesn't speak much, but doesn't seem to mind when I hang out and watch him work. He braids thin bands of leather in and out, pattern over-lapping pattern through the eyeholes on what will be an elaborate gaucho-style saddle. Unlike the action packed world of silversmithing, leatherwork requires a patient repetition of dexterous fingers creating cumulative, intricate results over time.

Here I'm introduced to the guitar and voice of Atahualpa Yupanqui playing over the stereo. Yupanqui is the quintessential folk singer of the Anrgentine pampas. His slow and resonant tenor embodies the endurance and nostalgia of the landscape. His lyric encapsulates the poetry of pampas life and its philosophy.

Alejandro works, I watch, we listen. This is the secret, I think: simple, honest work done with constancy and in patience. A craft and creation; mine will be writing. Do it as they do here: with patience, care, delicacy, and love.

Omar Tapia

"Come in, sit down."

Omar Tapia doesn't say much, but what he does say counts. He lifts a pair of kindling logs with his long arms and chucks them into the fireplace in his living room. With his long fingers, he opens a bottle of lighter fluid and douses the logs, spilling some on the concrete floor. The match illuminates his long face for a moment—punching-bag nose, sullen eyes—before landing on the kindling and there's a whoosh and the room feels warmer already.

"Let me tell you," Omar says, as I eye the puddle of lighter fluid within a spark's flight of the fireplace. "Singers never die."

Then he picks up his handcrafted 1962 Argentine guitar and plays a mournful estilo. His grainy voice rises and falls. It sounds like pretty weeping. The lyrics ask, "what will become?" of the singer's home, his wife, and the horse he left behind.

Omar's hands flick and pull with ease along the frets. Their veins stand out, like the chords in his neck. He's wearing another wool sweater, hand-knit by his wife to fit his extra-tall frame (he seems to have a closet of them).

The next song is one he composed to commemorate the anniversary celebration of Areco's iconic old bridge. The lyric tells of all the stories the bridge has born witness to through the years. This song is somehow sadder still.

"Why are all the songs sad?" I ask when Omar finishes.

"Because that's life," he says, as though I had just asked him my own name. "That's life in the pampas. That's how it is."

He continues to play. Another estilo. Un triste. Una chakarera. All sad.

The fire crackles like the sound of a record player in the background of Omar's singing, which also sounds like a vestige from a bygone time. When he finishes, we sit and stare at the fire. I ask if he knows how to play any other kinds of music, like tango.

"I only play Argentine folk music," Omar says. "It is the music of my town and its people."

I ask Omar to teach me to play, and begin lessons the next week using a borrowed guitar. The bi-weekly classes take place in the second floor of the Tapia home, which is no more than a thin alcove where Omar teaches guitar to local children. We both need to tilt our heads upon entering to avoid the low ceiling until we can take opposing seats between a shelf of music books and a rack of second-hand acoustic guitars.

Omar slowly scrawls each note that I'm to play along the five-line scale. It would be faster if he printed them in advance, or if we used a book, but I'm not going to knock his old-school ways. If he's been doing it this way for the past forty years, then far be it from me to ask him to change.

"Sol mayor. Mi menor. And return to sol mayor," he drills.

I play. I'm not a guitarist, but I'll fake it to learn to play Atahualpa. As I run through the chords, Omar sings and claps the rhythm:

When the dawn awakens
With her sanguine, purple tints,
When the trills are heard
Of the singing calandria bird,
When a dreamer's soul
Feels something undefined,
And when the sleeping countryside
Wakes from her lethargy,
I'm drinking a bitter mate
In my flowery rancho home.

When the last lesson ends, I can't help but give in to my inner William Miller. I turn in the doorway and ask Omar, "What is it that you love about folk music?"

He doesn't hesitate to reply.

"It has something profound that touches me," he says. "Something made with patience, like the work of a gaucho. Like braided leather."

<< back to the Table of Contents for Issue 3

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4. Ten million of Argentina’s roughly 36 million citizens are at least one-half Italian according to a Feb 2002 article published in Migration News (volume 8, number 4) at the University of California-Davis. //back >>
5. Fidel Castro (Cuba), Evo Morales (Bolivia), and Hugo Chávez (Venezuela) were at the time presidents of their respective countries. //back >>