El Ombú

By W H Hudson and David Miller

This edition of WH Hudson's novella El Ombú (together with three other stories of the Argentinian pampas: "The Story of a Piebald Horse", "Niño Diablo" and "Marta Riquelme", as well as an appendix to the original tale) includes an extensive critical introduction by Hudson scholar David Miller.

W H (William Henry) Hudson was born in Argentina in 18

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reality Street
• Release date: Jun 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781874400707

Book preview

EL OMBÚ

DAVID MILLER was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1950, and has lived in London since 1972. His more recent publications include The Dorothy and Benno Stories (2005), Black, Grey and White: A Book of Visual Sonnets (2011), Spiritual Letters (Series 1-5) (2011) and Reassembling Still: Collected Poems (2014). He has compiled British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ (with Richard Price, 2006) and edited The Lariat and Other Writings by Jaime de Angulo (2009) and The Alchemist’s Mind: a book of narrative prose by poets (2012). He wrote his PhD thesis on W H Hudson, and published a book based on the thesis, W H Hudson and the Elusive Paradise, in 1990.

EL OMBÚ

W H Hudson

RESCRIPT BOOKS

RESCRIPT BOOKS is an imprint of

REALITY STREET

63 All Saints Street, Hastings TN34 3BN

www.realitystreet.co.uk/rescript-books.php

First published 1902

First ReScript Books edition, 2015

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-1-874400-70-7 (ebook)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION, by David Miller

EL OMBÚ

STORY OF A PIEBALD HORSE

NIÑO DIABLO

MARTA RIQUELME

APPENDIX TO EL OMBÚ

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Books about W H Hudson

To My Friend

R B CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM

(Singularisimo escritor ingles)

Who has lived with and knows (even to the marrow as they themselves would say) the horsemen of the Pampas, and who alone of European writers has rendered something of the vanishing colour of that remote life.

(W H Hudson)

Introduction

EL OMBÚ is one of W H Hudson’s greatest artistic achievements; in fact, only the novel Green Mansions is of the same imaginative order as the two main stories in this volume, El Ombú and Marta Riquelme. Ruth Tomalin says outright that El Ombú is a masterpiece; while John T Frederick remarks of the story: Few works of fiction of comparable length, in English or any other literature, equal it in essential power or in completeness of achievement.¹ The power and the tragic intensity of the story are only equalled in Hudson’s own work by Marta Riquelme and by the last part of Green Mansions.

The Story of a Piebald Horse and Niño Diablo can be dealt with first, however, because they can be assumed to be chronologically prior to the other stories, and more importantly because they are much slighter pieces which I will therefore treat very summarily.² The Story of a Piebald Horse and Niño Diablo are brief sketches, picturesque, anecdotal, and concerned with exotic local detail, and here a comparison with R B Cunninghame Graham’s sketches would be apt, except that Hudson’s writing is somewhat more skilful than Cunninghame Graham’s.³

My interest in The Story of a Piebald Horse is with its projection of the notion of fate or destiny – a notion central to El Ombú as a whole. The narrator of the story says: I can laugh, too, knowing that all things are ordered by destiny; otherwise I might sit down and cry.⁴ The chain of occurrences, and what happens to a person through that chain or sequence, is what I understand by the term fate – the process by which one thing comes to pass rather than another. In The Story of a Piebald Horse, we can see this chain as being forged partly through chance, and partly through a nexus of personal qualities and actions – including Torcuato’s arrogance, and the perverse spirit of Chapaco, the man who helps bring about his death while they are marking cattle. The chain will dictate the strange way that Torcuato’s (unrelated) foster-brother and foster-sister, Anacleta and Elaria, are freed to marry each other. The piebald horse is a small thing in this narrative of fate, but a decisive one; it is while riding the piebald that Torcuato comes to his death, and it is through recognising the piebald that Anacleto discovers what has happened to Torcuato. The owner of the estancia where Torcuato has met his death, a man named Sotelo, leaves the piebald horse outside a pulpería, hoping that someone will recognise it and let the deceased man’s relatives know of his death. Elaria has been charged by her foster-father at his death to marry Torcuato, although she loves Anacleto; hence, she and Anacleto have waited to find out the missing Torcuato’s fate before they can marry: the piebald, and the story which Soleto has to tell in regard to it, bring their waiting to an end.

In Niño Diablo it is the person of Niño that is of particular interest. Niño is marked out by the singularity of his personal being. He has a nearness to the realm of nature, with his sharp senses and his receptiveness and knowledge of the sounds and signs of wild life. His moral character is unconventional, but he is in no way amoral; he is a horse-thief, but steals only from the Indians (who killed his relations when Niño was a child, and are regarded by the other characters in the story as the infidel) or from those who offend him; and when asked by a stranger to rescue his captive wife from the Indians, Niño complies selflessly – without hesitation, and without regard for reward.

He appears mysteriously – materialises as if out of thin air – in the household of Gregory Gorostiaga, and the mystery and the stealth are equally of the essence of the enigmatic Niño:

"Madre del Cielo, how you frightened me!" screamed one of the twins, giving a great start.

The cause of this sudden outcry was discovered in the presence of a young man quietly seated on the bench at the girl’s side. He had not been there a minute before, and no person had seen him enter the room – what wonder that the girl was startled! He was slender in form and had small hands and feet, and oval, olive face, smooth as a girl’s except for the incipient moustache on his lip. In the place of a hat he wore only a scarlet ribbon bound about his head, to keep back the glossy black hair that fell to his shoulders; and he was wrapped in a white woollen Indian poncho, while his lower limbs were cased in white colt-skin coverings, shaped like stockings to his feet, with the red tassels of his embroidered garters falling to the ankles.⁵

The singularity of Niño is set in relief by the ordinariness of most of the characters – though Hudson manages to give their bustling small world a picturesque, lively aspect – and by the evil-minded, blustering character of Polycarp (whom Niño tricks by stealing his horses); the latter acts as a foil to Niño through his incarnation of a type – a stupid, arrogant buffoon – while Niño both eludes the typical, and stands as Polycarp’s contrast in his quickness of mind, his quiet personal impressiveness, and the absence in him of Polycarp’s vain boastfulness. Gregory remarks of Niño:

When he comes the dogs bark not – who knows why? His tread is softer than the cat’s; the untamed horse is tamed for him. Always in the midst of dangers, yet no harm, no scratch. Why? Because he stoops like the falcon, makes his stroke and is gone – Heaven knows where!⁶

Perhaps more tellingly, he also says, earlier in the story: …the Niño… is freer than the wild things which Heaven has made.⁷ While it is certainly rudimentary, we can glimpse here the projection of an essentially enigmatic dimension to the person of Niño. The categories of psychological analysis can easily provide a causal relationship between Niño’s captivity as a child with the Indians and their murder of his relations, and his predilection for stealing horses from them. Yet apart from this, he remains elusive. Given the slightness of the story itself and the small space we are allowed for an unfolding of Niño’s personhood, it would be wrong to make too much of this; but it is possible to say that in his elusiveness and in his closeness to nature Niño prefigures something of the personal dimensions to be found in the figure of Rima in Green Mansions.

El Ombú is a story of fierce gravity; a succession of disasters, as Ruth Tomalin says, yet so skilfully told that it has the pathos and dignity of Greek tragedy.⁸ Told by Nicandro, an old man who has witnessed the succession of disasters, the tale is established from the first sentence as one of ruin and desolation: the estate called El Ombú – after the huge ombú tree standing solitary, where there is [now] no house – is ownerless and ruined.⁹ There is immediately projected a sense of inevitability: …into every door sorrow must enter – sorrow and death that comes to all men; and every house must fall at last.¹⁰

Edward Garnett said that in El Ombú we feel that character and destiny are one.¹¹ At certain points in the narrative, this is true; but we have to go beyond this formulation to understand the story more fully.

An equivalence or correlation between character and fate could be posited in relation to the way Hudson presents the fate of one of the characters at least: Don Santos Ugarte. The owner of El Ombú, Ugarte’s character is deftly and concretely established:

In all houses, for many leagues around, the children were taught to reverence him, calling him uncle, and when he appeared they would run and, dropping to their knees before him, cry out "Benedición mi tío". He would give them his blessing; then, after tweaking a nose and pinching an ear or two, he would flourish his whip over their heads to signify that he had done with them, and that they must quickly get out of his way.¹²

The imperiousness and self-importance of the man are further illustrated as the story proceeds; and they are turned towards very considerable cruelty in the treatment of his third wife, who is reduced to a desperately unhappy and frightened creature by Ugarte because of her childlessness. Nicandro indeed speaks of his indomitable temper and his violence.¹³ But he also characterises him as so strong, so brave, so noble; and recounts his generosity to both the poor and to the religious orders.¹⁴ The tragic quality of Ugarte’s story resides in this division of his nature: he is a man who is capable of much good; but he is also a man flawed by arrogance and cruelty, and in this resides the cause of his downfall. This comes about through his anger over a young slave, Meliton, whom Ugarte has favoured over all his other slaves. Meliton buys his freedom, in accordance with law, while wishing to remain in Ugarte’s service – without payment, but not as a slave. Ugarte’s inflated self-regard causes him to see this as ingratitude, and he throws the money into Meliton’s face, with such force that Meliton is cut and bruised, and then orders him off the estate. Two years later Meliton returns, hoping for forgiveness; Ugarte shoots him dead, and then has to flee first to Buenos Aires, and from there to Montevideo, where he remains while trying to arrange for a pardon. The pardon, however, never comes. The Advocate and the Judge assigned to the case quarrel about how Ugarte’s bribe is to be shared out, or so it is assumed, and Ugarte becomes forgotten, eventually slipping into insanity and dying without ever seeing El Ombú again. The estate has in the meanwhile fallen into ruins – before eventually becoming the home of the unfortunate Valerio de la Cueva.

Valerio’s fate is also worth recounting in some detail, because whereas we can see Ugarte’s downfall in correlation with his flawed character, Valerio’s story eludes this correlation – at any rate, in such a straightforward and unambiguous way.

Valerio is a poor man who is able to reside at El Ombú because no one else will live there – the reason being that it is supposedly inhabited by ghosts. Nicandro describes Valerio in a more high-flown manner than is customary with him, as if endeavouring to do full justice to his friend: Perhaps in rising and going out, on some clear morning in summer, he looked at the sun when it rose, and perceived an angel sitting in it, and as he gazed, something from that being fell upon and passed into and remained with him. Such a man was Valerio.¹⁵ He also characterises him as: He who was so brave, so generous, even in his poverty, of so noble a spirit, yet so gentle; whose words were sweeter than honey to me!¹⁶ Nicandro and Valerio are inducted into the army, under a brutal commander named Colonel Barboza; after an arduous, gruelling campaign, the men are paid off so miserably that they ask Valerio to act as their spokesman in complaining to Barboza; the Colonel responds by having Valerio given two hundred lashes of the whip after which he is thrown into the road. Nicandro discovers him, being cared for by a compassionate storekeeper; and Nicandro and Valerio set off back to El Ombú. Valerio dies just in front of the house, before his wife and child can reach him.

Unlike Ugarte, Valerio is not undone by a flaw of character. One might want to claim that his virtue – in his generous and brave willingness to bear the complaints of the