etymology
They crossed the ocean from Spain hoping to fill their empty hands with
whatever they could find in America, the Untouched Land.
But it was a Land that pushed back.
They chopped laboriously through jungles, traversed plains full of nothing for months; they died of malaria, their muscles stretched with exhaustion; they killed and were killed by strange fierce native men; they were shipwrecked; they were taken by hunger; their mules stumbled & gave up the ghost. Somewhere along the way--
I imagine the misted peaks of Jujuy--
someone--
I imagine another Conquistador, one with steady eyes and feral hair, a crazy
man's beard and leather shoes torn to ribbons, mysteriously alone as if
Circe had risen from the riverbed and turned his companions to bony mountain horses--
told them a story.
Just go East, he must have said, go East to the land of riches.
Go East and before you reach the ocean, the earth becomes
swollen with precious metal, so taut with metal you can feel it
clank beneath your step, and the rivers shine with banks of silver, shores of gold.
And so the men would go, always east. They would found fortresses and move on. They would kill indians and move on. From time to time a feral man would appear out of a swamp or a jungle and point silently eastward, so on they would go. Eventually they would reach the sea.
_They_reached_the_sea_
They would turn around and stare at the land they had crossed, the interminable stretch of bleached grasses shuffling uselessly in a stale breeze and they would realize that nowhere in that nothing was the ground laden with gold. In their defeat they would name the cruel river with its mouth to the sea "Rio de la Plata," the River of Silver.
If you look on the Periodic Table of the Elements,
you'll find silver as Ar:
Argentum.
Argentina, land of silver, whose earth never contained a single shimmering vein.