Plot Summary: “The Insufferable Gaucho” (El gaucho insufrible) is a short story by Roberto Bolaño, published in 2003. After losing his wife and seeing his children leave, the lawyer Manuel Pereda lives an orderly life in Buenos Aires until, faced with the economic crisis of the early twenty-first century, he decides to abandon the city and retire to the old family ranch on the Pampas. In a decaying rural environment overrun by rabbits, he tries to rebuild his life, surrounded by impoverished gauchos, malnourished children, and eccentric characters. Over time, he repairs the estate, establishes relationships with the local inhabitants, and keeps up a correspondence with his former housemaids. He is visited by his son, a successful writer, and other people from Buenos Aires, but remains in his retreat. Eventually, he returns briefly to the city to sign the sale of his apartment. After an altercation with a writer in a café, and feeling out of place in a city he no longer recognizes, he decides to go back to the Pampas.
Warning
The following summary and analysis is only a semblance and one of the many possible readings of the text. It is not intended to replace the experience of reading the story.
Summary of The Insufferable Gaucho, by Roberto Bolaño
“The Insufferable Gaucho”, the story that gives its title to the collection published by Roberto Bolaño in 2003, tells the story of Manuel Pereda, a widowed lawyer and father of two children —Cuca and Bebe— who leads a calm, meticulous, and solitary life in Buenos Aires. Honest and attached to routine, Pereda has refused to remarry after his wife’s death, determined to raise his children on his own. Eventually, they grow up and leave the country: his daughter settles in Rio de Janeiro, and his son, now a recognized writer, lives abroad. Lonely and aging, Pereda witnesses the social and economic collapse of Argentina at the dawn of the twenty-first century and loses his savings when the financial system crumbles.
Shaken by this crisis and sensing that Buenos Aires is falling apart, he decides to leave the city and move to the countryside, to the old family ranch called Álamo Negro, on the Pampas. He bids farewell to his servants, whom he can no longer afford, and takes a train to Capitán Jourdan, an almost deserted rural village infested with rabbits. There he finds the house in ruins and the landscape hostile. He buys some tools at the hardware store, acquires a horse named José Bianco from his neighbor Don Dulce, and precariously settles into his new life. From then on, he tries to rebuild the ranch, surrounded by bewildered figures: aging gauchos, starving children, and marginalized neighbors.
Having no rural experience, Pereda improvises traps to hunt rabbits, hires inept gauchos, and slowly organizes a minimal community. He tells stories—often invented ones—and reflects aloud on justice, homeland, and literature. He is visited by his writer son and several people from the capital, including an editor who gets bitten by a rabbit and a pompous psychiatrist who accompanies him on a horseback expedition. During that journey, they meet a mysterious woman living with her children in an abandoned ranch. Some time later, she moves to Álamo Negro, settles there without much talk, and one night sleeps with Pereda, establishing a new, silent form of companionship.
Life at Álamo Negro, though precarious, stabilizes: the food improves, more gauchos join them, and even a medical NGO arrives to vaccinate the locals. The ranch becomes a refuge of the elemental. Disillusioned with the country, Pereda seems to find a kind of meaning in isolation. He discusses politics with the gauchos, and when some of them express nostalgia for Peronism, he reacts with verbal aggression and even brandishes a knife, though he never uses it. Despite these moments of tension, the ranch continues to function as a small drifting community.
When his son asks him to return to the city to sign the sale of the family apartment, Pereda goes back to Buenos Aires. He finds the house clean but empty. He calls his former maids, wanders the streets, and feels disoriented. One night, he sees his son through a café window, surrounded by other writers. One of them—a narcissistic, drug-addled author—steps outside to confront him. Pereda lightly stabs him in the groin with a knife and disappears into the shadows. He roams the city unsure whether to stay or leave. He imagines himself riding into Buenos Aires on horseback, a messianic or ridiculous figure. At dawn, he decides to return to the Pampas.
Commentary and Analysis of The Insufferable Gaucho, by Roberto Bolaño
“The Insufferable Gaucho”, the story that lends its title to Roberto Bolaño’s collection, is a long narrative charged with irony, ambiguity, and literary references. It portrays the transformation of a city man into a rural figure verging on the grotesque. Yet beyond the apparent humor suggested by certain scenes —like when the protagonist rides his horse into a general store— the story delves deeply into the existential bewilderment of a man who, in a crisis-stricken Argentina, seeks new meaning amid the political, economic, and cultural collapse of the nation.
The protagonist, Manuel Pereda, is a retired lawyer, widower, and father of two successful children who has lived a proper, bourgeois life in Buenos Aires. His world falls apart when his children leave and Argentina plunges into turmoil. Confronted with this disintegration, Pereda retreats to the family ranch, Álamo Negro, located on the Pampas, intending to rebuild his life from the most elemental. This return to the countryside is both literal and symbolic: it marks a withdrawal from the modern world and a quest for identity. At its core, the story poses a central question: what does it mean to “be Argentine”? Is it possible to reconstruct a national identity from the ruins of a collapsed urban civilization?
The story functions as a double journey: both Pereda’s personal transformation and a symbolic passage through the myths of Argentine history and literature. The protagonist—a cultivated, rational bourgeois, reader of newspapers, and frequent visitor to literary cafés—is forced by national collapse into a process of forced ruralization, at once grotesque and pathetic. On the Pampas, Pereda imitates the figure of the gaucho: he rides a horse, wears bombachas, hunts rabbits, and drinks in the pulpería. But this identity is fragile and theatrical. He doesn’t become a gaucho; he plays one, becoming an ambiguous figure—halfway between the tragic and the ridiculous—embodying the longing to belong to a nation disintegrating before his eyes and to a tradition that no longer exists.
One of the story’s key intertexts is Borges’s El Sur (“The South”), explicitly evoked when Pereda waits at the train station. In Borges’s tale, Juan Dahlmann travels to the countryside hoping to escape modernity and reconnect with a heroic past, dying in a final duel at a general store. Bolaño reprises that same journey southward as a symbolic movement but completely subverts it. Borges’s gaucho is dignified, tragic, and silent; Bolaño’s is “insufferable,” contrived, out of place, and acutely aware that he is performing a role devoid of meaning. The heroic is replaced by comedy, clumsiness, and anachronism. There is no noble duel—only spit. There is no heroic death—only precarious survival.
Bolaño does not mock the gaucho or Borges; he relocates them in another context, as if asking: what meaning can such figures have today, amid bankruptcy, with rabbits instead of cattle? What remains of the national past in a deranged present? The scene where Pereda rides into the pulpería, asks for aguardiente, and spits on the floor reads like a parody of El Sur—but also an homage. Deep down, Pereda desperately seeks an authentic way of life, though the world no longer offers any framework to sustain it.
Stylistically, the story combines an objective, almost neutral tone with moments of delirium, irony, and lyricism. Written in the third person, the narration gradually moves closer to Pereda’s consciousness until it almost merges with his thoughts. This proximity allows Bolaño to play with ambiguity: it never becomes entirely clear whether Pereda is a lucid man who has chosen a marginal, poetic existence or a man who has slowly gone mad trying to make sense of a deranged reality. That ambiguity runs through the entire narrative, sustaining a constant tension between comedy and tragedy.
The rural landscape is portrayed with an almost dystopian aesthetic. The Pampas are no longer the epic territory of gauchesque tradition but a degraded expanse overrun by rabbits—a symbol of uncontrolled proliferation, ecological imbalance, and perhaps the impossibility of returning to a lost order. There are no cows, no patrons, no history. In this void, Pereda tries to rebuild a fragile community: he gathers disinherited gauchos, shelters an enigmatic woman with children, and receives visits from editors, doctors, and writers. Yet everything seems on the verge of collapse or absurdity. The Álamo Negro ranch becomes an island in the desert, closer to a haunted ruin than a productive estate.
Equally important is the tension between city and countryside. Buenos Aires appears as an artificial, hollow space where intellectuals discuss politics and literature in cafés without real consequence. The countryside, though ruinous, offers a more direct contact with the concrete—with hunger, need, and labor. But Bolaño idealizes neither space. Both are marked by simulation, decay, and disenchantment. Ultimately, what interests him is the portrayal of a displaced man caught between two worlds that no longer offer certainties, yet who persists in resisting.
The Insufferable Gaucho is a story about the dissonance between inherited ways of imagining a nation and the chaotic experience of living it in the present. Manuel Pereda is an anachronistic figure, a survivor of an educated class that has lost its place, trying to reinvent himself in a ruined country. His character is contradictory—at times pathetic, at others endearing, occasionally ridiculous. But in that contradiction lies his humanity. The story offers no answer or moral; rather, it proposes a lucid—and bitter—vision of what remains when everything has fallen apart: a life built from remnants, from fictions assumed as truths, from failed attempts to give shape to a world that no longer has one.
