Maté & the Last Cowboys at the End of the World

bzukowsk
Jan 29, 2021
5 min read

Maté is a cultural tenet of southern South America. If you’ve ever been through Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, or Uruguay - odds are you’ve seen maté being sipped through the quintessential spoon-straw. The bitter-sweet, highly caffeinated drink keeps southern Sudamérica running.

But it’s nearly impossible for a newcomer to pick up all the customs that come with maté culture. Take it from Nick Reding, author of The Last Cowboys at the End of the World (who has spent years living with gauchos of Argentina/Chile, often with the family of Pato [Duck] and Edith):

Duck and Edith’s possessions were few: a tea kettle, a pot, a frying pan, some clothes, Duck’s cowboying accoutrements. He and Edith and Patricia shared everything, right down to the family’s lone toothbrush. Everything, that is except for their matés and bombillas, the gourds and silver straws with which the gauchos drink a strong herbal tea called by the same name as the gourd: maté.

Aside from being the fulcrum of social life and a ritual repeated ad infinitum among the gauchos, taking maté is an indicator of politics, culture, and finances. Drinking too much maté - seven or eight times a day - is a sign that you’re backwards or even trashy. Drinking it five times a day is a sign of certain progressiveness. None of which is lost on Edith; she uses the word maté in as many ways as possible - about as often as she uses the phrase “catch it” [dale] and the word che - to say that one is (in addition to drinking a kind of tea from a gourd) relaxing or getting drunk or being lazy.

No matter how often you drink mate, its effects are very addictive, because it makes you once highly alert and very calm. Maté is grown predominantly in Paraguay and it is extremely bitter, leading many people to add mint, sage, oregango, or an apple, you might bore out the meat and use the husk as a gourd. The most common addition, however, is lots of sugar - a teaspoon or so for every three-ounce serving - which, along with the fact that few people have ever seen a dentist, accounts for so many toothless grins. Despite its popularity, there’s little known about mate’s chemical makeup, aside from the fact that it possesses a high level of caffeine. Why this doesn’t result in the jumpiness associated with coffee is unclear, as are the reasons behind the searing headaches you get for the first week after you stop drinking it. What’s more clear is that one’s etiquette while taking maté can be used to say any number of things, from welcome to my house to let’s raise knives, the idiom of choice to invite a brawl.

It’s two weeks since I began living with Duck and Edith, and, as far as mate goes, it appears as though I’ve finally arrived: Edith has given me the coveted position of pourer (though because it’s an unseasonably warm day and the pourer sits right next to the stove, I’m more than a little suspicious of Edith’s motivations). “Mariana!” she says, smiling, “bring more wood - Skinny’s nose is getting cold!”.

The maté process is theoretically quite simple, though there’s ample room for confusion, beginning with the fact that dried leaves used for brewing, as well as the gourd in which they steep and the ritual in general, are all referred to as mate. It all begins when water is placed in a tea kettle to warm without boiling. Boiling water is the most egregious mate foul, first because it burns the leaves (and called yerba), dulling the taste, and then burns the drinker’s mouth. To avoid water that’s too hot, tradition demands that the pourer use his pinkie as a thermometer. While the water heats, you get the yerba bag, sold by the quarter-kilo, and pour just enough but not too many leaves into the gourd, which is about four times the size of a shot glass, taking into account the yerba’s expansion when water is added over and over during the actual drinking. Should you want to take your maté sweet, then you must also leave room for sugar and yuyos - whatever other herbs that can be gathered by the river and hung over the stove on a nail to dry - which further crowd the tiny cup.

Meanwhile, the bombilla, a 10-inch silver or aluminum straw with a tear-drop tea-strainer at one end, must be checked for earwigs - which like nothing better than to crawl inside a wet bombilla and wait to be sucked in, pincers and all - by removing the strainer and blowing through the hollow shaft. That done, the bombilla goes strainer end down under the yerba until it leans against the lip of the mate at just the right angle. Too close to ninety degrees and it won’t draw, too close to sixty degrees and it draws too much. By then the water should be ready, and you pour it over your pinkie, splattering it onto the floor for luck. The first two pours into the mate are taken by the host, or pourer, to clean the yerba. So, with the kettle in hand and a mouth full of dusty, earthy water, I open the back door of Duck and Edith’s cabin, select a many chicken, and fire a stream at her. After a second shot, we’re ready to drink.

Or so I think. When I sit back down, Edith takes the mate from my hand. “Too much yerba, Flaco!” She yells with mock derision. “You’ll spill the water when the mate expands so that your mother, all the way over there in the Together States, will cry”. She opens the ash drawer on the stove, flicks two small piles of yerba into the fire from the gourd, and slaps the drawer shut. Then she hands the gourd back to me before Oscar can knock it out of her hand. Among the superstitions surrounding maté - and everything else among the gauchos, from how to interpret the trajectory of your love life from the flight of certain birds to how to turn yourself into a witch (answer: by kneeling at the side of a river with your head under water for twenty-four hours to reverse your baptism) - is that to spill water while pouring is to have made whomever you were thinking about at the time suddenly, immeasurably, and inexplicably sad.

Marina drops more wood by the stove. “It was a joke”, says Edith. “Uncle Chickenhead doesn’t need any more wood for the fire. It’s already hot as church in here. Take your brother,” says Edith, and when she hands Oscar down, he breaks from Mariana’s hug, slips to the floor, and starts to howl. “Fool!” says Edith to Mariana, and picks up Oscar, who belts here in the face. “Come here, my little prince,” she gurgles. “Go outside,” she says to Mariana. “Maybe you can find something to do other than fuck with me, india”.

Not inviting a guest to take maté is as good as asking the person to get out of your cabin. Passing it with the left hand is dicier still, and requires clarification on other levels. If, for instance, you did this and then failed to refill the kettle after the first round, you’d be telling the other person you’d never really wanted to share mate with them in the first place. If, on the other hand, you go through several rounds this way, it might mean you’re cursing the person or, more likely, exposing him to the humiliation of having to end the session prematurely and leave.