Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

In the end, the Pope accepted some good advice. Kings might well scorn the intelligence of the Jesuits, but the Pope could take advantage of it. Often it happens the other way around; now let Rome open her arms to what Madrid and Lisbon have rejected. It was said that the ex-Jesuit Julián Ríos returned to Argentina without his priestly vestments the better to fool the colonial authorities. Like all New World Jesuits, he taught national history, national geography, the flora and fauna (and the form and fame) of the nascent nations, from New Spain to Chile, from the Río de la Plata to New Granada.

And, besides giving his pupils a national awareness, Don Julián, the defrocked, also gave them books banned by the Church and the authorities: The Spirit of the Laws, The Social Contract, Diderot’s The Nun, Voltaire’s Candide … That was Baltasar’s education, but not his sister’s. She was left to the distracted instruction of her mother and the affectionate virtue of her father. But she was stubborn; she envied her brother; she read more than would be expected of one imprisoned at home. In contrast to her brother, she read breviaries, Catholic pamphlets, sermons … On her own she created a counterculture the better to challenge her younger brother.

He wanted to see her a different way, prettier, tenderer, better. He wanted to be generous. She would not allow it:

“Decide: are you loyal to your family or to your revolution?”

She ceased to be the swan he wanted to find; she became once again the ugly duckling she would always be, thus giving her father the opportunity yet again to be generous and evenhanded.

“Your sister means that there may be options less brutal than this one we are living through. Try to understand her.”

[3]

Baltasar walked out into the open country to think what those options might be and how he might undo what had already occurred. He accepted the fact that history, the conglomeration of ideas, facts, and desires which he fought for or against, came to be only in the company of others, in something shared with others. It irritated him that he so often felt that the we, the others, were the excess, the superfluous. But then his reading of Jean-Jacques would come to his rescue (the same way the romances of chivalry served as models for Don Quixote, said his friends, Dorrego and I, Varela, laughing), to tell him that feeling uneasy in society, or seeing society as an excretion, an excess, was not a sin but a virtue. It showed that society was in a bad way.

Here on the pampa, he looked into the distance, toward Mendoza and the mountains: the great range seemed South America’s sleeping beast, a lion-panther with a vast white back and black belly, lying in wait for its ferocious chance. He accepted the fact that, though he was born here, he was returning not to stay but to rest; from this spot he would move toward those mountains, where, perhaps, history could be made so that nature and society might once again be united.

I will be free in society only when I no longer need society because I myself have transformed it.

Unfortunately, he was tied to his society. He was not its master; he was mastered by it. He had thrown himself into the Argentine revolution and carried out a daring, highly personal act of justice, as vital for him as writing a manifesto was for Mariano Moreno or dethroning a viceroy for Cornelio de Saavedra. Baltasar Bustos had traded the destinies of two children. But he wasn’t fooling himself. He had only substituted one injustice for another. His most radical act, followed by his most private crisis of conscience, spoke to him thus. So, after having dinner with his father, served by his sister, he invoked the imperfect loneliness of the Argentine countryside, itself a prologue to the mountains and their pure solitude. He imagined the Andes an echo chamber for his soul, liberated and reconciled with the natural order.

Then things began to happen.

The first was the vision of Ofelia Salamanca pursuing him. The woman desired interposed herself between him and nature, occupying all physical space. She was an enchanting chimera. She always sat with her back to him, but in his vision tonight she was no longer seated but standing, a white flame, total, shimmering, bending over little by little, spreading her legs slowly to reveal, from the rear, the most irresistible vision of her sex, womankind’s genital catholicism, which is adored, imagined, and penetrated from all angles. The mountains were impenetrable: the vision of Ofelia Salamanca, naked and offering herself from the rear, wasn’t. It invited, invited … And then the woman whirled around and gave him, not her dreamed-of sex, but her feared face: she was a Gorgon, accusing him with eyes as white as marble, transforming him into the stone of injustice, hating him …

When Baltasar Bustos turned away from that vision floating between his eyes and the mountains, he felt for the first time a warning from his own soul: Ofelia Salamanca knows everything. She hates you and has sworn vengeance.

Besides, he found himself staring into eyes as wild as those of his would-be lover. There were other Medusas in the world: these gauchos who had gathered around him in the darkness, when all he wanted was to be alone with nature and the image of Ofelia. Their presence confused and bewildered him and set him up not against the mountains or the night or his desire for a woman but against other men. What were they doing? They offered him a light, but he wasn’t smoking. He wished he were offering them the flame of a match like the one Xavier Dorrego elegantly carried inside a watch during their sessions at the Café de Malcos. But his hallucinated imagination only took from the sky a candle like the twenty-five around the cradle of Ofelia Salamanca’s kidnapped child. It was doubtless because of this series of hallucinations that Baltasar Bustos offered the gauchos an imaginary light, taken from the night and protected from the mild mountain wind by the cupped hands of the master’s son, as if a flame were really burning there.

The gauchos did not laugh.

“Don’t make fun of us, young master.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m just a citizen.”

Now they did laugh, and as they laughed, Baltasar smelled in their collective breath a ravenous stench, like that of young stray dogs. There were bits of food in those bushy black or copper-colored beards that began at the neck and climbed almost to the eyebrows — an extension of the hair covering ears and cheeks, leaving open only the mouths, which were like wounds of a paradoxical abundance. Red and as bloodied as the meat they ate, they revealed the hardness of an uncertain country where the people eat everything they have, never just what they want. Today there’s more than enough, but tomorrow we may have nothing.

He felt a profound compassion for his homeland. But one of the gauchos kept him from extending that compassion to these men. The young gaucho, who knows with what intention, took him by the hand Baltasar had used to shield the imaginary light. The young citizen tried to pull himself out of his daydream, plant his feet on the rough earth and the roughness of the customs of this world. What was he surprised at? It was all familiar to him. He belonged to this land of dust as much as he did to the land of ideas that was Father Julián Ríos’s or the land of smoke of the gatherings at the Café de Malcos. He raised his eyes and found neither the mountains nor the Medusa, neither nature nor that forbidden sex. What he found was a mirror. The young gaucho holding him by the hand looked like Baltasar. A filthy, bearded, hungry Baltasar, even though sated today with the flesh of a dead steer. His round face, distant gaze, his hair with its curls burnished by the same elements that frightened his sister, Sabina.