Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“Do I stand out too much?” was the first thing he said. “I don’t want to cause a scandal. But even my name attracts attention — after all, muñecas are dolls and I certainly like good-looking women. So why wouldn’t my actions do as much? Do our names determine our character or is it our acts that give meaning to our names? Let Plato figure it out.” And the guerrilla priest laughed.

“We should all be guided by the law,” Baltasar Bustos said, jumping up and almost spilling the maté gourd he’d traveled with from the pampa. Who’d hidden it among the white shirts in his baggage: his father, José Antonio; his sister, Sabina; a friendly but facetious gaucho? “Your vow is an example to all, Father.”

“And you, what do you want that the law forbids?” He opened one eye and looked at Baltasar with a mix of sarcasm and curiosity.

“I want justice. You know that, Father.”

“It’s not the same thing. Your desire and the law are not in opposition.”

“But my desire and my reality are.”

Now only curiosity glinted in the revolutionary priest’s slit eyes. “If I give you an opportunity for justice, will you give me an opportunity for love, young man?”

Blushing, but without a second thought, Baltasar said yes, and Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas broke into uncontrollable laughter. “It just occurred to me that it ought to be the other way around, youngster. I should be imparting justice, and you should be learning about ‘pleasure-giving females,’ as Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, a priest as hot-blooded as I am, said a few hundred years ago.”

He tucked up his cassock, as he always did when he was making decisions that involved God and man equally, and he told the astonished lieutenant that he, Father de las Muñecas, did not know what the young citizen of Buenos Aires understood by justice but that he, the priest, did believe in the abundance of blessings the Scriptures associated with human or divine justice. He let his cassock drop to its normal length and then draped his chest with cartridge belts and scapularies.

The next day, Father Ildefonso summoned Baltasar to the main square of Ayopaya, where he found a mass of Indians waiting for him. Turning to Baltasar, the priest said, “On horseback, so they believe you. Get up on that horse, fool, if you want them to believe what you say.”

Baltasar’s astonished face pleaded for a reason.

“The horse is authority, numbskull. The horse defeated them. In this land, there is no word without a horse.”

“I want to bring them justice, not more defeats,” protested Baltasar, decked out for the occasion in his parade coat, with wide lapels and gold braid, epaulets, and three-cornered hat with cockades.

“There is no justice without authority,” said the priest in a tone of finality.

Baltasar took a deep breath and looked up, as if seeking inspiration in the oppressive totality of the plateau: the mountains a single colorless color, brown, like the pure earth before the stains of snow, rain, the boots of soldiers, the picks of miners, even before grass. Earth without adornment, naked, as if expecting that on Judgment Day it would be reborn from the reserve of the Aymará mountains. Then he lowered his eyes, and there they were, the men, women, and children he’d only seen cooking, carrying loads, tending the fields, breast-feeding, pushing cartloads of weapons, their foreheads marked by the sweaty thongs of the sacks of guano, coca leaves, or silver that their shoulders carried and their heads balanced.

Baltasar Bustos had been waiting for this opportunity, and he thanked Father Ildefonso for giving it to him. A few republican officers came out of the barracks, and a few guerrillas as well. In the distance, some carriages had stopped, and men wearing high, shiny top hats poked their heads out. Some even took off the hats that protected them from the sun but that heated up their foreheads, gripped by the bands of leather. Their hats were like their heads, which now, with habitual disdain, they wiped with the sleeves of their coats as they smoothed out the velvety softness of the hats. Their foreheads seemed marked by those hats in the same way the heads of the Indians were marked by the rough straps on the sacks of manure.

He said to all of them, because for him that world at that moment was all the world there was, that the enlightened revolution was sending from the Plata — which the English invaders called the River Plate — the river of silver, a luminous river, to this land whose bowels were of real silver. The Buenos Aires junta had ordered him — he said after a pause, insinuating that the metaphor was only a preamble and the preamble merely a metaphor — to free the Indians of the plateau from servitude, something he was now doing formally. The horse, jumpy, wanted to twist around and did so, but Baltasar never turned his back on his audience; they were all around him, mute, impassive, patient. Thus, the orator felt powerful and at ease, talking about justice to an oppressed people while mounted on one of the marvels of nature, a black shining horse joined to an eloquent rider. Baltasar Bustos held up for all to see, grasping it firmly (although the stiff paper persisted in rolling up again, adopting the comfortable form in which he’d carried it, tied with a red ribbon, ever since Dorrego had it borne by messenger to Jujuy), the decree he read aloud: All abuses are abolished; Indians are freed from paying tribute; all property is to be divided; schools are to be established; and the Indian is declared equal to any other Argentine or American national.

Baltasar saw some Indians kneel, so he dismounted, touched their heads covered by Indian caps, offered his hand to each one, and told them, in a voice not even he recognized, an infinitely tender voice he was saving for the first woman he ever loved, Ofelia Salamanca, whose blond, naked, perfumed image blended uneasily with the reality of this ragged, inexpressive people, whom he raised from their prostrate position, saying to them: Never again. We are equal. Never kneel again. It’s all over. We’re all brothers. You should govern yourselves. You should be an example. You are closer to nature than we are …

Father de las Muñecas took Baltasar by the arm, saying, That’s fine, that’s enough, you’ve been heard. In that instant, Baltasar reacted with a strength he didn’t know he had, just as he hadn’t known the tenderness that had just manifested itself in him.

“That’s a lie, Father. I haven’t been heard. How many of these Indians even speak Spanish?”

“Very few, almost none, it’s true,” said the priest, without changing his expression, as he stared, not at Baltasar or the Indians, but at the coaches stopped at the edge of the plaza. “But they know the truth from the tone of voice of the speaker. No one ever spoke to them like that before.”

“Not even you, Father?”

“Yes, but only about the other world. That’s where I hope to find the justice you have just proclaimed. Not here on earth. You spoke to them about the earth. It’s never belonged to them.”

He shrugged and looked again at the coaches.

“It doesn’t belong to those people over there either. But, on the other hand, I do think these Indians own heaven.”

“Who are they?”

“Rich creoles. They live off the mita. ”

“What’s that?”

De las Muñecas didn’t even smile. He decided to respect this envoy of the Buenos Aires junta, respect him even if he felt sorry for him.

“The mita is the great reality and the great curse of this land. The mita authorizes forced Indian labor in the mines. A lot of them actually run away and seek refuge on the plantations, where the owners seem like Franciscans compared to the mine overseers.”