Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

The priest kissed his scapulary.

“No. This is a rebel cleric speaking to you. There is something better for these people. I only hope you and I can help them. On the other hand, look at the faces of those merchants and plantation owners over there. I think we’ve just lost their confidence.”

“Why did they come?”

“I alerted them: Come and hear the voice of the revolution. Don’t fool yourselves.”

“But, when all is said and done, are you my friend or my enemy?”

“I don’t want anyone deluding himself.”

“But I depend on you to put the edicts I’ve just proclaimed into practice.”

“You, my boy?”

“Not me, the Buenos Aires junta.”

“How far away that sounds. As far as the viceroy in Lima, the king in Madrid, the Laws of the Indies…”

“I’m from the interior, Father Ildefonso. I know the maxim of these lands: We obey the law, but we don’t carry it out. I recognize that here you are the law, just as Miguel Lanza is in the jungle, and Arenales in Vallegrande, and…”

The priest squeezed Baltasar’s forearm. “Enough. Here only me. A rebel cleric is speaking to you. I and my boys, who number only two hundred — but not for nothing are they called the Sacred Battalion.”

“All right. Only you, Father. Just see to it that the law is carried out here.”

Father Ildefonso burst out laughing and embraced Baltasar. “See? You’ve just entrusted me with the law, but you haven’t found me a woman. Unlike you, I keep all my promises.”

He told Baltasar that the Buenos Aires puritans, just like the conservatives in La Paz, were horrified by the disorderly conduct of the women who confused the war of independence with a campaign of prostitution. He laughed, remembering some moralistic proclamations according to which the fair sex lost all its charms when it succumbed to disorder. To him, Ildefonso de las Muñecas, the conservative puritans and the revolutionary puritans seemed equally imbecilic. God gave sex to men and women not just for procreation but also for recreation. But to be human it is important to have sex with history, sex with sense, with antecedents, with substance, did the young lieutenant understand? Sex, literally, as a Eucharist: a body, a blood, a lasting emotion, a reason; therefore, a history … And if liberating a city like Cuzco, which reeked of prisons, jails, blood, and death, is permissible, then it’s equally permissible to liberate sex, which also reeks of its own prisons …

“In other words, Lieutenant, the vow of chastity is renewable, and that’s my law. This is a rebel cleric talking to you. You, on the other hand, don’t have those limitations; instead, like a fool, you impose them on yourself. I’ve been watching you for days. You take nothing unless it’s offered. Look, my dear lieutenant from Buenos Aires, let’s make a deal. I’ll swear to you, on the heads of my two hundred boys: I’ll carry out your decrees, even if it costs us our balls. But you have to promise me to lose your virginity this very night. Don’t blush now, Lieutenant. It’s written all over your face, and it’s easily visible from a long way off. What do you say: for me, the law; for you, a woman. Or better put: for me, your law. For you, my woman. A rebel cleric guarantees it.”

“Why do you do these things?” asked our rather flustered friend.

“Because you’ve become part of my madness, without even knowing it. And that’s always pleasant.”

[2]

A man should always sleep in the same position in which he was born. If he dies before he wakes, his life will end just as it began. Everything is a circle. It has no meaning if it doesn’t end as it began. Baltasar, curled up for nine months inside his mother’s womb, with his eyes closed and his knees touching his chin. Expecting that when everything ends it will begin again. A voice, known and unknown at the same time, was saying this in his ear. He’d always listened to that voice. And he was listening to it now. It was new and it was ancient.

When he opened his eyes, he saw women sitting on the floor. They were weaving. They were dyeing wool clothing. Then he went back to sleep. Perhaps he only closed his eyes. In any case, he dreamed. In his dream, his head separated from his body and went to visit his beloved Ofelia Salamanca. Where might she be now? Returning to Chile with her husband? Mourning the death of her child? Did everyone still think the child that had died in the fire was theirs? Unrecognizable because of the flames? Recognizable despite everything? And if so, not dead but only lost? Would Ofelia weep, “Where can my child be?” And Baltasar dreams: where can my Ofelia be?

The women weave in the midst of the smoke. They patiently dye the clothes. Baltasar tries to make out their faces. His eyes fail him. Or his imagination. Then his head escapes again, soaring, hopping, making funny noises, until it strikes the back of the marquis, Ofelia Salamanca’s husband, as if the old aristocrat could not command his wife’s sleeping body and Baltasar’s head had come, despite the husband, to the marquis’s back, summoned by Ofelia’s ardent dream, Ofelia, who didn’t even know Baltasar. The lieutenant woke up, in a panic, in pain, and the women came to him, calming him, lulling him, bringing him a steaming cup.

“Broth made from young condor fights madness and frees up your dreams.”

He fell asleep disgusted by his own body. Later its fire fused in him without contaminating itself or losing its separateness. Without destroying him. Fire approached his body and joined itself to him without destroying him. The child in the cradle surrounded by twenty-five candles did not have such luck. The fire triumphed. It devoured the child. Yet this fire touched Baltasar, pierced and consumed him, but did not destroy him.

“We’re afraid of fire. They burned us with fire. We have to create a fire that doesn’t kill.”

Then he saw a girl kneading cornmeal, preparing loaves in a corner. When he woke up, Baltasar Bustos saw that his pallet was surrounded by ashes, and in the ashes he clearly saw the tracks of an animal. He tried to get up. He couldn’t. He was tied to the bed. He was tied to himself. Gray bandages held him to the bed, to himself, to his dream about ashes, and to the animal tracks. Yet he felt free. His tied-up, ash-covered body, caught in a heavy sleep, was at the same time the freest body on earth. It floated, but it was the earth’s. But the earth was the air’s. He enjoyed all the elements: the earth that pulled him down, the air that drew him up, the fire that excited without destroying him, the water that liquefied every inch of his skin without breaking it. Everything was possible. Everything coexisted. Only he and the girl making bread were alive, suspended, in the world. Barely did he unite all the elements when the world became palpable. And when he tried to envision those elements, he discovered a woman at his side who was not Ofelia Salamanca. She turned to face him. He turned his back to her. She invited him to clasp her around the waist. She mounted him quickly. Her thighs were the fire. Her buttocks the earth. Her breasts the air. Her mouth the water. She burned without flame. She made him wish that the morning would never come. The idea that daytime life, the revolution, the Buenos Aires junta, the liberation of the slaves, the power of the warlord Ildefonso de las Muñecas, the distant hatred of those men with tall velvet hats, the nearby, resigned incomprehension of a people in rags, his father’s warnings, the rancor of his sister, the astute glances of the gauchos, Buenos Aires, his friends Dorrego and me, Varela, all of it, would flee, evaporate when he touched the elements of creation in the kisses, caresses, the surrender of an Indian woman meant that the world and its frenzy were excluded, outside, behind, ahead, but not here, not now. The woman who loved him physically had the power to prolong the night.