Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“What you are seeing is not the past; perhaps it’s the future,” said old Rodríguez to calm him down. “This city is a harbinger, not of the magic you detest, Baltasar, but of the reason to come.” But for Baltasar anything that wasn’t reason was magic. “And if it wasn’t magic but science, what would your reason say?” asked the old man, afraid, once more, that he’d shown too much to his new disciple, who, for that very reason, would hate his teacher and spend the rest of his days trying to forget this extraordinary vision that no one wanted to share, because it was disconcerting, because it put our own rational convictions into doubt.

This is how I answered Baltasar: You should put your certainties to the test, staring whatever negates them straight in the eye. I don’t know if Dorrego answered him or what he would have said, but I could see he was more distressed than I, perhaps even more distressed than Baltasar himself.

“Don’t let yourself be distracted from war and government,” Dorrego told me from Buenos Aires. “Upper Peru, as everyone knows, is a land of witch doctors, hallucinations, and drugs. We’ll have to put a stop to it someday.”

“We’ve got to leave it all untouched,” said Simón Rodríguez, using his arms to shield the weakened, almost lifeless body of the young Baltasar Bustos as he tried to lead him out of the city of light. “Swear you’ll never send anyone here. To explore it would be to destroy it. Let it survive until the moment in which everyone understands it because the future itself leaves it behind.”

But Baltasar could only ask: What have I seen? Have I really seen this, though I could not even touch it, or is it a dream? Where are we? He could only implore as Simón Rodríguez got him out of there, ignoring the tales passing through the luminous but now open eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado. Yet those tales held the secret to the place, and it was to a feverish Baltasar as he clung to the back of a mule on the dizzying spiral descent from the mountain that Simón Rodríguez told the truth he himself had just grasped.

“Everything you imagine is true. Today we happened on one fantasy among many possible fantasies. We don’t know if it’s yours, if it goes before you, or if it is the prelude to the next one.”

Baltasar did not seem to be listening and only muttered something, as if trying to forget what he was saying as he said it, rather than remember it.

That dreams are our real life

That the night is never over

That dreams overcome time

That the only sin is the separation of the sentient from the spiritual world

But Simón said no, no, no, that is not the lesson, the lesson is to accept that everything we imagine is true, that today we witnessed only one brief moment of that unending ribbon where truth is inscribed, and we do not know if what we saw is part of our imagination today, of an imagination that precedes us, or if it proclaims an imagination to come …

“I have experienced the vertigo of learning that something which is death’s can exist in life,” our younger brother, Baltasar, wrote us.

When we received his letter, Baltasar had recovered in a hospital in Cochabamba, where the disillusioned Simón Rodríguez had brought him. The old man went off, doubtless in search of newer, more receptive disciples. Baltasar, after writing us, waited for word from us. He said that, more than ever, he desired to take action in the real world and forget nightmares. What commission did we want to send him? He felt strong, was fully recovered, and he’d lost twenty pounds. Oh yes, and he reminded us that he’d been lost in one of the five thousand tunnels that connect Cuzco with the mines in Potosí, that it takes potatoes hours to cook there because of the altitude, that the lake is merely a track left by the retreating ice, that the lava of the volcanoes whistles as it flows downhill, that Upper Peru smells of the mercury transported in leather sacks to treat the silver, that I slept with a girl whose breasts sprouted between her legs, that I’ve seen the sun swimming beneath the world at dusk.

[1]

His dappled stallion, who smelled until then of the sweat of bare mountain horses, now joined a new herd that smelled of gunpowder, horseshoes, and leather. The mountain horses, without saddles or bridles, gradually slowed down until they were left behind, as if amazed by that unfamiliar smell. Baltasar Bustos’s stallion was the only one to follow the charge, joining the war horses.

Holding on to the animal’s sweaty neck as best he could, Baltasar Bustos felt his face slapped by its wild, coarse mane, which snapped like a hundred small whips. He didn’t dare grab the forelock for fear of making the horse buck. But its furious gallop, multiplied in emulation of the war charge of twenty or thirty others, made the young officer’s body slip back.

They picked him up at full gallop as if he were a sack, the way leaves are blown away or something is snatched up by the wind. He didn’t know what was happening. All he understood for certain was that the world of the imagination was behind him and that he would forget it; he was now tossed into the tumult called reality, which carried him along in its wake. Two strong arms lifted him up on the run, draped him over the saddle, and pressed his face into the wool of the gaucho gear. A voice muttered barbarous obscenities. The voice was close but the words were blown away by the clamor of the fighting. Baltasar’s head, hanging down, suffocated by the dust, saw the world upside down.

When he regained consciousness, it was night, and the noise had subsided. The first thing he saw was a pair of blue eyes, like two lights, that belonged to a bearded man sipping maté. The man never stopped looking at him. He was hairy, his black mop barely parted over his bushy brows, his beard and mustache covering his face right up to his cheekbones and hanging down to his chest. His skin, though, was as pale as wax. The complexion of a saint who’s never seen the light outside the church; his blue eyes, which nevertheless illuminated it, were paler even than his skin. His hands, holding the maté gourd, negated his waxen pallor, not with color but with roughness. And despite everything, there was, in those fingers, a hint of piety, of blessing and sacrifice.

They stared at each other for a long time, as if the hirsute man did not want to take advantage of Baltasar’s prostration to say something to which Baltasar would not be able to reply. Each gesture with which the man disturbed his basically immobile posture was, by contrast, dramatic, or even eloquent. His gaze, a slight movement, a shrug conspired to communicate command and dignity all at the same time. Finally, Baltasar was able to ask for a maté. Before uttering a word, he quickly summed up for himself what he understood now that he was back in reality. After observing his host for a few moments — where were they? — he listened to the man’s first words:

“My name is Miguel Lanza. Where we are is the Inquisivi mud. The other man is Baltasar Cárdenas. Out in the hills we’ve got more than a hundred guerrillas and five hundred Indians.”

Lanza lifted a burning rush out of the fire to show a dark Indian standing behind him, who held out a maté to Baltasar Bustos.

“The Indian and I have the same name,” said Baltasar, smiling idiotically.

“We’ll soon find out if you’ve got the same courage,” said Lanza.

“My danger is that I admire everything I’m not.” This is what Baltasar had thought and what he now felt empowered to say.

“Like what?”

“Strength, realism, and cruelty. You might as well know it.”

“You’re the porteño who proclaimed twenty thousand freedoms in the Ayopaya plaza with the priest Muñecas, isn’t that right?”