Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“That’s right, and I assume my orders have been carried out.”

Lanza stared at him without changing expression. Then laughter burst forth like a vein of silver from between his teeth: his mouth opened; a guffaw exploded; tears of laughter rolled down the short span between his blue eyes and his black beard as if down a long-dry channel. Again, he picked up the burning reed to light up Baltasar Cárdenas’s dark face. The Indian was not laughing. “Just look at him,” said Lanza, choking on his unfamiliar glee. “I’m dying of laughter, but he’s not. I know your proclamations are nothing but words, and they make me laugh, but the Indian doesn’t know that. He took them seriously. And he won’t forgive you for them.”

Baltasar Cárdenas took a step forward and, with the toe of his spurred boot, shoved Baltasar Bustos back on his straw mat.

“You owe your life to us,” said the Indian in answer to Baltasar’s puzzled look. “Your Buenos Aires battalion scattered,” Lanza explained. “You were left between the Spaniards and us. If the Spaniards had taken you, you’d be dead right now. So give thanks you ended up with us.”

“Go on, give thanks,” said the other Baltasar, who was just about to prod the officer from Buenos Aires one more time. But Lanza stopped him, “We’re brothers in this calvary,” he reminded both Baltasars, “so let our offenses be forgotten so we may abound in virtues.”

“Tell me your reasons now, quickly, and I’ll tell you mine,” Miguel Lanza went on, suddenly serious. “So we can get this over with and understand each other.”

Baltasar Bustos closed his eyes. A rivulet of blood ran through his lips, and he could say nothing more. Perhaps they would understand his silence, and the sleep that followed it, as an honorable reiteration of what he had managed to say earlier.

“I admire everything I’m not.”

During the days following this night, Baltasar tried to recognize the physical characteristics of the camps where he stopped, but they moved constantly from place to place. He discovered that his cot was a stretcher and that Miguel Lanza’s guerrilla group never stayed anywhere longer than forty hours. They were moving through unknown territory; but Lanza and the Indian leader, Cárdenas, seemed to know it well: the valleys, the plains they crossed as they expropriated crops, the passes, the crevasses and wrinkles in the mountains, and, suddenly, the rope bridges that led them down to the bottom of the jungle and the bottom of the bottom, the mud flats, the mud of the Inquisivi that the guerrilla leader had spoken of.

The landscape changed constantly; Lanza’s guerrillas had to change their ways, too. What was permanent in this? When Baltasar saw Lanza again, at dawn, standing by a labyrinth of peaks that the night before had looked from a distance like a half-closed fan, he remembered Lanza’s words: We’re going to give you our reasons.

That wouldn’t be the last time that Baltasar Bustos would hear Miguel Lanza tell his life story. His Indian namesake always stood behind Lanza and would interrupt him when he felt he was talking too much. For the other Baltasar, the Indian, speech was superfluous, an excessive effort. There were so many things waiting to be done that saying them was unnecessary. As he regained his strength, Baltasar the creole gradually took part in the labors of the mountain troops. They interrupt communications. They kidnap messengers. They collect rations and arms. They attack at night. By day they vanish (this morning they’re standing before the fan of mountains, they’ve come back from fighting, they will have some bacon and maté before going to sleep). They attack again, then bury themselves in the hills, luring the royalist forces toward their lairs in the jungle, attacking the Spanish rear guard sometimes and the advance guard others; they harass the Spaniards’ flanks, attacking their baggage again and again, their supplies, their mail, their gold, stopping to melt down church bells and make them into cannons, making powder and shot from the nitrates and the lead in the very mines which supplied Spain with the wealth it squandered and which now were the powder magazine of the independentist insurgents: first the war must be won, then justice and laws will come, Lanza repeated from time to time to Bustos in the midst of all this activity. Then he reminded Bustos:

“Whenever you porteños come here to the jungle and the mountains to implement the revolution, you make a mess of things. It may be that your porteño chiefs know more than our Indian chiefs, but savage troops, whether from Buenos Aires or from the Chaco, want women, money, and the pure enjoyment of violence. You, Baltasar Bustos, are the victim of your predecessors, who came here proclaiming liberty, equality, and fraternity, while their soldiers raped, robbed, and burned everything down. Just like ours. But we don’t put on airs. We want independence for ourselves here and for America in general, and we know the price we’ll have to pay. You don’t seem to. You’d like a clean little war, but there is none to be had. The mestizos in Potosí rose up against the troops from Buenos Aires and killed two hundred porteños then and there. What do you want us to think, my young friend? You people are either rogues or fools. I don’t understand you anymore. The illustrious General Belgrano, the truest hero of the revolution, came up here and ordered the Potosí treasury blown up to cut off the source of Spanish power. Fortunately, your namesake the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas was there to cut the burning fuse, which was moving toward the powder barrels faster than a greyhound. What use would the Potosí treasures have been to anyone, blown all to shit by Belgrano’s revolutionary zeal? The fabled Pueyrredón, who’s president of Argentina now, was wiser: he ran off with all the Potosí gold he could find, a million pesos in gold and silver he removed from the same treasury house and loaded onto two hundred pack mules. So the rebel mestizos killed as many of his men as he had mules, just to settle accounts with him. See what I mean? Either you’re all really stupid or really clever. We’re better off governing ourselves! Long live the Republic of the Inquisivi!”

“Viva! Viva!” chorused his entire band, who seemed to listen to their chief even when he spoke in a low voice as he educated Baltasar Bustos, the most recent recruit to this incessant war in which no quarter was ever given and about which it was impossible to say “it started up again” because it never really died down. Viva Inquisivi and its leader, our General Miguel Lanza! Long live the creole Baltasar Bustos! Just like them, side by side with them, he attacked, retreated, pretended to be losing so as to catch the Spaniards off guard, robbed Pueyrredón and Belgrano’s gold, stole letters and thought how much time it would have taken the ones he wrote his adored friends, Varela (me) and Dorrego, to reach Buenos Aires (if they ever reached Buenos Aires). We counted the days we lived without our younger brother, the brother we’d sent — severe comrades but convinced we were doing the right thing — to get experience, become a man, compare books to life, while we collected clocks. Baltasar was a man: he never hesitated to ford a swollen river, to drop a church bell from the tower down to the atrium to melt it down and make a copper cannon, to burn his face in the sun and his hands with the nitrates. It was that Baltasar Bustos who stole chickens, equipment, ammunition, who did everything but kill a man or take a woman whether she was willing or not. He became identical to all the others; he ate what they ate, slept when they slept. He was different only in that the others weren’t living, killing, stealing, or risking their lives for a distant woman named Ofelia Salamanca.