Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

He had avoided two things until now: fornication and murder.

And the guerrillas said that an angel protected the porteño cherub Baltasar, who though he never ceased moving and doing things for a single instant, never killed a fellow human being, not even the most detestable Spaniard, never took his pleasure with a woman, no matter how delectable or willing she might be.

Little by little, he came to compensate for these two sins of omission through his loyalty to the troops.

In secret, as he slept on the cot they gave him after they saw how weak, how creole, how much of a porteño he was — none of them knew he was born of the pampa — but also in public, speaking to the other Baltasar, who never said a word to him but at least listened, so he felt he wasn’t going mad, talking to himself, he would say, to himself and to his namesake: “I admire everything I’m not, you know. Strength, realism, and cruelty. My salvation, my silent brother, will be to become the best I can be. That’s why I’m with you.”

“It was an accident.” The Indian’s eyes reproached him.

“Now it’s my wish,” replied Baltasar the creole. “Here I am with you, and I’ll stay with you because I want to. Either way, I’m serving the cause of independence.”

That was his answer to the mystery, the dream, the nausea of El Dorado, that bewitched city where a man could see and hear the woman he loved without being able to touch her: once again, the torture of Tantalus, not in the veiled but immediate reality of a Buenos Aires bedroom, but in a ghostly, mediated evocation that took place inside a mountain of savage witchcraft.

We should mention that this was also his answer to the labors that we, his older brothers, Dorrego and Varela, imposed on our younger brother, comfortably, without running any of the risks to which we exposed our cadet. But where was the dividing line between our orders and young Baltasar’s acceptance? The reply would come not from his distant comrades, Dorrego and I, but from his immediate superior, the chieftain Miguel Lanza.

“I simply want to become the best I can be. What should I do? Is that the way to become one with nature?”

The Indian did not give an answer; neither did the landslides caused by the rains, or the swollen rivers the guerrillas knew to avoid even as they lured the overladen royalists into the current to drown. Miguel Lanza’s men had no uniforms, traveled light, and drew the Spaniards toward the most secret, most dangerous spots in South America, as if to say: Look, this proves the land is ours. You die here. We survive.

Through rationalizations like that, they stifled their own guilt: we are not formal soldiers, we don’t show our faces in daylight, we fight without taking risks, we are nocturnal warriors who grow at night, like the jungle itself.

That was how the conquistadors had survived, and there was something of them in Miguel Lanza, not only because he looked like a seasoned soldier as well as a mystic baptized in blood but because of his life story, which Baltasar Bustos, little by little, over the course of the interminable guerrilla war with its infrequent rest periods, was able to extract from him. He was destitute. He had been left an orphan as a child and was brought up by the Franciscans in their seminary at La Paz. His older brother Gregorio brought banned books into the monastery. “He was like you, Baltasar the creole. He believed what he read. He believed in independence. On July 16, 1809, in La Paz, he joined those who proclaimed emancipation from Spain without hiding behind the mask of Fernando VII. That was the first time he told himself what you believe: the representatives of the people can declare the rights of the people, with or without a Spanish monarchy. The repression carried out by the viceroy Abascal was savage. If the royalists wouldn’t stand for insurgence in the name of Ferdinand VII, what would they do to those who’d shit on the king? Well, what they did to my brother Gregorio: they hung him in the main square of La Paz. I always see in my mind’s eye my dead brother’s head — with that tongue of his that could speak so beautifully hanging down to his chest. What could that voice say now which had taught us younger brothers everything we knew? See how a life and a handful of ideas that belong only to you end up belonging to others, and tell me if what followed was just revenge on my part or the very reason why I’m rebelling.”

“You certainly talk a lot,” the Indian Baltasar would punctuate these conversations. But Miguel Lanza tenderly remembered his second older brother, Manuel Victorio, who followed the war of independence at the point where death cut off Gregorio’s life. His struggle came to a head on the banks of the Totorani River in a hand-to-hand battle without firearms against a Spanish captain, Gabriel Antonio Castro. “They say that afternoon no other sounds were heard along the entire Totorani but the panting of the two warriors, famished, exhausted, covered with wounds, completely alone in their struggle. In the end, both fell dead in the waters of the twilit river. Despite a shared death, their destinies were different. The Spaniards cut off Manuel Victorio’s head, stuck it on a pike, and brought it to La Paz, where it was exhibited as a warning to insurgents and rebels. I looked at it for a long time there, until it rotted and they took it down, until I was old enough to join my brothers’ struggle. Now, creole Baltasar, you tell me whether this war of mine is one of vengeance, conviction, or the fatality of destiny.”

Yes, Baltasar said to his namesake, the Indian caudillo; yes, he said to himself or to Lanza. Call it revenge, conviction, or fate, but it is your destiny. Baltasar understood then, and quickly wrote it down, so that Dorrego and I would receive his words someday, that just as Miguel Lanza spun a destiny for himself out of the entwined threads of liberty and fate, he, Baltasar Bustos, would create his own. How to admit, weeks, months after joining the guerrillas, that Miguel Lanza the orphan had a new brother, this time younger than he, Baltasar the creole, heir, without wanting it, to the lives of Gregorio and Manuel Victorio Lanza? Because Lanza, after telling him the personal reasons for his revolt, revealed the objective reasons for his military strategy as they stood over maps rolled out in the dust and held down by lanterns stolen from some hacienda or convent — because everything here was stolen, though Miguel Lanza explained: “All I do is circulate dormant capital. I am an agent of liberal economics.”

The maps told another story, and as he looked them over, listening to Lanza and noting his reasons, Bustos, barely liberated by experience, began to feel he was a prisoner. The poles of the revolution in southern America, according to Lanza, were in viceregal Lima and revolutionary Buenos Aires. “We’ve been going at it now for six years: Lima can’t beat Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires can’t beat Lima. The two powers cancel each other out. We’re right between them: the guerrilla fighters of Upper Peru. Buenos Aires is a long way off. Colonial oppression is right at hand. We have to keep up the guerrilla war. The royalist forces are here, and so are we. You and yours, Bustos, should come, help out, give speeches. But don’t lose sight of reality. There are three armies here. Your people from Buenos Aires don’t know how to fight in the mountains. The royalist has to fight. We mountaineers are the only ones who have to fight and also know how to fight here.”

If he, Baltasar Bustos, felt the need to talk about laws, injustice, and ideals, he should also note how guerrilla freedom worked — it was the very inhabitants of the place who made up the troop, they elected the chief, they disciplined themselves to serve the cause. The liberty he wanted for his great city was perhaps not the same as the liberty the Indians and mestizos of Upper Peru wanted. But if down there liberty became one with the law that proclaimed it, here, Lanza went on, liberty was inseparable from an equality that had never before been known in these lands.