Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“Maybe they’ll never know it unless they use their strength to implement the law,” replied our younger brother, Baltasar, following our advice: favor what contradicts you, to put your ideas to the test and strengthen them.

“They want to change their lives, not their laws,” said Lanza, speaking like Bustos in the Café de Malcos.

“Maybe they won’t get either thing and will go on living as always, in misery,” concluded Baltasar, because events were piling up on him, stealing his words, adding him to the cryptic, disguised, enigmatic strength of Miguel Lanza. They were making their way along a road of lances crowned with severed heads, heads like Miguel Lanza’s, all balanced in unnerving plasticity on the hollow reed lances with steel points knotted to them that the guerrillas carried on the steep paths taking them this time to the bare, windy peaks where there was no vegetation, not even enough to hang a rebel, before they tumbled down the slate slopes again to the tropical forests in the depths of the gorges, always with the intent of luring the Spaniards into an ambush, making them believe that they, the guerrillas, had been defeated. Thus, by slowly bleeding the royalist forces, they were devastating them, forcing them to commit acts of repression, to exterminate the villages from which the guerrillas, whom they called thieves, bandits, murderers, and mad dogs, came. Entire towns disappeared, and only the roads to them remained, until they, too, were devoured by nature, ever moving, ceaseless — overflowing rivers no one could harness, flooded lands, gangrenous forests with no one to prune them, snow-covered mountains, dying thickets, disappeared towns …

All of them fell during that year Baltasar Bustos spent with Miguel Lanza’s band. Like the landscape around him, the towns, and the men he met there, he, too, changed. Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas fell in Larecaja, from whence he closed the road to Lima; Vicente Camargo fell on the way to Potosí, from whence the way to Buenos Aires was open. Padilla and his guerrilla wife — their last words were “This war is eternal!”—fell. The generous Warnes fell, and when he did, the sanctuary he offered in times of defeat closed up. Only Lanza refused to admit defeat.

One day he appeared in camp. His blue eyes were as black as his beard.

He said simply, “They’ve killed Baltasar Cárdenas, they’ve killed our brother.”

The Indian’s head was paraded around the plaza at Cochabamba and then thrown to the hogs. But Lanza did not leave off intercepting communications, capturing couriers, stockpiling food, gunpowder, lead, horses, feed, medicine, alcohol, and even women — although they were becoming a very scarce commodity. On the other hand, the horses’ natural inclinations caused them to join the guerrillas’ herd. Runaways, ownerless, they straggled into the micro-republic of Inquisivi from no one knew where. Their bodies gave off the steam of the jungle. This altitude wasn’t the best place for them. What were they doing here?

“They’re trying to tell us something,” Baltasar, the only Baltasar left in the band, imagined.

“Don’t say it,” said Lanza, now with black eyes, as if the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas had given him his eyes when he died.

“But you don’t even know what I’m going to say,” exclaimed Baltasar, with exasperated logic.

“You’re one of us. We end up reading each other’s thoughts.”

“They’re inviting us to saddle up and go with them, far away, to abandon this land which we’ve crossed inch by inch and which we know perfectly well is hostile, dry, and not worth a shit?”

“That’s it,” said Miguel Lanza. “Don’t even think it. This war’s never going to end. It’s our fate. To fight to the death. Never to leave here. And not to let anyone out once they get in.”

Then he repeated, so there would be no doubt about his meaning, “It’s very difficult to get here, so it should be impossible to get out.”

He said it as if, despite their great friendship, he feared that a deserter — which is what anyone who walked out on Miguel Lanza alive would be — would tell down there in the cities, tell the porteños or the Spaniards, who Miguel Lanza was, how and where he lived, and what roads to take to get to him. Miguel Lanza’s secret intention was known to them all; it was the unwritten law of the Inquisivi. We’ll move around all the time, never stop, but never leave the perimeter of the mountains, the jungle, and the river. And all his soldiers should think the same thing. Without exception. Not even the little creole Baltasar.

Yet it was the arrival of the runaways that made this rule explicit. It was only then that Miguel Lanza stated categorically to Baltasar what Baltasar already knew and accepted day by day as part of his integration into the band of guerrillas and into the wild nature of Upper Peru. They would be together until the end. But the decision was his, Baltasar’s. It was a pact he made with himself. Miguel Lanza made a serious mistake when he told him out loud, when the runaway horses came:

“He who becomes a member of my band never leaves it. Don’t even think it, Baltasar. Neither you nor anyone else leaves here. We’re all citizens of Miguel Lanza’s Inquisivi until the final victory or death.”

That night Baltasar Cárdenas’s head was brought to camp, stolen by someone who supported the guerrillas. It was brought in by the squad assigned to lure the Spaniards into the Vallegrande sand pits and then to the jungle, where anyone who enters gets lost.

Someone had gouged out the Indian’s eyes.

Baltasar Bustos glanced over at Miguel Lanza, whose black eyes were once blue, and he understood all.

That night, as he had on his first day, he fell asleep shaking with fever. He tried to write to Dorrego and me in Buenos Aires to ask if we had ever considered this matter of destiny; he, our younger brother, our young comrade, had just realized that, without his being aware of it, a year had passed in which he’d followed a destiny which he thought was his but which wasn’t his, which was in fact the destiny Miguel Lanza sought to impose on him. The price was the reward we would understand better than anyone: to be brothers. He would expand his brotherhood at the cost of his personal liberty. Which is why he wrote to us, his real brothers: a minimal brotherhood made up of only three men. Baltasar Bustos wrote us to say he had no reason to live out the truncated destiny of another set of brothers: the Lanzas — Miguel, Gregorio, and Manuel Victorio.

He would admit he admired everything he wasn’t. And he hoped his salvation lay in being the best he could be as circumstances unfolded and multiplied, pressuring him. He wanted to be the best he could be in this collision between what he proposed for himself and what others imposed on him.

He remembered the distant, feverish discussions in the Café de Malcos back when the revolution was imminent. Seeing himself with the aid of hindsight, Baltasar Bustos knew now that he had been less sure of his ideals than he was eager to impose them on others. Or eager to punish those who didn’t share them. Baltasar’s ideals mattered not at all to Miguel Lanza, but he did take seriously Baltasar’s intention to impose them on others. Because, if Baltasar was right, wasn’t Miguel Lanza equally right when he confused the destiny of a single man with endless, repetitive, tedious war without quarter? And at the end of this calvary Lanza and his followers could only glimpse a claustrophobic paradise: to live within fixed boundaries, not to yield an inch of what they’d conquered with so much zeal and at such sacrifice, to convert the isolated, repetitive, besieged fatality of a land that wasn’t worth shit into a supreme value of existence?