Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

In that instant, Baltasar Bustos saw Miguel Lanza’s destiny as that of one of the heroes of ancient Iberian Numantia, who chose to throw themselves on Roman swords rather than surrender or compromise the purity of their struggle.

That being the case, who was the real idealist? Miguel Lanza, locked within the circle of his struggle to the death? Or Baltasar Bustos, who proposed an ideal but who now also understood the struggle that ideal demanded? The bad thing for him that night was that he could not understand — he wrote to Dorrego and me — if the struggle compromised and postponed the ideal indefinitely or if the ideal, ultimately, was not worth it and deserved to be defeated by human reality, the hunger for action and movement that justified Miguel Lanza’s life.

“Life, death. What a short distance and what a short span of time between them. Tell me now, my faithful friends Manuel Varela and Xavier Dorrego, have we made a mistake, was my father right, could we, through compromise, patience, and tenacity, have saved ourselves the spilling of this blood? Perhaps, if we hadn’t taken up arms, we would have suffered only the exemplary holocaust of the meek. But there was no one more violent than those who today accuse us of violence toward them: our time-honored executioners, whispers the voice, creole like my own, of the deplorable, admirable madman Miguel Lanza, dictating my destiny to me tonight, a destiny identical to his so he won’t be left alone now that his own brothers have been killed. And in understanding this I understand enough, Dorrego, Varela, to understand that my destiny will cease to be my own between Lanza and his guerrilla fighters, because my options will shrink to one only — not the struggle for independence but death in the name of an ideal; or a cloistered life so that Lanza won’t be left brotherless, alone with this enemy nature.

“Another voice speaks to me, but secretly; it’s the dead voice of the eyeless head of my namesake Baltasar Cárdenas.

“When the Spaniards fell into the trap Miguel Lanza prepared for them in Vallegrande, I was among the first to throw myself on them. I said goodbye to the angel of peace who protected me until then, and I gave myself to his dark comrade, the angel of death. I discovered they were twins. I joined in the hand-to-hand fighting that scattered us over the sandy ground, isolating us from each other, royalists and guerrillas; but during the exchange of saber cuts and dagger thrusts, I realized that if I was in fact going to kill an enemy, he couldn’t be my equal, my fellow man, but a non-fellow man, my real enemy brother, not because he was fighting in the ranks of the Spaniards but because he was really different, other, Indian.

“My glasses were streaked with mud in that mortal Upper Peru spring, and wiping them clean with the sleeve of my coat, I sought out the coppery face, the features of this person who was weak, even if physically strong. Weak when confronted by my reasoning, my learning, my theories, my refinements, my ways … Weak because his time was not mine but that of the magic, spectral city Simón Rodríguez had shown me. He was other because he dreamed of other myths, which were not my myths, weak because he did not speak my language, different because he did not understand me … because in me he saw his enemy, the master, the overseer, the rapacious, irredeemable white man.

“I embraced him wholeheartedly, as if in killing him I was also loving him and he was suddenly the consummation of the two acts I refused to perform in the guerrilla fighting. Killing and fornicating. I looked at the glassy yellow eyes of the Indian fighting on the side of the Spaniards, and I did not let my partiality confuse me. I wasn’t killing him for being a royalist but because he was Indian, weak, poor, different … I deprived him forever of his destiny without knowing if I could really (forever) make him part of mine …

“Embracing him, I sank my knife as deep as I could into his dark belly, his guts as hot as mine even if they were fed from a different kitchen. In these parts, it takes water a long time to boil — I thought absurdly as I killed him, hugging him around the neck, burying my knife in his stomach — and it takes hours to boil potatoes …

“I killed for the first time. It was over in a flash. And I felt the stupor of still being alive.

“I killed the Indian in a secluded spot. No one saw me commit the crime. I thought of Baltasar Cárdenas and the way the Spaniards made his death memorable. Tearing out his eyes and sticking his head up in the plaza.

“I wanted to make the death of this anonymous Indian soldier memorable, too. He was my first dead man.

“I quickly got undressed. I was completely naked in the mud and the rain, which had started up again and which washed away the blood and dirt of the battle.

“Then I undressed the dead Indian. I did it slowly. I put my clothes on him, carefully, without worrying that my dead man was small and my clothes were grotesquely big for him.

“Only when I saw him there, stretched out in the mud, washed clean, like me, by the rains, did I feel that I had done my duty by my first dead man and that I could kill from then on with a clear conscience, without thinking twice about it. He was my propitiatory victim, my memorable dead man.

“I put on the Indian’s clothes, which are cut large and made of thick stuff to protect him from the cold nights of the uplands.

“And then I set about memorizing his face.

“But I could not etch his face into my mind. I saw his face as identical to all the other Indian faces. Identical one to the other. Indistinguishable to my urban, white eye.

“In that case, what face could I give this victim of mine to make it truly memorable? I had scarcely thought this when I stopped seeing the face of the dead Indian and saw my own as the face of a glorious warrior. It made me laugh. I tried to transpose the face of my victory on the battlefield onto the Indian soldier dressed in my clothes, lying at my feet. That, my friends, I could do. The mask of glory passed over without any difficulty from my face to his, covering it with a rictus of horror and violence. I didn’t have to see myself in a mirror to know that now the Indian and I finally shared the same face.

“It was the face of violence.

“I fled the place as soon as I felt that both faces, mine and that of my victim, were changing once again. It was no longer glory. It wasn’t even violence. Once the masks of war were gone, the face that united us was that of death.

“I had paid my debt to Miguel Lanza.”

That night, Baltasar Bustos set aside the things he considered his — a leather document case, his glasses — and wrote out the pages I have quoted. Then he tucked the letters destined for Buenos Aires between his belt and his skin, and that night, while the troops were celebrating the victory of Vallegrande with drinking and song, he left Ayopaya and the dying fires of Miguel Lanza’s camp. Leaving the same way he’d arrived, he stretched out over the ribs of one of the runaway horses and held on for dear life. He set this member of the fabulous wild herd loose in the hope the horse would find the road back to his home: the pampa, his father, Sabina, the gauchos …

[2]

José Antonio Bustos was laid out in the drawing room, the same place they’d held the wake for his wife, the Basque María Teresa Echegaray, ten years before. But while the wife had died as she’d lived — oblivious — her husband had announced to their son, Baltasar: “If you find me dead with a candle in my hand, it means I finally came around to your way of thinking. If you find me with my hands crossed over my chest, entwined in a scapulary, it means that I held on to my ideas and died fighting yours. Try to convince me.”