Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

An enlightened cleric like Julián Ríos could not escape his own contradiction; therefore he could understand it in others. His contradiction was both to approve and to condemn the riots that led to the burning down of Esquilache’s mansion in Madrid when the decree to expel the Jesuits was published and the people laid at the feet of the Bourbon court all the evils unleashed in the absence of the Society of Jesus. The Esquilache riot had its touches of comedy, but for Ríos they only confirmed, in his own soul, the conflict between maintaining order through pragmatic, evolving solutions and transforming everything through violence, risking thereby a fall back to a level lower than the one that promoted the revolt but also taking the opportunity to achieve things that otherwise would never be realized.

These thoughts vexed the tutor as he led Baltasar, invisible under his cape, out of the viceregal palace. One part of him was asking (and so he said to Bustos): “Where are you staying? You must rest. Let me take you to your lodgings; we’ll talk there. I’m concerned about your future. What are you going to do? Why don’t you go back home and take care of your own? There is no other politics than that of the soil; all politics is local, but I don’t know anything about you, about what you’ve been doing since you were a boy.” The other half of him pulled him toward the palace occupied by the Marquis de Cabra in the plaza of the Mercedarian church. But first they took a long, roundabout walk to the other side of the river, so as to converse at some ease.

Leading Baltasar Bustos through the night streets of this always dangerous, secret city fashioned of the incompatible clays of arrogance and resentment, which made it fierce in its capacity to humiliate the weak and do violence to the powerful, Julián Ríos allowed himself the observation that all a thief of the kind that abounds in this capital of social extremes would need would be a jug of water and a spoon to open a hole in Lima’s mud walls. Lima: improvident, with no long-range projects to concentrate the will of its citizens; a city wasting itself in waiting all day, yet again, for a rain which was always threatened but never came, because a real tropical storm would melt away this city with no stone structures all the way to the Avenue of the Discalced Carmelites, from which the Amancoes hills could be seen.

“Someday a huge rainstorm is going to come down,” Ríos said to his pupil. But, given the circumstances, Baltasar seemed even more depressed than the Marquis de Cabra himself. There appeared to be one cause in both cases: Ofelia Salamanca.

“How are you? Have you traveled? I haven’t seen you since you were a boy!” said the tutor to his disciple as they stood by the tiny convent of St. Liberata.

They stopped in the plaza crowded with mules and drovers arriving from the mountains or setting out for the desert. The fresh scent of mint, coriander, parsley, and verbena prevailed with difficulty over the thick smells of wet wool, hides fresh from the slaughterhouse, spurs that still stank of the mine, steaming excrement, and the long urination of beasts of burden. Baltasar, his strong hands, longing for mercy, on his old teacher’s shoulders, told Ríos the story of his life since they’d last seen each other: his reading Rousseau, his incandescent faith in the May revolution, his private decision not to join the rebellion without first returning home, to his own tradition, and to the confrontation with what he was and where he came from: and then, the campaign of Upper Peru.

“With these hands, I have killed. And don’t say, C’est la guerre, Father.”

“As for me, I no longer have a personal history. My history has no meaning outside History. How sad. But the world has made us this way.”

“No one could erase the sign of the priesthood from you, not even God. Could you hear my confession?”

“I could. I could even tell you your confession. Don’t think it’s my pride speaking when I say that. Put simply: in my order each individual is something more than himself.”

“The first man I killed was an Indian. After that, it didn’t matter that I went on killing. I was a good guerrilla. Lanza is a brave man. I don’t blame him for anything. Only that one action was blameworthy. The first. It was bound to happen. I killed someone, and that someone was an Indian.”

“You know that we Jesuits armed the Guaranís in Paraguay. Thanks to those weapons, no one crossed into Indian territory: not the viceroys, not the traffickers in alcohol, not even the slavers. The Indians stopped using money, the land belonged to the community, the work day was six hours, everyone prospered, and no one was unjust. Does it sound like utopia to you? It wasn’t. The thirty-three settlements we created, from the Paraná to the Río Negro and from Belém to Paysandú, were only possible because of a political and military act: Philip IV’s decision to give the Guaranís weapons. If that hadn’t happened, those Indians, like all the others, would have been exterminated by alcohol, forced labor, the mita, and disease. An armed utopia! No money, but lots of firearms. But all you need is one musket for Utopia to cease being utopia. The seed of all evil is justifying the death of a fellow man.”

“Was it a community?”

Ríos said it was, but Baltasar that night would not have set out for utopia or any other community without stopping first for this frank conversation with a person he respected. The solitude of his time on the pampa, culminating in the death of José Antonio Bustos and the final break with his sister, Sabina; the solitude of the months spent with the guerrillas in the Inquisivi, where brotherhood was nipped by Miguel Lanza’s “to-the-last-man” decision: we all may die here, but no one leaves. The solitude of distance and time — five years already! without seeing Dorrego and Varela and feeling that they lived in the mad, loving, tight fraternity of the Café de Malcos. All that was not compensated for by a soiree in viceregal Lima, a tacitly perverse invitation from two young priests, or the sovereign indifference of a beautiful, brilliant dark woman who succumbed to the temptation of a man who certainly did not deserve her. And, finally, the absence of Ofelia Salamanca embittered him, as did the ugly rumor surrounding that absence: adultery, prejudice, cruelty, ostentatious frivolity.

“I’ve had the feeling that I was totally alone during these past years,” Baltasar said later to Ríos. “Now I’ve just lost myself in other people. I don’t feel free either way, alone or in company. I need society or I wouldn’t miss it. But when I’m in society, I feel sick. I find scenes like the one we witnessed tonight repugnant.”

“That’s because you want to change society,” said Julián Ríos. “But such desires are very costly. You will only feel free when the society you want to change is so perfect it no longer needs you.”

Baltasar Bustos asked if he had any other options but to fight for the impossible or to conform to what already existed. Ríos begged him to offer now what he said he was seeking and what he was sharing with his Buenos Aires friends: a bit of sincerity. For whose sake were they going through all these difficulties? Who was the individual channel of all this anguish?

Now, walking quickly among weeping willows arranged without symmetry, in a night whose fogs had lifted and whose Pacific stars adorned the only beautiful sky in Lima, which is the sky veiled to the light of day, Baltasar Bustos told the tutor what had taken place on the night of May 24–25 in Buenos Aires. The youth’s shame mounted as the tutor’s laughter grew louder, and Baltasar, incredulous, fell physically into his own trap: his body, his words, his energetic pace now that he’d lost so much weight in the campaign with Lanza were, in that moment, the worst trap, because they left him no gestures, no convincing corporeal responses to that laugh, which could not be injurious, coming from whom it came, but which, despite everything, was just that: there was a slap in each guffaw, a sting in every smile.