Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“You poor naïve fool! You did not burn down the Buenos Aires court building, Baltasar. It was the mob. That night they decided to destroy the colonial archives, the registers of racial discrimination, the property exclusions — everything, my dear Baltasar, that this colony’s chain of paper signifies. And remember, it has enslaved as much with words as with branding irons. Baltasar, you did not kill that child. Your thirty candles wouldn’t have been enough to honor a saint!”

“Twenty-five,” said Baltasar. “She was twenty-five then, she must be thirty now…”

“She lived right over there,” said Ríos, turning to point out the palace from where they had stopped, alongside the fountain in the Mercedarians’ plaza, amazed at the hustle and bustle — unusual at eleven o’clock in the evening — in the entranceways, doors, and windows of the house occupied by the Marquis de Cabra, former President of the Royal Council of Chile, and his vanished wife. Torches were seen in window after window, mules and carts were stopped outside the coachhouse door, trunks emerged, black drapes were carried in, a procession of puzzled acolytes paused as they searched for their pastor; the Blessed Sacrament was brought in, carried with proper solemnity; veiled women began to gather, tiny in their flat slippers, enveloped in capes and scarves.

“The doors of the house are wide open, Balta…”

In her bedroom, Ofelia Salamanca had left a box of powder and a silver scraper she used to cleanse her tongue. Also two popular books by Samuel Tissot, one on the disorders that afflict literary and sedentary people and their cure (walks, cinnamon, and fennel tea), the other, simply titled Onanism and Madness. She had also left behind the red, the blood-colored ribbon he’d watched her put around her neck from the balcony that May night in Buenos Aires. The thin line of blood symbolic of the guillotine. Baltasar discreetly slipped the ribbon into his pocket. He looked with distaste at the double bed and was overcome by a pounding wave of jealousy, imagining Ofelia in the arms of her husband, the marquis, who, wrapped in a shroud, was carried, in a perfectly synchronized ceremony, to the same bed from which Baltasar Bustos, no matter how he tried, could not banish the image of the erotic couple. Ofelia Salamanca, her legs spread, astride the skeleton of her husband Cabra, the old goat; the she-goat rubbing the mons Veneris he’d been imagining for five years as bulging yet deep, hairy yet prepubescent, the hidden, monastic sex of Ofelia Salamanca, invisible one moment and fleshy the next, protruding, visible from any angle, reproduced with febrile symmetry behind and in front of the thighs of the desired woman. Possessed by Cabra and how many others?

Baltasar Bustos and Julián Ríos were pushed into a corner of the bedroom when the servants carrying candles entered along with the hired mourners, the acolytes, the curious, the disconcerted priests, and especially the principal actor: Don Leocadio, Marquis de Cabra, who was laid out, wrapped in his shroud, paler than Miguel Lanza, in the same bed where he had enjoyed the love of his wife, Ofelia. Was he really dead? Was he pretending? Did he have an attack after the painful scene at Viceroy Abascal’s party? Baltasar did not want to find out. He approached the marquis’s funereal head and whispered into the dead or alive Marquis de Cabra’s ear, “I love your wife. I burned your son to death, and you will have no other, dead or alive, because in the past five years you’ve lost your virility and are nothing but a senile scarecrow. I will follow your wife to the ends of the world and force her to love me in the name of justice, because she must love a man who is passionately in love with her and would do anything for her.”

It did not matter to him that, either to simulate death or because he really was dead, the Marquis de Cabra’s ears were sealed with wax. But two crystallized tears, as hard as silver, had added another furrow to the wrinkled cheeks of the former President of the Royal Council of Chile.

[3]

I need only a few sheets of paper to end this chapter. One of them is the Marquis de Cabra’s will, worthy of mention for two reasons. The first is that in it he offers a substantial lifetime annuity to the cholo who will every day stand at the corner of Pilón del Molino Quebrado and allow himself to be kicked by any passing Creole. The sagacious husband of Ofelia Salamanca explains that he is guided in this bequest by a desire to alleviate the frustration of all Peruvians bereft of slaves.

The second, more bitter bequest is an uncalled-for, counterproductive, impracticable command. The Marquis de Cabra orders the colonial aristocracy to pillage itself so that the rebels will find nothing.

But where are those rebels in this year of 1815? All sorts of news reaches Buenos Aires, most of it depressing. Bolívar is in exile in Jamaica, and instead of raising armies, he writes letters complaining about our perennially infantile nations, their incapacity to govern themselves, and the distance between our liberal institutions and our customs and character. In the south, Belgrano’s expedition to Upper Peru has failed, and only the resistance of caudillos like Miguel Lanza has prevented the total restoration of colonial rule. Right here in Buenos Aires, Alvear’s directorate has fallen, and the estate owners, merchants, and priests have seized power, persecuting the liberals, confiscating their property, and sentencing them to exile or to death. The saddest news comes at year’s end from Mexico: the rebel priest Morelos has been captured, tried, and sentenced. His severed head is like a black moon clapped onto a lance in San Cristóbal Ecatepec.

Dorrego and I, Varela, get along as best we can, hoping for better times, keeping our eyes open, and reading the letters of our friend Baltasar. Sometimes we write back, but since we don’t really know where he is, we send our letters to the estate of his dead father. Let’s hope they reach him. We learned that Lanza sentenced him to death for desertion; we fix our clocks, and on afternoons when the pampa wind blows, we stand in front of maps of the continent and trace the imaginary movements of nonexistent armies: campaigns that are always dangerous but ultimately triumphant, waged by ideal, phantasmagorical, South American armies …

In this way, Dorrego and I, Varela, transform History into the presence of an absence. Is that another name for ideal perfection?

[1]

“His name is Baltasar Bustos, his family owns an estate — reasonable people, but half savage, like all ranch owners.” “If at least his father were a merchant.” “Is he a good marriage prospect?” “But he fought alongside the mountain rebels in Upper Peru — when did he become a royalist?” “When Miguel Lanza put a price on his head for deserting.” “He says that he’s in love, that he came here looking for the woman.” “That’s not important, but the news he brings from Inquisivi and Jujuy is.” “He’s very open; we know everything about him.” “He doesn’t hide anything from us.” “He knows we’ll crush the rebellion, so he’s doing us a favor.” “He certainly doesn’t look like a guerrilla.” “Your excellency shouldn’t judge by appearances.” “Plump, perfumed, dressed in silks, nearsighted…”

He strolled the salons of Santiago de Chile just as he’d strolled those of Lima, but he did not cut the same figure. Rather, he conformed to the description recorded above by the authorities of the captaincy-general of Chile. What a fuss this Baltasar Bustos made about his search for Ofelia Salamanca, now the widow of the Marquis de Cabra, who had died of bile and apoplexy in Lima! Who had died, it should be noted, in bed. Of course, no one knows if he died before or after his rehearsed death. Was he already dead when they laid him in his wife’s bed? Or did he die there, transforming the rehearsal into reality and the attempt at playfulness into God’s punishment?