Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

The next morning, with the troops assembled in front of the Franciscan convent, San Martín put at the head of the column the Commander and declared Patroness of the Army of the Andes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. At the center of that figure decked out like a doll, as triangular as the beloved sex of a woman, Baltasar replaced the face veiled in the white of maternal virginity with the visage of Ofelia Salamanca, smiling at him as if he were everything — the owner of the plaything, the lover of the woman, the son of the mother.

[5]

Echagüe gave General San Martín a detailed description of the Los Patos route, the one the bulk of the troops, commanded by Bernardo O’Higgins, would take. South of them, Colonel Las Heras would advance along the shorter Uspallata road with the artillery. Several smaller columns would spread north and south of these two to confirm the impression that the army was attacking Chile along a wide front, from Mount Aconcagua to Valdivia. They would thus divert the royalist forces, which were already demoralized by the campaign of rumors spread by San Martín like a fan of deception from La Rioja and the pass at Comecaballos to San Juan and the Pismanta route, down to the south, through the passes of Portillo and Planchón, where the Puechuenche Indians had already betrayed the patriots. Regular infantrymen and members of the militia, grenadiers, and lancers from the Province of Buenos Aires set out, following the routes of this great invasion, unprecedented in the New World. Of the 5,423 men in the army, only 4,000 were combatants. The rest made up the supply columns: grain wagons, cattle, sappers, bakers, lantern bearers, water wagons, and a carriage laden with dispatches and maps, pulled by six horses — all of which climbed to an altitude almost four miles above sea level, where they stared into the face of the Andes, which dominated those who sought to dominate them. These first men, the Adams of independence, their feet resting on an earth of volcanic ruins and extinct glaciers, contemplated the brown face and snowy crown of this dead god. Dead or not, he always seemed about to renew an interrupted catastrophe, latent in a nature which on the morning of San Martín’s crossing to Chile trembled with the memories of devastated worlds and the promises of worlds to come, worlds these men, San Martín’s five thousand, would never see.

Would they see, instead, the fratricidal war prophesied by the general, the new countries in ruins, destroyed by their own offspring? During the ascent to this highest temple of the Andes, Baltasar Bustos sought out the eyes of his friends Echagüe and Arias as well as those of José de San Martín himself. Occupied as they were in the effort to scale the heights, to give orders, exulting at the grandiose spectacle, inebriated perhaps with the will to triumph in battle and the will to arms of this incomparable army, did they have time, as Baltasar did, to look into their hearts and think about the moment in which rhetoric would be split from action? A sublime moment, and no one should spoil it. Let those who had the privilege of being Americans and of being on the roof of America in the company of the liberator of America exult in it in the name of the generations to come.

They slept. They drank from their canteens. Some even had themselves shaved by an impromptu barber so the Spaniards wouldn’t think the army was made up of savage gauchos from the pampa. The nights were freezing, and they were grateful for the blankets stolen from the good people of Mendoza. The cannons passed in single file, and the Indians carried the gear. In the rear guard could be heard the lowing of the cattle bent down under the load of the supplies. Some men collapsed, fainting, vomiting, suffering from altitude sickness. No guitars were heard on that heroic night, although someone did sing a vidalita, a sad Argentine love song. San Martín dreamed he had stilts and could cross the mountains in one stride.

They started the ascent on January 18 and on February 2 began the descent; on the fourth, they encountered a royalist detachment in a mountain pass called Achupallas, one hundred soldiers of the king who couldn’t stand up to the bare-saber charge of Juan Echagüe. From that moment on, the army’s two columns raced from the Aconcagua to Chile’s central valley. On February 12, by moonlight, they were all running downhill toward a clash with Marcó del Pont’s royalist troops at Chacabuco. It was by moonlight that the three friends, Baltasar, Francisco, and Juan, looked at each other for the last time, unable to shake hands, unable to embrace, unable even to say another word to each other. O’Higgins’s orders were: overwhelm the enemy, surround him; he’s stationed himself right in the center, so we can do it — make a circle of death. The cavalry began the attack with O’Higgins along Cuesta Nueva, the Spaniards’ right flank. This gave Soler time to come in later and destroy what remained of the enemy’s left-flank rear guard. The three friends were among the first to attack on the left, and this was a war of saber against saber, hand-to-hand combat amid the clash of cavalry, closely followed by the infantry, who carried their sabers in their teeth so they could climb on one another’s shoulders to get over the tree-trunk roadblocks erected by the enemy. The horses leapt over the parapets. The brave Juan Echagüe fell as he made a jump, and Baltasar saw his friend’s head battered. In another charge, a musket ball stained the handsome Father Arias’s black cassock with his own red blood. Baltasar charged, his glasses fogged, their metal frame wrapped tightly around his irritated, burning ears. He tried to leave his heart a blank, to keep the pain from encrusting itself there; yet, with his saber, he inscribed in his mind an involuntary act of thanksgiving that it was not he who had fallen. Baltasar Bustos wrote a testament like a lightning flash in which he left to himself the memory of the dead: he inherited his fallen friends. The death of a young soldier, handsomer and braver than the rest. The death of a young priest, handsomer and more pious than the rest. Baltasar Bustos bequeathed himself their lives, giving thanks for not being as handsome, brave, or pious as they. He was alive and could live for his enigma, Tantalus’s passion, fleeting and untouchable. Death on the battlefield determined him, in that instant, to wring all he could out of his own life before perishing like his friends. Perhaps, as well, to hasten the moment that would reunite him with them.

The night of the battle of Chacabuco, San Martín’s bugler blew so hard they say his brains flew out his ears.

[6]

Standing before the bodies of Father Arias and Captain Echagüe in the steepleless cathedral of the Chilean capital, which the liberating troops entered on February 14, General San Martín said to Baltasar Bustos:

“We lost only twelve men. A pity these two had to be among them.”

“How many did the enemy lose?” asked Baltasar without looking at San Martín; he was grieving over the loss of his two friends and over the general’s words, as if his pain extended to the Liberator’s heart, which he had thought frozen.

“Five hundred. Chacabuco cost them Chile and Peru. They are no longer colonies of Spain.”

Baltasar was tempted to say “What I lost is greater than two countries,” but San Martín told him to take a good look at the faces of his dead friends, because soon he would see not the faces of friends dead in a just cause and in the glory of the battle for independence but the faces of brothers killed in fratricidal wars for power. Baltasar asked if that was as absolutely certain as San Martín’s words led him to believe, words that reminded him of those uttered by a pessimist very different from San Martín, a Spanish council president. San Martín interrupted him: “We joined together to beat the Spaniards. We saw that if we were divided they would beat us. All I ask, Bustos, my friend, is that you realize this and that you be aware of the danger of a lack of unity. That lack of unity may well be our undoing; we have to create institutions where there are none. That takes time, clear thinking, and clean hands. We may think that laws, because they are separate from reality, make reality unreal. It isn’t so. We are going to be divided by reality and by law, by the will to federation against the will to centralized power. We’ve gone out on the pampa and now we’re left without a roof over our heads. But that’s no reason to stop breathing free air and to stay indoors forever. All I ask is that you realize what the risks are. No, I am not a fatalist. But I don’t want to be blind, either. See things as I see them, Bustos, my friend. Decide to be, along with me, a real citizen and renounce forever, as I do now before your dead friends, the possibility of being king, emperor, or devil.”