Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“Don’t betray me. I recognized you from the party in Lima.”

She swore not to say who Baltasar was. And she knew how to keep a secret. He did want to know how she had come to this house from the salons of the viceroyalty, did he not? Baltasar said nothing. She thanked him for his discretion but promised him: “When you come back, I’ll tell you everything.”

But now, she added quickly, with an expression of mourning that seemed to be the very face of evening, which glittered between her flesh and her dark robes, giving light to death, he had to go on to Mérida and from there go up to the mountains, to Páramo, the cold barren plain, and then, at Pico del Aguila, turn around and come back here.

“Will I find her there?”

“I cannot guarantee it. You will find her legend, in any case.”

“That I already know. It’s sung, along with my own.”

“About that woman you desire, no one knows the truth.”

“Then how will I know it?”

“I think by looking for her, even if you don’t find her.”

“Did you meet her in Lima, Luz María?”

“Never say that name again. I am not that person any longer.”

[2]

These words intensified Baltasar’s hunger. Without his glasses, he did not see well, but his other senses — smell, especially, and hearing — were more intense than ever. As he set out on his new journey, he felt unable to distinguish what he managed to see from what he smelled, heard, and, ultimately, what he dreamed. In Upper Peru, he’d once said he was afraid to admire everything he wasn’t, simply for that reason. But now a swift concatenation of songs — would songs always be the fastest means of communication in this vast, sprawling continent? — offered Baltasar Bustos the image of a man who was and was not himself: physically he was not that man, although in his soul, the moving mirror of the times he was living, he was. The passion commemorated in the songs was real; who knows if the story of a hero who used war to compensate for his mournful lack of love was, as well. But no melody — Peruvian waltz, cueca, cumbia, vidalita —told the truth he’d communicated to two fathers, his own and the Jesuit tutor Julián Ríos, and to two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela. Of course, we were so far away, so involved with our clocks and our Buenos Aires politics — governments fell, warlords from the provinces invaded, anarchy took over our dreams — that we didn’t even remember the legend of our friend Baltasar and the beautiful Ofelia. Two other friends, whose life and death filled us with envy and zeal, the priest Arias and Lieutenant Echagüe, died without knowing Baltasar’s secret: the kidnapping and substituting of the two babies. That provided some relief to our battered pride. We had started to become Argentines without realizing it.

But we did realize that in seeking Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar Bustos was seeking not only to satisfy a passion but also to receive a pardon.

And now, climbing by mule from the deep valleys and through the narrow passes of the Mérida mountains to the crenellated retaining walls of the foothills of the Andes, he asked forgiveness for one last time. Forgive me, Ofelia Salamanca, for what I did to your child.

And what about the black baby? Wasn’t Baltasar going to ask forgiveness — out of politeness — for what he did to him? No. Perhaps the black mother, publicly flogged for daring to have a child though she had syphilis, had suffered all the child himself deserved to suffer. But in this search for Ofelia, Baltasar was satisfying another passion besides the romantic one attributed to him: the spiritual passion of seeking Ofelia to fall on his knees before her and ask forgiveness. Forgive me for having kidnapped your child.

Between Tabay and Mucurumba, the landscape of the Andes shed its cover, showing itself naked, grayish-brown, cracked, abrupt, and before it the young reader of Rousseau insisted on imagining a man in nature who was spontaneously good, who was alienated by society, and masked by an evil that had nothing at all to do with nature: evil comes from elsewhere, not from us. He lost this article of Romantic faith, as if it were a cold griddle cake, when an old man sitting on a sack of potatoes in the town of Mucuchíes told him that, yes, the treacherous Ofelia Salamanca had passed through, and at that very house you see there, the one painted red and pink, she had asked a royalist colonel not to kill an armed patriot who had barricaded himself in it, not expecting to get out alive, but with “his honor intact.” The colonel agreed. The patriot threw his weapons out that white-framed window right there. Then she went in, took off her clothes, and showed herself naked to the patriot. She didn’t say a word. The entire town was in suspense, waiting to see what would happen. Everything could be seen through the open windows. She was naked and said nothing. But she allowed the patriot to look at her, at all of her. Then she ordered him out and herself told the firing squad to shoot.

What had all the girls seen, the ones with round faces, with apple cheeks, who tied their hats on with scarves to keep the mountain wind from blowing them away? What did all the old men sitting along the principal streets of all these Andean towns think? Those old men never died. They’d been here for a thousand years. The same length of time as the red yaraguá grass, the rich cattle pasture that managed to survive on this bald mountain — old cattle, as well. In the towns farther up, only old men and children were left, old men with silvery wrinkles and girls with long hair. What had they seen, what had they heard said about Ofelia Salamanca? They say she had a rebel captain killed while he was shitting at the gates of La Guaira. She waited until that moment, just to humiliate him. In Valencia, on the other hand, she forced a royalist general to turn himself in and die with a rope around his neck, on his knees, to beg forgiveness for his sins.

Ofelia Salamanca: just as the yellow-flowered frailejon survives the cold of the highlands to dot the mountainsides like calligraphy, stories about Ofelia Salamanca dot this Santo Domingo mountain range. And just as the frailejon’s flowers form a candelabrum that rises above the fleshy shrub, that’s how she rose here, hunting down patriots until there were none left and she’d be without victims. Right here in this wasteland town, where the buzzards fly ceaselessly, that woman lacking a breast and good sense, said this to the rebel commander besieging the forts along the Orinoco:

“If you beat the royalists, you can take me prisoner and kill me.”

“And if the Spaniards beat us?”

“You and I will make love.”

“A delightful opportunity, you Spaniard-loving slut. I won’t miss it, you can bet on it.”

“But there’s one condition. You mustn’t allow yourself to lose just to make love to me. Because then I’ll kill you. Agreed?”

He did let himself be beaten just to make love to her — as the mountain bards would sing it — and so he died in her arms, a dagger in his back.

What did all these men know who died in her arms, at her order, when they saw her naked, when they let themselves be conquered by her? Who was this Creole Penthesilea?

In the desolate nature of the high Venezuelan wastes, Baltasar Bustos listened but did not find a joyful reciprocity in his solitary, self-sufficient soul, that would unite the individual with things, or promise with actuality. On the contrary, Ofelia’s human acts obviated any possibility of reconciliation, rendering diabolical the very business of nature, from which the beautiful and cruel Chilean lady seemed to emanate and in which she found both her justification and her reflection. His faith in a possible reconciliation between man and nature was also shattered at that moment; we are burdened with too many sins, he whispered into the ear of the wasteland, to the old man and the young girl. Any reconciliation would be forced; we have no other choice but to go on hurting each other, and nothing will hurt us more than capricious passions, authoritarian disdain, power exercised without restraint: Ofelia Salamanca.