Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

He saw the woman’s face in the frozen, sterile, immensely beautiful mountains: he reached, protected by his Panama hat, the crest of the bird of prey, the back of the dead camel, the Eagle’s Beak, which had the shape of a necklace lost there, as if carelessly, by Ofelia Salamanca, this incomprehensible woman, this endless enigma, who had finally worn out her romantic lover; he was thankful that the fierce yellow flower invaded this pure nakedness only between July and August, quickly abandoning the mountains to their clean, undecorated solitude. A baroque woman, of obscene sumptuousness, whose dazzling excretions and lugubrious rewards were seeking to revive something inert: in that instant, Baltasar believed he’d finally expunged her from his heart and exiled her from his mind.

But the void she left was immense. He descended bit by bit, convinced that he’d found the woman transformed into eternal stone, occasional flower, the stone sterile, the flower poisonous; and he again sought spontaneous delight in the diffuse sweetness of the reborn landscape of the valleys, the hooves of the sheep, the thatched roofs of the houses, and the fields of green carnations like lemon groves.

But all these Spanish flowers in the Venezuelan Andes — carnations, roses, and geraniums — could not fill the void left by Ofelia. The war could; trotting near the shadow of the extended eaves of the village houses, Baltasar accepted that his life, which he once imagined unique, without fissures — nature and history reconciled in his person — was forever sundered, and, as those inevitable song books already had it, all that was left to him was to bounce from war to war, from south to north and from north to south, to carry out his legendary destiny, which had already been mapped out in popular song … He would stop at sunrise to partake of delicious mountain cheese, Andean bread, and pineapple wine, but not even those details of life escaped the fate already dictated in the song. Chewing, he thought about Homer, the Cid, Shakespeare: their epic dramas were written before they were lived. Achilles and Ximena, Helen, and Richard the hunchback in real life had done nothing but follow the poet’s scenic instructions and act out what had already been set down. We call this inversion of metaphor “history,” the naïve belief that, first, things happen and then they are written. That was an illusion, but he no longer fooled himself.

At that very moment, as an old woman was serving him a plate of griddle cakes in an inn by the side of the Macurumba road, it occurred to Baltasar Bustos to ask her about the war. To which she replied, “What war?”

Baltasar laughed and ate. At times, in these isolated towns, people don’t find out about anything — or they find out very late, only when the bard gives his version of events. But in Mucuchíes, hours later, he found the same old man sitting on the same sack of potatoes and asked him the same question—“How’s the war going?”—and received the same reply—“What war? What are you talking about?” The news was all over town instantly. The children took the opportunity to have some fun and tease. They made a circle around him, singing, “What war? What war?” and when he broke out of the magic circle of children and asked their elders who Simón Bolívar, Antonio Páez, and José Antonio Sucre were, they all said the same thing: “We don’t know them. Are they from around here? Has anyone heard of them? Ask the old man who plays the violin in El Tabay.”

He was a man with a square head, sculpted by saber wounds until it looked like a block of wood. Baltasar found him inland, far from the road, in a vast, run-down house. To get to it, Baltasar had to climb over the skeletons of cows. The old man was on his shady terrace, sitting on the skull of a cow, just as José Antonio Bustos sat on his pampa ranch when Baltasar was a child. This old man played the violin; he did nothing else, except to contemplate a black man about thirty years of age, naked from the waist up and covered by filthy, tattered canvas trousers.

When Bustos approached on his mule, the squared-off, dark old man stopped playing, wiped his moist mustache with his hand, and stared with eyes overcome by the glare. The sun baked the cow bones and invited one’s sight to become white as well, like the light. Baltasar understood, as never before, the need for shade; that is what he said, by way of greeting, to the old man; he didn’t bother to greet the black — there was always a black or an Indian, silent, leaning on the doorposts. Justice turned into sun and white bones in his head; he’d come in search of the war and asked the old man, “Where? What is happening?”

“I know nothing,” said the old man. “Eusebio here might have some news.”

The black did not stop talking; that is, Baltasar realized that he’d been talking all the while, but in a very low voice. And now he spoke more loudly, repeating, “Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a thief. Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a fugitive. Thank you, General, for allowing me to be here on your estate.”

“You’d like to be on the loose, killing and robbing,” said a woman who’d appeared from the half-light in the house, wiping her hands on an apron. “And you, what do you want?” she said, looking at Baltasar.

“I’m a soldier,” it occurred to Baltasar to say. “How can I join the nearest battalion?”

The woman stared at him in total incomprehension, the old man with pity, the black with a grin. They seemed, one with his violin, the other with his gratitude, the woman with her rage, as if suspended in time, as if absent.

“Bolívar,” Bustos recited the magic names of the heroes, “San Martín…” as if they were amulets.

There was a long silence, then the old man stopped playing and spoke, “He said, ‘Comrades, the revolution has no money, but it does have land. Look as far as you please, from the sea at Maracaibo to the jungle of Guayana, from Eagle Peak to the mouths of the Orinoco, and what you see is land. There is land. The Spaniards took it away from the Indians. Now we’re taking it away from the Spaniards. Take your land,’ he said to me, ‘not today but tomorrow, when we win the war. Here is a voucher; there’s another for your orderly, an ignorant black.’ I cashed in the voucher, as did all the generals, but here you have this boy. He’s an ignorant black. He didn’t know how to cash anything. The war’s over. Eusebio doesn’t know how to exercise his rights.”

“I’d be a thief if you didn’t protect me,” said the black.

“These people know nothing about papers. They only want to survive,” said the dark, squared-off old man. “We own everything, but we finish nothing.”

“Go on.” The woman laughed, a sixtyish Creole who must have been pretty a long time ago. “You’re almost black yourself; don’t be afraid of appearances. But I am, old man. I’m here on this cattle ranch you were given as payment for your service, ready to serve you as a maid as long as I don’t have to know what’s going on out there. For sure, the blacks have taken control of Caracas.”

“Because for you everything’s bad.” The old man hugged the violin to his chest.

“I got tired of watching you fight. Thank your lucky stars. This is better than nothing,” said the woman before leaving, her back turned to them.

No sooner had she gone than the old man shut his eyes, furrowed his brow, and summoned Baltasar with his hand. “Come closer,” he said, “so she can’t hear us. But I know the truth. I know what’s happened. Bolívar was betrayed. They turned on him, just as my wife turned her back on us a moment ago, they sent him off to die alone, but that is our destiny. They ran San Martín out. They surrounded him with spies so he couldn’t live in peace. They finished him off by forcing him into exile.”