Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“Who? The Spaniards?” said Baltasar, trying to follow the old man’s strange tale.

“No, the Creole military men, us.”

“Mulatto,” said the young man, laughing. “You’re a mulatto, old man.”

“I am, hiding here because I don’t want to be a part of the ingratitude or of the crimes committed against my brothers,” said the old man with astonishing strength, and his wife reappeared, asking, “What are you saying? Still talking your foolishness, still telling what is going to happen? What a mania for God’s sake! Who ever gave you the idea you were a prophet, you old fool?”

“I’m not. I only tell what already happened,” said the old man. He began to play his violin. “What happened a long time ago.”

Over the course of his slow return to Mérida, and from there to the sea, Baltasar Bustos found no evidence of war; no one knew anything about the old battles, and not a soul remembered the heroes. Sometimes they would say yes, the battle’s going to take place tomorrow, but later they would mention names that meant nothing to him — Boyacá, Pichincha, Junín — and when he asked for details, no one could tell him where those places were or give him dates; they could only say in a monotonous voice: “One more battle and the fatherland will be saved.”

He entered a burned-out city where he walked in ashes up to his ankles. He was told that the ashes would be there forever, that nothing could get rid of them. Later, he returned to the violin-playing general’s ranch. The woman had died. That afternoon they were burying her. The black had gone off to the mountains. He had fled. He would go down to the plains. He would fire his rifle. He would fight forever. Here he would have gone insane. The old man was left alone, and Baltasar felt that the solitude was giving him back his old spirit. The old man told more and more stories, about wars against the French, against the Yankees, military coups, torture, exile, an interminable history of failures and unrealized dreams, all postponed, all frustrated, pure hope; nothing ever ends and perhaps it’s better that way, because here, when anything ends, it ends badly.

Here and there, Baltasar Bustos found forgotten iron wheels of cannons, and during the day he would cool his brow on them and at night use them to keep his hands warm. He lost all sense of time. Perhaps in Venezuela they’d lost it as well, resigned to frustration and to things done only halfway. One day, in a cemetery filled with tombs painted thousands of different colors, he happened on the old violinist-general leading a rickety funeral cortege, obviously made up of paid mourners, recruited by that same old hero whom Simón Bolívar had rewarded with land instead of money — exactly what the Cid did with his Castilian warriors. Who had died? Who else — the general looked at him with compassion — but Eusebio the rebel black? Baltasar made the Sign of the Cross before the coffin borne by four laborers.

“Don’t worry,” said the general. “My little Chebo isn’t in there. Rebels are always buried far away in unknown land, at night and with no name on the grave. So that no one ever knows if they’re alive or dead! The box is empty.”

“Only one more crime and the fatherland will be saved.” Baltasar paraphrased the last sentence he’d heard the general utter.

“Of course I’m burying him here with his name, next to the mother who was ashamed of him, damn it. But what shame, what fear, what shitty prohibitions!” exclaimed the old man.

[3]

He was afraid of turning into a Robinson Crusoe of the mountains, so one day he set out to return to Maracaibo. He left behind the frigid wasteland and the mountains dotted with frailejon; when he reached the valleys, the tall, slender trees with bearded limbs, tropical moss that hangs like perennially gray hair from the ever renewed head of a trunk filled with young sap, bade him farewell.

He left behind a lost battalion. He would never find it or name its heroes. He felt he was leaving a different time, and his passage through the high, bleak plateau reminded him vaguely of another brief period, which his memory did not want to register, which escaped the norms of his philosophic reason. But in those days his reason had been stronger; now everything conspired, or so he thought, to weaken it, and the time he spent in this bleak region seemed thus more comprehensible, more acceptable, than that other time on that other mountain. The key word, though, was time, and all he had to do was enter Maracaibo on a steamy morning, consult the front page of a Caracas newspaper sold in the port, corroborate the date with a pharmacist, who charged for the use of the calendar in his almanac, and he must accept that a period of time which in his experience was very long, which in his memory spanned three whole months, had been barely two weeks. Two weeks between his leaving Maracaibo and his return.

The woman in perpetual mourning was waiting for him in Harlequin House. She invited him to move in. He was like her, no one else was; both of them came from the Creole south, were acquainted with the viceregal salons, knew how to eat properly, and he (she supposed) would step aside for a lady. No, it was not for what he was thinking. That gallant gentleman from Lima who one night, in the presence of his wife, silently invited her to be his lover knew what he was doing. Recently widowed, she was hungry for sex, but sex with imagination. The sagacious and perverse Peruvian understood that and knew she could not resist his daring to court her right under his wife’s nose. It was as if he were taking away her mourning and anticipating his wife’s widowhood. Yes, that aristocrat from Lima certainly had imagination. He also had syphilis and scorned the woman dressed in black for falling so easily and accepting the tainted love the gentleman could not offer his own wife. A widow, she told him, is totally useless. There are no aristocrats crueler or more arrogant than those of Peru, the widow concluded. They are the Florentines of the New World.

“Why, then, did you come to Maracaibo?”

“A Chinese doctor in Lima told me that the sea air in these parts spontaneously cures venereal disease.”

“You don’t disgust me,” Baltasar said surprisingly — as if another voice had said it for him — surprised that a voice that was not his own would express itself thus. Yet he recognized it as his own — only, before, it had been asleep, hiding.

She laughed. “Go on, if that’s what you want. The girls will let you have it for nothing. My sex, Baltasar, is a sewer.”

“And your doctor, Lutecia, is a rogue and a charlatan.”

Both of them liked the name, the name of permanent mourning of the woman from Lima. Day and night would find Baltasar in the bordello of the harlequins, where, by simple arithmetic, he realized he’d become a desirable man. Perhaps some of the girls approached him because Lutecia had explained the situation of the young, exhausted hero; but though he paid none of them, they all sought him out, because — as they began to whisper in his ear — he was handsome, because he was rich, because he was smooth, because of his distant, unseeing eyes, because of the way he treated women, all women, like high-born ladies. “You make me feel like a duchess,” the English girl told him; “Personne ne m’a traitée comme toi,” the French girl told him; the sullen Indians said nothing but were as grateful as the chattering blacks, who did say, “With you we feel different. You relieve us of centuries of insults and kicks, damn it.”

No one knew that he was giving to them, the harem of the Harlequin, what he had been saving for one alone, his sullied Columbine. He wanted to expunge her from his mind, just as the old general on the Tabay cattle ranch imagining disasters to come had expelled in anticipation all Liberators from their freshly minted nations. Still, he did not cease being loyal to Ofelia Salamanca, and a Creole girl from Caracas, with heavy-lidded eyes and an olive-colored body, said to him, “It’s possible to be loyal without having to be faithful.”