Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

Their eyes met, and Baltasar wondered where he’d seen those eyes before, in what skirmish, viceregal salon, or crossroad between La Paz and Lake Titicaca. Where? The same question was as obvious in the royalist officer’s eyes. Each knew that he would probably never recall their first meeting, or even if it had actually taken place.

Páez’s plainsmen, advancing from the south, besieged Maracaibo. Food began to run out. The hospitals were filled with the wounded. War to the death desolated Venezuela. Black fugitives would arrive, thinking they could blend into the anonymity of the port, but irrevocably assumed to be rebels, they were caught and executed by the royalists as quickly as by the insurgents. No one knew who was going to be hanged or why: for being a royalist, for being rich, for being black, for being a rebel …

Baltasar Bustos would accompany the girls who became ill with typhus or appendicitis, or who just had ticks, to the Maracaibo hospital. Many never returned. Others returned because of the calomel cure. But after a while Baltasar needed no pretext to walk into the sanatorium. He suffered and was horrified by the suffering of all. Nothing was more terrible than watching amputations in which the only anesthetic given the soldiers was a glass of brandy and a napkin to bite. Baltasar would stand at their side, holding their hands, knowing they needed something warmer than a piece of cloth or a glass. And he felt how hard they held on to him, as if holding on to life. He immersed himself in the hospital world. He felt his place was there, not despite the fact that the wounded were his eternal enemies, but precisely because of it: the Spaniards, the murderers of Francisco Arias and Juan Echagüe, those who had corrupted (who could doubt it?) Ofelia Salamanca.

Among all the cases, one moved him deeply. A man whose face had been blown off. There was a hole of raw flesh between his eyebrows and his mouth. And he still lived. His brain wasn’t gone. He had a life somewhere beyond the hideous wound, in a marvelous and melancholy corner of his head. He would move his hands, which were as thin as the rest of his body. A pair of cavalry boots stood upright, beautifully polished, at the foot of his cot.

Baltasar held that officer’s hands. He was as sure that he recognized him now as he had been unsure in Harlequin House. No, he didn’t remember where they’d first seen each other. The war had been waged for eight years and it ranged through an area three times larger than the lands in which Caesar or Napoleon had fought their campaigns. But he did remember where they’d last seen each other: when a curtain was pulled back in a bordello a few weeks before.

This had to be the same man. And even if he wasn’t, the remote possibility that he was the same man of narrow profile, shiny pomade, and sniffing nose, flirtatious, self-satisfied, so remote from the mere idea of being disfigured as he strolled around the house, recalling Madrid summers and sniffing with his nervous nose, now gone forever — that was enough for Baltasar to say to himself and to him: “I know who you are. I recognize you. Don’t worry. You won’t die without anyone’s knowing who you are. Trust me. I’ll be near you. I won’t abandon you. I’ll put a name on your tombstone.”

When the Spanish officer died, Baltasar returned to Harlequin House weeping and told Lutecia what had happened. She caressed his head of copper-colored curls and said: “I was waiting for this moment, or for one like it, to free you from this place.”

“I am free. I love you. You are my best friend. I don’t want to lose you, I’ve already lost…”

“Take this note. It’s from Ofelia Salamanca. She wants you to join her in Mexico. She’s waiting with Father Quintana in Veracruz. Here are the directions and a map. Hurry, Baltasar. Oh yes, I bought you a pair of glasses. Start using them again. You have to read this letter carefully. Don’t start hallucinating. You have to see things clearly.”

[1]

The Virgin of Guadalupe had no time to spread her arms in imitation of her son on the cross before receiving the blast.

She stood there with her hands clasped in prayer, with her eyes lowered and sweet, until the bullets pierced her eyes and mouth, and then her blue mantle and her warm, maternal feet.

The stars were reduced to dust, the horns of the moon shattered into a thousand pieces, the scandalized cherubs fled.

The commander of the fort of San Juan de Ulúa repeated the order, take aim, fire, as if a single barrage wasn’t sufficient for the independentist Virgin, as if the effigy venerated by the poor and the agitators who carried her image in their scapularies and on their insurgent flags deserved to be executed twice a day.

The priest Hidalgo in Guanajuato, the priest Morelos in Michoacán, and now the priest Quintana here in Veracruz had all thrown themselves into the revolt with the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe raised on high. And though they were ultimately captured and beheaded — except for that damned Quintana, who was still running around loose — she, the Virgin, could be shot at will, whenever there was no rebel leader to take her place.

Baltasar Bustos watched this ceremony of the shooting of the Virgin when he reached Veracruz from Maracaibo, and he concluded that he’d reached the strangest land in the Americas.

The revolutionary decade was coming to a close, and if in South America San Martín, Bolívar, Sucre, and O’Higgins had beaten the Spaniards and there had been no chance for retaliation, in Mexico the sacrifice of the poor parish priests, who led the only uprising of the Indians and the peasants armed with clubs and picks, had left independence to the dubious outcome of an agreement among warriors. On the one side, there were the weary professional soldiers of the Spanish Army, representatives of the reactionaries restored after the Congress of Vienna and the return to the throne of Ferdinand VII, more stupid and ultramontane than ever. On the other were the nervous (and enervated) creole officers, led by Agustín de Iturbide, who could no longer pretend (not even to fool themselves) to support Ferdinand or Carlota. All the same, the creole military men promised to protect the interests of the upper classes and keep the damned races — Indians, blacks, mestizos, zambos, cambujos, quadroons, and other racial mixtures — from taking over the government.

So the Virgin of Guadalupe was shot to death once more on the morning of Baltasar Bustos’s arrival at Veracruz, and through the perforated eyes of the Mother of God passed the rays of a tropical, leaden sun. Baltasar Bustos was entering Mexico: it was the final phase of his campaign of love and war. It had now been ten years since he’d kidnapped the white baby and put the black one in its place in Buenos Aires; but only two months had gone by since the quondam Luz María, Lutecia, the madam of Harlequin House, had handed him that ever so simple and direct note written in Veracruz:

Come instantly.

Ofelia.

Baltasar had brought something more than this note with him from Maracaibo: he was entering Mexico with the documents of a Spanish officer, as thin and nervous as a greyhound, whose face had been blown off and who had died in Baltasar’s arms.

He was entering Veracruz in search, first, as Lutecia had instructed him, of the priest Quintana. And entering Veracruz was like walking into a blazing oven.

Barely had Baltasar presented his papers to the port commander, Captain Carlos Saura, Fifth Grenadier Regiment of the Virgin of Covadonga, than he took off his royalist officer’s coat and used it to cover a wretched dead man in Customs House Street, an indigent, the other wretched creatures around him said, for whom there was no money for a funeral.