Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

Both arguments — Anselm’s and Tertulian’s — were necessary, we said in the anarchy of the Year XX in Argentina, for us to go on believing in the merits of independence. We could hardly imagine our third citizen of the Café de Malcos, our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos, ready to risk his life (and his faith?) in the first line of the last revolution, the Mexican revolution, and finding himself surrounded, as if through the worst gypsy curse, by lawyers, theologians of law, church fathers of the incipient nation, all of them excited, as if winning the war depended on paper and as if only that which was written could be real in our new nations and as if what was real were a mere mirage, to be disdained to the degree to which it did not adhere to the written ideal.

“The Law is the greatest thing imaginable.”

“That’s true because it’s absurd.”

Drones, pen pushers, and intriguers: he saw himself in them and saw us, or perhaps men like me, Manuel Varela, an impenitent printer confident he could change the world by throwing words at it, and men like Xavier Dorrego, a rich creole convinced that an enlightened elite could, if guided by reason, save these poor nations destroyed first by tyranny, then by anarchy, and always by the simple, crushing fact of the ignorance of the majority. But weren’t all of us also the bearers of the slim, provincial culture of our time, autodidacts instructed by censored books introduced into the Americas among the ornaments and sacred vessels of humble priests who did not pay duties, whose property was not searched, privileges the modernizing law of the Bourbons had prohibited?

Weren’t we — Balta, Dorrego, and I, Varela, not forgetting the already deceased Echagüe and Arias — the patient kneaders of a civilization that was not yet bread and thus had nothing to distribute?

These thoughts were like a bridge that united us, here in the Río de la Plata, with our younger brother in the Gulf of Mexico.

But it wasn’t among us or those who looked like us that Baltasar would find the person he sought.

The camp followers came and went with baskets of clean clothes on their heads; they would whip the chocolate in huge caldrons after grinding it in gigantic grinders; they would get down on their knees to wash; they would give birth to the tortillas in that same servile, maternal posture at the metate, the traditional corn-grinding stone; and one of them, more active than the rest, would seem to take care of everything and everyone at once, her hair a mess, her feet bare, and wiping her nose, which ran because of an annoying cold.

Soldiers in shirt sleeves and with handkerchiefs tied on their heads; troopers with machetes and swords, handsome horsemen like ancient condottieri, sitting on supply crates, vain, with their silk kerchiefs knotted at the corners, floating loosely around their necks, their campaign boots beautifully polished, their bell-bottom trousers embroidered with spangles and gold. Those not sitting on boxes used wicker chairs that were so worn they, too, looked like gold. But none of them could be Quintana — unless Baltasar Bustos’s myopic but nervous and rapid eyes were unable to pick out the leader — doubtless because the leader was not any different from anyone else.

Perhaps it was the idea of the wicker and the gold that caused him to turn his head and catch sight of a blond head of hair that quickly hid in one of the tobacco sheds, mixing in with the laughing children hiding there as they played blindman’s buff. The blond child came out with a handkerchief over his eyes, whiter than the filth on his rough cotton shirt and trousers. He collided with Baltasar’s body and went running back to the shed, as his little comrades’ laughter grew louder.

Baltasar was amazed at the serenity of the troops and the women and children that followed them from place to place, overcoming the distances of the vast continent because of the war, perhaps linking the idea of war with the end of a centuries-long isolation, an intimate justification of death, pain, failure, all in the name of movement and of contact with other men, women, and children.

Serenity or fatalism? They barely looked up at Baltasar, answering all his questions in short, almost lapidary, phrases. Only one question was left unanswered: “Where is Quintana? Which of you is the priest?”

They seemed to be saying that if he had managed to get this far, then this young man was one of them, and if he wasn’t, they wouldn’t let him go alive … Meanwhile, why get upset?

“Before he became a priest, he was a farm worker and a mule driver; he knows the land better than any Spaniard or native-born creole. And if he doesn’t end up winning the war, the truth is, he’s never given a victory to our enemies.”

“He was always poor and still is. He’s a hand-to-mouth priest. Others have their rents and monies from special fees. Not him. He had only one living, and the king of Spain took even that away from him, just to show his power and his nastiness.”

“Go on, Hermenegildo, don’t put it to the gentleman that Father Quintana rebelled just because they deprived him of his living.”

“No, I think he rebelled against his solitude in the world. Look at him sitting there.”

“Careful, Hermenegildo, shut up, we have orders.”

“Excuse me, Atanasio. It just came out.”

“Let’s see you find him,” said the man called Atanasio to Baltasar. “Don’t believe my eyes. I’m blinder than a bat.”

“Did you say solitude? Who knows? He used to like cockfights and gambling back in his town. He mixed with the people. Who knows if he didn’t start fighting just to stop gambling.”

“Or so he could go back to gambling after the war,” said a man passing by, guffawing, potbellied and merry. But he wasn’t Quintana either, Baltasar said to himself as he scrutinized the dark faces, some zambo, others mulatto, very few Indian, the majority mestizo.

“I saw some blond children playing. Where did they come from?”

“From right here. Don’t you know that Veracruz has been the entrance to Mexico for every foreigner since Hernán Cortés and that there are lots of blue-eyed, fair-haired kids in these parts?”

“All of them children of sleepless nights!”

“Not so. You see, our leader is very good at hiding. Once in Guanajuato he was running away from the Spaniards when we had no weapons, and he wound up becoming the lover of the wife of a famous lawyer of the Crown. He winked and told us, ‘No one would ever think to look for me in that lady’s bed.’”

“You want to find Father Quintana? What if he’s dead and we don’t want anyone to know?”

“What if he never existed and we invented him just to scare the Spaniards?”

“But, sir, don’t you believe that story, because the people who think Papa Anselmo’s dead drop dead themselves from fear when they see him reappear.”

“They think they’ve beaten him, that he’s dying of hunger, that he’s living in a cave, that he’s turned coward. But Quintana comes back to life, returns, and starts over. That’s why we’ll follow him anywhere. He never gives up.”

“Because he’s got nothing to lose. A poor parish priest! His living, his Crown privileges, that was the only wealth poor priests had in New Spain.”

“How could he have anything when he went to war because he believes the clergy should have nothing, since the laws of Rome forbid them to have anything?”

“Hold on, what about those elegant uniforms he likes to wear? We all know about that.”

“So, who doesn’t like elegant uniforms? Why should we prove the Spaniards tell the truth when they call us ragged beggars? A man has to look his best once in a while, especially in parades, in battle, and at his funeral. Don’t you agree?”