Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

We laughed at him a little, affectionately. Everyone knew that Baltasar Bustos had read all the books of the Enlightenment; we called him the Quixote of Reason, but we didn’t know what to fear most: his eloquent confusion of philosophies or his foolhardy, quixotic decision to test the validity of his readings in reality.

“Now, Baltasar, I hope you’re not going to…”

“Baltasar, act politically, with us…”

“With you, I’ll never find out if the law can really encompass all classes and not just one. The three of us are sons of ranchers, merchants, viceregal functionaries. We risk confusing our freedom with that of everyone else, without being certain that’s the way things really are.”

“The government has to be changed!”

“The new government will change the laws!”

“We’ll see to it that your ideas become reality!”

“All revolutions begin in the individual conscience. Everything else derives from that.”

“So, what are you suggesting, Baltasar?”

While he was putting his plan into action that night in the bedrooms of the aristocracy, Dorrego and I, Varela, were proclaiming a junta headed by Cornelio Saavedra, hero in the defeat of the British invasion of 1807, a born military leader, but in fact a conservative man. According to Bustos, Saavedra wanted freedom for the Creoles but not for the blacks, the poor, the downtrodden. The other leader of the junta was Bustos’s personal hero, Juan José Castelli, a man of ideas and an activist as well, who diligently sought to make law and reality coincide. Biologically speaking, neither was young any longer: Saavedra was fifty and Castelli forty-six. The young man of the revolution was Mariano Moreno, beloved by all, indomitable, radical, who at the age of thirty had made the greatest economic demands possible for the nascent Argentine revolution: free trade was necessary for the well-being of the people in the Río de la Plata. The young, ardent, fragile Mariano Moreno inspired love in everyone; we had heard strong and serious men say, “I am enthralled by Mariano Moreno.” His portrait appeared everywhere, always retouched to eliminate the smallpox scars on his face. But Bustos shared the doubts his father, a landowner on the Pampa, had about Moreno: he was afraid the commercial interests of the port of Buenos Aires that the young economist defended in the name of the nation’s well-being would sacrifice the well-being of the interior.

“Who’s going to buy products from La Rioja if he can get the same things cheaper from London? Even a poncho, my boy, even a pair of boots: the English (they’re crawling out of the woodwork!) can make them cheaper,” said Baltasar’s father, José Antonio.

Baltasar shook his mane of honey-colored curls and paid no attention to economic or political arguments: it was not, he declared during our nights at the Café de Malcos, the price of ponchos or commercial competition between Spain and England that was the revolution’s main problem, but equality and justice. Why aren’t there laws valid for all nations and all classes? Why are there laws that take from the people who work and give to people who are idle?

“That”—his eyeglasses steamed over—“is the problem of the revolution.”

But now the revolutionary junta presided over by Saavedra, Castelli, Moreno, and Belgrano gave all power to the military and the patriots in the professions. The Spanish functionaries were removed from office; the viceroy and the circuit judges were expelled to — where else? — the Canary Islands. History was moving with incomparable speed, but Baltasar Bustos slept with his head resting on a desk in the library, isolated from the decisive tumult in the streets, satisfied that he’d done his duty.

What he’d dreamed was now a reality. A black child condemned to violence, hunger, and discrimination would sleep from now on in the soft bed of the nobility. Another child, white, destined for idleness and elegance, had lost all his privileges in a flash and would now be brought up amid the violence, hunger, and discrimination suffered by the blacks, whom the Creoles called “the damned race.”

“Equality is valid for all classes,” the young hero declared to us, his friends in the Café de Malcos. “Without equality, there is no freedom: not for trade and not for the individual.” Surrounded by the sanctioned volumes approved with the nihil obstat, which gave off a peculiar aroma of incense and which became part of his cauchemar, Baltasar Bustos, using his arms as a pillow, tried to fall into the sleep of reason. The nightmare of reason reverberated like the bells and cannon shots of the morning of May 25 in Buenos Aires. And if this minor hero of equality could justify, in the name of justice, what he had done, passion, soul, the other side of his Enlightenment conviction told him: “Baltasar Bustos, you have mortally wounded the woman you think you love. You have committed an injustice against the most intimate nature of that woman. Ofelia Salamanca is a mother, and you, a vile kidnapper.”

He woke up with a shock because his nightmare took place just as a flood of May light poured in through the building’s tall latticed windows. He woke up asking himself why in his dream he had used the French word cauchemar instead of nightmare. Because it sounded better in French? The glare behind him kept him from answering. He looked at the letters in the title of the book he’d fallen asleep over as if they were flies: from a distance of centuries, St. John Chrysostom condemned unconsummated love because it sinfully exalted desire.

[4]

He thought he’d slept for a long time — the length of a nightmare — but it hadn’t even been ten minutes. He had carried out the most audacious act of his life without calculating the full effect of his actions, without anticipating, above all, that the vision of Ofelia Salamanca would captivate him with all the force of the inevitable. He dreamed about her — the sweet part of his dream — the way Tantalus dreamed of the fruit and water that continually eluded his grasp. A tantalizing woman: he desired her, desired not to possess her, so he could go on desiring her, desired not to have done what he had, desired — dreaming all the while — never having to stand before her, saying: “Here is your son, madame. I ask you to love me despite what I’ve done.”

He didn’t have time, because he looked, sensibly, at his watch, which resembled him (blind crystal, round body, gilt glitter), and realized that it was only twelve-thirty at night. The glow at his back was, nevertheless, that of daylight. But that was the heat not of May but of February. And the books began to crackle suspiciously. The threatened leaves in the sacred books were reverting, becoming, tout court, dead leaves. The creak of the bindings and the shelves was not only a hint of what was to come but also the result of the leaves that really were burning outside: Baltasar Bustos ran, opened the library door, scurried to the hall that led to the patio, and saw his fiery curls reflected in the courtyard in flames. The ivy blazed, the muslin blazed, the bedroom was ablaze. The servants gathered in the patio shrieked. Baltasar Bustos instinctively, cruelly looked for the black wet nurse among them. There she was, just for an instant, lulling a swaddled baby, which he could not see, in her arms. But then she was gone. Baltasar Bustos couldn’t decide whether to follow her or to stay where he was, which is what he did, mesmerized by the sight of the fire vomiting out of the balcony of the presiding judge’s quarters.

Twenty-five candles blaze, one for each year of the mother’s life. The flammable drapes blaze. The cradle blazes. The child is consumed by the flames. Disfigured, burned beyond recognition, the black child seems to be just a child killed in a fire. Even white children turn black when they are burned to death.