Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“Never in the history of Mexico has there been, nor will there ever be in the future, a band of men more patriotic and honorable than you. I am proud to have known you. Who knows what horrors await us. You, the insurgents, will have saved the nation’s honor for all time.”

They didn’t fight. They wrote laws. And they were fully capable of dying for what they felt and wrote. They were right, Baltasar wrote to Dorrego and to me, Varela. Wasn’t law reality itself? Thus, the circle of the written closed over its authors, capturing them in the noble fiction of their own inventive powers: the written is the real and we are its authors.

Can there be greater glory or certainty more solid for a lawyer from Spanish America?

“And who, from Argentina to Mexico, Varela”—Dorrego smiled at me as he read this letter—“doesn’t have locked within his breast a lawyer struggling to break out and make a speech?”

Quintana, more of a fox than his shepherds, told Baltasar when they’d finally lighted their cigars under the shelter of the entrance to one of the tobacco warehouses: “Perhaps they will abandon me. Perhaps they won’t. But they all know that they owe their personality to me. Even if they’d all be delighted to send me back to my rural parish.”

“The contradictions in the human character will never cease to astonish me,” Dorrego said, sighing, when I read him these lines: he was obstinately engaged in winding a carriage-shaped clock covered with an oval glass dome.

[4]

Dining alone with Baltasar in the kitchen of the tobacco factory, Quintana told more about his past. Thick smoke rose from the braziers fanned by the women as one of them, the solicitous, sniffling woman Baltasar had seen when he reached the encampment, placed Gulf Coast tamales wrapped in plantain leaves on their tin plates. These were followed by cups of Campeche-style seviche, a mixture of oysters, shrimp, and sliced scallops in lemon juice, along with yellow moles Oaxaca-style, redolent of saffron and chilies.

Quintana said he shouldn’t be judged a rebel simply because of the business of his losing his privileges, although he admitted that had been the original reason for his taking up arms. Rebelling for such a reason seemed too much like taking revenge, while insurrection seemed too much like rancor. And nothing good could come of rancor. Baltasar should also consider that the Bourbon reforms asserted that they were merely bringing reality into line with law. Fine. In that case, not even the Pope had any right to possess more than he needed for his personal comfort. The clergy could not be allowed to own land, treasure, and palaces. Canon law prohibited that.

The independence revolution came along and he, Quintana, began to think it over and to look for a better reason than rancor to become a guerrilla. It hadn’t been easy, even when he was ten years younger, to leave the tranquillity of a curacy and start risking his life.

“Should I have stayed there not doing anything? I could have. It was possible. Why did I join the revolution? If I again deny that it was because the Crown took the living away from us poor priests and that my living was my only wealth, I’ll bore you. Besides, you’ll stop believing me. If I tell you that I took one step too many and told myself that if this was all a matter of respecting the law then we’d have to go all the way, you won’t believe me unless I explain something more important. Which is that in order to abandon my peace and quiet or not to stay in my parish like a fool while everyone else chose sides, I had to believe that what I was doing mattered. Mattered not only for me or for the independence of the nation but for my faith, my religion, my soul. And this is where the difficulties begin, because I am going to try to convince you that my political rebellion is inseparable from my spiritual rebellion. I know, because I know who you are, Baltasar, because I see your face and know what boys like you know, how much they’ve read and all the rest, that for you there can be no freedom with religion, independence with a church, or reason with faith.”

He sighed and noisily tossed into his mouth a piece of tamale that was so red with chilies that it looked like a wound.

“But to talk about all that, we need time and opportunity. Now we’re short of both.”

He grasped Baltasar’s impatient wrist. “I know you’ve come for other reasons and not to hear me talk.”

“You’re mistaken. I have the deepest respect for you.”

“Be patient. One thing leads to the other. You know, in my town there was a blind beggar who was always accompanied by his dog. One day, the dog ran away and the blind man regained his sight.”

For a long time, Baltasar stared at the priest, who went on eating noisily and with pleasure, savoring his yellow mole right down to the last grain of rice. Finally Baltasar decided to ask him, “Why do you have such confidence in me, Father?”

Quintana wiped his lips and gave the young Argentine a look of candid, friendly complicity. “We’ve been fighting for the same cause for the same span of time. Doesn’t that seem sufficient reason to you?”

“That’s only a fact. It doesn’t satisfy me.”

“Think then that I see in you something more and better than what you see in yourself. I sense that in your heart you feel slightly dissatisfied with everything you’ve done.”

“That’s true. I have my guilt and my passion, but I don’t have greatness. I find myself laughable.”

“Don’t worry about greatness. Worry about your soul.”

“I warn you, I don’t believe in the Church or in God or in the absolute power of absolution that you think you have.”

“So much the better. Rest today, and tomorrow we’ll meet at midday in the chapel here at the tobacco warehouses. Remember that tomorrow is Thursday and that every Thursday I become very strong, very spiritual. Be prepared to do battle with me. Then you will have your reward, and everything will be resolved. I think your ten years of struggle will not have been in vain.”

Baltasar did not allow the conversation to end there. He had the feeling — he wrote to us later — that the priest was right and that these would be the final hours of his long campaign for love and justice.

“What do you see in me, Father, that makes you treat me with such respect … or simple interest? Forgive my boldness in asking.”

Quintana might have stared at him, looking him right in the eye. He chose instead to scoop up the rest of the mole with a tortilla.

“You have taken charge of other lives.”

“But I…”

“We’ve all committed crimes. Shall I tell you something? Would you like to know mine?”

“Father, in the name of justice I exchanged a poor child for a rich child in his cradle. The poor child died because of me. I stole the rich child from his mother and condemned him to who knows what fate. And, in spite of that, I dared to love the mother, to pursue her ridiculously across half the Americas. Ten years, Father, with no success, no reward, all to become, as you say, a fool … Do you call that justice? Does that deserve respect? Does my having abandoned my sister without a second thought, indifferent to her fate, in the name of my passion? I didn’t give my father a last hope or affection. Am I worthy of compassion because I survived at Chacabuco while my comrades died? Wasn’t I lacking in mercy when I shouted a cruel truth at the Marquis de Cabra on his deathbed? Father Quintana … I killed a man in battle.”

“That’s normal.”

“But I didn’t kill him as a soldier. I killed him as a man, a brother. I killed him because he was an Indian. I killed him because he was weaker than I. I killed him as an individual, abusing him, even though I don’t know his name and can’t remember his face.”