Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

With a strength that came from total conviction, Quintana told him to be quiet. “Don’t force me to confess my own sins to you.”

“What, that you’re a skirt-chaser, that you like cockfights, that you have illegitimate children all over the country, that you like fancy cassocks? Are those serious sins, Father?”

“Tomorrow I’ll make my confession before you,” he said with a sudden huge sigh of fatigue. “I’ll do it tomorrow. I swear. I’ll make my confession before you, even though you don’t believe in the power of absolution. I’ll confess before my younger brother, who in Maracaibo took charge of a fallen woman and the wounded enemy. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday, I shall speak to my brother in mercy.”

[5]

That night Baltasar slept in a hammock. He was lulled by the hammock, but even more by a weariness that came not from a single day but from ten years’ accumulation. It was the sleep that comes when something is about to end, an imminent sleep that told him: This is where you and I part company; now you will have to change, now you must take account of debits and credits, just as these paymasters and secretaries do who accompany Father Quintana.

Might Quintana be the true notary of Baltasar Bustos’s life?

Tomorrow was Thursday. They would meet; the priest had told him to come to the chapel at noon. Did they have anything else to say to each other? Baltasar thought that he had made his confession to the priest that afternoon, and the priest’s sins were the talk of Veracruz. What more could they say to each other? To what ceremony had this proud man surrounded by an aura of obscure self-denial invited him?

He had told Baltasar that in the young man he saw someone who took charge of others. The women in Harlequin House, the Duchess; the slender, disfigured officer … That was a slim list of credits next to the column of debits Baltasar had enumerated to Quintana.

But now, drifting deeper into sleep and rocked by the hammock (And who rocked it? There was no breeze, the Orizaba sky was in mourning but did not weep, and he descended, immobile, into sleep), Baltasar only reproached himself for a greater insincerity, which was to have told the rebel priest that everything he’d done, the good and the bad, had an erotic, sexual, amorous (as the priest liked to call it) purpose, which was to reach Ofelia Salamanca, finally to touch her after ten years of romantic passion paraded over the entire continent, the source both of sighs and of jokes, sung about in corridas, cuecas, and zambas.

To reach her, keeping his passion obsessive and unique, he’d had to sacrifice the love of the beautiful Chilean Gabriela Cóo, since to be unfaithful to Ofelia Salamanca, even if she didn’t know it, would be to betray the adorable Gabriela as well.

To see her face to face. To say to her: I love you. To say to her: I forgive you. To which of the two women would he say that? Didn’t one feed the love of the other, and didn’t both loves drink from a common spring — absence? Did he desire them so much only because he did not possess them?

He opened his eyes. The hammock stopped rocking. He shut them again, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his presumption. What was he going to pardon Ofelia Salamanca for? What did he know of her except, in effect, gossip, idle talk, limericks that often created a new truth only for the sake of rhyme? How did he dare? Hadn’t Gabriela told him in Santiago de Chile that acting is insincere, fleeting, that it leaves no more trace of itself than words?

Then he plummeted again from the peak of his aroused consciousness to a pleasant unconsciousness, drugged by the premonition of peace and rest after ten years of exaltation. And in the depths of his sleep he was always on his way back to El Dorado. Holding Simón Rodríguez’s hand, he returned to that most high abyss, that deep promontory, the heart of the Quechua mountain, the navel of sleep, and there he accused himself, with rage, with despair, with the terrible feeling that he’d lost his chance, because he hadn’t stopped for an instant to watch the passage of dreams in the luminous eyes of the inhabitants of the city where everything moved in light, was born from light, and returned to light.

He scorned dreams. He rejected the possibility of understanding anything through a dream which was not his own, which was not bound to the dream of reason, faith in material progress, the certitude that human perfectibility was infallible, and the celebration that in the end happiness and history, the subject and the object, would become one, once and for all.

The other story, the warning but also the possibility of escape, was perhaps in the eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado, where light was necessary because everything was dark and where, for that reason, they could see with their eyes shut and reveal their dreams in the screens of their eyelids, warning him, Baltasar Bustos, that for each reason there is an unreason without which reason would cease to be reasonable: a dream that simultaneously denies and affirms reason. That there was an exception to every law, which makes the law partial and tolerable. But his most vivid sensation as he abandoned El Dorado was not that things complement each other, but rather the other extreme, a negation:

Evil is only what our reason hides and refuses to contemplate.

The real sin is to separate the sensible world from the spiritual world.

Then in a dream Ofelia Salamanca ceased to be a visible projection onto the animated wall of an Indian cavern, visible but untouchable, as delightful as his eyes announced it to be from a balcony in Buenos Aires that May night so far away.

Now she was the object of his touch (she was a single, unending animal wearing pulsating silk), of his hearing (she was a Mass in the desert, a voice outside of consciousness telling him from then on, without giving him an opportunity to reply, “You love me!” “You love me not!”), of smell (she was the most delightful stench, the stink without which there is no love, the perfume of a sullied clover leaf), and of sight: Ofelia Salamanca had eyes on her nipples that stared at him furiously, seductively, disdainfully, mockingly, until they made him wake up with a start.

The hammock stopped rocking. Ofelia Salamanca was the owner of the world.

[6]

Anselmo Quintana was standing before the altar. Baltasar Bustos’s silhouette materialized in the light at the entrance to the chapel, and the priest waited until the thudding of his boot heels on the floor of flaking bricks, too soft for this rainy climate, stopped. When he was near, Quintana put his hand on Baltasar’s shoulder and said to him, “Yesterday you didn’t let me say my confession. Today you are going to sit in my place in the confessional, and I am going to kneel at your side and speak in secret through the grating.

“I know you don’t believe in the sacrament. So it shouldn’t matter where we do this. Yet it does matter to me to be on my knees to speak to you. Today is Thursday, and from now until tomorrow, weekly, Jesus Christ dies again for us. Many forget it; I do not. The most important thing I do is to remind anyone who cares to listen that if we are here and live, it is because Jesus sacrificed Himself to give us life on earth. Bear in mind then, Baltasar, that what I am going to tell you is preparation for the supreme act of faith, which is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is inseparable from Christ’s sacrifice. And even though Calvary sufficed, each time I drink the blood and eat the body of Christ, I add to His sacrifice and act in the name of the quick and the dead. The Cross is the confluence of everything: sacrifice, life, death. Calvary, as they taught us in seminary, was sufficient in itself. But for me the Eucharist comes closest to that sacrificial sufficiency. I have no road more certain toward Christ than the Eucharist.”