Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“The word is the only thing that links us when everything else becomes useless, treacherous, threatening. The word is the ultimate reality of Christ, His vigil among us, what allows us, without pride, to say, ‘I am like Him…’”

Quintana raised his voice as he said this, as if his faith could all be reduced to these few words, and Baltasar, in the half light of the confessional, saw through the grating not the fluttering earflaps of Father Anselmo Quintana’s cap but the head of Gabriela Cóo, crowned with clouds and weeds. He had to dispel that adorable vision because the voice of the priest continued, lower now, but more certain as well: “From that time I only spoke with Him, but He was more severe than all my judges put together, because no one can fool Him. There are no little tricks with Him. God is the Supreme Being who knows all, even what we imagine about Him, and steals the march on us and imagines us first; and if we go about thinking that it depends on us to believe or not in Him, He steals the march on us once again and finds the way of telling us that He will go on believing in us no matter what happens, even if we abandon Him and deny Him. That is the voice I listened to during the night when my soul suffered tribulation because of the edicts of expulsion from the Church and the calls for me to repent: the voice of Christ saying to me, ‘I am going to go on believing in you, Anselmo Quintana, even if you are a seducer, lascivious, a libertine, a hypocrite, which you are; why deny it? But what you are not, Anselmo, my son, is an apostate, a heretic, an atheist, or a traitor to your country, that you are not…’

“‘Listen to me carefully, your God says to you: there is no way that I’m going to allow that lie to pass.’”

He raised his eyes to tell Baltasar that all he needed to hear from God’s voice were those words, to fight for ten years, “to not yield in my battle for my country or in my other struggle for the love and confidence of my Creator. Imagine what one thing would have been without the other — neither the nation nor God; that most certainly would have been my anguish, and they know it, which is why they call me a heretic, excommunicate me, and ask me to repent and come back to the sheepfold. But Jesus said to me, ‘Anselmo, my son, don’t be a comfortable Christian; make life hell for the Church and the king, because they adore tranquil Christians. I, on the other hand, adore rampaging Christians like you; you gain nothing by being a Catholic without problems, a simple believer, a man of faith who doesn’t even realize that faith is absurd and is faith and not reason because of that. Reason cannot be illogical; faith is and has to be, because you have to believe in me against all evidence, and if I were a logician, I wouldn’t be God. I wouldn’t have sacrificed myself. I would have accepted all the temptations in the desert and would be’—are you listening to me, Anselmo, my son, are you listening to me, brother Baltasar? — ‘the very same long-tailed, incorrigible Devil who invented the statement “I think, therefore I am.”’ What pretension! Not even my thoughts are my own, not even my very existence. I neither think nor exist alone. I share each word with God, with you, Baltasar, and each heartbeat as well. Then I learned something else, that it was my obligation, in the name of the simple people of this world, to be complicated; just ask yourself right now as I look at you and listen to you, if you aren’t too comfortable in your philosophy, because I think you are being very simple with your own secular faith in reason and progress. You are as foolishly devout as those women who grow old in churches, sweeping and lighting candles every single day. Please, Baltasar, always be a problem, be a problem for your Rousseau and your Montesquieu, and all your philosophers. Don’t let them pass through your soul without paying something at the spiritual customs house; don’t give your faith to any ruler, any secular state, any philosophy, any military or economic power without adding your confusion, your complication, your exceptions, your damned imagination that deforms all truths.

“Well!” shouted Father Quintana in a flash of good humor. “Wouldn’t I have been better off losing my faith and avoiding all that anguish? No sir, because then I wouldn’t have fought for independence. It’s as simple as that. I would have let myself be beaten in the first fight. My faith in the nation that I want, free, without slaves, without the horrible need for thousands and thousands of bottom dogs, ignorant, dying of hunger, all this, Baltasar, would not have been possible without my faith in God. You may have your own formula. This is mine. I’m not asking you to believe as I do. I’m not that simple. I am asking you to complicate your own secular faith. You’ve come from far, far away, and this continent is very large. But we have two things in common. We understand each other because we speak Spanish. And, like it or not, we’ve had three centuries of Catholic, Christian culture, marked by the symbols, values, follies, the crimes and the dreams of Christianity in the New World. I know fellows like you: they’ve all passed through here; you’ve already seen them, although the ones you saw were a bit more beaten up than you, like the lawyers, scribes, authors of laws and proclamations in my own company. I’ve talked with all of you for ten years. You have given me the education which, sadly, I never had. My parents were mule drivers from the coast. I was in a religious seminary when I was young, and now that I’m grown up, I’m in the secular seminar with all of you. But let’s get on with it. I’m not foretelling anything — I have it right under my nose, as pugged and battered as it may be. All of you would like to put an end to that past which seems unjust and absurd to you, to forget it. Yes, how good it would have been to be founded by Montesquieu instead of Torquemada. But it didn’t happen that way. Do we want now to be Europeans, modern, rich, governed by the spirit of the laws and the universal rights of man? Well, let me tell you that nothing like that will ever happen unless we carry the corpse of our past with us. What I’m asking you is that we not sacrifice anything, son, not the magic of the Indians, not the theology of the Christians, not the reason of our European contemporaries. It would be better if we gathered up everything we are in order to go on being and to be, finally, something better. Don’t let yourself be divided and dazzled by a single idea, Baltasar. Put all your ideas on one side of the balance, then put everything that negates them on the other, and then you’ll be closer to the truth. Work counter to your secular faith, brother. Put next to it my divine faith, but as ballast, weight, contrast, and a part of your secularism. I do the same thing, working from my faith, with yours … Take me into account more, much more tomorrow than today, and think seriously that if I not only joined but forwarded the revolution until the end, it was so that history would not leave the Church behind— my church. See to it that you don’t leave your own church of romantic, anticlerical philosophers behind. I don’t want to find out ten years from now that you became just one more man made sick by frustrated Utopias, by betrayed ideals. And don’t think I don’t thank you all for your skepticism, my good company of lawyers. But I have what you lack, let me say it with forgiveness and humility. I had to burn the midnight oil reading St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus. Rousseau and Voltaire are a corrective for me, even an emetic. But you modern fellows, what will you use as a corrective for what you’ve learned? Experience, of course. But experience without ideas does not become a destiny, a soul … And what is the soul, St. Thomas wonders, but the form of the body? Think about it and you’ll see that that’s no paradox: the soul is the form of the body. Without the soul, the body would not last, would begin instantly to stink and disintegrate … Give soul to your body, Baltasar, and let’s hope we see each other again in ten years … Bah, perhaps tomorrow I’ll be captured, and perhaps that’s why I felt the need to talk with you today. I want you to think about me when you hear about my end. I also want you to take charge of my memory.”