Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“Father, I am that officer. The songs mention my name. Don’t try to fool me.”

“Not another word, Baltasar. She ordered another hero of independence to be sent here, a man who, like her, pretended to be a royalist to acquire intelligence and to spread false rumors. She wants that hero, you, to take charge of her son. That is why she wrote to her friend Luz María in Maracaibo, asking you to come.”

Quintana threw his arm around Ofelia’s shoulders.

“Now she’s very sick and cannot take care of the child or work for us any longer. She agrees that her son should return to Argentina with you. I suppose that you…”

“Yes,” Baltasar said simply. “I agree as well.”

The captain from Buenos Aires came nearer just as Ofelia Salamanca left Father Quintana’s side. She lost her balance, and Baltasar helped her to her feet. It was the first time he’d ever touched her. She said, in a faint voice, “Thank you.”

They separated instantly. She never looked at him. He did not want to see the mortal sadness in those eyes he’d adored so intensely. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and said something like, “What you need is a good bath. You’ll see, you’re going to like the pampa. From now on, you’re going to be my little brother…”

Clutched in his fist, Baltasar held the red ribbon that one night in May Ofelia Salamanca had worn around her neck. The myopic young man had stolen it from the Marquis de Cabra the night of another death in Lima.

He would have liked to return it now to Ofelia, to hang it down on her bosom, but the woman’s dazed look held him back.

Balta’s friends Xavier Dorrego and I, Manuel Varela, were standing on the dock waiting for him. We were overflowing with news for him. Eleven years since we’d seen each other! We gave him a rapid summary of what was happening in Argentina. All eyes were on Bernardino Rivadavia, the young prime minister who was fighting for liberal principles, free education, open communication, colonization of the interior, auctioning off of publicly owned lands, creating a public library, publishing books, stimulating local talent … One phrase of his seemed to summarize everything: “We are anticipating the future…”

But Balta did not seem to be listening to us. He gazed at us with intense seriousness, reading the changes in our features and perhaps guessing at the changes in our souls.

Well, he soon found out that Dorrego was still an inveterate philosophical Jacobin, although his family inheritance obliged him to be a conservative in economics, no matter how anticlerical he might be in his ideology.

Dorrego’s close-cropped hair had rapidly gone gray, giving a reddish tint to the porcelain tones of his skin. But he seemed more fashionable with his severe cap of short hair. It was a radical renunciation of the age of wigs. We would never see them again.

I, however, continued to be a printer, and will continue to be one all my life. And now that it was possible to publish modern authors without fear of censorship, I made great efforts in that direction. While I waited for authors of our own to emerge, I already had before me a life of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, a manuscript stained with rain and tied with tricolor ribbons, which the author, who called himself Aureliano García, had sent to me, as best he could, from Barranquilla. It was a sad chronicle, however, and like the story about the blind violinist from Tabay that Baltasar had written to me, it foretold a bad end for the Liberator and his deeds. I preferred to go on publishing Voltaire and Rousseau ( La Nouvelle Héloïse was the greatest literary success in the entire history of South America) and leave for another time the melancholy prophecy of a Bolívar as sick and defeated as his dream of American unity and civil liberty in our nations.

Yet, being together again gave the three of us immense joy. Baltasar knew that he had written a chronicle of those years — the one I’m holding in my hands right now, which one day you, reader, will also hold in yours — in the stream of letters he’d sent “Dorrego and Varela” (we’d begun to sound like a company).

We let Baltasar take the boy out to José Antonio Bustos’s old estate so that he could meet Sabina. He found her a bit mad: she had a mania about sleeping in a different bedroom every night — her father, José Antonio’s; that of her mother, Mayté, dead so many years before; that of the absent Baltasar; and, presumably, that of the forgotten Jesuit tutor, Julián Ríos — so she could keep them all warm.

It was useless. Brother and sister could never understand each other, and Sabina, as Baltasar told us when he got back to Buenos Aires, did not even have the courage to find herself a man, not even — he smiled with a malice unusual in him — now that Rivadavia’s modernizing laws had rooted the nomadic gauchos on the estates, forcing them to become agricultural workers and cattle ranchers, as well as a reserve available for conscription.

“Nothing happens for Sabina except in her nostalgia,” her younger brother said, sighing. “She is a living recrimination.”

By a strange confluence of destinies, neither Dorrego nor I had ever married, preferring to prolong our lives as Buenos Aires rakes as long as possible, though we were both approaching forty. The truth was that carousing was our pretext, a very Buenos Aires pretext to be sure, because our city had always abounded in vieux garçons who would not resign themselves to giving up the exciting freedom of their youth. And since Buenos Aires was a city of crossed destinies where thuggish gauchos, fleeing conscription, would jump off their horses — followed by country girls in love with them and cast, as they used to say, into perdition; but it was also a city of Spaniards who had come for business, and of Englishmen who had come to create works of civil engineering, we all met in the brothels, the bars, and taverns. We danced and drank and loved with the calm awareness that our Buenos Aires was a city of foundations, founded twice at the beginning and three, four, even a hundred times each time a foreigner, from the interior or from Europe, came to live here.

We couldn’t drag Baltasar to our bordellos, and we ourselves began to give them up. We realized that the real reason for our carousing was that we were awaiting the return of our “younger brother” to see what we would do together. Who would have thought it? In the decade of our participation in the revolution, we had encouraged him from Buenos Aires, had imposed on him that mission to Upper Peru to follow in the footsteps of Castelli, and had thrust him into a life of dangers and adventures that Dorrego and I, well, never in the slightest experienced personally. We soon became disillusioned with revolutionary politics and returned to our hereditary habits: Dorrego, living off his rents; I, a printer. But now Rivadavia was reanimating our hopes.

There was something more, as well. The exciting romantic story of Baltasar Bustos and Ofelia Salamanca, sung from one end of the Americas to the other, had both of us, Dorrego and me (although for different reasons), in suspense. We could not make any matrimonial decisions until we knew how that turned out.

Baltasar did not have to tell us who the child was. Before anyone else, we found out what had happened that night of May 24–25, 1810, in the burned palace of the Royal Court. We showered tenderness on the boy. Why, we began to treat him like a fourth brother, this one really younger. The boy was clever, although melancholy, and he spoke with the charming accent of the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He never mentioned his mother, as if he’d made a vow. But he did speak Spanish, after all, and we could understand each other.