Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

Dorrego had a small estate on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, out toward San Isidro, next to the river, and we would often go there on Saturdays and Sundays. We started calling ourselves the Citizens again, recalling our youthful polemics in that bare but packed Café de Malcos, where it seemed that whether or not the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire became reality depended exclusively on us.

Dorrego carried his clocks back and forth from Buenos Aires to San Isidro, and the boy was fascinated watching that collection of fantastic, diverse forms — tombs, drums, carriages, thrones, rings, and eggs — while we wondered if, for us, time had in a certain sense stopped. But for the fair boy it was as varied as those clocks, in which he would see a measure of the different suns, so far from each other, that marked his life.

Baltasar adopted the child, whose family name became Bustos, but in my honor Baltasar renamed him Manuel, replacing the Leocadio he’d been given at baptism. The boy and I did not resemble each other in any way, however. My first gray hairs, it’s true, softened my dark face, though the ferocity of my mustache did not hide the secret flaw in my face: my upper lip is too big. But neither the shadows under my eyes nor my thinness was repeated in this boy, who must have mirrored instead the youth of his mother, the adorable Ofelia.

We would watch him play on those Sundays we spent together in the country. He liked to blindfold himself and play blindman’s buff. Seeing him, so handsome, graceful, and happy, we finally dared to ask his stepfather about his last letter, the one he never sent us after reaching Veracruz and meeting Father Quintana, Ofelia, and the child.

Baltasar stared for a long time at the river that flowed more slowly than the years that were beginning for us that moment, the river that had nothing whatsoever to do with silver plate and seemed, rather, a huge drainage ditch for the jungles and mines of the continent’s interior.

He told us that he had always written the truth to us and that he was now finding it difficult to tell us a lie. We already knew by the gazettes that Father Quintana had been executed exactly as he had foretold, shot on the knees and through the back, then decapitated, his head exposed in a cage in the Veracruz plaza.

Quintana was a mysterious, self-absorbed Mexican mestizo, Baltasar added, but he had a spontaneous genius that cut its way through the terrible resentment of that race. He had a sense of the drama he was living, of what military decision entailed, and of historical language. But, above all, he really believed in Christ and in the possibility of establishing a relationship with God through language.

Baltasar took off his glasses and shut his eyes.

They captured him alone in the hills near Cuernavaca, in the middle of the flight of his defeated troops and the terror of his flock of lawyers. He was shouting to all of them: “Don’t flee — you can’t see the bullets that hit you in the back.”

He asked to be shot in his most elegant cassock. They looked in vain for the name of the tailor so they could punish him.

“Quintana was the last real revolutionary,” Baltasar said at the end of that afternoon, with its golden stains on the dark grass near the Río de la Plata. “Now what everyone expected in Mexico when I set sail from Veracruz will come about. Compromise, freedom only in law, the nation vanquished and dismembered … Can there be liberty without equality?” This was Father Quintana’s burning question, and Baltasar repeated it now. And we, his friends, laughed: “Don’t start that again, or you’ll be kidnapping children once more. We’re not as young as we used to be. Settle down…”

“There has to be a problem. There always has to be a problem,” murmured Baltasar.

“What are you saying?” I asked, because Dorrego wanted to hear no more.

“Nothing,” said Baltasar, “but since I’ve described in detail each doubt that has passed through my spirit, I think I ought to tell you that the worst of all has been not knowing if Quintana told me the truth that afternoon in the chapel.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked him in alarm.

“It’s very likely he lied out of charity and to take charge, as he put it, of Ofelia Salamanca’s memory. It’s hard for me to believe that story about her as an agent of the independence movement. She was infamous, from Chile to Venezuela, and the evidence of her crimes was overwhelming…”

I asked him not to torture himself and not to be less charitable than the Mexican priest. Besides, he should think about the child — the child certainly was Ofelia’s son. In all likelihood, the woman was dead. And he, Baltasar, should accept a respite in this passion that had tortured him for so long.

“But that passion was my reason for being,” our younger brother told us then, in his sad, melodic voice.

And we did not plague him with sermons or try to draw definitive conclusions from his experience. We had the bright idea of inviting young ladies of the best Buenos Aires society, accompanied by their mothers or chaperones, along on our promenades down the river, but nothing went beyond the limits of ordinary etiquette.

Nothing happened, except that Baltasar began to upset the equilibrium that Dorrego, with his comfortable compromise between wealth and Jacobinism, and I, with my labors as enterprising publisher (and both of us with our carousing), had contrived here in Buenos Aires, where independence was already consolidated, while in Peru the military campaigns still raged.

I think Baltasar realized this and wanted us to be calm, but without lying to us.

“I lost many things. Echagüe and Arias were as good friends as you two. I really miss them, believe me. What a good time we had together preparing the Andes campaign! There was never a more fraternal or enjoyable moment in the history of the Americas. How grateful I am to have shared it with them. No, I’m not bitter, though I embraced death many times. But I think I came to know myself. Principles became concrete for me. War and independence, respect for others, justice and faith. I know what those things mean. I also know that, having been through it all, I have you, my friends, and with you I may perhaps know the alliance of all souls, united by the sin and the grace that so concerned Father Quintana. But what I want you to know once and for all, to be perfectly sincere, is that there is still a good distance to go from what I’ve already lived to what I have yet to live. I just want you to know. I’m not going to live that time in peace. Not me, not Argentina, not all the Americas.”

He paused and ran his fingers through his wavy, rebellious hair.

“Now that you know this, let’s be friends forever.”

“What’s he saying?” Dorrego asked this time. He was growing impatient with our friend.

“Nothing,” I said to him, but we saw that there was that spark of madness in Baltasar’s eyes again. Dorrego told me later he’d noticed—“Did you notice?”—that our friend seemed a bit mad, but I said that he wasn’t; that it was enthusiasm. Our younger brother was an enthusiast, that’s all …

“And I hope he never stops being one.”

The eventual reader of these pages, which for the moment only I have the right to read, will now understand why I could not be charitable, then or ever, with my friend Baltasar Bustos and tell him, Yes, Father Quintana didn’t lie to you. Ofelia Salamanca was always on the side of independence, ever since the time of Father Camilo Henríquez and the Carrera brothers in Chile, then here with us in Buenos Aires — well, only with me, passing me information about the activities of her old husband, the Marquis de Cabra, during the twelve months they lived in the palace of the Superior Court of Buenos Aires between 1809 and 1810, when she and I fell in love, and I climbed up that vine and entered that room night after night, and I knew the ecstasy of her flesh and enjoyed her until she became large with my son. And yet not a single day passed without her finding out something useful for the cause, communicating it, and making possible, to a great extent, the triumphs of May.