Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

And now I write this and, like the chronicle of the writer from Barranquilla, this manuscript of mine must wait a very long time before being published, for the length of the lives of my friend Balta and the son, Manuel, I had with Ofelia Salamanca, the unknown heroine of the wars of independence, who died of cancer on a forgotten day in the malarial port of Coatzcoalcos, in the state of Veracruz.

I had no one to write with this request: put twenty-five candles around her poor coffin, the same number of years she’d been alive when our son was born, the same age the beautiful Ofelia will always be in my memory.

The legend of Ofelia and her platonic lover, my friend Baltasar, would go on living in the vidalitas, cumbias, and corridos.

I locked this manuscript away, and Dorrego and I went out on the lawn of the estate along the river.

The boy, whom a singular stroke of luck had saved ten years ago from the flames and from death in exchange for an anonymous black child, was playing blindman’s buff, alone, with his eyes blindfolded.

His adoptive father, our brother Baltasar, was watching him in silence, unsmiling, his hands joined under his chin, his index fingers covering his pursed lips and his long, light-brown beard. He was sitting at a comfortable white wicker table, while the lights of summer glimmered on the grass.

It was, I said to myself, as if Baltasar had carried out his fervent desire to have communion with nature, but not on his father and sister’s savage pampa, not on the risky sand flats and jungles of Miguel Lanza, not even in the crossing of the Andes with San Martín, not in the besieged port of Maracaibo, not in the final encampment of Father Anselmo Quintana; rather, only now, here, in this civilized corner of an estate in San Isidro, facing the river that reflected the slow undulations of the tops of the willows ruffled by the light summer breeze. Through those trees the clean, strong sun was filtered by a thousand intangible shields.

“These hours of solitude and meditation are the only times … I am completely myself, without diversion, without obstacles … what nature has wanted me to be.”

Was there any reason, in reality, not to accept, with Rousseau, that true felicity is within us?

We looked at Manuel, the child Manuel Bustos, who was playing happily, and the three of us remembered — Xavier abandoning his clocks and walking out to the lawn, I looking with fraternal love at my younger brother, Baltasar, who made his way, passionately, through an entire continent, the same Balta who touched Ofelia Salamanca only once, and then to help her to her feet — that terrible night of May 24 and 25, 1810, when we thought we had lost the child forever, searching for him until dawn in the brothels, meat-salting sheds, and shacks with straw roofs down along the river. Now Baltasar threw into that same river a thin red thread.

The child whirled around several times, playing alone, and then, without taking the handkerchief off his eyes, spread his arms before a wall in the garden, gave the order to fire, shouted Bang, bang, bang, and fell to the ground, clasping his hand to his heart.

We were about to laugh at this joke when shock stopped us. We heard a flutter of skirts and saw in the light of summer a woman running toward the child, holding his head, and hugging it to her breasts, a beautiful woman dressed in gray taffeta, gloved and pliant, through whose light veil Dorrego and I could recognize — how could we not? — the adorable features of the young actress who garnered great success in the nights of Buenos Aires, so frequented by Xavier and me: the little mistress, as everyone nicknamed her.

But in fact, the name of this intelligent and beautiful Chilean actress was Gabriela Cóo. She burst unexpectedly into our Sunday garden, tossing aside her drizzle-colored parasol to kneel by my son, Ofelia and my son, Baltasar Bustos’s adoptive son; and she turned, this little mistress, to look at us with her black eyes from under those famous, thick, uncensored eyebrows until, lighting up with a smile on her red lips, she fixed them on the face of our friend, our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos.

The campaign was finally over.

Mommsenstrasse, Berlin, June 1989

Paseo del Prado, Madrid, August 1989

Kingsand, Cornwall, January 1990

Mendoza, Argentina, February 1990