The Campaign (14 page)

All of them fell during that year Baltasar Bustos spent with Miguel Lanza's band. Like the landscape around him, the towns, and the men he met there, he, too, changed. Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas fell in Larecaja, from whence he closed the road to Lima; Vicente Camargo fell on the way to Potosí, from whence the way to Buenos Aires was open. Padilla and his guerrilla wife—their last words were “This war is eternal!”—fell. The generous Warnes fell, and when he did, the sanctuary he offered in times of defeat closed up. Only Lanza refused to admit defeat.

One day he appeared in camp. His blue eyes were as black as his beard.

He said simply, “They've killed Baltasar Cárdenas, they've killed our brother.”

The Indian's head was paraded around the plaza at Cochabamba and then thrown to the hogs. But Lanza did not leave off intercepting communications, capturing couriers, stockpiling food, gunpowder, lead, horses, feed, medicine, alcohol, and even women—although they were becoming a very scarce commodity. On the other hand, the horses' natural inclinations caused them to join the guerrillas' herd. Runaways, ownerless, they straggled into the micro-republic of Inquisivi from no one knew where. Their bodies gave off the steam of the jungle. This altitude wasn't the best place for them. What were they doing here?

“They're trying to tell us something,” Baltasar, the only Baltasar left in the band, imagined.

“Don't say it,” said Lanza, now with black eyes, as if the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas had given him his eyes when he died.

“But you don't even know what I'm going to say,” exclaimed Baltasar, with exasperated logic.

“You're one of us. We end up reading each other's thoughts.”

“They're inviting us to saddle up and go with them, far away, to abandon this land which we've crossed inch by inch and which we know perfectly well is hostile, dry, and not worth a shit?”

“That's it,” said Miguel Lanza. “Don't even think it. This war's never going to end. It's our fate. To fight to the death. Never to leave here. And not to let anyone out once they get in.”

Then he repeated, so there would be no doubt about his meaning, “It's very difficult to get here, so it should be impossible to get out.”

He said it as if, despite their great friendship, he feared that a deserter—which is what anyone who walked out on Miguel Lanza alive would be—would tell down there in the cities, tell the
porteños
or the Spaniards, who Miguel Lanza was, how and where he lived, and what roads to take to get to him. Miguel Lanza's secret intention was known to them all; it was the unwritten law of the Inquisivi. We'll move around all the time, never stop, but never leave the perimeter of the mountains, the jungle, and the river. And all his soldiers should think the same thing. Without exception. Not even the little creole Baltasar.

Yet it was the arrival of the runaways that made this rule explicit. It was only then that Miguel Lanza stated categorically to Baltasar what Baltasar already knew and accepted day by day as part of his integration into the band of guerrillas and into the wild nature of Upper Peru. They would be together until the end. But the decision was his, Baltasar's. It was a pact he made with himself. Miguel Lanza made a serious mistake when he told him out loud, when the runaway horses came:

“He who becomes a member of my band never leaves it. Don't even think it, Baltasar. Neither you nor anyone else leaves here. We're all citizens of Miguel Lanza's Inquisivi until the final victory or death.”

That night Baltasar Cárdenas's head was brought to camp, stolen by someone who supported the guerrillas. It was brought in by the squad assigned to lure the Spaniards into the Vallegrande sand pits and then to the jungle, where anyone who enters gets lost.

Someone had gouged out the Indian's eyes.

Baltasar Bustos glanced over at Miguel Lanza, whose black eyes were once blue, and he understood all.

That night, as he had on his first day, he fell asleep shaking with fever. He tried to write to Dorrego and me in Buenos Aires to ask if we had ever considered this matter of destiny; he, our younger brother, our young comrade, had just realized that, without his being aware of it, a year had passed in which he'd followed a destiny which he thought was his but which wasn't his, which was in fact the destiny Miguel Lanza sought to impose on him. The price was the reward we would understand better than anyone: to be brothers. He would expand his brotherhood at the cost of his personal liberty. Which is why he wrote to us, his real brothers: a minimal brotherhood made up of only three men. Baltasar Bustos wrote us to say he had no reason to live out the truncated destiny of another set of brothers: the Lanzas—Miguel, Gregorio, and Manuel Victorio.

He would admit he admired everything he wasn't. And he hoped his salvation lay in being the best he could be as circumstances unfolded and multiplied, pressuring him. He wanted to be the best he could be in this collision between what he proposed for himself and what others imposed on him.

He remembered the distant, feverish discussions in the Café de Malcos back when the revolution was imminent. Seeing himself with the aid of hindsight, Baltasar Bustos knew now that he had been less sure of his ideals than he was eager to impose them on others. Or eager to punish those who didn't share them. Baltasar's ideals mattered not at all to Miguel Lanza, but he did take seriously Baltasar's intention to impose them on others. Because, if Baltasar was right, wasn't Miguel Lanza equally right when he confused the destiny of a single man with endless, repetitive, tedious war without quarter? And at the end of this calvary Lanza and his followers could only glimpse a claustrophobic paradise: to live within fixed boundaries, not to yield an inch of what they'd conquered with so much zeal and at such sacrifice, to convert the isolated, repetitive, besieged fatality of a land that wasn't worth shit into a supreme value of existence?

In that instant, Baltasar Bustos saw Miguel Lanza's destiny as that of one of the heroes of ancient Iberian Numantia, who chose to throw themselves on Roman swords rather than surrender or compromise the purity of their struggle.

That being the case, who was the real idealist? Miguel Lanza, locked within the circle of his struggle to the death? Or Baltasar Bustos, who proposed an ideal but who now also understood the struggle that ideal demanded? The bad thing for him that night was that he could not understand—he wrote to Dorrego and me—if the struggle compromised and postponed the ideal indefinitely or if the ideal, ultimately, was not worth it and deserved to be defeated by human reality, the hunger for action and movement that justified Miguel Lanza's life.

“Life, death. What a short distance and what a short span of time between them. Tell me now, my faithful friends Manuel Varela and Xavier Dorrego, have we made a mistake, was my father right, could we, through compromise, patience, and tenacity, have saved ourselves the spilling of this blood? Perhaps, if we hadn't taken up arms, we would have suffered only the exemplary holocaust of the meek. But there was no one more violent than those who today accuse us of violence toward them: our time-honored executioners, whispers the voice, creole like my own, of the deplorable, admirable madman Miguel Lanza, dictating my destiny to me tonight, a destiny identical to his so he won't be left alone now that his own brothers have been killed. And in understanding this I understand enough, Dorrego, Varela, to understand that my destiny will cease to be my own between Lanza and his guerrilla fighters, because my options will shrink to one only—not the struggle for independence but death in the name of an ideal; or a cloistered life so that Lanza won't be left brotherless, alone with this enemy nature.

“Another voice speaks to me, but secretly; it's the dead voice of the eyeless head of my namesake Baltasar Cárdenas.

“When the Spaniards fell into the trap Miguel Lanza prepared for them in Vallegrande, I was among the first to throw myself on them. I said goodbye to the angel of peace who protected me until then, and I gave myself to his dark comrade, the angel of death. I discovered they were twins. I joined in the hand-to-hand fighting that scattered us over the sandy ground, isolating us from each other, royalists and guerrillas; but during the exchange of saber cuts and dagger thrusts, I realized that if I was in fact going to kill an enemy, he couldn't be my equal, my fellow man, but a non-fellow man, my real enemy brother, not because he was fighting in the ranks of the Spaniards but because he was really different, other, Indian.

“My glasses were streaked with mud in that mortal Upper Peru spring, and wiping them clean with the sleeve of my coat, I sought out the coppery face, the features of this person who was weak, even if physically strong. Weak when confronted by my reasoning, my learning, my theories, my refinements, my ways … Weak because his time was not mine but that of the magic, spectral city Simón Rodríguez had shown me. He was other because he dreamed of other myths, which were not my myths, weak because he did not speak my language, different because he did not understand me … because in me he saw his enemy, the master, the overseer, the rapacious, irredeemable white man.

“I embraced him wholeheartedly, as if in killing him I was also loving him and he was suddenly the consummation of the two acts I refused to perform in the guerrilla fighting. Killing and fornicating. I looked at the glassy yellow eyes of the Indian fighting on the side of the Spaniards, and I did not let my partiality confuse me. I wasn't killing him for being a royalist but because he was Indian, weak, poor, different … I deprived him forever of his destiny without knowing if I could really (forever) make him part of mine …

“Embracing him, I sank my knife as deep as I could into his dark belly, his guts as hot as mine even if they were fed from a different kitchen. In these parts, it takes water a long time to boil—I thought absurdly as I killed him, hugging him around the neck, burying my knife in his stomach—and it takes hours to boil potatoes …

“I killed for the first time. It was over in a flash. And I felt the stupor of still being alive.

“I killed the Indian in a secluded spot. No one saw me commit the crime. I thought of Baltasar Cárdenas and the way the Spaniards made his death memorable. Tearing out his eyes and sticking his head up in the plaza.

“I wanted to make the death of this anonymous Indian soldier memorable, too. He was my first dead man.

“I quickly got undressed. I was completely naked in the mud and the rain, which had started up again and which washed away the blood and dirt of the battle.

“Then I undressed the dead Indian. I did it slowly. I put my clothes on him, carefully, without worrying that my dead man was small and my clothes were grotesquely big for him.

“Only when I saw him there, stretched out in the mud, washed clean, like me, by the rains, did I feel that I had done my duty by my first dead man and that I could kill from then on with a clear conscience, without thinking twice about it. He was my propitiatory victim, my memorable dead man.

“I put on the Indian's clothes, which are cut large and made of thick stuff to protect him from the cold nights of the uplands.

“And then I set about memorizing his face.

“But I could not etch his face into my mind. I saw his face as identical to all the other Indian faces. Identical one to the other. Indistinguishable to my urban, white eye.

“In that case, what face could I give this victim of mine to make it truly memorable? I had scarcely thought this when I stopped seeing the face of the dead Indian and saw my own as the face of a glorious warrior. It made me laugh. I tried to transpose the face of my victory on the battlefield onto the Indian soldier dressed in my clothes, lying at my feet. That, my friends, I could do. The mask of glory passed over without any difficulty from my face to his, covering it with a rictus of horror and violence. I didn't have to see myself in a mirror to know that now the Indian and I finally shared the same face.

“It was the face of violence.

“I fled the place as soon as I felt that both faces, mine and that of my victim, were changing once again. It was no longer glory. It wasn't even violence. Once the masks of war were gone, the face that united us was that of death.

“I had paid my debt to Miguel Lanza.”

That night, Baltasar Bustos set aside the things he considered his—a leather document case, his glasses—and wrote out the pages I have quoted. Then he tucked the letters destined for Buenos Aires between his belt and his skin, and that night, while the troops were celebrating the victory of Vallegrande with drinking and song, he left Ayopaya and the dying fires of Miguel Lanza's camp. Leaving the same way he'd arrived, he stretched out over the ribs of one of the runaway horses and held on for dear life. He set this member of the fabulous wild herd loose in the hope the horse would find the road back to his home: the pampa, his father, Sabina, the gauchos …

[2]

José Antonio Bustos was laid out in the drawing room, the same place they'd held the wake for his wife, the Basque María Teresa Echegaray, ten years before. But while the wife had died as she'd lived—oblivious—her husband had announced to their son, Baltasar: “If you find me dead with a candle in my hand, it means I finally came around to your way of thinking. If you find me with my hands crossed over my chest, entwined in a scapulary, it means that I held on to my ideas and died fighting yours. Try to convince me.”

Baltasar returned to the pampa too late and too early. Too late to convince José Antonio Bustos, who had died two days before. Too early to avoid the uncertainty that would accompany him from that day on. His father was laid out with his hands folded, his fingers wrapped around a scapulary and with a candle, like a white phallus, between his fists, clenched forever in rigor mortis.

His father was so fragile and wasted that to Baltasar he seemed about to fly away. And while the candle looked like a mast, the scapulary was an anchor more powerful than any wind. Actually, his father looked more like wax. Bustos the creole recalled Miguel Lanza and his saint's complexion. Now Bustos's father had acquired it as well, but at the price of death.