The Campaign (6 page)

The ants, on the other hand, brought out her diligent, practical side, and that was when she and Sabina would become suspicious and check over the supplies stored in the cupboards and calculate the level of thievery among the maids, associating everything with the collapse of authority, the degeneration of customs, the lack of respect for the Church, and, finally, the dissolution of colonial authority. Napoleon in Spain, the English in Buenos Aires, and the terrible consequences: King Ferdinand dethroned, the English defeated not by the viceroy but by the local Argentine militia (gauchos, no doubt). All this news finished off the ant in Mistress Mayté, and not even the spiders in her were able to compensate for so much horror. Actually, the spiders betrayed her, and in her dreams she saw a world without Church or king, a world adrift. She would curse herself for having abandoned Spain, but then she would remember that Spain was in the hands of Napoleon and his drunken brother “Joe Bottle,” and her heart would sink.

It sank permanently one hot afternoon in the summer of 1808, and Sabina inherited all her mother's certitudes and agonies. Except that the daughter, stronger, standing upright, alien to ants and spiders, turned them into dogma and battles.

“She feels unprotected,” José Antonio reiterated, “but she doesn't know how to express her ideas in complex terms. She talks about Spain, the Church, and the king as if they were the roof of the house. Her fear goes deeper. We are leaving a traditional empire, one that is absolutist and Catholic, for a rationalist, scientific, liberal, and perhaps Protestant freedom. You should try to understand our fears. She's right. It is like being left to the mercy of the elements.”

Baltasar regretted that, instead of accepting tradition, he had brought revolution to the house (unprotected, from now on without a roof). He would have wanted, though, to ask his father: Can one exist without the other? Can there be tradition without revolution? Doesn't tradition die if it isn't renewed and shaken? He wasn't able to formulate something he barely intuited, because Sabina was already there, precipitating everything, presenting him with the final option: Are you loyal to your family or loyal to your revolution? His sister, a dividing force, offered herself as the representative of “what will keep us together.” Baltasar was left in the position of the one who divides. Their father did not seem displeased with the role that fell to him: that of arbiter between brother and sister.

“You taught me all I know.”

He managed to say that much to his father; the intention was affectionate, but mixed with the affection was some fine malice. José Antonio Bustos trembled as he listened. His son had had a Jesuit education. Julián Ríos, an aged member of the Society who had discarded his habit and returned to Argentina, where he'd been born, was the young Baltasar's mentor. The Jesuits, expelled from Spain and her colonies in 1767, left an immense void behind them. People protested the expulsion, demonstrated in the streets, wept … And the Jesuits of the Americas had their revenge on Spain. They sailed to the coast of Italy and asked the Pope for asylum. The pontiff, fearful of offending the Bourbons, at first forbade them to disembark. The holy brothers remained on board for weeks, at the mercy of waves and tides, seasick, unable to sleep, unable to believe what was happening to them.

In the end, the Pope accepted some good advice. Kings might well scorn the intelligence of the Jesuits, but the Pope could take advantage of it. Often it happens the other way around; now let Rome open her arms to what Madrid and Lisbon have rejected. It was said that the ex-Jesuit Julián Ríos returned to Argentina without his priestly vestments the better to fool the colonial authorities. Like all New World Jesuits, he taught national history, national geography, the flora and fauna (and the form and fame) of the nascent nations, from New Spain to Chile, from the Río de la Plata to New Granada.

And, besides giving his pupils a national awareness, Don Julián, the defrocked, also gave them books banned by the Church and the authorities:
The Spirit of the Laws, The Social Contract,
Diderot's
The Nun,
Voltaire's
Candide
 … That was Baltasar's education, but not his sister's. She was left to the distracted instruction of her mother and the affectionate virtue of her father. But she was stubborn; she envied her brother; she read more than would be expected of one imprisoned at home. In contrast to her brother, she read breviaries, Catholic pamphlets, sermons … On her own she created a counterculture the better to challenge her younger brother.

He wanted to see her a different way, prettier, tenderer, better. He wanted to be generous. She would not allow it:

“Decide: are you loyal to your family or to your revolution?”

She ceased to be the swan he wanted to find; she became once again the ugly duckling she would always be, thus giving her father the opportunity yet again to be generous and evenhanded.

“Your sister means that there may be options less brutal than this one we are living through. Try to understand her.”

[3]

Baltasar walked out into the open country to think what those options might be and how he might undo what had already occurred. He accepted the fact that history, the conglomeration of ideas, facts, and desires which he fought for or against, came to be only in the company of others, in something shared with others. It irritated him that he so often felt that the
we,
the
others,
were the
excess,
the
superfluous.
But then his reading of Jean-Jacques would come to his rescue (the same way the romances of chivalry served as models for Don Quixote, said his friends, Dorrego and I, Varela, laughing), to tell him that feeling uneasy in society, or seeing society as an excretion, an excess, was not a sin but a virtue. It showed that society was in a bad way.

Here on the pampa, he looked into the distance, toward Mendoza and the mountains: the great range seemed South America's sleeping beast, a lion-panther with a vast white back and black belly, lying in wait for its ferocious chance. He accepted the fact that, though he was born here, he was returning not to stay but to rest; from this spot he would move toward those mountains, where, perhaps, history could be made so that nature and society might once again be united.

I will be free in society only when I no longer need society because I myself have transformed it.

Unfortunately, he was tied to his society. He was not its master; he was mastered by it. He had thrown himself into the Argentine revolution and carried out a daring, highly personal act of justice, as vital for him as writing a manifesto was for Mariano Moreno or dethroning a viceroy for Cornelio de Saavedra. Baltasar Bustos had traded the destinies of two children. But he wasn't fooling himself. He had only substituted one injustice for another. His most radical act, followed by his most private crisis of conscience, spoke to him thus. So, after having dinner with his father, served by his sister, he invoked the imperfect loneliness of the Argentine countryside, itself a prologue to the mountains and their pure solitude. He imagined the Andes an echo chamber for his soul, liberated and reconciled with the natural order.

Then things began to happen.

The first was the vision of Ofelia Salamanca pursuing him. The woman desired interposed herself between him and nature, occupying all physical space. She was an enchanting chimera. She always sat with her back to him, but in his vision tonight she was no longer seated but standing, a white flame, total, shimmering, bending over little by little, spreading her legs slowly to reveal, from the rear, the most irresistible vision of her sex, womankind's genital catholicism, which is adored, imagined, and penetrated from all angles. The mountains were impenetrable: the vision of Ofelia Salamanca, naked and offering herself from the rear, wasn't. It invited, invited … And then the woman whirled around and gave him, not her dreamed-of sex, but her feared face: she was a Gorgon, accusing him with eyes as white as marble, transforming him into the stone of injustice, hating him …

When Baltasar Bustos turned away from that vision floating between his eyes and the mountains, he felt for the first time a warning from his own soul:
Ofelia Salamanca knows everything. She hates you and has sworn vengeance.

Besides, he found himself staring into eyes as wild as those of his would-be lover. There were other Medusas in the world: these gauchos who had gathered around him in the darkness, when all he wanted was to be alone with nature and the image of Ofelia. Their presence confused and bewildered him and set him up not against the mountains or the night or his desire for a woman but against other men. What were they doing? They offered him a light, but he wasn't smoking. He wished he were offering them the flame of a match like the one Xavier Dorrego elegantly carried inside a watch during their sessions at the Café de Malcos. But his hallucinated imagination only took from the sky a candle like the twenty-five around the cradle of Ofelia Salamanca's kidnapped child. It was doubtless because of this series of hallucinations that Baltasar Bustos offered the gauchos an imaginary light, taken from the night and protected from the mild mountain wind by the cupped hands of the master's son, as if a flame were really burning there.

The gauchos did not laugh.

“Don't make fun of us, young master.”

“Don't call me that. I'm just a citizen.”

Now they did laugh, and as they laughed, Baltasar smelled in their collective breath a ravenous stench, like that of young stray dogs. There were bits of food in those bushy black or copper-colored beards that began at the neck and climbed almost to the eyebrows—an extension of the hair covering ears and cheeks, leaving open only the mouths, which were like wounds of a paradoxical abundance. Red and as bloodied as the meat they ate, they revealed the hardness of an uncertain country where the people eat everything they have, never just what they want. Today there's more than enough, but tomorrow we may have nothing.

He felt a profound compassion for his homeland. But one of the gauchos kept him from extending that compassion to these men. The young gaucho, who knows with what intention, took him by the hand Baltasar had used to shield the imaginary light. The young citizen tried to pull himself out of his daydream, plant his feet on the rough earth and the roughness of the customs of this world. What was he surprised at? It was all familiar to him. He belonged to this land of dust as much as he did to the land of ideas that was Father Julián Ríos's or the land of smoke of the gatherings at the Café de Malcos. He raised his eyes and found neither the mountains nor the Medusa, neither nature nor that forbidden sex. What he found was a mirror. The young gaucho holding him by the hand looked like Baltasar. A filthy, bearded, hungry Baltasar, even though sated today with the flesh of a dead steer. His round face, distant gaze, his hair with its curls burnished by the same elements that frightened his sister, Sabina.

Baltasar stared at that atrocious twin and had the presence of mind to return the squeeze, take the gaucho's wrist, wrench back the man's sleeve, and reveal the cruel wounds on his forearm. Baltasar's country education, rejected and savage, came back to him, and he felt disgust at having allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his detested origins—especially because it was rural wisdom that would save the civilized presence.

The young gaucho, so like Baltasar, emitted a suffocated grunt, wrenched back his arm, and covered it with his sleeve. First the others looked at the young gaucho with scorn, then with pity; and they bestowed the same sentiments on Baltasar Bustos, but in reverse. First pity, then scorn. He knew what he was doing. He had showed the other gauchos that this one, who dared touch him, was, if not a coward, at least an incompetent who let himself be cut easily in fights on the ranch or at the general store. Did his companions already know that, keeping what they knew to themselves, insulted because an outsider, which José Antonio Bustos's son was by now, had come back to tell them: I know that this man has no talent for knife fighting? He's a fool of a gaucho, the boss's son had just said to the other gauchos. He doesn't know how to protect himself. Didn't you blockheads know that? What kind of joke is this?

José Antonio Bustos appeared at the door of the house, wrapped in his yellow poncho. Who can know how much a gaucho knows. Who can know if they really were comrades. They were all tramps. Perhaps they'd just met a few hours earlier; a few hours later, they'd separate, scattered in the immensity of the pampa. Baltasar Bustos had united them in support of the young gaucho whose ineptness he'd just shown, whom he'd just humiliated, because now the man's secret did not belong just to the gauchos. Perhaps it would end up being sung by a bard, maligning the stupid young man with the round face and the coppery curls. Could he also be a bit blind without knowing it? In the country there are no optometrists. They couldn't resemble each other so much, Baltasar and the nameless gaucho: a pure, dissembled wound.

The erect presence of the old man in the yellow poncho prevented any sequel to what had happened. The gauchos drifted away muttering and grumbling. They'd meet another day. Baltasar looked at his father and was amazed that the mere presence of the old man could dominate at a distance, dispersing these country toughs, even if they went reluctantly. Could what they said in Buenos Aires be true?
The ranchers from the interior are as ignorant as their gauchos. Inferior people, second-class creoles. Can't compare with the urbane city merchants.
He looked at his father from a distance. José Antonio Bustos was not like that. And it was not just that Baltasar was his son and loved him as he was. José Antonio Bustos was not like that. But his authority, demonstrated just then, reminding the gauchos that he was always watching, that he was the father, that he was the only authority, could that be more than a symbol of power in a land that ignored the laws of the distant cities, a land that let itself be governed by a patriarchal figure? He looked at his approaching father as someone he'd never understood before. A patriarch stronger than the laws of today and tomorrow. Baltasar didn't know if all the liberal constitutions in the world could be stronger than a simple patriarchal presence.