The Campaign (12 page)

This was light, pure and simple, with no fanfare, no cheering. It was more than the origin of light, although it resembled nothing so much as that—Baltasar and Simón, chagrined, stood still and touched hands, just to touch something familiar, flesh, warmth. It was light before light showed itself. It was the idea of light.

How did they discover that? How did Simón communicate it to Baltasar and Baltasar to the old mestizo without either of them opening his mouth? The two stared at the closed but bright eyes of their guides. Messages transmitted by light passed through those closed lids. There the two men could read and understand. But there was nothing written on the eyes, which were, in effect, blindfolded by light; there was only light. And the light said: I am the idea of light before light was ever seen.

Then all the eyes in the Inca cavern turned toward the outsiders and flooded the abyss with light. Peering over the edge, the old man and the young man saw an entire city slowly but clearly coming into view. A city made entirely of light. The buildings were the product of light, from the doors and windows to the high roofs of the towers; the clocks were made of light. The streets were grand, luminous paths; along the avenues sped rapid carriages of light: they seemed powered by light and heading toward the light; and on every corner, at every door, on every roof, the light produced incomprehensible messages, traced letters, signs, and figures, names quickly composed out of a dizzying number of points of light, in a frame that was like the very symbol of light. And within that frame, the rapid flashing of the luminous points spelled out a single name, repeating it in successive flashes until it was etched on the retinas of the two outsiders as if carved in stone. And that name was
OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA
.

Baltasar held back a gesture of terror and tenderness, as if he expected another revelation: the letters faded, but within the same frame there appeared the face of the beloved, not a painting, not a reproduction, not a symbolic rendering, but she herself, her flesh, her eyes, the movement of her lips and neck; and as the figure shrank so as to be seen in its entirety, they saw that she was naked. She offered herself to Baltasar, to the spectator, to the world, complete in every forbidden detail, each soft and caressable surface, every feared, harsh, spidery secretion … Ofelia Salamanca was there; she moved, was seen, and now spoke. And what she said was true, because Baltasar had heard her say it:

“Don't send me flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”

She repeated these words several times; then her voice began to fade, along with her image. And Baltasar Bustos felt the vertigo of one who has seen what belongs to the realm of death, which he had just discovered slumbering in the middle of life.

“You have just seen,” said Simón Rodríguez, when the lights in the basin went out, “what our Spanish ancestors searched for with such frenzy in the New World. I saved the vision of El Dorado for you. El Dorado, the city of gold of the Indian world.”

But for Baltasar Bustos, listening to the old mestizo, there was no cry of rejection, but something worse, more insidious: a nausea like that of the loss of innocence, an affirmation as subtle as poison, something totally irrational, magic, which with a few seductive, ethereal images destroyed all the patient, rational structures of civilized man. Never in his life—Baltasar wrote us—until that moment had a repulsion and an affirmation, as diametrically opposed as they were complementary, united in him with such force. He was convinced that he'd reached the remotest past, the origin of all things, and that this magic origin of sorcery and illusion was not that of a perfect assimilation of man with nature but, again, an intolerable divorce, a separation that wounded him in the most certain of his enlightened convictions. He wanted to believe in the myth of origins, not as a myth but as the reality of the world reconciled with the individual. What had he seen here, what trick or what warning? Unity with nature is not necessarily the formula for happiness; do not go back to the origins, do not seek an impossible harmony, cherish all the differences you find on the road … Do not think that at the beginning we were happy. By the same token, don't think we'll be happy at the end.

“What you are seeing is not the past; perhaps it's the future,” said old Rodríguez to calm him down. “This city is a harbinger, not of the magic you detest, Baltasar, but of the reason to come.” But for Baltasar anything that wasn't reason was magic. “And if it wasn't magic but science, what would your reason say?” asked the old man, afraid, once more, that he'd shown too much to his new disciple, who, for that very reason, would hate his teacher and spend the rest of his days trying to forget this extraordinary vision that no one wanted to share, because it was disconcerting, because it put our own rational convictions into doubt.

This is how I answered Baltasar: You should put your certainties to the test, staring whatever negates them straight in the eye. I don't know if Dorrego answered him or what he would have said, but I could see he was more distressed than I, perhaps even more distressed than Baltasar himself.

“Don't let yourself be distracted from war and government,” Dorrego told me from Buenos Aires. “Upper Peru, as everyone knows, is a land of witch doctors, hallucinations, and drugs. We'll have to put a stop to it someday.”

“We've got to leave it all untouched,” said Simón Rodríguez, using his arms to shield the weakened, almost lifeless body of the young Baltasar Bustos as he tried to lead him out of the city of light. “Swear you'll never send anyone here. To explore it would be to destroy it. Let it survive until the moment in which everyone understands it because the future itself leaves it behind.”

But Baltasar could only ask: What have I seen? Have I really seen this, though I could not even touch it, or is it a dream? Where are we? He could only implore as Simón Rodríguez got him out of there, ignoring the tales passing through the luminous but now open eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado. Yet those tales held the secret to the place, and it was to a feverish Baltasar as he clung to the back of a mule on the dizzying spiral descent from the mountain that Simón Rodríguez told the truth he himself had just grasped.

“Everything you imagine is true. Today we happened on one fantasy among many possible fantasies. We don't know if it's yours, if it goes before you, or if it is the prelude to the next one.”

Baltasar did not seem to be listening and only muttered something, as if trying to forget what he was saying as he said it, rather than remember it.

That dreams are our real life

That the night is never over

That dreams overcome time

That the only sin is the separation of the sentient from the spiritual world

But Simón said no, no, no, that is not the lesson, the lesson is to accept that everything we imagine is true, that today we witnessed only one brief moment of that unending ribbon where truth is inscribed, and we do not know if what we saw is part of our imagination today, of an imagination that precedes us, or if it proclaims an imagination to come …

“I have experienced the vertigo of learning that something which is death's can exist in life,” our younger brother, Baltasar, wrote us.

When we received his letter, Baltasar had recovered in a hospital in Cochabamba, where the disillusioned Simón Rodríguez had brought him. The old man went off, doubtless in search of newer, more receptive disciples. Baltasar, after writing us, waited for word from us. He said that, more than ever, he desired to take action in the real world and forget nightmares. What commission did we want to send him? He felt strong, was fully recovered, and he'd lost twenty pounds. Oh yes, and he reminded us that he'd been lost in one of the five thousand tunnels that connect Cuzco with the mines in Potosí, that it takes potatoes hours to cook there because of the altitude, that the lake is merely a track left by the retreating ice, that the lava of the volcanoes whistles as it flows downhill, that Upper Peru smells of the mercury transported in leather sacks to treat the silver, that I slept with a girl whose breasts sprouted between her legs, that I've seen the sun swimming beneath the world at dusk.

4

Upper Peru

[1]

His dappled stallion, who smelled until then of the sweat of bare mountain horses, now joined a new herd that smelled of gunpowder, horseshoes, and leather. The mountain horses, without saddles or bridles, gradually slowed down until they were left behind, as if amazed by that unfamiliar smell. Baltasar Bustos's stallion was the only one to follow the charge, joining the war horses.

Holding on to the animal's sweaty neck as best he could, Baltasar Bustos felt his face slapped by its wild, coarse mane, which snapped like a hundred small whips. He didn't dare grab the forelock for fear of making the horse buck. But its furious gallop, multiplied in emulation of the war charge of twenty or thirty others, made the young officer's body slip back.

They picked him up at full gallop as if he were a sack, the way leaves are blown away or something is snatched up by the wind. He didn't know what was happening. All he understood for certain was that the world of the imagination was behind him and that he would forget it; he was now tossed into the tumult called reality, which carried him along in its wake. Two strong arms lifted him up on the run, draped him over the saddle, and pressed his face into the wool of the gaucho gear. A voice muttered barbarous obscenities. The voice was close but the words were blown away by the clamor of the fighting. Baltasar's head, hanging down, suffocated by the dust, saw the world upside down.

When he regained consciousness, it was night, and the noise had subsided. The first thing he saw was a pair of blue eyes, like two lights, that belonged to a bearded man sipping maté. The man never stopped looking at him. He was hairy, his black mop barely parted over his bushy brows, his beard and mustache covering his face right up to his cheekbones and hanging down to his chest. His skin, though, was as pale as wax. The complexion of a saint who's never seen the light outside the church; his blue eyes, which nevertheless illuminated it, were paler even than his skin. His hands, holding the maté gourd, negated his waxen pallor, not with color but with roughness. And despite everything, there was, in those fingers, a hint of piety, of blessing and sacrifice.

They stared at each other for a long time, as if the hirsute man did not want to take advantage of Baltasar's prostration to say something to which Baltasar would not be able to reply. Each gesture with which the man disturbed his basically immobile posture was, by contrast, dramatic, or even eloquent. His gaze, a slight movement, a shrug conspired to communicate command and dignity all at the same time. Finally, Baltasar was able to ask for a maté. Before uttering a word, he quickly summed up for himself what he understood now that he was back in reality. After observing his host for a few moments—where were they?—he listened to the man's first words:

“My name is Miguel Lanza. Where we are is the Inquisivi mud. The other man is Baltasar Cárdenas. Out in the hills we've got more than a hundred guerrillas and five hundred Indians.”

Lanza lifted a burning rush out of the fire to show a dark Indian standing behind him, who held out a maté to Baltasar Bustos.

“The Indian and I have the same name,” said Baltasar, smiling idiotically.

“We'll soon find out if you've got the same courage,” said Lanza.

“My danger is that I admire everything I'm not.” This is what Baltasar had thought and what he now felt empowered to say.

“Like what?”

“Strength, realism, and cruelty. You might as well know it.”

“You're the
porteño
who proclaimed twenty thousand freedoms in the Ayopaya plaza with the priest Muñecas, isn't that right?”

“That's right, and I assume my orders have been carried out.”

Lanza stared at him without changing expression. Then laughter burst forth like a vein of silver from between his teeth: his mouth opened; a guffaw exploded; tears of laughter rolled down the short span between his blue eyes and his black beard as if down a long-dry channel. Again, he picked up the burning reed to light up Baltasar Cárdenas's dark face. The Indian was not laughing. “Just look at him,” said Lanza, choking on his unfamiliar glee. “I'm dying of laughter, but he's not. I know your proclamations are nothing but words, and they make me laugh, but the Indian doesn't know that. He took them seriously. And he won't forgive you for them.”

Baltasar Cárdenas took a step forward and, with the toe of his spurred boot, shoved Baltasar Bustos back on his straw mat.

“You owe your life to us,” said the Indian in answer to Baltasar's puzzled look. “Your Buenos Aires battalion scattered,” Lanza explained. “You were left between the Spaniards and us. If the Spaniards had taken you, you'd be dead right now. So give thanks you ended up with us.”

“Go on, give thanks,” said the other Baltasar, who was just about to prod the officer from Buenos Aires one more time. But Lanza stopped him, “We're brothers in this calvary,” he reminded both Baltasars, “so let our offenses be forgotten so we may abound in virtues.”

“Tell me your reasons now, quickly, and I'll tell you mine,” Miguel Lanza went on, suddenly serious. “So we can get this over with and understand each other.”

Baltasar Bustos closed his eyes. A rivulet of blood ran through his lips, and he could say nothing more. Perhaps they would understand his silence, and the sleep that followed it, as an honorable reiteration of what he had managed to say earlier.

“I admire everything I'm not.”

During the days following this night, Baltasar tried to recognize the physical characteristics of the camps where he stopped, but they moved constantly from place to place. He discovered that his cot was a stretcher and that Miguel Lanza's guerrilla group never stayed anywhere longer than forty hours. They were moving through unknown territory; but Lanza and the Indian leader, Cárdenas, seemed to know it well: the valleys, the plains they crossed as they expropriated crops, the passes, the crevasses and wrinkles in the mountains, and, suddenly, the rope bridges that led them down to the bottom of the jungle and the bottom of the bottom, the mud flats, the mud of the Inquisivi that the guerrilla leader had spoken of.