The Campaign (19 page)

The second, more bitter bequest is an uncalled-for, counterproductive, impracticable command. The Marquis de Cabra orders the colonial aristocracy to pillage itself so that the rebels will find nothing.

But where are those rebels in this year of 1815? All sorts of news reaches Buenos Aires, most of it depressing. Bolívar is in exile in Jamaica, and instead of raising armies, he writes letters complaining about our perennially infantile nations, their incapacity to govern themselves, and the distance between our liberal institutions and our customs and character. In the south, Belgrano's expedition to Upper Peru has failed, and only the resistance of caudillos like Miguel Lanza has prevented the total restoration of colonial rule. Right here in Buenos Aires, Alvear's directorate has fallen, and the estate owners, merchants, and priests have seized power, persecuting the liberals, confiscating their property, and sentencing them to exile or to death. The saddest news comes at year's end from Mexico: the rebel priest Morelos has been captured, tried, and sentenced. His severed head is like a black moon clapped onto a lance in San Cristóbal Ecatepec.

Dorrego and I, Varela, get along as best we can, hoping for better times, keeping our eyes open, and reading the letters of our friend Baltasar. Sometimes we write back, but since we don't really know where he is, we send our letters to the estate of his dead father. Let's hope they reach him. We learned that Lanza sentenced him to death for desertion; we fix our clocks, and on afternoons when the pampa wind blows, we stand in front of maps of the continent and trace the imaginary movements of nonexistent armies: campaigns that are always dangerous but ultimately triumphant, waged by ideal, phantasmagorical, South American armies …

In this way, Dorrego and I, Varela, transform History into the presence of an absence. Is that another name for ideal perfection?

6

The Army of the Andes

[1]

“His name is Baltasar Bustos, his family owns an estate—reasonable people, but half savage, like all ranch owners.” “If at least his father were a merchant.” “Is he a good marriage prospect?” “But he fought alongside the mountain rebels in Upper Peru—when did he become a royalist?” “When Miguel Lanza put a price on his head for deserting.” “He says that he's in love, that he came here looking for the woman.” “That's not important, but the news he brings from Inquisivi and Jujuy is.” “He's very open; we know everything about him.” “He doesn't hide anything from us.” “He knows we'll crush the rebellion, so he's doing us a favor.” “He certainly doesn't look like a guerrilla.” “Your excellency shouldn't judge by appearances.” “Plump, perfumed, dressed in silks, nearsighted…”

He strolled the salons of Santiago de Chile just as he'd strolled those of Lima, but he did not cut the same figure. Rather, he conformed to the description recorded above by the authorities of the captaincy-general of Chile. What a fuss this Baltasar Bustos made about his search for Ofelia Salamanca, now the widow of the Marquis de Cabra, who had died of bile and apoplexy in Lima! Who had died, it should be noted, in bed. Of course, no one knows if he died before or after his rehearsed death. Was he already dead when they laid him in his wife's bed? Or did he die there, transforming the rehearsal into reality and the attempt at playfulness into God's punishment?

The marquis fully deserved it. He left behind in Chile so many bad memories of his cruelty and injustice—which he carried out, it must be noted, with a smile and a joke on his lips! But his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, is no longer here; people say she went north, fleeing from the imminent fall of Chile, so ill defended, she said before departing, by the most pusillanimous captain-general in three centuries, Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Pont, who sought to compensate for his lack of military prowess by investing excessive energy in repression, passing judgment on the loyalty of all creoles without exception, expropriating their properties, burning their houses, and occasionally exiling them to the Island of Juan Fernández.

While none of that made up for Marcó del Pont's stupidity on the battlefield, it did succeed in making Spanish rule the object of general hatred and threw the inhabitants of Santiago and Valparaíso into a state of total hysteria. It was from that that Ofelia Salamanca had fled. She was fed up with suspicion, fear, sudden changes! Now this nearsighted, fat fellow was looking for her, and just by chance he came from Jujuy, Upper Peru, and Mendoza, and had friends in the rebel officer corps in Argentina, who, though they protected him from Lanza's death sentence, had no confidence in him.

In any case, the sword of Damocles is hanging over his head; obviously, he's not meant for war; he says that Lanza conscripted him; he seems as edgy as everyone else; he only wants to find the widow of the Marquis de Cabra and ease his anxiety with exasperated waves of his handkerchief, nervous twitches of his head, as if he were expecting bad news or a worse blow at any moment. He complains about not finding his usual lotions in Chile; this country is the end of the world! He wonders what he's doing here, if he's not looking for Ofelia Salamanca, until someone suggests he form a club for those whose hearts have been broken by the Chilean beauty, stubborn enemy of independence and the rebels, about whom it is said, but perhaps it's nothing but pure gossip, that it was she who personally plunged a dagger into the back of the insurgent Colonel Martín Echagüe to keep him from taking part in the battle of Rancagua, a rebel defeat that forced the vanquished leaders O'Higgins and Carrera to flee to Mendoza on the other side of the Andes. Whence comes to us this confused, edgy, beardless youngster to tell us that a rebel attack is imminent, that San Martín has deployed armies of more than twenty thousand men in mobile units north and south along the Argentine Andes in preparation for a general assault on Chile, from Aconcagua to Valdivia.

Santiago de Chile lived in terror at the outset of the summer of 1816, and precisely for that reason its forty thousand inhabitants decided to enjoy themselves until they died and to spend every cent they had. But the rumor mill, as in Lima, worked to its full capacity in the continuous, simultaneous parties with which royalist society, more and more depleted, sought to exorcise its fear of an insurgent victory, and sought in vain for possible allies among the Creoles, whom Marcó del Pont's repressive violence had delivered over to the patriots. They clandestinely circulated Father Camilo Henríquez's newspaper,
Dawn of Chile,
which contained news that should have been assumed to be false since it came from the mutinous enemy, unless the rebels were deluding themselves. The purpose of the social gatherings in the Chilean capital, during those months of oppressive heat and of peaches peeled a second before they rotted, was to gather information, air all rumors, place wagers on the future of the colony, and listen to anyone who had the merest particle of information.

“The rebels are mad,” Baltasar Bustos would say, strolling contemptuously through the Chilean soirees with a tiny glass of white wine in his hand. “They've gone all-out in deploying troops for a general attack along an
eeeenormous
front; they're going to cut all of you to bits, so get a good night's sleep. Me? I'm harmless, just looking for a certain woman.”

Those listening to this fop—as the English court, adorned at the time by Beau Brummel, would no doubt have called him—wondered if a myopic, soft dandy who proclaimed his passion so publicly could really love the woman he said he was pursuing. No, he couldn't possibly love her so much if he was so vocal in mentioning her. Perhaps it was just the sickness of the age: tiring passionately, being oneself only by being one's romantic passion, which was certainly sufficient, if painful, for the interior hero invented by the likes of Rousseau and Chateaubriand.

“All I ask of the world is that it grant me a point of departure: the woman I love,” said Bustos, between the sighs of the Chilean girls, the most beautiful in America. But he would quickly disillusion them with a mannered gesture and a clarification: “But I don't want you to think I desire a companion. Not in the slightest. I only need—can you chaste damsels listening to me understand?—a love object. An
object
for my love.”

They turned their backs on him. Perhaps that young, handsome priest looking so intently at Baltasar understood him. Approaching him, the priest said that Baltasar's words made him think there was something more in them than it seemed from their apparent frivolity. Unrequited love is the most intense of all.

“So you, too, have read St. John Chrysostom,” said Baltasar, remembering a violent May night in Buenos Aires. “But now”—he sighed—“our secret passions no longer matter. Order itself is in danger. I have lived with these guerrilla criminals. I know what they're capable of doing, to women, to priests like you … We've got to hang them before they hang us.”

“Dandy,” blurted out the priest, slapping Baltasar across the face.

“Oh! I saw you from a distance in Lima, I know who you are, so be careful,” replied Bustos.

A third young man, a royalist officer, whose high, embroidered collar pinched his cheeks painfully and eclipsed his thick, reddish, carefully cultivated sideburns, pulled them apart. The young lieutenant said this was no time for provoking arguments and making people more nervous. The priest put himself in serious danger by defending the rebels, even if he did so out of Christian charity. Bustos should try to restrain himself, however understandable it might be for a man with a price on his head to be on edge. But the Inquisivi rebels had not yet reached Santiago. He could relax. No, Baltasar replied, they hadn't, but San Martín had. “The army he's gathered in Argentina is going to attack us from all sides, there won't be enough supplies…”

The lieutenant with the sideburns ordered him to be quiet. He was sowing confusion and raising tensions. San Martín would attack from the south, where crossing the mountains was easier. Who would risk crossing the highest peaks? No one had ever marched an army through the Aconcagua Valley. It's almost four miles up! In fact, San Martín himself had had a great meeting with the Pechuenche chiefs to get permission to pass through their flatlands. He would surprise us Spaniards at Planchón and give the Indians back their freedom.

“Forces sufficient to stop any rebel invasion are already marching to Planchón,” said the cocky lieutenant, hooking one thumb over his wide belt while with his other hand he caressed the soft fingers of his snow-white parade gloves.

“Do you actually believe one word of what those lying Indians tell you?” Baltasar Bustos laughed.

“Everything suggests they've betrayed San Martín,” said Lieutenant Sideburns.

“Just as they would betray us royalists,” insisted Baltasar, playing on the expectations of the small group gathering to listen to them. “No one knows what to think anymore!”

“We should really beware of illuminati priests besotted with French readings,” added the young priest, as if to erase, then and there, any bad impression he might have made and to confuse the discussion even more. “We have the power of confession, and we have influence on the conscience of the military, the bureaucrats, the housewives … I know that disloyal priests abound in Chile, and that they never leave off their labor of undermining everything.”

“Those divisive priests have split my family, fathers against sons,” said a sallow little captain as he arranged his cream-colored shirt front with a gesture that belied his rancor. “And that I can never forgive them.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the red-haired lieutenant energetically. “All I know is that there isn't a single mountain pass where we don't have troops ready to repel San Martín, no matter where in the Andes he turns up.”

“Do you know that your beloved Ofelia murdered Captain Echagüe in bed, while they were fornicating?” the young priest said to Baltasar in a mysterious, seductive, cruel tone, but loud enough that the summer girls, the eternal little mistresses of Santiago society, could hear him with scandalized delight.

[2]

Baltasar cut such a comic, blind, addled-witted figure at the parties of the waning Chilean colony that it shouldn't have surprised him that people took more notice of him than he of them. The soirees followed on each other like a series of prolonged farewells extending from the salons of the Royal Council to the elegant country houses east of the city, through the baroque of the carved ceiling panels, the wrought-iron work, and the huge portals of Velasco House in the center of the city.

To honor the memory of Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar made a big show of haunting the chambers of the Royal Council, like a soul in torment; that was where the deceased Marquis de Cabra had presided before being sent to Buenos Aires. It was a new building, just finished in 1808, with twenty cast-iron windows on the second floor, wrought-iron balconies on the third, and a sequence of patios and galleries that reminded our hero (which is what you are, Baltasar) of the spacious River Plate Superior Court where his life was determined for all time.

This Santiago building owed its existence to a governor who arrived firmly committed to implanting the culture of the Enlightenment in Spain's most remote southern colony. Luis Muñoz de Guzmán took Charles III's ideas of modernization seriously and disembarked at the port of Valparaíso bearing musical instruments, baroque-music scores, perhaps some forbidden books, and no doubt the plays that soon began to be put on in those same patios and salons, under the patronage of his wife, Doña Luisa de Esterripa.

Nothing on this summer afternoon would have kept Baltasar Bustos from the performance taking place in one of the mansions—after all, it was nothing less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
The Discovery of America
—except that at that same hour, on every afternoon since he arrived in Santiago, Baltasar Bustos would step out on the balcony of the house where he was staying, a house that belonged to an old friend of his father's, a Spaniard who'd made his fortune in the New World and left all his property to go back to Spain. From that vantage point, he would observe a vision in the neighboring garden.