The Campaign (2 page)

*   *   *

“His style is dazzling, his demeanor intrepid, his spirit daring,” observed our friend that night in the Café de Malcos. “And his message is crystal-clear. There is no more sovereign power in Spain. Thus, sovereignty reverts to the people. To us. Castelli is the creole incarnation of Rousseau!”

“No”—I dared to break in on his enthusiasm. “That idea was invented two hundred years ago by Francisco Suárez, a Jesuit theologian. Look behind every new idea and you'll find an old one, which might even turn out to be Catholic and Spanish—painful as that would be to us.”

I smiled as I said it; I didn't want to wound my friend's enlightened sensibility. But that night nothing could diminish his enthusiasm, which was more philosophical than political.

“Saavedra has demanded total power for the Municipal Council. Castelli demands general elections. What are we going to do?”

“What is it you want?” interjected our third friend, Xavier Dorrego.

“Equality,” said Baltasar.

“Without liberty?” Dorrego argued, as was his custom.

“Yes, because we might end up proclaiming liberty without having eliminated the problem of inequality. And if that happens, the revolution will fail. So: equality above all!”

Baltasar Bustos was repeating his own sentence when he stopped, just for an instant, in the center of the patio adjacent to the residential wing of the Palace of the Superior Court, in front of the vine that reached to the balcony outside the rooms of the president and his wife. The door of the service wing opened, and a pair of black hands proffered a living bundle, asleep but breathing and warm.

“I don't understand why you have to make things so complicated, young master,” said the voice of the black woman. “It would have been so easy to come in through the service entrance and take…” The woman sobbed, and Baltasar, the child in his arms, headed for the vine. What he was going to do wasn't easy for a robust, overweight, not to mention nearsighted man. The ivy may have been an invitation to a young body to come up and celebrate the coolness of May, but the body of this friend of mine, Baltasar, at the age of twenty-four was the product of a sedentary life, febrile reading, a willful isolation from action, a proud disdain for the country life which had been his as a child and which continued to be his father's and sister's out on the pampa. Bustos, in short, had cultivated a physique which to him was at once cosmopolitan, civilized, intellectual, and a rebellion: the antithesis of the barbarous customs of the country, the colony, the Church, and Spain. He admitted ironically that his was not the proper physique for what he was doing: climbing a vine right after midnight with a bundle in his arms. In other words, he saw himself as urban and urbane but hardly romantic.

Barely had he set foot on the first tangle in the vine than he realized that if no one had noticed his earlier explorations of the terrain it was because no one could even imagine something as daring as what he was attempting; no one would examine the vine to see if it had been climbed. Ivy grew all on its own and did not need to be tended or watched over. Lawns had to be cared for, peach trees had to be pruned. But no one inspected the ivy, abandoned to its parched dustiness, to discover exactly what Baltasar Bustos did on the night of May 24, 1810: he climbed up to the balcony of the wife of the President of the Superior Court of Buenos Aires with a black baby in his arms, entered her bedroom, took the white, newly born child of the president and his wife, and in its place put the black infant, also newly arrived in this world, though his realm would be one of kitchens, beatings, and curses.

[2]

The announcement that Ofelia Salamanca, wife of the President of the Superior Court, the Marquis de Cabra, had given birth was forgotten during the disturbances that May in Buenos Aires. When the English ship arrived with the news that Seville had fallen, three centuries of custom, of fidelity to the Spanish Crown, of subservience to commercial plans made in that very Seville and its Indies Trade Office, floated in midair for one astonished instant and then crashed to the ground: if there was no monarchy in Spain, could there be independence in America?

The child was born without grief or glory but to the manifest anguish of Ofelia Salamanca, who reproached her husband for having taken her from the captaincy-general of Chile, where she had her comforts, her mestizo servants, and her Indian midwives, to hand her to these Buenos Aires black servants. And this on top of the voyage from Santiago to the Río de la Plata, which took almost two months!

“And all to try two viceroys already condemned for incompetence and for failing to maintain order,” Ofelia Salamanca rebuked her husband.

Leocadio Cabra had acquiesced to his beautiful, independent Chilean wife's wish to retain her maiden name. She explained why:

“First, my dear, because we have to start defending the right of women to their own name; that is, their own person. Second, because if I use your name, people will end up calling me la Cabrona, and I don't want to be known as a son- or even a daughter-of-a-bitch.”

“Chilean to the bone!” exclaimed her exasperated husband. “Don't delude yourself: Salamanca is your father's name, not yours, and it was your grandfather's. There's no way you can escape having a man's name, you goose.”

“There's never been any Ofelia Salamanca but me,” the beautiful Chilean creole proudly pointed out. Baltasar Bustos was seeing her naked for the first time through the vaporous curtains of the bedroom, curtains that were merely the first veil over a universe obscured by successive layers of muslin blindness: the permanent drapes over the canopied bed, as well as the summer mosquito netting the servants had neglected to take away; the translucent cloth over the dressing table where Ofelia Salamanca was sitting, naked, in front of the mirror, offering to the nearsighted but dazzled eyes of Baltasar Bustos a body shaped like an hourglass, a white guitar, her back turned to him but stunning with the round perfection of her firm buttocks, twin fruits below an even firmer and slimmer waist, as if there could coexist in a single human being not that many but such unique perfections: a slender waist, round buttocks soft yet hard, but not as much as the waist, and not one pore that did not exude perfume but also wholeness, perfect harmony, with no flab, buttocks that were carnal twins of the moon. And to think she had given birth just seven weeks before!

She powdered herself without the help of chambermaids, and the powder kept him from seeing her breasts clearly, so Baltasar Bustos fell in love with her back, her waist, and her buttocks. With her profile as well, since Ofelia Salamanca, as she powdered her breasts, presented only half her face to the ecstatic contemplation of the young
porteño,
the perfect reader of distant ideals. He would have wanted to see a romantic turbulence in her features; but the classical perfection of her clear brow, straight nose, full lips, her oval chin and long, swanlike neck foiled such wishes. It was like seeing Leda in the myth: the rice powder was the swan that enveloped her, possessed her, and veiled her from the eyes of her admirer, turning her into what he most desired: an unattainable ideal, the pure bride of pure desire, untouched.

His impassioned readings of Rousseau mixed with the cold teaching of the church fathers: Baltasar Bustos's intellectual hero was the Citizen of Geneva who asks us to abandon ourselves to our passion so that we can recover our souls, whereas St. John Chrysostom condemns ideal love that is not consummated, because the passions become all the more inflamed.

The saint knew that once we attain our carnal objective, habit will ultimately cool any passion. The distance between the balcony from which Baltasar spied, desired, and entered into conflict with his own feelings and the rotund object of his desire, at that moment covered by a haze of gauze and powder with which she was unfortunately more intimate than she was with him, distant witness of the unattainable beauty of Ofelia the president's wife, only succeeded, it was true, in increasing his passion.

That was the first time he saw her, spying from the balcony, rehearsing the act he would commit for justice's sake.

The second time, she was accompanied by her husband, who paced impatiently around the bedroom, pushing aside gauze veils as she got dressed, again without the help of a maid. Perhaps the subject of their conversation called for privacy: the marquis was complaining because Ofelia wasn't breastfeeding the newborn child, lamenting that his son had been turned over to one of these black Buenos Aires wet nurses. He missed Chile and its Indians; the Río de la Plata was filled with blacks—almost half the population. I don't want our son to grow up surrounded by blacks, said the old creole, who had reached his present position through his fervent devotion to the Crown. Don't worry, said Ofelia Salamanca, black children don't go to school with white children, not here or anywhere. In Catamarca, not long ago, a mulatto was flogged when people found out he'd learned to read and write.

The marquis, who seemed made of porcelain, said to his wife: “If your reprehensible appetite for novelties and horrors—the same thing, in my opinion—requires stimulation, let me tell you, my dear, that just two months ago, right here in Buenos Aires, a black hetaera sick with the French pox was sentenced for daring to have a child. To cure her of her malady, her profession, and her maternity all at the same time, she was condemned to a public whipping.”

“I'm sure that cured her of prostitution and syphilis,” said Ofelia Salamanca with cold simplicity, as she finished dressing, much closer this second time to the eyes of Baltasar Bustos, who used every means to preserve the beatific vision of the first occasion. Seeing them together, he realized that she was the same porcelain color as her husband.

Ofelia Salamanca wore Empire dresses, but she went against fashion by zealously covering her breasts and revealing instead her legs and the curve of her posterior. That wasn't what excited Baltasar Bustos most in this second vision; it was two elements in her toilette. The first was her hair, cut in “guillotine style,” shaved to the nape as if to make way for the quick slice of the revolutionary blade. The other was the thin ribbon of red satin tied around her neck like a thread of luxurious blood, as if the guillotine had already done its work.

Ofelia Salamanca said something in a low voice to her husband, and he laughed. “Patience, sweetheart, we'll make love after we stamp out the revolution.”

“Well, then, get on with trying your viceroys so we can get back to Chile as soon as possible.”

“It's very hard to hold a trial when the entire country wants to kill them. The time is not ripe for justice.”

“So, commit an injustice. It wouldn't be the first in your career. And let's get out of here.”

“We're comfortable here, and you've just given birth. Do you really want to travel with a two-month-old infant?”

“We could bring the nurse.”

“She's black.”

“But she's got milk. It's like traveling with a cow. Besides, this building frightens me. I hate living in the same place where you work. You sentence too many people to prison and death.”

“I just do my duty.”

“And I don't like weak men. I only have two complaints, Leocadio. Your past weighs too heavily on you. And in Santiago at least the court and our residence weren't under the same roof.”

“Perhaps a gift would cheer you up, darling.”

“Anything but flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”

“What would you have me do?” said her husband impatiently. “They brought me here from Chile because I'd be impartial and free of local influences.”

“For God's sake, I know that tune only too well. Justice for friends. The law for enemies. You're right. There is a difference. And I'm getting bored.”

“Well, what can I get you, if you don't want flowers?”

“Put twenty-five lighted candles around my son's cradle, one for each year of his mother's life. Perhaps that way we can scare the ghosts away.”

“As long as you live?”

She said yes. “You really take the long view of things. The older I get, the more afraid I'll be.”

“Poor child. And when you die?”

“The candles will all go out at once, Leocadio, and my son will be a man. Look at him.”

Baltasar inscribed these conversations on his soul. But on the third and final visit the child's parents were not there, although the twenty-five candles were around the cradle. They had replaced the black nurse who had handed Baltasar the black baby in the patio.

Bustos, nearsighted and panting, parted the curtains and walked into the bedroom. He moved quickly: he put the black child next to the white one in the cradle. He contemplated them both for a few seconds. Thanks to him, they were fraternal twins in fortune. But only for a moment. He took the white baby and wrapped him in the rags of the poor child; then he swaddled the black one in the gown of high lineage. With the white child in his arms, he returned to the balcony, blind, tripping, just as the child—which one?—began to wail. But the cries were drowned out by the pealing of the bells and the thunder of the guns at midnight, between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of May 1810.

When Baltasar's feet touched the ground, he shook his full head of honey-colored curls—his best feature, along with his passionately sweet eyes and Roman nose. Unfortunately, the image he projected was that of an overweight, myopic man. How would that splendid woman ever fall in love with him? He, in any case, adored her already, despite what he was doing or, in some obscure sense, because of what he was doing: kidnapping her son, his most fearsome rival, but giving himself over to the passion that claimed him; he sought no explanations, convinced that the passion we don't seize by the tail and follow all the way will never again show us its face, and instead will leave an eternal void in our soul.