The Campaign (28 page)

The priest Anselmo Quintana paused to take a breath, looked around him with a singular mix of arrogance, humor, irony, and unity with his people, and concluded: “That's why I have to choose very carefully which wine I drink at Mass. As you see, with the excommunication edicts I make cartridges and return them like Roman candles to the Spaniards. Now come and eat something and talk awhile. You must be very tired.”

He stood up.

“Ah, yes, let me shake hands with someone who fought alongside José de San Martín. But first let's smoke a cigar.”

[3]

There was no time to smoke anything that Wednesday morning in Orizaba that smelled of storm. Once the new arrival had solved the puzzle put to him by the entire encampment, the swarm of shysters and scribes descended on the priest Quintana with recommendations, warnings, requests, and news: “If the archives already take up more than ten wagons, what shall we do with them?” “Burn them,” says Quintana. “But then there will be no evidence of what we are doing. Your campaign, General, has always distinguished itself not only by winning battles but by setting down laws, freeing land, and giving constitutions and federal guarantees to those who work the land, if not for today, then certainly for tomorrow.” “Well, what do you want? To study all those papers, so you can burn some and save others? Your papers drive me mad, do whatever you like with them, but save me two, because I do want to keep them and remember them forever.” “Which two might they be, General?”

The priest stopped on his way to the tobacco sheds, where he was going with Baltasar. He took the cigar out of his shirt pocket but didn't raise it to his lips or light it. He waved it like a hyssop or a scourge or a phallus before the eyes of the lawyers and scribes.

“One is my first baptismal act as a priest, gentlemen. In those days it was the custom to conceal the race of newborns. Everyone wanted to pass for Spanish; no one wanted the infamy of being termed black, mestizo, or anything else. So when I baptized that first child, I naturally wrote ‘of the Spanish race.' Keep that paper for me also because that first child I anointed with the chrism was my own son. The other paper is a law I dictated to you in the Córdoba congress which says that from now on there will be no more blacks, Indians, or Spaniards but only Mexicans. Keep that law for me: the others deal with freedom, but that one deals with equality, without which all rights are chimeras. And then burn the rest and stop annoying me.”

But they did not do it. They formed swift circles around Quintana and Baltasar as the two stood under the wet mangroves, whose smell competed with the rising aroma of the tobacco sheds (which smelled of fertile earth and female thighs, smoky hair and mandrakes, primroses, a wake, and truffles all mixed together, Quintana murmured): “We must take precautions, Calleja del Rey says he's obsessed with capturing you alive before the inevitable defeat of the royalist troops. Executions, the taking of hostages, rewards to towns that refuse to help us, the destruction of those that do—all these things are increasing, General. And the worst is that it's the creole Mexicans who hate you most vehemently; they don't want you on the political horizon when they take power after independence.”

“What do you advise me to do?” This time Quintana looked at them with a nervous tremor in his left eyelid.

“Come to terms with them, General, save something of all this and, above all, save yourself.”

“Listen to them, Baltasar. That's how you lose revolutions and even your balls.”

“Come to terms, General.”

“Now, when the final hour is at hand, when my present enemy, Spain, is about to lose, and when my next enemy will be the creole officers? But if for ten years I didn't come to terms with the king of Spain, who at least is a descendant of Queen Isabella the Catholic, why should I come to terms with a ridiculous little creole like Don Agustín de Iturbide? Who do you take me for, gentlemen? Haven't you learned anything in ten years?”

“Well then, what will you do?”

The lawyers asked that question more to themselves than to Quintana.

“The same thing we've done since the beginning. When we had no arms we made up for it with numbers and violence. We began the campaign looking for weapons. And that's how we'll finish it. If they lay siege, we'll eat tree bark, soap, vermin, just as we did when we joined Morelos in Cuautla. If they capture us and sentence us, we'll commend our souls to God.”

He shouldn't be such a fatalist, he should think about them, he should steal a march on Iturbide, and he himself, Anselmo Quintana, because of the sway he held over the people, should proclaim himself Most Serene Highness and with them, his advisers, form a Junta of Notables for the kingdom.

“The only junta I ever hope to see is two rivers joining together, and the only highness I want to experience is the top of a mountain. Mexico will be a republic, not a kingdom. And if there's anyone who doesn't like the taste of that, let him make up his kit and leave. There are lots of others to choose from. With me you know where you're going. And without me we don't go anywhere. Join up with the Spaniards. They'll shoot you. Amnesty's over. Join up with Iturbide. He'll humiliate you. And forgive my arrogance. I know it's a grave sin.”

Quintana seized the hand of one of the lawyers, the one who had called Baltasar “boy,” and kissed it. Then, without letting go, he knelt before the lawyer with his eyes lowered, asking for pardon for his bouts of pride; he respected them; he was an ignorant priest who respected learned men. He respected them, above all else, because what they did would remain, while what he did would be carried away by the wind and turned to birdshit. “There is no glory greater than a book,” he said, his eyes still lowered, “no infamy greater than a military victory. Forgive me, understand that without the revolution my life would have been obscure, with no incidents in it greater than a romance now and then with an anonymous woman. You don't need me.”

He stood up and looked each one of them in the eye. “Forgive me, really. But as long as this campaign lasts, the only fat man around here is me.”

He guffawed, turned his back on them, and left them stunned by his rapid-fire Veracruz-style discourse—unlawyerish, inspired at times, but ridiculous, the lawyers said among themselves, turning their backs on him and heading for their improvised offices among their mountains of paper. But it wasn't the first time he'd done that to them, and they were still here. Why? Because ten years are an entire lifetime in these parts, where, except by a miracle, no one lives beyond the age of forty, and because the priest was right: at this point they belonged to him, like his children, his women, or, if you like, his parents. No one would believe them if they tried to change sides. But Pascal's bet would not work, because if the royalists didn't win, the creoles would. No one would believe them.

“Well, well,” said a lawyer—who wouldn't take off his black top hat and his funereal frock coat even if fighting broke out—as he wrinkled his nose so his eyeglasses wouldn't slide down any farther. “In this New Spain, no act is as certain of success as betrayal. Cortés betrayed Moctezuma, the Tlaxcaltecs betrayed the Aztecs, Ordaz and Alvarado betrayed Cortés. You'll see that the traitors will win and Quintana will lose.”

These men, to their own misfortune and despite everything, thought more about posterity than about immediate gain. Which is why, despite everything, they were still with Quintana, and the priest, despite his jests, did respect them. If they wanted an honorable place in history, this was it, alongside the priest. And if the path to glory depended on writing a splendid series of laws that abolished slavery, that restored lands to communities, and that guaranteed individual rights, they would side with him until the moment they were brought before the firing squad.

Quintana knew it, and even though he annoyed them every day with his insults, he would monthly, along with his religious Communion, perform a kind of civil communion:

“Never in the history of Mexico has there been, nor will there ever be in the future, a band of men more patriotic and honorable than you. I am proud to have known you. Who knows what horrors await us. You, the insurgents, will have saved the nation's honor for all time.”

They didn't fight. They wrote laws. And they were fully capable of dying for what they felt and wrote. They were right, Baltasar wrote to Dorrego and to me, Varela. Wasn't law reality itself? Thus, the circle of the written closed over its authors, capturing them in the noble fiction of their own inventive powers: the written is the real and we are its authors.

Can there be greater glory or certainty more solid for a lawyer from Spanish America?

“And who, from Argentina to Mexico, Varela”—Dorrego smiled at me as he read this letter—“doesn't have locked within his breast a lawyer struggling to break out and make a speech?”

Quintana, more of a fox than his shepherds, told Baltasar when they'd finally lighted their cigars under the shelter of the entrance to one of the tobacco warehouses: “Perhaps they will abandon me. Perhaps they won't. But they all know that they owe their personality to me. Even if they'd all be delighted to send me back to my rural parish.”

“The contradictions in the human character will never cease to astonish me,” Dorrego said, sighing, when I read him these lines: he was obstinately engaged in winding a carriage-shaped clock covered with an oval glass dome.

[4]

Dining alone with Baltasar in the kitchen of the tobacco factory, Quintana told more about his past. Thick smoke rose from the braziers fanned by the women as one of them, the solicitous, sniffling woman Baltasar had seen when he reached the encampment, placed Gulf Coast tamales wrapped in plantain leaves on their tin plates. These were followed by cups of Campeche-style seviche, a mixture of oysters, shrimp, and sliced scallops in lemon juice, along with yellow
moles
Oaxaca-style, redolent of saffron and chilies.

Quintana said he shouldn't be judged a rebel simply because of the business of his losing his privileges, although he admitted that had been the original reason for his taking up arms. Rebelling for such a reason seemed too much like taking revenge, while insurrection seemed too much like rancor. And nothing good could come of rancor. Baltasar should also consider that the Bourbon reforms asserted that they were merely bringing reality into line with law. Fine. In that case, not even the Pope had any right to possess more than he needed for his personal comfort. The clergy could not be allowed to own land, treasure, and palaces. Canon law prohibited that.

The independence revolution came along and he, Quintana, began to think it over and to look for a better reason than rancor to become a guerrilla. It hadn't been easy, even when he was ten years younger, to leave the tranquillity of a curacy and start risking his life.

“Should I have stayed there not doing anything? I could have. It was possible. Why did I join the revolution? If I again deny that it was because the Crown took the living away from us poor priests and that my living was my only wealth, I'll bore you. Besides, you'll stop believing me. If I tell you that I took one step too many and told myself that if this was all a matter of respecting the law then we'd have to go all the way, you won't believe me unless I explain something more important. Which is that in order to abandon my peace and quiet or not to stay in my parish like a fool while everyone else chose sides, I had to believe that what I was doing mattered. Mattered not only for me or for the independence of the nation but for my faith, my religion, my soul. And this is where the difficulties begin, because I am going to try to convince you that my political rebellion is inseparable from my spiritual rebellion. I know, because I know who you are, Baltasar, because I see your face and know what boys like you know, how much they've read and all the rest, that for you there can be no freedom with religion, independence with a church, or reason with faith.”

He sighed and noisily tossed into his mouth a piece of tamale that was so red with chilies that it looked like a wound.

“But to talk about all that, we need time and opportunity. Now we're short of both.”

He grasped Baltasar's impatient wrist. “I know you've come for other reasons and not to hear me talk.”

“You're mistaken. I have the deepest respect for you.”

“Be patient. One thing leads to the other. You know, in my town there was a blind beggar who was always accompanied by his dog. One day, the dog ran away and the blind man regained his sight.”

For a long time, Baltasar stared at the priest, who went on eating noisily and with pleasure, savoring his yellow
mole
right down to the last grain of rice. Finally Baltasar decided to ask him, “Why do you have such confidence in me, Father?”

Quintana wiped his lips and gave the young Argentine a look of candid, friendly complicity. “We've been fighting for the same cause for the same span of time. Doesn't that seem sufficient reason to you?”

“That's only a fact. It doesn't satisfy me.”

“Think then that I see in you something more and better than what you see in yourself. I sense that in your heart you feel slightly dissatisfied with everything you've done.”

“That's true. I have my guilt and my passion, but I don't have greatness. I find myself laughable.”

“Don't worry about greatness. Worry about your soul.”

“I warn you, I don't believe in the Church or in God or in the absolute power of absolution that you think you have.”

“So much the better. Rest today, and tomorrow we'll meet at midday in the chapel here at the tobacco warehouses. Remember that tomorrow is Thursday and that every Thursday I become very strong, very spiritual. Be prepared to do battle with me. Then you will have your reward, and everything will be resolved. I think your ten years of struggle will not have been in vain.”