The Campaign (29 page)

Baltasar did not allow the conversation to end there. He had the feeling—he wrote to us later—that the priest was right and that these would be the final hours of his long campaign for love and justice.

“What do you see in me, Father, that makes you treat me with such respect … or simple interest? Forgive my boldness in asking.”

Quintana might have stared at him, looking him right in the eye. He chose instead to scoop up the rest of the
mole
with a tortilla.

“You have taken charge of other lives.”

“But I…”

“We've all committed crimes. Shall I tell you something? Would you like to know mine?”

“Father, in the name of justice I exchanged a poor child for a rich child in his cradle. The poor child died because of me. I stole the rich child from his mother and condemned him to who knows what fate. And, in spite of that, I dared to love the mother, to pursue her ridiculously across half the Americas. Ten years, Father, with no success, no reward, all to become, as you say, a fool … Do you call that justice? Does that deserve respect? Does my having abandoned my sister without a second thought, indifferent to her fate, in the name of my passion? I didn't give my father a last hope or affection. Am I worthy of compassion because I survived at Chacabuco while my comrades died? Wasn't I lacking in mercy when I shouted a cruel truth at the Marquis de Cabra on his deathbed? Father Quintana … I killed a man in battle.”

“That's normal.”

“But I didn't kill him as a soldier. I killed him as a man, a brother. I killed him because he was an Indian. I killed him because he was weaker than I. I killed him as an individual, abusing him, even though I don't know his name and can't remember his face.”

With a strength that came from total conviction, Quintana told him to be quiet. “Don't force me to confess my own sins to you.”

“What, that you're a skirt-chaser, that you like cockfights, that you have illegitimate children all over the country, that you like fancy cassocks? Are those serious sins, Father?”

“Tomorrow I'll make my confession before you,” he said with a sudden huge sigh of fatigue. “I'll do it tomorrow. I swear. I'll make my confession before you, even though you don't believe in the power of absolution. I'll confess before my younger brother, who in Maracaibo took charge of a fallen woman and the wounded enemy. I'll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday, I shall speak to my brother in mercy.”

[5]

That night Baltasar slept in a hammock. He was lulled by the hammock, but even more by a weariness that came not from a single day but from ten years' accumulation. It was the sleep that comes when something is about to end, an imminent sleep that told him: This is where you and I part company; now you will have to change, now you must take account of debits and credits, just as these paymasters and secretaries do who accompany Father Quintana.

Might Quintana be the true notary of Baltasar Bustos's life?

Tomorrow was Thursday. They would meet; the priest had told him to come to the chapel at noon. Did they have anything else to say to each other? Baltasar thought that he had made his confession to the priest that afternoon, and the priest's sins were the talk of Veracruz. What more could they say to each other? To what ceremony had this proud man surrounded by an aura of obscure self-denial invited him?

He had told Baltasar that in the young man he saw someone who took charge of others. The women in Harlequin House, the Duchess; the slender, disfigured officer … That was a slim list of credits next to the column of debits Baltasar had enumerated to Quintana.

But now, drifting deeper into sleep and rocked by the hammock (And who rocked it? There was no breeze, the Orizaba sky was in mourning but did not weep, and he descended, immobile, into sleep), Baltasar only reproached himself for a greater insincerity, which was to have told the rebel priest that everything he'd done, the good and the bad, had an erotic, sexual, amorous (as the priest liked to call it) purpose, which was to reach Ofelia Salamanca, finally to touch her after ten years of romantic passion paraded over the entire continent, the source both of sighs and of jokes, sung about in
corridas, cuecas,
and
zambas.

To reach her, keeping his passion obsessive and unique, he'd had to sacrifice the love of the beautiful Chilean Gabriela Cóo, since to be unfaithful to Ofelia Salamanca, even if she didn't know it, would be to betray the adorable Gabriela as well.

To see her face to face. To say to her: I love you. To say to her: I forgive you. To which of the two women would he say that? Didn't one feed the love of the other, and didn't both loves drink from a common spring—absence? Did he desire them so much only because he did not possess them?

He opened his eyes. The hammock stopped rocking. He shut them again, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his presumption. What was he going to pardon Ofelia Salamanca for? What did he know of her except, in effect, gossip, idle talk, limericks that often created a new truth only for the sake of rhyme? How did he dare? Hadn't Gabriela told him in Santiago de Chile that acting is insincere, fleeting, that it leaves no more trace of itself than words?

Then he plummeted again from the peak of his aroused consciousness to a pleasant unconsciousness, drugged by the premonition of peace and rest after ten years of exaltation. And in the depths of his sleep he was always on his way back to El Dorado. Holding Simón Rodríguez's hand, he returned to that most high abyss, that deep promontory, the heart of the Quechua mountain, the navel of sleep, and there he accused himself, with rage, with despair, with the terrible feeling that he'd lost his chance, because he hadn't stopped for an instant to watch the passage of dreams in the luminous eyes of the inhabitants of the city where everything moved in light, was born from light, and returned to light.

He scorned dreams. He rejected the possibility of understanding anything through a dream which was not his own, which was not bound to the dream of reason, faith in material progress, the certitude that human perfectibility was infallible, and the celebration that in the end happiness and history, the subject and the object, would become one, once and for all.

The other story, the warning but also the possibility of escape, was perhaps in the eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado, where light was necessary because everything was dark and where, for that reason, they could see with their eyes shut and reveal their dreams in the screens of their eyelids, warning him, Baltasar Bustos, that for each reason there is an unreason without which reason would cease to be reasonable: a dream that simultaneously denies and affirms reason. That there was an exception to every law, which makes the law partial and tolerable. But his most vivid sensation as he abandoned El Dorado was not that things complement each other, but rather the other extreme, a negation:

Evil is only what our reason hides and refuses to contemplate.

The real sin is to separate the sensible world from the spiritual world.

Then in a dream Ofelia Salamanca ceased to be a visible projection onto the animated wall of an Indian cavern, visible but untouchable, as delightful as his eyes announced it to be from a balcony in Buenos Aires that May night so far away.

Now she was the object of his touch (she was a single, unending animal wearing pulsating silk), of his hearing (she was a Mass in the desert, a voice outside of consciousness telling him from then on, without giving him an opportunity to reply, “You love me!” “You love me not!”), of smell (she was the most delightful stench, the stink without which there is no love, the perfume of a sullied clover leaf), and of sight: Ofelia Salamanca had eyes on her nipples that stared at him furiously, seductively, disdainfully, mockingly, until they made him wake up with a start.

The hammock stopped rocking. Ofelia Salamanca was the owner of the world.

[6]

Anselmo Quintana was standing before the altar. Baltasar Bustos's silhouette materialized in the light at the entrance to the chapel, and the priest waited until the thudding of his boot heels on the floor of flaking bricks, too soft for this rainy climate, stopped. When he was near, Quintana put his hand on Baltasar's shoulder and said to him, “Yesterday you didn't let me say my confession. Today you are going to sit in my place in the confessional, and I am going to kneel at your side and speak in secret through the grating.

“I know you don't believe in the sacrament. So it shouldn't matter where we do this. Yet it does matter to me to be on my knees to speak to you. Today is Thursday, and from now until tomorrow, weekly, Jesus Christ dies again for us. Many forget it; I do not. The most important thing I do is to remind anyone who cares to listen that if we are here and live, it is because Jesus sacrificed Himself to give us life on earth. Bear in mind then, Baltasar, that what I am going to tell you is preparation for the supreme act of faith, which is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is inseparable from Christ's sacrifice. And even though Calvary sufficed, each time I drink the blood and eat the body of Christ, I add to His sacrifice and act in the name of the quick and the dead. The Cross is the confluence of everything: sacrifice, life, death. Calvary, as they taught us in seminary, was sufficient in itself. But for me the Eucharist comes closest to that sacrificial sufficiency. I have no road more certain toward Christ than the Eucharist.”

Quintana's words allowed for no response, and in any case the force with which he led Baltasar to the confessional precluded any appeal.

Baltasar fell into the seat of the confessor with a leaden sense that anchored him there as if in a loathsome jail cell, the mortal facsimile of the coffin whose worn-out velvet smelled of trapped cats.

Anselmo Quintana knelt down outside, by Baltasar's unwilling ear.

“Yesterday you did not allow me to confess,” said the priest.

“But I told you I don't believe in the power of absolution.”

“You think I want to talk about your sins, so you shut yourself off from me. But your sins do not interest me. Your fate does. And what I confess to you is also part of my fate. Let's get started: I confess, brother, to having ordered the execution of a hundred Spanish soldiers held in jails and even in hospitals, in order to avenge the death of my eldest son at the hands of the royalists. I ordered their throats slit. The idea of forgiveness never even passed through my mind. I was blinded. Tell me if you would have forgiven me if I were your father and you my dead son.”

Baltasar said nothing. A feeling of growing modesty was taking control of him, inseparable respect and compassion for this man whose voice was becoming black, thick, guttural, reverting to ancient African roots, almost the voice of a psalmodist, which Baltasar did not want to interrupt until he'd heard everything, the same propitiatory act, perhaps, that would permit a believer to repeat the sacrifice on Calvary without taking the slightest bit away from the sufficiency of Christ's martyrdom.

He decided to hear him through to the end without arguing, to listen to him speaking there on his knees, his face like an old ball that has been kicked around: “I understand your silence, Baltasar, I understand your reticence, but understand mine; I share your fear of our weaknesses, and I fear as you do that a word spoken in confidence will be taken away by the one who listens to us, will get lost with our secret in the multitudes, and that we shall be left at his mercy if one day, out of despair or necessity, he repeats it to others; if you don't believe in me, in my priestly investiture or in my power to pardon sins, I shall repeat that I understand you, and for that reason I ask not that you confess formally to me but that you accept my humility as I kneel before you, exposing myself to you as the one who carries away my secret and, not believing in the sacrament, gives my secret to the world. I offer myself to you as an example. I confess before you, Baltasar, because yesterday you said things for which I have to assume some responsibility, and it does not seem right that the burden of our relationship, which has barely begun, which may not last very long, should fall upon me: one day we shall give an accounting not only of ourselves but of each one of the people to whom we have said something or from whom we have heard something. I ask you to accept this and not to believe that yesterday only you spoke, unburdening your conscience, and that today only I will do the same: your responsibility, yours and mine together this morning, is to give an accounting of all the beings who have done us the favor of listening to us. Would you like to know something? I told you my crime against the prisoners, and you should understand that, just as you do when you sin, I committed a crime against universal morality. St. Paul explains that sin is an assault on the natural law inscribed in the conscience of each human being. In my own case, it was also a violation of the vows of the priesthood, which include forgiveness, mercy, and respect for the will of God, who alone is able to give and take away life. Because of what I had done, I feared the punishments of hell that day when I avenged my poor son, a twenty-year-old boy who gave himself to the fight for independence, a gallant fellow with a red kerchief tied on his head, which made it difficult to see the blood when the ferocious Spanish Captain Lorenzo Garrote executed the sentence. Garrote saved his own life and embittered mine … But I realized, Baltasar, that I did not fear the ordinary hell of flames and physical suffering but the hell I imagined, and that hell is a place where no one speaks: the place of eternal, total silence forever; never more a voice, never a word. For that reason I kneel before you and beg you to listen to me, to postpone that inferno of silence, even if you do not speak to me, even if there is a hint of disdain in your stubborn silence. It does not matter, my little brother, I swear it does not matter, as long as we do not let our language die. Listen to me, then: I admit that I rebelled because I was unhappy when I lost my living, but now my rebellion has gone far beyond that. My rebellion led me to one gain after another: this is what I want to communicate to you; this is what you should understand. I gained rational faith without losing religious faith: I could have said, simply, ‘I am a rebel priest; those who excommunicate me are right. I am going to deliver myself over to independence, to the wisdom of the age, to faith in progress; I am simply going to damn religious faith.' Everything was joining against my faith: my rage when they declared me a heretic and blasphemer, my fear when they denied me the Host, my rancor when they killed my son, my temptation to be only a rationalist rebel. This has been my most terrible struggle, worse than any military battle, worse than all the spilled blood and the obligation to execute: not to give in before my judges, not to admit they were right or give them the pleasure of saying, ‘Look, we were right, he was a heretic, he was an atheist, he deserved to be excommunicated.' They ask me to repent. They don't know that that would mean delivering myself to hell. It would mean admitting the absolute evil in me—reason without faith—because I can lose the Church that has expelled me, but I cannot lose God; and to repent would be exactly that, to return to the Church but to lose God—not reason, which can coexist with the Church, but God who can exist without the Church and without reason.”