The Campaign (4 page)

“The military? But they're all revolutionaries, allied with that pack of scheming lawyers, doctors, and pamphleteers who've popped up out of nowhere,” Don Adolfo Mugica, a grain merchant, indignantly observed.

“The military men won prestige by defeating the English in 1806, and they will derive even more prestige from fighting the Spanish now. Their allies are the Buenos Aires professional class—unimportant people: clerks, poor priests, God knows what,” said Don Ricardo Mallea, famous for his donations to convents that expressed their gratitude by hiding his illegal merchandise.

“Let them all defeat Spain, and then they'll have to decide between defeating Buenos Aires—that is, all of you—or defeating the merchants from the interior, who will demand protection from Buenos Aires's port commerce,” concluded the president and judge, whose authority was clear to everyone by the deference with which even the viceroys treated him. After all, tomorrow he would be trying the viceroy himself. But on this May night there was no viceroy in Buenos Aires: there was only the judge, Cabra himself. No further proof was needed to determine who was who.

“And what does your lordship advise?”

“You must try to create a new class of landowners out of the manufacturers from the interior and the Buenos Aires merchants.”

“What are you saying? The landowners are our enemies, and in any case they're ignorant gauchos, virtually savages,” exclaimed Mugica with a
frisson.

“I would advise you to divide up the public lands,” Leocadio Cabra went on elegantly, confidently, “to encourage cattle ranching and grain production. Then you will get rich on export, and the interior will have to submit to you even if it wants to break away. Problems in Tucumán or La Rioja can be put off, but meanwhile they'll have enough to eat and time to get used to the idea. As long as this abundant land produces, gentlemen, everyone can be content … You've got to castrate this country with its own abundance,” said Cabra, making a sudden, bitter grimace, which, because it was unnecessary, he corrected instantly.

“You are a wise man, your lordship. If only you'd govern us and not that mob we hear outside…”

“Rogues.”

“Deluded fools.”

This meeting showed that, between the disappeared viceroy on the one side and the revolutionary assembly on the other, the Spanish monarchy and its most loyal subjects were standing firm, proudly isolated from the reigning confusion. But that chaos was not slow in entering the salon where, even before English commerce, English manners were establishing themselves in the Río de la Plata.

After dinner, the ladies had withdrawn so the men could smoke cigars, drink claret, and talk politics. But the cigars hadn't yet been snuffed when the rules were broken: the women fluttered in like sea gulls, resplendent in the fashions of the detested Empire, the daring revelations commonplace in Paris modestly covered up—in great agitation from a shock bordering on grief but fully consonant with the uproar, the cannon blasts and ringing bells of that long night of independence.

“It's on fire, it's on fire!”

The porcelain marquis, stiff and fragile, stood up: “Where is my wife?”

“She's fainted, your lordship.”

“The court building is on fire…”

“By which you mean, madame, the mob has set it ablaze.”

“Meddlers.”

“Deluded fools.”

“What's that you said, Mister President?”

“Twenty-five candles.” He laughed, provoking all manner of scandal. “One for each year…”

[6]

Baltasar had to call on us to help him look for the black wet nurse in the tumult of that May night, inquire among the hysterical, weeping servants of the burning palace, run to the less respectable neighborhoods in the port, threaten, ascribe to ourselves nonexistent functions and nonexistent missions to tear like savages though bordellos where men were dancing the fandango with women of uncertain race, or among the multitudes of working-class children, born of free love, who would be brought up with and like animals, without homes or school. For Baltasar Bustos, it was the saddest city in the world that night when all was celebration.

In any case, we did not overlook one half-sunken shack at the edge of the marshes, one whorehouse shaken by its roaring clientele where a wet nurse might give comfort to a worn-out, sick sister who in turn would lull a blond baby. We searched every yard, every corner, every hut along the river.

The café was closed at that hour, on that exceptional day, and the city sad; it was only in the printing shop at the Orphan Asylum that we could rest, drink our foamless hot chocolate, and go on doing what held us together: talk.

Dorrego, the rationalist, had asked Baltasar why the black nurse herself hadn't exchanged the babies in the cradle, since she had direct access to them. It was right after committing the act, when Baltasar had told us, his two intimates, not to make us accomplices—that was not Baltasar's intention—but because we were his confidants in everything he did.

The black baby was the nurse's nephew, that's why—our friend explained—the child of a flogged prostitute impertinent enough to give birth. He was afraid that at the last moment the nurse's hand would tremble and she'd be overcome by emotion. I said I thought that when Baltasar found out about the flogging he'd decided to take justice into his own hands. But my friend said it wasn't that at all, that if things went wrong he didn't want the black wet nurse to be punished, to add injustice to injustice. He wanted to be solely responsible.

“Not anymore, since you've made us party to your crime,” said Dorrego, to provoke our friend.

I intervened to calm things down. Baltasar thought the philosophic basis of his acts demanded that he himself commit them. I gave Dorrego a severe look and added seriously that the responsibility of a free man excluded complicity with those who deny freedom.

Dorrego smiled. “Why are you afraid that things will go wrong, Baltasar? Well, just think: they did. Your black baby is dead, burned to death. And your white baby, even if he's to live in misery, is alive and kicking.”

Baltasar did not deign to answer. He knew that Dorrego liked to have the last word and that it didn't matter to us; it didn't mean Dorrego was right. Baltasar and I understood each other better than ever in silence. We were very young, and life was going to be an endless series of moral decisions, one after the other.

“One child is dead, the other alive. Long live justice,” exclaimed Dorrego, adding rapidly: “The chocolate's cold.”

“I'm going home” was all Baltasar Bustos said.

2

The Pampa

[1]

“If you find me dead with a candle in my hand, it means I've finally admitted you were right. If you find my hands crossed over my chest, entwined in a scapulary, it means I held fast to my ideas and died condemning yours. Try to win me over.”

In Baltasar's mind, these words were sufficient to characterize his father, José Antonio Bustos. He remembered him standing in the midst of corrals, stables, coachhouses, warehouses, workshops, flour mills, and gauchos bidding him farewell. Or solitary in a nightfall that was in itself an imitation of death, sitting on a chair made of hides, four stakes, and a cow's skull. Greeting him.

And this time, would he be there to say,
How are you, son, welcome home, you're always welcome here, Baltasar?

Or would he say, instead,
Goodbye, Baltasar, I've gone, I'm not here anymore, don't forget me, son?

It was twenty-four leagues from Buenos Aires to the pampa, and twenty more to Pergamino, where he would leave the stagecoach. News and travelers alike arrived late. From Pergamino to his father's land, on the other side of One-Eyed Deer, he'd have a good way to go by mule. But now Baltasar Bustos watched the passing of the carts laden with blankets, ostrich plumes, salt, bridles, and fabric on the deeply rutted road that would take him back to his father.

Would he find him dead or alive? Both forebodings took hold of his mind and heart little by little as he made his way to the paternal home. An abrupt, somber, mysterious, abysmal world seemed to close in around him, suggesting either alternative—life, death—news of which a slow or nonexistent mail service (word of mouth often outstripped paper) did not bring very often.

Lulled by the rocking of the stagecoach, Baltasar Bustos tried to find a meaning in the city he was leaving, and saw only an apparent contradiction: Buenos Aires was twice born. It had been founded first by Pedro de Mendoza with the ill-gotten gains he'd derived from the sack of Rome, with his fifteen hundred soldiers lusting for gold, with the women—some disguised as men—who had stowed away with the troops, all of them good at making campfires and keeping watch. But, ultimately, all of them, men and women, were defeated by the nightly Indian raids on their log fort, by the absence of gold and the presence of hunger: they ate the boots they were wearing, and some say they even ate the corpses of the dead. Finally the conquistador without conquest, Mendoza, died of fever, and they tossed his body into the Río de la Plata. The only silver anyone ever saw in that misnamed river was Mendoza's rings as they sank to the bottom.

It wasn't El Dorado. The city was abandoned, burned, leveled. Forty years later, Pedro de Garay founded it a second time. Seriously, Castilian-style, like a chessboard, using the surveyor's cross: it faced the Atlantic and the mud-colored river into which bled the exhausted veins of Potosí, the mountain of silver. It wasn't El Dorado. This was a city dreamed up for gold and won for commerce. A city besieged by the silence of the vast ocean on one side and the silence of this interior ocean, equally vast, on the other. Baltasar Bustos was crossing that interior sea at top speed, lulled by the long, sturdy strides of the horses, dreaming of himself in the middle of this portrait of the horizon which is the pampa, having the sensation of not moving at all. The horizon was ever present. It was eternal. It was also unreachable.

And here he was, in the middle of the pampa, with his baggage in his hands, suddenly surrounded by a herd of wild horses, tens of thousands of them, which populated the plains like a mob spreading over the entire planet, the natural descendants of the horses abandoned by the first, vanquished conquistadors. They bred haphazardly, like the blacks in the port, savagely growing and multiplying, wild, tall, untamed, and he was captive in the midst of these beasts, unable to move, smelling their glittering sweat, the pungent foam on their dewlaps, the acrid urine of thirty or forty thousand masterless horses overrunning the face of the earth, preventing him from moving a single inch, forcing him to abandon his suitcases crammed with volumes of Rousseau, as he implored his patron saint, the Citizen of Geneva, for aid: “I find myself on the earth as if on a strange planet…”

He woke with a start; the coach horses were galloping at half speed, imperturbable. The travelers fleeing Buenos Aires were quite perturbed. They were Spanish merchants going out to save what they could in Córdoba, Rosario, and Santa Fé or to take refuge in those bastions against the revolutionary tidal wave they could see coming, stirred up by the oratorical storms of Moreno, Castelli, and Belgrano. The wealthy Spaniards could not imagine a revolution in the traditionalist interior; all evils came over the sea to Buenos Aires—they were ideas. But all goods also entered there—that was commerce. This contradiction drove the conservative merchants mad, as did the contradiction disquieting Baltasar's soul as he left the city, his friends, the revolution, all to return to nature and in nature find “the solitude and meditation” that would enable him to be himself, without obstacles, truly be what nature wanted him to be.

They were racing across the treeless pampa, but whenever they chanced on a solitary ombu, the only thing the passengers could think (and often said) was: “We'll all end up hanging from its branches!”

Baltasar, on the other hand, felt a boundless freedom on the vast plain. His soul and his nature seemed harmonious reflections of each other, mutually attracted like lovers. As Baltasar emerged from the bad dream of the herd of wild horses, that was the sensation he sought and appreciated with greater intensity. He regretted the presence in the coach of the complaining, chattering Spaniards, who kept him from consummating his marriage with the landscape. He let the rumble of the wheels over the stones and ruts of the road to Córdoba deafen him so that the desired communion could take place despite all obstacles, in the unassailable silence of his soul.

What would these men he didn't know who were traveling with him say if he told them what he was thinking?

But instead of irritating them with a sonorous “Welcome to the pampa, you Spanish bastards!” Baltasar began to feel sorry for himself. Having identified himself with that face of infinity which is the great Argentine plain, he would have wanted to achieve his ideal in a flash: the identification of Baltasar Bustos's soul with immortal nature. The reader of Rousseau knew that the soul, reunited with itself after discarding its useless baggage, can finally enjoy the universe and possess the beauty that enters the spirit through the five senses.

Now alone on a mule, on the road to his father's wretched estate, he finally had the opportunity to envision what the noisy presence of the contemptible Spanish bastards had blocked out during the trip from Buenos Aires. Yet the hubbub around him and the dream of the wild herd had allowed him a communion more certain, though thwarted, than had this solitude on muleback in which the pampa, its creeks, its peach trees, its leagues and leagues of hard lime soil inhabited only by maddened ostriches seemed to him so many bleak, opposing accidents. The pampa was no longer the mirror of God on earth. Now, instead of the much desired communion, all he saw on the horizon were problems, contradictions, untenable options, all crowding his overly receptive spirit.