The Campaign (7 page)

“Don't come out at night. It's too cold. You might get sick,” Baltasar said affectionately to José Antonio, using the familiar form of “you,” forgetting for a moment to treat his father with the usual deference: the old man was so full of dignity, so strong, and at the same time so vulnerable, at the mercy of the elements, as Sabina had said, that at that moment his father was in fact his son. Which is what he wrote to Dorrego in Buenos Aires.

José Antonio Bustos overlooked his son's lack of respect. He attributed it to what he'd just seen. The unprecedented physical contact, between his son's hands and the gauchos'. He did not want to admit that old age turns parents back into children.

“Don't worry. When the doctors say I'm sick, I just make believe, to be polite. If I don't, they get discouraged and go back to being, I don't know, to being gauchos.” The old man laughed to himself. “You've got to respect people's titles. It costs them a lot to get them. Anyway, we lead a healthy life around here. We don't need doctors, people live a long time, and the only things that kill the young ones are knife fights and falling off horses.”

“It's good to see you looking so well, papa,” said Baltasar, reverting to the proper respectful tone.

“All I've got left are the small pleasures of old age. Like walking out to see the stars. Nights here are so beautiful. When I was a child I counted the stars, I couldn't understand that they were uncountable. Then, when I was a little older, I went on to count the nights when there was a moon, until I found out it was in the almanac. So what are we left with? Who knows.”

“You aren't the way people in Buenos Aires say ranchers are,” Baltasar said awkwardly. He felt as inept as the gaucho with the wounded arm.

“Savage rancher? Barbarous creole? No. I think I've had a few ideas. I don't want to lose my faith altogether. How good it is that you keep yours strong.”

The son took the father's wrist, the way he had taken the gaucho's a moment earlier. “You've kept your senses, papa, along with your faith.”

Now José Antonio laughed openly. “Five of them left me a while ago. The sixth stayed, but it's pure memory.”

“Then let me add a seventh, which is your intelligence.”

The father was silent for a moment and then said that old age offers small pleasures; not everything is lost. Arm in arm, they walked into the house.

Sabina seemed to be waiting for her brother after he left the old man asleep in his bedroom. He was surprised; he tried to see the beauty in her ugliness; he hadn't given up on that score.

“Hasn't he asked you yet?”

“What?”

“Whether you want to be a merchant or a rancher. The poor man has his illusions. Didn't he mention the small pleasures of his old age?”

“Yes.”

“That's to set the scene. He wants you to choose.”

“I can't.”

“Of course you can. This damned revolution will be your career.”

“And what about you?” asked Baltasar, furious, seeing her uglier than ever.

“You know the answer to that, too. Don't play the fool. While you go to your revolution, I stay here taking care of the old man. If I don't, who will? Someone has to.”

Baltasar felt the reproach. Sabina's eyes that night were filled with a burning desire.

“How I'd like to go off somewhere far away, too.”

Afterward, a pause during which the two of them looked at each other like strangers. To see if they could love each other only that way: “How I wish I could be like Mother—all she knew was how to make sweets. She who spent more on candles for the church than on food for the children. How she worried about which things she was going to leave us, how many cups, tea sets, or sterling-silver platters. And not only us. She thought about the generations to come. And at the same time, how sure she was that, once she was buried here, underneath the ombu, she would come back to see what had happened to the pot of honey, the biscuit, the silver teaspoon.”

“Why don't you leave, then?” Baltasar asked her, understanding the comparison she was making between their lives, as well as the fear that lurked behind his sister's words.

“Our father doesn't say it, but he'd rather give me to some creole as a mistress than see me married to a half-breed. The problem is that in all this immensity there are no creoles.”

She looked at him with disdain and a bitter coquettishness, unconsciously rubbing her thigh.

[4]

“If my friends could just see me stuck here on this ranch, they'd be happy for me and pity me at the same time,” said the old man with humor, perhaps recalling the days when he was politically active in Buenos Aires, when he felt it was necessary to defend the Spanish Crown against the English. Not even the viceroy's ineptitude could make him change his mind; the creole regiments were defending the same thing the viceroy defended.

“I fought against English Protestants, not Spanish Catholics. That would have been like fighting against ourselves.”

During his stay, Baltasar tried to observe and understand his father's life. A life he did not want for himself: feudal, isolated, without recognized laws, and with no authority other than that which the patriarch managed to win for himself. Unlike other landowners, José Antonio Bustos was too elegant a man to resort to theatrics and demand his patriarchal rights. He exercised them discreetly, with an admirable sense of personal honor, and, as a result, his chaotic world took note and even obeyed him. It wasn't easy, he said one day to Baltasar, not to brag but to teach his son, it wasn't easy to gain the respect of men whose livelihood was smoking beef, of roving town criers and horse drovers, judges and royal attorneys, scribes and court clerks, horse dealers and common criminals … For each one, he said, one had to have a good word, a bit of pity, and some reason to be feared. Without the patriarch, José Antonio Bustos suggested, they'd all devour each other. And not out of hunger, but out of satedness. That was the enigma of this land as well as its paradox.

“Is there anything this country doesn't produce?” said José Antonio. “A man can get a return of more than twenty times the value of his labor here. There are no forests to clear, as there are in North America. You can plant twice a year. The same field yields wheat for ten years without being exhausted. The only thing you have to be careful of is planting too much in one spot. If you do, the harvest will be overly abundant. And the cattle graze on their own.”

The father paused with a smile and asked his son: “Aren't you worried about a country like this?”

“On the contrary. You confirm all my optimism.”

“I'd be more cautious. A country where all you have to do is spit for the land to produce may turn out to be weak, sleepy, arrogant, self-satisfied, uncritical…”

What Baltasar feared was that his father, the patriarch, a power so discreet and at times so ironic, would have to make a show of strength in a dramatic, forceful, theatrical fashion to regain his authority.

The opportunity came that winter, when the news was spread by two scouts on horseback, from the country to the general store, to the workshops and the fort, that the cimarrons were back. Baltasar remembered his dream on the stagecoach. He knew that a herd of wild horses could surround a man for days, not letting him pass, or drag along post-horses, endangering the lives of passengers and drivers. This was worse, José Antonio said. What? Come see tonight.

The old man gathered a small army of his best, his fiercest gauchos. He rounded up his men, ordered them to bring in the scattered cattle, tie the animals to the fence, and then have a squad of gauchos collect the old, useless horses. They were to slaughter the nags by the ravine just beyond the front of the ranch, so the cimarrons couldn't miss the scent of the fresh blood.

José Antonio Bustos himself, mounted on his best horse, rode out. He ordered Baltasar to ride a barely broken stallion so the gauchos would look on him with respect. The troop of gauchos followed them on their own fast horses, half with lances ready, the other half with torches, all headed for the hollow where the
caranchos,
the vultures of the pampa, were already circling the spot where the old horses had been slaughtered. José Antonio ordered the place to be surrounded as cautiously as possible and then had the men attack without mercy the pack of wild dogs devouring the fresh, bloodied meat. The dogs, startled and barking, blinded by the torches, their muzzles and eyes red, couldn't recognize a master but would attack with the same ferocity with which their terrorizing packs pursued the herds. Lanced and then clubbed to death, their bodies were tossed on top of the dead horses until there wasn't a square foot in the hollow unsullied by blood or death.

“Didn't I tell you?” José Antonio looked at his son. “There's too much abundance here. Meat is just left to rot on the pampa. The dogs run off because they eat better in the wild. In two years they regress two centuries. They're a plague. This hadn't happened for a long time here. Then they started coming closer to towns. They have lost any fear they may have had, so we have to teach them a lesson.”

He ordered everyone to move on to the nearest caves.

There, José Antonio Bustos and his men found the dog cemetery packed with bones that glinted in the night. Cow and mule bones, but also the bones of dogs who'd died there, mad, wild, gorged with food. The patriarch ordered the cave sealed with mortar.

It was a rapid, efficient expedition. Baltasar understood the pride of the gauchos, and his respect for the old patriarch was renewed. The gauchos did not look at him. What had he done? Less than his sister, whom they found, when they got back to the house, standing in the drainage ditch. She was covered with blood, along with the servants and women from the farm, all engaged in an uncertain, dim action. Baltasar saw Sabina stained with blood, a knife in her hand, cutting the throats of dogs, which she then flung back into the ditch, which was filling up with carcasses. Watching his sister wield a knife with the strength and skill of ten men, Baltasar was suddenly aware that she loved knives. With what pleasure she sank hers into the throat of a dog, burying it right to the hilt, grasping the animal's neck between her thumb and index finger, her female fingers implacable and eager. With what delight she pulled it out and plunged it into the animal's guts, repeating the gesture of pleasure, feared love, closeness to the enemy body, to the heat of the beast.

“Sabina!” shouted José Antonio in horror when he saw his daughter. She passed her hand over her mouth, smearing it with blood, and then ran to the ranch—but without dropping her knife.

That night, Baltasar heard the muffled, wounded, strident voices of the father and the daughter: that echo of family combat neither time nor walls could silence.

He waited for José Antonio in the hall outside the bedrooms. The old man was upset when he saw him there.

“Want to know something?” Baltasar asked, grasping him by the shoulder and once more speaking to him familiarly. “I was always afraid of loving you a lot but not having anything to talk to you about…”

The old man sighed and squeezed his son's hand.

“Those weren't wild dogs. They were the dogs of the ranch hands; she ordered them brought here so that they would never become like the others.”

Baltasar did not know what his father saw in his eyes, but the old man felt obliged to say: “She did it out of goodness … She doesn't want anything bad to happen to us … She's a woman who keeps an eye on the future, just like her mother…”

[5]

José Antonio Bustos watched his son watching country life but not taking part in country life. He'd never asked the question Sabina had said he would ask: Have you decided? What do you want to be? Rancher or merchant?

He knew that his father considered him a raw boy, virgin, not very attractive physically, with a juvenile passion for newfangled ideas, waiting for the right moment to settle down, strangely rooted in the thing he said he detested: this land, the gauchos, barbarism, his hostile sister. José Antonio wouldn't want to admit the reason behind his son's renewed sense of rootedness. Baltasar thought him old, so he was stretching out this time with him before making the decision that would take him away from here. Rancher or merchant? The news that began to reach the interior over the following months made Baltasar's decision for him. But, before that, José Antonio Bustos had decided to change his tone, to force his son's hand.

Xavier Dorrego wrote from Buenos Aires: The former viceroy, Liniers, was executed along with the bishop and the treasurer. Liniers had organized a counterrevolution, and all the malcontents had joined with him. There were plenty—the expulsion of the current viceroy makes it clear that authority no longer resides in Spain but in Buenos Aires and the Argentine nation. The royalists have sworn revenge. The creole merchants are unhappy. Free trade is ruining them. They cannot compete with England. You in the interior should look at yourselves in that mirror. If the merchants can't compete, how will the producers of wine, textiles, and tools?

But our own people are discontented as well, Dorrego went on, because Cornelio Saavedra has imposed a conservative congress in opposition to Mariano Moreno's radical representatives. Those of us with Moreno have been forced to leave the government, and Mariano Moreno himself has been sent into gilded exile in England! Our ideas of progress and rapid transformations have been postponed.

This letter cast Baltasar Bustos into a deep depression, until another letter came from me, Varela the printer, telling him that Saavedra, the army, and the conservatives had created a Public Safety Committee to root out the counterrevolutionaries. “The Committee has attacked royalists, conservatives, and radicals equally. The royalists,” I told him, “are now seeking armed assistance from Spain to reconquer the colony. The government has thus extended the persecution to all Spaniards; they've been arrested, exiled, and executed. The conservatives have conspired against the creole government; the merchant Martín Alzaga and forty of his close associates have been executed. And Moreno's radicals, now leaderless, are also being persecuted. Weep, little friend: our idol, the young, brilliant, kindly Mariano Moreno died at the age of thirty-two aboard the ship taking him to England. Who's left? Your hero Castelli has been sent to take command of the northern army, that's where they expect the Spanish attack to come from. And here in Buenos Aires, Balta, we young followers of Moreno are again meeting—after taking precautions—in the old Café de Malcos. We are preparing to support Bernardino Rivadavia, who seems to be the most radical embodiment of our ideas of progress. We miss you, Balta, old man, you should be here with us.”