The Campaign (8 page)

José Antonio Bustos watched his son, waiting for his reaction, waiting for his son to give him the news he already knew from his own sources. “The Buenos Aires centralist tyranny”—José Antonio did not mince words this time—“is at odds with everyone. It persecuted the Spaniards just for being Spaniards; first it ruined the businessmen and then had them shot, it decapitated its own group of liberal thinkers at the same time that it strengthened the army and gave it political powers. Is that what you call a revolution for independence, Baltasar? Is this violence supposed to fill the void left by Spain?”

“Yes,” answered the son, “but the revolution has also created a new educational system and proclaimed the rights of man, just as they did in France. And it has outlawed the infamous slave trade.”

“And it passed a law called freedom of bellies which declares that all children of slaves born from now on are free,” José Antonio said, his eyes fixed on the silver straw in his maté gourd.

“What's so bad about that?” asked Baltasar, astonished, incredulous, above all, that this argument was actually taking place. The father and the son never raised their voices; there was something more than the politics of the revolution at stake here.

“Just read what they say in the
Buenos Aires Gazette.
” Now the father, embarked on this enraged recrimination, pulled the news sheet out from among the pile of papers on his desk. “The blacks should go on serving, because slavery, as unjust as it has been, has given them a slave mentality. Once a slave, says the paper, always a slave. And it says it to attack the Spanish slave laws, which is the most ironic thing. Just accept things as they are! We'll give you your freedom, little by little! The habit of slavery has marked them forever, won't allow them to be free, so we'll administer freedom to them with an eyedropper! Free bellies, but only when
we
say so. Those who were slaves before will go on being slaves.”

Baltasar's only argument was that the laws regarding blacks also took care of the education of the race that had languished in subjugation for so long. “But they still have to stay in the master's house until they're twenty, even if they're born free,” his father retorted.

Baltasar sensed a deep, dull pain in his father's words, as if he'd been bitten by a snake. There were thirty thousand slaves in Argentina, but for him they were summed up in a pair of black women, a wet nurse and her sister, who held Ofelia Salamanca's kidnapped child.

He was on the point of being honorable with his father: I kidnapped a white child. I left a black one in his place. What a surprise the judge and his wife would have had if they'd found him in that aristocratic crib! But, after their shock and rage, what would they have done? Would they have raised him as their own son or returned him to slavery? The creole republic was going to turn its back on the slavery issue; it was going to reform it only on paper. The reader of Rousseau had a premonition that split his skull like a lightning bolt. There will be freedom but not equality.

“The President of the Superior Court and the marquise returned to Chile. She looked splendid dressed all in black as she left the court in mourning for her son, burned to death in the sinister fire of May 25. No one thinks it was an accident. The counterrevolutionaries say a liberal mob entered the residence as part of the terrorism they attribute to us. If they only knew that all we did was try to face up to the many problems that lingered on without a solution for three centuries in the colony's cellars! What was better, to go on ignoring them or to bring them out into the light of day, acknowledge them and say: Look, there are problems, difficulties, contradictions. The revolution's sincerity gets mixed up with the revolution's terror, brother Baltasar. The same thing happened in France. Remind anyone who argues against us of that fact,” his friend Dorrego wrote.

“The same thing happened in France!” exclaimed Baltasar to his father.

“I have real fears about the freedom of the nation and the unity of our countries,” said the old man calmly. “I would have preferred the solution proposed by Aranda, Charles III's minister: that we form a confederation of Spain and her colonies, which would be sovereign but united. Strong. Not weakened by uncalled-for excesses and fatal dissension.”

“Things would not have gotten better without a revolution,” replied the son. “In France, neither the king nor the nobility would have given up an iota of their privilege if the revolution hadn't wrenched them out of their hands. It was the king who set off the violence. You're right—a civilized agreement would have been better. But it didn't happen that way, not there and not here. What matters to me is that we consolidate some rights for the majority, where, before, there were only many rights for just a few. If we put an end to a single abuse, a single privilege, the revolution will have been justified.”

Old José Antonio Bustos applauded in silence, with a gesture but without actually clapping his hands, as yellow as his poncho, their lines accentuated by the fluttering shadows of the dying candles during one of the longest after-dinner talks they'd ever had. Those hands were as thin as wafers but as yellow as the patriarchal poncho, not porcelain-colored like the hands of Ofelia and her husband. The applause meant: “Bravo! You're addressing me as if I were a multitude.” His words were firm but tender.

“I suppose you've made a decision, then,” said the father in his usual tone.

“Yes,” Baltasar lied.

He realized that his father's odd harshness in their political discussion had no purpose other than to oblige the son to reach a decision. Baltasar understood in that instant that his father wanted not to annoy or offend him but to force him to make up his mind. Obliged to review his options, the young Bustos had to choose, as he told us in a letter: “I am not going to stay here. It doesn't matter to me whether the merchant destroys the rancher or if the pampa takes control of Buenos Aires. I'm interested in two things. First, to see Ofelia Salamanca again. And second, to bring the revolution to those who have not yet been liberated. But I can't make an impression on her unless I act first. So I'll start by attending to the revolution. I'll join up with Castelli and the northern army to support the integrity of the republic against the royalist forces.”

“Tomorrow I'm going to join up with the revolutionary army in Upper Peru.”

The old man sighed, smiled, stretched out a hand that not even the candles could warm anymore.

“Do you believe so firmly in the final triumph of your ideals? I envy your faith. But don't fool yourself, or you're going to suffer a great deal. Have faith, but be sincere. Can you do that? Are you capable of modifying your own behavior before you change the world?”

Baltasar Bustos sat down next to the old man's armchair and told him what had happened the night of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of May in Buenos Aires. “Don't let anyone tell you it was the revolutionaries who caused the fire. I did it, Father. It was my clumsiness. I knocked over a candle without realizing it when I was exchanging the children. I'm the guilty party. I caused the death of an innocent child.”

[6]

Sabina was outside the door. One never knew if she was secretly listening, spying on father and son without any excuse, as if saying: Life has given me so little that I can take whatever I want. Less still could Baltasar believe that father and daughter were united in their siege of someone as insignificant in the eyes of his family and the world as he: a romantic idealist, a physically unattractive fellow, a fool in love with an unattainable woman, an agent of the blindest, most involuntarily comic justice. Might that act of sincerity with his father at least have saved him? He detested himself; therefore he detested the intrusive presence of his sister even more, as he imagined a net of possible complicities and actual indiscretions.

“He still hasn't asked you?” said Sabina, a candle in her hand.

“Asked me what?”

“Whether you want to be a merchant or a rancher.”

“Don't be a hypocrite. You heard everything.”

“The poor old man still has his illusions,” Sabina went on, as if not listening to her brother, as if reciting lines in a play. “He wants you to choose.”

“You heard everything. Don't go on pretending. You rehearsed this scene as if we were in a theater. Well, the first act's over. Say something new, please.”

“I told you that I wanted to get out of here, too.”

“But you can't. The old man needs you. Sacrifice yourself for him and, if you wish, for me as well. There's always one selfish child and one self-sacrificing child. Wait for the old man to die. Then you can get out, too.”

She began to laugh. No, she was not the only sister who could take care of her father, sacrificing herself for him. The old man had dozens of children. What did little innocent Baltasar think? Didn't he know the laws of the country? A patriarch like José Antonio Bustos could have as many children as he wanted with the farm girls, if his legitimate wife wasn't enough, especially if she was as insipid as poor María Teresa Echegaray, who ended her days as bent as a shepherd's crook, peering at the ground until she forgot people's faces and died. She was plump and nearsighted. “Like you.”

José Antonio Bustos had a regiment of children scattered over the pampa and the mountains. But country law was implacable: the patriarch could recognize only one son. As for the others, well, this vagabond land would swallow them up.

“You are the legitimate son, Baltasar,” said Sabina, as if she were illegitimate or as if, having been born, she died every night in the bed to which she'd been condemned and had no time to be reborn the next day. “But you look just like Mother. That gaucho you challenged a little while ago looks just like you, didn't you see it? I'm the one who looks like Papa, not you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” stammered Baltasar in confusion. “There must be any number of Papa's kids who look like you and him.”

He felt he was losing himself in the thing he detested most: self-justification. Even though he detested her, he preferred being as honest with Sabina, who was as dry and dark as their father, as he'd been with his father because he loved him.

“I know you heard everything. Think about it awhile and help me. I love a woman. I'll never win her unless I do what I must do. I'm going to join up with Castelli in Upper Peru, sister dear. But only now, talking here with you—and I thank you from the bottom of my heart!—do I realize that I have to do everything I can to save an innocent child. My friends in Buenos Aires will help me. I want to save that innocent child. I'll send him here to you so you can take care of him. Will you do me that favor?”

“What is all this about an innocent child? Do you want me to stay here, a captive, even after the old man dies? What are you talking about?”

This wasn't a complaint or even a question. It was simply a statement of the fatal, implacable fact that dominated her life. And when, in the days that followed, new information came, brother and sister would catch each other's eye during dinner or when Sabina would bring freshly pressed shirts into the bedroom where Baltasar was packing his bags. They only had eyes, in fact, for the corrals and fields, where the gauchos had become agitated because of the news. The government of Buenos Aires had passed a law against nomads. The gauchos were to abandon their barbarous, wandering, useless customs and settle down on ranches or farms or in industry. To that end, they would be given identification cards. In turn, they would have to produce employment certificates. Violators of the law would be sentenced to forced labor or military service.

José Antonio Bustos had to read this law aloud to the gauchos summoned to the entry gates of the ranch. The hairy men, with no break in their matted pelts other than the glint of their eyes and teeth, listened as if they were getting ready to fight, their hands on their belts or resting on the hafts of their daggers. Their blades, spurs, and belt buckles also glinted, blinding the old rural patriarch more than the tenuous rays of this winter sun that sank behind the mountain range early, as if bored with the laws of men. As he read the proclamation of the creole revolution, old Bustos looked into eyes that said: “Old man, you're useless to us. You are unable to save our way of life. Fence in a gaucho and you kill him. Let's see if there's someone here among us who will take charge and send you, Buenos Aires, and these laws straight to hell. Who do these people think they are? Do they really think they can dictate to us from there? Maybe we ought to go there and govern those sons of bitches. So who wants to take charge of the gauchos? Let's see who wants to be our chief. Whoever it is, we'll follow him to the death, against the capital city, against the law, and against you, to keep our freedom to roam as we always have, free.”

It was then that Baltasar really saw death in José Antonio's eyes. The liberal law offended him as much as it did the gauchos, but it was a triumph for the son and his ideas: it was as if José Antonio, standing firm in defeat, were dead with a candle in his hand. In his features an autarkic world was dying, a world as slow as the carts in which it traveled, a world held together by carpenters, bakers, seamstresses, soapmakers, candlemakers, and blacksmiths; and the gauchos. Almost all of them were born and came back to die here, but that fidelity in the extremes of life was based on their freedom to move, to get on a horse and seek their fortune bearing their property on their backs or between their legs—the mare, their spurs, arms, and trinkets. Women were bought. Indians were tamed with alcohol and honey. But the gauchos always came back to their real master to be reborn or to die again. All that passed through the anguished eyes of José Antonio Bustos, standing there with his yellow poncho elegantly crossed over his chest, indifferent to the slow and invisible disintegration of his warehouses, stables, coachhouses, granaries, and chapels. His gauchos were always there when he needed them—on condition that he not force them to be there.