The Campaign Page 2

  She powdered herself without the help of chambermaids, and the powder kept him from seeing her breasts clearly, so Baltasar Bustos fell in love with her back, her waist, and her buttocks. With her profile as well, since Ofelia Salamanca, as she powdered her breasts, presented only half her face to the ecstatic contemplation of the young porteño, the perfect reader of distant ideals. He would have wanted to see a romantic turbulence in her features; but the classical perfection of her clear brow, straight nose, full lips, her oval chin and long, swanlike neck foiled such wishes. It was like seeing Leda in the myth: the rice powder was the swan that enveloped her, possessed her, and veiled her from the eyes of her admirer, turning her into what he most desired: an unattainable ideal, the pure bride of pure desire, untouched.

  His impassioned readings of Rousseau mixed with the cold teaching of the church fathers: Baltasar Bustos’s intellectual hero was the Citizen of Geneva who asks us to abandon ourselves to our passion so that we can recover our souls, whereas St. John Chrysostom condemns ideal love that is not consummated, because the passions become all the more inflamed.

  The saint knew that once we attain our carnal objective, habit will ultimately cool any passion. The distance between the balcony from which Baltasar spied, desired, and entered into conflict with his own feelings and the rotund object of his desire, at that moment covered by a haze of gauze and powder with which she was unfortunately more intimate than she was with him, distant witness of the unattainable beauty of Ofelia the president’s wife, only succeeded, it was true, in increasing his passion.

  That was the first time he saw her, spying from the balcony, rehearsing the act he would commit for justice’s sake.

  The second time, she was accompanied by her husband, who paced impatiently around the bedroom, pushing aside gauze veils as she got dressed, again without the help of a maid. Perhaps the subject of their conversation called for privacy: the marquis was complaining because Ofelia wasn’t breastfeeding the newborn child, lamenting that his son had been turned over to one of these black Buenos Aires wet nurses. He missed Chile and its Indians; the Río de la Plata was filled with blacks—almost half the population. I don’t want our son to grow up surrounded by blacks, said the old creole, who had reached his present position through his fervent devotion to the Crown. Don’t worry, said Ofelia Salamanca, black children don’t go to school with white children, not here or anywhere. In Catamarca, not long ago, a mulatto was flogged when people found out he’d learned to read and write.

  The marquis, who seemed made of porcelain, said to his wife: “If your reprehensible appetite for novelties and horrors—the same thing, in my opinion—requires stimulation, let me tell you, my dear, that just two months ago, right here in Buenos Aires, a black hetaera sick with the French pox was sentenced for daring to have a child. To cure her of her malady, her profession, and her maternity all at the same time, she was condemned to a public whipping.”

  “I’m sure that cured her of prostitution and syphilis,” said Ofelia Salamanca with cold simplicity, as she finished dressing, much closer this second time to the eyes of Baltasar Bustos, who used every means to preserve the beatific vision of the first occasion. Seeing them together, he realized that she was the same porcelain color as her husband.

  Ofelia Salamanca wore Empire dresses, but she went against fashion by zealously covering her breasts and revealing instead her legs and the curve of her posterior. That wasn’t what excited Baltasar Bustos most in this second vision; it was two elements in her toilette. The first was her hair, cut in “guillotine style,” shaved to the nape as if to make way for the quick slice of the revolutionary blade. The other was the thin ribbon of red satin tied around her neck like a thread of luxurious blood, as if the guillotine had already done its work.

  Ofelia Salamanca said something in a low voice to her husband, and he laughed. “Patience, sweetheart, we’ll make love after we stamp out the revolution.”

  “Well, then, get on with trying your viceroys so we can get back to Chile as soon as possible.”

  “It’s very hard to hold a trial when the entire country wants to kill them. The time is not ripe for justice.”

  “So, commit an injustice. It wouldn’t be the first in your career. And let’s get out of here.”

  “We’re comfortable here, and you’ve just given birth. Do you really want to travel with a two-month-old infant?”

  “We could bring the nurse.”

  “She’s black.”

  “But she’s got milk. It’s like traveling with a cow. Besides, this building frightens me. I hate living in the same place where you work. You sentence too many people to prison and death.”

  “I just do my duty.”

  “And I don’t like weak men. I only have two complaints, Leocadio. Your past weighs too heavily on you. And in Santiago at least the court and our residence weren’t under the same roof.”

  “Perhaps a gift would cheer you up, darling.”

  “Anything but flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”

  “What would you have me do?” said her husband impatiently. “They brought me here from Chile because I’d be impartial and free of local influences.”

  “For God’s sake, I know that tune only too well. Justice for friends. The law for enemies. You’re right. There is a difference. And I’m getting bored.”

  “Well, what can I get you, if you don’t want flowers?”

  “Put twenty-five lighted candles around my son’s cradle, one for each year of his mother’s life. Perhaps that way we can scare the ghosts away.”

  “As long as you live?”

  She said yes. “You really take the long view of things. The older I get, the more afraid I’ll be.”

  “Poor child. And when you die?”

  “The candles will all go out at once, Leocadio, and my son will be a man. Look at him.”

  Baltasar inscribed these conversations on his soul. But on the third and final visit the child’s parents were not there, although the twenty-five candles were around the cradle. They had replaced the black nurse who had handed Baltasar the black baby in the patio.

  Bustos, nearsighted and panting, parted the curtains and walked into the bedroom. He moved quickly: he put the black child next to the white one in the cradle. He contemplated them both for a few seconds. Thanks to him, they were fraternal twins in fortune. But only for a moment. He took the white baby and wrapped him in the rags of the poor child; then he swaddled the black one in the gown of high lineage. With the white child in his arms, he returned to the balcony, blind, tripping, just as the child—which one?—began to wail. But the cries were drowned out by the pealing of the bells and the thunder of the guns at midnight, between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of May 1810.

  When Baltasar’s feet touched the ground, he shook his full head of honey-colored curls—his best feature, along with his passionately sweet eyes and Roman nose. Unfortunately, the image he projected was that of an overweight, myopic man. How would that splendid woman ever fall in love with him? He, in any case, adored her already, despite what he was doing or, in some obscure sense, because of what he was doing: kidnapping her son, his most fearsome rival, but giving himself over to the passion that claimed him; he sought no explanations, convinced that the passion we don’t seize by the tail and follow all the way will never again show us its face, and instead will leave an eternal void in our soul.

  Branches scratched him. The child’s smock was covered with dust and dead leaves. The black hands reappeared, this time trembling, at the service entrance, and Baltasar Bustos followed them, turned over his burden to them, and said simply: “Here’s the other baby. Let him live his own fate.”

  [3]

  Baltasar retraced the secret route he’d taken to mete out what he thought was a most severe form of justice, an act others might consider criminal. He wanted to avoid leaving by the service door this time because he was afraid to know where the black woman had taken Ofelia Salam
anca’s son. As the black wet nurse had said, he was once again complicating his life. He went back into the library, where he fell asleep, not knowing that throughout the night the debate in the Municipal Council had aligned the high-ranking creole merchants and Spanish administrators against the lawyers, doctors, military men, and philosophers like himself. Even if he hadn’t been chosen to represent the general will in the assembly, he had done something better: he’d put revolutionary ideas into practice. He did in real life what had been proclaimed (or declaimed) so often at the tables of the Café de Malcos, which was our meeting place, the scene of the most agitated political and philosophical arguments in early-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires.

  It was there the three of us—Baltasar Bustos, Xavier Dorrego, and I, Manuel Varela—savored ideas along with pastries and hot chocolate. We knew we were citizens of a city whose wealth as a port was based on the smuggling of blacks, hides, and iron; the blacks and the hides would, as they used to say, “get lost” en route and reappear on the docks, in the courtyards, mills, and markets; the iron came from France, because we have no industry; there aren’t even mines, as there are in Mexico and Peru. All we have is fraud—leather, wool, salted meat, and tallow abound, but they can be marketed only according to quotas set in Madrid, so even exports turn into contraband in Buenos Aires. But no one talks about great fortunes here; it’s important to complain and pass ourselves off as the poor relations of America, so we don’t reveal the fraudulent basis of our wealth. The Crown prohibits universities in active ports where ideas circulate rapidly, and this absence of an educational system virtually invites us to cheat. So the three of us are self-taught; we all share the same political dream whose name is happiness or progress or popular sovereignty, or laws in accord with human nature.

  We argue a lot, either in the heat of events or because of our individual positions. Around us, at the café’s marble tables, the main subject is the number of political options open to us after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. There are two parties: one proclaims its loyalty to the Spanish monarchy; the other insists there no longer is a monarchy. The latter talks about de facto independence while hiding behind the “mask of Ferdinand”; that is, past loyalty to Ferdinand VII, who is held under arrest by Bonaparte. Those loyal to the Crown support Carlota, Ferdinand’s sister and the daughter of Charles IV, who has taken refuge in Brazil with her husband, John VI of Portugal. She could govern us while her brother is Napoleon’s captive.

  Bustos, Varela, Dorrego—the three of us are above these political subtleties and dynastic conspiracies. We talk about the ideas that live the long life of the stoa, not the ephemeral struggles of the polis. Dorrego follows Voltaire; he believes in reason but thinks it should be exercised only by an enlightened minority capable of leading the masses to happiness. Bustos follows Rousseau: he believes in a passion that would lead us to recover natural truth and bind the laws of nature and the revolution together like a sheaf of wheat. They are two faces of the eighteenth century. There is one more: mine, the printer Manuel Varela’s. I follow Diderot’s smiling mask, the conviction that everything changes constantly and offers us at each moment of existence a repertory from which to choose. The quotient of freedom in this possibility to choose is equal to the quotient of necessity. Compromise is imperative. I smile tenderly as I listen to my dogmatic, impassioned friends. I will be the narrator of these events. Baltasar will need me; there is in him a candid gentleness, a vulnerable passion that requires the hand of a friend. Dorrego, however, is as insistent and dogmatic as his master Voltaire, and nothing inspires more scorn in him than the news that in Mexico and Chile there are priests who share our ideas, start discussion groups, publish revolutionary newspapers. He’s adopted Voltaire’s anticlerical motto: Ecrasez l’infâme!

  Which is to say that the Café de Malcos was our university, and in it circulated, now openly instead of in secret, La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Spirit of the Laws, and Candide. There all these books were read and meticulously discussed by the young men who were now opposing the Spanish administrators and the Argentine conservatives.

  “In the City Hall they talk about the general will of the people!”

  “You should have seen the faces on the Spaniards!”

  “One even said you’d never hear nonsense like this in a Spanish assembly!”

  Baltasar Bustos declared, in opposition to his friends, that the general ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu were all well and good, but it was up to each individual to put them into practice in his personal and civic life. It is not enough, he exclaimed, to denounce the general injustice of social relations or even to change the government if personal relationships aren’t also changed. Let us begin by revolutionizing our behavior, Bustos suggested; but at the same time we should change the government, suggested Dorrego and Varela.

  “Why are laws valid only in one country and not in all countries?”

  “You’re right. They must be changed. Human law is universal.”

  “That’s what Argentina should do—we should universalize the laws of civilization. We must assume the risks of the human race.”

  We laughed at him a little, affectionately. Everyone knew that Baltasar Bustos had read all the books of the Enlightenment; we called him the Quixote of Reason, but we didn’t know what to fear most: his eloquent confusion of philosophies or his foolhardy, quixotic decision to test the validity of his readings in reality.

  “Now, Baltasar, I hope you’re not going to…”

  “Baltasar, act politically, with us…”

  “With you, I’ll never find out if the law can really encompass all classes and not just one. The three of us are sons of ranchers, merchants, viceregal functionaries. We risk confusing our freedom with that of everyone else, without being certain that’s the way things really are.”

  “The government has to be changed!”

  “The new government will change the laws!”

  “We’ll see to it that your ideas become reality!”

  “All revolutions begin in the individual conscience. Everything else derives from that.”

  “So, what are you suggesting, Baltasar?”

  While he was putting his plan into action that night in the bedrooms of the aristocracy, Dorrego and I, Varela, were proclaiming a junta headed by Cornelio Saavedra, hero in the defeat of the British invasion of 1807, a born military leader, but in fact a conservative man. According to Bustos, Saavedra wanted freedom for the Creoles but not for the blacks, the poor, the downtrodden. The other leader of the junta was Bustos’s personal hero, Juan José Castelli, a man of ideas and an activist as well, who diligently sought to make law and reality coincide. Biologically speaking, neither was young any longer: Saavedra was fifty and Castelli forty-six. The young man of the revolution was Mariano Moreno, beloved by all, indomitable, radical, who at the age of thirty had made the greatest economic demands possible for the nascent Argentine revolution: free trade was necessary for the well-being of the people in the Río de la Plata. The young, ardent, fragile Mariano Moreno inspired love in everyone; we had heard strong and serious men say, “I am enthralled by Mariano Moreno.” His portrait appeared everywhere, always retouched to eliminate the smallpox scars on his face. But Bustos shared the doubts his father, a landowner on the Pampa, had about Moreno: he was afraid the commercial interests of the port of Buenos Aires that the young economist defended in the name of the nation’s well-being would sacrifice the well-being of the interior.

  “Who’s going to buy products from La Rioja if he can get the same things cheaper from London? Even a poncho, my boy, even a pair of boots: the English (they’re crawling out of the woodwork!) can make them cheaper,” said Baltasar’s father, José Antonio.

  Baltasar shook his mane of honey-colored curls and paid no attention to economic or political arguments: it was not, he declared during our nights at the Café de Malcos, the price of ponchos or commercial competition between Spain and England that was the revoluti
on’s main problem, but equality and justice. Why aren’t there laws valid for all nations and all classes? Why are there laws that take from the people who work and give to people who are idle?

  “That”—his eyeglasses steamed over—“is the problem of the revolution.”

  But now the revolutionary junta presided over by Saavedra, Castelli, Moreno, and Belgrano gave all power to the military and the patriots in the professions. The Spanish functionaries were removed from office; the viceroy and the circuit judges were expelled to—where else?—the Canary Islands. History was moving with incomparable speed, but Baltasar Bustos slept with his head resting on a desk in the library, isolated from the decisive tumult in the streets, satisfied that he’d done his duty.

  What he’d dreamed was now a reality. A black child condemned to violence, hunger, and discrimination would sleep from now on in the soft bed of the nobility. Another child, white, destined for idleness and elegance, had lost all his privileges in a flash and would now be brought up amid the violence, hunger, and discrimination suffered by the blacks, whom the Creoles called “the damned race.”

  “Equality is valid for all classes,” the young hero declared to us, his friends in the Café de Malcos. “Without equality, there is no freedom: not for trade and not for the individual.” Surrounded by the sanctioned volumes approved with the nihil obstat, which gave off a peculiar aroma of incense and which became part of his cauchemar, Baltasar Bustos, using his arms as a pillow, tried to fall into the sleep of reason. The nightmare of reason reverberated like the bells and cannon shots of the morning of May 25 in Buenos Aires. And if this minor hero of equality could justify, in the name of justice, what he had done, passion, soul, the other side of his Enlightenment conviction told him: “Baltasar Bustos, you have mortally wounded the woman you think you love. You have committed an injustice against the most intimate nature of that woman. Ofelia Salamanca is a mother, and you, a vile kidnapper.”