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  He wanted to see her a different way, prettier, tenderer, better. He wanted to be generous. She would not allow it:

  “Decide: are you loyal to your family or to your revolution?”

  She ceased to be the swan he wanted to find; she became once again the ugly duckling she would always be, thus giving her father the opportunity yet again to be generous and evenhanded.

  “Your sister means that there may be options less brutal than this one we are living through. Try to understand her.”

  [3]

  Baltasar walked out into the open country to think what those options might be and how he might undo what had already occurred. He accepted the fact that history, the conglomeration of ideas, facts, and desires which he fought for or against, came to be only in the company of others, in something shared with others. It irritated him that he so often felt that the we, the others, were the excess, the superfluous. But then his reading of Jean-Jacques would come to his rescue (the same way the romances of chivalry served as models for Don Quixote, said his friends, Dorrego and I, Varela, laughing), to tell him that feeling uneasy in society, or seeing society as an excretion, an excess, was not a sin but a virtue. It showed that society was in a bad way.

  Here on the pampa, he looked into the distance, toward Mendoza and the mountains: the great range seemed South America’s sleeping beast, a lion-panther with a vast white back and black belly, lying in wait for its ferocious chance. He accepted the fact that, though he was born here, he was returning not to stay but to rest; from this spot he would move toward those mountains, where, perhaps, history could be made so that nature and society might once again be united.

  I will be free in society only when I no longer need society because I myself have transformed it.

  Unfortunately, he was tied to his society. He was not its master; he was mastered by it. He had thrown himself into the Argentine revolution and carried out a daring, highly personal act of justice, as vital for him as writing a manifesto was for Mariano Moreno or dethroning a viceroy for Cornelio de Saavedra. Baltasar Bustos had traded the destinies of two children. But he wasn’t fooling himself. He had only substituted one injustice for another. His most radical act, followed by his most private crisis of conscience, spoke to him thus. So, after having dinner with his father, served by his sister, he invoked the imperfect loneliness of the Argentine countryside, itself a prologue to the mountains and their pure solitude. He imagined the Andes an echo chamber for his soul, liberated and reconciled with the natural order.

  Then things began to happen.

  The first was the vision of Ofelia Salamanca pursuing him. The woman desired interposed herself between him and nature, occupying all physical space. She was an enchanting chimera. She always sat with her back to him, but in his vision tonight she was no longer seated but standing, a white flame, total, shimmering, bending over little by little, spreading her legs slowly to reveal, from the rear, the most irresistible vision of her sex, womankind’s genital catholicism, which is adored, imagined, and penetrated from all angles. The mountains were impenetrable: the vision of Ofelia Salamanca, naked and offering herself from the rear, wasn’t. It invited, invited … And then the woman whirled around and gave him, not her dreamed-of sex, but her feared face: she was a Gorgon, accusing him with eyes as white as marble, transforming him into the stone of injustice, hating him …

  When Baltasar Bustos turned away from that vision floating between his eyes and the mountains, he felt for the first time a warning from his own soul: Ofelia Salamanca knows everything. She hates you and has sworn vengeance.

  Besides, he found himself staring into eyes as wild as those of his would-be lover. There were other Medusas in the world: these gauchos who had gathered around him in the darkness, when all he wanted was to be alone with nature and the image of Ofelia. Their presence confused and bewildered him and set him up not against the mountains or the night or his desire for a woman but against other men. What were they doing? They offered him a light, but he wasn’t smoking. He wished he were offering them the flame of a match like the one Xavier Dorrego elegantly carried inside a watch during their sessions at the Café de Malcos. But his hallucinated imagination only took from the sky a candle like the twenty-five around the cradle of Ofelia Salamanca’s kidnapped child. It was doubtless because of this series of hallucinations that Baltasar Bustos offered the gauchos an imaginary light, taken from the night and protected from the mild mountain wind by the cupped hands of the master’s son, as if a flame were really burning there.

  The gauchos did not laugh.

  “Don’t make fun of us, young master.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m just a citizen.”

  Now they did laugh, and as they laughed, Baltasar smelled in their collective breath a ravenous stench, like that of young stray dogs. There were bits of food in those bushy black or copper-colored beards that began at the neck and climbed almost to the eyebrows—an extension of the hair covering ears and cheeks, leaving open only the mouths, which were like wounds of a paradoxical abundance. Red and as bloodied as the meat they ate, they revealed the hardness of an uncertain country where the people eat everything they have, never just what they want. Today there’s more than enough, but tomorrow we may have nothing.

  He felt a profound compassion for his homeland. But one of the gauchos kept him from extending that compassion to these men. The young gaucho, who knows with what intention, took him by the hand Baltasar had used to shield the imaginary light. The young citizen tried to pull himself out of his daydream, plant his feet on the rough earth and the roughness of the customs of this world. What was he surprised at? It was all familiar to him. He belonged to this land of dust as much as he did to the land of ideas that was Father Julián Ríos’s or the land of smoke of the gatherings at the Café de Malcos. He raised his eyes and found neither the mountains nor the Medusa, neither nature nor that forbidden sex. What he found was a mirror. The young gaucho holding him by the hand looked like Baltasar. A filthy, bearded, hungry Baltasar, even though sated today with the flesh of a dead steer. His round face, distant gaze, his hair with its curls burnished by the same elements that frightened his sister, Sabina.

  Baltasar stared at that atrocious twin and had the presence of mind to return the squeeze, take the gaucho’s wrist, wrench back the man’s sleeve, and reveal the cruel wounds on his forearm. Baltasar’s country education, rejected and savage, came back to him, and he felt disgust at having allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his detested origins—especially because it was rural wisdom that would save the civilized presence.

  The young gaucho, so like Baltasar, emitted a suffocated grunt, wrenched back his arm, and covered it with his sleeve. First the others looked at the young gaucho with scorn, then with pity; and they bestowed the same sentiments on Baltasar Bustos, but in reverse. First pity, then scorn. He knew what he was doing. He had showed the other gauchos that this one, who dared touch him, was, if not a coward, at least an incompetent who let himself be cut easily in fights on the ranch or at the general store. Did his companions already know that, keeping what they knew to themselves, insulted because an outsider, which José Antonio Bustos’s son was by now, had come back to tell them: I know that this man has no talent for knife fighting? He’s a fool of a gaucho, the boss’s son had just said to the other gauchos. He doesn’t know how to protect himself. Didn’t you blockheads know that? What kind of joke is this?

  José Antonio Bustos appeared at the door of the house, wrapped in his yellow poncho. Who can know how much a gaucho knows. Who can know if they really were comrades. They were all tramps. Perhaps they’d just met a few hours earlier; a few hours later, they’d separate, scattered in the immensity of the pampa. Baltasar Bustos had united them in support of the young gaucho whose ineptness he’d just shown, whom he’d just humiliated, because now the man’s secret did not belong just to the gauchos. Perhaps it would end up being sung by a bard, maligning the stupid young man with the round face and the c
oppery curls. Could he also be a bit blind without knowing it? In the country there are no optometrists. They couldn’t resemble each other so much, Baltasar and the nameless gaucho: a pure, dissembled wound.

  The erect presence of the old man in the yellow poncho prevented any sequel to what had happened. The gauchos drifted away muttering and grumbling. They’d meet another day. Baltasar looked at his father and was amazed that the mere presence of the old man could dominate at a distance, dispersing these country toughs, even if they went reluctantly. Could what they said in Buenos Aires be true? The ranchers from the interior are as ignorant as their gauchos. Inferior people, second-class creoles. Can’t compare with the urbane city merchants. He looked at his father from a distance. José Antonio Bustos was not like that. And it was not just that Baltasar was his son and loved him as he was. José Antonio Bustos was not like that. But his authority, demonstrated just then, reminding the gauchos that he was always watching, that he was the father, that he was the only authority, could that be more than a symbol of power in a land that ignored the laws of the distant cities, a land that let itself be governed by a patriarchal figure? He looked at his approaching father as someone he’d never understood before. A patriarch stronger than the laws of today and tomorrow. Baltasar didn’t know if all the liberal constitutions in the world could be stronger than a simple patriarchal presence.

  “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.