The Campaign

1. The Río de la Plata

[1]

On the night of May 24, 1810, my friend Baltasar Bustos entered the bedroom of the Marquise de Cabra, the wife of the President of the Superior Court for the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and kidnapped her newborn child. In its place, he put a black baby, the child of a prostitute who had just been publicly flogged.

The anecdote is part of the story of three friends — Xavier Dorrego, Baltasar Bustos, and me, Manuel Varela — and a city, Buenos Aires, where the three of us were struggling to get an education, a city of smugglers too embarrassed to show off their wealth. Even though there are now about forty thousand of us porteños, as we inhabitants of the city call ourselves, Buenos Aires is drab, its buildings crouched low, its churches austere. The city wears a façade of false modesty and disgusting dissimulation. The rich subsidize the convents so the convents will hide their smuggled goods. But this also works to the advantage of those of us who love ideas and books: since crates containing chalices and ecclesiastical garments are not opened at customs, friendly priests use them to send us forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot … Dorrego, from a family of rich businessmen, buys the books; I work in the printing shop of the orphanage, where I secretly reprint them; and Baltasar Bustos, who is from the country, where his father has a big estate, turns the books into action. He wants to be a lawyer under a regime that despises lawyers, that accuses them of stirring up endless lawsuits, hatred, and rancor. What they’re really afraid of is that we’ll educate creole lawyers who will speak for the people and bring about independence. That’s Baltasar’s real problem: he’s got to study without a university in Buenos Aires and rely (like his two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela) on smuggled books and private libraries. The authorities keep an eye on us. The last viceroy was right when he said that the spread of “seduction” had to be stopped in Buenos Aires; this vice, he exclaimed, seemed to be rampant everywhere.

Seduction! What is it, where does it come from, where will it end? Ideas are what seduce us, and when all this is over, I will always remember the young Baltasar Bustos drinking a toast in the Café de Malcos, bubbling with optimism, seduced and now seducing us with the vision of a political idyll, the social contract renewed on the banks of Buenos Aires’s muddy, swampy river. Our friend’s fiery spirit made everyone stop working, even the boys pouring river water into clay jugs to make it drinkable and the cooks holding half-butchered chickens, capons, and turkeys. Baltasar Bustos drinks to the happiness of the citizens of Argentina, governed by human laws and not by the divine plan incarnate in the king, and even the wagons laden with freshly cut barley and hay destined for the stables stop to listen. He proclaims that man is born free but is everywhere in chains, and his voice grips this city of creoles, Spaniards, monks, nuns, convicts, slaves, Indians, blacks, and soldiers in their orderly ranks … Seduced by a miserly Citizen of Geneva who abandoned his bastards at the door of a church!

Does Baltasar seduce? Or is he seduced by his audience, real or imagined, in the streets of a city that has barely left the suffocation of summer as it is enveloped by the fogs that blow in from June to September? May is the ideal month to talk, to make oneself heard, to seduce and be seduced in Buenos Aires. We are seduced by the idea of being young, of being Argentine porteños with cosmopolitan ideas and books. But this isn’t all that seduces us; we are also seduced by a new idea of faith in the nation, its geography, its history. The three of us are seduced by the fact that we aren’t Spaniards who get rich on smuggling and run back to Spain; we are seduced by not being like the rich, who hoard grain to push up the price of bread.

I really don’t know if we seduce one another. I am thin and dark, with a big upper lip I cover with a black mustache, whose bristles are so wiry they seem aggressive even to me, as if they were attacking my face pitilessly. I defend myself from this hairy assault by shaving my cheeks three times a day, using the mirror to contemplate the inflamed fury in my almost light (they really aren’t) eyes set in all that blackness. I try to compensate for my savage appearance with calm gestures and an almost ecclesiastical composure. Xavier Dorrego, by comparison, is ugly, a redhead, his hair cropped close to his skull, almost shaved, which makes him look like something he isn’t: a manhunter, a usurer, the kind of man who keeps strict accounts. The beauty of his skin, which is translucent and opaline, like an egg illuminated from within by an eternal flame, makes up for the rest.

And Baltasar …

The clocks in the plazas ring out on these May days, and the three of us confess how fascinated we are by clocks. We admire them, collect them, and feel thus that we own time, or at least the mystery of time, which is to imagine it running backward or speeding us to our meeting with the future, until we reject that idea and define all time as the present: the past that we not only remember but that we imagine, as much as we imagine the future, so that both will have meaning. Where? Only here, today, we tell each other, wordlessly, when we admire the jewels Dorrego is collecting thanks to his father’s money: a clock in the shape of a carriage, covered by a glass dome; a ring clock; a snuff-box clock … I have my own special treasure, which I inherited from my father, who for some reason never sold it. A Calvary watch: the Cross presides over the entire works, and marks, as a memento mori, the hours of the passion and death of Christ.

“Citizens,” exclaims Dorrego when I go into raptures over my religious clock. “Remember that now we are citizens.” And that seduced us and bound us together as well: the name of our group is the Citizens.

And Baltasar?

He was educated on his father’s estate by one of those Jesuit tutors who, though they were expelled by the king, managed to return in secular clothes to carry out their obsessive mission among us: to teach us that American flora and fauna exist, that there are American mountains and rivers, and, above all, that we have a history that isn’t Spanish but Argentine, Chilean, Mexican …

Baltasar’s father, Don José Antonio Bustos, sided with the Crown against the English invaders and now again against Bonaparte in Spain. Which is how he acquired the influence to get Baltasar, the law student, a job at the Superior Court during the impeachment trials of the discredited viceroys Sobremonte and Liniers. Sobremonte was accused of dereliction of duty and neglect in the defense of the port during the English invasions of 1806 and 1807, when he fled from the British attack, absconded with public funds, and abandoned the defense of Buenos Aires to creole militiamen. Those soldiers eventually repelled the English and gained prestige which grew like a tidal wave that would reach its peak during the revolutionary days of May. The irony of these two trials is that Liniers led the militiamen who defeated the English. But when events rapidly moved toward independence, Liniers lost courage, hesitated, fell out with everyone (except, it was said, his French mistress, Madame Pernichon), and went from being a hero of the defense against the British to being a nullity during the fight for independence.

As he listened to the charges against the former hero, my friend Baltasar, the young legal clerk, imagined himself raised to a glorious position thanks to the new spirit and the speed of events. He wrote all that down in a document he sent to me later, at a certain point in our long and unpredictable friendship. “Since Liniers is being tried in absentia, I have to imagine him sitting here, his wig half powdered, forceful one day, feeble the next. Apparently, all we need is one demurrer to strip the hero of his honors and sentence him. You know, Varela, I imagine a fleeting fire passing through Liniers’s eyes. I see it and wonder if we three friends from the Café de Malcos are up to events. I live these days intensely, but I’m afraid we are fated to enjoy an uncertain glory which our hasty spirits will rapidly exhaust. I write our three names. His, Xavier Dorrego. Yours, Manuel Varela. And mine, Baltasar Bustos. I can trace back our names. But I cannot give them a final fate. And thinking of Liniers’s fortunes, a hero one day, a traitor the next, I want to avoid such a deviation of destiny. Yet I also ask myself a troubling question. Can we expect anything at all except knowing that we have a destiny yet are unable to master it? Wouldn’t this be the saddest destiny imaginable?”

I received these notes from my friend and imagined him carrying out his tasks as clerk in the trials of the viceroys with praiseworthy patience.

What I didn’t know is that Baltasar was meticulously rehearsing quite a sequence of actions.

A dry, old, cynical man, the Marquis de Cabra, presided over the sessions in the courtroom. He never even glanced at the clerk Baltasar, but Baltasar took careful note of the president of the court, seeking to read his thoughts, observing his every movement. Above all, as we shall see, Baltasar envied him.

Baltasar continued writing and pretending that he was sorting papers after the day’s session was finished. When asked to leave the hall, he apologized, acting very busy, and left by a side door, giving the impression by his gestures that he knew his way around the building better than anyone else. The main doors were locked; he would have to walk down the corridors and exit by a door at the back.

He walked along one of the halls to the noisy rhythm of his gold-buckled, high-heeled shoes, hugging the documents against his cambric shirt and scattering between the tails of his frock coat the crumbs that had accumulated in the lap of his nankeen trousers, the remains of a roll he’d eaten surreptitiously. Instead of leaving the building, he went into the now empty library, hid in the stacks, and waited patiently for the lights to go out. His father had told him a secret: behind the thick volumes containing the works of the church fathers, there was a hidden passage through which the presidents of the Superior Court passed unseen and unhindered into their private chambers.

* * *

He waited another half hour, then poked his finger hard against volume 4 of St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica. Slowly and silently the stack slid open — the hinges, Baltasar noted, as always were perfectly oiled. The passageway led to a patio shaded by peach trees. But a gray, dusty vine allowed an agile man to climb from the patio to the balcony. It was almost as if the ivy invited the young body to come up and celebrate the arrival of May and the departure of the humid, unbearable heat of summer in the Río de la Plata, heat that turns clothing into a clammy, undesirable second skin.

Now, however, a cool breeze with a touch of ice blew off the Plata, as if to quell the ardent spirits of the revolutionary city, itself rejuvenated by the speed at which events were taking place. On the thirteenth of May, an English (always the English!) ship had brought the news: the French occupied Seville; Napoleon held not only political control over Spain but economic control as well. Spain was no more. King Ferdinand VII was no more. What would Spain’s New World colonies do? The Argentine viceroyalty had only one strength, the militias forged to repulse the English invasions and replace viceregal ineptitude: Riverside Men, Plainsmen, Patricians — such were the names of the regiments that on the twentieth of May withdrew their support for the viceroy, Hidalgo de Cisneros, saying: “You represent nothing now.” And then they rallied around Cornelio de Saavedra, commander in chief of the Patricians, giving him the power to rule. On May 21, Saavedra’s ally, a fiery Jacobin orator, Juan José Castelli, appeared in the Plaza Mayor with six hundred hooded, well-armed men the people dubbed “the infernal legion,” and forced the viceroy to hold an open meeting at the City Hall, where Baltasar Bustos deliriously applauded Castelli’s speech …

* * *

“His style is dazzling, his demeanor intrepid, his spirit daring,” observed our friend that night in the Café de Malcos. “And his message is crystal-clear. There is no more sovereign power in Spain. Thus, sovereignty reverts to the people. To us. Castelli is the creole incarnation of Rousseau!”

“No”—I dared to break in on his enthusiasm. “That idea was invented two hundred years ago by Francisco Suárez, a Jesuit theologian. Look behind every new idea and you’ll find an old one, which might even turn out to be Catholic and Spanish — painful as that would be to us.”

I smiled as I said it; I didn’t want to wound my friend’s enlightened sensibility. But that night nothing could diminish his enthusiasm, which was more philosophical than political.

“Saavedra has demanded total power for the Municipal Council. Castelli demands general elections. What are we going to do?”

“What is it you want?” interjected our third friend, Xavier Dorrego.

“Equality,” said Baltasar.

“Without liberty?” Dorrego argued, as was his custom.

“Yes, because we might end up proclaiming liberty without having eliminated the problem of inequality. And if that happens, the revolution will fail. So: equality above all!”

Baltasar Bustos was repeating his own sentence when he stopped, just for an instant, in the center of the patio adjacent to the residential wing of the Palace of the Superior Court, in front of the vine that reached to the balcony outside the rooms of the president and his wife. The door of the service wing opened, and a pair of black hands proffered a living bundle, asleep but breathing and warm.

“I don’t understand why you have to make things so complicated, young master,” said the voice of the black woman. “It would have been so easy to come in through the service entrance and take…” The woman sobbed, and Baltasar, the child in his arms, headed for the vine. What he was going to do wasn’t easy for a robust, overweight, not to mention nearsighted man. The ivy may have been an invitation to a young body to come up and celebrate the coolness of May, but the body of this friend of mine, Baltasar, at the age of twenty-four was the product of a sedentary life, febrile reading, a willful isolation from action, a proud disdain for the country life which had been his as a child and which continued to be his father’s and sister’s out on the pampa. Bustos, in short, had cultivated a physique which to him was at once cosmopolitan, civilized, intellectual, and a rebellion: the antithesis of the barbarous customs of the country, the colony, the Church, and Spain. He admitted ironically that his was not the proper physique for what he was doing: climbing a vine right after midnight with a bundle in his arms. In other words, he saw himself as urban and urbane but hardly romantic.

Barely had he set foot on the first tangle in the vine than he realized that if no one had noticed his earlier explorations of the terrain it was because no one could even imagine something as daring as what he was attempting; no one would examine the vine to see if it had been climbed. Ivy grew all on its own and did not need to be tended or watched over. Lawns had to be cared for, peach trees had to be pruned. But no one inspected the ivy, abandoned to its parched dustiness, to discover exactly what Baltasar Bustos did on the night of May 24, 1810: he climbed up to the balcony of the wife of the President of the Superior Court of Buenos Aires with a black baby in his arms, entered her bedroom, took the white, newly born child of the president and his wife, and in its place put the black infant, also newly arrived in this world, though his realm would be one of kitchens, beatings, and curses.

[2]

The announcement that Ofelia Salamanca, wife of the President of the Superior Court, the Marquis de Cabra, had given birth was forgotten during the disturbances that May in Buenos Aires. When the English ship arrived with the news that Seville had fallen, three centuries of custom, of fidelity to the Spanish Crown, of subservience to commercial plans made in that very Seville and its Indies Trade Office, floated in midair for one astonished instant and then crashed to the ground: if there was no monarchy in Spain, could there be independence in America?

The child was born without grief or glory but to the manifest anguish of Ofelia Salamanca, who reproached her husband for having taken her from the captaincy-general of Chile, where she had her comforts, her mestizo servants, and her Indian midwives, to hand her to these Buenos Aires black servants. And this on top of the voyage from Santiago to the Río de la Plata, which took almost two months!

“And all to try two viceroys already condemned for incompetence and for failing to maintain order,” Ofelia Salamanca rebuked her husband.

Leocadio Cabra had acquiesced to his beautiful, independent Chilean wife’s wish to retain her maiden name. She explained why:

“First, my dear, because we have to start defending the right of women to their own name; that is, their own person. Second, because if I use your name, people will end up calling me la Cabrona, and I don’t want to be known as a son- or even a daughter-of-a-bitch.”

“Chilean to the bone!” exclaimed her exasperated husband. “Don’t delude yourself: Salamanca is your father’s name, not yours, and it was your grandfather’s. There’s no way you can escape having a man’s name, you goose.”

“There’s never been any Ofelia Salamanca but me,” the beautiful Chilean creole proudly pointed out. Baltasar Bustos was seeing her naked for the first time through the vaporous curtains of the bedroom, curtains that were merely the first veil over a universe obscured by successive layers of muslin blindness: the permanent drapes over the canopied bed, as well as the summer mosquito netting the servants had neglected to take away; the translucent cloth over the dressing table where Ofelia Salamanca was sitting, naked, in front of the mirror, offering to the nearsighted but dazzled eyes of Baltasar Bustos a body shaped like an hourglass, a white guitar, her back turned to him but stunning with the round perfection of her firm buttocks, twin fruits below an even firmer and slimmer waist, as if there could coexist in a single human being not that many but such unique perfections: a slender waist, round buttocks soft yet hard, but not as much as the waist, and not one pore that did not exude perfume but also wholeness, perfect harmony, with no flab, buttocks that were carnal twins of the moon. And to think she had given birth just seven weeks before!

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 Salamanca’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 revolution’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.”

He woke up with a shock because his nightmare took place just as a flood of May light poured in through the building’s tall latticed windows. He woke up asking himself why in his dream he had used the French word cauchemar instead of nightmare. Because it sounded better in French? The glare behind him kept him from answering. He looked at the letters in the title of the book he’d fallen asleep over as if they were flies: from a distance of centuries, St. John Chrysostom condemned unconsummated love because it sinfully exalted desire.

[4]

He thought he’d slept for a long time — the length of a nightmare — but it hadn’t even been ten minutes. He had carried out the most audacious act of his life without calculating the full effect of his actions, without anticipating, above all, that the vision of Ofelia Salamanca would captivate him with all the force of the inevitable. He dreamed about her — the sweet part of his dream — the way Tantalus dreamed of the fruit and water that continually eluded his grasp. A tantalizing woman: he desired her, desired not to possess her, so he could go on desiring her, desired not to have done what he had, desired — dreaming all the while — never having to stand before her, saying: “Here is your son, madame. I ask you to love me despite what I’ve done.”

He didn’t have time, because he looked, sensibly, at his watch, which resembled him (blind crystal, round body, gilt glitter), and realized that it was only twelve-thirty at night. The glow at his back was, nevertheless, that of daylight. But that was the heat not of May but of February. And the books began to crackle suspiciously. The threatened leaves in the sacred books were reverting, becoming, tout court, dead leaves. The creak of the bindings and the shelves was not only a hint of what was to come but also the result of the leaves that really were burning outside: Baltasar Bustos ran, opened the library door, scurried to the hall that led to the patio, and saw his fiery curls reflected in the courtyard in flames. The ivy blazed, the muslin blazed, the bedroom was ablaze. The servants gathered in the patio shrieked. Baltasar Bustos instinctively, cruelly looked for the black wet nurse among them. There she was, just for an instant, lulling a swaddled baby, which he could not see, in her arms. But then she was gone. Baltasar Bustos couldn’t decide whether to follow her or to stay where he was, which is what he did, mesmerized by the sight of the fire vomiting out of the balcony of the presiding judge’s quarters.

Twenty-five candles blaze, one for each year of the mother’s life. The flammable drapes blaze. The cradle blazes. The child is consumed by the flames. Disfigured, burned beyond recognition, the black child seems to be just a child killed in a fire. Even white children turn black when they are burned to death.

[5]

“What will happen here,” declared the Marquis de Cabra, the judge appointed by the king to preside over the Superior Court convened to try the two viceroys, Sobremonte and Liniers, “is that instead of enduring the distant authority of Madrid, Argentina will endure the nearby tyranny of the port of Buenos Aires. You,” he went on in his after-dinner chat to the illustrious assembly of creole and Spanish merchants from the port, “will have to decide whether to open the gates of commerce or to close them. The Crown had to make that decision about its colonies. If you close those gates, you will protect the producers of wine, sugar, and textiles in the far-off provinces. But you will ruin yourselves here in Buenos Aires. If you open the gates, you will become richer, but the interior will suffer because it will not be able to compete with the English. The interior will want to secede from Buenos Aires, but you need economic as well as political power, so there will be civil war. In the end you will be governed by the military.”

“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.