The Campaign

2. The Pampa

[1]

“If you find me dead with a candle in my hand, it means I’ve finally admitted you were right. If you find my hands crossed over my chest, entwined in a scapulary, it means I held fast to my ideas and died condemning yours. Try to win me over.”

In Baltasar’s mind, these words were sufficient to characterize his father, José Antonio Bustos. He remembered him standing in the midst of corrals, stables, coachhouses, warehouses, workshops, flour mills, and gauchos bidding him farewell. Or solitary in a nightfall that was in itself an imitation of death, sitting on a chair made of hides, four stakes, and a cow’s skull. Greeting him.

And this time, would he be there to say, How are you, son, welcome home, you’re always welcome here, Baltasar?

Or would he say, instead, Goodbye, Baltasar, I’ve gone, I’m not here anymore, don’t forget me, son?

It was twenty-four leagues from Buenos Aires to the pampa, and twenty more to Pergamino, where he would leave the stagecoach. News and travelers alike arrived late. From Pergamino to his father’s land, on the other side of One-Eyed Deer, he’d have a good way to go by mule. But now Baltasar Bustos watched the passing of the carts laden with blankets, ostrich plumes, salt, bridles, and fabric on the deeply rutted road that would take him back to his father.

Would he find him dead or alive? Both forebodings took hold of his mind and heart little by little as he made his way to the paternal home. An abrupt, somber, mysterious, abysmal world seemed to close in around him, suggesting either alternative — life, death — news of which a slow or nonexistent mail service (word of mouth often outstripped paper) did not bring very often.

Lulled by the rocking of the stagecoach, Baltasar Bustos tried to find a meaning in the city he was leaving, and saw only an apparent contradiction: Buenos Aires was twice born. It had been founded first by Pedro de Mendoza with the ill-gotten gains he’d derived from the sack of Rome, with his fifteen hundred soldiers lusting for gold, with the women — some disguised as men — who had stowed away with the troops, all of them good at making campfires and keeping watch. But, ultimately, all of them, men and women, were defeated by the nightly Indian raids on their log fort, by the absence of gold and the presence of hunger: they ate the boots they were wearing, and some say they even ate the corpses of the dead. Finally the conquistador without conquest, Mendoza, died of fever, and they tossed his body into the Río de la Plata. The only silver anyone ever saw in that misnamed river was Mendoza’s rings as they sank to the bottom.

It wasn’t El Dorado. The city was abandoned, burned, leveled. Forty years later, Pedro de Garay founded it a second time. Seriously, Castilian-style, like a chessboard, using the surveyor’s cross: it faced the Atlantic and the mud-colored river into which bled the exhausted veins of Potosí, the mountain of silver. It wasn’t El Dorado. This was a city dreamed up for gold and won for commerce. A city besieged by the silence of the vast ocean on one side and the silence of this interior ocean, equally vast, on the other. Baltasar Bustos was crossing that interior sea at top speed, lulled by the long, sturdy strides of the horses, dreaming of himself in the middle of this portrait of the horizon which is the pampa, having the sensation of not moving at all. The horizon was ever present. It was eternal. It was also unreachable.

And here he was, in the middle of the pampa, with his baggage in his hands, suddenly surrounded by a herd of wild horses, tens of thousands of them, which populated the plains like a mob spreading over the entire planet, the natural descendants of the horses abandoned by the first, vanquished conquistadors. They bred haphazardly, like the blacks in the port, savagely growing and multiplying, wild, tall, untamed, and he was captive in the midst of these beasts, unable to move, smelling their glittering sweat, the pungent foam on their dewlaps, the acrid urine of thirty or forty thousand masterless horses overrunning the face of the earth, preventing him from moving a single inch, forcing him to abandon his suitcases crammed with volumes of Rousseau, as he implored his patron saint, the Citizen of Geneva, for aid: “I find myself on the earth as if on a strange planet…”

He woke with a start; the coach horses were galloping at half speed, imperturbable. The travelers fleeing Buenos Aires were quite perturbed. They were Spanish merchants going out to save what they could in Córdoba, Rosario, and Santa Fé or to take refuge in those bastions against the revolutionary tidal wave they could see coming, stirred up by the oratorical storms of Moreno, Castelli, and Belgrano. The wealthy Spaniards could not imagine a revolution in the traditionalist interior; all evils came over the sea to Buenos Aires — they were ideas. But all goods also entered there — that was commerce. This contradiction drove the conservative merchants mad, as did the contradiction disquieting Baltasar’s soul as he left the city, his friends, the revolution, all to return to nature and in nature find “the solitude and meditation” that would enable him to be himself, without obstacles, truly be what nature wanted him to be.

They were racing across the treeless pampa, but whenever they chanced on a solitary ombu, the only thing the passengers could think (and often said) was: “We’ll all end up hanging from its branches!”

Baltasar, on the other hand, felt a boundless freedom on the vast plain. His soul and his nature seemed harmonious reflections of each other, mutually attracted like lovers. As Baltasar emerged from the bad dream of the herd of wild horses, that was the sensation he sought and appreciated with greater intensity. He regretted the presence in the coach of the complaining, chattering Spaniards, who kept him from consummating his marriage with the landscape. He let the rumble of the wheels over the stones and ruts of the road to Córdoba deafen him so that the desired communion could take place despite all obstacles, in the unassailable silence of his soul.

What would these men he didn’t know who were traveling with him say if he told them what he was thinking?

But instead of irritating them with a sonorous “Welcome to the pampa, you Spanish bastards!” Baltasar began to feel sorry for himself. Having identified himself with that face of infinity which is the great Argentine plain, he would have wanted to achieve his ideal in a flash: the identification of Baltasar Bustos’s soul with immortal nature. The reader of Rousseau knew that the soul, reunited with itself after discarding its useless baggage, can finally enjoy the universe and possess the beauty that enters the spirit through the five senses.

Now alone on a mule, on the road to his father’s wretched estate, he finally had the opportunity to envision what the noisy presence of the contemptible Spanish bastards had blocked out during the trip from Buenos Aires. Yet the hubbub around him and the dream of the wild herd had allowed him a communion more certain, though thwarted, than had this solitude on muleback in which the pampa, its creeks, its peach trees, its leagues and leagues of hard lime soil inhabited only by maddened ostriches seemed to him so many bleak, opposing accidents. The pampa was no longer the mirror of God on earth. Now, instead of the much desired communion, all he saw on the horizon were problems, contradictions, untenable options, all crowding his overly receptive spirit.

He left Buenos Aires carrying little baggage. A wicker suitcase, an umbrella, and three or four of his favorite books: La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Confessions, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The kidnapped child was not in his luggage. The wet nurse had disappeared along with her sister, the flogged mother of the black baby. He’d searched for her with his two friends, but their attempts had all failed. The two women had carried out their promise to Baltasar Bustos: the child of the Marquise de Cabra would live the life of the son of a sick, publicly flogged black prostitute. Justice, for Baltasar, would thus be carried out. In the suffering of the white child’s mother? The banks of the road darkened when he tried to justify his action (to himself, not to win sophistic arguments with his polemical friends: alone on a mule, with an umbrella, a wicker suitcase, and books by the Citizen of Geneva — with no one to speak to except nature, with which he sought to become one, freely and joyously). The goal of justice is not universal happiness. The person punished suffers so that the person rewarded may rejoice. That’s the norm. But it was a penal norm, worthy of the celebrated Italian Beccaria, not of the totally free Genevan, Rousseau. And the norm was even less sure in its application to the sufferer, in this case a woman for whom Baltasar Bustos — alone, twenty-four years of age, riding a mule — felt a passion that daily grew more unbridled.

Didn’t the woman Ofelia Salamanca deserve a more immediate devotion and selflessness than that called for by the ideas of Baltasar Bustos (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) on Nature and Justice? The shadows of the banks pierced his soul when he replied to himself that this was true. He would never find nature or justice except through a real person, a beloved person moreover, especially if, as it became clearer with every moment in his memory and his desire, that person was Ofelia Salamanca. Yet he couldn’t see himself tearing the child away from the nurse and her sister to return it to the Marquise de Cabra, especially since the black baby was dead. There was nothing to give them in return for the plea: It was all a mistake. Things will once more be as they were before. Forgive me.

He didn’t find them. But they would have spit his words in his face: nothing can ever be as it was. We slaves are more slaves than we were yesterday, poorer, more humiliated. The masters are more arrogant, crueler, more insensitive. They deserve this pain you’ve inflicted. The child stays with us. It doesn’t matter that the other child is dead. Blessed be his fate: he’s in heaven. Now this son of an expensive whore will live the life of the son of a cheap whore.

What could the wretched Baltasar say to that?

But I’m in love with Ofelia Salamanca.

He heard the laughter of the black women between two screeches of a screamer bird. He heard the laughter of his two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela, seeping out of his wicker suitcase. Even the mule stopped and brayed, laughing at him with its huge teeth as white as new corn. The Devil, goes the gaucho saying, dwells in cornfields.

[2]

This time, José Antonio Bustos was waiting for him at the entrance to the estate. Baltasar was grateful and relieved. What did it matter, in the end, if his father waited for him dead with or without a candle, with or without a rosary. He had bade him goodbye sitting on that throne of death the gauchos prefer for conversation, drinking maté, and warding off grief. But his father was waiting for him like this, on foot, amid workshops, warehouses, horses, gauchos, chickens … As long as he had come to stay.

“How did you know I was coming?” the traveler would have wanted to ask his father.

José Antonio Bustos’s eyes, somber and hollow, set in flesh which was once pink but which ranch work and the pampa sun had turned to leather, precluded such a question. It would have been redundant. José Antonio Bustos just knew. The son felt ridiculous sitting on the mule, out of joint beside the proud elegance of the father. The young man was the object of mocking glances from the tough, sinewy gauchos with hungry faces who watched him as he arrived.

He dismounted and led the mule to the grand gate that separated the road and the outside from the inner world, the property of José Antonio Bustos and his children. The house was constructed like a fort: it was surrounded by a moat to thwart Indian attack and had a watchtower at its center. The watchtower was the only high place, and it looked out over a vast, indifferent, dangerous world. The gallery was at once the warm and cool apex of the austere compound. There Baltasar had spent the long afternoons of his childhood (when he had a childhood), but now José Antonio preferred to take his strolls at the back, around the well, near the windows of the house. From there he could contemplate a small clover lawn. The old man was remembering. Keeping watch. Baltasar walked toward his father.

José Antonio took one step beyond his property and his legs failed him. His knees buckled, and he clutched a post as the gauchos watched him without any change of expression. Baltasar ran to his father to help him. The mule shied and headed for the road. A gaucho halted it, laughing to himself. They were all laughing at him, Baltasar realized, and at his father, the man they said they loved and respected. Baltasar had fled from this savagery when he was seventeen, to study in Buenos Aires, to become a man of his times, to save himself from this gaucho savagery — it seemed appropriate that the word gaucho resembled gaucherie, the French for error and clumsiness.

“See? Death starts in your legs,” José Antonio said with a smile as leathery as his skin, as he leaned his weight on his son.

“You come with me, Papa,” said Baltasar. Then he ordered the gauchos: “Bring my bags to the house.”

He liked to give them orders and feel their humiliation. His father rebuked him mildly for it. Charity begins at home. If you want to be just, begin with those who serve you. But Baltasar saw the gauchos as a Mongolian horde. Each one was Genghis Khan, with his own personal history of violence, superstition, and stupidity, the kind Voltaire had condemned for all time. Baltasar simply could not conceive of a future with gauchos in it. They spoiled his idyllic vision of nature. They had no compunctions whatsoever about slaughtering a steer, lassoing a horse, or murdering a fellow human being. They were the agents of an unproductive holocaust which left the countryside littered with corpses. And they offended Baltasar’s sensibility even more because they were nomads who would never take root anywhere, mobile negations of the sedentary life he identified with civilization.

What about nature, then? For Baltasar, nature, provisionally, consisted of his episodic visits home. A salutary return to his origins. A spur to move forward toward a happy future, free, prosperous, and without superstition. Only thus would nature be saved from those who exploited her: Spanish bastards or brutish gauchos.

That was the subject of the prodigal son’s conversation at the dinner table on his father’s estate. The two men alone, so different physically, come together to have supper by candlelight, which flashed in Baltasar’s dim eyes with the memory of the twenty-five candles around the cradle of Ofelia Salamanca’s newborn. A memory; also a foreboding. That of the single candle in the dead hand of his father, who would be saying to him from eternity: “Son, you were right.”

At table in the paternal house, it was not that way. No one was right. Baltasar was young, impulsive, convinced, and dazzled by the ideas he’d so recently encountered. The father was like his physical posture: sitting on a cow’s skull but animated and vital in his opinions; standing at the entrance to his estate, at the frontier between what was his and what belonged to everyone, standing straight but already vanquished by death, which came to him through the earth and which started in his legs.

“I hope that’s how it works and that it takes its time in reaching my heart and mind. I still want to see what’s going to happen. I want to see if you’re right, son.”

Baltasar imagined his father as a man on the threshold between life and death and also between reason and unreason, between independence and colonialism, between revolution and counterrevolution. He asked himself sometimes whether he would have preferred a brotherly father, a correligionary, to share his ideas and enthusiasms. He simply did not know the answer. Finally, he accepted this father of his, transformed by the sun, stripped over time of his European complexion to become what he was: the patriarch of a savage band of gauchos, and the impresario of a budding industry. A threatened industry. Perhaps this style of coexistence with opposites gave José Antonio Bustos his austere, just tone and his Solomonlike sympathy. He was a benevolent judge in a land and time that cried out for tolerance. And if Baltasar was demanding justice in the cities and was capable of implementing it as he did on the night of May 24 in Buenos Aires, what could he say to his father, landowner and judge in the barbarous territories of the interior? If the son had to be implacable in the city, the father, perhaps, had to be flexible in the country. It was the difference between the porcelain skin of the Marquis de Cabra and his wife and the leathery, tanned hide of José Antonio Bustos.

Plump, myopic, and with bronze-colored curls, Baltasar Bustos, looking at his reflection in the gilt-framed pier glass that lugubriously extended the dining room, saw himself as a hybrid between the two, formless and, barely outside the city, in need of the help of others to survive. He needed the mule because the post coach did not stop here. He needed the gauchos if only to order them to bring his bags to the house. He needed the servants because he did not know how to make his own bed, sew on a button, or press a coat; he needed the cook because he did not even know how to fry an egg. He needed his father to attack his ideas, not as an enemy, but as an affectionate, Socratic interlocutor. But, frankly, he did not know if he needed his sister, Sabina, whose presence would be ghostly if it weren’t so obstinately real.

Sabina resembled her father. Except that what in him was austere nobility was pained severity in her. Sour, Baltasar wanted to say when he hated her (which was quite often, especially when they were together); vinegary, premature old maid, born an old maid, a frustrated nun … But his sense of justice made him rectify that opinion (especially when he was far from her, in Buenos Aires) and tell himself that, trapped as she was out in the country, a woman alone in a houseful of men, condemned to live among savage gauchos, her character could not be other than what it was.

She would not sit at table with the men. No one stopped her, only she herself. And she insisted on serving them. Thus, she was both present and absent at the meals of the father and the son. Sometimes Baltasar paid no attention to her; other times, Sabina’s presence determined the tenor of his arguments. He knew what she was going to say, standing there with the platter of roast meat trembling in her hands, holding the serving tongs with a coarse napkin decorated in a red checkerboard pattern:

“We’ve got no protection. You and your ideas have left us at the mercy of the elements. We used to have a refuge, being a colony. We used to have protection — the Crown. We used to have redemption — the Church. You and your ideas have left us at the mercy of the four winds. Just take a good look, brother. What harm your side is doing to ours!”

These things, said between servings, did not help Baltasar Bustos’s digestion. In vain he searched in his sister’s severity for his father’s equanimity. Yet Sabina and Baltasar were both the product of the drive for equilibrium that characterized José Antonio Bustos.

Attentive to everything that went on, blessed with an extraordinary sixth sense for finding things out, some by induction, others by deduction, José Antonio Bustos could make use of even the most insignificant piece of information that came his way from reading a newspaper (rarely), from letters (occasionally), or through remarks, gossip, or anecdotes (for the most part), at times even from gaucho songs, to tie loose ends, remember or come to some conclusion — to anticipate and take action. The basis of his knowledge was the wandering network of gauchos he protected as they roamed the pampa. They told him more than anyone. When he was young, as soon as he discovered the idea of the age, he applied it to the economic reality of country life in several ways. On his own property, he established a small textile and metal industry; at the same time, he expanded his holdings in case of a boom in cattle ranching. He prepared himself to endure or enjoy the opening or closing of trade with the outside world. He looked to Buenos Aires as a market for his goods, but he feared the foreign competition that would make them too expensive.

He remained open to commerce with Upper Peru, the source of the metals necessary for the workshop where he made spurs, carts, axles, and keys. And he married a young Basque woman, a child of the so-called second conquest that in or around 1770 multiplied the number of Spanish merchants in the port of Buenos Aires, merchants spurred on by Bourbon reforms in favor of free trade. The arrival on the pampa of the young, golden-haired, somewhat plump, and decidedly myopic María Teresa Echegaray — Mayté—did not transform the social life of the distant province. It was the province that absorbed her. A homebody but vain, Mistress Mayté refused to use spectacles. She had to look for everything — an egg, a ball of yarn, a cat, a needle, her slippers — by bending down to peer at close range, and that posture eventually became natural to her.

Bent over and blind, José Antonio Bustos’s wife stopped talking with her fellow humans, all of whom stood up straight in the distance, and instead sustained long monologues with ants on her practical days, and on dream days she chatted with the spiders that approached, swinging before her eyes, teasing her, making her laugh with their silvery ups and downs, forcing her to imagine, invent, wishing sometimes she were entwined in those viscous, moist threads until she was caught in the center of a net as seamless as the fabric in her husband’s shops that went to make ponchos, shirts, and other gaucho clothing.

The ants, on the other hand, brought out her diligent, practical side, and that was when she and Sabina would become suspicious and check over the supplies stored in the cupboards and calculate the level of thievery among the maids, associating everything with the collapse of authority, the degeneration of customs, the lack of respect for the Church, and, finally, the dissolution of colonial authority. Napoleon in Spain, the English in Buenos Aires, and the terrible consequences: King Ferdinand dethroned, the English defeated not by the viceroy but by the local Argentine militia (gauchos, no doubt). All this news finished off the ant in Mistress Mayté, and not even the spiders in her were able to compensate for so much horror. Actually, the spiders betrayed her, and in her dreams she saw a world without Church or king, a world adrift. She would curse herself for having abandoned Spain, but then she would remember that Spain was in the hands of Napoleon and his drunken brother “Joe Bottle,” and her heart would sink.

It sank permanently one hot afternoon in the summer of 1808, and Sabina inherited all her mother’s certitudes and agonies. Except that the daughter, stronger, standing upright, alien to ants and spiders, turned them into dogma and battles.

“She feels unprotected,” José Antonio reiterated, “but she doesn’t know how to express her ideas in complex terms. She talks about Spain, the Church, and the king as if they were the roof of the house. Her fear goes deeper. We are leaving a traditional empire, one that is absolutist and Catholic, for a rationalist, scientific, liberal, and perhaps Protestant freedom. You should try to understand our fears. She’s right. It is like being left to the mercy of the elements.”

Baltasar regretted that, instead of accepting tradition, he had brought revolution to the house (unprotected, from now on without a roof). He would have wanted, though, to ask his father: Can one exist without the other? Can there be tradition without revolution? Doesn’t tradition die if it isn’t renewed and shaken? He wasn’t able to formulate something he barely intuited, because Sabina was already there, precipitating everything, presenting him with the final option: Are you loyal to your family or loyal to your revolution? His sister, a dividing force, offered herself as the representative of “what will keep us together.” Baltasar was left in the position of the one who divides. Their father did not seem displeased with the role that fell to him: that of arbiter between brother and sister.

“You taught me all I know.”

He managed to say that much to his father; the intention was affectionate, but mixed with the affection was some fine malice. José Antonio Bustos trembled as he listened. His son had had a Jesuit education. Julián Ríos, an aged member of the Society who had discarded his habit and returned to Argentina, where he’d been born, was the young Baltasar’s mentor. The Jesuits, expelled from Spain and her colonies in 1767, left an immense void behind them. People protested the expulsion, demonstrated in the streets, wept … And the Jesuits of the Americas had their revenge on Spain. They sailed to the coast of Italy and asked the Pope for asylum. The pontiff, fearful of offending the Bourbons, at first forbade them to disembark. The holy brothers remained on board for weeks, at the mercy of waves and tides, seasick, unable to sleep, unable to believe what was happening to them.

In the end, the Pope accepted some good advice. Kings might well scorn the intelligence of the Jesuits, but the Pope could take advantage of it. Often it happens the other way around; now let Rome open her arms to what Madrid and Lisbon have rejected. It was said that the ex-Jesuit Julián Ríos returned to Argentina without his priestly vestments the better to fool the colonial authorities. Like all New World Jesuits, he taught national history, national geography, the flora and fauna (and the form and fame) of the nascent nations, from New Spain to Chile, from the Río de la Plata to New Granada.

And, besides giving his pupils a national awareness, Don Julián, the defrocked, also gave them books banned by the Church and the authorities: The Spirit of the Laws, The Social Contract, Diderot’s The Nun, Voltaire’s Candide … That was Baltasar’s education, but not his sister’s. She was left to the distracted instruction of her mother and the affectionate virtue of her father. But she was stubborn; she envied her brother; she read more than would be expected of one imprisoned at home. In contrast to her brother, she read breviaries, Catholic pamphlets, sermons … On her own she created a counterculture the better to challenge her younger brother.

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 coppery 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.

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

He ordered everyone to move on to the nearest caves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[5]

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

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

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

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

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

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.

That night it was Baltasar who stopped before entering the dining room, to listen to the voices of his father and sister.

“Well, now that the gauchos are going to be locked in like me, why don’t you give me to one of them…”

“Calm down.”

“All locked in. Now we’ll be alike.”

“You can go to Buenos Aires or Mendoza whenever you want. We have friends and relatives.”

“You must think to yourself with a laugh, Well, she’s got her knives for fun; the poor thing amuses herself killing dogs with a dagger whose handle is made from a bull’s sex…”

“I’m going to slap you, Sabina.”

“You’d be better off kicking your wife’s grave. The poor woman shriveled and shriveled until she disappeared. Do you think I’m like her and that I’m going to imagine that being small is my only greatness? Nothing can console me, Papa, nothing, nothing. Except a pesky idea I always have in the back of my mind, which is that my mother must have been capable of passion, just once, a single infidelity, having another child … That consoles me when I see a savage gaucho with my mother’s face and his forearm covered with knife scars.”

“Calm down, daughter. You’re raving.”

“Doesn’t anything break your serenity? Do you ever say what you clearly mean — that you don’t agree, that I’m wrong, that I’m crazy, that in my mind I’m a slut?”

“My behavior is my tradition, daughter. Calm down. You seem bewitched.”

“That’s it, Father. The world has bewitched me.”

[7]

“The republic promulgates another good law,” said Baltasar to Sabina as he packed his bags, taking the shirts his sister passed him. “Most of these gauchos will end up in the army for being rebels. Then they’ll demand that careers in the military be open to all. The revolution’s officer corps should come from all classes and regions. It can no longer be limited to the upper classes.”

“You’ll see that these thugs will all end up dead or in jail for desertion,” said his sister, handing him a pair of old boots. “Take them, papa says they’re a gift. They’ve brought him good luck. They’re from here. Made from mules’ rumps.”

“He’s starting to give me his worldly possessions.” Baltasar smiled with some bitterness.

Then father and son parted with an embrace, and Baltasar said it was amusing to think that, while he went to war, the gauchos, by law, had to stay on the ranch for good.

“That way I’ll never be alone,” said José Antonio Bustos.

“Wait for me, Father.” Baltasar hugged him tight and kissed his hand.

“Let’s just see.” The old man laughed dryly. “In peacetime, sons bury their fathers, but in wartime, fathers bury their sons.”

“Then let them bury you next to me, Father.”

“So, in that case, it might be you welcoming me with a candle in your hand?”

“No, because they’re not going to bury me in holy ground.”

“All right. Goodbye, Citizen Bustos. Good luck.”

Then an order from the Buenos Aires junta came for Baltasar Bustos to join the army in Upper Peru, so what had been his own decision turned into an obligation imposed on him by others.