The Campaign

3. El Dorado

[1]

In the immense confusion of the armies, only nature — so naked, so harsh — could bring serenity to their souls.

The rebels and the Spaniards had defeated each other an equal number of times. The two armies had nullified each other and could count only on their military and political rear guards — the viceroyalty of Peru for the royalists, the revolutionary republic of Buenos Aires for the patriots.

“What advantage is there for us in this situation?” I asked in a letter that Baltasar Bustos received when, under orders from the Buenos Aires junta and with the rank of lieutenant, he joined the army gathering in Jujuy to prepare for the attack on Upper Peru. Baltasar wouldn’t have known what to answer. He arrived between two victories and two defeats; he hadn’t even reached the high plateau and already he was facing decisions he’d never made before. Dorrego and I had joined Alvear’s junta — Alvear, we assured him, was a strong, decisive, and attractive man — and, thinking we were doing our friend a favor, we’d put him at the head of a revolutionary regiment. Military expertise? “Don’t worry, dear Balta. You’ll have the best advice. What you already have, however, is something no one else there has: revolutionary fervor and a sense of justice. Without such virtues, the revolution would be just another war.” At that time, we did not know our orders coincided with his wishes.

It was a guerrilla war: Baltasar went on repeating this newly coined term — recently arrived from the Spain that rose up against Napoleon — as an orderly helped him put on his uniform of black boots, white trousers, short embroidered outer coat, and three-cornered hat with the tricolor cockade. The only forces the revolution had available to it to keep the road to Upper Peru open and to consolidate the revolutionary government in that region — which was inhospitable, unfair, but, because of its mines, essential to the prosperity of Buenos Aires — were the guerrillas who had spontaneously organized between Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Lake Titicaca. They would lend their support to the revolutionary force fighting the Spaniards. There was no other possibility. They interrupted the flow of supplies and food, ambushed the Spaniards, and cut lines of communication between the plateau and the pampa. Lieutenant Baltasar Bustos’s orders were: Collaborate with the guerrillas.

Our inadvertent hero had no time either to protest or to rejoice: I lack military ability, I don’t see well, I’m overweight, and my passion is justice, not war. “Why don’t you come out here and fight?” he asked in a letter to Dorrego and me, Varela. “What the hell am I — fat, blind, and enamored of my books — doing in these savage and lonely places? What are you doing in Buenos Aires? Having your clocks fixed? Well, take careful note of this: we’re in different time zones.”

In reality, there was no time. Between his relaxed life on his father’s ranch on the pampa and his tumultuous arrival at Chuquiscaca, there was more than mere spatial distance. There were other centuries and other dreams; no matter how much he denied them, they turned up in overflowing confusion on Baltasar Bustos’s route. There was no fighting. The improvised soldier of independence never had to command a battle formation, and more than once the word “Fire” froze in his mouth. There was nothing to fire on. The granite bulwarks of the mountains assumed human, enemy shapes, and the afternoon shadows could come alive in menacing ways. But barely had he ascended from the Argentine plains to the Peruvian plateau than Baltasar was thankful for the hostile, immobile solitude of that lunar landscape. It was, he told himself again and again, the only element of harmony and tranquillity in a world gone mad. The turmoil of the actors had nothing to do with the melancholy serenity of this stage. There was no one to shoot at in this phantasmagorical campaign.

Baltasar Bustos reached Upper Peru during the interregnum between Spain and independence. The Spanish forces had immediately executed patriot officers, and the patriots had shot the royalist officers. But the revenge grew: the colonial administration offered more and better candidates for the firing squad — quartermasters, wardens, judges (standing and circuit court), even lawyers, notaries, and mere scribes had been shot without a trial in the Potosí plaza. In La Paz, “unhappy and barbarous city,” explosions, pillage, libertinism, and desertion were the norm. The women opted for the most fiery party, joining the ranks of independence as a “pretext to abandon religion and modesty, and to give themselves over to pleasure with the utmost wantonness.”

“You must impose order,” Dorrego wrote him. “The army of the revolution should not sacrifice its prestige by committing or condoning crimes.” Order? Me? Baltasar Bustos burst into a bitter guffaw, as he sought a praiseworthy avenue for justice amid this chaos: the walls of Upper Peru were stained with the blood of creoles and Spaniards — white men like him, Baltasar wrote to our friend Dorrego — who were the officers and captains of the three armies — the Spanish, the guerrilla, and that of the Buenos Aires junta. The great mass of the soldiers were of mixed blood, and the Indians were the beasts of burden in all three armies. Even his myopic eyes perceived this, but he was in no position to mete out justice no matter what they’d seen.

The whites ran the war — the wars, the guerrilla wars — and killed one another off. The mestizos died in battle, and the Indians provided food, labor, and women. Everyone exploited, everyone recruited, everyone pillaged. When he reached the plateau, Baltasar Bustos repeated incessantly: Only justice can save us all, justice means order without exploitation, equality before the law. He was seeking a tribunal from which to proclaim his truth and set up the words, and also the acts, of justice against the chaos of blood spilled — and this he only reluctantly accepted — in order to allow the birth of a new world.

Arms captured from the Spanish forces entered the plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra at dawn, disturbing the coolness of the mountains. Horses released from the corrals invaded the streets of Suipacha at midnight, altering the rhythm of the planets. In the Cuzco marketplace, the guerrilla fighters of Ayopaya exchanged a confiscated crop of coca leaves for rations to be used by the guerrillas. The ranches abandoned by the rural oligarchy were occupied by the guerrillas and turned into barracks for the local warlords, petty chiefs who, from every mountain peak, canyon, and almost from every promontory on the road, seemed to proclaim their independence, their micro-republics, as Baltasar Bustos called them from his ridiculous calvary, his ascent to the roof of America.

There he was, under orders from the revolutionary, enlightened port of Buenos Aires to establish relations with a series of cruel, haughty, audacious, smilingly fraternal, egoistic warlords, who all felt they had a right to take anything — ranches, lives, women, crops, Indians, horses, stagecoaches and stagecoach routes — in the name of independence. But, as the caudillo José Vicente Camargo, who controlled the route between Argentina and Upper Peru, said to him: “Our goal is to free ourselves from the laws and the oppression of Spain, not to exchange them for the laws and the oppression of Buenos Aires.” And that is how it was in those years between 1813 and 1815. To bring Baltasar up to date, I wrote to him, “Every one of the valleys that spill their waters into the Pilcomayo River, every chain of mountains, every ravine, is a petty republic, a center of permanent insurrection.”

However, it wasn’t necessary to explain a thing. Between Tarija and Lake Titicaca, between Suipacha and the Sipe-Sipe River, Baltasar Bustos was made to feel that he was the representative of a new power as distant and despotic as Spain. The vindictive Miguel Lanza in the micro-republic of Ayopaya, the brave Juan Antonio Alvarez de Arenales on the Mizque and Vallegrande roads; the subtle and slightly mad Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas to the north of Lake Titicaca; the grand, generous patriarch Ignacio Warnes, who welcomed those who entered his impregnable refuge in the mountains; the reckless couple, Manuel Ascencio Padilla and Juana Azurday de Padilla — each declared his own independence, his own micro-republic, his own power against two equally vicious and distant powers: Spain and Buenos Aires.

All of them confiscated crops and cattle, recruited mestizos from the towns and Indians from the mountains, sacked ranches, raped women, but they also cut the Spanish Army’s communication lines, deprived the army of supplies, attacked it at night here and there, unexpectedly; incapable of defeating it in a frontal attack, they bled it with small, constant, cruel, and sudden wounds. And they opened the road, provided rest areas, food, and supplies for the liberating army, which, without the micro-republics, the local warlords, and their troops of guerrillas, would have died of hunger at the very start, lost in the hallucination of that plateau so similar to the perpetually hidden face of the moon. There were also the Spanish counterattacks. Without food or communications, without replacements, incredibly far from their Buenos Aires base, the army in which poor Baltasar Bustos commanded two hundred recruits from Argentina’s northern provinces wouldn’t have lasted a single night if it hadn’t been for the local warlords. But they rejected everything Baltasar Bustos brought to Upper Peru, as he sought, with a neophyte’s impatience, the opportunity to proclaim it.

The moment was finally supplied by Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas in the fortified plaza of Arecaja on the northern shore of Lake Titicaca. The other caudillos wouldn’t brook Baltasar’s revolutionary rhetoric; their decisions, so implacable they seemed irrefutable, were made on the spot even if they were the result of long planning. They always knew what they wanted: horses, a crop. Unless their orders were carried out immediately, the war would be lost; it was that simple. Victory was the name of their satisfied demands. Having their orders carried out immediately: the souls of the guerrilla warlords seemed to be what independence was. Baltasar, speaking with them, watching them in the wake of the whirlwind these men stirred up, could not find in them that tiny crack necessary for doubt; and, without doubt, there is no discourse for justice.

“Round up a hundred Indians to move supplies,” Manuel Ascencio Padilla would order on the road to Chuquisaca. “Shoot the whole administration of Oruro,” Miguel Lanza would dictate from his jungle throne between Cochabamba and La Paz. “Drive all the cattle off of B—’s ranch and bring them down to my place,” José Vicente Camargo, on the road to Argentina, would say, imposing his will. “Open the mountain trails to all wounded guerrillas who come to Santa Cruz,” Warnes the magnanimous would order. “I want a woman,” said Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas, clasping his hands and squeezing his lively eyes shut, “but I can’t; it would violate my vow of chastity…”

Baltasar saw him arrive on a mule, like a vision out of Cervantes on a stage that resembled the central plateau of Spain: dry, high, somber, and wrinkled. Spain was reiterated in its colonies: the Andalusian Caribbean, the Mexican Castile, Extremadura so like Cuzco. Ildefonso de las Muñecas also looked like his Spanish and American land, but if he was Castilian in physique, he was definitely Andalusian in gesture and eyes. A revolutionary priest: Baltasar smiled with shock, not his own but the shock he thought our Jacobin friend Xavier Dorrego would feel. Bustos’s glance did not escape Father de las Muñecas.

“Do I stand out too much?” was the first thing he said. “I don’t want to cause a scandal. But even my name attracts attention — after all, muñecas are dolls and I certainly like good-looking women. So why wouldn’t my actions do as much? Do our names determine our character or is it our acts that give meaning to our names? Let Plato figure it out.” And the guerrilla priest laughed.

“We should all be guided by the law,” Baltasar Bustos said, jumping up and almost spilling the maté gourd he’d traveled with from the pampa. Who’d hidden it among the white shirts in his baggage: his father, José Antonio; his sister, Sabina; a friendly but facetious gaucho? “Your vow is an example to all, Father.”

“And you, what do you want that the law forbids?” He opened one eye and looked at Baltasar with a mix of sarcasm and curiosity.

“I want justice. You know that, Father.”

“It’s not the same thing. Your desire and the law are not in opposition.”

“But my desire and my reality are.”

Now only curiosity glinted in the revolutionary priest’s slit eyes. “If I give you an opportunity for justice, will you give me an opportunity for love, young man?”

Blushing, but without a second thought, Baltasar said yes, and Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas broke into uncontrollable laughter. “It just occurred to me that it ought to be the other way around, youngster. I should be imparting justice, and you should be learning about ‘pleasure-giving females,’ as Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, a priest as hot-blooded as I am, said a few hundred years ago.”

He tucked up his cassock, as he always did when he was making decisions that involved God and man equally, and he told the astonished lieutenant that he, Father de las Muñecas, did not know what the young citizen of Buenos Aires understood by justice but that he, the priest, did believe in the abundance of blessings the Scriptures associated with human or divine justice. He let his cassock drop to its normal length and then draped his chest with cartridge belts and scapularies.

The next day, Father Ildefonso summoned Baltasar to the main square of Ayopaya, where he found a mass of Indians waiting for him. Turning to Baltasar, the priest said, “On horseback, so they believe you. Get up on that horse, fool, if you want them to believe what you say.”

Baltasar’s astonished face pleaded for a reason.

“The horse is authority, numbskull. The horse defeated them. In this land, there is no word without a horse.”

“I want to bring them justice, not more defeats,” protested Baltasar, decked out for the occasion in his parade coat, with wide lapels and gold braid, epaulets, and three-cornered hat with cockades.

“There is no justice without authority,” said the priest in a tone of finality.

Baltasar took a deep breath and looked up, as if seeking inspiration in the oppressive totality of the plateau: the mountains a single colorless color, brown, like the pure earth before the stains of snow, rain, the boots of soldiers, the picks of miners, even before grass. Earth without adornment, naked, as if expecting that on Judgment Day it would be reborn from the reserve of the Aymará mountains. Then he lowered his eyes, and there they were, the men, women, and children he’d only seen cooking, carrying loads, tending the fields, breast-feeding, pushing cartloads of weapons, their foreheads marked by the sweaty thongs of the sacks of guano, coca leaves, or silver that their shoulders carried and their heads balanced.

Baltasar Bustos had been waiting for this opportunity, and he thanked Father Ildefonso for giving it to him. A few republican officers came out of the barracks, and a few guerrillas as well. In the distance, some carriages had stopped, and men wearing high, shiny top hats poked their heads out. Some even took off the hats that protected them from the sun but that heated up their foreheads, gripped by the bands of leather. Their hats were like their heads, which now, with habitual disdain, they wiped with the sleeves of their coats as they smoothed out the velvety softness of the hats. Their foreheads seemed marked by those hats in the same way the heads of the Indians were marked by the rough straps on the sacks of manure.

He said to all of them, because for him that world at that moment was all the world there was, that the enlightened revolution was sending from the Plata — which the English invaders called the River Plate — the river of silver, a luminous river, to this land whose bowels were of real silver. The Buenos Aires junta had ordered him — he said after a pause, insinuating that the metaphor was only a preamble and the preamble merely a metaphor — to free the Indians of the plateau from servitude, something he was now doing formally. The horse, jumpy, wanted to twist around and did so, but Baltasar never turned his back on his audience; they were all around him, mute, impassive, patient. Thus, the orator felt powerful and at ease, talking about justice to an oppressed people while mounted on one of the marvels of nature, a black shining horse joined to an eloquent rider. Baltasar Bustos held up for all to see, grasping it firmly (although the stiff paper persisted in rolling up again, adopting the comfortable form in which he’d carried it, tied with a red ribbon, ever since Dorrego had it borne by messenger to Jujuy), the decree he read aloud: All abuses are abolished; Indians are freed from paying tribute; all property is to be divided; schools are to be established; and the Indian is declared equal to any other Argentine or American national.

Baltasar saw some Indians kneel, so he dismounted, touched their heads covered by Indian caps, offered his hand to each one, and told them, in a voice not even he recognized, an infinitely tender voice he was saving for the first woman he ever loved, Ofelia Salamanca, whose blond, naked, perfumed image blended uneasily with the reality of this ragged, inexpressive people, whom he raised from their prostrate position, saying to them: Never again. We are equal. Never kneel again. It’s all over. We’re all brothers. You should govern yourselves. You should be an example. You are closer to nature than we are …

Father de las Muñecas took Baltasar by the arm, saying, That’s fine, that’s enough, you’ve been heard. In that instant, Baltasar reacted with a strength he didn’t know he had, just as he hadn’t known the tenderness that had just manifested itself in him.

“That’s a lie, Father. I haven’t been heard. How many of these Indians even speak Spanish?”

“Very few, almost none, it’s true,” said the priest, without changing his expression, as he stared, not at Baltasar or the Indians, but at the coaches stopped at the edge of the plaza. “But they know the truth from the tone of voice of the speaker. No one ever spoke to them like that before.”

“Not even you, Father?”

“Yes, but only about the other world. That’s where I hope to find the justice you have just proclaimed. Not here on earth. You spoke to them about the earth. It’s never belonged to them.”

He shrugged and looked again at the coaches.

“It doesn’t belong to those people over there either. But, on the other hand, I do think these Indians own heaven.”

“Who are they?”

“Rich creoles. They live off the mita.”

“What’s that?”

De las Muñecas didn’t even smile. He decided to respect this envoy of the Buenos Aires junta, respect him even if he felt sorry for him.

“The mita is the great reality and the great curse of this land. The mita authorizes forced Indian labor in the mines. A lot of them actually run away and seek refuge on the plantations, where the owners seem like Franciscans compared to the mine overseers.”

The priest kissed his scapulary.

“No. This is a rebel cleric speaking to you. There is something better for these people. I only hope you and I can help them. On the other hand, look at the faces of those merchants and plantation owners over there. I think we’ve just lost their confidence.”

“Why did they come?”

“I alerted them: Come and hear the voice of the revolution. Don’t fool yourselves.”

“But, when all is said and done, are you my friend or my enemy?”

“I don’t want anyone deluding himself.”

“But I depend on you to put the edicts I’ve just proclaimed into practice.”

“You, my boy?”

“Not me, the Buenos Aires junta.”

“How far away that sounds. As far as the viceroy in Lima, the king in Madrid, the Laws of the Indies…”

“I’m from the interior, Father Ildefonso. I know the maxim of these lands: We obey the law, but we don’t carry it out. I recognize that here you are the law, just as Miguel Lanza is in the jungle, and Arenales in Vallegrande, and…”

The priest squeezed Baltasar’s forearm. “Enough. Here only me. A rebel cleric is speaking to you. I and my boys, who number only two hundred — but not for nothing are they called the Sacred Battalion.”

“All right. Only you, Father. Just see to it that the law is carried out here.”

Father Ildefonso burst out laughing and embraced Baltasar. “See? You’ve just entrusted me with the law, but you haven’t found me a woman. Unlike you, I keep all my promises.”

He told Baltasar that the Buenos Aires puritans, just like the conservatives in La Paz, were horrified by the disorderly conduct of the women who confused the war of independence with a campaign of prostitution. He laughed, remembering some moralistic proclamations according to which the fair sex lost all its charms when it succumbed to disorder. To him, Ildefonso de las Muñecas, the conservative puritans and the revolutionary puritans seemed equally imbecilic. God gave sex to men and women not just for procreation but also for recreation. But to be human it is important to have sex with history, sex with sense, with antecedents, with substance, did the young lieutenant understand? Sex, literally, as a Eucharist: a body, a blood, a lasting emotion, a reason; therefore, a history … And if liberating a city like Cuzco, which reeked of prisons, jails, blood, and death, is permissible, then it’s equally permissible to liberate sex, which also reeks of its own prisons …

“In other words, Lieutenant, the vow of chastity is renewable, and that’s my law. This is a rebel cleric talking to you. You, on the other hand, don’t have those limitations; instead, like a fool, you impose them on yourself. I’ve been watching you for days. You take nothing unless it’s offered. Look, my dear lieutenant from Buenos Aires, let’s make a deal. I’ll swear to you, on the heads of my two hundred boys: I’ll carry out your decrees, even if it costs us our balls. But you have to promise me to lose your virginity this very night. Don’t blush now, Lieutenant. It’s written all over your face, and it’s easily visible from a long way off. What do you say: for me, the law; for you, a woman. Or better put: for me, your law. For you, my woman. A rebel cleric guarantees it.”

“Why do you do these things?” asked our rather flustered friend.

“Because you’ve become part of my madness, without even knowing it. And that’s always pleasant.”

[2]

A man should always sleep in the same position in which he was born. If he dies before he wakes, his life will end just as it began. Everything is a circle. It has no meaning if it doesn’t end as it began. Baltasar, curled up for nine months inside his mother’s womb, with his eyes closed and his knees touching his chin. Expecting that when everything ends it will begin again. A voice, known and unknown at the same time, was saying this in his ear. He’d always listened to that voice. And he was listening to it now. It was new and it was ancient.

When he opened his eyes, he saw women sitting on the floor. They were weaving. They were dyeing wool clothing. Then he went back to sleep. Perhaps he only closed his eyes. In any case, he dreamed. In his dream, his head separated from his body and went to visit his beloved Ofelia Salamanca. Where might she be now? Returning to Chile with her husband? Mourning the death of her child? Did everyone still think the child that had died in the fire was theirs? Unrecognizable because of the flames? Recognizable despite everything? And if so, not dead but only lost? Would Ofelia weep, “Where can my child be?” And Baltasar dreams: where can my Ofelia be?

The women weave in the midst of the smoke. They patiently dye the clothes. Baltasar tries to make out their faces. His eyes fail him. Or his imagination. Then his head escapes again, soaring, hopping, making funny noises, until it strikes the back of the marquis, Ofelia Salamanca’s husband, as if the old aristocrat could not command his wife’s sleeping body and Baltasar’s head had come, despite the husband, to the marquis’s back, summoned by Ofelia’s ardent dream, Ofelia, who didn’t even know Baltasar. The lieutenant woke up, in a panic, in pain, and the women came to him, calming him, lulling him, bringing him a steaming cup.

“Broth made from young condor fights madness and frees up your dreams.”

He fell asleep disgusted by his own body. Later its fire fused in him without contaminating itself or losing its separateness. Without destroying him. Fire approached his body and joined itself to him without destroying him. The child in the cradle surrounded by twenty-five candles did not have such luck. The fire triumphed. It devoured the child. Yet this fire touched Baltasar, pierced and consumed him, but did not destroy him.

“We’re afraid of fire. They burned us with fire. We have to create a fire that doesn’t kill.”

Then he saw a girl kneading cornmeal, preparing loaves in a corner. When he woke up, Baltasar Bustos saw that his pallet was surrounded by ashes, and in the ashes he clearly saw the tracks of an animal. He tried to get up. He couldn’t. He was tied to the bed. He was tied to himself. Gray bandages held him to the bed, to himself, to his dream about ashes, and to the animal tracks. Yet he felt free. His tied-up, ash-covered body, caught in a heavy sleep, was at the same time the freest body on earth. It floated, but it was the earth’s. But the earth was the air’s. He enjoyed all the elements: the earth that pulled him down, the air that drew him up, the fire that excited without destroying him, the water that liquefied every inch of his skin without breaking it. Everything was possible. Everything coexisted. Only he and the girl making bread were alive, suspended, in the world. Barely did he unite all the elements when the world became palpable. And when he tried to envision those elements, he discovered a woman at his side who was not Ofelia Salamanca. She turned to face him. He turned his back to her. She invited him to clasp her around the waist. She mounted him quickly. Her thighs were the fire. Her buttocks the earth. Her breasts the air. Her mouth the water. She burned without flame. She made him wish that the morning would never come. The idea that daytime life, the revolution, the Buenos Aires junta, the liberation of the slaves, the power of the warlord Ildefonso de las Muñecas, the distant hatred of those men with tall velvet hats, the nearby, resigned incomprehension of a people in rags, his father’s warnings, the rancor of his sister, the astute glances of the gauchos, Buenos Aires, his friends Dorrego and me, Varela, all of it, would flee, evaporate when he touched the elements of creation in the kisses, caresses, the surrender of an Indian woman meant that the world and its frenzy were excluded, outside, behind, ahead, but not here, not now. The woman who loved him physically had the power to prolong the night.

“No one knows you and I are here together.”

“Acla cuna, Acla cuna,” people were shouting in the distance, outside, voices that could be birds calling; the cawing of crows, the screech of some bird of prey. “The chosen one, the chosen one.”

She went back to kneading the cornmeal.

When he wakened, feverish and in the heaviness of a shout, the women were no longer there. The shack was freezing cold. All the fires had gone out. But the clothes dyed purple were scattered over the dirt floor. The man who helped him stand was an old mestizo. He wore a dirty shirt, a frayed tie, blue baize trousers, and hobnail boots. His hair was short, his beard long. He led Baltasar out of the shack and its cold ashes. They were standing in a narrow mountain lane. Baltasar recognized the mountains and smelled the muddy nearness of the lake. The old man led him gently. It was difficult for Baltasar to stay upright, and he leaned on the old mestizo and on the walls made of such smooth, perfectly aligned stones they seemed the labor of titans.

He’d been here a week, but he hadn’t even noticed the most remarkable thing in the place: the architecture, the stones — perfect polygons joined together as if in a magic brotherhood. The discarded, unused stones were called “tired stones,” because they never attained the fraternal embrace of the other polygons.

But only the stones remained. There were no human beings in the streets; no Indians, no creole or Spanish officers, no top-hatted mine owners, no warlords in priestly robes. The micro-republic seemed empty.

“Is anyone left?” asked the astounded Baltasar.

The old man did not appear to hear.

“You wanted to bring these poor people to a mountain peak and show them a limitless empire. From the mountain, they saw an empire that had once been theirs. But it no longer is. They invited you to enter. You did.”

“Damn it! I’m asking you if there is anyone left in this village!” Baltasar Bustos shouted, unable to contain himself. He felt different, speaking in that tone, he who never got angry, he who, when he had to take control of the gauchos, did so with a smile. “Don’t you hear me, old man?”

“No, I don’t hear you. Neither do the people from here.”

“What I said was very clear. Slavery was over, the land will be divided, schools will be built…”

“The Indians didn’t listen to you. For them, you’re just one more arrogant porteño, the same as an arrogant Spaniard, distant, in the end indifferent and cruel. They don’t see the difference. Words don’t convince them. Not even when spoken on horseback.”

“I ordered the priest to implement my edicts.”

“Led by the warlord Ildefonso, they attacked the treasury at Oruro the moment they found out the Spaniards had abandoned the city and before the troops of the other warlord, Miguel Lanza, could arrive. These auxiliary armies exist for themselves, not to serve the Buenos Aires revolution. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it is they who have filled the void between the Crown and the republic. They are here. You merely come, promise things that are never done, and then go.”

“The priest promised to obey the laws,” said Baltasar, obsessed, bewildered.

“There will be time for laws. Eternity can’t be changed in a day. Just think, is Father Ildefonso going to eliminate taxation and the mita while his ally, the Indian leader Pumacusi, thinking that he’s helping him, is assassinating any priest who is not a follower of Ildefonso de las Muñecas? The most urgent item of business is to halt Pumacusi’s excesses. That is, ‘Friends like those make enemies superfluous.’”

The old man stopped in front of a building more luxurious than the others. It must be the town hall, Baltasar thought, trying to identify it as he emerged little by little from his long sleep. The old man — the vain old man — combed out his flowing beard, looking at his face in a windowpane.

“And you, old man, who are you?”

“My name is Simón Rodríguez.”

“What do you do?”

“I teach this and that. My students never forget my teachings, but they do forget me. Woe is me!”

“And the women?” Baltasar Bustos went on asking questions, more to free himself from the old man’s explanations, which said precious little to his fevered mind, than to increase his knowledge of a self-evident fact: Baltasar Bustos knew only one thing, and it was that in his long night, most certainly consisting of many negated days, he had ceased to be a virgin.

“They died, Lieutenant,” said Simón Rodríguez, pausing along with Baltasar in sight of the turbid mountains, the agitated lake, and the empty plaza. “It’s not possible to be an Acla cuna virgin in the service of the ancient gods and sleep with the first petty creole officer who turns up.”

“I didn’t ask…” Baltasar began idiotically, forgetting the exchange of promises with Ildefonso de las Muñecas and then only wanting to say, “I don’t remember anything.” He only wanted to alert himself to something he’d secretly felt when he’d pronounced the liberating edicts at Lake Titicaca, decrees written in the radical rhetoric and the spirit of Castelli but spoken to a people who perhaps had their own roads to liberty, not necessarily — Baltasar wrote in a letter sent both to Dorrego and to me — those we have piously devised:

When, surrounded by the physical desolation of the plateau and looking into the unflinching faces of the Indians, I read our proclamations, I felt a terrible temptation, which perhaps was the only one the Devil himself could never resist. I felt the temptation to exercise power with impunity over the weak. I wanted to impose my laws, my customs, my fears, and my temptations on them, even though I knew that they do not have, for the time being, any means to answer me. I wanted to see myself at that moment, astride my horse, with my three-cornered hat in one hand and the proclamation in the other, transformed into a statue. That is, dead. And something worse, my friends. For a moment I felt mortally proud of my superiority, and at the same time in love with the inferiority of others. I knew of no other way to relieve my pride than through an immense tenderness and a huge shame as I dismounted to touch the heads of those who respected me merely for my tone of voice even though they understood not a word of what I’d read them.

But Simón Rodríguez went on talking. “She was supposed to grow old a virgin. It was her vow, and she broke it for you.”

“Why?” Baltasar asked again furiously — without recognizing himself — before he wrote us the letter and before he found something of an answer in the very fact of asking why.

“You entered this place without knowing it. You spoke to these people from a mountaintop. Now you must descend to the poor land of the Indians. It is land that has been subjugated by the laws of poverty and slavery. But it is also a land liberated by magic and dreams…”

“Where are you taking me?” asked Baltasar, whose intelligence informed him that here in this abandoned village on the shore of the lake, he had no alternative but to follow.

Simón Rodríguez, with a strength that was supernatural in a man his age, first clasped Baltasar’s arms and then his shoulders, turning him to face the windowpane. Finally, he grasped the nape of the young Argentine military man’s neck, forcing him to see himself in the window where just a few minutes earlier the old man had combed his beard.

Baltasar, examining himself, saw a different man. His mane of copper-colored curls had grown. The fat had gone from his face. His nose grew sharper by the moment. His mouth became firmer. His eyes, behind his glasses, revealed a rage and a desire where before they had only seemed good-natured. His beard and mustache had grown. With this face he could look on the world in a different way. He didn’t say it. He merely asked himself again. He was no longer a virgin — a boy, as that strange priest de las Muñecas insisted on calling him. For whom had he been a virgin? Not for Ofelia Salamanca, whom he’d only seen and loved from a distance, three years ago. Did his tranquil passion to save himself for a woman have any other objective? Was there another, one who wasn’t Ofelia or the Indian virgin who had violated her vows to give herself to him? What are we doing here on this earth? Jean-Jacques had asked himself. “I was brought to life, and I’m dying without having lived.”

[3]

He would remember a trap door and some wooden steps in the cellar of the abandoned town hall. He would remember that at the bottom of the steps there was a sheer-rock precipice that fell away sharply to the bed of a river deep down. He would remember a trail, as wide as a mule’s back, cut into the cheek of the mountain. He would remember the hand of the old mestizo in hobnail boots leading him along that vertiginous, narrow path. He would remember barely glimpsed vistas through the crags: snowcapped volcanoes and dead salt pits. He would remember a red lake veined with flamingo eggs. He would remember the swift flight of the huallata, the white turkey of the Andes marked with its black wound, scouring the lake for food. He would remember a forest of starlit clouds against the wall of the mountain, bearing the moisture of the forest and the river but refusing to yield it to the desert on the other side of the Andes. He would remember the noise of bells behind the forest of clouds and then the sight of terrified flocks of llamas blocking the path, spitting and chattering in their venomous tongue, accompanied by the huallata’s distant lament. Then a hailstorm scattered the llamas and the birds, but when Baltasar turned to make sure of what he’d seen, he found himself enclosed within a dark cave. He felt around, seeking the company of Simón Rodríguez; the old mestizo reached a hand out to him and said he should try to get used to what light there was. But barely did Baltasar move his hand when he felt six, eight, a dozen hands touching his own, taking it with joy, feeling it, running fingers over it, and all he felt were the hot hands of those creatures who were invisible to him but who screeched like those white turkeys, excited by the presence of their mates and by their eager search for food in the lake.

“They say you’re cold, that your hands and feet give off no heat…”

Baltasar did not say to old Simón that the hands and feet of Indians always burned, something he found out that night, those nights, the time spent with the Indian woman, virgin like him, whose flame, unburning, was the natural protection of those born at an altitude of six thousand feet, who have more veins in their fingers and toes than other human beings. He would have wanted to end his journey right there — how long it had taken them to get wherever they were, he could not tell — and curl up like an animal to sleep with those warmblooded people, protected forever by the heat of their extremities, the heat needed to sleep. But as he grew more accustomed to the darkness, he began to sense another zone of heat in the bodies around him: their eyes.

Hot hands, hot feet, and luminous eyes. But they had their eyes closed. They all moved as if the band of light that bound their closed eyelids was a substitute for vision, until a dozen or more of those simultaneously veiled and transparent eyes combined their rays in one single beam that enveloped and preceded Baltasar and Simón Rodríguez, guided them to the edge of a new abyss, this one within the cavern, as if the cave (was it really that?) replicated the external world, the world of the sun, in its internal darkness.

The bodies that were leading them stopped, surrounding the two outsiders. The light in their eyes blinded Baltasar and Simón at first; but as soon as the bodies turned toward the abyss, those eyes cast a stronger and stronger, whiter and whiter light on a vast but strangely near panorama that was very deep and at the same time one-dimensional. It was an immense globe, the color of silver but crystal, like a mirror. In the center of that space — globe, abyss, mirror? — there was a light. But that light was neither separate from the other lights in the cavern’s amphitheater nor the simple sum or reflection of the lights in the eyes of the cave’s inhabitants. Were they really underground? Hadn’t they gone up, despite the descent through the trap door in the cellar of the town hall? Was he above or below?

This was light, pure and simple, with no fanfare, no cheering. It was more than the origin of light, although it resembled nothing so much as that — Baltasar and Simón, chagrined, stood still and touched hands, just to touch something familiar, flesh, warmth. It was light before light showed itself. It was the idea of light.

How did they discover that? How did Simón communicate it to Baltasar and Baltasar to the old mestizo without either of them opening his mouth? The two stared at the closed but bright eyes of their guides. Messages transmitted by light passed through those closed lids. There the two men could read and understand. But there was nothing written on the eyes, which were, in effect, blindfolded by light; there was only light. And the light said: I am the idea of light before light was ever seen.

Then all the eyes in the Inca cavern turned toward the outsiders and flooded the abyss with light. Peering over the edge, the old man and the young man saw an entire city slowly but clearly coming into view. A city made entirely of light. The buildings were the product of light, from the doors and windows to the high roofs of the towers; the clocks were made of light. The streets were grand, luminous paths; along the avenues sped rapid carriages of light: they seemed powered by light and heading toward the light; and on every corner, at every door, on every roof, the light produced incomprehensible messages, traced letters, signs, and figures, names quickly composed out of a dizzying number of points of light, in a frame that was like the very symbol of light. And within that frame, the rapid flashing of the luminous points spelled out a single name, repeating it in successive flashes until it was etched on the retinas of the two outsiders as if carved in stone. And that name was OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA.

Baltasar held back a gesture of terror and tenderness, as if he expected another revelation: the letters faded, but within the same frame there appeared the face of the beloved, not a painting, not a reproduction, not a symbolic rendering, but she herself, her flesh, her eyes, the movement of her lips and neck; and as the figure shrank so as to be seen in its entirety, they saw that she was naked. She offered herself to Baltasar, to the spectator, to the world, complete in every forbidden detail, each soft and caressable surface, every feared, harsh, spidery secretion … Ofelia Salamanca was there; she moved, was seen, and now spoke. And what she said was true, because Baltasar had heard her say it:

“Don’t send me flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”

She repeated these words several times; then her voice began to fade, along with her image. And Baltasar Bustos felt the vertigo of one who has seen what belongs to the realm of death, which he had just discovered slumbering in the middle of life.

“You have just seen,” said Simón Rodríguez, when the lights in the basin went out, “what our Spanish ancestors searched for with such frenzy in the New World. I saved the vision of El Dorado for you. El Dorado, the city of gold of the Indian world.”

But for Baltasar Bustos, listening to the old mestizo, there was no cry of rejection, but something worse, more insidious: a nausea like that of the loss of innocence, an affirmation as subtle as poison, something totally irrational, magic, which with a few seductive, ethereal images destroyed all the patient, rational structures of civilized man. Never in his life — Baltasar wrote us — until that moment had a repulsion and an affirmation, as diametrically opposed as they were complementary, united in him with such force. He was convinced that he’d reached the remotest past, the origin of all things, and that this magic origin of sorcery and illusion was not that of a perfect assimilation of man with nature but, again, an intolerable divorce, a separation that wounded him in the most certain of his enlightened convictions. He wanted to believe in the myth of origins, not as a myth but as the reality of the world reconciled with the individual. What had he seen here, what trick or what warning? Unity with nature is not necessarily the formula for happiness; do not go back to the origins, do not seek an impossible harmony, cherish all the differences you find on the road … Do not think that at the beginning we were happy. By the same token, don’t think we’ll be happy at the end.

“What you are seeing is not the past; perhaps it’s the future,” said old Rodríguez to calm him down. “This city is a harbinger, not of the magic you detest, Baltasar, but of the reason to come.” But for Baltasar anything that wasn’t reason was magic. “And if it wasn’t magic but science, what would your reason say?” asked the old man, afraid, once more, that he’d shown too much to his new disciple, who, for that very reason, would hate his teacher and spend the rest of his days trying to forget this extraordinary vision that no one wanted to share, because it was disconcerting, because it put our own rational convictions into doubt.

This is how I answered Baltasar: You should put your certainties to the test, staring whatever negates them straight in the eye. I don’t know if Dorrego answered him or what he would have said, but I could see he was more distressed than I, perhaps even more distressed than Baltasar himself.

“Don’t let yourself be distracted from war and government,” Dorrego told me from Buenos Aires. “Upper Peru, as everyone knows, is a land of witch doctors, hallucinations, and drugs. We’ll have to put a stop to it someday.”

“We’ve got to leave it all untouched,” said Simón Rodríguez, using his arms to shield the weakened, almost lifeless body of the young Baltasar Bustos as he tried to lead him out of the city of light. “Swear you’ll never send anyone here. To explore it would be to destroy it. Let it survive until the moment in which everyone understands it because the future itself leaves it behind.”

But Baltasar could only ask: What have I seen? Have I really seen this, though I could not even touch it, or is it a dream? Where are we? He could only implore as Simón Rodríguez got him out of there, ignoring the tales passing through the luminous but now open eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado. Yet those tales held the secret to the place, and it was to a feverish Baltasar as he clung to the back of a mule on the dizzying spiral descent from the mountain that Simón Rodríguez told the truth he himself had just grasped.

“Everything you imagine is true. Today we happened on one fantasy among many possible fantasies. We don’t know if it’s yours, if it goes before you, or if it is the prelude to the next one.”

Baltasar did not seem to be listening and only muttered something, as if trying to forget what he was saying as he said it, rather than remember it.

That dreams are our real life

That the night is never over

That dreams overcome time

That the only sin is the separation of the sentient from the spiritual world

But Simón said no, no, no, that is not the lesson, the lesson is to accept that everything we imagine is true, that today we witnessed only one brief moment of that unending ribbon where truth is inscribed, and we do not know if what we saw is part of our imagination today, of an imagination that precedes us, or if it proclaims an imagination to come …

“I have experienced the vertigo of learning that something which is death’s can exist in life,” our younger brother, Baltasar, wrote us.

When we received his letter, Baltasar had recovered in a hospital in Cochabamba, where the disillusioned Simón Rodríguez had brought him. The old man went off, doubtless in search of newer, more receptive disciples. Baltasar, after writing us, waited for word from us. He said that, more than ever, he desired to take action in the real world and forget nightmares. What commission did we want to send him? He felt strong, was fully recovered, and he’d lost twenty pounds. Oh yes, and he reminded us that he’d been lost in one of the five thousand tunnels that connect Cuzco with the mines in Potosí, that it takes potatoes hours to cook there because of the altitude, that the lake is merely a track left by the retreating ice, that the lava of the volcanoes whistles as it flows downhill, that Upper Peru smells of the mercury transported in leather sacks to treat the silver, that I slept with a girl whose breasts sprouted between her legs, that I’ve seen the sun swimming beneath the world at dusk.