The Campaign

4. Upper Peru

[1]

His dappled stallion, who smelled until then of the sweat of bare mountain horses, now joined a new herd that smelled of gunpowder, horseshoes, and leather. The mountain horses, without saddles or bridles, gradually slowed down until they were left behind, as if amazed by that unfamiliar smell. Baltasar Bustos’s stallion was the only one to follow the charge, joining the war horses.

Holding on to the animal’s sweaty neck as best he could, Baltasar Bustos felt his face slapped by its wild, coarse mane, which snapped like a hundred small whips. He didn’t dare grab the forelock for fear of making the horse buck. But its furious gallop, multiplied in emulation of the war charge of twenty or thirty others, made the young officer’s body slip back.

They picked him up at full gallop as if he were a sack, the way leaves are blown away or something is snatched up by the wind. He didn’t know what was happening. All he understood for certain was that the world of the imagination was behind him and that he would forget it; he was now tossed into the tumult called reality, which carried him along in its wake. Two strong arms lifted him up on the run, draped him over the saddle, and pressed his face into the wool of the gaucho gear. A voice muttered barbarous obscenities. The voice was close but the words were blown away by the clamor of the fighting. Baltasar’s head, hanging down, suffocated by the dust, saw the world upside down.

When he regained consciousness, it was night, and the noise had subsided. The first thing he saw was a pair of blue eyes, like two lights, that belonged to a bearded man sipping maté. The man never stopped looking at him. He was hairy, his black mop barely parted over his bushy brows, his beard and mustache covering his face right up to his cheekbones and hanging down to his chest. His skin, though, was as pale as wax. The complexion of a saint who’s never seen the light outside the church; his blue eyes, which nevertheless illuminated it, were paler even than his skin. His hands, holding the maté gourd, negated his waxen pallor, not with color but with roughness. And despite everything, there was, in those fingers, a hint of piety, of blessing and sacrifice.

They stared at each other for a long time, as if the hirsute man did not want to take advantage of Baltasar’s prostration to say something to which Baltasar would not be able to reply. Each gesture with which the man disturbed his basically immobile posture was, by contrast, dramatic, or even eloquent. His gaze, a slight movement, a shrug conspired to communicate command and dignity all at the same time. Finally, Baltasar was able to ask for a maté. Before uttering a word, he quickly summed up for himself what he understood now that he was back in reality. After observing his host for a few moments — where were they? — he listened to the man’s first words:

“My name is Miguel Lanza. Where we are is the Inquisivi mud. The other man is Baltasar Cárdenas. Out in the hills we’ve got more than a hundred guerrillas and five hundred Indians.”

Lanza lifted a burning rush out of the fire to show a dark Indian standing behind him, who held out a maté to Baltasar Bustos.

“The Indian and I have the same name,” said Baltasar, smiling idiotically.

“We’ll soon find out if you’ve got the same courage,” said Lanza.

“My danger is that I admire everything I’m not.” This is what Baltasar had thought and what he now felt empowered to say.

“Like what?”

“Strength, realism, and cruelty. You might as well know it.”

“You’re the porteño who proclaimed twenty thousand freedoms in the Ayopaya plaza with the priest Muñecas, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right, and I assume my orders have been carried out.”

Lanza stared at him without changing expression. Then laughter burst forth like a vein of silver from between his teeth: his mouth opened; a guffaw exploded; tears of laughter rolled down the short span between his blue eyes and his black beard as if down a long-dry channel. Again, he picked up the burning reed to light up Baltasar Cárdenas’s dark face. The Indian was not laughing. “Just look at him,” said Lanza, choking on his unfamiliar glee. “I’m dying of laughter, but he’s not. I know your proclamations are nothing but words, and they make me laugh, but the Indian doesn’t know that. He took them seriously. And he won’t forgive you for them.”

Baltasar Cárdenas took a step forward and, with the toe of his spurred boot, shoved Baltasar Bustos back on his straw mat.

“You owe your life to us,” said the Indian in answer to Baltasar’s puzzled look. “Your Buenos Aires battalion scattered,” Lanza explained. “You were left between the Spaniards and us. If the Spaniards had taken you, you’d be dead right now. So give thanks you ended up with us.”

“Go on, give thanks,” said the other Baltasar, who was just about to prod the officer from Buenos Aires one more time. But Lanza stopped him, “We’re brothers in this calvary,” he reminded both Baltasars, “so let our offenses be forgotten so we may abound in virtues.”

“Tell me your reasons now, quickly, and I’ll tell you mine,” Miguel Lanza went on, suddenly serious. “So we can get this over with and understand each other.”

Baltasar Bustos closed his eyes. A rivulet of blood ran through his lips, and he could say nothing more. Perhaps they would understand his silence, and the sleep that followed it, as an honorable reiteration of what he had managed to say earlier.

“I admire everything I’m not.”

During the days following this night, Baltasar tried to recognize the physical characteristics of the camps where he stopped, but they moved constantly from place to place. He discovered that his cot was a stretcher and that Miguel Lanza’s guerrilla group never stayed anywhere longer than forty hours. They were moving through unknown territory; but Lanza and the Indian leader, Cárdenas, seemed to know it well: the valleys, the plains they crossed as they expropriated crops, the passes, the crevasses and wrinkles in the mountains, and, suddenly, the rope bridges that led them down to the bottom of the jungle and the bottom of the bottom, the mud flats, the mud of the Inquisivi that the guerrilla leader had spoken of.

The landscape changed constantly; Lanza’s guerrillas had to change their ways, too. What was permanent in this? When Baltasar saw Lanza again, at dawn, standing by a labyrinth of peaks that the night before had looked from a distance like a half-closed fan, he remembered Lanza’s words: We’re going to give you our reasons.

That wouldn’t be the last time that Baltasar Bustos would hear Miguel Lanza tell his life story. His Indian namesake always stood behind Lanza and would interrupt him when he felt he was talking too much. For the other Baltasar, the Indian, speech was superfluous, an excessive effort. There were so many things waiting to be done that saying them was unnecessary. As he regained his strength, Baltasar the creole gradually took part in the labors of the mountain troops. They interrupt communications. They kidnap messengers. They collect rations and arms. They attack at night. By day they vanish (this morning they’re standing before the fan of mountains, they’ve come back from fighting, they will have some bacon and maté before going to sleep). They attack again, then bury themselves in the hills, luring the royalist forces toward their lairs in the jungle, attacking the Spanish rear guard sometimes and the advance guard others; they harass the Spaniards’ flanks, attacking their baggage again and again, their supplies, their mail, their gold, stopping to melt down church bells and make them into cannons, making powder and shot from the nitrates and the lead in the very mines which supplied Spain with the wealth it squandered and which now were the powder magazine of the independentist insurgents: first the war must be won, then justice and laws will come, Lanza repeated from time to time to Bustos in the midst of all this activity. Then he reminded Bustos:

“Whenever you porteños come here to the jungle and the mountains to implement the revolution, you make a mess of things. It may be that your porteño chiefs know more than our Indian chiefs, but savage troops, whether from Buenos Aires or from the Chaco, want women, money, and the pure enjoyment of violence. You, Baltasar Bustos, are the victim of your predecessors, who came here proclaiming liberty, equality, and fraternity, while their soldiers raped, robbed, and burned everything down. Just like ours. But we don’t put on airs. We want independence for ourselves here and for America in general, and we know the price we’ll have to pay. You don’t seem to. You’d like a clean little war, but there is none to be had. The mestizos in Potosí rose up against the troops from Buenos Aires and killed two hundred porteños then and there. What do you want us to think, my young friend? You people are either rogues or fools. I don’t understand you anymore. The illustrious General Belgrano, the truest hero of the revolution, came up here and ordered the Potosí treasury blown up to cut off the source of Spanish power. Fortunately, your namesake the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas was there to cut the burning fuse, which was moving toward the powder barrels faster than a greyhound. What use would the Potosí treasures have been to anyone, blown all to shit by Belgrano’s revolutionary zeal? The fabled Pueyrredón, who’s president of Argentina now, was wiser: he ran off with all the Potosí gold he could find, a million pesos in gold and silver he removed from the same treasury house and loaded onto two hundred pack mules. So the rebel mestizos killed as many of his men as he had mules, just to settle accounts with him. See what I mean? Either you’re all really stupid or really clever. We’re better off governing ourselves! Long live the Republic of the Inquisivi!”

“Viva! Viva!” chorused his entire band, who seemed to listen to their chief even when he spoke in a low voice as he educated Baltasar Bustos, the most recent recruit to this incessant war in which no quarter was ever given and about which it was impossible to say “it started up again” because it never really died down. Viva Inquisivi and its leader, our General Miguel Lanza! Long live the creole Baltasar Bustos! Just like them, side by side with them, he attacked, retreated, pretended to be losing so as to catch the Spaniards off guard, robbed Pueyrredón and Belgrano’s gold, stole letters and thought how much time it would have taken the ones he wrote his adored friends, Varela (me) and Dorrego, to reach Buenos Aires (if they ever reached Buenos Aires). We counted the days we lived without our younger brother, the brother we’d sent — severe comrades but convinced we were doing the right thing — to get experience, become a man, compare books to life, while we collected clocks. Baltasar was a man: he never hesitated to ford a swollen river, to drop a church bell from the tower down to the atrium to melt it down and make a copper cannon, to burn his face in the sun and his hands with the nitrates. It was that Baltasar Bustos who stole chickens, equipment, ammunition, who did everything but kill a man or take a woman whether she was willing or not. He became identical to all the others; he ate what they ate, slept when they slept. He was different only in that the others weren’t living, killing, stealing, or risking their lives for a distant woman named Ofelia Salamanca.

He had avoided two things until now: fornication and murder.

And the guerrillas said that an angel protected the porteño cherub Baltasar, who though he never ceased moving and doing things for a single instant, never killed a fellow human being, not even the most detestable Spaniard, never took his pleasure with a woman, no matter how delectable or willing she might be.

Little by little, he came to compensate for these two sins of omission through his loyalty to the troops.

In secret, as he slept on the cot they gave him after they saw how weak, how creole, how much of a porteño he was — none of them knew he was born of the pampa — but also in public, speaking to the other Baltasar, who never said a word to him but at least listened, so he felt he wasn’t going mad, talking to himself, he would say, to himself and to his namesake: “I admire everything I’m not, you know. Strength, realism, and cruelty. My salvation, my silent brother, will be to become the best I can be. That’s why I’m with you.”

“It was an accident.” The Indian’s eyes reproached him.

“Now it’s my wish,” replied Baltasar the creole. “Here I am with you, and I’ll stay with you because I want to. Either way, I’m serving the cause of independence.”

That was his answer to the mystery, the dream, the nausea of El Dorado, that bewitched city where a man could see and hear the woman he loved without being able to touch her: once again, the torture of Tantalus, not in the veiled but immediate reality of a Buenos Aires bedroom, but in a ghostly, mediated evocation that took place inside a mountain of savage witchcraft.

We should mention that this was also his answer to the labors that we, his older brothers, Dorrego and Varela, imposed on our younger brother, comfortably, without running any of the risks to which we exposed our cadet. But where was the dividing line between our orders and young Baltasar’s acceptance? The reply would come not from his distant comrades, Dorrego and I, but from his immediate superior, the chieftain Miguel Lanza.

“I simply want to become the best I can be. What should I do? Is that the way to become one with nature?”

The Indian did not give an answer; neither did the landslides caused by the rains, or the swollen rivers the guerrillas knew to avoid even as they lured the overladen royalists into the current to drown. Miguel Lanza’s men had no uniforms, traveled light, and drew the Spaniards toward the most secret, most dangerous spots in South America, as if to say: Look, this proves the land is ours. You die here. We survive.

Through rationalizations like that, they stifled their own guilt: we are not formal soldiers, we don’t show our faces in daylight, we fight without taking risks, we are nocturnal warriors who grow at night, like the jungle itself.

That was how the conquistadors had survived, and there was something of them in Miguel Lanza, not only because he looked like a seasoned soldier as well as a mystic baptized in blood but because of his life story, which Baltasar Bustos, little by little, over the course of the interminable guerrilla war with its infrequent rest periods, was able to extract from him. He was destitute. He had been left an orphan as a child and was brought up by the Franciscans in their seminary at La Paz. His older brother Gregorio brought banned books into the monastery. “He was like you, Baltasar the creole. He believed what he read. He believed in independence. On July 16, 1809, in La Paz, he joined those who proclaimed emancipation from Spain without hiding behind the mask of Fernando VII. That was the first time he told himself what you believe: the representatives of the people can declare the rights of the people, with or without a Spanish monarchy. The repression carried out by the viceroy Abascal was savage. If the royalists wouldn’t stand for insurgence in the name of Ferdinand VII, what would they do to those who’d shit on the king? Well, what they did to my brother Gregorio: they hung him in the main square of La Paz. I always see in my mind’s eye my dead brother’s head — with that tongue of his that could speak so beautifully hanging down to his chest. What could that voice say now which had taught us younger brothers everything we knew? See how a life and a handful of ideas that belong only to you end up belonging to others, and tell me if what followed was just revenge on my part or the very reason why I’m rebelling.”

“You certainly talk a lot,” the Indian Baltasar would punctuate these conversations. But Miguel Lanza tenderly remembered his second older brother, Manuel Victorio, who followed the war of independence at the point where death cut off Gregorio’s life. His struggle came to a head on the banks of the Totorani River in a hand-to-hand battle without firearms against a Spanish captain, Gabriel Antonio Castro. “They say that afternoon no other sounds were heard along the entire Totorani but the panting of the two warriors, famished, exhausted, covered with wounds, completely alone in their struggle. In the end, both fell dead in the waters of the twilit river. Despite a shared death, their destinies were different. The Spaniards cut off Manuel Victorio’s head, stuck it on a pike, and brought it to La Paz, where it was exhibited as a warning to insurgents and rebels. I looked at it for a long time there, until it rotted and they took it down, until I was old enough to join my brothers’ struggle. Now, creole Baltasar, you tell me whether this war of mine is one of vengeance, conviction, or the fatality of destiny.”

Yes, Baltasar said to his namesake, the Indian caudillo; yes, he said to himself or to Lanza. Call it revenge, conviction, or fate, but it is your destiny. Baltasar understood then, and quickly wrote it down, so that Dorrego and I would receive his words someday, that just as Miguel Lanza spun a destiny for himself out of the entwined threads of liberty and fate, he, Baltasar Bustos, would create his own. How to admit, weeks, months after joining the guerrillas, that Miguel Lanza the orphan had a new brother, this time younger than he, Baltasar the creole, heir, without wanting it, to the lives of Gregorio and Manuel Victorio Lanza? Because Lanza, after telling him the personal reasons for his revolt, revealed the objective reasons for his military strategy as they stood over maps rolled out in the dust and held down by lanterns stolen from some hacienda or convent — because everything here was stolen, though Miguel Lanza explained: “All I do is circulate dormant capital. I am an agent of liberal economics.”

The maps told another story, and as he looked them over, listening to Lanza and noting his reasons, Bustos, barely liberated by experience, began to feel he was a prisoner. The poles of the revolution in southern America, according to Lanza, were in viceregal Lima and revolutionary Buenos Aires. “We’ve been going at it now for six years: Lima can’t beat Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires can’t beat Lima. The two powers cancel each other out. We’re right between them: the guerrilla fighters of Upper Peru. Buenos Aires is a long way off. Colonial oppression is right at hand. We have to keep up the guerrilla war. The royalist forces are here, and so are we. You and yours, Bustos, should come, help out, give speeches. But don’t lose sight of reality. There are three armies here. Your people from Buenos Aires don’t know how to fight in the mountains. The royalist has to fight. We mountaineers are the only ones who have to fight and also know how to fight here.”

If he, Baltasar Bustos, felt the need to talk about laws, injustice, and ideals, he should also note how guerrilla freedom worked — it was the very inhabitants of the place who made up the troop, they elected the chief, they disciplined themselves to serve the cause. The liberty he wanted for his great city was perhaps not the same as the liberty the Indians and mestizos of Upper Peru wanted. But if down there liberty became one with the law that proclaimed it, here, Lanza went on, liberty was inseparable from an equality that had never before been known in these lands.

“Maybe they’ll never know it unless they use their strength to implement the law,” replied our younger brother, Baltasar, following our advice: favor what contradicts you, to put your ideas to the test and strengthen them.

“They want to change their lives, not their laws,” said Lanza, speaking like Bustos in the Café de Malcos.

“Maybe they won’t get either thing and will go on living as always, in misery,” concluded Baltasar, because events were piling up on him, stealing his words, adding him to the cryptic, disguised, enigmatic strength of Miguel Lanza. They were making their way along a road of lances crowned with severed heads, heads like Miguel Lanza’s, all balanced in unnerving plasticity on the hollow reed lances with steel points knotted to them that the guerrillas carried on the steep paths taking them this time to the bare, windy peaks where there was no vegetation, not even enough to hang a rebel, before they tumbled down the slate slopes again to the tropical forests in the depths of the gorges, always with the intent of luring the Spaniards into an ambush, making them believe that they, the guerrillas, had been defeated. Thus, by slowly bleeding the royalist forces, they were devastating them, forcing them to commit acts of repression, to exterminate the villages from which the guerrillas, whom they called thieves, bandits, murderers, and mad dogs, came. Entire towns disappeared, and only the roads to them remained, until they, too, were devoured by nature, ever moving, ceaseless — overflowing rivers no one could harness, flooded lands, gangrenous forests with no one to prune them, snow-covered mountains, dying thickets, disappeared towns …

All of them fell during that year Baltasar Bustos spent with Miguel Lanza’s band. Like the landscape around him, the towns, and the men he met there, he, too, changed. Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas fell in Larecaja, from whence he closed the road to Lima; Vicente Camargo fell on the way to Potosí, from whence the way to Buenos Aires was open. Padilla and his guerrilla wife — their last words were “This war is eternal!”—fell. The generous Warnes fell, and when he did, the sanctuary he offered in times of defeat closed up. Only Lanza refused to admit defeat.

One day he appeared in camp. His blue eyes were as black as his beard.

He said simply, “They’ve killed Baltasar Cárdenas, they’ve killed our brother.”

The Indian’s head was paraded around the plaza at Cochabamba and then thrown to the hogs. But Lanza did not leave off intercepting communications, capturing couriers, stockpiling food, gunpowder, lead, horses, feed, medicine, alcohol, and even women — although they were becoming a very scarce commodity. On the other hand, the horses’ natural inclinations caused them to join the guerrillas’ herd. Runaways, ownerless, they straggled into the micro-republic of Inquisivi from no one knew where. Their bodies gave off the steam of the jungle. This altitude wasn’t the best place for them. What were they doing here?

“They’re trying to tell us something,” Baltasar, the only Baltasar left in the band, imagined.

“Don’t say it,” said Lanza, now with black eyes, as if the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas had given him his eyes when he died.

“But you don’t even know what I’m going to say,” exclaimed Baltasar, with exasperated logic.

“You’re one of us. We end up reading each other’s thoughts.”

“They’re inviting us to saddle up and go with them, far away, to abandon this land which we’ve crossed inch by inch and which we know perfectly well is hostile, dry, and not worth a shit?”

“That’s it,” said Miguel Lanza. “Don’t even think it. This war’s never going to end. It’s our fate. To fight to the death. Never to leave here. And not to let anyone out once they get in.”

Then he repeated, so there would be no doubt about his meaning, “It’s very difficult to get here, so it should be impossible to get out.”

He said it as if, despite their great friendship, he feared that a deserter — which is what anyone who walked out on Miguel Lanza alive would be — would tell down there in the cities, tell the porteños or the Spaniards, who Miguel Lanza was, how and where he lived, and what roads to take to get to him. Miguel Lanza’s secret intention was known to them all; it was the unwritten law of the Inquisivi. We’ll move around all the time, never stop, but never leave the perimeter of the mountains, the jungle, and the river. And all his soldiers should think the same thing. Without exception. Not even the little creole Baltasar.

Yet it was the arrival of the runaways that made this rule explicit. It was only then that Miguel Lanza stated categorically to Baltasar what Baltasar already knew and accepted day by day as part of his integration into the band of guerrillas and into the wild nature of Upper Peru. They would be together until the end. But the decision was his, Baltasar’s. It was a pact he made with himself. Miguel Lanza made a serious mistake when he told him out loud, when the runaway horses came:

“He who becomes a member of my band never leaves it. Don’t even think it, Baltasar. Neither you nor anyone else leaves here. We’re all citizens of Miguel Lanza’s Inquisivi until the final victory or death.”

That night Baltasar Cárdenas’s head was brought to camp, stolen by someone who supported the guerrillas. It was brought in by the squad assigned to lure the Spaniards into the Vallegrande sand pits and then to the jungle, where anyone who enters gets lost.

Someone had gouged out the Indian’s eyes.

Baltasar Bustos glanced over at Miguel Lanza, whose black eyes were once blue, and he understood all.

That night, as he had on his first day, he fell asleep shaking with fever. He tried to write to Dorrego and me in Buenos Aires to ask if we had ever considered this matter of destiny; he, our younger brother, our young comrade, had just realized that, without his being aware of it, a year had passed in which he’d followed a destiny which he thought was his but which wasn’t his, which was in fact the destiny Miguel Lanza sought to impose on him. The price was the reward we would understand better than anyone: to be brothers. He would expand his brotherhood at the cost of his personal liberty. Which is why he wrote to us, his real brothers: a minimal brotherhood made up of only three men. Baltasar Bustos wrote us to say he had no reason to live out the truncated destiny of another set of brothers: the Lanzas — Miguel, Gregorio, and Manuel Victorio.

He would admit he admired everything he wasn’t. And he hoped his salvation lay in being the best he could be as circumstances unfolded and multiplied, pressuring him. He wanted to be the best he could be in this collision between what he proposed for himself and what others imposed on him.

He remembered the distant, feverish discussions in the Café de Malcos back when the revolution was imminent. Seeing himself with the aid of hindsight, Baltasar Bustos knew now that he had been less sure of his ideals than he was eager to impose them on others. Or eager to punish those who didn’t share them. Baltasar’s ideals mattered not at all to Miguel Lanza, but he did take seriously Baltasar’s intention to impose them on others. Because, if Baltasar was right, wasn’t Miguel Lanza equally right when he confused the destiny of a single man with endless, repetitive, tedious war without quarter? And at the end of this calvary Lanza and his followers could only glimpse a claustrophobic paradise: to live within fixed boundaries, not to yield an inch of what they’d conquered with so much zeal and at such sacrifice, to convert the isolated, repetitive, besieged fatality of a land that wasn’t worth shit into a supreme value of existence?

In that instant, Baltasar Bustos saw Miguel Lanza’s destiny as that of one of the heroes of ancient Iberian Numantia, who chose to throw themselves on Roman swords rather than surrender or compromise the purity of their struggle.

That being the case, who was the real idealist? Miguel Lanza, locked within the circle of his struggle to the death? Or Baltasar Bustos, who proposed an ideal but who now also understood the struggle that ideal demanded? The bad thing for him that night was that he could not understand — he wrote to Dorrego and me — if the struggle compromised and postponed the ideal indefinitely or if the ideal, ultimately, was not worth it and deserved to be defeated by human reality, the hunger for action and movement that justified Miguel Lanza’s life.

“Life, death. What a short distance and what a short span of time between them. Tell me now, my faithful friends Manuel Varela and Xavier Dorrego, have we made a mistake, was my father right, could we, through compromise, patience, and tenacity, have saved ourselves the spilling of this blood? Perhaps, if we hadn’t taken up arms, we would have suffered only the exemplary holocaust of the meek. But there was no one more violent than those who today accuse us of violence toward them: our time-honored executioners, whispers the voice, creole like my own, of the deplorable, admirable madman Miguel Lanza, dictating my destiny to me tonight, a destiny identical to his so he won’t be left alone now that his own brothers have been killed. And in understanding this I understand enough, Dorrego, Varela, to understand that my destiny will cease to be my own between Lanza and his guerrilla fighters, because my options will shrink to one only — not the struggle for independence but death in the name of an ideal; or a cloistered life so that Lanza won’t be left brotherless, alone with this enemy nature.

“Another voice speaks to me, but secretly; it’s the dead voice of the eyeless head of my namesake Baltasar Cárdenas.

“When the Spaniards fell into the trap Miguel Lanza prepared for them in Vallegrande, I was among the first to throw myself on them. I said goodbye to the angel of peace who protected me until then, and I gave myself to his dark comrade, the angel of death. I discovered they were twins. I joined in the hand-to-hand fighting that scattered us over the sandy ground, isolating us from each other, royalists and guerrillas; but during the exchange of saber cuts and dagger thrusts, I realized that if I was in fact going to kill an enemy, he couldn’t be my equal, my fellow man, but a non-fellow man, my real enemy brother, not because he was fighting in the ranks of the Spaniards but because he was really different, other, Indian.

“My glasses were streaked with mud in that mortal Upper Peru spring, and wiping them clean with the sleeve of my coat, I sought out the coppery face, the features of this person who was weak, even if physically strong. Weak when confronted by my reasoning, my learning, my theories, my refinements, my ways … Weak because his time was not mine but that of the magic, spectral city Simón Rodríguez had shown me. He was other because he dreamed of other myths, which were not my myths, weak because he did not speak my language, different because he did not understand me … because in me he saw his enemy, the master, the overseer, the rapacious, irredeemable white man.

“I embraced him wholeheartedly, as if in killing him I was also loving him and he was suddenly the consummation of the two acts I refused to perform in the guerrilla fighting. Killing and fornicating. I looked at the glassy yellow eyes of the Indian fighting on the side of the Spaniards, and I did not let my partiality confuse me. I wasn’t killing him for being a royalist but because he was Indian, weak, poor, different … I deprived him forever of his destiny without knowing if I could really (forever) make him part of mine …

“Embracing him, I sank my knife as deep as I could into his dark belly, his guts as hot as mine even if they were fed from a different kitchen. In these parts, it takes water a long time to boil — I thought absurdly as I killed him, hugging him around the neck, burying my knife in his stomach — and it takes hours to boil potatoes …

“I killed for the first time. It was over in a flash. And I felt the stupor of still being alive.

“I killed the Indian in a secluded spot. No one saw me commit the crime. I thought of Baltasar Cárdenas and the way the Spaniards made his death memorable. Tearing out his eyes and sticking his head up in the plaza.

“I wanted to make the death of this anonymous Indian soldier memorable, too. He was my first dead man.

“I quickly got undressed. I was completely naked in the mud and the rain, which had started up again and which washed away the blood and dirt of the battle.

“Then I undressed the dead Indian. I did it slowly. I put my clothes on him, carefully, without worrying that my dead man was small and my clothes were grotesquely big for him.

“Only when I saw him there, stretched out in the mud, washed clean, like me, by the rains, did I feel that I had done my duty by my first dead man and that I could kill from then on with a clear conscience, without thinking twice about it. He was my propitiatory victim, my memorable dead man.

“I put on the Indian’s clothes, which are cut large and made of thick stuff to protect him from the cold nights of the uplands.

“And then I set about memorizing his face.

“But I could not etch his face into my mind. I saw his face as identical to all the other Indian faces. Identical one to the other. Indistinguishable to my urban, white eye.

“In that case, what face could I give this victim of mine to make it truly memorable? I had scarcely thought this when I stopped seeing the face of the dead Indian and saw my own as the face of a glorious warrior. It made me laugh. I tried to transpose the face of my victory on the battlefield onto the Indian soldier dressed in my clothes, lying at my feet. That, my friends, I could do. The mask of glory passed over without any difficulty from my face to his, covering it with a rictus of horror and violence. I didn’t have to see myself in a mirror to know that now the Indian and I finally shared the same face.

“It was the face of violence.

“I fled the place as soon as I felt that both faces, mine and that of my victim, were changing once again. It was no longer glory. It wasn’t even violence. Once the masks of war were gone, the face that united us was that of death.

“I had paid my debt to Miguel Lanza.”

That night, Baltasar Bustos set aside the things he considered his — a leather document case, his glasses — and wrote out the pages I have quoted. Then he tucked the letters destined for Buenos Aires between his belt and his skin, and that night, while the troops were celebrating the victory of Vallegrande with drinking and song, he left Ayopaya and the dying fires of Miguel Lanza’s camp. Leaving the same way he’d arrived, he stretched out over the ribs of one of the runaway horses and held on for dear life. He set this member of the fabulous wild herd loose in the hope the horse would find the road back to his home: the pampa, his father, Sabina, the gauchos …

[2]

José Antonio Bustos was laid out in the drawing room, the same place they’d held the wake for his wife, the Basque María Teresa Echegaray, ten years before. But while the wife had died as she’d lived — oblivious — her husband had announced to their son, Baltasar: “If you find me dead with a candle in my hand, it means I finally came around to your way of thinking. If you find me with my hands crossed over my chest, entwined in a scapulary, it means that I held on to my ideas and died fighting yours. Try to convince me.”

Baltasar returned to the pampa too late and too early. Too late to convince José Antonio Bustos, who had died two days before. Too early to avoid the uncertainty that would accompany him from that day on. His father was laid out with his hands folded, his fingers wrapped around a scapulary and with a candle, like a white phallus, between his fists, clenched forever in rigor mortis.

His father was so fragile and wasted that to Baltasar he seemed about to fly away. And while the candle looked like a mast, the scapulary was an anchor more powerful than any wind. Actually, his father looked more like wax. Bustos the creole recalled Miguel Lanza and his saint’s complexion. Now Bustos’s father had acquired it as well, but at the price of death.

He questioned Sabina: what did he say, what was he thinking at the end, did he die in peace, did he remember me, did he leave me any final message?

“You think you’re asking about him, but you’re only thinking of yourself,” said his sister, scowling in the way that made her ugly, making it impossible for Baltasar to see her as lovable despite her ugliness.

“You’d like to know, if you were me.”

“The Prodigal Son,” Sabina declared in staccato tones, grimacing hideously. “He said it was impossible to swim against the tide. He thought everything was a mirage, that everyone was deluded, and he was right. He died calm but uncertain, as you can see by the candle and the scapulary. He left the message for you I’ve just given you.”

She seemed to hesitate for an instant, then added: “To me he said nothing and left no message.”

“You’re lying again. He loved you and was most tender with you. You were close to him. You spoke harshly to him, and he allowed it. You’re saying these things to make me feel sorry for you and guilty about myself. Didn’t someone bring a blond child to live with you here?”

Sabina shook her head. “No child, no father. And you’ve come back. You can no longer ask me to stay on here.”

“Do as you please, sister.”

The filial word turned bitter on his lips. He had just left so many brothers, dead, alive, or on the point of perishing; there were others he missed, Dorrego and me, Varela, whom he had not embraced for five years. And Sabina could only look at him in wonder, as if his words were those of a man who was not (or was no longer) standing before her. She spoke to her memory of Baltasar.

“You’ve changed. You’re not the same.”

“How so?”

“You’re like them,” she said, looking out toward the gauchos gathered in mourning around the house. They, too, were staring, with a wonder even more secret than Sabina’s, at the prodigal son who returned looking like them, Don José Antonio’s peons, once nomadic and now firmly rooted in place by the laws of the Buenos Aires revolution. It shouldn’t be this way, said the eyes that followed him around the shops and stables; the son of the master shouldn’t look like the master’s peons, his mule skinners, his experts in tossing the bolas, his riders, his horse breakers, his cowpunchers, his blacksmiths, his bellows operators. He should always be the little gentleman; he should always be different from them. How many of José Antonio’s bastards were there among the gauchos? One or a thousand: now Baltasar looked like all of them, no longer like himself.

Ever since Simón Rodríguez had raised him from the bed of Acla cuna and showed him his reflection in a windowpane in Ayopaya, Baltasar hadn’t wanted to look at himself in mirrors. Usually, the guerrillas didn’t carry them; he hoped nature would sculpt his features, using life’s blows. The mountain, after all, did not look at itself in the mirror, nor did those overflowing rivers in the jungle. The condor never thought about itself; why should Baltasar? Only now, parted from the band of guerrillas, back home and concerned with a death in the family, and under the gaze of his old servants, did he feel the temptation to look at himself in the mirror. Again, he resisted that temptation. The looks the gauchos gave him were enough: he’d turned into them. He touched his long hair, his unshaven beard, his skin tanned to leather by the sun, and his lean cheeks. Only his metal-rimmed glasses betrayed the Baltasar of before. How could his eyes change? His old antagonisms about inequality could still creep in through those eyes. He looked like them, he wanted to prove it by strolling through the ranch as he did out in the wild, showing his recently acquired familiarity with nitrates and iron, with the products of cattle ranching — jerked beef, tallow, bristles, bones.

But he was different from the gauchos. Not one of those men felt, as Baltasar did on returning to his house, that he was still trapped by the land of the Indians, the royalist army, the separatist petty republics, and the enlightened hegemony of Buenos Aires. Not one of these gauchos shared this political and moral anguish; for them, these divisions did not exist. All they knew was the immediate division between mine and yours: if you give me enough of yours, I’ll be satisfied with mine. During his ill-fated campaign in Upper Peru, didn’t Castelli say that the people should make their own decisions, exercise self-control, develop their economic, political, and cultural potential, and think whatever they chose? Baltasar Bustos looked one last time at his father’s crossed hands, entwined in the scapulary, stained by the candle, insensible to the scorching pain, and then looked at the puzzled faces of the gauchos, who hadn’t expected the return of a master equal to them. It was then he remembered how infinitely far away the Indian world was, how infinitely far away the fantasy his reason fought against, and how close his namesake, the Indian leader. None of them thought as they wished. They all thought as they believed.

The idea devastated him; he lost all heart, and finally understood why Miguel Lanza laughed, the only time that rueful saint, that sleepless warrior, ever laughed, when he repeated the words of the emissary from the Buenos Aires revolution in Upper Peru: “In one day, we shall do the work of eternity!”

They were risible words. Was the burden Baltasar Bustos felt on his shoulders as he said that in his father’s frozen ear also risible? “It’s up to me to do, over the course of my entire life, the work of one day. The entire responsibility for the revolution for independence weighs on me and on each one of us.”

The candle finally melted in the unfeeling hands of his dead father. The scapulary, however, remained, coiled like a sacred serpent. What would change, who would change it, how long would it take to change things? But was it worth it to change? All this came from so far off. He hadn’t realized before, their origin was so remote, that the American cosmogonies preceded all of secular reasoning’s feeble speculations; écraser l’infâme was in itself an infamy that called for its own destruction: it was a weak, rationalistic bulwark against the ancient tide of cycles governed by forces which were here before us and which will survive us … In El Dorado, he had seen the eyes of light that contemplated the origin of time and celebrated the birth of mankind. They did not remember the past; they were there always, without losing, because of it, either their immediate present or their most remote beginnings … How was it possible to stand next to them without losing our humanity but augmenting it thanks to everything we’ve been? Can we be at the same time all we have been and all we want to be?

His father did not answer his questions. But Baltasar was sure he was listening. Sabina had let the candle burn down. She shrieked when the flame touched the flesh. He can’t feel, said Baltasar. But she did feel: she felt the knives she wore, like scapularies, between her breasts, over her sex, between her thighs. He didn’t have to see them to know they were there; he could smell them, near his sister and his father’s cadaver, he could feel them piercing his own body with the same conviction his own fighting dagger had entered the Indian’s body in the Vallegrande skirmish. In the same way he knew “I killed my racial enemy in battle,” he also knew “My sister wears secret, warm, magical knives near her private parts”; just as he’d earlier found out “Miguel Lanza does not want me ever to escape from his troops, so that I can be his younger brother and not his dead brother.” Having taken all this into himself, he now wanted to distance himself from it so that he could go forward to his own passion, the woman named Ofelia Salamanca.

He later wrote to his friends that perhaps it was his fate to return to his father’s estate too late for some things, too soon for others. He was untimely. But they themselves had pointed out the opportunity to him. Ofelia Salamanca had left Chile and was now in Peru. There were, then, immediate and sensual reasons for being.

“Your friends sent you a note. They could not find the child. The woman’s in Lima. That’s that. Will you go?”

Baltasar said yes.

“Won’t you take me with you?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not, but it doesn’t matter. You won’t take me because you respect me. I expected nothing less of your love for me. You would never dishonor me. We’ll leave that to the gauchos.”

“Excuse me if I am distracted. I’ve always wanted to be open to what others think and want.”

“You know I have nothing left to do here. I have no one to care for.”

“There’s the house. The gauchos. You just said it yourself.”

“Am I the mistress?”

“If that’s what you want, Sabina.”

“I’m going to die of loneliness if I don’t give myself to them.”

“Do it. Now let’s bury our father.”