The Campaign

6. The Army of the Andes

[1]

“His name is Baltasar Bustos, his family owns an estate — reasonable people, but half savage, like all ranch owners.” “If at least his father were a merchant.” “Is he a good marriage prospect?” “But he fought alongside the mountain rebels in Upper Peru — when did he become a royalist?” “When Miguel Lanza put a price on his head for deserting.” “He says that he’s in love, that he came here looking for the woman.” “That’s not important, but the news he brings from Inquisivi and Jujuy is.” “He’s very open; we know everything about him.” “He doesn’t hide anything from us.” “He knows we’ll crush the rebellion, so he’s doing us a favor.” “He certainly doesn’t look like a guerrilla.” “Your excellency shouldn’t judge by appearances.” “Plump, perfumed, dressed in silks, nearsighted…”

He strolled the salons of Santiago de Chile just as he’d strolled those of Lima, but he did not cut the same figure. Rather, he conformed to the description recorded above by the authorities of the captaincy-general of Chile. What a fuss this Baltasar Bustos made about his search for Ofelia Salamanca, now the widow of the Marquis de Cabra, who had died of bile and apoplexy in Lima! Who had died, it should be noted, in bed. Of course, no one knows if he died before or after his rehearsed death. Was he already dead when they laid him in his wife’s bed? Or did he die there, transforming the rehearsal into reality and the attempt at playfulness into God’s punishment?

The marquis fully deserved it. He left behind in Chile so many bad memories of his cruelty and injustice — which he carried out, it must be noted, with a smile and a joke on his lips! But his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, is no longer here; people say she went north, fleeing from the imminent fall of Chile, so ill defended, she said before departing, by the most pusillanimous captain-general in three centuries, Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Pont, who sought to compensate for his lack of military prowess by investing excessive energy in repression, passing judgment on the loyalty of all creoles without exception, expropriating their properties, burning their houses, and occasionally exiling them to the Island of Juan Fernández.

While none of that made up for Marcó del Pont’s stupidity on the battlefield, it did succeed in making Spanish rule the object of general hatred and threw the inhabitants of Santiago and Valparaíso into a state of total hysteria. It was from that that Ofelia Salamanca had fled. She was fed up with suspicion, fear, sudden changes! Now this nearsighted, fat fellow was looking for her, and just by chance he came from Jujuy, Upper Peru, and Mendoza, and had friends in the rebel officer corps in Argentina, who, though they protected him from Lanza’s death sentence, had no confidence in him.

In any case, the sword of Damocles is hanging over his head; obviously, he’s not meant for war; he says that Lanza conscripted him; he seems as edgy as everyone else; he only wants to find the widow of the Marquis de Cabra and ease his anxiety with exasperated waves of his handkerchief, nervous twitches of his head, as if he were expecting bad news or a worse blow at any moment. He complains about not finding his usual lotions in Chile; this country is the end of the world! He wonders what he’s doing here, if he’s not looking for Ofelia Salamanca, until someone suggests he form a club for those whose hearts have been broken by the Chilean beauty, stubborn enemy of independence and the rebels, about whom it is said, but perhaps it’s nothing but pure gossip, that it was she who personally plunged a dagger into the back of the insurgent Colonel Martín Echagüe to keep him from taking part in the battle of Rancagua, a rebel defeat that forced the vanquished leaders O’Higgins and Carrera to flee to Mendoza on the other side of the Andes. Whence comes to us this confused, edgy, beardless youngster to tell us that a rebel attack is imminent, that San Martín has deployed armies of more than twenty thousand men in mobile units north and south along the Argentine Andes in preparation for a general assault on Chile, from Aconcagua to Valdivia.

Santiago de Chile lived in terror at the outset of the summer of 1816, and precisely for that reason its forty thousand inhabitants decided to enjoy themselves until they died and to spend every cent they had. But the rumor mill, as in Lima, worked to its full capacity in the continuous, simultaneous parties with which royalist society, more and more depleted, sought to exorcise its fear of an insurgent victory, and sought in vain for possible allies among the Creoles, whom Marcó del Pont’s repressive violence had delivered over to the patriots. They clandestinely circulated Father Camilo Henríquez’s newspaper, Dawn of Chile, which contained news that should have been assumed to be false since it came from the mutinous enemy, unless the rebels were deluding themselves. The purpose of the social gatherings in the Chilean capital, during those months of oppressive heat and of peaches peeled a second before they rotted, was to gather information, air all rumors, place wagers on the future of the colony, and listen to anyone who had the merest particle of information.

“The rebels are mad,” Baltasar Bustos would say, strolling contemptuously through the Chilean soirees with a tiny glass of white wine in his hand. “They’ve gone all-out in deploying troops for a general attack along an eeeenormous front; they’re going to cut all of you to bits, so get a good night’s sleep. Me? I’m harmless, just looking for a certain woman.”

Those listening to this fop — as the English court, adorned at the time by Beau Brummel, would no doubt have called him — wondered if a myopic, soft dandy who proclaimed his passion so publicly could really love the woman he said he was pursuing. No, he couldn’t possibly love her so much if he was so vocal in mentioning her. Perhaps it was just the sickness of the age: tiring passionately, being oneself only by being one’s romantic passion, which was certainly sufficient, if painful, for the interior hero invented by the likes of Rousseau and Chateaubriand.

“All I ask of the world is that it grant me a point of departure: the woman I love,” said Bustos, between the sighs of the Chilean girls, the most beautiful in America. But he would quickly disillusion them with a mannered gesture and a clarification: “But I don’t want you to think I desire a companion. Not in the slightest. I only need — can you chaste damsels listening to me understand? — a love object. An object for my love.”

They turned their backs on him. Perhaps that young, handsome priest looking so intently at Baltasar understood him. Approaching him, the priest said that Baltasar’s words made him think there was something more in them than it seemed from their apparent frivolity. Unrequited love is the most intense of all.

“So you, too, have read St. John Chrysostom,” said Baltasar, remembering a violent May night in Buenos Aires. “But now”—he sighed—“our secret passions no longer matter. Order itself is in danger. I have lived with these guerrilla criminals. I know what they’re capable of doing, to women, to priests like you … We’ve got to hang them before they hang us.”

“Dandy,” blurted out the priest, slapping Baltasar across the face.

“Oh! I saw you from a distance in Lima, I know who you are, so be careful,” replied Bustos.

A third young man, a royalist officer, whose high, embroidered collar pinched his cheeks painfully and eclipsed his thick, reddish, carefully cultivated sideburns, pulled them apart. The young lieutenant said this was no time for provoking arguments and making people more nervous. The priest put himself in serious danger by defending the rebels, even if he did so out of Christian charity. Bustos should try to restrain himself, however understandable it might be for a man with a price on his head to be on edge. But the Inquisivi rebels had not yet reached Santiago. He could relax. No, Baltasar replied, they hadn’t, but San Martín had. “The army he’s gathered in Argentina is going to attack us from all sides, there won’t be enough supplies…”

The lieutenant with the sideburns ordered him to be quiet. He was sowing confusion and raising tensions. San Martín would attack from the south, where crossing the mountains was easier. Who would risk crossing the highest peaks? No one had ever marched an army through the Aconcagua Valley. It’s almost four miles up! In fact, San Martín himself had had a great meeting with the Pechuenche chiefs to get permission to pass through their flatlands. He would surprise us Spaniards at Planchón and give the Indians back their freedom.

“Forces sufficient to stop any rebel invasion are already marching to Planchón,” said the cocky lieutenant, hooking one thumb over his wide belt while with his other hand he caressed the soft fingers of his snow-white parade gloves.

“Do you actually believe one word of what those lying Indians tell you?” Baltasar Bustos laughed.

“Everything suggests they’ve betrayed San Martín,” said Lieutenant Sideburns.

“Just as they would betray us royalists,” insisted Baltasar, playing on the expectations of the small group gathering to listen to them. “No one knows what to think anymore!”

“We should really beware of illuminati priests besotted with French readings,” added the young priest, as if to erase, then and there, any bad impression he might have made and to confuse the discussion even more. “We have the power of confession, and we have influence on the conscience of the military, the bureaucrats, the housewives … I know that disloyal priests abound in Chile, and that they never leave off their labor of undermining everything.”

“Those divisive priests have split my family, fathers against sons,” said a sallow little captain as he arranged his cream-colored shirt front with a gesture that belied his rancor. “And that I can never forgive them.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the red-haired lieutenant energetically. “All I know is that there isn’t a single mountain pass where we don’t have troops ready to repel San Martín, no matter where in the Andes he turns up.”

“Do you know that your beloved Ofelia murdered Captain Echagüe in bed, while they were fornicating?” the young priest said to Baltasar in a mysterious, seductive, cruel tone, but loud enough that the summer girls, the eternal little mistresses of Santiago society, could hear him with scandalized delight.

[2]

Baltasar cut such a comic, blind, addled-witted figure at the parties of the waning Chilean colony that it shouldn’t have surprised him that people took more notice of him than he of them. The soirees followed on each other like a series of prolonged farewells extending from the salons of the Royal Council to the elegant country houses east of the city, through the baroque of the carved ceiling panels, the wrought-iron work, and the huge portals of Velasco House in the center of the city.

To honor the memory of Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar made a big show of haunting the chambers of the Royal Council, like a soul in torment; that was where the deceased Marquis de Cabra had presided before being sent to Buenos Aires. It was a new building, just finished in 1808, with twenty cast-iron windows on the second floor, wrought-iron balconies on the third, and a sequence of patios and galleries that reminded our hero (which is what you are, Baltasar) of the spacious River Plate Superior Court where his life was determined for all time.

This Santiago building owed its existence to a governor who arrived firmly committed to implanting the culture of the Enlightenment in Spain’s most remote southern colony. Luis Muñoz de Guzmán took Charles III’s ideas of modernization seriously and disembarked at the port of Valparaíso bearing musical instruments, baroque-music scores, perhaps some forbidden books, and no doubt the plays that soon began to be put on in those same patios and salons, under the patronage of his wife, Doña Luisa de Esterripa.

Nothing on this summer afternoon would have kept Baltasar Bustos from the performance taking place in one of the mansions — after all, it was nothing less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Discovery of America—except that at that same hour, on every afternoon since he arrived in Santiago, Baltasar Bustos would step out on the balcony of the house where he was staying, a house that belonged to an old friend of his father’s, a Spaniard who’d made his fortune in the New World and left all his property to go back to Spain. From that vantage point, he would observe a vision in the neighboring garden.

At around five in the afternoon, a girl would appear among the olive and almond trees. Dressed all in white, she seemed to float in a private cloud of soft cottons and gauze bodices. Baltasar would wait for the appearance of this phantom: she was always punctual and always distant, like a new star, half sun, half moon, displaying herself to him alone, offering herself to him in the tender orbit of a satellite around a true star — him. As she approached, this delightful girl would spin among the almond trees; coming closer and closer, she would twirl on her always bare feet in a dance that Baltasar wanted to think was dedicated to him — after all, there were no other spectators but the sun and the moon, which at that uncertain hour coexist in the Andean sky.

Only once, Baltasar looked at the two of them, the sun and moon present at five o’clock in the afternoon over a garden of wise and serene plants. They could not compete with her; she was both of them at once, and many other things as well.

A fine sun, as hot and caressing as the familiar hand of a mother who knows she is taken for granted and resigns herself to not being especially loved; but also an evil sun about to execute the day by hurling it into an irreversible conflagration from which it would never rise: the sun was the stepmother of time.

And a bad moon, which appeared now as if to seal the day’s fate with a silver lock, white moon drained of life, pale moon with a vampire’s face, bloodless moon hungry for offal and bloody discharges; but a good moon too, the bed of the day reposing in white sheets, the final bath that washes off the day’s grime and sinks us into the amorous re-creation of time which is sleep.

Baltasar Bustos would watch all that from his balcony, afternoon after afternoon, until he came to distinguish a face, the unusual face of the moon, unexpected, individual, marked by eyebrows that in another woman would have been repulsive, joined together with no break, like a second sex about to devour her black eyes, her haughty nose, her red lips, and her expression of disdain, sweet disdain that began to madden Baltasar and to distance him from his obsession with Ofelia Salamanca.

Each afternoon, for a week now, this most beautiful girl — she could be no more than eighteen — came closer and closer until she disappeared through the series of arches of the house next door. Perhaps she had seen him, because she teased him coquettishly, appearing and then hiding behind the columns in the long aisles before she disappeared until the next day.

But this afternoon she was not there.

Baltasar felt a burning desire to jump over the wall, embrace her and kiss first her red lips and then her provocative eyebrows, like velvet, joined like a divine scourge, the promise of lust and terror. She was sun and moon, and this afternoon she was missing.

Only this afternoon. Why? What could have interrupted a rite he by now considered sacred, indispensable to his romantic life — once again he realized it and said it when he described this episode to us; his amorous emotions depended on distance, on absence, on the intensity of the desire manifested to a woman he could not touch, saw from afar, who now, just like Ofelia Salamanca, had disappeared without keeping the appointment, not with him, but with the sun and the moon.

Then Baltasar Bustos took his hat, ran out of the house, ran without noticing the ten blocks that separated him from the Red House in whose grand patio Rousseau’s short tragedy was being performed, ran along the Calle del Rey, burst through the grand doorway, and saw her dancing in the middle of the patio surrounded by a chorus, by Indians and Spaniards, she herself acting the role of an allegorical Spanish maiden who sang and recited at the same time: Let us row, let us cross the seas, our pleasures will have their time, because to discover new worlds is to offer new flowers to love …

She raised her arms, and the gauze of her bodice revealed two fresh cherries, kissable, doing a short and merry quadrille on the girl’s bosom.

“It isn’t Jean-Jacques’s best effort,” said the handsome priest to Baltasar as the public applauded and the actors bowed and thanked them. “I prefer Narcissus, or He Who Loves Himself, where Rousseau has the audacity to begin the dialogue with two women talking about a man, the brother of one of them, who, because of the refinement and affectation of his clothes is a kind of woman disguised in man’s clothing. Yet his feminine appearance, instead of being a disguise, restores him to his natural state.”

“Are you telling me that this marvelous girl is really a man in disguise?” said Baltasar, instantly assuming his own vapid, cruel affectation.

“No”—the priest laughed—“her name is Gabriela Cóo, and her father’s job, an endless, labyrinthine task, is to sell off the Jesuits’ rural properties in Chile for the benefit of the Crown. His daughter is no less emancipated than Rousseau himself, so she works at acting, avidly reading the authors of the age, and communing with nature. Allow me to introduce you, Bustos.”

“Are you telling me that all these afternoons she’s merely been rehearsing a part?” asked Baltasar, plainly disillusioned.

“Pardon me?”

He accepted the invitation to meet her socially, but only under the condition that no one ever find out that each afternoon at five, for as long as he had to live in Chile, he would see her appear, vaporous and infinitely desirable, in the garden next door to his own house. He was afraid that she might already have met him at one of the myriad Santiago gatherings and that she would despise him, as did the other girls, who were, besides, fully aware of his obsession for the vanished Marquise de Cabra. He was just about to reject the introduction and to propose, since both of them were Rousseau enthusiasts, a purely epistolary relationship, like the one in the novel causing a furor throughout the New World, from Mexico to Buenos Aires: La Nouvelle Héloïse.

But three things happened, three foreseeable yet unexpected things. Myopic and foppish, chubby and not very attractive, Baltasar launched into one of an infinite number of dinner conversations with the lady next to him at table. Their dialogue was well under way when Baltasar realized he was acting a romantic part he’d learned perfectly and would recite at these functions. But this role was, at the same time, perfectly authentic, because everything he said corresponded to an intimate conviction, even if its verbal expression was not especially felicitous. This divorce was, simultaneously, the matrimony of his words. He’d repeated them again and again with a mixture of apathy and passion ever since his visit to Lima, searching for Ofelia Salamanca and insinuating that, sentenced to death by the ferocious guerrilla leader Miguel Lanza, he had to place his sympathies with the Crown; after all, the insurgents would deny him any protection whatever.

He could not alter his discourse that night; it was authentic and false at the same time. But he addressed it to her, since he had discovered halfway through dinner that he was speaking to Gabriela Cóo. He gave a face to that face, eyebrows to that visage, a perfume to that body, and now he could not stop the flow of his words, careening like a cart down a mountainside. And each time she answered him in a polite but cutting, intelligent, firm, even amused way, was she laughing at him, as almost all these Chilean girls did who were too beautiful and intelligent to take him seriously? And wasn’t that exactly what he most desired: to be left free to pursue his true passion, the search for Ofelia?

“Whenever I come near to a woman like you, I feel the desire to avenge my pain and my sin on you.”

“You don’t say.”

“Only you can kill the passion in me.”

“It would be a pleasure.”

“I mean: do me the favor of hastening my calvary.”

“To whom are you speaking, Mr. Bustos?”

“I tell you that my soul only wants to recover or die, milady.”

“But I only know how to cure, not to kill.”

“Try to be another woman, and I will not try to seduce you,” said Baltasar, lowering his voice.

“I want neither to be someone else nor to be seduced by you,” she replied in the same low tone, before laughing out loud. “Be more reasonable, Mr. Bustos.”

The second thing that happened was that each afternoon at five she reappeared, far off in her garden. She approached little by little, as if suggesting that she would come closer, allowing herself to be desired, allowing him to make her more and more his own, first in his eyes and his desire and someday perhaps through real possession. The movements of the dance, the increasing languors, the increasing nakedness of that svelte, almost infantile body governed by a mask whose will was a mouth as red as a wound and brows as black as a whip, spelled out her name, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, desired, desirable, promising, promised, confident she would not deceive her lover, if he wanted to be her lover, if he gave himself to her, distant and nubile in her garden, as he had given himself to Ofelia Salamanca, distant and widowed, a mother who had given birth twice to the same child, given birth, that is, to life and to death, a woman burdened by suffering and rumors and probable cruelties and imagined betrayals. Gabriela Cóo’s dancing body was asking him to choose but did not say to him, “I am better than the other”; it merely said, “I am different, and you must accept me as I am.”

It had to be that way, Baltasar said to himself every afternoon, because she was no longer rehearsing Rousseau’s play, which was put on just once in the patio of the grand Portuguese-style mansion on Calle del Rey. No longer. Now the performance was for him alone.

She was his little mistress — he decided to give her that name, just as we called him our little brother.

One afternoon, the little brother and the little mistress met without having fixed a time. He jumped over the low wall separating the two properties just as she was coming out of the entrance to her house. Neither yielded, but both gave all. She explained to him that her behavior the other night had not been the infantile act of a spoiled girl trying to entertain in polite society. She really did want to be an actress, she believed in independence — not only political but personal, too. The two went together, at least that is what she believed. Here in Chile, in other parts of the New World, even in Europe, she would pursue her career. She loved words, said Gabriela Cóo; each word had its own life and required the same care as a newborn child. When she opened her mouth, as she did the other night, and repeated a word — love, pleasure, world, sea — she had to take charge of that word like a mother, like a shepherdess, like a lover, yes, even like a little mistress, convinced that, without her, without her mouth, her tongue, the word would smash against a wall of silence and die forsaken.

But to take charge of words that weren’t her own, the words of Rousseau, Ruiz de Alarcón, or Sophocles, she had to prepare herself for a long time. She would give nothing to a man unless he first gave her words. For her, love was a vocation as strong as the theater, but words also sustained love. All this was very difficult, even a little sad — Gabriela Cóo put her arm around Baltasar and patted his curls — because her work was pure shadow, fleeting, left no mark: only the words, poor things, that preceded it were left, and would be, even without her. In order to give meaning to her life of spectral voices, what else could Gabriela think except that, thanks to her mouth, the words had not died but had actually gained a modicum of life, body, dignity, who knows what else?

She felt for Baltasar’s nape under his curly hair and asked if he understood her. He said he did; he knew she understood him equally well. She knew he loved her and why he acted and spoke that way at the Santiago dinners he frequented and why they would be parting soon.

“Tell me it’s not because of that other woman.” Gabriela Cóo thus made her only faux pas, explicable in any case, and he forgave her but decided at that moment to separate her from his life, to give her the freedom she needed, and to give himself to the slavery his obsession with Ofelia entailed until he consummated his passion. At the moment, he could see no other way to be faithful to this adorable girl, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, my love, my adored little love, delightful Gabriela; we shall never truly know our own hearts, Little Mistress.

He so desired the only kiss he and Gabriela exchanged, his vision of that act was so intense, so red were the girl’s lips when they joined his, their mouths parting and their tongues joining and separating only to tickle their palates and count their avid, cruel, and tender teeth, that from it there emerged another mouth, another kiss, a kiss that stole theirs away, banished it, took it from them and turned it into the kiss, the mouth, the voice of Ofelia Salamanca.

And that was the third thing that happened.

He promised himself not to think about Gabriela until he could be hers alone.

[3]

Facing Santiago, but separated from it by the rampart of the Andes, Mendoza — capital of the Argentine province of Cuyo — was the revolutionary center of the Americas. The sweetness of its valley of vines and cherry trees, the eternal springtime of its warm breezes and its snow-capped backdrop, its lands given over to golden pear trees and fertile earth, was all negated. Mendoza was given over to the extremes of cold calculation and infernal din because of the activities of the Army of the Andes that was forming, in spite of all apathy and against all obstacles.

At the beginning, there was nothing; San Martín set about turning that nothing into war supplies. He ordered contributions, extorted money from everyone, pestered President Pueyrredón to distraction, exhorted the ladies of Mendoza to donate their jewels at the municipal council, proscribed luxury, and cut officers’ salaries in half. From the back of a horse no taller than the liberating general himself, sitting bolt upright, barely thirty-seven years old but already showing an incipient maturity that did not wholly extinguish the veiled glint in his eyes or the stubborn determination in his mouth, he proclaimed:

“Cuyo must sweat money for the liberation of America; from this day forward, each one of us must stand guard over his own life.”

The Supreme Director of the Junta of Buenos Aires, Pueyrredón, was not willing to be second to San Martín either in will or in zeal in a feat which in Buenos Aires was being compared with those of Hannibal, Caesar, and Napoleon: “From Buenos Aires we send you dispatch cases, uniforms, shirts. We send you two thousand replacement sabers and two hundred field tents. We send you, in a small box, the only two bugles we could find. And that’s enough,” wrote Pueyrredón. “We send the World. We send the Flesh. We send the Devil. I don’t have the remotest idea how I’m going to worm my way out of the contracts I’ve signed to pay for all of it. Damn it! Don’t ask me for another thing!”

Cuyo did sweat, Mendoza dried up, and even the church bells and vineyards were squeezed to get blunderbusses and harquebuses, carbines and sabers, daggers and tridents, the pistols, and the yataghans, those fearsome Turkish-style swords with silver hilts.

Already Major De la Plaza is at work, quartermaster in charge of supplies and arms; Alvarez Condarco, the Tucumán chemist, mixes nitrates to make different kinds of gunpowder. In his armory, Brother Luis de Beltrán tucks his cassock up on his waist as he casts cannon and bombs, while his neighbor, Tejada, sweats over his vats, dyeing cloth blue to make new uniforms. Right down to the humblest artisan, everyone contributes something to the campaign, even if it’s a lance cut from a reed; the poorest mule skinner turns over his animals, just as the doctors deliver their medicines to the hospital founded by Dr. Zapata. And if donations don’t come willingly, then San Martín’s men forcibly tear blankets and sheets off the beds, occupied or empty, of those living nearby. “There is no house that cannot give up an old sheet,” shout these pirates of liberty, proclaiming themselves beggars rather than thieves. “When all else fails, we all have to beg.”

But all the hustle and bustle, the clanging, the singing and dancing, the hammers smashing red-hot iron, the neighs, and the banging are like a vast silence when, at dusk on that January day, three horsemen enter General José de San Martín’s camp in Mendoza. Three horsemen hurtling down the mountains who cannot rein in their mounts, who spur them on to run, jump, and dodge obstacles around the armories, the supply sheds, the shops, and the mills, until the three sweating, tense chargers meld in the corral and stables with the three thousand horses, the seven thousand mules, and the myriad cows that constitute the marching stock of the Army of the Andes.

The three friends dismount, laughing and shouting, embracing, congratulating one another for being friends, for being alive, for having arrived, for bringing news, and above all for their manly comradeship, the friendship of their twenty-five years, the success of having crossed the Andes on horseback from Santiago — so swiftly that they are their own messengers:

The priest Francisco Arias, handsome and devout, twenty years of age, given to fervent readings and to those sensualities he deems worthy of his all-embracing faith and his noble intelligence.

Lieutenant Juan de Echagüe, valiant and dashing with his reddish favoris that show to equal advantage combed for a ball or tangled with dust.

And the young hero Baltasar Bustos, hopelessly myopic but willfully plump — losing, because of a diet of honey fritters, creams, egg-yolk sweets, and powder cakes, the physical hardness won in the Inquisivi campaign, obeying the order to return to his natural state, fat and smooth; losing the pride of his svelte virility to serve the cause to which the three of them have pledged themselves, even if they have to dance with that ugliest of partners: deceit.

“Arias and Bustos will join with Echagüe in Chile. The country is on edge. Despite the Rancagua defeat, the spirit of rebellion has not been vanquished. The captain-general is both an incompetent and a savage. Santiago is the center of all this edginess. Mix with everyone. Make friends with everyone. Spread false rumors. Contradict one another. Confuse anyone who wants the Spaniards to win. Seduce anyone who can serve our cause. Don’t leave a single truth unquestioned, create a universe of doubt, confusion, contradiction, false news, rumors … And don’t think you’re heroes. You are just part of an army of spies and counterspies scattered all over Chile. Spread misinformation but learn the truth for us. Find out the number and position of their troops, supplies, their movements, their plans. But, above all, make them believe we’re going to attack from all sides, all along the line from Mount Aconcagua to Valdivia.”

That is what General San Martín asked the three of them to do and that is what they accomplished. Now Baltasar wanted to eat steak and not vol-au-vent, Echagüe felt avenged for the death of his uncle (which took place, rumor had it, in the arms of Ofelia Salamanca, widow of the cuckold marquis), and Father Arias was looking at his two friends with his beautiful, languid, enigmatic eyes, which seduced both men and women, making everyone feel that this young priest could do whatever he wished — it was obvious that God Himself had so deemed it, and had incarnated His divine will in this delicate, strong, tender being ever ready to forgive but also disposed to anger, this youthful herald of Jehovah and Christ.

They walked arm in arm, at a distance from the stables where they’d dismounted, but always accompanied by the diminutive population of the encampment, whose habitual noises began to fill the afternoon once more after the galloping interruption of the friends. Geese, chickens, pigs, ducks. The honking, cackling, and squealing magically drowned out the hammers, bellows, and neighing. Arias looked at Bustos and Echagüe. If only it was true that Baltasar had invented — it was a stroke of genius — the pretext of the beautiful Ofelia to justify his passing through Chile; if only he did not know her or love her. If only Echagüe had never believed that his comrade loved the woman who had killed his uncle. If only this marvel of life, the union of the three young friends, who were not divided by anything, could last, glitter as long as possible, before the inevitable splits triumphed. When his friends asked him what he was doing, Arias said he was praying in his own fashion, using a word, ojalá—God willing — whose origin was the purest Arabic. Then they ate and drank together, told jokes, reminisced about family and lady friends, remembered childhood pranks, loved each other like brothers.

“That woman loved you,” Echagüe said to Bustos.

“Which woman?” Baltasar asked, distressed.

But Echagüe and Arias exchanged a glance and were silent. They had sworn never to mention Gabriela Cóo.

[4]

The three of them reported to General San Martín with their lungs cleansed by the air of Mendoza, the most tree-filled city in the world, a city sweet because it is protected by a roof of leaves woven together like the fingers of a huge circle of inseparable lovers.

The priest was all in black, with his long cassock; his eyes, too, were an ecclesiastical color.

The lieutenant carried his leather morion with its gold bars and wore a blue tunic whose buttons were stamped with the arms of Argentina.

Baltasar Bustos placed his glasses in their leather case and put his blue cloth cap with its single gold bar under his arm.

It was a trio of proud friends looking into the face of a hero, wondering at which point the personal fate of each of them — Echagüe, Arias, Bustos — would change or be changed by events, war, or other men — San Martín, for instance. But vanity, wrote Rousseau, measures nature according to our weaknesses, making us believe that the qualities we don’t possess are mere chimeras.

In the salon, bare except for a table strewn with maps, portfolios, magnifying glasses, inkwells, and document seals, the general stated outright that the plan for liberating South America hinged on the conquest of the viceroyalty that governed the rest: Peru. But to take Peru it was first necessary to invade Chile. A sustained long-term action could not be expected from the micro-republics in Upper Peru. They would do what they had always done: carry out raids to distract Lima’s troops and resources.

Everything was ready. He congratulated the three of them for fulfilling their task of undermining things in Chile. Marcó del Pont was thoroughly confused about where the patriots would launch their attack. He was confident Echagüe had taken advantage of the return trip to carry out orders. The young lieutenant replied in the affirmative: he’d memorized the entire route, down to the last stone, without needing to take notes. Baltasar and Father Francisco looked at Juan and then at San Martín. They knew the secret; there was no need to swear them to silence. But an Indian leaning on a lance at the entrance to the Mendoza map room stared at them with far-off melancholy. Had he been listening? Of course. Had he understood? Yes; no; yes. “I’ve lived with them. I know they understand everything,” said Baltasar when San Martín ordered the Indian to withdraw. But only by torturing Echagüe could anyone get the secret out of him, said Father Arias.

“In Peru we called them shitty cholos,” Bustos said to Arias in a sudden fit of rage.

“Don’t worry. They call each other worse.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem of justice,” insisted Bustos, somewhat irritated by the young priest’s cynical realism. “Are we going to free ourselves from the Spaniards just so we Creoles can take their place, always above the cholo and the Indian?”

Echagüe laughed. “Don’t think about that now, Balta. Concentrate on glory.”

He hummed “le jour de gloire est arrivé,” blushed, and regained his composure. “Excuse me, General. I forgot where I was. It’s just that the three of us are such close friends.”

“I, too, am concerned about justice,” said San Martín. “And wherever we go, we are going to establish free trade, suppress the Inquisition, abolish slavery, and prohibit torture. But you all saw what happened to Castelli and Belgrano in Upper Peru. They proclaimed the ideals of the Enlightenment to Indians who didn’t understand them and to the Creoles, who didn’t want a permanent revolution. Neither theories nor individuals suffice to achieve justice. We must create permanent institutions. First, of course, we have to achieve independence. Then our headaches will really begin.”

“You create laws, General. You must believe in them from the start,” said the impetuous Baltasar, happy to be back in the ranks of the patriots, more and more certain of his ability to combine the dreams and the realities of the revolution.

“We are very legalistic.” San Martín smiled. “We like balance, legal symmetry, because it masks the confusion of our ill-formed societies. We are delighted by hierarchy, protection through dogma, everything we’ve inherited from the Church and from Spain. We forget that beneath the cupolas of certainty and the columns of law there is a dream full of rocks, vermin, and quicksand that will put the equilibrium of the temple of the republic in danger.”

“We need an iron will, a man who can save us,” said a smiling Echagüe, his eternal glove in his hand.

“My young friends.” San Martín returned them a bitter smile. “I don’t know if we are going to be victorious or if we’re going to be cut to ribbons once and for all up in the mountains. That’s why I’m telling you here and now that even if we win, we will have been defeated if we hand power over to the sword-wielding arm, the successful military man.”

“But if it’s a matter of saving the nation,” insisted Echagüe.

“The nation will be saved by all its citizens, not by a military leader.”

“In wartime you don’t think that way.”

“But in peacetime I do, Lieutenant Echagüe. If we don’t create institutions, if we don’t achieve unity among Americans, we will rapidly go from squabbles to fratricidal warfare. I swear to you that I will kill Spaniards but not Argentines. Never. My saber will never leave its sheath for political reasons.”

“General, please pardon me for having spoken. I don’t claim to speak for my friends, who…”

“He’s just as fiery as his uncle.”

“Don Martín Echagüe would be proud of my actions. I hope I will always be proud of yours, sir.”

“Then never ask me or anyone else to be the executioner of my fellow citizens. A soldier can come to power with only that intention in mind. Beware of civilians as well,” he said to Bustos, and, curiously enough, to Father Francisco Arias. “Let no one propel you to power so that you will kill in the name of the military. Let no one bring you to the crossroads of power in order to kill or be killed.”

He laughed at the solemn silence of the young men and asked them to excuse the perorations of a man about to turn forty who only wanted to do his duty and then retire to some corner of the world to live like a man, in peace and with respect. “Would anyone believe, if I retire to my farm here in Mendoza, that I’m not a false Cincinnatus but a real Sulla waiting to take control of things? Damn!”

Everyone laughed, and he accused them of provoking this discussion about a hypothetical future because of the obvious, omnipresent fact — the American will to win independence: they had seen it, that will was all around them, nothing like it had ever before been seen in the Americas. It was the moment not to weep over the approaching storm clouds but to follow this sun, this will that manifested itself all around them — young men, patriots, Americans. Who could say, after these campaigns, that an Argentine, a Chilean, a Peruvian did not know how to organize or govern himself? The proof was right outside the door!

And outside the door, fresh recruits were being given uniforms, which they put on right out in the open after stripping themselves to the skin for a few seconds. Father Francisco Arias came over to help them dress; many did not know how to put the uniform on properly, button the tunic, adjust the belt, and cross the leather strap over their chests. He waved to the other two to come and help. Baltasar held Juan back.

“Don’t. You are going to feel bad the day you can no longer be a comrade to those who are not your equals. Only the war unites us. Society will divide us.”

The next morning, with the troops assembled in front of the Franciscan convent, San Martín put at the head of the column the Commander and declared Patroness of the Army of the Andes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. At the center of that figure decked out like a doll, as triangular as the beloved sex of a woman, Baltasar replaced the face veiled in the white of maternal virginity with the visage of Ofelia Salamanca, smiling at him as if he were everything — the owner of the plaything, the lover of the woman, the son of the mother.

[5]

Echagüe gave General San Martín a detailed description of the Los Patos route, the one the bulk of the troops, commanded by Bernardo O’Higgins, would take. South of them, Colonel Las Heras would advance along the shorter Uspallata road with the artillery. Several smaller columns would spread north and south of these two to confirm the impression that the army was attacking Chile along a wide front, from Mount Aconcagua to Valdivia. They would thus divert the royalist forces, which were already demoralized by the campaign of rumors spread by San Martín like a fan of deception from La Rioja and the pass at Comecaballos to San Juan and the Pismanta route, down to the south, through the passes of Portillo and Planchón, where the Puechuenche Indians had already betrayed the patriots. Regular infantrymen and members of the militia, grenadiers, and lancers from the Province of Buenos Aires set out, following the routes of this great invasion, unprecedented in the New World. Of the 5,423 men in the army, only 4,000 were combatants. The rest made up the supply columns: grain wagons, cattle, sappers, bakers, lantern bearers, water wagons, and a carriage laden with dispatches and maps, pulled by six horses — all of which climbed to an altitude almost four miles above sea level, where they stared into the face of the Andes, which dominated those who sought to dominate them. These first men, the Adams of independence, their feet resting on an earth of volcanic ruins and extinct glaciers, contemplated the brown face and snowy crown of this dead god. Dead or not, he always seemed about to renew an interrupted catastrophe, latent in a nature which on the morning of San Martín’s crossing to Chile trembled with the memories of devastated worlds and the promises of worlds to come, worlds these men, San Martín’s five thousand, would never see.

Would they see, instead, the fratricidal war prophesied by the general, the new countries in ruins, destroyed by their own offspring? During the ascent to this highest temple of the Andes, Baltasar Bustos sought out the eyes of his friends Echagüe and Arias as well as those of José de San Martín himself. Occupied as they were in the effort to scale the heights, to give orders, exulting at the grandiose spectacle, inebriated perhaps with the will to triumph in battle and the will to arms of this incomparable army, did they have time, as Baltasar did, to look into their hearts and think about the moment in which rhetoric would be split from action? A sublime moment, and no one should spoil it. Let those who had the privilege of being Americans and of being on the roof of America in the company of the liberator of America exult in it in the name of the generations to come.

They slept. They drank from their canteens. Some even had themselves shaved by an impromptu barber so the Spaniards wouldn’t think the army was made up of savage gauchos from the pampa. The nights were freezing, and they were grateful for the blankets stolen from the good people of Mendoza. The cannons passed in single file, and the Indians carried the gear. In the rear guard could be heard the lowing of the cattle bent down under the load of the supplies. Some men collapsed, fainting, vomiting, suffering from altitude sickness. No guitars were heard on that heroic night, although someone did sing a vidalita, a sad Argentine love song. San Martín dreamed he had stilts and could cross the mountains in one stride.

They started the ascent on January 18 and on February 2 began the descent; on the fourth, they encountered a royalist detachment in a mountain pass called Achupallas, one hundred soldiers of the king who couldn’t stand up to the bare-saber charge of Juan Echagüe. From that moment on, the army’s two columns raced from the Aconcagua to Chile’s central valley. On February 12, by moonlight, they were all running downhill toward a clash with Marcó del Pont’s royalist troops at Chacabuco. It was by moonlight that the three friends, Baltasar, Francisco, and Juan, looked at each other for the last time, unable to shake hands, unable to embrace, unable even to say another word to each other. O’Higgins’s orders were: overwhelm the enemy, surround him; he’s stationed himself right in the center, so we can do it — make a circle of death. The cavalry began the attack with O’Higgins along Cuesta Nueva, the Spaniards’ right flank. This gave Soler time to come in later and destroy what remained of the enemy’s left-flank rear guard. The three friends were among the first to attack on the left, and this was a war of saber against saber, hand-to-hand combat amid the clash of cavalry, closely followed by the infantry, who carried their sabers in their teeth so they could climb on one another’s shoulders to get over the tree-trunk roadblocks erected by the enemy. The horses leapt over the parapets. The brave Juan Echagüe fell as he made a jump, and Baltasar saw his friend’s head battered. In another charge, a musket ball stained the handsome Father Arias’s black cassock with his own red blood. Baltasar charged, his glasses fogged, their metal frame wrapped tightly around his irritated, burning ears. He tried to leave his heart a blank, to keep the pain from encrusting itself there; yet, with his saber, he inscribed in his mind an involuntary act of thanksgiving that it was not he who had fallen. Baltasar Bustos wrote a testament like a lightning flash in which he left to himself the memory of the dead: he inherited his fallen friends. The death of a young soldier, handsomer and braver than the rest. The death of a young priest, handsomer and more pious than the rest. Baltasar Bustos bequeathed himself their lives, giving thanks for not being as handsome, brave, or pious as they. He was alive and could live for his enigma, Tantalus’s passion, fleeting and untouchable. Death on the battlefield determined him, in that instant, to wring all he could out of his own life before perishing like his friends. Perhaps, as well, to hasten the moment that would reunite him with them.

The night of the battle of Chacabuco, San Martín’s bugler blew so hard they say his brains flew out his ears.

[6]

Standing before the bodies of Father Arias and Captain Echagüe in the steepleless cathedral of the Chilean capital, which the liberating troops entered on February 14, General San Martín said to Baltasar Bustos:

“We lost only twelve men. A pity these two had to be among them.”

“How many did the enemy lose?” asked Baltasar without looking at San Martín; he was grieving over the loss of his two friends and over the general’s words, as if his pain extended to the Liberator’s heart, which he had thought frozen.

“Five hundred. Chacabuco cost them Chile and Peru. They are no longer colonies of Spain.”

Baltasar was tempted to say “What I lost is greater than two countries,” but San Martín told him to take a good look at the faces of his dead friends, because soon he would see not the faces of friends dead in a just cause and in the glory of the battle for independence but the faces of brothers killed in fratricidal wars for power. Baltasar asked if that was as absolutely certain as San Martín’s words led him to believe, words that reminded him of those uttered by a pessimist very different from San Martín, a Spanish council president. San Martín interrupted him: “We joined together to beat the Spaniards. We saw that if we were divided they would beat us. All I ask, Bustos, my friend, is that you realize this and that you be aware of the danger of a lack of unity. That lack of unity may well be our undoing; we have to create institutions where there are none. That takes time, clear thinking, and clean hands. We may think that laws, because they are separate from reality, make reality unreal. It isn’t so. We are going to be divided by reality and by law, by the will to federation against the will to centralized power. We’ve gone out on the pampa and now we’re left without a roof over our heads. But that’s no reason to stop breathing free air and to stay indoors forever. All I ask is that you realize what the risks are. No, I am not a fatalist. But I don’t want to be blind, either. See things as I see them, Bustos, my friend. Decide to be, along with me, a real citizen and renounce forever, as I do now before your dead friends, the possibility of being king, emperor, or devil.”

“With my friends, I could have founded a world,” said Baltasar Bustos, his head bent low.

“And without them…” San Martín began.

“I can only live out a passion.”

The general did not understand what the young fellow was saying. He rested his hand on Baltasar’s shoulder and said, “They were heroes.” Then he promoted Baltasar to captain on the spot.

Baltasar stayed behind, alone, with the bodies of Francisco Arias and Juan Echagüe. Were they really heroes? Was José de San Martín himself a hero, the closest thing to a living hero Baltasar would ever know? In the funereal gloom of the cathedral, unbroken even by the baroque glitter scattered there by its architects, who besides being Jesuits were Bavarians, Baltasar saw in his mind’s eye the Liberator, his friends, Miguel Lanza and the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas, Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas, all the warriors he’d met: he saw them without cavalry, without a battlefield, without infantry. Perhaps that was what José de San Martín held in his most secret soul: the vision of a world without heroes, in which men like himself, and also men like Lanza and Cárdenas, the young Father Arias and Captain Echagüe, his friends, would no longer be possible, because there would be no more saber battles, no more hand-to-hand fighting, no more code of honor, only fratricide, battles won against brothers, not against enemies; foreseeable, programmed wars in which death would be determined and accomplished at a distance. Dirty wars in which the victims would be the weak. The hero — he turned to look at the square shoulders of General José de San Martín in his dress uniform, solemnly walking toward the exit, speckled by the diffuse light of the cupolas — would then be like the god of the mountains, a dying god. Then he imagined the pathos of a San Martín grown old, firmly resolved never to stain his sword killing Argentine citizens, preaching through example, refusing to be “the vigorous arm,” no matter how annoying the bickering of the “intractable, the apathetic, and the savage.” At the apex of victory, San Martín refused to celebrate with romantic exuberance. His occasional solemnness was excused by the excessively stoic, Castilian severity of this son of Palencian parents. If he was going to avoid the temptation of dictatorship, it would not be to avoid responsibility for Argentina but to say to Argentina that everyone should behave as he did. Everyone should be responsible. From this day forward, each one of us must stand guard over his own life. Someone had to say it, and not from the abyss of the failures to come, but here and now, at the high noon of triumph, and triumphing over the passion for victory.

When he understood this, Baltasar Bustos felt a desire to run to the last hero and embrace him. But that would have been just one more celebration, a denial of the seriousness of the dying god. He wouldn’t insult him with recriminations or with praise. It was better that Baltasar remain with his comrades, hold on to this tenderness, these hopes, these jokes, this intimacy he would never again know.

The general understood and wished him a good voyage.

One sunny February morning, Baltasar boarded a schooner, the Araucana, sailing from Valparaíso to Panama. It passed Lord Cochrane’s flotilla, preparing for the attack on Lima. As he sailed by, Baltasar named the ships of the small fleet in a kind of farewell-to-arms: the forty-six-gun frigate Lautaro, the brig Galvarino, armed with incendiary rockets, the schooner Moctezuma, the man-of-war San Martín, and the transport ships and attack launches.

In Santiago he’d been told: “The woman you seek is in Caracas. But don’t expect anything good from her.”

For him, the war was over; only passion remained.

But in Santiago he did not want to look for Gabriela Cóo.