The Campaign

8. Veracruz

[1]

The Virgin of Guadalupe had no time to spread her arms in imitation of her son on the cross before receiving the blast.

She stood there with her hands clasped in prayer, with her eyes lowered and sweet, until the bullets pierced her eyes and mouth, and then her blue mantle and her warm, maternal feet.

The stars were reduced to dust, the horns of the moon shattered into a thousand pieces, the scandalized cherubs fled.

The commander of the fort of San Juan de Ulúa repeated the order, take aim, fire, as if a single barrage wasn’t sufficient for the independentist Virgin, as if the effigy venerated by the poor and the agitators who carried her image in their scapularies and on their insurgent flags deserved to be executed twice a day.

The priest Hidalgo in Guanajuato, the priest Morelos in Michoacán, and now the priest Quintana here in Veracruz had all thrown themselves into the revolt with the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe raised on high. And though they were ultimately captured and beheaded — except for that damned Quintana, who was still running around loose — she, the Virgin, could be shot at will, whenever there was no rebel leader to take her place.

Baltasar Bustos watched this ceremony of the shooting of the Virgin when he reached Veracruz from Maracaibo, and he concluded that he’d reached the strangest land in the Americas.

The revolutionary decade was coming to a close, and if in South America San Martín, Bolívar, Sucre, and O’Higgins had beaten the Spaniards and there had been no chance for retaliation, in Mexico the sacrifice of the poor parish priests, who led the only uprising of the Indians and the peasants armed with clubs and picks, had left independence to the dubious outcome of an agreement among warriors. On the one side, there were the weary professional soldiers of the Spanish Army, representatives of the reactionaries restored after the Congress of Vienna and the return to the throne of Ferdinand VII, more stupid and ultramontane than ever. On the other were the nervous (and enervated) creole officers, led by Agustín de Iturbide, who could no longer pretend (not even to fool themselves) to support Ferdinand or Carlota. All the same, the creole military men promised to protect the interests of the upper classes and keep the damned races — Indians, blacks, mestizos, zambos, cambujos, quadroons, and other racial mixtures — from taking over the government.

So the Virgin of Guadalupe was shot to death once more on the morning of Baltasar Bustos’s arrival at Veracruz, and through the perforated eyes of the Mother of God passed the rays of a tropical, leaden sun. Baltasar Bustos was entering Mexico: it was the final phase of his campaign of love and war. It had now been ten years since he’d kidnapped the white baby and put the black one in its place in Buenos Aires; but only two months had gone by since the quondam Luz María, Lutecia, the madam of Harlequin House, had handed him that ever so simple and direct note written in Veracruz:

Come instantly.

Ofelia.

Baltasar had brought something more than this note with him from Maracaibo: he was entering Mexico with the documents of a Spanish officer, as thin and nervous as a greyhound, whose face had been blown off and who had died in Baltasar’s arms.

He was entering Veracruz in search, first, as Lutecia had instructed him, of the priest Quintana. And entering Veracruz was like walking into a blazing oven.

Barely had Baltasar presented his papers to the port commander, Captain Carlos Saura, Fifth Grenadier Regiment of the Virgin of Covadonga, than he took off his royalist officer’s coat and used it to cover a wretched dead man in Customs House Street, an indigent, the other wretched creatures around him said, for whom there was no money for a funeral.

“No one wants to bury them free, neither the priests nor the government.”

[2]

“You’re looking for Father Quintana? Well, let’s see you find him!” the toothless man in Orizaba said, laughing, when Baltasar Bustos came within sight of that rainy city close to the volcano, a city occupied by the insurgent forces of the priest Anselmo Quintana for no other reason — according to the malicious gossips of Veracruz — than to destroy the Spaniards’ tobacco supplies, or — according to the kindhearted gossips of the same port — to dress his troops in the excellent fabric produced in Orizaba, or — according to the cynics — because the rich Spaniards had hidden their property in the convents and this priest, they knew for a fact, had no respect for nuns; he’d certainly had, with one nun or another, one or another of his many bastards. After all, the principal purpose of this campaign was to frighten the Spaniards and then enter the richest and most devout city to sack it before running off with the loot and mounting the next campaign.

“My God, when will there be peace!” said the creole ladies, fanning themselves before the parish church of Veracruz.

“We’ve put all our faith in Iturbide and the royalist creole officers,” said another lady to Baltasar Bustos.

“Let the war be over, even if the Spaniards go. But, for God’s sake, don’t let the Indians and the blacks take over everything, like that excommunicated, heretical priest Quintana, who’s taken the city of Orizaba. All the decent people have come to the port, fleeing from the outrages perpetrated by that damned priest,” said a coffee grower from Cempoala, standing at the entrance to the License Office. This man, named Menchaca, had come to investigate tax exemptions, so he could export his sacks of coffee. “Around here, they say the Indians did the work of the conquest, because without them the Aztecs would have dined on Cortez and his five hundred Spaniards. Now it’s up to us creoles to bring about independence, just so the Indians don’t take their revenge.”

“Are you asking who this parish priest Quintana is?” the gentlemen playing billiards and smoking in the bars near the docks and the lethargic sea asked Baltasar rhetorically. “A dangerous man. A womanizer. He’s got a ton of kids. He laughs out loud at the edicts of the Inquisition, which excommunicate him. He used to be a parish priest right here near La Antigua. Of course we know him. He liked to bathe naked in the Chachalacas River with his flock. He’s immoral. He would bet on fighting cocks. Do you know why he became a rebel, Captain Saura? Because in 1804 the consolidation law legislated by the Bourbons took away his privileges as a member of the lesser clergy. He lost those privileges, especially the exemption from civil justice. That’s the reason. And now they’ve assumed the privilege of sacking every hacienda they find in their path. Just like Hidalgo, Morelos, and Matamoros. This is a land of rebel priests, who take advantage of religion to fool the asses and behave like pirates.”

“He’s a show-off. He wears fancy cassocks. He covers his head with a red cap, as if he were a cardinal.”

“He’s the heir of Hidalgo and Morelos,” said a young lawyer, slapping Baltasar’s face with a glove as the tiles of an interrupted domino game poured over the floor of the entrance. “He’s our last hope to keep criminals and scoundrels like you, Captain, from exploiting Mexico one second longer. Death to Iturbide! Death to the creoles! Hurrah for Father Quintana and the equality of the races!”

Baltasar Bustos had to agree to a duel with the petty lawyer from Veracruz at six o’clock the next morning on the road to Boca del Río, but that same evening he left on horseback for Orizaba, traveling uphill all the way. Two dawns later, in sight of the misty town where the tropics have hung the veils of an eternal Lent, he had no difficulty entering the town occupied by the famous priest Quintana, the last defender, or so everyone said, of an egalitarian revolution in North America. A few added that it would not be long before this revolution was betrayed by Iturbide and the creole military men.

In any case, this revolution could hardly be expected to triumph, and it would quite properly be the last, Baltasar wrote to us, his friends in Buenos Aires, if it was so careless as to allow anyone at all to ride into the camp of General Quintana and ask for him without being stopped by a single guard or even asked for a password. Why?

“Because Father Quintana says that if someone’s out to get him not even the Pope himself could protect him.” The toothless man from Orizaba who said that to him stared at Baltasar — blue flannel trousers, linen shirt, calico jacket, Panama hat, and the horse that Menchaca the coffee grower had given him just because he liked him — as if to imply that a rich little creole like him, turned out in such clothes and with gold-rimmed glasses, posed no threat to the priest Quintana. And once in the wolf’s mouth, how long would this little gentleman with a straight nose, tangled sideburns, and honey-colored curls last if he tried any mischief?

“Just as night and the mountains, which are our real safeguard, protect our army, the priest Quintana says, ‘He who seeks me will find me.’ Try it, young fellow,” the boy encouraged Baltasar. “Find Anselmo Quintana on your own; there are standing orders never to point him out.”

Veracruz roads are impassable in summer. The rain never ends, but all that water seems to originate in Orizaba and then flow back to it. Baltasar forded the rivers when the roads disappeared under mudslides. Before starting out for the day, he breakfasted on pineapple and mangoes still warm from the sun. But in Orizaba everything smelled of damp earth, and the fruits — oranges, strawberries, quinces, and sloes — boiled in immense caldrons to be made into preserves.

The rebels’ weapons, compared with what he’d seen of José de San Martín’s in Valparaíso and to the arms shipments that passed through Maracaibo, were not impressive. A few rifles, many lances, and even primitive slings. As if to make up for the paucity of artillery, there was an overabundance of archives. Mountains of paper at the entrance to the old tobacco warehouses, where military headquarters had been established. Sheets upon sheets, until they competed with the jealous mountain, the Orizaba peak the Indians called Citlaltepetl, Mountain of the Star. And running like mice around these huge parchment cheeses were secretaries and lawyers, scribes busily writing proclamations, agents and propagandists of all kinds. In greater numbers than the soldiers of the rebel army itself.

Baltasar Bustos had seen enough of the revolution in Spanish America to be able to tell who these people were without anyone’s having to point them out. They were there to offer testimony about deeds, convince the incredulous, give the lie to the malicious, draw up laws, and elucidate constitutions. The star of this legal mountain was eloquence — easy, abundant, solemn, and seductive all at the same time: a rhetorical volcano. And while they were ambitious, these independence lawyers were not cynical. Dorrego and I, Varela, endlessly fixing our clocks in Buenos Aires, often said that in the case of the revolution for independence Pascal’s bet about the existence of God was absolutely pointless: believing in God is a bet you cannot lose. If God exists, I win. If He doesn’t, it doesn’t matter.

In our revolutions (especially in one as fragile and harried as that of the priest Quintana along Mexico’s Gulf Coast), if the independence movement failed, the insurgents would be shot. What was necessary, Xavier Dorrego told me, when he invited me to the estate he’d acquired on the road to San Isidro to admire his most recently acquired clock, was a faith comparable to that of the other Anselm, the saint who argued that if God is the greatest thing we can imagine, the nonexistence of God is impossible, because hardly have we negated God than we find His place taken by the greatest thing we can imagine, which is to say, God. But I, rather more of a Jacobin than our friend Dorrego, preferred to be satisfied with Tertulian’s formula as a basis for belief in God: it’s true because it’s absurd.

Both arguments — Anselm’s and Tertulian’s — were necessary, we said in the anarchy of the Year XX in Argentina, for us to go on believing in the merits of independence. We could hardly imagine our third citizen of the Café de Malcos, our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos, ready to risk his life (and his faith?) in the first line of the last revolution, the Mexican revolution, and finding himself surrounded, as if through the worst gypsy curse, by lawyers, theologians of law, church fathers of the incipient nation, all of them excited, as if winning the war depended on paper and as if only that which was written could be real in our new nations and as if what was real were a mere mirage, to be disdained to the degree to which it did not adhere to the written ideal.

“The Law is the greatest thing imaginable.”

“That’s true because it’s absurd.”

Drones, pen pushers, and intriguers: he saw himself in them and saw us, or perhaps men like me, Manuel Varela, an impenitent printer confident he could change the world by throwing words at it, and men like Xavier Dorrego, a rich creole convinced that an enlightened elite could, if guided by reason, save these poor nations destroyed first by tyranny, then by anarchy, and always by the simple, crushing fact of the ignorance of the majority. But weren’t all of us also the bearers of the slim, provincial culture of our time, autodidacts instructed by censored books introduced into the Americas among the ornaments and sacred vessels of humble priests who did not pay duties, whose property was not searched, privileges the modernizing law of the Bourbons had prohibited?

Weren’t we — Balta, Dorrego, and I, Varela, not forgetting the already deceased Echagüe and Arias — the patient kneaders of a civilization that was not yet bread and thus had nothing to distribute?

These thoughts were like a bridge that united us, here in the Río de la Plata, with our younger brother in the Gulf of Mexico.

But it wasn’t among us or those who looked like us that Baltasar would find the person he sought.

The camp followers came and went with baskets of clean clothes on their heads; they would whip the chocolate in huge caldrons after grinding it in gigantic grinders; they would get down on their knees to wash; they would give birth to the tortillas in that same servile, maternal posture at the metate, the traditional corn-grinding stone; and one of them, more active than the rest, would seem to take care of everything and everyone at once, her hair a mess, her feet bare, and wiping her nose, which ran because of an annoying cold.

Soldiers in shirt sleeves and with handkerchiefs tied on their heads; troopers with machetes and swords, handsome horsemen like ancient condottieri, sitting on supply crates, vain, with their silk kerchiefs knotted at the corners, floating loosely around their necks, their campaign boots beautifully polished, their bell-bottom trousers embroidered with spangles and gold. Those not sitting on boxes used wicker chairs that were so worn they, too, looked like gold. But none of them could be Quintana — unless Baltasar Bustos’s myopic but nervous and rapid eyes were unable to pick out the leader — doubtless because the leader was not any different from anyone else.

Perhaps it was the idea of the wicker and the gold that caused him to turn his head and catch sight of a blond head of hair that quickly hid in one of the tobacco sheds, mixing in with the laughing children hiding there as they played blindman’s buff. The blond child came out with a handkerchief over his eyes, whiter than the filth on his rough cotton shirt and trousers. He collided with Baltasar’s body and went running back to the shed, as his little comrades’ laughter grew louder.

Baltasar was amazed at the serenity of the troops and the women and children that followed them from place to place, overcoming the distances of the vast continent because of the war, perhaps linking the idea of war with the end of a centuries-long isolation, an intimate justification of death, pain, failure, all in the name of movement and of contact with other men, women, and children.

Serenity or fatalism? They barely looked up at Baltasar, answering all his questions in short, almost lapidary, phrases. Only one question was left unanswered: “Where is Quintana? Which of you is the priest?”

They seemed to be saying that if he had managed to get this far, then this young man was one of them, and if he wasn’t, they wouldn’t let him go alive … Meanwhile, why get upset?

“Before he became a priest, he was a farm worker and a mule driver; he knows the land better than any Spaniard or native-born creole. And if he doesn’t end up winning the war, the truth is, he’s never given a victory to our enemies.”

“He was always poor and still is. He’s a hand-to-mouth priest. Others have their rents and monies from special fees. Not him. He had only one living, and the king of Spain took even that away from him, just to show his power and his nastiness.”

“Go on, Hermenegildo, don’t put it to the gentleman that Father Quintana rebelled just because they deprived him of his living.”

“No, I think he rebelled against his solitude in the world. Look at him sitting there.”

“Careful, Hermenegildo, shut up, we have orders.”

“Excuse me, Atanasio. It just came out.”

“Let’s see you find him,” said the man called Atanasio to Baltasar. “Don’t believe my eyes. I’m blinder than a bat.”

“Did you say solitude? Who knows? He used to like cockfights and gambling back in his town. He mixed with the people. Who knows if he didn’t start fighting just to stop gambling.”

“Or so he could go back to gambling after the war,” said a man passing by, guffawing, potbellied and merry. But he wasn’t Quintana either, Baltasar said to himself as he scrutinized the dark faces, some zambo, others mulatto, very few Indian, the majority mestizo.

“I saw some blond children playing. Where did they come from?”

“From right here. Don’t you know that Veracruz has been the entrance to Mexico for every foreigner since Hernán Cortés and that there are lots of blue-eyed, fair-haired kids in these parts?”

“All of them children of sleepless nights!”

“Not so. You see, our leader is very good at hiding. Once in Guanajuato he was running away from the Spaniards when we had no weapons, and he wound up becoming the lover of the wife of a famous lawyer of the Crown. He winked and told us, ‘No one would ever think to look for me in that lady’s bed.’”

“You want to find Father Quintana? What if he’s dead and we don’t want anyone to know?”

“What if he never existed and we invented him just to scare the Spaniards?”

“But, sir, don’t you believe that story, because the people who think Papa Anselmo’s dead drop dead themselves from fear when they see him reappear.”

“They think they’ve beaten him, that he’s dying of hunger, that he’s living in a cave, that he’s turned coward. But Quintana comes back to life, returns, and starts over. That’s why we’ll follow him anywhere. He never gives up.”

“Because he’s got nothing to lose. A poor parish priest! His living, his Crown privileges, that was the only wealth poor priests had in New Spain.”

“How could he have anything when he went to war because he believes the clergy should have nothing, since the laws of Rome forbid them to have anything?”

“Hold on, what about those elegant uniforms he likes to wear? We all know about that.”

“So, who doesn’t like elegant uniforms? Why should we prove the Spaniards tell the truth when they call us ragged beggars? A man has to look his best once in a while, especially in parades, in battle, and at his funeral. Don’t you agree?”

“The best part, sir, is that he makes sure we have good uniforms, too.”

“And he won’t accept anyone in the troop if he can’t give him at least a sword and a gun.”

“The ones I’m thinking about are the poor tailors who work for General Father Don Anselmo Quintana, because when the Spaniards capture his coats they’re going to shoot the poor tailors who sewed them.”

“How they hate him!”

“Don’t be a fool. That’s why the general’s coats don’t have labels.”

“There aren’t even any bills, not a single reference in the ledgers to receipts and payments,” said a lawyer carrying a bundle of papers. He’d stopped to drink a steaming cup of coffee handed to him by the woman with the cold, who offered to carry the papers from one archive to another. The lawyer gave her the papers and then turned to Baltasar. “You’re looking for Quintana? Well, son, you’ve been given the countersign, haven’t you? You can find him if you want. Or if you are able.”

“Is he here?”

“I can’t tell you that, boy. Who are you?”

“I’m not going to tell you. What’s good enough for Quintana is good enough for me.”

“You don’t talk like a Mexican. But you don’t sound like a Spaniard, either.”

“Well, it’s a big continent. It’s hard for all of us to know each other.”

“Well, boy, let me give you some advice. The general seems really easygoing, but he’s a tiger when he gets his back up. So watch your step. Don’t play with him.”

“What do you mean?”

“What right do you have, addressing me so familiarly?”

“What right do you have calling me boy?”

“I have a degree in jurisprudence from the Royal University of Valladolid in Michoacán.”

“I see. In that case, what is it your excellency wishes to say to me?”

“Boy, I want to tell you what happened to a man who looked like you who was with us in the Oaxaca campaigns. A little creole officer, about your age, was insubordinate to General Quintana. He disobeyed orders by visiting a woman. But he found her in the arms of the Spanish commander of the town. And the commander, in his underwear, felt ridiculous and beaten. Without his uniform, what is an officer, whether creole or Spaniard? Nothing! Our young officer threatened him, and the commander disgorged some military secrets. Our little officer then ran out to report what he’d learned, but found no one in headquarters. So he acted on his own and without permission attacked the rear guard of the Spanish garrison at Xoxotitlán along the Oaxaca road. His action allowed us to take old Antequera, Mr.…?”

“I see. You, sir, are both curious and impertinent.”

“Boy, I want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as we say in court.”

“I am Captain Baltasar Bustos. My last posting was to accompany General José de San Martín in the Andes campaign.”

“Captain, a thousand pardons. You seem so…”

“Callow. Yes. Your story interests me, please finish it.”

“Delighted. Let’s see now. Sit down on this crate here. We lack amenities.”

“Just go on. Quintana was faced with a dilemma: should he punish the officer or not?”

“Exactly, Captain. Your perspicacity is astonishing.”

“No more than your malice, Counselor.”

“You flatter me, Captain. That was the dilemma. Punish him. Or allow a tradition of disorder and caprice to flourish. The priest Quintana has enough headaches defending himself against edicts of excommunication and anathemas for heresy.”

“And he wouldn’t add lack of discipline to excommunication?”

“And he couldn’t allow aristocratic creoles — sorry if I offend you, Captain — to place themselves above the law.”

“Which you, Counselor, represent.”

“Exactly. To carry on with their caprices.”

“So he had him shot.”

“Precisely. It’s only fair to warn those who come here alleging they’ve put aside their social class and become one of us.”

“Take a good look at my skin, Captain,” said a soldier in a white shirt sitting on a crate across from two bottles of wine, which he studied while making paper cartridges. “You’re white, I’m very dark. What does your freedom matter to me if it doesn’t include my equality?”

“What are you doing?” Baltasar asked the soldier, whose face, with thick, half-open lips, seemed as flexible and rough as a wrinkled leather wineskin.

“I’m trying to choose between these bottles.”

“Why?”

“Because one kind of alcohol is merciful and another is hostile. I look at the bottles and wonder which is which.”

“I couldn’t have guessed. And what are you doing with those papers?”

“I’m making the edicts of excommunication published by the Holy Inquisition against our leader Father Quintana into cartridges.”

“But you are Father Quintana,” said Baltasar.

“How do you know that?” The soldier raised his dark, wrinkled face.

“Because you’re the only person in this entire encampment who is wavering between two things, even if they happen to be two bottles of wine. And also, you’re showing me your bare head, while everyone else has his covered. You don’t want to be identified by your cap, which you always have on. Your cap would betray you, but the fact that you take it off betrays you more.”

“No,” said Quintana without emotion, covering his black, curly head with a tawny cap with long earflaps. “It isn’t alcohol that concerns me but Hosts. We’re making them out of corn, out of sweet potatoes, out of whatever we have. There is no wheat in this region. And I have to think about the effects of Communion not only on Christ’s body but on my own. Understand?”

He fixed his gaze on Baltasar’s light eyes without interrupting his cartridge making and added that the boy, if he was going to join them, should know right from the start that every Thursday — tomorrow — everyone had to live in suffering without the Father — only once a week, from Thursday to Friday, but every week without exception, accepting the Host and the wine as the literal body and blood, not only of Christ, but of all those who take Communion: Quintana, Bustos, that toothless man over there, this woman with the cold, the children playing blindman’s buff. “Don’t try to find out how many are with me, because over the course of the war I myself have lost count. Even those constipated lawyers who fill my head with projects and laws”—Quintana raised his voice so the interested parties could hear—“because they would like to carry out this revolution their way, with order and laws, but without me they would win no battles, not even against their mothers-in-law.

“So all of us, all of us, Captain Bustos, are without the Father because Christ dies on the cross and we only recover Him in the Eucharist; we all have to live this anguish and this hope from Thursday to Friday or we have no right to go on calling ourselves Christians. But only I, Captain, have the pleasure of mixing in my mouth the Host and the wine and of liberating with my saliva and the alcohol two bodies: mine and Christ’s. It is not enough to keep the first Fridays because Christ made a charming promise to St. Margaret Mary! This is not a matter of beatitude and grace, it’s a question of pain and necessity: every week at least, and not every day so as not to shock anyone.”

The priest Anselmo Quintana paused to take a breath, looked around him with a singular mix of arrogance, humor, irony, and unity with his people, and concluded: “That’s why I have to choose very carefully which wine I drink at Mass. As you see, with the excommunication edicts I make cartridges and return them like Roman candles to the Spaniards. Now come and eat something and talk awhile. You must be very tired.”

He stood up.

“Ah, yes, let me shake hands with someone who fought alongside José de San Martín. But first let’s smoke a cigar.”

[3]

There was no time to smoke anything that Wednesday morning in Orizaba that smelled of storm. Once the new arrival had solved the puzzle put to him by the entire encampment, the swarm of shysters and scribes descended on the priest Quintana with recommendations, warnings, requests, and news: “If the archives already take up more than ten wagons, what shall we do with them?” “Burn them,” says Quintana. “But then there will be no evidence of what we are doing. Your campaign, General, has always distinguished itself not only by winning battles but by setting down laws, freeing land, and giving constitutions and federal guarantees to those who work the land, if not for today, then certainly for tomorrow.” “Well, what do you want? To study all those papers, so you can burn some and save others? Your papers drive me mad, do whatever you like with them, but save me two, because I do want to keep them and remember them forever.” “Which two might they be, General?”

The priest stopped on his way to the tobacco sheds, where he was going with Baltasar. He took the cigar out of his shirt pocket but didn’t raise it to his lips or light it. He waved it like a hyssop or a scourge or a phallus before the eyes of the lawyers and scribes.

“One is my first baptismal act as a priest, gentlemen. In those days it was the custom to conceal the race of newborns. Everyone wanted to pass for Spanish; no one wanted the infamy of being termed black, mestizo, or anything else. So when I baptized that first child, I naturally wrote ‘of the Spanish race.’ Keep that paper for me also because that first child I anointed with the chrism was my own son. The other paper is a law I dictated to you in the Córdoba congress which says that from now on there will be no more blacks, Indians, or Spaniards but only Mexicans. Keep that law for me: the others deal with freedom, but that one deals with equality, without which all rights are chimeras. And then burn the rest and stop annoying me.”

But they did not do it. They formed swift circles around Quintana and Baltasar as the two stood under the wet mangroves, whose smell competed with the rising aroma of the tobacco sheds (which smelled of fertile earth and female thighs, smoky hair and mandrakes, primroses, a wake, and truffles all mixed together, Quintana murmured): “We must take precautions, Calleja del Rey says he’s obsessed with capturing you alive before the inevitable defeat of the royalist troops. Executions, the taking of hostages, rewards to towns that refuse to help us, the destruction of those that do — all these things are increasing, General. And the worst is that it’s the creole Mexicans who hate you most vehemently; they don’t want you on the political horizon when they take power after independence.”

“What do you advise me to do?” This time Quintana looked at them with a nervous tremor in his left eyelid.

“Come to terms with them, General, save something of all this and, above all, save yourself.”

“Listen to them, Baltasar. That’s how you lose revolutions and even your balls.”

“Come to terms, General.”

“Now, when the final hour is at hand, when my present enemy, Spain, is about to lose, and when my next enemy will be the creole officers? But if for ten years I didn’t come to terms with the king of Spain, who at least is a descendant of Queen Isabella the Catholic, why should I come to terms with a ridiculous little creole like Don Agustín de Iturbide? Who do you take me for, gentlemen? Haven’t you learned anything in ten years?”

“Well then, what will you do?”

The lawyers asked that question more to themselves than to Quintana.

“The same thing we’ve done since the beginning. When we had no arms we made up for it with numbers and violence. We began the campaign looking for weapons. And that’s how we’ll finish it. If they lay siege, we’ll eat tree bark, soap, vermin, just as we did when we joined Morelos in Cuautla. If they capture us and sentence us, we’ll commend our souls to God.”

He shouldn’t be such a fatalist, he should think about them, he should steal a march on Iturbide, and he himself, Anselmo Quintana, because of the sway he held over the people, should proclaim himself Most Serene Highness and with them, his advisers, form a Junta of Notables for the kingdom.

“The only junta I ever hope to see is two rivers joining together, and the only highness I want to experience is the top of a mountain. Mexico will be a republic, not a kingdom. And if there’s anyone who doesn’t like the taste of that, let him make up his kit and leave. There are lots of others to choose from. With me you know where you’re going. And without me we don’t go anywhere. Join up with the Spaniards. They’ll shoot you. Amnesty’s over. Join up with Iturbide. He’ll humiliate you. And forgive my arrogance. I know it’s a grave sin.”

Quintana seized the hand of one of the lawyers, the one who had called Baltasar “boy,” and kissed it. Then, without letting go, he knelt before the lawyer with his eyes lowered, asking for pardon for his bouts of pride; he respected them; he was an ignorant priest who respected learned men. He respected them, above all else, because what they did would remain, while what he did would be carried away by the wind and turned to birdshit. “There is no glory greater than a book,” he said, his eyes still lowered, “no infamy greater than a military victory. Forgive me, understand that without the revolution my life would have been obscure, with no incidents in it greater than a romance now and then with an anonymous woman. You don’t need me.”

He stood up and looked each one of them in the eye. “Forgive me, really. But as long as this campaign lasts, the only fat man around here is me.”

He guffawed, turned his back on them, and left them stunned by his rapid-fire Veracruz-style discourse — unlawyerish, inspired at times, but ridiculous, the lawyers said among themselves, turning their backs on him and heading for their improvised offices among their mountains of paper. But it wasn’t the first time he’d done that to them, and they were still here. Why? Because ten years are an entire lifetime in these parts, where, except by a miracle, no one lives beyond the age of forty, and because the priest was right: at this point they belonged to him, like his children, his women, or, if you like, his parents. No one would believe them if they tried to change sides. But Pascal’s bet would not work, because if the royalists didn’t win, the creoles would. No one would believe them.

“Well, well,” said a lawyer — who wouldn’t take off his black top hat and his funereal frock coat even if fighting broke out — as he wrinkled his nose so his eyeglasses wouldn’t slide down any farther. “In this New Spain, no act is as certain of success as betrayal. Cortés betrayed Moctezuma, the Tlaxcaltecs betrayed the Aztecs, Ordaz and Alvarado betrayed Cortés. You’ll see that the traitors will win and Quintana will lose.”

These men, to their own misfortune and despite everything, thought more about posterity than about immediate gain. Which is why, despite everything, they were still with Quintana, and the priest, despite his jests, did respect them. If they wanted an honorable place in history, this was it, alongside the priest. And if the path to glory depended on writing a splendid series of laws that abolished slavery, that restored lands to communities, and that guaranteed individual rights, they would side with him until the moment they were brought before the firing squad.

Quintana knew it, and even though he annoyed them every day with his insults, he would monthly, along with his religious Communion, perform a kind of civil communion:

“Never in the history of Mexico has there been, nor will there ever be in the future, a band of men more patriotic and honorable than you. I am proud to have known you. Who knows what horrors await us. You, the insurgents, will have saved the nation’s honor for all time.”

They didn’t fight. They wrote laws. And they were fully capable of dying for what they felt and wrote. They were right, Baltasar wrote to Dorrego and to me, Varela. Wasn’t law reality itself? Thus, the circle of the written closed over its authors, capturing them in the noble fiction of their own inventive powers: the written is the real and we are its authors.

Can there be greater glory or certainty more solid for a lawyer from Spanish America?

“And who, from Argentina to Mexico, Varela”—Dorrego smiled at me as he read this letter—“doesn’t have locked within his breast a lawyer struggling to break out and make a speech?”

Quintana, more of a fox than his shepherds, told Baltasar when they’d finally lighted their cigars under the shelter of the entrance to one of the tobacco warehouses: “Perhaps they will abandon me. Perhaps they won’t. But they all know that they owe their personality to me. Even if they’d all be delighted to send me back to my rural parish.”

“The contradictions in the human character will never cease to astonish me,” Dorrego said, sighing, when I read him these lines: he was obstinately engaged in winding a carriage-shaped clock covered with an oval glass dome.

[4]

Dining alone with Baltasar in the kitchen of the tobacco factory, Quintana told more about his past. Thick smoke rose from the braziers fanned by the women as one of them, the solicitous, sniffling woman Baltasar had seen when he reached the encampment, placed Gulf Coast tamales wrapped in plantain leaves on their tin plates. These were followed by cups of Campeche-style seviche, a mixture of oysters, shrimp, and sliced scallops in lemon juice, along with yellow moles Oaxaca-style, redolent of saffron and chilies.

Quintana said he shouldn’t be judged a rebel simply because of the business of his losing his privileges, although he admitted that had been the original reason for his taking up arms. Rebelling for such a reason seemed too much like taking revenge, while insurrection seemed too much like rancor. And nothing good could come of rancor. Baltasar should also consider that the Bourbon reforms asserted that they were merely bringing reality into line with law. Fine. In that case, not even the Pope had any right to possess more than he needed for his personal comfort. The clergy could not be allowed to own land, treasure, and palaces. Canon law prohibited that.

The independence revolution came along and he, Quintana, began to think it over and to look for a better reason than rancor to become a guerrilla. It hadn’t been easy, even when he was ten years younger, to leave the tranquillity of a curacy and start risking his life.

“Should I have stayed there not doing anything? I could have. It was possible. Why did I join the revolution? If I again deny that it was because the Crown took the living away from us poor priests and that my living was my only wealth, I’ll bore you. Besides, you’ll stop believing me. If I tell you that I took one step too many and told myself that if this was all a matter of respecting the law then we’d have to go all the way, you won’t believe me unless I explain something more important. Which is that in order to abandon my peace and quiet or not to stay in my parish like a fool while everyone else chose sides, I had to believe that what I was doing mattered. Mattered not only for me or for the independence of the nation but for my faith, my religion, my soul. And this is where the difficulties begin, because I am going to try to convince you that my political rebellion is inseparable from my spiritual rebellion. I know, because I know who you are, Baltasar, because I see your face and know what boys like you know, how much they’ve read and all the rest, that for you there can be no freedom with religion, independence with a church, or reason with faith.”

He sighed and noisily tossed into his mouth a piece of tamale that was so red with chilies that it looked like a wound.

“But to talk about all that, we need time and opportunity. Now we’re short of both.”

He grasped Baltasar’s impatient wrist. “I know you’ve come for other reasons and not to hear me talk.”

“You’re mistaken. I have the deepest respect for you.”

“Be patient. One thing leads to the other. You know, in my town there was a blind beggar who was always accompanied by his dog. One day, the dog ran away and the blind man regained his sight.”

For a long time, Baltasar stared at the priest, who went on eating noisily and with pleasure, savoring his yellow mole right down to the last grain of rice. Finally Baltasar decided to ask him, “Why do you have such confidence in me, Father?”

Quintana wiped his lips and gave the young Argentine a look of candid, friendly complicity. “We’ve been fighting for the same cause for the same span of time. Doesn’t that seem sufficient reason to you?”

“That’s only a fact. It doesn’t satisfy me.”

“Think then that I see in you something more and better than what you see in yourself. I sense that in your heart you feel slightly dissatisfied with everything you’ve done.”

“That’s true. I have my guilt and my passion, but I don’t have greatness. I find myself laughable.”

“Don’t worry about greatness. Worry about your soul.”

“I warn you, I don’t believe in the Church or in God or in the absolute power of absolution that you think you have.”

“So much the better. Rest today, and tomorrow we’ll meet at midday in the chapel here at the tobacco warehouses. Remember that tomorrow is Thursday and that every Thursday I become very strong, very spiritual. Be prepared to do battle with me. Then you will have your reward, and everything will be resolved. I think your ten years of struggle will not have been in vain.”

Baltasar did not allow the conversation to end there. He had the feeling — he wrote to us later — that the priest was right and that these would be the final hours of his long campaign for love and justice.

“What do you see in me, Father, that makes you treat me with such respect … or simple interest? Forgive my boldness in asking.”

Quintana might have stared at him, looking him right in the eye. He chose instead to scoop up the rest of the mole with a tortilla.

“You have taken charge of other lives.”

“But I…”

“We’ve all committed crimes. Shall I tell you something? Would you like to know mine?”

“Father, in the name of justice I exchanged a poor child for a rich child in his cradle. The poor child died because of me. I stole the rich child from his mother and condemned him to who knows what fate. And, in spite of that, I dared to love the mother, to pursue her ridiculously across half the Americas. Ten years, Father, with no success, no reward, all to become, as you say, a fool … Do you call that justice? Does that deserve respect? Does my having abandoned my sister without a second thought, indifferent to her fate, in the name of my passion? I didn’t give my father a last hope or affection. Am I worthy of compassion because I survived at Chacabuco while my comrades died? Wasn’t I lacking in mercy when I shouted a cruel truth at the Marquis de Cabra on his deathbed? Father Quintana … I killed a man in battle.”

“That’s normal.”

“But I didn’t kill him as a soldier. I killed him as a man, a brother. I killed him because he was an Indian. I killed him because he was weaker than I. I killed him as an individual, abusing him, even though I don’t know his name and can’t remember his face.”

With a strength that came from total conviction, Quintana told him to be quiet. “Don’t force me to confess my own sins to you.”

“What, that you’re a skirt-chaser, that you like cockfights, that you have illegitimate children all over the country, that you like fancy cassocks? Are those serious sins, Father?”

“Tomorrow I’ll make my confession before you,” he said with a sudden huge sigh of fatigue. “I’ll do it tomorrow. I swear. I’ll make my confession before you, even though you don’t believe in the power of absolution. I’ll confess before my younger brother, who in Maracaibo took charge of a fallen woman and the wounded enemy. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday, I shall speak to my brother in mercy.”

[5]

That night Baltasar slept in a hammock. He was lulled by the hammock, but even more by a weariness that came not from a single day but from ten years’ accumulation. It was the sleep that comes when something is about to end, an imminent sleep that told him: This is where you and I part company; now you will have to change, now you must take account of debits and credits, just as these paymasters and secretaries do who accompany Father Quintana.

Might Quintana be the true notary of Baltasar Bustos’s life?

Tomorrow was Thursday. They would meet; the priest had told him to come to the chapel at noon. Did they have anything else to say to each other? Baltasar thought that he had made his confession to the priest that afternoon, and the priest’s sins were the talk of Veracruz. What more could they say to each other? To what ceremony had this proud man surrounded by an aura of obscure self-denial invited him?

He had told Baltasar that in the young man he saw someone who took charge of others. The women in Harlequin House, the Duchess; the slender, disfigured officer … That was a slim list of credits next to the column of debits Baltasar had enumerated to Quintana.

But now, drifting deeper into sleep and rocked by the hammock (And who rocked it? There was no breeze, the Orizaba sky was in mourning but did not weep, and he descended, immobile, into sleep), Baltasar only reproached himself for a greater insincerity, which was to have told the rebel priest that everything he’d done, the good and the bad, had an erotic, sexual, amorous (as the priest liked to call it) purpose, which was to reach Ofelia Salamanca, finally to touch her after ten years of romantic passion paraded over the entire continent, the source both of sighs and of jokes, sung about in corridas, cuecas, and zambas.

To reach her, keeping his passion obsessive and unique, he’d had to sacrifice the love of the beautiful Chilean Gabriela Cóo, since to be unfaithful to Ofelia Salamanca, even if she didn’t know it, would be to betray the adorable Gabriela as well.

To see her face to face. To say to her: I love you. To say to her: I forgive you. To which of the two women would he say that? Didn’t one feed the love of the other, and didn’t both loves drink from a common spring — absence? Did he desire them so much only because he did not possess them?

He opened his eyes. The hammock stopped rocking. He shut them again, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his presumption. What was he going to pardon Ofelia Salamanca for? What did he know of her except, in effect, gossip, idle talk, limericks that often created a new truth only for the sake of rhyme? How did he dare? Hadn’t Gabriela told him in Santiago de Chile that acting is insincere, fleeting, that it leaves no more trace of itself than words?

Then he plummeted again from the peak of his aroused consciousness to a pleasant unconsciousness, drugged by the premonition of peace and rest after ten years of exaltation. And in the depths of his sleep he was always on his way back to El Dorado. Holding Simón Rodríguez’s hand, he returned to that most high abyss, that deep promontory, the heart of the Quechua mountain, the navel of sleep, and there he accused himself, with rage, with despair, with the terrible feeling that he’d lost his chance, because he hadn’t stopped for an instant to watch the passage of dreams in the luminous eyes of the inhabitants of the city where everything moved in light, was born from light, and returned to light.

He scorned dreams. He rejected the possibility of understanding anything through a dream which was not his own, which was not bound to the dream of reason, faith in material progress, the certitude that human perfectibility was infallible, and the celebration that in the end happiness and history, the subject and the object, would become one, once and for all.

The other story, the warning but also the possibility of escape, was perhaps in the eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado, where light was necessary because everything was dark and where, for that reason, they could see with their eyes shut and reveal their dreams in the screens of their eyelids, warning him, Baltasar Bustos, that for each reason there is an unreason without which reason would cease to be reasonable: a dream that simultaneously denies and affirms reason. That there was an exception to every law, which makes the law partial and tolerable. But his most vivid sensation as he abandoned El Dorado was not that things complement each other, but rather the other extreme, a negation:

Evil is only what our reason hides and refuses to contemplate.

The real sin is to separate the sensible world from the spiritual world.

Then in a dream Ofelia Salamanca ceased to be a visible projection onto the animated wall of an Indian cavern, visible but untouchable, as delightful as his eyes announced it to be from a balcony in Buenos Aires that May night so far away.

Now she was the object of his touch (she was a single, unending animal wearing pulsating silk), of his hearing (she was a Mass in the desert, a voice outside of consciousness telling him from then on, without giving him an opportunity to reply, “You love me!” “You love me not!”), of smell (she was the most delightful stench, the stink without which there is no love, the perfume of a sullied clover leaf), and of sight: Ofelia Salamanca had eyes on her nipples that stared at him furiously, seductively, disdainfully, mockingly, until they made him wake up with a start.

The hammock stopped rocking. Ofelia Salamanca was the owner of the world.

[6]

Anselmo Quintana was standing before the altar. Baltasar Bustos’s silhouette materialized in the light at the entrance to the chapel, and the priest waited until the thudding of his boot heels on the floor of flaking bricks, too soft for this rainy climate, stopped. When he was near, Quintana put his hand on Baltasar’s shoulder and said to him, “Yesterday you didn’t let me say my confession. Today you are going to sit in my place in the confessional, and I am going to kneel at your side and speak in secret through the grating.

“I know you don’t believe in the sacrament. So it shouldn’t matter where we do this. Yet it does matter to me to be on my knees to speak to you. Today is Thursday, and from now until tomorrow, weekly, Jesus Christ dies again for us. Many forget it; I do not. The most important thing I do is to remind anyone who cares to listen that if we are here and live, it is because Jesus sacrificed Himself to give us life on earth. Bear in mind then, Baltasar, that what I am going to tell you is preparation for the supreme act of faith, which is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is inseparable from Christ’s sacrifice. And even though Calvary sufficed, each time I drink the blood and eat the body of Christ, I add to His sacrifice and act in the name of the quick and the dead. The Cross is the confluence of everything: sacrifice, life, death. Calvary, as they taught us in seminary, was sufficient in itself. But for me the Eucharist comes closest to that sacrificial sufficiency. I have no road more certain toward Christ than the Eucharist.”

Quintana’s words allowed for no response, and in any case the force with which he led Baltasar to the confessional precluded any appeal.

Baltasar fell into the seat of the confessor with a leaden sense that anchored him there as if in a loathsome jail cell, the mortal facsimile of the coffin whose worn-out velvet smelled of trapped cats.

Anselmo Quintana knelt down outside, by Baltasar’s unwilling ear.

“Yesterday you did not allow me to confess,” said the priest.

“But I told you I don’t believe in the power of absolution.”

“You think I want to talk about your sins, so you shut yourself off from me. But your sins do not interest me. Your fate does. And what I confess to you is also part of my fate. Let’s get started: I confess, brother, to having ordered the execution of a hundred Spanish soldiers held in jails and even in hospitals, in order to avenge the death of my eldest son at the hands of the royalists. I ordered their throats slit. The idea of forgiveness never even passed through my mind. I was blinded. Tell me if you would have forgiven me if I were your father and you my dead son.”

Baltasar said nothing. A feeling of growing modesty was taking control of him, inseparable respect and compassion for this man whose voice was becoming black, thick, guttural, reverting to ancient African roots, almost the voice of a psalmodist, which Baltasar did not want to interrupt until he’d heard everything, the same propitiatory act, perhaps, that would permit a believer to repeat the sacrifice on Calvary without taking the slightest bit away from the sufficiency of Christ’s martyrdom.

He decided to hear him through to the end without arguing, to listen to him speaking there on his knees, his face like an old ball that has been kicked around: “I understand your silence, Baltasar, I understand your reticence, but understand mine; I share your fear of our weaknesses, and I fear as you do that a word spoken in confidence will be taken away by the one who listens to us, will get lost with our secret in the multitudes, and that we shall be left at his mercy if one day, out of despair or necessity, he repeats it to others; if you don’t believe in me, in my priestly investiture or in my power to pardon sins, I shall repeat that I understand you, and for that reason I ask not that you confess formally to me but that you accept my humility as I kneel before you, exposing myself to you as the one who carries away my secret and, not believing in the sacrament, gives my secret to the world. I offer myself to you as an example. I confess before you, Baltasar, because yesterday you said things for which I have to assume some responsibility, and it does not seem right that the burden of our relationship, which has barely begun, which may not last very long, should fall upon me: one day we shall give an accounting not only of ourselves but of each one of the people to whom we have said something or from whom we have heard something. I ask you to accept this and not to believe that yesterday only you spoke, unburdening your conscience, and that today only I will do the same: your responsibility, yours and mine together this morning, is to give an accounting of all the beings who have done us the favor of listening to us. Would you like to know something? I told you my crime against the prisoners, and you should understand that, just as you do when you sin, I committed a crime against universal morality. St. Paul explains that sin is an assault on the natural law inscribed in the conscience of each human being. In my own case, it was also a violation of the vows of the priesthood, which include forgiveness, mercy, and respect for the will of God, who alone is able to give and take away life. Because of what I had done, I feared the punishments of hell that day when I avenged my poor son, a twenty-year-old boy who gave himself to the fight for independence, a gallant fellow with a red kerchief tied on his head, which made it difficult to see the blood when the ferocious Spanish Captain Lorenzo Garrote executed the sentence. Garrote saved his own life and embittered mine … But I realized, Baltasar, that I did not fear the ordinary hell of flames and physical suffering but the hell I imagined, and that hell is a place where no one speaks: the place of eternal, total silence forever; never more a voice, never a word. For that reason I kneel before you and beg you to listen to me, to postpone that inferno of silence, even if you do not speak to me, even if there is a hint of disdain in your stubborn silence. It does not matter, my little brother, I swear it does not matter, as long as we do not let our language die. Listen to me, then: I admit that I rebelled because I was unhappy when I lost my living, but now my rebellion has gone far beyond that. My rebellion led me to one gain after another: this is what I want to communicate to you; this is what you should understand. I gained rational faith without losing religious faith: I could have said, simply, ‘I am a rebel priest; those who excommunicate me are right. I am going to deliver myself over to independence, to the wisdom of the age, to faith in progress; I am simply going to damn religious faith.’ Everything was joining against my faith: my rage when they declared me a heretic and blasphemer, my fear when they denied me the Host, my rancor when they killed my son, my temptation to be only a rationalist rebel. This has been my most terrible struggle, worse than any military battle, worse than all the spilled blood and the obligation to execute: not to give in before my judges, not to admit they were right or give them the pleasure of saying, ‘Look, we were right, he was a heretic, he was an atheist, he deserved to be excommunicated.’ They ask me to repent. They don’t know that that would mean delivering myself to hell. It would mean admitting the absolute evil in me — reason without faith — because I can lose the Church that has expelled me, but I cannot lose God; and to repent would be exactly that, to return to the Church but to lose God — not reason, which can coexist with the Church, but God who can exist without the Church and without reason.”

Quintana lowered his head, and Baltasar saw the tawny-colored cloth of his celebrated cap hiding his curly dark hair, which the priest revealed so as not to stand out from the other men in the encampment, but in so doing he revealed himself with more fanfare than if he’d proclaimed it aloud: only Anselmo Quintana wears a cap amid all these top hats worn by the lawyers and the red kerchiefs worn by the troops; thus, Anselmo Quintana is the man who does not use a cap to disguise himself but who, by the same token, does not wear frock coats or tie kerchiefs on his head and who stares intensely at two bottles in order to choose between good and bad alcohol just as he might choose between reason and the Church. But you can’t just choose God: God is, with or without the Church, reason, or believers. “That’s where I have concentrated my real rebellion,” the priest Anselmo continued. “I’m telling this to you, Baltasar, because you are like my younger brother in the world and you are also rebelling against its laws, but you remain open to new persuasions. My real rebellion was to suffer the Calvary of losing my Church but not my God … Imagine what went through my soul when I took up arms on the Gulf Coast, angry over the loss of my living. Imagine me pug-nosed and blind, just ten years ago, consumed with lust, in love with gambling, with women, a horse’s ass of a priest, with a troop of bastards scattered all over the place, a seducer of women who came to kneel next to me and who thought that, to receive my forgiveness, they had to give themselves to me, and from time to time I did not discourage them … I took up arms, my boy, being the kind of man I was, and then excommunication hits along with the rain of labels: apostate against the Holy Catholic religion, libertine, seditious, revolutionary, schismatic, implacable enemy of Christianity and of the state, deist, materialist, and atheist, guilty of divine and human treason, seducer, impenitent, lascivious, hypocrite, traitor to king and country. They didn’t omit a one, Baltasar. The Holy Inquisition did not omit a single crime. They threw all of them at my poor head, and every time an accusation struck me between the eyes, I would say, ‘They are right; they must be right. It’s true, I deserve this, and my poor, damned motive for rebelling makes me a criminal in all those other things, and that, too, must be true…’ But I think, brother Baltasar, that the Inquisition, as usual, went too far; they accused me of too many things, some right, others outlandish, and I said to myself then, ‘God cannot look on me with as much injustice as my judges. In God’s vocabulary there are probably few words for me, but there most certainly must be a dictionary common to Jesus Christ and His servant Anselmo Quintana. They throw so many words at me, but not enough that every week, from Thursday to Friday, you, Lord, cannot still speak, my Jesus, with the most lascivious, impenitent seducer among your servants…’

“The word is the only thing that links us when everything else becomes useless, treacherous, threatening. The word is the ultimate reality of Christ, His vigil among us, what allows us, without pride, to say, ‘I am like Him…’”

Quintana raised his voice as he said this, as if his faith could all be reduced to these few words, and Baltasar, in the half light of the confessional, saw through the grating not the fluttering earflaps of Father Anselmo Quintana’s cap but the head of Gabriela Cóo, crowned with clouds and weeds. He had to dispel that adorable vision because the voice of the priest continued, lower now, but more certain as well: “From that time I only spoke with Him, but He was more severe than all my judges put together, because no one can fool Him. There are no little tricks with Him. God is the Supreme Being who knows all, even what we imagine about Him, and steals the march on us and imagines us first; and if we go about thinking that it depends on us to believe or not in Him, He steals the march on us once again and finds the way of telling us that He will go on believing in us no matter what happens, even if we abandon Him and deny Him. That is the voice I listened to during the night when my soul suffered tribulation because of the edicts of expulsion from the Church and the calls for me to repent: the voice of Christ saying to me, ‘I am going to go on believing in you, Anselmo Quintana, even if you are a seducer, lascivious, a libertine, a hypocrite, which you are; why deny it? But what you are not, Anselmo, my son, is an apostate, a heretic, an atheist, or a traitor to your country, that you are not…’

“‘Listen to me carefully, your God says to you: there is no way that I’m going to allow that lie to pass.’”

He raised his eyes to tell Baltasar that all he needed to hear from God’s voice were those words, to fight for ten years, “to not yield in my battle for my country or in my other struggle for the love and confidence of my Creator. Imagine what one thing would have been without the other — neither the nation nor God; that most certainly would have been my anguish, and they know it, which is why they call me a heretic, excommunicate me, and ask me to repent and come back to the sheepfold. But Jesus said to me, ‘Anselmo, my son, don’t be a comfortable Christian; make life hell for the Church and the king, because they adore tranquil Christians. I, on the other hand, adore rampaging Christians like you; you gain nothing by being a Catholic without problems, a simple believer, a man of faith who doesn’t even realize that faith is absurd and is faith and not reason because of that. Reason cannot be illogical; faith is and has to be, because you have to believe in me against all evidence, and if I were a logician, I wouldn’t be God. I wouldn’t have sacrificed myself. I would have accepted all the temptations in the desert and would be’—are you listening to me, Anselmo, my son, are you listening to me, brother Baltasar? — ‘the very same long-tailed, incorrigible Devil who invented the statement “I think, therefore I am.”’ What pretension! Not even my thoughts are my own, not even my very existence. I neither think nor exist alone. I share each word with God, with you, Baltasar, and each heartbeat as well. Then I learned something else, that it was my obligation, in the name of the simple people of this world, to be complicated; just ask yourself right now as I look at you and listen to you, if you aren’t too comfortable in your philosophy, because I think you are being very simple with your own secular faith in reason and progress. You are as foolishly devout as those women who grow old in churches, sweeping and lighting candles every single day. Please, Baltasar, always be a problem, be a problem for your Rousseau and your Montesquieu, and all your philosophers. Don’t let them pass through your soul without paying something at the spiritual customs house; don’t give your faith to any ruler, any secular state, any philosophy, any military or economic power without adding your confusion, your complication, your exceptions, your damned imagination that deforms all truths.

“Well!” shouted Father Quintana in a flash of good humor. “Wouldn’t I have been better off losing my faith and avoiding all that anguish? No sir, because then I wouldn’t have fought for independence. It’s as simple as that. I would have let myself be beaten in the first fight. My faith in the nation that I want, free, without slaves, without the horrible need for thousands and thousands of bottom dogs, ignorant, dying of hunger, all this, Baltasar, would not have been possible without my faith in God. You may have your own formula. This is mine. I’m not asking you to believe as I do. I’m not that simple. I am asking you to complicate your own secular faith. You’ve come from far, far away, and this continent is very large. But we have two things in common. We understand each other because we speak Spanish. And, like it or not, we’ve had three centuries of Catholic, Christian culture, marked by the symbols, values, follies, the crimes and the dreams of Christianity in the New World. I know fellows like you: they’ve all passed through here; you’ve already seen them, although the ones you saw were a bit more beaten up than you, like the lawyers, scribes, authors of laws and proclamations in my own company. I’ve talked with all of you for ten years. You have given me the education which, sadly, I never had. My parents were mule drivers from the coast. I was in a religious seminary when I was young, and now that I’m grown up, I’m in the secular seminar with all of you. But let’s get on with it. I’m not foretelling anything — I have it right under my nose, as pugged and battered as it may be. All of you would like to put an end to that past which seems unjust and absurd to you, to forget it. Yes, how good it would have been to be founded by Montesquieu instead of Torquemada. But it didn’t happen that way. Do we want now to be Europeans, modern, rich, governed by the spirit of the laws and the universal rights of man? Well, let me tell you that nothing like that will ever happen unless we carry the corpse of our past with us. What I’m asking you is that we not sacrifice anything, son, not the magic of the Indians, not the theology of the Christians, not the reason of our European contemporaries. It would be better if we gathered up everything we are in order to go on being and to be, finally, something better. Don’t let yourself be divided and dazzled by a single idea, Baltasar. Put all your ideas on one side of the balance, then put everything that negates them on the other, and then you’ll be closer to the truth. Work counter to your secular faith, brother. Put next to it my divine faith, but as ballast, weight, contrast, and a part of your secularism. I do the same thing, working from my faith, with yours … Take me into account more, much more tomorrow than today, and think seriously that if I not only joined but forwarded the revolution until the end, it was so that history would not leave the Church behind—my church. See to it that you don’t leave your own church of romantic, anticlerical philosophers behind. I don’t want to find out ten years from now that you became just one more man made sick by frustrated Utopias, by betrayed ideals. And don’t think I don’t thank you all for your skepticism, my good company of lawyers. But I have what you lack, let me say it with forgiveness and humility. I had to burn the midnight oil reading St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus. Rousseau and Voltaire are a corrective for me, even an emetic. But you modern fellows, what will you use as a corrective for what you’ve learned? Experience, of course. But experience without ideas does not become a destiny, a soul … And what is the soul, St. Thomas wonders, but the form of the body? Think about it and you’ll see that that’s no paradox: the soul is the form of the body. Without the soul, the body would not last, would begin instantly to stink and disintegrate … Give soul to your body, Baltasar, and let’s hope we see each other again in ten years … Bah, perhaps tomorrow I’ll be captured, and perhaps that’s why I felt the need to talk with you today. I want you to think about me when you hear about my end. I also want you to take charge of my memory.”

The priest was silent for a long time, and later Baltasar Bustos chastised himself for what, with time, he came to see as a cowardice that ratified the worst aspects of his character, argumentative without nobility, envious of what he wasn’t, abusive toward the weak, tempted to humiliate anyone he thought inferior … He did not fool himself later. But in that moment, when Quintana stopped talking, he thought he was acting as the priest had asked him to after giving over to him his soul, while, in his blindness, Baltasar Bustos thought the priest was only giving him a lesson.

“I was wondering, as I listened to you, what bothered me most in you — the solitary, chaste priest or the promiscuous priest with children of his own.”

Quintana tried to penetrate with his eyes the grating that separated them, so that Baltasar would realize the priest was hurt, silenced by a sudden shock more than by overwhelming fatigue.

“Do you want to fight with me?”

“You asked me to be combative. I can imagine that one fine day the Pope will lift the excommunication and you will think that everything you did was useless, a failure…”

“Forgive me, I don’t follow your line of thought…”

“I mean that I hope you aren’t alive when the Church forgives you and says ‘I was mistaken.’”

“The deed of trying to do something good is sufficient unto itself.”

“Even if it fails.”

“For God’s sake, Baltasar, don’t get lost in all this. All I wanted to tell you is that you and I resemble each other. We are both fighting for our souls, although you confuse the soul with matter. It’s of no importance. You may be right. The soul is the form of the body. But you and I … Later, those who fight for money and power will come. That’s what I fear. That will be the nation’s failure. And then you and I — or what you and I leave in this world — should help the thieves and the ambitious to recover their souls. That would be my answer to those who forgive me two hundred years from now.”

“But you, in part, agree with them.” Baltasar tied to guess at the look on Quintana’s mistreated face, turned into gridwork and made even uglier by the grating on the confessional door. “You have been lascivious, a hypocrite, and a seducer…”

“Do you know what the word devil means?” asked the priest, with his eyes lowered and his brow severe. “My problem is that I have not been exempt from the temptations of the flesh. Yours, on the other hand, is that you will not be exempt from the temptations of the soul. Devil means liar.”

“See, you judge me with the same severity with which you have been judged…”

“Ah, and it also means accuser. I want you to know how they are going to judge me, Baltasar. They are going to humiliate me on my knees before the bishop. They are going to repeat the excommunication and the anathemas. Then they will deliver me to the secular authorities. They will shoot me in the back and then again, down on my knees. I will be decapitated, brother. They will put my head in an iron cage in the public square of Veracruz. I shall be an example for all those who feel the temptation to rebel…”

He couldn’t finish the sentence because Baltasar was already out of the confessional, where he’d spent an hour occupying the priest’s place, and now instead he was embracing the priest, asking his forgiveness, asking him why he did what he did for him, feeling the power, like that of a stormy sea, with which Quintana reined in his own emotion, like the frozen seas where huge tempests seem gigantically immobile, allowing the wind and not the water to be the principal player in the storm.

But the priest embraced Baltasar, kissed his head, welcomed him, and Baltasar understood that Father Anselmo was taking charge of him, so that he, Baltasar, could take charge, finally, of what was awaiting him …

[7]

With the strength of a mule driver, the old warrior Father Anselmo Quintana turned the convulsed body of his younger brother, the captain from Buenos Aires, Baltasar Bustos. He made Baltasar look toward the entrance to the chapel.

In the same rectangle of light he himself had occupied an hour earlier, two silhouettes now stood out clearly, a contrast both in gender and in clothing. A woman and a child.

“Come here, come in…”

Unlike Baltasar, the two moved forward noiselessly. They were barefoot and said nothing to disturb the silence of the chapel. That silence had not swallowed up the martial thud of Baltasar’s heels. He was physically suspended between his two personalities, the fat, myopic young man and the slim, longhaired combatant; the Baltasar of Buenos Aires balconies and the Baltasar of the mountain campaigns in Upper Peru; the Baltasar of the salons of Lima and the Baltasar of the febrile brothels of Maracaibo.

Now, at thirty-five, Baltasar had achieved equilibrium between the half-blind but inquisitive gaze, the robust but agile body, and the lank mustache that gave firmness to his too small but full lips. His hair was indomitable; it seemed to have a life of its own, more than enough life for our romantic century, as we, Dorrego and I, Varela, decided to call it in Buenos Aires, when news of the poems of Byron and Shelley began to reach the New World … And his handsome Roman nose always gave Baltasar an air of nobility, resistance, stoicism. His gold glasses rested uncomfortably on the bridge of his nose.

The couple who approached were not at first glance recognizable, however, though the boy was the same one who’d played blindman’s buff the day before, a blond child about ten years old, whose fair complexion had to be surmised, because of the tangle of his filthy hair and the dirtiness of his cotton shirt and trousers.

And she was a woman of indefinite age, her hair combed back into a bun poorly held together with pins. Stray hair fell over her forehead creased with wrinkles. The furrows of age around her lips, at the corners of her mouth, and on her chin were not disguised by makeup. The woman, barefoot like the boy, crossed her arms as if wrapping herself in a nonexistent shawl, and her trembling body betrayed the treachery of the tropics in Orizaba, the results of perpetual dampness and rain. Her bad cold was becoming a persistent cough.

“Ofelia,” said the priest in his most tender voice, “I’ve already explained to the captain that you agree the boy should return with him to Argentina.”

Quintana looked now at Baltasar — who was a single immobile block, forever locked in the most secret and unshakable of melancholies — as Baltasar stared into the totality of his life; the woman, much too busy blowing her nose, did not even look at him. Quintana told him that the child had been born ten years before in Buenos Aires and then kidnapped under mysterious circumstances. But his mother had managed to get him back from the black wet nurses who had saved him from a fire and who later asked for ransom money. She sent him to Veracruz to be put in the care of the priest Quintana, in the hope that someone would come to get him and take charge of him.

“Yesterday I told you, brother. Your destiny is to take charge of those who need you. And your nation will need both you and this boy. He should go with you. We shall survive here. We are very ancient. You, the Argentines, are the children of the Americas, the younger brothers of this old continent. Take the boy with you and teach him the best there is in the world with your good friends. You will have peace and prosperity. We will not.”

“What about her?” Baltasar managed to blurt out.

“Ofelia Salamanca has been the most faithful agent of the revolution for independence in America,” said Quintana, staring fixedly at the woman, who seemed dazed and was not listening. “She has kept our struggle alive by creating a network of communication, something so difficult for us on this continent. If I have been in contact with San Martín and Bolívar, it has been thanks to her. Thanks to her, we found out in time what Spanish reinforcements were leaving Callao for Acapulco or going from Maracaibo to Veracruz. She is a heroine, Baltasar, a woman worthy of our greatest respect. She sacrificed her reputation in order to learn secrets, and stained her hands with the blood of traitors who passed themselves off as insurgents while actually serving the royalist cause. One day her story will be written. How ingenious she was so often! She used a network of songs that ran through the Americas faster than a lightning flash to send us news, taking advantage of a rumored love affair between herself and some creole officer from Buenos Aires.”

“Father, I am that officer. The songs mention my name. Don’t try to fool me.”

“Not another word, Baltasar. She ordered another hero of independence to be sent here, a man who, like her, pretended to be a royalist to acquire intelligence and to spread false rumors. She wants that hero, you, to take charge of her son. That is why she wrote to her friend Luz María in Maracaibo, asking you to come.”

Quintana threw his arm around Ofelia’s shoulders.

“Now she’s very sick and cannot take care of the child or work for us any longer. She agrees that her son should return to Argentina with you. I suppose that you…”

“Yes,” Baltasar said simply. “I agree as well.”

The captain from Buenos Aires came nearer just as Ofelia Salamanca left Father Quintana’s side. She lost her balance, and Baltasar helped her to her feet. It was the first time he’d ever touched her. She said, in a faint voice, “Thank you.”

They separated instantly. She never looked at him. He did not want to see the mortal sadness in those eyes he’d adored so intensely. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and said something like, “What you need is a good bath. You’ll see, you’re going to like the pampa. From now on, you’re going to be my little brother…”

Clutched in his fist, Baltasar held the red ribbon that one night in May Ofelia Salamanca had worn around her neck. The myopic young man had stolen it from the Marquis de Cabra the night of another death in Lima.

He would have liked to return it now to Ofelia, to hang it down on her bosom, but the woman’s dazed look held him back.