The Campaign

9. The Younger Brother

Balta’s friends Xavier Dorrego and I, Manuel Varela, were standing on the dock waiting for him. We were overflowing with news for him. Eleven years since we’d seen each other! We gave him a rapid summary of what was happening in Argentina. All eyes were on Bernardino Rivadavia, the young prime minister who was fighting for liberal principles, free education, open communication, colonization of the interior, auctioning off of publicly owned lands, creating a public library, publishing books, stimulating local talent … One phrase of his seemed to summarize everything: “We are anticipating the future…”

But Balta did not seem to be listening to us. He gazed at us with intense seriousness, reading the changes in our features and perhaps guessing at the changes in our souls.

Well, he soon found out that Dorrego was still an inveterate philosophical Jacobin, although his family inheritance obliged him to be a conservative in economics, no matter how anticlerical he might be in his ideology.

Dorrego’s close-cropped hair had rapidly gone gray, giving a reddish tint to the porcelain tones of his skin. But he seemed more fashionable with his severe cap of short hair. It was a radical renunciation of the age of wigs. We would never see them again.

I, however, continued to be a printer, and will continue to be one all my life. And now that it was possible to publish modern authors without fear of censorship, I made great efforts in that direction. While I waited for authors of our own to emerge, I already had before me a life of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, a manuscript stained with rain and tied with tricolor ribbons, which the author, who called himself Aureliano García, had sent to me, as best he could, from Barranquilla. It was a sad chronicle, however, and like the story about the blind violinist from Tabay that Baltasar had written to me, it foretold a bad end for the Liberator and his deeds. I preferred to go on publishing Voltaire and Rousseau (La Nouvelle Héloïse was the greatest literary success in the entire history of South America) and leave for another time the melancholy prophecy of a Bolívar as sick and defeated as his dream of American unity and civil liberty in our nations.

Yet, being together again gave the three of us immense joy. Baltasar knew that he had written a chronicle of those years — the one I’m holding in my hands right now, which one day you, reader, will also hold in yours — in the stream of letters he’d sent “Dorrego and Varela” (we’d begun to sound like a company).

We let Baltasar take the boy out to José Antonio Bustos’s old estate so that he could meet Sabina. He found her a bit mad: she had a mania about sleeping in a different bedroom every night — her father, José Antonio’s; that of her mother, Mayté, dead so many years before; that of the absent Baltasar; and, presumably, that of the forgotten Jesuit tutor, Julián Ríos — so she could keep them all warm.

It was useless. Brother and sister could never understand each other, and Sabina, as Baltasar told us when he got back to Buenos Aires, did not even have the courage to find herself a man, not even — he smiled with a malice unusual in him — now that Rivadavia’s modernizing laws had rooted the nomadic gauchos on the estates, forcing them to become agricultural workers and cattle ranchers, as well as a reserve available for conscription.

“Nothing happens for Sabina except in her nostalgia,” her younger brother said, sighing. “She is a living recrimination.”

By a strange confluence of destinies, neither Dorrego nor I had ever married, preferring to prolong our lives as Buenos Aires rakes as long as possible, though we were both approaching forty. The truth was that carousing was our pretext, a very Buenos Aires pretext to be sure, because our city had always abounded in vieux garçons who would not resign themselves to giving up the exciting freedom of their youth. And since Buenos Aires was a city of crossed destinies where thuggish gauchos, fleeing conscription, would jump off their horses — followed by country girls in love with them and cast, as they used to say, into perdition; but it was also a city of Spaniards who had come for business, and of Englishmen who had come to create works of civil engineering, we all met in the brothels, the bars, and taverns. We danced and drank and loved with the calm awareness that our Buenos Aires was a city of foundations, founded twice at the beginning and three, four, even a hundred times each time a foreigner, from the interior or from Europe, came to live here.

We couldn’t drag Baltasar to our bordellos, and we ourselves began to give them up. We realized that the real reason for our carousing was that we were awaiting the return of our “younger brother” to see what we would do together. Who would have thought it? In the decade of our participation in the revolution, we had encouraged him from Buenos Aires, had imposed on him that mission to Upper Peru to follow in the footsteps of Castelli, and had thrust him into a life of dangers and adventures that Dorrego and I, well, never in the slightest experienced personally. We soon became disillusioned with revolutionary politics and returned to our hereditary habits: Dorrego, living off his rents; I, a printer. But now Rivadavia was reanimating our hopes.

There was something more, as well. The exciting romantic story of Baltasar Bustos and Ofelia Salamanca, sung from one end of the Americas to the other, had both of us, Dorrego and me (although for different reasons), in suspense. We could not make any matrimonial decisions until we knew how that turned out.

Baltasar did not have to tell us who the child was. Before anyone else, we found out what had happened that night of May 24–25, 1810, in the burned palace of the Royal Court. We showered tenderness on the boy. Why, we began to treat him like a fourth brother, this one really younger. The boy was clever, although melancholy, and he spoke with the charming accent of the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He never mentioned his mother, as if he’d made a vow. But he did speak Spanish, after all, and we could understand each other.

Dorrego had a small estate on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, out toward San Isidro, next to the river, and we would often go there on Saturdays and Sundays. We started calling ourselves the Citizens again, recalling our youthful polemics in that bare but packed Café de Malcos, where it seemed that whether or not the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire became reality depended exclusively on us.

Dorrego carried his clocks back and forth from Buenos Aires to San Isidro, and the boy was fascinated watching that collection of fantastic, diverse forms — tombs, drums, carriages, thrones, rings, and eggs — while we wondered if, for us, time had in a certain sense stopped. But for the fair boy it was as varied as those clocks, in which he would see a measure of the different suns, so far from each other, that marked his life.

Baltasar adopted the child, whose family name became Bustos, but in my honor Baltasar renamed him Manuel, replacing the Leocadio he’d been given at baptism. The boy and I did not resemble each other in any way, however. My first gray hairs, it’s true, softened my dark face, though the ferocity of my mustache did not hide the secret flaw in my face: my upper lip is too big. But neither the shadows under my eyes nor my thinness was repeated in this boy, who must have mirrored instead the youth of his mother, the adorable Ofelia.

We would watch him play on those Sundays we spent together in the country. He liked to blindfold himself and play blindman’s buff. Seeing him, so handsome, graceful, and happy, we finally dared to ask his stepfather about his last letter, the one he never sent us after reaching Veracruz and meeting Father Quintana, Ofelia, and the child.

Baltasar stared for a long time at the river that flowed more slowly than the years that were beginning for us that moment, the river that had nothing whatsoever to do with silver plate and seemed, rather, a huge drainage ditch for the jungles and mines of the continent’s interior.

He told us that he had always written the truth to us and that he was now finding it difficult to tell us a lie. We already knew by the gazettes that Father Quintana had been executed exactly as he had foretold, shot on the knees and through the back, then decapitated, his head exposed in a cage in the Veracruz plaza.

Quintana was a mysterious, self-absorbed Mexican mestizo, Baltasar added, but he had a spontaneous genius that cut its way through the terrible resentment of that race. He had a sense of the drama he was living, of what military decision entailed, and of historical language. But, above all, he really believed in Christ and in the possibility of establishing a relationship with God through language.

Baltasar took off his glasses and shut his eyes.

They captured him alone in the hills near Cuernavaca, in the middle of the flight of his defeated troops and the terror of his flock of lawyers. He was shouting to all of them: “Don’t flee — you can’t see the bullets that hit you in the back.”

He asked to be shot in his most elegant cassock. They looked in vain for the name of the tailor so they could punish him.

“Quintana was the last real revolutionary,” Baltasar said at the end of that afternoon, with its golden stains on the dark grass near the Río de la Plata. “Now what everyone expected in Mexico when I set sail from Veracruz will come about. Compromise, freedom only in law, the nation vanquished and dismembered … Can there be liberty without equality?” This was Father Quintana’s burning question, and Baltasar repeated it now. And we, his friends, laughed: “Don’t start that again, or you’ll be kidnapping children once more. We’re not as young as we used to be. Settle down…”

“There has to be a problem. There always has to be a problem,” murmured Baltasar.

“What are you saying?” I asked, because Dorrego wanted to hear no more.

“Nothing,” said Baltasar, “but since I’ve described in detail each doubt that has passed through my spirit, I think I ought to tell you that the worst of all has been not knowing if Quintana told me the truth that afternoon in the chapel.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked him in alarm.

“It’s very likely he lied out of charity and to take charge, as he put it, of Ofelia Salamanca’s memory. It’s hard for me to believe that story about her as an agent of the independence movement. She was infamous, from Chile to Venezuela, and the evidence of her crimes was overwhelming…”

I asked him not to torture himself and not to be less charitable than the Mexican priest. Besides, he should think about the child — the child certainly was Ofelia’s son. In all likelihood, the woman was dead. And he, Baltasar, should accept a respite in this passion that had tortured him for so long.

“But that passion was my reason for being,” our younger brother told us then, in his sad, melodic voice.

And we did not plague him with sermons or try to draw definitive conclusions from his experience. We had the bright idea of inviting young ladies of the best Buenos Aires society, accompanied by their mothers or chaperones, along on our promenades down the river, but nothing went beyond the limits of ordinary etiquette.

Nothing happened, except that Baltasar began to upset the equilibrium that Dorrego, with his comfortable compromise between wealth and Jacobinism, and I, with my labors as enterprising publisher (and both of us with our carousing), had contrived here in Buenos Aires, where independence was already consolidated, while in Peru the military campaigns still raged.

I think Baltasar realized this and wanted us to be calm, but without lying to us.

“I lost many things. Echagüe and Arias were as good friends as you two. I really miss them, believe me. What a good time we had together preparing the Andes campaign! There was never a more fraternal or enjoyable moment in the history of the Americas. How grateful I am to have shared it with them. No, I’m not bitter, though I embraced death many times. But I think I came to know myself. Principles became concrete for me. War and independence, respect for others, justice and faith. I know what those things mean. I also know that, having been through it all, I have you, my friends, and with you I may perhaps know the alliance of all souls, united by the sin and the grace that so concerned Father Quintana. But what I want you to know once and for all, to be perfectly sincere, is that there is still a good distance to go from what I’ve already lived to what I have yet to live. I just want you to know. I’m not going to live that time in peace. Not me, not Argentina, not all the Americas.”

He paused and ran his fingers through his wavy, rebellious hair.

“Now that you know this, let’s be friends forever.”

“What’s he saying?” Dorrego asked this time. He was growing impatient with our friend.

“Nothing,” I said to him, but we saw that there was that spark of madness in Baltasar’s eyes again. Dorrego told me later he’d noticed—“Did you notice?”—that our friend seemed a bit mad, but I said that he wasn’t; that it was enthusiasm. Our younger brother was an enthusiast, that’s all …

“And I hope he never stops being one.”

The eventual reader of these pages, which for the moment only I have the right to read, will now understand why I could not be charitable, then or ever, with my friend Baltasar Bustos and tell him, Yes, Father Quintana didn’t lie to you. Ofelia Salamanca was always on the side of independence, ever since the time of Father Camilo Henríquez and the Carrera brothers in Chile, then here with us in Buenos Aires — well, only with me, passing me information about the activities of her old husband, the Marquis de Cabra, during the twelve months they lived in the palace of the Superior Court of Buenos Aires between 1809 and 1810, when she and I fell in love, and I climbed up that vine and entered that room night after night, and I knew the ecstasy of her flesh and enjoyed her until she became large with my son. And yet not a single day passed without her finding out something useful for the cause, communicating it, and making possible, to a great extent, the triumphs of May.

And now I write this and, like the chronicle of the writer from Barranquilla, this manuscript of mine must wait a very long time before being published, for the length of the lives of my friend Balta and the son, Manuel, I had with Ofelia Salamanca, the unknown heroine of the wars of independence, who died of cancer on a forgotten day in the malarial port of Coatzcoalcos, in the state of Veracruz.

I had no one to write with this request: put twenty-five candles around her poor coffin, the same number of years she’d been alive when our son was born, the same age the beautiful Ofelia will always be in my memory.

The legend of Ofelia and her platonic lover, my friend Baltasar, would go on living in the vidalitas, cumbias, and corridos.

I locked this manuscript away, and Dorrego and I went out on the lawn of the estate along the river.

The boy, whom a singular stroke of luck had saved ten years ago from the flames and from death in exchange for an anonymous black child, was playing blindman’s buff, alone, with his eyes blindfolded.

His adoptive father, our brother Baltasar, was watching him in silence, unsmiling, his hands joined under his chin, his index fingers covering his pursed lips and his long, light-brown beard. He was sitting at a comfortable white wicker table, while the lights of summer glimmered on the grass.

It was, I said to myself, as if Baltasar had carried out his fervent desire to have communion with nature, but not on his father and sister’s savage pampa, not on the risky sand flats and jungles of Miguel Lanza, not even in the crossing of the Andes with San Martín, not in the besieged port of Maracaibo, not in the final encampment of Father Anselmo Quintana; rather, only now, here, in this civilized corner of an estate in San Isidro, facing the river that reflected the slow undulations of the tops of the willows ruffled by the light summer breeze. Through those trees the clean, strong sun was filtered by a thousand intangible shields.

“These hours of solitude and meditation are the only times … I am completely myself, without diversion, without obstacles … what nature has wanted me to be.”

Was there any reason, in reality, not to accept, with Rousseau, that true felicity is within us?

We looked at Manuel, the child Manuel Bustos, who was playing happily, and the three of us remembered — Xavier abandoning his clocks and walking out to the lawn, I looking with fraternal love at my younger brother, Baltasar, who made his way, passionately, through an entire continent, the same Balta who touched Ofelia Salamanca only once, and then to help her to her feet — that terrible night of May 24 and 25, 1810, when we thought we had lost the child forever, searching for him until dawn in the brothels, meat-salting sheds, and shacks with straw roofs down along the river. Now Baltasar threw into that same river a thin red thread.

The child whirled around several times, playing alone, and then, without taking the handkerchief off his eyes, spread his arms before a wall in the garden, gave the order to fire, shouted Bang, bang, bang, and fell to the ground, clasping his hand to his heart.

We were about to laugh at this joke when shock stopped us. We heard a flutter of skirts and saw in the light of summer a woman running toward the child, holding his head, and hugging it to her breasts, a beautiful woman dressed in gray taffeta, gloved and pliant, through whose light veil Dorrego and I could recognize — how could we not? — the adorable features of the young actress who garnered great success in the nights of Buenos Aires, so frequented by Xavier and me: the little mistress, as everyone nicknamed her.

But in fact, the name of this intelligent and beautiful Chilean actress was Gabriela Cóo. She burst unexpectedly into our Sunday garden, tossing aside her drizzle-colored parasol to kneel by my son, Ofelia and my son, Baltasar Bustos’s adoptive son; and she turned, this little mistress, to look at us with her black eyes from under those famous, thick, uncensored eyebrows until, lighting up with a smile on her red lips, she fixed them on the face of our friend, our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos.

The campaign was finally over.

Mommsenstrasse, Berlin, June 1989

Paseo del Prado, Madrid, August 1989

Kingsand, Cornwall, January 1990

Mendoza, Argentina, February 1990