The next day, Father Ildefonso summoned Baltasar to the main square of Ayopaya, where he found a mass of Indians waiting for him. Turning to Baltasar, the priest said, “On horseback, so they believe you. Get up on that horse, fool, if you want them to believe what you say.”
Baltasar’s astonished face pleaded for a reason.
“The horse is authority, numbskull. The horse defeated them. In this land, there is no word without a horse.”
“I want to bring them justice, not more defeats,” protested Baltasar, decked out for the occasion in his parade coat, with wide lapels and gold braid, epaulets, and three-cornered hat with cockades.
“There is no justice without authority,” said the priest in a tone of finality.
Baltasar took a deep breath and looked up, as if seeking inspiration in the oppressive totality of the plateau: the mountains a single colorless color, brown, like the pure earth before the stains of snow, rain, the boots of soldiers, the picks of miners, even before grass. Earth without adornment, naked, as if expecting that on Judgment Day it would be reborn from the reserve of the Aymará mountains. Then he lowered his eyes, and there they were, the men, women, and children he’d only seen cooking, carrying loads, tending the fields, breast-feeding, pushing cartloads of weapons, their foreheads marked by the sweaty thongs of the sacks of guano, coca leaves, or silver that their shoulders carried and their heads balanced.
Baltasar Bustos had been waiting for this opportunity, and he thanked Father Ildefonso for giving it to him. A few republican officers came out of the barracks, and a few guerrillas as well. In the distance, some carriages had stopped, and men wearing high, shiny top hats poked their heads out. Some even took off the hats that protected them from the sun but that heated up their foreheads, gripped by the bands of leather. Their hats were like their heads, which now, with habitual disdain, they wiped with the sleeves of their coats as they smoothed out the velvety softness of the hats. Their foreheads seemed marked by those hats in the same way the heads of the Indians were marked by the rough straps on the sacks of manure.
He said to all of them, because for him that world at that moment was all the world there was, that the enlightened revolution was sending from the Plata—which the English invaders called the River Plate—the river of silver, a luminous river, to this land whose bowels were of real silver. The Buenos Aires junta had ordered him—he said after a pause, insinuating that the metaphor was only a preamble and the preamble merely a metaphor—to free the Indians of the plateau from servitude, something he was now doing formally. The horse, jumpy, wanted to twist around and did so, but Baltasar never turned his back on his audience; they were all around him, mute, impassive, patient. Thus, the orator felt powerful and at ease, talking about justice to an oppressed people while mounted on one of the marvels of nature, a black shining horse joined to an eloquent rider. Baltasar Bustos held up for all to see, grasping it firmly (although the stiff paper persisted in rolling up again, adopting the comfortable form in which he’d carried it, tied with a red ribbon, ever since Dorrego had it borne by messenger to Jujuy), the decree he read aloud: All abuses are abolished; Indians are freed from paying tribute; all property is to be divided; schools are to be established; and the Indian is declared equal to any other Argentine or American national.
Baltasar saw some Indians kneel, so he dismounted, touched their heads covered by Indian caps, offered his hand to each one, and told them, in a voice not even he recognized, an infinitely tender voice he was saving for the first woman he ever loved, Ofelia Salamanca, whose blond, naked, perfumed image blended uneasily with the reality of this ragged, inexpressive people, whom he raised from their prostrate position, saying to them: Never again. We are equal. Never kneel again. It’s all over. We’re all brothers. You should govern yourselves. You should be an example. You are closer to nature than we are …
Father de las Muñecas took Baltasar by the arm, saying, That’s fine, that’s enough, you’ve been heard. In that instant, Baltasar reacted with a strength he didn’t know he had, just as he hadn’t known the tenderness that had just manifested itself in him.
“That’s a lie, Father. I haven’t been heard. How many of these Indians even speak Spanish?”
“Very few, almost none, it’s true,” said the priest, without changing his expression, as he stared, not at Baltasar or the Indians, but at the coaches stopped at the edge of the plaza. “But they know the truth from the tone of voice of the speaker. No one ever spoke to them like that before.”
“Not even you, Father?”
“Yes, but only about the other world. That’s where I hope to find the justice you have just proclaimed. Not here on earth. You spoke to them about the earth. It’s never belonged to them.”
He shrugged and looked again at the coaches.
“It doesn’t belong to those people over there either. But, on the other hand, I do think these Indians own heaven.”
“Who are they?”
“Rich creoles. They live off the mita.”
“What’s that?”
De las Muñecas didn’t even smile. He decided to respect this envoy of the Buenos Aires junta, respect him even if he felt sorry for him.
“The mita is the great reality and the great curse of this land. The mita authorizes forced Indian labor in the mines. A lot of them actually run away and seek refuge on the plantations, where the owners seem like Franciscans compared to the mine overseers.”
The priest kissed his scapulary.
“No. This is a rebel cleric speaking to you. There is something better for these people. I only hope you and I can help them. On the other hand, look at the faces of those merchants and plantation owners over there. I think we’ve just lost their confidence.”
“Why did they come?”
“I alerted them: Come and hear the voice of the revolution. Don’t fool yourselves.”
“But, when all is said and done, are you my friend or my enemy?”
“I don’t want anyone deluding himself.”
“But I depend on you to put the edicts I’ve just proclaimed into practice.”
“You, my boy?”
“Not me, the Buenos Aires junta.”
“How far away that sounds. As far as the viceroy in Lima, the king in Madrid, the Laws of the Indies…”
“I’m from the interior, Father Ildefonso. I know the maxim of these lands: We obey the law, but we don’t carry it out. I recognize that here you are the law, just as Miguel Lanza is in the jungle, and Arenales in Vallegrande, and…”
The priest squeezed Baltasar’s forearm. “Enough. Here only me. A rebel cleric is speaking to you. I and my boys, who number only two hundred—but not for nothing are they called the Sacred Battalion.”
“All right. Only you, Father. Just see to it that the law is carried out here.”
Father Ildefonso burst out laughing and embraced Baltasar. “See? You’ve just entrusted me with the law, but you haven’t found me a woman. Unlike you, I keep all my promises.”
He told Baltasar that the Buenos Aires puritans, just like the conservatives in La Paz, were horrified by the disorderly conduct of the women who confused the war of independence with a campaign of prostitution. He laughed, remembering some moralistic proclamations according to which the fair sex lost all its charms when it succumbed to disorder. To him, Ildefonso de las Muñecas, the conservative puritans and the revolutionary puritans seemed equally imbecilic. God gave sex to men and women not just for procreation but also for recreation. But to be human it is important to have sex with history, sex with sense, with antecedents, with substance, did the young lieutenant understand? Sex, literally, as a Eucharist: a body, a blood, a lasting emotion, a reason; therefore, a history … And if liberating a city like Cuzco, which reeked of prisons, jails, blood, and death, is permissible, then it’s equally permissible to liberate sex, which also reeks of its own prisons …
“In other words, Lieutenant, the vow of chastity is renewable, and that’s my law. T
his is a rebel cleric talking to you. You, on the other hand, don’t have those limitations; instead, like a fool, you impose them on yourself. I’ve been watching you for days. You take nothing unless it’s offered. Look, my dear lieutenant from Buenos Aires, let’s make a deal. I’ll swear to you, on the heads of my two hundred boys: I’ll carry out your decrees, even if it costs us our balls. But you have to promise me to lose your virginity this very night. Don’t blush now, Lieutenant. It’s written all over your face, and it’s easily visible from a long way off. What do you say: for me, the law; for you, a woman. Or better put: for me, your law. For you, my woman. A rebel cleric guarantees it.”
“Why do you do these things?” asked our rather flustered friend.
“Because you’ve become part of my madness, without even knowing it. And that’s always pleasant.”
[2]
A man should always sleep in the same position in which he was born. If he dies before he wakes, his life will end just as it began. Everything is a circle. It has no meaning if it doesn’t end as it began. Baltasar, curled up for nine months inside his mother’s womb, with his eyes closed and his knees touching his chin. Expecting that when everything ends it will begin again. A voice, known and unknown at the same time, was saying this in his ear. He’d always listened to that voice. And he was listening to it now. It was new and it was ancient.
When he opened his eyes, he saw women sitting on the floor. They were weaving. They were dyeing wool clothing. Then he went back to sleep. Perhaps he only closed his eyes. In any case, he dreamed. In his dream, his head separated from his body and went to visit his beloved Ofelia Salamanca. Where might she be now? Returning to Chile with her husband? Mourning the death of her child? Did everyone still think the child that had died in the fire was theirs? Unrecognizable because of the flames? Recognizable despite everything? And if so, not dead but only lost? Would Ofelia weep, “Where can my child be?” And Baltasar dreams: where can my Ofelia be?
The women weave in the midst of the smoke. They patiently dye the clothes. Baltasar tries to make out their faces. His eyes fail him. Or his imagination. Then his head escapes again, soaring, hopping, making funny noises, until it strikes the back of the marquis, Ofelia Salamanca’s husband, as if the old aristocrat could not command his wife’s sleeping body and Baltasar’s head had come, despite the husband, to the marquis’s back, summoned by Ofelia’s ardent dream, Ofelia, who didn’t even know Baltasar. The lieutenant woke up, in a panic, in pain, and the women came to him, calming him, lulling him, bringing him a steaming cup.
“Broth made from young condor fights madness and frees up your dreams.”
He fell asleep disgusted by his own body. Later its fire fused in him without contaminating itself or losing its separateness. Without destroying him. Fire approached his body and joined itself to him without destroying him. The child in the cradle surrounded by twenty-five candles did not have such luck. The fire triumphed. It devoured the child. Yet this fire touched Baltasar, pierced and consumed him, but did not destroy him.
“We’re afraid of fire. They burned us with fire. We have to create a fire that doesn’t kill.”
Then he saw a girl kneading cornmeal, preparing loaves in a corner. When he woke up, Baltasar Bustos saw that his pallet was surrounded by ashes, and in the ashes he clearly saw the tracks of an animal. He tried to get up. He couldn’t. He was tied to the bed. He was tied to himself. Gray bandages held him to the bed, to himself, to his dream about ashes, and to the animal tracks. Yet he felt free. His tied-up, ash-covered body, caught in a heavy sleep, was at the same time the freest body on earth. It floated, but it was the earth’s. But the earth was the air’s. He enjoyed all the elements: the earth that pulled him down, the air that drew him up, the fire that excited without destroying him, the water that liquefied every inch of his skin without breaking it. Everything was possible. Everything coexisted. Only he and the girl making bread were alive, suspended, in the world. Barely did he unite all the elements when the world became palpable. And when he tried to envision those elements, he discovered a woman at his side who was not Ofelia Salamanca. She turned to face him. He turned his back to her. She invited him to clasp her around the waist. She mounted him quickly. Her thighs were the fire. Her buttocks the earth. Her breasts the air. Her mouth the water. She burned without flame. She made him wish that the morning would never come. The idea that daytime life, the revolution, the Buenos Aires junta, the liberation of the slaves, the power of the warlord Ildefonso de las Muñecas, the distant hatred of those men with tall velvet hats, the nearby, resigned incomprehension of a people in rags, his father’s warnings, the rancor of his sister, the astute glances of the gauchos, Buenos Aires, his friends Dorrego and me, Varela, all of it, would flee, evaporate when he touched the elements of creation in the kisses, caresses, the surrender of an Indian woman meant that the world and its frenzy were excluded, outside, behind, ahead, but not here, not now. The woman who loved him physically had the power to prolong the night.
“No one knows you and I are here together.”
“Acla cuna, Acla cuna,” people were shouting in the distance, outside, voices that could be birds calling; the cawing of crows, the screech of some bird of prey. “The chosen one, the chosen one.”
She went back to kneading the cornmeal.
When he wakened, feverish and in the heaviness of a shout, the women were no longer there. The shack was freezing cold. All the fires had gone out. But the clothes dyed purple were scattered over the dirt floor. The man who helped him stand was an old mestizo. He wore a dirty shirt, a frayed tie, blue baize trousers, and hobnail boots. His hair was short, his beard long. He led Baltasar out of the shack and its cold ashes. They were standing in a narrow mountain lane. Baltasar recognized the mountains and smelled the muddy nearness of the lake. The old man led him gently. It was difficult for Baltasar to stay upright, and he leaned on the old mestizo and on the walls made of such smooth, perfectly aligned stones they seemed the labor of titans.
He’d been here a week, but he hadn’t even noticed the most remarkable thing in the place: the architecture, the stones—perfect polygons joined together as if in a magic brotherhood. The discarded, unused stones were called “tired stones,” because they never attained the fraternal embrace of the other polygons.
But only the stones remained. There were no human beings in the streets; no Indians, no creole or Spanish officers, no top-hatted mine owners, no warlords in priestly robes. The micro-republic seemed empty.
“Is anyone left?” asked the astounded Baltasar.
The old man did not appear to hear.
“You wanted to bring these poor people to a mountain peak and show them a limitless empire. From the mountain, they saw an empire that had once been theirs. But it no longer is. They invited you to enter. You did.”
“Damn it! I’m asking you if there is anyone left in this village!” Baltasar Bustos shouted, unable to contain himself. He felt different, speaking in that tone, he who never got angry, he who, when he had to take control of the gauchos, did so with a smile. “Don’t you hear me, old man?”
“No, I don’t hear you. Neither do the people from here.”
“What I said was very clear. Slavery was over, the land will be divided, schools will be built…”
“The Indians didn’t listen to you. For them, you’re just one more arrogant porteño, the same as an arrogant Spaniard, distant, in the end indifferent and cruel. They don’t see the difference. Words don’t convince them. Not even when spoken on horseback.”
“I ordered the priest to implement my edicts.”
“Led by the warlord Ildefonso, they attacked the treasury at Oruro the moment they found out the Spaniards had abandoned the city and before the troops of the other warlord, Miguel Lanza, could arrive. These auxiliary armies exist for themselves, not to serve the Buenos Aires revolution. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it is they who have filled the void between the Crown and the republic. They are here. You mer
ely come, promise things that are never done, and then go.”
“The priest promised to obey the laws,” said Baltasar, obsessed, bewildered.
“There will be time for laws. Eternity can’t be changed in a day. Just think, is Father Ildefonso going to eliminate taxation and the mita while his ally, the Indian leader Pumacusi, thinking that he’s helping him, is assassinating any priest who is not a follower of Ildefonso de las Muñecas? The most urgent item of business is to halt Pumacusi’s excesses. That is, ‘Friends like those make enemies superfluous.’”
The old man stopped in front of a building more luxurious than the others. It must be the town hall, Baltasar thought, trying to identify it as he emerged little by little from his long sleep. The old man—the vain old man—combed out his flowing beard, looking at his face in a windowpane.
“And you, old man, who are you?”
“My name is Simón Rodríguez.”
“What do you do?”
“I teach this and that. My students never forget my teachings, but they do forget me. Woe is me!”
“And the women?” Baltasar Bustos went on asking questions, more to free himself from the old man’s explanations, which said precious little to his fevered mind, than to increase his knowledge of a self-evident fact: Baltasar Bustos knew only one thing, and it was that in his long night, most certainly consisting of many negated days, he had ceased to be a virgin.
“They died, Lieutenant,” said Simón Rodríguez, pausing along with Baltasar in sight of the turbid mountains, the agitated lake, and the empty plaza. “It’s not possible to be an Acla cuna virgin in the service of the ancient gods and sleep with the first petty creole officer who turns up.”
“I didn’t ask…” Baltasar began idiotically, forgetting the exchange of promises with Ildefonso de las Muñecas and then only wanting to say, “I don’t remember anything.” He only wanted to alert himself to something he’d secretly felt when he’d pronounced the liberating edicts at Lake Titicaca, decrees written in the radical rhetoric and the spirit of Castelli but spoken to a people who perhaps had their own roads to liberty, not necessarily—Baltasar wrote in a letter sent both to Dorrego and to me—those we have piously devised:
The Campaign Page 8