The Campaign

by Carlos Fuentes

  The brilliant Lima gathering did not keep the young Argentine from looking at the stockings which a forty-year-old but still appetizing woman showed off with incredible sauciness by refusing to allow her skirts to conceal the novelty of her bas—as she called them—decorated from toes to knees with small, linked violet clocks that reminded our friend Baltasar about us, Varela and Dorrego, playing with our clocks in Buenos Aires, adjusting them as we adjusted our political lives, accommodating ourselves, when Posadas resigned, to Alvear’s leadership, never daring to ask ourselves what we were doing there while our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos, the weakest of the three, the most physically awkward, the most intellectual as well, was exposing himself to the Spaniards way out in the mountains.

  “The theme of our time is time!” announced the lady—who, at the back of her neck, wore feathers the color of the embroidered clocks—inviting the young creole gentlemen to play with words and ideas, responding to them herself in a way the ignorant colonial ladies—who soon found themselves bereft of their gallants, as attracted by the novelty as fireflies by a burning candle—could not.

  “What a contretemps!”

  “You, ma’am, can make time march backwards…”

  “Or even better: such abundance of time…”

  “Do my legs seem fat to you?”

  “They seem to me a heralding of the face with which you confront time.”

  “Time, my friend, is ageless.”

  “But it does suffer evils, ma’am.”

  “I think I’m on time.”

  “And we here in Peru, alas, are always either too early or too late.”

  They all laughed, but Baltasar Bustos, looking at the lady’s violet legs and her hoopskirt, allowed himself to be distracted by the black skirts of the two young priests who had been playing blindman’s buff and who were now looking at him, waiting for him to raise his eyes. He forgot the provocative lady, whose days as a coquette were numbered (even Micaela Villegas, the notorious Perrichole, the loosest woman in the colony, had just turned sixty—just think of that, your lordship), to look back at them as they smiled at him: one priest was very ugly, the other very handsome; their combined age wouldn’t have added up to the violet lady’s forty. They stared shamelessly at him, but only when they stopped and raised their tiny glasses of wine to toast each other did Baltasar become aware of the immense tenderness that joined them; the looks the two young priests exchanged indicated as well that the ugly one had the subservient function of pampering, worshipping, caring for, and attending the handsome one.

  Baltasar Bustos stared at the skirts of the handsome priest for a while with no desire to ascertain the reaction of the other. He found himself so alone after the long Upper Peru campaign and the death of his father that he feared the attraction of that young cleric with fine features, dark hair, and waxy complexion—like that of Miguel Lanza, like his father’s dead hands holding the candle, burning because of the cruelty, the rancor of Sabina, who was so eager to form with him a circle of two, like the one formed by the two priests—might obstruct his relationship with the devout priest with rough features, slightly prognathous, and, like Baltasar, myopic. When he raised his eyes to meet theirs, however, he found satisfaction, shared attraction, and an invitation. They guessed his hunger for company, his solitude; they did not imagine that behind his eyes was the desired figure of Ofelia Salamanca.

  Other eyes attracted him, although they never paid him the slightest attention and instead made him feel he was an intruder, alien to the exclusive circle of these aristocratic creoles, who in the city of Lima, capital of capitals, only rivaled in Spanish America by Mexico City, reached not only their splendor but their purest essence. Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful woman—beyond any doubt—attending the afternoon party. She looked like the sunset, her dark beauty shone, and her outfit, which turned mourning into show, glittered, in part thanks to the gold thread subtly woven into her funereal gown. The gold did not obviate her grief but gave a feeling of luxury to death, no doubt the death of the husband of the young woman, whose true, fatal glow was in her skin and not in her clothing or jewels. In fact, she wore no jewelry. She needed none. Her beauty dazzled Baltasar, whose eyes were full of blood and gore, hills of slate and thickets.

  Was she as beautiful as he saw her? The object of her gaze was a couple. Another couple, obviously married, her arm resting ever on his, as if to initiate, also for eternity, a solemn promenade that with each step would announce: we are a couple. He was saying to the dark woman: dare to break up this pair, I invite you to do it, come with us. The wife’s face expressed marital fidelity so strongly that it almost contradicted itself to become the most subtle of invitations. That afternoon, Baltasar Bustos instinctively sought out the lady in mourning’s solitude to accompany his own. He learned that the solitary woman would cease to be so in the company of the married man who said to her, secretly yet so publicly, “You are my possible lover. In the presence of my own wife, I invite you to be my actual lover. I can do no more to attract you to me.”

  “Luz María…”

  The name escaped like a sigh or a threat from the shared voice of the married couple. “We are so sorry about what happened.”

  “It’s all right: time works miracles.”

  They began to speak about Masses and novenas, a castrato began to sing a passage from Palestrina, and a very old lady, draped in veils and wearing more combs than she had hairs on her head, lectured Baltasar the way someone teaches a basic lesson: “The servants know. They are the only ones who know in a society like ours. The Quechuan nurses abandoned the Incan nobles to serve the Spaniards. Now they will abandon the Spaniards to serve Creole patriots like you, callow boy.”

  She scratched the moles that marked the spot where the hair missing from her skull once grew, and she giggled in pure joy, announcing that her head was still good for something: “And besides. Did you ever see this Ofelia Salamanca’s silver service? Well, get her husband, the cuckold marquis, to invite you to dinner, and there you will see the fate of all the silver mined in these Indies of ours, lad, youth, boy, what to call you?” The crone cackled, dressed in transparent gauze and propped up by two Indian servants wearing Versaillesque frock coats and cotton wigs. The old lady flapped her arms: “Get moving, you shitty cholitos, help me, don’t stop, no one deserves more than a minute of my conversation, I have so little time.”

  Baltasar sought out the stockings embroidered with clocks, but perhaps their owner had been invited to withdraw. On the other hand, these scenes were like sideshows—mere sleight-of-hand by these mountebanks, whispered a familiar voice that reached Baltasar Bustos. Incredulous, he spun around to see the tall, slightly stooped figure of his old mentor Julián Ríos, the Jesuit who had put aside his cassock and had taught half the pampa the local flora and fauna, and the local languages—all in the hope of discovering, he said, remembering the childhood of Baltasar and Sabina Bustos, a universal imagination, even if it was an imagination nurtured in the soil; roots, said the old Jesuit, smiling and adding with a glint from his silver-framed glasses, “Mais mes racines sont plutôt rabelaie-siennes, dit la corneille quand elle boît l’eau de la fontaine…”

  Baltasar laughed, squeezing Ríos’s arm and listening as the old man gently led the young one to the other end of the viceregal party: “Everything else is a sideshow, to use circus jargon—I didn’t say Circe’s barroom, now—no: the main show is always the Marquis de Cabra himself.”

  Who, in fact, was holding court. Because—Julían Ríos pointed out—the rug has been swept clean of gossip by edict of the marquis himself, who was the first to mention the rumor about his wife, his life, his strife, rhymed Father Ríos irrepressibly. The marquis was talking now in an endless flow:

  “Modern revolution is divided evenly between those enemy brothers, Rousseau and Voltaire. The Genevan wanted the people to act. The other wanted them to be led. But it takes a long time for the people to become educated and to act prudently, s
o they have to be guided at first—thence Voltaire wins the match, he can never lose it. What did that old cynic say?”

  “That the light of reason falls by degrees,” quoted Julián Ríos. “The lowest level of society needs the example of its superiors. Forty thousand wise men: that’s more or less what we need.”

  “Forty thousand wise men!” said the old marquis, sighing. “Include me among them. The first thing I’ll do is keep the people from ever taking my place or instructing me. All modern revolution does is create a new elite. Why? The old elite was more elegant and practiced in the very thing the new elite is going to do: mete out injustice.”

  “To transfer property from a minute group of landowners to four million electors in one year does not seem so elitist to me, your lordship. There has never been a redistribution of wealth as large or as swift in all of recorded history.”

  “Bah.” The marquis did not even look at the tutor. “Revolutions of interests end up costing more than revolutions of ideals. All the Jacobin terror in France seems less painful to me than the elitist injustice of the North American revolution. Some revolution, gentlemen—a revolution that not only leaves slavery intact but actually consecrates it.”

  “Are we less racist than they?” asked Ríos.

  “What is to be done, Mr., Mr.—” said the Marquis haughtily, not finding the proper title for the tutor. “I mean, what is to be done when the people of color themselves come to the courts here in Lima, in Barranquilla, or in La Guaira, requesting written proof that they are white? How many venal judges have stared into the scorched face of a man whose father and grandfather were black and whose mother and grandmother were Indian, and stated: ‘He may be considered white’? Our courts are flooded with requests for certification of whiteness, Mr., Mr.—”

  “Father Rivers,” the tutor supplied, smiling.

  “Ah, a perfidious son of Albion…”

  “No, your Lordship, merely a poor albino dazzled with admiration at your wisdom.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. Rivers should flow. Or, better yet, run.”

  “Having the runs is something that happens all too frequently in these parts, sir. But the way you say my name makes me think of reverse, so perhaps you would prefer me to step back.”

  “I was merely commenting on the irony of the blacks submitting legal petitions so as not to be termed ‘poor black’ or ‘poor mulatto.’”

  “We are all cooperating, your lordship. White families in Lima, Caracas, and Panama are also initiating legal actions to keep any family members from marrying people of color.”

  “In sum, then, Mr. Reverse, I’m right to declare here, before all of you, that my only virtue has been the proper administration of injustice and that, personally, I would rather die than cease to be unjust.”

  A chorus of laughter followed these lapidary witticisms of the Marquis de Cabra, a device by which he dissipated not only the attention initially focused on his wife’s affaires but also whatever attention was being paid to the poor castrato performing Palestrina. In any case, he certainly hushed the comment of the old Jesuit: “Privilege is like the robe of Nessus; when you tear it off, you also tear off the flesh under it.”

  The marquis spun around like a wasp and spoke like a whip: “Go ahead and wage your war of independence. Disillusionment will soon follow. And, I assure you, I am not making idle pronouncements. I am predicting the most concrete things. A stagnant economy, without the protection of Spain and incapable of competing in world markets. A society of privilege; the mere act of casting out the Spaniards will not make the Creoles less unjust, cruel, or greedy. And dictatorship after dictatorship will be necessary to bridge the gap between the country as constituted by law and the country as reality. You will be left to the mercy of the elements, my dear patriots. You will wrench off the roof of tradition. But you do not know how to survive in the new, open air. The modern age, which for an Englishman, Father Rivers, is a breeze, will be a hurricane for a Peruvian. We who speak Spanish were not born for it.”

  “We shall make our own modernity, and it will be unlike that of the English or the French, your lordship,” said young Baltasar, imagining a French roof over the head of his sister, Sabina, to protect her, after being abandoned by Spain, from the cruel elements she so feared.

  The marquis stared at him curiously, as if the old man’s intelligence would never dare to reject a possible relationship, association, or contiguity, no matter how arbitrary it might seem at first glance.

  “Father Rivers”—the marquis smiled—“your young disciple—that is what he is, isn’t that so?—knows that all waters ultimately flow into each other. Am I right?”

  “Rivers do flow,” said the tutor.

  “Rivers roll, servants serve, priests pray—or is it prey?—but castrati, fortunately, do not castrate. Yet young men with sunburned faces and newly shorn beards pique my curiosity. Do they flow, serve, pray, prey, or castrate?”

  “None of those things, your lordship,” said Baltasar. “At times, they merely desire.”

  “Just so long as they don’t covet that which belongs to others,” said the old man in acid tones. “In this country, the wise practice is to stick a finger up the ass of every miner as he leaves his work, to see that he isn’t stealing the gold.”

  “Good heavens, your lordship! Not even I allow myself such obscenities,” cackled the balding old woman bristling with combs, “in spite of the fact that I’m older and that Viceroy Abascal isn’t listening to what I say.”

  That very personage was standing behind Cabra with his solemn, Visigoth face. The marquis bowed. Everyone awaited the words of the viceroy, Don Fernando de Abascal, Marquis de Concordia, who no doubt hoped to cancel any discussion of independence or loyalty to the Crown—the only fashionable topics, since no others lent themselves so well to animated conversation—with a few words more lapidary than any the others might utter. He imagined himself captivating his audience with his eyes, which were like those of an offended codfish:

  “The Americans were born to be slaves, destined by nature to vegetate in obscurity and melancholy.”

  He said it out of obligation, to give offense, because he thought that under the present circumstances his obligation was to offend and that his greatest offense would be to overlook any arguments the others might propose. He was the viceroy, but not even the viceroy and his attributes could dampen—now was the time to prove it—the imagination and humor of the Marquis de Cabra, who sought thus to suggest that, more than Abascal, the man who should be viceroy was he who was speaking: Cabra himself.

  He looked straight at Baltasar Bustos and commented that his tanned complexion and pale chin indicated many months in the open air and sun and a beard until recently unshaven. Baltasar nodded. This fellow looked like no one else: was he a soldier? But none of the officers present showed such a contrast, such roughness. “What campaigns were you in, Mr., Mr.—”

  “Bustos. Baltasar Bustos.”

  “And a classical bust it is. Am I right, Father Rivers?”

  “Quite right. This Balshazar seems ready for his feast.”

  “But it was Nebuchadnezzar who saw the writing on the wall.”

  “From which we should all take warning: the end is near, gentlemen.”

  Cabra glanced mockingly at the viceroy, who from offended codfish had metamorphosed into a satisfied mollusk. He had spoken, and nothing else mattered.

  “So, Baltasar Bustos.”

  The marquis said he did not know if this Baltasar was a loyalist or an insurgent, but he was a creole, that much was obvious. And an officer, although on which side was not obvious, added Cabra with the mildest hint of menace in his voice. But he was an officer and a creole, so he would no doubt do what all of them did, which was to take an Indian, like this boy in livery and cotton wig attending the most excellent widow of the Marquis de Z_____, who was Viceroy of Peru, and tell him, just as the Marquis de Cabra was telling him now, grabbing him roughly, you half-breed shit,
that’s right, half-breed shit a thousand times, I won’t stick my finger up your ass to see if you steal my gold, half-breed, but if I were this creole officer—patriot? rebel? loyal to the king? who knows, who cares?—he would say to you, half-breed shit, sweep out the barracks, make my bed, wash the floor, disinfect the lavatories, carry in wood, pour me a glass of water, don’t move a muscle if I give you a kick in the ass, don’t let so much as a sigh escape your lips if I slap your face, don’t you dare raise your head if I order you, you half-breed shit, to look down at my feet, because your soul, assuming you have one, you poor devil, doesn’t even reach as high as my feet.”

  The marquis, more upset even than he thought, paused and took a deep breath, saying that a creole would say all that to this half-breed shit he’d grabbed by the neck. He would say it even if he was a patriot, because, before being a patriot, he was creole shit. Why didn’t little Master Bustos do what the marquis was inviting him to do, when one day, sooner or later he would have to do it to prove who was in charge here.

  Cabra held out the servant of the widow of the Marquis de Z_____as if he were some exotic trophy. The bald old lady shook the tortoiseshell daggers jutting out of her head and protested, Miguelito is so good, so faithful, she would allow no one, not even the most distinguished President of the Court of Visitation, to …

  Cabra spun ferociously on his heel to face the crone, she who had ordered Perrichole publicly flogged for bragging that she was the Viceroy de Amat’s concubine, and, worse still, for thinking that the sins of prostitution could be expiated by publicly, not secretly, walking barefoot behind the carriage of the Blessed Sacrament, without adding scandal to scandal and publicity to virtue; she who witnessed and rejoiced in the drawing and quartering of the rebel Indian Tupac Amaru, the pretender to the title of last Inca, who in the name of the oppressed rose up in arms to turn the poor of Peru into Indian kings—was she now going to defend this half-breed shit in her service from a beating?