The Campaign

by Carlos Fuentes

  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, n
ot 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

  By Carlos Fuentes

  Where the Air Is Clear

  The Good Conscience

  Aura

  The Death of Artemio Cruz

  A Change of Skin

  Terra Nostra

  The Hydra Head

  Burnt Water

  Distant Relations

  The Old Gringo

  Myself with Others

  Christopher Unborn

  Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins

  The Campaign

  English translation copyright © 1991 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

  Originally published in Spanish as La Campaña

  Copyright © 1990 by Carlos Fuentes

  Copyright © 1990 by Mondadori España, S.A.

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by HarperCollinsCanadaLtd

  First edition, 1991

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fuentes, Carlos.

  The campaign / Carlos Fuentes ; translated by Alfred Mac Adam. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Translation of: La campaña.

  I. Title. II. Series; Fuentes, Carlos.

  PQ7297.F793C2913 1991 863—dc20 91-9723 CIP

  eISBN 9781466840072

  First eBook edition: February 2013