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 lik
es 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.”
&
nbsp; 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.”