He left Buenos Aires carrying little baggage. A wicker suitcase, an umbrella, and three or four of his favorite books: La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Confessions, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The kidnapped child was not in his luggage. The wet nurse had disappeared along with her sister, the flogged mother of the black baby. He’d searched for her with his two friends, but their attempts had all failed. The two women had carried out their promise to Baltasar Bustos: the child of the Marquise de Cabra would live the life of the son of a sick, publicly flogged black prostitute. Justice, for Baltasar, would thus be carried out. In the suffering of the white child’s mother? The banks of the road darkened when he tried to justify his action (to himself, not to win sophistic arguments with his polemical friends: alone on a mule, with an umbrella, a wicker suitcase, and books by the Citizen of Geneva—with no one to speak to except nature, with which he sought to become one, freely and joyously). The goal of justice is not universal happiness. The person punished suffers so that the person rewarded may rejoice. That’s the norm. But it was a penal norm, worthy of the celebrated Italian Beccaria, not of the totally free Genevan, Rousseau. And the norm was even less sure in its application to the sufferer, in this case a woman for whom Baltasar Bustos—alone, twenty-four years of age, riding a mule—felt a passion that daily grew more unbridled.
Didn’t the woman Ofelia Salamanca deserve a more immediate devotion and selflessness than that called for by the ideas of Baltasar Bustos (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) on Nature and Justice? The shadows of the banks pierced his soul when he replied to himself that this was true. He would never find nature or justice except through a real person, a beloved person moreover, especially if, as it became clearer with every moment in his memory and his desire, that person was Ofelia Salamanca. Yet he couldn’t see himself tearing the child away from the nurse and her sister to return it to the Marquise de Cabra, especially since the black baby was dead. There was nothing to give them in return for the plea: It was all a mistake. Things will once more be as they were before. Forgive me.
He didn’t find them. But they would have spit his words in his face: nothing can ever be as it was. We slaves are more slaves than we were yesterday, poorer, more humiliated. The masters are more arrogant, crueler, more insensitive. They deserve this pain you’ve inflicted. The child stays with us. It doesn’t matter that the other child is dead. Blessed be his fate: he’s in heaven. Now this son of an expensive whore will live the life of the son of a cheap whore.
What could the wretched Baltasar say to that?
But I’m in love with Ofelia Salamanca.
He heard the laughter of the black women between two screeches of a screamer bird. He heard the laughter of his two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela, seeping out of his wicker suitcase. Even the mule stopped and brayed, laughing at him with its huge teeth as white as new corn. The Devil, goes the gaucho saying, dwells in cornfields.
[2]
This time, José Antonio Bustos was waiting for him at the entrance to the estate. Baltasar was grateful and relieved. What did it matter, in the end, if his father waited for him dead with or without a candle, with or without a rosary. He had bade him goodbye sitting on that throne of death the gauchos prefer for conversation, drinking maté, and warding off grief. But his father was waiting for him like this, on foot, amid workshops, warehouses, horses, gauchos, chickens … As long as he had come to stay.
“How did you know I was coming?” the traveler would have wanted to ask his father.
José Antonio Bustos’s eyes, somber and hollow, set in flesh which was once pink but which ranch work and the pampa sun had turned to leather, precluded such a question. It would have been redundant. José Antonio Bustos just knew. The son felt ridiculous sitting on the mule, out of joint beside the proud elegance of the father. The young man was the object of mocking glances from the tough, sinewy gauchos with hungry faces who watched him as he arrived.
He dismounted and led the mule to the grand gate that separated the road and the outside from the inner world, the property of José Antonio Bustos and his children. The house was constructed like a fort: it was surrounded by a moat to thwart Indian attack and had a watchtower at its center. The watchtower was the only high place, and it looked out over a vast, indifferent, dangerous world. The gallery was at once the warm and cool apex of the austere compound. There Baltasar had spent the long afternoons of his childhood (when he had a childhood), but now José Antonio preferred to take his strolls at the back, around the well, near the windows of the house. From there he could contemplate a small clover lawn. The old man was remembering. Keeping watch. Baltasar walked toward his father.
José Antonio took one step beyond his property and his legs failed him. His knees buckled, and he clutched a post as the gauchos watched him without any change of expression. Baltasar ran to his father to help him. The mule shied and headed for the road. A gaucho halted it, laughing to himself. They were all laughing at him, Baltasar realized, and at his father, the man they said they loved and respected. Baltasar had fled from this savagery when he was seventeen, to study in Buenos Aires, to become a man of his times, to save himself from this gaucho savagery—it seemed appropriate that the word gaucho resembled gaucherie, the French for error and clumsiness.
“See? Death starts in your legs,” José Antonio said with a smile as leathery as his skin, as he leaned his weight on his son.
“You come with me, Papa,” said Baltasar. Then he ordered the gauchos: “Bring my bags to the house.”
He liked to give them orders and feel their humiliation. His father rebuked him mildly for it. Charity begins at home. If you want to be just, begin with those who serve you. But Baltasar saw the gauchos as a Mongolian horde. Each one was Genghis Khan, with his own personal history of violence, superstition, and stupidity, the kind Voltaire had condemned for all time. Baltasar simply could not conceive of a future with gauchos in it. They spoiled his idyllic vision of nature. They had no compunctions whatsoever about slaughtering a steer, lassoing a horse, or murdering a fellow human being. They were the agents of an unproductive holocaust which left the countryside littered with corpses. And they offended Baltasar’s sensibility even more because they were nomads who would never take root anywhere, mobile negations of the sedentary life he identified with civilization.
What about nature, then? For Baltasar, nature, provisionally, consisted of his episodic visits home. A salutary return to his origins. A spur to move forward toward a happy future, free, prosperous, and without superstition. Only thus would nature be saved from those who exploited her: Spanish bastards or brutish gauchos.
That was the subject of the prodigal son’s conversation at the dinner table on his father’s estate. The two men alone, so different physically, come together to have supper by candlelight, which flashed in Baltasar’s dim eyes with the memory of the twenty-five candles around the cradle of Ofelia Salamanca’s newborn. A memory; also a foreboding. That of the single candle in the dead hand of his father, who would be saying to him from eternity: “Son, you were right.”
At table in the paternal house, it was not that way. No one was right. Baltasar was young, impulsive, convinced, and dazzled by the ideas he’d so recently encountered. The father was like his physical posture: sitting on a cow’s skull but animated and vital in his opinions; standing at the entrance to his estate, at the frontier between what was his and what belonged to everyone, standing straight but already vanquished by death, which came to him through the earth and which started in his legs.
“I hope that’s how it works and that it takes its time in reaching my heart and mind. I still want to see what’s going to happen. I want to see if you’re right, son.”
Baltasar imagined his father as a man on the threshold between life and death and also between reason and unreason, between independence and colonialism, between revolution and counterrevolution. He asked himself sometimes whether he would have preferred a brotherly father, a correligionar
y, to share his ideas and enthusiasms. He simply did not know the answer. Finally, he accepted this father of his, transformed by the sun, stripped over time of his European complexion to become what he was: the patriarch of a savage band of gauchos, and the impresario of a budding industry. A threatened industry. Perhaps this style of coexistence with opposites gave José Antonio Bustos his austere, just tone and his Solomonlike sympathy. He was a benevolent judge in a land and time that cried out for tolerance. And if Baltasar was demanding justice in the cities and was capable of implementing it as he did on the night of May 24 in Buenos Aires, what could he say to his father, landowner and judge in the barbarous territories of the interior? If the son had to be implacable in the city, the father, perhaps, had to be flexible in the country. It was the difference between the porcelain skin of the Marquis de Cabra and his wife and the leathery, tanned hide of José Antonio Bustos.
Plump, myopic, and with bronze-colored curls, Baltasar Bustos, looking at his reflection in the gilt-framed pier glass that lugubriously extended the dining room, saw himself as a hybrid between the two, formless and, barely outside the city, in need of the help of others to survive. He needed the mule because the post coach did not stop here. He needed the gauchos if only to order them to bring his bags to the house. He needed the servants because he did not know how to make his own bed, sew on a button, or press a coat; he needed the cook because he did not even know how to fry an egg. He needed his father to attack his ideas, not as an enemy, but as an affectionate, Socratic interlocutor. But, frankly, he did not know if he needed his sister, Sabina, whose presence would be ghostly if it weren’t so obstinately real.
Sabina resembled her father. Except that what in him was austere nobility was pained severity in her. Sour, Baltasar wanted to say when he hated her (which was quite often, especially when they were together); vinegary, premature old maid, born an old maid, a frustrated nun … But his sense of justice made him rectify that opinion (especially when he was far from her, in Buenos Aires) and tell himself that, trapped as she was out in the country, a woman alone in a houseful of men, condemned to live among savage gauchos, her character could not be other than what it was.
She would not sit at table with the men. No one stopped her, only she herself. And she insisted on serving them. Thus, she was both present and absent at the meals of the father and the son. Sometimes Baltasar paid no attention to her; other times, Sabina’s presence determined the tenor of his arguments. He knew what she was going to say, standing there with the platter of roast meat trembling in her hands, holding the serving tongs with a coarse napkin decorated in a red checkerboard pattern:
“We’ve got no protection. You and your ideas have left us at the mercy of the elements. We used to have a refuge, being a colony. We used to have protection—the Crown. We used to have redemption—the Church. You and your ideas have left us at the mercy of the four winds. Just take a good look, brother. What harm your side is doing to ours!”
These things, said between servings, did not help Baltasar Bustos’s digestion. In vain he searched in his sister’s severity for his father’s equanimity. Yet Sabina and Baltasar were both the product of the drive for equilibrium that characterized José Antonio Bustos.
Attentive to everything that went on, blessed with an extraordinary sixth sense for finding things out, some by induction, others by deduction, José Antonio Bustos could make use of even the most insignificant piece of information that came his way from reading a newspaper (rarely), from letters (occasionally), or through remarks, gossip, or anecdotes (for the most part), at times even from gaucho songs, to tie loose ends, remember or come to some conclusion—to anticipate and take action. The basis of his knowledge was the wandering network of gauchos he protected as they roamed the pampa. They told him more than anyone. When he was young, as soon as he discovered the idea of the age, he applied it to the economic reality of country life in several ways. On his own property, he established a small textile and metal industry; at the same time, he expanded his holdings in case of a boom in cattle ranching. He prepared himself to endure or enjoy the opening or closing of trade with the outside world. He looked to Buenos Aires as a market for his goods, but he feared the foreign competition that would make them too expensive.
He remained open to commerce with Upper Peru, the source of the metals necessary for the workshop where he made spurs, carts, axles, and keys. And he married a young Basque woman, a child of the so-called second conquest that in or around 1770 multiplied the number of Spanish merchants in the port of Buenos Aires, merchants spurred on by Bourbon reforms in favor of free trade. The arrival on the pampa of the young, golden-haired, somewhat plump, and decidedly myopic María Teresa Echegaray—Mayté—did not transform the social life of the distant province. It was the province that absorbed her. A homebody but vain, Mistress Mayté refused to use spectacles. She had to look for everything—an egg, a ball of yarn, a cat, a needle, her slippers—by bending down to peer at close range, and that posture eventually became natural to her.
Bent over and blind, José Antonio Bustos’s wife stopped talking with her fellow humans, all of whom stood up straight in the distance, and instead sustained long monologues with ants on her practical days, and on dream days she chatted with the spiders that approached, swinging before her eyes, teasing her, making her laugh with their silvery ups and downs, forcing her to imagine, invent, wishing sometimes she were entwined in those viscous, moist threads until she was caught in the center of a net as seamless as the fabric in her husband’s shops that went to make ponchos, shirts, and other gaucho clothing.
The ants, on the other hand, brought out her diligent, practical side, and that was when she and Sabina would become suspicious and check over the supplies stored in the cupboards and calculate the level of thievery among the maids, associating everything with the collapse of authority, the degeneration of customs, the lack of respect for the Church, and, finally, the dissolution of colonial authority. Napoleon in Spain, the English in Buenos Aires, and the terrible consequences: King Ferdinand dethroned, the English defeated not by the viceroy but by the local Argentine militia (gauchos, no doubt). All this news finished off the ant in Mistress Mayté, and not even the spiders in her were able to compensate for so much horror. Actually, the spiders betrayed her, and in her dreams she saw a world without Church or king, a world adrift. She would curse herself for having abandoned Spain, but then she would remember that Spain was in the hands of Napoleon and his drunken brother “Joe Bottle,” and her heart would sink.
It sank permanently one hot afternoon in the summer of 1808, and Sabina inherited all her mother’s certitudes and agonies. Except that the daughter, stronger, standing upright, alien to ants and spiders, turned them into dogma and battles.
“She feels unprotected,” José Antonio reiterated, “but she doesn’t know how to express her ideas in complex terms. She talks about Spain, the Church, and the king as if they were the roof of the house. Her fear goes deeper. We are leaving a traditional empire, one that is absolutist and Catholic, for a rationalist, scientific, liberal, and perhaps Protestant freedom. You should try to understand our fears. She’s right. It is like being left to the mercy of the elements.”
Baltasar regretted that, instead of accepting tradition, he had brought revolution to the house (unprotected, from now on without a roof). He would have wanted, though, to ask his father: Can one exist without the other? Can there be tradition without revolution? Doesn’t tradition die if it isn’t renewed and shaken? He wasn’t able to formulate something he barely intuited, because Sabina was already there, precipitating everything, presenting him with the final option: Are you loyal to your family or loyal to your revolution? His sister, a dividing force, offered herself as the representative of “what will keep us together.” Baltasar was left in the position of the one who divides. Their father did not seem displeased with the role that fell to him: that of arbiter between brother and sister.
“You taught me all I kn
ow.”
He managed to say that much to his father; the intention was affectionate, but mixed with the affection was some fine malice. José Antonio Bustos trembled as he listened. His son had had a Jesuit education. Julián Ríos, an aged member of the Society who had discarded his habit and returned to Argentina, where he’d been born, was the young Baltasar’s mentor. The Jesuits, expelled from Spain and her colonies in 1767, left an immense void behind them. People protested the expulsion, demonstrated in the streets, wept … And the Jesuits of the Americas had their revenge on Spain. They sailed to the coast of Italy and asked the Pope for asylum. The pontiff, fearful of offending the Bourbons, at first forbade them to disembark. The holy brothers remained on board for weeks, at the mercy of waves and tides, seasick, unable to sleep, unable to believe what was happening to them.
In the end, the Pope accepted some good advice. Kings might well scorn the intelligence of the Jesuits, but the Pope could take advantage of it. Often it happens the other way around; now let Rome open her arms to what Madrid and Lisbon have rejected. It was said that the ex-Jesuit Julián Ríos returned to Argentina without his priestly vestments the better to fool the colonial authorities. Like all New World Jesuits, he taught national history, national geography, the flora and fauna (and the form and fame) of the nascent nations, from New Spain to Chile, from the Río de la Plata to New Granada.
And, besides giving his pupils a national awareness, Don Julián, the defrocked, also gave them books banned by the Church and the authorities: The Spirit of the Laws, The Social Contract, Diderot’s The Nun, Voltaire’s Candide … That was Baltasar’s education, but not his sister’s. She was left to the distracted instruction of her mother and the affectionate virtue of her father. But she was stubborn; she envied her brother; she read more than would be expected of one imprisoned at home. In contrast to her brother, she read breviaries, Catholic pamphlets, sermons … On her own she created a counterculture the better to challenge her younger brother.