It was then that Baltasar really saw death in José Antonio’s eyes. The liberal law offended him as much as it did the gauchos, but it was a triumph for the son and his ideas: it was as if José Antonio, standing firm in defeat, were dead with a candle in his hand. In his features an autarkic world was dying, a world as slow as the carts in which it traveled, a world held together by carpenters, bakers, seamstresses, soapmakers, candlemakers, and blacksmiths; and the gauchos. Almost all of them were born and came back to die here, but that fidelity in the extremes of life was based on their freedom to move, to get on a horse and seek their fortune bearing their property on their backs or between their legs—the mare, their spurs, arms, and trinkets. Women were bought. Indians were tamed with alcohol and honey. But the gauchos always came back to their real master to be reborn or to die again. All that passed through the anguished eyes of José Antonio Bustos, standing there with his yellow poncho elegantly crossed over his chest, indifferent to the slow and invisible disintegration of his warehouses, stables, coachhouses, granaries, and chapels. His gauchos were always there when he needed them—on condition that he not force them to be there.
That night it was Baltasar who stopped before entering the dining room, to listen to the voices of his father and sister.
“Well, now that the gauchos are going to be locked in like me, why don’t you give me to one of them…”
“Calm down.”
“All locked in. Now we’ll be alike.”
“You can go to Buenos Aires or Mendoza whenever you want. We have friends and relatives.”
“You must think to yourself with a laugh, Well, she’s got her knives for fun; the poor thing amuses herself killing dogs with a dagger whose handle is made from a bull’s sex…”
“I’m going to slap you, Sabina.”
“You’d be better off kicking your wife’s grave. The poor woman shriveled and shriveled until she disappeared. Do you think I’m like her and that I’m going to imagine that being small is my only greatness? Nothing can console me, Papa, nothing, nothing. Except a pesky idea I always have in the back of my mind, which is that my mother must have been capable of passion, just once, a single infidelity, having another child … That consoles me when I see a savage gaucho with my mother’s face and his forearm covered with knife scars.”
“Calm down, daughter. You’re raving.”
“Doesn’t anything break your serenity? Do you ever say what you clearly mean—that you don’t agree, that I’m wrong, that I’m crazy, that in my mind I’m a slut?”
“My behavior is my tradition, daughter. Calm down. You seem bewitched.”
“That’s it, Father. The world has bewitched me.”
[7]
“The republic promulgates another good law,” said Baltasar to Sabina as he packed his bags, taking the shirts his sister passed him. “Most of these gauchos will end up in the army for being rebels. Then they’ll demand that careers in the military be open to all. The revolution’s officer corps should come from all classes and regions. It can no longer be limited to the upper classes.”
“You’ll see that these thugs will all end up dead or in jail for desertion,” said his sister, handing him a pair of old boots. “Take them, papa says they’re a gift. They’ve brought him good luck. They’re from here. Made from mules’ rumps.”
“He’s starting to give me his worldly possessions.” Baltasar smiled with some bitterness.
Then father and son parted with an embrace, and Baltasar said it was amusing to think that, while he went to war, the gauchos, by law, had to stay on the ranch for good.
“That way I’ll never be alone,” said José Antonio Bustos.
“Wait for me, Father.” Baltasar hugged him tight and kissed his hand.
“Let’s just see.” The old man laughed dryly. “In peacetime, sons bury their fathers, but in wartime, fathers bury their sons.”
“Then let them bury you next to me, Father.”
“So, in that case, it might be you welcoming me with a candle in your hand?”
“No, because they’re not going to bury me in holy ground.”
“All right. Goodbye, Citizen Bustos. Good luck.”
Then an order from the Buenos Aires junta came for Baltasar Bustos to join the army in Upper Peru, so what had been his own decision turned into an obligation imposed on him by others.
3
El Dorado
[1]
In the immense confusion of the armies, only nature—so naked, so harsh—could bring serenity to their souls.
The rebels and the Spaniards had defeated each other an equal number of times. The two armies had nullified each other and could count only on their military and political rear guards—the viceroyalty of Peru for the royalists, the revolutionary republic of Buenos Aires for the patriots.
“What advantage is there for us in this situation?” I asked in a letter that Baltasar Bustos received when, under orders from the Buenos Aires junta and with the rank of lieutenant, he joined the army gathering in Jujuy to prepare for the attack on Upper Peru. Baltasar wouldn’t have known what to answer. He arrived between two victories and two defeats; he hadn’t even reached the high plateau and already he was facing decisions he’d never made before. Dorrego and I had joined Alvear’s junta—Alvear, we assured him, was a strong, decisive, and attractive man—and, thinking we were doing our friend a favor, we’d put him at the head of a revolutionary regiment. Military expertise? “Don’t worry, dear Balta. You’ll have the best advice. What you already have, however, is something no one else there has: revolutionary fervor and a sense of justice. Without such virtues, the revolution would be just another war.” At that time, we did not know our orders coincided with his wishes.
It was a guerrilla war: Baltasar went on repeating this newly coined term—recently arrived from the Spain that rose up against Napoleon—as an orderly helped him put on his uniform of black boots, white trousers, short embroidered outer coat, and three-cornered hat with the tricolor cockade. The only forces the revolution had available to it to keep the road to Upper Peru open and to consolidate the revolutionary government in that region—which was inhospitable, unfair, but, because of its mines, essential to the prosperity of Buenos Aires—were the guerrillas who had spontaneously organized between Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Lake Titicaca. They would lend their support to the revolutionary force fighting the Spaniards. There was no other possibility. They interrupted the flow of supplies and food, ambushed the Spaniards, and cut lines of communication between the plateau and the pampa. Lieutenant Baltasar Bustos’s orders were: Collaborate with the guerrillas.
Our inadvertent hero had no time either to protest or to rejoice: I lack military ability, I don’t see well, I’m overweight, and my passion is justice, not war. “Why don’t you come out here and fight?” he asked in a letter to Dorrego and me, Varela. “What the hell am I—fat, blind, and enamored of my books—doing in these savage and lonely places? What are you doing in Buenos Aires? Having your clocks fixed? Well, take careful note of this: we’re in different time zones.”
In reality, there was no time. Between his relaxed life on his father’s ranch on the pampa and his tumultuous arrival at Chuquiscaca, there was more than mere spatial distance. There were other centuries and other dreams; no matter how much he denied them, they turned up in overflowing confusion on Baltasar Bustos’s route. There was no fighting. The improvised soldier of independence never had to command a battle formation, and more than once the word “Fire” froze in his mouth. There was nothing to fire on. The granite bulwarks of the mountains assumed human, enemy shapes, and the afternoon shadows could come alive in menacing ways. But barely had he ascended from the Argentine plains to the Peruvian plateau than Baltasar was thankful for the hostile, immobile solitude of that lunar landscape. It was, he told himself again and again, the only element of harmony and tranquillity in a world gone mad. The turmoil of the actors had nothing to do with the melancholy serenity of this stage. T
here was no one to shoot at in this phantasmagorical campaign.
Baltasar Bustos reached Upper Peru during the interregnum between Spain and independence. The Spanish forces had immediately executed patriot officers, and the patriots had shot the royalist officers. But the revenge grew: the colonial administration offered more and better candidates for the firing squad—quartermasters, wardens, judges (standing and circuit court), even lawyers, notaries, and mere scribes had been shot without a trial in the Potosí plaza. In La Paz, “unhappy and barbarous city,” explosions, pillage, libertinism, and desertion were the norm. The women opted for the most fiery party, joining the ranks of independence as a “pretext to abandon religion and modesty, and to give themselves over to pleasure with the utmost wantonness.”
“You must impose order,” Dorrego wrote him. “The army of the revolution should not sacrifice its prestige by committing or condoning crimes.” Order? Me? Baltasar Bustos burst into a bitter guffaw, as he sought a praiseworthy avenue for justice amid this chaos: the walls of Upper Peru were stained with the blood of creoles and Spaniards—white men like him, Baltasar wrote to our friend Dorrego—who were the officers and captains of the three armies—the Spanish, the guerrilla, and that of the Buenos Aires junta. The great mass of the soldiers were of mixed blood, and the Indians were the beasts of burden in all three armies. Even his myopic eyes perceived this, but he was in no position to mete out justice no matter what they’d seen.
The whites ran the war—the wars, the guerrilla wars—and killed one another off. The mestizos died in battle, and the Indians provided food, labor, and women. Everyone exploited, everyone recruited, everyone pillaged. When he reached the plateau, Baltasar Bustos repeated incessantly: Only justice can save us all, justice means order without exploitation, equality before the law. He was seeking a tribunal from which to proclaim his truth and set up the words, and also the acts, of justice against the chaos of blood spilled—and this he only reluctantly accepted—in order to allow the birth of a new world.
Arms captured from the Spanish forces entered the plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra at dawn, disturbing the coolness of the mountains. Horses released from the corrals invaded the streets of Suipacha at midnight, altering the rhythm of the planets. In the Cuzco marketplace, the guerrilla fighters of Ayopaya exchanged a confiscated crop of coca leaves for rations to be used by the guerrillas. The ranches abandoned by the rural oligarchy were occupied by the guerrillas and turned into barracks for the local warlords, petty chiefs who, from every mountain peak, canyon, and almost from every promontory on the road, seemed to proclaim their independence, their micro-republics, as Baltasar Bustos called them from his ridiculous calvary, his ascent to the roof of America.
There he was, under orders from the revolutionary, enlightened port of Buenos Aires to establish relations with a series of cruel, haughty, audacious, smilingly fraternal, egoistic warlords, who all felt they had a right to take anything—ranches, lives, women, crops, Indians, horses, stagecoaches and stagecoach routes—in the name of independence. But, as the caudillo José Vicente Camargo, who controlled the route between Argentina and Upper Peru, said to him: “Our goal is to free ourselves from the laws and the oppression of Spain, not to exchange them for the laws and the oppression of Buenos Aires.” And that is how it was in those years between 1813 and 1815. To bring Baltasar up to date, I wrote to him, “Every one of the valleys that spill their waters into the Pilcomayo River, every chain of mountains, every ravine, is a petty republic, a center of permanent insurrection.”
However, it wasn’t necessary to explain a thing. Between Tarija and Lake Titicaca, between Suipacha and the Sipe-Sipe River, Baltasar Bustos was made to feel that he was the representative of a new power as distant and despotic as Spain. The vindictive Miguel Lanza in the micro-republic of Ayopaya, the brave Juan Antonio Alvarez de Arenales on the Mizque and Vallegrande roads; the subtle and slightly mad Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas to the north of Lake Titicaca; the grand, generous patriarch Ignacio Warnes, who welcomed those who entered his impregnable refuge in the mountains; the reckless couple, Manuel Ascencio Padilla and Juana Azurday de Padilla—each declared his own independence, his own micro-republic, his own power against two equally vicious and distant powers: Spain and Buenos Aires.
All of them confiscated crops and cattle, recruited mestizos from the towns and Indians from the mountains, sacked ranches, raped women, but they also cut the Spanish Army’s communication lines, deprived the army of supplies, attacked it at night here and there, unexpectedly; incapable of defeating it in a frontal attack, they bled it with small, constant, cruel, and sudden wounds. And they opened the road, provided rest areas, food, and supplies for the liberating army, which, without the micro-republics, the local warlords, and their troops of guerrillas, would have died of hunger at the very start, lost in the hallucination of that plateau so similar to the perpetually hidden face of the moon. There were also the Spanish counterattacks. Without food or communications, without replacements, incredibly far from their Buenos Aires base, the army in which poor Baltasar Bustos commanded two hundred recruits from Argentina’s northern provinces wouldn’t have lasted a single night if it hadn’t been for the local warlords. But they rejected everything Baltasar Bustos brought to Upper Peru, as he sought, with a neophyte’s impatience, the opportunity to proclaim it.
The moment was finally supplied by Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas in the fortified plaza of Arecaja on the northern shore of Lake Titicaca. The other caudillos wouldn’t brook Baltasar’s revolutionary rhetoric; their decisions, so implacable they seemed irrefutable, were made on the spot even if they were the result of long planning. They always knew what they wanted: horses, a crop. Unless their orders were carried out immediately, the war would be lost; it was that simple. Victory was the name of their satisfied demands. Having their orders carried out immediately: the souls of the guerrilla warlords seemed to be what independence was. Baltasar, speaking with them, watching them in the wake of the whirlwind these men stirred up, could not find in them that tiny crack necessary for doubt; and, without doubt, there is no discourse for justice.
“Round up a hundred Indians to move supplies,” Manuel Ascencio Padilla would order on the road to Chuquisaca. “Shoot the whole administration of Oruro,” Miguel Lanza would dictate from his jungle throne between Cochabamba and La Paz. “Drive all the cattle off of B—’s ranch and bring them down to my place,” José Vicente Camargo, on the road to Argentina, would say, imposing his will. “Open the mountain trails to all wounded guerrillas who come to Santa Cruz,” Warnes the magnanimous would order. “I want a woman,” said Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas, clasping his hands and squeezing his lively eyes shut, “but I can’t; it would violate my vow of chastity…”
Baltasar saw him arrive on a mule, like a vision out of Cervantes on a stage that resembled the central plateau of Spain: dry, high, somber, and wrinkled. Spain was reiterated in its colonies: the Andalusian Caribbean, the Mexican Castile, Extremadura so like Cuzco. Ildefonso de las Muñecas also looked like his Spanish and American land, but if he was Castilian in physique, he was definitely Andalusian in gesture and eyes. A revolutionary priest: Baltasar smiled with shock, not his own but the shock he thought our Jacobin friend Xavier Dorrego would feel. Bustos’s glance did not escape Father de las Muñecas.
“Do I stand out too much?” was the first thing he said. “I don’t want to cause a scandal. But even my name attracts attention—after all, muñecas are dolls and I certainly like good-looking women. So why wouldn’t my actions do as much? Do our names determine our character or is it our acts that give meaning to our names? Let Plato figure it out.” And the guerrilla priest laughed.
“We should all be guided by the law,” Baltasar Bustos said, jumping up and almost spilling the maté gourd he’d traveled with from the pampa. Who’d hidden it among the white shirts in his baggage: his father, José Antonio; his sister, Sabina; a friendly but facetious gaucho? “Your vow is an example to a
ll, Father.”
“And you, what do you want that the law forbids?” He opened one eye and looked at Baltasar with a mix of sarcasm and curiosity.
“I want justice. You know that, Father.”
“It’s not the same thing. Your desire and the law are not in opposition.”
“But my desire and my reality are.”
Now only curiosity glinted in the revolutionary priest’s slit eyes. “If I give you an opportunity for justice, will you give me an opportunity for love, young man?”
Blushing, but without a second thought, Baltasar said yes, and Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas broke into uncontrollable laughter. “It just occurred to me that it ought to be the other way around, youngster. I should be imparting justice, and you should be learning about ‘pleasure-giving females,’ as Juan Ruiz, the Archpriest of Hita, a priest as hot-blooded as I am, said a few hundred years ago.”
He tucked up his cassock, as he always did when he was making decisions that involved God and man equally, and he told the astonished lieutenant that he, Father de las Muñecas, did not know what the young citizen of Buenos Aires understood by justice but that he, the priest, did believe in the abundance of blessings the Scriptures associated with human or divine justice. He let his cassock drop to its normal length and then draped his chest with cartridge belts and scapularies.