Lanza lifted a burning rush out of the fire to show a dark Indian standing behind him, who held out a maté to Baltasar Bustos.
“The Indian and I have the same name,” said Baltasar, smiling idiotically.
“We’ll soon find out if you’ve got the same courage,” said Lanza.
“My danger is that I admire everything I’m not.” This is what Baltasar had thought and what he now felt empowered to say.
“Like what?”
“Strength, realism, and cruelty. You might as well know it.”
“You’re the porteño who proclaimed twenty thousand freedoms in the Ayopaya plaza with the priest Muñecas, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right, and I assume my orders have been carried out.”
Lanza stared at him without changing expression. Then laughter burst forth like a vein of silver from between his teeth: his mouth opened; a guffaw exploded; tears of laughter rolled down the short span between his blue eyes and his black beard as if down a long-dry channel. Again, he picked up the burning reed to light up Baltasar Cárdenas’s dark face. The Indian was not laughing. “Just look at him,” said Lanza, choking on his unfamiliar glee. “I’m dying of laughter, but he’s not. I know your proclamations are nothing but words, and they make me laugh, but the Indian doesn’t know that. He took them seriously. And he won’t forgive you for them.”
Baltasar Cárdenas took a step forward and, with the toe of his spurred boot, shoved Baltasar Bustos back on his straw mat.
“You owe your life to us,” said the Indian in answer to Baltasar’s puzzled look. “Your Buenos Aires battalion scattered,” Lanza explained. “You were left between the Spaniards and us. If the Spaniards had taken you, you’d be dead right now. So give thanks you ended up with us.”
“Go on, give thanks,” said the other Baltasar, who was just about to prod the officer from Buenos Aires one more time. But Lanza stopped him, “We’re brothers in this calvary,” he reminded both Baltasars, “so let our offenses be forgotten so we may abound in virtues.”
“Tell me your reasons now, quickly, and I’ll tell you mine,” Miguel Lanza went on, suddenly serious. “So we can get this over with and understand each other.”
Baltasar Bustos closed his eyes. A rivulet of blood ran through his lips, and he could say nothing more. Perhaps they would understand his silence, and the sleep that followed it, as an honorable reiteration of what he had managed to say earlier.
“I admire everything I’m not.”
During the days following this night, Baltasar tried to recognize the physical characteristics of the camps where he stopped, but they moved constantly from place to place. He discovered that his cot was a stretcher and that Miguel Lanza’s guerrilla group never stayed anywhere longer than forty hours. They were moving through unknown territory; but Lanza and the Indian leader, Cárdenas, seemed to know it well: the valleys, the plains they crossed as they expropriated crops, the passes, the crevasses and wrinkles in the mountains, and, suddenly, the rope bridges that led them down to the bottom of the jungle and the bottom of the bottom, the mud flats, the mud of the Inquisivi that the guerrilla leader had spoken of.
The landscape changed constantly; Lanza’s guerrillas had to change their ways, too. What was permanent in this? When Baltasar saw Lanza again, at dawn, standing by a labyrinth of peaks that the night before had looked from a distance like a half-closed fan, he remembered Lanza’s words: We’re going to give you our reasons.
That wouldn’t be the last time that Baltasar Bustos would hear Miguel Lanza tell his life story. His Indian namesake always stood behind Lanza and would interrupt him when he felt he was talking too much. For the other Baltasar, the Indian, speech was superfluous, an excessive effort. There were so many things waiting to be done that saying them was unnecessary. As he regained his strength, Baltasar the creole gradually took part in the labors of the mountain troops. They interrupt communications. They kidnap messengers. They collect rations and arms. They attack at night. By day they vanish (this morning they’re standing before the fan of mountains, they’ve come back from fighting, they will have some bacon and maté before going to sleep). They attack again, then bury themselves in the hills, luring the royalist forces toward their lairs in the jungle, attacking the Spanish rear guard sometimes and the advance guard others; they harass the Spaniards’ flanks, attacking their baggage again and again, their supplies, their mail, their gold, stopping to melt down church bells and make them into cannons, making powder and shot from the nitrates and the lead in the very mines which supplied Spain with the wealth it squandered and which now were the powder magazine of the independentist insurgents: first the war must be won, then justice and laws will come, Lanza repeated from time to time to Bustos in the midst of all this activity. Then he reminded Bustos:
“Whenever you porteños come here to the jungle and the mountains to implement the revolution, you make a mess of things. It may be that your porteño chiefs know more than our Indian chiefs, but savage troops, whether from Buenos Aires or from the Chaco, want women, money, and the pure enjoyment of violence. You, Baltasar Bustos, are the victim of your predecessors, who came here proclaiming liberty, equality, and fraternity, while their soldiers raped, robbed, and burned everything down. Just like ours. But we don’t put on airs. We want independence for ourselves here and for America in general, and we know the price we’ll have to pay. You don’t seem to. You’d like a clean little war, but there is none to be had. The mestizos in Potosí rose up against the troops from Buenos Aires and killed two hundred porteños then and there. What do you want us to think, my young friend? You people are either rogues or fools. I don’t understand you anymore. The illustrious General Belgrano, the truest hero of the revolution, came up here and ordered the Potosí treasury blown up to cut off the source of Spanish power. Fortunately, your namesake the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas was there to cut the burning fuse, which was moving toward the powder barrels faster than a greyhound. What use would the Potosí treasures have been to anyone, blown all to shit by Belgrano’s revolutionary zeal? The fabled Pueyrredón, who’s president of Argentina now, was wiser: he ran off with all the Potosí gold he could find, a million pesos in gold and silver he removed from the same treasury house and loaded onto two hundred pack mules. So the rebel mestizos killed as many of his men as he had mules, just to settle accounts with him. See what I mean? Either you’re all really stupid or really clever. We’re better off governing ourselves! Long live the Republic of the Inquisivi!”
“Viva! Viva!” chorused his entire band, who seemed to listen to their chief even when he spoke in a low voice as he educated Baltasar Bustos, the most recent recruit to this incessant war in which no quarter was ever given and about which it was impossible to say “it started up again” because it never really died down. Viva Inquisivi and its leader, our General Miguel Lanza! Long live the creole Baltasar Bustos! Just like them, side by side with them, he attacked, retreated, pretended to be losing so as to catch the Spaniards off guard, robbed Pueyrredón and Belgrano’s gold, stole letters and thought how much time it would have taken the ones he wrote his adored friends, Varela (me) and Dorrego, to reach Buenos Aires (if they ever reached Buenos Aires). We counted the days we lived without our younger brother, the brother we’d sent—severe comrades but convinced we were doing the right thing—to get experience, become a man, compare books to life, while we collected clocks. Baltasar was a man: he never hesitated to ford a swollen river, to drop a church bell from the tower down to the atrium to melt it down and make a copper cannon, to burn his face in the sun and his hands with the nitrates. It was that Baltasar Bustos who stole chickens, equipment, ammunition, who did everything but kill a man or take a woman whether she was willing or not. He became identical to all the others; he ate what they ate, slept when they slept. He was different only in that the others weren’t living, killing, stealing, or risking their lives for a distant woman named Ofelia Salamanca.
He had avoided two things
until now: fornication and murder.
And the guerrillas said that an angel protected the porteño cherub Baltasar, who though he never ceased moving and doing things for a single instant, never killed a fellow human being, not even the most detestable Spaniard, never took his pleasure with a woman, no matter how delectable or willing she might be.
Little by little, he came to compensate for these two sins of omission through his loyalty to the troops.
In secret, as he slept on the cot they gave him after they saw how weak, how creole, how much of a porteño he was—none of them knew he was born of the pampa—but also in public, speaking to the other Baltasar, who never said a word to him but at least listened, so he felt he wasn’t going mad, talking to himself, he would say, to himself and to his namesake: “I admire everything I’m not, you know. Strength, realism, and cruelty. My salvation, my silent brother, will be to become the best I can be. That’s why I’m with you.”
“It was an accident.” The Indian’s eyes reproached him.
“Now it’s my wish,” replied Baltasar the creole. “Here I am with you, and I’ll stay with you because I want to. Either way, I’m serving the cause of independence.”
That was his answer to the mystery, the dream, the nausea of El Dorado, that bewitched city where a man could see and hear the woman he loved without being able to touch her: once again, the torture of Tantalus, not in the veiled but immediate reality of a Buenos Aires bedroom, but in a ghostly, mediated evocation that took place inside a mountain of savage witchcraft.
We should mention that this was also his answer to the labors that we, his older brothers, Dorrego and Varela, imposed on our younger brother, comfortably, without running any of the risks to which we exposed our cadet. But where was the dividing line between our orders and young Baltasar’s acceptance? The reply would come not from his distant comrades, Dorrego and I, but from his immediate superior, the chieftain Miguel Lanza.
“I simply want to become the best I can be. What should I do? Is that the way to become one with nature?”
The Indian did not give an answer; neither did the landslides caused by the rains, or the swollen rivers the guerrillas knew to avoid even as they lured the overladen royalists into the current to drown. Miguel Lanza’s men had no uniforms, traveled light, and drew the Spaniards toward the most secret, most dangerous spots in South America, as if to say: Look, this proves the land is ours. You die here. We survive.
Through rationalizations like that, they stifled their own guilt: we are not formal soldiers, we don’t show our faces in daylight, we fight without taking risks, we are nocturnal warriors who grow at night, like the jungle itself.
That was how the conquistadors had survived, and there was something of them in Miguel Lanza, not only because he looked like a seasoned soldier as well as a mystic baptized in blood but because of his life story, which Baltasar Bustos, little by little, over the course of the interminable guerrilla war with its infrequent rest periods, was able to extract from him. He was destitute. He had been left an orphan as a child and was brought up by the Franciscans in their seminary at La Paz. His older brother Gregorio brought banned books into the monastery. “He was like you, Baltasar the creole. He believed what he read. He believed in independence. On July 16, 1809, in La Paz, he joined those who proclaimed emancipation from Spain without hiding behind the mask of Fernando VII. That was the first time he told himself what you believe: the representatives of the people can declare the rights of the people, with or without a Spanish monarchy. The repression carried out by the viceroy Abascal was savage. If the royalists wouldn’t stand for insurgence in the name of Ferdinand VII, what would they do to those who’d shit on the king? Well, what they did to my brother Gregorio: they hung him in the main square of La Paz. I always see in my mind’s eye my dead brother’s head—with that tongue of his that could speak so beautifully hanging down to his chest. What could that voice say now which had taught us younger brothers everything we knew? See how a life and a handful of ideas that belong only to you end up belonging to others, and tell me if what followed was just revenge on my part or the very reason why I’m rebelling.”
“You certainly talk a lot,” the Indian Baltasar would punctuate these conversations. But Miguel Lanza tenderly remembered his second older brother, Manuel Victorio, who followed the war of independence at the point where death cut off Gregorio’s life. His struggle came to a head on the banks of the Totorani River in a hand-to-hand battle without firearms against a Spanish captain, Gabriel Antonio Castro. “They say that afternoon no other sounds were heard along the entire Totorani but the panting of the two warriors, famished, exhausted, covered with wounds, completely alone in their struggle. In the end, both fell dead in the waters of the twilit river. Despite a shared death, their destinies were different. The Spaniards cut off Manuel Victorio’s head, stuck it on a pike, and brought it to La Paz, where it was exhibited as a warning to insurgents and rebels. I looked at it for a long time there, until it rotted and they took it down, until I was old enough to join my brothers’ struggle. Now, creole Baltasar, you tell me whether this war of mine is one of vengeance, conviction, or the fatality of destiny.”
Yes, Baltasar said to his namesake, the Indian caudillo; yes, he said to himself or to Lanza. Call it revenge, conviction, or fate, but it is your destiny. Baltasar understood then, and quickly wrote it down, so that Dorrego and I would receive his words someday, that just as Miguel Lanza spun a destiny for himself out of the entwined threads of liberty and fate, he, Baltasar Bustos, would create his own. How to admit, weeks, months after joining the guerrillas, that Miguel Lanza the orphan had a new brother, this time younger than he, Baltasar the creole, heir, without wanting it, to the lives of Gregorio and Manuel Victorio Lanza? Because Lanza, after telling him the personal reasons for his revolt, revealed the objective reasons for his military strategy as they stood over maps rolled out in the dust and held down by lanterns stolen from some hacienda or convent—because everything here was stolen, though Miguel Lanza explained: “All I do is circulate dormant capital. I am an agent of liberal economics.”
The maps told another story, and as he looked them over, listening to Lanza and noting his reasons, Bustos, barely liberated by experience, began to feel he was a prisoner. The poles of the revolution in southern America, according to Lanza, were in viceregal Lima and revolutionary Buenos Aires. “We’ve been going at it now for six years: Lima can’t beat Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires can’t beat Lima. The two powers cancel each other out. We’re right between them: the guerrilla fighters of Upper Peru. Buenos Aires is a long way off. Colonial oppression is right at hand. We have to keep up the guerrilla war. The royalist forces are here, and so are we. You and yours, Bustos, should come, help out, give speeches. But don’t lose sight of reality. There are three armies here. Your people from Buenos Aires don’t know how to fight in the mountains. The royalist has to fight. We mountaineers are the only ones who have to fight and also know how to fight here.”
If he, Baltasar Bustos, felt the need to talk about laws, injustice, and ideals, he should also note how guerrilla freedom worked—it was the very inhabitants of the place who made up the troop, they elected the chief, they disciplined themselves to serve the cause. The liberty he wanted for his great city was perhaps not the same as the liberty the Indians and mestizos of Upper Peru wanted. But if down there liberty became one with the law that proclaimed it, here, Lanza went on, liberty was inseparable from an equality that had never before been known in these lands.
“Maybe they’ll never know it unless they use their strength to implement the law,” replied our younger brother, Baltasar, following our advice: favor what contradicts you, to put your ideas to the test and strengthen them.
“They want to change their lives, not their laws,” said Lanza, speaking like Bustos in the Café de Malcos.
“Maybe they won’t get either thing and will go on living as always, in misery,” concluded Baltasar, because events were p
iling up on him, stealing his words, adding him to the cryptic, disguised, enigmatic strength of Miguel Lanza. They were making their way along a road of lances crowned with severed heads, heads like Miguel Lanza’s, all balanced in unnerving plasticity on the hollow reed lances with steel points knotted to them that the guerrillas carried on the steep paths taking them this time to the bare, windy peaks where there was no vegetation, not even enough to hang a rebel, before they tumbled down the slate slopes again to the tropical forests in the depths of the gorges, always with the intent of luring the Spaniards into an ambush, making them believe that they, the guerrillas, had been defeated. Thus, by slowly bleeding the royalist forces, they were devastating them, forcing them to commit acts of repression, to exterminate the villages from which the guerrillas, whom they called thieves, bandits, murderers, and mad dogs, came. Entire towns disappeared, and only the roads to them remained, until they, too, were devoured by nature, ever moving, ceaseless—overflowing rivers no one could harness, flooded lands, gangrenous forests with no one to prune them, snow-covered mountains, dying thickets, disappeared towns …
All of them fell during that year Baltasar Bustos spent with Miguel Lanza’s band. Like the landscape around him, the towns, and the men he met there, he, too, changed. Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas fell in Larecaja, from whence he closed the road to Lima; Vicente Camargo fell on the way to Potosí, from whence the way to Buenos Aires was open. Padilla and his guerrilla wife—their last words were “This war is eternal!”—fell. The generous Warnes fell, and when he did, the sanctuary he offered in times of defeat closed up. Only Lanza refused to admit defeat.
One day he appeared in camp. His blue eyes were as black as his beard.
He said simply, “They’ve killed Baltasar Cárdenas, they’ve killed our brother.”
The Indian’s head was paraded around the plaza at Cochabamba and then thrown to the hogs. But Lanza did not leave off intercepting communications, capturing couriers, stockpiling food, gunpowder, lead, horses, feed, medicine, alcohol, and even women—although they were becoming a very scarce commodity. On the other hand, the horses’ natural inclinations caused them to join the guerrillas’ herd. Runaways, ownerless, they straggled into the micro-republic of Inquisivi from no one knew where. Their bodies gave off the steam of the jungle. This altitude wasn’t the best place for them. What were they doing here?