The Campaign

  In this way, Dorrego and I, Varela, transform History into the presence of an absence. Is that another name for ideal perfection?

  6

  The Army of the Andes

  [1]

  “His name is Baltasar Bustos, his family owns an estate—reasonable people, but half savage, like all ranch owners.” “If at least his father were a merchant.” “Is he a good marriage prospect?” “But he fought alongside the mountain rebels in Upper Peru—when did he become a royalist?” “When Miguel Lanza put a price on his head for deserting.” “He says that he’s in love, that he came here looking for the woman.” “That’s not important, but the news he brings from Inquisivi and Jujuy is.” “He’s very open; we know everything about him.” “He doesn’t hide anything from us.” “He knows we’ll crush the rebellion, so he’s doing us a favor.” “He certainly doesn’t look like a guerrilla.” “Your excellency shouldn’t judge by appearances.” “Plump, perfumed, dressed in silks, nearsighted…”

  He strolled the salons of Santiago de Chile just as he’d strolled those of Lima, but he did not cut the same figure. Rather, he conformed to the description recorded above by the authorities of the captaincy-general of Chile. What a fuss this Baltasar Bustos made about his search for Ofelia Salamanca, now the widow of the Marquis de Cabra, who had died of bile and apoplexy in Lima! Who had died, it should be noted, in bed. Of course, no one knows if he died before or after his rehearsed death. Was he already dead when they laid him in his wife’s bed? Or did he die there, transforming the rehearsal into reality and the attempt at playfulness into God’s punishment?

  The marquis fully deserved it. He left behind in Chile so many bad memories of his cruelty and injustice—which he carried out, it must be noted, with a smile and a joke on his lips! But his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, is no longer here; people say she went north, fleeing from the imminent fall of Chile, so ill defended, she said before departing, by the most pusillanimous captain-general in three centuries, Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Pont, who sought to compensate for his lack of military prowess by investing excessive energy in repression, passing judgment on the loyalty of all creoles without exception, expropriating their properties, burning their houses, and occasionally exiling them to the Island of Juan Fernández.

  While none of that made up for Marcó del Pont’s stupidity on the battlefield, it did succeed in making Spanish rule the object of general hatred and threw the inhabitants of Santiago and Valparaíso into a state of total hysteria. It was from that that Ofelia Salamanca had fled. She was fed up with suspicion, fear, sudden changes! Now this nearsighted, fat fellow was looking for her, and just by chance he came from Jujuy, Upper Peru, and Mendoza, and had friends in the rebel officer corps in Argentina, who, though they protected him from Lanza’s death sentence, had no confidence in him.

  In any case, the sword of Damocles is hanging over his head; obviously, he’s not meant for war; he says that Lanza conscripted him; he seems as edgy as everyone else; he only wants to find the widow of the Marquis de Cabra and ease his anxiety with exasperated waves of his handkerchief, nervous twitches of his head, as if he were expecting bad news or a worse blow at any moment. He complains about not finding his usual lotions in Chile; this country is the end of the world! He wonders what he’s doing here, if he’s not looking for Ofelia Salamanca, until someone suggests he form a club for those whose hearts have been broken by the Chilean beauty, stubborn enemy of independence and the rebels, about whom it is said, but perhaps it’s nothing but pure gossip, that it was she who personally plunged a dagger into the back of the insurgent Colonel Martín Echagüe to keep him from taking part in the battle of Rancagua, a rebel defeat that forced the vanquished leaders O’Higgins and Carrera to flee to Mendoza on the other side of the Andes. Whence comes to us this confused, edgy, beardless youngster to tell us that a rebel attack is imminent, that San Martín has deployed armies of more than twenty thousand men in mobile units north and south along the Argentine Andes in preparation for a general assault on Chile, from Aconcagua to Valdivia.

  Santiago de Chile lived in terror at the outset of the summer of 1816, and precisely for that reason its forty thousand inhabitants decided to enjoy themselves until they died and to spend every cent they had. But the rumor mill, as in Lima, worked to its full capacity in the continuous, simultaneous parties with which royalist society, more and more depleted, sought to exorcise its fear of an insurgent victory, and sought in vain for possible allies among the Creoles, whom Marcó del Pont’s repressive violence had delivered over to the patriots. They clandestinely circulated Father Camilo Henríquez’s newspaper, Dawn of Chile, which contained news that should have been assumed to be false since it came from the mutinous enemy, unless the rebels were deluding themselves. The purpose of the social gatherings in the Chilean capital, during those months of oppressive heat and of peaches peeled a second before they rotted, was to gather information, air all rumors, place wagers on the future of the colony, and listen to anyone who had the merest particle of information.

  “The rebels are mad,” Baltasar Bustos would say, strolling contemptuously through the Chilean soirees with a tiny glass of white wine in his hand. “They’ve gone all-out in deploying troops for a general attack along an eeeenormous front; they’re going to cut all of you to bits, so get a good night’s sleep. Me? I’m harmless, just looking for a certain woman.”

  Those listening to this fop—as the English court, adorned at the time by Beau Brummel, would no doubt have called him—wondered if a myopic, soft dandy who proclaimed his passion so publicly could really love the woman he said he was pursuing. No, he couldn’t possibly love her so much if he was so vocal in mentioning her. Perhaps it was just the sickness of the age: tiring passionately, being oneself only by being one’s romantic passion, which was certainly sufficient, if painful, for the interior hero invented by the likes of Rousseau and Chateaubriand.

  “All I ask of the world is that it grant me a point of departure: the woman I love,” said Bustos, between the sighs of the Chilean girls, the most beautiful in America. But he would quickly disillusion them with a mannered gesture and a clarification: “But I don’t want you to think I desire a companion. Not in the slightest. I only need—can you chaste damsels listening to me understand?—a love object. An object for my love.”

  They turned their backs on him. Perhaps that young, handsome priest looking so intently at Baltasar understood him. Approaching him, the priest said that Baltasar’s words made him think there was something more in them than it seemed from their apparent frivolity. Unrequited love is the most intense of all.

  “So you, too, have read St. John Chrysostom,” said Baltasar, remembering a violent May night in Buenos Aires. “But now”—he sighed—“our secret passions no longer matter. Order itself is in danger. I have lived with these guerrilla criminals. I know what they’re capable of doing, to women, to priests like you … We’ve got to hang them before they hang us.”

  “Dandy,” blurted out the priest, slapping Baltasar across the face.

  “Oh! I saw you from a distance in Lima, I know who you are, so be careful,” replied Bustos.

  A third young man, a royalist officer, whose high, embroidered collar pinched his cheeks painfully and eclipsed his thick, reddish, carefully cultivated sideburns, pulled them apart. The young lieutenant said this was no time for provoking arguments and making people more nervous. The priest put himself in serious danger by defending the rebels, even if he did so out of Christian charity. Bustos should try to restrain himself, however understandable it might be for a man with a price on his head to be on edge. But the Inquisivi rebels had not yet reached Santiago. He could relax. No, Baltasar replied, they hadn’t, but San Martín had. “The army he’s gathered in Argentina is going to attack us from all sides, there won’t be enough supplies…”

  The lieutenant with the sideburns ordered him to be quiet. He was sowing confusion and raising tensions. San Martín would attack from the south, where c
rossing the mountains was easier. Who would risk crossing the highest peaks? No one had ever marched an army through the Aconcagua Valley. It’s almost four miles up! In fact, San Martín himself had had a great meeting with the Pechuenche chiefs to get permission to pass through their flatlands. He would surprise us Spaniards at Planchón and give the Indians back their freedom.

  “Forces sufficient to stop any rebel invasion are already marching to Planchón,” said the cocky lieutenant, hooking one thumb over his wide belt while with his other hand he caressed the soft fingers of his snow-white parade gloves.

  “Do you actually believe one word of what those lying Indians tell you?” Baltasar Bustos laughed.

  “Everything suggests they’ve betrayed San Martín,” said Lieutenant Sideburns.

  “Just as they would betray us royalists,” insisted Baltasar, playing on the expectations of the small group gathering to listen to them. “No one knows what to think anymore!”

  “We should really beware of illuminati priests besotted with French readings,” added the young priest, as if to erase, then and there, any bad impression he might have made and to confuse the discussion even more. “We have the power of confession, and we have influence on the conscience of the military, the bureaucrats, the housewives … I know that disloyal priests abound in Chile, and that they never leave off their labor of undermining everything.”

  “Those divisive priests have split my family, fathers against sons,” said a sallow little captain as he arranged his cream-colored shirt front with a gesture that belied his rancor. “And that I can never forgive them.”

  “I know nothing about that,” said the red-haired lieutenant energetically. “All I know is that there isn’t a single mountain pass where we don’t have troops ready to repel San Martín, no matter where in the Andes he turns up.”

  “Do you know that your beloved Ofelia murdered Captain Echagüe in bed, while they were fornicating?” the young priest said to Baltasar in a mysterious, seductive, cruel tone, but loud enough that the summer girls, the eternal little mistresses of Santiago society, could hear him with scandalized delight.

  [2]

  Baltasar cut such a comic, blind, addled-witted figure at the parties of the waning Chilean colony that it shouldn’t have surprised him that people took more notice of him than he of them. The soirees followed on each other like a series of prolonged farewells extending from the salons of the Royal Council to the elegant country houses east of the city, through the baroque of the carved ceiling panels, the wrought-iron work, and the huge portals of Velasco House in the center of the city.

  To honor the memory of Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar made a big show of haunting the chambers of the Royal Council, like a soul in torment; that was where the deceased Marquis de Cabra had presided before being sent to Buenos Aires. It was a new building, just finished in 1808, with twenty cast-iron windows on the second floor, wrought-iron balconies on the third, and a sequence of patios and galleries that reminded our hero (which is what you are, Baltasar) of the spacious River Plate Superior Court where his life was determined for all time.

  This Santiago building owed its existence to a governor who arrived firmly committed to implanting the culture of the Enlightenment in Spain’s most remote southern colony. Luis Muñoz de Guzmán took Charles III’s ideas of modernization seriously and disembarked at the port of Valparaíso bearing musical instruments, baroque-music scores, perhaps some forbidden books, and no doubt the plays that soon began to be put on in those same patios and salons, under the patronage of his wife, Doña Luisa de Esterripa.

  Nothing on this summer afternoon would have kept Baltasar Bustos from the performance taking place in one of the mansions—after all, it was nothing less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Discovery of America—except that at that same hour, on every afternoon since he arrived in Santiago, Baltasar Bustos would step out on the balcony of the house where he was staying, a house that belonged to an old friend of his father’s, a Spaniard who’d made his fortune in the New World and left all his property to go back to Spain. From that vantage point, he would observe a vision in the neighboring garden.

  At around five in the afternoon, a girl would appear among the olive and almond trees. Dressed all in white, she seemed to float in a private cloud of soft cottons and gauze bodices. Baltasar would wait for the appearance of this phantom: she was always punctual and always distant, like a new star, half sun, half moon, displaying herself to him alone, offering herself to him in the tender orbit of a satellite around a true star—him. As she approached, this delightful girl would spin among the almond trees; coming closer and closer, she would twirl on her always bare feet in a dance that Baltasar wanted to think was dedicated to him—after all, there were no other spectators but the sun and the moon, which at that uncertain hour coexist in the Andean sky.

  Only once, Baltasar looked at the two of them, the sun and moon present at five o’clock in the afternoon over a garden of wise and serene plants. They could not compete with her; she was both of them at once, and many other things as well.

  A fine sun, as hot and caressing as the familiar hand of a mother who knows she is taken for granted and resigns herself to not being especially loved; but also an evil sun about to execute the day by hurling it into an irreversible conflagration from which it would never rise: the sun was the stepmother of time.

  And a bad moon, which appeared now as if to seal the day’s fate with a silver lock, white moon drained of life, pale moon with a vampire’s face, bloodless moon hungry for offal and bloody discharges; but a good moon too, the bed of the day reposing in white sheets, the final bath that washes off the day’s grime and sinks us into the amorous re-creation of time which is sleep.

  Baltasar Bustos would watch all that from his balcony, afternoon after afternoon, until he came to distinguish a face, the unusual face of the moon, unexpected, individual, marked by eyebrows that in another woman would have been repulsive, joined together with no break, like a second sex about to devour her black eyes, her haughty nose, her red lips, and her expression of disdain, sweet disdain that began to madden Baltasar and to distance him from his obsession with Ofelia Salamanca.

  Each afternoon, for a week now, this most beautiful girl—she could be no more than eighteen—came closer and closer until she disappeared through the series of arches of the house next door. Perhaps she had seen him, because she teased him coquettishly, appearing and then hiding behind the columns in the long aisles before she disappeared until the next day.

  But this afternoon she was not there.

  Baltasar felt a burning desire to jump over the wall, embrace her and kiss first her red lips and then her provocative eyebrows, like velvet, joined like a divine scourge, the promise of lust and terror. She was sun and moon, and this afternoon she was missing.

  Only this afternoon. Why? What could have interrupted a rite he by now considered sacred, indispensable to his romantic life—once again he realized it and said it when he described this episode to us; his amorous emotions depended on distance, on absence, on the intensity of the desire manifested to a woman he could not touch, saw from afar, who now, just like Ofelia Salamanca, had disappeared without keeping the appointment, not with him, but with the sun and the moon.

  Then Baltasar Bustos took his hat, ran out of the house, ran without noticing the ten blocks that separated him from the Red House in whose grand patio Rousseau’s short tragedy was being performed, ran along the Calle del Rey, burst through the grand doorway, and saw her dancing in the middle of the patio surrounded by a chorus, by Indians and Spaniards, she herself acting the role of an allegorical Spanish maiden who sang and recited at the same time: Let us row, let us cross the seas, our pleasures will have their time, because to discover new worlds is to offer new flowers to love …

  She raised her arms, and the gauze of her bodice revealed two fresh cherries, kissable, doing a short and merry quadrille on the girl’s bosom.

  “It isn’t Jean-Jacques’s
best effort,” said the handsome priest to Baltasar as the public applauded and the actors bowed and thanked them. “I prefer Narcissus, or He Who Loves Himself, where Rousseau has the audacity to begin the dialogue with two women talking about a man, the brother of one of them, who, because of the refinement and affectation of his clothes is a kind of woman disguised in man’s clothing. Yet his feminine appearance, instead of being a disguise, restores him to his natural state.”

  “Are you telling me that this marvelous girl is really a man in disguise?” said Baltasar, instantly assuming his own vapid, cruel affectation.

  “No”—the priest laughed—“her name is Gabriela Cóo, and her father’s job, an endless, labyrinthine task, is to sell off the Jesuits’ rural properties in Chile for the benefit of the Crown. His daughter is no less emancipated than Rousseau himself, so she works at acting, avidly reading the authors of the age, and communing with nature. Allow me to introduce you, Bustos.”

  “Are you telling me that all these afternoons she’s merely been rehearsing a part?” asked Baltasar, plainly disillusioned.

  “Pardon me?”

  He accepted the invitation to meet her socially, but only under the condition that no one ever find out that each afternoon at five, for as long as he had to live in Chile, he would see her appear, vaporous and infinitely desirable, in the garden next door to his own house. He was afraid that she might already have met him at one of the myriad Santiago gatherings and that she would despise him, as did the other girls, who were, besides, fully aware of his obsession for the vanished Marquise de Cabra. He was just about to reject the introduction and to propose, since both of them were Rousseau enthusiasts, a purely epistolary relationship, like the one in the novel causing a furor throughout the New World, from Mexico to Buenos Aires: La Nouvelle Héloïse.