The priest was silent for a long time, and later Baltasar Bustos chastised himself for what, with time, he came to see as a cowardice that ratified the worst aspects of his character, argumentative without nobility, envious of what he wasn’t, abusive toward the weak, tempted to humiliate anyone he thought inferior … He did not fool himself later. But in that moment, when Quintana stopped talking, he thought he was acting as the priest had asked him to after giving over to him his soul, while, in his blindness, Baltasar Bustos thought the priest was only giving him a lesson.
“I was wondering, as I listened to you, what bothered me most in you—the solitary, chaste priest or the promiscuous priest with children of his own.”
Quintana tried to penetrate with his eyes the grating that separated them, so that Baltasar would realize the priest was hurt, silenced by a sudden shock more than by overwhelming fatigue.
“Do you want to fight with me?”
“You asked me to be combative. I can imagine that one fine day the Pope will lift the excommunication and you will think that everything you did was useless, a failure…”
“Forgive me, I don’t follow your line of thought…”
“I mean that I hope you aren’t alive when the Church forgives you and says ‘I was mistaken.’”
“The deed of trying to do something good is sufficient unto itself.”
“Even if it fails.”
“For God’s sake, Baltasar, don’t get lost in all this. All I wanted to tell you is that you and I resemble each other. We are both fighting for our souls, although you confuse the soul with matter. It’s of no importance. You may be right. The soul is the form of the body. But you and I … Later, those who fight for money and power will come. That’s what I fear. That will be the nation’s failure. And then you and I—or what you and I leave in this world—should help the thieves and the ambitious to recover their souls. That would be my answer to those who forgive me two hundred years from now.”
“But you, in part, agree with them.” Baltasar tied to guess at the look on Quintana’s mistreated face, turned into gridwork and made even uglier by the grating on the confessional door. “You have been lascivious, a hypocrite, and a seducer…”
“Do you know what the word devil means?” asked the priest, with his eyes lowered and his brow severe. “My problem is that I have not been exempt from the temptations of the flesh. Yours, on the other hand, is that you will not be exempt from the temptations of the soul. Devil means liar.”
“See, you judge me with the same severity with which you have been judged…”
“Ah, and it also means accuser. I want you to know how they are going to judge me, Baltasar. They are going to humiliate me on my knees before the bishop. They are going to repeat the excommunication and the anathemas. Then they will deliver me to the secular authorities. They will shoot me in the back and then again, down on my knees. I will be decapitated, brother. They will put my head in an iron cage in the public square of Veracruz. I shall be an example for all those who feel the temptation to rebel…”
He couldn’t finish the sentence because Baltasar was already out of the confessional, where he’d spent an hour occupying the priest’s place, and now instead he was embracing the priest, asking his forgiveness, asking him why he did what he did for him, feeling the power, like that of a stormy sea, with which Quintana reined in his own emotion, like the frozen seas where huge tempests seem gigantically immobile, allowing the wind and not the water to be the principal player in the storm.
But the priest embraced Baltasar, kissed his head, welcomed him, and Baltasar understood that Father Anselmo was taking charge of him, so that he, Baltasar, could take charge, finally, of what was awaiting him …
[7]
With the strength of a mule driver, the old warrior Father Anselmo Quintana turned the convulsed body of his younger brother, the captain from Buenos Aires, Baltasar Bustos. He made Baltasar look toward the entrance to the chapel.
In the same rectangle of light he himself had occupied an hour earlier, two silhouettes now stood out clearly, a contrast both in gender and in clothing. A woman and a child.
“Come here, come in…”
Unlike Baltasar, the two moved forward noiselessly. They were barefoot and said nothing to disturb the silence of the chapel. That silence had not swallowed up the martial thud of Baltasar’s heels. He was physically suspended between his two personalities, the fat, myopic young man and the slim, longhaired combatant; the Baltasar of Buenos Aires balconies and the Baltasar of the mountain campaigns in Upper Peru; the Baltasar of the salons of Lima and the Baltasar of the febrile brothels of Maracaibo.
Now, at thirty-five, Baltasar had achieved equilibrium between the half-blind but inquisitive gaze, the robust but agile body, and the lank mustache that gave firmness to his too small but full lips. His hair was indomitable; it seemed to have a life of its own, more than enough life for our romantic century, as we, Dorrego and I, Varela, decided to call it in Buenos Aires, when news of the poems of Byron and Shelley began to reach the New World … And his handsome Roman nose always gave Baltasar an air of nobility, resistance, stoicism. His gold glasses rested uncomfortably on the bridge of his nose.
The couple who approached were not at first glance recognizable, however, though the boy was the same one who’d played blindman’s buff the day before, a blond child about ten years old, whose fair complexion had to be surmised, because of the tangle of his filthy hair and the dirtiness of his cotton shirt and trousers.
And she was a woman of indefinite age, her hair combed back into a bun poorly held together with pins. Stray hair fell over her forehead creased with wrinkles. The furrows of age around her lips, at the corners of her mouth, and on her chin were not disguised by makeup. The woman, barefoot like the boy, crossed her arms as if wrapping herself in a nonexistent shawl, and her trembling body betrayed the treachery of the tropics in Orizaba, the results of perpetual dampness and rain. Her bad cold was becoming a persistent cough.
“Ofelia,” said the priest in his most tender voice, “I’ve already explained to the captain that you agree the boy should return with him to Argentina.”
Quintana looked now at Baltasar—who was a single immobile block, forever locked in the most secret and unshakable of melancholies—as Baltasar stared into the totality of his life; the woman, much too busy blowing her nose, did not even look at him. Quintana told him that the child had been born ten years before in Buenos Aires and then kidnapped under mysterious circumstances. But his mother had managed to get him back from the black wet nurses who had saved him from a fire and who later asked for ransom money. She sent him to Veracruz to be put in the care of the priest Quintana, in the hope that someone would come to get him and take charge of him.
“Yesterday I told you, brother. Your destiny is to take charge of those who need you. And your nation will need both you and this boy. He should go with you. We shall survive here. We are very ancient. You, the Argentines, are the children of the Americas, the younger brothers of this old continent. Take the boy with you and teach him the best there is in the world with your good friends. You will have peace and prosperity. We will not.”
“What about her?” Baltasar managed to blurt out.
“Ofelia Salamanca has been the most faithful agent of the revolution for independence in America,” said Quintana, staring fixedly at the woman, who seemed dazed and was not listening. “She has kept our struggle alive by creating a network of communication, something so difficult for us on this continent. If I have been in contact with San Martín and Bolívar, it has been thanks to her. Thanks to her, we found out in time what Spanish reinforcements were leaving Callao for Acapulco or going from Maracaibo to Veracruz. She is a heroine, Baltasar, a woman worthy of our greatest respect. She sacrificed her reputation in order to learn secrets, and stained her hands with the blood of traitors who passed themselves off as insurgents while actually serving the royalist cause. One day her story will be written. How
ingenious she was so often! She used a network of songs that ran through the Americas faster than a lightning flash to send us news, taking advantage of a rumored love affair between herself and some creole officer from Buenos Aires.”
“Father, I am that officer. The songs mention my name. Don’t try to fool me.”
“Not another word, Baltasar. She ordered another hero of independence to be sent here, a man who, like her, pretended to be a royalist to acquire intelligence and to spread false rumors. She wants that hero, you, to take charge of her son. That is why she wrote to her friend Luz María in Maracaibo, asking you to come.”
Quintana threw his arm around Ofelia’s shoulders.
“Now she’s very sick and cannot take care of the child or work for us any longer. She agrees that her son should return to Argentina with you. I suppose that you…”
“Yes,” Baltasar said simply. “I agree as well.”
The captain from Buenos Aires came nearer just as Ofelia Salamanca left Father Quintana’s side. She lost her balance, and Baltasar helped her to her feet. It was the first time he’d ever touched her. She said, in a faint voice, “Thank you.”
They separated instantly. She never looked at him. He did not want to see the mortal sadness in those eyes he’d adored so intensely. He put an arm around the boy’s shoulders and said something like, “What you need is a good bath. You’ll see, you’re going to like the pampa. From now on, you’re going to be my little brother…”
Clutched in his fist, Baltasar held the red ribbon that one night in May Ofelia Salamanca had worn around her neck. The myopic young man had stolen it from the Marquis de Cabra the night of another death in Lima.
He would have liked to return it now to Ofelia, to hang it down on her bosom, but the woman’s dazed look held him back.
9
The Younger Brother
Balta’s friends Xavier Dorrego and I, Manuel Varela, were standing on the dock waiting for him. We were overflowing with news for him. Eleven years since we’d seen each other! We gave him a rapid summary of what was happening in Argentina. All eyes were on Bernardino Rivadavia, the young prime minister who was fighting for liberal principles, free education, open communication, colonization of the interior, auctioning off of publicly owned lands, creating a public library, publishing books, stimulating local talent … One phrase of his seemed to summarize everything: “We are anticipating the future…”
But Balta did not seem to be listening to us. He gazed at us with intense seriousness, reading the changes in our features and perhaps guessing at the changes in our souls.
Well, he soon found out that Dorrego was still an inveterate philosophical Jacobin, although his family inheritance obliged him to be a conservative in economics, no matter how anticlerical he might be in his ideology.
Dorrego’s close-cropped hair had rapidly gone gray, giving a reddish tint to the porcelain tones of his skin. But he seemed more fashionable with his severe cap of short hair. It was a radical renunciation of the age of wigs. We would never see them again.
I, however, continued to be a printer, and will continue to be one all my life. And now that it was possible to publish modern authors without fear of censorship, I made great efforts in that direction. While I waited for authors of our own to emerge, I already had before me a life of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, a manuscript stained with rain and tied with tricolor ribbons, which the author, who called himself Aureliano García, had sent to me, as best he could, from Barranquilla. It was a sad chronicle, however, and like the story about the blind violinist from Tabay that Baltasar had written to me, it foretold a bad end for the Liberator and his deeds. I preferred to go on publishing Voltaire and Rousseau (La Nouvelle Héloïse was the greatest literary success in the entire history of South America) and leave for another time the melancholy prophecy of a Bolívar as sick and defeated as his dream of American unity and civil liberty in our nations.
Yet, being together again gave the three of us immense joy. Baltasar knew that he had written a chronicle of those years—the one I’m holding in my hands right now, which one day you, reader, will also hold in yours—in the stream of letters he’d sent “Dorrego and Varela” (we’d begun to sound like a company).
We let Baltasar take the boy out to José Antonio Bustos’s old estate so that he could meet Sabina. He found her a bit mad: she had a mania about sleeping in a different bedroom every night—her father, José Antonio’s; that of her mother, Mayté, dead so many years before; that of the absent Baltasar; and, presumably, that of the forgotten Jesuit tutor, Julián Ríos—so she could keep them all warm.
It was useless. Brother and sister could never understand each other, and Sabina, as Baltasar told us when he got back to Buenos Aires, did not even have the courage to find herself a man, not even—he smiled with a malice unusual in him—now that Rivadavia’s modernizing laws had rooted the nomadic gauchos on the estates, forcing them to become agricultural workers and cattle ranchers, as well as a reserve available for conscription.
“Nothing happens for Sabina except in her nostalgia,” her younger brother said, sighing. “She is a living recrimination.”
By a strange confluence of destinies, neither Dorrego nor I had ever married, preferring to prolong our lives as Buenos Aires rakes as long as possible, though we were both approaching forty. The truth was that carousing was our pretext, a very Buenos Aires pretext to be sure, because our city had always abounded in vieux garçons who would not resign themselves to giving up the exciting freedom of their youth. And since Buenos Aires was a city of crossed destinies where thuggish gauchos, fleeing conscription, would jump off their horses—followed by country girls in love with them and cast, as they used to say, into perdition; but it was also a city of Spaniards who had come for business, and of Englishmen who had come to create works of civil engineering, we all met in the brothels, the bars, and taverns. We danced and drank and loved with the calm awareness that our Buenos Aires was a city of foundations, founded twice at the beginning and three, four, even a hundred times each time a foreigner, from the interior or from Europe, came to live here.
We couldn’t drag Baltasar to our bordellos, and we ourselves began to give them up. We realized that the real reason for our carousing was that we were awaiting the return of our “younger brother” to see what we would do together. Who would have thought it? In the decade of our participation in the revolution, we had encouraged him from Buenos Aires, had imposed on him that mission to Upper Peru to follow in the footsteps of Castelli, and had thrust him into a life of dangers and adventures that Dorrego and I, well, never in the slightest experienced personally. We soon became disillusioned with revolutionary politics and returned to our hereditary habits: Dorrego, living off his rents; I, a printer. But now Rivadavia was reanimating our hopes.
There was something more, as well. The exciting romantic story of Baltasar Bustos and Ofelia Salamanca, sung from one end of the Americas to the other, had both of us, Dorrego and me (although for different reasons), in suspense. We could not make any matrimonial decisions until we knew how that turned out.
Baltasar did not have to tell us who the child was. Before anyone else, we found out what had happened that night of May 24–25, 1810, in the burned palace of the Royal Court. We showered tenderness on the boy. Why, we began to treat him like a fourth brother, this one really younger. The boy was clever, although melancholy, and he spoke with the charming accent of the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He never mentioned his mother, as if he’d made a vow. But he did speak Spanish, after all, and we could understand each other.
Dorrego had a small estate on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, out toward San Isidro, next to the river, and we would often go there on Saturdays and Sundays. We started calling ourselves the Citizens again, recalling our youthful polemics in that bare but packed Café de Malcos, where it seemed that whether or not the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire became reality depended exclusively on us.
Dorrego carried his clocks back
and forth from Buenos Aires to San Isidro, and the boy was fascinated watching that collection of fantastic, diverse forms—tombs, drums, carriages, thrones, rings, and eggs—while we wondered if, for us, time had in a certain sense stopped. But for the fair boy it was as varied as those clocks, in which he would see a measure of the different suns, so far from each other, that marked his life.
Baltasar adopted the child, whose family name became Bustos, but in my honor Baltasar renamed him Manuel, replacing the Leocadio he’d been given at baptism. The boy and I did not resemble each other in any way, however. My first gray hairs, it’s true, softened my dark face, though the ferocity of my mustache did not hide the secret flaw in my face: my upper lip is too big. But neither the shadows under my eyes nor my thinness was repeated in this boy, who must have mirrored instead the youth of his mother, the adorable Ofelia.