The Campaign

  When, surrounded by the physical desolation of the plateau and looking into the unflinching faces of the Indians, I read our proclamations, I felt a terrible temptation, which perhaps was the only one the Devil himself could never resist. I felt the temptation to exercise power with impunity over the weak. I wanted to impose my laws, my customs, my fears, and my temptations on them, even though I knew that they do not have, for the time being, any means to answer me. I wanted to see myself at that moment, astride my horse, with my three-cornered hat in one hand and the proclamation in the other, transformed into a statue. That is, dead. And something worse, my friends. For a moment I felt mortally proud of my superiority, and at the same time in love with the inferiority of others. I knew of no other way to relieve my pride than through an immense tenderness and a huge shame as I dismounted to touch the heads of those who respected me merely for my tone of voice even though they understood not a word of what I’d read them.

  But Simón Rodríguez went on talking. “She was supposed to grow old a virgin. It was her vow, and she broke it for you.”

  “Why?” Baltasar asked again furiously—without recognizing himself—before he wrote us the letter and before he found something of an answer in the very fact of asking why.

  “You entered this place without knowing it. You spoke to these people from a mountaintop. Now you must descend to the poor land of the Indians. It is land that has been subjugated by the laws of poverty and slavery. But it is also a land liberated by magic and dreams…”

  “Where are you taking me?” asked Baltasar, whose intelligence informed him that here in this abandoned village on the shore of the lake, he had no alternative but to follow.

  Simón Rodríguez, with a strength that was supernatural in a man his age, first clasped Baltasar’s arms and then his shoulders, turning him to face the windowpane. Finally, he grasped the nape of the young Argentine military man’s neck, forcing him to see himself in the window where just a few minutes earlier the old man had combed his beard.

  Baltasar, examining himself, saw a different man. His mane of copper-colored curls had grown. The fat had gone from his face. His nose grew sharper by the moment. His mouth became firmer. His eyes, behind his glasses, revealed a rage and a desire where before they had only seemed good-natured. His beard and mustache had grown. With this face he could look on the world in a different way. He didn’t say it. He merely asked himself again. He was no longer a virgin—a boy, as that strange priest de las Muñecas insisted on calling him. For whom had he been a virgin? Not for Ofelia Salamanca, whom he’d only seen and loved from a distance, three years ago. Did his tranquil passion to save himself for a woman have any other objective? Was there another, one who wasn’t Ofelia or the Indian virgin who had violated her vows to give herself to him? What are we doing here on this earth? Jean-Jacques had asked himself. “I was brought to life, and I’m dying without having lived.”

  [3]

  He would remember a trap door and some wooden steps in the cellar of the abandoned town hall. He would remember that at the bottom of the steps there was a sheer-rock precipice that fell away sharply to the bed of a river deep down. He would remember a trail, as wide as a mule’s back, cut into the cheek of the mountain. He would remember the hand of the old mestizo in hobnail boots leading him along that vertiginous, narrow path. He would remember barely glimpsed vistas through the crags: snowcapped volcanoes and dead salt pits. He would remember a red lake veined with flamingo eggs. He would remember the swift flight of the huallata, the white turkey of the Andes marked with its black wound, scouring the lake for food. He would remember a forest of starlit clouds against the wall of the mountain, bearing the moisture of the forest and the river but refusing to yield it to the desert on the other side of the Andes. He would remember the noise of bells behind the forest of clouds and then the sight of terrified flocks of llamas blocking the path, spitting and chattering in their venomous tongue, accompanied by the huallata’s distant lament. Then a hailstorm scattered the llamas and the birds, but when Baltasar turned to make sure of what he’d seen, he found himself enclosed within a dark cave. He felt around, seeking the company of Simón Rodríguez; the old mestizo reached a hand out to him and said he should try to get used to what light there was. But barely did Baltasar move his hand when he felt six, eight, a dozen hands touching his own, taking it with joy, feeling it, running fingers over it, and all he felt were the hot hands of those creatures who were invisible to him but who screeched like those white turkeys, excited by the presence of their mates and by their eager search for food in the lake.

  “They say you’re cold, that your hands and feet give off no heat…”

  Baltasar did not say to old Simón that the hands and feet of Indians always burned, something he found out that night, those nights, the time spent with the Indian woman, virgin like him, whose flame, unburning, was the natural protection of those born at an altitude of six thousand feet, who have more veins in their fingers and toes than other human beings. He would have wanted to end his journey right there—how long it had taken them to get wherever they were, he could not tell—and curl up like an animal to sleep with those warmblooded people, protected forever by the heat of their extremities, the heat needed to sleep. But as he grew more accustomed to the darkness, he began to sense another zone of heat in the bodies around him: their eyes.

  Hot hands, hot feet, and luminous eyes. But they had their eyes closed. They all moved as if the band of light that bound their closed eyelids was a substitute for vision, until a dozen or more of those simultaneously veiled and transparent eyes combined their rays in one single beam that enveloped and preceded Baltasar and Simón Rodríguez, guided them to the edge of a new abyss, this one within the cavern, as if the cave (was it really that?) replicated the external world, the world of the sun, in its internal darkness.

  The bodies that were leading them stopped, surrounding the two outsiders. The light in their eyes blinded Baltasar and Simón at first; but as soon as the bodies turned toward the abyss, those eyes cast a stronger and stronger, whiter and whiter light on a vast but strangely near panorama that was very deep and at the same time one-dimensional. It was an immense globe, the color of silver but crystal, like a mirror. In the center of that space—globe, abyss, mirror?—there was a light. But that light was neither separate from the other lights in the cavern’s amphitheater nor the simple sum or reflection of the lights in the eyes of the cave’s inhabitants. Were they really underground? Hadn’t they gone up, despite the descent through the trap door in the cellar of the town hall? Was he above or below?

  This was light, pure and simple, with no fanfare, no cheering. It was more than the origin of light, although it resembled nothing so much as that—Baltasar and Simón, chagrined, stood still and touched hands, just to touch something familiar, flesh, warmth. It was light before light showed itself. It was the idea of light.

  How did they discover that? How did Simón communicate it to Baltasar and Baltasar to the old mestizo without either of them opening his mouth? The two stared at the closed but bright eyes of their guides. Messages transmitted by light passed through those closed lids. There the two men could read and understand. But there was nothing written on the eyes, which were, in effect, blindfolded by light; there was only light. And the light said: I am the idea of light before light was ever seen.

  Then all the eyes in the Inca cavern turned toward the outsiders and flooded the abyss with light. Peering over the edge, the old man and the young man saw an entire city slowly but clearly coming into view. A city made entirely of light. The buildings were the product of light, from the doors and windows to the high roofs of the towers; the clocks were made of light. The streets were grand, luminous paths; along the avenues sped rapid carriages of light: they seemed powered by light and heading toward the light; and on every corner, at every door, on every roof, the light produced incomprehensible messages, traced letters, signs, and figures, names quickly composed out of a dizzying num
ber of points of light, in a frame that was like the very symbol of light. And within that frame, the rapid flashing of the luminous points spelled out a single name, repeating it in successive flashes until it was etched on the retinas of the two outsiders as if carved in stone. And that name was OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA.

  Baltasar held back a gesture of terror and tenderness, as if he expected another revelation: the letters faded, but within the same frame there appeared the face of the beloved, not a painting, not a reproduction, not a symbolic rendering, but she herself, her flesh, her eyes, the movement of her lips and neck; and as the figure shrank so as to be seen in its entirety, they saw that she was naked. She offered herself to Baltasar, to the spectator, to the world, complete in every forbidden detail, each soft and caressable surface, every feared, harsh, spidery secretion … Ofelia Salamanca was there; she moved, was seen, and now spoke. And what she said was true, because Baltasar had heard her say it:

  “Don’t send me flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”

  She repeated these words several times; then her voice began to fade, along with her image. And Baltasar Bustos felt the vertigo of one who has seen what belongs to the realm of death, which he had just discovered slumbering in the middle of life.

  “You have just seen,” said Simón Rodríguez, when the lights in the basin went out, “what our Spanish ancestors searched for with such frenzy in the New World. I saved the vision of El Dorado for you. El Dorado, the city of gold of the Indian world.”

  But for Baltasar Bustos, listening to the old mestizo, there was no cry of rejection, but something worse, more insidious: a nausea like that of the loss of innocence, an affirmation as subtle as poison, something totally irrational, magic, which with a few seductive, ethereal images destroyed all the patient, rational structures of civilized man. Never in his life—Baltasar wrote us—until that moment had a repulsion and an affirmation, as diametrically opposed as they were complementary, united in him with such force. He was convinced that he’d reached the remotest past, the origin of all things, and that this magic origin of sorcery and illusion was not that of a perfect assimilation of man with nature but, again, an intolerable divorce, a separation that wounded him in the most certain of his enlightened convictions. He wanted to believe in the myth of origins, not as a myth but as the reality of the world reconciled with the individual. What had he seen here, what trick or what warning? Unity with nature is not necessarily the formula for happiness; do not go back to the origins, do not seek an impossible harmony, cherish all the differences you find on the road … Do not think that at the beginning we were happy. By the same token, don’t think we’ll be happy at the end.

  “What you are seeing is not the past; perhaps it’s the future,” said old Rodríguez to calm him down. “This city is a harbinger, not of the magic you detest, Baltasar, but of the reason to come.” But for Baltasar anything that wasn’t reason was magic. “And if it wasn’t magic but science, what would your reason say?” asked the old man, afraid, once more, that he’d shown too much to his new disciple, who, for that very reason, would hate his teacher and spend the rest of his days trying to forget this extraordinary vision that no one wanted to share, because it was disconcerting, because it put our own rational convictions into doubt.

  This is how I answered Baltasar: You should put your certainties to the test, staring whatever negates them straight in the eye. I don’t know if Dorrego answered him or what he would have said, but I could see he was more distressed than I, perhaps even more distressed than Baltasar himself.

  “Don’t let yourself be distracted from war and government,” Dorrego told me from Buenos Aires. “Upper Peru, as everyone knows, is a land of witch doctors, hallucinations, and drugs. We’ll have to put a stop to it someday.”

  “We’ve got to leave it all untouched,” said Simón Rodríguez, using his arms to shield the weakened, almost lifeless body of the young Baltasar Bustos as he tried to lead him out of the city of light. “Swear you’ll never send anyone here. To explore it would be to destroy it. Let it survive until the moment in which everyone understands it because the future itself leaves it behind.”

  But Baltasar could only ask: What have I seen? Have I really seen this, though I could not even touch it, or is it a dream? Where are we? He could only implore as Simón Rodríguez got him out of there, ignoring the tales passing through the luminous but now open eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado. Yet those tales held the secret to the place, and it was to a feverish Baltasar as he clung to the back of a mule on the dizzying spiral descent from the mountain that Simón Rodríguez told the truth he himself had just grasped.

  “Everything you imagine is true. Today we happened on one fantasy among many possible fantasies. We don’t know if it’s yours, if it goes before you, or if it is the prelude to the next one.”

  Baltasar did not seem to be listening and only muttered something, as if trying to forget what he was saying as he said it, rather than remember it.

  That dreams are our real life

  That the night is never over

  That dreams overcome time

  That the only sin is the separation of the sentient from the spiritual world

  But Simón said no, no, no, that is not the lesson, the lesson is to accept that everything we imagine is true, that today we witnessed only one brief moment of that unending ribbon where truth is inscribed, and we do not know if what we saw is part of our imagination today, of an imagination that precedes us, or if it proclaims an imagination to come …

  “I have experienced the vertigo of learning that something which is death’s can exist in life,” our younger brother, Baltasar, wrote us.

  When we received his letter, Baltasar had recovered in a hospital in Cochabamba, where the disillusioned Simón Rodríguez had brought him. The old man went off, doubtless in search of newer, more receptive disciples. Baltasar, after writing us, waited for word from us. He said that, more than ever, he desired to take action in the real world and forget nightmares. What commission did we want to send him? He felt strong, was fully recovered, and he’d lost twenty pounds. Oh yes, and he reminded us that he’d been lost in one of the five thousand tunnels that connect Cuzco with the mines in Potosí, that it takes potatoes hours to cook there because of the altitude, that the lake is merely a track left by the retreating ice, that the lava of the volcanoes whistles as it flows downhill, that Upper Peru smells of the mercury transported in leather sacks to treat the silver, that I slept with a girl whose breasts sprouted between her legs, that I’ve seen the sun swimming beneath the world at dusk.

  4

  Upper Peru

  [1]

  His dappled stallion, who smelled until then of the sweat of bare mountain horses, now joined a new herd that smelled of gunpowder, horseshoes, and leather. The mountain horses, without saddles or bridles, gradually slowed down until they were left behind, as if amazed by that unfamiliar smell. Baltasar Bustos’s stallion was the only one to follow the charge, joining the war horses.

  Holding on to the animal’s sweaty neck as best he could, Baltasar Bustos felt his face slapped by its wild, coarse mane, which snapped like a hundred small whips. He didn’t dare grab the forelock for fear of making the horse buck. But its furious gallop, multiplied in emulation of the war charge of twenty or thirty others, made the young officer’s body slip back.

  They picked him up at full gallop as if he were a sack, the way leaves are blown away or something is snatched up by the wind. He didn’t know what was happening. All he understood for certain was that the world of the imagination was behind him and that he would forget it; he was now tossed into the tumult called reality, which carried him along in its wake. Two strong arms lifted him up on the run, draped him over the saddle, and pressed his face into the wool of the gaucho gear. A voice muttered barbarous obscenities. The voice was close but the words were blown away by the clamor of the fighting. Baltasar’s head, hanging down, suff
ocated by the dust, saw the world upside down.

  When he regained consciousness, it was night, and the noise had subsided. The first thing he saw was a pair of blue eyes, like two lights, that belonged to a bearded man sipping maté. The man never stopped looking at him. He was hairy, his black mop barely parted over his bushy brows, his beard and mustache covering his face right up to his cheekbones and hanging down to his chest. His skin, though, was as pale as wax. The complexion of a saint who’s never seen the light outside the church; his blue eyes, which nevertheless illuminated it, were paler even than his skin. His hands, holding the maté gourd, negated his waxen pallor, not with color but with roughness. And despite everything, there was, in those fingers, a hint of piety, of blessing and sacrifice.

  They stared at each other for a long time, as if the hirsute man did not want to take advantage of Baltasar’s prostration to say something to which Baltasar would not be able to reply. Each gesture with which the man disturbed his basically immobile posture was, by contrast, dramatic, or even eloquent. His gaze, a slight movement, a shrug conspired to communicate command and dignity all at the same time. Finally, Baltasar was able to ask for a maté. Before uttering a word, he quickly summed up for himself what he understood now that he was back in reality. After observing his host for a few moments—where were they?—he listened to the man’s first words:

  “My name is Miguel Lanza. Where we are is the Inquisivi mud. The other man is Baltasar Cárdenas. Out in the hills we’ve got more than a hundred guerrillas and five hundred Indians.”