The gauchos did not laugh.
“Don’t make fun of us, young master.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m just a citizen.”
Now they did laugh, and as they laughed, Baltasar smelled in their collective breath a ravenous stench, like that of young stray dogs. There were bits of food in those bushy black or copper-colored beards that began at the neck and climbed almost to the eyebrows — an extension of the hair covering ears and cheeks, leaving open only the mouths, which were like wounds of a paradoxical abundance. Red and as bloodied as the meat they ate, they revealed the hardness of an uncertain country where the people eat everything they have, never just what they want. Today there’s more than enough, but tomorrow we may have nothing.
He felt a profound compassion for his homeland. But one of the gauchos kept him from extending that compassion to these men. The young gaucho, who knows with what intention, took him by the hand Baltasar had used to shield the imaginary light. The young citizen tried to pull himself out of his daydream, plant his feet on the rough earth and the roughness of the customs of this world. What was he surprised at? It was all familiar to him. He belonged to this land of dust as much as he did to the land of ideas that was Father Julián Ríos’s or the land of smoke of the gatherings at the Café de Malcos. He raised his eyes and found neither the mountains nor the Medusa, neither nature nor that forbidden sex. What he found was a mirror. The young gaucho holding him by the hand looked like Baltasar. A filthy, bearded, hungry Baltasar, even though sated today with the flesh of a dead steer. His round face, distant gaze, his hair with its curls burnished by the same elements that frightened his sister, Sabina.
Baltasar stared at that atrocious twin and had the presence of mind to return the squeeze, take the gaucho’s wrist, wrench back the man’s sleeve, and reveal the cruel wounds on his forearm. Baltasar’s country education, rejected and savage, came back to him, and he felt disgust at having allowed himself to be overwhelmed by his detested origins — especially because it was rural wisdom that would save the civilized presence.
The young gaucho, so like Baltasar, emitted a suffocated grunt, wrenched back his arm, and covered it with his sleeve. First the others looked at the young gaucho with scorn, then with pity; and they bestowed the same sentiments on Baltasar Bustos, but in reverse. First pity, then scorn. He knew what he was doing. He had showed the other gauchos that this one, who dared touch him, was, if not a coward, at least an incompetent who let himself be cut easily in fights on the ranch or at the general store. Did his companions already know that, keeping what they knew to themselves, insulted because an outsider, which José Antonio Bustos’s son was by now, had come back to tell them: I know that this man has no talent for knife fighting? He’s a fool of a gaucho, the boss’s son had just said to the other gauchos. He doesn’t know how to protect himself. Didn’t you blockheads know that? What kind of joke is this?
José Antonio Bustos appeared at the door of the house, wrapped in his yellow poncho. Who can know how much a gaucho knows. Who can know if they really were comrades. They were all tramps. Perhaps they’d just met a few hours earlier; a few hours later, they’d separate, scattered in the immensity of the pampa. Baltasar Bustos had united them in support of the young gaucho whose ineptness he’d just shown, whom he’d just humiliated, because now the man’s secret did not belong just to the gauchos. Perhaps it would end up being sung by a bard, maligning the stupid young man with the round face and the coppery curls. Could he also be a bit blind without knowing it? In the country there are no optometrists. They couldn’t resemble each other so much, Baltasar and the nameless gaucho: a pure, dissembled wound.
The erect presence of the old man in the yellow poncho prevented any sequel to what had happened. The gauchos drifted away muttering and grumbling. They’d meet another day. Baltasar looked at his father and was amazed that the mere presence of the old man could dominate at a distance, dispersing these country toughs, even if they went reluctantly. Could what they said in Buenos Aires be true? The ranchers from the interior are as ignorant as their gauchos. Inferior people, second-class creoles. Can’t compare with the urbane city merchants. He looked at his father from a distance. José Antonio Bustos was not like that. And it was not just that Baltasar was his son and loved him as he was. José Antonio Bustos was not like that. But his authority, demonstrated just then, reminding the gauchos that he was always watching, that he was the father, that he was the only authority, could that be more than a symbol of power in a land that ignored the laws of the distant cities, a land that let itself be governed by a patriarchal figure? He looked at his approaching father as someone he’d never understood before. A patriarch stronger than the laws of today and tomorrow. Baltasar didn’t know if all the liberal constitutions in the world could be stronger than a simple patriarchal presence.
“Don’t come out at night. It’s too cold. You might get sick,” Baltasar said affectionately to José Antonio, using the familiar form of “you,” forgetting for a moment to treat his father with the usual deference: the old man was so full of dignity, so strong, and at the same time so vulnerable, at the mercy of the elements, as Sabina had said, that at that moment his father was in fact his son. Which is what he wrote to Dorrego in Buenos Aires.
José Antonio Bustos overlooked his son’s lack of respect. He attributed it to what he’d just seen. The unprecedented physical contact, between his son’s hands and the gauchos’. He did not want to admit that old age turns parents back into children.
“Don’t worry. When the doctors say I’m sick, I just make believe, to be polite. If I don’t, they get discouraged and go back to being, I don’t know, to being gauchos.” The old man laughed to himself. “You’ve got to respect people’s titles. It costs them a lot to get them. Anyway, we lead a healthy life around here. We don’t need doctors, people live a long time, and the only things that kill the young ones are knife fights and falling off horses.”
“It’s good to see you looking so well, papa,” said Baltasar, reverting to the proper respectful tone.
“All I’ve got left are the small pleasures of old age. Like walking out to see the stars. Nights here are so beautiful. When I was a child I counted the stars, I couldn’t understand that they were uncountable. Then, when I was a little older, I went on to count the nights when there was a moon, until I found out it was in the almanac. So what are we left with? Who knows.”
“You aren’t the way people in Buenos Aires say ranchers are,” Baltasar said awkwardly. He felt as inept as the gaucho with the wounded arm.
“Savage rancher? Barbarous creole? No. I think I’ve had a few ideas. I don’t want to lose my faith altogether. How good it is that you keep yours strong.”
The son took the father’s wrist, the way he had taken the gaucho’s a moment earlier. “You’ve kept your senses, papa, along with your faith.”
Now José Antonio laughed openly. “Five of them left me a while ago. The sixth stayed, but it’s pure memory.”
“Then let me add a seventh, which is your intelligence.”
The father was silent for a moment and then said that old age offers small pleasures; not everything is lost. Arm in arm, they walked into the house.
Sabina seemed to be waiting for her brother after he left the old man asleep in his bedroom. He was surprised; he tried to see the beauty in her ugliness; he hadn’t given up on that score.