José Antonio Bustos had to read this law aloud to the gauchos summoned to the entry gates of the ranch. The hairy men, with no break in their matted pelts other than the glint of their eyes and teeth, listened as if they were getting ready to fight, their hands on their belts or resting on the hafts of their daggers. Their blades, spurs, and belt buckles also glinted, blinding the old rural patriarch more than the tenuous rays of this winter sun that sank behind the mountain range early, as if bored with the laws of men. As he read the proclamation of the creole revolution, old Bustos looked into eyes that said: “Old man, you’re useless to us. You are unable to save our way of life. Fence in a gaucho and you kill him. Let’s see if there’s someone here among us who will take charge and send you, Buenos Aires, and these laws straight to hell. Who do these people think they are? Do they really think they can dictate to us from there? Maybe we ought to go there and govern those sons of bitches. So who wants to take charge of the gauchos? Let’s see who wants to be our chief. Whoever it is, we’ll follow him to the death, against the capital city, against the law, and against you, to keep our freedom to roam as we always have, free.”
It was then that Baltasar really saw death in José Antonio’s eyes. The liberal law offended him as much as it did the gauchos, but it was a triumph for the son and his ideas: it was as if José Antonio, standing firm in defeat, were dead with a candle in his hand. In his features an autarkic world was dying, a world as slow as the carts in which it traveled, a world held together by carpenters, bakers, seamstresses, soapmakers, candlemakers, and blacksmiths; and the gauchos. Almost all of them were born and came back to die here, but that fidelity in the extremes of life was based on their freedom to move, to get on a horse and seek their fortune bearing their property on their backs or between their legs — the mare, their spurs, arms, and trinkets. Women were bought. Indians were tamed with alcohol and honey. But the gauchos always came back to their real master to be reborn or to die again. All that passed through the anguished eyes of José Antonio Bustos, standing there with his yellow poncho elegantly crossed over his chest, indifferent to the slow and invisible disintegration of his warehouses, stables, coachhouses, granaries, and chapels. His gauchos were always there when he needed them — on condition that he not force them to be there.
That night it was Baltasar who stopped before entering the dining room, to listen to the voices of his father and sister.
“Well, now that the gauchos are going to be locked in like me, why don’t you give me to one of them…”
“Calm down.”
“All locked in. Now we’ll be alike.”
“You can go to Buenos Aires or Mendoza whenever you want. We have friends and relatives.”
“You must think to yourself with a laugh, Well, she’s got her knives for fun; the poor thing amuses herself killing dogs with a dagger whose handle is made from a bull’s sex…”
“I’m going to slap you, Sabina.”
“You’d be better off kicking your wife’s grave. The poor woman shriveled and shriveled until she disappeared. Do you think I’m like her and that I’m going to imagine that being small is my only greatness? Nothing can console me, Papa, nothing, nothing. Except a pesky idea I always have in the back of my mind, which is that my mother must have been capable of passion, just once, a single infidelity, having another child … That consoles me when I see a savage gaucho with my mother’s face and his forearm covered with knife scars.”
“Calm down, daughter. You’re raving.”
“Doesn’t anything break your serenity? Do you ever say what you clearly mean — that you don’t agree, that I’m wrong, that I’m crazy, that in my mind I’m a slut?”
“My behavior is my tradition, daughter. Calm down. You seem bewitched.”
“That’s it, Father. The world has bewitched me.”
[7]
“The republic promulgates another good law,” said Baltasar to Sabina as he packed his bags, taking the shirts his sister passed him. “Most of these gauchos will end up in the army for being rebels. Then they’ll demand that careers in the military be open to all. The revolution’s officer corps should come from all classes and regions. It can no longer be limited to the upper classes.”
“You’ll see that these thugs will all end up dead or in jail for desertion,” said his sister, handing him a pair of old boots. “Take them, papa says they’re a gift. They’ve brought him good luck. They’re from here. Made from mules’ rumps.”
“He’s starting to give me his worldly possessions.” Baltasar smiled with some bitterness.
Then father and son parted with an embrace, and Baltasar said it was amusing to think that, while he went to war, the gauchos, by law, had to stay on the ranch for good.
“That way I’ll never be alone,” said José Antonio Bustos.
“Wait for me, Father.” Baltasar hugged him tight and kissed his hand.
“Let’s just see.” The old man laughed dryly. “In peacetime, sons bury their fathers, but in wartime, fathers bury their sons.”
“Then let them bury you next to me, Father.”
“So, in that case, it might be you welcoming me with a candle in your hand?”
“No, because they’re not going to bury me in holy ground.”
“All right. Goodbye, Citizen Bustos. Good luck.”
Then an order from the Buenos Aires junta came for Baltasar Bustos to join the army in Upper Peru, so what had been his own decision turned into an obligation imposed on him by others.
3. El Dorado
[1]
In the immense confusion of the armies, only nature — so naked, so harsh — could bring serenity to their souls.
The rebels and the Spaniards had defeated each other an equal number of times. The two armies had nullified each other and could count only on their military and political rear guards — the viceroyalty of Peru for the royalists, the revolutionary republic of Buenos Aires for the patriots.
“What advantage is there for us in this situation?” I asked in a letter that Baltasar Bustos received when, under orders from the Buenos Aires junta and with the rank of lieutenant, he joined the army gathering in Jujuy to prepare for the attack on Upper Peru. Baltasar wouldn’t have known what to answer. He arrived between two victories and two defeats; he hadn’t even reached the high plateau and already he was facing decisions he’d never made before. Dorrego and I had joined Alvear’s junta — Alvear, we assured him, was a strong, decisive, and attractive man — and, thinking we were doing our friend a favor, we’d put him at the head of a revolutionary regiment. Military expertise? “Don’t worry, dear Balta. You’ll have the best advice. What you already have, however, is something no one else there has: revolutionary fervor and a sense of justice. Without such virtues, the revolution would be just another war.” At that time, we did not know our orders coincided with his wishes.
It was a guerrilla war: Baltasar went on repeating this newly coined term — recently arrived from the Spain that rose up against Napoleon — as an orderly helped him put on his uniform of black boots, white trousers, short embroidered outer coat, and three-cornered hat with the tricolor cockade. The only forces the revolution had available to it to keep the road to Upper Peru open and to consolidate the revolutionary government in that region — which was inhospitable, unfair, but, because of its mines, essential to the prosperity of Buenos Aires — were the guerrillas who had spontaneously organized between Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Lake Titicaca. They would lend their support to the revolutionary force fighting the Spaniards. There was no other possibility. They interrupted the flow of supplies and food, ambushed the Spaniards, and cut lines of communication between the plateau and the pampa. Lieutenant Baltasar Bustos’s orders were: Collaborate with the guerrillas.