The maps told another story, and as he looked them over, listening to Lanza and noting his reasons, Bustos, barely liberated by experience, began to feel he was a prisoner. The poles of the revolution in southern America, according to Lanza, were in viceregal Lima and revolutionary Buenos Aires. “We’ve been going at it now for six years: Lima can’t beat Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires can’t beat Lima. The two powers cancel each other out. We’re right between them: the guerrilla fighters of Upper Peru. Buenos Aires is a long way off. Colonial oppression is right at hand. We have to keep up the guerrilla war. The royalist forces are here, and so are we. You and yours, Bustos, should come, help out, give speeches. But don’t lose sight of reality. There are three armies here. Your people from Buenos Aires don’t know how to fight in the mountains. The royalist has to fight. We mountaineers are the only ones who have to fight and also know how to fight here.”
If he, Baltasar Bustos, felt the need to talk about laws, injustice, and ideals, he should also note how guerrilla freedom worked — it was the very inhabitants of the place who made up the troop, they elected the chief, they disciplined themselves to serve the cause. The liberty he wanted for his great city was perhaps not the same as the liberty the Indians and mestizos of Upper Peru wanted. But if down there liberty became one with the law that proclaimed it, here, Lanza went on, liberty was inseparable from an equality that had never before been known in these lands.
“Maybe they’ll never know it unless they use their strength to implement the law,” replied our younger brother, Baltasar, following our advice: favor what contradicts you, to put your ideas to the test and strengthen them.
“They want to change their lives, not their laws,” said Lanza, speaking like Bustos in the Café de Malcos.
“Maybe they won’t get either thing and will go on living as always, in misery,” concluded Baltasar, because events were piling up on him, stealing his words, adding him to the cryptic, disguised, enigmatic strength of Miguel Lanza. They were making their way along a road of lances crowned with severed heads, heads like Miguel Lanza’s, all balanced in unnerving plasticity on the hollow reed lances with steel points knotted to them that the guerrillas carried on the steep paths taking them this time to the bare, windy peaks where there was no vegetation, not even enough to hang a rebel, before they tumbled down the slate slopes again to the tropical forests in the depths of the gorges, always with the intent of luring the Spaniards into an ambush, making them believe that they, the guerrillas, had been defeated. Thus, by slowly bleeding the royalist forces, they were devastating them, forcing them to commit acts of repression, to exterminate the villages from which the guerrillas, whom they called thieves, bandits, murderers, and mad dogs, came. Entire towns disappeared, and only the roads to them remained, until they, too, were devoured by nature, ever moving, ceaseless — overflowing rivers no one could harness, flooded lands, gangrenous forests with no one to prune them, snow-covered mountains, dying thickets, disappeared towns …
All of them fell during that year Baltasar Bustos spent with Miguel Lanza’s band. Like the landscape around him, the towns, and the men he met there, he, too, changed. Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas fell in Larecaja, from whence he closed the road to Lima; Vicente Camargo fell on the way to Potosí, from whence the way to Buenos Aires was open. Padilla and his guerrilla wife — their last words were “This war is eternal!”—fell. The generous Warnes fell, and when he did, the sanctuary he offered in times of defeat closed up. Only Lanza refused to admit defeat.
One day he appeared in camp. His blue eyes were as black as his beard.
He said simply, “They’ve killed Baltasar Cárdenas, they’ve killed our brother.”
The Indian’s head was paraded around the plaza at Cochabamba and then thrown to the hogs. But Lanza did not leave off intercepting communications, capturing couriers, stockpiling food, gunpowder, lead, horses, feed, medicine, alcohol, and even women — although they were becoming a very scarce commodity. On the other hand, the horses’ natural inclinations caused them to join the guerrillas’ herd. Runaways, ownerless, they straggled into the micro-republic of Inquisivi from no one knew where. Their bodies gave off the steam of the jungle. This altitude wasn’t the best place for them. What were they doing here?
“They’re trying to tell us something,” Baltasar, the only Baltasar left in the band, imagined.
“Don’t say it,” said Lanza, now with black eyes, as if the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas had given him his eyes when he died.
“But you don’t even know what I’m going to say,” exclaimed Baltasar, with exasperated logic.
“You’re one of us. We end up reading each other’s thoughts.”
“They’re inviting us to saddle up and go with them, far away, to abandon this land which we’ve crossed inch by inch and which we know perfectly well is hostile, dry, and not worth a shit?”
“That’s it,” said Miguel Lanza. “Don’t even think it. This war’s never going to end. It’s our fate. To fight to the death. Never to leave here. And not to let anyone out once they get in.”
Then he repeated, so there would be no doubt about his meaning, “It’s very difficult to get here, so it should be impossible to get out.”
He said it as if, despite their great friendship, he feared that a deserter — which is what anyone who walked out on Miguel Lanza alive would be — would tell down there in the cities, tell the porteños or the Spaniards, who Miguel Lanza was, how and where he lived, and what roads to take to get to him. Miguel Lanza’s secret intention was known to them all; it was the unwritten law of the Inquisivi. We’ll move around all the time, never stop, but never leave the perimeter of the mountains, the jungle, and the river. And all his soldiers should think the same thing. Without exception. Not even the little creole Baltasar.
Yet it was the arrival of the runaways that made this rule explicit. It was only then that Miguel Lanza stated categorically to Baltasar what Baltasar already knew and accepted day by day as part of his integration into the band of guerrillas and into the wild nature of Upper Peru. They would be together until the end. But the decision was his, Baltasar’s. It was a pact he made with himself. Miguel Lanza made a serious mistake when he told him out loud, when the runaway horses came:
“He who becomes a member of my band never leaves it. Don’t even think it, Baltasar. Neither you nor anyone else leaves here. We’re all citizens of Miguel Lanza’s Inquisivi until the final victory or death.”
That night Baltasar Cárdenas’s head was brought to camp, stolen by someone who supported the guerrillas. It was brought in by the squad assigned to lure the Spaniards into the Vallegrande sand pits and then to the jungle, where anyone who enters gets lost.