Baltasar Bustos had to agree to a duel with the petty lawyer from Veracruz at six o’clock the next morning on the road to Boca del Río, but that same evening he left on horseback for Orizaba, traveling uphill all the way. Two dawns later, in sight of the misty town where the tropics have hung the veils of an eternal Lent, he had no difficulty entering the town occupied by the famous priest Quintana, the last defender, or so everyone said, of an egalitarian revolution in North America. A few added that it would not be long before this revolution was betrayed by Iturbide and the creole military men.
In any case, this revolution could hardly be expected to triumph, and it would quite properly be the last, Baltasar wrote to us, his friends in Buenos Aires, if it was so careless as to allow anyone at all to ride into the camp of General Quintana and ask for him without being stopped by a single guard or even asked for a password. Why?
“Because Father Quintana says that if someone’s out to get him not even the Pope himself could protect him.” The toothless man from Orizaba who said that to him stared at Baltasar — blue flannel trousers, linen shirt, calico jacket, Panama hat, and the horse that Menchaca the coffee grower had given him just because he liked him — as if to imply that a rich little creole like him, turned out in such clothes and with gold-rimmed glasses, posed no threat to the priest Quintana. And once in the wolf’s mouth, how long would this little gentleman with a straight nose, tangled sideburns, and honey-colored curls last if he tried any mischief?
“Just as night and the mountains, which are our real safeguard, protect our army, the priest Quintana says, ‘He who seeks me will find me.’ Try it, young fellow,” the boy encouraged Baltasar. “Find Anselmo Quintana on your own; there are standing orders never to point him out.”
Veracruz roads are impassable in summer. The rain never ends, but all that water seems to originate in Orizaba and then flow back to it. Baltasar forded the rivers when the roads disappeared under mudslides. Before starting out for the day, he breakfasted on pineapple and mangoes still warm from the sun. But in Orizaba everything smelled of damp earth, and the fruits — oranges, strawberries, quinces, and sloes — boiled in immense caldrons to be made into preserves.
The rebels’ weapons, compared with what he’d seen of José de San Martín’s in Valparaíso and to the arms shipments that passed through Maracaibo, were not impressive. A few rifles, many lances, and even primitive slings. As if to make up for the paucity of artillery, there was an overabundance of archives. Mountains of paper at the entrance to the old tobacco warehouses, where military headquarters had been established. Sheets upon sheets, until they competed with the jealous mountain, the Orizaba peak the Indians called Citlaltepetl, Mountain of the Star. And running like mice around these huge parchment cheeses were secretaries and lawyers, scribes busily writing proclamations, agents and propagandists of all kinds. In greater numbers than the soldiers of the rebel army itself.
Baltasar Bustos had seen enough of the revolution in Spanish America to be able to tell who these people were without anyone’s having to point them out. They were there to offer testimony about deeds, convince the incredulous, give the lie to the malicious, draw up laws, and elucidate constitutions. The star of this legal mountain was eloquence — easy, abundant, solemn, and seductive all at the same time: a rhetorical volcano. And while they were ambitious, these independence lawyers were not cynical. Dorrego and I, Varela, endlessly fixing our clocks in Buenos Aires, often said that in the case of the revolution for independence Pascal’s bet about the existence of God was absolutely pointless: believing in God is a bet you cannot lose. If God exists, I win. If He doesn’t, it doesn’t matter.
In our revolutions (especially in one as fragile and harried as that of the priest Quintana along Mexico’s Gulf Coast), if the independence movement failed, the insurgents would be shot. What was necessary, Xavier Dorrego told me, when he invited me to the estate he’d acquired on the road to San Isidro to admire his most recently acquired clock, was a faith comparable to that of the other Anselm, the saint who argued that if God is the greatest thing we can imagine, the nonexistence of God is impossible, because hardly have we negated God than we find His place taken by the greatest thing we can imagine, which is to say, God. But I, rather more of a Jacobin than our friend Dorrego, preferred to be satisfied with Tertulian’s formula as a basis for belief in God: it’s true because it’s absurd.
Both arguments — Anselm’s and Tertulian’s — were necessary, we said in the anarchy of the Year XX in Argentina, for us to go on believing in the merits of independence. We could hardly imagine our third citizen of the Café de Malcos, our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos, ready to risk his life (and his faith?) in the first line of the last revolution, the Mexican revolution, and finding himself surrounded, as if through the worst gypsy curse, by lawyers, theologians of law, church fathers of the incipient nation, all of them excited, as if winning the war depended on paper and as if only that which was written could be real in our new nations and as if what was real were a mere mirage, to be disdained to the degree to which it did not adhere to the written ideal.
“The Law is the greatest thing imaginable.”
“That’s true because it’s absurd.”
Drones, pen pushers, and intriguers: he saw himself in them and saw us, or perhaps men like me, Manuel Varela, an impenitent printer confident he could change the world by throwing words at it, and men like Xavier Dorrego, a rich creole convinced that an enlightened elite could, if guided by reason, save these poor nations destroyed first by tyranny, then by anarchy, and always by the simple, crushing fact of the ignorance of the majority. But weren’t all of us also the bearers of the slim, provincial culture of our time, autodidacts instructed by censored books introduced into the Americas among the ornaments and sacred vessels of humble priests who did not pay duties, whose property was not searched, privileges the modernizing law of the Bourbons had prohibited?
Weren’t we — Balta, Dorrego, and I, Varela, not forgetting the already deceased Echagüe and Arias — the patient kneaders of a civilization that was not yet bread and thus had nothing to distribute?
These thoughts were like a bridge that united us, here in the Río de la Plata, with our younger brother in the Gulf of Mexico.
But it wasn’t among us or those who looked like us that Baltasar would find the person he sought.
The camp followers came and went with baskets of clean clothes on their heads; they would whip the chocolate in huge caldrons after grinding it in gigantic grinders; they would get down on their knees to wash; they would give birth to the tortillas in that same servile, maternal posture at the metate, the traditional corn-grinding stone; and one of them, more active than the rest, would seem to take care of everything and everyone at once, her hair a mess, her feet bare, and wiping her nose, which ran because of an annoying cold.
Soldiers in shirt sleeves and with handkerchiefs tied on their heads; troopers with machetes and swords, handsome horsemen like ancient condottieri, sitting on supply crates, vain, with their silk kerchiefs knotted at the corners, floating loosely around their necks, their campaign boots beautifully polished, their bell-bottom trousers embroidered with spangles and gold. Those not sitting on boxes used wicker chairs that were so worn they, too, looked like gold. But none of them could be Quintana — unless Baltasar Bustos’s myopic but nervous and rapid eyes were unable to pick out the leader — doubtless because the leader was not any different from anyone else.
Perhaps it was the idea of the wicker and the gold that caused him to turn his head and catch sight of a blond head of hair that quickly hid in one of the tobacco sheds, mixing in with the laughing children hiding there as they played blindman’s buff. The blond child came out with a handkerchief over his eyes, whiter than the filth on his rough cotton shirt and trousers. He collided with Baltasar’s body and went running back to the shed, as his little comrades’ laughter grew louder.