“And he wouldn’t add lack of discipline to excommunication?”
“And he couldn’t allow aristocratic creoles — sorry if I offend you, Captain — to place themselves above the law.”
“Which you, Counselor, represent.”
“Exactly. To carry on with their caprices.”
“So he had him shot.”
“Precisely. It’s only fair to warn those who come here alleging they’ve put aside their social class and become one of us.”
“Take a good look at my skin, Captain,” said a soldier in a white shirt sitting on a crate across from two bottles of wine, which he studied while making paper cartridges. “You’re white, I’m very dark. What does your freedom matter to me if it doesn’t include my equality?”
“What are you doing?” Baltasar asked the soldier, whose face, with thick, half-open lips, seemed as flexible and rough as a wrinkled leather wineskin.
“I’m trying to choose between these bottles.”
“Why?”
“Because one kind of alcohol is merciful and another is hostile. I look at the bottles and wonder which is which.”
“I couldn’t have guessed. And what are you doing with those papers?”
“I’m making the edicts of excommunication published by the Holy Inquisition against our leader Father Quintana into cartridges.”
“But you are Father Quintana,” said Baltasar.
“How do you know that?” The soldier raised his dark, wrinkled face.
“Because you’re the only person in this entire encampment who is wavering between two things, even if they happen to be two bottles of wine. And also, you’re showing me your bare head, while everyone else has his covered. You don’t want to be identified by your cap, which you always have on. Your cap would betray you, but the fact that you take it off betrays you more.”
“No,” said Quintana without emotion, covering his black, curly head with a tawny cap with long earflaps. “It isn’t alcohol that concerns me but Hosts. We’re making them out of corn, out of sweet potatoes, out of whatever we have. There is no wheat in this region. And I have to think about the effects of Communion not only on Christ’s body but on my own. Understand?”
He fixed his gaze on Baltasar’s light eyes without interrupting his cartridge making and added that the boy, if he was going to join them, should know right from the start that every Thursday — tomorrow — everyone had to live in suffering without the Father — only once a week, from Thursday to Friday, but every week without exception, accepting the Host and the wine as the literal body and blood, not only of Christ, but of all those who take Communion: Quintana, Bustos, that toothless man over there, this woman with the cold, the children playing blindman’s buff. “Don’t try to find out how many are with me, because over the course of the war I myself have lost count. Even those constipated lawyers who fill my head with projects and laws”—Quintana raised his voice so the interested parties could hear—“because they would like to carry out this revolution their way, with order and laws, but without me they would win no battles, not even against their mothers-in-law.
“So all of us, all of us, Captain Bustos, are without the Father because Christ dies on the cross and we only recover Him in the Eucharist; we all have to live this anguish and this hope from Thursday to Friday or we have no right to go on calling ourselves Christians. But only I, Captain, have the pleasure of mixing in my mouth the Host and the wine and of liberating with my saliva and the alcohol two bodies: mine and Christ’s. It is not enough to keep the first Fridays because Christ made a charming promise to St. Margaret Mary! This is not a matter of beatitude and grace, it’s a question of pain and necessity: every week at least, and not every day so as not to shock anyone.”
The priest Anselmo Quintana paused to take a breath, looked around him with a singular mix of arrogance, humor, irony, and unity with his people, and concluded: “That’s why I have to choose very carefully which wine I drink at Mass. As you see, with the excommunication edicts I make cartridges and return them like Roman candles to the Spaniards. Now come and eat something and talk awhile. You must be very tired.”
He stood up.
“Ah, yes, let me shake hands with someone who fought alongside José de San Martín. But first let’s smoke a cigar.”
[3]
There was no time to smoke anything that Wednesday morning in Orizaba that smelled of storm. Once the new arrival had solved the puzzle put to him by the entire encampment, the swarm of shysters and scribes descended on the priest Quintana with recommendations, warnings, requests, and news: “If the archives already take up more than ten wagons, what shall we do with them?” “Burn them,” says Quintana. “But then there will be no evidence of what we are doing. Your campaign, General, has always distinguished itself not only by winning battles but by setting down laws, freeing land, and giving constitutions and federal guarantees to those who work the land, if not for today, then certainly for tomorrow.” “Well, what do you want? To study all those papers, so you can burn some and save others? Your papers drive me mad, do whatever you like with them, but save me two, because I do want to keep them and remember them forever.” “Which two might they be, General?”
The priest stopped on his way to the tobacco sheds, where he was going with Baltasar. He took the cigar out of his shirt pocket but didn’t raise it to his lips or light it. He waved it like a hyssop or a scourge or a phallus before the eyes of the lawyers and scribes.
“One is my first baptismal act as a priest, gentlemen. In those days it was the custom to conceal the race of newborns. Everyone wanted to pass for Spanish; no one wanted the infamy of being termed black, mestizo, or anything else. So when I baptized that first child, I naturally wrote ‘of the Spanish race.’ Keep that paper for me also because that first child I anointed with the chrism was my own son. The other paper is a law I dictated to you in the Córdoba congress which says that from now on there will be no more blacks, Indians, or Spaniards but only Mexicans. Keep that law for me: the others deal with freedom, but that one deals with equality, without which all rights are chimeras. And then burn the rest and stop annoying me.”
But they did not do it. They formed swift circles around Quintana and Baltasar as the two stood under the wet mangroves, whose smell competed with the rising aroma of the tobacco sheds (which smelled of fertile earth and female thighs, smoky hair and mandrakes, primroses, a wake, and truffles all mixed together, Quintana murmured): “We must take precautions, Calleja del Rey says he’s obsessed with capturing you alive before the inevitable defeat of the royalist troops. Executions, the taking of hostages, rewards to towns that refuse to help us, the destruction of those that do — all these things are increasing, General. And the worst is that it’s the creole Mexicans who hate you most vehemently; they don’t want you on the political horizon when they take power after independence.”
“What do you advise me to do?” This time Quintana looked at them with a nervous tremor in his left eyelid.
“Come to terms with them, General, save something of all this and, above all, save yourself.”
“Listen to them, Baltasar. That’s how you lose revolutions and even your balls.”
“Come to terms, General.”
“Now, when the final hour is at hand, when my present enemy, Spain, is about to lose, and when my next enemy will be the creole officers? But if for ten years I didn’t come to terms with the king of Spain, who at least is a descendant of Queen Isabella the Catholic, why should I come to terms with a ridiculous little creole like Don Agustín de Iturbide? Who do you take me for, gentlemen? Haven’t you learned anything in ten years?”