He left Buenos Aires carrying little baggage. A wicker suitcase, an umbrella, and three or four of his favorite books: La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Confessions, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The kidnapped child was not in his luggage. The wet nurse had disappeared along with her sister, the flogged mother of the black baby. He’d searched for her with his two friends, but their attempts had all failed. The two women had carried out their promise to Baltasar Bustos: the child of the Marquise de Cabra would live the life of the son of a sick, publicly flogged black prostitute. Justice, for Baltasar, would thus be carried out. In the suffering of the white child’s mother? The banks of the road darkened when he tried to justify his action (to himself, not to win sophistic arguments with his polemical friends: alone on a mule, with an umbrella, a wicker suitcase, and books by the Citizen of Geneva — with no one to speak to except nature, with which he sought to become one, freely and joyously). The goal of justice is not universal happiness. The person punished suffers so that the person rewarded may rejoice. That’s the norm. But it was a penal norm, worthy of the celebrated Italian Beccaria, not of the totally free Genevan, Rousseau. And the norm was even less sure in its application to the sufferer, in this case a woman for whom Baltasar Bustos — alone, twenty-four years of age, riding a mule — felt a passion that daily grew more unbridled.
Didn’t the woman Ofelia Salamanca deserve a more immediate devotion and selflessness than that called for by the ideas of Baltasar Bustos (and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) on Nature and Justice? The shadows of the banks pierced his soul when he replied to himself that this was true. He would never find nature or justice except through a real person, a beloved person moreover, especially if, as it became clearer with every moment in his memory and his desire, that person was Ofelia Salamanca. Yet he couldn’t see himself tearing the child away from the nurse and her sister to return it to the Marquise de Cabra, especially since the black baby was dead. There was nothing to give them in return for the plea: It was all a mistake. Things will once more be as they were before. Forgive me.
He didn’t find them. But they would have spit his words in his face: nothing can ever be as it was. We slaves are more slaves than we were yesterday, poorer, more humiliated. The masters are more arrogant, crueler, more insensitive. They deserve this pain you’ve inflicted. The child stays with us. It doesn’t matter that the other child is dead. Blessed be his fate: he’s in heaven. Now this son of an expensive whore will live the life of the son of a cheap whore.
What could the wretched Baltasar say to that?
But I’m in love with Ofelia Salamanca.
He heard the laughter of the black women between two screeches of a screamer bird. He heard the laughter of his two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela, seeping out of his wicker suitcase. Even the mule stopped and brayed, laughing at him with its huge teeth as white as new corn. The Devil, goes the gaucho saying, dwells in cornfields.
[2]
This time, José Antonio Bustos was waiting for him at the entrance to the estate. Baltasar was grateful and relieved. What did it matter, in the end, if his father waited for him dead with or without a candle, with or without a rosary. He had bade him goodbye sitting on that throne of death the gauchos prefer for conversation, drinking maté, and warding off grief. But his father was waiting for him like this, on foot, amid workshops, warehouses, horses, gauchos, chickens … As long as he had come to stay.
“How did you know I was coming?” the traveler would have wanted to ask his father.
José Antonio Bustos’s eyes, somber and hollow, set in flesh which was once pink but which ranch work and the pampa sun had turned to leather, precluded such a question. It would have been redundant. José Antonio Bustos just knew. The son felt ridiculous sitting on the mule, out of joint beside the proud elegance of the father. The young man was the object of mocking glances from the tough, sinewy gauchos with hungry faces who watched him as he arrived.
He dismounted and led the mule to the grand gate that separated the road and the outside from the inner world, the property of José Antonio Bustos and his children. The house was constructed like a fort: it was surrounded by a moat to thwart Indian attack and had a watchtower at its center. The watchtower was the only high place, and it looked out over a vast, indifferent, dangerous world. The gallery was at once the warm and cool apex of the austere compound. There Baltasar had spent the long afternoons of his childhood (when he had a childhood), but now José Antonio preferred to take his strolls at the back, around the well, near the windows of the house. From there he could contemplate a small clover lawn. The old man was remembering. Keeping watch. Baltasar walked toward his father.
José Antonio took one step beyond his property and his legs failed him. His knees buckled, and he clutched a post as the gauchos watched him without any change of expression. Baltasar ran to his father to help him. The mule shied and headed for the road. A gaucho halted it, laughing to himself. They were all laughing at him, Baltasar realized, and at his father, the man they said they loved and respected. Baltasar had fled from this savagery when he was seventeen, to study in Buenos Aires, to become a man of his times, to save himself from this gaucho savagery — it seemed appropriate that the word gaucho resembled gaucherie, the French for error and clumsiness.
“See? Death starts in your legs,” José Antonio said with a smile as leathery as his skin, as he leaned his weight on his son.
“You come with me, Papa,” said Baltasar. Then he ordered the gauchos: “Bring my bags to the house.”
He liked to give them orders and feel their humiliation. His father rebuked him mildly for it. Charity begins at home. If you want to be just, begin with those who serve you. But Baltasar saw the gauchos as a Mongolian horde. Each one was Genghis Khan, with his own personal history of violence, superstition, and stupidity, the kind Voltaire had condemned for all time. Baltasar simply could not conceive of a future with gauchos in it. They spoiled his idyllic vision of nature. They had no compunctions whatsoever about slaughtering a steer, lassoing a horse, or murdering a fellow human being. They were the agents of an unproductive holocaust which left the countryside littered with corpses. And they offended Baltasar’s sensibility even more because they were nomads who would never take root anywhere, mobile negations of the sedentary life he identified with civilization.
What about nature, then? For Baltasar, nature, provisionally, consisted of his episodic visits home. A salutary return to his origins. A spur to move forward toward a happy future, free, prosperous, and without superstition. Only thus would nature be saved from those who exploited her: Spanish bastards or brutish gauchos.
That was the subject of the prodigal son’s conversation at the dinner table on his father’s estate. The two men alone, so different physically, come together to have supper by candlelight, which flashed in Baltasar’s dim eyes with the memory of the twenty-five candles around the cradle of Ofelia Salamanca’s newborn. A memory; also a foreboding. That of the single candle in the dead hand of his father, who would be saying to him from eternity: “Son, you were right.”
At table in the paternal house, it was not that way. No one was right. Baltasar was young, impulsive, convinced, and dazzled by the ideas he’d so recently encountered. The father was like his physical posture: sitting on a cow’s skull but animated and vital in his opinions; standing at the entrance to his estate, at the frontier between what was his and what belonged to everyone, standing straight but already vanquished by death, which came to him through the earth and which started in his legs.