“I hope that’s how it works and that it takes its time in reaching my heart and mind. I still want to see what’s going to happen. I want to see if you’re right, son.”
Baltasar imagined his father as a man on the threshold between life and death and also between reason and unreason, between independence and colonialism, between revolution and counterrevolution. He asked himself sometimes whether he would have preferred a brotherly father, a correligionary, to share his ideas and enthusiasms. He simply did not know the answer. Finally, he accepted this father of his, transformed by the sun, stripped over time of his European complexion to become what he was: the patriarch of a savage band of gauchos, and the impresario of a budding industry. A threatened industry. Perhaps this style of coexistence with opposites gave José Antonio Bustos his austere, just tone and his Solomonlike sympathy. He was a benevolent judge in a land and time that cried out for tolerance. And if Baltasar was demanding justice in the cities and was capable of implementing it as he did on the night of May 24 in Buenos Aires, what could he say to his father, landowner and judge in the barbarous territories of the interior? If the son had to be implacable in the city, the father, perhaps, had to be flexible in the country. It was the difference between the porcelain skin of the Marquis de Cabra and his wife and the leathery, tanned hide of José Antonio Bustos.
Plump, myopic, and with bronze-colored curls, Baltasar Bustos, looking at his reflection in the gilt-framed pier glass that lugubriously extended the dining room, saw himself as a hybrid between the two, formless and, barely outside the city, in need of the help of others to survive. He needed the mule because the post coach did not stop here. He needed the gauchos if only to order them to bring his bags to the house. He needed the servants because he did not know how to make his own bed, sew on a button, or press a coat; he needed the cook because he did not even know how to fry an egg. He needed his father to attack his ideas, not as an enemy, but as an affectionate, Socratic interlocutor. But, frankly, he did not know if he needed his sister, Sabina, whose presence would be ghostly if it weren’t so obstinately real.
Sabina resembled her father. Except that what in him was austere nobility was pained severity in her. Sour, Baltasar wanted to say when he hated her (which was quite often, especially when they were together); vinegary, premature old maid, born an old maid, a frustrated nun … But his sense of justice made him rectify that opinion (especially when he was far from her, in Buenos Aires) and tell himself that, trapped as she was out in the country, a woman alone in a houseful of men, condemned to live among savage gauchos, her character could not be other than what it was.
She would not sit at table with the men. No one stopped her, only she herself. And she insisted on serving them. Thus, she was both present and absent at the meals of the father and the son. Sometimes Baltasar paid no attention to her; other times, Sabina’s presence determined the tenor of his arguments. He knew what she was going to say, standing there with the platter of roast meat trembling in her hands, holding the serving tongs with a coarse napkin decorated in a red checkerboard pattern:
“We’ve got no protection. You and your ideas have left us at the mercy of the elements. We used to have a refuge, being a colony. We used to have protection — the Crown. We used to have redemption — the Church. You and your ideas have left us at the mercy of the four winds. Just take a good look, brother. What harm your side is doing to ours!”
These things, said between servings, did not help Baltasar Bustos’s digestion. In vain he searched in his sister’s severity for his father’s equanimity. Yet Sabina and Baltasar were both the product of the drive for equilibrium that characterized José Antonio Bustos.
Attentive to everything that went on, blessed with an extraordinary sixth sense for finding things out, some by induction, others by deduction, José Antonio Bustos could make use of even the most insignificant piece of information that came his way from reading a newspaper (rarely), from letters (occasionally), or through remarks, gossip, or anecdotes (for the most part), at times even from gaucho songs, to tie loose ends, remember or come to some conclusion — to anticipate and take action. The basis of his knowledge was the wandering network of gauchos he protected as they roamed the pampa. They told him more than anyone. When he was young, as soon as he discovered the idea of the age, he applied it to the economic reality of country life in several ways. On his own property, he established a small textile and metal industry; at the same time, he expanded his holdings in case of a boom in cattle ranching. He prepared himself to endure or enjoy the opening or closing of trade with the outside world. He looked to Buenos Aires as a market for his goods, but he feared the foreign competition that would make them too expensive.
He remained open to commerce with Upper Peru, the source of the metals necessary for the workshop where he made spurs, carts, axles, and keys. And he married a young Basque woman, a child of the so-called second conquest that in or around 1770 multiplied the number of Spanish merchants in the port of Buenos Aires, merchants spurred on by Bourbon reforms in favor of free trade. The arrival on the pampa of the young, golden-haired, somewhat plump, and decidedly myopic María Teresa Echegaray — Mayté—did not transform the social life of the distant province. It was the province that absorbed her. A homebody but vain, Mistress Mayté refused to use spectacles. She had to look for everything — an egg, a ball of yarn, a cat, a needle, her slippers — by bending down to peer at close range, and that posture eventually became natural to her.
Bent over and blind, José Antonio Bustos’s wife stopped talking with her fellow humans, all of whom stood up straight in the distance, and instead sustained long monologues with ants on her practical days, and on dream days she chatted with the spiders that approached, swinging before her eyes, teasing her, making her laugh with their silvery ups and downs, forcing her to imagine, invent, wishing sometimes she were entwined in those viscous, moist threads until she was caught in the center of a net as seamless as the fabric in her husband’s shops that went to make ponchos, shirts, and other gaucho clothing.
The ants, on the other hand, brought out her diligent, practical side, and that was when she and Sabina would become suspicious and check over the supplies stored in the cupboards and calculate the level of thievery among the maids, associating everything with the collapse of authority, the degeneration of customs, the lack of respect for the Church, and, finally, the dissolution of colonial authority. Napoleon in Spain, the English in Buenos Aires, and the terrible consequences: King Ferdinand dethroned, the English defeated not by the viceroy but by the local Argentine militia (gauchos, no doubt). All this news finished off the ant in Mistress Mayté, and not even the spiders in her were able to compensate for so much horror. Actually, the spiders betrayed her, and in her dreams she saw a world without Church or king, a world adrift. She would curse herself for having abandoned Spain, but then she would remember that Spain was in the hands of Napoleon and his drunken brother “Joe Bottle,” and her heart would sink.
It sank permanently one hot afternoon in the summer of 1808, and Sabina inherited all her mother’s certitudes and agonies. Except that the daughter, stronger, standing upright, alien to ants and spiders, turned them into dogma and battles.
“She feels unprotected,” José Antonio reiterated, “but she doesn’t know how to express her ideas in complex terms. She talks about Spain, the Church, and the king as if they were the roof of the house. Her fear goes deeper. We are leaving a traditional empire, one that is absolutist and Catholic, for a rationalist, scientific, liberal, and perhaps Protestant freedom. You should try to understand our fears. She’s right. It is like being left to the mercy of the elements.”