The Campaign (24 page)

What had all the girls seen, the ones with round faces, with apple cheeks, who tied their hats on with scarves to keep the mountain wind from blowing them away? What did all the old men sitting along the principal streets of all these Andean towns think? Those old men never died. They'd been here for a thousand years. The same length of time as the red
yaraguá
grass, the rich cattle pasture that managed to survive on this bald mountain—old cattle, as well. In the towns farther up, only old men and children were left, old men with silvery wrinkles and girls with long hair. What had they seen, what had they heard said about Ofelia Salamanca? They say she had a rebel captain killed while he was shitting at the gates of La Guaira. She waited until that moment, just to humiliate him. In Valencia, on the other hand, she forced a royalist general to turn himself in and die with a rope around his neck, on his knees, to beg forgiveness for his sins.

Ofelia Salamanca: just as the yellow-flowered frailejon survives the cold of the highlands to dot the mountainsides like calligraphy, stories about Ofelia Salamanca dot this Santo Domingo mountain range. And just as the frailejon's flowers form a candelabrum that rises above the fleshy shrub, that's how she rose here, hunting down patriots until there were none left and she'd be without victims. Right here in this wasteland town, where the buzzards fly ceaselessly, that woman lacking a breast and good sense, said this to the rebel commander besieging the forts along the Orinoco:

“If you beat the royalists, you can take me prisoner and kill me.”

“And if the Spaniards beat us?”

“You and I will make love.”

“A delightful opportunity, you Spaniard-loving slut. I won't miss it, you can bet on it.”

“But there's one condition. You mustn't allow yourself to lose just to make love to me. Because then I'll kill you. Agreed?”

He did let himself be beaten just to make love to her—as the mountain bards would sing it—and so he died in her arms, a dagger in his back.

What did all these men know who died in her arms, at her order, when they saw her naked, when they let themselves be conquered by her? Who was this Creole Penthesilea?

In the desolate nature of the high Venezuelan wastes, Baltasar Bustos listened but did not find a joyful reciprocity in his solitary, self-sufficient soul, that would unite the individual with things, or promise with actuality. On the contrary, Ofelia's human acts obviated any possibility of reconciliation, rendering diabolical the very business of nature, from which the beautiful and cruel Chilean lady seemed to emanate and in which she found both her justification and her reflection. His faith in a possible reconciliation between man and nature was also shattered at that moment; we are burdened with too many sins, he whispered into the ear of the wasteland, to the old man and the young girl. Any reconciliation would be forced; we have no other choice but to go on hurting each other, and nothing will hurt us more than capricious passions, authoritarian disdain, power exercised without restraint: Ofelia Salamanca.

He saw the woman's face in the frozen, sterile, immensely beautiful mountains: he reached, protected by his Panama hat, the crest of the bird of prey, the back of the dead camel, the Eagle's Beak, which had the shape of a necklace lost there, as if carelessly, by Ofelia Salamanca, this incomprehensible woman, this endless enigma, who had finally worn out her romantic lover; he was thankful that the fierce yellow flower invaded this pure nakedness only between July and August, quickly abandoning the mountains to their clean, undecorated solitude. A baroque woman, of obscene sumptuousness, whose dazzling excretions and lugubrious rewards were seeking to revive something inert: in that instant, Baltasar believed he'd finally expunged her from his heart and exiled her from his mind.

But the void she left was immense. He descended bit by bit, convinced that he'd found the woman transformed into eternal stone, occasional flower, the stone sterile, the flower poisonous; and he again sought spontaneous delight in the diffuse sweetness of the reborn landscape of the valleys, the hooves of the sheep, the thatched roofs of the houses, and the fields of green carnations like lemon groves.

But all these Spanish flowers in the Venezuelan Andes—carnations, roses, and geraniums—could not fill the void left by Ofelia. The war could; trotting near the shadow of the extended eaves of the village houses, Baltasar accepted that his life, which he once imagined unique, without fissures—nature and history reconciled in his person—was forever sundered, and, as those inevitable song books already had it, all that was left to him was to bounce from war to war, from south to north and from north to south, to carry out his legendary destiny, which had already been mapped out in popular song … He would stop at sunrise to partake of delicious mountain cheese, Andean bread, and pineapple wine, but not even those details of life escaped the fate already dictated in the song. Chewing, he thought about Homer, the Cid, Shakespeare: their epic dramas were written before they were lived. Achilles and Ximena, Helen, and Richard the hunchback in real life had done nothing but follow the poet's scenic instructions and act out what had already been set down. We call this inversion of metaphor “history,” the naïve belief that, first, things happen and then they are written. That was an illusion, but he no longer fooled himself.

At that very moment, as an old woman was serving him a plate of griddle cakes in an inn by the side of the Macurumba road, it occurred to Baltasar Bustos to ask her about the war. To which she replied, “What war?”

Baltasar laughed and ate. At times, in these isolated towns, people don't find out about anything—or they find out very late, only when the bard gives his version of events. But in Mucuchíes, hours later, he found the same old man sitting on the same sack of potatoes and asked him the same question—“How's the war going?”—and received the same reply—“What war? What are you talking about?” The news was all over town instantly. The children took the opportunity to have some fun and tease. They made a circle around him, singing, “What war? What war?” and when he broke out of the magic circle of children and asked their elders who Simón Bolívar, Antonio Páez, and José Antonio Sucre were, they all said the same thing: “We don't know them. Are they from around here? Has anyone heard of them? Ask the old man who plays the violin in El Tabay.”

He was a man with a square head, sculpted by saber wounds until it looked like a block of wood. Baltasar found him inland, far from the road, in a vast, run-down house. To get to it, Baltasar had to climb over the skeletons of cows. The old man was on his shady terrace, sitting on the skull of a cow, just as José Antonio Bustos sat on his pampa ranch when Baltasar was a child. This old man played the violin; he did nothing else, except to contemplate a black man about thirty years of age, naked from the waist up and covered by filthy, tattered canvas trousers.

When Bustos approached on his mule, the squared-off, dark old man stopped playing, wiped his moist mustache with his hand, and stared with eyes overcome by the glare. The sun baked the cow bones and invited one's sight to become white as well, like the light. Baltasar understood, as never before, the need for shade; that is what he said, by way of greeting, to the old man; he didn't bother to greet the black—there was always a black or an Indian, silent, leaning on the doorposts. Justice turned into sun and white bones in his head; he'd come in search of the war and asked the old man, “Where? What is happening?”

“I know nothing,” said the old man. “Eusebio here might have some news.”

The black did not stop talking; that is, Baltasar realized that he'd been talking all the while, but in a very low voice. And now he spoke more loudly, repeating, “Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a thief. Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a fugitive. Thank you, General, for allowing me to be here on your estate.”

“You'd like to be on the loose, killing and robbing,” said a woman who'd appeared from the half-light in the house, wiping her hands on an apron. “And you, what do you want?” she said, looking at Baltasar.

“I'm a soldier,” it occurred to Baltasar to say. “How can I join the nearest battalion?”

The woman stared at him in total incomprehension, the old man with pity, the black with a grin. They seemed, one with his violin, the other with his gratitude, the woman with her rage, as if suspended in time, as if absent.

“Bolívar,” Bustos recited the magic names of the heroes, “San Martín…” as if they were amulets.

There was a long silence, then the old man stopped playing and spoke, “He said, ‘Comrades, the revolution has no money, but it does have land. Look as far as you please, from the sea at Maracaibo to the jungle of Guayana, from Eagle Peak to the mouths of the Orinoco, and what you see is land. There is land. The Spaniards took it away from the Indians. Now we're taking it away from the Spaniards. Take your land,' he said to me, ‘not today but tomorrow, when we win the war. Here is a voucher; there's another for your orderly, an ignorant black.' I cashed in the voucher, as did all the generals, but here you have this boy. He's an ignorant black. He didn't know how to cash anything. The war's over. Eusebio doesn't know how to exercise his rights.”

“I'd be a thief if you didn't protect me,” said the black.

“These people know nothing about papers. They only want to survive,” said the dark, squared-off old man. “We own everything, but we finish nothing.”

“Go on.” The woman laughed, a sixtyish Creole who must have been pretty a long time ago. “You're almost black yourself; don't be afraid of appearances. But I am, old man. I'm here on this cattle ranch you were given as payment for your service, ready to serve you as a maid as long as I don't have to know what's going on out there. For sure, the blacks have taken control of Caracas.”

“Because for you everything's bad.” The old man hugged the violin to his chest.

“I got tired of watching you fight. Thank your lucky stars. This is better than nothing,” said the woman before leaving, her back turned to them.

No sooner had she gone than the old man shut his eyes, furrowed his brow, and summoned Baltasar with his hand. “Come closer,” he said, “so she can't hear us. But I know the truth. I know what's happened. Bolívar was betrayed. They turned on him, just as my wife turned her back on us a moment ago, they sent him off to die alone, but that is our destiny. They ran San Martín out. They surrounded him with spies so he couldn't live in peace. They finished him off by forcing him into exile.”

“Who? The Spaniards?” said Baltasar, trying to follow the old man's strange tale.

“No, the Creole military men, us.”

“Mulatto,” said the young man, laughing. “You're a mulatto, old man.”

“I am, hiding here because I don't want to be a part of the ingratitude or of the crimes committed against my brothers,” said the old man with astonishing strength, and his wife reappeared, asking, “What are you saying? Still talking your foolishness, still telling what is going to happen? What a mania for God's sake! Who ever gave you the idea you were a prophet, you old fool?”

“I'm not. I only tell what already happened,” said the old man. He began to play his violin. “What happened a long time ago.”

Over the course of his slow return to Mérida, and from there to the sea, Baltasar Bustos found no evidence of war; no one knew anything about the old battles, and not a soul remembered the heroes. Sometimes they would say yes, the battle's going to take place tomorrow, but later they would mention names that meant nothing to him—Boyacá, Pichincha, Junín—and when he asked for details, no one could tell him where those places were or give him dates; they could only say in a monotonous voice: “One more battle and the fatherland will be saved.”

He entered a burned-out city where he walked in ashes up to his ankles. He was told that the ashes would be there forever, that nothing could get rid of them. Later, he returned to the violin-playing general's ranch. The woman had died. That afternoon they were burying her. The black had gone off to the mountains. He had fled. He would go down to the plains. He would fire his rifle. He would fight forever. Here he would have gone insane. The old man was left alone, and Baltasar felt that the solitude was giving him back his old spirit. The old man told more and more stories, about wars against the French, against the Yankees, military coups, torture, exile, an interminable history of failures and unrealized dreams, all postponed, all frustrated, pure hope; nothing ever ends and perhaps it's better that way, because here, when anything ends, it ends badly.

Here and there, Baltasar Bustos found forgotten iron wheels of cannons, and during the day he would cool his brow on them and at night use them to keep his hands warm. He lost all sense of time. Perhaps in Venezuela they'd lost it as well, resigned to frustration and to things done only halfway. One day, in a cemetery filled with tombs painted thousands of different colors, he happened on the old violinist-general leading a rickety funeral cortege, obviously made up of paid mourners, recruited by that same old hero whom Simón Bolívar had rewarded with land instead of money—exactly what the Cid did with his Castilian warriors. Who had died? Who else—the general looked at him with compassion—but Eusebio the rebel black? Baltasar made the Sign of the Cross before the coffin borne by four laborers.

“Don't worry,” said the general. “My little Chebo isn't in there. Rebels are always buried far away in unknown land, at night and with no name on the grave. So that no one ever knows if they're alive or dead! The box is empty.”

“Only one more crime and the fatherland will be saved.” Baltasar paraphrased the last sentence he'd heard the general utter.

“Of course I'm burying him here with his name, next to the mother who was ashamed of him, damn it. But what shame, what fear, what shitty prohibitions!” exclaimed the old man.