The Campaign by Carlos Fuentes

Author:Carlos Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

6

The Army of the Andes

[1]

“His name is Baltasar Bustos, his family owns an estate—reasonable people, but half savage, like all ranch owners.” “If at least his father were a merchant.” “Is he a good marriage prospect?” “But he fought alongside the mountain rebels in Upper Peru—when did he become a royalist?” “When Miguel Lanza put a price on his head for deserting.” “He says that he’s in love, that he came here looking for the woman.” “That’s not important, but the news he brings from Inquisivi and Jujuy is.” “He’s very open; we know everything about him.” “He doesn’t hide anything from us.” “He knows we’ll crush the rebellion, so he’s doing us a favor.” “He certainly doesn’t look like a guerrilla.” “Your excellency shouldn’t judge by appearances.” “Plump, perfumed, dressed in silks, nearsighted…”

He strolled the salons of Santiago de Chile just as he’d strolled those of Lima, but he did not cut the same figure. Rather, he conformed to the description recorded above by the authorities of the captaincy-general of Chile. What a fuss this Baltasar Bustos made about his search for Ofelia Salamanca, now the widow of the Marquis de Cabra, who had died of bile and apoplexy in Lima! Who had died, it should be noted, in bed. Of course, no one knows if he died before or after his rehearsed death. Was he already dead when they laid him in his wife’s bed? Or did he die there, transforming the rehearsal into reality and the attempt at playfulness into God’s punishment?

The marquis fully deserved it. He left behind in Chile so many bad memories of his cruelty and injustice—which he carried out, it must be noted, with a smile and a joke on his lips! But his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, is no longer here; people say she went north, fleeing from the imminent fall of Chile, so ill defended, she said before departing, by the most pusillanimous captain-general in three centuries, Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Pont, who sought to compensate for his lack of military prowess by investing excessive energy in repression, passing judgment on the loyalty of all creoles without exception, expropriating their properties, burning their houses, and occasionally exiling them to the Island of Juan Fernández.

While none of that made up for Marcó del Pont’s stupidity on the battlefield, it did succeed in making Spanish rule the object of general hatred and threw the inhabitants of Santiago and Valparaíso into a state of total hysteria. It was from that that Ofelia Salamanca had fled. She was fed up with suspicion, fear, sudden changes! Now this nearsighted, fat fellow was looking for her, and just by chance he came from Jujuy, Upper Peru, and Mendoza, and had friends in the rebel officer corps in Argentina, who, though they protected him from Lanza’s death sentence, had no confidence in him.

In any case, the sword of Damocles is hanging over his head; obviously, he’s not meant for war; he says that Lanza conscripted him; he seems as

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