I received these notes from my friend and imagined him carrying out his tasks as clerk in the trials of the viceroys with praiseworthy patience.
What I didn’t know is that Baltasar was meticulously rehearsing quite a sequence of actions.
A dry, old, cynical man, the Marquis de Cabra, presided over the sessions in the courtroom. He never even glanced at the clerk Baltasar, but Baltasar took careful note of the president of the court, seeking to read his thoughts, observing his every movement. Above all, as we shall see, Baltasar envied him.
Baltasar continued writing and pretending that he was sorting papers after the day’s session was finished. When asked to leave the hall, he apologized, acting very busy, and left by a side door, giving the impression by his gestures that he knew his way around the building better than anyone else. The main doors were locked; he would have to walk down the corridors and exit by a door at the back.
He walked along one of the halls to the noisy rhythm of his gold-buckled, high-heeled shoes, hugging the documents against his cambric shirt and scattering between the tails of his frock coat the crumbs that had accumulated in the lap of his nankeen trousers, the remains of a roll he’d eaten surreptitiously. Instead of leaving the building, he went into the now empty library, hid in the stacks, and waited patiently for the lights to go out. His father had told him a secret: behind the thick volumes containing the works of the church fathers, there was a hidden passage through which the presidents of the Superior Court passed unseen and unhindered into their private chambers.
* * *
He waited another half hour, then poked his finger hard against volume 4 of St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica. Slowly and silently the stack slid open — the hinges, Baltasar noted, as always were perfectly oiled. The passageway led to a patio shaded by peach trees. But a gray, dusty vine allowed an agile man to climb from the patio to the balcony. It was almost as if the ivy invited the young body to come up and celebrate the arrival of May and the departure of the humid, unbearable heat of summer in the Río de la Plata, heat that turns clothing into a clammy, undesirable second skin.
Now, however, a cool breeze with a touch of ice blew off the Plata, as if to quell the ardent spirits of the revolutionary city, itself rejuvenated by the speed at which events were taking place. On the thirteenth of May, an English (always the English!) ship had brought the news: the French occupied Seville; Napoleon held not only political control over Spain but economic control as well. Spain was no more. King Ferdinand VII was no more. What would Spain’s New World colonies do? The Argentine viceroyalty had only one strength, the militias forged to repulse the English invasions and replace viceregal ineptitude: Riverside Men, Plainsmen, Patricians — such were the names of the regiments that on the twentieth of May withdrew their support for the viceroy, Hidalgo de Cisneros, saying: “You represent nothing now.” And then they rallied around Cornelio de Saavedra, commander in chief of the Patricians, giving him the power to rule. On May 21, Saavedra’s ally, a fiery Jacobin orator, Juan José Castelli, appeared in the Plaza Mayor with six hundred hooded, well-armed men the people dubbed “the infernal legion,” and forced the viceroy to hold an open meeting at the City Hall, where Baltasar Bustos deliriously applauded Castelli’s speech …
* * *
“His style is dazzling, his demeanor intrepid, his spirit daring,” observed our friend that night in the Café de Malcos. “And his message is crystal-clear. There is no more sovereign power in Spain. Thus, sovereignty reverts to the people. To us. Castelli is the creole incarnation of Rousseau!”
“No”—I dared to break in on his enthusiasm. “That idea was invented two hundred years ago by Francisco Suárez, a Jesuit theologian. Look behind every new idea and you’ll find an old one, which might even turn out to be Catholic and Spanish — painful as that would be to us.”
I smiled as I said it; I didn’t want to wound my friend’s enlightened sensibility. But that night nothing could diminish his enthusiasm, which was more philosophical than political.
“Saavedra has demanded total power for the Municipal Council. Castelli demands general elections. What are we going to do?”
“What is it you want?” interjected our third friend, Xavier Dorrego.
“Equality,” said Baltasar.
“Without liberty?” Dorrego argued, as was his custom.
“Yes, because we might end up proclaiming liberty without having eliminated the problem of inequality. And if that happens, the revolution will fail. So: equality above all!”
Baltasar Bustos was repeating his own sentence when he stopped, just for an instant, in the center of the patio adjacent to the residential wing of the Palace of the Superior Court, in front of the vine that reached to the balcony outside the rooms of the president and his wife. The door of the service wing opened, and a pair of black hands proffered a living bundle, asleep but breathing and warm.
“I don’t understand why you have to make things so complicated, young master,” said the voice of the black woman. “It would have been so easy to come in through the service entrance and take…” The woman sobbed, and Baltasar, the child in his arms, headed for the vine. What he was going to do wasn’t easy for a robust, overweight, not to mention nearsighted man. The ivy may have been an invitation to a young body to come up and celebrate the coolness of May, but the body of this friend of mine, Baltasar, at the age of twenty-four was the product of a sedentary life, febrile reading, a willful isolation from action, a proud disdain for the country life which had been his as a child and which continued to be his father’s and sister’s out on the pampa. Bustos, in short, had cultivated a physique which to him was at once cosmopolitan, civilized, intellectual, and a rebellion: the antithesis of the barbarous customs of the country, the colony, the Church, and Spain. He admitted ironically that his was not the proper physique for what he was doing: climbing a vine right after midnight with a bundle in his arms. In other words, he saw himself as urban and urbane but hardly romantic.
Barely had he set foot on the first tangle in the vine than he realized that if no one had noticed his earlier explorations of the terrain it was because no one could even imagine something as daring as what he was attempting; no one would examine the vine to see if it had been climbed. Ivy grew all on its own and did not need to be tended or watched over. Lawns had to be cared for, peach trees had to be pruned. But no one inspected the ivy, abandoned to its parched dustiness, to discover exactly what Baltasar Bustos did on the night of May 24, 1810: he climbed up to the balcony of the wife of the President of the Superior Court of Buenos Aires with a black baby in his arms, entered her bedroom, took the white, newly born child of the president and his wife, and in its place put the black infant, also newly arrived in this world, though his realm would be one of kitchens, beatings, and curses.