“We need an iron will, a man who can save us,” said a smiling Echagüe, his eternal glove in his hand.
“My young friends.” San Martín returned them a bitter smile. “I don’t know if we are going to be victorious or if we’re going to be cut to ribbons once and for all up in the mountains. That’s why I’m telling you here and now that even if we win, we will have been defeated if we hand power over to the sword-wielding arm, the successful military man.”
“But if it’s a matter of saving the nation,” insisted Echagüe.
“The nation will be saved by all its citizens, not by a military leader.”
“In wartime you don’t think that way.”
“But in peacetime I do, Lieutenant Echagüe. If we don’t create institutions, if we don’t achieve unity among Americans, we will rapidly go from squabbles to fratricidal warfare. I swear to you that I will kill Spaniards but not Argentines. Never. My saber will never leave its sheath for political reasons.”
“General, please pardon me for having spoken. I don’t claim to speak for my friends, who…”
“He’s just as fiery as his uncle.”
“Don Martín Echagüe would be proud of my actions. I hope I will always be proud of yours, sir.”
“Then never ask me or anyone else to be the executioner of my fellow citizens. A soldier can come to power with only that intention in mind. Beware of civilians as well,” he said to Bustos, and, curiously enough, to Father Francisco Arias. “Let no one propel you to power so that you will kill in the name of the military. Let no one bring you to the crossroads of power in order to kill or be killed.”
He laughed at the solemn silence of the young men and asked them to excuse the perorations of a man about to turn forty who only wanted to do his duty and then retire to some corner of the world to live like a man, in peace and with respect. “Would anyone believe, if I retire to my farm here in Mendoza, that I’m not a false Cincinnatus but a real Sulla waiting to take control of things? Damn!”
Everyone laughed, and he accused them of provoking this discussion about a hypothetical future because of the obvious, omnipresent fact — the American will to win independence: they had seen it, that will was all around them, nothing like it had ever before been seen in the Americas. It was the moment not to weep over the approaching storm clouds but to follow this sun, this will that manifested itself all around them — young men, patriots, Americans. Who could say, after these campaigns, that an Argentine, a Chilean, a Peruvian did not know how to organize or govern himself? The proof was right outside the door!
And outside the door, fresh recruits were being given uniforms, which they put on right out in the open after stripping themselves to the skin for a few seconds. Father Francisco Arias came over to help them dress; many did not know how to put the uniform on properly, button the tunic, adjust the belt, and cross the leather strap over their chests. He waved to the other two to come and help. Baltasar held Juan back.
“Don’t. You are going to feel bad the day you can no longer be a comrade to those who are not your equals. Only the war unites us. Society will divide us.”
The next morning, with the troops assembled in front of the Franciscan convent, San Martín put at the head of the column the Commander and declared Patroness of the Army of the Andes, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. At the center of that figure decked out like a doll, as triangular as the beloved sex of a woman, Baltasar replaced the face veiled in the white of maternal virginity with the visage of Ofelia Salamanca, smiling at him as if he were everything — the owner of the plaything, the lover of the woman, the son of the mother.
[5]
Echagüe gave General San Martín a detailed description of the Los Patos route, the one the bulk of the troops, commanded by Bernardo O’Higgins, would take. South of them, Colonel Las Heras would advance along the shorter Uspallata road with the artillery. Several smaller columns would spread north and south of these two to confirm the impression that the army was attacking Chile along a wide front, from Mount Aconcagua to Valdivia. They would thus divert the royalist forces, which were already demoralized by the campaign of rumors spread by San Martín like a fan of deception from La Rioja and the pass at Comecaballos to San Juan and the Pismanta route, down to the south, through the passes of Portillo and Planchón, where the Puechuenche Indians had already betrayed the patriots. Regular infantrymen and members of the militia, grenadiers, and lancers from the Province of Buenos Aires set out, following the routes of this great invasion, unprecedented in the New World. Of the 5,423 men in the army, only 4,000 were combatants. The rest made up the supply columns: grain wagons, cattle, sappers, bakers, lantern bearers, water wagons, and a carriage laden with dispatches and maps, pulled by six horses — all of which climbed to an altitude almost four miles above sea level, where they stared into the face of the Andes, which dominated those who sought to dominate them. These first men, the Adams of independence, their feet resting on an earth of volcanic ruins and extinct glaciers, contemplated the brown face and snowy crown of this dead god. Dead or not, he always seemed about to renew an interrupted catastrophe, latent in a nature which on the morning of San Martín’s crossing to Chile trembled with the memories of devastated worlds and the promises of worlds to come, worlds these men, San Martín’s five thousand, would never see.
Would they see, instead, the fratricidal war prophesied by the general, the new countries in ruins, destroyed by their own offspring? During the ascent to this highest temple of the Andes, Baltasar Bustos sought out the eyes of his friends Echagüe and Arias as well as those of José de San Martín himself. Occupied as they were in the effort to scale the heights, to give orders, exulting at the grandiose spectacle, inebriated perhaps with the will to triumph in battle and the will to arms of this incomparable army, did they have time, as Baltasar did, to look into their hearts and think about the moment in which rhetoric would be split from action? A sublime moment, and no one should spoil it. Let those who had the privilege of being Americans and of being on the roof of America in the company of the liberator of America exult in it in the name of the generations to come.
They slept. They drank from their canteens. Some even had themselves shaved by an impromptu barber so the Spaniards wouldn’t think the army was made up of savage gauchos from the pampa. The nights were freezing, and they were grateful for the blankets stolen from the good people of Mendoza. The cannons passed in single file, and the Indians carried the gear. In the rear guard could be heard the lowing of the cattle bent down under the load of the supplies. Some men collapsed, fainting, vomiting, suffering from altitude sickness. No guitars were heard on that heroic night, although someone did sing a vidalita, a sad Argentine love song. San Martín dreamed he had stilts and could cross the mountains in one stride.
They started the ascent on January 18 and on February 2 began the descent; on the fourth, they encountered a royalist detachment in a mountain pass called Achupallas, one hundred soldiers of the king who couldn’t stand up to the bare-saber charge of Juan Echagüe. From that moment on, the army’s two columns raced from the Aconcagua to Chile’s central valley. On February 12, by moonlight, they were all running downhill toward a clash with Marcó del Pont’s royalist troops at Chacabuco. It was by moonlight that the three friends, Baltasar, Francisco, and Juan, looked at each other for the last time, unable to shake hands, unable to embrace, unable even to say another word to each other. O’Higgins’s orders were: overwhelm the enemy, surround him; he’s stationed himself right in the center, so we can do it — make a circle of death. The cavalry began the attack with O’Higgins along Cuesta Nueva, the Spaniards’ right flank. This gave Soler time to come in later and destroy what remained of the enemy’s left-flank rear guard. The three friends were among the first to attack on the left, and this was a war of saber against saber, hand-to-hand combat amid the clash of cavalry, closely followed by the infantry, who carried their sabers in their teeth so they could climb on one another’s shoulders to get over the tree-trunk roadblocks erected by the enemy. The horses leapt over the parapets. The brave Juan Echagüe fell as he made a jump, and Baltasar saw his friend’s head battered. In another charge, a musket ball stained the handsome Father Arias’s black cassock with his own red blood. Baltasar charged, his glasses fogged, their metal frame wrapped tightly around his irritated, burning ears. He tried to leave his heart a blank, to keep the pain from encrusting itself there; yet, with his saber, he inscribed in his mind an involuntary act of thanksgiving that it was not he who had fallen. Baltasar Bustos wrote a testament like a lightning flash in which he left to himself the memory of the dead: he inherited his fallen friends. The death of a young soldier, handsomer and braver than the rest. The death of a young priest, handsomer and more pious than the rest. Baltasar Bustos bequeathed himself their lives, giving thanks for not being as handsome, brave, or pious as they. He was alive and could live for his enigma, Tantalus’s passion, fleeting and untouchable. Death on the battlefield determined him, in that instant, to wring all he could out of his own life before perishing like his friends. Perhaps, as well, to hasten the moment that would reunite him with them.