“Perhaps a gift would cheer you up, darling.”
“Anything but flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”
“What would you have me do?” said her husband impatiently. “They brought me here from Chile because I’d be impartial and free of local influences.”
“For God’s sake, I know that tune only too well. Justice for friends. The law for enemies. You’re right. There is a difference. And I’m getting bored.”
“Well, what can I get you, if you don’t want flowers?”
“Put twenty-five lighted candles around my son’s cradle, one for each year of his mother’s life. Perhaps that way we can scare the ghosts away.”
“As long as you live?”
She said yes. “You really take the long view of things. The older I get, the more afraid I’ll be.”
“Poor child. And when you die?”
“The candles will all go out at once, Leocadio, and my son will be a man. Look at him.”
Baltasar inscribed these conversations on his soul. But on the third and final visit the child’s parents were not there, although the twenty-five candles were around the cradle. They had replaced the black nurse who had handed Baltasar the black baby in the patio.
Bustos, nearsighted and panting, parted the curtains and walked into the bedroom. He moved quickly: he put the black child next to the white one in the cradle. He contemplated them both for a few seconds. Thanks to him, they were fraternal twins in fortune. But only for a moment. He took the white baby and wrapped him in the rags of the poor child; then he swaddled the black one in the gown of high lineage. With the white child in his arms, he returned to the balcony, blind, tripping, just as the child — which one? — began to wail. But the cries were drowned out by the pealing of the bells and the thunder of the guns at midnight, between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of May 1810.
When Baltasar’s feet touched the ground, he shook his full head of honey-colored curls — his best feature, along with his passionately sweet eyes and Roman nose. Unfortunately, the image he projected was that of an overweight, myopic man. How would that splendid woman ever fall in love with him? He, in any case, adored her already, despite what he was doing or, in some obscure sense, because of what he was doing: kidnapping her son, his most fearsome rival, but giving himself over to the passion that claimed him; he sought no explanations, convinced that the passion we don’t seize by the tail and follow all the way will never again show us its face, and instead will leave an eternal void in our soul.
Branches scratched him. The child’s smock was covered with dust and dead leaves. The black hands reappeared, this time trembling, at the service entrance, and Baltasar Bustos followed them, turned over his burden to them, and said simply: “Here’s the other baby. Let him live his own fate.”
[3]
Baltasar retraced the secret route he’d taken to mete out what he thought was a most severe form of justice, an act others might consider criminal. He wanted to avoid leaving by the service door this time because he was afraid to know where the black woman had taken Ofelia Salamanca’s son. As the black wet nurse had said, he was once again complicating his life. He went back into the library, where he fell asleep, not knowing that throughout the night the debate in the Municipal Council had aligned the high-ranking creole merchants and Spanish administrators against the lawyers, doctors, military men, and philosophers like himself. Even if he hadn’t been chosen to represent the general will in the assembly, he had done something better: he’d put revolutionary ideas into practice. He did in real life what had been proclaimed (or declaimed) so often at the tables of the Café de Malcos, which was our meeting place, the scene of the most agitated political and philosophical arguments in early-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires.
It was there the three of us — Baltasar Bustos, Xavier Dorrego, and I, Manuel Varela — savored ideas along with pastries and hot chocolate. We knew we were citizens of a city whose wealth as a port was based on the smuggling of blacks, hides, and iron; the blacks and the hides would, as they used to say, “get lost” en route and reappear on the docks, in the courtyards, mills, and markets; the iron came from France, because we have no industry; there aren’t even mines, as there are in Mexico and Peru. All we have is fraud — leather, wool, salted meat, and tallow abound, but they can be marketed only according to quotas set in Madrid, so even exports turn into contraband in Buenos Aires. But no one talks about great fortunes here; it’s important to complain and pass ourselves off as the poor relations of America, so we don’t reveal the fraudulent basis of our wealth. The Crown prohibits universities in active ports where ideas circulate rapidly, and this absence of an educational system virtually invites us to cheat. So the three of us are self-taught; we all share the same political dream whose name is happiness or progress or popular sovereignty, or laws in accord with human nature.
We argue a lot, either in the heat of events or because of our individual positions. Around us, at the café’s marble tables, the main subject is the number of political options open to us after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. There are two parties: one proclaims its loyalty to the Spanish monarchy; the other insists there no longer is a monarchy. The latter talks about de facto independence while hiding behind the “mask of Ferdinand”; that is, past loyalty to Ferdinand VII, who is held under arrest by Bonaparte. Those loyal to the Crown support Carlota, Ferdinand’s sister and the daughter of Charles IV, who has taken refuge in Brazil with her husband, John VI of Portugal. She could govern us while her brother is Napoleon’s captive.
Bustos, Varela, Dorrego — the three of us are above these political subtleties and dynastic conspiracies. We talk about the ideas that live the long life of the stoa, not the ephemeral struggles of the polis. Dorrego follows Voltaire; he believes in reason but thinks it should be exercised only by an enlightened minority capable of leading the masses to happiness. Bustos follows Rousseau: he believes in a passion that would lead us to recover natural truth and bind the laws of nature and the revolution together like a sheaf of wheat. They are two faces of the eighteenth century. There is one more: mine, the printer Manuel Varela’s. I follow Diderot’s smiling mask, the conviction that everything changes constantly and offers us at each moment of existence a repertory from which to choose. The quotient of freedom in this possibility to choose is equal to the quotient of necessity. Compromise is imperative. I smile tenderly as I listen to my dogmatic, impassioned friends. I will be the narrator of these events. Baltasar will need me; there is in him a candid gentleness, a vulnerable passion that requires the hand of a friend. Dorrego, however, is as insistent and dogmatic as his master Voltaire, and nothing inspires more scorn in him than the news that in Mexico and Chile there are priests who share our ideas, start discussion groups, publish revolutionary newspapers. He’s adopted Voltaire’s anticlerical motto: Ecrasez l’infâme!
Which is to say that the Café de Malcos was our university, and in it circulated, now openly instead of in secret, La Nouvelle Héloïse, The Social Contract, The Spirit of the Laws, and Candide. There all these books were read and meticulously discussed by the young men who were now opposing the Spanish administrators and the Argentine conservatives.
“In the City Hall they talk about the general will of the people!”
“You should have seen the faces on the Spaniards!”
“One even said you’d never hear nonsense like this in a Spanish assembly!”