The night of the battle of Chacabuco, San Martín’s bugler blew so hard they say his brains flew out his ears.
[6]
Standing before the bodies of Father Arias and Captain Echagüe in the steepleless cathedral of the Chilean capital, which the liberating troops entered on February 14, General San Martín said to Baltasar Bustos:
“We lost only twelve men. A pity these two had to be among them.”
“How many did the enemy lose?” asked Baltasar without looking at San Martín; he was grieving over the loss of his two friends and over the general’s words, as if his pain extended to the Liberator’s heart, which he had thought frozen.
“Five hundred. Chacabuco cost them Chile and Peru. They are no longer colonies of Spain.”
Baltasar was tempted to say “What I lost is greater than two countries,” but San Martín told him to take a good look at the faces of his dead friends, because soon he would see not the faces of friends dead in a just cause and in the glory of the battle for independence but the faces of brothers killed in fratricidal wars for power. Baltasar asked if that was as absolutely certain as San Martín’s words led him to believe, words that reminded him of those uttered by a pessimist very different from San Martín, a Spanish council president. San Martín interrupted him: “We joined together to beat the Spaniards. We saw that if we were divided they would beat us. All I ask, Bustos, my friend, is that you realize this and that you be aware of the danger of a lack of unity. That lack of unity may well be our undoing; we have to create institutions where there are none. That takes time, clear thinking, and clean hands. We may think that laws, because they are separate from reality, make reality unreal. It isn’t so. We are going to be divided by reality and by law, by the will to federation against the will to centralized power. We’ve gone out on the pampa and now we’re left without a roof over our heads. But that’s no reason to stop breathing free air and to stay indoors forever. All I ask is that you realize what the risks are. No, I am not a fatalist. But I don’t want to be blind, either. See things as I see them, Bustos, my friend. Decide to be, along with me, a real citizen and renounce forever, as I do now before your dead friends, the possibility of being king, emperor, or devil.”
“With my friends, I could have founded a world,” said Baltasar Bustos, his head bent low.
“And without them…” San Martín began.
“I can only live out a passion.”
The general did not understand what the young fellow was saying. He rested his hand on Baltasar’s shoulder and said, “They were heroes.” Then he promoted Baltasar to captain on the spot.
Baltasar stayed behind, alone, with the bodies of Francisco Arias and Juan Echagüe. Were they really heroes? Was José de San Martín himself a hero, the closest thing to a living hero Baltasar would ever know? In the funereal gloom of the cathedral, unbroken even by the baroque glitter scattered there by its architects, who besides being Jesuits were Bavarians, Baltasar saw in his mind’s eye the Liberator, his friends, Miguel Lanza and the Indian Baltasar Cárdenas, Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas, all the warriors he’d met: he saw them without cavalry, without a battlefield, without infantry. Perhaps that was what José de San Martín held in his most secret souclass="underline" the vision of a world without heroes, in which men like himself, and also men like Lanza and Cárdenas, the young Father Arias and Captain Echagüe, his friends, would no longer be possible, because there would be no more saber battles, no more hand-to-hand fighting, no more code of honor, only fratricide, battles won against brothers, not against enemies; foreseeable, programmed wars in which death would be determined and accomplished at a distance. Dirty wars in which the victims would be the weak. The hero — he turned to look at the square shoulders of General José de San Martín in his dress uniform, solemnly walking toward the exit, speckled by the diffuse light of the cupolas — would then be like the god of the mountains, a dying god. Then he imagined the pathos of a San Martín grown old, firmly resolved never to stain his sword killing Argentine citizens, preaching through example, refusing to be “the vigorous arm,” no matter how annoying the bickering of the “intractable, the apathetic, and the savage.” At the apex of victory, San Martín refused to celebrate with romantic exuberance. His occasional solemnness was excused by the excessively stoic, Castilian severity of this son of Palencian parents. If he was going to avoid the temptation of dictatorship, it would not be to avoid responsibility for Argentina but to say to Argentina that everyone should behave as he did. Everyone should be responsible. From this day forward, each one of us must stand guard over his own life. Someone had to say it, and not from the abyss of the failures to come, but here and now, at the high noon of triumph, and triumphing over the passion for victory.
When he understood this, Baltasar Bustos felt a desire to run to the last hero and embrace him. But that would have been just one more celebration, a denial of the seriousness of the dying god. He wouldn’t insult him with recriminations or with praise. It was better that Baltasar remain with his comrades, hold on to this tenderness, these hopes, these jokes, this intimacy he would never again know.
The general understood and wished him a good voyage.
One sunny February morning, Baltasar boarded a schooner, the Araucana, sailing from Valparaíso to Panama. It passed Lord Cochrane’s flotilla, preparing for the attack on Lima. As he sailed by, Baltasar named the ships of the small fleet in a kind of farewell-to-arms: the forty-six-gun frigate Lautaro, the brig Galvarino, armed with incendiary rockets, the schooner Moctezuma, the man-of-war San Martín, and the transport ships and attack launches.
In Santiago he’d been told: “The woman you seek is in Caracas. But don’t expect anything good from her.”
For him, the war was over; only passion remained.
But in Santiago he did not want to look for Gabriela Cóo.
7. Harlequin House