But Balta did not seem to be listening to us. He gazed at us with intense seriousness, reading the changes in our features and perhaps guessing at the changes in our souls.
Well, he soon found out that Dorrego was still an inveterate philosophical Jacobin, although his family inheritance obliged him to be a conservative in economics, no matter how anticlerical he might be in his ideology.
Dorrego’s close-cropped hair had rapidly gone gray, giving a reddish tint to the porcelain tones of his skin. But he seemed more fashionable with his severe cap of short hair. It was a radical renunciation of the age of wigs. We would never see them again.
I, however, continued to be a printer, and will continue to be one all my life. And now that it was possible to publish modern authors without fear of censorship, I made great efforts in that direction. While I waited for authors of our own to emerge, I already had before me a life of the Liberator Simón Bolívar, a manuscript stained with rain and tied with tricolor ribbons, which the author, who called himself Aureliano García, had sent to me, as best he could, from Barranquilla. It was a sad chronicle, however, and like the story about the blind violinist from Tabay that Baltasar had written to me, it foretold a bad end for the Liberator and his deeds. I preferred to go on publishing Voltaire and Rousseau (La Nouvelle Héloïse was the greatest literary success in the entire history of South America) and leave for another time the melancholy prophecy of a Bolívar as sick and defeated as his dream of American unity and civil liberty in our nations.
Yet, being together again gave the three of us immense joy. Baltasar knew that he had written a chronicle of those years — the one I’m holding in my hands right now, which one day you, reader, will also hold in yours — in the stream of letters he’d sent “Dorrego and Varela” (we’d begun to sound like a company).
We let Baltasar take the boy out to José Antonio Bustos’s old estate so that he could meet Sabina. He found her a bit mad: she had a mania about sleeping in a different bedroom every night — her father, José Antonio’s; that of her mother, Mayté, dead so many years before; that of the absent Baltasar; and, presumably, that of the forgotten Jesuit tutor, Julián Ríos — so she could keep them all warm.
It was useless. Brother and sister could never understand each other, and Sabina, as Baltasar told us when he got back to Buenos Aires, did not even have the courage to find herself a man, not even — he smiled with a malice unusual in him — now that Rivadavia’s modernizing laws had rooted the nomadic gauchos on the estates, forcing them to become agricultural workers and cattle ranchers, as well as a reserve available for conscription.
“Nothing happens for Sabina except in her nostalgia,” her younger brother said, sighing. “She is a living recrimination.”
By a strange confluence of destinies, neither Dorrego nor I had ever married, preferring to prolong our lives as Buenos Aires rakes as long as possible, though we were both approaching forty. The truth was that carousing was our pretext, a very Buenos Aires pretext to be sure, because our city had always abounded in vieux garçons who would not resign themselves to giving up the exciting freedom of their youth. And since Buenos Aires was a city of crossed destinies where thuggish gauchos, fleeing conscription, would jump off their horses — followed by country girls in love with them and cast, as they used to say, into perdition; but it was also a city of Spaniards who had come for business, and of Englishmen who had come to create works of civil engineering, we all met in the brothels, the bars, and taverns. We danced and drank and loved with the calm awareness that our Buenos Aires was a city of foundations, founded twice at the beginning and three, four, even a hundred times each time a foreigner, from the interior or from Europe, came to live here.
We couldn’t drag Baltasar to our bordellos, and we ourselves began to give them up. We realized that the real reason for our carousing was that we were awaiting the return of our “younger brother” to see what we would do together. Who would have thought it? In the decade of our participation in the revolution, we had encouraged him from Buenos Aires, had imposed on him that mission to Upper Peru to follow in the footsteps of Castelli, and had thrust him into a life of dangers and adventures that Dorrego and I, well, never in the slightest experienced personally. We soon became disillusioned with revolutionary politics and returned to our hereditary habits: Dorrego, living off his rents; I, a printer. But now Rivadavia was reanimating our hopes.
There was something more, as well. The exciting romantic story of Baltasar Bustos and Ofelia Salamanca, sung from one end of the Americas to the other, had both of us, Dorrego and me (although for different reasons), in suspense. We could not make any matrimonial decisions until we knew how that turned out.
Baltasar did not have to tell us who the child was. Before anyone else, we found out what had happened that night of May 24–25, 1810, in the burned palace of the Royal Court. We showered tenderness on the boy. Why, we began to treat him like a fourth brother, this one really younger. The boy was clever, although melancholy, and he spoke with the charming accent of the Gulf Coast of Mexico. He never mentioned his mother, as if he’d made a vow. But he did speak Spanish, after all, and we could understand each other.
Dorrego had a small estate on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, out toward San Isidro, next to the river, and we would often go there on Saturdays and Sundays. We started calling ourselves the Citizens again, recalling our youthful polemics in that bare but packed Café de Malcos, where it seemed that whether or not the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire became reality depended exclusively on us.
Dorrego carried his clocks back and forth from Buenos Aires to San Isidro, and the boy was fascinated watching that collection of fantastic, diverse forms — tombs, drums, carriages, thrones, rings, and eggs — while we wondered if, for us, time had in a certain sense stopped. But for the fair boy it was as varied as those clocks, in which he would see a measure of the different suns, so far from each other, that marked his life.
Baltasar adopted the child, whose family name became Bustos, but in my honor Baltasar renamed him Manuel, replacing the Leocadio he’d been given at baptism. The boy and I did not resemble each other in any way, however. My first gray hairs, it’s true, softened my dark face, though the ferocity of my mustache did not hide the secret flaw in my face: my upper lip is too big. But neither the shadows under my eyes nor my thinness was repeated in this boy, who must have mirrored instead the youth of his mother, the adorable Ofelia.
We would watch him play on those Sundays we spent together in the country. He liked to blindfold himself and play blindman’s buff. Seeing him, so handsome, graceful, and happy, we finally dared to ask his stepfather about his last letter, the one he never sent us after reaching Veracruz and meeting Father Quintana, Ofelia, and the child.
Baltasar stared for a long time at the river that flowed more slowly than the years that were beginning for us that moment, the river that had nothing whatsoever to do with silver plate and seemed, rather, a huge drainage ditch for the jungles and mines of the continent’s interior.
He told us that he had always written the truth to us and that he was now finding it difficult to tell us a lie. We already knew by the gazettes that Father Quintana had been executed exactly as he had foretold, shot on the knees and through the back, then decapitated, his head exposed in a cage in the Veracruz plaza.
Quintana was a mysterious, self-absorbed Mexican mestizo, Baltasar added, but he had a spontaneous genius that cut its way through the terrible resentment of that race. He had a sense of the drama he was living, of what military decision entailed, and of historical language. But, above all, he really believed in Christ and in the possibility of establishing a relationship with God through language.