Twenty-five candles blaze, one for each year of the mother’s life. The flammable drapes blaze. The cradle blazes. The child is consumed by the flames. Disfigured, burned beyond recognition, the black child seems to be just a child killed in a fire. Even white children turn black when they are burned to death.
[5]
“What will happen here,” declared the Marquis de Cabra, the judge appointed by the king to preside over the Superior Court convened to try the two viceroys, Sobremonte and Liniers, “is that instead of enduring the distant authority of Madrid, Argentina will endure the nearby tyranny of the port of Buenos Aires. You,” he went on in his after-dinner chat to the illustrious assembly of creole and Spanish merchants from the port, “will have to decide whether to open the gates of commerce or to close them. The Crown had to make that decision about its colonies. If you close those gates, you will protect the producers of wine, sugar, and textiles in the far-off provinces. But you will ruin yourselves here in Buenos Aires. If you open the gates, you will become richer, but the interior will suffer because it will not be able to compete with the English. The interior will want to secede from Buenos Aires, but you need economic as well as political power, so there will be civil war. In the end you will be governed by the military.”
“The military? But they’re all revolutionaries, allied with that pack of scheming lawyers, doctors, and pamphleteers who’ve popped up out of nowhere,” Don Adolfo Mugica, a grain merchant, indignantly observed.
“The military men won prestige by defeating the English in 1806, and they will derive even more prestige from fighting the Spanish now. Their allies are the Buenos Aires professional class — unimportant people: clerks, poor priests, God knows what,” said Don Ricardo Mallea, famous for his donations to convents that expressed their gratitude by hiding his illegal merchandise.
“Let them all defeat Spain, and then they’ll have to decide between defeating Buenos Aires — that is, all of you — or defeating the merchants from the interior, who will demand protection from Buenos Aires’s port commerce,” concluded the president and judge, whose authority was clear to everyone by the deference with which even the viceroys treated him. After all, tomorrow he would be trying the viceroy himself. But on this May night there was no viceroy in Buenos Aires: there was only the judge, Cabra himself. No further proof was needed to determine who was who.
“And what does your lordship advise?”
“You must try to create a new class of landowners out of the manufacturers from the interior and the Buenos Aires merchants.”
“What are you saying? The landowners are our enemies, and in any case they’re ignorant gauchos, virtually savages,” exclaimed Mugica with a frisson.
“I would advise you to divide up the public lands,” Leocadio Cabra went on elegantly, confidently, “to encourage cattle ranching and grain production. Then you will get rich on export, and the interior will have to submit to you even if it wants to break away. Problems in Tucumán or La Rioja can be put off, but meanwhile they’ll have enough to eat and time to get used to the idea. As long as this abundant land produces, gentlemen, everyone can be content … You’ve got to castrate this country with its own abundance,” said Cabra, making a sudden, bitter grimace, which, because it was unnecessary, he corrected instantly.
“You are a wise man, your lordship. If only you’d govern us and not that mob we hear outside…”
“Rogues.”
“Deluded fools.”
This meeting showed that, between the disappeared viceroy on the one side and the revolutionary assembly on the other, the Spanish monarchy and its most loyal subjects were standing firm, proudly isolated from the reigning confusion. But that chaos was not slow in entering the salon where, even before English commerce, English manners were establishing themselves in the Río de la Plata.
After dinner, the ladies had withdrawn so the men could smoke cigars, drink claret, and talk politics. But the cigars hadn’t yet been snuffed when the rules were broken: the women fluttered in like sea gulls, resplendent in the fashions of the detested Empire, the daring revelations commonplace in Paris modestly covered up — in great agitation from a shock bordering on grief but fully consonant with the uproar, the cannon blasts and ringing bells of that long night of independence.
“It’s on fire, it’s on fire!”
The porcelain marquis, stiff and fragile, stood up: “Where is my wife?”
“She’s fainted, your lordship.”
“The court building is on fire…”
“By which you mean, madame, the mob has set it ablaze.”
“Meddlers.”
“Deluded fools.”
“What’s that you said, Mister President?”
“Twenty-five candles.” He laughed, provoking all manner of scandal. “One for each year…”
[6]
Baltasar had to call on us to help him look for the black wet nurse in the tumult of that May night, inquire among the hysterical, weeping servants of the burning palace, run to the less respectable neighborhoods in the port, threaten, ascribe to ourselves nonexistent functions and nonexistent missions to tear like savages though bordellos where men were dancing the fandango with women of uncertain race, or among the multitudes of working-class children, born of free love, who would be brought up with and like animals, without homes or school. For Baltasar Bustos, it was the saddest city in the world that night when all was celebration.
In any case, we did not overlook one half-sunken shack at the edge of the marshes, one whorehouse shaken by its roaring clientele where a wet nurse might give comfort to a worn-out, sick sister who in turn would lull a blond baby. We searched every yard, every corner, every hut along the river.
The café was closed at that hour, on that exceptional day, and the city sad; it was only in the printing shop at the Orphan Asylum that we could rest, drink our foamless hot chocolate, and go on doing what held us together: talk.
Dorrego, the rationalist, had asked Baltasar why the black nurse herself hadn’t exchanged the babies in the cradle, since she had direct access to them. It was right after committing the act, when Baltasar had told us, his two intimates, not to make us accomplices — that was not Baltasar’s intention — but because we were his confidants in everything he did.
The black baby was the nurse’s nephew, that’s why — our friend explained — the child of a flogged prostitute impertinent enough to give birth. He was afraid that at the last moment the nurse’s hand would tremble and she’d be overcome by emotion. I said I thought that when Baltasar found out about the flogging he’d decided to take justice into his own hands. But my friend said it wasn’t that at all, that if things went wrong he didn’t want the black wet nurse to be punished, to add injustice to injustice. He wanted to be solely responsible.
“Not anymore, since you’ve made us party to your crime,” said Dorrego, to provoke our friend.
I intervened to calm things down. Baltasar thought the philosophic basis of his acts demanded that he himself commit them. I gave Dorrego a severe look and added seriously that the responsibility of a free man excluded complicity with those who deny freedom.
Dorrego smiled. “Why are you afraid that things will go wrong, Baltasar? Well, just think: they did. Your black baby is dead, burned to death. And your white baby, even if he’s to live in misery, is alive and kicking.”