The Campaign (30 page)

Quintana lowered his head, and Baltasar saw the tawny-colored cloth of his celebrated cap hiding his curly dark hair, which the priest revealed so as not to stand out from the other men in the encampment, but in so doing he revealed himself with more fanfare than if he'd proclaimed it aloud: only Anselmo Quintana wears a cap amid all these top hats worn by the lawyers and the red kerchiefs worn by the troops; thus, Anselmo Quintana is the man who does not use a cap to disguise himself but who, by the same token, does not wear frock coats or tie kerchiefs on his head and who stares intensely at two bottles in order to choose between good and bad alcohol just as he might choose between reason and the Church. But you can't just choose God: God is, with or without the Church, reason, or believers. “That's where I have concentrated my real rebellion,” the priest Anselmo continued. “I'm telling this to you, Baltasar, because you are like my younger brother in the world and you are also rebelling against its laws, but you remain open to new persuasions. My real rebellion was to suffer the Calvary of losing my Church but not my God … Imagine what went through my soul when I took up arms on the Gulf Coast, angry over the loss of my living. Imagine me pug-nosed and blind, just ten years ago, consumed with lust, in love with gambling, with women, a horse's ass of a priest, with a troop of bastards scattered all over the place, a seducer of women who came to kneel next to me and who thought that, to receive my forgiveness, they had to give themselves to me, and from time to time I did not discourage them … I took up arms, my boy, being the kind of man I was, and then excommunication hits along with the rain of labels: apostate against the Holy Catholic religion, libertine, seditious, revolutionary, schismatic, implacable enemy of Christianity and of the state, deist, materialist, and atheist, guilty of divine and human treason, seducer, impenitent, lascivious, hypocrite, traitor to king and country. They didn't omit a one, Baltasar. The Holy Inquisition did not omit a single crime. They threw all of them at my poor head, and every time an accusation struck me between the eyes, I would say, ‘They are right; they must be right. It's true, I deserve this, and my poor, damned motive for rebelling makes me a criminal in all those other things, and that, too, must be true…' But I think, brother Baltasar, that the Inquisition, as usual, went too far; they accused me of too many things, some right, others outlandish, and I said to myself then, ‘God cannot look on me with as much injustice as my judges. In God's vocabulary there are probably few words for me, but there most certainly must be a dictionary common to Jesus Christ and His servant Anselmo Quintana. They throw so many words at me, but not enough that every week, from Thursday to Friday, you, Lord, cannot still speak, my Jesus, with the most lascivious, impenitent seducer among your servants…'

“The word is the only thing that links us when everything else becomes useless, treacherous, threatening. The word is the ultimate reality of Christ, His vigil among us, what allows us, without pride, to say, ‘I am like Him…'”

Quintana raised his voice as he said this, as if his faith could all be reduced to these few words, and Baltasar, in the half light of the confessional, saw through the grating not the fluttering earflaps of Father Anselmo Quintana's cap but the head of Gabriela Cóo, crowned with clouds and weeds. He had to dispel that adorable vision because the voice of the priest continued, lower now, but more certain as well: “From that time I only spoke with Him, but He was more severe than all my judges put together, because no one can fool Him. There are no little tricks with Him. God is the Supreme Being who knows all, even what we imagine about Him, and steals the march on us and imagines us first; and if we go about thinking that it depends on us to believe or not in Him, He steals the march on us once again and finds the way of telling us that He will go on believing in us no matter what happens, even if we abandon Him and deny Him. That is the voice I listened to during the night when my soul suffered tribulation because of the edicts of expulsion from the Church and the calls for me to repent: the voice of Christ saying to me, ‘I am going to go on believing in you, Anselmo Quintana, even if you are a seducer, lascivious, a libertine, a hypocrite, which you are; why deny it? But what you are not, Anselmo, my son, is an apostate, a heretic, an atheist, or a traitor to your country, that you are not…'

“‘Listen to me carefully, your God says to you: there is no way that I'm going to allow that lie to pass.'”

He raised his eyes to tell Baltasar that all he needed to hear from God's voice were those words, to fight for ten years, “to not yield in my battle for my country or in my other struggle for the love and confidence of my Creator. Imagine what one thing would have been without the other—neither the nation nor God; that most certainly would have been my anguish, and they know it, which is why they call me a heretic, excommunicate me, and ask me to repent and come back to the sheepfold. But Jesus said to me, ‘Anselmo, my son, don't be a comfortable Christian; make life hell for the Church and the king, because they adore tranquil Christians. I, on the other hand, adore rampaging Christians like you; you gain nothing by being a Catholic without problems, a simple believer, a man of faith who doesn't even realize that faith is absurd and is faith and not reason because of that. Reason cannot be illogical; faith is and has to be, because you have to believe in me against all evidence, and if I were a logician, I wouldn't be God. I wouldn't have sacrificed myself. I would have accepted all the temptations in the desert and would be'—are you listening to me, Anselmo, my son, are you listening to me, brother Baltasar?—‘the very same long-tailed, incorrigible Devil who invented the statement “I think, therefore I am.”' What pretension! Not even my thoughts are my own, not even my very existence. I neither think nor exist alone. I share each word with God, with you, Baltasar, and each heartbeat as well. Then I learned something else, that it was my obligation, in the name of the simple people of this world, to be complicated; just ask yourself right now as I look at you and listen to you, if you aren't too comfortable in your philosophy, because I think you are being very simple with your own secular faith in reason and progress. You are as foolishly devout as those women who grow old in churches, sweeping and lighting candles every single day. Please, Baltasar, always be a problem, be a problem for your Rousseau and your Montesquieu, and all your philosophers. Don't let them pass through your soul without paying something at the spiritual customs house; don't give your faith to any ruler, any secular state, any philosophy, any military or economic power without adding your confusion, your complication, your exceptions, your damned imagination that deforms all truths.

“Well!” shouted Father Quintana in a flash of good humor. “Wouldn't I have been better off losing my faith and avoiding all that anguish? No sir, because then I wouldn't have fought for independence. It's as simple as that. I would have let myself be beaten in the first fight. My faith in the nation that I want, free, without slaves, without the horrible need for thousands and thousands of bottom dogs, ignorant, dying of hunger, all this, Baltasar, would not have been possible without my faith in God. You may have your own formula. This is mine. I'm not asking you to believe as I do. I'm not that simple. I am asking you to complicate your own secular faith. You've come from far, far away, and this continent is very large. But we have two things in common. We understand each other because we speak Spanish. And, like it or not, we've had three centuries of Catholic, Christian culture, marked by the symbols, values, follies, the crimes and the dreams of Christianity in the New World. I know fellows like you: they've all passed through here; you've already seen them, although the ones you saw were a bit more beaten up than you, like the lawyers, scribes, authors of laws and proclamations in my own company. I've talked with all of you for ten years. You have given me the education which, sadly, I never had. My parents were mule drivers from the coast. I was in a religious seminary when I was young, and now that I'm grown up, I'm in the secular seminar with all of you. But let's get on with it. I'm not foretelling anything—I have it right under my nose, as pugged and battered as it may be. All of you would like to put an end to that past which seems unjust and absurd to you, to forget it. Yes, how good it would have been to be founded by Montesquieu instead of Torquemada. But it didn't happen that way. Do we want now to be Europeans, modern, rich, governed by the spirit of the laws and the universal rights of man? Well, let me tell you that nothing like that will ever happen unless we carry the corpse of our past with us. What I'm asking you is that we not sacrifice anything, son, not the magic of the Indians, not the theology of the Christians, not the reason of our European contemporaries. It would be better if we gathered up everything we are in order to go on being and to be, finally, something better. Don't let yourself be divided and dazzled by a single idea, Baltasar. Put all your ideas on one side of the balance, then put everything that negates them on the other, and then you'll be closer to the truth. Work counter to your secular faith, brother. Put next to it my divine faith, but as ballast, weight, contrast, and a part of your secularism. I do the same thing, working from my faith, with yours … Take me into account more, much more tomorrow than today, and think seriously that if I not only joined but forwarded the revolution until the end, it was so that history would not leave the Church behind—
my
church. See to it that you don't leave your own church of romantic, anticlerical philosophers behind. I don't want to find out ten years from now that you became just one more man made sick by frustrated Utopias, by betrayed ideals. And don't think I don't thank you all for your skepticism, my good company of lawyers. But I have what you lack, let me say it with forgiveness and humility. I had to burn the midnight oil reading St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus. Rousseau and Voltaire are a corrective for me, even an emetic. But you modern fellows, what will you use as a corrective for what you've learned? Experience, of course. But experience without ideas does not become a destiny, a soul … And what is the soul, St. Thomas wonders, but the form of the body? Think about it and you'll see that that's no paradox: the soul is the form of the body. Without the soul, the body would not last, would begin instantly to stink and disintegrate … Give soul to your body, Baltasar, and let's hope we see each other again in ten years … Bah, perhaps tomorrow I'll be captured, and perhaps that's why I felt the need to talk with you today. I want you to think about me when you hear about my end. I also want you to take charge of my memory.”

The priest was silent for a long time, and later Baltasar Bustos chastised himself for what, with time, he came to see as a cowardice that ratified the worst aspects of his character, argumentative without nobility, envious of what he wasn't, abusive toward the weak, tempted to humiliate anyone he thought inferior … He did not fool himself later. But in that moment, when Quintana stopped talking, he thought he was acting as the priest had asked him to after giving over to him his soul, while, in his blindness, Baltasar Bustos thought the priest was only giving him a lesson.

“I was wondering, as I listened to you, what bothered me most in you—the solitary, chaste priest or the promiscuous priest with children of his own.”

Quintana tried to penetrate with his eyes the grating that separated them, so that Baltasar would realize the priest was hurt, silenced by a sudden shock more than by overwhelming fatigue.

“Do you want to fight with me?”

“You asked me to be combative. I can imagine that one fine day the Pope will lift the excommunication and you will think that everything you did was useless, a failure…”

“Forgive me, I don't follow your line of thought…”

“I mean that I hope you aren't alive when the Church forgives you and says ‘I was mistaken.'”

“The deed of trying to do something good is sufficient unto itself.”

“Even if it fails.”

“For God's sake, Baltasar, don't get lost in all this. All I wanted to tell you is that you and I resemble each other. We are both fighting for our souls, although you confuse the soul with matter. It's of no importance. You may be right. The soul is the form of the body. But you and I … Later, those who fight for money and power will come. That's what I fear. That will be the nation's failure. And then you and I—or what you and I leave in this world—should help the thieves and the ambitious to recover their souls. That would be my answer to those who forgive me two hundred years from now.”

“But you, in part, agree with them.” Baltasar tied to guess at the look on Quintana's mistreated face, turned into gridwork and made even uglier by the grating on the confessional door. “You have been lascivious, a hypocrite, and a seducer…”

“Do you know what the word
devil
means?” asked the priest, with his eyes lowered and his brow severe. “My problem is that I have not been exempt from the temptations of the flesh. Yours, on the other hand, is that you will not be exempt from the temptations of the soul.
Devil
means
liar.
”

“See, you judge me with the same severity with which you have been judged…”

“Ah, and it also means
accuser.
I want you to know how they are going to judge me, Baltasar. They are going to humiliate me on my knees before the bishop. They are going to repeat the excommunication and the anathemas. Then they will deliver me to the secular authorities. They will shoot me in the back and then again, down on my knees. I will be decapitated, brother. They will put my head in an iron cage in the public square of Veracruz. I shall be an example for all those who feel the temptation to rebel…”