Read The Campaign for Free Online

outstripped paper) did not bring very often.
    Lulled by the rocking of the stagecoach, Baltasar Bustos tried to find a meaning in the city he was leaving, and saw only an apparent contradiction: Buenos Aires was twice born. It had been founded first by Pedro de Mendoza with the ill-gotten gains he’d derived from the sack of Rome, with his fifteen hundred soldiers lusting for gold, with the women—some disguised as men—who had stowed away with the troops, all of them good at making campfires and keeping watch. But, ultimately, all of them, men and women, were defeated by the nightly Indian raids on their log fort, by the absence of gold and the presence of hunger: they ate the boots they were wearing, and some say they even ate the corpses of the dead. Finally the conquistador without conquest, Mendoza, died of fever, and they tossed his body into the Río de la Plata. The only silver anyone ever saw in that misnamed river was Mendoza’s rings as they sank to the bottom.
    It wasn’t El Dorado. The city was abandoned, burned, leveled. Forty years later, Pedro de Garay founded it a second time. Seriously, Castilian-style, like a chessboard, using the surveyor’s cross: it faced the Atlantic and the mud-colored river into which bled the exhausted veins of Potosí, the mountain of silver. It wasn’t El Dorado. This was a city dreamed up for gold and won for commerce. A city besieged by the silence of the vast ocean on one side and the silence of this interior ocean, equally vast, on the other. Baltasar Bustos was crossing that interior sea at top speed, lulled by the long, sturdy strides of the horses, dreaming of himself in the middle of this portrait of the horizon which is the pampa, having the sensation of not moving at all. The horizon was ever present. It was eternal. It was also unreachable.
    And here he was, in the middle of the pampa, with his baggage in his hands, suddenly surrounded by a herd of wild horses, tens of thousands of them, which populated the plains like a mob spreading over the entire planet, the natural descendants of the horses abandoned by the first, vanquished conquistadors. They bred haphazardly, like the blacks in the port, savagely growing and multiplying, wild, tall, untamed, and he was captive in the midst of these beasts, unable to move, smelling their glittering sweat, the pungent foam on their dewlaps, the acrid urine of thirty or forty thousand masterless horses overrunning the face of the earth, preventing him from moving a single inch, forcing him to abandon his suitcases crammed with volumes of Rousseau, as he implored his patron saint, the Citizen of Geneva, for aid: “I find myself on the earth as if on a strange planet…”
    He woke with a start; the coach horses were galloping at half speed, imperturbable. The travelers fleeing Buenos Aires were quite perturbed. They were Spanish merchants going out to save what they could in Córdoba, Rosario, and Santa Fé or to take refuge in those bastions against the revolutionary tidal wave they could see coming, stirred up by the oratorical storms of Moreno, Castelli, and Belgrano. The wealthy Spaniards could not imagine a revolution in the traditionalist interior; all evils came over the sea to Buenos Aires—they were ideas. But all goods also entered there—that was commerce. This contradiction drove the conservative merchants mad, as did the contradiction disquieting Baltasar’s soul as he left the city, his friends, the revolution, all to return to nature and in nature find “the solitude and meditation” that would enable him to be himself, without obstacles, truly be what nature wanted him to be.
    They were racing across the treeless pampa, but whenever they chanced on a solitary ombu, the only thing the passengers could think (and often said) was: “We’ll all end up hanging from its branches!”
    Baltasar, on the other hand, felt a boundless freedom on the vast