The Campaign by Carlos Fuentes Page A

a complaint or even a question. It was simply a statement of the fatal, implacable fact that dominated her life. And when, in the days that followed, new information came, brother and sister would catch each other’s eye during dinner or when Sabina would bring freshly pressed shirts into the bedroom where Baltasar was packing his bags. They only had eyes, in fact, for the corrals and fields, where the gauchos had become agitated because of the news. The government of Buenos Aires had passed a law against nomads. The gauchos were to abandon their barbarous, wandering, useless customs and settle down on ranches or farms or in industry. To that end, they would be given identification cards. In turn, they would have to produce employment certificates. Violators of the law would be sentenced to forced labor or military service.
    José Antonio Bustos had to read this law aloud to the gauchos summoned to the entry gates of the ranch. The hairy men, with no break in their matted pelts other than the glint of their eyes and teeth, listened as if they were getting ready to fight, their hands on their belts or resting on the hafts of their daggers. Their blades, spurs, and belt buckles also glinted, blinding the old rural patriarch more than the tenuous rays of this winter sun that sank behind the mountain range early, as if bored with the laws of men. As he read the proclamation of the creole revolution, old Bustos looked into eyes that said: “Old man, you’re useless to us. You are unable to save our way of life. Fence in a gaucho and you kill him. Let’s see if there’s someone here among us who will take charge and send you, Buenos Aires, and these laws straight to hell. Who do these people think they are? Do they really think they can dictate to us from there? Maybe we ought to go there and govern those sons of bitches. So who wants to take charge of the gauchos? Let’s see who wants to be our chief. Whoever it is, we’ll follow him to the death, against the capital city, against the law, and against you, to keep our freedom to roam as we always have, free.”
    It was then that Baltasar really saw death in José Antonio’s eyes. The liberal law offended him as much as it did the gauchos, but it was a triumph for the son and his ideas: it was as if José Antonio, standing firm in defeat, were dead with a candle in his hand. In his features an autarkic world was dying, a world as slow as the carts in which it traveled, a world held together by carpenters, bakers, seamstresses, soapmakers, candlemakers, and blacksmiths; and the gauchos. Almost all of them were born and came back to die here, but that fidelity in the extremes of life was based on their freedom to move, to get on a horse and seek their fortune bearing their property on their backs or between their legs—the mare, their spurs, arms, and trinkets. Women were bought. Indians were tamed with alcohol and honey. But the gauchos always came back to their real master to be reborn or to die again. All that passed through the anguished eyes of José Antonio Bustos, standing there with his yellow poncho elegantly crossed over his chest, indifferent to the slow and invisible disintegration of his warehouses, stables, coachhouses, granaries, and chapels. His gauchos were always there when he needed them—on condition that he not force them to be there.
    That night it was Baltasar who stopped before entering the dining room, to listen to the voices of his father and sister.
    â€œWell, now that the gauchos are going to be locked in like me, why don’t you give me to one of them…”
    â€œCalm down.”
    â€œAll locked in. Now we’ll be alike.”
    â€œYou can go to Buenos Aires or Mendoza whenever you want. We have friends and relatives.”
    â€œYou must think to yourself with a laugh, Well, she’s got her knives for fun; the poor thing amuses herself killing dogs with a dagger whose handle is made