The Campaign Read Online Free

act others might consider criminal. He wanted to avoid leaving by the service door this time because he was afraid to know where the black woman had taken Ofelia Salamanca’s son. As the black wet nurse had said, he was once again complicating his life. He went back into the library, where he fell asleep, not knowing that throughout the night the debate in the Municipal Council had aligned the high-ranking creole merchants and Spanish administrators against the lawyers, doctors, military men, and philosophers like himself. Even if he hadn’t been chosen to represent the general will in the assembly, he had done something better: he’d put revolutionary ideas into practice. He did in real life what had been proclaimed (or declaimed) so often at the tables of the Café de Malcos, which was our meeting place, the scene of the most agitated political and philosophical arguments in early-nineteenth-century Buenos Aires.
    It was there the three of us—Baltasar Bustos, Xavier Dorrego, and I, Manuel Varela—savored ideas along with pastries and hot chocolate. We knew we were citizens of a city whose wealth as a port was based on the smuggling of blacks, hides, and iron; the blacks and the hides would, as they used to say, “get lost” en route and reappear on the docks, in the courtyards, mills, and markets; the iron came from France, because we have no industry; there aren’t even mines, as there are in Mexico and Peru. All we have is fraud—leather, wool, salted meat, and tallow abound, but they can be marketed only according to quotas set in Madrid, so even exports turn into contraband in Buenos Aires. But no one talks about great fortunes here; it’s important to complain and pass ourselves off as the poor relations of America, so we don’t reveal the fraudulent basis of our wealth. The Crown prohibits universities in active ports where ideas circulate rapidly, and this absence of an educational system virtually invites us to cheat. So the three of us are self-taught; we all share the same political dream whose name is happiness or progress or popular sovereignty, or laws in accord with human nature.
    We argue a lot, either in the heat of events or because of our individual positions. Around us, at the café’s marble tables, the main subject is the number of political options open to us after Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. There are two parties: one proclaims its loyalty to the Spanish monarchy; the other insists there no longer is a monarchy. The latter talks about de facto independence while hiding behind the “mask of Ferdinand”; that is, past loyalty to Ferdinand VII, who is held under arrest by Bonaparte. Those loyal to the Crown support Carlota, Ferdinand’s sister and the daughter of Charles IV, who has taken refuge in Brazil with her husband, John VI of Portugal. She could govern us while her brother is Napoleon’s captive.
    Bustos, Varela, Dorrego—the three of us are above these political subtleties and dynastic conspiracies. We talk about the ideas that live the long life of the stoa, not the ephemeral struggles of the polis. Dorrego follows Voltaire; he believes in reason but thinks it should be exercised only by an enlightened minority capable of leading the masses to happiness. Bustos follows Rousseau: he believes in a passion that would lead us to recover natural truth and bind the laws of nature and the revolution together like a sheaf of wheat. They are two faces of the eighteenth century. There is one more: mine, the printer Manuel Varela’s. I follow Diderot’s smiling mask, the conviction that everything changes constantly and offers us at each moment of existence a repertory from which to choose. The quotient of freedom in this possibility to choose is equal to the quotient of necessity. Compromise is imperative. I smile tenderly as I listen to my dogmatic, impassioned friends. I will be the narrator of these events. Baltasar