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.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…”He couldn’t finish the sentence because Baltasar was already out of the confessional, where he’d spent an hour occupying the priest’s place, and now instead he was embracing the priest, asking his forgiveness, asking him why he did what he did for him, feeling the power, like that of a stormy sea, with which Quintana reined in his own emotion, like the frozen seas where huge tempests seem gigantically immobile, allowing the wind and not the water to be the principal player in the storm.But the priest embraced Baltasar, kissed his head, welcomed him, and Baltasar understood that Father Anselmo was taking charge of him, so that he, Baltasar, could take charge, finally, of what was awaiting him …[7]With the strength of a mule driver, the old warrior Father Anselmo Quintana turned the convulsed body of his younger brother, the captain from Buenos Aires, Baltasar Bustos.He made Baltasar look toward the entrance to the chapel.In the same rectangle of light he himself had occupied an hour earlier, two silhouettes now stood out clearly, a contrast both in gender and in clothing.A woman and a child.“Come here, come in…”Unlike Baltasar, the two moved forward noiselessly.They were barefoot and said nothing to disturb the silence of the chapel.That silence had not swallowed up the martial thud of Baltasar’s heels.He was physically suspended between his two personalities, the fat, myopic young man and the slim, longhaired combatant; the Baltasar of Buenos Aires balconies and the Baltasar of the mountain campaigns in Upper Peru; the Baltasar of the salons of Lima and the Baltasar of the febrile brothels of Maracaibo.Now, at thirty-five, Baltasar had achieved equilibrium between the half-blind but inquisitive gaze, the robust but agile body, and the lank mustache that gave firmness to his too small but full lips.His hair was indomitable; it seemed to have a life of its own, more than enough life for our romantic century, as we, Dorrego and I, Varela, decided to call it in Buenos Aires, when news of the poems of Byron and Shelley began to reach the New World … And his handsome Roman nose always gave Baltasar an air of nobility, resistance, stoicism.His gold glasses rested uncomfortably on the bridge of his nose.The couple who approached were not at first glance recognizable, however, though the boy was the same one who’d played blindman’s buff the day before, a blond child about ten years old, whose fair complexion had to be surmised, because of the tangle of his filthy hair and the dirtiness of his cotton shirt and trousers.And she was a woman of indefinite age, her hair combed back into a bun poorly held together with pins.Stray hair fell over her forehead creased with wrinkles.The furrows of age around her lips, at the corners of her mouth, and on her chin were not disguised by makeup.The woman, barefoot like the boy, crossed her arms as if wrapping herself in a nonexistent shawl, and her trembling body betrayed the treachery of the tropics in Orizaba, the results of perpetual dampness and rain.Her bad cold was becoming a persistent cough.“Ofelia,” said the priest in his most tender voice, “I’ve already explained to the captain that you agree the boy should return with him to Argentina.”Quintana looked now at Baltasar—who was a single immobile block, forever locked in the most secret and unshakable of melancholies—as Baltasar stared into the totality of his life; the woman, much too busy blowing her nose, did not even look at him.Quintana told him that the child had been born ten years before in Buenos Aires and then kidnapped under mysterious circumstances.But his mother had managed to get him back from the black wet nurses who had saved him from a fire and who later asked for ransom money.She sent him to Veracruz to be put in the care of the priest Quintana, in the hope that someone would come to get him and take charge of him.“Yesterday I told you, brother.Your destiny is to take charge of those who need you.And your nation will need both you and this boy [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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