The Campaign Read Online Free PDF

Buenos Aires’s port commerce,” concluded the president and judge, whose authority was clear to everyone by the deference with which even the viceroys treated him. After all, tomorrow he would be trying the viceroy himself. But on this May night there was no viceroy in Buenos Aires: there was only the judge, Cabra himself. No further proof was needed to determine who was who.
    â€œAnd what does your lordship advise?”
    â€œYou must try to create a new class of landowners out of the manufacturers from the interior and the Buenos Aires merchants.”
    â€œWhat are you saying? The landowners are our enemies, and in any case they’re ignorant gauchos, virtually savages,” exclaimed Mugica with a frisson.
    â€œI would advise you to divide up the public lands,” Leocadio Cabra went on elegantly, confidently, “to encourage cattle ranching and grain production. Then you will get rich on export, and the interior will have to submit to you even if it wants to break away. Problems in Tucumán or La Rioja can be put off, but meanwhile they’ll have enough to eat and time to get used to the idea. As long as this abundant land produces, gentlemen, everyone can be content … You’ve got to castrate this country with its own abundance,” said Cabra, making a sudden, bitter grimace, which, because it was unnecessary, he corrected instantly.
    â€œYou are a wise man, your lordship. If only you’d govern us and not that mob we hear outside…”
    â€œRogues.”
    â€œDeluded fools.”
    This meeting showed that, between the disappeared viceroy on the one side and the revolutionary assembly on the other, the Spanish monarchy and its most loyal subjects were standing firm, proudly isolated from the reigning confusion. But that chaos was not slow in entering the salon where, even before English commerce, English manners were establishing themselves in the Río de la Plata.
    After dinner, the ladies had withdrawn so the men could smoke cigars, drink claret, and talk politics. But the cigars hadn’t yet been snuffed when the rules were broken: the women fluttered in like sea gulls, resplendent in the fashions of the detested Empire, the daring revelations commonplace in Paris modestly covered up—in great agitation from a shock bordering on grief but fully consonant with the uproar, the cannon blasts and ringing bells of that long night of independence.
    â€œIt’s on fire, it’s on fire!”
    The porcelain marquis, stiff and fragile, stood up: “Where is my wife?”
    â€œShe’s fainted, your lordship.”
    â€œThe court building is on fire…”
    â€œBy which you mean, madame, the mob has set it ablaze.”
    â€œMeddlers.”
    â€œDeluded fools.”
    â€œWhat’s that you said, Mister President?”
    â€œTwenty-five candles.” He laughed, provoking all manner of scandal. “One for each year…”
    [6]
    Baltasar had to call on us to help him look for the black wet nurse in the tumult of that May night, inquire among the hysterical, weeping servants of the burning palace, run to the less respectable neighborhoods in the port, threaten, ascribe to ourselves nonexistent functions and nonexistent missions to tear like savages though bordellos where men were dancing the fandango with women of uncertain race, or among the multitudes of working-class children, born of free love, who would be brought up with and like animals, without homes or school. For Baltasar Bustos, it was the saddest city in the world that night when all was celebration.
    In any case, we did not overlook one half-sunken shack at the edge of the marshes, one whorehouse shaken by its roaring clientele where a wet nurse might give comfort to a worn-out, sick sister who in turn would lull a blond baby. We searched every yard, every corner, every hut along the river.
    The café was closed at that hour, on that exceptional day, and