The Campaign

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On the night of May 24, 1810, my friend Baltasar Bustos entered the bedroom of the Marquise de Cabra, the wife of the President of the Superior Court for the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and kidnapped her newborn child. In its place, he put a black baby, the child of a prostitute who had just been publicly flogged.

The anecdote is part of the story of three friends — Xavier Dorrego, Baltasar Bustos, and me, Manuel Varela — and a city, Buenos Aires, where the three of us were struggling to get an education, a city of smugglers too embarrassed to show off their wealth. Even though there are now about forty thousand of us porteños, as we inhabitants of the city call ourselves, Buenos Aires is drab, its buildings crouched low, its churches austere. The city wears a façade of false modesty and disgusting dissimulation. The rich subsidize the convents so the convents will hide their smuggled goods. But this also works to the advantage of those of us who love ideas and books: since crates containing chalices and ecclesiastical garments are not opened at customs, friendly priests use them to send us forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot … Dorrego, from a family of rich businessmen, buys the books; I work in the printing shop of the orphanage, where I secretly reprint them; and Baltasar Bustos, who is from the country, where his father has a big estate, turns the books into action. He wants to be a lawyer under a regime that despises lawyers, that accuses them of stirring up endless lawsuits, hatred, and rancor. What they’re really afraid of is that we’ll educate creole lawyers who will speak for the people and bring about independence.

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