Free The Campaign by Carlos Fuentes

something?” Baltasar asked, grasping him by the shoulder and once more speaking to him familiarly. “I was always afraid of loving you a lot but not having anything to talk to you about…”
    The old man sighed and squeezed his son’s hand.
    â€œThose weren’t wild dogs. They were the dogs of the ranch hands; she ordered them brought here so that they would never become like the others.”
    Baltasar did not know what his father saw in his eyes, but the old man felt obliged to say: “She did it out of goodness … She doesn’t want anything bad to happen to us … She’s a woman who keeps an eye on the future, just like her mother…”
    [5]
    José Antonio Bustos watched his son watching country life but not taking part in country life. He’d never asked the question Sabina had said he would ask: Have you decided? What do you want to be? Rancher or merchant?
    He knew that his father considered him a raw boy, virgin, not very attractive physically, with a juvenile passion for newfangled ideas, waiting for the right moment to settle down, strangely rooted in the thing he said he detested: this land, the gauchos, barbarism, his hostile sister. José Antonio wouldn’t want to admit the reason behind his son’s renewed sense of rootedness. Baltasar thought him old, so he was stretching out this time with him before making the decision that would take him away from here. Rancher or merchant? The news that began to reach the interior over the following months made Baltasar’s decision for him. But, before that, José Antonio Bustos had decided to change his tone, to force his son’s hand.
    Xavier Dorrego wrote from Buenos Aires: The former viceroy, Liniers, was executed along with the bishop and the treasurer. Liniers had organized a counterrevolution, and all the malcontents had joined with him. There were plenty—the expulsion of the current viceroy makes it clear that authority no longer resides in Spain but in Buenos Aires and the Argentine nation. The royalists have sworn revenge. The creole merchants are unhappy. Free trade is ruining them. They cannot compete with England. You in the interior should look at yourselves in that mirror. If the merchants can’t compete, how will the producers of wine, textiles, and tools?
    But our own people are discontented as well, Dorrego went on, because Cornelio Saavedra has imposed a conservative congress in opposition to Mariano Moreno’s radical representatives. Those of us with Moreno have been forced to leave the government, and Mariano Moreno himself has been sent into gilded exile in England! Our ideas of progress and rapid transformations have been postponed.
    This letter cast Baltasar Bustos into a deep depression, until another letter came from me, Varela the printer, telling him that Saavedra, the army, and the conservatives had created a Public Safety Committee to root out the counterrevolutionaries. “The Committee has attacked royalists, conservatives, and radicals equally. The royalists,” I told him, “are now seeking armed assistance from Spain to reconquer the colony. The government has thus extended the persecution to all Spaniards; they’ve been arrested, exiled, and executed. The conservatives have conspired against the creole government; the merchant Martín Alzaga and forty of his close associates have been executed. And Moreno’s radicals, now leaderless, are also being persecuted. Weep, little friend: our idol, the young, brilliant, kindly Mariano Moreno died at the age of thirty-two aboard the ship taking him to England. Who’s left? Your hero Castelli has been sent to take command of the northern army, that’s where they expect the Spanish attack to come from. And here in Buenos Aires, Balta, we young followers of Moreno are again meeting—after taking precautions—in the old Café de Malcos. We are preparing to support Bernardino