Campaign, authored by Carlos Fuentes

On the night of May 24, 1810, Baltasar Bistus entered the bedroom of the Marchioness de Cabra, wife of the chief justice of the Supreme Court in Rio de la Plata, and kidnapped her newborn child, replacing him with a black child, the son of a prostitute who had just been whipped. The story is part of a tale of three friends: Javier Dorigó, Baltasar Bistus, and myself, Manuel Varela, and a city called Buenos Aires where we struggled to obtain culture, a city of very embarrassed smugglers who were reluctant to show their wealth. And although there are forty thousand of us, we who call ourselves residents of Buenos Aires, this city is dirty, its houses are low, and its churches dull. It wears an appearance of false modesty and disgusting hypocrisy. The wealthy pay bribes to the nuns to hide their smuggled goods, and this was for our benefit, we who love ideas and books: since the cages holding the chalice cups and priestly robes were not opened at customs checkpoints, the priest friends used them to send us forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot... Dorigó, who comes from a family of wealthy businessmen, buys the books, and since I work in a printing shop affiliated with an orphanage, I reprint them secretly. Baltasar Bistus, who is from the countryside where his father owns a large estate, turns the books into actions. He wants to become a lawyer in a system that despises lawyers and accuses them of stirring endless cases, as well as hatred and malice. What he fears is that we will educate the Criollo lawyers who will speak for the people and achieve independence. And this was Baltasar Bistus's real problem: he had to study in Buenos Aires without a university, relying, like his two friends Dorigó and me, Varela, on smuggled books and private libraries. And the authorities were watching us. The last viceroy was right when he said that the dissemination of seduction in Buenos Aires should stop, adding that this vice seems to be widespread everywhere.