They were risible words. Was the burden Baltasar Bustos felt on his shoulders as he said that in his father’s frozen ear also risible? “It’s up to me to do, over the course of my entire life, the work of one day. The entire responsibility for the revolution for independence weighs on me and on each one of us.”
The candle finally melted in the unfeeling hands of his dead father. The scapulary, however, remained, coiled like a sacred serpent. What would change, who would change it, how long would it take to change things? But was it worth it to change? All this came from so far off. He hadn’t realized before, their origin was so remote, that the American cosmogonies preceded all of secular reasoning’s feeble speculations; écraser l’infâme was in itself an infamy that called for its own destruction: it was a weak, rationalistic bulwark against the ancient tide of cycles governed by forces which were here before us and which will survive us … In El Dorado, he had seen the eyes of light that contemplated the origin of time and celebrated the birth of mankind. They did not remember the past; they were there always, without losing, because of it, either their immediate present or their most remote beginnings … How was it possible to stand next to them without losing our humanity but augmenting it thanks to everything we’ve been? Can we be at the same time all we have been and all we want to be?
His father did not answer his questions. But Baltasar was sure he was listening. Sabina had let the candle burn down. She shrieked when the flame touched the flesh. He can’t feel, said Baltasar. But she did feel: she felt the knives she wore, like scapularies, between her breasts, over her sex, between her thighs. He didn’t have to see them to know they were there; he could smell them, near his sister and his father’s cadaver, he could feel them piercing his own body with the same conviction his own fighting dagger had entered the Indian’s body in the Vallegrande skirmish. In the same way he knew “I killed my racial enemy in battle,” he also knew “My sister wears secret, warm, magical knives near her private parts”; just as he’d earlier found out “Miguel Lanza does not want me ever to escape from his troops, so that I can be his younger brother and not his dead brother.” Having taken all this into himself, he now wanted to distance himself from it so that he could go forward to his own passion, the woman named Ofelia Salamanca.
He later wrote to his friends that perhaps it was his fate to return to his father’s estate too late for some things, too soon for others. He was untimely. But they themselves had pointed out the opportunity to him. Ofelia Salamanca had left Chile and was now in Peru. There were, then, immediate and sensual reasons for being.
“Your friends sent you a note. They could not find the child. The woman’s in Lima. That’s that. Will you go?”
Baltasar said yes.
“Won’t you take me with you?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not, but it doesn’t matter. You won’t take me because you respect me. I expected nothing less of your love for me. You would never dishonor me. We’ll leave that to the gauchos.”
“Excuse me if I am distracted. I’ve always wanted to be open to what others think and want.”
“You know I have nothing left to do here. I have no one to care for.”
“There’s the house. The gauchos. You just said it yourself.”
“Am I the mistress?”
“If that’s what you want, Sabina.”
“I’m going to die of loneliness if I don’t give myself to them.”
“Do it. Now let’s bury our father.”
5
The City of the Kings
[1]
The drizzle falling on Lima during that summer of 1815 stopped when the Marquis de Cabra, venturing out onto his baroque balcony suspended over the small plaza of the Mercederian Nuns, said, to no one in particular—to the fractured cloud, to the invisible rain that chilled one’s soul: “This city enervates us Spaniards. It depresses and demoralizes us. The good thing is that it has the same effect on the Peruvians.”
He cackled like a hen over his own wit and closed the complicated lattices of the viceregal windows. His Indian valet had already helped him into his silver-trimmed dress coat, his starched linen shirt, his short silk trousers, his white stockings, and his black shoes with silver buckles. All he needed was his ivory-handled malacca stick.
“Cholito!” he said to his servant with imperious tenderness. He was just about to give the order, but the Indian boy already had the walking stick ready and handed it to his master, not as he should have—so the marquis could take it by the handle—but offering the middle of the stick, as if handing over a vanquished sword. This cholito, this little half-breed, must have seen quite a few defeated swords handed to the winners of duels over the course of his short life. They were part of the legend of Peru: every victory was negated by two defeats, so the arithmetic of failure was inevitable. Now what attracted the Marquis de Cabra’s attention was something familiar: the ivory handle of his stick was a Medusa with a fixed, terrifying gaze and hard breasts that seemed to herald the stones set in the eyes.
It was a present from his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, and from being handled so much, the Medusa’s facial features had lost some of their sharpness. For the same reason, the atrocious mythological figure had completely lost her ancient nipples. The marquis shook his head, and his recently powdered wig dropped a few snowflakes on the shoulders of the former President of the Royal Council of Chile. The brocade absorbed them, just as it absorbed the dandruff that fell from the thinning hair of the sixty-year-old man who this afternoon was walking out into a Lima divided, as always, by public and private rumors.
The rumors concerned the situation created by Waterloo and the exile of Bonaparte to Saint Helena. Ferdinand VII had been restored to his throne in Spain, and refused to swear allegiance to the liberal constitution of Cádiz which had made his restoration possible. The Inquisition had been reinstated, and the Spanish liberals were the object of a persecution that to some seemed incompatible with the liberals’ defense of the homeland against the French invaders, during which time the idiot king lived in gilded exile in Bayonne. The important thing for Spain’s American colonies was that, once and for all, the famous “Fernandine mask” had fallen. Now it was simply a matter of being either in favor of the restored Bourbon monarchy or against it. It was no longer possible to hedge. Spaniards against Spanish Americans. Simón Bolívar had done everyone the favor of giving a name to the conflict: a fight to the death.
The Marquis de Cabra preferred to prolong, just as he was doing at that very moment, to the rhythm of the coach, the public rumors in order to put off the private ones. During this enervating summer of unrealized rains—like a marriage left unconsummated night after night—he himself was the preferred object of Lima gossip. His entrance into the gardens of Viceroy Abascal, in this city where gardens proliferated as an escape from earthquakes, would, as the witty Chileans called it, keep the rumor mill churning at top speed.
The truth is that other things held the attention of the guests at the viceroy’s soiree, first a game of blindman’s buff that the young people who basked in the blessings of the Crown—the jeunesse dorée, as the Marquis de Cabra, always aware of the latest Paris fashions, called them—were enjoying, as they dashed and stumbled their way around the eighteenth-century viceregal garden, a pale imitation of the gardens of the Spanish palace at Aranjuez, themselves the palest reflection, finally, of Lenôtre’s royal gardens.
“Goodness, with all these blindfolded figures in it, the garden looks like a courtroom,” said the marquis, as usual to no one and to everyone. That allowed him to make ironic, snide comments no one could take amiss because they weren’t directed at anyone in particular. Of course, anyone who so desired could apply them to himself.
The garden actually resembled nothing so much as beautiful, flapping laundry because the flutter of white cloth, gauze, silks, handkerchiefs, and parasols dominated the space: floating skirts, scarves, linen shirts, hoopskirts, frock coats the color of
deerskin, tassels, fringes, silver braid, epaulets, and military sashes, but above all handkerchiefs, passed laughingly from one person to another, blindfolding them, handcuffing them, allowing the blindman only an instant, as white as a lightning flash, to locate his or her chosen prey. Two young priests had also joined the game, and their black habits provided the only contrast amid so much white. From his privileged distance, the marquis noted with approval the nervous blushes of the beautiful Creole youngsters, who avidly cultivated fair complexions, blond gazes, and solar tresses. That explained the parasols in the hands of the girls, who wouldn’t set them aside even when they were blindfolded. They would run charmingly, one hand holding the parasol, the other feeling for the ideal match promised by the luck of the game. On the other hand, the heat and the excitement of the game brought out dark blushes among the boys, as if the image of the pure white Creole required total inactivity.
The newly arrived spectator smiled; either in the curtained bedroom of a lattice-windowed palace or in a dungeon, that’s where these fine young gentlemen would finally take their rest; that was what the war of independence promised Lima’s beautiful young people: renewed power or jail. War to the death … For the moment, far from the insane, incredible resistance of the bands of Upper Peru’s guerrillas, far, even, from the perilous peace of Chile, Peru remained Spain’s principal bastion in South America. But for how long?
It was like playing blindman’s buff, said the roguish, amused marquis, introducing himself like some sort of minstrel into the circle of young people, striking coquettish poses, tossing away his three-cornered hat, nostalgic perhaps for the capes and broad-brimmed hats that Charles III had banned in a vain attempt to modernize the Spanish masses. As he walked, he scattered the perfume and powder of his eighteenth-century toilette among these fresh but perspiring young people, who had abandoned the classic wig in favor of long, romantic tresses that floated in the breeze … Even in Lima the generation gap began with hairstyles; it indicated—and this the Marquis de Cabra, of an understanding nature, wanted to believe—that it began in their heads. It was the era of heads. Isn’t that exactly what Philip IV’s minister had demanded? “Bring me heads!”
He could think no more because his own head collided with that of a blindfolded youth searching for his lady-love. He spun with more energy and zeal than anyone else, shaking his mane of bronzed curls, half opening his full, red lips, around which the pallor of his carefully shaped cheeks contrasted with the skin on his forehead and cheeks, which was dark, tanned by the sun. The white blindfold covered his eyes; and if his curly head cracked into the Marquis de Cabra’s wig, it was as much because of the agitation of the young man as it was because of the old man’s intrusion into the game.
The young man grabbed the old man’s arms, felt the folds of his frock coat, and pulled off the blindfold just as the old man was rearranging his unsettled wig, which had slipped to one side of his head. Baltasar Bustos smothered a cry, muffled, almost animal-like, like that of a bull whose strength has been mocked, for what he actually imagined in the darkness demanded by the game was a nocturnal encounter with Ofelia Salamanca, an encounter of which this game of blindman’s buff was but a foretaste, a preliminary ritual. He’d been assured she was in Lima; it was for her that he’d journeyed here from the pampa, through the desert and the mountains to Ayacucho and the Peruvian coast; for her he’d trimmed his beard and mustache, combed his hair, dabbed on perfume, and dressed in the clothes fashionable in the viceroyalty. It was for her he’d come looking, visiting the twilight parties of Lima, the final bastion of the Spanish empire in the Americas, seeking her because his friends had told him, “She is in the Americas, but no one has seen her.” “She is in Lima, but she is with someone else.” It was for her that he took part in blindman’s buff, imagining that each woman he touched when he pulled the handkerchief off his eyes would be she, the woman he’d sighed for since that terrible night of the kidnapping and fire in Buenos Aires. And even before that: since he’d seen her in outline, naked, sitting before her mirror, powdering herself, a new mother, but with an incomparable waist and infinitely caressable buttocks, buttocks that would fit the hands of a man, the secret, strokable buttocks of Ofelia Salamanca, which drove Baltasar Bustos mad.
Instead, he was embracing his beloved’s aged husband.
The Marquis de Cabra looked at him without knowing him. He’d never seen him before. Baltasar’s vision ended; he took the handkerchief off his eyes and handed it in confusion, ironically, to Ofelia Salamanca’s startled husband. The platonic lover struggled to put on his oval glasses, showing that he was blinder than any blindfolded man: his heavy breathing fogged the lenses.
The magic circle of the game dissolved, but courtesy was a more complicated game, and it took the players a few minutes to allow one another to pass, to invite one another to go first.
“After you. Please, go ahead.”
“Certainly not.”
“Come now, don’t make me plead.”
“Beauty before experience.”
“It is more honorable to follow experience, not to precede it.”
“I am at your service.”
“I beg you, please.”
“Your servant.”
“I kiss your hand.”
“Please do me this signal honor.”
“I cannot allow it.”
“But how can I repay your kindness?”
“After you, please.”
“The person who precedes you has yet to be born, ma’am.”
“I envy the carpet under your feet, ma’am.”
“Your most humble servant.”
“After you, I implore you.”
These endless Lima courtesies obstructed all the doorways to the palace, but no sooner was everyone inside and partaking of warm punch and sugar concoctions, candied egg yolks and honey fritters prepared by the nuns of the order of St. Clare, than the two rumors—the public and the private—overwhelmed the elaborate rituals of courtesy.
It was, nevertheless, the presence of the Marquis de Cabra that forged the perfect union of the street and the bedroom gossip, and it was he himself who broke the news when he announced, “My wife has departed Lima. Yes, yes, you haven’t seen her for several weeks now and you’ve wondered why.” (That was true. Baltasar had been told that she was in Lima but that she had not been seen; she was not, perhaps, the perfect wife but at least she was under wraps—ha, ha.) “Perhaps you’ve invented reasons.” (They say she’s following a gallant artillery captain transferred from the viceroyalty in Lima to the captaincy-general of Chile, for him the promotion was a demotion, having parted him from the sweet Ofelia; the sweet Ofelia? Just let me tell you what I heard …) “But the truth is that the marquise has had a terrible attack of nerves because of all this patriotic commotion, and her royalist faith cannot bear the spectacle of a defeated, humiliated Spain expelled from the very world she discovered and built.” (They say she hasn’t been able to come to terms with the death of her child in Buenos Aires; a most mysterious death, my most respected Doña Carmelita, because no one knows what happened, the story of a simple accident convinces no one: just think what sort of accident it had to have been to concentrate all the fires of Buenos Aires in that innocent cradle. There’s something fishy here, I tell you, and we’ll never learn the truth of what took place five years ago. Just look how it’s livened up the gossip flying from Montevideo to Bogotá; long are these roads, late are the documents when they finally get here, and how lost the laws get, my dear Don Manuelito, but how gossip flies, if you please!) “The Spanish empire in America has lasted three hundred years, longer than any other empire in history,” the Marquis de Cabra was saying, his three-cornered hat under his arm, “and a soul as sensitive as my wife could hardly be expected to bear the spectacle of its end.” (Isn’t the marquis speaking treason? How dare he predict the end of the Spanish empire in America? This Ofelia Salamanca must have done something terrible for the old gallant to expose himself in
this way and in these times to suspicion of treason—the Inquisition in Lima was not asleep. Surely the Marquis de Cabra knows how many heretics and rebels the ecclesiastical arm has taken, to give them their just deserts.) “She is a descendant of the first conquistadors, a pure creole of the best lineage, and whenever my imagination flags, she’s there to rekindle its flame with the memory of those incomparable deeds: five hundred men marching from Veracruz to Tenochtitlán after scuttling their ships to capture the great Moctezuma and conquer the Aztec empire; a similar number vanquishing the Inca Atahualpa in the space of one week; the conquest of the Andes, the Amazon, the Pacific; cities strung like a rosary of baroque pearls, from California to Tierra del Fuego; souls converted and saved: thousands, thousands, repaying with interest the loss of perverse lives in thrall to stubborn rebelliousness and idolatry.” The Marquis de Cabra laughed, strolling through the crowded salons of the viceregal palace in Lima that afternoon of Baltasar Bustos’s return to the world, a world that seemed even more unreal to him after his recent life on the pampa, in Ayopaya, and with Miguel Lanza’s troops.
“The Marquise de Cabra, then, begs your pardon for not being present at this soiree, but you all know that there is no better way of calling attention to oneself than by calling attention to one’s absence.” The elfin marquis laughed again, inviting the animated but languid company (who were perhaps wise to mix one drop of Indian fatality with another of creole indolence) to turn away from the theme of Ofelia Salamanca, the wife of the Marquis de Cabra, which they did so as not to admit he was right, not to let him feel that he could read them so easily or manipulate them without mercy. In doing so, they left Baltasar Bustos alone, flustered, hungry for the truth, or at least for company.