But three things happened, three foreseeable yet unexpected things. Myopic and foppish, chubby and not very attractive, Baltasar launched into one of an infinite number of dinner conversations with the lady next to him at table. Their dialogue was well under way when Baltasar realized he was acting a romantic part he’d learned perfectly and would recite at these functions. But this role was, at the same time, perfectly authentic, because everything he said corresponded to an intimate conviction, even if its verbal expression was not especially felicitous. This divorce was, simultaneously, the matrimony of his words. He’d repeated them again and again with a mixture of apathy and passion ever since his visit to Lima, searching for Ofelia Salamanca and insinuating that, sentenced to death by the ferocious guerrilla leader Miguel Lanza, he had to place his sympathies with the Crown; after all, the insurgents would deny him any protection whatever.
He could not alter his discourse that night; it was authentic and false at the same time. But he addressed it to her, since he had discovered halfway through dinner that he was speaking to Gabriela Cóo. He gave a face to that face, eyebrows to that visage, a perfume to that body, and now he could not stop the flow of his words, careening like a cart down a mountainside. And each time she answered him in a polite but cutting, intelligent, firm, even amused way, was she laughing at him, as almost all these Chilean girls did who were too beautiful and intelligent to take him seriously? And wasn’t that exactly what he most desired: to be left free to pursue his true passion, the search for Ofelia?
“Whenever I come near to a woman like you, I feel the desire to avenge my pain and my sin on you.”
“You don’t say.”
“Only you can kill the passion in me.”
“It would be a pleasure.”
“I mean: do me the favor of hastening my calvary.”
“To whom are you speaking, Mr. Bustos?”
“I tell you that my soul only wants to recover or die, milady.”
“But I only know how to cure, not to kill.”
“Try to be another woman, and I will not try to seduce you,” said Baltasar, lowering his voice.
“I want neither to be someone else nor to be seduced by you,” she replied in the same low tone, before laughing out loud. “Be more reasonable, Mr. Bustos.”
The second thing that happened was that each afternoon at five she reappeared, far off in her garden. She approached little by little, as if suggesting that she would come closer, allowing herself to be desired, allowing him to make her more and more his own, first in his eyes and his desire and someday perhaps through real possession. The movements of the dance, the increasing languors, the increasing nakedness of that svelte, almost infantile body governed by a mask whose will was a mouth as red as a wound and brows as black as a whip, spelled out her name, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, desired, desirable, promising, promised, confident she would not deceive her lover, if he wanted to be her lover, if he gave himself to her, distant and nubile in her garden, as he had given himself to Ofelia Salamanca, distant and widowed, a mother who had given birth twice to the same child, given birth, that is, to life and to death, a woman burdened by suffering and rumors and probable cruelties and imagined betrayals. Gabriela Cóo’s dancing body was asking him to choose but did not say to him, “I am better than the other”; it merely said, “I am different, and you must accept me as I am.”
It had to be that way, Baltasar said to himself every afternoon, because she was no longer rehearsing Rousseau’s play, which was put on just once in the patio of the grand Portuguese-style mansion on Calle del Rey. No longer. Now the performance was for him alone.
She was his little mistress—he decided to give her that name, just as we called him our little brother.
One afternoon, the little brother and the little mistress met without having fixed a time. He jumped over the low wall separating the two properties just as she was coming out of the entrance to her house. Neither yielded, but both gave all. She explained to him that her behavior the other night had not been the infantile act of a spoiled girl trying to entertain in polite society. She really did want to be an actress, she believed in independence—not only political but personal, too. The two went together, at least that is what she believed. Here in Chile, in other parts of the New World, even in Europe, she would pursue her career. She loved words, said Gabriela Cóo; each word had its own life and required the same care as a newborn child. When she opened her mouth, as she did the other night, and repeated a word—love, pleasure, world, sea—she had to take charge of that word like a mother, like a shepherdess, like a lover, yes, even like a little mistress, convinced that, without her, without her mouth, her tongue, the word would smash against a wall of silence and die forsaken.
But to take charge of words that weren’t her own, the words of Rousseau, Ruiz de Alarcón, or Sophocles, she had to prepare herself for a long time. She would give nothing to a man unless he first gave her words. For her, love was a vocation as strong as the theater, but words also sustained love. All this was very difficult, even a little sad—Gabriela Cóo put her arm around Baltasar and patted his curls—because her work was pure shadow, fleeting, left no mark: only the words, poor things, that preceded it were left, and would be, even without her. In order to give meaning to her life of spectral voices, what else could Gabriela think except that, thanks to her mouth, the words had not died but had actually gained a modicum of life, body, dignity, who knows what else?
She felt for Baltasar’s nape under his curly hair and asked if he understood her. He said he did; he knew she understood him equally well. She knew he loved her and why he acted and spoke that way at the Santiago dinners he frequented and why they would be parting soon.
“Tell me it’s not because of that other woman.” Gabriela Cóo thus made her only faux pas, explicable in any case, and he forgave her but decided at that moment to separate her from his life, to give her the freedom she needed, and to give himself to the slavery his obsession with Ofelia entailed until he consummated his passion. At the moment, he could see no other way to be faithful to this adorable girl, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, my love, my adored little love, delightful Gabriela; we shall never truly know our own hearts, Little Mistress.
He so desired the only kiss he and Gabriela exchanged, his vision of that act was so intense, so red were the girl’s lips when they joined his, their mouths parting and their tongues joining and separating only to tickle their palates and count their avid, cruel, and tender teeth, that from it there emerged another mouth, another kiss, a kiss that stole theirs away, banished it, took it from them and turned it into the kiss, the mouth, the voice of Ofelia Salamanca.
And that was the third thing that happened.
He promised himself not to think about Gabriela until he could be hers alone.
[3]
Facing Santiago, but separated from it by the rampart of the Andes, Mendoza—capital of the Argentine province of Cuyo—was the revolutionary center of the Americas. The sweetness of its valley of vines and cherry trees, the eternal springtime of its warm breezes and its snow-capped backdrop, its lands given over to golden pear trees and fertile earth, was all negated. Mendoza was given over to the extremes of cold calculation and infernal din because of the activities of the Army of the Andes that was forming, in spite of all apathy and against all obstacles.
At the beginning, there was nothing; San Martín set about turning that nothing into war supplies. He ordered contributions, extorted money from everyone, pestered President Pueyrredón to distraction, exhorted the ladies of Mendoza to donate their jewels at the municipal council, proscribed luxury, and cut officers’ salaries in half. From the back of a horse no taller than the liberating general himself, sitting bolt upright, barely thirty-seven years old but already showing an incipient maturity that did not wholly extinguish the veiled glint in his eyes or the stubborn determination in his mouth, he proclaimed:
“Cuyo must sweat money for the liberation of America; from this day for
ward, each one of us must stand guard over his own life.”
The Supreme Director of the Junta of Buenos Aires, Pueyrredón, was not willing to be second to San Martín either in will or in zeal in a feat which in Buenos Aires was being compared with those of Hannibal, Caesar, and Napoleon: “From Buenos Aires we send you dispatch cases, uniforms, shirts. We send you two thousand replacement sabers and two hundred field tents. We send you, in a small box, the only two bugles we could find. And that’s enough,” wrote Pueyrredón. “We send the World. We send the Flesh. We send the Devil. I don’t have the remotest idea how I’m going to worm my way out of the contracts I’ve signed to pay for all of it. Damn it! Don’t ask me for another thing!”
Cuyo did sweat, Mendoza dried up, and even the church bells and vineyards were squeezed to get blunderbusses and harquebuses, carbines and sabers, daggers and tridents, the pistols, and the yataghans, those fearsome Turkish-style swords with silver hilts.
Already Major De la Plaza is at work, quartermaster in charge of supplies and arms; Alvarez Condarco, the Tucumán chemist, mixes nitrates to make different kinds of gunpowder. In his armory, Brother Luis de Beltrán tucks his cassock up on his waist as he casts cannon and bombs, while his neighbor, Tejada, sweats over his vats, dyeing cloth blue to make new uniforms. Right down to the humblest artisan, everyone contributes something to the campaign, even if it’s a lance cut from a reed; the poorest mule skinner turns over his animals, just as the doctors deliver their medicines to the hospital founded by Dr. Zapata. And if donations don’t come willingly, then San Martín’s men forcibly tear blankets and sheets off the beds, occupied or empty, of those living nearby. “There is no house that cannot give up an old sheet,” shout these pirates of liberty, proclaiming themselves beggars rather than thieves. “When all else fails, we all have to beg.”
But all the hustle and bustle, the clanging, the singing and dancing, the hammers smashing red-hot iron, the neighs, and the banging are like a vast silence when, at dusk on that January day, three horsemen enter General José de San Martín’s camp in Mendoza. Three horsemen hurtling down the mountains who cannot rein in their mounts, who spur them on to run, jump, and dodge obstacles around the armories, the supply sheds, the shops, and the mills, until the three sweating, tense chargers meld in the corral and stables with the three thousand horses, the seven thousand mules, and the myriad cows that constitute the marching stock of the Army of the Andes.
The three friends dismount, laughing and shouting, embracing, congratulating one another for being friends, for being alive, for having arrived, for bringing news, and above all for their manly comradeship, the friendship of their twenty-five years, the success of having crossed the Andes on horseback from Santiago—so swiftly that they are their own messengers:
The priest Francisco Arias, handsome and devout, twenty years of age, given to fervent readings and to those sensualities he deems worthy of his all-embracing faith and his noble intelligence.
Lieutenant Juan de Echagüe, valiant and dashing with his reddish favoris that show to equal advantage combed for a ball or tangled with dust.
And the young hero Baltasar Bustos, hopelessly myopic but willfully plump—losing, because of a diet of honey fritters, creams, egg-yolk sweets, and powder cakes, the physical hardness won in the Inquisivi campaign, obeying the order to return to his natural state, fat and smooth; losing the pride of his svelte virility to serve the cause to which the three of them have pledged themselves, even if they have to dance with that ugliest of partners: deceit.
“Arias and Bustos will join with Echagüe in Chile. The country is on edge. Despite the Rancagua defeat, the spirit of rebellion has not been vanquished. The captain-general is both an incompetent and a savage. Santiago is the center of all this edginess. Mix with everyone. Make friends with everyone. Spread false rumors. Contradict one another. Confuse anyone who wants the Spaniards to win. Seduce anyone who can serve our cause. Don’t leave a single truth unquestioned, create a universe of doubt, confusion, contradiction, false news, rumors … And don’t think you’re heroes. You are just part of an army of spies and counterspies scattered all over Chile. Spread misinformation but learn the truth for us. Find out the number and position of their troops, supplies, their movements, their plans. But, above all, make them believe we’re going to attack from all sides, all along the line from Mount Aconcagua to Valdivia.”
That is what General San Martín asked the three of them to do and that is what they accomplished. Now Baltasar wanted to eat steak and not vol-au-vent, Echagüe felt avenged for the death of his uncle (which took place, rumor had it, in the arms of Ofelia Salamanca, widow of the cuckold marquis), and Father Arias was looking at his two friends with his beautiful, languid, enigmatic eyes, which seduced both men and women, making everyone feel that this young priest could do whatever he wished—it was obvious that God Himself had so deemed it, and had incarnated His divine will in this delicate, strong, tender being ever ready to forgive but also disposed to anger, this youthful herald of Jehovah and Christ.
They walked arm in arm, at a distance from the stables where they’d dismounted, but always accompanied by the diminutive population of the encampment, whose habitual noises began to fill the afternoon once more after the galloping interruption of the friends. Geese, chickens, pigs, ducks. The honking, cackling, and squealing magically drowned out the hammers, bellows, and neighing. Arias looked at Bustos and Echagüe. If only it was true that Baltasar had invented—it was a stroke of genius—the pretext of the beautiful Ofelia to justify his passing through Chile; if only he did not know her or love her. If only Echagüe had never believed that his comrade loved the woman who had killed his uncle. If only this marvel of life, the union of the three young friends, who were not divided by anything, could last, glitter as long as possible, before the inevitable splits triumphed. When his friends asked him what he was doing, Arias said he was praying in his own fashion, using a word, ojalá—God willing—whose origin was the purest Arabic. Then they ate and drank together, told jokes, reminisced about family and lady friends, remembered childhood pranks, loved each other like brothers.
“That woman loved you,” Echagüe said to Bustos.
“Which woman?” Baltasar asked, distressed.
But Echagüe and Arias exchanged a glance and were silent. They had sworn never to mention Gabriela Cóo.
[4]
The three of them reported to General San Martín with their lungs cleansed by the air of Mendoza, the most tree-filled city in the world, a city sweet because it is protected by a roof of leaves woven together like the fingers of a huge circle of inseparable lovers.
The priest was all in black, with his long cassock; his eyes, too, were an ecclesiastical color.
The lieutenant carried his leather morion with its gold bars and wore a blue tunic whose buttons were stamped with the arms of Argentina.
Baltasar Bustos placed his glasses in their leather case and put his blue cloth cap with its single gold bar under his arm.
It was a trio of proud friends looking into the face of a hero, wondering at which point the personal fate of each of them—Echagüe, Arias, Bustos—would change or be changed by events, war, or other men—San Martín, for instance. But vanity, wrote Rousseau, measures nature according to our weaknesses, making us believe that the qualities we don’t possess are mere chimeras.
In the salon, bare except for a table strewn with maps, portfolios, magnifying glasses, inkwells, and document seals, the general stated outright that the plan for liberating South America hinged on the conquest of the viceroyalty that governed the rest: Peru. But to take Peru it was first necessary to invade Chile. A sustained long-term action could not be expected from the micro-republics in Upper Peru. They would do what they had always done: carry out raids to distract Lima’s troops and resources.
Everything was ready. He congratulated the three of them for fulfilling their task of undermining things in Chile. Marcó del Pont was thoroughly confused about wh
ere the patriots would launch their attack. He was confident Echagüe had taken advantage of the return trip to carry out orders. The young lieutenant replied in the affirmative: he’d memorized the entire route, down to the last stone, without needing to take notes. Baltasar and Father Francisco looked at Juan and then at San Martín. They knew the secret; there was no need to swear them to silence. But an Indian leaning on a lance at the entrance to the Mendoza map room stared at them with far-off melancholy. Had he been listening? Of course. Had he understood? Yes; no; yes. “I’ve lived with them. I know they understand everything,” said Baltasar when San Martín ordered the Indian to withdraw. But only by torturing Echagüe could anyone get the secret out of him, said Father Arias.
“In Peru we called them shitty cholos,” Bustos said to Arias in a sudden fit of rage.
“Don’t worry. They call each other worse.”
“That doesn’t solve the problem of justice,” insisted Bustos, somewhat irritated by the young priest’s cynical realism. “Are we going to free ourselves from the Spaniards just so we Creoles can take their place, always above the cholo and the Indian?”
Echagüe laughed. “Don’t think about that now, Balta. Concentrate on glory.”
He hummed “le jour de gloire est arrivé,” blushed, and regained his composure. “Excuse me, General. I forgot where I was. It’s just that the three of us are such close friends.”
“I, too, am concerned about justice,” said San Martín. “And wherever we go, we are going to establish free trade, suppress the Inquisition, abolish slavery, and prohibit torture. But you all saw what happened to Castelli and Belgrano in Upper Peru. They proclaimed the ideals of the Enlightenment to Indians who didn’t understand them and to the Creoles, who didn’t want a permanent revolution. Neither theories nor individuals suffice to achieve justice. We must create permanent institutions. First, of course, we have to achieve independence. Then our headaches will really begin.”