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The announcement that Ofelia Salamanca, wife of the President of the Superior Court, the Marquis de Cabra, had given birth was forgotten during the disturbances that May in Buenos Aires. When the English ship arrived with the news that Seville had fallen, three centuries of custom, of fidelity to the Spanish Crown, of subservience to commercial plans made in that very Seville and its Indies Trade Office, floated in midair for one astonished instant and then crashed to the ground: if there was no monarchy in Spain, could there be independence in America?
The child was born without grief or glory but to the manifest anguish of Ofelia Salamanca, who reproached her husband for having taken her from the captaincy-general of Chile, where she had her comforts, her mestizo servants, and her Indian midwives, to hand her to these Buenos Aires black servants. And this on top of the voyage from Santiago to the Río de la Plata, which took almost two months!
“And all to try two viceroys already condemned for incompetence and for failing to maintain order,” Ofelia Salamanca rebuked her husband.
Leocadio Cabra had acquiesced to his beautiful, independent Chilean wife’s wish to retain her maiden name. She explained why:
“First, my dear, because we have to start defending the right of women to their own name; that is, their own person. Second, because if I use your name, people will end up calling me la Cabrona, and I don’t want to be known as a son- or even a daughter-of-a-bitch.”
“Chilean to the bone!” exclaimed her exasperated husband. “Don’t delude yourself: Salamanca is your father’s name, not yours, and it was your grandfather’s. There’s no way you can escape having a man’s name, you goose.”
“There’s never been any Ofelia Salamanca but me,” the beautiful Chilean creole proudly pointed out. Baltasar Bustos was seeing her naked for the first time through the vaporous curtains of the bedroom, curtains that were merely the first veil over a universe obscured by successive layers of muslin blindness: the permanent drapes over the canopied bed, as well as the summer mosquito netting the servants had neglected to take away; the translucent cloth over the dressing table where Ofelia Salamanca was sitting, naked, in front of the mirror, offering to the nearsighted but dazzled eyes of Baltasar Bustos a body shaped like an hourglass, a white guitar, her back turned to him but stunning with the round perfection of her firm buttocks, twin fruits below an even firmer and slimmer waist, as if there could coexist in a single human being not that many but such unique perfections: a slender waist, round buttocks soft yet hard, but not as much as the waist, and not one pore that did not exude perfume but also wholeness, perfect harmony, with no flab, buttocks that were carnal twins of the moon. And to think she had given birth just seven weeks before!
She powdered herself without the help of chambermaids, and the powder kept him from seeing her breasts clearly, so Baltasar Bustos fell in love with her back, her waist, and her buttocks. With her profile as well, since Ofelia Salamanca, as she powdered her breasts, presented only half her face to the ecstatic contemplation of the young porteño, the perfect reader of distant ideals. He would have wanted to see a romantic turbulence in her features; but the classical perfection of her clear brow, straight nose, full lips, her oval chin and long, swanlike neck foiled such wishes. It was like seeing Leda in the myth: the rice powder was the swan that enveloped her, possessed her, and veiled her from the eyes of her admirer, turning her into what he most desired: an unattainable ideal, the pure bride of pure desire, untouched.
His impassioned readings of Rousseau mixed with the cold teaching of the church fathers: Baltasar Bustos’s intellectual hero was the Citizen of Geneva who asks us to abandon ourselves to our passion so that we can recover our souls, whereas St. John Chrysostom condemns ideal love that is not consummated, because the passions become all the more inflamed.
The saint knew that once we attain our carnal objective, habit will ultimately cool any passion. The distance between the balcony from which Baltasar spied, desired, and entered into conflict with his own feelings and the rotund object of his desire, at that moment covered by a haze of gauze and powder with which she was unfortunately more intimate than she was with him, distant witness of the unattainable beauty of Ofelia the president’s wife, only succeeded, it was true, in increasing his passion.
That was the first time he saw her, spying from the balcony, rehearsing the act he would commit for justice’s sake.
The second time, she was accompanied by her husband, who paced impatiently around the bedroom, pushing aside gauze veils as she got dressed, again without the help of a maid. Perhaps the subject of their conversation called for privacy: the marquis was complaining because Ofelia wasn’t breastfeeding the newborn child, lamenting that his son had been turned over to one of these black Buenos Aires wet nurses. He missed Chile and its Indians; the Río de la Plata was filled with blacks — almost half the population. I don’t want our son to grow up surrounded by blacks, said the old creole, who had reached his present position through his fervent devotion to the Crown. Don’t worry, said Ofelia Salamanca, black children don’t go to school with white children, not here or anywhere. In Catamarca, not long ago, a mulatto was flogged when people found out he’d learned to read and write.
The marquis, who seemed made of porcelain, said to his wife: “If your reprehensible appetite for novelties and horrors — the same thing, in my opinion — requires stimulation, let me tell you, my dear, that just two months ago, right here in Buenos Aires, a black hetaera sick with the French pox was sentenced for daring to have a child. To cure her of her malady, her profession, and her maternity all at the same time, she was condemned to a public whipping.”
“I’m sure that cured her of prostitution and syphilis,” said Ofelia Salamanca with cold simplicity, as she finished dressing, much closer this second time to the eyes of Baltasar Bustos, who used every means to preserve the beatific vision of the first occasion. Seeing them together, he realized that she was the same porcelain color as her husband.
Ofelia Salamanca wore Empire dresses, but she went against fashion by zealously covering her breasts and revealing instead her legs and the curve of her posterior. That wasn’t what excited Baltasar Bustos most in this second vision; it was two elements in her toilette. The first was her hair, cut in “guillotine style,” shaved to the nape as if to make way for the quick slice of the revolutionary blade. The other was the thin ribbon of red satin tied around her neck like a thread of luxurious blood, as if the guillotine had already done its work.
Ofelia Salamanca said something in a low voice to her husband, and he laughed. “Patience, sweetheart, we’ll make love after we stamp out the revolution.”
“Well, then, get on with trying your viceroys so we can get back to Chile as soon as possible.”
“It’s very hard to hold a trial when the entire country wants to kill them. The time is not ripe for justice.”
“So, commit an injustice. It wouldn’t be the first in your career. And let’s get out of here.”
“We’re comfortable here, and you’ve just given birth. Do you really want to travel with a two-month-old infant?”
“We could bring the nurse.”
“She’s black.”
“But she’s got milk. It’s like traveling with a cow. Besides, this building frightens me. I hate living in the same place where you work. You sentence too many people to prison and death.”
“I just do my duty.”
“And I don’t like weak men. I only have two complaints, Leocadio. Your past weighs too heavily on you. And in Santiago at least the court and our residence weren’t under the same roof.”