The marquis stared at him curiously, as if the old man’s intelligence would never dare to reject a possible relationship, association, or contiguity, no matter how arbitrary it might seem at first glance.
“Father Rivers”—the marquis smiled—“your young disciple — that is what he is, isn’t that so? — knows that all waters ultimately flow into each other. Am I right?”
“Rivers do flow,” said the tutor.
“Rivers roll, servants serve, priests pray — or is it prey? — but castrati, fortunately, do not castrate. Yet young men with sunburned faces and newly shorn beards pique my curiosity. Do they flow, serve, pray, prey, or castrate?”
“None of those things, your lordship,” said Baltasar. “At times, they merely desire.”
“Just so long as they don’t covet that which belongs to others,” said the old man in acid tones. “In this country, the wise practice is to stick a finger up the ass of every miner as he leaves his work, to see that he isn’t stealing the gold.”
“Good heavens, your lordship! Not even I allow myself such obscenities,” cackled the balding old woman bristling with combs, “in spite of the fact that I’m older and that Viceroy Abascal isn’t listening to what I say.”
That very personage was standing behind Cabra with his solemn, Visigoth face. The marquis bowed. Everyone awaited the words of the viceroy, Don Fernando de Abascal, Marquis de Concordia, who no doubt hoped to cancel any discussion of independence or loyalty to the Crown — the only fashionable topics, since no others lent themselves so well to animated conversation — with a few words more lapidary than any the others might utter. He imagined himself captivating his audience with his eyes, which were like those of an offended codfish:
“The Americans were born to be slaves, destined by nature to vegetate in obscurity and melancholy.”
He said it out of obligation, to give offense, because he thought that under the present circumstances his obligation was to offend and that his greatest offense would be to overlook any arguments the others might propose. He was the viceroy, but not even the viceroy and his attributes could dampen — now was the time to prove it — the imagination and humor of the Marquis de Cabra, who sought thus to suggest that, more than Abascal, the man who should be viceroy was he who was speaking: Cabra himself.
He looked straight at Baltasar Bustos and commented that his tanned complexion and pale chin indicated many months in the open air and sun and a beard until recently unshaven. Baltasar nodded. This fellow looked like no one else: was he a soldier? But none of the officers present showed such a contrast, such roughness. “What campaigns were you in, Mr., Mr.—”
“Bustos. Baltasar Bustos.”
“And a classical bust it is. Am I right, Father Rivers?”
“Quite right. This Balshazar seems ready for his feast.”
“But it was Nebuchadnezzar who saw the writing on the wall.”
“From which we should all take warning: the end is near, gentlemen.”
Cabra glanced mockingly at the viceroy, who from offended codfish had metamorphosed into a satisfied mollusk. He had spoken, and nothing else mattered.
“So, Baltasar Bustos.”
The marquis said he did not know if this Baltasar was a loyalist or an insurgent, but he was a creole, that much was obvious. And an officer, although on which side was not obvious, added Cabra with the mildest hint of menace in his voice. But he was an officer and a creole, so he would no doubt do what all of them did, which was to take an Indian, like this boy in livery and cotton wig attending the most excellent widow of the Marquis de Z_____, who was Viceroy of Peru, and tell him, just as the Marquis de Cabra was telling him now, grabbing him roughly, you half-breed shit, that’s right, half-breed shit a thousand times, I won’t stick my finger up your ass to see if you steal my gold, half-breed, but if I were this creole officer — patriot? rebel? loyal to the king? who knows, who cares? — he would say to you, half-breed shit, sweep out the barracks, make my bed, wash the floor, disinfect the lavatories, carry in wood, pour me a glass of water, don’t move a muscle if I give you a kick in the ass, don’t let so much as a sigh escape your lips if I slap your face, don’t you dare raise your head if I order you, you half-breed shit, to look down at my feet, because your soul, assuming you have one, you poor devil, doesn’t even reach as high as my feet.”
The marquis, more upset even than he thought, paused and took a deep breath, saying that a creole would say all that to this half-breed shit he’d grabbed by the neck. He would say it even if he was a patriot, because, before being a patriot, he was creole shit. Why didn’t little Master Bustos do what the marquis was inviting him to do, when one day, sooner or later he would have to do it to prove who was in charge here.
Cabra held out the servant of the widow of the Marquis de Z_____as if he were some exotic trophy. The bald old lady shook the tortoiseshell daggers jutting out of her head and protested, Miguelito is so good, so faithful, she would allow no one, not even the most distinguished President of the Court of Visitation, to …
Cabra spun ferociously on his heel to face the crone, she who had ordered Perrichole publicly flogged for bragging that she was the Viceroy de Amat’s concubine, and, worse still, for thinking that the sins of prostitution could be expiated by publicly, not secretly, walking barefoot behind the carriage of the Blessed Sacrament, without adding scandal to scandal and publicity to virtue; she who witnessed and rejoiced in the drawing and quartering of the rebel Indian Tupac Amaru, the pretender to the title of last Inca, who in the name of the oppressed rose up in arms to turn the poor of Peru into Indian kings — was she now going to defend this half-breed shit in her service from a beating?
“Oh, but your lordship, that Tupac Amaru forced the governor of Cuzco to drink molten gold from the mines and die horribly. Miguelito the cholo, on the other hand, is neither a whore nor a rebel, but one of God’s true souls,” said the old crone, her voice racked with phlegm.
Laughter broke out, but Cabra did not release the bewigged cholo. He waited for silence, to proclaim that from that day forward, to prevent the fall of the Spanish empire in America, he, Leocadio Cabra, marquis of the same, quondam President of the Royal Council of Chile, would consider himself dead — after all, a man like himself could hardly survive the death of his world — and would celebrate, right here, in the City of the Kings, his own funeral, with pomp and splendor, presided over by the Viceroy Don Fernando de Abascal, Marquis de Concordia (who looked bewildered as he tried to understand these antinomian ideas for which he had no ready answer — how to term this mad marquis: “slave,” “obscure,” “abject”?). His excellency was not to take this anticipation of death as an impious or cocasse act, like the premature funeral of the heretic Voltaire or the rebel Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, the liberal Mexican in Cádiz, but rather as an act of devotion and profound piety, like the burial-in-advance of His Majesty Charles V in the monastery at Yuste, amid solemn hymns and ecclesiastical panegyrics. Therefore: the burial-in-advance of the Marquis de Cabra would be not (God save us!) a Voltairean joke or a sublime foreshadowing of our common destiny incarnate in the most catholic of monarchs, but a bitter commentary on the times. (The lady banished from the presence of the viceroy gazed at her stockings with their tiny clocks; the tutor Julián Ríos let the marquis rattle on.) “When Simón Bolívar enters this city from the north and José de San Martín from the south, something I also predict today, all of you will say that I am dead and buried, knowing full well that in my place will be this half-breed shit, the servant of the widow of the Marquis de Z_____. I hereby condemn him to die young, in my place, so that the world will think I am dead and leave me in peace, leave me in peace, leave me in peace, alone and old and forgotten and abandoned and cuckolded by my sweet Ofelia,” said the raving-mad Marquis de Cabra, tossing with a sportsman’s skill (unless it was pure luck) his wig, which landed on the old lady’s bald head bristling with combs. And with that the marquis withdrew, dragging his feet, sobbing, as the strains of the minuet being played by the cholo musicians in cotton wigs and red frock coats metamorphosed, in Baltasar Bustos’s ear, into a melancholy, remote mountain air, a melody of irremediable farewells, carrying with it the din of arms, of age-old llamas and new horses, the trembling of the earth and the storms in the heavens, its ever so sad quena pipes, the only voice of the uplands, silencing both.