“Was it a community?”
Ríos said it was, but Baltasar that night would not have set out for utopia or any other community without stopping first for this frank conversation with a person he respected. The solitude of his time on the pampa, culminating in the death of José Antonio Bustos and the final break with his sister, Sabina; the solitude of the months spent with the guerrillas in the Inquisivi, where brotherhood was nipped by Miguel Lanza’s “to-the-last-man” decision: we all may die here, but no one leaves. The solitude of distance and time — five years already! without seeing Dorrego and Varela and feeling that they lived in the mad, loving, tight fraternity of the Café de Malcos. All that was not compensated for by a soiree in viceregal Lima, a tacitly perverse invitation from two young priests, or the sovereign indifference of a beautiful, brilliant dark woman who succumbed to the temptation of a man who certainly did not deserve her. And, finally, the absence of Ofelia Salamanca embittered him, as did the ugly rumor surrounding that absence: adultery, prejudice, cruelty, ostentatious frivolity.
“I’ve had the feeling that I was totally alone during these past years,” Baltasar said later to Ríos. “Now I’ve just lost myself in other people. I don’t feel free either way, alone or in company. I need society or I wouldn’t miss it. But when I’m in society, I feel sick. I find scenes like the one we witnessed tonight repugnant.”
“That’s because you want to change society,” said Julián Ríos. “But such desires are very costly. You will only feel free when the society you want to change is so perfect it no longer needs you.”
Baltasar Bustos asked if he had any other options but to fight for the impossible or to conform to what already existed. Ríos begged him to offer now what he said he was seeking and what he was sharing with his Buenos Aires friends: a bit of sincerity. For whose sake were they going through all these difficulties? Who was the individual channel of all this anguish?
Now, walking quickly among weeping willows arranged without symmetry, in a night whose fogs had lifted and whose Pacific stars adorned the only beautiful sky in Lima, which is the sky veiled to the light of day, Baltasar Bustos told the tutor what had taken place on the night of May 24–25 in Buenos Aires. The youth’s shame mounted as the tutor’s laughter grew louder, and Baltasar, incredulous, fell physically into his own trap: his body, his words, his energetic pace now that he’d lost so much weight in the campaign with Lanza were, in that moment, the worst trap, because they left him no gestures, no convincing corporeal responses to that laugh, which could not be injurious, coming from whom it came, but which, despite everything, was just that: there was a slap in each guffaw, a sting in every smile.
“You poor naïve fool! You did not burn down the Buenos Aires court building, Baltasar. It was the mob. That night they decided to destroy the colonial archives, the registers of racial discrimination, the property exclusions — everything, my dear Baltasar, that this colony’s chain of paper signifies. And remember, it has enslaved as much with words as with branding irons. Baltasar, you did not kill that child. Your thirty candles wouldn’t have been enough to honor a saint!”
“Twenty-five,” said Baltasar. “She was twenty-five then, she must be thirty now…”
“She lived right over there,” said Ríos, turning to point out the palace from where they had stopped, alongside the fountain in the Mercedarians’ plaza, amazed at the hustle and bustle — unusual at eleven o’clock in the evening — in the entranceways, doors, and windows of the house occupied by the Marquis de Cabra, former President of the Royal Council of Chile, and his vanished wife. Torches were seen in window after window, mules and carts were stopped outside the coachhouse door, trunks emerged, black drapes were carried in, a procession of puzzled acolytes paused as they searched for their pastor; the Blessed Sacrament was brought in, carried with proper solemnity; veiled women began to gather, tiny in their flat slippers, enveloped in capes and scarves.
“The doors of the house are wide open, Balta…”
In her bedroom, Ofelia Salamanca had left a box of powder and a silver scraper she used to cleanse her tongue. Also two popular books by Samuel Tissot, one on the disorders that afflict literary and sedentary people and their cure (walks, cinnamon, and fennel tea), the other, simply titled Onanism and Madness. She had also left behind the red, the blood-colored ribbon he’d watched her put around her neck from the balcony that May night in Buenos Aires. The thin line of blood symbolic of the guillotine. Baltasar discreetly slipped the ribbon into his pocket. He looked with distaste at the double bed and was overcome by a pounding wave of jealousy, imagining Ofelia in the arms of her husband, the marquis, who, wrapped in a shroud, was carried, in a perfectly synchronized ceremony, to the same bed from which Baltasar Bustos, no matter how he tried, could not banish the image of the erotic couple. Ofelia Salamanca, her legs spread, astride the skeleton of her husband Cabra, the old goat; the she-goat rubbing the mons Veneris he’d been imagining for five years as bulging yet deep, hairy yet prepubescent, the hidden, monastic sex of Ofelia Salamanca, invisible one moment and fleshy the next, protruding, visible from any angle, reproduced with febrile symmetry behind and in front of the thighs of the desired woman. Possessed by Cabra and how many others?
Baltasar Bustos and Julián Ríos were pushed into a corner of the bedroom when the servants carrying candles entered along with the hired mourners, the acolytes, the curious, the disconcerted priests, and especially the principal actor: Don Leocadio, Marquis de Cabra, who was laid out, wrapped in his shroud, paler than Miguel Lanza, in the same bed where he had enjoyed the love of his wife, Ofelia. Was he really dead? Was he pretending? Did he have an attack after the painful scene at Viceroy Abascal’s party? Baltasar did not want to find out. He approached the marquis’s funereal head and whispered into the dead or alive Marquis de Cabra’s ear, “I love your wife. I burned your son to death, and you will have no other, dead or alive, because in the past five years you’ve lost your virility and are nothing but a senile scarecrow. I will follow your wife to the ends of the world and force her to love me in the name of justice, because she must love a man who is passionately in love with her and would do anything for her.”
It did not matter to him that, either to simulate death or because he really was dead, the Marquis de Cabra’s ears were sealed with wax. But two crystallized tears, as hard as silver, had added another furrow to the wrinkled cheeks of the former President of the Royal Council of Chile.
[3]
I need only a few sheets of paper to end this chapter. One of them is the Marquis de Cabra’s will, worthy of mention for two reasons. The first is that in it he offers a substantial lifetime annuity to the cholo who will every day stand at the corner of Pilón del Molino Quebrado and allow himself to be kicked by any passing Creole. The sagacious husband of Ofelia Salamanca explains that he is guided in this bequest by a desire to alleviate the frustration of all Peruvians bereft of slaves.
The second, more bitter bequest is an uncalled-for, counterproductive, impracticable command. The Marquis de Cabra orders the colonial aristocracy to pillage itself so that the rebels will find nothing.
But where are those rebels in this year of 1815? All sorts of news reaches Buenos Aires, most of it depressing. Bolívar is in exile in Jamaica, and instead of raising armies, he writes letters complaining about our perennially infantile nations, their incapacity to govern themselves, and the distance between our liberal institutions and our customs and character. In the south, Belgrano’s expedition to Upper Peru has failed, and only the resistance of caudillos like Miguel Lanza has prevented the total restoration of colonial rule. Right here in Buenos Aires, Alvear’s directorate has fallen, and the estate owners, merchants, and priests have seized power, persecuting the liberals, confiscating their property, and sentencing them to exile or to death. The saddest news comes at year’s end from Mexico: the rebel priest Morelos has been captured, tried, and sentenced. His severed head is like a black moon clapped onto a lance in San Cristóbal Ecatepec.