Dorrego and I, Varela, get along as best we can, hoping for better times, keeping our eyes open, and reading the letters of our friend Baltasar. Sometimes we write back, but since we don’t really know where he is, we send our letters to the estate of his dead father. Let’s hope they reach him. We learned that Lanza sentenced him to death for desertion; we fix our clocks, and on afternoons when the pampa wind blows, we stand in front of maps of the continent and trace the imaginary movements of nonexistent armies: campaigns that are always dangerous but ultimately triumphant, waged by ideal, phantasmagorical, South American armies …
In this way, Dorrego and I, Varela, transform History into the presence of an absence. Is that another name for ideal perfection?
6. The Army of the Andes
[1]
“His name is Baltasar Bustos, his family owns an estate — reasonable people, but half savage, like all ranch owners.” “If at least his father were a merchant.” “Is he a good marriage prospect?” “But he fought alongside the mountain rebels in Upper Peru — when did he become a royalist?” “When Miguel Lanza put a price on his head for deserting.” “He says that he’s in love, that he came here looking for the woman.” “That’s not important, but the news he brings from Inquisivi and Jujuy is.” “He’s very open; we know everything about him.” “He doesn’t hide anything from us.” “He knows we’ll crush the rebellion, so he’s doing us a favor.” “He certainly doesn’t look like a guerrilla.” “Your excellency shouldn’t judge by appearances.” “Plump, perfumed, dressed in silks, nearsighted…”
He strolled the salons of Santiago de Chile just as he’d strolled those of Lima, but he did not cut the same figure. Rather, he conformed to the description recorded above by the authorities of the captaincy-general of Chile. What a fuss this Baltasar Bustos made about his search for Ofelia Salamanca, now the widow of the Marquis de Cabra, who had died of bile and apoplexy in Lima! Who had died, it should be noted, in bed. Of course, no one knows if he died before or after his rehearsed death. Was he already dead when they laid him in his wife’s bed? Or did he die there, transforming the rehearsal into reality and the attempt at playfulness into God’s punishment?
The marquis fully deserved it. He left behind in Chile so many bad memories of his cruelty and injustice — which he carried out, it must be noted, with a smile and a joke on his lips! But his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, is no longer here; people say she went north, fleeing from the imminent fall of Chile, so ill defended, she said before departing, by the most pusillanimous captain-general in three centuries, Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Pont, who sought to compensate for his lack of military prowess by investing excessive energy in repression, passing judgment on the loyalty of all creoles without exception, expropriating their properties, burning their houses, and occasionally exiling them to the Island of Juan Fernández.
While none of that made up for Marcó del Pont’s stupidity on the battlefield, it did succeed in making Spanish rule the object of general hatred and threw the inhabitants of Santiago and Valparaíso into a state of total hysteria. It was from that that Ofelia Salamanca had fled. She was fed up with suspicion, fear, sudden changes! Now this nearsighted, fat fellow was looking for her, and just by chance he came from Jujuy, Upper Peru, and Mendoza, and had friends in the rebel officer corps in Argentina, who, though they protected him from Lanza’s death sentence, had no confidence in him.
In any case, the sword of Damocles is hanging over his head; obviously, he’s not meant for war; he says that Lanza conscripted him; he seems as edgy as everyone else; he only wants to find the widow of the Marquis de Cabra and ease his anxiety with exasperated waves of his handkerchief, nervous twitches of his head, as if he were expecting bad news or a worse blow at any moment. He complains about not finding his usual lotions in Chile; this country is the end of the world! He wonders what he’s doing here, if he’s not looking for Ofelia Salamanca, until someone suggests he form a club for those whose hearts have been broken by the Chilean beauty, stubborn enemy of independence and the rebels, about whom it is said, but perhaps it’s nothing but pure gossip, that it was she who personally plunged a dagger into the back of the insurgent Colonel Martín Echagüe to keep him from taking part in the battle of Rancagua, a rebel defeat that forced the vanquished leaders O’Higgins and Carrera to flee to Mendoza on the other side of the Andes. Whence comes to us this confused, edgy, beardless youngster to tell us that a rebel attack is imminent, that San Martín has deployed armies of more than twenty thousand men in mobile units north and south along the Argentine Andes in preparation for a general assault on Chile, from Aconcagua to Valdivia.
Santiago de Chile lived in terror at the outset of the summer of 1816, and precisely for that reason its forty thousand inhabitants decided to enjoy themselves until they died and to spend every cent they had. But the rumor mill, as in Lima, worked to its full capacity in the continuous, simultaneous parties with which royalist society, more and more depleted, sought to exorcise its fear of an insurgent victory, and sought in vain for possible allies among the Creoles, whom Marcó del Pont’s repressive violence had delivered over to the patriots. They clandestinely circulated Father Camilo Henríquez’s newspaper, Dawn of Chile, which contained news that should have been assumed to be false since it came from the mutinous enemy, unless the rebels were deluding themselves. The purpose of the social gatherings in the Chilean capital, during those months of oppressive heat and of peaches peeled a second before they rotted, was to gather information, air all rumors, place wagers on the future of the colony, and listen to anyone who had the merest particle of information.
“The rebels are mad,” Baltasar Bustos would say, strolling contemptuously through the Chilean soirees with a tiny glass of white wine in his hand. “They’ve gone all-out in deploying troops for a general attack along an eeeenormous front; they’re going to cut all of you to bits, so get a good night’s sleep. Me? I’m harmless, just looking for a certain woman.”
Those listening to this fop — as the English court, adorned at the time by Beau Brummel, would no doubt have called him — wondered if a myopic, soft dandy who proclaimed his passion so publicly could really love the woman he said he was pursuing. No, he couldn’t possibly love her so much if he was so vocal in mentioning her. Perhaps it was just the sickness of the age: tiring passionately, being oneself only by being one’s romantic passion, which was certainly sufficient, if painful, for the interior hero invented by the likes of Rousseau and Chateaubriand.
“All I ask of the world is that it grant me a point of departure: the woman I love,” said Bustos, between the sighs of the Chilean girls, the most beautiful in America. But he would quickly disillusion them with a mannered gesture and a clarification: “But I don’t want you to think I desire a companion. Not in the slightest. I only need — can you chaste damsels listening to me understand? — a love object. An object for my love.”