They turned their backs on him. Perhaps that young, handsome priest looking so intently at Baltasar understood him. Approaching him, the priest said that Baltasar’s words made him think there was something more in them than it seemed from their apparent frivolity. Unrequited love is the most intense of all.
“So you, too, have read St. John Chrysostom,” said Baltasar, remembering a violent May night in Buenos Aires. “But now”—he sighed—“our secret passions no longer matter. Order itself is in danger. I have lived with these guerrilla criminals. I know what they’re capable of doing, to women, to priests like you … We’ve got to hang them before they hang us.”
“Dandy,” blurted out the priest, slapping Baltasar across the face.
“Oh! I saw you from a distance in Lima, I know who you are, so be careful,” replied Bustos.
A third young man, a royalist officer, whose high, embroidered collar pinched his cheeks painfully and eclipsed his thick, reddish, carefully cultivated sideburns, pulled them apart. The young lieutenant said this was no time for provoking arguments and making people more nervous. The priest put himself in serious danger by defending the rebels, even if he did so out of Christian charity. Bustos should try to restrain himself, however understandable it might be for a man with a price on his head to be on edge. But the Inquisivi rebels had not yet reached Santiago. He could relax. No, Baltasar replied, they hadn’t, but San Martín had. “The army he’s gathered in Argentina is going to attack us from all sides, there won’t be enough supplies…”
The lieutenant with the sideburns ordered him to be quiet. He was sowing confusion and raising tensions. San Martín would attack from the south, where crossing the mountains was easier. Who would risk crossing the highest peaks? No one had ever marched an army through the Aconcagua Valley. It’s almost four miles up! In fact, San Martín himself had had a great meeting with the Pechuenche chiefs to get permission to pass through their flatlands. He would surprise us Spaniards at Planchón and give the Indians back their freedom.
“Forces sufficient to stop any rebel invasion are already marching to Planchón,” said the cocky lieutenant, hooking one thumb over his wide belt while with his other hand he caressed the soft fingers of his snow-white parade gloves.
“Do you actually believe one word of what those lying Indians tell you?” Baltasar Bustos laughed.
“Everything suggests they’ve betrayed San Martín,” said Lieutenant Sideburns.
“Just as they would betray us royalists,” insisted Baltasar, playing on the expectations of the small group gathering to listen to them. “No one knows what to think anymore!”
“We should really beware of illuminati priests besotted with French readings,” added the young priest, as if to erase, then and there, any bad impression he might have made and to confuse the discussion even more. “We have the power of confession, and we have influence on the conscience of the military, the bureaucrats, the housewives … I know that disloyal priests abound in Chile, and that they never leave off their labor of undermining everything.”
“Those divisive priests have split my family, fathers against sons,” said a sallow little captain as he arranged his cream-colored shirt front with a gesture that belied his rancor. “And that I can never forgive them.”
“I know nothing about that,” said the red-haired lieutenant energetically. “All I know is that there isn’t a single mountain pass where we don’t have troops ready to repel San Martín, no matter where in the Andes he turns up.”
“Do you know that your beloved Ofelia murdered Captain Echagüe in bed, while they were fornicating?” the young priest said to Baltasar in a mysterious, seductive, cruel tone, but loud enough that the summer girls, the eternal little mistresses of Santiago society, could hear him with scandalized delight.
[2]
Baltasar cut such a comic, blind, addled-witted figure at the parties of the waning Chilean colony that it shouldn’t have surprised him that people took more notice of him than he of them. The soirees followed on each other like a series of prolonged farewells extending from the salons of the Royal Council to the elegant country houses east of the city, through the baroque of the carved ceiling panels, the wrought-iron work, and the huge portals of Velasco House in the center of the city.
To honor the memory of Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar made a big show of haunting the chambers of the Royal Council, like a soul in torment; that was where the deceased Marquis de Cabra had presided before being sent to Buenos Aires. It was a new building, just finished in 1808, with twenty cast-iron windows on the second floor, wrought-iron balconies on the third, and a sequence of patios and galleries that reminded our hero (which is what you are, Baltasar) of the spacious River Plate Superior Court where his life was determined for all time.
This Santiago building owed its existence to a governor who arrived firmly committed to implanting the culture of the Enlightenment in Spain’s most remote southern colony. Luis Muñoz de Guzmán took Charles III’s ideas of modernization seriously and disembarked at the port of Valparaíso bearing musical instruments, baroque-music scores, perhaps some forbidden books, and no doubt the plays that soon began to be put on in those same patios and salons, under the patronage of his wife, Doña Luisa de Esterripa.
Nothing on this summer afternoon would have kept Baltasar Bustos from the performance taking place in one of the mansions — after all, it was nothing less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Discovery of America—except that at that same hour, on every afternoon since he arrived in Santiago, Baltasar Bustos would step out on the balcony of the house where he was staying, a house that belonged to an old friend of his father’s, a Spaniard who’d made his fortune in the New World and left all his property to go back to Spain. From that vantage point, he would observe a vision in the neighboring garden.
At around five in the afternoon, a girl would appear among the olive and almond trees. Dressed all in white, she seemed to float in a private cloud of soft cottons and gauze bodices. Baltasar would wait for the appearance of this phantom: she was always punctual and always distant, like a new star, half sun, half moon, displaying herself to him alone, offering herself to him in the tender orbit of a satellite around a true star — him. As she approached, this delightful girl would spin among the almond trees; coming closer and closer, she would twirl on her always bare feet in a dance that Baltasar wanted to think was dedicated to him — after all, there were no other spectators but the sun and the moon, which at that uncertain hour coexist in the Andean sky.
Only once, Baltasar looked at the two of them, the sun and moon present at five o’clock in the afternoon over a garden of wise and serene plants. They could not compete with her; she was both of them at once, and many other things as well.
A fine sun, as hot and caressing as the familiar hand of a mother who knows she is taken for granted and resigns herself to not being especially loved; but also an evil sun about to execute the day by hurling it into an irreversible conflagration from which it would never rise: the sun was the stepmother of time.
And a bad moon, which appeared now as if to seal the day’s fate with a silver lock, white moon drained of life, pale moon with a vampire’s face, bloodless moon hungry for offal and bloody discharges; but a good moon too, the bed of the day reposing in white sheets, the final bath that washes off the day’s grime and sinks us into the amorous re-creation of time which is sleep.