She was his little mistress — he decided to give her that name, just as we called him our little brother.
One afternoon, the little brother and the little mistress met without having fixed a time. He jumped over the low wall separating the two properties just as she was coming out of the entrance to her house. Neither yielded, but both gave all. She explained to him that her behavior the other night had not been the infantile act of a spoiled girl trying to entertain in polite society. She really did want to be an actress, she believed in independence — not only political but personal, too. The two went together, at least that is what she believed. Here in Chile, in other parts of the New World, even in Europe, she would pursue her career. She loved words, said Gabriela Cóo; each word had its own life and required the same care as a newborn child. When she opened her mouth, as she did the other night, and repeated a word — love, pleasure, world, sea — she had to take charge of that word like a mother, like a shepherdess, like a lover, yes, even like a little mistress, convinced that, without her, without her mouth, her tongue, the word would smash against a wall of silence and die forsaken.
But to take charge of words that weren’t her own, the words of Rousseau, Ruiz de Alarcón, or Sophocles, she had to prepare herself for a long time. She would give nothing to a man unless he first gave her words. For her, love was a vocation as strong as the theater, but words also sustained love. All this was very difficult, even a little sad — Gabriela Cóo put her arm around Baltasar and patted his curls — because her work was pure shadow, fleeting, left no mark: only the words, poor things, that preceded it were left, and would be, even without her. In order to give meaning to her life of spectral voices, what else could Gabriela think except that, thanks to her mouth, the words had not died but had actually gained a modicum of life, body, dignity, who knows what else?
She felt for Baltasar’s nape under his curly hair and asked if he understood her. He said he did; he knew she understood him equally well. She knew he loved her and why he acted and spoke that way at the Santiago dinners he frequented and why they would be parting soon.
“Tell me it’s not because of that other woman.” Gabriela Cóo thus made her only faux pas, explicable in any case, and he forgave her but decided at that moment to separate her from his life, to give her the freedom she needed, and to give himself to the slavery his obsession with Ofelia entailed until he consummated his passion. At the moment, he could see no other way to be faithful to this adorable girl, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, my love, my adored little love, delightful Gabriela; we shall never truly know our own hearts, Little Mistress.
He so desired the only kiss he and Gabriela exchanged, his vision of that act was so intense, so red were the girl’s lips when they joined his, their mouths parting and their tongues joining and separating only to tickle their palates and count their avid, cruel, and tender teeth, that from it there emerged another mouth, another kiss, a kiss that stole theirs away, banished it, took it from them and turned it into the kiss, the mouth, the voice of Ofelia Salamanca.
And that was the third thing that happened.
He promised himself not to think about Gabriela until he could be hers alone.
[3]
Facing Santiago, but separated from it by the rampart of the Andes, Mendoza — capital of the Argentine province of Cuyo — was the revolutionary center of the Americas. The sweetness of its valley of vines and cherry trees, the eternal springtime of its warm breezes and its snow-capped backdrop, its lands given over to golden pear trees and fertile earth, was all negated. Mendoza was given over to the extremes of cold calculation and infernal din because of the activities of the Army of the Andes that was forming, in spite of all apathy and against all obstacles.
At the beginning, there was nothing; San Martín set about turning that nothing into war supplies. He ordered contributions, extorted money from everyone, pestered President Pueyrredón to distraction, exhorted the ladies of Mendoza to donate their jewels at the municipal council, proscribed luxury, and cut officers’ salaries in half. From the back of a horse no taller than the liberating general himself, sitting bolt upright, barely thirty-seven years old but already showing an incipient maturity that did not wholly extinguish the veiled glint in his eyes or the stubborn determination in his mouth, he proclaimed:
“Cuyo must sweat money for the liberation of America; from this day forward, each one of us must stand guard over his own life.”
The Supreme Director of the Junta of Buenos Aires, Pueyrredón, was not willing to be second to San Martín either in will or in zeal in a feat which in Buenos Aires was being compared with those of Hannibal, Caesar, and Napoleon: “From Buenos Aires we send you dispatch cases, uniforms, shirts. We send you two thousand replacement sabers and two hundred field tents. We send you, in a small box, the only two bugles we could find. And that’s enough,” wrote Pueyrredón. “We send the World. We send the Flesh. We send the Devil. I don’t have the remotest idea how I’m going to worm my way out of the contracts I’ve signed to pay for all of it. Damn it! Don’t ask me for another thing!”
Cuyo did sweat, Mendoza dried up, and even the church bells and vineyards were squeezed to get blunderbusses and harquebuses, carbines and sabers, daggers and tridents, the pistols, and the yataghans, those fearsome Turkish-style swords with silver hilts.
Already Major De la Plaza is at work, quartermaster in charge of supplies and arms; Alvarez Condarco, the Tucumán chemist, mixes nitrates to make different kinds of gunpowder. In his armory, Brother Luis de Beltrán tucks his cassock up on his waist as he casts cannon and bombs, while his neighbor, Tejada, sweats over his vats, dyeing cloth blue to make new uniforms. Right down to the humblest artisan, everyone contributes something to the campaign, even if it’s a lance cut from a reed; the poorest mule skinner turns over his animals, just as the doctors deliver their medicines to the hospital founded by Dr. Zapata. And if donations don’t come willingly, then San Martín’s men forcibly tear blankets and sheets off the beds, occupied or empty, of those living nearby. “There is no house that cannot give up an old sheet,” shout these pirates of liberty, proclaiming themselves beggars rather than thieves. “When all else fails, we all have to beg.”
But all the hustle and bustle, the clanging, the singing and dancing, the hammers smashing red-hot iron, the neighs, and the banging are like a vast silence when, at dusk on that January day, three horsemen enter General José de San Martín’s camp in Mendoza. Three horsemen hurtling down the mountains who cannot rein in their mounts, who spur them on to run, jump, and dodge obstacles around the armories, the supply sheds, the shops, and the mills, until the three sweating, tense chargers meld in the corral and stables with the three thousand horses, the seven thousand mules, and the myriad cows that constitute the marching stock of the Army of the Andes.
The three friends dismount, laughing and shouting, embracing, congratulating one another for being friends, for being alive, for having arrived, for bringing news, and above all for their manly comradeship, the friendship of their twenty-five years, the success of having crossed the Andes on horseback from Santiago — so swiftly that they are their own messengers:
The priest Francisco Arias, handsome and devout, twenty years of age, given to fervent readings and to those sensualities he deems worthy of his all-embracing faith and his noble intelligence.
Lieutenant Juan de Echagüe, valiant and dashing with his reddish favoris that show to equal advantage combed for a ball or tangled with dust.