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Traveling with the Irish sailors between Callao and Panama, Baltasar Bustos recovered the slim figure he had during his days in Upper Peru; with only a Panama hat (bought in Guayaquil) for cover, he insisted on crossing the emerald forest between the two seas, between Pedro Miguel and Portobelo. The Indians of San Blas, whose faces marked with blue scars were a wounded parallel to the immutable colossi of Barriles, guided him among clay statues in the shape of men standing on each other’s shoulders. The waters of the Panamanian lagoons reflected nothing, so intense was the sun that blinded the men during the day. And at night he could make out the lights of Portobelo, where a second schooner, on the other side of the isthmus, waited to take him to Maracaibo, the ancient fortress of the Spanish Main, besieged from time to time by the arms and later by the fame of Drake and Cavendish. But now, in more recent memory, Maracaibo’s renown was associated with the pirate Laurent de Graff, who never attacked the Venezuelan harbor unless accompanied by a private orchestra of violinists and drummers; and the French captain Montauban, who would appear on its briny streets only in a sedan chair carried by stevedores and preceded, even at midday, by a procession of torchbearers.
The fame of the ancient English, French, and Dutch pirates was nothing compared with that which ran before our hero, Baltasar Bustos, in his celebrated search for Ofelia Salamanca throughout the American continent. The trails of the alpaca and the mule were slow, the jungles thick, the mountain ranges arid and impassable, the seas of the buccaneers bloody, and the ravines deep, but news traveled faster than any Indian messenger or Irish schooner: a fellow of unimpressive aspect, plump, long-haired, myopic, has been in pursuit of the beautiful Chilean Ofelia Salamanca, from the estuary of the Plata to the gulf of Maracaibo. They say he’s never seen her, much less touched her, but his passion compensates for everything and, despite his physical weakness, stirs him to fight, saber in hand, for the independence of America, side by side with the fearsome guerrillas of Miguel Lanza in the mud of the Inquisivi, with the legendary Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas at the head of the Indian hordes of the Ayopaya, with José de San Martín himself in the heroic crossing of the Andes.
Some hero! Baltasar Bustos said to himself when in the fetid port of Buenaventura he heard the first song about his love, transformed into a cumbia and danced, amid long, black plantains that resembled the phalluses of extinct giants, by immense black women, their heads decked out in red-checked handkerchiefs tied in fours. The multiple skirts the women wore did not impede them from communicating exactly what was there below or from moving their hips rhythmically, regularly, delightfully, and slowly. Some hero! Baltasar repeated to himself in Panama, listening to the story of his frustrated romance transformed into a tamborito and danced by Creole girls as white as cream, wrapped in immense skirts that turned their bodies, like those of milky spiders, into fans. Some hero — who had to struggle to resist the temptation of shortbread and powder cakes that dissolve on your lips, prickly pears, and caramelized custard apples in those dancing ports between a scorching Pacific, free of the frozen waters of Baron von Humboldt’s current, and a lulling Caribbean, separated only by Panama’s pinched waist, the sash worn by the dancing and singing black girls: Here comes Baltasar Bustos, looking for Ofelia Salamanca, from the pampa to the lowlands! Some hero! Who would recognize him, not plump as the song had him, but once again thin, his stomach muscles hardened by days before the mast with the Irish sailors, who made their hours of work into a happy game and their hours of drunkenness and rest (which were one and the same) into nostalgic sobbing: Baltasar Bustos, chestnut-hued, his hair honey-colored, his beard and mustache blond — reborn, resembling the prickly pear he resisted the temptation to eat, his thighs taut, his bare legs covered with golden down, his chest hairless and damp with sweat, and the long hair in his armpits intimating the most salacious secrets. This was not the Baltasar of the cumbia or the tamborito—or, for that matter, of the merengue (here his mouth watered because he automatically thought of meringue).
His fame preceded him, but no one recognized him. He threw the last sign of his legendary identity — his round glasses with the silver frames — into the sea as he left the mouth of the Guayas River, where he heard his first satiric Andean song, a zamba that had come all the way from Lake Titicaca to Mount Chimborazo, if not dragged along by a dying condor, then hissed out by an irate llama.
This was his fate: people idolized him and wanted him to triumph both in war and in love. Even the blacks, who were kept away from the gangplank of the schooner in Maracaibo by shouts of “Evil race!” bawled out by exasperated royalist officers — even they peered out from among the sacks of cacao, whiter and certainly less damned than they. These blacks, despised by the Spaniards and the Creoles, were the defeated troops of another revolt, “the insurrection of the other species,” which very soon recognized the reality of the wars of independence: everyone wanted freedom for themselves, but no one wanted equality for the blacks, who unleashed their rage against every white man in Venezuela — Spaniard, creole, Simón Bolivar himself (who condemned the black explosion at Guatire as the work of an inhuman and atrocious people who fed on the blood and property of the patriots). Baltasar Bustos now saw the embers of rage in their yellow eyes and sweaty bodies, which the Spaniards kept back, so his baggage and that of the Irish sailors with whom he blended could be unloaded. He walked on ground that seemed to him unstable, under a sky he saw suspended, all of it, like certain clouds we stare at for a long time in the calmest summers, hoping they’ll move so that we can, too: how can we move if the world has stopped dead in its tracks?
The revolution was winning in the south under San Martín; in the north, Bolívar’s early victories had been wiped out by the Spanish reconquest led by the ferocious General Morillo. The revolution in the north was sustained only by the tenacity of Simón Bolívar, exiled first in Jamaica and now back in his southern base at Angostura, his redoubt and refuge after his defeat by Morillo in the battle of the Semen, which took place almost at the same time San Martín was winning the battle of Chacabuco, with Bustos at his side. Those battles were followed by the defeat of the great rebel plainsman Páez in the battle of Cojedes. Semen and Cojedes, two battles that bottled up the patriots south of the Orinoco, and two comic words — the first for obvious reasons, the second because it recalled a euphemistic creole verb for “fornication”—which were savored by Baltasar Bustos as a good omen about his amatory fortunes in this Venezuela which Ofelia Salamanca had already reached, ahead of him as always and wildly enthusiastic about the implacable royalist brutality of Morillo.
“She passed through Guayaquil, heading for Buenaventura.”
“She disembarked in Panama, crossed the Isthmus.”
“She took ship in Cartagena for Maracaibo. The Spaniards are strong there, so she can toast their victories, the bitch.”
An ailing port of brothels and shops, the latter empty because Maracaibo was under constant siege by the rebel forces, the former overflowing with all the refuse tossed up by a war which had been going on for eight years, during which time the armies of the king fought the patriots over harvests and cattle, while slaves fled burned-out haciendas and masters doggedly clung to slavery with or without independence. The peasants had no land, the townspeople had no towns to return to, the artisans had no work, the widows and orphans flooded into the royalist port out of which chocolate, in ever diminishing quantities, was exported. As always, our bitter supper sent out all of its desserts to the world.