Baltasar Bustos tossed his glasses into the Guayas River. They hadn’t helped him find Ofelia Salamanca. Now, with no guide but his passion, he would traverse plains and mountains, rivers and forests until he wore out the legend and made it into reality. For an entire year, while Bolívar conquered New Granada and royalist power spent itself because it had to be constantly on guard, Venezuela lived in suspense, waiting for the decisive battle between the Liberator and the royalists, between Páez and his lancers and Morillo and his Spanish regulars. But in Maracaibo’s brothels, bars, hospitals, docks, and warehouses — and no longer in the salons, as he had in Lima and Santiago — Baltasar Bustos sought out news of his beloved that would justify, when the two met, the songs that were being sung right there — and not at nonexistent creole balls — by whores, mule drivers, children, stevedores, and nuns from the first-aid station: the ballad of Baltasar and Ofelia.
Did she know them? Did she know those lyrics, some funny, some silly, most dirty? Was she what the songs said: an Amazon with one breast cut off, the better to use her bow and arrow, who came from a country exclusively of women, who left it once a year to become pregnant and who killed all male children? The way those ballads described him was also not true. Obsessed, he walked every street and alley in the tropical port, hoping to glean accurate information and hearing only inaccurate songs, wearing himself out in the unrelenting humidity, eating bad food, in perpetual danger of fever.
A pair of eyes followed him as he became a familiar though unidentifiable figure. This man was not the one from the song. But the eyes that followed him had seen him like this before, as he was now, just as he had been when he returned from the Upper Peru campaign, thin and hard. From a bay window, the eyes watched him through shutter slats and black veils. This woman had always appeared enveloped in dark cloth, but now her dresses of gloomy, mournful black were no longer reflected in the glitter of drizzly Lima nights.
She sent a sharp little black boy dressed as a harlequin to bring him to her. Thus it was that Baltasar entered the Harlequin House in Maracaibo for the first time. Fame had kept him away; the whorehouse was as famous as the legend of Ofelia and Baltasar, and he was afraid of being recognized there. Fame is shared and recognized everywhere. Bustos was right. He was recognized, but not when he came in, not by the company of the bordello nymphs, women of all colors and tastes, whom Baltasar imagined, as he strolled among these odalisques with naked bellies, as all tied to nature by their wide or deep, wrinkled or pristine navels, nearer to or farther from the separating scissors, but all those navels sighing with a life of their own, as if a whore were a whore simply to prolong the splendid idleness and the sinless sensualities, suspended in nothingness, of prenatal life. Undulating whores: lewd blacks from Puerto Cabello, lank Indians from Guayana, repentant mestizas from Arauca, cynical Creole girls from Caracas, the French from Martinique with their fans, a Chinese with a breast between her legs, bovine Dutch from Curaçao, distracted English tarts from Barbados who pretended not to be there at all. Baltasar Bustos, led by the black harlequin, smelled their mustard and urine, incense and skunk, congereel and sandalwood, guava and Campeche wood, tea and wet sand, sheep; all these humors gathered in the grand salon decorated in the style of Napoleon I, with ottomans, plaster sphinxes, fixed lights, and stopped clocks, the grand salon of the most famous brothel in a port famous for piracy, plunder, and slavery, now besieged by the patriots of an empire, Spain’s, that believed itself installed there for all eternity.
The harlequin and Baltasar finally reached their destination, and Baltasar stood as if before a conquered queen, conquered by herself. The greedy eyes of the prostitutes followed him until the doors closed behind him. The woman in black lost no time: she said she’d been expecting him to turn up, even though she knew that he did not want to find within the brothel what he was looking for outside. He was involved in other things — she was told everything — because out there he could not expect to find this Ofelia Salamanca. But here he did, correct? No, he shook his head, not here, either; I’ve almost lost all hope of ever finding her. At this stage in the game, Baltasar, would you prefer never to find her, to go on searching forever because that justifies your life, this rhythm that makes you crazy and makes all of us women crazy when we sing and dance it? Not even a Chinese girl with three breasts? Our dearest?
“Don’t betray me. I recognized you from the party in Lima.”
She swore not to say who Baltasar was. And she knew how to keep a secret. He did want to know how she had come to this house from the salons of the viceroyalty, did he not? Baltasar said nothing. She thanked him for his discretion but promised him: “When you come back, I’ll tell you everything.”
But now, she added quickly, with an expression of mourning that seemed to be the very face of evening, which glittered between her flesh and her dark robes, giving light to death, he had to go on to Mérida and from there go up to the mountains, to Páramo, the cold barren plain, and then, at Pico del Aguila, turn around and come back here.
“Will I find her there?”
“I cannot guarantee it. You will find her legend, in any case.”
“That I already know. It’s sung, along with my own.”
“About that woman you desire, no one knows the truth.”
“Then how will I know it?”
“I think by looking for her, even if you don’t find her.”
“Did you meet her in Lima, Luz María?”
“Never say that name again. I am not that person any longer.”
[2]
These words intensified Baltasar’s hunger. Without his glasses, he did not see well, but his other senses — smell, especially, and hearing — were more intense than ever. As he set out on his new journey, he felt unable to distinguish what he managed to see from what he smelled, heard, and, ultimately, what he dreamed. In Upper Peru, he’d once said he was afraid to admire everything he wasn’t, simply for that reason. But now a swift concatenation of songs — would songs always be the fastest means of communication in this vast, sprawling continent? — offered Baltasar Bustos the image of a man who was and was not himself: physically he was not that man, although in his soul, the moving mirror of the times he was living, he was. The passion commemorated in the songs was real; who knows if the story of a hero who used war to compensate for his mournful lack of love was, as well. But no melody — Peruvian waltz, cueca, cumbia, vidalita—told the truth he’d communicated to two fathers, his own and the Jesuit tutor Julián Ríos, and to two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela. Of course, we were so far away, so involved with our clocks and our Buenos Aires politics — governments fell, warlords from the provinces invaded, anarchy took over our dreams — that we didn’t even remember the legend of our friend Baltasar and the beautiful Ofelia. Two other friends, whose life and death filled us with envy and zeal, the priest Arias and Lieutenant Echagüe, died without knowing Baltasar’s secret: the kidnapping and substituting of the two babies. That provided some relief to our battered pride. We had started to become Argentines without realizing it.
But we did realize that in seeking Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar Bustos was seeking not only to satisfy a passion but also to receive a pardon.
And now, climbing by mule from the deep valleys and through the narrow passes of the Mérida mountains to the crenellated retaining walls of the foothills of the Andes, he asked forgiveness for one last time. Forgive me, Ofelia Salamanca, for what I did to your child.
And what about the black baby? Wasn’t Baltasar going to ask forgiveness — out of politeness — for what he did to him? No. Perhaps the black mother, publicly flogged for daring to have a child though she had syphilis, had suffered all the child himself deserved to suffer. But in this search for Ofelia, Baltasar was satisfying another passion besides the romantic one attributed to him: the spiritual passion of seeking Ofelia to fall on his knees before her and ask forgiveness. Forgive me for having kidnapped your child.