Between Tabay and Mucurumba, the landscape of the Andes shed its cover, showing itself naked, grayish-brown, cracked, abrupt, and before it the young reader of Rousseau insisted on imagining a man in nature who was spontaneously good, who was alienated by society, and masked by an evil that had nothing at all to do with nature: evil comes from elsewhere, not from us. He lost this article of Romantic faith, as if it were a cold griddle cake, when an old man sitting on a sack of potatoes in the town of Mucuchíes told him that, yes, the treacherous Ofelia Salamanca had passed through, and at that very house you see there, the one painted red and pink, she had asked a royalist colonel not to kill an armed patriot who had barricaded himself in it, not expecting to get out alive, but with “his honor intact.” The colonel agreed. The patriot threw his weapons out that white-framed window right there. Then she went in, took off her clothes, and showed herself naked to the patriot. She didn’t say a word. The entire town was in suspense, waiting to see what would happen. Everything could be seen through the open windows. She was naked and said nothing. But she allowed the patriot to look at her, at all of her. Then she ordered him out and herself told the firing squad to shoot.
What had all the girls seen, the ones with round faces, with apple cheeks, who tied their hats on with scarves to keep the mountain wind from blowing them away? What did all the old men sitting along the principal streets of all these Andean towns think? Those old men never died. They’d been here for a thousand years. The same length of time as the red yaraguá grass, the rich cattle pasture that managed to survive on this bald mountain — old cattle, as well. In the towns farther up, only old men and children were left, old men with silvery wrinkles and girls with long hair. What had they seen, what had they heard said about Ofelia Salamanca? They say she had a rebel captain killed while he was shitting at the gates of La Guaira. She waited until that moment, just to humiliate him. In Valencia, on the other hand, she forced a royalist general to turn himself in and die with a rope around his neck, on his knees, to beg forgiveness for his sins.
Ofelia Salamanca: just as the yellow-flowered frailejon survives the cold of the highlands to dot the mountainsides like calligraphy, stories about Ofelia Salamanca dot this Santo Domingo mountain range. And just as the frailejon’s flowers form a candelabrum that rises above the fleshy shrub, that’s how she rose here, hunting down patriots until there were none left and she’d be without victims. Right here in this wasteland town, where the buzzards fly ceaselessly, that woman lacking a breast and good sense, said this to the rebel commander besieging the forts along the Orinoco:
“If you beat the royalists, you can take me prisoner and kill me.”
“And if the Spaniards beat us?”
“You and I will make love.”
“A delightful opportunity, you Spaniard-loving slut. I won’t miss it, you can bet on it.”
“But there’s one condition. You mustn’t allow yourself to lose just to make love to me. Because then I’ll kill you. Agreed?”
He did let himself be beaten just to make love to her — as the mountain bards would sing it — and so he died in her arms, a dagger in his back.
What did all these men know who died in her arms, at her order, when they saw her naked, when they let themselves be conquered by her? Who was this Creole Penthesilea?
In the desolate nature of the high Venezuelan wastes, Baltasar Bustos listened but did not find a joyful reciprocity in his solitary, self-sufficient soul, that would unite the individual with things, or promise with actuality. On the contrary, Ofelia’s human acts obviated any possibility of reconciliation, rendering diabolical the very business of nature, from which the beautiful and cruel Chilean lady seemed to emanate and in which she found both her justification and her reflection. His faith in a possible reconciliation between man and nature was also shattered at that moment; we are burdened with too many sins, he whispered into the ear of the wasteland, to the old man and the young girl. Any reconciliation would be forced; we have no other choice but to go on hurting each other, and nothing will hurt us more than capricious passions, authoritarian disdain, power exercised without restraint: Ofelia Salamanca.
He saw the woman’s face in the frozen, sterile, immensely beautiful mountains: he reached, protected by his Panama hat, the crest of the bird of prey, the back of the dead camel, the Eagle’s Beak, which had the shape of a necklace lost there, as if carelessly, by Ofelia Salamanca, this incomprehensible woman, this endless enigma, who had finally worn out her romantic lover; he was thankful that the fierce yellow flower invaded this pure nakedness only between July and August, quickly abandoning the mountains to their clean, undecorated solitude. A baroque woman, of obscene sumptuousness, whose dazzling excretions and lugubrious rewards were seeking to revive something inert: in that instant, Baltasar believed he’d finally expunged her from his heart and exiled her from his mind.
But the void she left was immense. He descended bit by bit, convinced that he’d found the woman transformed into eternal stone, occasional flower, the stone sterile, the flower poisonous; and he again sought spontaneous delight in the diffuse sweetness of the reborn landscape of the valleys, the hooves of the sheep, the thatched roofs of the houses, and the fields of green carnations like lemon groves.
But all these Spanish flowers in the Venezuelan Andes — carnations, roses, and geraniums — could not fill the void left by Ofelia. The war could; trotting near the shadow of the extended eaves of the village houses, Baltasar accepted that his life, which he once imagined unique, without fissures — nature and history reconciled in his person — was forever sundered, and, as those inevitable song books already had it, all that was left to him was to bounce from war to war, from south to north and from north to south, to carry out his legendary destiny, which had already been mapped out in popular song … He would stop at sunrise to partake of delicious mountain cheese, Andean bread, and pineapple wine, but not even those details of life escaped the fate already dictated in the song. Chewing, he thought about Homer, the Cid, Shakespeare: their epic dramas were written before they were lived. Achilles and Ximena, Helen, and Richard the hunchback in real life had done nothing but follow the poet’s scenic instructions and act out what had already been set down. We call this inversion of metaphor “history,” the naïve belief that, first, things happen and then they are written. That was an illusion, but he no longer fooled himself.
At that very moment, as an old woman was serving him a plate of griddle cakes in an inn by the side of the Macurumba road, it occurred to Baltasar Bustos to ask her about the war. To which she replied, “What war?”
Baltasar laughed and ate. At times, in these isolated towns, people don’t find out about anything — or they find out very late, only when the bard gives his version of events. But in Mucuchíes, hours later, he found the same old man sitting on the same sack of potatoes and asked him the same question—“How’s the war going?”—and received the same reply—“What war? What are you talking about?” The news was all over town instantly. The children took the opportunity to have some fun and tease. They made a circle around him, singing, “What war? What war?” and when he broke out of the magic circle of children and asked their elders who Simón Bolívar, Antonio Páez, and José Antonio Sucre were, they all said the same thing: “We don’t know them. Are they from around here? Has anyone heard of them? Ask the old man who plays the violin in El Tabay.”