“Of course I’m burying him here with his name, next to the mother who was ashamed of him, damn it. But what shame, what fear, what shitty prohibitions!” exclaimed the old man.
[3]
He was afraid of turning into a Robinson Crusoe of the mountains, so one day he set out to return to Maracaibo. He left behind the frigid wasteland and the mountains dotted with frailejon; when he reached the valleys, the tall, slender trees with bearded limbs, tropical moss that hangs like perennially gray hair from the ever renewed head of a trunk filled with young sap, bade him farewell.
He left behind a lost battalion. He would never find it or name its heroes. He felt he was leaving a different time, and his passage through the high, bleak plateau reminded him vaguely of another brief period, which his memory did not want to register, which escaped the norms of his philosophic reason. But in those days his reason had been stronger; now everything conspired, or so he thought, to weaken it, and the time he spent in this bleak region seemed thus more comprehensible, more acceptable, than that other time on that other mountain. The key word, though, was time, and all he had to do was enter Maracaibo on a steamy morning, consult the front page of a Caracas newspaper sold in the port, corroborate the date with a pharmacist, who charged for the use of the calendar in his almanac, and he must accept that a period of time which in his experience was very long, which in his memory spanned three whole months, had been barely two weeks. Two weeks between his leaving Maracaibo and his return.
The woman in perpetual mourning was waiting for him in Harlequin House. She invited him to move in. He was like her, no one else was; both of them came from the Creole south, were acquainted with the viceregal salons, knew how to eat properly, and he (she supposed) would step aside for a lady. No, it was not for what he was thinking. That gallant gentleman from Lima who one night, in the presence of his wife, silently invited her to be his lover knew what he was doing. Recently widowed, she was hungry for sex, but sex with imagination. The sagacious and perverse Peruvian understood that and knew she could not resist his daring to court her right under his wife’s nose. It was as if he were taking away her mourning and anticipating his wife’s widowhood. Yes, that aristocrat from Lima certainly had imagination. He also had syphilis and scorned the woman dressed in black for falling so easily and accepting the tainted love the gentleman could not offer his own wife. A widow, she told him, is totally useless. There are no aristocrats crueler or more arrogant than those of Peru, the widow concluded. They are the Florentines of the New World.
“Why, then, did you come to Maracaibo?”
“A Chinese doctor in Lima told me that the sea air in these parts spontaneously cures venereal disease.”
“You don’t disgust me,” Baltasar said surprisingly — as if another voice had said it for him — surprised that a voice that was not his own would express itself thus. Yet he recognized it as his own — only, before, it had been asleep, hiding.
She laughed. “Go on, if that’s what you want. The girls will let you have it for nothing. My sex, Baltasar, is a sewer.”
“And your doctor, Lutecia, is a rogue and a charlatan.”
Both of them liked the name, the name of permanent mourning of the woman from Lima. Day and night would find Baltasar in the bordello of the harlequins, where, by simple arithmetic, he realized he’d become a desirable man. Perhaps some of the girls approached him because Lutecia had explained the situation of the young, exhausted hero; but though he paid none of them, they all sought him out, because — as they began to whisper in his ear — he was handsome, because he was rich, because he was smooth, because of his distant, unseeing eyes, because of the way he treated women, all women, like high-born ladies. “You make me feel like a duchess,” the English girl told him; “Personne ne m’a traitée comme toi,” the French girl told him; the sullen Indians said nothing but were as grateful as the chattering blacks, who did say, “With you we feel different. You relieve us of centuries of insults and kicks, damn it.”
No one knew that he was giving to them, the harem of the Harlequin, what he had been saving for one alone, his sullied Columbine. He wanted to expunge her from his mind, just as the old general on the Tabay cattle ranch imagining disasters to come had expelled in anticipation all Liberators from their freshly minted nations. Still, he did not cease being loyal to Ofelia Salamanca, and a Creole girl from Caracas, with heavy-lidded eyes and an olive-colored body, said to him, “It’s possible to be loyal without having to be faithful.”
He covered her face with kisses. He wished he could cover Ofelia Salamanca’s face with kisses, too, but without her knowing it. At least in this instance, reality and desire were one: the Creole girl melted in her orgasm because she was really in love. It no longer mattered what the night might bring. But Baltasar lived first (and he lived fully) only to present himself later before Ofelia after having lived with other women what he wanted to live with her: a night of endless kisses on the beloved’s face, and she would never know.
“Listen, if you treat us like ladies, do you treat your lady like a whore?” asked the Cartesian inmate of the Harlequin.
He always thought (this was his greatest mental loyalty) that the best there was in him could emerge from his admiration for everything he wasn’t. He had summarized his destiny in this idea. It was another way of thinking that, by being exposed to the danger of this admiration, he would ultimately be the best he could reasonably be. He patiently explained all this to Lutecia when at dawn, which was the end of the workday, the two of them were eating papayas with lemon and scented guavas in the madam’s rooms, protected by the shutters from Maracaibo’s nascent heat.
“These times have seen many men who are less convinced of their ideas than they are eager to impose them on others,” he said to the woman from Lima. She listened to him talk and repeated, mysteriously, something he’d told her many years before: “Or to punish them for not having those ideas. You’re right.”
He told Lutecia, the former Luz María of the Lima salons, everything he knew about himself except for the kidnapping of Ofelia Salamanca’s child. She replied that there is always something not known or left unsaid, simply because there hasn’t yet been a correspondence between the deed and the word. We keep things in reserve without knowing it, to say or do them when the occasion presents itself. They’ve always been there, but we didn’t know it and are surprised.
“I’m listening to voices inside me that I never listened to before,” Baltasar said to her.
“Do you see what I mean? Don’t silence them, no matter what.”
One night the pale English girl began to vomit blood, and Baltasar, unwittingly transformed into the most gentlemanly pimp of the oldest profession, carried her himself, in his arms, to the Maracaibo hospital.
That yellow barracks, crowned with shrubs that refused to die, hadn’t been painted in eight years. Why bother? The mass of wounded Spanish soldiers was so great, there was such doubt about the triumph of either side, the feeling that this was an interminable war was so strong, that to worry about the façade seemed at best a frivolity, at worst an act of cynicism. The Ursuline nuns with their headdresses that made them look like captive seagulls managed to find a bed for the duchess, as the nominative Baltasar dubbed her. For Baltasar, knowing names, giving them, devising pseudonyms, was part of a radical game that began when he read Plato under the tutelage of his pampa mentor Julián Ríos, who said: “It is important to note that our fascination with our own names gave rise to the first treatise of literary criticism, Plato’s Cratylus. Remember, Baltasar, in that dialogue Socrates finds room for every theory of names. Some say the name is intrinsic to the thing. Some contradict that, saying that names are purely conventional. Socrates says names are mere approximations of things, a rough guess. And in that way names name philosophy itself, and love as well, and all human activities: a mere approximation.”