“An approach,” repeated Baltasar in English, holding the English girl’s cold hand. Was this, given the fact that she was English, a good sign — the colder, the more full of life? It wasn’t; she died a few hours later in Baltasar’s arms, begging him to repeat the word approach. Approach to what? To death, to her lost home, to the unknown love of the poor foreign courtesan? He never found out. He stayed with her, holding her for a long while. Even after he was asked to leave her, he clung to the fair, pale body with its thin, matchstick limbs. It was hard for him to let go. A voice had told him: “Take charge of her. Until the end. She has no one else in the world. The day she’s buried, there will be no one to accompany the body. Only you will know for certain that she died.” He remembered the funeral and the nameless grave of Eusebio, the black son of the dark-skinned old general in Tabay, and did not want the English girl’s tombstone to be without a name. Since he invented names, what name would he give to this woman, who had no identification papers? In the face of death, his imagination flagged. Perhaps, simply, the Duchess. The Duchess of Malfi. A literary homage. Webster. Elizabeth Webster. By naming her, he created her. But he was only obeying the voice that exhorted: “Take care of her.”
He was afraid that if he listened to that voice he would cease to be master of his own destiny. The experiences of a short life told him, however — as he wandered through the hospital’s long gallery, where the sick, mostly soldiers, were laid out on their cots — that his destiny was a chorus of voices, his own and others. Nothing more.
Every night, the Spanish officers would noisily burst into Lutecia’s brothel — she herself had begun to use the name — and Baltasar would listen from afar to their shouts, confidences, and explosions of camaraderie. He never went out to them. They disgusted him and had nothing to do with his happy, free dealings with the madam from Lima. He would visit the girls in the afternoon, when all of them, without exception, were still virgins. They would talk a great deal about the officers, sometimes making observations that would otherwise pass unnoticed. The French logician, who had seen action even before Waterloo, insisted that women were a mere pretext, something to excite these handsome men who had degrees from European academies, for whom machismo was an essential part of their military calling and their national identity. But class identifications were even more important. They were the peacocks and, at times, the stud horses of the Maracaibo whores, but she, the French tart, noticed how they looked at each other, how they liked to catch each other in the women’s beds, how their desire was stronger for each other than it was for the women. Bah, she didn’t rule out the possibility that in Spain they would prefer the women of their own class to the men of the same class, but in this port of fevers and pubic lice, allez-y. Men and women all agreed: they wanted Spanish pricks.
One of the officers, so thin he was almost invisible from the front, because he was all profile — long nose, languid eyes, mustache combed upward, hair as highly polished as the leather of his cavalry boots, used his entire body to sniff around. He was like a greyhound. His nose would turn red, and he would cease being pure profile because of an unusual, exotic smell. His regiment was constantly in and out of Maracaibo, deeply engaged in a war to the death with Páez and Bolívar, but he always put up at Harlequin House. He prided himself on having gone to bed with all the girls except the English whore. He was afraid of “perfidious Albion,” especially between the sheets, and was paralyzed with terror when he learned she’d died. He was sure, he said, that if she’d died on him in bed, she would have dragged him to the bottom of the sea, the paradise of the English.
One night he smelled something unusual. Feigning joviality, he approached, talking about August nights in Madrid, when wearing a uniform was a foretaste of hell, and suddenly pulled back the curtain of the lavatory where Baltasar Bustos, in turn, was pretending to wash his face in a basin, although in fact he was spying on the Spanish officers.
Their eyes met, and Baltasar wondered where he’d seen those eyes before, in what skirmish, viceregal salon, or crossroad between La Paz and Lake Titicaca. Where? The same question was as obvious in the royalist officer’s eyes. Each knew that he would probably never recall their first meeting, or even if it had actually taken place.
Páez’s plainsmen, advancing from the south, besieged Maracaibo. Food began to run out. The hospitals were filled with the wounded. War to the death desolated Venezuela. Black fugitives would arrive, thinking they could blend into the anonymity of the port, but irrevocably assumed to be rebels, they were caught and executed by the royalists as quickly as by the insurgents. No one knew who was going to be hanged or why: for being a royalist, for being rich, for being black, for being a rebel …
Baltasar Bustos would accompany the girls who became ill with typhus or appendicitis, or who just had ticks, to the Maracaibo hospital. Many never returned. Others returned because of the calomel cure. But after a while Baltasar needed no pretext to walk into the sanatorium. He suffered and was horrified by the suffering of all. Nothing was more terrible than watching amputations in which the only anesthetic given the soldiers was a glass of brandy and a napkin to bite. Baltasar would stand at their side, holding their hands, knowing they needed something warmer than a piece of cloth or a glass. And he felt how hard they held on to him, as if holding on to life. He immersed himself in the hospital world. He felt his place was there, not despite the fact that the wounded were his eternal enemies, but precisely because of it: the Spaniards, the murderers of Francisco Arias and Juan Echagüe, those who had corrupted (who could doubt it?) Ofelia Salamanca.
Among all the cases, one moved him deeply. A man whose face had been blown off. There was a hole of raw flesh between his eyebrows and his mouth. And he still lived. His brain wasn’t gone. He had a life somewhere beyond the hideous wound, in a marvelous and melancholy corner of his head. He would move his hands, which were as thin as the rest of his body. A pair of cavalry boots stood upright, beautifully polished, at the foot of his cot.
Baltasar held that officer’s hands. He was as sure that he recognized him now as he had been unsure in Harlequin House. No, he didn’t remember where they’d first seen each other. The war had been waged for eight years and it ranged through an area three times larger than the lands in which Caesar or Napoleon had fought their campaigns. But he did remember where they’d last seen each other: when a curtain was pulled back in a bordello a few weeks before.
This had to be the same man. And even if he wasn’t, the remote possibility that he was the same man of narrow profile, shiny pomade, and sniffing nose, flirtatious, self-satisfied, so remote from the mere idea of being disfigured as he strolled around the house, recalling Madrid summers and sniffing with his nervous nose, now gone forever — that was enough for Baltasar to say to himself and to him: “I know who you are. I recognize you. Don’t worry. You won’t die without anyone’s knowing who you are. Trust me. I’ll be near you. I won’t abandon you. I’ll put a name on your tombstone.”
When the Spanish officer died, Baltasar returned to Harlequin House weeping and told Lutecia what had happened. She caressed his head of copper-colored curls and said: “I was waiting for this moment, or for one like it, to free you from this place.”