Was there any reason, in reality, not to accept, with Rousseau, that true felicity is within us?
We looked at Manuel, the child Manuel Bustos, who was playing happily, and the three of us remembered — Xavier abandoning his clocks and walking out to the lawn, I looking with fraternal love at my younger brother, Baltasar, who made his way, passionately, through an entire continent, the same Balta who touched Ofelia Salamanca only once, and then to help her to her feet — that terrible night of May 24 and 25, 1810, when we thought we had lost the child forever, searching for him until dawn in the brothels, meat-salting sheds, and shacks with straw roofs down along the river. Now Baltasar threw into that same river a thin red thread.
The child whirled around several times, playing alone, and then, without taking the handkerchief off his eyes, spread his arms before a wall in the garden, gave the order to fire, shouted Bang, bang, bang, and fell to the ground, clasping his hand to his heart.
We were about to laugh at this joke when shock stopped us. We heard a flutter of skirts and saw in the light of summer a woman running toward the child, holding his head, and hugging it to her breasts, a beautiful woman dressed in gray taffeta, gloved and pliant, through whose light veil Dorrego and I could recognize — how could we not? — the adorable features of the young actress who garnered great success in the nights of Buenos Aires, so frequented by Xavier and me: the little mistress, as everyone nicknamed her.
But in fact, the name of this intelligent and beautiful Chilean actress was Gabriela Cóo. She burst unexpectedly into our Sunday garden, tossing aside her drizzle-colored parasol to kneel by my son, Ofelia and my son, Baltasar Bustos’s adoptive son; and she turned, this little mistress, to look at us with her black eyes from under those famous, thick, uncensored eyebrows until, lighting up with a smile on her red lips, she fixed them on the face of our friend, our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos.
The campaign was finally over.
Mommsenstrasse, Berlin, June 1989
Paseo del Prado, Madrid, August 1989
Kingsand, Cornwall, January 1990
Mendoza, Argentina, February 1990