The Campaign (15 page)

He questioned Sabina: what did he say, what was he thinking at the end, did he die in peace, did he remember me, did he leave me any final message?

“You think you're asking about him, but you're only thinking of yourself,” said his sister, scowling in the way that made her ugly, making it impossible for Baltasar to see her as lovable despite her ugliness.

“You'd like to know, if you were me.”

“The Prodigal Son,” Sabina declared in staccato tones, grimacing hideously. “He said it was impossible to swim against the tide. He thought everything was a mirage, that everyone was deluded, and he was right. He died calm but uncertain, as you can see by the candle and the scapulary. He left the message for you I've just given you.”

She seemed to hesitate for an instant, then added: “To me he said nothing and left no message.”

“You're lying again. He loved you and was most tender with you. You were close to him. You spoke harshly to him, and he allowed it. You're saying these things to make me feel sorry for you and guilty about myself. Didn't someone bring a blond child to live with you here?”

Sabina shook her head. “No child, no father. And you've come back. You can no longer ask me to stay on here.”

“Do as you please, sister.”

The filial word turned bitter on his lips. He had just left so many brothers, dead, alive, or on the point of perishing; there were others he missed, Dorrego and me, Varela, whom he had not embraced for five years. And Sabina could only look at him in wonder, as if his words were those of a man who was not (or was no longer) standing before her. She spoke to her memory of Baltasar.

“You've changed. You're not the same.”

“How so?”

“You're like them,” she said, looking out toward the gauchos gathered in mourning around the house. They, too, were staring, with a wonder even more secret than Sabina's, at the prodigal son who returned looking like them, Don José Antonio's peons, once nomadic and now firmly rooted in place by the laws of the Buenos Aires revolution. It shouldn't be this way, said the eyes that followed him around the shops and stables; the son of the master shouldn't look like the master's peons, his mule skinners, his experts in tossing the
bolas,
his riders, his horse breakers, his cowpunchers, his blacksmiths, his bellows operators. He should always be the little gentleman; he should always be different from them. How many of José Antonio's bastards were there among the gauchos? One or a thousand: now Baltasar looked like all of them, no longer like himself.

Ever since Simón Rodríguez had raised him from the bed of
Acla cuna
and showed him his reflection in a windowpane in Ayopaya, Baltasar hadn't wanted to look at himself in mirrors. Usually, the guerrillas didn't carry them; he hoped nature would sculpt his features, using life's blows. The mountain, after all, did not look at itself in the mirror, nor did those overflowing rivers in the jungle. The condor never thought about itself; why should Baltasar? Only now, parted from the band of guerrillas, back home and concerned with a death in the family, and under the gaze of his old servants, did he feel the temptation to look at himself in the mirror. Again, he resisted that temptation. The looks the gauchos gave him were enough: he'd turned into them. He touched his long hair, his unshaven beard, his skin tanned to leather by the sun, and his lean cheeks. Only his metal-rimmed glasses betrayed the Baltasar of before. How could his eyes change? His old antagonisms about inequality could still creep in through those eyes. He looked like them, he wanted to prove it by strolling through the ranch as he did out in the wild, showing his recently acquired familiarity with nitrates and iron, with the products of cattle ranching—jerked beef, tallow, bristles, bones.

But he was different from the gauchos. Not one of those men felt, as Baltasar did on returning to his house, that he was still trapped by the land of the Indians, the royalist army, the separatist petty republics, and the enlightened hegemony of Buenos Aires. Not one of these gauchos shared this
political
and
moral
anguish; for them, these divisions did not exist. All they knew was the immediate division between mine and yours: if you give me enough of yours, I'll be satisfied with mine. During his ill-fated campaign in Upper Peru, didn't Castelli say that the people should make their own decisions, exercise self-control, develop their economic, political, and cultural potential, and think whatever they chose? Baltasar Bustos looked one last time at his father's crossed hands, entwined in the scapulary, stained by the candle, insensible to the scorching pain, and then looked at the puzzled faces of the gauchos, who hadn't expected the return of a master equal to them. It was then he remembered how infinitely far away the Indian world was, how infinitely far away the fantasy his reason fought against, and how close his namesake, the Indian leader. None of them thought as they
wished.
They all thought as they
believed.

The idea devastated him; he lost all heart, and finally understood why Miguel Lanza laughed, the only time that rueful saint, that sleepless warrior, ever laughed, when he repeated the words of the emissary from the Buenos Aires revolution in Upper Peru: “In one day, we shall do the work of eternity!”

They were risible words. Was the burden Baltasar Bustos felt on his shoulders as he said that in his father's frozen ear also risible? “It's up to me to do, over the course of my entire life, the work of one day. The entire responsibility for the revolution for independence weighs on me and on each one of us.”

The candle finally melted in the unfeeling hands of his dead father. The scapulary, however, remained, coiled like a sacred serpent. What would change, who would change it, how long would it take to change things? But was it worth it to change? All this came from so far off. He hadn't realized before, their origin was so remote, that the American cosmogonies preceded all of secular reasoning's feeble speculations;
écraser l'infâme
was in itself an infamy that called for its own destruction: it was a weak, rationalistic bulwark against the ancient tide of cycles governed by forces which were here before us and which will survive us … In El Dorado, he had seen the eyes of light that contemplated the origin of time and celebrated the birth of mankind. They did not remember the past; they were there always, without losing, because of it, either their immediate present or their most remote beginnings … How was it possible to stand next to them without losing our humanity but augmenting it thanks to everything we've been? Can we be at the same time all we have been and all we want to be?

His father did not answer his questions. But Baltasar was sure he was listening. Sabina had let the candle burn down. She shrieked when the flame touched the flesh. He can't feel, said Baltasar. But she did feel: she felt the knives she wore, like scapularies, between her breasts, over her sex, between her thighs. He didn't have to see them to know they were there; he could smell them, near his sister and his father's cadaver, he could feel them piercing his own body with the same conviction his own fighting dagger had entered the Indian's body in the Vallegrande skirmish. In the same way he knew “I killed my racial enemy in battle,” he also knew “My sister wears secret, warm, magical knives near her private parts”; just as he'd earlier found out “Miguel Lanza does not want me ever to escape from his troops, so that I can be his younger brother and not his dead brother.” Having taken all this into himself, he now wanted to distance himself from it so that he could go forward to his own passion, the woman named Ofelia Salamanca.

He later wrote to his friends that perhaps it was his fate to return to his father's estate too late for some things, too soon for others. He was untimely. But they themselves had pointed out the opportunity to him. Ofelia Salamanca had left Chile and was now in Peru. There were, then, immediate and sensual reasons for being.

“Your friends sent you a note. They could not find the child. The woman's in Lima. That's that. Will you go?”

Baltasar said yes.

“Won't you take me with you?”

“No. I'm sorry.”

“You're not, but it doesn't matter. You won't take me because you respect me. I expected nothing less of your love for me. You would never dishonor me. We'll leave that to the gauchos.”

“Excuse me if I am distracted. I've always wanted to be open to what others think and want.”

“You know I have nothing left to do here. I have no one to care for.”

“There's the house. The gauchos. You just said it yourself.”

“Am I the mistress?”

“If that's what you want, Sabina.”

“I'm going to die of loneliness if I don't give myself to them.”

“Do it. Now let's bury our father.”

5

The City of the Kings

[1]

The drizzle falling on Lima during that summer of 1815 stopped when the Marquis de Cabra, venturing out onto his baroque balcony suspended over the small plaza of the Mercederian Nuns, said, to no one in particular—to the fractured cloud, to the invisible rain that chilled one's soul: “This city enervates us Spaniards. It depresses and demoralizes us. The good thing is that it has the same effect on the Peruvians.”

He cackled like a hen over his own wit and closed the complicated lattices of the viceregal windows. His Indian valet had already helped him into his silver-trimmed dress coat, his starched linen shirt, his short silk trousers, his white stockings, and his black shoes with silver buckles. All he needed was his ivory-handled malacca stick.

“Cholito!”
he said to his servant with imperious tenderness. He was just about to give the order, but the Indian boy already had the walking stick ready and handed it to his master, not as he should have—so the marquis could take it by the handle—but offering the middle of the stick, as if handing over a vanquished sword. This
cholito,
this little half-breed, must have seen quite a few defeated swords handed to the winners of duels over the course of his short life. They were part of the legend of Peru: every victory was negated by two defeats, so the arithmetic of failure was inevitable. Now what attracted the Marquis de Cabra's attention was something familiar: the ivory handle of his stick was a Medusa with a fixed, terrifying gaze and hard breasts that seemed to herald the stones set in the eyes.

It was a present from his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, and from being handled so much, the Medusa's facial features had lost some of their sharpness. For the same reason, the atrocious mythological figure had completely lost her ancient nipples. The marquis shook his head, and his recently powdered wig dropped a few snowflakes on the shoulders of the former President of the Royal Council of Chile. The brocade absorbed them, just as it absorbed the dandruff that fell from the thinning hair of the sixty-year-old man who this afternoon was walking out into a Lima divided, as always, by public and private rumors.

The rumors concerned the situation created by Waterloo and the exile of Bonaparte to Saint Helena. Ferdinand VII had been restored to his throne in Spain, and refused to swear allegiance to the liberal constitution of Cádiz which had made his restoration possible. The Inquisition had been reinstated, and the Spanish liberals were the object of a persecution that to some seemed incompatible with the liberals' defense of the homeland against the French invaders, during which time the idiot king lived in gilded exile in Bayonne. The important thing for Spain's American colonies was that, once and for all, the famous “Fernandine mask” had fallen. Now it was simply a matter of being either in favor of the restored Bourbon monarchy or against it. It was no longer possible to hedge. Spaniards against Spanish Americans. Simón Bolívar had done everyone the favor of giving a name to the conflict:
a fight to the death.

The Marquis de Cabra preferred to prolong, just as he was doing at that very moment, to the rhythm of the coach, the public rumors in order to put off the private ones. During this enervating summer of unrealized rains—like a marriage left unconsummated night after night—he himself was the preferred object of Lima gossip. His entrance into the gardens of Viceroy Abascal, in this city where gardens proliferated as an escape from earthquakes, would, as the witty Chileans called it, keep the rumor mill churning at top speed.

The truth is that other things held the attention of the guests at the viceroy's soiree, first a game of blindman's buff that the young people who basked in the blessings of the Crown—the
jeunesse dorée,
as the Marquis de Cabra, always aware of the latest Paris fashions, called them—were enjoying, as they dashed and stumbled their way around the eighteenth-century viceregal garden, a pale imitation of the gardens of the Spanish palace at Aranjuez, themselves the palest reflection, finally, of Lenôtre's royal gardens.

“Goodness, with all these blindfolded figures in it, the garden looks like a courtroom,” said the marquis, as usual to no one and to everyone. That allowed him to make ironic, snide comments no one could take amiss because they weren't directed at anyone in particular. Of course, anyone who so desired could apply them to himself.

The garden actually resembled nothing so much as beautiful, flapping laundry because the flutter of white cloth, gauze, silks, handkerchiefs, and parasols dominated the space: floating skirts, scarves, linen shirts, hoopskirts, frock coats the color of deerskin, tassels, fringes, silver braid, epaulets, and military sashes, but above all handkerchiefs, passed laughingly from one person to another, blindfolding them, handcuffing them, allowing the blindman only an instant, as white as a lightning flash, to locate his or her chosen prey. Two young priests had also joined the game, and their black habits provided the only contrast amid so much white. From his privileged distance, the marquis noted with approval the nervous blushes of the beautiful Creole youngsters, who avidly cultivated fair complexions, blond gazes, and solar tresses. That explained the parasols in the hands of the girls, who wouldn't set them aside even when they were blindfolded. They would run charmingly, one hand holding the parasol, the other feeling for the ideal match promised by the luck of the game. On the other hand, the heat and the excitement of the game brought out dark blushes among the boys, as if the image of the pure white Creole required total inactivity.