The Campaign

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.

The newly arrived spectator smiled; either in the curtained bedroom of a lattice-windowed palace or in a dungeon, that’s where these fine young gentlemen would finally take their rest; that was what the war of independence promised Lima’s beautiful young people: renewed power or jail. War to the death … For the moment, far from the insane, incredible resistance of the bands of Upper Peru’s guerrillas, far, even, from the perilous peace of Chile, Peru remained Spain’s principal bastion in South America. But for how long?

It was like playing blindman’s buff, said the roguish, amused marquis, introducing himself like some sort of minstrel into the circle of young people, striking coquettish poses, tossing away his three-cornered hat, nostalgic perhaps for the capes and broad-brimmed hats that Charles III had banned in a vain attempt to modernize the Spanish masses. As he walked, he scattered the perfume and powder of his eighteenth-century toilette among these fresh but perspiring young people, who had abandoned the classic wig in favor of long, romantic tresses that floated in the breeze … Even in Lima the generation gap began with hairstyles; it indicated — and this the Marquis de Cabra, of an understanding nature, wanted to believe — that it began in their heads. It was the era of heads. Isn’t that exactly what Philip IV’s minister had demanded? “Bring me heads!”

He could think no more because his own head collided with that of a blindfolded youth searching for his lady-love. He spun with more energy and zeal than anyone else, shaking his mane of bronzed curls, half opening his full, red lips, around which the pallor of his carefully shaped cheeks contrasted with the skin on his forehead and cheeks, which was dark, tanned by the sun. The white blindfold covered his eyes; and if his curly head cracked into the Marquis de Cabra’s wig, it was as much because of the agitation of the young man as it was because of the old man’s intrusion into the game.

The young man grabbed the old man’s arms, felt the folds of his frock coat, and pulled off the blindfold just as the old man was rearranging his unsettled wig, which had slipped to one side of his head. Baltasar Bustos smothered a cry, muffled, almost animal-like, like that of a bull whose strength has been mocked, for what he actually imagined in the darkness demanded by the game was a nocturnal encounter with Ofelia Salamanca, an encounter of which this game of blindman’s buff was but a foretaste, a preliminary ritual. He’d been assured she was in Lima; it was for her that he’d journeyed here from the pampa, through the desert and the mountains to Ayacucho and the Peruvian coast; for her he’d trimmed his beard and mustache, combed his hair, dabbed on perfume, and dressed in the clothes fashionable in the viceroyalty. It was for her he’d come looking, visiting the twilight parties of Lima, the final bastion of the Spanish empire in the Americas, seeking her because his friends had told him, “She is in the Americas, but no one has seen her.” “She is in Lima, but she is with someone else.” It was for her that he took part in blindman’s buff, imagining that each woman he touched when he pulled the handkerchief off his eyes would be she, the woman he’d sighed for since that terrible night of the kidnapping and fire in Buenos Aires. And even before that: since he’d seen her in outline, naked, sitting before her mirror, powdering herself, a new mother, but with an incomparable waist and infinitely caressable buttocks, buttocks that would fit the hands of a man, the secret, strokable buttocks of Ofelia Salamanca, which drove Baltasar Bustos mad.

Instead, he was embracing his beloved’s aged husband.

The Marquis de Cabra looked at him without knowing him. He’d never seen him before. Baltasar’s vision ended; he took the handkerchief off his eyes and handed it in confusion, ironically, to Ofelia Salamanca’s startled husband. The platonic lover struggled to put on his oval glasses, showing that he was blinder than any blindfolded man: his heavy breathing fogged the lenses.

The magic circle of the game dissolved, but courtesy was a more complicated game, and it took the players a few minutes to allow one another to pass, to invite one another to go first.

“After you. Please, go ahead.”

“Certainly not.”

“Come now, don’t make me plead.”

“Beauty before experience.”

“It is more honorable to follow experience, not to precede it.”

“I am at your service.”

“I beg you, please.”

“Your servant.”

“I kiss your hand.”

“Please do me this signal honor.”

“I cannot allow it.”

“But how can I repay your kindness?”

“After you, please.”

“The person who precedes you has yet to be born, ma’am.”

“I envy the carpet under your feet, ma’am.”

“Your most humble servant.”

“After you, I implore you.”

These endless Lima courtesies obstructed all the doorways to the palace, but no sooner was everyone inside and partaking of warm punch and sugar concoctions, candied egg yolks and honey fritters prepared by the nuns of the order of St. Clare, than the two rumors — the public and the private — overwhelmed the elaborate rituals of courtesy.

It was, nevertheless, the presence of the Marquis de Cabra that forged the perfect union of the street and the bedroom gossip, and it was he himself who broke the news when he announced, “My wife has departed Lima. Yes, yes, you haven’t seen her for several weeks now and you’ve wondered why.” (That was true. Baltasar had been told that she was in Lima but that she had not been seen; she was not, perhaps, the perfect wife but at least she was under wraps — ha, ha.) “Perhaps you’ve invented reasons.” (They say she’s following a gallant artillery captain transferred from the viceroyalty in Lima to the captaincy-general of Chile, for him the promotion was a demotion, having parted him from the sweet Ofelia; the sweet Ofelia? Just let me tell you what I heard …) “But the truth is that the marquise has had a terrible attack of nerves because of all this patriotic commotion, and her royalist faith cannot bear the spectacle of a defeated, humiliated Spain expelled from the very world she discovered and built.” (They say she hasn’t been able to come to terms with the death of her child in Buenos Aires; a most mysterious death, my most respected Doña Carmelita, because no one knows what happened, the story of a simple accident convinces no one: just think what sort of accident it had to have been to concentrate all the fires of Buenos Aires in that innocent cradle. There’s something fishy here, I tell you, and we’ll never learn the truth of what took place five years ago. Just look how it’s livened up the gossip flying from Montevideo to Bogotá; long are these roads, late are the documents when they finally get here, and how lost the laws get, my dear Don Manuelito, but how gossip flies, if you please!) “The Spanish empire in America has lasted three hundred years, longer than any other empire in history,” the Marquis de Cabra was saying, his three-cornered hat under his arm, “and a soul as sensitive as my wife could hardly be expected to bear the spectacle of its end.” (Isn’t the marquis speaking treason? How dare he predict the end of the Spanish empire in America? This Ofelia Salamanca must have done something terrible for the old gallant to expose himself in this way and in these times to suspicion of treason — the Inquisition in Lima was not asleep. Surely the Marquis de Cabra knows how many heretics and rebels the ecclesiastical arm has taken, to give them their just deserts.) “She is a descendant of the first conquistadors, a pure creole of the best lineage, and whenever my imagination flags, she’s there to rekindle its flame with the memory of those incomparable deeds: five hundred men marching from Veracruz to Tenochtitlán after scuttling their ships to capture the great Moctezuma and conquer the Aztec empire; a similar number vanquishing the Inca Atahualpa in the space of one week; the conquest of the Andes, the Amazon, the Pacific; cities strung like a rosary of baroque pearls, from California to Tierra del Fuego; souls converted and saved: thousands, thousands, repaying with interest the loss of perverse lives in thrall to stubborn rebelliousness and idolatry.” The Marquis de Cabra laughed, strolling through the crowded salons of the viceregal palace in Lima that afternoon of Baltasar Bustos’s return to the world, a world that seemed even more unreal to him after his recent life on the pampa, in Ayopaya, and with Miguel Lanza’s troops.

“The Marquise de Cabra, then, begs your pardon for not being present at this soiree, but you all know that there is no better way of calling attention to oneself than by calling attention to one’s absence.” The elfin marquis laughed again, inviting the animated but languid company (who were perhaps wise to mix one drop of Indian fatality with another of creole indolence) to turn away from the theme of Ofelia Salamanca, the wife of the Marquis de Cabra, which they did so as not to admit he was right, not to let him feel that he could read them so easily or manipulate them without mercy. In doing so, they left Baltasar Bustos alone, flustered, hungry for the truth, or at least for company.

The brilliant Lima gathering did not keep the young Argentine from looking at the stockings which a forty-year-old but still appetizing woman showed off with incredible sauciness by refusing to allow her skirts to conceal the novelty of her bas—as she called them — decorated from toes to knees with small, linked violet clocks that reminded our friend Baltasar about us, Varela and Dorrego, playing with our clocks in Buenos Aires, adjusting them as we adjusted our political lives, accommodating ourselves, when Posadas resigned, to Alvear’s leadership, never daring to ask ourselves what we were doing there while our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos, the weakest of the three, the most physically awkward, the most intellectual as well, was exposing himself to the Spaniards way out in the mountains.

“The theme of our time is time!” announced the lady — who, at the back of her neck, wore feathers the color of the embroidered clocks — inviting the young creole gentlemen to play with words and ideas, responding to them herself in a way the ignorant colonial ladies — who soon found themselves bereft of their gallants, as attracted by the novelty as fireflies by a burning candle — could not.

“What a contretemps!”

“You, ma’am, can make time march backwards…”

“Or even better: such abundance of time…”

“Do my legs seem fat to you?”

“They seem to me a heralding of the face with which you confront time.”

“Time, my friend, is ageless.”

“But it does suffer evils, ma’am.”

“I think I’m on time.”

“And we here in Peru, alas, are always either too early or too late.”

They all laughed, but Baltasar Bustos, looking at the lady’s violet legs and her hoopskirt, allowed himself to be distracted by the black skirts of the two young priests who had been playing blindman’s buff and who were now looking at him, waiting for him to raise his eyes. He forgot the provocative lady, whose days as a coquette were numbered (even Micaela Villegas, the notorious Perrichole, the loosest woman in the colony, had just turned sixty — just think of that, your lordship), to look back at them as they smiled at him: one priest was very ugly, the other very handsome; their combined age wouldn’t have added up to the violet lady’s forty. They stared shamelessly at him, but only when they stopped and raised their tiny glasses of wine to toast each other did Baltasar become aware of the immense tenderness that joined them; the looks the two young priests exchanged indicated as well that the ugly one had the subservient function of pampering, worshipping, caring for, and attending the handsome one.

Baltasar Bustos stared at the skirts of the handsome priest for a while with no desire to ascertain the reaction of the other. He found himself so alone after the long Upper Peru campaign and the death of his father that he feared the attraction of that young cleric with fine features, dark hair, and waxy complexion — like that of Miguel Lanza, like his father’s dead hands holding the candle, burning because of the cruelty, the rancor of Sabina, who was so eager to form with him a circle of two, like the one formed by the two priests — might obstruct his relationship with the devout priest with rough features, slightly prognathous, and, like Baltasar, myopic. When he raised his eyes to meet theirs, however, he found satisfaction, shared attraction, and an invitation. They guessed his hunger for company, his solitude; they did not imagine that behind his eyes was the desired figure of Ofelia Salamanca.

Other eyes attracted him, although they never paid him the slightest attention and instead made him feel he was an intruder, alien to the exclusive circle of these aristocratic creoles, who in the city of Lima, capital of capitals, only rivaled in Spanish America by Mexico City, reached not only their splendor but their purest essence. Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful woman — beyond any doubt — attending the afternoon party. She looked like the sunset, her dark beauty shone, and her outfit, which turned mourning into show, glittered, in part thanks to the gold thread subtly woven into her funereal gown. The gold did not obviate her grief but gave a feeling of luxury to death, no doubt the death of the husband of the young woman, whose true, fatal glow was in her skin and not in her clothing or jewels. In fact, she wore no jewelry. She needed none. Her beauty dazzled Baltasar, whose eyes were full of blood and gore, hills of slate and thickets.

Was she as beautiful as he saw her? The object of her gaze was a couple. Another couple, obviously married, her arm resting ever on his, as if to initiate, also for eternity, a solemn promenade that with each step would announce: we are a couple. He was saying to the dark woman: dare to break up this pair, I invite you to do it, come with us. The wife’s face expressed marital fidelity so strongly that it almost contradicted itself to become the most subtle of invitations. That afternoon, Baltasar Bustos instinctively sought out the lady in mourning’s solitude to accompany his own. He learned that the solitary woman would cease to be so in the company of the married man who said to her, secretly yet so publicly, “You are my possible lover. In the presence of my own wife, I invite you to be my actual lover. I can do no more to attract you to me.”

“Luz María…”

The name escaped like a sigh or a threat from the shared voice of the married couple. “We are so sorry about what happened.”

“It’s all right: time works miracles.”

They began to speak about Masses and novenas, a castrato began to sing a passage from Palestrina, and a very old lady, draped in veils and wearing more combs than she had hairs on her head, lectured Baltasar the way someone teaches a basic lesson: “The servants know. They are the only ones who know in a society like ours. The Quechuan nurses abandoned the Incan nobles to serve the Spaniards. Now they will abandon the Spaniards to serve Creole patriots like you, callow boy.”

She scratched the moles that marked the spot where the hair missing from her skull once grew, and she giggled in pure joy, announcing that her head was still good for something: “And besides. Did you ever see this Ofelia Salamanca’s silver service? Well, get her husband, the cuckold marquis, to invite you to dinner, and there you will see the fate of all the silver mined in these Indies of ours, lad, youth, boy, what to call you?” The crone cackled, dressed in transparent gauze and propped up by two Indian servants wearing Versaillesque frock coats and cotton wigs. The old lady flapped her arms: “Get moving, you shitty cholitos, help me, don’t stop, no one deserves more than a minute of my conversation, I have so little time.”

Baltasar sought out the stockings embroidered with clocks, but perhaps their owner had been invited to withdraw. On the other hand, these scenes were like sideshows — mere sleight-of-hand by these mountebanks, whispered a familiar voice that reached Baltasar Bustos. Incredulous, he spun around to see the tall, slightly stooped figure of his old mentor Julián Ríos, the Jesuit who had put aside his cassock and had taught half the pampa the local flora and fauna, and the local languages — all in the hope of discovering, he said, remembering the childhood of Baltasar and Sabina Bustos, a universal imagination, even if it was an imagination nurtured in the soil; roots, said the old Jesuit, smiling and adding with a glint from his silver-framed glasses, “Mais mes racines sont plutôt rabelaie-siennes, dit la corneille quand elle boît l’eau de la fontaine…”

Baltasar laughed, squeezing Ríos’s arm and listening as the old man gently led the young one to the other end of the viceregal party: “Everything else is a sideshow, to use circus jargon — I didn’t say Circe’s barroom, now — no: the main show is always the Marquis de Cabra himself.”

Who, in fact, was holding court. Because — Julían Ríos pointed out — the rug has been swept clean of gossip by edict of the marquis himself, who was the first to mention the rumor about his wife, his life, his strife, rhymed Father Ríos irrepressibly. The marquis was talking now in an endless flow:

“Modern revolution is divided evenly between those enemy brothers, Rousseau and Voltaire. The Genevan wanted the people to act. The other wanted them to be led. But it takes a long time for the people to become educated and to act prudently, so they have to be guided at first — thence Voltaire wins the match, he can never lose it. What did that old cynic say?”

“That the light of reason falls by degrees,” quoted Julián Ríos. “The lowest level of society needs the example of its superiors. Forty thousand wise men: that’s more or less what we need.”

“Forty thousand wise men!” said the old marquis, sighing. “Include me among them. The first thing I’ll do is keep the people from ever taking my place or instructing me. All modern revolution does is create a new elite. Why? The old elite was more elegant and practiced in the very thing the new elite is going to do: mete out injustice.”

“To transfer property from a minute group of landowners to four million electors in one year does not seem so elitist to me, your lordship. There has never been a redistribution of wealth as large or as swift in all of recorded history.”

“Bah.” The marquis did not even look at the tutor. “Revolutions of interests end up costing more than revolutions of ideals. All the Jacobin terror in France seems less painful to me than the elitist injustice of the North American revolution. Some revolution, gentlemen — a revolution that not only leaves slavery intact but actually consecrates it.”

“Are we less racist than they?” asked Ríos.

“What is to be done, Mr., Mr. — ” said the Marquis haughtily, not finding the proper title for the tutor. “I mean, what is to be done when the people of color themselves come to the courts here in Lima, in Barranquilla, or in La Guaira, requesting written proof that they are white? How many venal judges have stared into the scorched face of a man whose father and grandfather were black and whose mother and grandmother were Indian, and stated: ‘He may be considered white’? Our courts are flooded with requests for certification of whiteness, Mr., Mr.—”

“Father Rivers,” the tutor supplied, smiling.

“Ah, a perfidious son of Albion…”

“No, your Lordship, merely a poor albino dazzled with admiration at your wisdom.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Rivers should flow. Or, better yet, run.”

“Having the runs is something that happens all too frequently in these parts, sir. But the way you say my name makes me think of reverse, so perhaps you would prefer me to step back.”

“I was merely commenting on the irony of the blacks submitting legal petitions so as not to be termed ‘poor black’ or ‘poor mulatto.’”

“We are all cooperating, your lordship. White families in Lima, Caracas, and Panama are also initiating legal actions to keep any family members from marrying people of color.”

“In sum, then, Mr. Reverse, I’m right to declare here, before all of you, that my only virtue has been the proper administration of injustice and that, personally, I would rather die than cease to be unjust.”

A chorus of laughter followed these lapidary witticisms of the Marquis de Cabra, a device by which he dissipated not only the attention initially focused on his wife’s affaires but also whatever attention was being paid to the poor castrato performing Palestrina. In any case, he certainly hushed the comment of the old Jesuit: “Privilege is like the robe of Nessus; when you tear it off, you also tear off the flesh under it.”

The marquis spun around like a wasp and spoke like a whip: “Go ahead and wage your war of independence. Disillusionment will soon follow. And, I assure you, I am not making idle pronouncements. I am predicting the most concrete things. A stagnant economy, without the protection of Spain and incapable of competing in world markets. A society of privilege; the mere act of casting out the Spaniards will not make the Creoles less unjust, cruel, or greedy. And dictatorship after dictatorship will be necessary to bridge the gap between the country as constituted by law and the country as reality. You will be left to the mercy of the elements, my dear patriots. You will wrench off the roof of tradition. But you do not know how to survive in the new, open air. The modern age, which for an Englishman, Father Rivers, is a breeze, will be a hurricane for a Peruvian. We who speak Spanish were not born for it.”

“We shall make our own modernity, and it will be unlike that of the English or the French, your lordship,” said young Baltasar, imagining a French roof over the head of his sister, Sabina, to protect her, after being abandoned by Spain, from the cruel elements she so feared.

The marquis stared at him curiously, as if the old man’s intelligence would never dare to reject a possible relationship, association, or contiguity, no matter how arbitrary it might seem at first glance.

“Father Rivers”—the marquis smiled—“your young disciple — that is what he is, isn’t that so? — knows that all waters ultimately flow into each other. Am I right?”

“Rivers do flow,” said the tutor.

“Rivers roll, servants serve, priests pray — or is it prey? — but castrati, fortunately, do not castrate. Yet young men with sunburned faces and newly shorn beards pique my curiosity. Do they flow, serve, pray, prey, or castrate?”

“None of those things, your lordship,” said Baltasar. “At times, they merely desire.”

“Just so long as they don’t covet that which belongs to others,” said the old man in acid tones. “In this country, the wise practice is to stick a finger up the ass of every miner as he leaves his work, to see that he isn’t stealing the gold.”

“Good heavens, your lordship! Not even I allow myself such obscenities,” cackled the balding old woman bristling with combs, “in spite of the fact that I’m older and that Viceroy Abascal isn’t listening to what I say.”

That very personage was standing behind Cabra with his solemn, Visigoth face. The marquis bowed. Everyone awaited the words of the viceroy, Don Fernando de Abascal, Marquis de Concordia, who no doubt hoped to cancel any discussion of independence or loyalty to the Crown — the only fashionable topics, since no others lent themselves so well to animated conversation — with a few words more lapidary than any the others might utter. He imagined himself captivating his audience with his eyes, which were like those of an offended codfish:

“The Americans were born to be slaves, destined by nature to vegetate in obscurity and melancholy.”

He said it out of obligation, to give offense, because he thought that under the present circumstances his obligation was to offend and that his greatest offense would be to overlook any arguments the others might propose. He was the viceroy, but not even the viceroy and his attributes could dampen — now was the time to prove it — the imagination and humor of the Marquis de Cabra, who sought thus to suggest that, more than Abascal, the man who should be viceroy was he who was speaking: Cabra himself.

He looked straight at Baltasar Bustos and commented that his tanned complexion and pale chin indicated many months in the open air and sun and a beard until recently unshaven. Baltasar nodded. This fellow looked like no one else: was he a soldier? But none of the officers present showed such a contrast, such roughness. “What campaigns were you in, Mr., Mr.—”

“Bustos. Baltasar Bustos.”

“And a classical bust it is. Am I right, Father Rivers?”

“Quite right. This Balshazar seems ready for his feast.”

“But it was Nebuchadnezzar who saw the writing on the wall.”

“From which we should all take warning: the end is near, gentlemen.”

Cabra glanced mockingly at the viceroy, who from offended codfish had metamorphosed into a satisfied mollusk. He had spoken, and nothing else mattered.

“So, Baltasar Bustos.”

The marquis said he did not know if this Baltasar was a loyalist or an insurgent, but he was a creole, that much was obvious. And an officer, although on which side was not obvious, added Cabra with the mildest hint of menace in his voice. But he was an officer and a creole, so he would no doubt do what all of them did, which was to take an Indian, like this boy in livery and cotton wig attending the most excellent widow of the Marquis de Z_____, who was Viceroy of Peru, and tell him, just as the Marquis de Cabra was telling him now, grabbing him roughly, you half-breed shit, that’s right, half-breed shit a thousand times, I won’t stick my finger up your ass to see if you steal my gold, half-breed, but if I were this creole officer — patriot? rebel? loyal to the king? who knows, who cares? — he would say to you, half-breed shit, sweep out the barracks, make my bed, wash the floor, disinfect the lavatories, carry in wood, pour me a glass of water, don’t move a muscle if I give you a kick in the ass, don’t let so much as a sigh escape your lips if I slap your face, don’t you dare raise your head if I order you, you half-breed shit, to look down at my feet, because your soul, assuming you have one, you poor devil, doesn’t even reach as high as my feet.”

The marquis, more upset even than he thought, paused and took a deep breath, saying that a creole would say all that to this half-breed shit he’d grabbed by the neck. He would say it even if he was a patriot, because, before being a patriot, he was creole shit. Why didn’t little Master Bustos do what the marquis was inviting him to do, when one day, sooner or later he would have to do it to prove who was in charge here.

Cabra held out the servant of the widow of the Marquis de Z_____as if he were some exotic trophy. The bald old lady shook the tortoiseshell daggers jutting out of her head and protested, Miguelito is so good, so faithful, she would allow no one, not even the most distinguished President of the Court of Visitation, to …

Cabra spun ferociously on his heel to face the crone, she who had ordered Perrichole publicly flogged for bragging that she was the Viceroy de Amat’s concubine, and, worse still, for thinking that the sins of prostitution could be expiated by publicly, not secretly, walking barefoot behind the carriage of the Blessed Sacrament, without adding scandal to scandal and publicity to virtue; she who witnessed and rejoiced in the drawing and quartering of the rebel Indian Tupac Amaru, the pretender to the title of last Inca, who in the name of the oppressed rose up in arms to turn the poor of Peru into Indian kings — was she now going to defend this half-breed shit in her service from a beating?

“Oh, but your lordship, that Tupac Amaru forced the governor of Cuzco to drink molten gold from the mines and die horribly. Miguelito the cholo, on the other hand, is neither a whore nor a rebel, but one of God’s true souls,” said the old crone, her voice racked with phlegm.

Laughter broke out, but Cabra did not release the bewigged cholo. He waited for silence, to proclaim that from that day forward, to prevent the fall of the Spanish empire in America, he, Leocadio Cabra, marquis of the same, quondam President of the Royal Council of Chile, would consider himself dead — after all, a man like himself could hardly survive the death of his world — and would celebrate, right here, in the City of the Kings, his own funeral, with pomp and splendor, presided over by the Viceroy Don Fernando de Abascal, Marquis de Concordia (who looked bewildered as he tried to understand these antinomian ideas for which he had no ready answer — how to term this mad marquis: “slave,” “obscure,” “abject”?). His excellency was not to take this anticipation of death as an impious or cocasse act, like the premature funeral of the heretic Voltaire or the rebel Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, the liberal Mexican in Cádiz, but rather as an act of devotion and profound piety, like the burial-in-advance of His Majesty Charles V in the monastery at Yuste, amid solemn hymns and ecclesiastical panegyrics. Therefore: the burial-in-advance of the Marquis de Cabra would be not (God save us!) a Voltairean joke or a sublime foreshadowing of our common destiny incarnate in the most catholic of monarchs, but a bitter commentary on the times. (The lady banished from the presence of the viceroy gazed at her stockings with their tiny clocks; the tutor Julián Ríos let the marquis rattle on.) “When Simón Bolívar enters this city from the north and José de San Martín from the south, something I also predict today, all of you will say that I am dead and buried, knowing full well that in my place will be this half-breed shit, the servant of the widow of the Marquis de Z_____. I hereby condemn him to die young, in my place, so that the world will think I am dead and leave me in peace, leave me in peace, leave me in peace, alone and old and forgotten and abandoned and cuckolded by my sweet Ofelia,” said the raving-mad Marquis de Cabra, tossing with a sportsman’s skill (unless it was pure luck) his wig, which landed on the old lady’s bald head bristling with combs. And with that the marquis withdrew, dragging his feet, sobbing, as the strains of the minuet being played by the cholo musicians in cotton wigs and red frock coats metamorphosed, in Baltasar Bustos’s ear, into a melancholy, remote mountain air, a melody of irremediable farewells, carrying with it the din of arms, of age-old llamas and new horses, the trembling of the earth and the storms in the heavens, its ever so sad quena pipes, the only voice of the uplands, silencing both.

But not now. A great rush of candelabras being extinguished, rustling tablecloths, and clinking china accompanied the merry farewells of the young people arranging to meet that night and the following nights: Let’s go to the Bodegones Café. We’ll see each other in the theater. Don’t miss Paca Rodríguez — you’ve never seen as charming an Andalusian; a shame she loves her husband, Bufo Rodríguez. Careful, a year’s gone by and no one talks about anything but the murder of the most famous actress before this Paca, María Moreno, killed by her rejected lover, a certain Cebada, whose passionate jealousy was pardoned by everyone in Lima except our host of the evening. Lower your voice, Juan Francisco, don’t be disrespectful to our illustrious viceroy who ordered him garrotted like a common criminal, doubtless because the viceroy himself desired the actress María Moreno and paid no heed to the warnings scrawled on every wall in Lima: Abascal, Abascal, if you hang Cebada, you’re sure to fall! Fall, Matilde, fall? Just look at him, as fresh as a head of lettuce. Don’t talk about lettuce, it makes me hungry. Everyone to the café and then to the theater!

[2]

Baltasar Bustos embraced the old Jesuit tutor and asked him to wrap him in his cape. Julián Ríos, no doubt because of the adverse feelings inspired in him by the Bourbons’ decision to expel the Society, insisted stubbornly on dressing in the style banned by Charles III: wide-brimmed hat and cape. More than hiding Baltasar, the cape helped protect him: the sage tutor recognized the need of this boy, who was not only going out into the world but going out into a radically new world, who was painfully breaking away from a past he deemed abominable but which was his own. Would the South American patriots ever understand that without that past they would never be what they so desired: paradigms of modernity? Novelty for its own sake is an anachronism: it races toward its inevitable old age and death. A past renewed is the only guarantee of modernity: that was Father Ríos’s lesson for his young Argentine disciple, who that night seemed so helpless. As helpless as the entire continent.

An enlightened cleric like Julián Ríos could not escape his own contradiction; therefore he could understand it in others. His contradiction was both to approve and to condemn the riots that led to the burning down of Esquilache’s mansion in Madrid when the decree to expel the Jesuits was published and the people laid at the feet of the Bourbon court all the evils unleashed in the absence of the Society of Jesus. The Esquilache riot had its touches of comedy, but for Ríos they only confirmed, in his own soul, the conflict between maintaining order through pragmatic, evolving solutions and transforming everything through violence, risking thereby a fall back to a level lower than the one that promoted the revolt but also taking the opportunity to achieve things that otherwise would never be realized.

These thoughts vexed the tutor as he led Baltasar, invisible under his cape, out of the viceregal palace. One part of him was asking (and so he said to Bustos): “Where are you staying? You must rest. Let me take you to your lodgings; we’ll talk there. I’m concerned about your future. What are you going to do? Why don’t you go back home and take care of your own? There is no other politics than that of the soil; all politics is local, but I don’t know anything about you, about what you’ve been doing since you were a boy.” The other half of him pulled him toward the palace occupied by the Marquis de Cabra in the plaza of the Mercedarian church. But first they took a long, roundabout walk to the other side of the river, so as to converse at some ease.

Leading Baltasar Bustos through the night streets of this always dangerous, secret city fashioned of the incompatible clays of arrogance and resentment, which made it fierce in its capacity to humiliate the weak and do violence to the powerful, Julián Ríos allowed himself the observation that all a thief of the kind that abounds in this capital of social extremes would need would be a jug of water and a spoon to open a hole in Lima’s mud walls. Lima: improvident, with no long-range projects to concentrate the will of its citizens; a city wasting itself in waiting all day, yet again, for a rain which was always threatened but never came, because a real tropical storm would melt away this city with no stone structures all the way to the Avenue of the Discalced Carmelites, from which the Amancoes hills could be seen.

“Someday a huge rainstorm is going to come down,” Ríos said to his pupil. But, given the circumstances, Baltasar seemed even more depressed than the Marquis de Cabra himself. There appeared to be one cause in both cases: Ofelia Salamanca.

“How are you? Have you traveled? I haven’t seen you since you were a boy!” said the tutor to his disciple as they stood by the tiny convent of St. Liberata.

They stopped in the plaza crowded with mules and drovers arriving from the mountains or setting out for the desert. The fresh scent of mint, coriander, parsley, and verbena prevailed with difficulty over the thick smells of wet wool, hides fresh from the slaughterhouse, spurs that still stank of the mine, steaming excrement, and the long urination of beasts of burden. Baltasar, his strong hands, longing for mercy, on his old teacher’s shoulders, told Ríos the story of his life since they’d last seen each other: his reading Rousseau, his incandescent faith in the May revolution, his private decision not to join the rebellion without first returning home, to his own tradition, and to the confrontation with what he was and where he came from: and then, the campaign of Upper Peru.

“With these hands, I have killed. And don’t say, C’est la guerre, Father.”

“As for me, I no longer have a personal history. My history has no meaning outside History. How sad. But the world has made us this way.”

“No one could erase the sign of the priesthood from you, not even God. Could you hear my confession?”

“I could. I could even tell you your confession. Don’t think it’s my pride speaking when I say that. Put simply: in my order each individual is something more than himself.”

“The first man I killed was an Indian. After that, it didn’t matter that I went on killing. I was a good guerrilla. Lanza is a brave man. I don’t blame him for anything. Only that one action was blameworthy. The first. It was bound to happen. I killed someone, and that someone was an Indian.”

“You know that we Jesuits armed the Guaranís in Paraguay. Thanks to those weapons, no one crossed into Indian territory: not the viceroys, not the traffickers in alcohol, not even the slavers. The Indians stopped using money, the land belonged to the community, the work day was six hours, everyone prospered, and no one was unjust. Does it sound like utopia to you? It wasn’t. The thirty-three settlements we created, from the Paraná to the Río Negro and from Belém to Paysandú, were only possible because of a political and military act: Philip IV’s decision to give the Guaranís weapons. If that hadn’t happened, those Indians, like all the others, would have been exterminated by alcohol, forced labor, the mita, and disease. An armed utopia! No money, but lots of firearms. But all you need is one musket for Utopia to cease being utopia. The seed of all evil is justifying the death of a fellow man.”

“Was it a community?”

Ríos said it was, but Baltasar that night would not have set out for utopia or any other community without stopping first for this frank conversation with a person he respected. The solitude of his time on the pampa, culminating in the death of José Antonio Bustos and the final break with his sister, Sabina; the solitude of the months spent with the guerrillas in the Inquisivi, where brotherhood was nipped by Miguel Lanza’s “to-the-last-man” decision: we all may die here, but no one leaves. The solitude of distance and time — five years already! without seeing Dorrego and Varela and feeling that they lived in the mad, loving, tight fraternity of the Café de Malcos. All that was not compensated for by a soiree in viceregal Lima, a tacitly perverse invitation from two young priests, or the sovereign indifference of a beautiful, brilliant dark woman who succumbed to the temptation of a man who certainly did not deserve her. And, finally, the absence of Ofelia Salamanca embittered him, as did the ugly rumor surrounding that absence: adultery, prejudice, cruelty, ostentatious frivolity.

“I’ve had the feeling that I was totally alone during these past years,” Baltasar said later to Ríos. “Now I’ve just lost myself in other people. I don’t feel free either way, alone or in company. I need society or I wouldn’t miss it. But when I’m in society, I feel sick. I find scenes like the one we witnessed tonight repugnant.”

“That’s because you want to change society,” said Julián Ríos. “But such desires are very costly. You will only feel free when the society you want to change is so perfect it no longer needs you.”

Baltasar Bustos asked if he had any other options but to fight for the impossible or to conform to what already existed. Ríos begged him to offer now what he said he was seeking and what he was sharing with his Buenos Aires friends: a bit of sincerity. For whose sake were they going through all these difficulties? Who was the individual channel of all this anguish?

Now, walking quickly among weeping willows arranged without symmetry, in a night whose fogs had lifted and whose Pacific stars adorned the only beautiful sky in Lima, which is the sky veiled to the light of day, Baltasar Bustos told the tutor what had taken place on the night of May 24–25 in Buenos Aires. The youth’s shame mounted as the tutor’s laughter grew louder, and Baltasar, incredulous, fell physically into his own trap: his body, his words, his energetic pace now that he’d lost so much weight in the campaign with Lanza were, in that moment, the worst trap, because they left him no gestures, no convincing corporeal responses to that laugh, which could not be injurious, coming from whom it came, but which, despite everything, was just that: there was a slap in each guffaw, a sting in every smile.

“You poor naïve fool! You did not burn down the Buenos Aires court building, Baltasar. It was the mob. That night they decided to destroy the colonial archives, the registers of racial discrimination, the property exclusions — everything, my dear Baltasar, that this colony’s chain of paper signifies. And remember, it has enslaved as much with words as with branding irons. Baltasar, you did not kill that child. Your thirty candles wouldn’t have been enough to honor a saint!”

“Twenty-five,” said Baltasar. “She was twenty-five then, she must be thirty now…”

“She lived right over there,” said Ríos, turning to point out the palace from where they had stopped, alongside the fountain in the Mercedarians’ plaza, amazed at the hustle and bustle — unusual at eleven o’clock in the evening — in the entranceways, doors, and windows of the house occupied by the Marquis de Cabra, former President of the Royal Council of Chile, and his vanished wife. Torches were seen in window after window, mules and carts were stopped outside the coachhouse door, trunks emerged, black drapes were carried in, a procession of puzzled acolytes paused as they searched for their pastor; the Blessed Sacrament was brought in, carried with proper solemnity; veiled women began to gather, tiny in their flat slippers, enveloped in capes and scarves.

“The doors of the house are wide open, Balta…”

In her bedroom, Ofelia Salamanca had left a box of powder and a silver scraper she used to cleanse her tongue. Also two popular books by Samuel Tissot, one on the disorders that afflict literary and sedentary people and their cure (walks, cinnamon, and fennel tea), the other, simply titled Onanism and Madness. She had also left behind the red, the blood-colored ribbon he’d watched her put around her neck from the balcony that May night in Buenos Aires. The thin line of blood symbolic of the guillotine. Baltasar discreetly slipped the ribbon into his pocket. He looked with distaste at the double bed and was overcome by a pounding wave of jealousy, imagining Ofelia in the arms of her husband, the marquis, who, wrapped in a shroud, was carried, in a perfectly synchronized ceremony, to the same bed from which Baltasar Bustos, no matter how he tried, could not banish the image of the erotic couple. Ofelia Salamanca, her legs spread, astride the skeleton of her husband Cabra, the old goat; the she-goat rubbing the mons Veneris he’d been imagining for five years as bulging yet deep, hairy yet prepubescent, the hidden, monastic sex of Ofelia Salamanca, invisible one moment and fleshy the next, protruding, visible from any angle, reproduced with febrile symmetry behind and in front of the thighs of the desired woman. Possessed by Cabra and how many others?

Baltasar Bustos and Julián Ríos were pushed into a corner of the bedroom when the servants carrying candles entered along with the hired mourners, the acolytes, the curious, the disconcerted priests, and especially the principal actor: Don Leocadio, Marquis de Cabra, who was laid out, wrapped in his shroud, paler than Miguel Lanza, in the same bed where he had enjoyed the love of his wife, Ofelia. Was he really dead? Was he pretending? Did he have an attack after the painful scene at Viceroy Abascal’s party? Baltasar did not want to find out. He approached the marquis’s funereal head and whispered into the dead or alive Marquis de Cabra’s ear, “I love your wife. I burned your son to death, and you will have no other, dead or alive, because in the past five years you’ve lost your virility and are nothing but a senile scarecrow. I will follow your wife to the ends of the world and force her to love me in the name of justice, because she must love a man who is passionately in love with her and would do anything for her.”

It did not matter to him that, either to simulate death or because he really was dead, the Marquis de Cabra’s ears were sealed with wax. But two crystallized tears, as hard as silver, had added another furrow to the wrinkled cheeks of the former President of the Royal Council of Chile.

[3]

I need only a few sheets of paper to end this chapter. One of them is the Marquis de Cabra’s will, worthy of mention for two reasons. The first is that in it he offers a substantial lifetime annuity to the cholo who will every day stand at the corner of Pilón del Molino Quebrado and allow himself to be kicked by any passing Creole. The sagacious husband of Ofelia Salamanca explains that he is guided in this bequest by a desire to alleviate the frustration of all Peruvians bereft of slaves.

The second, more bitter bequest is an uncalled-for, counterproductive, impracticable command. The Marquis de Cabra orders the colonial aristocracy to pillage itself so that the rebels will find nothing.

But where are those rebels in this year of 1815? All sorts of news reaches Buenos Aires, most of it depressing. Bolívar is in exile in Jamaica, and instead of raising armies, he writes letters complaining about our perennially infantile nations, their incapacity to govern themselves, and the distance between our liberal institutions and our customs and character. In the south, Belgrano’s expedition to Upper Peru has failed, and only the resistance of caudillos like Miguel Lanza has prevented the total restoration of colonial rule. Right here in Buenos Aires, Alvear’s directorate has fallen, and the estate owners, merchants, and priests have seized power, persecuting the liberals, confiscating their property, and sentencing them to exile or to death. The saddest news comes at year’s end from Mexico: the rebel priest Morelos has been captured, tried, and sentenced. His severed head is like a black moon clapped onto a lance in San Cristóbal Ecatepec.

Dorrego and I, Varela, get along as best we can, hoping for better times, keeping our eyes open, and reading the letters of our friend Baltasar. Sometimes we write back, but since we don’t really know where he is, we send our letters to the estate of his dead father. Let’s hope they reach him. We learned that Lanza sentenced him to death for desertion; we fix our clocks, and on afternoons when the pampa wind blows, we stand in front of maps of the continent and trace the imaginary movements of nonexistent armies: campaigns that are always dangerous but ultimately triumphant, waged by ideal, phantasmagorical, South American armies …

In this way, Dorrego and I, Varela, transform History into the presence of an absence. Is that another name for ideal perfection?