The Campaign

7. Harlequin House

[1]

Traveling with the Irish sailors between Callao and Panama, Baltasar Bustos recovered the slim figure he had during his days in Upper Peru; with only a Panama hat (bought in Guayaquil) for cover, he insisted on crossing the emerald forest between the two seas, between Pedro Miguel and Portobelo. The Indians of San Blas, whose faces marked with blue scars were a wounded parallel to the immutable colossi of Barriles, guided him among clay statues in the shape of men standing on each other’s shoulders. The waters of the Panamanian lagoons reflected nothing, so intense was the sun that blinded the men during the day. And at night he could make out the lights of Portobelo, where a second schooner, on the other side of the isthmus, waited to take him to Maracaibo, the ancient fortress of the Spanish Main, besieged from time to time by the arms and later by the fame of Drake and Cavendish. But now, in more recent memory, Maracaibo’s renown was associated with the pirate Laurent de Graff, who never attacked the Venezuelan harbor unless accompanied by a private orchestra of violinists and drummers; and the French captain Montauban, who would appear on its briny streets only in a sedan chair carried by stevedores and preceded, even at midday, by a procession of torchbearers.

The fame of the ancient English, French, and Dutch pirates was nothing compared with that which ran before our hero, Baltasar Bustos, in his celebrated search for Ofelia Salamanca throughout the American continent. The trails of the alpaca and the mule were slow, the jungles thick, the mountain ranges arid and impassable, the seas of the buccaneers bloody, and the ravines deep, but news traveled faster than any Indian messenger or Irish schooner: a fellow of unimpressive aspect, plump, long-haired, myopic, has been in pursuit of the beautiful Chilean Ofelia Salamanca, from the estuary of the Plata to the gulf of Maracaibo. They say he’s never seen her, much less touched her, but his passion compensates for everything and, despite his physical weakness, stirs him to fight, saber in hand, for the independence of America, side by side with the fearsome guerrillas of Miguel Lanza in the mud of the Inquisivi, with the legendary Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas at the head of the Indian hordes of the Ayopaya, with José de San Martín himself in the heroic crossing of the Andes.

Some hero! Baltasar Bustos said to himself when in the fetid port of Buenaventura he heard the first song about his love, transformed into a cumbia and danced, amid long, black plantains that resembled the phalluses of extinct giants, by immense black women, their heads decked out in red-checked handkerchiefs tied in fours. The multiple skirts the women wore did not impede them from communicating exactly what was there below or from moving their hips rhythmically, regularly, delightfully, and slowly. Some hero! Baltasar repeated to himself in Panama, listening to the story of his frustrated romance transformed into a tamborito and danced by Creole girls as white as cream, wrapped in immense skirts that turned their bodies, like those of milky spiders, into fans. Some hero — who had to struggle to resist the temptation of shortbread and powder cakes that dissolve on your lips, prickly pears, and caramelized custard apples in those dancing ports between a scorching Pacific, free of the frozen waters of Baron von Humboldt’s current, and a lulling Caribbean, separated only by Panama’s pinched waist, the sash worn by the dancing and singing black girls: Here comes Baltasar Bustos, looking for Ofelia Salamanca, from the pampa to the lowlands! Some hero! Who would recognize him, not plump as the song had him, but once again thin, his stomach muscles hardened by days before the mast with the Irish sailors, who made their hours of work into a happy game and their hours of drunkenness and rest (which were one and the same) into nostalgic sobbing: Baltasar Bustos, chestnut-hued, his hair honey-colored, his beard and mustache blond — reborn, resembling the prickly pear he resisted the temptation to eat, his thighs taut, his bare legs covered with golden down, his chest hairless and damp with sweat, and the long hair in his armpits intimating the most salacious secrets. This was not the Baltasar of the cumbia or the tamborito—or, for that matter, of the merengue (here his mouth watered because he automatically thought of meringue).

His fame preceded him, but no one recognized him. He threw the last sign of his legendary identity — his round glasses with the silver frames — into the sea as he left the mouth of the Guayas River, where he heard his first satiric Andean song, a zamba that had come all the way from Lake Titicaca to Mount Chimborazo, if not dragged along by a dying condor, then hissed out by an irate llama.

This was his fate: people idolized him and wanted him to triumph both in war and in love. Even the blacks, who were kept away from the gangplank of the schooner in Maracaibo by shouts of “Evil race!” bawled out by exasperated royalist officers — even they peered out from among the sacks of cacao, whiter and certainly less damned than they. These blacks, despised by the Spaniards and the Creoles, were the defeated troops of another revolt, “the insurrection of the other species,” which very soon recognized the reality of the wars of independence: everyone wanted freedom for themselves, but no one wanted equality for the blacks, who unleashed their rage against every white man in Venezuela — Spaniard, creole, Simón Bolivar himself (who condemned the black explosion at Guatire as the work of an inhuman and atrocious people who fed on the blood and property of the patriots). Baltasar Bustos now saw the embers of rage in their yellow eyes and sweaty bodies, which the Spaniards kept back, so his baggage and that of the Irish sailors with whom he blended could be unloaded. He walked on ground that seemed to him unstable, under a sky he saw suspended, all of it, like certain clouds we stare at for a long time in the calmest summers, hoping they’ll move so that we can, too: how can we move if the world has stopped dead in its tracks?

The revolution was winning in the south under San Martín; in the north, Bolívar’s early victories had been wiped out by the Spanish reconquest led by the ferocious General Morillo. The revolution in the north was sustained only by the tenacity of Simón Bolívar, exiled first in Jamaica and now back in his southern base at Angostura, his redoubt and refuge after his defeat by Morillo in the battle of the Semen, which took place almost at the same time San Martín was winning the battle of Chacabuco, with Bustos at his side. Those battles were followed by the defeat of the great rebel plainsman Páez in the battle of Cojedes. Semen and Cojedes, two battles that bottled up the patriots south of the Orinoco, and two comic words — the first for obvious reasons, the second because it recalled a euphemistic creole verb for “fornication”—which were savored by Baltasar Bustos as a good omen about his amatory fortunes in this Venezuela which Ofelia Salamanca had already reached, ahead of him as always and wildly enthusiastic about the implacable royalist brutality of Morillo.

“She passed through Guayaquil, heading for Buenaventura.”

“She disembarked in Panama, crossed the Isthmus.”

“She took ship in Cartagena for Maracaibo. The Spaniards are strong there, so she can toast their victories, the bitch.”

An ailing port of brothels and shops, the latter empty because Maracaibo was under constant siege by the rebel forces, the former overflowing with all the refuse tossed up by a war which had been going on for eight years, during which time the armies of the king fought the patriots over harvests and cattle, while slaves fled burned-out haciendas and masters doggedly clung to slavery with or without independence. The peasants had no land, the townspeople had no towns to return to, the artisans had no work, the widows and orphans flooded into the royalist port out of which chocolate, in ever diminishing quantities, was exported. As always, our bitter supper sent out all of its desserts to the world.

Baltasar Bustos tossed his glasses into the Guayas River. They hadn’t helped him find Ofelia Salamanca. Now, with no guide but his passion, he would traverse plains and mountains, rivers and forests until he wore out the legend and made it into reality. For an entire year, while Bolívar conquered New Granada and royalist power spent itself because it had to be constantly on guard, Venezuela lived in suspense, waiting for the decisive battle between the Liberator and the royalists, between Páez and his lancers and Morillo and his Spanish regulars. But in Maracaibo’s brothels, bars, hospitals, docks, and warehouses — and no longer in the salons, as he had in Lima and Santiago — Baltasar Bustos sought out news of his beloved that would justify, when the two met, the songs that were being sung right there — and not at nonexistent creole balls — by whores, mule drivers, children, stevedores, and nuns from the first-aid station: the ballad of Baltasar and Ofelia.

Did she know them? Did she know those lyrics, some funny, some silly, most dirty? Was she what the songs said: an Amazon with one breast cut off, the better to use her bow and arrow, who came from a country exclusively of women, who left it once a year to become pregnant and who killed all male children? The way those ballads described him was also not true. Obsessed, he walked every street and alley in the tropical port, hoping to glean accurate information and hearing only inaccurate songs, wearing himself out in the unrelenting humidity, eating bad food, in perpetual danger of fever.

A pair of eyes followed him as he became a familiar though unidentifiable figure. This man was not the one from the song. But the eyes that followed him had seen him like this before, as he was now, just as he had been when he returned from the Upper Peru campaign, thin and hard. From a bay window, the eyes watched him through shutter slats and black veils. This woman had always appeared enveloped in dark cloth, but now her dresses of gloomy, mournful black were no longer reflected in the glitter of drizzly Lima nights.

She sent a sharp little black boy dressed as a harlequin to bring him to her. Thus it was that Baltasar entered the Harlequin House in Maracaibo for the first time. Fame had kept him away; the whorehouse was as famous as the legend of Ofelia and Baltasar, and he was afraid of being recognized there. Fame is shared and recognized everywhere. Bustos was right. He was recognized, but not when he came in, not by the company of the bordello nymphs, women of all colors and tastes, whom Baltasar imagined, as he strolled among these odalisques with naked bellies, as all tied to nature by their wide or deep, wrinkled or pristine navels, nearer to or farther from the separating scissors, but all those navels sighing with a life of their own, as if a whore were a whore simply to prolong the splendid idleness and the sinless sensualities, suspended in nothingness, of prenatal life. Undulating whores: lewd blacks from Puerto Cabello, lank Indians from Guayana, repentant mestizas from Arauca, cynical Creole girls from Caracas, the French from Martinique with their fans, a Chinese with a breast between her legs, bovine Dutch from Curaçao, distracted English tarts from Barbados who pretended not to be there at all. Baltasar Bustos, led by the black harlequin, smelled their mustard and urine, incense and skunk, congereel and sandalwood, guava and Campeche wood, tea and wet sand, sheep; all these humors gathered in the grand salon decorated in the style of Napoleon I, with ottomans, plaster sphinxes, fixed lights, and stopped clocks, the grand salon of the most famous brothel in a port famous for piracy, plunder, and slavery, now besieged by the patriots of an empire, Spain’s, that believed itself installed there for all eternity.

The harlequin and Baltasar finally reached their destination, and Baltasar stood as if before a conquered queen, conquered by herself. The greedy eyes of the prostitutes followed him until the doors closed behind him. The woman in black lost no time: she said she’d been expecting him to turn up, even though she knew that he did not want to find within the brothel what he was looking for outside. He was involved in other things — she was told everything — because out there he could not expect to find this Ofelia Salamanca. But here he did, correct? No, he shook his head, not here, either; I’ve almost lost all hope of ever finding her. At this stage in the game, Baltasar, would you prefer never to find her, to go on searching forever because that justifies your life, this rhythm that makes you crazy and makes all of us women crazy when we sing and dance it? Not even a Chinese girl with three breasts? Our dearest?

“Don’t betray me. I recognized you from the party in Lima.”

She swore not to say who Baltasar was. And she knew how to keep a secret. He did want to know how she had come to this house from the salons of the viceroyalty, did he not? Baltasar said nothing. She thanked him for his discretion but promised him: “When you come back, I’ll tell you everything.”

But now, she added quickly, with an expression of mourning that seemed to be the very face of evening, which glittered between her flesh and her dark robes, giving light to death, he had to go on to Mérida and from there go up to the mountains, to Páramo, the cold barren plain, and then, at Pico del Aguila, turn around and come back here.

“Will I find her there?”

“I cannot guarantee it. You will find her legend, in any case.”

“That I already know. It’s sung, along with my own.”

“About that woman you desire, no one knows the truth.”

“Then how will I know it?”

“I think by looking for her, even if you don’t find her.”

“Did you meet her in Lima, Luz María?”

“Never say that name again. I am not that person any longer.”

[2]

These words intensified Baltasar’s hunger. Without his glasses, he did not see well, but his other senses — smell, especially, and hearing — were more intense than ever. As he set out on his new journey, he felt unable to distinguish what he managed to see from what he smelled, heard, and, ultimately, what he dreamed. In Upper Peru, he’d once said he was afraid to admire everything he wasn’t, simply for that reason. But now a swift concatenation of songs — would songs always be the fastest means of communication in this vast, sprawling continent? — offered Baltasar Bustos the image of a man who was and was not himself: physically he was not that man, although in his soul, the moving mirror of the times he was living, he was. The passion commemorated in the songs was real; who knows if the story of a hero who used war to compensate for his mournful lack of love was, as well. But no melody — Peruvian waltz, cueca, cumbia, vidalita—told the truth he’d communicated to two fathers, his own and the Jesuit tutor Julián Ríos, and to two friends, Dorrego and me, Varela. Of course, we were so far away, so involved with our clocks and our Buenos Aires politics — governments fell, warlords from the provinces invaded, anarchy took over our dreams — that we didn’t even remember the legend of our friend Baltasar and the beautiful Ofelia. Two other friends, whose life and death filled us with envy and zeal, the priest Arias and Lieutenant Echagüe, died without knowing Baltasar’s secret: the kidnapping and substituting of the two babies. That provided some relief to our battered pride. We had started to become Argentines without realizing it.

But we did realize that in seeking Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar Bustos was seeking not only to satisfy a passion but also to receive a pardon.

And now, climbing by mule from the deep valleys and through the narrow passes of the Mérida mountains to the crenellated retaining walls of the foothills of the Andes, he asked forgiveness for one last time. Forgive me, Ofelia Salamanca, for what I did to your child.

And what about the black baby? Wasn’t Baltasar going to ask forgiveness — out of politeness — for what he did to him? No. Perhaps the black mother, publicly flogged for daring to have a child though she had syphilis, had suffered all the child himself deserved to suffer. But in this search for Ofelia, Baltasar was satisfying another passion besides the romantic one attributed to him: the spiritual passion of seeking Ofelia to fall on his knees before her and ask forgiveness. Forgive me for having kidnapped your child.

Between Tabay and Mucurumba, the landscape of the Andes shed its cover, showing itself naked, grayish-brown, cracked, abrupt, and before it the young reader of Rousseau insisted on imagining a man in nature who was spontaneously good, who was alienated by society, and masked by an evil that had nothing at all to do with nature: evil comes from elsewhere, not from us. He lost this article of Romantic faith, as if it were a cold griddle cake, when an old man sitting on a sack of potatoes in the town of Mucuchíes told him that, yes, the treacherous Ofelia Salamanca had passed through, and at that very house you see there, the one painted red and pink, she had asked a royalist colonel not to kill an armed patriot who had barricaded himself in it, not expecting to get out alive, but with “his honor intact.” The colonel agreed. The patriot threw his weapons out that white-framed window right there. Then she went in, took off her clothes, and showed herself naked to the patriot. She didn’t say a word. The entire town was in suspense, waiting to see what would happen. Everything could be seen through the open windows. She was naked and said nothing. But she allowed the patriot to look at her, at all of her. Then she ordered him out and herself told the firing squad to shoot.

What had all the girls seen, the ones with round faces, with apple cheeks, who tied their hats on with scarves to keep the mountain wind from blowing them away? What did all the old men sitting along the principal streets of all these Andean towns think? Those old men never died. They’d been here for a thousand years. The same length of time as the red yaraguá grass, the rich cattle pasture that managed to survive on this bald mountain — old cattle, as well. In the towns farther up, only old men and children were left, old men with silvery wrinkles and girls with long hair. What had they seen, what had they heard said about Ofelia Salamanca? They say she had a rebel captain killed while he was shitting at the gates of La Guaira. She waited until that moment, just to humiliate him. In Valencia, on the other hand, she forced a royalist general to turn himself in and die with a rope around his neck, on his knees, to beg forgiveness for his sins.

Ofelia Salamanca: just as the yellow-flowered frailejon survives the cold of the highlands to dot the mountainsides like calligraphy, stories about Ofelia Salamanca dot this Santo Domingo mountain range. And just as the frailejon’s flowers form a candelabrum that rises above the fleshy shrub, that’s how she rose here, hunting down patriots until there were none left and she’d be without victims. Right here in this wasteland town, where the buzzards fly ceaselessly, that woman lacking a breast and good sense, said this to the rebel commander besieging the forts along the Orinoco:

“If you beat the royalists, you can take me prisoner and kill me.”

“And if the Spaniards beat us?”

“You and I will make love.”

“A delightful opportunity, you Spaniard-loving slut. I won’t miss it, you can bet on it.”

“But there’s one condition. You mustn’t allow yourself to lose just to make love to me. Because then I’ll kill you. Agreed?”

He did let himself be beaten just to make love to her — as the mountain bards would sing it — and so he died in her arms, a dagger in his back.

What did all these men know who died in her arms, at her order, when they saw her naked, when they let themselves be conquered by her? Who was this Creole Penthesilea?

In the desolate nature of the high Venezuelan wastes, Baltasar Bustos listened but did not find a joyful reciprocity in his solitary, self-sufficient soul, that would unite the individual with things, or promise with actuality. On the contrary, Ofelia’s human acts obviated any possibility of reconciliation, rendering diabolical the very business of nature, from which the beautiful and cruel Chilean lady seemed to emanate and in which she found both her justification and her reflection. His faith in a possible reconciliation between man and nature was also shattered at that moment; we are burdened with too many sins, he whispered into the ear of the wasteland, to the old man and the young girl. Any reconciliation would be forced; we have no other choice but to go on hurting each other, and nothing will hurt us more than capricious passions, authoritarian disdain, power exercised without restraint: Ofelia Salamanca.

He saw the woman’s face in the frozen, sterile, immensely beautiful mountains: he reached, protected by his Panama hat, the crest of the bird of prey, the back of the dead camel, the Eagle’s Beak, which had the shape of a necklace lost there, as if carelessly, by Ofelia Salamanca, this incomprehensible woman, this endless enigma, who had finally worn out her romantic lover; he was thankful that the fierce yellow flower invaded this pure nakedness only between July and August, quickly abandoning the mountains to their clean, undecorated solitude. A baroque woman, of obscene sumptuousness, whose dazzling excretions and lugubrious rewards were seeking to revive something inert: in that instant, Baltasar believed he’d finally expunged her from his heart and exiled her from his mind.

But the void she left was immense. He descended bit by bit, convinced that he’d found the woman transformed into eternal stone, occasional flower, the stone sterile, the flower poisonous; and he again sought spontaneous delight in the diffuse sweetness of the reborn landscape of the valleys, the hooves of the sheep, the thatched roofs of the houses, and the fields of green carnations like lemon groves.

But all these Spanish flowers in the Venezuelan Andes — carnations, roses, and geraniums — could not fill the void left by Ofelia. The war could; trotting near the shadow of the extended eaves of the village houses, Baltasar accepted that his life, which he once imagined unique, without fissures — nature and history reconciled in his person — was forever sundered, and, as those inevitable song books already had it, all that was left to him was to bounce from war to war, from south to north and from north to south, to carry out his legendary destiny, which had already been mapped out in popular song … He would stop at sunrise to partake of delicious mountain cheese, Andean bread, and pineapple wine, but not even those details of life escaped the fate already dictated in the song. Chewing, he thought about Homer, the Cid, Shakespeare: their epic dramas were written before they were lived. Achilles and Ximena, Helen, and Richard the hunchback in real life had done nothing but follow the poet’s scenic instructions and act out what had already been set down. We call this inversion of metaphor “history,” the naïve belief that, first, things happen and then they are written. That was an illusion, but he no longer fooled himself.

At that very moment, as an old woman was serving him a plate of griddle cakes in an inn by the side of the Macurumba road, it occurred to Baltasar Bustos to ask her about the war. To which she replied, “What war?”

Baltasar laughed and ate. At times, in these isolated towns, people don’t find out about anything — or they find out very late, only when the bard gives his version of events. But in Mucuchíes, hours later, he found the same old man sitting on the same sack of potatoes and asked him the same question—“How’s the war going?”—and received the same reply—“What war? What are you talking about?” The news was all over town instantly. The children took the opportunity to have some fun and tease. They made a circle around him, singing, “What war? What war?” and when he broke out of the magic circle of children and asked their elders who Simón Bolívar, Antonio Páez, and José Antonio Sucre were, they all said the same thing: “We don’t know them. Are they from around here? Has anyone heard of them? Ask the old man who plays the violin in El Tabay.”

He was a man with a square head, sculpted by saber wounds until it looked like a block of wood. Baltasar found him inland, far from the road, in a vast, run-down house. To get to it, Baltasar had to climb over the skeletons of cows. The old man was on his shady terrace, sitting on the skull of a cow, just as José Antonio Bustos sat on his pampa ranch when Baltasar was a child. This old man played the violin; he did nothing else, except to contemplate a black man about thirty years of age, naked from the waist up and covered by filthy, tattered canvas trousers.

When Bustos approached on his mule, the squared-off, dark old man stopped playing, wiped his moist mustache with his hand, and stared with eyes overcome by the glare. The sun baked the cow bones and invited one’s sight to become white as well, like the light. Baltasar understood, as never before, the need for shade; that is what he said, by way of greeting, to the old man; he didn’t bother to greet the black — there was always a black or an Indian, silent, leaning on the doorposts. Justice turned into sun and white bones in his head; he’d come in search of the war and asked the old man, “Where? What is happening?”

“I know nothing,” said the old man. “Eusebio here might have some news.”

The black did not stop talking; that is, Baltasar realized that he’d been talking all the while, but in a very low voice. And now he spoke more loudly, repeating, “Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a thief. Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a fugitive. Thank you, General, for allowing me to be here on your estate.”

“You’d like to be on the loose, killing and robbing,” said a woman who’d appeared from the half-light in the house, wiping her hands on an apron. “And you, what do you want?” she said, looking at Baltasar.

“I’m a soldier,” it occurred to Baltasar to say. “How can I join the nearest battalion?”

The woman stared at him in total incomprehension, the old man with pity, the black with a grin. They seemed, one with his violin, the other with his gratitude, the woman with her rage, as if suspended in time, as if absent.

“Bolívar,” Bustos recited the magic names of the heroes, “San Martín…” as if they were amulets.

There was a long silence, then the old man stopped playing and spoke, “He said, ‘Comrades, the revolution has no money, but it does have land. Look as far as you please, from the sea at Maracaibo to the jungle of Guayana, from Eagle Peak to the mouths of the Orinoco, and what you see is land. There is land. The Spaniards took it away from the Indians. Now we’re taking it away from the Spaniards. Take your land,’ he said to me, ‘not today but tomorrow, when we win the war. Here is a voucher; there’s another for your orderly, an ignorant black.’ I cashed in the voucher, as did all the generals, but here you have this boy. He’s an ignorant black. He didn’t know how to cash anything. The war’s over. Eusebio doesn’t know how to exercise his rights.”

“I’d be a thief if you didn’t protect me,” said the black.

“These people know nothing about papers. They only want to survive,” said the dark, squared-off old man. “We own everything, but we finish nothing.”

“Go on.” The woman laughed, a sixtyish Creole who must have been pretty a long time ago. “You’re almost black yourself; don’t be afraid of appearances. But I am, old man. I’m here on this cattle ranch you were given as payment for your service, ready to serve you as a maid as long as I don’t have to know what’s going on out there. For sure, the blacks have taken control of Caracas.”

“Because for you everything’s bad.” The old man hugged the violin to his chest.

“I got tired of watching you fight. Thank your lucky stars. This is better than nothing,” said the woman before leaving, her back turned to them.

No sooner had she gone than the old man shut his eyes, furrowed his brow, and summoned Baltasar with his hand. “Come closer,” he said, “so she can’t hear us. But I know the truth. I know what’s happened. Bolívar was betrayed. They turned on him, just as my wife turned her back on us a moment ago, they sent him off to die alone, but that is our destiny. They ran San Martín out. They surrounded him with spies so he couldn’t live in peace. They finished him off by forcing him into exile.”

“Who? The Spaniards?” said Baltasar, trying to follow the old man’s strange tale.

“No, the Creole military men, us.”

“Mulatto,” said the young man, laughing. “You’re a mulatto, old man.”

“I am, hiding here because I don’t want to be a part of the ingratitude or of the crimes committed against my brothers,” said the old man with astonishing strength, and his wife reappeared, asking, “What are you saying? Still talking your foolishness, still telling what is going to happen? What a mania for God’s sake! Who ever gave you the idea you were a prophet, you old fool?”

“I’m not. I only tell what already happened,” said the old man. He began to play his violin. “What happened a long time ago.”

Over the course of his slow return to Mérida, and from there to the sea, Baltasar Bustos found no evidence of war; no one knew anything about the old battles, and not a soul remembered the heroes. Sometimes they would say yes, the battle’s going to take place tomorrow, but later they would mention names that meant nothing to him — Boyacá, Pichincha, Junín — and when he asked for details, no one could tell him where those places were or give him dates; they could only say in a monotonous voice: “One more battle and the fatherland will be saved.”

He entered a burned-out city where he walked in ashes up to his ankles. He was told that the ashes would be there forever, that nothing could get rid of them. Later, he returned to the violin-playing general’s ranch. The woman had died. That afternoon they were burying her. The black had gone off to the mountains. He had fled. He would go down to the plains. He would fire his rifle. He would fight forever. Here he would have gone insane. The old man was left alone, and Baltasar felt that the solitude was giving him back his old spirit. The old man told more and more stories, about wars against the French, against the Yankees, military coups, torture, exile, an interminable history of failures and unrealized dreams, all postponed, all frustrated, pure hope; nothing ever ends and perhaps it’s better that way, because here, when anything ends, it ends badly.

Here and there, Baltasar Bustos found forgotten iron wheels of cannons, and during the day he would cool his brow on them and at night use them to keep his hands warm. He lost all sense of time. Perhaps in Venezuela they’d lost it as well, resigned to frustration and to things done only halfway. One day, in a cemetery filled with tombs painted thousands of different colors, he happened on the old violinist-general leading a rickety funeral cortege, obviously made up of paid mourners, recruited by that same old hero whom Simón Bolívar had rewarded with land instead of money — exactly what the Cid did with his Castilian warriors. Who had died? Who else — the general looked at him with compassion — but Eusebio the rebel black? Baltasar made the Sign of the Cross before the coffin borne by four laborers.

“Don’t worry,” said the general. “My little Chebo isn’t in there. Rebels are always buried far away in unknown land, at night and with no name on the grave. So that no one ever knows if they’re alive or dead! The box is empty.”

“Only one more crime and the fatherland will be saved.” Baltasar paraphrased the last sentence he’d heard the general utter.

“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.”

“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.”

“I am free. I love you. You are my best friend. I don’t want to lose you, I’ve already lost…”

“Take this note. It’s from Ofelia Salamanca. She wants you to join her in Mexico. She’s waiting with Father Quintana in Veracruz. Here are the directions and a map. Hurry, Baltasar. Oh yes, I bought you a pair of glasses. Start using them again. You have to read this letter carefully. Don’t start hallucinating. You have to see things clearly.”