The Campaign (16 page)

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.”