The Campaign (20 page)

At around five in the afternoon, a girl would appear among the olive and almond trees. Dressed all in white, she seemed to float in a private cloud of soft cottons and gauze bodices. Baltasar would wait for the appearance of this phantom: she was always punctual and always distant, like a new star, half sun, half moon, displaying herself to him alone, offering herself to him in the tender orbit of a satellite around a true star—him. As she approached, this delightful girl would spin among the almond trees; coming closer and closer, she would twirl on her always bare feet in a dance that Baltasar wanted to think was dedicated to him—after all, there were no other spectators but the sun and the moon, which at that uncertain hour coexist in the Andean sky.

Only once, Baltasar looked at the two of them, the sun and moon present at five o'clock in the afternoon over a garden of wise and serene plants. They could not compete with her; she was both of them at once, and many other things as well.

A fine sun, as hot and caressing as the familiar hand of a mother who knows she is taken for granted and resigns herself to not being especially loved; but also an evil sun about to execute the day by hurling it into an irreversible conflagration from which it would never rise: the sun was the stepmother of time.

And a bad moon, which appeared now as if to seal the day's fate with a silver lock, white moon drained of life, pale moon with a vampire's face, bloodless moon hungry for offal and bloody discharges; but a good moon too, the bed of the day reposing in white sheets, the final bath that washes off the day's grime and sinks us into the amorous re-creation of time which is sleep.

Baltasar Bustos would watch all that from his balcony, afternoon after afternoon, until he came to distinguish a face, the unusual face of the moon, unexpected, individual, marked by eyebrows that in another woman would have been repulsive, joined together with no break, like a second sex about to devour her black eyes, her haughty nose, her red lips, and her expression of disdain, sweet disdain that began to madden Baltasar and to distance him from his obsession with Ofelia Salamanca.

Each afternoon, for a week now, this most beautiful girl—she could be no more than eighteen—came closer and closer until she disappeared through the series of arches of the house next door. Perhaps she had seen him, because she teased him coquettishly, appearing and then hiding behind the columns in the long aisles before she disappeared until the next day.

But this afternoon she was not there.

Baltasar felt a burning desire to jump over the wall, embrace her and kiss first her red lips and then her provocative eyebrows, like velvet, joined like a divine scourge, the promise of lust and terror. She was sun and moon, and this afternoon she was missing.

Only this afternoon. Why? What could have interrupted a rite he by now considered sacred, indispensable to his romantic life—once again he realized it and said it when he described this episode to us; his amorous emotions depended on distance, on absence, on the intensity of the desire manifested to a woman he could not touch, saw from afar, who now, just like Ofelia Salamanca, had disappeared without keeping the appointment, not with him, but with the sun and the moon.

Then Baltasar Bustos took his hat, ran out of the house, ran without noticing the ten blocks that separated him from the Red House in whose grand patio Rousseau's short tragedy was being performed, ran along the Calle del Rey, burst through the grand doorway, and saw her dancing in the middle of the patio surrounded by a chorus, by Indians and Spaniards, she herself acting the role of an allegorical Spanish maiden who sang and recited at the same time: Let us row, let us cross the seas, our pleasures will have their time, because to discover new worlds is to offer new flowers to love …

She raised her arms, and the gauze of her bodice revealed two fresh cherries, kissable, doing a short and merry quadrille on the girl's bosom.

“It isn't Jean-Jacques's best effort,” said the handsome priest to Baltasar as the public applauded and the actors bowed and thanked them. “I prefer
Narcissus, or He Who Loves Himself,
where Rousseau has the audacity to begin the dialogue with two women talking about a man, the brother of one of them, who, because of the refinement and affectation of his clothes is a kind of woman disguised in man's clothing. Yet his feminine appearance, instead of being a disguise, restores him to his natural state.”

“Are you telling me that this marvelous girl is really a man in disguise?” said Baltasar, instantly assuming his own vapid, cruel affectation.

“No”—the priest laughed—“her name is Gabriela Cóo, and her father's job, an endless, labyrinthine task, is to sell off the Jesuits' rural properties in Chile for the benefit of the Crown. His daughter is no less emancipated than Rousseau himself, so she works at acting, avidly reading the authors of the age, and communing with nature. Allow me to introduce you, Bustos.”

“Are you telling me that all these afternoons she's merely been rehearsing a part?” asked Baltasar, plainly disillusioned.

“Pardon me?”

He accepted the invitation to meet her socially, but only under the condition that no one ever find out that each afternoon at five, for as long as he had to live in Chile, he would see her appear, vaporous and infinitely desirable, in the garden next door to his own house. He was afraid that she might already have met him at one of the myriad Santiago gatherings and that she would despise him, as did the other girls, who were, besides, fully aware of his obsession for the vanished Marquise de Cabra. He was just about to reject the introduction and to propose, since both of them were Rousseau enthusiasts, a purely epistolary relationship, like the one in the novel causing a furor throughout the New World, from Mexico to Buenos Aires:
La Nouvelle Héloïse.

But three things happened, three foreseeable yet unexpected things. Myopic and foppish, chubby and not very attractive, Baltasar launched into one of an infinite number of dinner conversations with the lady next to him at table. Their dialogue was well under way when Baltasar realized he was acting a romantic part he'd learned perfectly and would recite at these functions. But this role was, at the same time, perfectly authentic, because everything he said corresponded to an intimate conviction, even if its verbal expression was not especially felicitous. This divorce was, simultaneously, the matrimony of his words. He'd repeated them again and again with a mixture of apathy and passion ever since his visit to Lima, searching for Ofelia Salamanca and insinuating that, sentenced to death by the ferocious guerrilla leader Miguel Lanza, he had to place his sympathies with the Crown; after all, the insurgents would deny him any protection whatever.

He could not alter his discourse that night; it was authentic and false at the same time. But he addressed it to her, since he had discovered halfway through dinner that he was speaking to Gabriela Cóo. He gave a face to that face, eyebrows to that visage, a perfume to that body, and now he could not stop the flow of his words, careening like a cart down a mountainside. And each time she answered him in a polite but cutting, intelligent, firm, even amused way, was she laughing at him, as almost all these Chilean girls did who were too beautiful and intelligent to take him seriously? And wasn't that exactly what he most desired: to be left free to pursue his true passion, the search for Ofelia?

“Whenever I come near to a woman like you, I feel the desire to avenge my pain and my sin on you.”

“You don't say.”

“Only you can kill the passion in me.”

“It would be a pleasure.”

“I mean: do me the favor of hastening my calvary.”

“To whom are you speaking, Mr. Bustos?”

“I tell you that my soul only wants to recover or die, milady.”

“But I only know how to cure, not to kill.”

“Try to be another woman, and I will not try to seduce you,” said Baltasar, lowering his voice.

“I want neither to be someone else nor to be seduced by you,” she replied in the same low tone, before laughing out loud. “Be more reasonable, Mr. Bustos.”

The second thing that happened was that each afternoon at five she reappeared, far off in her garden. She approached little by little, as if suggesting that she would come closer, allowing herself to be desired, allowing him to make her more and more his own, first in his eyes and his desire and someday perhaps through real possession. The movements of the dance, the increasing languors, the increasing nakedness of that svelte, almost infantile body governed by a mask whose will was a mouth as red as a wound and brows as black as a whip, spelled out her name, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, desired, desirable, promising, promised, confident she would not deceive her lover, if he wanted to be her lover, if he gave himself to her, distant and nubile in her garden, as he had given himself to Ofelia Salamanca, distant and widowed, a mother who had given birth twice to the same child, given birth, that is, to life and to death, a woman burdened by suffering and rumors and probable cruelties and imagined betrayals. Gabriela Cóo's dancing body was asking him to choose but did not say to him, “I am better than the other”; it merely said, “I am different, and you must accept me as I am.”

It had to be that way, Baltasar said to himself every afternoon, because she was no longer rehearsing Rousseau's play, which was put on just once in the patio of the grand Portuguese-style mansion on Calle del Rey. No longer. Now the performance was for him alone.

She was his little mistress—he decided to give her that name, just as we called him our little brother.

One afternoon, the little brother and the little mistress met without having fixed a time. He jumped over the low wall separating the two properties just as she was coming out of the entrance to her house. Neither yielded, but both gave all. She explained to him that her behavior the other night had not been the infantile act of a spoiled girl trying to entertain in polite society. She really did want to be an actress, she believed in independence—not only political but personal, too. The two went together, at least that is what she believed. Here in Chile, in other parts of the New World, even in Europe, she would pursue her career. She loved words, said Gabriela Cóo; each word had its own life and required the same care as a newborn child. When she opened her mouth, as she did the other night, and repeated a word—love, pleasure, world, sea—she had to take charge of that word like a mother, like a shepherdess, like a lover, yes, even like a little mistress, convinced that, without her, without her mouth, her tongue, the word would smash against a wall of silence and die forsaken.

But to take charge of words that weren't her own, the words of Rousseau, Ruiz de Alarcón, or Sophocles, she had to prepare herself for a long time. She would give nothing to a man unless he first gave her words. For her, love was a vocation as strong as the theater, but words also sustained love. All this was very difficult, even a little sad—Gabriela Cóo put her arm around Baltasar and patted his curls—because her work was pure shadow, fleeting, left no mark: only the words, poor things, that preceded it were left, and would be, even without her. In order to give meaning to her life of spectral voices, what else could Gabriela think except that, thanks to her mouth, the words had not died but had actually gained a modicum of life, body, dignity, who knows what else?

She felt for Baltasar's nape under his curly hair and asked if he understood her. He said he did; he knew she understood him equally well. She knew he loved her and why he acted and spoke that way at the Santiago dinners he frequented and why they would be parting soon.

“Tell me it's not because of that other woman.” Gabriela Cóo thus made her only faux pas, explicable in any case, and he forgave her but decided at that moment to separate her from his life, to give her the freedom she needed, and to give himself to the slavery his obsession with Ofelia entailed until he consummated his passion. At the moment, he could see no other way to be faithful to this adorable girl, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, my love, my adored little love, delightful Gabriela; we shall never truly know our own hearts, Little Mistress.

He so desired the only kiss he and Gabriela exchanged, his vision of that act was so intense, so red were the girl's lips when they joined his, their mouths parting and their tongues joining and separating only to tickle their palates and count their avid, cruel, and tender teeth, that from it there emerged another mouth, another kiss, a kiss that stole theirs away, banished it, took it from them and turned it into the kiss, the mouth, the voice of Ofelia Salamanca.

And that was the third thing that happened.

He promised himself not to think about Gabriela until he could be hers alone.

[3]

Facing Santiago, but separated from it by the rampart of the Andes, Mendoza—capital of the Argentine province of Cuyo—was the revolutionary center of the Americas. The sweetness of its valley of vines and cherry trees, the eternal springtime of its warm breezes and its snow-capped backdrop, its lands given over to golden pear trees and fertile earth, was all negated. Mendoza was given over to the extremes of cold calculation and infernal din because of the activities of the Army of the Andes that was forming, in spite of all apathy and against all obstacles.

At the beginning, there was nothing; San Martín set about turning that nothing into war supplies. He ordered contributions, extorted money from everyone, pestered President Pueyrredón to distraction, exhorted the ladies of Mendoza to donate their jewels at the municipal council, proscribed luxury, and cut officers' salaries in half. From the back of a horse no taller than the liberating general himself, sitting bolt upright, barely thirty-seven years old but already showing an incipient maturity that did not wholly extinguish the veiled glint in his eyes or the stubborn determination in his mouth, he proclaimed:

“Cuyo must sweat money for the liberation of America; from this day forward, each one of us must stand guard over his own life.”