“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 add
ed 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 …