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 s
inless 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 an
d 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.