But Simón Rodríguez went on talking. “She was supposed to grow old a virgin. It was her vow, and she broke it for you.”
“Why?” Baltasar asked again furiously — without recognizing himself — before he wrote us the letter and before he found something of an answer in the very fact of asking why.
“You entered this place without knowing it. You spoke to these people from a mountaintop. Now you must descend to the poor land of the Indians. It is land that has been subjugated by the laws of poverty and slavery. But it is also a land liberated by magic and dreams…”
“Where are you taking me?” asked Baltasar, whose intelligence informed him that here in this abandoned village on the shore of the lake, he had no alternative but to follow.
Simón Rodríguez, with a strength that was supernatural in a man his age, first clasped Baltasar’s arms and then his shoulders, turning him to face the windowpane. Finally, he grasped the nape of the young Argentine military man’s neck, forcing him to see himself in the window where just a few minutes earlier the old man had combed his beard.
Baltasar, examining himself, saw a different man. His mane of copper-colored curls had grown. The fat had gone from his face. His nose grew sharper by the moment. His mouth became firmer. His eyes, behind his glasses, revealed a rage and a desire where before they had only seemed good-natured. His beard and mustache had grown. With this face he could look on the world in a different way. He didn’t say it. He merely asked himself again. He was no longer a virgin — a boy, as that strange priest de las Muñecas insisted on calling him. For whom had he been a virgin? Not for Ofelia Salamanca, whom he’d only seen and loved from a distance, three years ago. Did his tranquil passion to save himself for a woman have any other objective? Was there another, one who wasn’t Ofelia or the Indian virgin who had violated her vows to give herself to him? What are we doing here on this earth? Jean-Jacques had asked himself. “I was brought to life, and I’m dying without having lived.”
[3]
He would remember a trap door and some wooden steps in the cellar of the abandoned town hall. He would remember that at the bottom of the steps there was a sheer-rock precipice that fell away sharply to the bed of a river deep down. He would remember a trail, as wide as a mule’s back, cut into the cheek of the mountain. He would remember the hand of the old mestizo in hobnail boots leading him along that vertiginous, narrow path. He would remember barely glimpsed vistas through the crags: snowcapped volcanoes and dead salt pits. He would remember a red lake veined with flamingo eggs. He would remember the swift flight of the huallata, the white turkey of the Andes marked with its black wound, scouring the lake for food. He would remember a forest of starlit clouds against the wall of the mountain, bearing the moisture of the forest and the river but refusing to yield it to the desert on the other side of the Andes. He would remember the noise of bells behind the forest of clouds and then the sight of terrified flocks of llamas blocking the path, spitting and chattering in their venomous tongue, accompanied by the huallata’s distant lament. Then a hailstorm scattered the llamas and the birds, but when Baltasar turned to make sure of what he’d seen, he found himself enclosed within a dark cave. He felt around, seeking the company of Simón Rodríguez; the old mestizo reached a hand out to him and said he should try to get used to what light there was. But barely did Baltasar move his hand when he felt six, eight, a dozen hands touching his own, taking it with joy, feeling it, running fingers over it, and all he felt were the hot hands of those creatures who were invisible to him but who screeched like those white turkeys, excited by the presence of their mates and by their eager search for food in the lake.
“They say you’re cold, that your hands and feet give off no heat…”
Baltasar did not say to old Simón that the hands and feet of Indians always burned, something he found out that night, those nights, the time spent with the Indian woman, virgin like him, whose flame, unburning, was the natural protection of those born at an altitude of six thousand feet, who have more veins in their fingers and toes than other human beings. He would have wanted to end his journey right there — how long it had taken them to get wherever they were, he could not tell — and curl up like an animal to sleep with those warmblooded people, protected forever by the heat of their extremities, the heat needed to sleep. But as he grew more accustomed to the darkness, he began to sense another zone of heat in the bodies around him: their eyes.
Hot hands, hot feet, and luminous eyes. But they had their eyes closed. They all moved as if the band of light that bound their closed eyelids was a substitute for vision, until a dozen or more of those simultaneously veiled and transparent eyes combined their rays in one single beam that enveloped and preceded Baltasar and Simón Rodríguez, guided them to the edge of a new abyss, this one within the cavern, as if the cave (was it really that?) replicated the external world, the world of the sun, in its internal darkness.
The bodies that were leading them stopped, surrounding the two outsiders. The light in their eyes blinded Baltasar and Simón at first; but as soon as the bodies turned toward the abyss, those eyes cast a stronger and stronger, whiter and whiter light on a vast but strangely near panorama that was very deep and at the same time one-dimensional. It was an immense globe, the color of silver but crystal, like a mirror. In the center of that space — globe, abyss, mirror? — there was a light. But that light was neither separate from the other lights in the cavern’s amphitheater nor the simple sum or reflection of the lights in the eyes of the cave’s inhabitants. Were they really underground? Hadn’t they gone up, despite the descent through the trap door in the cellar of the town hall? Was he above or below?
This was light, pure and simple, with no fanfare, no cheering. It was more than the origin of light, although it resembled nothing so much as that — Baltasar and Simón, chagrined, stood still and touched hands, just to touch something familiar, flesh, warmth. It was light before light showed itself. It was the idea of light.
How did they discover that? How did Simón communicate it to Baltasar and Baltasar to the old mestizo without either of them opening his mouth? The two stared at the closed but bright eyes of their guides. Messages transmitted by light passed through those closed lids. There the two men could read and understand. But there was nothing written on the eyes, which were, in effect, blindfolded by light; there was only light. And the light said: I am the idea of light before light was ever seen.
Then all the eyes in the Inca cavern turned toward the outsiders and flooded the abyss with light. Peering over the edge, the old man and the young man saw an entire city slowly but clearly coming into view. A city made entirely of light. The buildings were the product of light, from the doors and windows to the high roofs of the towers; the clocks were made of light. The streets were grand, luminous paths; along the avenues sped rapid carriages of light: they seemed powered by light and heading toward the light; and on every corner, at every door, on every roof, the light produced incomprehensible messages, traced letters, signs, and figures, names quickly composed out of a dizzying number of points of light, in a frame that was like the very symbol of light. And within that frame, the rapid flashing of the luminous points spelled out a single name, repeating it in successive flashes until it was etched on the retinas of the two outsiders as if carved in stone. And that name was OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA, OFELIA SALAMANCA.