Baltasar held back a gesture of terror and tenderness, as if he expected another revelation: the letters faded, but within the same frame there appeared the face of the beloved, not a painting, not a reproduction, not a symbolic rendering, but she herself, her flesh, her eyes, the movement of her lips and neck; and as the figure shrank so as to be seen in its entirety, they saw that she was naked. She offered herself to Baltasar, to the spectator, to the world, complete in every forbidden detail, each soft and caressable surface, every feared, harsh, spidery secretion … Ofelia Salamanca was there; she moved, was seen, and now spoke. And what she said was true, because Baltasar had heard her say it:
“Don’t send me flowers. I hate them. And think what you like about me.”
She repeated these words several times; then her voice began to fade, along with her image. And Baltasar Bustos felt the vertigo of one who has seen what belongs to the realm of death, which he had just discovered slumbering in the middle of life.
“You have just seen,” said Simón Rodríguez, when the lights in the basin went out, “what our Spanish ancestors searched for with such frenzy in the New World. I saved the vision of El Dorado for you. El Dorado, the city of gold of the Indian world.”
But for Baltasar Bustos, listening to the old mestizo, there was no cry of rejection, but something worse, more insidious: a nausea like that of the loss of innocence, an affirmation as subtle as poison, something totally irrational, magic, which with a few seductive, ethereal images destroyed all the patient, rational structures of civilized man. Never in his life — Baltasar wrote us — until that moment had a repulsion and an affirmation, as diametrically opposed as they were complementary, united in him with such force. He was convinced that he’d reached the remotest past, the origin of all things, and that this magic origin of sorcery and illusion was not that of a perfect assimilation of man with nature but, again, an intolerable divorce, a separation that wounded him in the most certain of his enlightened convictions. He wanted to believe in the myth of origins, not as a myth but as the reality of the world reconciled with the individual. What had he seen here, what trick or what warning? Unity with nature is not necessarily the formula for happiness; do not go back to the origins, do not seek an impossible harmony, cherish all the differences you find on the road … Do not think that at the beginning we were happy. By the same token, don’t think we’ll be happy at the end.
“What you are seeing is not the past; perhaps it’s the future,” said old Rodríguez to calm him down. “This city is a harbinger, not of the magic you detest, Baltasar, but of the reason to come.” But for Baltasar anything that wasn’t reason was magic. “And if it wasn’t magic but science, what would your reason say?” asked the old man, afraid, once more, that he’d shown too much to his new disciple, who, for that very reason, would hate his teacher and spend the rest of his days trying to forget this extraordinary vision that no one wanted to share, because it was disconcerting, because it put our own rational convictions into doubt.
This is how I answered Baltasar: You should put your certainties to the test, staring whatever negates them straight in the eye. I don’t know if Dorrego answered him or what he would have said, but I could see he was more distressed than I, perhaps even more distressed than Baltasar himself.
“Don’t let yourself be distracted from war and government,” Dorrego told me from Buenos Aires. “Upper Peru, as everyone knows, is a land of witch doctors, hallucinations, and drugs. We’ll have to put a stop to it someday.”
“We’ve got to leave it all untouched,” said Simón Rodríguez, using his arms to shield the weakened, almost lifeless body of the young Baltasar Bustos as he tried to lead him out of the city of light. “Swear you’ll never send anyone here. To explore it would be to destroy it. Let it survive until the moment in which everyone understands it because the future itself leaves it behind.”
But Baltasar could only ask: What have I seen? Have I really seen this, though I could not even touch it, or is it a dream? Where are we? He could only implore as Simón Rodríguez got him out of there, ignoring the tales passing through the luminous but now open eyes of the inhabitants of El Dorado. Yet those tales held the secret to the place, and it was to a feverish Baltasar as he clung to the back of a mule on the dizzying spiral descent from the mountain that Simón Rodríguez told the truth he himself had just grasped.
“Everything you imagine is true. Today we happened on one fantasy among many possible fantasies. We don’t know if it’s yours, if it goes before you, or if it is the prelude to the next one.”
Baltasar did not seem to be listening and only muttered something, as if trying to forget what he was saying as he said it, rather than remember it.
That dreams are our real life
That the night is never over
That dreams overcome time
That the only sin is the separation of the sentient from the spiritual world
But Simón said no, no, no, that is not the lesson, the lesson is to accept that everything we imagine is true, that today we witnessed only one brief moment of that unending ribbon where truth is inscribed, and we do not know if what we saw is part of our imagination today, of an imagination that precedes us, or if it proclaims an imagination to come …
“I have experienced the vertigo of learning that something which is death’s can exist in life,” our younger brother, Baltasar, wrote us.
When we received his letter, Baltasar had recovered in a hospital in Cochabamba, where the disillusioned Simón Rodríguez had brought him. The old man went off, doubtless in search of newer, more receptive disciples. Baltasar, after writing us, waited for word from us. He said that, more than ever, he desired to take action in the real world and forget nightmares. What commission did we want to send him? He felt strong, was fully recovered, and he’d lost twenty pounds. Oh yes, and he reminded us that he’d been lost in one of the five thousand tunnels that connect Cuzco with the mines in Potosí, that it takes potatoes hours to cook there because of the altitude, that the lake is merely a track left by the retreating ice, that the lava of the volcanoes whistles as it flows downhill, that Upper Peru smells of the mercury transported in leather sacks to treat the silver, that I slept with a girl whose breasts sprouted between her legs, that I’ve seen the sun swimming beneath the world at dusk.
4. Upper Peru
[1]
His dappled stallion, who smelled until then of the sweat of bare mountain horses, now joined a new herd that smelled of gunpowder, horseshoes, and leather. The mountain horses, without saddles or bridles, gradually slowed down until they were left behind, as if amazed by that unfamiliar smell. Baltasar Bustos’s stallion was the only one to follow the charge, joining the war horses.
Holding on to the animal’s sweaty neck as best he could, Baltasar Bustos felt his face slapped by its wild, coarse mane, which snapped like a hundred small whips. He didn’t dare grab the forelock for fear of making the horse buck. But its furious gallop, multiplied in emulation of the war charge of twenty or thirty others, made the young officer’s body slip back.
They picked him up at full gallop as if he were a sack, the way leaves are blown away or something is snatched up by the wind. He didn’t know what was happening. All he understood for certain was that the world of the imagination was behind him and that he would forget it; he was now tossed into the tumult called reality, which carried him along in its wake. Two strong arms lifted him up on the run, draped him over the saddle, and pressed his face into the wool of the gaucho gear. A voice muttered barbarous obscenities. The voice was close but the words were blown away by the clamor of the fighting. Baltasar’s head, hanging down, suffocated by the dust, saw the world upside down.