They were risible words. Was the burden Baltasar Bustos felt on his shoulders as he said that in his father’s frozen ear also risible? “It’s up to me to do, over the course of my entire life, the work of one day. The entire responsibility for the revolution for independence weighs on me and on each one of us.”
The candle finally melted in the unfeeling hands of his dead father. The scapulary, however, remained, coiled like a sacred serpent. What would change, who would change it, how long would it take to change things? But was it worth it to change? All this came from so far off. He hadn’t realized before, their origin was so remote, that the American cosmogonies preceded all of secular reasoning’s feeble speculations; écraser l’infâme was in itself an infamy that called for its own destruction: it was a weak, rationalistic bulwark against the ancient tide of cycles governed by forces which were here before us and which will survive us … In El Dorado, he had seen the eyes of light that contemplated the origin of time and celebrated the birth of mankind. They did not remember the past; they were there always, without losing, because of it, either their immediate present or their most remote beginnings … How was it possible to stand next to them without losing our humanity but augmenting it thanks to everything we’ve been? Can we be at the same time all we have been and all we want to be?
His father did not answer his questions. But Baltasar was sure he was listening. Sabina had let the candle burn down. She shrieked when the flame touched the flesh. He can’t feel, said Baltasar. But she did feeclass="underline" she felt the knives she wore, like scapularies, between her breasts, over her sex, between her thighs. He didn’t have to see them to know they were there; he could smell them, near his sister and his father’s cadaver, he could feel them piercing his own body with the same conviction his own fighting dagger had entered the Indian’s body in the Vallegrande skirmish. In the same way he knew “I killed my racial enemy in battle,” he also knew “My sister wears secret, warm, magical knives near her private parts”; just as he’d earlier found out “Miguel Lanza does not want me ever to escape from his troops, so that I can be his younger brother and not his dead brother.” Having taken all this into himself, he now wanted to distance himself from it so that he could go forward to his own passion, the woman named Ofelia Salamanca.
He later wrote to his friends that perhaps it was his fate to return to his father’s estate too late for some things, too soon for others. He was untimely. But they themselves had pointed out the opportunity to him. Ofelia Salamanca had left Chile and was now in Peru. There were, then, immediate and sensual reasons for being.
“Your friends sent you a note. They could not find the child. The woman’s in Lima. That’s that. Will you go?”
Baltasar said yes.
“Won’t you take me with you?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“You’re not, but it doesn’t matter. You won’t take me because you respect me. I expected nothing less of your love for me. You would never dishonor me. We’ll leave that to the gauchos.”
“Excuse me if I am distracted. I’ve always wanted to be open to what others think and want.”
“You know I have nothing left to do here. I have no one to care for.”
“There’s the house. The gauchos. You just said it yourself.”
“Am I the mistress?”
“If that’s what you want, Sabina.”
“I’m going to die of loneliness if I don’t give myself to them.”
“Do it. Now let’s bury our father.”
5. The City of the Kings
[1]
The drizzle falling on Lima during that summer of 1815 stopped when the Marquis de Cabra, venturing out onto his baroque balcony suspended over the small plaza of the Mercederian Nuns, said, to no one in particular — to the fractured cloud, to the invisible rain that chilled one’s souclass="underline" “This city enervates us Spaniards. It depresses and demoralizes us. The good thing is that it has the same effect on the Peruvians.”
He cackled like a hen over his own wit and closed the complicated lattices of the viceregal windows. His Indian valet had already helped him into his silver-trimmed dress coat, his starched linen shirt, his short silk trousers, his white stockings, and his black shoes with silver buckles. All he needed was his ivory-handled malacca stick.
“Cholito!” he said to his servant with imperious tenderness. He was just about to give the order, but the Indian boy already had the walking stick ready and handed it to his master, not as he should have — so the marquis could take it by the handle — but offering the middle of the stick, as if handing over a vanquished sword. This cholito, this little half-breed, must have seen quite a few defeated swords handed to the winners of duels over the course of his short life. They were part of the legend of Peru: every victory was negated by two defeats, so the arithmetic of failure was inevitable. Now what attracted the Marquis de Cabra’s attention was something familiar: the ivory handle of his stick was a Medusa with a fixed, terrifying gaze and hard breasts that seemed to herald the stones set in the eyes.
It was a present from his wife, Ofelia Salamanca, and from being handled so much, the Medusa’s facial features had lost some of their sharpness. For the same reason, the atrocious mythological figure had completely lost her ancient nipples. The marquis shook his head, and his recently powdered wig dropped a few snowflakes on the shoulders of the former President of the Royal Council of Chile. The brocade absorbed them, just as it absorbed the dandruff that fell from the thinning hair of the sixty-year-old man who this afternoon was walking out into a Lima divided, as always, by public and private rumors.
The rumors concerned the situation created by Waterloo and the exile of Bonaparte to Saint Helena. Ferdinand VII had been restored to his throne in Spain, and refused to swear allegiance to the liberal constitution of Cádiz which had made his restoration possible. The Inquisition had been reinstated, and the Spanish liberals were the object of a persecution that to some seemed incompatible with the liberals’ defense of the homeland against the French invaders, during which time the idiot king lived in gilded exile in Bayonne. The important thing for Spain’s American colonies was that, once and for all, the famous “Fernandine mask” had fallen. Now it was simply a matter of being either in favor of the restored Bourbon monarchy or against it. It was no longer possible to hedge. Spaniards against Spanish Americans. Simón Bolívar had done everyone the favor of giving a name to the conflict: a fight to the death.
The Marquis de Cabra preferred to prolong, just as he was doing at that very moment, to the rhythm of the coach, the public rumors in order to put off the private ones. During this enervating summer of unrealized rains — like a marriage left unconsummated night after night — he himself was the preferred object of Lima gossip. His entrance into the gardens of Viceroy Abascal, in this city where gardens proliferated as an escape from earthquakes, would, as the witty Chileans called it, keep the rumor mill churning at top speed.
The truth is that other things held the attention of the guests at the viceroy’s soiree, first a game of blindman’s buff that the young people who basked in the blessings of the Crown — the jeunesse dorée, as the Marquis de Cabra, always aware of the latest Paris fashions, called them — were enjoying, as they dashed and stumbled their way around the eighteenth-century viceregal garden, a pale imitation of the gardens of the Spanish palace at Aranjuez, themselves the palest reflection, finally, of Lenôtre’s royal gardens.