“Goodness, with all these blindfolded figures in it, the garden looks like a courtroom,” said the marquis, as usual to no one and to everyone. That allowed him to make ironic, snide comments no one could take amiss because they weren’t directed at anyone in particular. Of course, anyone who so desired could apply them to himself.
The garden actually resembled nothing so much as beautiful, flapping laundry because the flutter of white cloth, gauze, silks, handkerchiefs, and parasols dominated the space: floating skirts, scarves, linen shirts, hoopskirts, frock coats the color of deerskin, tassels, fringes, silver braid, epaulets, and military sashes, but above all handkerchiefs, passed laughingly from one person to another, blindfolding them, handcuffing them, allowing the blindman only an instant, as white as a lightning flash, to locate his or her chosen prey. Two young priests had also joined the game, and their black habits provided the only contrast amid so much white. From his privileged distance, the marquis noted with approval the nervous blushes of the beautiful Creole youngsters, who avidly cultivated fair complexions, blond gazes, and solar tresses. That explained the parasols in the hands of the girls, who wouldn’t set them aside even when they were blindfolded. They would run charmingly, one hand holding the parasol, the other feeling for the ideal match promised by the luck of the game. On the other hand, the heat and the excitement of the game brought out dark blushes among the boys, as if the image of the pure white Creole required total inactivity.
The newly arrived spectator smiled; either in the curtained bedroom of a lattice-windowed palace or in a dungeon, that’s where these fine young gentlemen would finally take their rest; that was what the war of independence promised Lima’s beautiful young people: renewed power or jail. War to the death … For the moment, far from the insane, incredible resistance of the bands of Upper Peru’s guerrillas, far, even, from the perilous peace of Chile, Peru remained Spain’s principal bastion in South America. But for how long?
It was like playing blindman’s buff, said the roguish, amused marquis, introducing himself like some sort of minstrel into the circle of young people, striking coquettish poses, tossing away his three-cornered hat, nostalgic perhaps for the capes and broad-brimmed hats that Charles III had banned in a vain attempt to modernize the Spanish masses. As he walked, he scattered the perfume and powder of his eighteenth-century toilette among these fresh but perspiring young people, who had abandoned the classic wig in favor of long, romantic tresses that floated in the breeze … Even in Lima the generation gap began with hairstyles; it indicated — and this the Marquis de Cabra, of an understanding nature, wanted to believe — that it began in their heads. It was the era of heads. Isn’t that exactly what Philip IV’s minister had demanded? “Bring me heads!”
He could think no more because his own head collided with that of a blindfolded youth searching for his lady-love. He spun with more energy and zeal than anyone else, shaking his mane of bronzed curls, half opening his full, red lips, around which the pallor of his carefully shaped cheeks contrasted with the skin on his forehead and cheeks, which was dark, tanned by the sun. The white blindfold covered his eyes; and if his curly head cracked into the Marquis de Cabra’s wig, it was as much because of the agitation of the young man as it was because of the old man’s intrusion into the game.
The young man grabbed the old man’s arms, felt the folds of his frock coat, and pulled off the blindfold just as the old man was rearranging his unsettled wig, which had slipped to one side of his head. Baltasar Bustos smothered a cry, muffled, almost animal-like, like that of a bull whose strength has been mocked, for what he actually imagined in the darkness demanded by the game was a nocturnal encounter with Ofelia Salamanca, an encounter of which this game of blindman’s buff was but a foretaste, a preliminary ritual. He’d been assured she was in Lima; it was for her that he’d journeyed here from the pampa, through the desert and the mountains to Ayacucho and the Peruvian coast; for her he’d trimmed his beard and mustache, combed his hair, dabbed on perfume, and dressed in the clothes fashionable in the viceroyalty. It was for her he’d come looking, visiting the twilight parties of Lima, the final bastion of the Spanish empire in the Americas, seeking her because his friends had told him, “She is in the Americas, but no one has seen her.” “She is in Lima, but she is with someone else.” It was for her that he took part in blindman’s buff, imagining that each woman he touched when he pulled the handkerchief off his eyes would be she, the woman he’d sighed for since that terrible night of the kidnapping and fire in Buenos Aires. And even before that: since he’d seen her in outline, naked, sitting before her mirror, powdering herself, a new mother, but with an incomparable waist and infinitely caressable buttocks, buttocks that would fit the hands of a man, the secret, strokable buttocks of Ofelia Salamanca, which drove Baltasar Bustos mad.
Instead, he was embracing his beloved’s aged husband.
The Marquis de Cabra looked at him without knowing him. He’d never seen him before. Baltasar’s vision ended; he took the handkerchief off his eyes and handed it in confusion, ironically, to Ofelia Salamanca’s startled husband. The platonic lover struggled to put on his oval glasses, showing that he was blinder than any blindfolded man: his heavy breathing fogged the lenses.
The magic circle of the game dissolved, but courtesy was a more complicated game, and it took the players a few minutes to allow one another to pass, to invite one another to go first.
“After you. Please, go ahead.”
“Certainly not.”
“Come now, don’t make me plead.”
“Beauty before experience.”
“It is more honorable to follow experience, not to precede it.”
“I am at your service.”
“I beg you, please.”
“Your servant.”
“I kiss your hand.”
“Please do me this signal honor.”
“I cannot allow it.”
“But how can I repay your kindness?”
“After you, please.”
“The person who precedes you has yet to be born, ma’am.”
“I envy the carpet under your feet, ma’am.”
“Your most humble servant.”
“After you, I implore you.”
These endless Lima courtesies obstructed all the doorways to the palace, but no sooner was everyone inside and partaking of warm punch and sugar concoctions, candied egg yolks and honey fritters prepared by the nuns of the order of St. Clare, than the two rumors — the public and the private — overwhelmed the elaborate rituals of courtesy.
It was, nevertheless, the presence of the Marquis de Cabra that forged the perfect union of the street and the bedroom gossip, and it was he himself who broke the news when he announced, “My wife has departed Lima. Yes, yes, you haven’t seen her for several weeks now and you’ve wondered why.” (That was true. Baltasar had been told that she was in Lima but that she had not been seen; she was not, perhaps, the perfect wife but at least she was under wraps — ha, ha.) “Perhaps you’ve invented reasons.” (They say she’s following a gallant artillery captain transferred from the viceroyalty in Lima to the captaincy-general of Chile, for him the promotion was a demotion, having parted him from the sweet Ofelia; the sweet Ofelia? Just let me tell you what I heard …) “But the truth is that the marquise has had a terrible attack of nerves because of all this patriotic commotion, and her royalist faith cannot bear the spectacle of a defeated, humiliated Spain expelled from the very world she discovered and built.” (They say she hasn’t been able to come to terms with the death of her child in Buenos Aires; a most mysterious death, my most respected Doña Carmelita, because no one knows what happened, the story of a simple accident convinces no one: just think what sort of accident it had to have been to concentrate all the fires of Buenos Aires in that innocent cradle. There’s something fishy here, I tell you, and we’ll never learn the truth of what took place five years ago. Just look how it’s livened up the gossip flying from Montevideo to Bogotá; long are these roads, late are the documents when they finally get here, and how lost the laws get, my dear Don Manuelito, but how gossip flies, if you please!) “The Spanish empire in America has lasted three hundred years, longer than any other empire in history,” the Marquis de Cabra was saying, his three-cornered hat under his arm, “and a soul as sensitive as my wife could hardly be expected to bear the spectacle of its end.” (Isn’t the marquis speaking treason? How dare he predict the end of the Spanish empire in America? This Ofelia Salamanca must have done something terrible for the old gallant to expose himself in this way and in these times to suspicion of treason — the Inquisition in Lima was not asleep. Surely the Marquis de Cabra knows how many heretics and rebels the ecclesiastical arm has taken, to give them their just deserts.) “She is a descendant of the first conquistadors, a pure creole of the best lineage, and whenever my imagination flags, she’s there to rekindle its flame with the memory of those incomparable deeds: five hundred men marching from Veracruz to Tenochtitlán after scuttling their ships to capture the great Moctezuma and conquer the Aztec empire; a similar number vanquishing the Inca Atahualpa in the space of one week; the conquest of the Andes, the Amazon, the Pacific; cities strung like a rosary of baroque pearls, from California to Tierra del Fuego; souls converted and saved: thousands, thousands, repaying with interest the loss of perverse lives in thrall to stubborn rebelliousness and idolatry.” The Marquis de Cabra laughed, strolling through the crowded salons of the viceregal palace in Lima that afternoon of Baltasar Bustos’s return to the world, a world that seemed even more unreal to him after his recent life on the pampa, in Ayopaya, and with Miguel Lanza’s troops.