“The Marquise de Cabra, then, begs your pardon for not being present at this soiree, but you all know that there is no better way of calling attention to oneself than by calling attention to one’s absence.” The elfin marquis laughed again, inviting the animated but languid company (who were perhaps wise to mix one drop of Indian fatality with another of creole indolence) to turn away from the theme of Ofelia Salamanca, the wife of the Marquis de Cabra, which they did so as not to admit he was right, not to let him feel that he could read them so easily or manipulate them without mercy. In doing so, they left Baltasar Bustos alone, flustered, hungry for the truth, or at least for company.
The brilliant Lima gathering did not keep the young Argentine from looking at the stockings which a forty-year-old but still appetizing woman showed off with incredible sauciness by refusing to allow her skirts to conceal the novelty of her bas—as she called them — decorated from toes to knees with small, linked violet clocks that reminded our friend Baltasar about us, Varela and Dorrego, playing with our clocks in Buenos Aires, adjusting them as we adjusted our political lives, accommodating ourselves, when Posadas resigned, to Alvear’s leadership, never daring to ask ourselves what we were doing there while our younger brother, Baltasar Bustos, the weakest of the three, the most physically awkward, the most intellectual as well, was exposing himself to the Spaniards way out in the mountains.
“The theme of our time is time!” announced the lady — who, at the back of her neck, wore feathers the color of the embroidered clocks — inviting the young creole gentlemen to play with words and ideas, responding to them herself in a way the ignorant colonial ladies — who soon found themselves bereft of their gallants, as attracted by the novelty as fireflies by a burning candle — could not.
“What a contretemps!”
“You, ma’am, can make time march backwards…”
“Or even better: such abundance of time…”
“Do my legs seem fat to you?”
“They seem to me a heralding of the face with which you confront time.”
“Time, my friend, is ageless.”
“But it does suffer evils, ma’am.”
“I think I’m on time.”
“And we here in Peru, alas, are always either too early or too late.”
They all laughed, but Baltasar Bustos, looking at the lady’s violet legs and her hoopskirt, allowed himself to be distracted by the black skirts of the two young priests who had been playing blindman’s buff and who were now looking at him, waiting for him to raise his eyes. He forgot the provocative lady, whose days as a coquette were numbered (even Micaela Villegas, the notorious Perrichole, the loosest woman in the colony, had just turned sixty — just think of that, your lordship), to look back at them as they smiled at him: one priest was very ugly, the other very handsome; their combined age wouldn’t have added up to the violet lady’s forty. They stared shamelessly at him, but only when they stopped and raised their tiny glasses of wine to toast each other did Baltasar become aware of the immense tenderness that joined them; the looks the two young priests exchanged indicated as well that the ugly one had the subservient function of pampering, worshipping, caring for, and attending the handsome one.
Baltasar Bustos stared at the skirts of the handsome priest for a while with no desire to ascertain the reaction of the other. He found himself so alone after the long Upper Peru campaign and the death of his father that he feared the attraction of that young cleric with fine features, dark hair, and waxy complexion — like that of Miguel Lanza, like his father’s dead hands holding the candle, burning because of the cruelty, the rancor of Sabina, who was so eager to form with him a circle of two, like the one formed by the two priests — might obstruct his relationship with the devout priest with rough features, slightly prognathous, and, like Baltasar, myopic. When he raised his eyes to meet theirs, however, he found satisfaction, shared attraction, and an invitation. They guessed his hunger for company, his solitude; they did not imagine that behind his eyes was the desired figure of Ofelia Salamanca.
Other eyes attracted him, although they never paid him the slightest attention and instead made him feel he was an intruder, alien to the exclusive circle of these aristocratic creoles, who in the city of Lima, capital of capitals, only rivaled in Spanish America by Mexico City, reached not only their splendor but their purest essence. Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful woman — beyond any doubt — attending the afternoon party. She looked like the sunset, her dark beauty shone, and her outfit, which turned mourning into show, glittered, in part thanks to the gold thread subtly woven into her funereal gown. The gold did not obviate her grief but gave a feeling of luxury to death, no doubt the death of the husband of the young woman, whose true, fatal glow was in her skin and not in her clothing or jewels. In fact, she wore no jewelry. She needed none. Her beauty dazzled Baltasar, whose eyes were full of blood and gore, hills of slate and thickets.
Was she as beautiful as he saw her? The object of her gaze was a couple. Another couple, obviously married, her arm resting ever on his, as if to initiate, also for eternity, a solemn promenade that with each step would announce: we are a couple. He was saying to the dark woman: dare to break up this pair, I invite you to do it, come with us. The wife’s face expressed marital fidelity so strongly that it almost contradicted itself to become the most subtle of invitations. That afternoon, Baltasar Bustos instinctively sought out the lady in mourning’s solitude to accompany his own. He learned that the solitary woman would cease to be so in the company of the married man who said to her, secretly yet so publicly, “You are my possible lover. In the presence of my own wife, I invite you to be my actual lover. I can do no more to attract you to me.”