“Luz María…”
The name escaped like a sigh or a threat from the shared voice of the married couple. “We are so sorry about what happened.”
“It’s all right: time works miracles.”
They began to speak about Masses and novenas, a castrato began to sing a passage from Palestrina, and a very old lady, draped in veils and wearing more combs than she had hairs on her head, lectured Baltasar the way someone teaches a basic lesson: “The servants know. They are the only ones who know in a society like ours. The Quechuan nurses abandoned the Incan nobles to serve the Spaniards. Now they will abandon the Spaniards to serve Creole patriots like you, callow boy.”
She scratched the moles that marked the spot where the hair missing from her skull once grew, and she giggled in pure joy, announcing that her head was still good for something: “And besides. Did you ever see this Ofelia Salamanca’s silver service? Well, get her husband, the cuckold marquis, to invite you to dinner, and there you will see the fate of all the silver mined in these Indies of ours, lad, youth, boy, what to call you?” The crone cackled, dressed in transparent gauze and propped up by two Indian servants wearing Versaillesque frock coats and cotton wigs. The old lady flapped her arms: “Get moving, you shitty cholitos, help me, don’t stop, no one deserves more than a minute of my conversation, I have so little time.”
Baltasar sought out the stockings embroidered with clocks, but perhaps their owner had been invited to withdraw. On the other hand, these scenes were like sideshows — mere sleight-of-hand by these mountebanks, whispered a familiar voice that reached Baltasar Bustos. Incredulous, he spun around to see the tall, slightly stooped figure of his old mentor Julián Ríos, the Jesuit who had put aside his cassock and had taught half the pampa the local flora and fauna, and the local languages — all in the hope of discovering, he said, remembering the childhood of Baltasar and Sabina Bustos, a universal imagination, even if it was an imagination nurtured in the soil; roots, said the old Jesuit, smiling and adding with a glint from his silver-framed glasses, “Mais mes racines sont plutôt rabelaie-siennes, dit la corneille quand elle boît l’eau de la fontaine…”
Baltasar laughed, squeezing Ríos’s arm and listening as the old man gently led the young one to the other end of the viceregal party: “Everything else is a sideshow, to use circus jargon — I didn’t say Circe’s barroom, now — no: the main show is always the Marquis de Cabra himself.”
Who, in fact, was holding court. Because — Julían Ríos pointed out — the rug has been swept clean of gossip by edict of the marquis himself, who was the first to mention the rumor about his wife, his life, his strife, rhymed Father Ríos irrepressibly. The marquis was talking now in an endless flow:
“Modern revolution is divided evenly between those enemy brothers, Rousseau and Voltaire. The Genevan wanted the people to act. The other wanted them to be led. But it takes a long time for the people to become educated and to act prudently, so they have to be guided at first — thence Voltaire wins the match, he can never lose it. What did that old cynic say?”
“That the light of reason falls by degrees,” quoted Julián Ríos. “The lowest level of society needs the example of its superiors. Forty thousand wise men: that’s more or less what we need.”
“Forty thousand wise men!” said the old marquis, sighing. “Include me among them. The first thing I’ll do is keep the people from ever taking my place or instructing me. All modern revolution does is create a new elite. Why? The old elite was more elegant and practiced in the very thing the new elite is going to do: mete out injustice.”
“To transfer property from a minute group of landowners to four million electors in one year does not seem so elitist to me, your lordship. There has never been a redistribution of wealth as large or as swift in all of recorded history.”
“Bah.” The marquis did not even look at the tutor. “Revolutions of interests end up costing more than revolutions of ideals. All the Jacobin terror in France seems less painful to me than the elitist injustice of the North American revolution. Some revolution, gentlemen — a revolution that not only leaves slavery intact but actually consecrates it.”
“Are we less racist than they?” asked Ríos.
“What is to be done, Mr., Mr. — ” said the Marquis haughtily, not finding the proper title for the tutor. “I mean, what is to be done when the people of color themselves come to the courts here in Lima, in Barranquilla, or in La Guaira, requesting written proof that they are white? How many venal judges have stared into the scorched face of a man whose father and grandfather were black and whose mother and grandmother were Indian, and stated: ‘He may be considered white’? Our courts are flooded with requests for certification of whiteness, Mr., Mr.—”
“Father Rivers,” the tutor supplied, smiling.
“Ah, a perfidious son of Albion…”
“No, your Lordship, merely a poor albino dazzled with admiration at your wisdom.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Rivers should flow. Or, better yet, run.”
“Having the runs is something that happens all too frequently in these parts, sir. But the way you say my name makes me think of reverse, so perhaps you would prefer me to step back.”
“I was merely commenting on the irony of the blacks submitting legal petitions so as not to be termed ‘poor black’ or ‘poor mulatto.’”
“We are all cooperating, your lordship. White families in Lima, Caracas, and Panama are also initiating legal actions to keep any family members from marrying people of color.”
“In sum, then, Mr. Reverse, I’m right to declare here, before all of you, that my only virtue has been the proper administration of injustice and that, personally, I would rather die than cease to be unjust.”
A chorus of laughter followed these lapidary witticisms of the Marquis de Cabra, a device by which he dissipated not only the attention initially focused on his wife’s affaires but also whatever attention was being paid to the poor castrato performing Palestrina. In any case, he certainly hushed the comment of the old Jesuit: “Privilege is like the robe of Nessus; when you tear it off, you also tear off the flesh under it.”
The marquis spun around like a wasp and spoke like a whip: “Go ahead and wage your war of independence. Disillusionment will soon follow. And, I assure you, I am not making idle pronouncements. I am predicting the most concrete things. A stagnant economy, without the protection of Spain and incapable of competing in world markets. A society of privilege; the mere act of casting out the Spaniards will not make the Creoles less unjust, cruel, or greedy. And dictatorship after dictatorship will be necessary to bridge the gap between the country as constituted by law and the country as reality. You will be left to the mercy of the elements, my dear patriots. You will wrench off the roof of tradition. But you do not know how to survive in the new, open air. The modern age, which for an Englishman, Father Rivers, is a breeze, will be a hurricane for a Peruvian. We who speak Spanish were not born for it.”
“We shall make our own modernity, and it will be unlike that of the English or the French, your lordship,” said young Baltasar, imagining a French roof over the head of his sister, Sabina, to protect her, after being abandoned by Spain, from the cruel elements she so feared.