Baltasar Bustos would watch all that from his balcony, afternoon after afternoon, until he came to distinguish a face, the unusual face of the moon, unexpected, individual, marked by eyebrows that in another woman would have been repulsive, joined together with no break, like a second sex about to devour her black eyes, her haughty nose, her red lips, and her expression of disdain, sweet disdain that began to madden Baltasar and to distance him from his obsession with Ofelia Salamanca.
Each afternoon, for a week now, this most beautiful girl — she could be no more than eighteen — came closer and closer until she disappeared through the series of arches of the house next door. Perhaps she had seen him, because she teased him coquettishly, appearing and then hiding behind the columns in the long aisles before she disappeared until the next day.
But this afternoon she was not there.
Baltasar felt a burning desire to jump over the wall, embrace her and kiss first her red lips and then her provocative eyebrows, like velvet, joined like a divine scourge, the promise of lust and terror. She was sun and moon, and this afternoon she was missing.
Only this afternoon. Why? What could have interrupted a rite he by now considered sacred, indispensable to his romantic life — once again he realized it and said it when he described this episode to us; his amorous emotions depended on distance, on absence, on the intensity of the desire manifested to a woman he could not touch, saw from afar, who now, just like Ofelia Salamanca, had disappeared without keeping the appointment, not with him, but with the sun and the moon.
Then Baltasar Bustos took his hat, ran out of the house, ran without noticing the ten blocks that separated him from the Red House in whose grand patio Rousseau’s short tragedy was being performed, ran along the Calle del Rey, burst through the grand doorway, and saw her dancing in the middle of the patio surrounded by a chorus, by Indians and Spaniards, she herself acting the role of an allegorical Spanish maiden who sang and recited at the same time: Let us row, let us cross the seas, our pleasures will have their time, because to discover new worlds is to offer new flowers to love …
She raised her arms, and the gauze of her bodice revealed two fresh cherries, kissable, doing a short and merry quadrille on the girl’s bosom.
“It isn’t Jean-Jacques’s best effort,” said the handsome priest to Baltasar as the public applauded and the actors bowed and thanked them. “I prefer Narcissus, or He Who Loves Himself, where Rousseau has the audacity to begin the dialogue with two women talking about a man, the brother of one of them, who, because of the refinement and affectation of his clothes is a kind of woman disguised in man’s clothing. Yet his feminine appearance, instead of being a disguise, restores him to his natural state.”
“Are you telling me that this marvelous girl is really a man in disguise?” said Baltasar, instantly assuming his own vapid, cruel affectation.
“No”—the priest laughed—“her name is Gabriela Cóo, and her father’s job, an endless, labyrinthine task, is to sell off the Jesuits’ rural properties in Chile for the benefit of the Crown. His daughter is no less emancipated than Rousseau himself, so she works at acting, avidly reading the authors of the age, and communing with nature. Allow me to introduce you, Bustos.”
“Are you telling me that all these afternoons she’s merely been rehearsing a part?” asked Baltasar, plainly disillusioned.
“Pardon me?”
He accepted the invitation to meet her socially, but only under the condition that no one ever find out that each afternoon at five, for as long as he had to live in Chile, he would see her appear, vaporous and infinitely desirable, in the garden next door to his own house. He was afraid that she might already have met him at one of the myriad Santiago gatherings and that she would despise him, as did the other girls, who were, besides, fully aware of his obsession for the vanished Marquise de Cabra. He was just about to reject the introduction and to propose, since both of them were Rousseau enthusiasts, a purely epistolary relationship, like the one in the novel causing a furor throughout the New World, from Mexico to Buenos Aires: La Nouvelle Héloïse.
But three things happened, three foreseeable yet unexpected things. Myopic and foppish, chubby and not very attractive, Baltasar launched into one of an infinite number of dinner conversations with the lady next to him at table. Their dialogue was well under way when Baltasar realized he was acting a romantic part he’d learned perfectly and would recite at these functions. But this role was, at the same time, perfectly authentic, because everything he said corresponded to an intimate conviction, even if its verbal expression was not especially felicitous. This divorce was, simultaneously, the matrimony of his words. He’d repeated them again and again with a mixture of apathy and passion ever since his visit to Lima, searching for Ofelia Salamanca and insinuating that, sentenced to death by the ferocious guerrilla leader Miguel Lanza, he had to place his sympathies with the Crown; after all, the insurgents would deny him any protection whatever.
He could not alter his discourse that night; it was authentic and false at the same time. But he addressed it to her, since he had discovered halfway through dinner that he was speaking to Gabriela Cóo. He gave a face to that face, eyebrows to that visage, a perfume to that body, and now he could not stop the flow of his words, careening like a cart down a mountainside. And each time she answered him in a polite but cutting, intelligent, firm, even amused way, was she laughing at him, as almost all these Chilean girls did who were too beautiful and intelligent to take him seriously? And wasn’t that exactly what he most desired: to be left free to pursue his true passion, the search for Ofelia?
“Whenever I come near to a woman like you, I feel the desire to avenge my pain and my sin on you.”
“You don’t say.”
“Only you can kill the passion in me.”
“It would be a pleasure.”
“I mean: do me the favor of hastening my calvary.”
“To whom are you speaking, Mr. Bustos?”
“I tell you that my soul only wants to recover or die, milady.”
“But I only know how to cure, not to kill.”
“Try to be another woman, and I will not try to seduce you,” said Baltasar, lowering his voice.
“I want neither to be someone else nor to be seduced by you,” she replied in the same low tone, before laughing out loud. “Be more reasonable, Mr. Bustos.”
The second thing that happened was that each afternoon at five she reappeared, far off in her garden. She approached little by little, as if suggesting that she would come closer, allowing herself to be desired, allowing him to make her more and more his own, first in his eyes and his desire and someday perhaps through real possession. The movements of the dance, the increasing languors, the increasing nakedness of that svelte, almost infantile body governed by a mask whose will was a mouth as red as a wound and brows as black as a whip, spelled out her name, Gabriela, Gabriela Cóo, desired, desirable, promising, promised, confident she would not deceive her lover, if he wanted to be her lover, if he gave himself to her, distant and nubile in her garden, as he had given himself to Ofelia Salamanca, distant and widowed, a mother who had given birth twice to the same child, given birth, that is, to life and to death, a woman burdened by suffering and rumors and probable cruelties and imagined betrayals. Gabriela Cóo’s dancing body was asking him to choose but did not say to him, “I am better than the other”; it merely said, “I am different, and you must accept me as I am.”
It had to be that way, Baltasar said to himself every afternoon, because she was no longer rehearsing Rousseau’s play, which was put on just once in the patio of the grand Portuguese-style mansion on Calle del Rey. No longer. Now the performance was for him alone.