He sighed and noisily tossed into his mouth a piece of tamale that was so red with chilies that it looked like a wound.
“But to talk about all that, we need time and opportunity. Now we’re short of both.”
He grasped Baltasar’s impatient wrist. “I know you’ve come for other reasons and not to hear me talk.”
“You’re mistaken. I have the deepest respect for you.”
“Be patient. One thing leads to the other. You know, in my town there was a blind beggar who was always accompanied by his dog. One day, the dog ran away and the blind man regained his sight.”
For a long time, Baltasar stared at the priest, who went on eating noisily and with pleasure, savoring his yellow mole right down to the last grain of rice. Finally Baltasar decided to ask him, “Why do you have such confidence in me, Father?”
Quintana wiped his lips and gave the young Argentine a look of candid, friendly complicity. “We’ve been fighting for the same cause for the same span of time. Doesn’t that seem sufficient reason to you?”
“That’s only a fact. It doesn’t satisfy me.”
“Think then that I see in you something more and better than what you see in yourself. I sense that in your heart you feel slightly dissatisfied with everything you’ve done.”
“That’s true. I have my guilt and my passion, but I don’t have greatness. I find myself laughable.”
“Don’t worry about greatness. Worry about your soul.”
“I warn you, I don’t believe in the Church or in God or in the absolute power of absolution that you think you have.”
“So much the better. Rest today, and tomorrow we’ll meet at midday in the chapel here at the tobacco warehouses. Remember that tomorrow is Thursday and that every Thursday I become very strong, very spiritual. Be prepared to do battle with me. Then you will have your reward, and everything will be resolved. I think your ten years of struggle will not have been in vain.”
Baltasar did not allow the conversation to end there. He had the feeling — he wrote to us later — that the priest was right and that these would be the final hours of his long campaign for love and justice.
“What do you see in me, Father, that makes you treat me with such respect … or simple interest? Forgive my boldness in asking.”
Quintana might have stared at him, looking him right in the eye. He chose instead to scoop up the rest of the mole with a tortilla.
“You have taken charge of other lives.”
“But I…”
“We’ve all committed crimes. Shall I tell you something? Would you like to know mine?”
“Father, in the name of justice I exchanged a poor child for a rich child in his cradle. The poor child died because of me. I stole the rich child from his mother and condemned him to who knows what fate. And, in spite of that, I dared to love the mother, to pursue her ridiculously across half the Americas. Ten years, Father, with no success, no reward, all to become, as you say, a fool … Do you call that justice? Does that deserve respect? Does my having abandoned my sister without a second thought, indifferent to her fate, in the name of my passion? I didn’t give my father a last hope or affection. Am I worthy of compassion because I survived at Chacabuco while my comrades died? Wasn’t I lacking in mercy when I shouted a cruel truth at the Marquis de Cabra on his deathbed? Father Quintana … I killed a man in battle.”
“That’s normal.”
“But I didn’t kill him as a soldier. I killed him as a man, a brother. I killed him because he was an Indian. I killed him because he was weaker than I. I killed him as an individual, abusing him, even though I don’t know his name and can’t remember his face.”
With a strength that came from total conviction, Quintana told him to be quiet. “Don’t force me to confess my own sins to you.”
“What, that you’re a skirt-chaser, that you like cockfights, that you have illegitimate children all over the country, that you like fancy cassocks? Are those serious sins, Father?”
“Tomorrow I’ll make my confession before you,” he said with a sudden huge sigh of fatigue. “I’ll do it tomorrow. I swear. I’ll make my confession before you, even though you don’t believe in the power of absolution. I’ll confess before my younger brother, who in Maracaibo took charge of a fallen woman and the wounded enemy. I’ll do it tomorrow. Tomorrow, Thursday, I shall speak to my brother in mercy.”
[5]
That night Baltasar slept in a hammock. He was lulled by the hammock, but even more by a weariness that came not from a single day but from ten years’ accumulation. It was the sleep that comes when something is about to end, an imminent sleep that told him: This is where you and I part company; now you will have to change, now you must take account of debits and credits, just as these paymasters and secretaries do who accompany Father Quintana.
Might Quintana be the true notary of Baltasar Bustos’s life?
Tomorrow was Thursday. They would meet; the priest had told him to come to the chapel at noon. Did they have anything else to say to each other? Baltasar thought that he had made his confession to the priest that afternoon, and the priest’s sins were the talk of Veracruz. What more could they say to each other? To what ceremony had this proud man surrounded by an aura of obscure self-denial invited him?
He had told Baltasar that in the young man he saw someone who took charge of others. The women in Harlequin House, the Duchess; the slender, disfigured officer … That was a slim list of credits next to the column of debits Baltasar had enumerated to Quintana.
But now, drifting deeper into sleep and rocked by the hammock (And who rocked it? There was no breeze, the Orizaba sky was in mourning but did not weep, and he descended, immobile, into sleep), Baltasar only reproached himself for a greater insincerity, which was to have told the rebel priest that everything he’d done, the good and the bad, had an erotic, sexual, amorous (as the priest liked to call it) purpose, which was to reach Ofelia Salamanca, finally to touch her after ten years of romantic passion paraded over the entire continent, the source both of sighs and of jokes, sung about in corridas, cuecas, and zambas.
To reach her, keeping his passion obsessive and unique, he’d had to sacrifice the love of the beautiful Chilean Gabriela Cóo, since to be unfaithful to Ofelia Salamanca, even if she didn’t know it, would be to betray the adorable Gabriela as well.
To see her face to face. To say to her: I love you. To say to her: I forgive you. To which of the two women would he say that? Didn’t one feed the love of the other, and didn’t both loves drink from a common spring — absence? Did he desire them so much only because he did not possess them?
He opened his eyes. The hammock stopped rocking. He shut them again, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his presumption. What was he going to pardon Ofelia Salamanca for? What did he know of her except, in effect, gossip, idle talk, limericks that often created a new truth only for the sake of rhyme? How did he dare? Hadn’t Gabriela told him in Santiago de Chile that acting is insincere, fleeting, that it leaves no more trace of itself than words?
Then he plummeted again from the peak of his aroused consciousness to a pleasant unconsciousness, drugged by the premonition of peace and rest after ten years of exaltation. And in the depths of his sleep he was always on his way back to El Dorado. Holding Simón Rodríguez’s hand, he returned to that most high abyss, that deep promontory, the heart of the Quechua mountain, the navel of sleep, and there he accused himself, with rage, with despair, with the terrible feeling that he’d lost his chance, because he hadn’t stopped for an instant to watch the passage of dreams in the luminous eyes of the inhabitants of the city where everything moved in light, was born from light, and returned to light.