But the void she left was immense. He descended bit by bit, convinced that he’d found the woman transformed into eternal stone, occasional flower, the stone sterile, the flower poisonous; and he again sought spontaneous delight in the diffuse sweetness of the reborn landscape of the valleys, the hooves of the sheep, the thatched roofs of the houses, and the fields of green carnations like lemon groves.
But all these Spanish flowers in the Venezuelan Andes—carnations, roses, and geraniums—could not fill the void left by Ofelia. The war could; trotting near the shadow of the extended eaves of the village houses, Baltasar accepted that his life, which he once imagined unique, without fissures—nature and history reconciled in his person—was forever sundered, and, as those inevitable song books already had it, all that was left to him was to bounce from war to war, from south to north and from north to south, to carry out his legendary destiny, which had already been mapped out in popular song … He would stop at sunrise to partake of delicious mountain cheese, Andean bread, and pineapple wine, but not even those details of life escaped the fate already dictated in the song. Chewing, he thought about Homer, the Cid, Shakespeare: their epic dramas were written before they were lived. Achilles and Ximena, Helen, and Richard the hunchback in real life had done nothing but follow the poet’s scenic instructions and act out what had already been set down. We call this inversion of metaphor “history,” the naïve belief that, first, things happen and then they are written. That was an illusion, but he no longer fooled himself.
At that very moment, as an old woman was serving him a plate of griddle cakes in an inn by the side of the Macurumba road, it occurred to Baltasar Bustos to ask her about the war. To which she replied, “What war?”
Baltasar laughed and ate. At times, in these isolated towns, people don’t find out about anything—or they find out very late, only when the bard gives his version of events. But in Mucuchíes, hours later, he found the same old man sitting on the same sack of potatoes and asked him the same question—“How’s the war going?”—and received the same reply—“What war? What are you talking about?” The news was all over town instantly. The children took the opportunity to have some fun and tease. They made a circle around him, singing, “What war? What war?” and when he broke out of the magic circle of children and asked their elders who Simón Bolívar, Antonio Páez, and José Antonio Sucre were, they all said the same thing: “We don’t know them. Are they from around here? Has anyone heard of them? Ask the old man who plays the violin in El Tabay.”
He was a man with a square head, sculpted by saber wounds until it looked like a block of wood. Baltasar found him inland, far from the road, in a vast, run-down house. To get to it, Baltasar had to climb over the skeletons of cows. The old man was on his shady terrace, sitting on the skull of a cow, just as José Antonio Bustos sat on his pampa ranch when Baltasar was a child. This old man played the violin; he did nothing else, except to contemplate a black man about thirty years of age, naked from the waist up and covered by filthy, tattered canvas trousers.
When Bustos approached on his mule, the squared-off, dark old man stopped playing, wiped his moist mustache with his hand, and stared with eyes overcome by the glare. The sun baked the cow bones and invited one’s sight to become white as well, like the light. Baltasar understood, as never before, the need for shade; that is what he said, by way of greeting, to the old man; he didn’t bother to greet the black—there was always a black or an Indian, silent, leaning on the doorposts. Justice turned into sun and white bones in his head; he’d come in search of the war and asked the old man, “Where? What is happening?”
“I know nothing,” said the old man. “Eusebio here might have some news.”
The black did not stop talking; that is, Baltasar realized that he’d been talking all the while, but in a very low voice. And now he spoke more loudly, repeating, “Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a thief. Thank you, master. Because of you I am not a fugitive. Thank you, General, for allowing me to be here on your estate.”
“You’d like to be on the loose, killing and robbing,” said a woman who’d appeared from the half-light in the house, wiping her hands on an apron. “And you, what do you want?” she said, looking at Baltasar.
“I’m a soldier,” it occurred to Baltasar to say. “How can I join the nearest battalion?”
The woman stared at him in total incomprehension, the old man with pity, the black with a grin. They seemed, one with his violin, the other with his gratitude, the woman with her rage, as if suspended in time, as if absent.
“Bolívar,” Bustos recited the magic names of the heroes, “San Martín…” as if they were amulets.
There was a long silence, then the old man stopped playing and spoke, “He said, ‘Comrades, the revolution has no money, but it does have land. Look as far as you please, from the sea at Maracaibo to the jungle of Guayana, from Eagle Peak to the mouths of the Orinoco, and what you see is land. There is land. The Spaniards took it away from the Indians. Now we’re taking it away from the Spaniards. Take your land,’ he said to me, ‘not today but tomorrow, when we win the war. Here is a voucher; there’s another for your orderly, an ignorant black.’ I cashed in the voucher, as did all the generals, but here you have this boy. He’s an ignorant black. He didn’t know how to cash anything. The war’s over. Eusebio doesn’t know how to exercise his rights.”
“I’d be a thief if you didn’t protect me,” said the black.
“These people know nothing about papers. They only want to survive,” said the dark, squared-off old man. “We own everything, but we finish nothing.”
“Go on.” The woman laughed, a sixtyish Creole who must have been pretty a long time ago. “You’re almost black yourself; don’t be afraid of appearances. But I am, old man. I’m here on this cattle ranch you were given as payment for your service, ready to serve you as a maid as long as I don’t have to know what’s going on out there. For sure, the blacks have taken control of Caracas.”
“Because for you everything’s bad.” The old man hugged the violin to his chest.
“I got tired of watching you fight. Thank your lucky stars. This is better than nothing,” said the woman before leaving, her back turned to them.
No sooner had she gone than the old man shut his eyes, furrowed his brow, and summoned Baltasar with his hand. “Come closer,” he said, “so she can’t hear us. But I know the truth. I know what’s happened. Bolívar was betrayed. They turned on him, just as my wife turned her back on us a moment ago, they sent him off to die alone, but that is our destiny. They ran San Martín out. They surrounded him with spies so he couldn’t live in peace. They finished him off by forcing him into exile.”
“Who? The Spaniards?” said Baltasar, trying to follow the old man’s strange tale.
“No, the Creole military men, us.”
“Mulatto,” said the young man, laughing. “You’re a mulatto, old man.”
“I am, hiding here because I don’t want to be a part of the ingratitude or of the crimes committed against my brothers,” said the old man with astonishing strength, and his wife reappeared, asking, “What are you saying? Still talking your foolishness, still telling what is going to happen? What a mania for God’s sake! Who ever gave you the idea you were a prophet, you old fool?”
“I’m not. I only tell what already happened,” said the old man. He began to play his violin. “What happened a long time ago.”
Over the course of his slow return to Mérida, and from there to the sea, Baltasar Bustos found no evidence of war; no one knew anything about the old battles, and not a soul remembered the heroes. Sometimes they would say yes, the battle’s going to take place tomorrow, but later they would mention names that meant nothing to him—Boyacá, Pichincha, Junín—and when he asked for details, no one could tell him where those places were or give him dates; they could only say in a monotonous voice: “One more battle and the fatherland will be saved.”
He entered a burned-out city
where he walked in ashes up to his ankles. He was told that the ashes would be there forever, that nothing could get rid of them. Later, he returned to the violin-playing general’s ranch. The woman had died. That afternoon they were burying her. The black had gone off to the mountains. He had fled. He would go down to the plains. He would fire his rifle. He would fight forever. Here he would have gone insane. The old man was left alone, and Baltasar felt that the solitude was giving him back his old spirit. The old man told more and more stories, about wars against the French, against the Yankees, military coups, torture, exile, an interminable history of failures and unrealized dreams, all postponed, all frustrated, pure hope; nothing ever ends and perhaps it’s better that way, because here, when anything ends, it ends badly.
Here and there, Baltasar Bustos found forgotten iron wheels of cannons, and during the day he would cool his brow on them and at night use them to keep his hands warm. He lost all sense of time. Perhaps in Venezuela they’d lost it as well, resigned to frustration and to things done only halfway. One day, in a cemetery filled with tombs painted thousands of different colors, he happened on the old violinist-general leading a rickety funeral cortege, obviously made up of paid mourners, recruited by that same old hero whom Simón Bolívar had rewarded with land instead of money—exactly what the Cid did with his Castilian warriors. Who had died? Who else—the general looked at him with compassion—but Eusebio the rebel black? Baltasar made the Sign of the Cross before the coffin borne by four laborers.
“Don’t worry,” said the general. “My little Chebo isn’t in there. Rebels are always buried far away in unknown land, at night and with no name on the grave. So that no one ever knows if they’re alive or dead! The box is empty.”
“Only one more crime and the fatherland will be saved.” Baltasar paraphrased the last sentence he’d heard the general utter.
“Of course I’m burying him here with his name, next to the mother who was ashamed of him, damn it. But what shame, what fear, what shitty prohibitions!” exclaimed the old man.
[3]
He was afraid of turning into a Robinson Crusoe of the mountains, so one day he set out to return to Maracaibo. He left behind the frigid wasteland and the mountains dotted with frailejon; when he reached the valleys, the tall, slender trees with bearded limbs, tropical moss that hangs like perennially gray hair from the ever renewed head of a trunk filled with young sap, bade him farewell.
He left behind a lost battalion. He would never find it or name its heroes. He felt he was leaving a different time, and his passage through the high, bleak plateau reminded him vaguely of another brief period, which his memory did not want to register, which escaped the norms of his philosophic reason. But in those days his reason had been stronger; now everything conspired, or so he thought, to weaken it, and the time he spent in this bleak region seemed thus more comprehensible, more acceptable, than that other time on that other mountain. The key word, though, was time, and all he had to do was enter Maracaibo on a steamy morning, consult the front page of a Caracas newspaper sold in the port, corroborate the date with a pharmacist, who charged for the use of the calendar in his almanac, and he must accept that a period of time which in his experience was very long, which in his memory spanned three whole months, had been barely two weeks. Two weeks between his leaving Maracaibo and his return.
The woman in perpetual mourning was waiting for him in Harlequin House. She invited him to move in. He was like her, no one else was; both of them came from the Creole south, were acquainted with the viceregal salons, knew how to eat properly, and he (she supposed) would step aside for a lady. No, it was not for what he was thinking. That gallant gentleman from Lima who one night, in the presence of his wife, silently invited her to be his lover knew what he was doing. Recently widowed, she was hungry for sex, but sex with imagination. The sagacious and perverse Peruvian understood that and knew she could not resist his daring to court her right under his wife’s nose. It was as if he were taking away her mourning and anticipating his wife’s widowhood. Yes, that aristocrat from Lima certainly had imagination. He also had syphilis and scorned the woman dressed in black for falling so easily and accepting the tainted love the gentleman could not offer his own wife. A widow, she told him, is totally useless. There are no aristocrats crueler or more arrogant than those of Peru, the widow concluded. They are the Florentines of the New World.
“Why, then, did you come to Maracaibo?”
“A Chinese doctor in Lima told me that the sea air in these parts spontaneously cures venereal disease.”
“You don’t disgust me,” Baltasar said surprisingly—as if another voice had said it for him—surprised that a voice that was not his own would express itself thus. Yet he recognized it as his own—only, before, it had been asleep, hiding.
She laughed. “Go on, if that’s what you want. The girls will let you have it for nothing. My sex, Baltasar, is a sewer.”
“And your doctor, Lutecia, is a rogue and a charlatan.”
Both of them liked the name, the name of permanent mourning of the woman from Lima. Day and night would find Baltasar in the bordello of the harlequins, where, by simple arithmetic, he realized he’d become a desirable man. Perhaps some of the girls approached him because Lutecia had explained the situation of the young, exhausted hero; but though he paid none of them, they all sought him out, because—as they began to whisper in his ear—he was handsome, because he was rich, because he was smooth, because of his distant, unseeing eyes, because of the way he treated women, all women, like high-born ladies. “You make me feel like a duchess,” the English girl told him; “Personne ne m’a traitée comme toi,” the French girl told him; the sullen Indians said nothing but were as grateful as the chattering blacks, who did say, “With you we feel different. You relieve us of centuries of insults and kicks, damn it.”
No one knew that he was giving to them, the harem of the Harlequin, what he had been saving for one alone, his sullied Columbine. He wanted to expunge her from his mind, just as the old general on the Tabay cattle ranch imagining disasters to come had expelled in anticipation all Liberators from their freshly minted nations. Still, he did not cease being loyal to Ofelia Salamanca, and a Creole girl from Caracas, with heavy-lidded eyes and an olive-colored body, said to him, “It’s possible to be loyal without having to be faithful.”
He covered her face with kisses. He wished he could cover Ofelia Salamanca’s face with kisses, too, but without her knowing it. At least in this instance, reality and desire were one: the Creole girl melted in her orgasm because she was really in love. It no longer mattered what the night might bring. But Baltasar lived first (and he lived fully) only to present himself later before Ofelia after having lived with other women what he wanted to live with her: a night of endless kisses on the beloved’s face, and she would never know.
“Listen, if you treat us like ladies, do you treat your lady like a whore?” asked the Cartesian inmate of the Harlequin.
He always thought (this was his greatest mental loyalty) that the best there was in him could emerge from his admiration for everything he wasn’t. He had summarized his destiny in this idea. It was another way of thinking that, by being exposed to the danger of this admiration, he would ultimately be the best he could reasonably be. He patiently explained all this to Lutecia when at dawn, which was the end of the workday, the two of them were eating papayas with lemon and scented guavas in the madam’s rooms, protected by the shutters from Maracaibo’s nascent heat.
“These times have seen many men who are less convinced of their ideas than they are eager to impose them on others,” he said to the woman from Lima. She listened to him talk and repeated, mysteriously, something he’d told her many years before: “Or to punish them for not having those ideas. You’re right.”
He told Lutecia, the former Luz María of the Lima salons, everything he knew about himself except for the kidnapping of Ofelia Salamanca’s child. She replied that there is always something not known o
r left unsaid, simply because there hasn’t yet been a correspondence between the deed and the word. We keep things in reserve without knowing it, to say or do them when the occasion presents itself. They’ve always been there, but we didn’t know it and are surprised.
“I’m listening to voices inside me that I never listened to before,” Baltasar said to her.
“Do you see what I mean? Don’t silence them, no matter what.”
One night the pale English girl began to vomit blood, and Baltasar, unwittingly transformed into the most gentlemanly pimp of the oldest profession, carried her himself, in his arms, to the Maracaibo hospital.
That yellow barracks, crowned with shrubs that refused to die, hadn’t been painted in eight years. Why bother? The mass of wounded Spanish soldiers was so great, there was such doubt about the triumph of either side, the feeling that this was an interminable war was so strong, that to worry about the façade seemed at best a frivolity, at worst an act of cynicism. The Ursuline nuns with their headdresses that made them look like captive seagulls managed to find a bed for the duchess, as the nominative Baltasar dubbed her. For Baltasar, knowing names, giving them, devising pseudonyms, was part of a radical game that began when he read Plato under the tutelage of his pampa mentor Julián Ríos, who said: “It is important to note that our fascination with our own names gave rise to the first treatise of literary criticism, Plato’s Cratylus. Remember, Baltasar, in that dialogue Socrates finds room for every theory of names. Some say the name is intrinsic to the thing. Some contradict that, saying that names are purely conventional. Socrates says names are mere approximations of things, a rough guess. And in that way names name philosophy itself, and love as well, and all human activities: a mere approximation.”
The Campaign Page 19
