The Campaign (25 page)

[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 or 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.”

“An
approach,
” repeated Baltasar in English, holding the English girl's cold hand. Was this, given the fact that she was English, a good sign—the colder, the more full of life? It wasn't; she died a few hours later in Baltasar's arms, begging him to repeat the word
approach.
Approach to what? To death, to her lost home, to the unknown love of the poor foreign courtesan? He never found out. He stayed with her, holding her for a long while. Even after he was asked to leave her, he clung to the fair, pale body with its thin, matchstick limbs. It was hard for him to let go. A voice had told him: “Take charge of her. Until the end. She has no one else in the world. The day she's buried, there will be no one to accompany the body. Only you will know for certain that she died.” He remembered the funeral and the nameless grave of Eusebio, the black son of the dark-skinned old general in Tabay, and did not want the English girl's tombstone to be without a name. Since he invented names, what name would he give to this woman, who had no identification papers? In the face of death, his imagination flagged. Perhaps, simply, the Duchess. The Duchess of Malfi. A literary homage. Webster. Elizabeth Webster. By naming her, he created her. But he was only obeying the voice that exhorted: “Take care of her.”

He was afraid that if he listened to that voice he would cease to be master of his own destiny. The experiences of a short life told him, however—as he wandered through the hospital's long gallery, where the sick, mostly soldiers, were laid out on their cots—that his destiny was a chorus of voices, his own and others. Nothing more.

Every night, the Spanish officers would noisily burst into Lutecia's brothel—she herself had begun to use the name—and Baltasar would listen from afar to their shouts, confidences, and explosions of camaraderie. He never went out to them. They disgusted him and had nothing to do with his happy, free dealings with the madam from Lima. He would visit the girls in the afternoon, when all of them, without exception, were still virgins. They would talk a great deal about the officers, sometimes making observations that would otherwise pass unnoticed. The French logician, who had seen action even before Waterloo, insisted that women were a mere pretext, something to excite these handsome men who had degrees from European academies, for whom machismo was an essential part of their military calling and their national identity. But class identifications were even more important. They were the peacocks and, at times, the stud horses of the Maracaibo whores, but she, the French tart, noticed how they looked at each other, how they liked to catch each other in the women's beds, how their desire was stronger for each other than it was for the women. Bah, she didn't rule out the possibility that in Spain they would prefer the women of their own class to the men of the same class, but in this port of fevers and pubic lice,
allez-y.
Men and women all agreed: they wanted Spanish pricks.

One of the officers, so thin he was almost invisible from the front, because he was all profile—long nose, languid eyes, mustache combed upward, hair as highly polished as the leather of his cavalry boots, used his entire body to sniff around. He was like a greyhound. His nose would turn red, and he would cease being pure profile because of an unusual, exotic smell. His regiment was constantly in and out of Maracaibo, deeply engaged in a war to the death with Páez and Bolívar, but he always put up at Harlequin House. He prided himself on having gone to bed with all the girls except the English whore. He was afraid of “perfidious Albion,” especially between the sheets, and was paralyzed with terror when he learned she'd died. He was sure, he said, that if she'd died on him in bed, she would have dragged him to the bottom of the sea, the paradise of the English.

One night he smelled something unusual. Feigning joviality, he approached, talking about August nights in Madrid, when wearing a uniform was a foretaste of hell, and suddenly pulled back the curtain of the lavatory where Baltasar Bustos, in turn, was pretending to wash his face in a basin, although in fact he was spying on the Spanish officers.

Their eyes met, and Baltasar wondered where he'd seen those eyes before, in what skirmish, viceregal salon, or crossroad between La Paz and Lake Titicaca. Where? The same question was as obvious in the royalist officer's eyes. Each knew that he would probably never recall their first meeting, or even if it had actually taken place.

Páez's plainsmen, advancing from the south, besieged Maracaibo. Food began to run out. The hospitals were filled with the wounded. War to the death desolated Venezuela. Black fugitives would arrive, thinking they could blend into the anonymity of the port, but irrevocably assumed to be rebels, they were caught and executed by the royalists as quickly as by the insurgents. No one knew who was going to be hanged or why: for being a royalist, for being rich, for being black, for being a rebel …

Baltasar Bustos would accompany the girls who became ill with typhus or appendicitis, or who just had ticks, to the Maracaibo hospital. Many never returned. Others returned because of the calomel cure. But after a while Baltasar needed no pretext to walk into the sanatorium. He suffered and was horrified by the suffering of all. Nothing was more terrible than watching amputations in which the only anesthetic given the soldiers was a glass of brandy and a napkin to bite. Baltasar would stand at their side, holding their hands, knowing they needed something warmer than a piece of cloth or a glass. And he felt how hard they held on to him, as if holding on to life. He immersed himself in the hospital world. He felt his place was there, not despite the fact that the wounded were his eternal enemies, but precisely because of it: the Spaniards, the murderers of Francisco Arias and Juan Echagüe, those who had corrupted (who could doubt it?) Ofelia Salamanca.

Among all the cases, one moved him deeply. A man whose face had been blown off. There was a hole of raw flesh between his eyebrows and his mouth. And he still lived. His brain wasn't gone. He had a life somewhere beyond the hideous wound, in a marvelous and melancholy corner of his head. He would move his hands, which were as thin as the rest of his body. A pair of cavalry boots stood upright, beautifully polished, at the foot of his cot.