Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

“We should really beware of illuminati priests besotted with French readings,” added the young priest, as if to erase, then and there, any bad impression he might have made and to confuse the discussion even more. “We have the power of confession, and we have influence on the conscience of the military, the bureaucrats, the housewives … I know that disloyal priests abound in Chile, and that they never leave off their labor of undermining everything.”

“Those divisive priests have split my family, fathers against sons,” said a sallow little captain as he arranged his cream-colored shirt front with a gesture that belied his rancor. “And that I can never forgive them.”

“I know nothing about that,” said the red-haired lieutenant energetically. “All I know is that there isn’t a single mountain pass where we don’t have troops ready to repel San Martín, no matter where in the Andes he turns up.”

“Do you know that your beloved Ofelia murdered Captain Echagüe in bed, while they were fornicating?” the young priest said to Baltasar in a mysterious, seductive, cruel tone, but loud enough that the summer girls, the eternal little mistresses of Santiago society, could hear him with scandalized delight.

[2]

Baltasar cut such a comic, blind, addled-witted figure at the parties of the waning Chilean colony that it shouldn’t have surprised him that people took more notice of him than he of them. The soirees followed on each other like a series of prolonged farewells extending from the salons of the Royal Council to the elegant country houses east of the city, through the baroque of the carved ceiling panels, the wrought-iron work, and the huge portals of Velasco House in the center of the city.

To honor the memory of Ofelia Salamanca, Baltasar made a big show of haunting the chambers of the Royal Council, like a soul in torment; that was where the deceased Marquis de Cabra had presided before being sent to Buenos Aires. It was a new building, just finished in 1808, with twenty cast-iron windows on the second floor, wrought-iron balconies on the third, and a sequence of patios and galleries that reminded our hero (which is what you are, Baltasar) of the spacious River Plate Superior Court where his life was determined for all time.

This Santiago building owed its existence to a governor who arrived firmly committed to implanting the culture of the Enlightenment in Spain’s most remote southern colony. Luis Muñoz de Guzmán took Charles III’s ideas of modernization seriously and disembarked at the port of Valparaíso bearing musical instruments, baroque-music scores, perhaps some forbidden books, and no doubt the plays that soon began to be put on in those same patios and salons, under the patronage of his wife, Doña Luisa de Esterripa.

Nothing on this summer afternoon would have kept Baltasar Bustos from the performance taking place in one of the mansions — after all, it was nothing less than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Discovery of America —except that at that same hour, on every afternoon since he arrived in Santiago, Baltasar Bustos would step out on the balcony of the house where he was staying, a house that belonged to an old friend of his father’s, a Spaniard who’d made his fortune in the New World and left all his property to go back to Spain. From that vantage point, he would observe a vision in the neighboring garden.

At around five in the afternoon, a girl would appear among the olive and almond trees. Dressed all in white, she seemed to float in a private cloud of soft cottons and gauze bodices. Baltasar would wait for the appearance of this phantom: she was always punctual and always distant, like a new star, half sun, half moon, displaying herself to him alone, offering herself to him in the tender orbit of a satellite around a true star — him. As she approached, this delightful girl would spin among the almond trees; coming closer and closer, she would twirl on her always bare feet in a dance that Baltasar wanted to think was dedicated to him — after all, there were no other spectators but the sun and the moon, which at that uncertain hour coexist in the Andean sky.

Only once, Baltasar looked at the two of them, the sun and moon present at five o’clock in the afternoon over a garden of wise and serene plants. They could not compete with her; she was both of them at once, and many other things as well.

A fine sun, as hot and caressing as the familiar hand of a mother who knows she is taken for granted and resigns herself to not being especially loved; but also an evil sun about to execute the day by hurling it into an irreversible conflagration from which it would never rise: the sun was the stepmother of time.

And a bad moon, which appeared now as if to seal the day’s fate with a silver lock, white moon drained of life, pale moon with a vampire’s face, bloodless moon hungry for offal and bloody discharges; but a good moon too, the bed of the day reposing in white sheets, the final bath that washes off the day’s grime and sinks us into the amorous re-creation of time which is sleep.

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.”