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.The important thing for Spain’s American colonies was that, once and for all, the famous “Fernandine mask” had fallen.Now it was simply a matter of being either in favor of the restored Bourbon monarchy or against it.It was no longer possible to hedge.Spaniards against Spanish Americans.Simón Bolívar had done everyone the favor of giving a name to the conflict: a fight to the death.The Marquis de Cabra preferred to prolong, just as he was doing at that very moment, to the rhythm of the coach, the public rumors in order to put off the private ones.During this enervating summer of unrealized rains—like a marriage left unconsummated night after night—he himself was the preferred object of Lima gossip.His entrance into the gardens of Viceroy Abascal, in this city where gardens proliferated as an escape from earthquakes, would, as the witty Chileans called it, keep the rumor mill churning at top speed.The truth is that other things held the attention of the guests at the viceroy’s soiree, first a game of blindman’s buff that the young people who basked in the blessings of the Crown—the jeunesse dorée, as the Marquis de Cabra, always aware of the latest Paris fashions, called them—were enjoying, as they dashed and stumbled their way around the eighteenth-century viceregal garden, a pale imitation of the gardens of the Spanish palace at Aranjuez, themselves the palest reflection, finally, of Lenôtre’s royal gardens.“Goodness, with all these blindfolded figures in it, the garden looks like a courtroom,” said the marquis, as usual to no one and to everyone.That allowed him to make ironic, snide comments no one could take amiss because they weren’t directed at anyone in particular.Of course, anyone who so desired could apply them to himself.The garden actually resembled nothing so much as beautiful, flapping laundry because the flutter of white cloth, gauze, silks, handkerchiefs, and parasols dominated the space: floating skirts, scarves, linen shirts, hoopskirts, frock coats the color of deerskin, tassels, fringes, silver braid, epaulets, and military sashes, but above all handkerchiefs, passed laughingly from one person to another, blindfolding them, handcuffing them, allowing the blindman only an instant, as white as a lightning flash, to locate his or her chosen prey.Two young priests had also joined the game, and their black habits provided the only contrast amid so much white.From his privileged distance, the marquis noted with approval the nervous blushes of the beautiful Creole youngsters, who avidly cultivated fair complexions, blond gazes, and solar tresses.That explained the parasols in the hands of the girls, who wouldn’t set them aside even when they were blindfolded.They would run charmingly, one hand holding the parasol, the other feeling for the ideal match promised by the luck of the game.On the other hand, the heat and the excitement of the game brought out dark blushes among the boys, as if the image of the pure white Creole required total inactivity.The newly arrived spectator smiled; either in the curtained bedroom of a lattice-windowed palace or in a dungeon, that’s where these fine young gentlemen would finally take their rest; that was what the war of independence promised Lima’s beautiful young people: renewed power or jail.War to the death … For the moment, far from the insane, incredible resistance of the bands of Upper Peru’s guerrillas, far, even, from the perilous peace of Chile, Peru remained Spain’s principal bastion in South America.But for how long?It was like playing blindman’s buff, said the roguish, amused marquis, introducing himself like some sort of minstrel into the circle of young people, striking coquettish poses, tossing away his three-cornered hat, nostalgic perhaps for the capes and broad-brimmed hats that Charles III had banned in a vain attempt to modernize the Spanish masses.As he walked, he scattered the perfume and powder of his eighteenth-century toilette among these fresh but perspiring young people, who had abandoned the classic wig in favor of long, romantic tresses that floated in the breeze … Even in Lima the generation gap began with hairstyles; it indicated—and this the Marquis de Cabra, of an understanding nature, wanted to believe—that it began in their heads.It was the era of heads.Isn’t that exactly what Philip IV’s minister had demanded? “Bring me heads!”He could think no more because his own head collided with that of a blindfolded youth searching for his lady-love.He spun with more energy and zeal than anyone else, shaking his mane of bronzed curls, half opening his full, red lips, around which the pallor of his carefully shaped cheeks contrasted with the skin on his forehead and cheeks, which was dark, tanned by the sun.The white blindfold covered his eyes; and if his curly head cracked into the Marquis de Cabra’s wig, it was as much because of the agitation of the young man as it was because of the old man’s intrusion into the game.The young man grabbed the old man’s arms, felt the folds of his frock coat, and pulled off the blindfold just as the old man was rearranging his unsettled wig, which had slipped to one side of his head.Baltasar Bustos smothered a cry, muffled, almost animal-like, like that of a bull whose strength has been mocked, for what he actually imagined in the darkness demanded by the game was a nocturnal encounter with Ofelia Salamanca, an encounter of which this game of blindman’s buff was but a foretaste, a preliminary ritual.He’d been assured she was in Lima; it was for her that he’d journeyed here from the pampa, through the desert and the mountains to Ayacucho and the Peruvian coast; for her he’d trimmed his beard and mustache, combed his hair, dabbed on perfume, and dressed in the clothes fashionable in the viceroyalty.It was for her he’d come looking, visiting the twilight parties of Lima, the final bastion of the Spanish empire in the Americas, seeking her because his friends had told him, “She is in the Americas, but no one has seen her.” “She is in Lima, but she is with someone else.” It was for her that he took part in blindman’s buff, imagining that each woman he touched when he pulled the handkerchief off his eyes would be she, the woman he’d sighed for since that terrible night of the kidnapping and fire in Buenos Aires.And even before that: since he’d seen her in outline, naked, sitting before her mirror, powdering herself, a new mother, but with an incomparable waist and infinitely caressable buttocks, buttocks that would fit the hands of a man, the secret, strokable buttocks of Ofelia Salamanca, which drove Baltasar Bustos mad.Instead, he was embracing his beloved’s aged husband.The Marquis de Cabra looked at him without knowing him.He’d never seen him before.Baltasar’s vision ended; he took the handkerchief off his eyes and handed it in confusion, ironically, to Ofelia Salamanca’s startled husband.The platonic lover struggled to put on his oval glasses, showing that he was blinder than any blindfolded man: his heavy breathing fogged the lenses
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