Beneath the awning, on a ship sailing the Orinoco, Bolívar dictates to his secretaries his projected Constitution. He listens, corrects, and dictates it again in camp, while smoke from the fire defends him against mosquitos. Other ships bring deputies from Caracas, Barcelona, Cumaná, Barinas, Guyana, and Margarita Island. Suddenly, the winds of war have changed, perhaps in homage to Bolívar’s obstinacy, and in a flash half of Venezuela has fallen into the patriots’ hands.
The delegates to the congress disembark at the port of Angostura, town of little houses drawn by a child. On a toy press is printed here, week after week, El Correo del Orinoco. From the jungle this organ of republican thought spreads the articles of Creole doctors and announcements of the arrival of beer, penknives, harnesses, and volunteer soldiers from London.
Three salvos salute Bolívar and his general staff. The birds take off, but a macaw swaggers indifferently with tough-guy strides.
The deputies mount the stone stairway.
Francisco Antonio Zea, major of Angostura, opens the session. His speech compares this patriot township with Memphis, Thebes, Alexandria, and Rome. The congress confirms Bolívar as head of the army and president with full powers. The cabinet is named.
Afterwards Bolívar takes the rostrum. Ignorant people, he warns, confuse reality with imagination and justice with vengeance … He expounds his ideas on the need to create Grand Colombia and lays the foundation of his projected Constitution, drawn up on the basis of the Englishmen’s Magna Carta.
(202)
1820: Boquerón Pass
Finale
The three great southern ports, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, could not prevail against the rural hosts of José Artigas, chief of the interior. But death has had better luck and taken most of his people. In the bellies of birds of prey lie half the men of the eastern campaign. Andresito lies dying in jail. Lavalleja and Campbell and others are prisoners; and a few have succumbed to treachery. Fructuoso Rivera calls Artigas a criminal and accuses him of having put property at the mercy of despotism and anarchy. Francisco Ramirez of Entre Ríos proclaims that Artigas is the cause and origin of all the evils of South America, and Estanislao López in Santa Fe does a somersault as well.
Landowner chiefs make common cause with port merchants, as the leader of the revolution goes from disaster to disaster. The last of his Indians and blacks still follow him, as do a handful of ragged gauchos under the command of Andrés Latorre, last of his officers.
On the banks of the Paraná, Artigas chooses the best horseman. He gives him four thousand silver coins, all that remain, to take to the prisoners in Brazil.
Then he sticks his spear in the bank and crosses the river. Ruefully he marches off to Paraguay, into exile, this man who didn’t want America’s independence to be a trap for her poorest children.
(277)
You
Without turning your head, you bury yourself in exile. I see you, I am watching you: the Paraná slips by with the sluggishness of a lizard, and over there your flaming torn poncho fades into the distance at a horse’s trot and is lost in the foliage.
You don’t say goodbye to your land. She would not believe you. Or perhaps you still don’t know that you’re leaving for good.
The countryside turns gray. You are going, defeated, and your land is left breathless. The children to be born of her, the lovers who come to her, will they give her back her breath? Those who emerge from that land, those who enter it, will they prove themselves worthy of such deep sadness?
Your land. Our land of the south. You will be very necessary to her, Don Jose. Every time the greedy hurt her and humiliate her, every time that fools believe her dumb or sterile, she will miss you. Because you, Don José Artigas, general of plain folk, are the best word she has spoken.
1821: Camp Laurelty
Saint Balthazar, Black King, Greatest Sage
From nearby towns and distant regions, Paraguayans flock to see these strange beings with skin like night.
Blacks are not known in Paraguay. The slaves Artigas has freed, who have followed his tracks into exile, make a town in Laurelty.
With them is Balthazar, the black king chosen to welcome God on earth. Invoking Saint Balthazar, they work the gardens, and for him resound drums and war chants brought from Africa to the River Plata plains. Artigas’s companions, the “Artigas-cué,” put on red silk capes and crowns of flowers when January Sixth comes around; and, dancing, they ask the sage-king that slavery may never return, and that he give them protection against bad spirits who soften heads, and hens that crow like cocks.
(66)
1821: Carabobo
Páez
At fifteen he was born killing. He killed to defend himself; had to flee to the mountains, and became a nomad horseman on the immense prairies of Venezuela. Horseman leader of horsemen: José Antonio Páez, Páez of the plains, flies at the head of the cowpoke artists of spear and lasso, who ride bareback and charge like an avalanche. He rides a white horse, because white horses ride better. When he is not on a campaign, he learns to read and to play the cello.
The half-naked plainsmen, who in the times of Boves had served Spain, defeat Spain at the battle of Carabobo. With machetes they fight their way through the impossible brushland of the west, its marshes and thickets, take the enemy by surprise, chew him up.
Bolívar names Páez commander in chief of the Venezuelan armed forces. The plainsman enters Caracas by his side wearing, like him, a garland of flowers.
In Venezuela, the die is cast.
(202)
1822: Guayaquil
San Martín
Appointment in Guayaquil. Between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, an avenue of triumphal arches. General Bolívar appears from the north. From the south comes José de San Martín, the general who crossed the Andes cordillera in search of freedom for Chile and Peru.
Bolívar talks and talks, offers and offers.
San Martin laconically cuts him short. “I am weary.” Bolívar does not believe him; or perhaps is mistrustful because he still does not know that glory also tires one out.
San Martín has spent thirty years in battle, from Oran to Maipú. As a soldier he fought for Spain, as a hardened general for America. For America, and never against her: when the Buenos Aires government sent him to smash the federal hosts of Artigas, San Martín disobeyed and took his army into the mountains to continue his campaign for the independence of Chile. Buenos Aires, which does not forgive, now denies him bread and salt. In Lima they don’t like him either. They call him King José.
Disappointment in Guayaquil. San Martín, great chess player, evades the game.
“I am weary of commanding,” he says, but Bolívar hears other words: You and I. Together, we don’t fit.
Later there is a banquet and ball. Bolívar dances in the center of the room, the ladies competing for him. The noise makes San Martin dizzy. After midnight, without saying goodbye, he leaves for the docks. The baggage is already aboard the brigantine.
He gives the order to sail. He walks the deck, with slow steps, accompanied by his dog and pursued by mosquitos. The ship heads away from the coast and San Martín turns to contemplate the land of America which fades and fades.
(53 and 54)
1822: Buenos Aires
Songbird
At the edge of the village of Morín, a common grave swallows the bones of a poet who until yesterday had a guitar and a name.
It’s better to travel light,
like an eagle and without sorrows …
Bartolomé Hidalgo, troubadour of Artigas’s camps, lived only for a moment, always in a whirlwind of songs and battles, and has died in exile. The dogs of hunger chewed up his lungs. Through the streets and squares of Buenos Aires wandered Hidalgo, hawking his couplets which sing to free men and strip enemies bare. They afforded him little food but much life. His unshrouded body ends up in the earth; the couplets, also naked, also plebeian, abide in the winds.
(125)
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1822: Rio de Janeiro
Traffic Gone Mad
The Diario do Rio de Janeiro announces novelties just arrived from London: machines to repair streets or heal lungs or squeeze manioc; lathes and stills and steam cookers; eyeglasses, telescopes, razors, combs. Also padded saddles, silver stirrups, shiny harnesses and carriage lanterns.
Still seen in the streets are lone horsemen and a few old gilded palanquins from another age; but fashion dictates late-model English carriages that draw sparks from the cobblestones. The streets of Rio de Janeiro are dangerous. Speeding accidents multiply, and the power of the coachman grows.
White gloves, top hats: from high on their perches the coachmen let fall bullying glances on other black slaves, and enjoy sowing panic among pedestrians. They are famous drunkards and pimps and good guitar players; and they are indispensable in modern life. A carriage is worth a fortune when it is sold with a fast horse and a skillful black.
(119)
1822: Quito
Twelve Nymphs Stand Guard in the Main Plaza
and each one holds up a crown. Bands and fireworks explode and the tapping of horses’ hooves on the long stone street sounds like the onset of rain. At the head of his army Bolívar enters Quito: a skinny gladiator, all nerve, his golden sword longer than his body. From the balconies rain down flowers and little embroidered kerchiefs. The balconies are altars upon which the ladies of Quito permit the erect-ness of their almost bare breasts to be worshipped amid lace and mantillas. Manuela Sáenz stands out like a dazzling ship’s figurehead. She drops a hand, and from the hand falls a crown of laurel. Bolívar raises his head and fastens his glance on her, a spear in slow motion.
That night, they dance. They waltz until they are giddy, and the world spins round and round to the rustle of that peerless woman’s thousand petticoats and the sweep of her long black hair.
(202, 249, and 295)
1823: Lima
Swollen Hands from So Much Applauding
He rides from El Callao, between two files of soldiers, on a road of flowers. Lima receives General Bolívar with a hundred-gun salute, a hundred flags, a hundred speeches and hundred-cover banquets.
The Congress grants him full powers to throw out the Spaniards, who have retaken half of Peru. The Marquess of Torre Tagle presents him with a biography of Napoleon, a set of Toledo blades and bouquets of florid phrases: Victory awaits you on the icy peaks of the Andes to crown you with her laurels and the nymphs of the Rimac are already chanting hymns to celebrate your triumphs! The War Minister gives orders to the goddess Fortune: Take thy majestic flight from the foothills of Chimborazo to the peaks of our Andes and there await immortal Bolívar to crown his brow with the laurels of Peru!
The Rimac, the river that talks, is the only one that keeps quiet.
(53 and 202)
1824: Lima
In Spite of Everything
He rides from El Callao, between two files of soldiers, on a road of flowers. Lima receives the chief of the Spaniards, General Monet, hoisting and cheering the king’s flag. The flag flutters and speeches flutter. The Marquess of Torre Tagle melts with gratitude and implores Spain to save Peru from the menace of the accursed Bolívar, the Colombian monster.
Lima prefers to continue sleeping, amid rippling heraldry, the slumber of a colonial arcadia. Viceroys, saints and cavaliers, crooks and coquettes exchange sighings and bowings amid the sandy wastes of America, beneath a sky that denies rain and sun but sends angels to defend the city walls. Inside them, one breathes the aroma of jasmine; outside, solitude and danger lie in wait. Inside, hand kissings and processions and courtings: every officer imitates the king and every monk the pope. In the palaces, stucco imitates marble; in the seventy churches of gold and silver, ritual imitates faith.
Far from Lima, Bolívar lies sick in the coast town of Pativilca. On all sides, he writes between fevers, I hear the sound of disaster … Everything is born into life and dies before my eyes, as if split by a bolt of lightning … Dust, ashes, nothing. All Peru, save for a few valleys, has fallen back into the hands of Spain. The independent governments of Buenos Aires and Chile have abandoned the cause of the freedom of this land; and not even the Peruvians themselves seem very interested.
“And now, what do you plan to do?” someone asks this battered and lonely man.
“Triumph,” says Bolívar.
(53, 202, and 302)
1824: Montevideo
City Chronicles from a Barber’s Chair
No breeze tinkles the tin washbasin that hangs from a wire over a hole in the door to announce that here they shave beards, pull teeth, and apply suction cups.
Out of sheer habit, or to shake off the languors of summer, the Andalusian barber makes speeches or sings while he finishes covering a customer’s face with foam. Between phrases and fandangos, the razor whispers. One of the barber’s eyes watches the blade, which plows through the meringue; the other watches the Montevideans who plod along the dusty street. The tongue is sharper than the razor, and no one escapes its fleecing. The customer, prisoner as long as the shave lasts, dumb, immobile, listens to this chattering chronicle of customs and events and from time to time tries to follow, from the corner of an eye, the victims passing by.
A yoke of oxen hauling a dead woman to the cemetery. Behind the cart, a monk telling his beads. The sound of a bell bidding a routine farewell to the third-class deceased reaches into the shop.
The razor pauses in the air. The barber crosses himself and from his mouth come words pronounced with a change of tone: “Poor little thing. She was never happy.”
The corpse of Rosalía Villagrán is crossing the city occupied by Artigas’s enemies. For a long time she had believed she was someone else, and believed she was living in another time and another world, and in the charity hospital she kissed the walls and talked to the pigeons. Rosalía Villagrán, Artigas’s wife, has entered the gates of death without a cent to pay for her coffin.
(315)
1824: Plain of junín
The Silent Battle
Bolívar reorganizes his army, magic of his stubborn courage, and triumphs on the Peruvian plain of junín. The world’s best horsemen charge with sword and spear and wreak havoc. Not a shot is heard in the whole battle.
The American army is a mix of gauchos from the River Plata shores; Chilean peasants and plainsmen from Grand Colombia, who fight with reins tied to their knees; Peruvian and Ecuadoran patriots, heroes of San Lorenzo and Maipú, Carabobo, and Pichincha. The men have spears from Guayaquil and ponchos from Cajamarca; the horses, saddles from Lambayeque and shoes from Trujillo. Also following Bolívar are Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, and even Spaniards won over by the New World, European veterans of distant wars on the Guadiana or the Rhine or the Seine.
As the sun dies, the lives of the wounded are snuffed out. Dying in Bolívar’s tent is Lieutenant Colonel Sowersby, an Englishman who was with Napoleon at Borodino; and not far away a little dog howls beside the body of a Spanish officer. That dog kept running at the side of his friend’s horse throughout the entire battle of junín. Now General Miller tries to catch it or chase it off, but there is no way.
(202)
1825: La Paz
Bolivia
The imperial standard falls in surrender at the feet of Antonio José de Sucre, general at twenty-three, grand marshal at thirty, Bolívar’s favorite officer. The thunderous battle of the Ayacucho pampa finishes off Spanish power not just in Peru but on the whole continent.
When the news reaches Lima, Bolívar leaps onto the dining room table and dances, stepping on plates and breaking glasses and bottles.
Later Bolívar and Sucre ride together beneath the triumphal arches of the city of La Paz. There, a country is born. Upper Peru, which had been absorbed into the viceroyalties of Lima and Buenos Aires, now calls itself the Bolívar Republic, and will be called Bolivia, so that its sons may perpetuate the name of their liberator.
José Mariano Ruyloba, a monk with a
great gift for oratory, a mouth full of gold, has prepared a splendid welcoming speech; but fate decrees that Ruyloba shall die before Bolívar can hear it. The speech is composed in Greek.
(202)
1825: Potosí
Abecedarium: The Hero at the Peak
In Potosí, Bolívar climbs to the peak of the silver mountain. Bolívar speaks, History will speak: This mountain whose bosom is the wonder and envy of the world … The wind seizes the flags of the new fatherlands and the bells of all the churches. I think nothing of this opulence when I compare it … Bolívar’s arms embrace a thousand leagues. The valleys multiply the salvos of the guns and the echo of the words … with the glory of having brought to victory the standard of liberty from the burning and distant beaches … History will speak of the great man up on the heights. It will say nothing of the thousand wrinkles lining the face of this man, still unworn by years but deeply furrowed by loves and sorrows. History will not be concerned with the galloping colts in his breast when, from the skies of Potosí, he embraces the land as if it were a woman. The land as if it were that woman: the one who sharpens his swords; and strips him and forgives him with a glance. The one who knows how to listen to him beneath the thunder of guns and the speeches and ovations, when he says: You will be alone, Manuela. And I will be alone, in the middle of the world. There will be no more consolation than the glory of having conquered ourselves.
(53, 202, and 238)
1825: Potosí
England Is Owed a Potosí
The Spanish colonies that are born to independent life walk bent over. From the first day they drag a heavy stone hung from the neck, a stone that grows and overwhelms. The English debt, born of Britain’s support in arms and soldiers, is multiplied by the grace of usurers and merchants. The moneylenders and their intermediaries, versed in the arts of alchemy, turn any old cobblestone into a golden jewel; and British traders find in these lands their most lucrative markets. The new countries, fearful of Spanish reconquest, need official recognition by England; but England recognizes no one without first signing a Treaty of Friendship and Commerce which assures freedom of invasion for its industrial merchandise.