Our Lives Are the Rivers

by Jaime Manrique

  I was about to ask Manuela for the freedom she had always promised me when she announced we were going to Quito to sell Catahuango. Since she said it would be a short trip, I decided to wait to tell her about Mariano and his marriage proposal until we got back.

  Mariano was unhappy at this news. “If you really love me,” I said, “you’ll wait for me. Manuela promised us we’ll be back in a few months. She’ll be so happy when she sells her farm, she’ll not think twice about letting me go.”

  THE NEXT DAY AFTER we returned to Lima, I went to see Mariano. From the way his eyes lit up when he saw me, I knew his feelings for me had not been diminished by my absence.

  “Now that you are here, let’s get married as soon as possible, negrita adorada,” Mariano said, kissing me. “Tell your mistress I am ready to buy your freedom.”

  “Mariano,” I protested, “you won’t have to do that. Manuela’s not like other white people. Manuela cares for me. She’s like a sister to us. She wants my happiness.”

  “I know she’s been a good mistress to you, Natán. But kind or not, white masters do not easily give up their slaves.”

  He was wrong, I was certain. I had known Manuela all her life. She always insisted that I called her Manuela, not doña or señora, even when there were white people present. She always said we could have our freedom any time we wanted it, and I believed her. The right moment to ask for my freedom would come soon. Then I would settle down with my Mariano to have a family.

  Manuela was always full of surprises. No sooner had I gotten up the nerve to talk to her about my plans, she moved out of Mr. Thorne’s house and went to live at La Casona, taking Jonotás and me with her. Again I would have to wait until things settled a bit. Another month passed before the situation at La Casona presented a moment to speak with Manuela.

  She was never more relaxed than when she sat down to embroider. One afternoon, when Jonotás was off on an errand and we were sitting together in her sewing room, choosing patterns and colors for a tablecloth, the moment seemed favorable.

  “Manuela, there is something I’ve been wanting to tell you for a long time.” She smiled, her face full of curiosity, as I told her the story of how I had met Mariano.

  “Well!” she exclaimed. “You could have fooled me. I had no idea. Oh, Natán,” she said, embracing me, “you deserve all the happiness in the world.”

  “That’s not all, Manuela,” I continued, now that I had her undivided attention. “He’s a free man and he wants to marry me.”

  “My felicitations, my dear. This is the best news.” Her joy for me was genuine—I could see that. “He will be the luckiest man in the world. When can I meet Mariano? You have to bring him here as soon as possible. I’m so eager to met him…. But if I don’t think he’s worthy of you, I’ll tell you so.”

  Manuela was full of questions about Mariano. What did he do for a living? Where was he from? How old was he? Had he been married before? How long had he been a free man? Was he handsome? And (a question that almost made me shudder) would he like to join the general’s army? When I had answered her questions, Manuela took my hand and said, “Come with me, Natán.”

  Manuela asked me to take the seat in front of her dressing table. She opened the chest that contained her jewels and pulled out a pearl necklace, a diamond brooch, and a gold chain with a crucifix made of emeralds. She laid them out on the table for me to admire. I knew the pieces. They were beautiful and very costly ornaments. “These will be part of your dowry,” Manuela said. She took the pearl necklace and roped it around my neck. I looked at myself in the mirror, not believing it was me. The exquisite pearls from Japan made me forget I was a slave.

  “Look at you,” Manuela clapped her hands in delight. “You look like an African princess. Oh, Natán, you will look so regal on your wedding day.”

  Her generosity was overwhelming, yet she had not uttered the words I longed to hear. Sensing my disappointment, Manuela said, “Of course you’re free to marry Mariano. You didn’t even have to ask. However, I must ask you to delay your happiness for a little while until my own situation with Señor Thorne and the general is resolved. The general has decided to go after the renegade Royalists troops hiding in the Andes. The liberation of Peru will not be secure until these forces are defeated. The Liberator has vowed to persecute and destroy them. After the Royalists are crushed, that will be the best time for you to get married. As the patriot you are, I’m asking you to make this great sacrifice for our cause, Natán.”

  It was hard to mask my disappointment. I wanted her to free me right then and there. I was sick of following her from place to place. I was sure that the Liberator and the battles for independence would be fine without me. And probably without her. Manuela was asking me to drop the subject of my freedom and to postpone my marriage. I had given this woman almost every waking moment and every hour of my life, and the first time I asked her for anything she was asking me to wait. The battle I wanted to fight was for an end to slavery, for an end to my enslavement, not for the liberation of the descendants of the Spaniards in South America, whose egotism knew no bounds.

  Perhaps Mariano had been right after all, that I would not achieve my freedom unless I fought for it.

  LIFE AROUND THE LIBERATOR was lived moment to moment, and eventful. Preparations were under way for the new campaign. This time, Manuela was determined to join the general and his troops. Without room for doubt, he let her know this was impossible. A kind of war started between the two of them. Manuela mounted a campaign of her own to get the general to change his mind. She moved out of their bedroom in La Casona and refused to eat meals with him. She was playing a dangerous game. It was clear to me then that he must have loved her very much to put up with her haughtiness.

  A few days before the general was set to depart for his campaign, Manuela sent for Jonotás and me. We found her in her bedroom in a state of delirious excitement. “Mis niñas,” she said, running toward us, her arms open to embrace us. “I have the best news.” What crossed my mind at that moment was that she was going to say her Aunt Ignacia had died. Which would have made me happy for Manuela. Instead, she said, “The general has given us permission to follow his troops. We will not be marching with the main regiment, but in the rear guard. We will be a day or so behind them, taking care of the wounded. At all times we must be ready to send reinforcements to his regiment in case they’re needed.”

  It was good news for her, because the women who followed their lovers in the army, or who disguised themselves as men to join the troops, were punished with fifty lashes if they were caught. Obviously, special dispensations would be made for Manuela.

  Jonotás and Manuela jumped up and down with joy, but I was seething. I already dreaded trekking across frigid mountains, crawling up slippery cliffs, being perpetually drenched, infested with chiggers and fleas, maybe eating rodents to stay alive. I had heard about all these things from slaves who helped the officers fight their wars. Not to mention the unpredictable attacks of the Indians—rock slingers whose aim was much more accurate than any weapon in use in the army of the patriots.

  Manuela was content to give up her life for the cause of liberation; and Jonotás, of course, would give up her own life to protect Manuela’s. I, on the other hand, resented more and more the war of liberation from Spain. It’s true that the general and many of his followers were abolitionists, and one of the promises he made was that slavery would end once South America was free from Spain. Yet I could see quite plainly what the end of slavery had meant to the Indians. They were no longer owned body and soul by white people, but the Spaniards treated their dogs better. The Indians’ lot had improved little in the three hundred years that had passed since their so-called liberation. All I wanted was to be with Mariano. Yet I could not breathe a word of these thoughts to Manuela, or even to Jonotás.

  Manuela had more to say. “Mis niñas, I’ve decided that if we want to be treated with respect by the troops, we need to dress as soldiers.”
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  To me, putting on a soldier’s costume was just a silly game left over from childhood. Jonotás and Manuela, however, were deadly serious about it. Dressed as soldiers, they felt as if they had the power of men. Like so much of what I did when I lived with them, I also dressed as a soldier, though I much preferred wearing a dress. I enjoyed the way men looked at me when I wore a dress, and their compliments made me feel good.

  I HAD LIVED my entire life in a world at war, where violence and cruelty were the norm. Yet I had never seen combat firsthand until this Peruvian campaign. In the remote Andes, where we were going, there were Indians who had never even heard of the Wars of Independence. They were used to the idea of having a king. It was here that the last Spanish regiments in Peru were hiding from Bolívar. The high cordilleras were a perfect place from which to launch surprise attacks and then flee.

  Everybody knows the names of the great generals who led the people against the Spaniards and liberated South America. But what of the men they commanded? Who were they? The slaves fought because their masters ordered them to fight, the way Jonotás and I followed Manuela wherever she went. The rest of the soldiers—Indians and criollos—were mercenaries who fought for a change of clothes, tobacco, and food. Few of the soldiers in the patriot armies believed their lot would actually improve after the defeat of the Spaniards. Often, when they got tired of fighting—underclothed, shoeless, hungry, and sick with scurvy—many deserted, fleeing to hide in the forbidding jungles, or the woods of the cordilleras, or the frozen wastelands of the high Andes, where they could blend in with the permanent fog—if they did not freeze to death first. I believe many of these soldiers fought because the taking of human life was one of the few pleasures left to them.

  FOR THE NEXT year, we followed the Liberator’s troops across the baking deserts of the coast and up the icy peaks of the cordilleras. Often, the Indians mounted surprise attacks on us, provoking avalanches or raining stones upon us with their slings. When our troops entered an Indian village, looking for recruits, all the able-bodied men had run away to hide in caves in the snowy reaches of inaccessible mountains, where no one dared go after them. That’s how much Indians feared what the Spaniards would do to them if they were suspected of collaborating with the revolutionary army. On our march, we heard accounts of Indians who refused to feed the Spaniards and were burned alive in their huts. Those Indians were the lucky ones. Others were drawn and quartered—tied to four horses heading in separate directions. The corpses of the men were dismembered: their heads and limbs hung in the trees, their intestines festooning the branches, and the trunks of their bodies cubed and cooked in soups that the villagers were forced to eat. The leftovers were tossed to the dogs and pigs. Pregnant women were forced to gather in the plaza where the Spanish soldiers tore out their fetuses and presented them to the fathers. Afterward, the men were flayed alive, their testicles and penises cut off and inserted in the vaginas of their wives and daughters. The rest of the women of the village were raped. Their lives were spared so that they could teach their children to fear what would happen to anyone who rebelled against the crown. When I heard about these things, I wished all the Spaniards dead. After all, it was the Spaniards who had kidnaped my people in Africa, and the Spaniards who had destroyed my family. For that I would loath them until I took my last breath.

  As a slave I had been taught that we Negroes were superior and more valuable than the smaller, reserved Indians, who never adapted to white society. Africans eventually lost their languages, whereas the Indians still spoke among themselves in Quechua and Aymará. Maybe we Africans thought there was no chance of ever returning to Africa, while the Indians, knowing they were the majority of the population, secretly clung to the hope that one day they would drive off the invaders from their ancestral lands.

  We Negroes made exotic house servants, the white man thought, whereas Indians were valued only for their knowledge of farming. After the king freed them, Indians became invisible. The people fighting the Wars of Independence, and this included Manuela and Bolívar, couldn’t care less about the Indians. At least when the Indians were slaves, their masters had to feed them to keep them working. Now most of the Indian men in the cities lived in an alcoholic stupor, while their wives and children died of hunger.

  That’s why it was no surprise to me that most of the Indians were mercenaries fighting for the Royalists. They must have understood, after centuries of Spanish rule, that the Wars of Independence—whether they were won by the Spaniards or the patriots—were not being fought on their behalf.

  It was during this campaign that Manuela learned to shoot a musket, wield a sword, and use a lance. For the first time she seemed fulfilled. She had been waiting all her life to become a soldier. She won the admiration of the general’s troops as a woman who, in a soldier’s uniform, could fight like a warrior on the battlefield, and, in a dress, transform herself into a lady. As part of the rear guard, she won the soldiers’ love by succoring the wounded.

  The campaign was to become one of the Liberator’s great successes. Before he could claim victory, however, he had to defeat a large and well-armed Spanish regiment garrisoned near Cuzco. The Liberator’s bravest soldiers marched ahead to engage and battle the renegades. We in the rear camped on the shores of Lake Tumaca, to wait for news of victory so we could bring the troops provisions and assist the wounded. We were waiting to receive word of another success when a messenger arrived—the Royalists had cornered our troops on a plateau at the edge of a precipice. From the slopes of a mountain they were decimating our regiment with rocks, cannon, and mortar fire. Our soldiers had no cover on the open plateau, where their only defense was to dig trenches.

  Manuela, hearing this news, said to Colonel Herrán, who was in charge of our division, “There’s not a moment to lose, Colonel. If the Liberator is defeated, everything we’ve fought for will have been wasted. We must all go at once to the defense of our men.”

  Colonel Herrán immediately gave orders to prepare for a march on the enemy. Anyone who could ride and use a weapon left the camp at a gallop. Only the sick and wounded remained behind. They were given arms to defend themselves in case they were attacked by unfriendly Indians.

  Riding at full speed without stopping, we reached the area where the battle was being fought late that afternoon. Colonel Herrán and Manuela decided that the attack on the Spaniards could not wait till morning. After studying a map of the area, Manuela came up with a plan that was as bold as it was mad. She proposed that we climb the back of the mountain where the Royalist troops were lodged and attack them from behind. It amounted to a suicide dash to take horses down that sheer slope. We might all die from broken necks before the Spaniards had a chance to fire a shot at us. But if by some miracle we succeeded, we might create a great deal of confusion and give the general’s troops a chance to regroup and counterattack.

  When we reached the top of the mountain, our meager and exhausted troops began to lose their spirit. We needed horses with wings to roll down that incline. Manuela grabbed the Colombian flag and addressed the men, “We have two choices now, my brothers. To live as heroes or to die as cowards. If we must die, let’s do it with dignity.” Next she hoisted the flag against the darkening sky and, crying “Death to tyranny,” spurred her horse and plunged toward the Spaniards, firing her pistol in the air. Without hesitation, Jonotás followed, firing her pistol, too. Seeing Manuela flying into that precipice, she transformed from a flesh-and-bone woman into a figure larger than life. In that moment I forgave her for her recklessness, for everything—I could not deny the heroism and the fire of Manuela Sáenz. I spurred my horse after her. Not to be outdone by three women, our soldiers followed. I was terrified sliding down that slope, firing my gun, but I can honestly say I had never felt so intensely alive.

  As the Royalists tried to thwart our descent, General Bolívar, seeing the Colombian flag flying down the incline, took advantage of the distraction and led his men up the mountain to engage the Spaniards
in hand-to-hand combat. The Royalists had relied on their superior artillery to weaken the Liberator’s forces. Caught between two flanks, they became confused.

  By sunset, the enemy had been slaughtered. Rills of blood ran down the mountain. Condors hovered in the sky like ravenous angels of death, waiting to feast on mountains of corpses.

  Later that night, we collected buckets of blood from the prisoners as they were beheaded so that the Liberator’s staff, who had run out of ink, could use it to write letters to Lima announcing our victory.

  That day I thought of a book Manuela read to us so long ago. The story flowed from her lips in a way that made Don Quixote more demented, Sancho Panza funnier, more pathetic, and wiser; the people they met on the road larger and more vivid than anyone we would ever encounter in real life; the roads of Castille, the towns of Spain, the caves, inns, mills, rivers, and forests more enchanted than any place in a fairy tale. Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s wisdom was filtered through Manuela, so that she squeezed out its essence, its very truth. I understood that day that Don Quixote was her ideal, and Jonotás and I were her Sancho Panza.

  After this victory, Bolívar’s troops dubbed Manuela “La Coronela.” She became, in effect, the most admired woman in Peru. Bolívar was acclaimed, even worshiped, in the Americas and in Europe. He became the most celebrated man in the world, the South American Napoleon, and Manuela, empress.

  GRAN COLOMBIA was a restless hornets’ nest. Late in 1826, it became imperative that the Liberator return to Bogotá where his vice-president, General Santander, was plotting against him. Manuela pleaded to accompany him, but the Liberator reminded her that the march to Bogotá would be grueling. Manuela, being Manuela, did not give in easily: had she not proven she could keep up with him in the Andes? He reminded her that she had become a controversial figure, and he wanted to put out the fires of discontent along the way, not stoke them. The Liberator prevailed. He left Manuela settled in La Casona, with promises he would send for her as soon as he reached Bogotá. He knew that without him to protect her, she, too, was at risk from his political enemies. She was relieved, then, that he left some of his most trusted men behind to look after her.