Our Lives Are the Rivers

by Jaime Manrique

  One day, thinking about the whole of my life, I found that the anger in my heart had subsided: I’d forgiven Ignacia, my father, and even Santander—my mortal enemies. When I thought about the past, now it was not my motherless childhood in Catahuango, nor my mistreatment by the nuns, nor my unhappy, stunted life in an arranged marriage I thought about. Instead, I remembered my days with Bolívar, the happy times as well as the unhappy ones, and my grief lifted at last. One day it struck me that even though I was old, an invalid, and forgotten, I was finally free because the poisonous scorpion that had dwelt in my heart for most of my life had died.

  I KNEW MY end was approaching when Bolívar began to appear in my dreams. I grew closer to him than we had been in life. No enemy and no campaign could come between us. Now he belonged to me alone. To summon his presence, all I had to do was to think of him, to wish him by my side to share a confidence and, regardless of the hour, he would be there, as he had never done when he was alive. His presence became almost corporeal, as tangible as Jonotás’s when we sat on the patio, smoking a cigar and gossiping about our neighbors. I never felt alone again. When Jonotás went out to do errands, it was the general who kept me company, not the little dogs on my lap. We talked about our years together, and took walks through his family’s hacienda in Venezuela, or through the fields of Catahuango, and indulged in the games we had played as children. Always I would bring him up to date on the news that reached Paita about old friends or enemies. More and more, I looked forward to the time when I could join him on the other side, when we could be two naked souls together in eternity, never to be separated again.

  32

  1856

  Over the years, the ships that docked in Paita brought with them many diseases and plagues. As soon as the authorities announced the arrival of a pestilence, Jonotás and I made sure we had enough supplies to last us for a while. Then we would shut ourselves in our home until the scourge ran its course.

  One morning in November, Jonotás came back from the market with the news that a ship had arrived that day carrying two sailors stricken with uncontrollable coughing. The men died hours later in the infirmary, after a dreadful agony. Word of the illness spread through town immediately.

  Without losing a minute, we filled all the tinajas in the house and made plans to ration our consumption of water to no more than a totuma per day—which could hold us for a couple of months, if necessary. We stocked up on salted fish, rice, lard, salt, sugar, and candles. To supplement these essentials, we filled shelves with jars of the sweetmeats and pickled fruits that we prepared. We made additional purchases of wood and charcoal for cooking, incense to purify the air, and a good supply of cigars, which were the only real pleasure left to us in our old age. Finally, Jonotás sealed up the windows and doors, and we settled down to wait for the cloud of disease to pass over us.

  As the plague felled scores, I heard from my hammock the paiteños imploring God’s mercy for their loved ones. Late at night, lamentations pierced the quiet, like ululations of the souls trapped in purgatory. I was reminded of the cries rising from the battlefield after darkness fell, the moans of the wounded as they prayed to be rescued—or prayed to die a quick death. Each night, shortly after the bells of Paita’s church tolled midnight, the squeaky wheels of the wagon and the snorting of the mule announced the transport of the dead to the communal grave outside Paita, where they would be buried before dawn.

  We made sure one of us was awake late at night so we could answer the knock of the cadaver collector who went from house to house to confirm that there were people still alive inside. As the days passed, I began to think that if we stayed inside and did not let anyone in the house, and kept the windows and doors shut—despite the suffocating heat—we might outlast the scourge. Our house was like an oven, not just from the lack of ventilation but from the heat outside produced by the fires set all over town to burn the homes and the possessions of the victims of the plague.

  Late at night, Jonotás would open the door to the patio to let the dogs out just long enough for them to relieve themselves, and for her to empty our chamber pots in the latrine. Before she opened the door to do any of this, she wrapped her nose and mouth in a shawl soaked in camphor to protect herself from the malevolence in the air.

  One morning Jonotás woke up coughing, and she continued coughing as she lit a fire to boil water for coffee. When she came over to my hammock to help me use the chamber pot, she complained of a tightening in her throat, a dryness, and difficulty in breathing. “You probably haven’t been drinking enough water,” I said. “The sand of Paita has stuck in your throat.” Jonotás took a long drink of water, but she did not feel any better. “Ay, Manuela,” she protested, “there’s something blocking my throat.”

  “Come over here and let me take a look inside your mouth,” I said. Jonotás held a candle near her face and opened wide. On the roof of her mouth I saw a thick fibrous spot the size of a small starfish, and the lining of her throat was red and swollen. I noticed, too, whitish membranes had almost sealed her nostrils. She had only hours to live.

  Jonotás sat in the chair by my hammock, rocking slowly, her eyes closed. She started humming an African song. Something she had not done in a long time. But I remembered it; it was a song of leave-taking, of good-bye. When her coughing intensified, she announced, “Manuela, I’m going to leave the house. I’ll close the door behind me.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Jonotás,” I said. “But it’s too late. It’s just a matter of time before I come down with it, too. The least we can do is die together.”

  We stared at each other, no longer able to speak. The plague had robbed Jonotás of her garrulous nature. Every sound she uttered seemed to cause her pain. This was a time to seek comfort praying to God, but we were atheists. Jonotás and I were old women, and I had been an invalid for ten years. The future was not something I anticipated with any pleasure. If anything, I had lived too long and now I was curious to find out what would happen to us after we left the earth.

  “Let’s smoke,” I proposed. Jonotás got up with great difficulty, lit two cigars, and we sat beside each other in silence, puffing and blowing smoke. Jonotás was halfway through her cigar when her coughing became intense. She started to get up, gulping for air. She collapsed on the floor and fell into a fit, making gagging noises. As I watched her, a whitish foam poured out of her open mouth, like something that kept growing inside her even though she was no longer alive. I had lived practically all my life with Jonotás—I did not know what it was like to live without her by my side. I had seen too much destruction and pain and experienced too much loss—all my tears had dried long ago. I felt cobwebs starting to grow in my throat, becoming thicker and thicker until the air was cut off. I could not breathe. I had made up my mind to remain in Paita no matter what so I could die by the sea, like the Liberator. My only regret was that the plague did not wait until December—the month he had died.

  I placed my hand over my heart. It had stopped beating—I was dead.

  That night, the bats that usually glided over my hammock when darkness fell did not come. For years Jonotás had fought these winged rats, chasing them with a broom, catching them in a net, searching for their hideouts during the day to kill them, sealing the gaps in the bamboo walls they came through from the outside—all to no avail. It would have been easier to keep out the sand of Paita than to keep out the bats. Every evening, as soon as the candle was snuffed, the bats would arrive.

  As my eyes closed, the tips of their wings chilled the fuzz on my cheeks. After years of trying to get rid of them, we gave up. When we did, I began to welcome my nightly visitors, the only visitors I had during Paita’s long nights. But tonight no bat came, as if the plague had claimed the bats, too.

  The candle Jonotás had lit the day before had burned down, but in death I could quite clearly see Jonotás lying on her back, her toothless mouth agape, her eyes glazed, the top of her head covered with a cap of white hair, her old g
narled fingers placed on her breasts as if she were reaching for her throat to open the passage for air. The dogs sat by Jonotás as if they were expecting her to wake up soon and let them out onto the patio. What would become of them? So long as our corpses were found the following day, Santander and Córdoba would not die of thirst.

  But Jonotás and I were no longer of this world. My body lay in the hammock, head to one side, ears, nostrils, mouth coated by cottony membranes. Yet my soul remained inside my body, as if waiting for permission to leave. Or waiting to be told where to go next.

  From my hammock I could see the mahogany chest containing Bolívar’s letters. Waiting for the plague to move on to another town, I had asked Jonotás to bring the chest near my hammock, and although I knew each letter by heart, I began to read and reread them silently, hearing his voice in my ears, the honey of his words, his whispered terms of endearment, his declarations of love. For two decades I had guarded this chest as if it contained my own life. What would happen to it now?

  In the twenty-six years since Bolívar’s death, my name had not rated as even a footnote in the official history of the Liberator’s life. For a long time I refused to think about what would happen to the letters when I was gone. In recent years, I had thought of sending them to my dear friend General Flores, who would have guaranteed that the letters would be preserved for posterity. But I had delayed acting for too long, perhaps because once I let go of them I would be admitting the world had defeated me. Now the letters would be destroyed, and I, Manuela Sáenz, the woman who had loved and comforted Simón Bolívar in the last eight years of his life, the woman who had shared with him not just his glory but his decline, would be forgotten. It would be as if I had never existed.

  Suddenly men with torches burst into the house, picked up our corpses, and threw them on top of the pyramid of cadavers in the mule wagon. Then my spirit began to exit my cold flesh. It was a strange sensation to be weightless. As our bodies were transported through the sandy streets to Paita’s outskirts, I desperately searched for Jonotás’s soul, but she had left my side for good. Maybe she had gone back to her origins in San Basilio, and maybe she was glad to be her own mistress at last.

  I was not done with Paita. I knew I had to return to my house for one last time. I watched as a man with a lighted torch set my house on fire, creating a vortex of red flames. In minutes the fire consumed everything except a shred of brittle, yellow paper that escaped the flames and swirled up to the sky, flying toward me. I could see Bolívar’s handwriting on it. I read—“Come to me, come soon, come sooner.”

  A powerful wind engulfed my spirit in a fast-traveling cloud. The sky above me glimmered as a full moon emerged from the mouth of a volcano. I recognized the shape of Cayembe. I had returned to Ecuador and was flying over the luscious fields of Catahuango, my ancestral land, the inheritance that never came to me and had caused me so much pain. I was finally free of it, free of a place that should never have belonged to me in the first place. It would always belong to the Indians, who had always belonged to it, because the land and the Indians were one.

  As the moon spilled rays of light over the landscape, a wide view opened up, revealing an avenue of snow-crowned volcanoes. Tiers of stars sparkled in the frosty sky. The moon climbed higher, and a burning white splendor swathed the topmost peaks. The light kept spreading until the white landscape became a crystal cordillera against the charcoal line of the horizon. A deep brooding hush hung above the scene, until I heard faintly, as if approaching from afar, a swoosh—the sound made by the wings of a condor.

  I had returned to my place of birth so that my spirit could be buried in one of the sacred volcanoes, as the Indian legends promised to the people born in the valley. I flew over the mouth of Tungurahua where, in olden times, the ancient dwellers of Quito hid their emeralds deep inside, away from the rapacious conquistadors, until Tungurahua’s crater became a verdant mirror.

  I was but a speck of dust in the fierce wind that carried me over the boiling ruby mouth of Cotopaxi, its entrails brothers and sisters killing each other in civil wars that lasted hundreds of years—the great spilling of blood that would harm and enslave in the name of hatred, draining the nations of the Andes of their best people, and of hope, until the five nations forming Gran Colombia became one delta of blood.

  Indian drums echoed across the valley, followed by the piercing horn sound of the bombo leguero and the mournful tuba notes of the tru tru ca, the most ancient of all the flutes. These instruments were playing the music of my own funeral march. I was entranced by this music, the glow of the valley, the caressing ruffling sound in the air. It was the sound of my wings, the same sound that all solitary, dying condors make as they begin their descent into the mouth of Cotopaxi, Lord of Terror, where all the creatures of the land of the volcanoes eventually return to be consumed until nothing is left of us but the ephemeral trail we have made in this world that we unwisely call ours, and even home, but which is nothing more than a beautiful, and often painful, resting station; a place where we fight with desperation to create, to control, to change, to hold on to things, people, power, glory, beauty, and even love, without understanding that they are given to us on loan, forever and ever being passed on to those who come on our heels, whether master or slave—all the fools who inhabit the earth, dreaming the dreams of which we are made.

  MY THANKS

  AMONG THE BIOGRAPHERS, historians, and memoirists I must acknowledge and thank for opening the way for me, my largest debt of gratitude must go to Victor von Hagen, for his romantic biography The Four Seasons of Manuela, which made me fall in love with Manuela’s story many years ago. Other books that illuminated for me the era and the characters are Selected Writings of Bolívar, compiled by Vicente Lecuna and edited by Harold A. Bierck, Jr.; Bolívar by Indalecio Liévano Aguirre; Bolívar by Salvador de Madariaga; Santander by Pilar Moreno de Angel; Jean Baptiste Boussingault’s Memorias; Péroux de Lacroix’s letter to Manuela Sáenz, dated December 18, 1830; Carlos Prince’s Lima Antigua, La Ciudad de los Reyes; La Guía del Viajero en Lima by Manuel Atanasio-Fuentes; Tradiciones Peruanas by Ricardo Palma; and, of course, the writings of Manuela Sáenz herself: Manuela Sáenz, Epistolario, Estudio y Selección del Dr. Jorge Villalba F.S.J. My description of the events of the attempt on Bolívar’s life is based on Manuela’s famous account, which she wrote for General O’Leary and which is dated August 10, 1850. One literary debt in particular I must acknowledge: the last few pages of my novel were inspired by the ending of Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, where Ti Noel is transformed into a goose. That is my homage to an author and a novel I love.

  I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to many old friends, and to the new ones I made in the writing of this novel. My thanks to my friends in Paita: to Don José Miguel Godos Curay, who shared with me his knowledge of Manuela’s life and his insights into her personality, and who made available to me hundreds of pages of writings he has collected about Manuela; and to his son, Juan de Dios, who insisted I get in touch with his father.

  Other friends heard me talk about this project for years and read endless drafts of the novel, making invaluable contributions. My thanks to Nicholas Christopher who, one afternoon in late December 1999, said to me, “What’s holding you from traveling to Paita?” The next day I purchased a ticket, and that was the beginning of this journey. To Kennedy Fraser, my writing buddy as I started writing the book; to Maggie Paley and her writers’ group, where I workshoped an early draft of the novel; to Mim Anne Houk, my college teacher, who read an early version and made me realize how far off the mark I was; to Jessica Hagedorn, who said to me, “What are these slaves doing here?” It was after her reading of that early draft that I began to write in Jonotás’s and Natán’s voices; to Connie Christopher, who said to me, “You have to make me believe that Manuela really loved Bolívar;” to Edith Grossman, who after reading a late draft said, “I need to understand how Manuela became the woman she became”; to my agent, Thomas
Colchie, who early on said to me, “I think you’re onto something here”; to Shepherd Raimi, who heard me tell and retell the story hundreds of times; to Robert Ward, for his assistance preparing the manuscript; and to Bill Sullivan, who read countless drafts, and never complained. But I am most grateful to two people in particular: to the freelance editor Erin Clermont, for her inspired and exacting copy- and line-editing of the novel. And to my fellow teacher and novelist, Marina Budhos, who helped me find the structure and the shape of Our Lives, after I had been writing for four years. It was only when I began to listen to her suggestions, that the novel finally fell into place. Last but not least, I wish to express my gratitude to my insightful editor, Rene Alegría, for many valuable suggestions and for embracing my novel with passion.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Josefina Folgoso, whom I met in Barranquilla, Colombia, when I was fourteen years old. She became my mentor and my teacher. For forty years, we maintained a close friendship that distance made all the more precious. From the moment I began to write this novel, hardly a week went by without a call from Josefina from Barranquilla to inquire how the novel was progressing. After a while, it became apparent to me that she saw the writing of my novel about Manuela as the vindication of her own life. Like Manuela, hardship had befallen her in her old age.

  Then, on August 13, 2004, as I was writing the last pages of this book, I received a call from Josefina’s sister saying she had died of cancer the day before. She added that Josefina had been ill for four months but had kept the illness from me so I would not be distracted from finishing my novel.