At noon, the assassin comes to offer his services to the national cause. Arms crossed, Morelos gets a broadside of patriotic speeches. Without saying a word he sits the assassin down on his right and invites him to share his dinner. He watches the assassin eating, as the man stares at his plate.
In the evening they sup together. The assassin eats and talks and chokes. Morelos, courteous statue, seeks out his eyes.
“I have a bad presentiment,” he says suddenly and waits for the eyes to tense, the chair to creak, and then offers relief: “My rheumatism again. Rain.”
His somber expression cuts short a laugh.
He lights a cigar. Studies the smoke.
The assassin dares not get up. He stammers thanks. Morelos faces him closely. “I shall be curious,” he says.
He notices the assassin giving a start and counts the beads of sweat on his forehead. He draws out the question: “Are you sleepy?”
And without a pause: “Would you do me the honor of sleeping beside me?”
They stretch out, separated by a candle fluttering in its death agonies, yet undecided whether to die or not. Morelos turns his back. He breathes deeply, perhaps snores. Before dawn he hears a horse’s hooves fading into the distance.
At midmorning, he asks his assistant for paper and pen.
A letter to Ignacio López Rayón: Thanks for the tip. In this camp there is no one more potbellied than I.
(348)
1811: East Bank Ranges
“Nobody is more than anybody,”
say the mounted cowboys. The land cannot have an owner, because the air doesn’t have one. They know no better roof than the stars, nor any glory that compares with the freedom to wander aimlessly on friend horse across the prairie that rolls like the sea.
Having herds to drive in the open country is to have almost everything. The gauchos eat only meat, because the verdure is grass and grass is for cows. The roast is topped off with tobacco and rum, and with guitars that sing of events and miracles.
The gauchos, loose men whom the estates use and discard, join forces with José Artigas. The ranges east of the Uruguay River take fire.
(227 and 278)
1811: Banks of the Uruguay River
Exodus
Buenos Aires makes a deal with the viceroy and withdraws the troops that were besieging Montevideo. José Artigas refuses to observe the armistice, which restores his land to the Spaniards, and vows to carry on the war even if it be with teeth, with nails.
The leader emigrates northward to organize an army of independence. A dispersed people unites and is born in his tracks, a roving host that joins wild cowboys with peons and laborers, patriots of the estancias. To the north march women who heal wounds or take up a spear and monks who all along the march baptize newborn soldiers. The formerly well-sheltered opt for the rigors of outdoor life, those who lived quietly choose danger. Marching northward are masters of letters and the knife, loquacious doctors and worried bandits in debt for some death. Tooth-pullers and miracle workers, deserters from ships and forts, fugitive slaves. All are marching. Indians burn their huts and join up, bringing along only arrows and bolas.
Northward goes the long caravan of carts, horses, people on foot. As they go, the land that will be called Uruguay is stripped of those who want a fatherland. The land itself goes with its children, goes in them, and nothing is left behind. Not even an ash, not even silence.
(277)
1812: Cochabamba
Women
From Cochabamba, many men have fled. Not one woman. On the hillside, a great clamor. Cochabamba’s plebeian women, at bay, fight from the center of a circle of fire.
Surrounded by five thousand Spaniards, they resist with battered tin guns and a few arquebuses; and they fight to the last yell, whose echoes will resound throughout the long war for independence. Whenever his army weakens, General Manuel Belgrano will shout those words which never fail to restore courage and spark anger. The general will ask his vacillating soldiers: Are the women of Cochabamba present?
(5)
1812: Caracas
Bolívar
An earthquake demolishes Caracas, La Guaira, San Felipe, Barquisimeto, and Mérida. They are the Venezuelan cities which have proclaimed independence. In Caracas, center of the Creole insurrection, ten thousand lie dead beneath the ruins. Nothing is heard but supplications and curses as people seek bodies among the stones.
Can God be Spanish? The earthquake has swallowed the gallows erected by the patriots and has not left standing one of the churches which had sung the Te Deum in honor of the nascent republic. In the ruined Mercedes church the column bearing Spain’s imperial coat of arms still stands. Coro, Maracaibo, Valencia and Angostura, cities loyal to the king, have not suffered a scratch.
In Caracas, the air burns. From the ruins rises a dense dust which the eye cannot penetrate. A monk harangues the people, proclaiming that God will no longer tolerate such effrontery.
“Vengeance!”
The multitude presses around him in what was the San Jacinto convent. Perched on the ruins of the altar, the monk demands punishment for those who brought on God’s wrath.
“Vengeance!” roars the scourge of Christ, and his accusing finger points at a patriot officer who, his arms crossed, contemplates the scene. The crowd turns against the officer—short, bony, in a brilliant uniform—and advances to crush him.
Simón Bolívar neither implores nor retreats: he attacks. Sword in hand he plunges through the frenzy, mounts the altar and with one blow topples the apocalyptic monk.
The people, silent, disperse.
(116)
1813: Chilpancingo
Independence Is Revolution or a Lie
In three military campaigns Morelos has won a good part of Mexico. The Congress of the future republic, a wandering Congress, travels behind its leader. The deputies sleep on the ground and eat soldiers’ rations.
By the light of a thick tallow candle Morelos draws up the essentials of the national Constitution. He proposes a free, independent, and Catholic America; substitutes an income tax for Indian tributes and increases the wages of the poor; confiscates the goods of the enemy; establishes freedom of commerce, but with tariff barriers; suppresses slavery and torture and liquidates the caste system, which bases social differences on the color of skin, so that only vice and virtue distinguish one American from another.
The rich Creoles go from shock to shock as Morelos’s troops march along expropriating fortunes and dividing up haciendas. A war against Spain or a rising of the serfs? This is not the sort of independence they were hoping for. They will make another.
(348)
1814: San Mateo
Boves
In Venezuela the word independence still does not mean much more than freedom of commerce for rich Creoles.
Blacks and browns look to the chief of the Spaniards, a Hercules with red beard and green eyes, as their leader. Slaves run away to find José Tomás Rodríguez Boves, Papa Boves. Ten thousand prairie horsemen set fire to plantations and cut masters’ throats in the name of God and the king. Boves’s flag, a skull on black ground, promises pillage and revenge, war to the death against the cacao oligarchy who want independence from Spain. On the plains of San Mateo, Boves rides his horses into the mansion of the Bolívar family and carves his name with a knife on the door of the main vestibule.
The spear does not repent; the bullet does not repent. Before killing with lead, Boves shoots salvos of gunpowder, for the pleasure of seeing the expressions on his victims’ faces. Among his bravest soldiers he divides up the young ladies of the best families. He enjoys bullfighting elegant patriots, after sticking banderillas in their necks. He cuts heads off as if it were a joke.
Before long now, a spear will pierce him. He will be buried with bound feet.
(160)
1815: San Cristóbal Ecatepec
The Lake Comes for Him
On the thorny ridge of Tezmalaca the Spaniards catch José
María Morelos. After so many mistakes and defeats, they hunt him down in the brambles, his clothing in shreds, without weapons or spurs.
They chain him. They insult him. Lieutenant-Colonel Eugenio Villasana asks, “What would you do if you were the winner, and I the defeated?”
“Give you two hours to confess,” says the priest Morelos, “and shoot you.”
They take him to the secret cells of the Inquisition.
They humiliate him on his knees. They shoot him in the back.
The viceroy says that the rebel died repentant. The Mexican people say that the lake heard the firing squad’s blast and overflowed to carry off the body.
(178 and 332)
1815: Paris
Navigators of Seas and Libraries
Julien Mellet, writer and traveler, relates his adventures in South America to the European public. Among other things he describes a very lively and lascivious dance much done in Quillota, in Chile, and which was brought by the blacks from Guinea. Pretending to look the other way, Mellet copies a description of a dance of Montevideo’s blacks, as published by the traveler Anthony Helms eight years previously in London. Helms had stolen his text line by line from the book that Dom Pernetty published in Paris in 1770. Pernetty, for his part, had portrayed at first hand the dance of the Montevideo slaves with words astonishingly similar to those that Father Jean Baptiste Labat had devoted to the blacks of Haiti, in a book published half a century earlier in The Hague.
From the Caribbean to the Chilean city of Quillota, passing through Montevideo, and from The Hague to Paris, passing through London, those passages of Father Labat’s have traveled much further than their author. Without passport or disguise.
(19)
1815: Mèrida, Yucatàn
Ferdinand VII
The starched gentlemen of Yucatàn cross the Plaza de Armas in Mérida, whitened by dust and sun, and enter the cathedral in very solemn procession. From the shade of its portico, the Indian tamale and necklace vendors don’t understand why the bells ring so merrily, or know whose is that crowned head that the gentlemen carry on a banner.
The colonial aristocracy is celebrating the news from Madrid. It has been belatedly learned that the French were driven out and Ferdinand VII reigns in Spain. Messengers report that the cry being heard around the monarch is “Long live chains!” As court jesters tinkle their little bells, King Ferdinand orders the guerrillas who brought him to the throne jailed or shot, revives the Inquisition, and restores the privileges of the clergy and nobility.
(339)
1815: Curuzú-Cuatiá
The Hides Cycle on the River Plata
On the tip of a spear, the sharp-edged half-moon reaches for the fleeing animal’s legs. Just one slash: the horseman strikes with sure aim, and the calf limps and gasps and falls. The horseman dismounts. He cuts the throat and begins to skin.
He does not always kill that way. Easier to drive the maverick cattle with yells into the corrals and knife them there, thousands and thousands of wild cattle or horses stampeded to their death; easier yet to surprise the animals in the hills by night, while they sleep.
The gaucho pulls off the hide and stakes it out in the sun. Of the remainder, what the mouth doesn’t want is left for the crows.
The Robertson brothers, John and William, Scottish merchants, go around these lands with sacks that look like sausages, stuffed with gold coins. From an estancia in Curuzú-Cuatiá they send ten thousand hides to the town of Goya, in sixty carts.
The enormous wooden wheels creak as they turn, and goads urge the oxen on. The carts cut through the countryside. They climb hills, cross swamps and swollen rivers. At nightfall the encircled carts form a hearth. While the gauchos smoke and drink maté, the air thickens with the aroma of meat browning on the embers. After the roast, yarns are exchanged and guitars heard.
From the town of Goya, the hides will travel on to the port of Buenos Aires and cross the ocean to the tanneries of Liverpool. The price will have multiplied many times when the hides return to the River Plata, converted into boots, shoes, and whips of British manufacture.
(283)
1815: Buenos Aires
The Bluebloods Seek a King in Europe
The goose-quill pen writes: José Artigas, traitor to his country.
In vain they have offered him gold and glory. Shopkeepers expert in yard-measures and precise balances, the patricians of Buenos Aires calculate the price of Artigas dead or alive. They are ready to pay six thousand duros for the head of the leader of the rebel camps.
To exorcise these lands of the gaucho devil, Carlos de Alvear offers them to the English: These provinces, Alvear writes to Lord Castlereagh, want to belong to Great Britain without any conditions. And he implores Lord Strangford: The British Nation cannot abandon to their fate the inhabitants of the River Plata in the very act of throwing themselves into its generous arms …
Manuel de Sarratea journeys to London in search of a monarch to crown in Buenos Aires. The interior, republican and federal, threatens the privileges of the port, and panic prevails over any oath of allegiance. In Madrid, Manuel Belgrano and Bernardino Rivadavia, who had been ardent republicans, offer the throne to the Infante Francisco de Paula, brother of Ferdinand VII. The port city’s emissaries promise hereditary power embracing all the River Plata region, Chile, and even Peru. The new independent kingdom would have a blue and white flag; freedom and property would be sacred and the court would be formed by distinguished Creoles promoted into dukes, counts, and marquesses.
Nobody accepts.
(2 and 278)
1815: Purification Camp
Artigas
Here, where the river gets mad and boils up in eddies and whirlpools, on a purple tableland surrounded by hollows and canyons, General Artigas governs. These thousand hearths of poor Creoles, these huts of mud and straw and leather windows, are the capital of the confederation of peoples of the River Plata interior. In front of the government shack, horses await the messengers who gallop back and forth bringing advice and taking decrees. No trimmings or medals adorn the uniform of the leader of the south.
Artigas, son of the prairie, had been a smuggler and a hunter of smugglers. He knew the meanderings of every river, the secrets of every hill, the savor of the grass of each field; and even more deeply, the diffident souls of the cowboys who only have their lives to give and give them fighting in a hallucinating whirlwind of spears.
The banners of Artigas fly over the region watered by the Uruguay and Paraná rivers, which extends to the sierras of Córdoba. Sharing this immense space are the provinces that refuse to be a colony of Buenos Aires after winning their liberation from Spain.
The port of Buenos Aires lives with its back to the land that it despises and fears. Glued to their lookout windows, the merchants await ships that bring novelties of dress, speech, and thought, but no king.
Against the avalanche of European merchandise, Artigas wants to build dikes to defend our arts and factories—with free passage only for machines, books, and medicines; and he diverts to the port of Montevideo the provincial trade over which Buenos Aires had long assumed a monopoly. The Artiguista federal league wants no king, but assemblies and congresses of citizens; and to top off the scandal, the leader decrees agrarian reform.
(277 and 278)
1816: East Bank Ranges
Agrarian Reform
In Buenos Aires they are crying bloody murder. East of the Uruguay River, Artigas expropriates the lands of the Belgrano and Mitre families, of the family of San Martín’s father-in-law, of Bernardino Rivadavia, of Azcuénaga and Almagro and Díaz Vélez. In Montevideo they call the agrarian reform a criminal project. Artigas has jailed Lucas Obes, Juan María Pérez and other artists of the minuet and legerdemain.
For the owners of land, devourers of acreage eaten by grace of king, fraud, or plunder, the gaucho is cannon fodder or estancia serf—and anyone denying it should be put in the stocks or up against a wall.
Artiga
s wants every gaucho to own a piece of land. Poor folk invade the estancias. In the eastern ranges devastated by war, huts and tilled plots and corrals begin to sprout. The trampled peasantry starts to trample. The men who put their lives on the line in the war of independence refuse to accept further abandonment. For the Montevideo town council, Encarnación Benítez, Artigas’s soldier who gallops about dividing land and cattle at the head of a troop of villains, is an outlaw, pervert, vagrant, and agitator. In the shade of his spear poor people find refuge; but this brown man, illiterate, courageous, perhaps fierce, will never be a statue, nor will any avenue or street or byroad ever bear his name.
(335)
1816: Chicote Hill
The Art of War
On Chicote Hill the royalist infantry have surrounded a handful of patriots of Upper Peru.
“I don’t give myself up to the enemy!” yells the soldier Pedro Loayza, and throws himself over the precipice.
“We’ll die for the fatherland!” proclaims commandant Eusebio Lira, as he too runs for the precipice.
“We’ll die if we’re idiots,” drum major José Santos Vargas says abruptly, cutting him off.
“Let’s set fire to the dry grass,” proposes sergeant Julián Reinaga.
The tall grass blazes up and the wind fans the flames toward the enemy ranks. The fire thrusts forward in waves. Confused and terrified, the, besiegers flee, throwing rifles and cartridge belts to the winds and imploring the Almighty for pity.
(347)
1816: Tarabuco
Juana Azurduy,
well versed in catechisms, born to be a nun in the Chuquisaca convent, is a lieutenant colonel in the guerrilla armies of independence. Of her four children the only survivor is the one who was born in the heat of battle, amid the thunder of horses and guns. The head of her husband is stuck high up on a Spanish pike.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 49