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)
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 h
is 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.
I abhor the debts more than the Spaniards, writes Bolívar to the Colombian general Santander, and tells him that to pay those debts he has sold the Potosí mines to the English for two and a half million pesos. Furthermore, he writes, I have indicated to the government of Peru that it should sell to England all of its mines, all of its lands and properties and all the other holdings of the government, for its national debt, which is not less than twenty million.
The Rich Mountain of Potosí, down in the world, now belongs to a London firm, the phantom Potosí, La Paz, and Peruvian Mining Association. As happens with other delusions born of speculative fevers, the name is longer than the capital: the firm claims a million pounds sterling, but actually has fifty thousand.
(40, 172, and 134)
The Curse of the Silver Mountain
Potosí, which has yielded so much silver, is yielding little. The mountain does not want to.
For more than two centuries, Potosí heard Indians groaning in her entrails. The Indians, condemned to the tunnels, implored her to exhaust her seams. And finally the mountain cursed greed.
Since then, mysterious mule caravans have been arriving by night, diving into the mountain and secretly carrying off loads of silver. No one can see them, no one can catch them; but somehow the mountain keeps emptying herself night by night.
When a mule breaks a leg because the ore makes too heavy a load, the dawn rises upon a beetle limping painfully down the road.
(247)
1826: Chuquisaca
Bolívar and the Indians
The laws in Spain’s American colonies were never obeyed. Good or bad, the laws never existed in reality—neither the many royal warrants which protected the Indians (and which confessed their own impotence through repetition), nor the ordinances that banned the circulation of Jews and novels. This tradition does not keep eminent Creoles, generals, or doctors, from believing that the Constitution is an infallible potion for public happiness.
Simón Bolívar weaves constitutions with fervor. Now he presents to the Congress a constitutional project for the new republic bearing his name. According to the text, Bolivia will have a president for life and three legislative chambers—tribunes, senators, and censors— which have some resemblance, says Bolívar, to the Areopagus of Athens and the censors of Rome.
People who cannot read will not have the right to vote; and since almost all Bolivians speak Quechua or Aymara, know nothing of the Castilian language, and cannot read, only a handful of select males will have that right. As in Colombia and Peru, Bolívar has decreed in the new country the abolition of native tribute and of forced labor for Indians; and has arranged to divide communal lands into private plots. And, so that the Indians, the country’s immense majority, may receive the European light of Civilization, Bolívar has brought to Chuquisaca his old teacher, Simón Rodríguez, with orders to establish schools.
(42 and 172)
1826: Chuquisaca
Cursed Be the Creative Imagination
Simón Rodríguez, Bolívar’s teacher, has returned to America. For a quarter of a century Simón was on the other side of the sea. There, he was a friend of the socialists of Paris, London, and Geneva; he worked with the printers of Rome, the chemists of Vienna, and even taught elementary lessons in a small town on the Russian steppe.
After the long embrace of welcome, Bolívar names him director of education in the newly founded country. With a model school in Chuquisaca, Simón Rodríguez begins the task of uprooting the lies and fears hallowed by tradition. Pious ladies scream, learned doctors howl, dogs bark at the scandal. Horror: the madman Rodríguez proposes to mix children of high birth with mestizos who until last night slept in the streets. What is he thinking of? Does he want the orphans to take him to heaven? Or does he corrupt them so they’ll accompany him to hell? In the classrooms, neither catechism nor sacristy Latin, nor rules of grammar are heard, only a racket of saws and hammers unbe
arable to the ears of monks and pettifoggers schooled in the repulsiveness of manual work. A school for whores and thieves! Those who believe the body is shameful and woman an adornment, cry to high heaven. In Don Simóns school, boys and girls sit jammed side by side; and to top it all, their studying is playing.
The prefect of Chuquisaca heads the campaign against the satyr who has come to corrupt the morals of youth. Soon, Marshal Sucre, president of Bolivia, demands Simón Rodríguez’s resignation, because he has not presented his accounts with due meticulousness.
(296 and 298)
The Ideas of Simón Rodríguez: Teaching How to Think
The author is considered mad. Let him transmit his ravings to the fathers yet to be born.
Everyone must be educated without distinction of race or color. Let us not deceive ourselves: without popular education, there will be no true society.
Instruction is not education. Teach, and you will have people who know; educate, and you will have people who do.
To order recital from memory of what is not understood, is to make parrots. Do not in any case order a child to do anything that has no “why” at the foot of it. If you accustom the child always to see reason behind the orders he receives, he misses it when he does not see it, and asks for it, saying, “Why?” Teach the children to be inquisitive, so that, asking the reasons for what they are told to do, they learn to obey reason, not authority like limited people, nor custom like stupid people.
Boys and girls should study together in the schools. First, so that in this way men should learn from childhood to respect women; second, so that women should learn not to be afraid of men.
The boys should learn the three principal trades: masonry, carpentry, and smithery, because with earth, wood, and metal the most essential things are made. Instruction and a trade should be given to women, so that they will not prostitute themselves out of necessity, nor make marriage a speculation to assure subsistence.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 51