Faces and Masks Read online

  In the main plaza of Caracas, “Spain” is drawn and quartered: Jose María de España, chief of the plot.

  (191 and 298)

  1799: London

  Miranda

  It is thirty years since Francisco de Miranda left Venezuela. In Spain he was a victorious warrior. He became a Mason in Cadiz and left on a tour of Europe seeking arms and money for the independence of America. On a magic carpet he has journeyed from court to court, with no baggage but a flute, the false title of count, and many letters of introduction. He has dined with kings and he has slept with queens. In France, the revolution made him a general. The people of Paris acclaimed him as a hero, but Robespierre condemned him as a traitor; and to save his head, Miranda crossed the Channel to London with a false passport, a wig, and sunglasses.

  The head of the English government, William Pitt, receives him in his office. He sends for General Abercromby, and the three talk while crawling on hands and knees over huge maps spread on the floor.

  MIRANDA (in English): It should be clear that all this is to be done for the independence and freedom of those provinces, without which … (gazing at the ceiling, he switched to Spanish) … it would be an infamy.

  ABERCROMBY (nodding his head): Independence and freedom.

  MIRANDA: I need four thousand men and six warships. (Points a finger at the map.) We should start by attacking Caracas and …

  PITT: Don’t be offended, but I’ll speak frankly to you. I prefer the oppressive government of Spain to the abominable system of France.

  MIRANDA (shuts his eyes and whispers in Spanish): The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The enemy …

  PITT: I wouldn’t want to push the Americans into the calamities of such a revolution.

  MIRANDA: I understand and share your concern, Your Excellency. Precisely for that I ask for the alliance, so that together we may fight against the monstrous principles of French liberty. (Returns to the map.) Caracas will fall without any difficulty …

  ABERCROMBY: And if the colored people take up arms? And if they get control, as in Haiti?

  MIRANDA: In my country the flag of liberty is in the hands of illustrious citizens of such civilized customs as Plato would have wanted for his republic. (Slides his hand to the province of Santa Fe. The three fasten their eyes on the port of Cartagena.)

  ABERCROMBY: It looks difficult.

  MIRANDA: It looks invulnerable. But I know a spot where the defense is extremely weak. On the right flank of the rampart …

  (150 and 191)

  Miranda Dreams of Catherine of Russia

  Sometimes, very late at night, Miranda returns to Saint Petersburg and conjures up Catherine the Great in her intimate Winter Palace chambers. The endless train of the empress’s gown, which thousands of pages hold up in the air, is a tunnel of embroidered silk through which Miranda rushes until he sinks into a sea of lace. Seeking the body that burns and waits, Miranda loosens golden fasteners and ropes of pearls and makes his way among rustling materials. Beyond the ample puffed skirt he is scratched by the wires of the crinoline, but manages to penetrate this armor and arrives at the first petticoat, tearing it off with one pull. Beneath it he finds another, and another and another, many petticoats of pearly smoothness, onion skins which his fingers peel with less and less spirit, and when with a great effort he breaks through the last petticoat the corset appears, invulnerable bastion defended by an army of belts and hooks and little laces and buttons, while the august lady, flesh that never tires, groans and beseeches.

  1799: Cumaná

  Two Wise Men on a Mule

  The New World is too big for the eyes of the two Europeans who have just landed at Cumaná. The port sparkles on the river, set aflame by the sun, houses of white timber or bamboo beside the stone fort, and beyond, green sea, green land, the glowing bay. All truly new, never used, never seen: the plumage of the flamingos, the beaks of the pelicans, the sixty-foot coconut trees and the immense velvety flowers, tree trunks padded with lianas and foliage, the eternal siesta of the crocodiles, the skyblue, yellow, red crabs… There are Indians sleeping nude on the warm sand, and mulattas dressed in embroidered muslin, their bare feet caressing the places they tread. Here there is no tree that does not offer forbidden fruit from the center of the lost garden.

  Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland rent a house facing the main plaza, with a good flat on which to stand the telescope. Looking upward from this roof they see an eclipse of the sun and a shower of meteors, the angry sky spitting fire through a whole night, and looking down they see how the buyers of slaves open the mouths of blacks newly arrived at the Cumaná market. In this house they experience the first earthquake of their lives; and from it they go out to explore the region. They classify ferns and rare birds and look for Francisco Loyano, who suckled his son for five months and had tits and pure, sweet milk as long as his woman was sick.

  Later Humboldt and Bonpland set out for the southern highlands. They carry their instruments: sextant, compass, thermometer, hygrometer, magnetometer. They also bring paper for drying flowers, bistouries for bird, fish, and crab autopsies; and ink and pen to sketch all the wonders. They go on muleback, weighed down with equipment, the German with the black top hat and blue eyes and the Frenchman with the insatiable magnifying glass.

  Perplexed, the forests and mountains of America open up to these two lunatics.

  (30 and 46)

  1799: Montevideo

  Father of the Poor

  Francisco Antonio Maciel has founded the first meat-salting plant on this bank of the River Plata. His, too, is the soap and tallow candle factory. The lamplighter who patrols Montevideo’s streets at nightfall, torch in hand and ladder on shoulder, lights Maciel’s candles.

  When not touring his fields, Maciel is at the salting plant checking the strips of jerky he will sell to Cuba or Brazil, or at the docks inspecting the hides he exports. He often accompanies his brigantines, which bear the names of saints, beyond the bay. Montevideans call him Father of the Poor, because he always has time, though it seems a miracle, to succor the sick left in the hands of God. Anywhere and at any hour the pious Maciel will stretch out a plate asking alms for the charity hospital he founded. Nor does he forget to visit blacks who spend Eastertide in the barracks at the mouth of the Miguelete River. He personally fixes the minimum price of each slave that his ships bring from Rio de Janeiro or Havana. Those with a complete set of teeth go for two hundred pesos; those who know the arts of masonry and carpentry, for four hundred.

  Maciel is the most important of the Montevidean businessmen specializing in the exchange of cow meat for people meat.

  (195 and 251)

  1799: Guanajuato

  Life, Passion, and Business of the Ruling Class

  All through the century that is dying, the owners of the Guanajuato and Zacatecas mines have been buying titles of high nobility. Ten mine owners have become counts and six marquises. While they planted family trees and tried on wigs, a new labor code was transforming their workers into debt-slaves. During the eighteenth century Guanajuato has multiplied eightfold its production of silver and gold.

  Meanwhile, the magic wand of money has also touched seven Mexico City merchants, farm laborers from the mountains of northern Spain, and made them marquises and counts.

  Some mine owners and merchants, anxious for aristocratic prestige, buy lands as well as titles. Throughout Mexico, innumerable haciendas advance, devouring the traditional lands of Indian communities.

  Others prefer to go in for usury. The moneylender Jose Antonio del Mazo, for example, risks little and wins much. Friend Mazo, writes Francisco Alonso Terán, is one of those who do the most business in Guanajuato. If God gives him long life, he will contain the whole city in his belly.

  (49 and 223)

  1799: Royal City of Chiapas

  The Tamemes

  Don Augustín de las Quentas Zayas, governor of Chiapas, plans a new road from the River Tulijá to Co
mitán, on the way to Guatemala. Twelve hundred Tamemes will transport the necessary materials.

  The Tamemes, two-legged mules, are Indians capable of carrying up to a hundred and seventy-five pounds. With ropes around their foreheads, they tote enormous bundles on their backs—even people seated in chairs—and thus cross high mountains and skirt precipices with one foot in life and the other out.

  (146 and 321)

  1799: Madrid

  Fernando Túpac Amaru

  On the street, someone plucks lamentations from a guitar. Inside, Fernando Túpac Amaru shakes with fever and dies dreaming that he is drooling snow.

  The son of Peru’s great chieftain does not reach his thirtieth year. Poor as a rat, he ends in Madrid his brief life of exile and prison.

  Twenty years ago, violent rain swept the main plaza of Cuzco, and since then it has not stopped raining in the world.

  The doctor says Fernando has died of melancholy.

  (344)

  1800: Apure River

  To the Orinoco

  America flames and spins, burned and dizzied by its suns. Giant trees embrace over the rivers and in their shade glows the canoe of the sages.

  The canoe progresses pursued by birds and by hungry hordes of gnats and mosquitos. Slapping continuously, Humboldt and Bonpland defend themselves against the onslaughts of the lancers, which penetrate clothing and skin and reach to the bone, while the German studies the anatomy of the manatee, the fat fish with hands, or the electricity of the eel or the teeth of the piraña, and the Frenchman collects and classifies plants or measures a crocodile or calculates its age. Together they draw maps, register the temperature of the water and the pressure of the air, analyze the mica in the sand and the conches of snails and the passage of Orion’s belt across the sky. They want America to tell them all it knows and here not a leaf or pebble is dumb.

  They camp in a small cove, unloading the troublesome instruments. They light a fire to ward off mosquitos, and to cook. Suddenly, the dog barks as if to warn of an approaching jaguar, and runs to hide beneath Bonpland’s legs. The toucan that Humboldt carries on his shoulder picks nervously at his straw hat. The undergrowth creaks and from among the trees appears a naked man, copper skin, Indian face, African hair:

  “Welcome to my lands, gentlemen.”

  And he bows to them: “Don Ignacio, at your service.”

  Don Ignacio makes a face at the improvised fire. The sages are roasting a capybara rat. “That’s Indian food,” he says disdainfully, and invites them to sup in his house in splendid venison freshly hunted with an arrow.

  Don Ignacio’s house consists of three nets slung between trees not far from the river. There he presents them to his wife, Doña Isabela, and his daughter, Doña Manuela, not as naked as he is. He offers the travelers cigars. While the venison is browning, he riddles them with questions. Don Ignacio is hungry to know the news of the court of Madrid and the latest on those endless wars that are so wounding Europe.

  (338)

  1800: Esmeralda del Orinoco

  Master of Poison

  They sail on down river.

  At the foot of a rocky mountain, at the remote Christian mission of Esmeralda, they meet the master of poison. His laboratory is the cleanest and neatest hut in the village. The old Indian, surrounded by smoking cauldrons and clay jugs, pours a yellowish juice into banana leaf cones and palm leaf funnels: the horrifying curare falls drop by drop, and bubbles. The arrow anointed with this curare will enter and kill better than the fang of a snake.

  “Better than anything,” says the old man, as he chews some liana and tree bark into a paste. “Better than anything you people make.”

  And Humboldt thinks: He has the same pedantic tone and the same starchy manner as our pharmacists.

  “You people have invented black powder,” the old man continues, as very slowly, with meticulous hand, he pours water onto the paste.

  “I know it,” he says after a pause, “that powder isn’t worth a damn. It’s noisy. It’s unreliable. Powder can’t kill silently and it kills even when you miss your aim.”

  He revives the fire under the kettles and pots. From within the smoke he asks, “Know how to make soap?”

  “He knows,” says Bonpland.

  The old man looks at Humboldt with respect. “After curare,” he says, “soap is the big thing.”

  (338)

  Curare

  Guam, the child-god of the Tukan Indians, managed to reach the kingdom of poison. There he caught the daughter of Curare and made love to her. She had spiders, scorpions, and snakes hidden between her legs. Each time he entered that body, Guam died; and on reviving he saw colors that were not of this world.

  She took him to her father’s house. Old Curare, who ate people, licked himself. But Guam turned himself into a flea, and in that form entered the old man’s mouth, slithered down to his liver and took a bite. Curare covered his mouth, nose, ears, eyes, his navel, asshole and his penis, so that the flea would have no way to escape; but Guam tickled him inside and got out with the sneeze.

  He flew back to his country, and in his bird’s beak carried a little piece of Curare’s liver.

  So the Tukan Indians got poison, as the men of much time, the guardians of memory, tell it.

  (164)

  1800: Uruana

  Forever Earth

  Opposite the island of Uruana, Humboldt meets the Indians who eat earth.

  Every year the Orinoco rises, the Father of rivers, flooding its banks for two or three months. While the flood lasts, the Otomacos eat soft clay, slightly hardened by fire, and on that they live. It is pure earth, Humboldt confirms, not mixed with corn flour or turtle oil or crocodile fat.

  So these wandering Indians travel through life toward death, clay wandering toward clay, erect clay eating the earth that will eat them.

  (338)

  1801: Lake Guatavita

  The Goddess at the Bottom of the Waters

  On the maps of America, El Dorado still occupies a good part of Guyana. The lake of gold takes flight when its hunters approach, and curses and kills them; but on the maps it is a tranquil blot of blue joined to the upper Orinoco.

  Humboldt and Bonpland decipher the mystery of the elusive lake. In the glittering mica on a mountain which the Indians call Golden Mountain, they discover part of the hallucination; and another in a little lake which in the rainy season invades the vast plain neighboring the source waters of the Orinoco and then, when the rains cease, disappears.

  In Guyana lies the phantom lake, that most tempting of America’s deliriums. Far away, on the plateau of Bogotá, is the true El Dorado. After covering many leagues by canoe and mule, Humboldt and Bonpland discover it in the sacred Lake Guatavita. This mirror of waters faithfully reflects even the tiniest leaf in the woods surrounding it: at its bottom lie the treasures of the Muisca Indians.

  To this sanctuary came princes, their naked bodies gleaming with gold dust, and at the center of the lake dropped their goldsmiths’ finest works, then plunged in themselves. If they came up without a single speck of gold on the skin, the goddess Furatena had accepted their offerings. In those times the goddess Furatena, snake goddess, governed the world from the depths.

  (326 and 338)

  1801: Bogotá

  Mutis

  The old monk talks as he peels oranges and an unending shower of gold spirals down into a pan between his feet.

  To see him, to listen to him, Humboldt and Bonpland have detoured from their southward route and have gone upriver for forty days. José Celestino Mutis, patriarch of America’s botanists, is put to sleep by speeches but enjoys intimate chats as much as anyone.

  The three men, sages ever astonished by the beauty and mystery of the universe, exchange plants, ideas, doubts, discoveries. Mutis is excited by talk of Lake Guatavita, the salt mines of Zipaquirá, and the Tequendama waterfall. He praises the map of the Magdalena River which Humboldt has just drawn, and discreetly suggests some changes with the surene
ss of one who has traveled much and knows much, and knows very deep inside himself that something of him will remain in the world.

  And he shows everything and tells everything. While he eats and offers oranges, Mutis speaks of the letters that Linnaeus wrote him, and of how much those letters taught him, and of the problems he had with the Inquisition. And he recalls and shares his discoveries about the curative powers of quinine bark, and the influence of the moon on the barometer, and the cycles of flowers, which sleep as we do and stretch and wake up little by little, unfurling their petals.

  (148)

  1802: The Caribbean Sea

  Napoleon Restores Slavery

  Squadrons of wild ducks escort the French army. The fish take flight. Through a turquoise sea, bristling with coral, the ships head for the blue mountains of Haiti. Soon the land of victorious slaves will appear on the horizon. General Leclerc stands tall at the head of the fleet. Like a ship’s figurehead, his shadow is first to part the waves. Astern, other islands disappear, castles of rock, splendors of deepest green, sentinels of the new world found three centuries ago by people who were not looking for it.

  “Which has been the most prosperous regime for the colonies?”

  “The previous one.”

  “Well, then, put it back,” Napoleon decided.

  No man, born red, black, or white can be his neighbor’s property, Toussaint L’Ouverture had said. Now the French fleet returns slavery to the Caribbean. More than fifty ships, more than twenty thousand soldiers, come from France to bring back the past with guns.