Faces and Masks Page 13

  (127, 203, and 321)

  1810: Pie de la Cuesta

  Morelos

  He is a country priest, like Hidalgo. Like Hidalgo, he was born in the Tarascan country, in the mountains of Michoacán where Bishop Vasco de Quiroga had created, two and a half centuries earlier, his communist utopia—lands of redemption later laid waste by plagues and by the forced labor of thousands of Indians dragged to the mines of Guanajuato.

  “With violence I go to the hot lands of the south.”

  José María Morelos, shepherd and muleteer, parish priest of Carácuaro, joins the revolution. He takes the road with twenty-five spearmen and a few shotguns. Behind the white silk kerchief that binds his head, the troop keeps growing.

  In search of Atoyac Indians hidden in the palm groves, Morelos crosses the little town of Pie de la Cuesta.

  “Who goes there?”

  “Holy God,” say the Indians.

  Morelos talks to them. From now on, to the cry of “Who goes there?” people will answer, “America.”

  (332 and 348)

  1811: Buenos Aires

  Moreno

  Great fortunes in a few hands, thought Mariano Moreno, are stagnant waters that do not bathe the earth. So as not to escape from tyrants without destroying tyranny, parasitical capital amassed in colonial business would have to be expropriated. Why seek in Europe, at the price of extortionate interest, money that is more than abundant at home? From abroad should be brought machines and seeds, instead of Stoddard pianos and Chinese vases. The State, thought Moreno, should become a great entrepreneur of a newly independent nation. The revolution, he thought, should be terrible and astute, implacable with enemies and vigilant towards onlookers.

  Fleetingly he held power, or thought he did.

  “Thanks be to God,” breathed the merchants of Buenos Aires. Mariano Moreno, the demon of hell, has died on the high seas. His friends French and Beruti go into exile. Castelli is sentenced to prison.

  Cornelio Saavedra orders copies of Rousseau’s Social Contract, which Moreno had published and circulated, rounded up; and he warns that no Robespierre has any place on the River Plata.

  (2 and 267)

  1811: Buenos Aires

  Castelli

  There were two of them: a pen and a voice. A Robespierre who wrote, Mariano Moreno, and another who spoke. They are all perverse, said a Spanish commandant, but Castelli and Moreno are very perverse indeed. Juan José Castelli, the great orator, is in jail in Buenos Aires.

  Usurped by conservatives, the revolution sacrifices the revolutionaries. The charges pile up: Castelli is a womanizer, a drunk, a cardsharp, and a profaner of churches. The prisoner, agitator of Indians, seeker of justice for the poor, spokesman for the American cause, cannot defend himself. Cancer has attacked his mouth. His tongue has to be amputated.

  The revolution falls dumb in Buenos Aires.

  (84)

  1811: Bogotá

  Nariño

  We have changed masters, writes Antonio Nariño in Colombia.

  La Bagatela, the newspaper founded, directed, and edited by him from cover to cover, deprives puppets of heads and big shots of pedestals. Nariño proclaims that the patriotic uprising of the Colombians is turning into a masked ball and demands that independence be declared once and for all. He also demands, voice crying in the desert, that the right of the poor to vote be recognized and that the will of the naked plebeian is worth as much as that of the gentleman sheathed in velvet.

  We have changed masters, he writes. Some months ago the people invaded the main square of Bogotá, the men took the viceroy prisoner and the women threw the vicereine into the whores’ prison. The ghost of José Antonio Galán, the commoners’ captain, charged at the head of the infuriated multitude. Then the doctors and bishops and merchants and masters of lands and slaves were badly scared. Swearing to avoid at any price the errors of the libertines of France, they helped the viceregal couple to escape secretly.

  We have changed masters. Colombia is governed by gentlemen in very starched shirts and cassocks with many buttons. Even in Heaven there are hierarchies, preaches the Canon of the Cathedral, and not even the fingers of the hand are equal. The ladies cross themselves, lowering a thicket of curls, flowers, and ribbons beneath the black mantilla. The Junta of Notables issues its first decrees. Among other patriotic measures, it resolves to despoil the despoiled Indians of all that remains to them. Under the pretext of freeing them from tribute, the Junta seizes the Indians’ communal lands to force them to serve in the big haciendas which feature a pillory in the middle of the patio.

  (185 and 235)

  The World Upside Down, Verses for Guitar Accompanied by Singer

  When you paint the world upside down

  You see it in all its error:

  The dog flees the fox in terror,

  Thief chases judge in his gown.

  The feet look down on the head,

  The mouth drags along in the mire,

  Water is put out by fire,

  Letters are taught by the blind,

  The carter is pulling the wagon,

  The oxen are riding behind.

  On the banks of a man sits a river,

  Sharpening his horse in the shade

  And watering his blunted blade.

  (179)

  1811: Chilapa

  Potbelly

  In Mexico, military order is vanquishing popular tumult. Hidalgo has been executed in Chihuahua. It is said that he renounced his ideas, after four months of chains and torture. Independence now has only the forces that follow Morelos to rely on.

  Ignacio López Rayón sends Morelos an urgent message of warning: I have it from good sources that the viceroy has paid an assassin to kill you. I cannot tell you any more about this man, except that he is very potbellied …

  At dawn, in a burst of hooves, the messenger reaches the camp at Chilapa.

  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 bann
er.

  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.