Faces and Masks Read online

  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 unbearable 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.

  He who knows nothing can be deceived by anyone. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.

  (297)

  1826: Buenos Aires

  Rivadavia

  On the crest of the River Plata ravines, above the muddy bank of the river, lies the port that usurps the wealth of the whole country.

  In the Buenos Aires Coliseum the British consul occupies the box of the viceroy of Spain. The Creole patricians use words from France and gloves from England, and thus they slip into the life of independence.

  From the Thames flows the torrent of merchandise manufactured, to Argentine specifications, in Yorkshire and Lancashire. In Birmingham they imitate to the last detail the traditional copper boiler that heats water for maté, and they produce exact replicas of the wooden stirrups, bolas, and lassos used in this country. Workshops and textile mills in the provinces have scarcely a chance of resisting the assault. A single ship brings twenty thousand pairs of boots at bargain prices and a Liverpool poncho costs five times less than one from Catamarca.

  Argentine banknotes are printed in London and the National Bank, with a majority of British shareholders, monopolizes their emission. Through this bank operates the River Plate Mining Association, which pays Bernardino Rivadavia an annual salary of twelve hundred pounds.

  From an armchair that will be sacred, Rivadavia multiplies the public debt and public libraries. Buenos Aires’s illustrious jurist, who goes about in a four-horse carriage, claims to be president of a country he does not know and despises. Beyond the city walls of Buenos Aires, that country hates him.

  (55, 271, and 342)

  1826: Panama

  Lonely Countries

  The infant said its first words. They were its last. Of those invited to the baptism, only four reached Panama, and instead of a baptism there was extreme unction. Grief, father’s grief, shrinks the face of Bolívar. The condolences sound hollow.

  Bells ring out for the unity of Hispanic America.

  Bolívar had called on the new countries to unite, under British protection, in one fatherland. He did not invite the United States or Haiti, becaus
e they are foreign to our American ways; but he wanted Great Britain to integrate the Hispanic American league, to defend it from the danger of Spanish reconquest.

  London has no interest in the unity of its new dominions. The Congress of Panama has given birth to nothing but edifying declarations, because the old viceroyalties have birthed countries tied to a new empire overseas, and divorced among themselves. The colonial economy, mines and plantations producing for abroad, cities that prefer the bazaar to the factory, opens the way not for a great nation but for a great archipelago. The independent countries are disintegrating while Bolívar dreams of a unified fatherland. They have not signed a single trade agreement among themselves, but are flooded with European merchandise and almost all have bought the chief British export product, the doctrine of free trade.

  In London, Prime Minister George Canning exhibits his trophy before the House of Commons.

  (202 and 207)

  1826: London

  Canning

  The pearl of the crown speaks. Plebeian George Canning, chief of British diplomacy, consecrates his work before the House of Commons. Canning spreads out his arms, his falcon wings: “I called the New World into existence,” proclaims the architect of empire, “to redress the balance of the Old.”

  From a corner comes a mocking giggle. A long silence follows. Canning rears up in the darkness his sharp ghost’s profile and then the greatest ovation ever heard in this chamber explodes.

  England is the axis of the planet. Lord Castlereagh had done much for the imperial project until one evening, overwhelmed, he slit his throat with a razor. Hardly had Castlereagh’s successor, Canning, come to power when he announced that the knightly era had been left behind. Military glories should give way to astute diplomacy. Smugglers had done more for England than generals; and the time had come for merchants and bankers to win the real battles for world domination.

  The patience of the cat is more effective than the fury of the tiger.

  (171 and 280)

  1828: Bogotá

  Here They Hate Her

  Without lowering their voices they call her “outsider” and “Messalina,” and in secret they give her worse names. They say that on her account Bolívar goes about loaded with shadows and riddled with wrinkles, and that he is burning up his talents in bed.

  Manuela Sáenz has fought with a spear in Ayacucho. The mustachios she tore from an enemy were a talisman of the patriot army. When the troops in Lima mutinied against Bolívar, she disguised herself as a man and went through the barracks with a pistol and a bag of money. Here, in Bogotá, she strolls in the shade of the cherry trees, dressed as a captain and escorted by two black women in hussar uniforms. A few nights ago, at a party, she put against the wall a rag doll labeled “Death to Francisco de Paula Santander, Traitor,” and shot it.

  Santander has grown in the shadow of Bolívar. During the war years it was Bolívar who named him vice president. Now, Santander would like to assassinate the king without a crown at some masked ball or in treacherous ambush.

  The night watchman of Bogotá, lamp in hand, says the last word. He is answered by the church bells, which scare the Devil and call all to go home.

  Shots ring out, guards fall. The assassins burst up the stairs. Thanks to Manuela, who lies to put them off, Bolívar manages to escape out the window.

  (53, 202, and 295)

  1828: Bogotá

  From Manuela Sáenz’s Letter to Her Husband James Thorne

  No, no, not again, man, for God’s sake! Why do you make me write, breaking my resolution? Look, what good are you doing, only giving me the pain of telling you a thousand times no? Mister, you are excellent, you are inimitable. I will never say anything else about you. But, my friend, leaving you for General Bolívar is something. Leaving another husband without your qualities would be nothing.

  … I know very well that nothing can unite me to him under the auspices of what you call honor. Do you think me less honorable for having him as my lover and not my husband? Oh, I don’t live by the social concerns invented for mutual torture!

  Leave me alone, my dear Englishman. Let’s do something else. In heaven we’ll be married again, but on earth, no … There, everything will be English style, because a life of monotony is reserved for your nation (in love, I mean, because in other ways … who are cleverer in trade and navies?). They take love without pleasure, conversation without humor, and walks without vigor; they greet with bows and curtsies, get up and sit down with caution, joke without laughing. These are divine formalities; but I, wretched mortal, who laugh at myself, at you, and at these English solemnities, how badly I would do in heaven! …

  (238)

  1829: Corrientes

  Bonpland

  He discovered America in the course of nine thousand leagues and seventy thousand little plants. When he returned to Paris, he missed America. His nostalgia made it clear to him that he belonged to the same land as the roots and flowers he had collected. That land called him as Europe had never called him; and for it he crossed the ocean again.

  He was a professor in Buenos Aires and a laborer in the mate fields of the upper Paraná. There, the soldiers of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Supreme and Lifetime Dictator of Paraguay, came upon him. They beat him with sticks and took him upriver in a canoe.

  For nine years he has been imprisoned in Paraguay. Dictator Francia, who rules by terror and mystery, is said to have said it was for spying. Kings, emperors, and presidents intercede for the freedom of the famous sage; but neither mediations nor missions, entreaties nor threats have any effect.

  The dictator condemned him on a day of north wind, the wind that turns the soul sour. One day of south wind, he decides to free him. Since Bonpland doesn’t want to leave, the dictator expels him.

  Bonpland has not been shut up in a cell. He was working lands that yielded cotton, sugarcane, and oranges, and has created a rum distillery, a carpentry shop, and a hospital; he attended the deliveries of women and cows throughout the region and gave out infallible concoctions against rheumatism and fever. Paraguay loved its barefoot prisoner with the oversized shirt, seeker of rare plants, man of bad luck who gave so much good; and now he leaves because soldiers take him out by force.

  No sooner does he cross the frontier into Argentine territory than someone steals his horses.

  (255)

  1829: Asunción, Paraguay

  Francia the Supreme

  There are no thieves in Paraguay, that is, none above ground, nor beggars. At the call of a drum, not of a bell, the children go to school. Although everyone can read, no print shop or library exists, nor is any book, newspaper, or bulletin received from outside, and the post office has disappeared for lack of use.

  Penned in upriver by nature and neighbors, the country lives on guard, waiting for Argentina or Brazil to lash out. So that the Paraguayans should repent of their independence, Buenos Aires has cut off their outlet to the sea, and their ships rot at the wharves; but they persist in their poverty and dignity. Dignity, national solitude: high over the vast acreage, Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia commands and keeps watch. The dictator lives alone, and alone eats the bread and salt of his land in dishes previously sampled by dogs.

  All Paraguayans are spies or spied upon. Very early in the morning, while sharpening his razor, Alejandro the barber gives El Supremo the first report of the day on rumors and conspiracies. After nightfall the dictator hunts stars with his telescope; and they too tell him what his enemies are plotting.

  (82 and 281)

  1829: Rio de Janeiro

  The Snowball of External Debt

  It has been seven years since Prince Pedro proclaimed himself emperor of Brazil. The country was born into independent life knocking at the doors of English bankers. King Juan, Pedro’s father, had stripped the bank bare and taken with him to Lisbon the last grams of gold and silver. The first millions of pounds sterling soon arrived from London. The customs income was mortgaged as a guarantee, and native inte
rmediaries got two percent of every loan.

  Now Brazil owes double what it received and the debt rolls on, growing like a snowball. The creditors give the orders; and every Brazilian is born in debt.

  In a solemn speech Emperor Pedro reveals that the public treasury is exhausted, in a miserable state, and that total ruin threatens the country. However, he announces salvation: the emperor has decided to take measures which will destroy the cause of the existing calamity at one blow. And he explains what those radical measures are: they consist of new loans that Brazil expects to receive from the houses of Rothschild and Wilson in London, with stiff but honorable interest.

  Meanwhile, the newspapers report that a thousand fiestas are being prepared to celebrate the emperor’s wedding to Princess Amelia. The advertisements in the papers offer black slaves for sale or hire, cheeses and pianos newly arrived from Europe, English jackets of fine woolens, and Bordeaux wines. The Hotel do Globo on Quitanda Street seeks a white, foreign chef who is not a drunkard or a puffer of cigars, and at 76 Duvidor Street they need a lady who speaks French to look after a blind person.

  (186 and 275)

  1830: Magdalena River

  The Boat Goes Down to the Sea

  Green land, black land. In the far distance mist shrouds the mountains. The Magdalena is carrying Simón Bolívar downstream.