Bolívar — the man who freed a continent and died disillusioned

Transcript

Bram: The first thing is that I cannot breathe, and the second thing is that I am climbing anyway. Cold thin air, so thin it has a taste, like a coin held under the tongue, and I am going up a slope of red rock the colour of an old wound with a load on my back that is trying to walk me backwards down it. I count my own steps because that is what this body does when it is frightened, and I have got to two hundred and something and lost the thread twice, and every ten steps I have to stop and put my hands on my knees and let the world stop swimming. Introductions. I do this early, because it steadies me, and because — look, I have been doing this a very long time, waking up in whoever the current leaves me in, and the fastest way to find out who I am is to look at my hands and believe them. These hands are brown and split at the knuckles and there is a rope burn across both palms turning to callus. There is a mule somewhere below me I am apparently responsible for. And the load on my back, when I get a hand round to feel it, is a leather trunk with brass corners and somebody else's initials on it. Marvellous. I'm the help again. I am a porter, I am about seventeen and built like a whip, and I am carrying a gentleman's luggage up the single most famous mountain in the world that you have never heard of. Because you should look at it. Stop, with me — the body wants to stop anyway. Turn round. Below us the whole red cone of it drops away, threaded top to bottom with paths and adits and the black mouths of workings, and at the foot of it a city, a real city, churches and smoke, up here where nothing should live at all. This is the Cerro Rico, the rich hill, at Potosí, and for two hundred and fifty years the silver that came out of the inside of this mountain paid for an empire. Fleets. Wars in Europe you have heard of. It is the most expensive graveyard on earth — the men and the mules that went into it do not come out — and the whole gorgeous murderous machine of it ran on a mountain, and here I am, on the mountain, with a rich man's socks. And the rich man is above me. He has been above me the whole climb, and I keep looking up at him because everybody does. He is small. That is the thing nobody tells you and the first thing you see — a small, spare man, not big at all, in a plain dark coat, going up this slope that is killing grown miners like it is a set of front steps, talking the whole way, laughing, turning round to say things to the officers strung out gasping below him. He has the energy of a much larger and much younger man and it is coming off him like heat. Somewhere far down a bell is ringing the hour off one of the churches, thin in the thin air. And at the top — we get to the top — the party plants flags. Real flags, new ones, colours I half-know, the colours of countries that did not exist when this body was born, and the small man stands among them on the summit of the mountain that bought three centuries of chains, and he is silent for once, looking north and east across a quarter of the world he can nearly see, and I hear one of the officers say his name to another, low, the way you say a word in church. And I understand, standing there holding the bags and trying to keep my feet, that I am looking at the man who broke the thing this mountain paid for. That the flags are his. That the officer gasping beside me governs, in that man's name, more of the surface of the earth than any Spaniard ever did. And then I see the other one. Coming up the path behind us, alone, faster than anyone should move at this height, a courier with a satchel and the fixed grey face of a man carrying something he does not want to be carrying — and he is not looking at the flags. He is looking at the small man. And I feel this body's heart, which is seventeen and does not know anything, go cold for no reason it could give you. I do not know what is in the satchel. But I have got twenty years to find out how a man gets from the top of this mountain to a borrowed bed by the sea, forbidden the country he made — and whether the man who fills an empty throne turns into the very thing he threw down. Come and find out with me. I'll carry the bags. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. I'm the Traveller. Episode thirteen. The Man Who Ploughed the Sea — the life of Simón Bolívar, who freed six countries and could not keep one, and died with the whole thing coming apart in his hands. Right. Come back down off that mountain with me — I'll get you to that summit again by the honest road, I promise, and it'll mean more when we do. Because that flag-planting is standing twenty years further along the road than the place this story actually starts. And this story starts with a grave. But before the grave, the ground. Picture the top half of South America in the year this man is born, which is seventeen eighty-three. It is Spanish, and has been for nearly three centuries — the longest-running empire the world had going, run from Madrid across an ocean, and running, at the top of it, on people like the family he is born into. They are called mantuanos — the cacao aristocracy of Caracas, the white creole grandees, fifth generation, who own cacao estates and copper mines the size of small countries, and the hundreds of enslaved people who work them. Remember that. The man who is going to spend his life on the word liberty is born owning human beings, and one of the people who raises him — an enslaved woman named Hipólita, the nearest thing to a mother he gets after his own dies — is one of them. And here is the thing the grandees have been quietly chewing on for a generation before the trouble starts, because it matters for what they do when the chair goes empty. Madrid, over the eighteenth century, had been squeezing them — taxing the American-born creoles harder while handing the good offices, the governorships and the judgeships, to men shipped out from Spain. So the richest, proudest people in the colony have spent fifty years being treated as junior partners in a firm they believe they actually run. They are not revolutionaries. They are shareholders with a grievance. And a grievance like that sits quiet for decades — right up until the day the head office burns down. So that is the world: rich, hierarchical, Catholic, stable, and completely certain of itself. And then, in one year, the certainty falls out of the bottom of it. The year is eighteen-oh-eight, and it happens four thousand miles away, in Spain. Napoleon — who by now has eaten most of Europe — invites the Spanish royal family to a meeting, and simply keeps them. Takes the King prisoner. Puts his own brother on the throne of Spain. And I want you to feel how strange that is, because it is the hinge the whole life swings on. Every city in Spanish America wakes up one morning legally belonging to a king who is a prisoner in France. The government in each of those cities is holding power in the name of a man who cannot give an order. It is not a revolution yet. Nobody in Caracas in eighteen-oh-eight wants independence — the very idea would frighten them. But the chair at the top of everything is suddenly, provably empty, and once you have seen that the chair is empty, you cannot un-see it. And the question that comes up out of that empty chair is the question this entire life is going to turn on: when the throne is empty, who has the right to sit down? Caracas answers it, on the nineteenth of April eighteen ten, in the most cautious way imaginable. The town council — the cabildo — thanks the Spanish governor for his service and relieves him of it, and sets up a governing junta, a committee, to hold the province for the captive king until he returns. That's it. That's the great first step. A committee, swearing loyalty to a prisoner. Everything — six nations, a quarter of a million dead, the whole magnificent catastrophe — grows out of a committee that thought it was being conservative. And let me put you in your own frame for a moment, because this is the part that never gets across in the telling. While this is happening, where is the history you were actually taught? Take a single later year in this story — eighteen nineteen, the year he crosses the Andes. In eighteen nineteen, Waterloo is four years in the past; Napoleon is already on his rock in the South Atlantic, finished. That same August, in Manchester, cavalry ride into a crowd demanding the vote and cut people down, and England calls it Peterloo and argues about it for a century. A year later the United States nearly tears itself in half over whether Missouri comes in slave or free. That is the world you know, the one in the textbook. And all the while, off the edge of that textbook, across the whole of a continent, one man is doing something on a scale that makes Waterloo look like a border skirmish — raising armies, crossing cordilleras, inventing countries — and most people who did that syllabus have never heard his best battle. Spanish America is the hinge of the entire age, and it is missing from the page. I want to put it back on the page. That is why we are here. But not from the top. Not from the committee. We start where I always start — off to the side, holding something, watching a man who does not know yet that he is going to be the answer to the empty chair. And on the day we start, he does not want to free anybody. He wants his wife back. Come on. It is hot, and I am holding two horses, and I am bored. That is the whole job. I am a hired boy — Roman, this time, a local lad taken on for a few coins to walk two gentlemen and their horses up a dry hill outside the city and hold the reins while they go and look at ruins, which is a thing rich foreigners do here, they come and stand in weeds where something used to be and they get emotions about it. My feet know this hill. My hands, holding the leathers, know exactly how long two horses will stand before they start leaning on you. The sun is straight up. Down the slope, past the broken brick and the umbrella pines, Rome sits in its own heat-haze, and somewhere in it a bell is going. The two gentlemen are not Roman. They are from somewhere across the ocean, I have gathered — the young one's Spanish has a music in it I do not know — and they are an odd pair. The older one is shabby and does all the talking, a wiry restless man who has been lecturing since we left the gate, about the ancients, about liberty, about the plebeians who came up onto a hill exactly like this one, he says, and refused to go back down until they got their rights. He is the kind of tutor who cannot see a hill without turning it into a lesson. His name, the young one calls him, is Rodríguez.

Rodriguez: Hold them here, boy, and mind the grey — he bites when he's bored, like his master. We shan't be long. Don Simón wants to look at some ruins.

Bram: And the young one. The young one is rich — you can see it in the coat, in the boots, in the way he has never in his life had to hold his own horse. He is small, dark, quick-eyed, no more than twenty-two, and he is not listening to the lesson. He is somewhere else. I have carried enough grief up enough hills to know the shape of it in a body, and this one is carrying it the way you carry something you have not put down for a long time — you stop noticing the weight and you start walking crooked.

Rodriguez: You see it, don't you? This is the hill. This is where a people said no more.

Bram: The young man does not answer him. He walks a little apart, to the edge, where the ground falls away toward the city, and he stands there with his hat in his hand. And I am close enough — boys holding horses are always close enough, nobody counts us — to see his face, and it is doing something I do not expect. It is not sad. It has gone past sad into something harder and stranger, something being decided. And I know, the way you know things when you are the servant in the corner, the piece of the story nobody told, that eighteen months ago this man had a wife. Married her in Spain, brought her home to Caracas across that same ocean, and inside of a year a fever took her, and he was twenty and a widower and he came apart. He has been coming apart across a whole continent of Europe ever since, spending money, going to parties, watching Napoleon put a crown on his own head in Paris — and it has not fixed anything, and now he is on a weed-covered hill in the heat with a tutor who will not stop talking, and something in him has reached the bottom. And then he speaks. Not loudly. But the tutor stops dead, and I stop breathing, because the voice has changed — it has stopped being a rich young man's voice and become something with a spine in it.

Bolivar: I swear to you. I swear on these ashes, I swear by my fathers — I will not rest my arm, I will not let my soul rest, until I have broken the chains that bind us.

Bram: And the tutor — this loud, dry, unimpressed man who has been talking all morning — the tutor starts to cry.

Rodriguez: I will remember this. Every word of it — I will write it all down one day, so the world knows what was said on this hill.

Bram: And here is the thing I carry off that hill, the thing that is mine because I was the one holding the horses. I could not tell you what I had just seen. I could not tell you whether that was the truest sentence a man ever said or a grieving boy performing his grief for an audience of one on a hill built for exactly that performance. It sounded like both. It sounded like a vow and it sounded like a wound talking, and the terrible thing — the thing I think about — is that it did not have to be one or the other. He is twenty-two. His wife is dead. He has just promised to break an empire, on a hill, because a mountain of grief had to go somewhere, and it went there. The horses lean on me. The two men come back down. The young one presses a coin into my hand, more than the job was worth, and does not see me at all, and they are gone down the road to the city where the bell is still going, and I stand there in the heat holding more money than I expected, having just watched, I think, the exact moment a private catastrophe turned into a public one. He will keep the promise. That is the part that frightens me, looking back. He is going to keep it. Alright — come off the hill. Let me tell you the man, quickly, because the promise only frightens you if you know what is behind it. He is an orphan. Father dead when he was three, mother when he was nine, and the boy handed round — an uncle, a tutor, and Hipólita, the enslaved woman who nursed him, whom he will pension from Peru at the height of his power and call, in a letter, the only father I have known. Sit with that sentence a second. The Liberator's only father was a woman his family owned. Everything true and everything unbearable about this story is already in that one line. Then Rodríguez — the tutor on the hill — who fed him Rousseau and revolution and never quite left his head. Then Madrid, and the one ordinary life he nearly had: he marries a girl called María Teresa, brings her home, and eight months later a fever kills her. He never marries again — in a world where a man of his rank remarries the way he'd rebuild a barn, he simply doesn't — and years later he tells a French diplomat, flatly, that if she had lived he'd have stayed a planter and there would have been no Liberator. He may even be right. And then history hands him the empty chair. He's back in Caracas when the committee takes over in 1810, and they send him — young, rich, useful — to London to buy guns and recognition. He gets neither. What he gets is a passenger: an old exile living in Grafton Street, sixty years old, a genuine legend — Francisco de Miranda, who had fought in the French Revolution and the American one, the Precursor, the man who'd been dreaming this revolution since before Bolívar was born. Bolívar brings him home to lead it. Hold onto Miranda, because he is the first ghost. Two years later the young Republic is losing, badly, and Miranda signs a surrender to the Spanish — a defensible surrender, maybe the only move on the board — and on a dark stair at the port of La Guaira, Bolívar and a knot of other officers arrest the old man as a traitor, in the night, and hand him to the Spanish, who put him in a cell in Cádiz where he dies. Bolívar gets a passport out. Why he did it — rage, fear, cold calculation, the need for someone else to be the one who lost — he never once explained, to anyone, for the rest of his life. It is the stain at the very start of him, and he carried it, unexplained, the whole rest of the way. But that's ahead of us. Right now the First Republic is dying, the man has lost his first command, and he does the thing that turns out to be the truest thing about him: he doesn't quit. He crosses into exile, sits down, and picks up a pen. Come and look at what he writes with it — because the whole rest of the story, the glory and the horror both, is already in the ink. Candlelight, a mountain town, a table, and I am proud of my handwriting. That is the body I'm in and it is the first thing I feel — not fear, pride. I am a secretary's clerk, and these are good hands, trained hands, and there is a page in front of me and a fresh-cut quill in my fingers, and I am copying out a document in the fair hand, the presentation hand, the one you use for things that matter. The ink is good. The candle is steady. We are up in the Andes of western Venezuela, in a town called Trujillo, and outside in the dark there is an army — our army, a small ragged victorious one that has just walked over a thousand miles of mountain to get here, and the young general who walks it is in the next room, and I have been given the honour of copying his proclamation. And he is extraordinary, this general. You hear the men talk about him. Ten months ago he was a nobody who'd lost a fortress. Then he sat down in exile and wrote a paper — they call it the Cartagena Manifesto — that took the death of the First Republic apart like a clock and told everyone exactly why it had failed: too soft, too many arguments, too much mercy, too much paper. What a revolution needs, he wrote, is not a beautiful constitution. It is one hand, and speed. And then he went and proved it, turned a little border command into this sprint across the top of the world, and here he is, about to take the whole country back, and I am copying his words by candle. I dip the quill. I am, God help me, enjoying myself. And then I actually read what my hand is writing.

Bolivar: Spaniards and Canarians — count upon death, even if you are neutral, unless you work actively for the freedom of America.

Bram: I stop. I read it again, because surely I have miscopied. I have not. Even if you are neutral. The sentence does not say: our enemies will die. Every proclamation says that. This sentence says the opposite of the thing that keeps a war a war. It says that a Spaniard or a man from the Canary Islands — a shopkeeper, a priest, a man who has done nothing, who wants only to be left alone — will be killed for what he was born as, unless he actively takes up our side. And the other half, in the same clean hand: Americans, count upon life, even if you are guilty. Your birth is your verdict. That is the whole of it. Your birth is your verdict, and I am writing it out beautifully. And I know names. That is what will not let me go, sitting here being careful with the loops of my letters. I am a local man. I know a Canary Islander two streets over who mends clocks and has a bad leg and three daughters and no more interest in the King of Spain than in the King of Siam, and my hand, my proud trained hand, is at this moment copying out the order that says he can be killed on sight and it will not be a crime, it will be policy. War to the death, they will call it. He means it as a strategy — I understand the strategy, even, sitting here: the Republic keeps collapsing because it is too gentle, so he will make gentleness impossible, he will make the two peoples unable to live in the same country, he will weld a nation together out of the one thing that never lets go, which is blood already spilt. It is not madness. That is the horror of it. It is a plan. And it is in his own words, in his own order, and the reason we know it so exactly two hundred years later is that clerks like me copied it out in a good clean hand.

Bolivar: It is written?

The_clerk: It is written, General.

Bram: He takes the page. He reads it once, fast, the way he reads everything, and he nods, and for one second his eyes come up and meet mine, and there is nothing wrong in them at all — no cruelty, no relish, nothing you could point to. Just a tired, brilliant, grieving man who has decided that this is the price and he will pay it and he will make a whole country pay it, and who is, I think, absolutely certain that history will understand. He goes back into the dark to his army. I clean my quill. My hand has stopped being something I am proud of. Come up out of the candlelight. Because the terrible arithmetic works — for a while. That decree buys him a country. Six weeks after Trujillo he walks into Caracas, August 1813, under thrown flowers, and they give him the name he keeps for the rest of history: Libertador. The Liberator. Second Republic, and for a few months he is the answer to the empty chair after all. And I owe you the thing I skipped, because it is one of the strangest facts in the whole war and it is behind all of this. A year before that welcome, on the twenty-sixth of March 1812 — Maundy Thursday, Holy Week, the churches full — the ground under Caracas moved. An earthquake, a bad one, thousands dead in a few seconds. And here is the part that is not superstition, it is verifiable geography: it wrecked the cities that had gone over to the Republic and it barely touched the ones still loyal to Spain. And every royalist pulpit in the country had the sermon written by nightfall — you rebelled against your King, and on the holiest day of the year, God answered. It was the most effective propaganda anyone in that war ever produced, and no one had to make it up. And Bolívar climbed onto the fallen stone in front of the crowd and shouted back at the sky — if nature herself is against us, we will fight against nature and force her to obey. You can hear the whole man in that one line, can't you. The one who will later try to force a continent to obey.

So: God has taken a side, the decree has made the war unlivable, and now the bill for the war to the death comes due — and it does not come from Spain. It comes from below. Meet the man who is about to destroy him, and it is not who you think.

Bram: The first thing is the smell, and it is cattle — hide and dung and the green reek of a great herd somewhere close, which should mean safety, herds mean people, and instead it is the worst smell in the world, and I will tell you why in a minute. I am a girl. Ten, eleven, somewhere in there — small, anyway, and my arms are full. I am carrying a child, a real one, two or three years old, a brother I think, heavy and hot and asleep against my neck, and I have been carrying him long enough that I cannot feel my arms as arms anymore, just as the ache that is holding him. We are walking. We have been walking for days, on a road going east out of Caracas, and we are not alone — the road is people, thousands of them, a whole city poured out onto a track, carts and mules and old men and women with bundles and children and more children, all going one way, east, away, at the pace of the slowest, which is very slow. And I know why we are walking, the way a child knows the shape of a thing without the words for it. The plainsmen are coming. The llaneros — the men of the great grass plains to the south, the cattle-country, the best horsemen God ever made and the poorest men in the colony, mixed-blood, Black and brown and everything, who have spent their whole lives owning nothing on land that grand families in Caracas own on paper. And a man has raised them. A Spaniard, of all things, a red-headed shopkeeper turned devil called Boves, who rode into the plains and told the llaneros a true thing and a simple one: the Republic is the mantuanos, the grandees, the people whose names are on the land you break your body on — and if you ride with me, you can have it. Their cattle. Their houses. Their women. Everything the grand families have, you take. And the plains rose behind him like a fire in dry grass, and that is who is behind us on the road, and that is why the smell of cattle is the smell of death: it means his scouts are close. And then they are on the ridge. I hear them before I see them, the hooves, and there is a sound that goes through the whole column, a moan, everybody at once, and the walking becomes something else. Up on the low ridge to our right, against the white sky, horsemen. Not many. They do not need many. They sit their horses and they watch us the way you watch a herd, deciding, and the lances catch the light. And the road comes apart into panic and terror and screaming, people running who have nowhere to run to, carts overturning.

A_woman: Don't stop — don't any of you stop! Keep the little ones up, keep moving, they only take the ones that stop!

Bram: And I do the only thing my body knows to do, which is to turn my back to the ridge and put myself between it and the small one and keep walking, because stopping is the thing you must not do, stopping is how the road eats you.

The_child: 'Gua. 'Gua...

The_girl: Soon, mijito. Soon. Eyes on my face, just on my face — don't look at the hill. We're nearly there. We are nearly there. A woman ahead of me goes down — just goes down, in the crush, an old woman, and the river of people goes round her and over the edge of her and she does not get up and I do not stop, I cannot stop, the arms that are holding my brother cannot also hold her, and I hate myself in a way an eleven-year-old should never have the material for, and I keep walking.

Bram: The horsemen come down off the ridge at the far end of the column, where the stragglers are. I do not see it. That is the mercy and it is not a mercy — I only hear it, behind us, getting no closer because I am walking and the small one is a stone against my neck and I am counting my own steps now to keep them going, one and one and one, and I have decided without deciding it that I will not turn round, that whatever is happening at the back of this column is a thing I will not carry the sight of, only the sound. Twenty thousand people walked out of Caracas onto that road. Thousands of them never got to the other end of it. They did not die in a battle. There was no battle. They died of the road — of thirst and heat and the lances at the back and the simple grinding length of it — and most of them were women and children and the old, and almost none of them have a name that anyone wrote down. That is what the war to the death actually looked like from underneath, on the day the bill came. The man who wrote the decree is somewhere far ahead of us with the army, losing. And I am eleven, and my arms are full, and I am not going to turn round. Let the road go. I won't make you walk any more of it. The Second Republic dies on that road. Boves wins, totally — and then, that same year, gets a lance through him at a battle he'd already won, and dies without ever knowing his side would lose the war. But it doesn't matter, because there is no Republic left to save. Bolívar loses everything for the second time, and does the same thing he did the first time: he goes into exile, and he writes. This time it's a rented room in Jamaica, 1815, no money, an English landlady, the heat. And he writes what might be the clearest thing anyone in that whole hemisphere wrote in that whole century — the Letter from Jamaica, a cold-eyed map of what Spanish America is and what it can bear, written by a man who has been beaten twice and has nothing, and is still, somehow, planning the third try. An assassin comes for him in the night and stabs the wrong man — a friend asleep in Bolívar's own hammock. He moves on. And where he moves to is the turn of the whole story, and it is a place the statues never mention. He goes to Haiti — the one country on earth, at that moment, that has already done it: enslaved people who rose up, beat Napoleon's army, and made themselves free. Their president, a man named Pétion, receives this broke Venezuelan aristocrat and gives him what no one else will — ships, guns, a printing press, money — and asks for exactly one thing in return. Not territory. Not a treaty. He says: free your slaves. Free them. Make the war mean what it says. And Bolívar — who owns people, whose whole class is built on owning people — says yes. Whether he can deliver it is the question that's about to shoot a man against a wall. Come and stand in the mud and hear it happen. Wet through, itching all over, and Irish — that is the state of this body, and the fact under all of it is that I have made a catastrophic mistake with my life. I can hear it in my own head — the accent, Dublin, and the running commentary of a man who signed a piece of paper in a recruiting office off the quays a year ago because a smooth gentleman promised him land and glory and a commission in the army of a General Bolívar, liberating somewhere warm. And here I am. The warm was not a lie. Nothing else was true. I am standing in a swamp on a river the size of a sea, in a town called Angostura that is six huts and a fever, in the uniform of the British Legion, which is what they call the few thousand of us — Irish and English and Scots, most of us soldiers Waterloo made redundant, sold a fairy story and shipped to the Orinoco to find out that the enemy here is mostly the water.

The_sergeant: Stop scratching. You'll take the arm off yourself and the surgeon's drunk.

Bram: That's the sergeant. Venezuelan, been at this since the start, watches us new men the way you'd watch children near a well. He has explained the war to me twice and I have understood about a third of it. It is not, he keeps saying, a war against Spain. Not really, not anymore. It is a war inside America now — creoles and plainsmen and freed slaves and men of every colour, half of whom were on the King's side a year ago, welded together by that man in the big house into an army that is, against all sense, starting to win. I nod. I do not understand. I am cold, in the heat, which should not be possible. And I'll tell you the one thing I have understood, because it's the thing that's about to matter. The General freed the slaves. Said it out loud, put it in a decree — every man who takes up arms for the Republic is free, and his family with him. The Black and brown men in this army, and there are thousands, are here on that word. Except the sergeant, when I said wasn't that a grand thing, gave me a long look and said: aye, and where do you think a freed man goes? To the front rank. Freedom's the enlistment, boy. He meant it and he'd want it told true — the man freed them, and freed his own, and meant it to the marrow, and it also happened to fill the army he needed, and most of the men who took that bargain paid for it with the shorter half of their lives. Both of those are true at once. The whole country is both of those at once. And then the drum starts. Across the town, in the square by the half-built cathedral, a side-drum, slow, and the sergeant goes still.

The_private: What is it? What's the drum for?

Bram: He doesn't answer at first. The drum goes on, that flat slow beat, and men are moving toward the square and we are not, we are staying here in the mud, and I understand that we are staying here on purpose, that this is a thing we are meant to hear and not see.

The_sergeant: There's a general to be shot. One of ours.

Bram: And he tells me, low, over the drum. There is a general named Piar. A pardo — a man of colour, and the sergeant says the word the way you handle something sharp — and not just any officer: the man who won this very province, Guayana, the ground we are standing on, the base the whole war is now being run from. He won it, and then he started saying a thing out loud. That the men doing the dying and the bleeding for this republic were the Black men and the brown men, the pardos, and that when it was won they would be handed back their old place at the bottom by the same white gentlemen who were handing out the word liberty. He called it what it was. And there is a word for the nightmare that put in the gentlemen's heads — pardocracia, the rule of the coloured men — and it is on the charge sheet. Conspiracy. Race war. And it may even have been true that he was raising a faction; men still argue it. But the sergeant's face says the thing underneath: they stopped needing him, and he had become dangerous to say aloud, and so. The drum stops. There is a pause with the whole town in it. And then the volley — a single crash of muskets off the cathedral wall, flat across the water, and a cloud of birds goes up off the river, and it is done.

The_private: And the General — does he not come out for it? For one of his own, a man who won him all this?

The_sergeant: He signed it. He'll not watch it. There's your man, boy, the whole of him in one morning — he'll do the hard thing, and then he cannot make himself look at it.

Bram: And the thing I cannot get out of my head, the thing I will carry back to Dublin if I ever see Dublin, is where the General is. Because he is not in the square. The man who signed the order is not watching it. He is in the big house, with the door shut, and word is he will not come out, and word is he said afterward, of the man he'd just had shot, I have spilt my own blood. The general who won him this ground, killed for the crime of naming who was paying for the freedom — and the Liberator four hundred yards away with his back to the window, spilling his own blood, and not able to watch it fall. I scratch my arm. The sergeant does not tell me to stop. Come away from the wall. I need you to understand the size of what he does next, because it is, genuinely, one of the great mad gambles in the history of war, and it starts with him giving a speech about being humble. Early 1819. He opens a congress at Angostura — thirty men in a river town pretending to be a parliament — and he stands up and gives a speech that is startlingly gloomy for a man on the way up. He tells them he does not think his own people are ready to govern themselves. He proposes a senate that is hereditary, a president who serves for life, a whole fourth branch of government whose only job is public virtue. It is not the speech of a democrat. It is the speech of a man who has watched two republics die of their own liberty and has decided that liberty, left to itself, produces the road east. Hold that. It's the argument that eventually eats him. And then, having said all that — he does the most romantic thing anyone did in the entire war. It is the rainy season. The llanos, the great plains, are under water; nobody campaigns in the rains, everybody knows you cannot move an army through it. Which is exactly why he does. He takes about two and a half thousand men — his plainsmen, who have never in their lives seen a mountain, and the freezing bewildered survivors of that Irish Legion — and he points them at the Andes. Not around. Over. Over the top, by the worst pass he can find, in the rain, because the one thing the Spanish will never believe is that a sane man would try it. Come and find out what it costs. And I'm sorry in advance, because I'm putting you in the body of one of the men it costs the most. I have never been cold in my life until now, and I do not have the word for it, so I keep calling it wet. I am a llanero. A man of the Apure, the low hot plains, and I want you to understand what that means about this body: I have spent every day of my life barefoot on flat grass under a sky that goes to the edge of the world. I have never worn a shoe. I have never been higher than a horse lifts me. I have never seen a stone bigger than a house. Heat is the air; the plains are the floor of everything. That is the man. And for two weeks now this man has been climbing. First it was water — the plains flooded, the rains, we crossed rivers with the water at our chests holding the horses' tails, seven whole days of wet, and that was the easy part and I did not know it. Then the ground began to go up, and up, and it did not stop. And the world I know got taken away from me one piece at a time. The grass went. The trees went. The air got thin and mean and would not fill me. And the cold came, this thing I had no name for, not the cold of a plains night that a fire fixes — a cold with no bottom to it, that gets inside the wet clothes and lives there. We are on the páramo now. That is the word for this place and I learned it climbing. It is the top of the world, above where trees will grow, and it is not the white mountain of a picture — there is no snow, it is worse than snow, it is black rock and grey cloud sitting on the ground at the height of your face, and a freezing rain that is half ice, blowing sideways, all day, all night, no sun, no dark, no fire. Because there is nothing to burn. That is the sentence I keep coming back to in this body, the one my mind says over and over like a prayer that has stopped working. There is nothing here that will burn. We are men of the campfire, men of roasted beef and talk in the dark, and there is no fire, there will be no fire, there is nothing on the top of the world that will take a flame. The horses die first. All of them. A llanero without his horse is a man with his legs cut off, and we lead them up until they lie down and do not rise, and we go on without them. And then it is the men. My friend — and I will not tell you his name, because a name is a thing you can lose and I have lost enough — my friend from my own village, who I have known since we were both small on the hot grass, lies down on the fourth night. Just sits, and then lies. And I get down by him and I say the things you say.

The_llanero: Get up. It is not far now — think of the grass, think of the horses in the morning. Get up, hermano, get up.

The_friend: I'm warm now. Leave me — I'm warm, I only want to sleep a little. Go on ahead. I'll come after.

Bram: And he answers me for a while and then he answers me less and then he is warm, he tells me, he is warm now and he wants to sleep, and I know — every plainsman knows — that warm is the lie the cold tells you at the end. And I hold him. And in the grey that is not morning, because there is no morning up here, he is a shape under frost, and he is not my friend anymore, he is the mountain's, and I get up, because the only thing you can do for the living is not become one more of the dead. And here is the thing I did not expect, the thing that keeps this from being only horror. Because he is there. The General. Up and down the line the whole time, on foot when the horses are gone, small and soaked and grey as the rest of us, and he does not make speeches up here, there is no breath for speeches, he just — is there, at the bad moments, saying the short things.

Bolivar: Keep moving. We are nearly at the top — the country is on the other side of this. Keep moving.

Bram: And the mad thing is you believe him, because he is climbing it too, he is not being carried, the richest man any of us ever saw is dying of this cold in the same clothes as me. A quarter of the Irishmen die up here. Every horse. And we come down the far side into a little green town called Socha, and the people come out and they weep at the sight of us and they put their own clothes on our backs because we have none, and I stand in a stranger's shirt in warm air and I cry like the child I have not been for twenty years. And then — because he does not stop, this man, he does not ever stop — six days later there is a bog and a hill and a battle already lost, and a colonel of horse named Rondón, a pardo, a plainsman like me.

Rondon: Rondón's lancers — to me! The fourteen of you — at that hill, now, and let me show you how a colonel of the Apure dies!

Bram: And he takes fourteen lancers straight into it and turns it, and the General watches a Black cavalryman save the whole campaign. And two weeks after that, the seventh of August, on a river with a stone bridge, we catch the Spanish army that never dreamed we were alive. There is one cannon, a light gun, and it fires twice and then we are past it. It is not much of a battle by the measure of Europe — a couple of hours, a few hundred down. But when the Spanish general gives up his sword on that bridge, a whole country changes hands. Everything north of here, the old viceroyalty, the treasure, the capital — his, ours, in an afternoon, because two months ago a barefoot man walked over a mountain that should have killed an army and did kill a quarter of it. I did that. My friend under the frost did that. Put that in the picture with the flags on it. Put us in it. We are what the flags are made of. Come down into Bogotá with him, into the cheering, because now — now it works, and I want you to feel it work before it stops. He walks into the viceroy's abandoned palace with a treasury in it and a whole kingdom around it, and he does the thing he was really for. He invents a country. Not wins one — invents one. He takes Venezuela and New Granada, the place we now call Colombia, and the not-yet-freed south, and by a vote in a hot room he welds them into a single enormous republic, Gran Colombia, one state from the Caribbean coast to the edge of the Amazon. On paper. It exists because he says it does and thirty men agree. Two years later, June 1821, he comes home to Venezuela at last and breaks the last royal army at a field called Carabobo — the Irish Legion, what's left of them, holding the ridge in the middle of it and dying in rows, saluted afterward as the saviours of a country most of them couldn't find on a map. Home is free. He's forty. He has done it. And here's the crack, already, in the middle of the triumph, so quiet you'd miss it. That enormous country has three capitals and no road between any two of them. It is bigger than western Europe and it is held together by exactly one thing, and the one thing is him. Keep that in your pocket. Everything from here is the summit — and the summit is the place where the only way left to go is down. Come south. It gets, for a little while longer, even better. I am on a horse, high up where the air is thin again, and every man around me is checking his blade, and nobody is loading anything, and that is the thing that is frightening me. I am a trooper. Peruvian, a cavalryman, and these are good hands on the reins and a good seat under me, this body can ride, which is a mercy because we are four thousand metres up on a bare cold plateau in the middle of Peru, by a lake called Junín, and across a couple of miles of yellow grass is the other army — the royal cavalry, the last good horse the King has on this continent — forming up exactly like us. The war has come all the way down here, to the roof of the world, to finish. The General has come south to end it. He is somewhere behind us on the high ground; I saw him this morning, small on a grey horse, watching, and the sight of him steadied two thousand men who have not eaten properly in a week.

The_colombian: Sabres. No powder. Pass it down — nobody fires.

Bram: No powder. The order goes down the line and I do not like it — steel only, sabre and lance, and I take my own sabre out because the man beside me has taken his — and it means there will be no smoke, no noise to hide in, no far-off killing, none of the merciful confusion of a battle with guns in it. It means we are going to do this the old way, the close way, the way you can see the face of.

The_trooper: Stay on the horse. Whatever comes — stay on the horse, keep the point up. Stay on the horse.

Bram: And then the trumpets, and both lines of horse start to move at once across the yellow grass, and there is no going back in a cavalry charge, the horse decides for you, and I am counting — I don't know why, the minutes, the seconds, something — and then we hit. And it is silent. That is the thing no one who wasn't there will ever believe. Forty minutes of cavalry, two thousand horses, and not one shot in all of it — just the enormous soft thunder of the hooves and then, at the join, steel, the flat clang of blade on blade and the wet sounds under it and men grunting with the effort of killing, which is work, hard physical work, and the screams of horses, which are worse than the men. A lance comes at me out of the crush and I take it on the sabre and the shock of it goes to my shoulder and the man behind it is right there, close as a dance partner, his face, a boy's face, terrified exactly as much as mine — and one of us has to, and it is not me that goes down, and I do not have the words for what that is and I am not going to pretend to you that I do. Something takes me across the ribs — a blade, someone's, I never see it — and it is a line of cold and then a line of fire and I stay on the horse because falling off the horse here is the end. And it turns. Battles turn like weather, all at once, for no reason you can see from inside them: a squadron of ours that had gone past and around comes back into their flank.

The_colombian: They're breaking! On them — go through them, don't let them form again!

Bram: And the royal line that was winning is suddenly not, is breaking, is running, and we are through them and the yellow grass is behind us and it is, somehow, ours. Forty minutes. Not a shot. The strangest fight of the whole long war, at the top of the world, decided with the weapons men used before there was powder, and I am holding my own side together with my hand and the man I killed is back there on the grass being rained on and he was the same age as me and on the other side by an accident of which town he was born in. The General rides down through us afterward and the men cheer him with the breath they have left. He did not draw a blade today. He never really does. He is the reason we were here, though — the reason two thousand men rode at each other in silence on a mountain — and four months later his young general Sucre finishes it for good at a place called Ayacucho, and the thing that started on a Roman hill twenty years ago is, on the field, done. We won. Hold onto that we won. Because it is the last clean thing there is. So let him have the summit. He has earned it, and it does not last, and I want you standing on it with him before the floor goes. 1825. The war is won, the last Spanish army on the whole American mainland has surrendered, and he is master of a stretch of the earth larger than Europe west of Russia. They carve a brand-new country out of Upper Peru and — this has happened exactly once in the history of the world — they name it after him, while he is alive to hear it. Bolivia. There is a nation on the map tonight called Bolivia because a grateful congress wanted to pay a living man a compliment. That is the summit. That is the mountain of silver with the flags on it, the place we started. Now watch how fast it goes. Three years before, there'd been a sign, if anyone had wanted to read it. He'd met the only other man his size — San Martín, the general who had freed the whole southern half of the continent coming up the other way. They met at Guayaquil, on the coast, and they talked for two days behind a closed door with no one else in the room, and from that day to this nobody has known what passed between them. A house-servant carried wine in twice and heard four seconds of two voices, and that is all there is. What we do know is what happened after. San Martín came out, got on a ship, left the war, left the continent, and lived out his life in France and never came back. Two liberators went behind a door and one of them quit the earth. You can build any story you like on that; I am not going to build one for you. And now the arithmetic that eats him, and it isn't villainy, it's geography. That giant country he invented has no roads. I said it before; now it matters. Cordillera, jungle, flood plain, and no way across any of it, and in a land like that the only power that can actually reach anywhere is a man on a horse who can personally feed and mount two thousand more. There's a word for that man — caudillo, the strongman, the boss of a region who is its government because nothing else can get there. And the greatest of them is a llanero we've met the shadow of already: Páez, the man the plains obey, who won half the war and does not, when you think about it honestly, need Bogotá at all. In 1826 Páez stops obeying — a revolt they call La Cosiata, the Whatsit, the Thingy, that contemptuous little name — and the giant paper country gives a great crack straight down the middle, and every fault line in it starts to open at once. And the terrible thing, the thing that makes this a tragedy and not just a defeat, is that Páez is not wrong. His Venezuela really is better served by a man who is there than by a congress a thousand miles away over a cordillera. The country cannot hold because the coun…