Weary, half-defeated by history, and almost as wary of those you have spent your life’s energies and treasure to make free as you are of their iron-minded oppressors, you are the middle-aging Simón Bolívar, and less than a month ago you arrived here in Kingston, Jamaica, in desperate flight from Venezuela, arrived with a Spanish price on your head and a pack of rabid assassins dogging your trail down from the mountains of Colombia to the sea, always hoping you would stupidly trust someone you should not. You did not, and, happily, the assassins seem not to have followed you here, at least not yet.
It is the afternoon of the seventh of June, 1815. Your friend, Mr. Henry Cullen, has invited you to leave Kingston and visit with him at his plantation in Falmouth, a Great House situated on a limestone cliff overlooking Jamaica’s tranquil north shore, and you have gratefully accepted. The effort of trying to convince agents of the English king to support you and your ragtag rebellions against the Spanish king has angered and exhausted you. And neither anger nor exhaustion becomes you. Your pale, delicate face and frame, your intelligence, your exquisitely refined, yet passionate sensibility, these become clouded and only vaguely felt, by you or anyone else, when you are angry; and when you are exhausted, you fear that you resemble an aesthete, a type of human being you abhor.
Yes, my dear friend, you write to Cullen, scratch-scratch against the parchment. I shall arrive one week from tomorrow, probably rather late in the day, for your Jamaican roadways are not much smoother or straighter than my beloved Venezuelan mountain paths.
You put down the pen, and the first of the assassins to reach the island, one López Martínez Martínez, springs through the open door from the balcony outside, grabs you by the ruffled collar of your shirt, and raises his knife. You note absurdly that he smells of goat cheese and wet canvas. Though you are the victim and he the killer, he grins in fear, his tongue afloat in his toothless mouth.
When your shirt tears in his grip, you yank yourself away from him, knocking over the escritoire, and your letter to Cullen falls to the parquet floor like a leaf, slips onto the balcony and off, drifting to the sunny courtyard below, where it is seen by a black man, an English slave named Jack, commonly called Three-Fingered Jack, for two fingers of his right hand were chopped off in childhood as punishment. He squints and stares up, as if to see where the paper might have come from. He could, if he wished, peer across the balcony outside your room and through the open doors and could watch you struggle with the assassin.
Jack says nothing. He walks slowly over and picks up your unfinished letter to Cullen, folds it carefully in half and half again, and slides it between his sweaty belly and leather belt. Jack does not worry about your welfare. He knows that you are an important man, that you have two British soldiers from Fort Charles posted outside your door, and that they will hear your struggle with Martínez Martínez and will save you. Jack wants your piece of paper. Paper is useful and not cheap.
Later in the day, you look around your room for your letter to Cullen. You search under the bed and the dresser, even inside the mahogany wardrobe. It’s nowhere to be seen. Where could it have flown to? Curious.
Finally, you sit down at the escritoire and begin again, even more wearily and gratefully than when you wrote the first letter. My dear Henry, your kind offer to remove me from the swelter and the crowds of Kingston to the refreshing luxury of your Great House has been received here with delight and great relief, for I was beginning to believe that I…
When you have completed the letter and have sealed it with wax, you rise from the table, go to the door of your chamber, and hand the letter to the guard outside, instructing him to post it immediately to Falmouth. Then, feeling both enervated and oddly agitated — because of Martínez Martínez, you tell yourself, in spite of the fact that he is now quite dead, a chunk of meat with a mouth shuddering with flies — you walk to the balcony and peer down into the courtyard.
The packed earth is the color of cream. A black man works alone down there, raking away the tracks of the horses, smoothing the grounds, pulling slowly on his split-bamboo rake, moving the riffles and ripples in the dirt, clods kicked loose by the horses, droppings, and the leaf or stalk that may have idly fallen to the ground after having been blown into the courtyard from beyond the walls by an errant puff of wind off the bay. Slowly, tediously, he pulls these tiny disturbances in gradually closing, concentric circles. From above, you examine the circles closely, and eventually you realize that they are spirals, coils, moving toward a still center which, with a wide, square-bladed shovel, the black man will remove and deposit outside the gate. The design will be gone. Without the center, there will be no spiral, no coil.
You study the man for a moment. He is a slave. A man wholly inside history, you reflect. No one will assassinate him. He can only be murdered. To be assassinated, you must first step outside history; you have to be guilty of trying to affect history from outside. Like God. The slave, by definition, can never obtain that prerogative, you observe. You envy him. More and more often, in recent months, you have found yourself envying people you regard as being wholly determined by the sweep of history. The shepherd in Peru. The Inca baby outside the cathedral in Bogotá. The sailor on the British frigate that brought you to Kingston. And now this one, a slave.
You think: That man probably has my letter to Cullen, the first one. He probably saw it skitter out the open door to the balcony, the very door that the assassin entered. He probably saw the assassin climb the tile drain to the narrow ledge and watched him crawl along the ledge to the balcony, saw him swing his legs over the balcony rail, open the door an inch wider, and stroll into my room, the knife already in his hand.
Even so, you bear the slave no malice. Quite the contrary. No, to be free to stand there below and watch one man attempt to assassinate another, and to be able to do nothing — what a respite! You squint and look closely, and you realize that the black man has seen you staring down at him. He is staring back. He probably envies me, you think. What an irony. To envy the man who envies you.
It is late. The sun drifts closer to the horizon above the bay and the flatlands to the west of Kingston. Beyond the fortress walls lies the turquoise sea, now smeared red by the setting sun. You are growing morose, so you “pull yourself together,” as the English say, and in your mind compose the first sentence of yet another letter to the editors of the Kingston newspapers, The Royal Gazette and The St. Jago Gazette. Here is the sentence: Sir: To the everlasting credit and glory of His Royal Majesty King George III and the Royal Governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Manchester, it is true today that the lowliest blackamoor in this paradise, a three-fingered Negro slave named Jack, is more to be envied than the founder of a Republic torn from the darkly bleeding heart of the mighty South American continent.
You believe that the English will believe that this is true; you know that at this moment, for you, it is true; and you also know that Three-Fingered Jack, if he could read your letter, would laugh. But the obligation to shape a future history forbids you to say what is true for everyone. That crude freedom would only allow you to doodle and dribble, to waste time and paper while sitting here in a fortress by the sea, helplessly waiting for the Spanish Empire to crack at its feeble feet and drop its heavy head down parapets, cliffs, palisades, campaniles. You think of equestrian statues toppling from building-sized bases. You think of armored Arab horses stumbling on the pampas and shattering their thin, brittle legs. You think of cashew trees sprawling heavily across spindly trunks. You think of a waterspout. “If only,” you murmur, and the images of collapse multiply.
It is dark. The room is filled with maroon and purple wedges of shadow. Again, you stroll to the balcony and look into the courtyard. Down there it is now wholly dark. You can see nothing definite. A pit of blackness. Noise of leather moving against leather, of horses breathing, of a man’s callused hand moving across his forearm against the hairs — these carefully rise through the silence to you.
He’s still down there. You know he’s down there, buried in the darkness the same way he’s buried in history. You light the lantern behind you and place it on the escritoire. You step in front of it to the edge of the balcony. You show yourself in sharp profile. A shot rings out.