“And now you come among us. On both sides of the Gulf we have got to know the prospectuses of your London sponsors, Turnbull and Forbes. They offer many desirable modern manufactures at a fair price, but it cannot be a surprise to you if in the eyes of some of us you appear less a liberator and a lover of freedom than a Caracas man who has remained true to his origins, and has returned as the factor of a British commercial enterprise that seeks to reduce the people of the continent to peonage, as has happened to people in large parts of Asia, and as has happened here.
“Since the British conquest you and Picton between you have used the language of liberty and revolution to seduce many good people away from the fear of God, the sentiments of humanity, and the no less sacred duties of religion and society. You have lured these people to this island, your base for subversion, and you have kept them here like caged wild animals, to be released at your whim on an innocent populace. These misguided people have been ready to give everything to you and your cause. You have given them nothing. Your revolution, because it is baseless and finds no echo in the souls of good men, because it has degenerated into a personal enterprise and is without nobility, has never come. And when these proud Spanish spirits, recognizing their error, have rebelled against their betrayal by you and Picton, ways have been found of silencing them. Think of Juan Mansanares, for some time so loud and boastful in the grog-shops of this town, and flush with English money, then mysteriously dead at the age of thirty-six; old Manuel Guai, at first hidden away by Picton, then cruelly poisoned with pills of opium mixed with crushed glass; his friend José España, driven by his despair back across the Gulf, betrayed in his own hearth, beheaded, his fair body quartered, his head displayed in an iron cage at the Caracas Gate of the port of La Guaira; Andrés de España, languishing for years in the infamous jail here; Juan Caro and Antonio Vallecilla, both dead, their graves unknown. Think of these men, and all the others whose life and passion you and Picton ate away month by month and year by year, and wonder that you felt so little trepidation at setting foot on this bloodstained soil. Wonder that you never thought that your fate might be like theirs, and that this usurped island might also become your prison and grave.
“Whatever encouragement Hislop gives, his word is worthless. He is a soldier; his honour lies in obedience. He will feast you today; he is famous as a good host. He will turn his back on you tomorrow, if he is required to do that. You may discover, as we have done, that he has claws. Justice approaches for the fifty-eight men you abandoned off the coast. Justice approaches for you too. You are more alone and unprotected here, in what used to be your homeland, than you ever were in London. Six copies have been made of this letter. At least one will get to you, and you will think of TUPAC AMARU.”
Hislop said, “General, General. I shouldn’t have shown you the letter on your first day. It has unsettled you.”
“It has, I know Spanish hate, but it’s always a shock whenever I am reintroduced to it. This is a letter of hate. You were talking earlier of the hatred the people here got you to feel for the free man of colour whose ears they wanted to cut off. They made you look at him. They told you he believed in his own powers. They showed you hell in his eyes. They made you feel you didn’t have just to punish the man, you had to destroy what was inside him. Spanish hatred is like that. It’s never far away, and it’s mixed up with ideas of faith and truth and retribution. As a punisher you’re in the right. You’re in the place of God.
“I know about this hate because it’s in me too, after all these years. I have dealt in it myself, and I know that what I’ve done is partly responsible for this letter. Hate against hate. I’ve said things about Spain and the Spaniards I shouldn’t have said. I said foolish things, wounding things. I know how to wound them. When I left Caracas in 1771 Spain was the centre of the world for me. History, culture, elegance. The United States didn’t exist — the American colonies were poorer than we were — and the French Revolution was twenty years away. I’m ashamed to tell you how much money I spent on clothes in my first month in Cadiz. It was some years before I saw that the ideas I had had about Spain and its position in the world were exaggerated. When I deserted from the Spanish service and went to the United States in 1783, at the end of the war, I found for the first time I could say things about Spain that I had grown to feel. And it actually did me no harm. I saw that. And then there was the execution of the second Tupac Amaru. That affected me more than the Americans I was with. I began to say things I shouldn’t have said. The president of Yale rebuked me one evening. He said the Spaniards had a higher regard for law than I allowed. I said I knew about Spanish legalism: I had graduated in law from the University of Mexico. I made that up on the spur of the moment. It came out very easily, and it silenced him.
“It was much worse when I went to Russia. I felt I was so far away that it didn’t matter what I said about Spain or myself. I made full use of the freedom, I should tell you. And the empress and her nobles were so interested, so protective. I was dazzled. I felt it was what I was born for. I had never felt so safe. I said things about Spain to please them, dreadful things about the Inquisition and superstition and Spanish ignorance and degeneracy, dreadful things about the Spanish king and his son, the Prince of Asturias.
“I was in demand. One night at a gathering in St. Petersburg a fine gentleman I hadn’t met, as soon as he caught sight of me, came right across the room towards me. I smiled and bowed, getting ready for his Russian French, expecting him to be hampered by the language but friendly and interested and as anxious to invite me to his house as so many of the other Russian noblemen I had met. It wasn’t French that came out of this fine gentleman’s mouth, but Spanish, the Spanish of Spain, spoken in a tone and with the forms you would use with a servant. He was the Spanish chargé d’affaires, Macanaz. He wanted me to produce — there and then, almost — the Spanish patents which made me a colonel and a count. That was my style in Russia. It did no one any harm, and it gave the Russians pleasure. I was staggered by his contempt. It was the contempt of the well-born Spaniard from Spain for the South American. I felt shabby, caught out. It was like being pushed back to the Caracas of twenty years before. I was about to say that I had served for some time in the Princess Regiment and had retired from the service as a colonel. But at the last moment I changed my mind, and the crudest street-corner obscenities of Caracas came out of my mouth. In any other setting he would have had to draw his sword. But in that room he had to digest the insult. He didn’t forget, of course. He wrote to the ambassador, and the ambassador wrote around to other people about me. I thought about that incident quite recently, when the Bee and the Bacchus were cut off. It was very strange. I was leading an invasion, something I had talked about for years, and then with the memory of that far-away St. Petersburg room I thought, ‘And now you’ve put yourself within their reach.’ ”