He says, “I’m not staring, General. I’m looking, to remember. I was thinking that one day I would be telling people that General Miranda turned his tea into a lemonade.”
“It’s what my father used to do on hot afternoons in Caracas. I began to do it when I came back.”
“When I’m with you I think of all the places you’ve been to, and all the people you’ve seen, and I can begin to feel that I myself have entered history a little. It is a feeling so precious I can hardly hold on to it. General, I’ve been trying for some time to put this to you. It is something I know I shouldn’t put to you. But, equally, I will not forgive myself later for not doing so. I want to know about Catherine the Great. If you think the question is wrong, please forgive me. If you think it is too intrusive, please consider it as never having been spoken.”
“It was one of the stories I encouraged, almost something I spread myself in the beginning, in my thirties, after I had left the Spanish service. Like so many of the thoughtless things I did then, it came back later and did me much harm. It exposed me to a lot of jealousy. Not in the way you might think. Venezuelans loved the story. They didn’t see it as a tribute to me. They saw it as a tribute to themselves. Some of them behaved as though I had taken away something from them. They felt that I had misused something that belonged to them. I had come between them and the arms of the empress. And then they extended this to my whole career. Whatever I had done in the world I had done, according to this way of thinking, only because I was like them, my critics. Whether in Russia or England or France or the United States, there was nothing personal about my achievement. If they had been where I had been they would have done what I had done. I had gambled nothing of myself, taken no risks, exercised no personal will. And this was extended even further. They had done it for me. I had done nothing. I was nothing.
“I told Hislop in Trinidad — I don’t know whether he told you — how Picton had damaged me in 1798, nearly thirty years after I had left home. He had written to the ministers in London that though I was important, I was nothing, the son of a Caracas shopkeeper. Of course he had got that from Caracas — and even at all the removes I could detect the voice of the Venezuelan who felt I had sullied the empress’s arms and spoilt what was his due.
“Something like that happened again when I came back. I had been called back by Bolívar, as you know, and I was going to stay in his house in Caracas, because after forty years I had none of my own. I didn’t go there directly. I thought I should behave formally and show respect to the revolution. When I landed at La Guaira I wrote to Roscio, the junta’s secretary for foreign affairs, asking for permission to go to Caracas. His reply was insulting and extraordinary. He said that I should never forget that I owed more than most to the country, because I had been unusually privileged and had spent many years abroad in the courts of Europe. What he was saying was that during my forty years abroad I had actually been exploiting the country, living off the national patrimony, and now should pay back a little of what I owed. And I knew at once that, though we were talking about the revolution, it was the old Catherine-the-Great jealousy at work on Roscio. That story did me much harm. I should never have come to Caracas after receiving that letter of Roscio’s. I should have known that the situation had been misrepresented to me. I should have stayed at La Guaira and gone back to Curaçao on H.M.S. Avon. I should have made them wait, for a year, if necessary. That’s how I should have handled it.”
Level says, “Our hate, General, our hate. It isn’t like the hate of other places.”
“The Spanish empire damaged us in that way. It kept us backward, gave us very little to do. It gave us as men no way of proving ourselves. It never made us believe in human achievement. It made us believe only in luck and birth and influence and theft and getting patents from the king. It made us cringe before authority and mock it at the same time. It made us believe that all men at bottom were worthless. Many of the stupid things I did in the early days were because of that. It was ten years before I understood that things were different in other countries.”
Level says, “At one time I used to think the jealousy you talk about was harmless, like the jealousy of a grocer for a man who comes and sets up a shop next door. After the revolution this jealousy turned to hate. We’ve all surrendered to this hatred. People won’t” stop now until they see the white bones of the enemy. I never thought it would happen. I thought people would be too frightened. I remember the early revolutionaries, Gual, España, in the late 1790s. They sent people to our estates and to others and tried to get us interested. They said they were going to have a republic and the flag was going to have four colours, for the different races. White, blue for the Negro, yellow for the mixed, red for the Indian. The four colours would also stand for the four aims of the republic. Liberty, equality, security, property. Property for the white, liberty for the Negro, equality for the mulatto, security for everybody. They were going to give everything to everybody. How were they going to do it? When you asked them they couldn’t answer. They hadn’t worked it out. They had thought only about the flag and the colours. Sometimes they got angry. ‘You’re an americano. You should be a proud man. How can you talk in this low way? Don’t you care about your country?’ I would say, ‘It’s wrong of you to put it like that. You can’t tell me that my country is your flag. The question to ask when you talk about independence is: “Who is going to rule over us?” That’s the question everyone will ask, and that is where the war will begin.’ And, actually, that’s how it happened. Now that we are launched on that four-colour war I don’t see how it can stop. There will always be someone looking for a final victory, and someone wanting revenge.”
Miranda says, “I don’t think anyone can work out a constitution for a place like Venezuela. It’s the Spanish legacy to us. Those people you mention, Gual, España, and the others — they suffered too much to think more clearly. I can also tell you now that the constitution I worked out for Venezuela was absurd. And yet I spent so much time on it. It was half Roman and half British. I didn’t have consuls. I had officials I called Incas. A local touch, you see. I persuaded myself that I believed in my constitution, but I also know I had devised it to impress people abroad. Perhaps there is a genius somewhere who can work out a constitution for us. But he certainly isn’t Venezuelan, because no Venezuelan will be calm enough to manage things wisely, and he can’t be an outsider because he wouldn’t begin to understand the divisions and the passions.”
“In all your years of writing about Venezuela and South America, you simplified it, General. You talked about Incas and white people. You talked about people worthy of Plato’s republic. You always left out two of the colours. You left out the black and you left out the mulatto. Was that because you were far away?”
“No. I did it because it was easier for me intellectually. Most of my ideas about liberty came to me from conversation and reading when I was abroad. So the country I created in my mind became more and more like the countries I read about. There were no Negroes in Tom Paine or Rousseau. And when I tried to be like them I found it hard to fit in the Negroes. Of course, I knew they existed. But I thought of them as accidental to the truth I was getting at. I felt when I came to write that I had to leave them out. Because of the way I have lived, always in other people’s countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head about the same thing. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about myself. I have paid a heavy price for this. You mustn’t rebuke me now.