“I thought later, when things became hard, that I should enrol Negroes in my army. I offered them freedom if they served for ten years. I don’t know what Wilberforce would have thought of that — this was just a year after our meetings in London. But at this stage everything I did was going to be wrong. The offer to enrol Negroes didn’t get me suitable soldiers, and it turned everybody else against me. The royalists at Curiepe in revenge turned the Negroes from their plantations on me. They sent them marching to Caracas to loot and burn the place down.
“This was the end. I was quite encircled. After Bolívar lost Puerto Cabello we were absolutely without resources. People were leaving me every day. I could depend on no one. I couldn’t carry on the war. At the beginning people like Roscio wanted me to keep out of their revolution. Now they left me alone with it. Everybody focussed his resentment or fear or hate on me — republican, royalist, all the four colours. I saw then what you have said, that the war was unwinnable, that if somehow the revolution could be reconstituted and we could go back to the beginning, it would all unravel again, and in almost the same way. I realized in those last days that for all those years abroad I had been speaking only for myself, that the revolution I had been working for would have come about only if all Venezuelans were like me, coming from a family like mine, and having a career like mine. It was what the Spaniards had always said, that my revolution was a personal enterprise.
“The knowledge was a kind of release. I wouldn’t have arrived at it if I had stayed in London or if I had left the war half-way through. I would have been nagged by the feeling that there might have been something I could have done, that in spite of the four colours and the marquises of cocoa and tobacco and everything else I had always known about Venezuela, the ideas I had worked out might have proved right. Perhaps the philosophers were right. Perhaps below all the accidental things about people — birth, character, geography, history — there was something truer. That was what I had always felt about myself. Perhaps all men, if they were given a wise or rational liberty, became worthy of Plato’s republic.
“I had no half-feelings or misgivings now. I knew I had seen things through as far as they could go. The unimaginable moment came when I realized that I no longer had a side, and that apart from personal dependants there was no one with me. My thoughts then were all of Grafton Street. The territory I controlled or was safe in was shrinking day by day. Soon it was reduced to the city of Caracas and the mountain road to the coast, to La Guaira. A few square miles. Think of that! Two or three years after I deserted I used to present myself to foreign governments as the potential controller of a territory stretching from the source of the Mississippi, all the land to the west of the river, down to Cape Horn.
“A British warship was waiting at La Guaira for me, to take me to the British island of Curaçao. I sent my three boxes of papers ahead with a loyal follower. I took the precaution to address those boxes not to me, in case they were captured, but to a British firm on the island. I did the same with the twenty-two thousand silver pesos and twelve hundred ounces of gold I took from the Caracas Treasury. It was with a perverse pleasure that right at the end I assumed the character my enemies gave me. My feeling was that this was owed me, for all that I had done for the country, and for the forty years I had been cut off from my family fortune. But I didn’t manage to board H.M.S. Sapphire, as you know. It sailed with my possessions to Curaçao. My information is that the firm to which they were addressed claimed the money as their own, and were very happy to recover this fraction of what they had advanced through me to the revolutionary government in Caracas. So that account, too, has been settled all round.”
Miranda makes a signal to someone outside. Captain Lara, the head of the special guard, comes and stands outside the open door, and Level de Goda knows it is time to leave.
• • •
LATER THAT night, when the town was quite asleep, Level was awakened by Meléndez, the captain-general, in whose quarters he was staying. The captain-general was formally dressed, with his officer’s jacket, and he carried the polished baton of his rank.
He said, “It’s very hot, Andrés. Put on some clothes and come and walk with me by the sea.”
They walked a short way along the sea wall and stopped by a pier. Ships’ lights were reflected in the water of the harbour and masts were dark against the sky. A night breeze blew off the sea. The sails of one ship were bent for sailing. A small boat rocked near the pier steps. It wasn’t empty: there were two oarsmen and two soldiers in it. The soldiers got out now and stood to attention on the steps. Along the sea wall then appeared Captain Lara and Miranda arm in arm. Behind them walked a Negro carrying a small wooden trunk on his head. Level recognized the Negro: he came from the inn that for five months had been preparing Miranda’s meals.
Meléndez said, “The ship is waiting, General. It only remains to say goodbye. Lieutenant Ibáñez has given his word that no restraint will be placed on you during your voyage to Cadiz.”
Miranda said, “No chains?”
“You will be treated with honour.”
Miranda said, “I give thanks to God that I am going to Europe. Captain-General, I will never forget this kindness you have done me.”
He embraced Meléndez and then, before being handed down into the boat by the soldiers, he embraced Level. Level remembered the embrace as the embrace of a friend.
LEVEL WROTE his memoirs — and gave that little formal farewell speech to Miranda — thirty-eight years later, when he was seventy-four. This was in 1851, when, as Level said, the Venezuelan revolution or civil war was still going on after forty-one years, and seemed set to go on for another forty-one. The memoirs might have been one of the casualties of the war. They were never absolutely finished, and (perhaps also because of Level’s politics) were not published until 1933, and then only in a Venezuelan learned journal.
Level would have known that Miranda had died in jail in Cadiz just about thirty months after he left Puerto Rico. He wouldn’t have known that Miranda had died painfully, over four months, racked by one affliction after the other, violent fits, typhus, and towards the end by an illness that made him haemorrhage from the mouth. He was buried unceremoniously, lifted away from the hospital of the jail in the mattress and sheets of his deathbed, and in the clothes in which he had died, and set down with it all in his grave. The men who took him away then came back and gathered up his other clothes and possessions and burnt them. Knowledge of the spot where he was buried was soon lost.
Miranda’s second son, Francisco, was seven when Miranda was in Puerto Rico. Level might not have known that this Francisco, his father’s namesake, left London when he was grown up and went to fight in the South American civil wars. He was executed in Colombia in 1831 (the year after Bolívar’s death), when he was twenty-five, in one of the many purges of the war.
Level remembered, very delicately, Miranda’s concern about a lady in London, to whom he would have liked to send money, and to whom, through Meléndez, he sent a letter about household matters. Level would not have known that in 1847, four years before he began to write his memoirs, Sarah had died in the house in Grafton Street. She was seventy-three. She had lived in the same house for forty-eight years, and for the last thirty-seven of those years she had been without Miranda. The census of 1841 records two women servants in the house, and it is possible that Miranda’s library — valued at nine thousand pounds in 1807, with debts to booksellers of five thousand pounds — provided her in the end with a fair income.