“You see, fortunes are like ships. They seek a safe port in a storm, and at times the instinct of money, that is, the urge to find that safe berth, blinds one, and confuses distance with safety. Laugh if you will, thinking how a French merchant in the Antilles — made rich by the wide-scale smuggling that accompanied the decline of Spanish rule and the instability of the Napoleonic wars, but based in the black colony of Haiti, where planters were hanged from their own palm trees and armies of mosquitoes routed the French armies as later the snow and mud of Russia were to do — knew better than any politician that what is up today will be down tomorrow, and that the greater the pride, the greater the humiliation. It seemed grotesque to him to have to abase himself before the French Bourbons, masters of the meager lives and fortunes of his homeland, but not so before the Spanish Bourbons, with whom, in his unhinged mind, he had a clean ledger. Napoleon was unable to subjugate Spain, because the Spain of the Napoleonic era was not to be found on the mainland but in her colonies — which is where the French Revolution was to continue once it had been interred in Europe by dynasties alert to the fact that their true alliance lay with the third estate of dry-goods clerks and sawbones and pen pushers, and always against the common people, who will always be downtrodden even in the reign of freedom because they haven’t the will to be anything but slaves, eh?”
Monsieur Lange rented a small boat in Santiago de Cuba, where he had taken refuge after the uprising in Haiti, and set sail for La Guaira with his dream of a liberal revolution without blacks, but — thanks to the good offices of a customs inspector whom he had taught to count — with stocks of their cotton and tobacco and rum, the harpsichord from which his precious sixteen-year-old daughter would not be parted, the daughter, and the three turkey buzzards that followed him through all the ports of the New World. He laughed: Caribbean buzzards, it seemed, were given to the sport of leaping from island to island, like Jesus in the famous account of crossing … was it the Jordan or the Dead Sea? Monsieur Lange knew very little about these things, but in La Guaira everyone became embroiled in a fierce rivalry over the beautiful French girl, even the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, who blew into town with gale force at the end of July, occupied the port, jailed the encyclopedist Miranda, who had been the lover of Catherine the Great, and then evacuated the port, and through it all, the royalists went on with their great balls, and Monsieur Lange went on showing off his damsel — why else had he brought her? — she was bait, a hook to revitalize the wealth being drained away with the end of the Napoleonic epic and on the verge, inevitably, of vanishing altogether in the confusion of colonialist and wartime smuggling. A man of the storm-tossed sea, the Frenchman, with his daughter, disembarked in a colony in revolt, where the young men of La Guaira, the same as he, sought a port in the storm, an easy road to what was left of Spanish dominion in the Antilles — San Juan, Havana, or back to Caracas, whatever looked most promising, but always an elegant flight, picking one’s way between insurrection here and repression there.
“But you see how things work out,” said old Clemencita. “They pulled the wool over each other’s eyes, and when the biggest know-it-all, the sweetest talker of all the fine gentlemen in La Guaira married the beautiful French Mamasel, she found out that the parents of her ‘young gentleman’ had cut him off because of his rebel doings; as for his rebel friends, he couldn’t count on them for so much as a mass in Lent.”
And where was our young rebel while an exiled Bolívar made his way through Curaçao and Cartagena and risked his hide in Puerto Cabello and Cúcuta? Well, he was discovering that after the news of the winter of 1812 no one would give the time of day for the vouchers and IOU’s of an Empire that was going to end up with salt water on all four sides, young Victor, on St. Helena, an island without snow or birds or monkeys or anything, I swear it.
Among the vultures circling above La Guaira, she tried to make out the three that to the day of his death followed her poor father, so skillful in day-to-day accounts and shady dealings but so stupid when it came to what made the year’s balance come out in the black. There is no one more dangerous than an idealistic merchant, and the logical man to succeed him was the one who hated him most: Francisco Luis de Heredia, who had married Mademoiselle Lange believing she was an heiress, as Lange thought Heredia was an heir. How can Branly believe that this undying rancor that dares to become incarnate in dreams that aren’t its own is anything but a sordid tale of money?
Heredia laughs disagreeably. Doesn’t the Count agree that money can be the source of bitterness, tragedy, and evil; and loving money more than a human being — isn’t that motive for enduring hatred? This courtly young man, handsome like a shiny green olive shedding brine as roses shed dew, said that what revolutions had enabled the father-in-law to do over there, revolutions would enable him to do over here, and he began to ply between Venezuela and Cuba, Haiti and Mexico, sailing contraband up and down the coasts, bringing in and taking out what Spain sent to and demanded from Havana, what arrived in Haiti from Europe for the squabbling, newly emancipated republics of New Spain and New Granada, and what the British purposely let seep through Jamaica.
“British colonies enrich British subjects,” M. Lange would say during his lifetime, “but Spanish colonies enrich only the Spanish crown. Spain isn’t growing rich, only the coffers of her rulers. You will see, it will be the same story with the rulers of these new republics.”
She did not understand any of the things her father said. She played old madrigals on her harpsichord, and she went on playing them after her marriage to Francisco Luis. She never realized, and had she realized would not have understood, that her husband, heir to her dead father, was trafficking first in inanimate luxuries, silver and dyes for English cloth, then, though they say no, the animate luxury of a few souls, slaves in fact if not in deed, workers in short supply here but needed there, blacks from Gran Colombia, Indians from the Yucatan, octoroons from Cuba, aborigines from Tabasco, again for English cloth, always for English cloth, because in this part of the world where everyone dealt in gold and silver no one seemed capable of setting up decent looms or selling a good piece of cloth — what didn’t Francisco Luis de Heredia traffic in, eh? lord of gibbet and blade, cruel and growing older, the older the crueler, thanks to the cheap rum of the cantinas of Río Hacha and Santo Domingo, the crueler the sicker, thanks to the dark evils of the brothels of Maracaibo and Cap-Haïtien, what didn’t he sell to cement his friendship with an indispensable signer of exequaturs here, a repulsive pockmarked notary there, the loutish Señor Coronel, chief officer of the garrison at Puerto Bello, a customs officer in Greytown who never seemed to dip a toe in dirty water but stood with one foot in Nicaragua and one in Costa Rica, and sometimes a Señor Ministro who might be fingering white flesh for the first time, what didn’t he sell?
“When she was no longer of any use to him, he sent her off to the high cliffs overlooking La Guaira; that would be his final gift to her, she loved La Guaira so much: ‘I’ll let you stay right here so you can fill your eyes the livelong day,’ cruel Señor, master of lives and fortunes,” Clemencita recalled. But he was as pocked as the notaries who close their deals in whorehouses and then celebrate with women who wreak their own revenge on any man who celebrates with their wretchedness: you’ll see. Now he was a livid olive, wrinkled and rotten. But what did he care if he had lost his looks; he would go on the way he always had. It had been a long time since anyone came to him because he was handsome, now they came because he was cruel, a swindler, and a good man for pulling chestnuts out of the fire, and here it all came down to getting chestnuts in and out of the fire, and the first thing he learned was that a pot of beans is a pot of beans no matter where you cook it, and in his sphere of influence, Mexico, the Antilles, and the new republics of Terra Firma, someone was always cooking up something, and that’s the God’s truth.