Marquez 2 (Span 312)

What is the final portrait of Latin America’s greatest military and political figure? What does Marquez leave the reader with? Certainly it is one failure, as his death coincides with the outbreak of war among the various unitarian and nationalist factions of the formerly united countries of Gran Columbia. This, however, is not in-and-of-itself an indictment of Bolivar. Two centuries later, nobody has come closer to achieving his dream or even creating lasting stability in the countries that formerly made up his short-lived nation. More than anything we are left with the portrait of a man whose ambitions could not overcome his decaying body or quite realize the political reality of a truly unified Gran Columbia.

Marquez’s Bolivar seems to simultaneously accept the limitations of physical reality and yet reject them. “He could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most” (p.135), and for this reason he conspired and inspired towards his pan-American ends until the very end, while simultaneously claiming that “I don’t exist” (p.137). The general knew that his body was failing him; the same body that had escaped from so many battles and assassination plots unharmed. He knew that death would find him before he could finish a project that only he could have started. Undoubtedly the general knew that his project would crumble in the power vacuum he had left, especially after, General Sucre, his only worthy heir, shuns power and is then assassinated. On his deathbed, despite of his pessimistic (realistic?) and bitter pronouncements that he has uttered over the previous 250 pages he finds himself “shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line.” Is this surprising? I don't think so.

Only a person of incredible resolve and with infinite capacity for dreaming (if not illusion) could have undertaken Bolivar’s project. His capacity to reject Manuela and life-long companionship; to take interest in the suffering of strangers when he was in his last painful days; to love strange and dirty dogs when he had lived in the lap of luxury on so many occasions; to ride a horse when he could barely sit-up. These are all evidence of a of a supernaturally willed and compassionate individual. In the end it was as though neither his body nor his newly created nation was made of the same exceptional material as his will, and thus both broke and perished.