A-PDF Merger DEMO : Purchase from www.A-PDF.com to remove the watermark 2 Our Lives Are the Rivers a n o v e l 3 jaime manrique for josefina folgoso, in memoriam My Splendors are Menagerie— But their Competeless Show Will entertain the Centuries When I, am long ago, An Island in dishonored Grass— Whom none but Beetles know. emily dickinson contents Epigraph iv b o o k o n e The Spaniard’s Daughter 1 b o o k t wo An Adulterous Woman 113 b o o k t h r e e Bolívar’s Liberator 173 b o o k f o u r The Years by the Sea 319 Acknowledgments Other Books by Jaime Manrique after the empire In the first two hundred years following Christo- pher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the Spanish Em- pire spread so widely over the confines of the earth that it was said the sun never set on it. But by the 1820s, after a series of corrupt monarchs, Spain had lost most of its Latin American territories and had entered a period of chaos and irreversible decline. Under the leadership of Venezuelan-born General Simón Bolívar, known as the Liberator, five South American na- tions—Colombia (which back then was known as Nueva Granada and included present-day Panama), Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia—had achieved their independence af- ter decades of bloody warfare. Bolívar had a dream of uniting these five countries to create one great and powerful nation named Gran Colombia. book o n e 3 The Spaniard’s Daughter