García Márquez portrays with masterful skill the figure of Simón Bolívar, who transformed the destiny of America.
Hailed by the people as Liberator, the target of numerous political and military conspiracies, a romantic hero and even a libertine for his detractors and supporters, an upright and abandoned idealist who contemplates the ruins of his dream of unity of the American peoples, after independence from Spanish rule, Simón Bolívar - ill, with a small entourage - sets out on what will be his final journey. He leaves Bogotá to follow the course of the Magdalena River. His journey will be his last in a double sense: it provides him with opportunities to consider the steps he has taken in his eventful life and, at the same time, the seriousness of his illnesses prepares him for his encounter with death in several months.
Gabriel García Márquez's masterful pulse recounts, down to the smallest details, the immense adventure that, driven by the will of Bolívar, transformed the destiny of America.
«Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating in the purifying waters of the bathtub, naked and with his eyes open, and thought he had drowned. He knew that this was one of his many ways of meditating, but the state of ecstasy in which he lay adrift seemed like that of someone who was no longer of this world. He did not dare to approach him, but called him in a dull voice in accordance with the order to wake him before five in order to travel with the first light.»
