Bolívar was no longer listening to me but to a voice he alone heard that prodded him to plan his departure from the city, even before Mosquera was due to move into the palace. Most nights he stayed awake pacing his room. The virulence of his coughing fits left him breathless and listless, and I became afraid that his days might be coming to an end. Much as the notion terrified me, I came to accept he must go abroad, someplace where he could recover from the ingratitude of the people who owed him their freedom.
So it was that after a long day in which the protesters outside threw stones at the windows of the palace, and he spent the night coughing blood, I said to him, “My general, we must begin to prepare for your departure without delay.” I did not ask him to take me with him. For the first time in many months I saw something like a smile cross his face.
“I want you to come live with me in Italy,” Bolívar said, quelling my fears of being left behind. “But we cannot leave Bogotá together. Once I reach the coast, you can follow me.”
I had been left behind many times before, and we were always able to reunite, so I seized this ray of hope for a future away from political intrigue, a future in which we would grow old together, enjoying the small pleasures of life.
Bolívar all but started counting the minutes until he could leave Bogotá, and then Colombia altogether. However, his travel plans depended, in large measure, upon the sale of his silver mines in Venezuela. Unfortunately, legal troubles delayed the sale to a British syndicate. In the meantime, Bolívar was short of cash. In a feverish desperation, the general sold his silverware, his jewelry, and his finest horses at a fraction of their value to raise funds for the journey.
ONE GRAY AND bleak dawn, just like every dawn of his leaving me behind, he rode out of Bogotá, accompanied by a small group of loyal officers. As I watched his figure fade into the morning fog, a coat of numbness so complete wrapped around me that I felt neither sadness nor pain, just a numbness that said to me that all the coming mornings of my life, when I awoke in my bed and opened my eyes, I would find myself alone. Years and years went by before that numbness wore off, before I began to feel the ice in my veins beginning to thaw.
A few days after his departure, as if to reassure me that he was thinking of me, the general wrote me a letter from Guaduas that, in years to come, I would recite aloud whenever I felt I wanted to give up:
My darling:
I have the pleasure of informing you that my journey goes well, except for the sadness we both feel that we cannot be together. I love you very much, you are my beloved, but I will love you even more if now, more than ever, you behave with prudence. Be careful of your actions; should anything happen to you, it will be too much for me to bear.
Always your most loyal lover,
Bolívar
I put this letter in the little mahogany chest where I kept all the letters he ever wrote me, the letters that were proof of his love for me. I held on to these letters for the rest of my days.
MANY OF BOLÍVAR’S men who had stayed behind were murdered. The exiled conspirators began to return to Bogotá, welcomed as heroes. Whenever I heard about a traitor’s return, I wanted to grab my pistol and shoot the coward. With the help of the few friends I had left, I went back to writing broadsides—denunciations of the corrupt new government—to paste on the city’s walls. Doing that much made me feel that perhaps not all was lost.
I lived each stage of Bolívar’s journey, as he traveled down the Magdalena River to the coast, leaving the mountains behind, and entering the jungles of the tropics. I found consolation in the thought that he was traveling through a place where the air was warm, the nights fragrant and luminous, where the vivid colors of the flowers and the greenness of the trees were a feast for the eyes. He could only be regaining his health in such a realm, closer and closer to the life-giving Atlantic Ocean.
Yet the reports I received about Bolívar’s health dampened my hopes. I heard that he could not climb a flight of stairs without help; that he continued to be his stubborn self, ignoring his doctor’s orders even as he coughed blood; that his temper tantrums had become more violent; that he was often delirious; that he suffered from a debilitating insomnia; that he talked to himself all the time.
Each new report made me want to leave Bogotá without his permission and join his party so I could nurse him back to health, as I had proven so many times I could do. I wrote to him:
Señor, please, I beg you. Let me come to your side and I will make you all the sweets you love so much. I am told you are hardly eating. I worry about you day and night. Not to see you, not to be by your side, is the hardest punishment of all.
My letter went unanswered.
THEN, JUST DAYS before the New Year, a rumor spread through the streets of Bogotá that Simón Bolívar had died in the Quinta of San Pedro Alejandrino on the outskirts of Santa Marta. I told myself this was vicious gossip started by the santanderistas. It was unimaginable that his brilliant light had gone out. A world without the nobility of his vision, life without his selflessness, seemed inconceivable.
I had to swallow the truth when a letter arrived from Péroux de Lacroix, the physician who had tended to Bolívar when his death was imminent. I read de Lacroix’s letter over and over again, hoping to find a hidden message in it, something that would change its terrible last line,
Allow me, my kind señora, to add my tears to yours in this immense loss.
AFTER HIS DEATH, I saw the general as I crossed the streets, as I sat down to a plate of soup, as I lit a cigar, as I brushed my hair, as I blew out the candle on my night table. In my dreams his image was so lifelike, so throbbing with life, so revealing of his soul, that I knew he was appearing to me in this manner so I could engrave him in my mind forever.
I spent days, weeks, months, years, decades, thinking of things I would have done differently. How was it that I was never able to call him Simón, as any woman would address the man she loves? It was always “My general,” or “Señor” when we were alone, and “Bolívar,” “the general,” or “the Liberator” when I mentioned his name in the presence of others. In our moments of passion, I would sometimes grab his member and call it “mi palo santo,” my holy rod, but not once was I ever able to say, “Simón, come here” or “Simón, look”…or even just plain “Simoncito.”
Who had he been, this lover of mine? Man or hero, man or monument, man or chimera? I was unable to separate them. I had loved them all. He had been like a comet traveling through my life with such speed and heat that it was impossible to think of him as a mere mortal. After he died, when I was destitute, nationless, without a family, with the rest of my life devoted to thinking of my days with him, I was not so sure whether loving the multitudes that Bolívar was had been best—perhaps I had loved a mirage, not a man.
LATER IT WAS SAID by the people that I took a mapaná viper, the most poisonous of all Colombian snakes, and tried to get it to bite my breast—as if he had been my Marc Antony and I his Cleopatra; that I roamed the streets of Bogotá at night like a lost soul doing penance, calling out loud his name—the Colombian version of Mad Joan; that I went on shooting rampages, attacking government soldiers who had erected a mocking effigy of Bolívar; that I resisted arrest with my sword. Not one of those stories even approached my desolation, because I myself did not know its depths. It was as if the earth had stopped turning around the sun and I was left suspended in midair, encapsulated in a stationary bubble. Everything I did, everything I tasted and saw, everything I touched reminded me of Bolívar. For a while I would wake from my dreams, smiling, happy, thinking he was still alive, sleeping beside me. The smile vanished as soon as I opened the windows and let the daylight into my bedroom.
A crusade to erode his glory and tarnish his legend soon began. I would like to say that I stayed in Bogotá to fight to restore his name, or because I hoped to see his detractors revealed for the reactionary cowards they were. The truth is, I stayed in a city I despised, surrounded by people I loathed, because I
had no other home to which to return. I wanted to go to Ecuador to join my brother, who was now a general, and who had joined forces with other bolivarianos to continue fighting for the ideals that the Liberator had left us as his legacy.
José María sent word discouraging me from traveling to Ecuador to join him. The man who delivered the news said that my brother and his men were always on the run and that they operated in a terrain so inhospitable that no woman could endure it for long. The messenger, however, made it sound like my brother’s forces were becoming stronger, that he had the support of the people and that it was just a matter of time before the reactionaries were defeated. I began to allow myself to dream of the day when I would join my brother, and then reclaim Catahuango. The idea of growing old around my brother was appealing. At that point all I wanted was to live in peace for however many days I had left on earth.
The situation in Ecuador became only more turbulent and inauspicious. I heard reports that José María and his men were in hiding, and launching attacks from the vicinity of the volcano Imbabura. But among his soldiers there was a traitor who betrayed him. When José María, wearing a disguise and accompanied by his servant, descended to a village to buy provisions, his enemies were waiting for him. Realizing he had fallen into a trap, my brother tried to flee, but his horse tripped and José María was thrown to the ground. His servant, Zaguña, raised his arm, holding a white flag, as a signal of surrender. José María was taken prisoner by a certain Captain Espinosa, in whose custody he remained until a Lieutenant Cárdenas arrived with orders that José María was to be shot without delay. This unspeakable act was carried out. My grief at learning of the cowardly murder of my brother, and my bitterness at seeing my last hope dashed, became unbearable. I shut myself in my house and stopped receiving visitors. All I wanted was to nurse my pain. It was all I had left. Without my bottomless grief, I was nothing.
ROSITA CAMPUSANO, WITH whom I had lost contact after I fled Peru, heard the news of José María’s death and wrote me a long letter from Lima. Earlier, when I had tried to discover her whereabouts from Bogotá, I discovered she no longer lived above the National Library in Lima, but no one could say where she had gone. A consolation was that she could not be dead, otherwise the news would surely have reached my ears. During those years, my affection remained undiminished for the friend with whom I had shared both miserable schooldays and the splendid moment of glory when San Martín liberated Lima.
One afternoon I was embroidering on the patio when Jonotás brought me a letter. I indicated that she should set it on the table, but Jonotás said, “I think this might cheer you up, Manuela.” I immediately recognized Rosita’s familiar handwriting. Rosita’s letter opened with a heartfelt expression of sympathy on José María’s death. She knew I had stayed in Bogotá after the Liberator’s death and had been thinking about contacting me for a long time, she wrote, but for a time her own life had been so full of uncertainty that she didn’t want to burden me with her travails. She was close to destitution, living with a series of friends who could make room for her in a corner of their homes, when news arrived that her father had died, leaving her an inheritance. The amount of money was not sufficiently large to support her comfortably for the rest of her life without working, the letter explained. But it was enough to start a business. So she opened a school for the daughters of families of modest means. It would be an alternative to the punitive education that most Peruvian girls suffered at the hands of the nuns, as we had, and which in any case were open only to girls from rich families. She talked in her letter about a new curriculum she had devised concerned with freeing the imaginations of her students. For example, they all had to learn to play chess, as preparation for the games of logic in life. This made me smile. It was so like Rosita to come up with something as Quixotic as that. There was also an annual competition, she continued, involving hiking up the mountains behind Lima. “Dearest Manuela,” she wrote, “nothing would make me happier than to have you join me at my escuelita as a teacher and partner. You could teach the girls about the history of independence, about General Simón Bolívar, and you would be an example to them of what women can do with their lives. You and Jonotás could live at the school. Nothing would give me greater joy, Manuela, than the two of us spending our last years on this earth living under the same roof.”
I wrote back immediately, expressing my immense happiness at hearing from her and my deep gratitude for her kind invitation to come teach at her school. That she had made a useful life for herself and did not have to depend on anyone’s help was the best news I could imagine. But although her invitation was tempting, I said I was not ready to leave Bogotá yet. Perhaps in the future.
Rosita and I corresponded for years. Later, when I was living in Paita, once in a while she sent me a novel (though by then I had lost my appetite for romantic novels), and I sent her packages with the pineapple, papaya, and guava sweetmeats I made. This went on for many years, until one day a letter came from one of the teachers at Rosita’s school, informing me that my oldest friend had died.
COULD IT BE I stayed in Colombia to learn a lesson from the women of Bogotá, the same women I had ridiculed so many times behind their backs as banal and empty-headed? It was the women of that city who came to my defense when the government repeatedly tried to jail me. It was they who, in a broadside posted on the walls of the main buildings of Bogotá, reminded the citizens and authorities that when I had been the most powerful woman in Gran Colombia, I used my power to help our soldiers.
When the santanderistas’ demands for my punishment continued to escalate, these same women of the Liberal Party drafted an even stronger document, reminding bogotanos that, despite my haughtiness, my provocations, my recklessness, and, above all else, my imprudence, I was not a criminal. “What heroism she has shown! What magnanimity! If Señora Sáenz has written or shouted, ‘Long live Bolívar,’ where is the law that forbids it?” they wrote. It humbled me that the women I had dismissed as marionettes forgave me my arrogance, my hubris, and it moved me to discover that I had been admired by my own sex from afar.
What else might I have misjudged, to what else had I been blind when I had been the empress of the Andes? Had I remained in power, I might well have become unfeeling and unjust, like all the tyrants I abhorred. Perhaps tyranny was no more than the extreme expression of a heart gone cold. And one could become a tyrant even if one worked selflessly to undo the evils of the world.
29
Jonotás
Manuela drank a lot to numb her pain after the Liberator’s death. In time she stopped drinking excessively, but she still seemed to be in a trance, as if her soul had been snatched by her enemies. She had lost everything but us.
“Jonotás, I wish I’d taken my life when I heard the general was dead,” she confided to me. “I don’t know if I have the guts to do it now.”
We slaves learn to be patient. I knew that fate was the ultimate master and liberator, that time was the best healer, that eventually the situation would change and Manuela would rejoin the world of the living. I did not want to die yet, even if sometimes I felt my only reason for living was Manuela. This much I knew: if Manuela died, I would not want to go on without her. What kind of life could I have on my own, even if I were free? After I lost my parents, I had wanted only one thing—to be with Manuela.
STAYING IN BOGOTÁ became too dangerous. We were convinced that sooner or later there would be an attempt on Manuela’s life. Except for the few jewels she had not sold, Manuela was virtually indigent. So she rented a casita in Fucha, a village outside the city. There the three of us spent our time embroidering tablecloths, sheets, pillow covers, and ladies’ handkerchiefs to support ourselves. Natán and I sold these items in the market, or going door to door.
Around this time I began to dress as a man, at first because men’s clothes were cheaper, then because wearing men’s clothes made me feel like I could protect Manuela better than I could as a mere slave woman. I became so use
d to wearing pants and shirts that I took all my dresses to the market and sold them, every one. I kept my hair bushy, out of what little female vanity I had left. One day an irresistible urge came over me and I took a pair of scissors and cut my hair off. Not content with the way it looked shorn, I went to see a barber and told him I was sick and tired of getting lice and wanted my head shaved.
When I returned home, Manuela laughed and commented, “You look good, Jonotás.” From then on, once a week I sat on the floor at her feet and she shaved my head. After a while, people began to forget that I was a woman and addressed me as “muchacho,” if they were prejudiced; or as “señor,” if it was another Negro talking to me; and years later, in my old age in Paita, as “viejo.” I never corrected them.
I made up my mind that I would stay with Manuela, as long as she wanted me by her side. Natán, on the other hand, was full of resentment that she could not join Mariano in Lima.
She concealed this from Manuela, but not from me. Natán was a noble creature, enough that she felt it was her duty to stay with Manuela so long as Manuela’s future was so uncertain. But she was biding her time until the right moment came along when she could ask again for her freedom to start a family of her own. I wanted this for Natán, too, but I wondered how and when her freedom would arrive.
WE HAD BEEN LIVING for three years in Fucha when in early December, 1833, news reached us that Santander had returned to Bogotá. He had returned in triumph, which was devastating to Manuela. To see the Liberator’s enemy return as Colombia’s savior was too painful an insult to bear. For days, she sat on her chair on the patio, smoking cigars and staring at the mountains and tracking the journey of the clouds. She only spoke to us to answer a question.
Our Lives Are the Rivers Page 23