Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  “Don’t worry,” he comforted her, “nothing will happen.” Despite the few guards stationed around the palace that night—a fact she had seen for herself as she wended her way there—Bolívar was unpreoccupied. Colonel Guerra had assured him that an entire garrison was standing by should the slightest trouble emerge. The Liberator’s only protection at that moment was the sword and the pistol that rested in the next room, sheathed and holstered, on the bureau.

  He asked Manuela to read to him while he soaked in the tub, thinking that words might soothe his misery. When he climbed into bed shortly thereafter, he fell into a heavy, torpid sleep, as did his exhausted mistress. But at some point near midnight, she was brought wide awake by the raucous barking of dogs. Bolívar’s mastiffs were yawping wildly in the courtyard. She heard a few dull thuds, as if something were being struck, cut down, and then the sound of men’s voices, ringing through the dark.

  Alert to the possibility of danger, she roused Bolívar from deep sleep. His first instinct was to grab his weapons and go, in his nightshirt, to the door. She stopped him and pleaded with him to get dressed, which he did calmly and quickly. But when he looked around for shoes, there were none. His only pair of boots had been taken away to be polished. In desperation, Manuela pressed her galoshes on him and, somehow, he was able to squeeze into them. “Now what?” he said, taking up his pistol and sword. “Shall we brave the storm?”

  Thinking fast—for the clamor was only growing as the intruders burst through the hallways—she pointed to the window. She reminded him that only days before he had told Pepe París it would make a perfect getaway. Bolívar had said it in jest, but now with marauders at the door, pounding their fists and shouting, he saw how right he had been. The window opened onto the street—it was an easy jump to the cobblestones. Manuela peered out to see if the way was clear, and made him wait a few seconds until it was. Just as he leapt through the casement into the night, his assailants began to force an entry.

  Manuela took up her sword and unbolted the latch with as much calm as she could muster. She could hear the yelling on the other side: “Long live liberty!” “Death to the tyrant!” And then she flung wide the door.

  “There appeared in the doorway,” González later recounted, “a strikingly beautiful woman, sword in hand, who, with admirable presence of mind and very courteously, asked us what we wanted.”

  “Bolívar!”

  “He’s not here,” Manuela answered. “See for yourselves.” Horment and the others pushed past her, looking for Bolívar. Until then, they had had little trouble moving toward their target, and they wanted none now. Carujo and his sharpshooters had shot a guard and slit the throats of a number of sentries on their way through the palace gates, and then they had sped away to take on the Vargas battalion, Bolívar’s most faithful unit, while the armed civilians rushed inside. Horment, González, and the others had raced up the few steps toward the Liberator’s quarters on the mezzanine. They had wounded Ibarra, who, hearing the din, had run from his bed, disheveled and febrile but carrying a sword.

  The conspirators had daggers in hand, pistols in holsters strapped to their chests. Manuela could see that they meant business. Carrying lanterns aloft, they pushed past her and inspected the rooms, feeling the bed to see if it was still warm. But Bolívar was nowhere to be found. Frustrated, they seized Manuela by the arm and questioned her gruffly, demanding to know where he had gone. She responded that he was in the council rooms, down the hall. It was the only plausible excuse that sprang to mind. When one of the men shouted that a window was gaping, Manuela insisted that she had just opened it herself. They believed her; they couldn’t imagine that Carujo’s soldiers would leave that side of the street unattended. She led them this way and that down the circuitous hallways, trying to throw them off track and hoping to buy Bolívar precious time. When at last they had been led to every floor of the palace and back again, they suspected that she was toying with them. She crossed her arms, standing her ground against the lot of them. “He’s safe!” she admitted finally. “I helped him flee! So kill me!” They flung her to the floor, kicked her head, and began beating her with their swords, but González pulled them off. “I didn’t come here to fight women,” he said. They vanished down the hall as quickly as they had come, just as cannon fire exploded outside: Carujo’s gunners were attacking the Vargas regiment. As Manuela staggered back to the room, she heard the sharp clatter of boots outside. Glancing out into the moonlight, she made out Bolívar’s aide Ferguson, sprinting back from the barrack hospital. She tried to warn him, but he refused to halt. “What’s going on?” Ferguson cried when he saw his fellow colonel Carujo, wielding a gun, shouting orders. Carujo killed him with a single shot before he could reach the door.

  As Bolívar lit on the cobblestone street beyond the bedroom window, he saw his pastry cook scurrying from the palace. Together, they ran as far as they could, along the river, taking refuge under a dank bridge as Bogotá came to life with shouts, bustle, and gunfire. For three hours, they shivered in the dark, listening to the clatter of horse hooves overhead, the staccato of steel-studded boots on stone, the cries of frightened citizens as they flung open and slammed shut their windows. The conspirators had freed Padilla from the barrack prison—killing his jailer in the process—and the black general staggered into the moonlit night with no idea that a coup was afoot. Street by street, Bolívar’s faithful Vargas battalion, led by Córdova and Urdaneta, worked at beating back the conspirators, taking some prisoner, chasing others until they scattered, never to be found. Sometime after the bell tower struck two, the uproar finally began to die down. Bolívar’s fever had mounted in the humid mountain chill, but he couldn’t risk coming out just yet. He sent the cook out to learn what he could from the barracks. The man came back with good news: the army had remained loyal to Bolívar; the citizens were outraged; the conspirators had vanished into the night. When General Herrán came riding down the street to cries of “Viva, Bolívar!” the Liberator knew, at last, that he might venture out and take measure of the situation.

  Soaked to the bone, slathered in mud, hardly able to speak, he was taken to the main plaza, where he was received with boundless elation. Urdaneta, Castillo, París, Córdova, and every last soldier on the square rushed to embrace him, their eyes glistening with tears. He was near delirious, on the verge of fainting, but told them, “Here I am, dying of grief, and you’re trying to kill me with joy.”

  The grief was indeed palpable. He was humiliated, shaken. Until then, he had blithely dismissed all rumors of danger as the gibberish of a harmless fringe. He had never imagined that soldiers in his own army—his “patriots”—would raise swords against him. It was a shattering revelation, especially when he learned that his house had become a killing field, his mistress so battered she could hardly walk. Indeed, something in Bolívar died during that predawn vigil under the bridge—it was as if his heart were broken, his spirit mortally wounded. He had survived two assassination attempts before, but this one would torment him for the rest of his life.

  By four in the morning, he was back in the palace, thanking Manuela for her nimbleness of mind and courage. “You are the Liberatrix of the Liberator,” he told her tenderly. Again and again, he asked her to recount the details as they unfolded, responding gloomily every time, “I don’t want to hear any more.” But then he would toss and turn until he sat up and asked her to tell it all over again.

  Bolívar’s first impulse when he met with his ministers later that morning was to resign the presidency and pardon the conspirators. He didn’t even want to hear who his attackers were. “My heart is in pieces,” he told his confidants. He admitted to Castillo that he was profoundly saddened and wanted nothing so much as to leave the country. He added that he preferred to die rather than live; he was simply carrying on for the glory of the republic. With that, Castillo could see that the man before him was gravely ill. He advised him to think closely about the ramifications. If he did as he said, Bolívar would
signal to the world that the anger of a very few was more important than the welfare of many; that Colombia’s Liberator would rather resign than fight for his republic’s glory.

  Castillo’s counsel was persuasive. By the next day, Bolívar’s officers had put Santander, Guerra, Padilla, Horment, and Carujo under arrest. They rounded up suspects, began a full investigation of the conspirators. One by one, the people of Bogotá turned them in. Colonel Guerra, who had spent the evening playing cards with Castillo, appeared at the palace as if it were just another day; as if he had never been part of the plot. He was seized and taken off to prison. General Urdaneta—Bolívar’s loyal combatant since the Admirable Campaign and Santander’s most bitter enemy—was given charge of dispensing justice. Within a month, Bolívar wrote to tell Sucre that he was certain his former vice president was the brain behind the assassins’ scheme. “I am crushing the aborted conspiracy,” he said. “Every accomplice will be punished, one way or another. Santander is the highest-ranking among them, but he is also the most fortunate. My generosity protects him.”

  In the end, of the fifty-nine men identified as principal actors, eight were acquitted for one reason or another, largely because they were willing to testify against the rest. Fourteen were condemned to death and executed outright, among them Guerra, Horment, and Padilla. Facing the firing squad, General Padilla—who was certainly a rebel, but by no means an assassin—refused to wear a blindfold and, like Piar, who had been executed so controversially a decade before, was unapologetic to the finish, shouting “Cowards!” before he succumbed to gunshot. Other conspirators either escaped or were imprisoned for only a short while. Carujo and González, the true ringleaders, saved their necks via one machination or another; González (married to the coveted Bernardina) swore to tell Urdaneta and the judges everything he knew. Santander, who was dragged through the courts and from prison to dungeon, was issued a death sentence, but Bolívar munificently commuted it to banishment.

  In spite of his decision to let the courts punish the aggressors, the Liberator didn’t have the stomach for all-out revenge. “I’ve got conspiracy up to the eyeballs,” he said, in exasperation. Manuela later insisted that he was the soul of clemency: he had forbidden the courts to force her to testify and be part of the bloodletting; he had asked Manuela to visit Padilla in his prison cell and console him; he had looked the other way when she harbored fugitives in her house. She had never forgotten that, in the heat of the moment—when she was defenseless, her head to the floor—Florentino González had prevented his goons from killing her. If culprits were inexplicably freed and pardoned, it was because human circumstances such as these prompted Bolívar’s mercy.

  If Bolívar had not leapt from his bedroom window on that moonstruck night, he might have been a dead man and the country in bloody ruin. A mistress and a pastry cook had turned the tide of history. A pair of galoshes had saved the day. And yet it is fair to say that the assassins accomplished what they wanted. The Liberator was never the same again. His body and spirit slipped into a fatal spiral. A death knell began to sound.

  CHAPTER 17

  Plowing the Sea

  No one achieves greatness with impunity: No one escapes the fangs of envy along the way.

  —Simón Bolívar

  In the days that followed, Bolívar’s health plunged to a dangerously fragile state. Apart from the heartbreak of the attempted assassination, there was the physical strain: squatting under a bridge for three hours in the cold damp of night would have taxed a healthier man, and he had been racked by fever to begin with. The ordeal profoundly affected his lungs, which were teeming with undiagnosed tuberculosis; he withdrew to La Quinta to convalesce. Even as Manuela’s bruises faded and she began to bustle about the house, managing affairs, Bolívar remained weak, and the frailty showed.

  He decided to stay on at La Quinta, for he felt more secure in that hillside redoubt, and it was there that visitors were obliged to call. The newly appointed ambassador from Paris, Auguste Le Moyne, who arrived three months after the foiled conspiracy, made his way up the hill to present his credentials to the president. Le Moyne had endured a rough, two-month voyage up the Magdalena in a canoe propelled by twelve near-naked men—the ambassador had seen his share of crocodiles, drunken locals, riotously colored parrots—but he was never so struck by those sights as he was by the figure before him now:

  We arrived at la Quinta and were received by Manuela Sáenz. . . . Moments later there appeared a man in a miserable state, with a long, jaundiced face, a cotton cap on his head, wrapped in a robe, and his legs all but lost in a pair of wide flannel trousers. At first mention of his health: “Ay!” he said, pointing to his emaciated arms, “it isn’t nature that has reduced me to this, but the pain gnawing at my heart. My fellow citizens couldn’t kill me with daggers, so they are trying to kill me with ingratitude. When I cease to exist, those hotheads will devour each other like a pack of wolves, and what I erected with superhuman effort will drown in the muck of rebellion.

  As he dogged ahead, trying to recover some semblance of stability, he was painted by a soldier from the glory days of Boyacá. Although the artist strove to give him a distinguished bearing, he couldn’t help but record the specter: the thin hair, sunken cheeks, the eyes that lacked all radiance. No longer was the Liberator the spirited warrior of the triumphalist canvases of La Paz and Lima. His muscles had withered. His skin was slack; his face, dug with furrows. The jaw—once fine and strong—had grown weak with a thousand doubts. The bold stance had become tentative.

  Bolívar agonized over the punishment to be meted out to the conspirators, changing his mind constantly as to whether sentences should be harsh or merciful. He was all too willing to be led in this, listening in turns to Sucre, Manuela, and Santander’s mistress, Nicolasa Ibañez, who pleaded for mercy on Santander’s behalf. Urdaneta’s jury had found the vice president indisputably guilty. According to them, Santander had known about the plot, given the conspirators advice, and never once made an attempt to notify the authorities. But as much as the courts looked for evidence that linked him to the crime, they found none. Bolívar was persuaded Santander was at the bottom of it, but he also worried about the ramifications of executing so popular and eminent a man. In the end, he listened to his council of ministers, who recommended leniency. Bolívar commuted the sentence to banishment and Santander was shipped off to await it in a fetid cell in the dungeons of Cartagena. Bolívar couldn’t help worrying about that, too. Was it right to grant clemency to a white man who had dealt with traitors when a black man—Padilla—had been executed for the same crime? Would Colombia ever forgive its Liberator for putting to death its greatest black heroes: Padilla and Piar? He confided to a friend that the blood of so many had come to haunt him.

  Bolívar’s intense preoccupation with justice now colored all his decisions. He hesitated, wavered. He was tormented by the fact that his enemies called themselves “liberals” and arrogated to themselves such concepts as “freedom” and “justice” when he had invoked precisely those words at every step of the revolution. Hadn’t he promised equality, freedom, the rights of man? Hadn’t he delivered independence? But in peace it all seemed a carousel of empty rhetoric. The meaning of “liberal” had been twisted, used to hostile ends, and then sent around to plague him. He grew more and more irritated with people who urged him to be his old self, renew his energies; couldn’t they see he was mortally tired, that his energies were spent? As one historian put it: it was during those days of unrelieved anguish—realizing his failures as a politician—that he reached a peak of personal greatness. He understood now with rare lucidity what it meant to hold unlimited power; he knew, too, that a ruler should be loath to use it. “Beware the nation in which one man rules,” he had told his fellow patriots, “for it is a nation of slaves.” He hadn’t meant to find himself in that position. He had assumed dictatorial power because the country was in shambles and he needed to get things done; he had set the date of the constituent congr
ess—January 2, 1830—as the day he would surrender it. But the night of September 25 had shown him just how unrealistic his goals had been, how bitter the animus against him. So it was that the most radical and impetuous of world revolutionaries became filled with a mortal hesitancy. Bolívar had become a man of qualms; he could hardly budge; and he saw the tragedy of it clearly.

  As usual, it was his generals and friends who pressed him on. They knew that wherever Bolívar went, some semblance of order would follow; and wherever the man was not was bound to fall into disrepair. It now became crucial to prop him up, keep him in power, for he seemed the only certainty in an increasingly uncertain republic. Every political advance, every institution, every step in world recognition had been achieved by virtue of the Liberator’s stature. Santander himself had said it: “You are the anchor of all our hopes; the essence of our vitality. . . . Only you can save us in these perilous times.” As O’Leary so aptly put it: people believed that Bolívar could calm troubles by his very presence, by “the magic of his prestige.”

  No one knew more than Bolívar how imperfect the work had been. Independence had been achieved—enlightened forms of government considered—and yet the victors had emerged with no singleness of purpose, no spirit of collegiality. Warlords still wanted to rule their little fiefdoms, their undersized dreams a match for undersized abilities. It was as true in Bolivia as it was in Venezuela: Notions of a larger union seemed pompous, foreign, vaguely threatening. The colonies were dead, but the colonial mentality was very much alive. The new republics were as insular and xenophobic as Spain had encouraged its American satellites to be. Venezuelans saw Peruvians as arrogant royalists. Coastal dwellers saw mountain dwellers as benighted Indians. Southerners saw northerners as outlandish Negroes. “Goodbye, sambo!” someone yelled as General Sucre pulled out of La Paz. No one seemed to want the dream of an amalgamated America.