by Arana, Marie
Days later, when President Mosquera was finally expected to enter Bogotá, Manuela decided to watch from her perch on her second-floor balcony. It was a comfortable enough place to pass the time, and she had often gone there to sit and sew. As she settled into her chair, she could see that a great many people had streamed into the public spaces. A good crowd of revelers had gathered under her balcony. They were young, loud, obstreperous—eager to welcome the new head of state. But before long, they were shouting expressions that hardly corresponded to the occasion: “Down with despots! Down with tyranny!”—aimed clearly at Manuela’s house. The slogans, well known by now, were code for Bolívar, meant to offend. A mounting fury rose in Manuela. But the parade had begun in earnest now, and just as President Mosquera came into view, a string of fireworks pealed down the street to announce him. Music, cheering, and a resounding din rocked the air. Whether or not it was intentional, a few sputtering flares veered dangerously close to her balcony. They seemed aimed straight at her, and they caused her no shortage of alarm. She shot out of her chair. “You think that man is president?” she yelled at them fiercely. “Wrong! He is no president! The real one is Bolívar, liberator of nations!”
Soon, she was in an angry exchange. Fists punched the air, fingers jabbed in opposing directions; within moments her servants appeared on the balcony, lit firecrackers in hand, ready to defend their mistress. They lobbed their ammunition into the throng, scattering people in terror. Outraged, the men below started hurling rocks. Then one of her male servants ran into the street, waving a gun. Someone managed to wrench it away, but not before Manuela and Jonatás had dashed downstairs, grabbed their rifles, and burst through the doors to join him. Flailing the air with weapons, they tried to push the angry crowd from the house. A tragedy might have followed had it not been for General Mariano París, a close friend of Bolívar’s, who rode back from the president’s parade and put a quick end to it all.
The government understood that it had a formidable foe in the Liberator’s mistress. It fought back with steely resolve, describing her as ravenously promiscuous, a voluptuary who took on lovers even as Bolívar was making his way to exile. She was no longer the valiant Liberatrix, who stood fast against assassins. They mocked her eccentricities, her manly poses, her Quito accent. Before the brawl, the government had harassed her for little more than shouting “Viva Bolívar!” Now they called her impertinence treason and made it a matter of state. They did so flagrantly, without any interference from President Mosquera or Vice President Caicedo, the very men Bolívar had counted on to protect her. Both president and vice president, however, had fallen under the thrall of Santander’s liberals. Days after Mosquera arrived in Bogotá, he appointed Bolívar’s most ardent critics—the sharp-tongued journalist Vicente Azuero and the convicted conspirator Pedro Carujo—to top positions in his government. There was a reason: he owed his election to their party. Mosquera and Caicedo were decent men, trusted by both factions, but they soon proved to be weak executives. When pressed to put Santander’s liberals in high positions, they acquiesced. When those liberals gave orders to punish Manuela, they looked the other way. Mosquera had become the very antithesis of the leader Bolívar had expected him to be: soft, spineless—scared of his own shadow, doing everyone else’s bidding. “My hero has turned into a pumpkin,” Bolívar would later say.
In time, the pressures on Manuela grew intolerable. The regime tried to seize Bolívar’s archives, but she fought it fiercely. “In answer to your demands, let me just say that I have absolutely nothing in my possession that belongs to the government,” she wrote back. “What I do have is the personal property of His Excellency, the Liberator. . . . I will not surrender one sheet of paper, one book, unless you can produce a ruling that proves he is in breach of the law.”
Little by little, she meant to break the back of the liberals and stage a comeback for Bolívar. It was why she had stayed in the capital in the first place. She courted the regiments with beer and cigars; she plastered the capital’s walls with propaganda; she wrote letters to editors, insisting that she was the victim of a small, pernicious cabal. She firmly believed that the Colombian people were overwhelmingly for Bolívar, that they weren’t being allowed to have their say. But before she could make much headway, the government moved to destroy her. Azuero, now the minister of the interior, initiated a formal investigation into her wanton and “scandalous comportment.” The mayor of Bogotá let it be known that he would seek her imprisonment. She received so many death threats that her friends finally persuaded her to leave the capital. What had happened to Sucre, they argued, could happen to her. In mid-August, wearily Sáenz packed up her possessions, mounted her horse, and left Bogotá, riding west toward the Magdalena River.
But the winds of change were such that within two weeks, the entire political climate of Colombia had reversed. The rich conservatives of Bogotá, aghast at their flagrantly inept government, began making demands: They wanted General Urdaneta reinstated as minister of war, the journalist Azuero removed as minister of the interior; they wanted all who had been implicated in the attempt on Bolívar’s life ousted from office; they insisted on fewer liberal appointments, more balance, more conservatives in high command. The Church was firmly on their side, as was the military. It was evident to all that Mosquera had made a great error in handing so much power to Bolívar’s enemies. The government was unbalanced, and the people felt marginalized, ignored. By the time a band of angry Bolívarian rebels overcame government forces in a skirmish outside the capital, the tide had begun to turn. Days later, Mosquera left Bogotá, claiming he was unwell; on September 5, he and Caicedo were deposed. General Urdaneta, who had been behind the coup all along, wasted no time. He seized power, warily proclaiming victory for Bolívar, although he had opposed the Liberator only months before. Like so many others, Urdaneta was using Bolívar’s glory for his own purposes. Cagily, with little to lose, he promised to rule for the time being, only until the Liberator returned.
Bolívar was long past returning. Broken by Sucre’s assassination, stung by ingratitude, he had slipped into the mortal grip of his affliction. Manuela did not know this. She believed the rumors of his decline had been lies, advanced by enemies. “The Liberator is immortal,” she crowed, and, as far as she was concerned, it was so. She sent one of her friends to Cartagena to confirm it. Her lover had been ill before—in Peru, in Guayaquil—and he had always sprung back to win wars, liberate nations, dance. She was convinced he would flourish once more when he reached England, or wherever he decided to go. But by September 25, the second anniversary of the assassination attempt, Bolívar had become a spectral shadow. From time to time, vestiges of the old Liberator would emerge, quixotic, abiding, flickering in the gloom, but they quickly receded with the bleak march of his disease.
In October, buoyed momentarily by a surge of popular support, he claimed he would march south with three thousand troops—“If they offer me an army, I’ll accept. If they send me to Venezuela, I’ll go.” But he admitted later that he had said so only to boost his supporters. When General Urdaneta sent a delegation to request that he come to Bogotá and take command, Bolívar responded with an unequivocal no. The delegation could see why: he was deathly sick; his only goal seemed to be to get well enough to travel. He told friends that he was largely in the dark—too exhausted, too weak to think.
It was only partially so. His body may have been wasted, but his mind was in perfect order. He knew he didn’t want any part of this new, makeshift Colombia. In Urdaneta’s wild caprices, in Páez’s “crazy fandango,” Bolívar recognized the chaos he had always feared for Latin America. “I cannot live between rebels and assassins,” he confided. “I refuse to be honored by swine, cannot take comfort in empty victories.” For him Urdaneta’s rebellion was illegitimate—as illegal as any act by Córdova, Piar, or Páez—even if it promised Bolívar a return to glory. Where was the legal process? Where was the orderly democratic vote? He could not accept power on the
basis of rank mutiny. He felt he had been diminished enough already in the public eye—by Santander’s intrigues, by Páez’s vicissitudes, by his own party’s ill-advised project to crown him king—“and now here they are, wanting to strip me of my personal honor, reduce me to an enemy of the state.” They were asking Bolívar to take power at any cost. It was too much.
“Mosquera is the legitimate president,” he wrote to Urdaneta. “That is the law. . . . I have no right to his title. Nor has he ceded it.” To a confidant, he spoke with emphatic pessimism: “I no longer have a fatherland for which to sacrifice my life.” He believed with all his heart that the dogs of anarchy were running loose now. He had always been animated by adversity, willing to try extreme measures of constitutional law if they could save the country. But why would he want to impose his will on an effort that was already lost? “Believe me,” he wrote, in a feverish spurt of epistolary energy, “I’ve never looked on insurrections kindly; I’ve even come, at this late stage, to deplore the one we mounted against Spain. . . . I don’t see much good coming for our country.”
It was during this time that he received a letter from General Lafayette, the revolutionary hero now living on a magnificent estate outside Paris. Bolívar had treasured his correspondence with Lafayette, just as he had treasured warm letters from Bishop de Pradt, or the one from George Washington’s family that acknowledged Bolívar as “the Washington of the South.” Lafayette was deeply respectful, almost adoring in his praise. As far as he was concerned, Bolívar had accomplished more than Washington; he had freed his people in far more difficult circumstances. North America’s revolutionaries had been uniformly white, after all; and their values had been shared ideals, their faith overwhelmingly Protestant. In South America, on the other hand, Bolívar had cobbled liberty from a gallimaufry of peoples and races; and he had done so by “sheer dint of talent, tenacity, and valor.” The tribute to the Liberator was crisp, cordial, and bighearted, but Lafayette dealt him two lasting wounds in its delivery: he made it clear that the lifetime presidency Bolívar had proposed in the Bolivian constitution did not square with democratic principle; and he urged Bolívar to forgive, bring home, and join forces with Santander. The message was tidy, straightforward. And it was more than a dying man could bear.
“I am old, sick, tired, disillusioned, besieged, maligned, and badly paid,” he protested to a friend. “And I ask for nothing more than a good rest and the preservation of my honor. Alas, I don’t think I will ever find either.”
IN FORTY-SEVEN YEARS OF LIFE—traversing more than 75,000 miles of hard terrain—Bolívar had been the essence of vigor. He had rarely experienced physical weakness, much less the spiritual anguish that so often accompanies it. He had truly been “Iron Ass”: hale, able to outrun and outride far younger soldiers, blessed with a seemingly inexhaustible stamina. Certainly, he had experienced bouts of exhaustion in his time, but drastic circumstances had helped explain them: feats in high altitudes, freezing promontories, waist-high floods, jungle swelter. It seemed there was no adversity he could not surmount. Fussy about hygiene, abstemious, he was free of debilitating vices, neither a smoker nor a drinker. He was able to function with a minimum of rest. As the years wore on and he went from battlefield to battlefield, he was crimped by a touch of this and that: malaria, dysentery, punishing hemorrhoids that followed long campaigns on a horse. But these were rare setbacks in an otherwise vigorous constitution. He had always been war-ready, prepared for hardship, remarkably fit, even if he couldn’t always explain why.
To find himself so suddenly helpless—unable to overcome simple fatigue, unable to ride or walk for even a short distance—was disorienting. By October, it was clear that he was too incapacitated to do more than dictate letters from bed. He had shooting pains in his abdomen, an angry cough, and his appetite had dwindled emphatically. He asked for a little dry sherry to spur it, a fresh vegetable perhaps, but when presented with food, he lost all interest. The heat of Cartagena was debilitating, its effect on his ills so pronounced that his entourage decided to move him inland to Barranquilla, where the air seemed slightly more salubrious. But any relief he gained from the move was soon dwarfed by a passel of different discomforts. In Barranquilla, he was swaddled in wool from head to toe, fighting off chills. Soon, he was longing for a quick voyage at sea, convinced that the Caribbean air would do him good, that a little nausea from a rocking ship might serve as a welcome purgative. But all the while, he adamantly refused medicines, took no palliatives; even the most acute pain could not persuade him to do otherwise. There was no doctor whose opinion he trusted. “I’ve deteriorated to such a degree,” he wrote Urdaneta, “that I’ve come to believe I’m dying. . . . You would find me absolutely unrecognizable.”
Indeed he was dangerously emaciated, a living skeleton, so wisplike that he could hardly stand. “Today, I had a bad fall,” he wrote in early November. “I toppled half-dead from my feet for no reason. Fortunately, it turned out to be no more than a passing vertigo, although it left me quite confused. All of which proves how feeble I am.” Climbing a few steps had become an arduous undertaking. Crossing a large room had become an impossible task. His symptoms so shocked and horrified him that he fretted over each, an anxious hypochondriac, charting the evidence of his own decline. He had barely enough strength to sit and play cards; he was ill-humored, slept badly. When he ate, he took no more than a few bites—a little tapioca, a spoonful of lentils—and so he was growing weaker by the day. “I’m very, very alarmed by his physical state,” his close aide, Belford Wilson, reported. “There is no way this man can participate in public office; he is physically and psychologically impaired.”
But for all the afflictions that gripped his body and spirit, his mind was sharp. He received visitors from Venezuela, where Páez’s bid for power had spun into open bedlam; he heard out Granadans who wanted him back in Bogotá. He pleaded with Colombians to make peace with their enemies. He warned rebels that they could bring ruin on America. He told Justo Briceño, the rebel governor of an outlying province, that if he didn’t reconcile with Urdaneta, the republic would tumble like a house of cards. “Believe me,” he said in no uncertain terms, “you two will end up like Páez and Santander, whose rift caused my downfall and wreaked havoc on us all.” To Urdaneta, he spoke as plainly: “Building one good accord is better than winning a thousand arguments. I have no doubt that my inability to make peace with Santander has been our undoing.” It was as if—in that rapidly waning body—he was reaching a higher plane. He seemed to see his failures all too clearly: “Many generals,” he counseled, “know how to win wars, but too few know what to do with their victories.” He worried openly about the legitimacy of his successor and told Urdaneta that until he held an election he was no more than a tin-pot usurper. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they kill you,” he said, “and then plunge into total anarchy. If they do, it will be because you didn’t obey the laws.” He instructed Urdaneta to burn those letters as soon as he read them; they were too candid, too disapproving; he didn’t want his words twisted against Urdaneta after he was dead and gone. No one in that roiling stew of ambition could count on holding power for long.
To General Flores, the new president of Ecuador, his message was just as dire: “Avenge Sucre’s murder,” he advised Flores, for it was the vilest crime America had ever known, “then get out while you can.” In a passage that has become a classic in the Bolívarian canon, he went on to list what two decades of rule had taught him:
1. America is ungovernable; 2. he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea; 3. all one can do in America is leave it; 4. the country is bound to fall into unimaginable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color; 5. once we are devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one—not even the Europeans—will want to subjugate us; 6. and, finally, if mankind could revert to its primitive state, it would be here in America, in her final hour.
He was n
ever so lucid, and yet he was not entirely sane. Like a Shakespearean king wandering through the wreckage, he couldn’t help but issue commands to his faraway generals, warn them of the collapse to come. For all his pessimism about Colombia, however, he believed, beyond all evidence to the contrary, that his sickness was curable, that it was only a matter of time before he would walk away from it all. When he did, he would sail for the blue mountains of Jamaica. Then on to London, with Manuela.
One of his most loyal supporters, General Mariano Montilla, who was then in command of the northwestern coast of Colombia, soon took interest in his condition. When Bolívar wrote to him asking for help in procuring a few supplies, Montilla responded by doing far more. He hired a brig to ferry Bolívar to Santa Marta, a quiet enclave in a Caribbean cove just fifty miles east of Barranquilla. The voyage would be swift, easy, precisely the cathartic Bolívar had in mind. But Montilla did not stop there. He found Bolívar a doctor of sorts, a Frenchman who had served as a medic in Napoleon’s army; and he persuaded the brig’s owner, a rich Spaniard named Joaquín de Mier, to give the Liberator refuge in his sprawling hacienda on the lip of the sea.
Bolívar arrived in Santa Marta on the 1st of December, accompanied by his nephew Fernando; his servant, José; and a retinue of loyal friends, among them Perú de Lacroix, whom Manuela had sent from Bogotá. It had taken a mere two days to skirt the coast in those calm December waters. As they rounded the last jut of land and sailed into an embrace of bay, they saw the glistening white beaches of Santa Marta. Behind were the verdant hills, alive with a riot of birds and orchids. And behind that, like a hoary old giant stretching his legs in the sea, stood the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. Alexander von Humboldt, who had recounted such sights to a far younger Bolívar, had traveled this shore in wonder, recording its snakes, fruits, and shimmering insects—hacking his way past palm trees to chance upon a row of tiny volcanoes, barely taller than a man.