Bolivar: American Liberator (57 page)

—Pedro Briceño Méndez

T
he Congress of Panama was a bitter disappointment to Bolívar.

“The institution was admirable,” he wrote Páez, but it ended “like that mythic madman, perched on a rock in the open sea, thinking he could direct the ships’ traffic.” Just as warlords had plagued the revolution with small-minded ambitions, republics now threatened to undermine one another with toxic distrust.

Little seemed to have gone well since Bolívar’s return to Lima. His enemies had grown in number;
accusations flowed. Bolívar might have been a hero before he arrived, one Peruvian fumed,
“but he is working with a randomness and immorality so thorough that the public has had to reevaluate its opinion.” They enumerated the transgressions: the “violent” occupation of Guayaquil; the ouster of its president; his arbitrary appropriation of power in Peru; the forced labor to which he had subjected the people of Trujillo; his summary expulsion of President Riva Agüero. In the end,
one writer fretted, Bolívar’s resounding victory in Ayacucho had silenced all healthy discourse.

The negative press had a powerful effect. It was as if Peru had forgotten that Bolívar’s armies—tattered and colored as they may have been—had won its freedom. As he traveled the countryside and the army of liberation lingered, the
people of Lima began to grumble openly. Hadn’t the man promised he would
throw off the ruler’s mantle and leave
“without so much as a grain of sand” once the revolution was over? They resented the legions of dark-skinned aliens who remained among them, consuming their sparse supplies like a swarm of locusts. Nor had they forgotten Bolívar’s speech after the Battle of Ayacucho, in which he had said that for him to remain would be absurd, monstrous, disgraceful.
“I am a foreigner,” he had told them, “I came to assist you as a warrior, not to rule over you as a politician. . . . If I were to accept the position your legislators are pressing on me, Peru would become a parasite nation, affixed to Colombia, where I am president and where I was born.” But a year and a half had passed since he had uttered those words, and still he was in Lima. Still ruling.

In July of 1826, just as the Congress of Panama collapsed, his staff in Lima discovered a plot to assassinate him. The conspiracy had aimed to expel all Colombians, murder Bolívar, and return power to Peruvian hands. Its organizers, high-level ministers, were summarily deported or executed;
Bolívar approved the sentences. But the distrust could not be disposed of so easily. In Lima, the white aristocracy had come to regard Bolívar as a mulatto who was trying to upend their carefully constructed world with ludicrous notions of racial egalitarianism.
“Sambo,” they called him—Nigger—as if the black blood rumored to course in his veins explained all his harebrained ideals about equality. Yet many of those same aristocrats became genuinely alarmed when they heard Bolívar was finally contemplating a departure. Worried about the government’s ability to keep the peace, they streamed to his door to persuade him to stay. The specter of anarchy loomed large in that land of gold and slaves.

But by August Bolívar had made up his mind. Too many troubles threatened his homeland. Páez had broken with Bogotá and, in a brazen coup, tried to assume a separate power in Venezuela. It was, at once, an act of treason and an expression of loyalty to the Liberator. Riding
bareback from Valencia to Caracas, raising his rebellion, Páez had shouted for all to hear,
“Viva Bolívar! Viva the Republic!” At first the Venezuelan people, frustrated with Bogotá, had responded to Páez’s call so enthusiastically that Santander—who had never been adept in the language of truculence—was at a loss as to how to respond. But he knew that he wanted to prevent a full-scale civil war.
He begged Bolívar to return and defend the law. Páez, for his own part, begged Bolívar to return and support the military. Both used his name to argue rival positions. As far as they were concerned, only one man could broker the peace. There was no choice for either but to call him home.

Bolívar had other reasons to return. He longed to keep his dream of a unified federation alive; he wanted to ensure that the countries he had liberated adopted his constitution. The Peruvian government, after much debate and, ironically, in order to keep him in Lima a while longer, had finally approved it, as had Bolivia. The Peruvians had gone on to proclaim him president for life. He declined and put the presidency in the hands of General Santa Cruz—a decision he would come to rue. He shipped off the lion’s share of the liberating army, leaving three hefty battalions to protect the capital.
He then went about giving away every gift Peru had bestowed on him, save one:
the jewel-encrusted gold sword given to him by the municipality of Lima. He was determined to leave Peru—as promised—without one grain of its sand, and indeed he left it an impoverished man. In order to liquidate his few debts, he had to borrow from aides.
The one million dollars Peru had insisted on paying him after the Battle of Ayacucho—which he hoped would be sent to the poor of Venezuela—
had never been produced. Ironically,
the liberator to whom Peru would pay a life pension and all the tributes was San Martín, the man who left Lima before completing the task.

Bolívar departed Peru believing all was in reasonably good order. His constitution was in place in Peru and Bolivia, and he was confident that Santa Cruz and Sucre would carry out his vision. He began to think that
if he could get those two republics to unite under his constitution—then push through its approval in Colombia—he would have an amalgamated America of sorts. Larger was always better in Bolívar’s mind, and that dream seemed large enough for the moment. It wasn’t that he was after more power.
As he had said many times: he was weary of
responsibilities.
He was prepared to leave them to Santander. Coalition became his sole purpose and aim.

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, BOLÍVAR BOARDED
a boat for Guayaquil, leaving Manuela Sáenz in Lima.
She had long since moved out of Thorne’s house and into her own in Magdalena so that she could be closer to her lover. There had been no more pretense, no effort to stand on ceremony. She had broken with her husband and refused all his money. She was known as the Libertadora now. In the company of her loyal black servants, the
famously uninhibited Jonatás and Natán, she had come and gone from Bolívar’s villa freely.

The romance had not been without its rocky moments. The nine months he had been away in Cuzco and La Paz had tested their love. At first,
Bolívar thought it best to end the affair. He was well aware of the scandal Manuela had caused in Lima and the damage such a flagrant affair with a married woman had done to his reputation.
It is possible, too, that Thorne persuaded him that it would be in her best interest to let her go. Bolívar wrote soon after his departure:
“Dear beautiful and good Manuela, I think of you and your fate constantly. I see no way we can unite in innocence and honor. I see all too well the terrible predicament you’re in, having to rejoin someone you do not love (indeed, it makes me tremble); and mine, having to separate myself from someone I adore. . . . My determination to tear myself from your love has done this, and now eternity itself has come between us.”

Within a few months, he wrote from Potosí, answering a letter in which she had described
“the ill-treatment” to which she was being subjected; we do not know what misery Thorne was inflicting on her, but it was serious enough for Bolívar to suggest she leave Lima and take refuge with friends in Arequipa. The letter was cut-and-dried, hardly the passionate missive she was used to receiving from him. But Manuela proved hard to rebuff. A month later, he was writing again:
“What you say about your husband is painful and funny all at once. . . . I don’t know how to reconcile our respective happiness with our respective duties; I don’t know
how to cut a knot that even Alexander’s sword would only complicate; it’s not a matter of sword or strength, after all, but of pure against guilty love, duty against weakness.”

He had had no shortage of affairs in between, and she was well aware of them. Women were always lavishing their attention on the Liberator; he found them impossible to resist. In Lima, before leaving on his travels, he had romanced the
doe-eyed American Jeannette Hart, Commodore Isaac Hull’s sister-in-law,
who had visited Lima with Hull and his wife. It is even said in some Connecticut circles that
Bolívar proposed marriage to the brunette beauty, although it is more likely that he only hinted at it, as he was inclined to do when courting a woman.

If legend is to be believed, Bolívar had a string of lovers as he toured Peru and Bolivia. Some were simply the nymphs who welcomed him from town to town; others were more serious entanglements—involving wives of high-placed officials—with lasting complications. One was the formidable and fetching Peruvian heroine Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, wife of the prefect of Cuzco, Agustín Gamarra. Little is known about her relationship to Bolívar, apart from two facts. It was she who was
chosen to place a crown of laurel on his head when he entered Cuzco; and much later, when her husband was asked why he hated Bolívar even though the Liberator had been so generous to him, Gamarra replied,
“He gave me many honors, it’s true, but he also took away my wife.”

Gamarra’s wife, known to all as
Doña Pancha or “the Marshalette,” was as fierce as she was beautiful. Accompanying her husband in battle, she was fearless, peremptory, taking command when officers grew weak-kneed. She was a consummate horsewoman, knew how to handle a gun, and loved a good cockfight. Like Páez,
she was an epileptic and rose to such heights of fury during combat that she would fall to the ground to be trampled by horses and carried off for dead. But in the drawing rooms of Cuzco—and, later, Lima—she was a dazzling presence, as a contemporary recalled:
“She had a long, slightly turned-up nose and a large but very expressive mouth; her face was long, with prominent cheekbones; her skin dark but full of vitality.” She made no secret of using her beauty and wiles to
“exploit situations as the need arose.” She had been forged in the fires of revolution and, when Gamarra was elected president, would rise to be first lady of the land. If indeed Doña Pancha had a passing liaison with Bolívar, it was a union on equal terms.

In Potosí, Bolivia, on the other hand, Bolívar had engaged in a dalliance with more lasting consequences. The young woman who placed a wreath on his head this time was
María Joaquina Costas, whose Argentine husband was off fighting the war in Chile. She was graceful, elegant, with coal black eyes and a gentle smile. It is said that as Costas was laying her garland on Bolívar’s brow, she
warned him of a royalist plot brewing against him. At once intrigued and smitten, he invited her to a tête-à-tête. The plot against him never materialized, but he and Costas
entered into an ardent affair and, in due course—months after the Liberator was back in Lima—a child was born. That child,
José Antonio Costas, would die claiming he was Bolívar’s son, but the Liberator never acknowledged him. An enigmatic exchange at a gathering of cronies two years after the child’s birth, however, led him to mention that
he was hardly sterile, that he had living evidence to the contrary. It was probably wishful thinking.

None of it would have come as a surprise to Manuela. She had long since reconciled herself to Bolívar’s philandering ways. He never hid his interest in women; he admired them publicly, kissed their hands,
danced with them in her presence. But he always went back to Manuela. When he had returned to Lima from his tour of Cuzco and La Paz, he reunited with her once more. His notes to her en route were as urgent as any young suitor’s:
“Wait for me at all costs, do you hear? Do you understand? If you don’t, you’re an ingrate, a traitor, even worse: an enemy.”

Their love would not waver again.

Through the years and during the course of her many travels with the army, Manuela had managed to forge lasting friendships with many of Bolívar’s men. She was devoted to his campaign, attentive to his soldiers’ petitions, and, most important as far as his troops were concerned, brave in extremely perilous circumstances. As a result,
she had earned the respect of a number of his generals—Sucre, Heres, and others—and the Liberator’s British aides: all the men he loved best. She was, according to a diplomatic report to Secretary of State Henry Clay, a remarkably handsome woman,
“generous in the extreme” to officers and soldiers. She was always willing to give them the last dollar in her purse and exhibited
“the most zealous humanity” to the sick or wounded. She
had become known as the person to whom a desperate soldier could go to win Bolívar’s official attention.

Manuela’s commitment to her lover’s cause was most in evidence when he left Peru and the soldiers of a division he had left behind rose up in a series of mutinies. They claimed that they hadn’t been paid full wages, that their rations had been curtailed, that they wanted a share of the fortune Peru had offered to pay Bolívar. As became clear,
the insurrection had been concocted in Bogotá by those who, like Santander, wanted to cut short Colombia’s military presence in Peru and bring the costly troops home. On January 26, 1827,
the 3rd Division expelled Bolívar’s generals, seized control of Lima’s government palace and the fortress of Callao, and began to make demands. Manuela put on her colonel’s uniform, rode out, and tried to win back the mutineers. Doling out money, she implored them to ignore their leader and form a new contingent.

Days later, she was arrested in her home in Magdalena. Peruvian authorities stormed the house at midnight on February 7, detained her, and insisted she leave the country that very night. She pleaded illness. The next morning, she was cast into a cell in a Lima convent, where the abbess received her with open contempt. She tried to object, argue her rights, but all the force of Peruvian vitriol came down on her now. The minister of foreign relations, Manuel Vidaurre—one of Bolívar’s most rabid critics—accused her of being wanton, scandalous,
“an insult to public honor and morals.” On April 11, she was
shuffled onto a boat in Callao along with a dozen Colombian officers and 130 sick and wounded men. Without any further ado, they were shipped off to Guayaquil. By the time she arrived, Bolívar would be far away, in a more troubled corner of his new world.