Bolivar: American Liberator (45 page)

What we do know is that when Bolívar left Bogotá for Cali on the 13th of December, the Ibañez women had already
moved into that comfortable house on Santa Clara Street, and they accepted Bolívar’s gift with the fullest gratitude. From Cali, Bolívar would write Bernardina one last letter, professing his ardor and forever leaving open the question whether, in the scant six weeks he had spent in Bogotá, he had been able to win some measure of the widow’s love:

Fussy, beautiful Bernardina, . . . What love can do! I think of nothing but you and your lovely temptations. . . . You are the only one in the world for me. You alone, celestial angel, inspire my most vivid feelings and desires. From you I hope to win whatever happiness and pleasure you deign to give me, for you are what I long for. If I say no more—much more—it is out of modesty and discretion; don’t think it is because I don’t love you. And stop accusing me of indifference or callousness. You see how time and distance only combine to boost the thrill of memory. It’s not right to blame me with empty suspicions. Think only of my passion and my eternal devotion, which you cannot deny.

War would soon conspire to put Bernardina far from Bolívar’s mind. The road from Bogotá to Cali was arduous, depleting. Initially, he had thought he would march to the coast and sail to Guayaquil, where he could join Sucre in a coastal attack on the colony of Quito. But word had it that
Spanish frigates controlled Ecuadorian shores. It wasn’t true. The craft that had caused that fleeting worry was the one depositing the new captain-general. He was Juan Mourgeón, an accomplished
soldier who had fought alongside San Martín in the wars against Napoleon and, ironically enough,
had once saved the Argentine’s life. The Spaniard Mourgeón had sailed from Panama, where he had been governor, and
landed on the coast of Ecuador with eight hundred men and orders to fortify Quito.

The faulty intelligence made Bolívar opt for land rather than sea, forcing him to take
an army of four thousand across 250 miles of punishing mountain terrain. It was either a fool’s or a hero’s journey. The Colombians traversed burning plains, perilous rivers, improvising bridges of rope over deadly gorges and cataracts. By the time they reached the other side,
the army was a fraction of itself. Those who survived had marched thousands of miles, many of them from as far away as Valencia, some from the battles of Boyacá and Carabobo. Now, as they filed into Cali, they were a shattered force—crushed by exhaustion, hypothermia, disease. Hundreds had deserted. Among those who remained—many of them languishing in litters—few could march, much less muster and fight.

BOLÍVAR STAYED IN CALI LONG
enough to learn that Sucre and his troops were trapped in Guayaquil, unable to advance and meet him halfway in Quito. The royalists had blocked the way north, and for all the support Sucre had raised in Guayaquil, he didn’t have the manpower to take on the stubbornly defended capital. His vain thrusts to penetrate royalist territory
had met with devastating defeat. In desperation,
Sucre had called on San Martín in Lima to loan him troops, but he would have to wait months for an answer.

Meanwhile, Bolívar—unable to rely on anyone—forged his way south along the difficult mountain route to Popayán. As he approached that highly fortified town, the Spanish colonel in charge, José María
Obando, emerged under a flag of truce and surprised Bolívar by requesting an interview. The Liberator’s charisma and passion for the American cause instantly won over the colonel. Not only did Obando surrender, he offered his services—and the services of his entire garrison—to the patriot side. This bit of politicking persuaded Bolívar that he might have similar success with other royalists. If only he could be allowed to talk to them. He wrote to Santander with an idea:

I have been awake all night, thinking about the new challenges. . . . I am certain I will reach the Juanambú River with less than two thousand men. I am equally certain that the enemy will meet me with more than four thousand; if I go on, I will be forced to fight a battle more risky than Boyacá, and I will fight it out of rage and despair. . . . My best hope is to take a political tack and try to win over the enemy leaders and troops, if at all possible. Here then is what I propose . . .

What he proposed was forgery. He instructed Santander to send him letters and documents stating that Spain had yielded the fight and now recognized Greater Colombia’s independence. With these false papers and strategically placed “announcements” in the local
Gaceta
, he would fool Quito, force it to let down its guard, and allow him to enter the city.
“The object of all this fuss,” he wrote Santander, “is to persuade the enemy that there is no other recourse: they must deal with me, and we must prevent more blood sacrifice.”

His instructions to Santander were specific. The vice president was to create a trumped-up letter from the Spanish general La Torre, requesting safe passage for a commission that had arrived from Madrid to make peace with the new government of Colombia. Vice President Zea and General Páez were to produce appropriately welcoming responses. Santander obliged without delay and produced the bogus documentation. When all was duly delivered, Bolívar presented these “lies”—for that is what he called them—to
Quito’s interim president Aymerich as well as the
recently arrived Captain-General Mourgeón, and made
overtures to Popayán’s bishop, requesting his help in ensuring a peaceful transition. But no one was taken in by this deceit, least of all the people of Pasto, diehard royalists who lay between him and the capital, and who preferred all-out war to any talk about reconciliation.

All-out war is what Bolívar finally gave them. On April 7, 1822, Easter Sunday, he led his army to the cliffs of Cariaco, on the side of the volcano where the Spanish army had been seen making an advance. Before he rode off to reconnoiter the area—something he always did alone—he
ordered his officers not to have lunch until they had secured the overlooking promontory, which at that hour appeared untaken. When he returned, he saw royalists perched on those heights and his
army eating leisurely in the gorge. His second in command had misunderstood his order and was full of remorse. But there was no doubt that the liberating army was now at a distinct disadvantage. Fuming, Bolívar moved to make up for it.

He commanded his men to make a bold, frontal attack. It was a questionable decision, wholly impulsive, built on fury.
Wave after wave of patriot lines rushed up the escarpment to sure death. The British battalion—“Rifles”—made a heroic advance with their bayonets drawn, trying to drive the enemy from its fast perch, but to little avail. They couldn’t get close enough. It seemed the whole republican force would be obliterated on that maddeningly pitched slope. Bolívar, watching the butchery from below, was convinced the battle was lost. But as the sun slipped over the rocky ridge, creating deep shadows in the ravine, a miracle was at work in the right flank. Soldiers with nothing but bayonets thrust their blades into the steep incline, then,
clambering up a ladder of ascending weapons, scaled the cliff. The fighting went well into night, until the moon vanished in a murky haze and darkness engulfed the fray.
“Our camp,” wrote Obando, the royalist who had defected to the patriots in Popayán, “was a mill of destruction. Our rifles were broken, our equipment burned; all that we might have carried away was destroyed. Dawn came and we were unable to withdraw. A thick fog prevented us from seeing the enemy or the position taken by our own Rifles. The Liberator was in a mood.” Bolívar was in more than a mood. For days, he had been fighting a fever. That he had lived through those eight grueling hours was remarkable in itself.

There were those—
including Bolívar—who described the Battle of Bomboná as a triumph for the patriot side; others saw it as sheer folly. It was neither. When dusk covered the field and the enemy withdrew like a frightened phantom, no one was sure who had prevailed. The patriots, dazed, remained in the arena, wondering whether hostilities would return with the sun. If nothing else, they could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had
split the royalist camp and distracted it from its defense of Quito. But by morning, it was clear what price they had paid for it. Bodies littered the ground in obscene heaps; a vile stench permeated the air.
Every patriot officer save six lay gravely wounded. Bolívar, sick to death, was
carried away in a litter.

Though doubts about those bitter losses followed, it soon became clear that the Battle of Bomboná had won something after all. It had been a harbinger of change. The citizens of Pasto and Quito—two stout chambers of the royalist heart—awoke the next morning a little less certain, a little more afraid. General Sucre, now able to push north from Guayaquil, rose masterfully to the occasion.

CHAPTER
12

I am consumed by the demon of war, determined to finish this struggle.

—Simón Bolívar

“E
ither I lose my way, or I press on to glory,” Bolívar had confessed to Vice President Santander, and indeed he seemed to be fighting battles within as well as without. To those seeing him for the first time,
he seemed far older than his age. At thirty-eight, he was
grizzled by war, jaundiced by illness and fatigue. Though his movements remained nimble, his voice vibrant, he bore the signs of a soldier too long in the fray. His face was weary, his color wan. His hair was long, thinning, shot through with silver, tied back to curb its wild disorder. He was emaciated, given to fevers and mysterious ailments. He was no longer the brash young man who had fought his way up the Magdalena River and triumphed effortlessly in battle. He was no longer the hero of the Admirable Campaign. Although he paid close attention to his hygiene—maintained a strict regimen of baths, drank little and seldom, and resolutely did not smoke—his health had noticeably deteriorated. He was no longer the infamous, indefatigable Iron Ass. For all the vigor of his will and spirit, he was a prematurely aging soldier, a hard-living, hard-bitten veteran who had fought across thousands of miles
of punishing terrain and showed it. Few leaders of nations, apart from Genghis Khan, had spent as many hours—months, years—in a saddle. But twelve years of unremitting effort had taken their toll. He didn’t allow his men to see it, but it had become
harder for him to tolerate the physical hardship. More than anything, what he needed now was to be assisted by a sprier, younger version of himself: a warrior with all the right instincts, a leader with a common touch, a bright young general who did not question his supremacy and who pledged absolute and undying loyalty to the cause.

That man was Antonio José de Sucre.
“If God had given us the right to choose our own families,” Bolívar would later say, “I would have chosen General Sucre as my son.” The twenty-seven-year-old general of brigade was a vigorous warrior in his prime. Alert, high-spirited, and rigorously disciplined, he was the quintessential officer and gentleman, respected by all who fought under his command. When Bolívar had elevated him, despite his youth, to the most senior of generals, it was because Sucre’s talents rivaled his own: Sucre was brave, tireless, uncannily adept at making quick decisions. He insisted on doing everything himself, from maintaining troop records to inspecting his soldiers’ rations. He had a sixth sense for battle strategy. In short, Sucre was everything the Liberator admired in the best of soldiers. Together they were the Achilles and Patroclus of the New World.

By May of 1822, the two were laboring toward each other across a volatile terrain—the lava-encrusted avenue of craters that dominated the bitterly contested ground between Colombia and Peru. With the Battle of Bomboná, Bolívar had managed to distract the enemy enough to allow Sucre to move, and the young general proceeded to make his way up the volcano-studded landscape between Guayaquil and Quito, reinforced by a battalion sent to him by San Martín. For a year now, Sucre and three thousand superbly trained soldiers under his command had pointed toward this moment, awaiting word from Bolívar. But the
last missive Sucre had received from the Liberator had been sent months before, in December of 1821. By the time he read it, he had been powerless to obey its orders. So much of the war had gone this way: late correspondence, missed opportunities. Seeing now that the enemy was in disorder, he decided to try to take Quito at all costs.