Bolivar: American Liberator (54 page)

My hope is that our republics—less nations than sisters—will unite according to the bonds that have always united us, with the difference that in centuries past we obeyed the same tyrant, whereas now we will embrace a shared freedom.

—Simón Bolívar

B
olívar’s life had never been short on extremes. But 1824 marked a new threshold of wild aberrations. He had begun the year in a sickbed, traveled a veritable wheelwork of triumphs and calamities, and closed with a victory heard round the world. In London, on the last day of 1824, Britain announced its recognition of Colombia. In Washington, on New Year’s Day of 1825, Henry Clay stood at a dinner in Lafayette’s honor attended by President Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Senator Andrew Jackson, and proposed a toast
“to General Simon Bolívar, the George Washington of South America!” It was just the kind of salute Bolívar had hoped for from the English-speaking world. The achievements warranted it.
Not Alexander, not Hannibal, not even Julius Caesar had fought across such a vast, inhospitable terrain. Charlemagne’s victories would have had to double to match Bolívar’s. Napoleon, striving to build an empire, had covered less ground than Bolívar, struggling to win freedom.

The liberation of South America had created a new world order. The Battle of Ayacucho was not just a military exploit in the faraway dust of Peru, but an action that transformed the hemisphere forever. In banishing Spain from American shores, the revolutionaries had confirmed the fundamental incompatibility between America and Europe; they had drawn a firm line between Europe’s conservative worldview and its radical opposite—between ancient monarchies and a fresh democratic ideal. There would be no common ground between Europe’s Holy Alliance, now scrambling to preserve its old axis of power, and the Americas North and South, which were committed to turn those hierarchies upside down. As Bolívar pointed out,
“European ambition forced the yoke of slavery on the rest of the world, and the rest of the world was obliged to answer with an equivalent force. . . . This is what I call the equilibrium of the Universe.” It was the essence of Bolívarianism, a clear admonition to bullies. As far as Bolívar was concerned now that the revolution was won, South America needed no overseer, no higher might, no Monroe Doctrine. In his model, the will to power would come from the people themselves, and—with all the republics united—it would be a prodigious force to be reckoned with.

The next few months were the happiest, most glorious of Bolívar’s life. He gave all the credit for his triumph to Sucre—
“this splendid victory is due entirely to the skill, valor, and heroism of the general in chief,” he announced—and he promoted him to grand marshal. Bolívar received the eminent along with the humble in his capacious house in Lima’s suburb of Magdalena; although he reveled in the adulation, he wasted no time reforming Peru according to democratic principle. He reorganized the government, the treasury, the legal system, the schools.
He tendered his resignation from the Colombian presidency, telling Santander that he
planned to leave Colombia someday and take up residence overseas. When the resignation was read out to congress in Bogotá, the
assembly fell into a stunned silence; the man was renowned throughout the world now, adored. Presidents and magnates had toasted the Republic of Greater Colombia because of him. The eminent British diplomat John Potter Hamilton had gone so far as to call Bolívar
“the greatest man and most extraordinary character which the New World has ever produced.” A few congressmen sounded scattered
applause for the Liberator and soon the rest broke into a wild ovation. They moved to reaffirm his presidency of Colombia. In this halcyon moment, even avowed enemies dared not complain.

But Bolívar was hardly ready to leave Peru. There was too much unfinished business. It would take several months to subdue the renegade Spanish general Olañeta, who had turned out to be more monarchist than the viceroy, more authoritarian than the king himself; and it would take another year to flush out the royalists in Callao, who had locked themselves up in the fortress against all reasonable hope of survival. Bolívar announced that he would call the Peruvian congress to session on February 10. That day, he said,
“will be the day of my glory, the day on which my most fervent desires will be fulfilled; the day on which, once and for all, I resign my rule.” By rule he meant dictatorship; he had every intention of staying on and determining the future of the republic. When February 10 came, an ecstatic Peruvian congress made that possible: he was granted supreme political and military authority for at least another year. The congress also
presented him with a gift of one million pesos to compensate him for his victories. He refused to accept it. When the money was offered again—indeed, insisted upon—he asked that it be given not to him but to charitable causes in Venezuela, the republic that had sacrificed most on behalf of Peru.

Those happy days were marred, nevertheless, by the assassination of Bernardo Monteagudo, San Martín’s widely despised deputy, who had been expelled from Lima during San Martín’s tenure only to return again under Bolívar.
Monteagudo, whose agile mind the Liberator respected, had been working on his notion to unite all the republics. The Argentine was
found facedown on a street with a kitchen knife plunged deep into his heart and his fingers wrapped tightly around the handle. Dismayed by the crime—and fearing it
might be part of a royalist plot to assassinate republican leaders—Bolívar called for an investigation. The inquest soon produced the assassin:
a black cook, who worked in the kitchen of one of Monteagudo’s associates. When Bolívar questioned the cook himself—
in private, in a dimly lit room of the palace—the trembling man confessed that José Sánchez Carrión, Bolívar’s highest minister,
had paid him 200 pesos in gold to do the deed.
The Liberator was flabbergasted; Sánchez Carrión was a brilliant intellectual, a republican
stalwart, Bolívar’s warmest supporter in Peru. He was also the leader of a powerful secret society. Mysteriously enough, within a few months, Sánchez Carrión, too, tipped over dead. According to a high-ranking official,
a Peruvian general had poisoned him. Stranger yet, that general was eventually murdered.
It was a murky chain of events and much of it played out after Bolívar had left to tour the country. As far as the people of Lima were concerned, the despised Monteagudo had met a just fate. They had loathed the Argentine when he was San Martín’s éminence grise and they loathed him under Bolívar. He was quickly forgotten in the whirl of that triumphant summer. There were festivities to attend—a grand ball in honor of the victory at Ayacucho, a pending assembly of the Peruvian congress. The city was in a celebratory mood.

Bolívar delighted in the public tributes. Seldom had he received such complete adoration. He had lost much in the course of his forty-one years: mother, father, brother, wife, a country to which he would never truly return, countless fellow warriors, and in the course of the past year his best friend, Fernando Toro, who had died after long exile. The Liberator’s name was known around the globe, but his intimates were few. He was virtually alone, except for his manservant, José Palacios, and his married mistress.

During those blissful months, Bolívar enjoyed the unbridled attentions of Manuela Sáenz, who basked in the republican glow beside him. Coming and going freely from his house in Magdalena,
she scandalized Lima society with her brazen disregard for decorum. She was hardly free of her husband, but she was long past caring about appearances. James Thorne had struck every register of rage—from sputtering indignation to wretched entreaty—to persuade her to end her affair with Bolívar. Thorne was possessive,
“more jealous than a Portuguese,” according to Manuela, and he was tired of the public humiliation. It may well be that
he swallowed his pride and begged Bolívar to release her; he may even have gone so far as to file a legal suit to restrain her. Deeply in love, and adamantly unwilling to give up his pretty young wife, he was prepared to do anything to win her back.

Sáenz was forthright—even brutal—in her rejection of Thorne. She didn’t want his money; and she most assuredly did not want him. Even
as Bolívar was wending his way back to Lima in late 1823, she had written to her husband in no uncertain terms:

No, no, no, hombre! . . . A thousand times No! Sir, you are an excellent person, indeed one of a kind—that I will never deny. I only regret that you are not a better man so that my leaving you would honor Bolívar more. I know very well that I can never be joined to him in what you call honor. Do you think I am any less honorable because he is my lover, not my husband? Ah! I do not live by social conventions men construct to torment us. So leave me be, my dear Englishman. We will marry again in heaven but not on this earth. . . . On earth, you are a boring man. Up there in the celestial heights, everything will be so English, because a life of monotony was invented for you people, who make love without pleasure, conversation without grace—who walk slowly, greet solemnly, move heavily, joke without laughing. . . . But enough of my cheekiness. With all the sobriety, truth, and clarity of an Englishwoman, I say now: I will never return to you. You are a protestant and I a pagan—that should be obstacle enough. But I am also in love with another man, and that is the greater, stronger reason. You see how precise my mind can be? Your invariable friend, Manuela

She would later send a copy of this letter to Bolívar, adding coyly that she was hardly a pagan, but had said so for dramatic effect. Certainly to the rest of Lima she seemed diabolically pagan.
Even in a city where women smoked cigars, dressed like coquettes, and spoke their minds freely, Manuela was a flagrant eccentric. Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, an overheated young Frenchman whom Humboldt had pressed on Bolívar and who followed the Liberator closely during those years, described her unforgettably in his own memoir:

At times she behaved like a grand lady, at others like a half-breed; she could dance the minuet or the cancan with equal flair. She was shockingly reckless, promiscuous. The aides told me astonishing tales about her exploits, which Bolívar simply ignored. She was inseparable
from her beautiful, young mulatto slave, who often dressed as a soldier. That colored girl was the very shadow of her mistress and, very possibly, her lover—a vice common enough in Peru and one that I myself witnessed. The girl performed lewd, but quite entertaining dances at salon gatherings. And she came and went freely at all hours from Manuelita’s room. We can imagine why.

Boussingault had a singular turn of mind in this, to be sure, and it may well be that the twenty-two-year-old
was infatuated with Manuela himself. But if it was true that Manuela was erratic, a slave to her senses, it was also true that
Bolívar didn’t much care. The Liberator’s letters to her are
filled with tenderness, admiration. He was in love with his mistress’s humor, her passion, her courage, her intelligence, and—no doubt, too—her tolerance for his own aberrant ways.

ONCE THE TRIBUTES AND CELEBRATIONS
were out of the way, Peru seemed to lose interest in reforming the country. Indeed the entire continent of South America appeared to slide into weary lassitude. The people were exhausted after fourteen years of unremitting violence and chaos. It was as if the very effort of upending the colonial structure had left them without a will to build something new.
Far from spurring an era of creativity like the one that now flourished in the United States, newly won liberty gave Spanish Americans a sense that the work was behind them now, that the social challenges were too monumental to tackle—that, having made so many sacrifices, the people had earned the right to sit back and take.

Bolívar wasted no time in trying to inject the country with his spirit of reform. He sent Sucre and his army to La Paz to carry the spirit of liberation into
Upper Peru, the region traded back and forth between Lima and Buenos Aires that eventually would be Bolivia. In April, he started out on an overland trip of his own, averaging
an astounding twenty-one miles a day, all of it on horseback, and most over rough terrain. The trails along the coast were dry with a choking dust; the gorges stifling, airless. But as he approached the towering volcanoes of Arequipa, he was met with
a sight that seldom fails to move a traveler. It was the point that marks the western limit of the desert, where burning
sands climb to majestic heights; where a multitude of snowcapped peaks glisten against azure skies. He rode through the desolation and the mountain splendor, visiting every township along the way; he founded schools, laws, municipal governments. But the vigor he brought with him seemed to
dissipate the moment he was gone. Appointments, institutions, visions thrived for a while in his wake until they went neglected—then quietly faded away.

In Arequipa, he installed the British Lancaster method of education, putting his old childhood teacher, Simón Rodríguez, in charge. Bolívar had been thrilled to hear that the eccentric, imaginative tutor who had opened his mind to the wider world had
returned to South America after decades of exile; he urged Rodríguez to come to Peru. Eventually, he would give Rodríguez the responsibility of revamping the entire school system in Bolivia. But Rodríguez, who had turned up by chance after years of aimless peregrinations around the world, had never been handed so great a responsibility. He was now little more than a bumbling professor, spectacularly unprepared for the task. Like many who were entrusted with vital work at this critical juncture, Rodríguez lacked organizational skills. Building a nation was turning out to be far more thorny than waging an all-out war. San Martín, even from his faraway perch in Brussels, could see the challenge before Bolívar now:
“The opus is finished,” San Martín wrote to a colleague, “and Americans will begin to see the fruits of their labors and sacrifices; but only if we are wise, and only if twelve years of revolution have taught us to obey—yes, sir,
obey
—for if a man doesn’t know how to obey, he will never know how to lead.” He had a point. What South America needed now was organization, discipline, a solid foundation of laws. One man couldn’t possibly hope to do it all.