Bolivar: American Liberator (11 page)

I regarded the crown that Napoleon placed on his head as a miserable, outdated relic. For me, his greatness was in his universal acclaim, in the interest his person could inspire. I confess that the whole thing only served to remind me of my own country’s enslavement, of the glory that would accrue to him who would liberate it. But I was far from imagining that I would be that man.

By the end of 1804, Bolívar’s disgust with the emperor was so intense, his nerves so ragged from too many late night dissipations, that
his temper erupted at a banquet attended by a number of distinguished guests, among them senators, decorated soldiers, and a few prominent priests. He railed so vociferously against Napoleon, prompting such outrage, that the argument quickly degenerated into a shouting match. He accused Napoleon of being a traitor to liberty. He blamed the clergymen at the table of being too fanatical in Napoleon’s favor. The evening ended
badly, the guests scattering in a huff. The next morning, he felt obliged to write a letter to Colonel Mariano de Tristan, who had been present and later suggested that Bolívar would do well to leave the country.

Colonel, I have known you for six years, and for six years I have loved you as a true friend, have had nothing but the deepest respect for the nobility of your character and the honesty of your views. I can’t tell you how deeply I regret that you were made to witness that disgraceful scene at my table caused by the fanaticism of a few intolerant clerics . . . and the shouts with which they defended Bonaparte! Like you, I admire his gifts as a soldier. But how can one fail to see his single-minded pursuit of personal power? He is turning into a despot. . . . Is it wise for the nation to entrust its fate to a single man? I’m no politician, able to hold a debate before a congress; I don’t lead an army, am not expected to inspire confidence in anyone’s troops; nor am I a sage who can calmly and patiently parse difficult truths. . . . I am a nobody, just a rich man, society’s fluff, a mere stone in Bonaparte’s dagger. . . . But I am curious to know: Is a foreigner in this republic allowed to speak out about the men who govern it, or will he be thrown out for the crime of having spoken freely?

He was not well. His untrammeled life had finally gotten the best of him.
He had lost a fortune at Parisian gaming tables and had had to borrow from Fanny, a humiliation he did not want to repeat. He played one more time, repaid the debt, and swore off gambling forever. But as Europe slid into winter and the chill bore into his bones, he grew weak, unhealthy. Simón Rodríguez, seeing his former pupil on the verge of physical and nervous collapse, suggested a spring excursion. A long, leisurely amble through France and Italy in warm weather would be just the thing to revivify an exhausted young man.

BY THEN, BOLÍVAR’S SCHOOLTEACHER—THE ECCENTRIC,
peripatetic Rodríguez—had been away from Venezuela for more than six years.
Having fled during the Gual-España conspiracy, found safe haven in Jamaica, and changed his name to Samuel Robinson, he taught school for a while, and learned English and typography. Shortly thereafter he
turned up in Baltimore and lived there for almost three years, working at a printing press. Rodríguez would come to earn his living in a myriad ways—as schoolteacher, small farmer, estate manager, soap maker, candlemaker, gunpowder merchant, journalist, writer, organizer of orphanages and old people’s homes, reformer of prostitutes, avant-garde educator—but always he would be traveling, learning, living by the principles of the Enlightenment, in which a “republic of letters” transcended national borders.
“I don’t want to be like trees that put down roots in one place,” he wrote. “I’d rather be like the wind, the water, the sun—like all those things that are forever in perpetual motion.” And so he was.

In 1799, he traveled to Bayonne, where he taught Spanish, French, and English and, with the exiled Mexican priest Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, began to dream about establishing a language school in Paris. By 1801, that dream had come true. He and Mier were gainfully employed in Paris, teaching Spanish, which was in vogue, given France’s new alliance with Spain. But Rodríguez’s itinerant spirit soon had him yearning for the road. When Bolívar caught up with him in Paris in 1804, Rodríguez was just returning from Vienna, where—in yet another remarkable reincarnation—he had worked for a brief time in the laboratory of
a noted Austrian chemist. He didn’t hesitate to abandon his plans to the task of restoring his former pupil’s health.

Bolívar, Rodríguez, and Fernando del Toro set out on their curative trip to Italy in April of 1805. They traveled to Lyon by public carriage, rested for a few days, then sent their luggage ahead and made their way on foot—à la Rousseau—covering short distances every day. The French countryside was glorious at that time of year: the wisteria, poppies, and irises blooming in vibrant profusion; the willows and poplars a bright new green. Bolívar had always loved nature—enjoyed travel on an open road—and, little by little, the fresh air and exercise began to animate him.

They crossed the Savoy Alps and stopped in the valley of Les Charmettes,
where Rousseau purportedly had spent a few happy years in the house of his lover, the scandalous “Maman.” Rodríguez delighted in recounting the details of his hero’s eventful life as they visited his various hideaways. From there, they headed for Italy, increasingly aware of
the triumphal arches, the monuments—even a towering pyramid—that had been erected along the way in preparation for Napoleon’s Italian coronation.

The three made harmonious traveling companions. Rodríguez, the eldest at thirty-three, was jolly, earthy, irrepressible, ever the teacher and instigator. Fernando del Toro was an aristocrat and soldier—son of the Marquis del Toro, the very distinguished Mantuano with whom Humboldt had stayed in Caracas—but Fernando was also
an inveterate gambler and bon vivant. Bolívar, by far the youngest, was restless, moody, already marked by life yet deeply curious. It is easy to imagine them making their way down dirt roads, singing, talking—the teacher declaiming on philosophy, the soldier recalling his exploits, the future Liberator marveling at the history around them. As they crossed into Italy, they plunged heartily into the study of Italian, reading
Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante, writers from whom Bolívar was to acquire many a useful maxim. But they also did what any traveler would have done—buy fruit in the open markets, repose at small inns along the way, dodge mud as carriages hurtled by in the rain, fall into conversation in cafés, deliberate their route in boisterous roadside trattorias. Few South Americans traveled the countryside at that time, and so—with their eccentric manners and accents—they must have drawn attention.

By May 26, they were in Milan, watching Napoleon don the historic crown of Lombardy, said to contain one of the nails from Christ’s crucifixion. “
Dieu me la donne
,” Napoleon announced as he placed it on his head—God gives me this—“woe to the man who dares lay a finger on it.”
Fanny was there to see it, as were her old husband and young lover Eugène de Beauharnais—and it seemed all Europe was pointing at this moment, exulting in the triumph of one man. On the fields of Montechiaro a few days later, Bolívar had the opportunity to watch Napoleon review his troops—once again, in humble clothing—and, as Bolívar told it,
Napoleon stared back from his throne, training his small telescope at the South American travelers, who stood apart on a far hillock.
“Perhaps he will think we are spies,” one of Bolívar’s companions said, and, awe turning to dread, they decided to move on.

Milan’s feverish celebrations went on for days. On June 8, Napoleon made his adopted stepson, the twenty-four-year-old
Eugène de
Beauharnais, viceroy of the New Kingdom of Italy. Bolívar and his friends witnessed it all from the sidelines. It was no secret that Fanny and Eugène were lovers and that she delighted in playing Josephine’s son off against Bolívar. Years later, she mentioned in a letter that she and Bolívar had seen one another in Italy, but whether it was in a large gathering or alone, we do not know. In either case, it would have been an awkward encounter: Bolívar had already said goodbye.

Soon after those festivities, the travelers set out for the open road. Pointing to Rome, they made leisurely stops in Verona, Venice, Ferrara, Bologna, Padua, Florence, and Perugia.
Florence is said to have delighted Bolívar with its art and history; Venice disappointed him with what he felt was insufficient grandeur; but the Eternal City of Rome filled him with a profound inspiration that would ignite his career.

By July he was there, exploring the ruins of the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Temple of Castor and Pollux; recalling history; reading the works of Livy; imagining the days when Julius Caesar trod that ground and framed the empire’s destiny. The three friends found an apartment
on the Piazza di Spagna, near the Church of Trinità dei Monti. As they roamed the streets, eager to see the city, they spoke tirelessly of ancient Rome’s miseries as well as its glories—how, from a humble village, a grand republic had been made.
“I found Rome brick, and left it marble,” Caesar had boasted. The notion of doing the same for Venezuela
filled Bolívar with purpose. There can be little doubt that it was among Caesar’s ruins that he began to build hopes for America.

In Rome, Bolívar
saw Alexander von Humboldt again as well as Madame de Staël, who virtually had been hounded out of Paris for her outspoken censure of Napoleon. De Staël was traveling with her usual entourage of celebrated writers and busily gathering material for what would be her most famous book,
Corinne; Or, Italy.
Humboldt, on the other hand, was visiting
his brother, Wilhelm, the noted philosopher, who was Prussia’s minister to the Holy See. Wilhelm von Humboldt was a favorite at the papal court and his splendid house on Monte Pincio became
a gathering place for the famous. It was probably in that house—the towering Villa di Malta—that Bolívar met
a number of European intellectuals who happened to be in Rome at the time and taught him much about the world.

While some have claimed that Bolívar and Alexander von Humboldt traveled to Naples together and climbed Mount Vesuvius side by side, neither Bolívar’s nor Humboldt’s papers mention it. More likely, Bolívar’s visits with Humboldt took place entirely at Wilhelm’s house, where Humboldt continued to promote his expedition and discuss the New World’s natural marvels, and Bolívar tried to nudge the discussions toward America’s independence from Spain. Even as the young man grew more radical in his thinking,
Humboldt maintained a strict objectivity.

More than a year before, as Humboldt had traveled the heart of the American continent, he had written vividly in his journals about the injustices of colonialism.
“How could a minority of European Spaniards hold on to so vast an empire for so many centuries?” he posed rhetorically. But he never did so publicly, deciding that the people of Spanish America were essentially
complacent, indolent by nature, and insufficiently motivated to throw over the yoke. Almost half a century later and long after Bolívar’s death, Humboldt would write apologetically to Bolívar’s aide-de-camp, Daniel O’Leary:

During my time in America, I never encountered discontent; I noticed that while there was no great love of Spain, at least there was conformity. . . . It was only later, once the struggle had begun, that I realized that they had hidden the truth from me, and that far from love there existed a deep-seated hatred. . . . But what surprised me most was the brilliant career of Bolívar, which took off so quickly after we separated. . . . I confess I was wrong back then, when I judged him a puerile man, incapable of realizing so grand an ambition.

Whoever was hiding the truth about the colonies’ deep-seated hatred of Spain, Bolívar was not among them. On the contrary, he had been trying to enlighten Humboldt on this very score, but he was never able to persuade Humboldt that his visions of rebellion were anything more than the fleeting passions of a callow young man. Humboldt wrote to him much later, in the heat of the revolution, when Bolívar’s name was already known to the world. They exchanged a few polite letters, but they never saw one another again.

In the elegant bustle of the Humboldt villa in Rome, however, the diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt introduced Bolívar to Antonio
Vargas Laguna, Spain’s ambassador to the Holy See. Vargas would later be imprisoned for his harsh and principled views of Napoleon, but in those early and heady days of 1805, when tolerance was the rule and France was perceived to be a progressive force in the world, the candid ambassador was a highly respected presence. In a fit of generosity, he offered to take Bolívar to the Vatican to meet Pope Pius VII.

Perhaps Vargas thought he had prepared his young guest adequately when he told him that a visitor to the pope should be ready to kiss his sandal and pay deference to papal symbols. But the ambassador was rudely surprised by the scene that unfolded under his supervision. When they were ushered into the papal offices and Bolívar was expected to step forward, kneel, and kiss the cross on the pontiff’s sandal, he refused to do it. Vargas was taken aback, visibly flustered. The pope, seeing the diplomat’s embarrassment, tried to make light of it. “Let the young Indian do as he pleases,” he murmured. He extended a hand and Bolívar took it and kissed his ring. The pope then asked him a question about the Indies and Bolívar answered it to his satisfaction, after which the audience was over and the pope moved on to someone else. As they were leaving the Vatican, Vargas scolded the young man for not following the proper etiquette, to which Bolívar had the sharp retort, “The Pope must have little respect for the highest symbol of Christianity if he wears it on his sandals, whereas the proudest kings of Christendom affix it to their crowns.”

It is hard to know what was more irksome to Bolívar at that moment: being expected to kiss a shoe or being rebuked by a Spaniard. He had been away from Spain’s sphere of influence for almost a year now and the distance had been clarifying. He had—as Alexander von Humboldt would come to realize many years later—a deep-seated hatred for Spain. It had started as a natural Mantuano response and had grown in the few months he had spent in Venezuela as a married landowner, struggling to manage his properties. It had grown again in France, where he had seen the exuberance of a nation rid of its Bourbon king.