Bolivar: American Liberator (62 page)

Santander’s vigorous efforts to pack the convention paid off. The “liberal” party won a majority of the delegates and Santander was elected as the representative of six provinces, including Bogotá. Bolívar was astonished. At first, he accused his vice president of fraud, but realizing how petty and foolish that sounded, backed off and accepted the humiliation. In resignation, he wrote,
“All New Granada has conspired against me. . . . Santander is the idol of this place.”

Although the convention was uppermost in his mind, Bolívar had much to occupy his days. He was still president of Greater Colombia, after all, from Panama City to Guayaquil. With prophetic foresight,
he commissioned a British engineer to survey the Panamanian isthmus for the possible construction of a canal between the seas. Envisioning Colombia as the gatekeeper of a mighty commerce, he studied the trade routes that had developed in the region. But Latin American conflagrations
kept getting in the way of progress. In the north, Venezuelans were arming themselves against a possible Spanish invasion from Cuba. In the south, President Sucre had been wounded in a skirmish when two separatist Peruvian generals, Gamarra and Santa Cruz, had tried to topple Sucre’s “foreign” presidency and win Bolivia for themselves.

There were other, more immediate dangers. In Cartagena, two sworn enemies—a white aristocrat and a mulatto sailor—were vying for power. General Mariano Montilla and his nemesis, the black admiral José Padilla, had been
wrangling over supremacy in Cartagena for years.
Padilla was a giant of a man and, as one contemporary put it, as strong and scarred by life as a Cyclops; sometimes he was so full of hatred for the white race that he was helpless to contain it. The feisty, adventurous son of a ship’s carpenter, Padilla had survived the Battle of Trafalgar, transformed himself into a hero of the revolution, and now boasted a popular following. Montilla, on the other hand, was the army’s local commander in chief, a refined, erudite man from one of the leading families in Caracas. Padilla suspected Montilla of being on the verge of staging a coup, and so decided to storm Cartagena. With a band of colored followers, Padilla invaded the port city and declared himself its intendant. But the struggle between Padilla and Montilla had deeper political ramifications: Padilla was a New Granadan and loyal to Santander; Montilla, a Venezuelan, was an agent of Bolívar. It was an extension of the larger feud.

Bolívar could hardly be in three places at once. He decided to set out for Cartagena immediately. He hadn’t gone far before word came that Montilla had quelled the coup and sent Padilla running to Santander’s side just as the convention was getting under way in Ocaña. Bolívar decided to take fuller measure of the situation. He stopped in Bucaramanga, a picturesque little town in the verdant, wooded hills, ninety miles from Ocaña, and there he stayed—close enough to monitor the convention’s proceedings, far enough to appear as if he were doing nothing of the kind. But Bolívar’s enemies suspected that he had always intended to come to Ocaña and keep an eye on Santander.
When Bolívar sent his aides to sit in on all the debates, they were certain of it. The truth was simpler:
Bolívar had stated very clearly to his staff that
the stakes at Ocaña were too high to ignore, that what was decided there would frame the future of the republic. It would affect all he had ever struggled for. With the volatile Padilla taking refuge there under Santander’s wing, the
convention had taken on a possibly explosive dynamic. Bolívar wanted to know precisely what was being said.

As days passed and the deliberations in Ocaña dragged on, Bolívar surrendered himself to a quiet life in the green vales of Bucaramanga. He took over a cluster of elegant country houses where he and his officers could dine together, discuss the news of the day, and govern the republic.
They set up a system of mail deliveries to keep him informed of developing events in Ocaña, Bogotá, and Caracas. As he waited to hear the fate of the nation,
he visited the local church,
played cards with his aides, wrote letters, went on brisk runs, rode out into the wilds at full gallop. At meals, he presided over long, ruminative conversations, in which he discussed his long-ago marriage, his generals, the various attempts on his life over the years, his alternating respect and contempt for Napoleon. The Liberator adapted easily to life in that rustic sanctuary. He ate modestly, prepared his own salads, drank little, bathed often, and allowed no one to smoke in his presence. He even undertook to teach his more uncultivated companions a little table manners.

He had shaved his beard and mustache, and he wore his hair short, affecting a look of Spartan practicality. He had little time or taste anymore for an elaborate toilette. No longer did he dress to impress the ladies nor, for that matter, did he attend Bucaramanga’s dances. He wore comfortable linen clothing and a wide straw hat. His face was an atlas of wrinkles, his skin cured to a deep, leathery tan; he seemed far older than his forty-four years. Thin to cadaverous, he had grown ever more delicate, his thighs and legs emaciated. He suffered from fevers, night sweats, deliriums—sure signs of his advancing tuberculosis. In response, his doctor tried to treat him with emetics, but these only exacerbated the condition. All the same, his spirit was strong. When he laughed, his eyes fairly twinkled; they had, as was often said,
an expression of soul and energy impossible to capture. When he brooded, they grew pinched, his lower lip large: he could also be, according to even his most devoted admirers, decidedly ugly.

He was generally up at five in the morning, tending his horses. When he wasn’t out on a jaunt through the wilds, he was swinging vigorously in his hammock, dictating letters or reading from a store of books that traveled with him—works by Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu, Locke, or the eloquent Bishop de Pradt. By early evening, exhausted by the sheer stress of waiting, he was ready for bed. Mostly, during those days of forced idleness, he vacillated between determination and pessimism. He was as moody as a tiger in a cage. What he was hearing from Ocaña was not good: José María del
Castillo, a loyal partisan to his cause, had been elected president of the convention, but the man couldn’t get Bolívarians to agree and vote as a unified bloc.
The Venezuelans, particularly, had turned out to be unreliable advocates, inclined to pursue personal agendas in lieu of the greater good. The Santanderistas, on the other hand, ate together, moved together, consulted on every point, and worked as a uniform offensive.

On the first order of business, both sides were in unanimous agreement: the old constitution needed to be overhauled. But beyond that, as delegates began to pull tedious drafts of a new charter from their pockets, debates quickly degenerated into long windy harangues or shouting matches, freighted with personal animus.
Bolívar’s followers were accused of being tyrants; Santander’s, cunning conspirators.
In time, a rumor began to spread that Santander had ordered one of his men to steal out to Bucaramanga and assassinate the president. Immediately, Bolívar’s retinue tightened the security around him. But nothing came of it; and the Liberator, apprised of these machinations, dismissed them as entirely ridiculous.

By the end of May, Santander’s front had made real headway in the deliberations. Azuero, the journalist who had issued the most scathing condemnations of Bolívar, put forward the group’s recommendations for a new constitution: They would abolish the law that allowed Bolívar emergency dictatorial powers. They would curb the president’s power in general, dismember the republic, federalize the nation into twenty provinces, and give congress broad powers over the executive. It was Bolívar’s nightmare. Fully aware of this, his followers
demanded that the Liberator be allowed to go to Ocaña and present his side. But Santander took the floor and argued vehemently against it. No, the vice
president insisted, he cannot come.
“For if he does, there will be no will, no ideas other than his own!” The assembly roundly agreed.

Castillo sensed the reins slipping out of his control. He considered boycotting the proceedings—walking out with just enough members to prevent a legitimate vote.
When Bolívar heard of it, he was appalled.
Had it come to this? Had one bully so stalled the democratic process that men of principle would be forced to walk away? Had the convention, his great hope for the republic, been so futile? But Azuero’s proposals for the nation were worse.
“Do what you must,” Bolívar told his delegates, “and I will do my duty.”

The more he thought about it, the more determined he became. In idler days, he had fantasized going home to join his retired, war-battered cohort in Venezuela. Now, he was incapable of abandoning the fight.
“My doctor often has told me,” he wrote Briceño Méndez, “that for my flesh to be strong, my spirit needs to feed on danger. This is so true that when God brought me into this world, he brought a storm of revolutions for me to feed on. . . . I am a genius of the storm.”

On the 10th of June,
nineteen conventioneers walked out of the proceedings at Ocaña, leaving fifty-four delegates in the room—one person short of a quorum. The Great Constitutional Convention was over. By then, Bolívar was on his way to the capital.
“The bull is in the arena,” he wrote his minister of foreign affairs, “and now we’ll see who’s got guts.”
As he rode on, he got word that Bogotá’s ministers were demanding that he take supreme dictatorial powers. He didn’t know it yet, but one of his generals, Pedro Herrán, had summoned the people of Bogotá to the main square.
The constitution, Herrán had told them, was in tatters; the convention, a failure; the country, verging on chaos. Bolívar was riding back to renounce his presidency, Herrán said, and a bloody civil war would surely follow. Was that what they wanted? With eight hundred of Herrán’s armed soldiers just beyond the square, there was considerable weight to the question. The council of ministers did not hesitate. They voted to disregard all decisions at Ocaña, suspend elected officials, and confer unlimited power on Bolívar. When the Liberator entered the city on June 24, he was
welcomed euphorically as the savior of the republic.

It was a genuine torrent of gratitude. The citizens of Bogotá sensed
they had peered into a maw of anarchy and pulled back, just in time.
Bolívar may have had enemies in the halls of government—Santander had elevated them, made them appear mightier than they truly were—but on the streets, among ordinary people, there was no doubt who was the nation’s leader. For many, Bolívar represented freedom itself: the polestar of a new identity. As he rode into view on that warm summer’s day, they roared with wild approval.

Two months later, in a ceremony that formalized Colombia’s “Organic Decree,” Bolívar was pronounced president-liberator. His acceptance address was puzzling, odd, filled with a rare ambivalence:
“Colombians,” he said in closing, “I won’t even utter the word ‘liberty,’ for, if I am good on my promises, you will be more than liberated, you will be
obeyed.
Moreover, under a dictatorship, how can we speak of liberty? On this then let us agree: Pity the nation that obeys one man as we should pity the man who holds all power.”

He was that man; he held absolute power; and his uneasy romance with authority would come to define a continent. A few days later, José Padilla was put behind bars. Francisco de Paula Santander was stripped of all command. The office of vice president was abolished. In a pale show of national appreciation, Bolívar offered Santander an ambassadorship in Washington. But it was clear that if the failed general didn’t accept, he would be setting sail all the same.
“Santander will leave the country,” Bolívar announced, “one way or another.”

In the end, Santander would go for an entirely different reason.

WHILE BOLÍVAR WAS IN BUCARAMANGA
awaiting news of the convention, Manuela Sáenz was coming and going freely from La Quinta, his house overlooking Bogotá. She was ever bolder in her eccentricities, her predilection for dressing like a man, her lavish parties with naughty skits and dances.
Among her guests at those ribald affairs were some of Bolívar’s closest friends—including an emerald magnate named Pepe París and a jolly Englishman named Colonel John Illingworth. They were captivated by Manuela’s warmth, her raffish wit and humor, but they were drawn, too, by her closeness to the Liberator. She was La Presidenta, La Libertadora: a door to his intimate circle. That she adored him was patently obvious; that she despised anyone who didn’t was amusing.
“Paula, Padilla, Páez!” she had complained to Bolívar, “all those P’s! . . . God, let them all die! It will be a great day for Colombia when they do.” She had—as South Americans like to say—no hair on her tongue.
“We adored her,” one of his friends confessed. “She would receive visitors in the morning, dressed in a fetching robe. She tried covering her arms, but essentially they were bare; and, embroidering away, with possibly the prettiest fingers in the world, she spoke little, smoked fetchingly . . . and shared the most interesting news of the day. Later on, she would ride out in an officer’s uniform.”

A month after his return, on Monday, July 28, Manuela held an extravagant party in La Quinta to celebrate Bolívar’s forty-fifth birthday.
The festivities were open to the public and held on the sloping meadows that surrounded the house. La Quinta itself was hung in patriotic bunting. Outside, a military band did the honors, soldiers performed drill formations, revelers danced or splashed in the river, and an abundance of food and drink was offered: grilled meats, fresh bread, countless barrels of chicha. Inside the house, where the Liberator’s personal friends were received, the fare was more elegant. Bolívar, as chance would have it, was in town, busy, and could not attend, but his generals and old cronies filled the rooms, toasting his name with champagne. As the evening wore on, tributes grew uninhibited and vinous, until—in the wee hours of morning—someone mentioned the name of Santander. It was like holding a match to gunpowder: Someone else proposed that they hold a mock trial and hang the irksome ex–vice president in effigy. Off they went, clapping and hooting, to fashion Santander from a sack of grain, a three-cornered hat, long black stockings, and a sign that read: “F.P.S. dies, Traitor.”
An officer improvised a firing squad, a priest gave last rites, and—to the apparent delight of all—the puppet was pounded with gunshot.