Bolivar: American Liberator (63 page)

It was a disgrace, a scandal—and all of it in public. Some claimed that Manuela Sáenz was to blame. That, at least, was
the opinion of General José María Córdova, a young officer in Bolívar’s service, who had
despised her since the ship’s voyage he had taken with Manuela after the harried evacuation of Peru. We don’t know whether the cause for that animus was a heated argument or, as some popular historians claim, a failed flirtation. But to Córdova, the Libertadora was obstreperous,
spiteful, a meddler in government affairs; she was corrosive to the very fiber of the country. In high dudgeon, he told the Liberator that he would do well to be rid of her.

“I know you’re angry with me,” Sáenz wrote her lover just after the scandal broke, “but I’m not at fault.” According to her, others had been responsible. She hadn’t seen it; she’d been fast asleep—all of which may or may not have been true. She offered to lie low in her own house for a while. “The best thing now, sir, may be for me to stay away, unless you want to see me.”

Bolívar was furious, knowing that even though he hadn’t been present, he would be blamed for the whole affair. He tried to dismiss it as a prank, an instance of too much mirth and drink—unfortunate, but ultimately harmless. But he knew he had to respond.
“I’ll suspend the commanding officer,” he told Córdova. “As for the lovable madwoman, what can I say? I’ve tried my best to be rid of her, but she’s impossible to resist. . . . Even so, once we’re past this, I think I’ll send her back to her country, or wherever she wants to go.”

He would do nothing of the kind. She was indispensable to him. Other than his manservant, José Palacios, who had served him for years and
kept a close catalog of every penny he spent and every well-worn, earthly scrap in his possession, Manuela was the most intimate companion Bolívar had ever known. She was the only other human being who worried over him, tended to his every need, kept a keen eye on his entourage, and said what no one else had the courage to say.

What few had the courage to say was that whispers of an impending coup were beginning to be heard in the capital. Manuela, who had her ear well to the ground, became suspicious of just such a plot in early August, as the council of ministers readied itself to grant absolute power to Bolívar. A cabal of young intellectuals loyal to Santander
began to speak openly of “tyrannicide” as the only way to save the republic. Although the people and the army were firmly on Bolívar’s side, these youths were adamantly not. They were a motley alliance with one thing in common: they had spent their short lives in the shadow of revolution and, as far as they were concerned,
the country needed to move on. Bolívar was of their parents’ generation: a throwback, a warmonger, a diehard of the old guard. As far as they were concerned, in suspending
the law and usurping power, Bolívar had committed high treason. He was little more than a common criminal.
“Off with the Tyrant’s head!” became the rallying cry. To any casual observer, the young liberals were only quoting literature. But the tight cabal was plotting the president’s assassination.

Among the conspirators was
Florentino González, a young editor who had taken over Azuero’s newspaper and married Bernardina Ibañez, the stubborn young beauty with whom Bolívar had been so infatuated a decade before.
González was pale,
volcanic, gifted with words; and, like Azuero, he despised Bolívar with a passion. His conspirators were
Pedro Carujo, a young artillery officer with literary pretensions, who had always harbored royalist sympathies; Agustín
Horment, a French liberal, suspected of being a Spanish spy; Luis Vargas Tejada, whom Santander had chosen to be his secretary in his pending ambassadorship to the United States; and, finally, Colonel Ramón Guerra, chief officer of the city’s garrison, whom no one would have suspected of being involved in the skullduggery.

The first plan was
to kill Bolívar at a masked ball to be held at the Coliseum Theater on August 10, the tenth anniversary of the historic Battle of Boyacá. The mayor had approved the festivities with one proviso: guests had to wear costumes that corresponded to their gender. To enforce it, he stood near the door as guests filed into the ball. One by one, he peered behind their masks. Among the early arrivals was a partygoer dressed as a hussar. When the mayor asked him to lift his mask, he refused. Barred admission, the hussar whispered she was Manuela Sáenz, but the mayor was firm: not even the Liberator’s mistress would be admitted dressed as a man. Manuela, who feared precisely what the conspirators had planned—a swarm of assassins, dispatching their Caesar with a battery of well-aimed daggers—did what she had come to do. She raised an earsplitting ruckus. She shouted, screamed, argued frantically, until there could be no doubt who was at the door, trying to gain entry. Bolívar, already inside and in sure danger, was so thoroughly embarrassed that he excused himself and left. Manuela had been disgraceful yet again, but she had made sure Bolívar would leave alive.

The second plan to murder him came on September 21, three weeks after the “Organic Decree” granted him absolute power. It was
Sunday—a crisp, cool day—and Bolívar had decided to take a long walk to Soacha, a pretty little suburb five miles from the city’s center. His companions, as the conspirators had learned, were to be few—
one friend, one aide—and the stroll would be on a country road: the ideal scenario for a murder.
Carujo prepared six assassins for the task, but the conspirators were
called off at the last minute by Santander, who told them emphatically that the public wasn’t ready to be rid of Bolívar. It was best to wait, to use legal arguments where possible; and in any case he wanted to be as far away as possible when the moment came
“so that no one will say I had anything to do with the intrigue.” The new date was
set for late October, when Santander, as the newly appointed ambassador to the United States, would be on a ship and long gone from the capital.

By now the scheme to kill Bolívar involved more than 150 collaborators, the great majority of whom were soldiers in Colonel Guerra’s barracks, a short walk from the presidential palace. The leaders worked actively to coordinate the assault, aware that with so many in their ranks they ran a high risk of exposure.
Their plan was to storm the palace in full force and dispatch Bolívar along with two of his most loyal generals—Urdaneta and Castillo. Florentino González had been elected to sound out Santander: was Santander ready and willing to assume the presidency? He responded vaguely that, if the “criminals” were out of the way, he would serve his country. All was set, then. It was a matter of time.

Time ran out, however, on the 25th of September, when the head of the garrison, Colonel Guerra, alerted his fellow conspirators that they were in danger of being discovered.
An army captain had just reported to him that a revolution was afoot, that Bolívar’s life was in peril, and that a number of soldiers in Guerra’s garrison were involved. The informant had not imagined that such a high-ranking officer as Guerra would be part of the nefarious plan. It was late in the afternoon when González, Carujo, and Horment received Guerra’s message, but they understood immediately that there was no choice but to act that night, before any details leaked to Bolívar. Indeed, rumors of a pending coup were so widespread by then in Bogotá that
a woman had been emboldened to go directly to the palace and report what she had heard to
Manuela Sáenz. When Manuela fretted about it to Bolívar, he consulted his entourage, but nothing came of it. The men had a good laugh and concluded that it was like women to imagine things.

Wasting no time now, the chief conspirators gathered at seven that night
in the house of Santander’s deputy, Luis Vargas Tejada. Methodically, they began to send word to all 150 collaborators that they were about to execute the plan. Call it cowardice, call it change of heart: the majority failed to respond. Even Colonel Guerra decided to play it safe by visiting one of Bolívar’s ministers that night to play a friendly game of cards. Nevertheless, by half past ten, the group in Vargas Tejada’s house had formed a tight fist of committed assassins. They left for the palace at about half past eleven: ten armed citizens under the command of Horment; sixteen seasoned soldiers under Carujo. It was a typical September night in Bogotá—a brisk
rain had drenched the city and left streets
slick with mud—but
the moon was bright and full.

THAT NIGHT, EVERYONE IN BOLÍVAR’S
circle was ailing. The palace had been reduced to a clinic. Bolívar was sick with fever. José Palacios was confined to bed, severely ill. Two aides were suffering from bad colds, Colonel Ferguson so much so that he had gone off with a burning throat to be treated at the army hospital, and Colonel Andrés Ibarra was suffering his infirmities in his room. Even Fernando Bolívar, the Liberator’s nephew, freshly arrived from school in Virginia, was unwell and indisposed. Seldom had Bolívar been more unattended.

At six o’clock, he sent a message to Manuela’s house and asked her to come and accompany him, but Manuela demurred. She, too, had a terrible head cold and didn’t want to venture out in the inclement weather. But Bolívar insisted that she was far better off than he. He was achy, feverish, in need of her tender ministrations. Yielding to his entreaties, she put on her galoshes and hurried to him through the damp night.

When she arrived, he was in the tub, giving himself a cooling bath to ease the fever. He seemed melancholy—understandably so. He was a sick man in a sick house, with much to trouble him: the Peruvian navy had just attacked Colombia in Guayaquil; the president of Peru, General La Mar, had marched north to take command of the offensive; and
the wounded General Sucre, who had lost Bolivia to
Peruvian generals, was about to disembark in Guayaquil and face the hostilities. All in all, he said to Manuela—with a heavy dose of gallows humor—
it’s time for a palace coup. She scoffed. “Ten coups could be in the offing right now, for all the attention you pay!”

“Don’t worry,” he comforted her, “nothing will happen.”
Despite the few guards stationed around the palace that night—a fact she had seen for herself as she wended her way there—Bolívar was unpreoccupied.
Colonel Guerra had assured him that an entire garrison was standing by should the slightest trouble emerge. The Liberator’s only protection at that moment was the sword and the pistol that rested in the next room, sheathed and holstered, on the bureau.

He asked Manuela to read to him while he soaked in the tub, thinking that words might soothe his misery. When he climbed into bed shortly thereafter, he fell into a heavy, torpid sleep, as did his exhausted mistress. But at some point near midnight, she was brought wide awake by the raucous barking of dogs. Bolívar’s mastiffs were yawping wildly in the courtyard. She heard a few dull thuds, as if something were being struck, cut down, and then the sound of men’s voices, ringing through the dark.

Alert to the possibility of danger, she roused Bolívar from deep sleep. His first instinct was to grab his weapons and go,
in his nightshirt, to the door. She stopped him and pleaded with him to get dressed, which he did calmly and quickly. But when he looked around for shoes, there were none.
His only pair of boots had been taken away to be polished. In desperation, Manuela pressed her galoshes on him and, somehow, he was able to squeeze into them. “Now what?” he said, taking up his pistol and sword. “Shall we brave the storm?”

Thinking fast—for the clamor was only growing as the intruders burst through the hallways—she pointed to the window. She reminded him that only days before he had told Pepe París it would make a perfect getaway. Bolívar had said it in jest, but now with marauders at the door, pounding their fists and shouting, he saw how right he had been. The window opened onto the street—it was an easy jump to the cobblestones. Manuela peered out to see if the way was clear, and made him
wait a few seconds until it was. Just as he leapt through the casement into the night, his assailants began to force an entry.

Manuela took up her sword and unbolted the latch with as much calm as she could muster. She could hear the yelling on the other side: “Long live liberty!” “Death to the tyrant!” And then she flung wide the door.

“There appeared in the doorway,” González later recounted, “a strikingly beautiful woman, sword in hand, who, with admirable presence of mind and very courteously, asked us what we wanted.”

“Bolívar!”

“He’s not here,” Manuela answered. “See for yourselves.” Horment and the others pushed past her, looking for Bolívar. Until then, they had had little trouble moving toward their target, and they wanted none now.
Carujo and his sharpshooters had shot a guard and slit the throats of a number of sentries on their way through the palace gates, and then they had sped away to take on the Vargas battalion, Bolívar’s most faithful unit, while the armed civilians rushed inside. Horment, González, and the others had raced up the few steps toward the Liberator’s quarters on the mezzanine. They had wounded Ibarra, who, hearing the din, had run from his bed, disheveled and febrile but carrying a sword.

The conspirators had daggers in hand, pistols in holsters strapped to their chests. Manuela could see that they meant business. Carrying lanterns aloft, they pushed past her and inspected the rooms, feeling the bed to see if it was still warm. But Bolívar was nowhere to be found. Frustrated, they seized Manuela by the arm and questioned her gruffly, demanding to know where he had gone. She responded that he was in the council rooms, down the hall. It was the only plausible excuse that sprang to mind. When one of the men shouted that a window was gaping, Manuela insisted that she had just opened it herself. They believed her; they couldn’t imagine that Carujo’s soldiers would leave that side of the street unattended. She led them this way and that down the circuitous hallways, trying to throw them off track and hoping to buy Bolívar precious time. When at last they had been led to every floor of the palace and back again, they suspected that she was toying
with them.
She crossed her arms, standing her ground against the lot of them.
“He’s safe!” she admitted finally. “I helped him flee! So kill me!” They flung her to the floor, kicked her head, and began beating her with their swords, but González pulled them off.
“I didn’t come here to fight women,” he said. They vanished down the hall as quickly as they had come, just
as cannon fire exploded outside: Carujo’s gunners were attacking the Vargas regiment. As Manuela staggered back to the room, she heard
the sharp clatter of boots outside. Glancing out into the moonlight, she made out Bolívar’s aide Ferguson, sprinting back from the barrack hospital. She tried to warn him, but he refused to halt.
“What’s going on?” Ferguson cried when he saw his fellow colonel Carujo, wielding a gun, shouting orders. Carujo killed him with a single shot before he could reach the door.