Bolivar: American Liberator (71 page)

To find himself so suddenly helpless—unable to overcome simple fatigue, unable to ride or walk for even a short distance—was disorienting. By October, it was clear that he was
too incapacitated to do more than dictate letters from bed. He had
shooting pains in his abdomen, an angry cough, and his appetite had dwindled emphatically.
He asked for a little dry sherry to spur it, a fresh vegetable perhaps, but when presented with food, he lost all interest.
The heat of Cartagena was debilitating, its effect on his ills so pronounced that his entourage decided to move him inland to Barranquilla, where the air seemed slightly more salubrious. But any relief he gained from the move was soon dwarfed by a passel of different discomforts. In Barranquilla, he was
swaddled in wool from head to toe, fighting off chills. Soon, he was
longing for a quick voyage at sea, convinced that the Caribbean air would do him good, that a little nausea from a rocking ship might serve as a welcome purgative. But all the while, he
adamantly refused medicines, took no palliatives; even the most acute pain could not persuade him to do otherwise.
There was no doctor whose opinion he trusted.
“I’ve deteriorated to such a degree,” he wrote Urdaneta, “that I’ve come to believe I’m dying. . . . You would find me absolutely unrecognizable.”

Indeed he was dangerously emaciated,
a living skeleton, so wisplike that he could hardly stand.
“Today, I had a bad fall,” he wrote in early November. “I toppled half-dead from my feet for no reason. Fortunately, it turned out to be no more than a passing vertigo, although it left me quite confused. All of which proves how feeble I am.”
Climbing a few steps had become an arduous undertaking. Crossing a large room had become an impossible task. His symptoms so shocked and horrified him that he fretted over each, an anxious hypochondriac, charting the
evidence of his own decline.
He had barely enough strength to sit and play cards; he was ill-humored, slept badly. When he ate, he took no more than a few bites—
a little tapioca, a spoonful of lentils—and so he was growing weaker by the day.
“I’m very, very alarmed by his physical state,” his close aide, Belford Wilson, reported. “There is no way this man can participate in public office; he is physically and psychologically impaired.”

But for all the afflictions that gripped his body and spirit,
his mind was sharp. He received visitors from Venezuela, where Páez’s bid for power had spun into open bedlam; he heard out Granadans who wanted him back in Bogotá. He pleaded with Colombians to make peace with their enemies. He warned rebels that they could bring ruin on America. He told Justo Briceño, the rebel governor of an outlying province, that if he didn’t reconcile with Urdaneta, the republic would tumble like a house of cards.
“Believe me,” he said in no uncertain terms, “you two will end up like Páez and Santander, whose rift caused my downfall and wreaked havoc on us all.” To Urdaneta, he spoke as plainly:
“Building one good accord is better than winning a thousand arguments. I have no doubt that my inability to make peace with Santander has been our undoing.” It was as if—in that rapidly waning body—he was reaching a higher plane. He seemed to see his failures all too clearly:
“Many generals,” he counseled, “know how to win wars, but too few know what to do with their victories.” He worried openly about the legitimacy of his successor and told Urdaneta that until he held an election he was no more than a tin-pot usurper.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they kill you,” he said, “and then plunge into total anarchy. If they do, it will be because you didn’t obey the laws.” He
instructed Urdaneta to burn those letters as soon as he read them; they were too candid, too disapproving; he didn’t want his words twisted against Urdaneta after he was dead and gone. No one in that roiling stew of ambition
could count on holding power for long.

To General Flores, the new president of Ecuador, his message was just as dire:
“Avenge Sucre’s murder,” he advised Flores, for it was the vilest crime America had ever known, “then get out while you can.” In a passage that has become a classic in the Bolívarian canon, he went on to list what two decades of rule had taught him:

1. America is ungovernable; 2. he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea; 3. all one can do in America is leave it; 4. the country is bound to fall into unimaginable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color; 5. once we are devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one—not even the Europeans—will want to subjugate us; 6. and, finally, if mankind could revert to its primitive state, it would be here in America, in her final hour.

He was never so lucid, and yet he was not entirely sane. Like a Shakespearean king wandering through the wreckage, he couldn’t help but issue commands to his faraway generals, warn them of the collapse to come. For all his pessimism about Colombia, however,
he believed, beyond all evidence to the contrary, that his sickness was curable, that it was only a matter of time before he would walk away from it all. When he did,
he would sail for the blue mountains of Jamaica. Then on to London, with Manuela.

One of his most
loyal supporters, General Mariano Montilla, who was then in command of the northwestern coast of Colombia, soon took interest in his condition.
When Bolívar wrote to him asking for help in procuring a few supplies, Montilla responded by doing far more. He hired a brig to ferry Bolívar to Santa Marta, a quiet enclave in a Caribbean cove just fifty miles east of Barranquilla. The voyage would be swift, easy, precisely the cathartic Bolívar had in mind. But Montilla did not stop there.
He found Bolívar a doctor of sorts, a Frenchman who had served as a medic in Napoleon’s army; and he persuaded the brig’s owner, a rich Spaniard named Joaquín de Mier, to give the Liberator refuge in his sprawling hacienda on the lip of the sea.

Bolívar arrived in Santa Marta on the 1st of December, accompanied by his nephew Fernando; his servant, José; and
a retinue of loyal friends,
among them Perú de Lacroix, whom Manuela had sent from Bogotá. It had taken a mere two days to skirt the coast in
those calm December waters. As they rounded the last jut of land and sailed into an embrace of bay, they saw the glistening white beaches of Santa Marta. Behind were the verdant hills, alive with a riot of birds and orchids. And behind that, like a hoary old giant stretching his legs in the sea, stood the snowcapped
Sierra Nevada.
Alexander von Humboldt, who had recounted such sights to a far younger Bolívar, had traveled this shore in wonder, recording its snakes, fruits, and shimmering insects—hacking his way past palm trees to chance upon a row of tiny volcanoes, barely taller than a man.

When the ship pulled into harbor, Joaquín de Mier was there to greet it,
his face a mask of alarm. The dread author of the war to the death had been
reduced to a human cinder; the only sign of life, as far as the Spaniard could see, was the fevered eyes—black as onyx—still smoldering in the meager frame. The officers lowered Bolívar from the ship’s deck in
a cradle of locked hands. With infinite care,
they laid him on a pallet, then carried him off to the stately old mansion that housed the Spanish consulate. There, on that tiny patch of Spain—as ironic a destination as an American hero might imagine—he was received with the utmost courtesy and consideration.

Alejandro Révérend, the doctor whom Montilla had engaged to care for the ailing Liberator, took careful notes of the occasion:

His excellency arrived in Santa Marta at seven thirty in the evening and, unable to walk at all, came to shore in a chair of human arms. I found him in the following state: extremely thin, exhausted, pained expression, high-strung. Hoarse voice; profound cough, producing a thick, green sputum. Even, but rapid pulse. Labored digestion. The patient exhibited considerable suffering. In sum, His Excellency’s illness struck me as most grave, and my immediate impression was that
his lungs were sadly damaged. In Barranquilla, he had been given little more than a few tablespoons of cough syrup.

For the next few days, Révérend cared for him, securing a second opinion from
a United States naval surgeon, whose ship, by chance, had dropped anchor in Santa Marta. The American surgeon corroborated Révérend’s diagnosis: the Liberator’s illness was largely in his lungs,
most probably tuberculosis.

With every day, Bolívar’s condition grew more dire. He was
jaundiced, hardly able to sleep more than two hours at a time; at night, he was feverish, delirious; come morning, he was seized by nausea. His
bones ached. His scrawny frame,
reduced to less than eighty pounds, shook with coughs or occasional fits of hiccups. He was, as victims of tuberculosis can be, grizzled, balding, shriveled: ancient before his time. Five days later, Révérend decided to transport him in a comfortable sedan to Mier’s sugar plantation, where, at the very least, Bolívar would be in more pleasant surroundings, surrounded by an attentive staff.

At first, Mier’s splendid estate at San Pedro Alejandrino seemed to be just the cure that Bolívar needed. The house was bright, open, with large windows that welcomed fresh breezes from the sea. Palm trees and tamarinds swayed gently in the adjacent gardens. Under a warm sun and a vaulting blue sky, the patient’s spirits rose. The sweet fragrance of sugar invaded his senses. It was
an aroma he knew well, having grown up on a sugarcane plantation in San Mateo. As he lay in
a hammock strung between two tamarind trees, he may well have remembered the hewn cane, the mashed pulp, the black pits of sorghum that perfumed his childhood. He gained a little energy, wrote a few remarkably eloquent letters.
Sometime before, he had sent word to Manuela, beseeching her to come. Where was she?

More visitors arrived:
couriers bursting with news, a solemn bishop, a crisply efficient notary public, generals and colonels eager to see their hero. The officers made themselves comfortable.
They played cards, drank rum, hired musicians to raise the fading Liberator’s spirits. Rolling cigars, puffing on pipes, they smoked until the corridors were hung with gray.
When the stench of one general was so noxious that Bolívar asked him to move back his chair, the man was taken aback.
“Excuse me, Your Excellency, I don’t think I’ve soiled myself!” “Not at all,” Bolívar said, “it’s just that you smell like hell.” The general laughed and replied that Bolívar would have never said such a thing to Mistress Manuela, whose love of tobacco was well known. Bolívar’s face was suddenly filled with infinite sadness. His eyes welled with tears.
“Ah, Manuela,” he said. “Very well.”

Sometime later, when Dr. Révérend was at his side, Bolívar took it upon himself to ask,
“Doctor, what brought you to these parts?” “Liberty,” the doctor answered. “And have you found it?” Bolívar queried. “Yes, my General.” “Well, then,” Bolívar sighed, “you are more fortunate
than I. Go back to your beautiful France . . . eventually you’ll find that life is impossible here, with so many sons of bitches.”

By the night of December 9,
he was feverish again, raving. The last, fatal seizures of consumption took grip of his bony frame. When he came to his senses the next morning, the bishop pressed him to take his last sacraments; General
Montilla, beside himself with grief, pleaded with him to put his house in order, make a will.
Bolívar balked at first. Accustomed to fight, he was not prepared for surrender.
“How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?” he cried out in dismay. But as the day wore on, he saw the sense in it. With friends at his side as witnesses,
he commended his soul to God, declared the long-dead Teresa del Toro his lawfully wedded wife, and avowed that he had no descendants. For all the dozens of mistresses he had romanced in the past, for all the love he had professed to Manuela and Pepita, his bid to posterity confirmed what he had sworn as a young man: no woman would ever take Teresa’s place. He had buried his baptismal garments with her body and fulfilled his vows to the church. The rest was a matter of earthly cargo. He bequeathed
8,000 pesos (from the pension he had yet to receive) to his lifelong servant José Palacios, his disputed property in Venezuela to his two sisters, his most valuable books to the University of Caracas, his sword to Sucre’s wife. That night, he received
last rites from a humble Indian priest who had been called from a neighboring village. Those rituals done, he turned his remaining strength to address his countrymen one last time. The notary took down his final words:

Colombians! You have witnessed my efforts to launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly, sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives, I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred—my reputation, my love of liberty. They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them.

As I depart your midst, my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. . . . My last vote is for the happiness of our native
land. If my death can heal and fortify the union, I go to my tomb in peace.

As Bolívar’s companions gathered around his bed, the notary read out those last lines. The Liberator was a living ghost—he could hardly keep his eyes open, hardly talk, hardly breathe—
but his mind was clear enough to grasp that his words had made an impression: in that circle of hard-bitten soldiers, there was scarcely a dry eye.

A man could do little more but die. And so it came to be. Within hours, he was
weaving in and out of delirium.
His urine burned, doubling him over with pain; his hands and feet were as cold as the Andean snow. His pulse galloped; he passed blood, and then he started to babble incoherently.
“José!” he called out, “Let’s go! Let’s go! They don’t want us! Take my luggage on board!” In time, he lost the ability to form words at all.
When asked whether he was in pain, he seemed to be signaling no. Six days passed in this harrowing limbo.

At noon on December 17,
the strange wheeze that was coming from his chest gave way to desperate gasps. Life would not depart Bolívar’s body easily. But there was no mistaking it: he was taking his last, deep gulps of mortality. Something about that urgent rattle startled Dr. Révérend. He called the men from the room next door.
“Gentlemen, if you want to be present for the Liberator’s last breath and his final hour,” he said, “come now.” They filed in quickly, somberly.
At one o’clock in the afternoon,
exactly eleven years to the minute after his famed declaration of independence in Angostura, Bolívar’s soul passed from his shattered body. His lips went white,
his brow softened in beatific repose.