Bolivar: American Liberator (8 page)

He spent a comfortable week in the magnificent home of the Marquis of Uluapa, a stay that was arranged by Mexico City’s chief justice, the oidor Don Guillermo Aguirre, a nephew of the bishop’s whose letter he carried. Under Aguirre’s guidance, Simón mixed with Mexico’s high society and was presented to the powerful viceroy Asanza. Much has been written about Simón’s conversation with the viceroy and his supposedly plucky and incendiary references to revolution, which may or may not have been made. It is hard to believe that the Mexican sovereign would have engaged in political debate with a fifteen-year-old. But there is no doubt that they did speak and that the subject of their brief exchange was the blockade that prevented the
San Ildefonso
from setting sail. For all of Spain’s empire, for all the gold and silver of Mexico, the British had reduced Spanish trade to a standstill. Simón’s presence alone—a direct result of the blockade—was proof of Spain’s relative powerlessness. That thought cannot have been far from anyone’s mind.

Along with Simón’s heady introduction to the Mexican society, it is said that he had his first romance while he was there. He had been known to flirt with pretty cousins in Caracas, had learned from his musical uncle, Padre Sojo, to dance, and he had turned into something of a dandy in his frilly lace collars and handsome waistcoats. But after twenty-five days of boredom and idleness in the port city of Veracruz, Simón was given an opportunity to act on amorous impulses.

She was María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco y Osorio, a married
woman of twenty-one. She was flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, the daughter of aristocrats, and she had been introduced to Simón by his hostess, the Marquesa of Uluapa, who was her older sister. His romance with María Ignacia was instantaneous, ephemeral, wedged into a brief eight-day dalliance, but as the two were very much at home in the marquesa’s house, they managed to
snatch a few private moments in a narrow staircase of an upper floor. “The blond Rodríguez,” as she was called,
already had quite a reputation in Mexico City. Married at fifteen, this indefatigable voluptuary would scandalize Mexico with a string of husbands and scores of lovers, among them the Mexican emperor Agustín de Iturbide and Baron Alexander von Humboldt, who proclaimed her
the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. It’s impossible to know whether this romantic encounter was a first for Simón Bolívar. Certainly, it was the first time he had engaged with a woman as a fully independent male, free from the oversight and encumbrances of family.

Simón finally returned to Veracruz and departed for Havana when the blockade lifted, on March 20. Soon, his ship joined an even larger convoy and headed north,
making its wary way past the Bahamas toward the Chesapeake Bay. The captain of the convoy had decided to follow the North American coast until his ships were well past danger, risking a longer trip and the possibility of exhausting their supplies. In Havana, they had taken on cattle, goats, sheep, chickens—enough food and water for sixty days. The trip would take seventy-two. Caught in a violent storm as they approached Cádiz, the fleet scattered; the
San Ildefonso
tossed alongside the coast of Portugal, toward northern Spain. By the time it pulled into the Basque port of Santoña, it stank of rancid cheese and a pestilential bilge of the blood of animals. Burned by relentless sun, buffeted by angry winds, the sailors were a ragged lot. As they squinted through rain at the gray huddled houses of Santoña, they must have felt great weariness and hunger. But they had evaded war.

SPAIN HAD BEEN AT WAR
for six long years, and it would be at war for twenty-six more, until its strength was sapped and its standing as one of the most powerful nations in the world was ancient memory. King Carlos IV had become a laughingstock in his own country. A man of shallow abilities and a weak will, he had relinquished all power to his prime
minister, Manuel de Godoy, who had been cuckolding him for years. At seventeen, Godoy had come to the king’s palace as a royal bodyguard, and, before long, his virile good looks had caught the eye of the queen. For all her plainness of face and ruined complexion, Queen María Luisa had a formidable appetite for good-looking young men. Godoy soon became her lover. The queen rewarded his sexual favors with greater titles and responsibilities, marrying him off to disguise their entanglement, persuading her dull husband to appoint him head of state in 1792. That same year, the queen gave birth to her fourteenth child, who, it was rumored throughout Europe, looked shockingly like the new prime minister.
As the king whiled away the hours in his palace workshop, fiddling with furniture and polishing swords, Godoy commandeered the throne. It was Godoy who disastrously declared war on England, initiating Spain’s precipitous financial decline; and it was Godoy against whom the population of Spain had turned in an avenging fury. It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the French king and queen had been marched to the guillotine just a few years earlier. Trying to regain approval, Queen María Luisa appointed a new prime minister, the physically frail Francisco Saavedra, who had been in the New World and had helped the Americans defeat the English at the Battle of Yorktown; and, ever flighty where sex was concerned, she set her sights on another man.

The new object of her concupiscence was Manuel Mallo, a strapping young bodyguard from Caracas and, as it happened, a friend and confidant of Esteban Palacios, the uncle Simón had come to see. The fifteen-year-old boy could hardly know it, but the
madre patria
was a hotbed of decadence—not the inviolable power it pretended to be. Politically, economically, morally, Spain was suffering the consequences of its own ruinous management. The upper classes could feel it in their pockets; the rabble, in their bellies. It is hardly surprising that
a rich young aristocrat from the Indies was welcomed with open arms.

Simón arrived in Madrid “quite handsome,” as his uncle Esteban reported.
“He has absolutely no education, but he has the will and intelligence to acquire one, and, even though he spent quite a bit of money in transit, he landed here a complete mess. I’ve had to re-outfit him totally. I am very fond of him and, although he takes a great deal of looking after, I attend to his needs with pleasure.”

Esteban had been in Madrid for more than six years, trying to confirm the title of marquis for Simón’s older brother, Juan Vicente. In the process, he had expended a considerable amount of Bolívar funds and achieved very little. However charming and handsome—however engaged in swank musical circles—Esteban was inexpert at politics, unable to win the sort of influence it took to rid a family tree of its pesky defects. He had been about to abandon his efforts and return to Caracas empty-handed, when three eventualities changed his mind: he was made
minister of the auditing tribunal, a distinguished if modestly paid position; he knew Saavedra, who had just been appointed prime minister; and, last, his housemate, the irresistible Manuel Mallo, had become the favorite of the queen. All Spain had heard about María Luisa’s latest inamorato, and all Caracas was abuzz with rumor. Though Mallo had actually been born in New Granada, he had grown up in Caracas and was a fixture in Mantuano society. Sure that his fortunes would rise alongside his friend’s, Esteban had decided to stay. He had urged his brothers in Caracas to send Juan Vicente and Simón, so that they, too, might take advantage of this new American moment. When Juan Vicente demurred and Don Carlos Palacios proposed to send Simón alone, Esteban had agreed. When the Palacios’ younger brother Pedro wrote that he also wanted to come bask in Mallo’s successes, Esteban had agreed to that as well.

Simón arrived in Madrid eleven days after the
San Ildefonso
had docked in Santoña; he had little baggage and almost no clothes. Days later, his uncle Pedro stumbled into the city, penniless and scruffy;
his ship had been seized, first by British corsairs near Puerto Rico and then by the English navy, which had set him free. At first, Simón and Pedro moved into Esteban’s rooms in the house Esteban shared with Mallo, but the crowded conditions soon made it evident that they would need to find their own quarters. The three took a modest apartment on the Calle de los Jardines and hired three manservants to attend to their needs.
“We do enjoy some favor,” Pedro wrote to his brother Carlos, “but it is too complicated to be explained in writing.” The favor, in fact, was scant. Mallo appeared to have considerable run of the queen’s boudoir, but he had little influence in her court, surely nothing approaching Godoy’s power. More troubling, the war with England had thwarted
the regular transport of funds, which the young Venezuelans needed desperately in order to keep up appearances. Neither of the Palacios brothers possessed anything like the fortune that belonged to their charge, Bolívar. As best he could, Esteban set about organizing Simón’s education, so that the boy might shine amid society circles in Madrid.

He hired a tailor to outfit the boy in an elegant uniform, an evening tailcoat, cashmere jackets, velvet vests, silk shirts, lace collars, and capes.
He arranged special tutors who could teach him proper Castilian grammar, French, mathematics, world history. But after a few months, Esteban had a better idea. He asked the Marquis of Ustáriz, a native of Caracas and an old family friend, to take on the boy’s education. The marquis, then sixty-five, was a highly respected member of Spain’s Supreme Council of War and in the prime of a distinguished career. But he had never had a son. He did not hesitate; he accepted the responsibility with pleasure. An erudite man who read widely and studied deeply, the marquis turned out to be an ideal teacher. He was liberal, wise, a paragon of integrity, and an ardent lover of all things Venezuelan. He and Bolívar liked one another immediately. Within days, the sixteen-year-old moved into
the marquis’s resplendent mansion at No. 8 Calle Atocha and began study under his direction.

The change Simón experienced under the marquis’s fatherly tutelage was swift and dramatic. Until then, his schooling had been erratic.
The only surviving letter written in his hand before this time—directed to his uncle Pedro—exhibits an appalling lack of knowledge for a fifteen-year-old aristocrat. He misspells the simplest words, has little grasp of good grammar. His mentor surely recognized this right away and undertook to remake the boy completely. He hired the best tutors available in Spanish literature, French and Italian languages, Enlightenment philosophy, world history. He recommended books, piqued Simón’s curiosity with tales of his own experiences, looked over the boy’s shoulder as Simón read and wrote. Surrounded by the marquis’s books in his magnificently appointed library, Simón read avidly, applying his considerable energies to mastering the classics as well as works of contemporary European thought. He listened to Beethoven and Pleyel—composers of the day, whose works were just being introduced in Madrid’s salons. He learned principles of accounting, which he would
turn one day against his predatory uncle Carlos. But as cultured and academic as the program of his instruction was, it did not lack the physical. He trained in fencing and, being quick on his feet, developed a keen aptitude for it. He studied dance, a pastime that gave him enormous pleasure. Come evenings, he would engage in long philosophical conversations with the marquis, mingle with illustrious guests, or embark on a whirl of social activities with his uncles.

From time to time, the young Venezuelans would call on Mallo in the royal court, where Simón would have the opportunity to observe Queen María Luisa at first hand. He had glimpsed her before, when she had visited Mallo in the house Esteban shared with him.
Disguised in a monk’s cape, slipping furtively into her lover’s quarters, the woman would not have inspired particular awe in a boy. But here, in the glittering halls of the royal palace, there was no question that she was a powerful presence. Surrounded by toadies, ruling her courtiers by whim, she cut a formidable figure with her grim face and flamboyant silk gowns. In a portrait painted within a year of Bolívar’s arrival, Francisco de Goya captured the queen’s frightening amalgam of debauchery and cunning. Even then, judging by Goya’s candid and openly satirical depiction, her critics were legion.
“There is no woman on earth who lies with more composure or is as treacherous,” a respected diplomat in Madrid wrote. “Her simple observations become irrevocable law. She sacrifices the best interests of the crown to her low, scandalous vices.” Now, with her empire beset, her lust too much in evidence, her very teeth marred by decay, the queen’s corruption cannot have been lost on the young man from the Indies. He was acquiring an education befitting a Spanish nobleman, but he was also learning how fragile the construct of monarchies could be.

Henry Adams, a great chronicler of the times, described the fatuousness of the Spanish court in his
History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison:

The Queen’s favorite in the year 1800 was a certain Mallo, whom she was said to have enriched, and who, according to the women of the bed-chamber, physically beat Her Majesty as though she were any common Maritornes. One day in that year, when Godoy had come
to pay his respects to the King, and as usual was conversing with him in the Queen’s presence, Charles asked him a question: “Manuel,” said the King, “what is it with this Mallo? I see him with new horses and carriages every day. Where does he get so much money?” “Sire,” replied Godoy, “Mallo has nothing in the world; but he is kept by an ugly old woman who robs her husband to pay her lover.” The King shouted with laughter, and turning to his wife, said: “Luisa, what think you of that?” “Ah, Charles!” she replied; “don’t you know that Manuel is always joking?”

One afternoon, Bolívar made a trip to the palace to visit the queen’s fifteen-year-old son, Prince Ferdinand, the future king. Ferdinand had invited him to a game of badminton. In the heat of one of their volleys, Simón’s shuttlecock landed on the prince’s head, and the young monarch, incensed and humiliated, refused to continue. The queen, who had been watching all the while, insisted that Ferdinand go on, instructing him to comport himself like a good host.
“How could Ferdinand VII possibly have known,” Bolívar commented twenty-seven years later, “that the accident was an omen that some day I would wrest the most precious jewel from his crown?”