Bolivar: American Liberator (9 page)

At about the same time, in February of 1800,
Esteban and Pedro moved out of their apartment on Calle de los Jardines and left Madrid altogether, wanting to distance themselves from a mounting problem. It’s not entirely clear why, but it is reasonable to assume that they had come under suspicion as the century turned, power shifted in court, two prime ministers came and went, and the queen’s lover was taken for what he was: a simple gigolo. It might also have been due to the queen herself, who was highly jealous, inclined to suspect that Mallo was disloyal and had mistresses elsewhere. In any case, Esteban was arrested and put in prison—an unremarkable eventuality in those convoluted times—and Pedro proceeded to make himself scarce, spending much of his time in Cádiz. The Marquis of Ustáriz, a proud pillar in that increasingly venal city, became Bolívar’s sole anchor.

But by then young Simón had a very pressing distraction: he had fallen in love. He had met María Teresa Rodríguez del Toro in the marquis’s house and, in the course of two or three afternoon visits, expressed
his affection and managed to win hers in return. She was the daughter of rich Caracans—a cousin of one of his close childhood friends, Fernando del Toro—which meant that even though she had been born in Spain, she had been raised with the American customs that Bolívar held dear. She was pale, delicate, tall, not particularly beautiful, but she had large dark eyes and an exquisite figure. Not quite nineteen, she was almost two years older, and yet she seemed pure and innocent, with a child’s easy nature.
As the marquis and her father bent over a chess game or discussed politics in comfortable chairs by the great, blazing fireplace, Bolívar drew María Teresa into intimate conversation. Before long, he began to dream of a lifetime at her side.

He proposed marriage to her father so soon that Don Bernardo Rodríguez del Toro was taken aback. It was an advantageous proposition for María Teresa, to be sure: the Bolívar name was persuasive in and of itself, and Simón had acquired quite a reputation for a young man, having been received at court and so obviously favored by the elegant marquis. But Don Bernardo worried about the aspirant’s age. He had yet to turn seventeen. Don Bernardo decided to take María Teresa off to their summerhouse in the Basque city of Bilbao to cool the youngsters’ passions as well as to test the genuineness of the boy’s proposal—and patience.

In the interim, Bolívar persuaded the marquis to help him secure María Teresa’s hand. He shot off a letter to his uncle Pedro, advising him of his intent to marry. He wrote a letter to his beloved, calling her the
“sweet hex of my soul.” Six months later, on March 20, 1801, with an official passport in hand, he left for Bilbao to join her.

There is too little evidence to know with any certainty what happened during the year that followed, but it is clear that Bolívar spent most of it in Bilbao. All spring and summer, he visited with his prospective bride and family. By August, Don Bernardo had taken María Teresa back to Madrid, but Bolívar stayed on in Bilbao. A few months later, in the beginning of 1802, he made a brief visit to Paris. Why? Some historians have suggested that he had a plan to help his uncle Esteban escape from prison. Others have said that Bolívar had become persona non grata, because Queen María Luisa believed he was carrying love letters from Mallo to someone else. Yet others say that Godoy,
newly reinstalled as prime minister, despised the queen’s lover along with all of his “Indian” cronies, and had intentionally blocked Bolívar’s movements. Most likely, Bolívar stayed in Bilbao and traveled to Paris simply because he had made French friends in Bilbao and was trying to prove himself to his prospective father-in-law—show that he was a man of the world. Whatever the reason, shortly after Cornwallis and Napoleon signed a treaty effectively ending the war between England and France, Bolívar was
granted a passport and headed back to Madrid. It was April 29, 1802. He was eighteen years old.

He
applied for a marriage license immediately on arrival in Madrid, and on May 5 received it. Elated, he bought two tickets to Caracas on the
San Ildefonso,
the same ship on which he had sailed three years before. Clearly, he had already persuaded his sweetheart to return with him to his homeland, where life promised to be far less complicated and a large inheritance awaited them.
One of the main stipulations of his inheritance, after all, was that he had to reside in Venezuela.

Simón and María Teresa were married with all of her father’s blessings on the balmy spring day of May 26 in
Madrid’s Parish Church of San José, a short walk from the bride’s house. The wedding, so ardently desired by the groom, was celebrated largely by the bride’s family, as Esteban was still in prison and Pedro unable to travel from Cádiz. Three weeks later, the happy newlyweds departed Spain from the port of La Coruña, in a ship’s cabin Bolívar had
festooned with flowers.

They returned to Venezuela for what Bolívar assumed would be a comfortable landowner’s life filled with the business of property, harvests, and the management of money and slaves. They spent
a few carefree months in Caracas next to the cathedral, in the splendid mansion Bolívar had inherited from the priest who had baptized him—the
house his uncle Carlos had coveted for years. María Teresa was welcomed warmly, not only by Simón’s family, but by her own. The del Toros had had a long, illustrious history in Venezuela and her uncle, the Marquis del Toro, was an influential presence in the capital. But María Teresa had never experienced the colonies for herself and so her first sight of the tropical city with its exotic races, riotously colored birds, and rich women trailed by retinues of slaves must have made a striking impression.

Bolívar had hoped to take her to one of the family haciendas—the estate at San Mateo, perhaps—where he might show her, for a fleeting glimpse at least, his childhood idyll: the sugar fields, the orchards and gardens, the charmed country life they had so often envisioned together.
But he never accomplished this. She felt too weak to travel, too frail to undertake the long carriage ride on rutted roads. There, in the city where his father had died too soon, where his mother had died young, María Teresa grew gravely ill with yellow fever. Whether she had contracted it in Caracas or in La Guaira, or even on board the
San Ildefonso,
will never be known, but there is no doubt that the disease came over her quickly, surprising her frantic husband with its virulence. Within five months of their joy-filled arrival in Venezuela, she was dead.

CHAPTER
3

I was suddenly made to understand that men were made for other things than love.

—Simón Bolívar

M
aría Teresa’s body, jaundiced and emaciated by disease, was
laid to rest in an open coffin for all Caracas to see. She was dressed in a
richly decorated gown of white silk brocade. Her head rested on a pillow that held her husband’s baptismal garments; no child would ever wear them again. A cloth covered her face. When the funeral was over, the mourners gone, her casket was nailed shut and slipped into the family crypt to await eternity with the Bolívars.

Simón’s grief was so extreme that, according to his brother, Juan Vicente, he veered into a kind of madness, alternating between fury and despair. Had Juan Vicente not spent each waking minute caring for him, he might have lost his will to live.
“I had thought of my wife as a personification of the Divine Being,” Bolívar later told one of his generals. “Heaven stole her from me, because she was never meant for this earth.” Spiritually depleted, physically exhausted, he tried to manage his cacao and indigo estates, but the work failed to distract him; everywhere he looked, there were only shards of an imagined life.
“May God grant me a son,” he had once written to his uncle Pedro when he was
seventeen and deeply in love, but he had been stripped of that dream for now, forced to rethink every ambition of his hope-filled youth. He could hardly go on living alone in his immense mansion next to the cathedral, its yawning rooms a reminder of his lost, irrecoverable bliss. He could take no comfort from the parlors of Caracas society. He could no longer look forward to a tranquil life in his haciendas with a doting wife and a spirited brood of children. As he later recounted:

Had I not become a widower, my life might have been very different. I would never have become General Bolívar, nor the Liberator, although I have to admit that my temperament would hardly have predisposed me to become mayor of San Mateo. . . . When I was with my wife, my head was filled only with the most ardent love, not with political ideas. Those thoughts hadn’t yet captured my imagination. . . . The death of my wife placed me early in the road of politics, and caused me to follow the chariot of Mars.

If Bolívar went on to develop a remarkable capacity to rebound from setbacks, it started here in his twentieth year of life. From the depths of despondency he found a survivor’s grit. He became aggressive, combative, blunt. Soon he was involved
in a legal dispute with Antonio Nicolás Briceño, a neighbor who, he claimed, had trespassed on one of his haciendas—building houses and planting fields on his land in the valley of Tuy. Not long after, he wrote a
letter scolding his uncle Carlos Palacios for not keeping him properly informed about his finances. Eventually, he assigned the management of his properties to another person entirely, José Manuel Jaén. But none of this held his interest or counted as any kind of life for a young man. By his twentieth birthday, he was planning a return trip to Europe. He was
bored beyond imagining, eager to get away.

He commissioned a ship to transport his cacao, coffee, and indigo to Spain and set sail on it from La Guaira in October of 1803. Armed with a stack of
books by Plutarch, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, he settled down for the hard journey across the Atlantic. Two months later he arrived in Cádiz after a turbulent passage.

He stayed in that port long enough to sell his haciendas’ crops and
send
detailed instructions to his agent Jaén. But Cádiz in January was a rainy, windy city, and he was anxious to move on. In February, he headed north to Madrid to console his father-in-law, Don Bernardo del Toro, and to give him a few melancholy keepsakes that had once belonged to María Teresa. Bolívar spent two chilly months in Madrid, a city that could only depress him, filled as it was with countless reminders of his dead wife and the evidence of a decaying empire. He was
still in mourning clothes, which decency and custom demanded that he wear for a least a year. He found some comfort in
weeping with Don Bernardo, but seeing old friends and trying to renew past ties proved as unbearable as it had been in Caracas. In March, when
the crown issued a decree demanding that all transients evacuate the capital because of an acute bread shortage, Bolívar was almost relieved. Come April, when
the violet fields bloomed, sending their sweet fragrance into the warming air of the Pyrenees, he made his way across those mountains into France with his childhood friend, Teresa’s cousin Fernando del Toro.

They arrived in Paris just before the French Senate proclaimed Napoleon emperor, on May 18. The capital was filled with high spirits, trembling with possibility. It seemed there was no limit to what France could achieve. Its Enlightenment philosophers had shaped a new era; the Revolution, for all its atrocities, had reinvented a nation; and Napoleon’s striking military successes in Europe and the Middle East suggested that France could become the dominant world power.

Bolívar had watched Napoleon’s star rise with fascination. Now, as he walked the streets of Paris, he could not fail to see the man’s accomplishments: there was a new air of prosperity that contrasted starkly with the mold and ruin of Spain. Napoleon was undertaking a redefinition of all public institutions—education, banking, civil laws, even transportation and sewage—and the improvements were bold and evident. A larger global strategy also seemed to be at work. By then, Napoleon had sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson; months before, he had conceded defeat in the bloody insurrection that had birthed the Republic of Haiti. But even as France appeared to be shrinking in the New World, in the Old it was emerging as a muscular nation. No ruler in the world could claim more admiration at that moment than the newly proclaimed emperor. Seeing
Napoleon, in a modest coat and cap, review his
splendidly arrayed troops in the court of the Tuileries, Bolívar, too, was filled with awe.
“I worshiped him as the hero of the republic,” Bolívar was later to say, “as the bright star of glory, the genius of liberty”—and, perhaps most of all, as a humble servant of his people. But that was soon to change.