"God knows where Sucre can be!"
General Montilla had returned twice and found him much better than he had been on the first day. Furthermore, it seemed to him that little by little the General was recovering his old drive, above all because of the insistence with which he complained that his supporters in Cartagena had not yet voted for the new constitution or recognized the new government, as had been agreed on the previous visit. General Montilla invented the excuse that they were waiting to find out if Joaquin Mosquera would accept the presidency.
"They'll be in a better position if they do it beforehand," said the General.
On the next visit he complained with even greater energy, for he had known Montilla since they were boys and realized that the resistance he attributed to others was in fact his own. Not only were they bound by a friendship based on class and profession, but they had spent their lives in common as well. At one time their relations cooled to the point where they stopped speaking to each other because Montilla left the General without reinforcements in Mompox, at one of the most dangerous moments in the war, and the General accused him of both moral degeneracy and responsibility for all his calamities. Montilla's reaction was so impassioned that he challenged the General to a duel, but he continued to serve the cause of independence despite personal animosities.
He had studied mathematics and philosophy at the Military Academy in Madrid and had been a personal bodyguard to King Fernando VII until the day the first news of Venezuelan emancipation reached him. He was a good conspirator in Mexico, a good arms smuggler in Curacao, and a good fighter everywhere from the time he was first wounded, at the age of seventeen. In 1821 he rid the coast of Spaniards from Riohacha to Panama and took Cartagena from a larger and better-equipped army. Then he offered reconciliation to the General with a gallant gesture: he sent him the gold keys of the city, which the General returned along with his promotion to the rank of brigadier general and orders to take over the government of the coast. He was not a well-loved governor, although he tended to mitigate his excesses with a sense of humor. His house was the best in the city, his hacienda, Aguas Vivas, was one of the most desirable in the province, and in broadsides on the walls the people asked where he got the money to buy them. But after eight years of a difficult and solitary exercise of power he was still governor, having become an astute politician, difficult to oppose.
Montilla replied to each insistent complaint with a different argument. Nevertheless, at one point he told the unadorned truth: The Bolivarists in Cartagena were resolved not to swear to a compromise constitution or recognize a weak government whose origins lay not in harmony but in widespread discord. This was typical of local politicians, whose disagreements had been the cause of great historical tragedies. "And they are not mistaken if Your Excellency, the most liberal of us all, leaves us at the mercy of men who have appropriated the name liberal in order to destroy your work," said Montilla. And therefore the only way to settle matters was for the General to remain in the country and prevent its disintegration.
"Fine. If that's the case, tell Carmona to come back and we'll persuade him to revolt," replied the General with characteristic sarcasm. "It won't be as bloody as the civil war the Cartagenans are going to provoke with their insolence."
But before he said goodbye to Montilla he had regained his composure, and he asked him to bring the leaders of his party to Turbaco to air their objections. He was still waiting for them when General Carreno arrived with the news that Joaquin Mosquera had assumed the presidency.
He slapped his forehead. "Fuck it!" he exclaimed. "I won't believe it until I see it with my own eyes."
That same afternoon General Montilla went to confirm the report in person, in a downpour with crosswinds that uprooted trees, devastated half the town, destroyed the house's farmyard, and swept away the drowned animals. But it also softened the blow of the bad news. The official escort, in an agony of tedium in the empty days, prevented the disaster from becoming worse. Montilla threw on a battlefield rain cape and directed rescue operations. The General sat on a rocking chair in front of the window, wrapped in the sleeping blanket, his look thoughtful and his respiration calm, contemplating the torrent of mud that carried along the wreckage left by the disaster. Those Caribbean disturbances had been familiar to him since he was a boy. Nevertheless, while the troops hurried to reestablish order in the house, he told Jose Palacios that he could not remember seeing anything like it. When at last calm was restored, Montilla came into the room, dripping water and muddied up to his knees. The General was still intent on his idea.
"Well, Montilla," he said. "Mosquera is President now, and Cartagena still hasn't recognized him."
Montilla would not allow storms to distract him either.
"If Your Excellency were in Cartagena it would be much easier," he said.
"There's the danger it would be interpreted as interference by me, and I don't want to be the protagonist of anything," he said. "Furthermore, I'm not moving from here until this matter is resolved."
That night he wrote a letter of support to General Mosquera. "I have just learned, with no surprise, that you accepted the presidency, which makes me happy for the country and for myself," he told him. "But I regret it, and will always regret it, for your sake." And he ended the letter with a sly postscript: "I have not left because my passport has not arrived, but I am leaving without fail when it does."
On Sunday General Daniel Florencio O'Leary arrived in Turbaco and joined the entourage. He was a prominent member of the British Legion, who for some time had been an aide-de-camp and a bilingual secretary to the General. Montilla, in a better humor than ever, had accompanied him from Cartagena, and they and the General spent a pleasant afternoon as old friends under the orange trees. At the end of a long conversation with O'Leary concerning his military career, the General asked his favorite question:
"And what are people saying?"
"That it isn't true you're leaving," said O'Leary.
"Aha," said the General. "Why not this time?"
"Because Manuelita is staying behind."
The General responded with disarming sincerity:
"But she's always stayed behind!"
O'Leary, a close friend of Manuela Saenz, knew the General was right. It was true she always stayed behind, not because she wanted to but because the General would leave her on any pretext in a foolhardy effort to escape the servitude of formalized love. "I'll never fall in love again," he once confessed to Jose Palacios, the only human being with whom he ever permitted himself that sort of confidence. "It's like having two souls at the same time." Manuela asserted herself with a determination that could not be contained and with none of the hindrances of dignity, but the more she attempted to conquer him, the more eager the General seemed to free himself from her chains. It was a love of perpetual flight. In Quito, after their first two weeks of passionate love, he had to travel to Guayaquil for a meeting with General Jose de San Martin, the liberator of Rio de la Plata, and she stayed behind, asking herself what kind of lover left the table in the middle of the meal. He had promised to write every day, everywhere he went, so that he could swear with all his heart that he loved her more than he had ever loved anyone else in this world. He did write to her, in fact, and sometimes in his own hand, but he did not send the letters. In the meantime he consoled himself in a multiple idyll with the five indistinguishable women of the Garaycoa matriarchy, never knowing for certain if he had chosen the grandmother of fifty-six, the daughter of thirty-eight, or the three granddaughters in the flower of their youth. When his mission in Guayaquil was over, he escaped from them all with promises of eternal love and a prompt return, and he went back to Quito to sink into the quicksands of Manuela Saenz.
Early the following year he left her again, to complete the liberation of Peru, which was the final enterprise of his dream. Manuela waited four months, but she set sail for Lima as soon as letters began to arrive that not only were written by Juan Jose Santana, t
he General's private secretary, which was not unusual, but were thought and felt by him as well. She found him in the pleasure palace of La Magdalena, invested with dictatorial powers by the Congress and besieged by the beautiful bold women of the new republican court. The Presidential Palace was so disorderly that a colonel of the lancers had moved out one midnight because the agonies of love in the bedrooms did not let him sleep. But Manuela was now in territory that she knew all too well. She had been born in Quito, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy American landowner and a married man, and at the age of eighteen she had jumped out the window of the convent where she was a student and run off with an officer in the king's army. Nevertheless, two years later she was married in Lima, and with a virgin's orange blossoms, to Dr. James Thorne, a complaisant physician who was twice her age. And therefore, when she returned to Peru in pursuit of the love of her life, she did not need lessons from anyone on how to hold her own in the midst of scandal.
O'Leary was her best aide-de-camp in these battles of the heart. At first Manuela did not live at La Magdalena, but she came and went as she pleased, through the main door and with military honors. Astute and indomitable, she had irresistible grace, a sense of power, and unbounded tenacity. She spoke good English because of her husband, as well as an elementary but comprehensible French, and she played the clavichord in the sanctimonious style of novices. Her handwriting was difficult to read, her syntax impassable, and she would convulse with laughter at what she called her orthographical horrors. The General named her curator of his archives in order to keep her near him, and this made it easy for them to make love anytime, anywhere, surrounded by the clamor of the wild Amazonian animals that Manuela tamed with her charms.
Nevertheless, when the General began the conquest of the difficult territories of Peru, which were still in the hands of the Spanish, Manuela could not persuade him to take her along as a member of his general staff. She followed him without his permission, with her trunks worthy of a first lady, the chests filled with archives, and her court of slavewomen, in a rear guard of Colombian troops who adored her for her barracks language. She traveled three hundred leagues on the back of a mule along the dizzying precipices of the Andes, and in four months she managed to spend only two nights with the General, one of them because she succeeded in frightening him with a suicide threat. Some time went by before she learned that while she could not be with him, he consoled himself with other, transitory loves that he found along the way. Among them was Manuelita Madrono, an untamed eighteen-year-old mulatta who sanctified his bouts of insomnia.
After her return from Quito, Manuela decided to leave her husband, whom she described as an insipid Englishman who loved without pleasure, conversed without wit, walked without haste, greeted people with bows, sat down and stood up with caution, and did not laugh even at his own jokes. But the General convinced her to preserve at all costs the privileges of her legal status, and she acceded to his wishes.
A month after the victory at Ayacucho, when he was master of half the world, the General left for Alto Peru, which would later become the Republic of Bolivia. He not only left without Manuela, but before leaving suggested as a matter of state the advantage of a definitive separation. "I see that nothing can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor," he wrote to her. "In the future you will be alone, although at your husband's side, and I will be alone in the midst of the world. The glory of having conquered ourselves will be our only consolation." Before three months had passed he received a letter in which Manuela announced her departure for London with her husband. The news found him in the alien bed of Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, a spirited woman of action married to a field marshal who would later be President of the Republic. The General did not wait for the second lovemaking of the night to write an immediate reply to Manuela that seemed more like an order in battle: "Tell the truth and don't go anywhere." And with his own hand he underlined the last sentence: "My love for you is steadfast." She obeyed, delighted.
The General's dream began to fall apart on the very day it was realized. No sooner had he founded Bolivia and concluded the institutional reorganization of Peru than he had to hurry back to Santa Fe de Bogota, spurred by General Paez' first separatist attempts in Venezuela and Santander's political intrigues in New Granada. On this occasion Manuela had a longer wait until he allowed her to follow him, but when at last he did she traveled in a caravan worthy of Gypsies, with her trunks on the backs of a dozen mules, her immortal slavewomen, and eleven cats, six dogs, three monkeys educated in the art of palace obscenities, a bear trained to thread needles, and nine cages of parrots and macaws that railed against Santander in three languages.
She arrived in Santa Fe de Bogota just in time to save the little life remaining to the General on the evil night of September 25. Six years had gone by since they had met, but he was as aged and full of doubt as if it had been fifty, and Manuela had the impression that he was wandering without direction through the mists of solitude. He would return to the south a short while later to curb the colonial ambitions of Peru in Quito and Guayaquil, but by that time all his efforts were in vain. On this occasion Manuela stayed behind in Santa Fe de Bogota without the least desire to follow him, for she knew that her eternal fugitive no longer had a place to escape to.
In his memoirs O'Leary observed that the General had never been so willing to recall his furtive loves as on that Sunday afternoon in Turbaco. Montilla thought at the time, and wrote years later in a private letter, that this was an unmistakable symptom of old age. Encouraged by the General's good humor and confidences, Montilla could not resist the temptation of a cordial provocation.
"Was Manuela the only one who stayed behind?" he asked.
"They all stayed behind," said the General with complete seriousness. "But Manuela more than any of them."
Montilla winked at O'Leary and said:
"Confess, General: how many were there?"
The General eluded him.
"Many fewer than you think," he said.
That night, while he was in the warm bath, Jose Palacios tried to clarify matters for him. "According to my calculations there were thirty-five," he said. "Not counting the one-night birds, of course." The figure matched the General's own calculations, but he had not wanted to say so during the visit.
"O'Leary is a great man, a great soldier, and a faithful friend, but he takes notes on everything," he explained. "And there's nothing more dangerous than a written memoir."
The next day, after a long private interview held to inform him of conditions on the border, he asked O'Leary to go to Cartagena for the formal purpose of bringing him up-to-date on the movement of ships bound for Europe, although the real mission was to keep him advised regarding the hidden details of local politics. No sooner had O'Leary arrived than, on Saturday, June 12, the Cartagena Congress swore loyalty to the new constitution and recognized the chosen officials. Montilla sent the General an inevitable message along with the news:
"We're waiting for you."
He was still waiting when a rumor that the General had died made him leap out of bed. He rode to Turbaco at full gallop, not taking time to confirm the report, and there he found the General better than ever, lunching with a Frenchman, the Count de Raigecourt, who had come with an invitation that they travel together to Europe on an English packet boat arriving in Cartagena the following week. It was the culmination of a salubrious day for the General, who had decided to confront his poor health with moral fortitude, and no one could say he had not been successful. He had awakened early, walked through the farmyards at milking time, visited the grenadiers in their barracks, listened to them as they spoke about their living conditions, and given categorical orders to improve them. On his way back he stopped at an inn in the market, drank some coffee, and took the cup with him to avoid the humiliation of their destroying it. He was walking toward his house when he turned a corner and the children leaving school ambushed him, singing and clapping in rhythm: "Long live
The Liberator! Long live The Liberator!" He was bewildered and would not have known what to do if the children themselves had not made way for him.
At his house he found the Count de Raigecourt, who had arrived unannounced in the company of the most beautiful, elegant, and haughty woman he had ever seen. She wore riding clothes, although in reality they had come in a chaise drawn by a burro. All she revealed of her identity was that her name was Camille and that she was a native of Martinique. The Count gave no additional information, although in the course of the day it would become far too evident that he was mad with love for her.
The mere presence of Camille revived the General's high spirits of other days, and he lost no time in ordering a gala luncheon. Although the Count spoke correct Spanish, conversation was carried on in French, which was Camille's language. When she said she had been born in Trois-Ilets, he gestured with enthusiasm and his faded eyes flashed.
"Ah," he said. "Where Josephine was born."
She laughed.
"Please, Excellency, I was hoping for a more intelligent observation than the one everybody else makes."
He indicated that he was wounded and defended himself with a lyrical evocation of La Pagerie Plantation, the birthplace of Marie-Josephe, Empress of France, which was visible at a distance of several leagues across the vast canebrakes and through the clamor of the birds and the hot smell from the distilleries. She was surprised that the General knew it so well.