Our Lives Are the Rivers

by Jaime Manrique

  The news spread that Manuelita Sáenz, the Liberator of the Liberator, had settled in Paita. I shut myself inside the house. Bolivarianos soon came knocking on the door. I instructed Jonotás to say I was indisposed. I wanted quiet and time alone to think. I was sick of talking about politics. The bolivarianos wanted to turn me into a symbol of their resistance—I wanted no part of it. My main occupation became fending off the morbid curiosity of people who arrived in Paita, wanting to see in the flesh a living curio of the past.

  This was our home, the last home I would know on earth. At first, I occupied myself with writing to General Flores, who had put a man named Pedro Sanín in charge of my affairs. When Sanín didn’t reply to my letters or send any money, I wrote directly to General Flores to ask him to pressure Sanín, whom I was beginning to suspect was unscrupulous. I began to entertain the idea that if I could collect on my birthright, the money that had been cruelly withheld from me, perhaps I could move to Lima. After so many years of separation, I was sure James would leave me alone. Natán and her family lived in Lima, and we would be able to see them, so Jonotás and I would not feel so alone.

  Sometimes, gripped by despair, I rehearsed the idea of ending the state of suspension my life had become with a bullet through my head. Yet I had a responsibility toward Jonotás. She was a free woman, but she was growing old, and there was nothing of any value I could bequeath her. Not even enough for a trip to Lima, where Natán would be happy to take her into her family.

  Often I wrote letters in a hurry, when I heard there was a boat ready to depart for Guayaquil. In my missives, I begged General Flores for reading materials; for copies of the writings of Bolívar; for anything that would relieve the monotony of life in Paita. But months would go by before I got even a line or two in return from the general. Indeed, few letters arrived addressed to me. Convinced my mail was being intercepted, I took a pseudonym: María de los Angeles Calderón. No letters addressed to Señora Calderón arrived, either.

  After a wait of almost two years, a letter arrived from the owner of Catahuango explaining why he had not been able to meet the schedule of payments. He had suffered severe losses from a hailstorm that had destroyed most of the livestock and all the crops. He had been ruined and begged me to have compassion for his predicament. I threw up my hands. What else could I do? It was almost as if there was a curse on my inheritance, and it might take a miracle to ever see a peso of it. I realized that the endless wait for my money was making me dull and bitter. No matter how much I tried to be patient, it was impossible to live for years on hope alone.

  SO JONOTÁS AND I started again to knit shawls and embroider linen. Jonotás was not very adept at this skill—she was happier running errands in town—but was always helpful. We knitted in earnest, to stave off starvation.

  Eventually I warmed up toward the locals. Paiteños were an amusing people. One day they believed in one thing, the next in another. Their opinions changed with the winds that swept Paita. Poor Peru! Its morally bankrupt populace had forgotten what it was like to live for an ideal dictated by the purity of the heart. Instead, everything was done out of greed or fear. Peru had become a country of buccaneers, which made me feel more patriotic about Ecuador. I was appalled by Peru’s drive to annex more and more Ecuadorian soil. Deep down I disliked myself for caring about Ecuador as a single country; it meant that some part of me had accepted there would never be a Gran Colombia.

  DAILY ABLUTIONS IN the sea became my consolation. In the early morning and late afternoons, the tides brought venomous stingrays, but from noon to four o’clock, as the tide receded, the water was freed of the frightening creatures. Then I could immerse myself all the way to my neck in the bay’s still coolness. As schools of small transparent fish swirled around my body, I was transported to a more innocent state and in that moment shed the hardships of my life.

  Embroidering and knitting did not bring enough money, so, making the best of our circumstances, I started a business—the sweets Natán had taught me to prepare many years before. In the late afternoon, a tray of these confections balanced on her head, Jonotás went from house to house, selling my little sugared animals and cocadas. The profits were insignificant, but we had gotten used to living like poor women, thus any amount of money was welcome. Besides, making candies cheered me up. Many hungry children came to our door to beg for sweets we had not sold that day. To Paita’s children I became “La dulcera,” which made me proud.

  IN PAITA, WHERE I—the only woman who ever rode into battle by Simón Bolívar’s side, wearing my colonel’s uniform, and the red, blue and gold colors of Gran Colombia, wielding my saber or firing at the enemy—was destined to lie in my humble house, so still, so quiet that I could hear the termites gnawing the thin walls of mud and bamboo, my days and nights became interchangeable in their sameness, like the unmoving sea of Paita. I had nothing but memories to keep me alive. And so, now that I was no longer powerful, young, or beautiful—in the unhurried humiliation of sinking from wealth and power to indigence and anonymity—I finally came to understand the workings of the world. And I was grateful for the truth of things, for a knowledge that became as unnecessary as it was bitter.

  In that old age, when we were so poor, and my diet consisted of the sweets I made sitting in my rocking chair, by the charcoal fire, with the coins earned I let Jonotás buy fish, so we had fried fish for breakfast, dinner and supper, sometimes accompanied by rice; and when there was a little water in the tinaja, and a tomato or two, fish soup thick with the fruits of the sea. Then I would remember hand-picking vegetables for the Liberator’s table from La Quinta’s garden, selecting the tenderest endives, the thickest cabbages, the firmest carrots, the reddest tomatoes and juiciest, sweetest onions.

  And as I breathed the saltpeter in the air of Paita, which cracked my lips, made my throat dry and my skin brittle and lined like onion paper, when I longed for the taste of fresh fruit—other than the white flesh of the coconut and its refreshing milk—I recalled the trays on the dining table of La Quinta heaped with mangos, maracuyas, chirimoyas, caimitos, juicy curubas, oranges, fleshy guavas, peaches, pears, plumb tangerines, pomegranates, and the other fruits Bolívar loved because they reminded him of his childhood in Caracas.

  Late afternoons in Paita, when twilight invaded my room, and a bat the size of a pigeon swooped past my hammock as if on a trapeze; when I had no visitors, and Jonotás was in the kitchen finishing her chores before daylight was extinguished, before a candle would be brought to my room, in the chiaroscuro of my bedroom, I would feel lonely and yearn for conversation, for human company.

  In Paita, where my old age seemed to be longer than the rest of my life, there were many days when I would look at myself in the mirror in my bedroom and see an indigent invalid living in a town that was the latrine of the world, “where the mule shits,” as Jonotás used to say, and I wondered whether that other Manuela, who had lived at the center of power of a great nation, who was wealthy and famous, powerful and feared, loved and hated, beautiful and desired, was the same old woman swaying in a worn-out hammock in a hot, termite-infested dark room. Then my own life seemed to me like a history book I had read about a woman named Manuela, another Manuela, living in a brighter, more exciting world full of hope and dizzying ideas, and all I had to do was close my eyes, holding my two dozing hairless dogs against my withered breasts. If I kept my eyes closed long enough, long enough to forget about my present circumstances, then it would all come back, freshly alive and fragrant in my dusty room—the leafy cool haven, the sprawling beds of vivid flowers, the pirouetting hummingbirds, the transparent rivulets. It made me, Manuela Sáenz—whom history would dub the Liberator of the Liberator because I had risked my life once to save his, because I made his heart glad with love and freed it from bitterness when Bolívar was dying, broken, rejected, and hated by so many ingrates—it made me thirsty just to think of La Quinta in Paita with its inert sea, a desiccated, arid hell where a jug of drinking water was more precious tha
n pearls.

  IN A LIMA NEWSPAPER already two weeks old when it arrived in Paita, I read the awful news that James Thorne had been murdered on February 16, 1847, in the hacienda of Huayto by unknown assassins. James and the woman who accompanied him (who I assumed was his mistress) had been hacked to pieces. After the shock wore off, I grieved for him the way one grieves the death of a dear friend. I regretted that James and I did not have a chance to meet again in the years since we had become friends.

  As James’s legal widow, I retained the services of an old acquaintance in Lima, Cayetano Freire, to claim in my name the dowry of 8,000 pesos that my father had given James. Don Cayetano wrote to inform me that in his last will and testament James had bequeathed the 8,000 pesos to me. However, should the funds not be liquid at the time of his death, which they were not due to the nature of his export business, the executor of his estate was to send me annual interest of six percent, until I was paid in full.

  James’s will also supplied answers to questions I had not presumed to ask in our correspondence. He had fathered two daughters and one son, born to a woman named Ventura Conchas, and to each of them he left the sum of 2,000 pesos. The Anglican Church received the remainder of his estate.

  Don Cayetano suggested that I gather documents attesting to my dire circumstances, which might spur the court to release more of the funds. For a time I dared to dream that my years of mendicancy might be at an end. Jonotás was growing old, and I wanted to hire a younger maid to take over the heavier chores. But I was being naïve: I had forgotten how much I was still despised in some circles in Lima. The executor of James’s estate, a man named Escobar, raised an objection to my claim on it and went to court to void the will. He argued that at the time James made his will, he was not in possession of his reason. Furthermore, the money James had left me was merely a gallant gesture, not a legitimate debt because I had forfeited my rights as a lawful wife when I abandoned him for Bolívar. Thus the bequest was null and void.

  Don Cayetano tried to get the courts to release the money due me, but it was a wasted effort. The judge ruled that I had indeed lost all my rights as James’s wife when I committed adultery.

  I grew philosophical as a defense, slowly accepting that money was not to be my inheritance in this life, but the riches that resided in my heart and mind. These were the riches of my days and nights with Bolívar, of those eight glorious years when I was loved by the greatest man born in South America, and when I loved him in return with a burning fire that time—destroyer of so many things—could not touch.

  NOT LONG AFTER James’s death, I fell going down the stairs of my house. I thought it was just a matter of time before the fracture healed and I could walk again. I followed the doctor’s instructions, staying in bed for weeks, but when I tried to get up, and put my foot on the floor, the pain shot through me like a knife. Jonotás moved my bed to the parlor so I wouldn’t be confined to my bed upstairs. Eventually, I got strong enough to sit in my rocking chair until my siesta, when Jonotás helped me onto the hammock, where I also slept at night. My hip had healed but it was frozen. I could not walk. Still, I continued to believe that one day I would walk again. Thus I became an old woman and a cripple in Paita. From then on, I lay a large portion of my days in a hammock to alleviate the pain in my hips, my dogs at my side providing body heat to relieve my aching arthritic bones.

  My only distraction was to sit in my rocking chair outside my house at dusk, the way many paiteños did to enjoy the cool evening breezes before they turned in for the night. One afternoon an old, lanky man on a decrepit donkey approached my house, looking for all the world like Don Quixote. The donkey came to a halt a few yards from my rocking chair. The man’s black eyes sparkled. I was surprised when he said, “Doña Manuelita Sáenz?”

  “What’s left of her,” I said. “How can I help you, my friend?”

  “I am Simón Rodríguez.”

  Bolívar’s teacher was still alive and sitting atop a donkey next to my chair? How had he found me?

  “My dear professor,” I welcomed him. “My house is your house.” He tried to dismount the donkey but was having great trouble doing so.

  I called Jonotás, who was in the parlor, doing chores. “Please help Don Simón Rodríguez dismount from his donkey.”

  “Thank you, kind lady,” he said to Jonotás as she helped him down. He tottered in my direction.

  “Forgive me for not getting up,” I told him. “A problem with my leg.”

  “Doña Manuelita, Your Grace,” he said, grabbing my hand and bending over to kiss my parched skin.

  Jonotás brought out a chair and helped him sit. Then she went to fetch him water.

  “I’ve traveled a long distance to come meet you,” he said, after he had had a long drink of it. “I didn’t want to die without having the great honor of meeting you. I’ve come to you, Doña Manuelita,” he added, “because I cannot yet go to join Simoncito.”

  It was as if the Liberator in his pantheon had sent him to me as a gift to sweeten my old age. I did not want to lose Don Simón.

  “As you can see, Professor,” I said, “I am no longer a woman of means, but my humble home is your home. And where there’s enough food for two, three can eat. I know this is what the Liberator would have wanted. Nothing would make me happier than the pleasure of your company. Jonotás and I don’t have many friends here in Paita, and certainly no old friends.”

  Don Simón accepted gladly. We spent days and nights talking. He had just finished a tour on his donkey of the entire American continent, spreading his philosophy that the book of nature was “the only book worth studying. Besides those of Rousseau, of course.”

  Professor Rodríguez must have been in his nineties at that time. His earthly possessions consisted of his donkey, Brutus, who tried to kick anyone who approached him from behind, and a threadbare bundle in which he carried a change of clothes and a few worn-out volumes of Rousseau.

  “Can you believe the backwardness of our people?” he exclaimed, during one of our conversations. “I’ve been chased out of many towns just for insisting on teaching anatomy lessons in the nude, and for saying to my students, ‘Children, the walls of this school are a prison. It is time to tear down the walls of the schools so you can contemplate reality. ’”

  Professor Rodríguez regaled me with anecdotes from Bolívar’s youth. Not only about their early years in Venezuela, but about their trip to Europe to complete Bolívar’s education. So much time had passed since the Liberator’s death that we could talk about those times without sadness.

  Don Simón satisfied my curiosity about what it was like to have been in Rome, at the top of Mount Aventino, when Bolívar, still a youth, vowed to liberate the South American continent from the Spanish Crown.

  “Tell me, Professor, what was it like to witness the most important moment in the Liberator’s political awakening?” I asked.

  “Doña Manuelita, I do not consider it the most important moment. It’s the one historians have popularized and the people have embellished, certainly, but the defining moment came much earlier, when he was thirteen years old and heard the story of the great Indian chief Tupac Amaru. I remember that morning so clearly, how his eyes shone with pain and disbelief when I told him how in 1781 the chief of Pampamarca raised twenty thousand soldiers with slings and sticks and machetes to fight the mighty army of Spain. You should have seen the sorrow in his eyes when I told him how Tupac Amaru had been betrayed and then hacked to pieces with an ax, though not before the noble chief witnessed the Spaniards beat his wife and his son to death. ‘See, Simoncito?’ I said. ‘The oppressors can cut off our heads and fry them in sizzling oil, but the ideas in those heads will survive.’ It was on that day he swore to raise an army of tyrant-slayers, even if they had to fight the tyrants with slings and rocks. It was then, you see, that he understood that the great men in history become so by fighting against the tyrants, even though they risk losing their wealth, their health, or their very lives.”
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  IT DEVELOPED THAT the professor was too frail to manage the stairs to the bedroom, so, after a few weeks with us he went to live with his friend Don Julio, the priest of Amotape, a tiny hamlet a stone’s throw from Paita.

  “Have you become religious?” I asked him when he told me of his plan. “I thought you and I shared the same anticlerical sentiments.”

  “We do, of course, Doña Manuelita. But Don Julio is my friend—we both love Rousseau, and so we overlook each other’s defects.”

  Not long after he left, the altar boy of the priest of Amotape came by our house to deliver the news. Don Simón Rodríguez, the Liberator’s teacher, had died. “Father Julio asked me not to forget to tell you, Doña Manuela,” the boy said, “that the professor’s dying words were: ‘I’m proud to leave behind nothing but a trunk full of ideas.’ Father Julio wanted you to know that he buried him in the chapel of the church because, though Don Simón professed to be an atheist, he was more a man of God than most clergymen Father Julio knows.”

  THE APPEARANCE OF the professor in my life made me think again of politics, of the cause we had fought for. Paita was a good place to contemplate the unfolding of history in the nations of the Andes. From this vantage point I’d seen them plunge into the protracted civil wars that Bolívar had predicted would result after the dissolution of Gran Colombia. I found perverse pleasure in knowing that history had proven the Liberator right. It was only a matter of time, I hoped, before history would absolve me as well.

  What was the main difference between the time when the Spaniards ruled and now? During my years in Paita, I’d often pondered this question. What good had our independence brought? No one wants to see his motherland ruled by foreigners. We fixed that. Yet I was afraid that the same injustices perpetrated by the Spaniards were now perpetrated by us criollos. The Negroes and the Indians and our poor were now oppressed by their own countrymen.