In 1817 Rosita arrived in Lima in the company of her lover, a wealthy Spaniard almost half a century old, whose pleasure it was to surround his beloved in all the splendors money can buy and satisfy her caprices and fancies.
Within a short time Rosita’s elegant salon, on the calle de San Marcelo, was the center of gilded youth. The counts of La Vega del Ren and of San Juan de Lurigancho, the marquis of Villafuerte, the viscount of Dan Donás and other titled supporters of the revolution; Boqui, the Caracan Cortínez, Sánchez Carrión, Mariátegui, and many outstanding conspirators in favor of the cause of Independence formed Rosita’s circle of intimates, and she, with the fervent enthusiasm with which women conceive a passion for any grandiose idea, became an ardent supporter of the patriots.
After San Martín1disembarked in Pisco, doña Rosa, who at the time had as her official lover General Domingo Tristán, began an active correspondence with the illustrious Argentine. Tristán and La Mar, who was another of the passionate lovers of the gentle lady, were still serving under the king’s banner, and perhaps in the presence of the young lady they gave away political secrets that she in turn used for the benefit of the cause with which she sympathized. It was also said that Viceroy La Serna burned the incense of gallantry before the pretty young woman from Guayaquil, and that not a few secret plans of the royalists thus passed from the house of doña Rosa to the patriots’ camp in Huaura.
Don Tomás Heres, the prestigious captain of the Numancia battalion, urged on by two of his friends, Oratorian priests, to join the good cause, could not make up his mind to do so. Doña Rosa’s charms finally made him decide, and the Numancia, 900 troops strong, passed over to the Republican side. The cause of Spain in Peru suffered a mortal blow from that moment on.
In a revolution that, at the beginning of 1821, was to be headed by the commandant of the Cantabria battalion in the fortress of Callao, it was doña Rosa who was entrusted with placing this leader in contact with the patriots. But Santalla,2a brute of such herculean strength that he could bend a gold peso in two with only three fingers, repented at that very moment and broke with his friends, giving the plot away to the viceroy, although he was chivalrous enough not to betray any of those involved.
San Martín, in this respect unlike his minister Monteagudo and Bolívar the Liberator, gave no cause for scandal in Lima because of his love–adventures.3 His relations with Rosita remained a secret. He was never seen in public with his beloved, but since nothing under the sun remains hidden, something must have gotten out, and the heroine was known by the nickname of the Protectress.4
The Order of the Sun5 having already been organized, San Martín, by a decree of January 11, 1822, created 112 secular dames of honor and 32 who were nuns, chosen from among the most notable of the 13 monasteries of Lima. Among the former were the countesses of San Isidro and La Vega and the marquises of Torre–Tagle, Casa–Boza, Castellón, and Casa Muñoz.
The traveler Stevenson, the secretary of Lord Cochrane who as such shared the ill will of his chief against San Martín, criticizes in Volume III of his curious and entertaining work, printed in London in 1829, Historical and descriptive narrative of twenty years’ residence in South America, the fact that the protector had invested his favorite, doña Rosita, with the bicolor sash (white and red), the emblem of the dames of honor. This sash bore the following inscription in gold letters: To the patriotism of the most sensitive of ladies. It seems to me that in the early days of Independence sensitivity was very much in fashion.
Without discoursing on the suitability or unsuitability of the creation of an antidemocratic Order, and keeping solely to the known facts, I find Stevenson’s criticism unfair. It is certain that to no other of the dames of honor did the cause of Independence owe services of such magnitude as those lent it by doña Rosa. In the hour of recompense and honors it was impermissible to wrong her by ungrateful oblivion.
With the withdrawal of San Martín from public life doña Rosa Campusano’s star was also eclipsed. With Bolívar another feminine star was to shine brightly.
Later on, when the years and perhaps disappointments as well had faded the woman’s charms and caused her to live in straitened circumstances, the Congress of Peru awarded the dame of honor of the Order of the Sun a modest pension.
The Protectress died, in Lima, somewhere between the years 1858 and 1860.
II
Doña Manuela Saenz
The port of Paita, around the year 1859, when I was paymaster aboard the corvette Loa, was not, despite the gentleness of the waters of its bay and excellent sanitary conditions, a very promising station for navy officers. There was very little chance to form decorous ties with families. On the other hand, for the rough sailor, Paita, with its barrio of Maintope, with every other doorway frequented by female providers of hospitality (cheap at the moment, very expensive later on because of the consequences), was another paradise of Mohammed, complemented by the nauseatingly bad stews of the inn or cheap eating house of don José Chepito, a personage of immortal renown in Paita.
I can say about myself that I seldom disembarked, preferring to remain aboard ship with a book or the jovial chat of my shipmates for diversion.
One afternoon, in the company of a young Frenchman who was a shop assistant, I went for a stroll along streets that were veritable sand pits. My companion halted near the church and said to me:
“Would you like, don Ricardo, to make the acquaintance of the very best thing there is in Paita? I take it upon myself to present you and I assure you that you’ll be well received.”
It occurred to me that he was going to introduce me to a pretty girl, and since at 236the soul is frolicsome and the body asks for nothing better than a good time, I answered without hesitating:
“Blessings be on such as we, Frenchie. Come what may, let’s not stray.”
“Well then, en route, mon cher.”
We went on for half a block, and my ciceronestopped at the door of a modest–looking little house. Once inside, the pieces of furniture in the parlor were all equally shabby. They consisted of a broad leather chair with wheels and a push bar, and next to it an oak bench with cushions upholstered in linen, a large square table in the middle of the room, a dozen chairs with rush seats, some of which cried out for immediate replacement, and at one end, a rough sideboard with dishes and eating utensils, and at the other a comfortable hammock from Guayaquil.
In the wheelchair, with the majesty of a queen on her throne, was an elderly lady who seemed to me to be 60 at most. She was dressed poorly but neatly, and one could easily guess that that body had worn grosgrain, satin, and velvet in better days.
She was a plump woman, with very lively black eyes, in which the remains of the vital fire still left to her seemed concentrated, a round face and aristocratic hands.
“Doña Manuela, I would like to introduce to you this young man, a sailor and a poet, because I know that you will be pleased to speak with him of poetry.”
“Welcome, señor poet, to this poor house of yours,” the elderly lady replied, addressing me in a distinguished tone of voice that caused me to surmise that the lady had lived in a high social sphere.
And with a gesture full of a politeness that came naturally, she bade me be seated.
Our conversation on that afternoon was strictly formal. In the lady’s accent there was a trace of the superior woman accustomed to take command and impose her will. She was a perfect example of the haughty woman. Her speech was fluent, correct, and not at all presumptuous, with irony the dominant note in it.
From that afternoon on, I found in Paita an attraction, and I never left ship without spending an enjoyable hour of delightful conversation with doña Manuela Sáenz. I remember too that almost always she served me sweets, made herself in a little iron brazier that she had placed next to her wheelchair.
The poor lady had been crippled for many years. A faithful servant dressed and undressed her, seated her in the wheelchair, and brought her to the little parlor.
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When I led the conversation around to historical reminiscences, when I tried to obtain from doña Manuela confidences about Bolívar and Sucre, San Martín and Monteagudo, or other personages whom she had known and dealt with on equal terms, she cleverly avoided answering. Looking backward was not to her liking, and I even suspect that she deliberately shied away from ever talking about the past.
Ever since doña Manuela had settled in Paita, in 1850 if memory serves me, every passenger of some note or importance who was traveling by steamship, either heading for Europe or coming from it, disembarked motivated by the desire to know the lady who had managed to capture the heart of Bolívar.7In the beginning doña Manuela was pleased to welcome visitors, but she soon realized that she was the object of impertinent curiosity and resolved to receive only those persons who were introduced to her by her close friends.
Let us sketch now the biography of our friend.
Doña Manuela Sáenz, a member of a prominent family, was born in Quito in the final years of the last century, and was educated in a convent of nuns in her native city. She was two or three years older than her compatriot, Rosita Campusano, a native of Guayaquil. In 1817 she married don Jaime Thorne, an English physician, who a few years later came with his wife to live in Lima.
I cannot specify the exact date when, after the marriage ties were broken for reasons that I have not endeavored to ascertain, doña Manuela returned to Quito, but it must have been toward the end of 1822, for among the 12 dames of the Order of the Sun was señora Sáenz de Thorne, who undoubtedly was one of the most impassioned patriots, figures on the list.
After the victory of Pichincha, won by Sucre in May of 1822, the Liberator arrived in Quito, and at this time there began his amorous relations with the beautiful Manuelita, the only woman who, after becoming his lover, managed to dominate the sensual and fickle Bolívar.
During the Liberator’s first year in Peru, doña Manuela remained in Ecuador, completely involved in politics. It was then that, lance at the ready and at the head of a cavalry squad, she put down an uprising in the main square and streets of Quito.
Shortly before the battle of Ayacucho doña Manuela joined the Liberator, who was in Huaura.
All the generals of the army, including Sucre, and the most prominent men of the era honored Manuela with the same attentions that they would have paid the lawfully married wife of the Liberator. The ladies were unanimously disdainful of the favorite, and she, for her part, did nothing to win the sympathies of the creatures of her sex.
When Bolívar returned to Colombia doña Manuela remained behind in Lima, but when the revolution headed by Bustamante to protest against awarding Bolívar the presidency for life broke out in the Colombia division, a revolution that echoed throughout Peru, doña Manuela made her way inside one of the barracks disguised as a man, with the aim of getting a battalion to fight back. When her attempt failed, the new government notified her to leave the country, and doña Manuela set out to join Bolívar in Bogota. There Bolívar and his favorite lived together as though they were man and wife, and Bogota society had to turn a blind eye to this scandalous behavior. The lady from Quito lived in the governor’s palace with her lover.
Providence reserved for her the role of savior of the life of the Liberator, for on the night when the Septembrists stormed the place,8she obliged Bolívar to escape by letting himself down from a balcony, and seeing him safe in the street, confronted the would–be murderers, detaining them and putting them on the wrong track in order to gain time and allow her lover to leave the scene of the encounter.9
Generous–hearted in the extreme, doña Manuela persuaded Bolívar to commute to exile the death sentence that had been imposed by the court–martial on, among other revolutionaries, two that had heaped the most insults on her. Bolívar resisted doing as she wished, but his beloved adamantly insisted and two lives were pardoned. Never did a favorite better use her influence to further a most noble action!
Many years after the death of Bolívar in December of 1830, the Congress of Peru (and by that I also mean one of the three governments of Colombia at the time) awarded a life pension to the Liberatrix, a nickname by which doña Manuela is known even in contemporary history. What is more, even in her old age she did not take offense at being called that, and on several occasions I saw arrive at her house people who, like a person asking the most natural and simple question, said: “Does the Liberatrix live here?” Doña Manuela would smile faintly and answer: “Come in. What do you want of the Liberatrix?”
What reasons did Bolívar’s beloved have for coming to settle and to die in one of what was at the time one of the most dismal places in Peru? The poor cripple said to me, one day when I ventured to put the question to her, that she had chosen Paita on the advice of a doctor, who was of the opinion that with sand baths the sick woman’s nerves would recover the pliancy they had lost. Someone has written that it was out of pride that doña Manuela refused to live in large cities where she had been admired as a dazzling star: She was afraid of leaving herself open to vengeful snubs.
When doña Manuela came to live in Paita, her husband, doctor Jaime Thorne, had died an unfortunate death. Thorne, the associate of a certain señor Escobar, worked on the hacienda of Huayto, over the ownership of which he had a stormy running legal battle with Colonel Justo Hercelles, who also claimed rights to the property as part of his inheritance from his mother. One afternoon in 1840 or 1841 when Thorne, arm in arm with a pretty girl who may have been consoling him for doña Manuela’s infidelities, not long past, was strolling along one of the paths on the hacienda, three masked men flung themselves on him and stabbed him to death. Rumor (that often is wrong) held Hercelles guilty of having been behind the unknown assassins. Hercelles also met a tragic end a year or two later, for as the leader of a revolution against the government of President General Vidal, he was shot by a firing squad in Huaraz.
III
The Protectress and the Liberatrix
I, who had the good fortune to know and spend time with both San Martín’s favorite and Bolívar’s, can testify to major differences between the two. Physically and temperamentally they were opposites.
In doña Rosa I saw woman in all her delicacy of feeling and the weaknesses typical of her sex. In Rosa’s heart there was a store of tears and tender affections, and God allowed her to know the joy of motherhood, which He denied to Manuela.
Doña Manuela was a mistake of nature, for in sculpturally feminine lineaments she embodied a masculine spirit and aspirations. It was not her way to shed tears; instead she flew into a rage like a hard–hearted man.
The Protectress loved her home and the luxurious life of the city, and the Liberatrix found herself at ease in the midst of the turbulence of the barracks and the camp. The former never went for outings except in a calash. The latter was seen in the streets of Quito and Lima mounted like a man on a spirited steed, escorted by two Colombian lancers and wearing a red dolman with gold frogs and white cotton balloon pants.
Doña Manuela denied her sex, whereas doña Rosa was proud to be a woman. The latter took care to dress in fashion and the other dressed in the taste of her dressmaker. Doña Manuela always wore two gold or coral hoops as earrings, and doña Rosa was dazzling in her profusion of fine jewels.
The first, educated by nuns amid the austerity of a cloister, was a free thinker. The second, who spent her childhood amid social agitation, was a devout believer.
Doña Manuela kept her nerves under control, remaining calm and energetic in the midst of bullets and at the head of lancers and swordsmen bathed in blood or facing the sharp dagger of assassins. Doña Rosa knew how to faint or swoon, like all those precious and vain creatures of the fair sex who dress from the head down,10 when confronted with the hooting of an owl or the scurrying of a frightened mouse.
Doña Rosa perfumed her handkerchief with the most exquisite English fragrances. Doña Manuela used mannish verbena water.
Even in their literary taste
they were total opposites.
When absolutism was restored and with it the Inquisition, because stupid drunken mobs in Madrid surrounded the carriage in which Ferdinand VII was parading, shouting “Long live the King!” “Long live chains!” whereupon the monarch sarcastically answered them: “Do you want chains, sons? Well, don’t worry, they’ll be yours for the asking,” the name of doña Rosa Campusano figured in the secret registry of the Holy Office of Lima as a reader of Heloise and Abelard and of pornographic books. There was a flood of such books in Lima around that year, and the persecution that the fathers of families undertook so that they would not be introduced into the home caused even religious bigots to overindulge in reading so as to have something to tell their confessor during Lent.
The courtly Arriaza and the gentle Meléndez were the poets that Rosita read.11
What a contrast to the tastes of Manuela! She read Tacitus and Plutarch; she studied the history of the Peninsula by Father Mariana and that of America by Solís and Garcilaso; she was a passionate admirer of Cervantes, and for her there were no poets outside of Cienfuegos, Quintana, and Olmedo.12 She knew by heart the Canto a Junín13 and whole parliamentary speeches of Pelayo, and her eyes, a bit puffy from the weight of the years now, sparkled with enthusiasm on reciting the verses of her favorite poets. In the days when I knew her, one of her favorite readings was the fine poetic translation of the Psalms by the Peruvian Valdés.14 Doña Manuela was beginning to experience flashes of asceticism, and her earlier traces of rationalism had evaporated.
Rosa Campusano was decidedly a woman through and through, and without scruples; had I been young in her days of graciousness and elegance, I would have enrolled in the list of her... platonic lovers. Doña Manuela, even in the days when she was a beauty, would have inspired in me only the respectful feeling of friendship that I professed for her in her old age.
Peruvian Traditions Page 24
