The
Disease and the Hero: Representations of Belgrano’s and Bolívar’s Hidden and
Public Syphilis
El mal y el héroe: representaciones de
la sífilis oculta y pública en Belgrano y Bolívar
Juan Carlos González Espitia
University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, jcge@unc.edu
ORCID: 0000-0002-3121-4920
DOI: http://doi.org/10.30827/RL.v0i25.16708
This essay explores discourses of disease,
specifically syphilis, linked to two defining figures of Latin American independence:
Manuel Belgrano and Simón Bolívar. It examines the construction of discursive
myths and their relation to political and societal shifts; the manner in which
different representations of the disease serve as tools of mythification in the
pursuit of cohesion-seeking narratives for their countries; and how
mythification is continuously reshaped and at a constant risk of failure,
particularly when the understanding of these diseases is adjusted as a result
of scientific changes. It concludes by showing how the tension between
extolment and debasement in terms of this venereal disease ultimately results
in a further rooted mythical understanding of the two independence heroes.
Keywords: independence heroes; syphilis;
myth; disease.
RESUMEN
Este ensayo estudia los
discursos de la enfermedad, específicamente la sífilis, vinculados a dos
figuras importantes de la independencia latinoamericana: Manuel Belgrano y
Simón Bolívar. Se examina la construcción de mitos discursivos y su relación
con los cambios políticos y sociales; la forma en que las diferentes
representaciones de la enfermedad sirven como herramientas de mitificación en
narrativas que buscan cohesión identitaria para sus países; y cómo la
mitificación se reforma continuamente y corre constante riesgo de fracasar,
particularmente cuando la manera en que se entienden estas enfermedades se
ajusta a los cambios científicos. Se concluye mostrando cómo la tensión entre
elogio y la degradación en términos de esta enfermedad venérea da como resultado
un encuadre mítico más arraigado de los dos héroes de la independencia.
Palabras
clave: héroes de la independencia; sífilis; mito; enfermedad.
We
don’t need theorization to understand the constant presence of disease in
everyday life. We have all experienced flu or a cold in our own bodies, or have witnessed other diseases in the body of
people close to us. We relate easily to sickness experienced firsthand. Our relation with, and reaction to, the experience of disease in
others is different because these are diseases recounted to us, that is, these
diseases are mediated through narration. We may have had the experience of that
particular student that got sick the day a paper was due. The terrible flu, the
cold, the case of mono –all of which we may know directly because of our own
experience– are retold to us, framed within a narrative, shaped for us to
consider, crafted so to bolster the immediate agenda of the student who asks to
be allowed to turn the paper a week late. The facts we hear are similar to
those we know in terms of the narrative of our own experience. Now it is up to
us to believe, to reject, or to doubt.
A different issue is the narrativization of disease of
those who have an important role in a determined society during a determined
timeframe. Here, the negotiations of hidden and unconcealed disease become part
of the public representation of that person. Take for example the case of the
United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945). There is an
abundance of information about his poliomyelitis, and robust discussion on how
his public and political persona is linked to his struggle to manage the
disease. His polio, acquired when he was an adult man, became a way of framing
his life as a fight against odds, as a story of overcoming obstacles, and as a
metaphorical example to be projected at the United States national level to
show that the country could also overcome the obstacles of recession and war.
The image of the doubling of disease in Roosevelt is so appealing and powerful
that it was used by Hollywood in the 2001 movie Pearl Harbor, in which
the character of FDR appears trying to, and succeeding in standing up from his
wheelchair by himself to show that the nation must raise in a similar way from
the complications of the attack of the Japanese empire.
But there are things that we are not told, or that do
not fit into the mythical narrative. Unlike polio, there is a disease in
Roosevelt’s case that is not narrativized to project agentive power. We are not
told that he ran for his record fourth term for the presidency while suffering
severe problems with his heart, a fact that was kept secret from the public, to
the point of untruthful denial, when, for example, his personal physician,
Admiral Ross McIntire, claimed that “The President’s health is perfectly OK.
There are absolutely no organic difficulties at all” (qtd. in Gunther 372).
Indeed, Roosevelt died as a result of his ailment, six months later, while in
office, on April 12, 1945.
In this type of tension between the hidden and the
revealed, between the disregarded and the extolled, the study of imaginaries of
disease may prove to be a useful tool to understand the articulation, and
challenging, of national cohesion-seeking discourses. In this essay, I am
interested, on one hand, in exploring discourses of disease as portrayed in
brief, hidden pen strokes related to defining figures of the Latin American
identity. On the other hand, I want to examine the construction of discursive
myths and their relation to political and societal shifts. I propose the
isolation of two snapshots of the presence of syphilis in Latin America in
which these two discourses intertwine. The first case is the Argentinian hero
of the independence, Manuel Belgrano, and the second case is that of “El
Libertador” [The Liberator], Simón Bolívar. More specifically, I want to
explore the manner in which different representations of the disease serve as
tools of mythification in the pursuit of cohesion-seeking discourses, and how
such mythification, which for all intends and purposes is nothing more than
fictionalization, is continuously reshaped and at a constant risk of failure,
particularly when the understanding of these diseases is adjusted as a result
of scientific changes. I will conclude by showing how the tension between
extolment and debasement in terms of this venereal disease ultimately results
in a further rooted mythical understanding of history.
Before moving into a discussion of the particulars of
these two independence heroes in relation to their exaltation later followed by
an attack based on the negative interpretation of a disease like syphilis, it
is useful to explain how I understand the terms “myth” and “mythical” for the
purposes of this essay. I am mainly using here the ideas of Émile Durkheim in
his The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Myth in
Primitive Psychology, Percy S.
Cohen’s “Theories of Myth”, and Ben Halpern’s “‘Myth’ and ‘Ideology’ in Modern
Usage”. We tend to use the term “myth” very loosely, generally connected to
ideas of deceit, self-deceit, untruthfulness, fallacy, or a dismissible
something, as is the case, for example, of assertions like “if you eat a steak
right before going to the pool, you will get cramps, and may drown”, or “Barack
Obama is a Muslim”. A more detailed approach shows that the myth is
characterized as, 1. A historical, cumulative, construction (Halpern). 2. Myth
has the social function of securing solidarity (Durkheim, in relation to
ritual), 3. Its importance lies in the justificatory qualities of its message
and not as much in being a symbolic representation or explanation (Malinowski),
4. Myth is placed in an invented, or part-invented, past that seeks to solve
inconsistencies, 5. It takes the point of origin out of verifiable memory, and
6. Provides transcendence from the mundane (Malinowski).
What I see as more important for my approach is the
function of myth as a way of anchoring the present in the past. In this sense,
the myth, a. Provides profound unconscious symbolism that vibrates at various
levels of meaning; b. Even if a verifiable origin is
blurred, the myth is located in time, and this location allows it to produce
effective legitimacy; c. The constant reference to the
past also allows for the legitimacy of present social life by claiming that the
past is part of the present; and d. The myth creates a seemingly
monolithic moment that avoids further questioning of the origin. It is
precisely here where we hit a complicated conundrum, since it is very different
to deal with what we can call an “arch-myth” –far removed from our present
reality and linked to primordial moral precepts, e.g. Oedipus of Thebes–, and
what we could call a “neo-myth”–that could also be understood as “legend”, but
which in this case is traceable in the historical record and susceptible to
revision, as is the case of the lore that George Washington never told a lie. I am interested in examining the second kind of myth,
the “neo-myth”, because of its relevance to the study of the processes of
nation building in Latin America. Myth as anchoring of the present in the past
is undoubtedly at the core of such processes, as Ernest Renan states in his
“What is a Nation?”: “To have common glories in the past and to have a common
will in the present; to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform
still more –these are the essential conditions for being a people” (19). This
path is full of riddles because history becomes intertwined with myth. In other
words, we would be confronting a mythical reading of history. In The Savage Mind Claude Lévi-Strauss points
out how the framing of major historical events is arbitrary (if not
ideologically mediated) and then we attribute it with reality it does not have:
In so far as history aspires to meaning, it is doomed
to select regions, periods, groups of men and individuals in these groups and
to make them stand out, as discontinuous figures, against a continuity barely
good enough to be used as a backdrop [...] History is therefore never history,
but history-for. It is partial in the sense of being biased even when it claims
not to be, for it inevitably remains partial — that is, incomplete — and this
is itself a form of partiality (257-58).
This framing of history shares many of the qualities
of myth I already have stressed, including a profound unconscious symbolism
vibrating at various levels of meaning, the location in time, the reference to
the past to gain legitimacy, and the seamless discourse, among others. The
question would then be, what happens when this kind of myth, that has been
gradually crafted and gradually sanctioned, that has served to resolve
inconsistencies and secure solidarity or commonality, and to provide an aura of
sacredness, is challenged? In other words, what happens when the myth is
inoculated with a disease like syphilis and its attendant implications?
Clinical
Case A: Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano (1770–1820). Born in Buenos Aires, educated in Spain. A lawyer.
Although with no military inclination, Belgrano was named officer in the
Argentinian independentist militia and later became a General. He was reluctant
of using the red color of the Spanish flag in a time when the future of Spain
in the Americas was beginning to look gloomy. He decided that the colors blue
and white should be hoisted before his army instead. With this act he became
the creator of the flag of Argentina. Beyond being recognized for the creation
of the national flag, Belgrano’s fame has been concentrated on the brief
mentioning of his efforts in setting the course of education and economy for
his country, and on his paradoxical final days in poverty, given that he had
been born in a wealthy family.
At the mythical level, the story of the flag is
counterbalanced by the comments about his liaison with María Josefa Ezcurra,
Juan Manuel de Rosas’s sister-in-law, who was married, and with who Belgrano
had a child. There is also the buzz about his voice, which usually has been described
as high-pitched, and in consequence linked to femininity. The tone of voice has
also been associated with other of Belgrano’s physical characteristics: blond,
blue-eyed; or with his manner: a refined studious man, suited for libraries and
salons, and not for war campaigns. The combination of all these features
resulted in his characterization as a homosexual. The traditional environment
for the narrativization of Belgrano’s image in the mythical land of “padres de
la patria” [fathers of the nation] was always one that switched between his
representation as creator of the national symbol and his portrayal as a weak,
feminine, man of letters who died in poverty. But the setting of the
narrativization was further problematized with the incorporation of syphilis.
Of course, this is a founding figure and the
mentioning of the disease was always at the level of rumor, in the realm of the
half-hidden, of the mythical. Interestingly, the fictionalization of the
disease in Belgrano began by making the classical inference that a man touched
by the disease is to be admired because he must have gotten it in the exercise
of his manhood, even if the exercise was with someone hired for that purpose.
This kind of nod of approval is the one found in a novel published in 1995 by
María Esther de Miguel titled Las
batallas secretas de Belgrano:
He knew very well on his own flesh what can be found
surrounded by the warmth of women: he just had asked a board of doctors to
diagnose the illness that more and more often made him to ask for leaves of
absence at the Consulate, and the physicians certified that he “suffered a range of ailments caught as a
result of a syphilitic vice, and worsened by others
derived by the land’s influx”.
[Bien
sabía en carne propia qué puede encontrarse entre tibiezas de hembras: acababa
de pedir a una junta de médicos el diagnóstico de esos males que cada vez más a
menudo lo obligaban a solicitar licencia en el Consulado, y los médicos
certificaron que “padecía varias
dolencias contraídas por un vicio sifilítico, complicadas con otras originadas
del influjo del país”] (85; emphasis in the original)[1].
De Miguel is using the only traceable piece of
information we can gather about syphilis in Belgrano, which is just a bit
shorter than the data in a footnote provided in Felipe Pigna’s a history book Los mitos de la historia argentina:
When he joined the Consulate,
in the medical exam to be admitted for his position, he was checked up by
doctors Miguel O’Gorman, Miguel
García Rojas and José Ignacio de Aroche, who wrote in the medical report: “We
examined the state of the health of Don Manuel Belgrano, Secretary of the Royal
Consulate in this Capital City, of whom we agreed, had suffered a range of ailments caught as a result of a syphilitic vice, and
worsened by others derived by the land’s influx’”.
[Al incorporarse al Consulado, en el reconocimiento
médico para admitirlo en el empleo, fue revisado por los doctores Miguel
O’Gorman, Miguel García Rojas y José Ignacio de Aroche, que escribieron en el
parte médico: “Reconocimos el estado de salud de Don Manuel Belgrano, Secretario del Real Consulado de esta Capital, el que según
acordamos, padecía varias dolencias contraídas por un vicio sifilítico y
complicadas con otras originadas del influjo del país”] (373).
The factual element of the disease is rearticulated
here at the mythical level to save the image of Belgrano as a man who, beyond
roughing it in the battleground of Tucumán in his mid-forties, had known other
more horizontal and glorious theatres of war in his youth, receiving the “gift
of Venus” as Valle-Inclán’s Max Estrella would put it (93), or as De Miguel
presents it in her historical novel:
Manuel thought of Margarita and other long-gone
coquettish women, vendors of temporary happiness and lasting ailments
surrounded with silks and perfumes. And he sighed, “Blas would have said that
no one can take away from me all the fun I had, but I blame myself for having
been such a fool”.
[Manuel
pensó en Margarita y otras ya lejanas damas galantes, expendedoras de
felicidades transitorias y males perdurables entre sedas y perfumes. Y suspiró,
Blas diría quién me quita lo bailado; pero yo me reprocho haber sido tan tonto,
se dijo] (85).
This reinforcement of heroic manhood has more
“dramatic” literary echoes in an entry written in 2013 by an enthusiastic
blogger under the pseudonym Petroff who, through a male gaze and a torrid
prose, describes Belgrano’s sexual proclivities and the presence of the
venereal disease as a sign of manliness[2]:
And he, horny as a goat, preferred the cheap prostitute
who knocked at his door and asked him if
tonight the gentleman was in the mood for screwing, just like that. And
Belgrano would screw to forget his sorrows and the sorrows of others, and to
remind himself he was a man, although he preferred to impose the bravery of his
virility by blood and fire […] She felt as a woman, as a goddess, liberated,
she felt she was more than what she had been. Belgrano would pay her with
punctuality, and then he would ask her to lick his stiff dick to alleviate the
syphilis that was starting to kill him. ‘So many whores of my past are coming
after me that, if I have to die, I want it be with one of you,’ he would tell
her in Latin.
[y
él, un macho cabrío, prefería la prostituta barata que todas las noches tocaba
a su puerta y le preguntaba si esta noche el Señor estaba de ánimos para
coger, así sin más. Y Belgrano cogía para olvidar penas propias y ajenas, y
para recordarse Hombre, aunque el coraje de su hombría, prefería imponerlo en
combate, a sangre y fuego. […] Ella se sentía mujer, diosa, liberada, se sentía
más de lo que hubo sido. Belgrano, le pagaba con puntualidad, y después le
pedía que le pase [sic] la lengua por su verga erecta para aliviarle la sífilis
que lo empezaba a matar. Tantas putas del pasado me persiguen, que si me toque
[sic] morir, que sea con una de ustedes, le decía él en latín] (Petroff).
Nevertheless, in contrast, there is also the mythical
reverberation that brings back the idea that Belgrano was homosexual. In this
case, the same syphilis that in the previous examples was used to underline
Belgrano’s manhood is used here to reinforce the fabrication of his lack thereof. I have traced this popular belief in a
question asked in todoexpertos.com by
Ricardo Jose Ali[3]:
Hi, I have heard around that Belgrano died of
syphilis, for being a homosexual. Later some literature teacher told me that
Belgrano’s voice was high-pitched, and produced a
reaction on the people of the time. If one looks at his portraits and images he does not have a demeanor like that of San Martín.
[Hola,
he escuchado por ahí que Belgrano había muerto de sífilis, por homosexual.
Después alguna profesora de literatura me dijo que belgrano [sic] tenia [sic]
la voz “aflautada”, lo que producía cierta reacción de la gente de la época.
Uno mira los cuadros y las figuritas de el [sic] y no tiene un porte como el de
San Martin [sic]] (Ali).
It is apparent that when Ali states that “Belgrano died of syphilis, for being a
homosexual” he is combining the discourses and social meanings of two
diseases, one contemporary and one more historical. He is thinking of the myth
of AIDS that claims that only homosexuals or drug users get infected with the
syndrome, and then is inferring that the same myth is applicable also to
syphilis in the case of Belgrano. As a result, the traditional mythical belief
of Belgrano either as the flag creator, as a manly man, or as effeminate, is
rearticulated and renewed, contextually rehashed. In such tension between the
historical record and its narrative reinterpretation, the venereal disease
serves as a catalyst that updates the presence of the mythical figure. This
updating means addition and modification –a node of significations related to
movement, dynamism and temporality but equally, and paradoxically, also linked
to permanence and relevance. The intervention of syphilis acts then as both a
destructive anti-mythical discourse and as a discourse of preservation of the
mythical qualities of the hero.
The presence of syphilis in Belgrano’s case is mainly
linked to its physical manifestation; it deals with how the disease acts upon
his body, in particular if one considers that the historical record talks about
his last days pray of edema, which is actually not a disease in itself, but the
symptoms of an underlying illness. The venereal disease as a vehicle that
updates the bodily features (e.g. voice or demeanor)
does not perturb the powerful symbolic image of being the creator of the flag
–the emblem is unscathed by it–, syphilis only prods the more distinct feature
of his sexuality. In the case of Bolívar, nevertheless, although still
corporeal, syphilis mainly troubles his mental fitness.
Clinical
Case B. Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios
Ponte-Andrade y Blanco (1783–1830). Simón
Bolívar. El Libertador. It is December of 1830. We have been taught to imagine
Bolívar in his deathbed. Alone, defeated, sick, somehow impatient to get away
from his own country. There are a couple of oil paintings and sketches that try
to capture the solemnity of his last days, and of his death. At the discursive
level, the mythical framing, has chosen to portray the end of Bolívar’s life
with qualities of self-sacrifice, as summarized in his last proclamation of
December 10, 1830:
Colombians! My last wishes are for the happiness of
the motherland. If my death contributes to cease the political differences and
to consolidate the Union, I will then peacefully step down to the tomb.
[¡Colombianos! Mis últimos votos son por la felicidad de la
patria. Si mi muerte contribuye para que cesen los partidos y se consolide la
Unión, yo bajaré tranquilo al sepulcro] (Bolívar 327).
Although the image is quite powerful, I will not dwell
in the cohesion-seeking components of such framing, but rather in the way this
fixed discourse functions as a tool to straighten deviating paths of
interpretation. One who deviated from this route of exaltation was Diego
Carbonell, a Venezuelan doctor I was introduced to by Christopher Conway, the
author of the central study The Cult of
Bolívar in Latin American Literature (2003). In his Psicopatología de Bolívar (1916), published in Paris, Carbonell
intended to produce a scientific, objective reading of the figure of Bolívar
which, until rather recently, had been invested with mythical qualities for
nation-building purposes. Contextually, the author was using scientific
cutting-edge theories to drive his argumentation, but from our present
perspective Carbonell’s reliance on now-defunct, pseudo-scientific approaches,
such as those of Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) and Max Nordau (1849–1923), strips
much of his argument’s credibility.
But the relevant issue for the discussion here is that
Carbonell disrupted the boundaries that limit mythos and logos, the binary that
Greeks invested with the power to attain truth[4].
The author claimed that Bolívar had been prey, since early on, of the morbus comitialis, or epilepsy, which at
the time was believed to be connected to geniality. Carbonell intended to show
in fact that Bolívar’s genius –and epilepsy as a mark of genius–, was of the
same sort as that of great historical figures such as Julius Cesar, Alexander
the Great, or Napoleon Bonaparte. The line of his argument is related to Cesare
Lombroso’s theory, which presented madness, genius and criminality as
concomitant forms of degeneration that revealed a hereditary retrogression and
a delay or block in evolutionary terms. According to Lombroso in Genio e Follia [Genius and Madness]
(1864) and The Man of Genius (1889),
madness and genius were associated, and both the mad and the genius individuals
presented linked degenerate behaviors. More pointedly, he claimed that artistic
genius was a form of hereditary insanity, only that geniality was a biological
adjustment, that is, a favorable manifestation of insanity in evolutionary
terms. Following Lombroso’s The Man of Genius, Carbonell affirms that when syphilis
as a cause that sets the course of inheritance does
not have sufficient strength to produce the gummatous osteomyelitis, deafness
or eye maladies, it produces, sometimes, in the shape of hereditary syphilis,
the more or less active forms of the cerebral epileptiform syphilis, or
hysteroepileptic seizures, to follow Lombroso’s opinion.
[cuando
ésta como causa que imprime rumbos a la herencia no tiene suficiente fortaleza
tóxica para producir osteomielitis gomosa, la sordera o las afecciones
oculares, provoca en ocasiones, como sífilis hereditaria las formas más o menos
activas de la sífilis cerebral epileptiforme, o convulsiones
histeroepilépticas, para recordar la opinión de Lombroso] (25).
According to Carbonell, in the case of Bolívar, there
was a biological compensation. Instead of manifesting itself in the form of the
typical terrible physical symptoms, syphilis developed into a form of
syphilitic epilepsy characteristic of the genius. The doctor claims that the
general paralysis suffered by Bolívar’s father, don Juan Vicente de Bolívar y
Ponte, was in fact the result of syphilis (25), and that Bolívar himself was a
heredo-syphilitic, a congenital syphilitic or a syphilitic by inheritance:
Since his father was probably a megalomaniac and, as a
result, with general paralysis, Bolívar should have been heredosyphilitic,
since that later disease is considered a form of nervous syphilis. Being
heredosyphilitic, it is not surprising that he was irritable, headstrong and a
restless youth. Naturally, there must have been a cause or lesion that would
explain as heredosyphilitic the restlessness mentioned by Perú de Lacroix: the
scarce data taken from the autopsy by the physician Révérend should allow us to
locate in the meningeal vessels and in the brain cortex that lesion, of which
we know very little.
[Como
el padre de éste fue probablemente megalómano y, por consiguiente, paralítico
general, Bolívar debió de ser heredosifilítico, pues aquella última afección
está considerada como una forma de la sífilis nerviosa. Siendo
heredosifilítico, no es extraño que aquél fuese irritable, voluntarioso y
muchacho agitado. Naturalmente que debía de haber una causa o lesión que
explicara por la heredosífilis aquella movilidad de que habla Perú de Lacroix:
los escasos datos tomados de la autopsia practicada por el médico Révérend, nos
permitirían localizar en los vasos de las meninges y en la corteza cerebral,
aquella lesión de la cual sabemos muy poco] (150).
The author also bolsters his argument by an accruement
of family cases. He mentions that the youngest of Bolívar’s sisters, a
posthumous child herself, died a few days after birth, probably because of her
own inherited syphilis (23); that Bolívar’s delivery was extremely difficult,
and the placenta was particularly thick: a sign of syphilis (24); that María
Antonia, his other surviving sister, was slightly hysteric, also a
heredosyphilitic and, as in the case of Bolívar, suffering of a milder case of
the disease thanks to the placenta’s filtering function (25).
Lombroso’s ideas have been debunked. We don’t accept
the problematic category of hysteria, we know that there is not such a thing as
syphilis filtered by the placenta, although congenital syphilis is a reality
and most of the times, if not treated, develops into the acute version of the
disease –in fact, in recent years there is an increase of pregnant women with
syphilis and, therefore, a rising number of infants born with congenital
syphilis[5].
Nevertheless, Lombroso’s theories were preeminent for many years. The problem
of course was not if Bolívar was heredosyphilitic or not, but the consequences
that an approach like Carbonell’s had in the uniting qualities of the myth. In
other words, the strong response to Carbonell’s study had more to do with the
“diseasing” of the nation that had been constructed over Bolívar’s mythical
union-seeking corpse[6].
Although Carbonell presented it as a connection to
other important historical figures, epilepsy was a shameful disease
nonetheless, and a flood of articles, like that of Dr. Luis Razetti, attacking
Carbonell’s views followed:
I do not believe that such a serious and
transcendental retrospective diagnosis can be deduced, which would completely
destroy all the Liberator’s glory; the most elemental patriotism imposes on us
Venezuelan doctors the duty to demonstrate that such an assumption is arbitrary
before Dr. Carbonell’s book appears to cast a new shadow on the sublime work of
the Father of the Nation.
[No
creo que pueda deducirse tan grave y transcendental diagnóstico retrospectivo,
el cual vendría a destruir por completo toda la gloria del Libertador, el
patriotismo más elemental nos impone a nosotros los médicos venezolanos el
deber de demostrar que semejante suposición es arbitraria, antes de que el
libro del doctor Carbonell aparezca arrojando una nueva sombra sobre la obra
excelsa del Padre de la Patria] (qtd. in Carbonell xxv).
Most of the articles were not of the scientific kind,
even in the case of a doctor like Razetti, but clearly showed the need to
safeguard the integrity of a mythical discourse that defended a judicious,
wise, self-sacrificing, Bolívar. It did not help Carbonell that he decided to
publish his book precisely when the fervor of the celebrations of the first
centennial of Venezuelan independence was still in the air, and the country was
amidst the tyrannical rule of General Juan Vicente Gómez (1857–1935), the
infamous Bolivarian enthusiast that had his date of birth changed to match with
that of Bolívar, and whom actually died the same day
as the Liberator.
That the myth’s legitimacy lies in its lodging in
punctual history is true, but it is also true that in such historical location
lies its undoing; recent history can be reinterpreted and challenged. Attempts
to rearticulate the mythical crux of Bolívar’s death still happened after more
than eighty years after Carbonell’s publication. In 1997, Luis Salazar
Martínez, a Venezuelan educator, published a book titled El parricidio de Santa Marta –a book where, as in Carbonell’s,
conjectures seem to outweigh facts–, in which he defends the theory that
Bolívar was poisoned by his own nephew, Fernando Bolívar, with the backing of
the United States. Then, ten years later, in December
17, 2007, during the commemoration of the 177 years of Bolívar’s death,
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías (1954–2013) vowed to find the truth of
the hero’s demise. As Salazar Martínez, he claimed that Bolívar had been
assassinated, lamenting
in what a way the oligarchies misled us, the one here
(Venezuela), the one there (Colombia). In what a way the official historians
misled us, those that wrote the history falsifying it, distorting it.
[cómo
nos engañaron las oligarquías, la de aquí (Venezuela), la de allá (Colombia).
Cómo nos engañaron los historiadores oficiales, que escribieron la historia
falsificándola, distorsionándola] (“Chávez cree”).
The myth was then re-articulated, re-vamped, in order
to invest it with renewed cohesive features. In this case, Bolívar did not die
of a human, all-too-human, historically traceable disease like tuberculosis
(after all, many were those who died of consumption back in the day), but the
mythical death of the hero, a Christ-like death of a messiah betrayed by those
he had given liberty to; or rather, betrayed and killed by the Colombian and
Venezuelan oligarchic enemies, yet still strong enough to label his death as
sacrifice for union. Chávez’s attempt was to parallel the neo-myth of Bolívar
to the arch-myth of Christ’s death, and in the process reframe a characteristic
of the myth I mentioned before: the consolidation of an unconscious symbolism
that produces effects at many levels. The Venezuelan president opted to
challenge the structure of the myth at the precise moment in which the
relations with the Colombian neighbor were deeply strained (not much has
changed since then). Chávez liked to hint that then Colombian president Álvaro
Uribe was a Santander revived –Francisco de Paula Santander (1792–1840) was
Bolívar’s Colombian political enemy, who criticized his move toward monarchism.
By displacing the narrative of the death of Bolívar from the implications of
disease to the possibility of murder, Chávez sook to update the myth of Bolívar
in order to use it as a political re-interpretation that would benefit his own
agenda. This move may be criticized, as indeed it was, but in terms of the
dynamic of the neo-myth Chávez was plainly making true the claim by Renan that
“the nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of
endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the
most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past,
great men, glory (by which I understand genuine glory), this is the social
capital upon which one bases a national idea” (19).
Allow me to recount: tuberculosis, epilepsy,
heredosyphilis, poisoning. This is indeed a long list of possible death-causing
diseases for a rather short man (Bolívar was only 1.68 meters tall).
Nevertheless, in the case of Bolívar the discussion is not about the way
syphilis or any other disease appears in his physical body, but about the
macula on the mind and on the aura of exceptionality of the hero. Even if
related to genius, the hereditary blemish of a disease that by the 1910s was
presented not as an incongruous badge of virile honor but as a tangible threat
to the future of the nation, meant that the nation was equally blemished from
its inception[7]. Bolívar
is a diseased national myth, but in the challenging of a myth that anchors the
present in the past there is a possibility for creators and scholars to explore
how each mythical re-articulation, each splinter left by fragmentation, brings
with it our own discomfort and subsequently our own repositioning, our
rearranging and dusting of forgotten dark corners. Take for example the novel
by Evelio Rosero La carroza de Bolívar
(2012) translated into English as Feast
of the Innocents (2015), that presents a very negative image of Bolívar as
a warrior (a coward), as a man of law (a despot), and as a human being (lustful
and venal), diametrically opposed to that defended by Chávez or Nicolás Maduro, but based nevertheless in facts of the behavior of
Bolívar against the people (women, children and old men) of Pasto, in the south
of Colombia. This kind of discomfort, developed as literary creation or as a
critical approach, this rearranging and dusting, can help us to see present
reality or presently brewing myths, in a different fashion.
Even if touched by this macula, the mythical quality
of these heroes is not cancelled. In fact, in some way, the blemish strengthens
and projects its presence in a way similar to the dynamic of the katechon, as presented by Roberto Esposito in his discussion of immunity in Immunitas (2002): “the katechon restrains evil by containing
it, by keeping it, by holding it within itself. It confronts evil, but from
within, by hosting it and welcoming it, to the point of binding its own
necessity to the presence of evil. It limits evil, defers it, but does not
eradicate it: because if it did, it would also eliminate itself” (63). In a
more pedestrian iteration, even bad publicity is good publicity for the
updating of the neo-myth. To update the neo-myth is not only to keep it up-to-date, it is also to keep it alive altogether. Disease
does not kill it, it perpetuates it.
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Date of reception: 06/11/2020
Date
of acceptance: 19/01/2021
Citation: González
Espitia, Juan Carlos, “The Disease and the Hero: Representations of
Belgrano’s and Bolívar’s Hidden and Public Syphilis”, Revista Letral, n.º 25, 2021, pp. 121-139. ISSN 1989-3302.
Funding data: The publication of this article
has not received any public or private finance.
License: This content is under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial, 3.0 Unported license.
[1] All translations into the
English language are mine.
[2] I follow the film theorist
Laura Mulvey’s idea of the masculine gaze presented in her seminal essay
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey
reveals the way women in Hollywood films are seen from the perspective of the
eyes of a heterosexual man. As a result, female characters are represented as
objects, not as subjects, for masculine desire and pleasure. The audience, both
male and female, is driven to see the film from the masculine heterosexual
perspective, that is, forced to identify with the masculine gaze. Mulvey’s
approach can also be used to the study of literary works, as is the case here.
Although published in an online blog, Petroff’s text is presented as a literary
piece.
[3] Todoexpertos.com is a
popular website that claims to offer “Questions and answers by real people. […]
questions answered by more than a million experts like you” [Preguntas y
respuestas de gente real. (…)
respuestas creadas por más de un millón de expertos como tú]. It is
important to underline that the creation and reinforcement of myths does not
necessarily branch out from official, sanctioned channels. In fact, it is the
blurred inception in popular venues what provides much of the narrative
attractiveness of myths.
[4] In The Dialogical Mind Ivana Marková explains that “some scholars,
like Aristotle and Jacob argued that scientific and mythical reasoning fulfil,
at least to some degree, similar functions: they both aim at explaining
fundamental questions about the universe, the origin of matter and life; and
they are both based on imagination, representations of the world, and they
explore powers that rule it [...] Although the categories of mythos and logos
have created controversies since ancient Greece, they have been maintained
throughout centuries together with the conviction that on its road towards
progress humankind will shed off irrational beliefs and myths” (15).
[5] For example, for the case of
the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC), “the number of reported congenital syphilis cases in the United States
increased 261% during 2013–2018, from 362 to 1,306. Among reported congenital
syphilis cases during 2018, a total of 94 resulted in stillbirths or early
infant deaths. Using 2018 national congenital syphilis surveillance data and a
previously developed frame-work, CDC identified missed opportunities for
congenital syphilis prevention” (“Missed Opportunities” 661).
[6] Representations of disease, the revision of the “mythical health” of heroic figures, and the linkage of sexuality
and virility are contentious
subjects. Even with historical distance, it continues to be difficult to
acknowledge –that is, to recognize or to avoid looking away– that these
representative heroes may have suffered maladies culturally related to
virility. Only wholesome men are supposed to attain heroic success.
[7] This threat had already been
visited literarily by Henrik Ibsen in his theater piece Ghosts (1881). In the Latin American case, the preoccupation
appears in Eugenio Cambaceres’s Música
sentimental (1884), and is at the center of Claudio de Alas’s La herencia de la sangre, written by
1918.