By Eduardo Garcia Aguilar
Around the bizarre story of the Journal of Bucaramanga in Peru de Lacroix, published in 1912 in Paris by the Colombian writer Cornelio Hispano, can be woven several novelistic stories, as if it were an intricate series of Chinese boxes or Russian matrioschkas.
First is the tragic story of the French general Lacroix, who worked next liberator Simon Bolivar and was one of his trusted men like so many other Europeans of his inner circle. After the death of Bolivar, he and other colleagues fell into disgrace and was unjustly driven into exile by his enemy Obando, was forced to abandon his wife and children.
Back in Paris in 1837, at 57 years old, broke and unable to pay child and where he was staying, fired a gun, leaving a will and some manuscripts, including include the famous Diary of Bucaramanga, which had been in Caracas in the hands of the Marquis del Toro.
This document describes day to day everyday life of Bolivar in Bucaramanga in 1828, when he was surrounded by his staff while carrying out the frustrated convention of Ocana. It's one of those moments and peaceful transition in the life of hero who quietly elapses without battles and plenty of free time, just switch the signing of official documents, writing letters and receiving guests or employees who came from across the region to submit reports to the president.
Peru de Lacroix, three years older than Bolivar, takes those long moments intimacy and conversation at breakfast, lunches, dinners and trips to record everything that has the head and describe it in the smallest details of privacy, without him being aware of the purpose, so the book is a true original and live instant character.
Peru de Lacroix scores a lot of Bolivar's controversial comments about the various circumstances of the struggle for independence and qualifications of its employees hard, which shows another overlooked aspect of official truths . For example, he speaks very ill of the military Granada, whom he considers enemies, lucidly describes the defects and qualities others like Páez, Santander and Sucre and clarifies many of their actions of realpolitik.
Even Bolivar goes on to say that Ricaurte did not die in atoms flying in San Mateo and that other stories are just as patriotic legends progaganda necessary in the struggle for power in the middle of a war. Those who read the document were shocked and Venezuelan Academy of History chose to keep it a secret and jealously hide from the public to avoid problems.
The ambitious young Colombian intellectual Cornelio Hispano, born in 1880, a good lawyer and a graduate student in Bogota, was appointed consul in Venezela and using his rank made contact with the document that you copied in secret, kept hidden from those in the dust.
Ismael Lopez, whose nickname was Cornelio Hispano, arrived in Paris at the time of Vargas Vila, Enrique Gomez Carrillo and Rufino Blanco Fombona, and published in 1912 in the editorial Ollendorf several successful books, including famous Diary. To publish and distribute the paper generated a scandal continental Hispanic supporters and detractors. But for the first time the European public, who admired Bolivar as a romantic hero, and the public Latin America had access to a lively and true portrait of the Liberator.
There we see the simple, generous man in civilian dress, shirt and white pants, blue jacket and straw hat, riding on horseback to clear around Bucaramanga, go to church often but unbelieving, and spends long hours reading the classics and playing cards with his closest collaborators. On those evenings account Lacroix their own adventures, as when Napoleon saw from afar the day of his coronation, and many details of his life as his marriage, battles, loves, prejudices, ideas and disappointments different.
Cornelio Hispano, a disciple of Miguel Antonio Caro and young friend of Guillermo Valencia, is the other character of this curious story tripartite. Despite having very early literary success in Paris with works such as the Garden of the Hesperides, Cauca and Paris Elegies at Amazon, today is totally unknown and ignored. Little is known of his long life and died in Colombia in 1962 at 82 years of age. In some texts recalls with nostalgia the years of youth and economic prosperity in Paris, when life smiled, related to the great authors of the day and spoiled by his editor.
unfortunate Three stories are interwoven in this detective story about a lost manuscript palimpsest. Bolivar, the hero ends up unhappy and ill at St. Peter of Alexandria, Peru Lacroix falls into poverty and poor old commits suicide in Paris and ate Cornelio Hispano forgotten despite his flamboyant nickname his youthful ambitions and success.
So now read the Journal of Bucaramanga in Peru de Lacroix, dumped by Cornelio Hispano in impeccable prose and enriched with cometary exordium and multiple attachments, is like reading a novel in which we live life from within everyday hero who speaks no hieratic position of the statues or idealized version slavish fans, while the way we discover the lives of two minor characters that revolve around her legend.
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