A Geography of Hard Times: Narratives about Travel to South America, 1780-1849

chapter one

The malady called America is an affliction that attacks certain inhabitants of the Old World. It presents as a longing to stretch beyond the ocean and beyond what is known, to reach a New World: an ambiguous desire, in fact. —Giorgio Antei, Mal de América: Las obras y los días de Agustín Codazzi, 1793–1859 I saw that I had to free myself of the images which up till then had announced the things I was seeking: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities MANY PAINTINGS and sculptures memorialize José Celestino Mutis. He spent twenty-two years surrounded by painters drawing the flora of Nueva Granada, and he did not live in such company in vain. These painters immortalized him too on canvas. He now presides over the halls and chambers of museums and planetariums, universities and governments, to such an extent that his image ought to be immediately recognizable to Colombians at least. One particularly common portrait adorned my third-grade natural sciences book: the painting of an old man’s head and torso suspended above a marble pedestal which itself was surrounded by instruments of measurement and books of botanical notes. A vine that seemed to emerge from one of these books climbed the base of the bust and delicately began to circle around the man. Underneath was written, “Mutis: scholar and precursor of Independence ” (Figure 1.1). My curiosity could not help but be aroused by this founding father with neither weapon nor uniform, gently touched by a flower. Reading the reports of the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom 17 chapter one Mutis, or The Trap of Mutisia Clematis of Granada (Villegas 1992) satisfied my curiosity at last. The plant is called Mutisia clematis in honor of the scholar and was so named by none less than Linnaeus. The portrait is by Salvador Rizo, the outstanding painter among the personnel of the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada of which Mutis was the promoter and the director. Rizo painted it in Santa Fe de Bogotá, in the expedition’s workshop where the innumerable collections of the plants of Nueva Granada were organized according to Linnaeus ’s system. He depicted Mutis this way a few years before the botanist’s death. Mutis rests atop the marble pedestal where dead patriots are placed, THE SCHOLAR AND THE BARON 18 FIGURE 1.1 “José Celestino Mutis” Villegas, Oil on Canvas, Attributed to Salvador Rizo 118 x104 cm, Original in Museo Veinte de Julio. Taken from Villegas, Mutis y la Real Expedición Botánica del Nuevo Reyno de Granada, 1992. enmeshed in a plant that grows not out of the earth but out of a book. To the left is an astrolabe, to the right his treatise on quinine, and carved into the marble is a Latin inscription: “Virtutem Factis, Naturam Scriptis Colere Docuit” (“He taught respect for the virtue of facts and the writings of nature”). Mutis did in fact spend his final days surrounded by these items that Rizo selected for his portrait, while suffering, among many other maladies, the American one: that literary disease said to attack European travelers who dare to cross the torrid zone, which condemns them to be unable to ever return to Europe.1 That ubiquitous painting assembles elements that are symbolic of the links I propose to make in this reading of the Diario de observaciones científicas de José Celestino Mutis (1760–1790) (Journal of Observations of José Celestino Mutis).2 In the center is the Spanish traveler of the Enlightenment whom historiography raised onto a pedestal even before his death, converting him into a “precursor” of Nueva Granada’s independence. In the wings are the instruments used to create geography, that text about nature, and the books in which an unknown reality is classified within the new code of the West. Wrapping itself around the botanist comes the Mutisia, the involving, entangling nature that completely takes over the Diario de observaciones just as it took over the life of the historical character there portrayed. The painting thus summarizes a travel book that, like so many, is also the story of an interior journey, of a transformation provoked by the visited reality. A reading of this text from the perspective of the subjectivity, desire, and transformations that make themselves felt in the journal...