Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [209]
“I’m almost regretful to see you all here,” he joked. “I have got to make a rather dry speech.”
He proceeded, with the aid of a blackboard, a stereopticon screen, and three printed maps, to lecture learnedly on his expedition. “It is almost impossible for me to show you on these standard maps what I did, because the maps are so preposterously wrong. For instance, here are the headquarters of the Tapajoz de Juruena.…” To those in the audience who could think of Theodore Roosevelt only as a politician, the experience of seeing him, with his strangely drawn face and eroded voice, assessing bottom-flow rates at 4,500 cubic meters per second in the seventh degree of southern latitude was so bizarre that he might have been an impersonator. George Cherrie, Leo Miller, Anthony Fiala, and Father Zahm were conversely reminded that the man they had huddled with in Mato Grosso hailstorms was not, after all, their intimate, but a public figure making arch reference to them as “exhibits A, B, C, and D.”
Again and again Roosevelt emphasized that he had not discovered the Dúvida, but had merely—with the professional assistance of Brazilian surveyors—“put it on the map.” He refrained from mentioning that the river now bore his name, and did not say that it had nearly killed him, except to admit that there had been times when life in camp “lacked a good deal of being undiluted pleasure.”
He was plainly exhausted afterward. But that did not prevent a pium-like swarm of Congressional Progressives pursuing him to the Party headquarters and talking politics until it was time for him to take the midnight sleeper back to New York.
TWO WEEKS LATER, in the kind of translocation only Roosevelt could find natural, he sat at lunch with the King and Queen of Spain in the fragrant garden of their summer palace outside Madrid. The guests of honor were Kermit and Belle Willard, who were due to be married twice over the next two days—first by a local magistrate at a civil ceremony, then in an Episcopalian service in the private chapel of the British Embassy, so as not to profane Spain’s Catholic orthodoxy. Belle’s father, Joseph E. Willard, was on hand in his capacity as the American ambassador, and Alice Longworth substituted for Edith Roosevelt, who at fifty-three was suffering vague female ailments, and had declined to accompany her husband overseas.
Roosevelt and Alfonso XIII already knew each other, as fellow mourners at the funeral of Edward VII four years before. Their initial meetings had been awkward. Alfonso found it hard to forget, and forgive, the defeats his soldiers had suffered in the Spanish-American War, at the hands of adversaries prominently including the Colonel of the Rough Riders. Now it was necessary for him to be cordial, if only because of the diplomatic importance of tomorrow’s ceremony, linking the administrations of two American presidents. Roosevelt treated Alfonso with his usual affability, unbending him to the extent that they ended up laughing about the “wake” George V had held in Buckingham Palace.
Royal favor notwithstanding, the Spanish government found it necessary to surround the Colonel with heavy security during his four-day stay. Plainclothes detectives followed him everywhere, and a detachment of police guarded his quarters at the American Embassy. He did what he could to improve his local image, holding a press conference to express love for the country of Velázquez and the Conquistadors, and saying that after what he had seen of the spread of Latin civilization in South America, he would not be surprised to see Spanish becoming the world’s universal language. Socialist and republican editors were unpersuaded that he had changed since the Battle of San Juan. “We know his attitude toward Spain,” El País remarked. “We cannot welcome him.”
To Roosevelt’s mild irritation, he was pestered by cable requests from American newspapers for a statement regarding his future as leader of the Progressive Party. “This trip is just a spree,” he replied to The New York Times, “and I am not interested