The General in His Labyrinth

  "Tell Carcamo I died! That's all, just tell him I died!"

  Colonel Wilson went to the office to confront the obstreperous soldier, who was dressed for the occasion in his parade uniform and a constellation of combat medals. But by then his arrogance had collapsed and his eyes were flooded with tears.

  "No, Wilson, don't give me the message," he said. "I've already heard it."

  When the General opened his eyes he realized the clock still read seven minutes past one. Jose Palacios wound it, set it from memory, and then confirmed the time on his two watches. A little later Fernanda Barriga came in and tried to have the General eat some vegetable stew. He resisted, although he had not eaten anything since the previous day, but he ordered the food brought to the office so that he could eat during the interviews. In the meantime he succumbed to temptation and picked up one of the many guavas in the gourd. He was intoxicated by its aroma for a moment, gave it a greedy bite, chewed the flesh with childish delight, tasted the fruit on all sides, and swallowed it little by little with a long sigh of memory. Then he sat on the hammock with the gourd of guavas between his legs, and he ate them all, one after the other, almost not taking the time to breathe. Jose Palacios took him by surprise when there was only one left.

  "We'll kill ourselves!"

  The General mimicked him with good humor:

  "No deader than we are already."

  At three-thirty sharp, the prearranged hour, he gave orders for the visitors to begin to come into the office in twos, for in this way he could finish with one in the shortest time by letting him see his haste to attend to the other. Dr. Nicasio del Valle, who was among the first, found him sitting with his back to a glass-paned window through which one could see the entire farm and beyond that the steaming swamps. In his hand he held the plate of vegetable stew that Fernanda Barriga had brought him and that he did not even taste because he was already beginning to feel the effects of his overindulgence in the guavas. Dr. del Valle later summarized his impression of the interview in unadorned language: "That man's goose was cooked." Everyone who came for an interview agreed, each in his own way. Nevertheless, even those most touched by his weakness lacked compassion, for they urged him to travel to neighboring villages to be godfather to children, or to inaugurate public works, or to see for himself the poverty in which people lived because of the government's negligence.

  After an hour the nausea and stomach cramps caused by the guavas became alarming, and he had to call a halt to the interviews despite his desire to accommodate everyone who had been waiting since the morning. There was no room in the patio for more calves, goats, chickens, or the different kinds of wild game that had been brought as gifts. The grenadiers had to intervene to prevent a disturbance, but by dusk the situation had returned to normal thanks to a second providential downpour, which cleared the air and enhanced the silence.

  Despite the General's explicit refusal, a dinner in his honor had been prepared for four o'clock at a nearby house. But it was held without him, for the carminative power of the guavas kept him in a state of emergency until after eleven o'clock that night. He stayed in the hammock, prostrate with torturous shooting pains and fragrant farts, feeling his soul slip away in abrasive waters. The priest brought a medicine prepared by the pharmacist at the Academy. The General refused it. "If I lost power with one emetic, Old Nick will carry me away with a second," he said. He abandoned himself to his fate, shivering with the icy sweat in his bones, his only consolation the occasional snatches of beautiful string music wafting in from the banquet held without him. Little by little the flood from his belly subsided, the pain passed, the music ended, and he remained floating in nothingness.

  His previous visit to Mompox had almost been the last. He was returning from Caracas after effecting, through the magic of his person, an emergency reconciliation with General Jose Antonio Paez, who was, nevertheless, very far from renouncing his separatist dream. At that time his enmity with Santander was public knowledge and had gone to the extreme of the General's refusing to receive any more of his letters because he no longer trusted either his heart or his morality. "Save yourself the trouble of calling yourself my friend," he wrote to him. The immediate pretext for Santanderist animosity was a hurried proclamation the General had made to the people of the city in which he said, without thinking too much about it, that all his actions had been guided by the liberty and glory of Caracas. On his return to New Granada he had tried to smooth things over with an appropriate phrase for Cartagena and Mompox: "If Caracas gave me life, you gave me glory." But it looked too much like rhetorical fence-mending to placate the demagoguery of the Santanderists.

  In an attempt to hold off the final disaster, the General was returning to Santa Fe de Bogota with a column of troops, hoping to gather others along the way, in order to begin once again the struggle for national integrity. He had said then that this was his decisive moment, which is just what he had said when he marched off to prevent the separation of Venezuela. A little more reflection would have permitted him to realize that for almost twenty years no moment of his life had not been decisive. "The entire Church, the entire army, the immense majority of the nation, were on my side," he would write later, remembering those days. But despite all these advantages, he said, it had been proved over and over again that when he abandoned the south to march north, and vice versa, the country he left behind was lost, devastated by new civil wars. It was his destiny.

  The Santanderist press missed no opportunity to attribute military defeats to his nocturnal excesses. Among the many other lies intended to diminish his glory, at that time they published the story in Santa Fe de Bogota that not he but General Santander had been in command at the battle of Boyaca, where independence had been assured at seven o'clock in the morning of August 7, 1819, while he was pleasuring himself in Tunja with a lady of dubious reputation in viceregal society.

  In any case, it was not just the Santanderist press that evoked his libertine nights in order to discredit him. Even before the final victory it was said that at least three battles in the wars for independence had been lost only because he was not where he was supposed to be but in some woman's bed instead. During another of his visits to Mompox, a caravan of women of diverse ages and colors came down the second of the three streets and left the air heavy with cheap perfume. They rode sidesaddle, carried parasols of printed satin, and wore dresses of exquisite silk the likes of which had never been seen in the city. No one denied the speculation that they were the General's concubines, traveling ahead of him. A false speculation, like so many others, for his wartime harems were one of the many salon fabrications that pursued him beyond the grave.

  There was nothing new in these methods of slanted reporting. The General himself had used them during the war against Spain, when he ordered Santander to print false news items in order to deceive the Spanish commanders. And therefore when the Republic was already established and he criticized this same Santander for his misuse of the press, he responded with exquisite sarcasm:

  "We had a good teacher, Excellency."

  "A bad teacher," the General replied, "for you must remember that the news we invented was turned against us."

  He was so sensitive to everything said about him, true or false, that he never recovered from any falsehood, and until the moment of his death he struggled to disprove them. Nevertheless, he did little to protect himself from lies. As he had on other occasions, the last time he was in Mompox he gambled his glory for the sake of a woman.

  She was Josefa Sagrario, a highborn Mompoxina who, disguised in a Franciscan habit, made her way past seven guard stations using the password given to her by Jose Palacios: "God's country." She was so white that her dazzling body made her visible in the darkness. That night, moreover, she had succeeded in surpassing the miracle of her beauty with that of her ornamentation, for over the front and the back of her dress she had hung a cuirass of magnificent local goldwork. And when he tried to carry her to the hammock he could scarcel
y lift her because of the weight of the gold. At dawn, after a night of abandon, she felt the terror of transience and begged him to stay another night.

  It was an enormous risk, since according to the General's secret agents Santander had organized a conspiracy to strip him of his power and dismember Colombia. But he stayed, and not just one night. He stayed ten, and they were so happy they both came to believe that in fact they loved each other more than anyone in this world ever had before.

  She gave him her gold. "For your wars," she said. He did not use it because of his scruples regarding treasure earned in bed and therefore ill-gotten, and he left it in the keeping of a friend. He forgot it. After the attack caused by the guavas on his final visit to Mompox, the General had the chest opened to verify its contents, and only then did he find the gold, along with her name and date, in his memory.

  It was a miraculous vision: Josefa Sagrario's gold cuirass made of different kinds of exquisite metalwork, with a total weight of thirty pounds. And there was a case with twenty-three forks, twenty-four knives, twenty-four teaspoons, and a small sugar tongs, all of gold, as well as other household items of great value, also left behind on different occasions for safekeeping, and also forgotten. In the fabulous disorder of the General's treasuries, these discoveries in the most unthought-of places no longer surprised anyone. He gave instructions that the flatware should be added to his baggage and that the trunk full of gold should be returned to its owner. But the priest who was rector of San Pedro Apostol astounded him with the news that Josefa Sagrario and her family were living in exile in Italy for conspiring against the security of the state.

  "More of Santander's shit, of course," said the General.

  "No, General," said the priest. "You exiled them yourself without realizing it after the troubles in '28."

  He left the chest of gold where it was while he clarified the matter, and then he did not concern himself anymore about her exile. For as he told Jose Palacios, he was certain that Josefa Sagrario would return along with the horde of his proscribed enemies as soon as he lost sight of the Cartagena coastline.

  "Cassandro must be packing his trunks by now," he said.

  And in fact, many exiles began their own repatriation as soon as they learned he was on his way to Europe. But General Santander, a man of sober reflections and unfathomable decisions, was one of the last. The news of the renunciation put him on the alert, but he gave no signs of returning, and he did not hasten to conclude the avid study trips through the countries of Europe that he had undertaken as soon as he disembarked in Hamburg in October of the previous year. On March 2, 1831, when he was in Florence, he read in the Journal du Commerce that the General had died. Nevertheless, he did not begin his slow return until six months later, when a new government restored his military ranks and honors and the Congress elected him President of the Republic in absentia.

  Before weighing anchor in Mompox, the General made an apologetic visit to Lorenzo Carcamo, his old comrade in arms. Only then did he learn that he was gravely ill and got up from his bed the previous afternoon only to greet him. Despite the ravages of illness, Carcamo had to make an effort to control the power of his body, and his voice thundered while he used pillows to dry the flood of tears that poured from his eyes without any connection at all to his state of mind.

  Together they lamented their misfortunes, mourned the frivolity of nations and the ingratitude of victory, and ranted against Santander, who was always an obligatory topic for them. The General had not often been so explicit. During the campaign of 1813 Lorenzo Carcamo had been witness to a violent altercation between the General and Santander when the latter refused to obey his order to cross the frontier in order to liberate Venezuela a second time. General Carcamo still thought this had been the origin of a deep-seated bitterness that the passage of time did no more than exacerbate.

  The General, on the other hand, believed this was not the end but rather the beginning of a great friendship. Nor was it true that the origin of their antagonism lay in the privileges granted to General Paez, or the ill-fated Constitution of Bolivia, or the imperial investiture the General accepted in Peru, or the lifelong presidency and Senate membership he dreamed of in Colombia, or the absolute powers he assumed after the Ocana Convention. No: these reasons and many others like them had not caused the terrible animosity that grew more bitter with the years until it culminated in the assassination attempt of September 25. "The real reason was that Santander could never assimilate the idea that this continent should be a single nation," said the General. "The unity of America was too much for him." He looked at Lorenzo Carcamo, lying on his bed as if it were the last battlefield of a war that had been doomed from the start, and he ended the visit.

  "Of course none of this means anything now that the patient has died," he said.

  Lorenzo Carcamo watched him stand up, sad and stripped of everything, and he realized that for both the General and himself, memories were more of a burden than the years. When he grasped the General's hand between both of his he also realized that each had a fever, and he wondered which of their deaths would keep them from seeing each other again.

  "We lost a world, Simon my old friend," said Lorenzo Carcamo.

  "They lost it for us," said the General. "And the only thing to do now is start again from the beginning."

  "And we will," said Lorenzo Carcamo.

  "Not me," said the General. "All that's left for me is for them to throw me out with the garbage."

  As a memento Lorenzo Carcamo gave him a pair of pistols in a beautiful crimson satin case. He knew the General did not like firearms, and that in his few personal quarrels he had trusted to the sword. But these pistols possessed the moral virtue of having once been used with success in a duel for love, and the General accepted them with emotion. A few days later, in Turbaco, the news would reach him that General Carcamo had died.

  The signs were auspicious when the voyage was resumed at dusk on May 23. Propelled more by favorable currents than by the oarsmen, the barges left behind the slate precipices and the mirages on the wide beaches. The rafts made of tree trunks, which they were seeing now in greater numbers, seemed swifter. Unlike the ones they had observed earlier, these had dreamy little houses with flowerpots, and clothes hung to dry in the windows, and they carried wire chicken coops, milk cows, and shabby children who continued to wave at the barges long after they had passed by. They traveled all night through a flock of stars. At dawn they sighted the town of Zambrano, brilliant in the early light.

  Don Castulo Campillo, nicknamed The Kid, was waiting for them under the huge ceiba tree in port, having prepared a coastal sancocho stew at his house in honor of the General. The invitation was inspired by the legend that on his first visit to Zambrano he had eaten lunch in a poor inn on the rocky hill overlooking the port and had said that he had to come back once a year if only for the succulent coastal sancocho. The landlady was so impressed by the importance of her guest that she borrowed dishes and flatware from the distinguished house of the Campillo family. The General did not remember many details of that occasion, and neither he nor Jose Palacios was certain if coastal sancocho was the same as Venezuelan hervido. Nevertheless, General Carreno thought it was the same dish, and that they had in fact eaten it on the hill in the port, not during the river campaign, however, but when they were there three years earlier on the steamboat. The General, more and more disquieted by the leaks in his memory, accepted Carreno's version with humility.

  The luncheon for the grenadiers was set under the large almond trees in the patio of the Campillo family's seignorial home and served on wooden planks covered with plantain leaves instead of tablecloths. On the interior terrace overlooking the patio a splendid table was laid with rigorous formality in the English manner for the General, his officers, and a few guests. The lady of the house explained that the news from Mompox had taken them by surprise at four o'clock in the morning, and they had just had time to slaughter the fattest animal in their herds.
There it was, cut into succulent pieces and cooked at a merry boil in great pots, along with all the fruits of the garden.

  The announcement that they had prepared a banquet for him without first notifying him soured the General's humor, and Jose Palacios had to call on his best arts as conciliator so that he would agree to disembark, but the hospitable atmosphere at the fiesta improved his mood. He had well-deserved praise for the good taste of the house and for the sweetness of the young girls in the family, who were modest and diligent and served the table of honor with old-fashioned grace. Above all he praised the fineness of the china and the quality of the silver, emblazoned with the heraldic emblems of some house brought down by the fatality of modern times, but he ate with his own.

  The only unpleasantness was caused by a Frenchman who was living under the protection of the Campillo family and who attended the luncheon with an insatiable need to demonstrate before such notable guests his universal knowledge regarding the enigmas of this life and the next. He had lost everything in a shipwreck, and with his entourage of assistants and servants he had occupied half the house for almost a year while he waited for uncertain assistance that was supposed to come to him from New Orleans. Jose Palacios learned that his name was Diocles Atlantique, but he could not determine either his field of knowledge or the nature of his mission to New Granada. Naked and with a trident in his hand, he would have been identical to King Neptune, and he had a well-established reputation in the town as a swinish boor. But luncheon with the General moved him to come to the table bathed and with clean fingernails and dressed for the stifling heat of May as if it were the wintry salons of Paris, wearing a blue jacket with gold buttons and striped trousers in the outdated style of the Directorate.