The General in His Labyrinth

  No sooner were the first greetings concluded than he embarked on an encyclopedic lecture in meticulous Spanish. He stated that a classmate of his from the primary school in Grenoble had just deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphics after fourteen sleepless years. That corn did not originate in Mexico but in a region of Mesopotamia where fossils had been discovered that antedated the arrival of Columbus in the Antilles. That the Assyrians had obtained experimental proof of the influence of celestial bodies on disease. That contrary to the claims of a recent encyclopedia, the Greeks had possessed no knowledge of cats until 400 B.C. While he pontificated without mercy on these and many other matters, he made emergency pauses only to lament the cultural deficiencies of American cuisine.

  The General sat opposite him and paid him no more than the scant attention civility demanded, pretending to eat more than he really ate and not raising his eyes from the plate. From the start the Frenchman attempted to speak to him in his own language, and the General responded in kind for the sake of courtesy but then returned without delay to Spanish. His patience that day surprised Jose Laurencio Silva, who knew how the absolutism of Europeans exasperated him.

  The Frenchman addressed the various guests in a loud voice, even those sitting farthest from him, but it was evident he was interested only in the attention of the General. Then, leaping from the rooster to the burro, as he called it, he asked the General a direct question: What would be the one correct system of government suitable to the new republics? Without raising his eyes from the plate, the General asked in turn:

  "And what is your opinion?"

  "My opinion is that the example of Bonaparte is a good one not only for us but for the entire world," said the Frenchman.

  "I don't doubt that you think so," said the General without hiding the irony. "Europeans believe that only what Europe invents is good for the entire universe, and anything else is detestable."

  "It had been my understanding that Your Excellency advocated the monarchist solution," said the Frenchman.

  The General raised his eyes for the first time. "Well, don't let it be your understanding anymore," he said. "My brow will never be sullied by a crown." He pointed at the group of his aides-de-camp, and concluded:

  "I have Iturbide there to remind me."

  "Speaking of which," said the Frenchman, "the statement you made when they shot his father the Emperor gave great encouragement to European monarchists."

  "I would not change a letter of what I said then," said the General. "It amazes me that a man as ordinary as Iturbide could do such extraordinary things, but may God save me from his fate as He has saved me from his actions, although I know He will never save me from the same ingratitude."

  Then he tried to temper his harshness and explained that the initiative for establishing a monarchical regime in the new republics had come from General Jose Antonio Paez. The idea proliferated, driven by all manner of equivocal interests, and even he had come to think of it, hidden under the cloak of a presidency for life, as a desperate formula for achieving and maintaining the integrity of America at any cost. But he soon realized how senseless it was.

  "With federalism the opposite occurs," he concluded. "It seems too perfect for our countries because it demands virtues and talents far superior to our own."

  "In any case," said the Frenchman, "it is not systems but their excesses that dehumanize history."

  "We know that speech by heart," said the General. "At bottom it's the stupidity of Benjamin Constant, the greatest pastry chef in Europe, who was against the Revolution and then for the Revolution, who fought against Napoleon and then was one of his courtiers, who often goes to bed republican and wakes up monarchist, or vice versa, and who has now established himself as the absolute repository of our truth by the act and grace of European arrogance."

  "Constant's arguments against tyranny are very lucid," said the Frenchman.

  "Senor Constant, like a good Frenchman, is a fanatic for absolute interests," said the General. "On the other hand, Abbot Pradt made the only lucid statement in that polemic when he pointed out that policy depends on where and when it is formulated. During the War to the Death I myself gave the order to execute eight hundred Spanish prisoners in a single day, including the patients in the hospital at La Guayra. Today, under the same circumstances, my voice would not tremble if I gave the order again, and Europeans would not have the moral authority to reproach me, for if any history is drowned in blood, indignity, and injustice, it is the history of Europe."

  The deeper he delved into his analysis in the great silence that seemed to take possession of the entire town, the more he fed the fire of his own rage. The Frenchman was thunderstruck and attempted to interrupt, but he cut him off with a wave of his hand. The General evoked the hideous slaughters of European history. On Saint Bartholomew's Night the number of slain reached more than two thousand in ten hours. During the splendor of the Renaissance twelve thousand mercenaries in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and cut the throats of eight thousand of its inhabitants. And the apotheosis: Ivan IV, Czar of all the Russias, who deserved the name The Terrible, exterminated the entire population of the cities between Moscow and Novgorod, and in Novgorod, in a single assault, massacred all twenty thousand inhabitants on the simple suspicion of a conspiracy against him.

  "So stop doing us the favor of telling us what we should do," he concluded. "Don't attempt to teach us how we should be, don't attempt to make us just like you, don't try to have us do well in twenty years what you have done so badly in two thousand."

  He crossed his cutlery on his plate, and for the first time he fixed his flaming eyes on the Frenchman:

  "Damn it, please let us have our Middle Ages in peace!"

  He was breathless, overcome by another attack of coughing. But when at last he could control it, there was not a vestige of rage left in him. He turned toward Kid Campillo and favored him with his best smile.

  "Pardon me, my dear friend," he said. "Such ravings were not worthy of so memorable a luncheon."

  Colonel Wilson related this incident to a chronicler of the time, who did not take the trouble to record it. "The poor General's case is closed," he said. That was the fundamental belief of all who saw him on his final journey, and perhaps that was why no one left a written record. Indeed, in the opinion of some of his companions, the General would have no place in history.

  The jungle was less dense after Zambrano, the towns became gayer and more colorful, and in some there was music in the streets for no reason at all. The General stretched out in the hammock, trying to digest the Frenchman's impertinence with a peaceful siesta, but it was not easy to do. He could not stop thinking about him, and with Jose Palacios he lamented not having found the well-aimed sentences and invincible arguments that occurred to him only now, in the solitude of the hammock and with his adversary out of reach. Nevertheless, by nightfall he felt better, and he gave General Carreno instructions that the government should try to improve the lot of the unfortunate Frenchman.

  Most of the officers, enlivened by their proximity to the sea, which was becoming more and more evident in the heaving excitement of nature, loosened the reins on their natural high spirits by helping the oarsmen, hunting for alligators with bayonet harpoons, complicating the easiest tasks in order to find release for their excess energy in the toil of galley slaves. Jose Laurencio Silva, on the other hand, slept by day and worked by night whenever possible because of his long-standing terror of developing cataracts and going blind, as did several members of his mother's family. He got up in darkness to learn how to be a useful blind man. During bouts of insomnia in the encampments, the General had often heard him at his artisan's work, sawing boards from trees he had trimmed himself, assembling the pieces, muffling the hammer in order not to disturb others as they slept. In the full light of the following day it was difficult to believe that such artful cabinetry had been accomplished in the dark. On the night in Puerto Real, Jose Laurencio Silva just had
time to give the password to a sentry who was about to shoot him, thinking that someone was trying to slip through the darkness to the General's hammock.

  Navigation was more rapid and serene, and the only mishap occurred when one of Commodore Elbers' ships steamed past them, moving in the opposite direction, and its wake endangered the barges and capsized the one loaded with provisions. High on the hull one could read its name in large letters: The Liberator. The General looked at it, pensive, until the danger was past and the vessel disappeared from view. "The Liberator," he murmured. Then, like someone turning the page, he said to himself:

  "To think I'm that man!"

  At night he lay awake in the hammock, while the oarsmen wagered on who could identify the voices of the jungle: the capuchin monkeys, the cockatoos, the anaconda. Then, out of the blue, one of them said that the Campillos had buried the English china, the Bohemian crystal, and the Holland linen tablecloths in the patio because they were terrified of being infected by consumption.

  It was the first time that the General heard this popular diagnosis, although it was already current up and down the river and would soon be repeated along the entire coast. Jose Palacios realized it had made an impression on him, for he stopped swaying in the hammock. After long reflection he said:

  "I ate with my own place setting."

  The next day they moored in the village of Tenerife to replace the provisions lost in the accident. The General remained incognito on the barge, but he sent Wilson to inquire after a French merchant whose last name was Lenoit, or Lenoir, and whose daughter Anita would be about thirty years old. Since the inquiries in Tenerife were unsuccessful, the General wanted them repeated in the neighboring towns of Guaitaro, Salamina, and El Pinon, until he was convinced the legend had no basis at all in reality.

  His interest was understandable, because for years he had been pursued from Caracas to Lima by insidious gossip regarding a reckless, illicit passion that had sprung up between him and Anita Lenoit while he was in Tenerife during the river campaign. It troubled him, although he could do nothing to disprove it. First, because his father, Colonel Juan Vicente Bolivar, had also been obliged to undergo various proceedings and hearings before the Bishop of San Mateo for alleged violations of women, some of whom were minors, and for the notoriety of his liaisons with many others in avid exercise of his droit du seigneur. Second, because during the river campaign he had been in Tenerife for only two days, insufficient time for so tempestuous a love affair. Nevertheless, the legend prospered so well that in the Tenerife cemetery Senorita Anne Lenoit's tombstone was a place of pilgrimage for lovers until the end of the century.

  In the General's entourage the discomfort Jose Maria Carreno experienced in the stump of his arm was reason for cordial teasing. He felt the movements of his hand, the sense of touch in his fingers, the pain bad weather caused in bones he did not have. He had retained enough of a sense of humor to laugh at himself. On the other hand, he was disturbed by his habit of answering questions when he was asleep. He engaged in conversations on any subject with none of his waking inhibitions, he revealed goals and frustrations he doubtless would have kept to himself had he been awake, and on one occasion he was accused, without any basis in fact, of betraying a military secret in his sleep. On the last night of the voyage, while Jose Palacios watched beside the General's hammock, he heard Carreno speaking in the bow of the barge:

  "Seven thousand eight hundred eighty-two."

  "What are we talking about?" Jose Palacios asked him.

  "The stars," said Carreno.

  The General opened his eyes, convinced that Carreno was talking in his sleep, and sat up in the hammock to look through the window at the night. It was immense and radiant, and the bright stars filled the sky.

  "There must be ten times that number," said the General.

  "It's the number I said," replied Carreno, "plus two shooting stars that went by while I was counting."

  Then the General left the hammock and saw Carreno lying on his back in the prow, more awake than ever, his naked torso crisscrossed by a tangle of scars, counting stars with the stump of his arm. That was how they found him after the battle of Cerritos Blancos in Venezuela, covered with blood and cut to ribbons, and left for dead in the mud. He had suffered fourteen saber cuts, several of which caused him to lose his arm. Later he received more wounds in other battles. But his morale remained intact, and he learned to be so dexterous with his left hand that he was famous not only for his ferocious swordsmanship but for his exquisite handwriting as well.

  "Not even stars escape the ruin of life," said Carreno. "There are fewer now than there were eighteen years ago."

  "You're crazy," said the General.

  "No," said Carreno. "I'm old, but I refuse to believe it."

  "I'm eight long years older than you," said the General.

  "I count two extra years for each wound," said Carreno. "And so I'm older than everybody."

  "In that case Jose Laurencio must be the oldest," said the General, "wounded six times by bullet, seven by lance, and twice by arrow."

  Carreno took offense and replied with disguised venom:

  "And you must be the youngest: not a scratch."

  It was not the first time the General heard that truth spoken as a reproach, but he did not seem to resent it in the mouth of Carreno, whose friendship had already been proved in the sorest trials. He sat beside him to help him contemplate the stars on the river. When Carreno spoke again after a long pause, he was deep in the abyss of sleep.

  "I refuse to accept that with this journey our life is ended," he said.

  "Lives don't end only with death," said the General. "There are other ways, some even more honorable."

  Carreno resisted.

  "There must be something we can do," he said. "Even if it's taking a good bath in purple verbena. And not just us: the whole liberating army."

  On his second trip to Paris the General had not yet heard of baths in purple verbena, the lantana blossom popular in his own country for conjuring away bad luck. It was Dr. Aime Bonpland, Humboldt's collaborator, who spoke to him with dangerous scientific seriousness about the virtues of those flowers. During the same period he met a venerable magistrate in the French Court of Justice who had been a young man in Caracas and who often appeared in the literary salons of Paris with his beautiful flowing hair and apostle's beard stained purple by the purifying baths.

  The General laughed at everything that smelled of superstition or supernatural artifice, at any cult contrary to the rationalism of his tutor, Simon Rodriguez. At that time he had just turned twenty, he was a recent and wealthy widower bedazzled by the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte, he had become a Mason, he would recite from memory his favorite pages in Rousseau's Emile and La nouvelle Heloise, which had been his bedside reading for some time, and he had traveled by foot, led by his tutor and carrying a knapsack on his back, through almost all of Europe. On one of the hills, with Rome at their feet, Don Simon Rodriguez pronounced another of his high-sounding prophecies regarding the destiny of the Americas. His own vision was clearer.

  "What has to be done with those immigrant Spanish pricks is to kick them out of Venezuela," he said. "And I swear I'll do it."

  When at last he reached his majority and had control of his inheritance, he undertook the kind of life that the frenzied times and his high-spirited character demanded of him, and in three months he spent one hundred fifty thousand francs. He had the most expensive rooms in the most expensive hotel in Paris, two liveried servants, a carriage drawn by white horses, a Turkish driver, and a different lover for every occasion, whether it was his favorite table at the Cafe de Procope, the dances in Montmartre, or his private box at the Opera, and he told anyone who would believe him that on a single unlucky night he had lost three thousand pesos at roulette.

  When he returned to Caracas he was still closer to Rousseau than to his own heart, and with shameless passion he continued to reread the edition of La nouvelle Heloise
that was beginning to fall apart in his hands. Nevertheless, a short while before the assassination attempt of September 25, when he had more than honored his Roman vow, he interrupted Manuela Saenz during her tenth reading of Emile because the book seemed abominable to him. "Nowhere have I been so bored as in Paris in the year 1804," he said to her then. On the other hand, while he was there he had thought himself not only happy but the happiest man in the world, and he had not colored his destiny with the auspicious waters of purple verbena.

  Twenty-six years later, absorbed in the magic of the river, dying, in defeat, perhaps he wondered if he might not have the courage to say to hell with the oregano and sage leaves and bitter oranges of Jose Palacios' distracting baths, to follow Carreno's advice and sink down into a redemptive ocean of purple verbena along with his armies of beggars, his useless glories, his memorable errors, the entire country.

  It was a night of vast silences, like those on the colossal estuaries of Los Llanos, whose resonance allowed you to hear intimate conversations several leagues away. Christopher Columbus had lived a moment like this one and had written in his diary: "All night I heard the birds flying." For land was near after sixty-nine days at sea. The General heard them too. They began to fly past at about eight o'clock, while Carreno was sleeping, and an hour later there were so many overhead that the wind stirred by their wings was stronger than the wind, A short while later some immense fish, lost among the stars on the river bottom, began to swim under the barges, and they could detect the first gusts of the northeast's putrefaction. There was no need to see it in order to recognize the inexorable power this strange sensation of freedom inspired in their hearts. "Merciful God!" sighed the General. "We've arrived." And it was true. For there was the sea, and on the other side of the sea was the world.

  AND SO HE WAS in Turbaco once again. In the same house with its shadowy rooms, its great lunar arches and floor-to-ceiling windows facing the graveled square, and the monastic patio where he had seen the ghost of Don Antonio Caballero y Gongora, Archbishop and Viceroy of New Granada, who on moonlit nights would seek relief from his many sins and insoluble trespasses by walking among the orange trees. In contrast to the prevalent hot and humid climate of the coast, the weather was cool and healthful in Turbaco since it was situated above sea level, and along the banks of its streams there were immense laurel trees with tentacular roots where the soldiers would lie down to rest in the shade.