The General in His Labyrinth

  Two nights earlier they had reached Barranca Nueva, the longed-for end of the river journey, where they had to spend a sleepless night in a foul-smelling storage shed of cane and mud, surrounded by sacks of rice and heaps of untanned hides, because they had reserved no lodgings and the mules they had ordered in advance were not ready for them. As a consequence the General arrived in Turbaco drenched and aching, desperate for sleep but not sleepy.

  They had not finished unloading, and the news of his arrival had already reached Cartagena de Indias, only six leagues away, where General Mariano Montilla, quartermaster general and military commander of the province, had prepared a public reception for the following day. But the General was in no mood for inopportune fiestas. He greeted those who waited in the rain for him along the King's Highway with the warmth reserved for old friends, but he requested with the same openness that they leave him alone.

  In reality, regardless of how he struggled to disguise it, his condition was worse than his bad humor suggested, and day after day even his entourage could see the insatiable decline. He could not master his soul. The color of his skin had gone from pale green to mortal yellow. He was feverish, and the pain in his head had become eternal. The local priest offered to send for a doctor, but he refused: "If I'd listened to my doctors I'd have been buried years ago." He had arrived in Turbaco ready to continue on to Cartagena the next day, but in the course of the morning he was informed that no ship bound for Europe was in port and no passport had come for him in the last mail. Therefore he decided to stay and rest for three days. His officers rejoiced, not only for the sake of his body but also because the first secret reports that arrived regarding the situation in Venezuela were not the most salutary for his soul.

  Nevertheless, he could not prevent his friends from shooting off rockets until they ran out of powder, or stationing a corps of bagpipers near the house, who would play until late that night. They also arranged for a troupe of black men and women from the neighboring marshes of Marialabaja, dressed as sixteenth-century European aristocrats, to perform with African artfulness their burlesques of Spanish court dances, because on his previous visit he had liked them so much that he had called them back several times. Now he did not even glance at them.

  "Get that noisy mob out of here," he said.

  Viceroy Caballero y Gongora had built the house and lived in it for some three years, and the phantasmagorical echoes in its rooms were attributed to the spell of his soul in torment. The General refused to return to the bedroom he had used on his last visit, which he remembered as the room of nightmares because each night he slept there he dreamed over and over again until daybreak about a woman with illuminated hair who tied a red ribbon around his neck until she woke him. He had the hammock hung instead from the metal rings in the drawing room, and he slept for a while without dreaming. The rain came down in torrents, and a group of children stood peering through the street windows to watch him sleep. One of them woke him with a whispered "Bolivar, Bolivar." He searched for him through the mists of fever, and the boy asked:

  "Do you love me?"

  The General assented with a tremulous smile, but then he ordered the chickens wandering through the house to be chased out, the children made to leave, and the windows closed, and he fell asleep again. When he awoke the second time it was still raining and Jose Palacios was preparing the mosquito netting for the hammock.

  "I dreamed a boy on the street was asking me strange questions through the window," the General told him.

  He agreed to drink an infusion, the first in twenty-four hours, but he could not finish it. He lay down again in the hammock, victim of a dizzy spell, and for a long while he remained submerged in a twilight meditation, contemplating the line of bats hanging from the ceiling beams. At last he sighed:

  "We're ready for a pauper's grave."

  He had been so prodigal with the former officers and ordinary soldiers of the liberating army who told him their misfortunes all along the river that in Turbaco he had no more than a quarter of his travel funds left. It remained to be seen if the provincial government had enough money in its battered treasury to cover the draft, or could at least negotiate it with a speculator. For his immediate accommodation in Europe he counted on the gratitude of England, for which he had done so many favors. "The English love me," he would say. For him, his servants, and his minimal entourage to live with the dignified decorum of his nostalgia, he counted on the dream of selling the Aroa Mines. Nevertheless, if he really wanted to leave, passage and travel expenses for him and his entourage were of immediate urgency, and the amount of cash he had on hand made it unthinkable. But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most. On the contrary. Although he saw fireflies where there were none because of fever and the pain in his head, he overcame the somnolence that dulled his senses and dictated three letters to Fernando.

  The first was a heartfelt response to Field Marshal Sucre's farewell, in which he said nothing about his illness although he often did so in situations where he was pressed for compassion, as he was that afternoon. The second letter was to Don Juan de Dios Amador, the Prefect of Cartagena, urging payment of the eight-thousand-peso draft from the provincial treasury. "I am in dire need of that money for my departure," he told him. His plea bore fruit, and before four days had passed he received a favorable reply and Fernando went to Cartagena for the money. The third was to the poet Jose Fernandez Madrid, the Colombian Minister to London, requesting that he pay a letter of credit on his behalf to Sir Robert Wilson and another to the Englishman Professor Joseph Lancaster, who was owed twenty thousand duros for establishing his innovative system of reciprocal education in Caracas. "My honor is involved in this matter," he told him. For he trusted that his long-standing case would be resolved very soon and that the mines would be sold. A useless effort: by the time the letter reached London, Minister Fernandez Madrid had died.

  Jose Palacios signaled for quiet to the officers shouting their disputes as they played cards in the interior gallery, but they continued to argue in whispers until the bells in the nearby church tower sounded eleven o'clock. A short while later the bagpipes and drums at the public fiesta stopped playing, the breeze from the distant sea blew away the dark clouds that had gathered again after the downpour in the afternoon, and the full moon caught fire in the patio filled with orange trees.

  Jose Palacios did not leave the General for a moment, for he had been in the hammock, delirious with fever, since nightfall. He prepared one of the usual potions and gave him a senna enema, hoping that someone with more authority would dare to suggest a doctor, but no one did. The General barely dozed for an hour at dawn.

  That day General Mariano Montilla came to visit him with a select group of his friends from Cartagena, among them the men known as the three Juans of the Bolivarist party: Juan Garcia del Rio, Juan de Francisco Martin, and Juan de Dios Amador. The three were horrified at the sight of the body in torment that tried to sit up in the hammock and lacked the breath to embrace them all. They had seen him at the Admirable Congress, in which they had participated, and they could not believe he had deteriorated so much in so short a time. His bones were visible under his skin, and he could not focus his eyes. He must have been aware of the hot stench of his breath, for he was careful to speak from a distance and almost in profile. But what struck them most was the evidence that he had lost height, to the point where it seemed to General Montilla when they embraced that he reached no higher than his waist.

  He weighed eighty-eight pounds and would weigh ten pounds less just before he died. His official height was one meter sixty-five centimeters, although his medical and military records did not always agree, and on the autopsy table he would measure four centimeters less than that figure. His feet were as small as his hands in relation to his body, and they too seemed smaller. Jose Palacios had noted that he wore his trousers almost around his chest and had to turn back his shirt cuffs. The General observed his visit
ors' curiosity and admitted that the boots he always wore, a French size thirty-five, had been too big for him since January. General Montilla, famous for his flashes of wit even in the least opportune situations, put an end to the poignancy.

  "The important thing," he said, "is that Your Excellency doesn't shrink on the inside."

  As always, he underscored his own humor with uproarious laughter. The General gave him in return the smile of an old comrade and changed the subject. The weather had improved and was fine for a conversation outdoors, but he preferred to receive his visitors sitting in the hammock in the same room where he had slept.

  Their main topic was the state of the nation. The Cartagena Bolivarists refused to recognize the new constitution and the chosen leaders on the pretext that Santanderist students had exerted unacceptable pressure on Congress. On the other hand, the loyal military had remained on the sidelines, by order of the General, and the rural clergy that supported him had not had the opportunity to mobilize. General Francisco Carmona, commander of a garrison in Cartagena and a man loyal to his cause, had been about to instigate an insurrection and still threatened to do so. The General asked Montilla to send Carmona to see him, so he could attempt to pacify him. Then, addressing them all but not looking at anyone, he gave them a brutal synthesis of the new government:

  "Mosquera is an asshole and Caycedo is a pastry chef, and both of them are scared shitless by the boys from San Bartolome."

  What he was saying in Caribbean was that the President was a weakling and the Vice-President an opportunist capable of changing party depending on how the wind blew. He also pointed out with the sourness typical of his worst times that it was not at all strange that each of them was a cleric's brother. Yet the new constitution seemed better than anyone could have expected at a historical moment when the danger was not electoral defeat but the civil war that Santander was fomenting with his letters from Paris. In Popayan the President-elect had made repeated calls for order and unity but still had not said if he would accept the presidency.

  "He's waiting for Caycedo to do the dirty work," said the General.

  "Mosquera must be in Santa Fe de Bogota by now," said Montilla. "He left Popayan on Monday."

  The General had not known, but he was not surprised. "You'll see: he'll collapse like a rotten squash when the time comes for action," he said. "That man couldn't do the porter's work in a government." He fell into deep thought and was overcome by sadness.

  "Too bad," he said. "Sucre was the man."

  "The worthiest of the generals," said de Francisco Martin, smiling.

  By now the phrase was famous throughout the country despite the General's efforts to prevent its circulation.

  "Urdaneta's brilliant phrase," joked Montilla.

  The General ignored the interruption and made ready to hear the secrets of local politics, more in jest than in a serious way, but then without warning Montilla reestablished the solemnity he himself had just broken. "You'll forgive me, Excellency," he said, "you know better than anyone my devotion to the Field Marshal, but he is not the man." And he concluded with theatrical emphasis:

  "You are."

  The General cut him off on the spot:

  "I don't exist."

  Then, taking up the thread, he recounted the manner in which Field Marshal Sucre resisted his pleas to accept the presidency of Colombia. "He has everything to save us from anarchy," he said, "but he allowed himself to be charmed by the sirens' song." Garcia del Rio thought the real reason was that Sucre had an absolute lack of vocation for power. The General did not think this was an insurmountable obstacle. "In the long history of humanity it has often been shown that vocation is the legitimate child of necessity," he said. In any case, these longings came too late, because he knew as no one else did that the worthiest general in the Republic now belonged to forces less ephemeral than his own.

  "The greatest power lies in the force of love," he said, and he concluded his gibe: "Sucre himself said so."

  While the General was reminiscing about him in Turbaco, Field Marshal Sucre was leaving Santa Fe de Bogota for Quito, disenchanted and alone, but in the prime of his age and health and at the height of his glory. His last piece of business the night before he left was a secret visit to a well-known fortune-teller in the Egyptian district who had guided him in several of his wartime enterprises, and she had seen in the cards that even during the stormy season the most favorable routes for him were still by sea. The Field Marshal of Ayacucho thought they were too slow for his urgent love, and he risked the hazards of land against the good judgment of the cards.

  "So there's nothing to be done," concluded the General. "We're so screwed up, our best government is the worst."

  He knew his local supporters. They had been illustrious heroes who had performed great deeds in the struggle for liberation, but in political affairs they were petty traffickers in jobs and man-eating schemers who had even gone as far as forming alliances with Montilla against him. As he did with so many others, he gave them no peace until he had succeeded in charming them. And then he asked them to support the government, even at the expense of their personal interests. His reasoning, as usual, had a prophetic air: Tomorrow, when he was no longer there, the same government he was asking them to support would call back Santander, who would return, crowned with glory, to eradicate the wreckage of his dreams, and the immense, unified nation he had forged during so many years of wars and sacrifices would break apart, factions would divide it among themselves, and in the memory of the centuries his name would be vilified and his work distorted. But none of that mattered to him now if he could at least prevent more bloodshed. "Insurrections, like the waves of the sea, come one after the other," he said. "That's why I've never liked them." And to the amazement of his visitors, he concluded:

  "Believe it or not, these days I even deplore the one we made against the Spanish."

  General Montilla and his friends felt he had come to his end. Before they said goodbye he gave them each a gold medal engraved with his likeness, and they could not avoid the impression that it was a posthumous gift. As they walked to the door Garcia del Rio said in a low voice:

  "He has the face of a dead man."

  The words, amplified and repeated by the echoes in the house, pursued the General all night. Nevertheless, the next day General Francisco Carmona was surprised at how well he looked. He found him in the patio perfumed by orange blossoms, in a hammock with his name embroidered on it in silk thread, which had been made for him in the neighboring town of San Jacinto and which Jose Palacios had hung between two orange trees. He had just bathed, his hair was pulled back, and he wore a blue tunic without a shirt, which lent him an air of innocence. As he swayed very slowly, he dictated an indignant letter for President Caycedo to his nephew Fernando. He did not seem as moribund to General Carmona as they had said, perhaps because he was intoxicated by one of his legendary rages.

  Carmona was too visible to pass unnoticed anywhere, yet the General looked at him but did not see him as he dictated a sentence attacking the perfidy of his detractors. Only when he had completed it did he turn toward the giant who stood looking at him without blinking, his whole body facing the hammock, and ask with no preliminary greeting:

  "And do you think I'm an instigator of insurrections too?"

  General Carmona, anticipating a hostile reception, asked with a touch of arrogance:

  "Where does the General get that idea?"

  "From the same place they do," he said.

  He handed him the news clippings he had just received in the mail from Santa Fe de Bogota, which accused him once again of having instigated in secret the rebellion of the grenadiers in order to return to power despite the decision of Congress. "What vile trash," he said. "While I waste my time preaching union, these half-baked imbeciles accuse me of conspiracy." General Carmona suffered a certain disillusionment when he read the clippings.

  "Well, I not only believed it," he said, "I was delighted to think it was
true."

  "I can imagine," said the General.

  He showed no signs of irritation but asked him to wait while he finished dictating the letter, in which he again requested official permission to leave the country. When he finished he had recovered his composure with the same sudden ease he had shown in losing it when he read the newspapers. He stood up without help and took General Carmona by the arm for a stroll around the cistern.

  After three days of rain, the light was a gold powder that filtered through the leaves of the trees and moved the birds to sing among the orange blossoms. The General listened for a moment, heard them in his soul, and almost sighed: "At least they still sing." He gave General Carmona an erudite explanation of why birds in the Antilles sing better in April than in June, and then, with no transition, he returned to the business at hand. He needed no more than ten minutes to convince him to respect without conditions the authority of the new government. Afterwards he accompanied Carmona to the door, and then he went to the bedroom to write in his own hand to Manuela Saenz, who continued to complain about the obstacles the government was placing in the way of her letters.

  He did no more than taste the cornmeal mush that Fernanda Barriga brought to the bedroom while he was writing. At siesta he asked Fernando to continue reading aloud the book on Chinese botanicals they had begun the night before. A short while later Jose Palacios came into the room with oregano water for the warm bath and found Fernando asleep on the chair with the open book on his lap. The General was awake in the hammock, and he placed his index finger over his lips to signal quiet. For the first time in two weeks he had no fever.

  In this way, marking time between one mail and the next, he spent twenty-nine days in Turbaco. He had been there twice before but appreciated its medicinal virtues only on the second visit, three years earlier, when he was returning from Caracas to Santa Fe de Bogota in order to thwart Santander's separatist plans. On that occasion the climate had agreed with him so well that he stayed ten days instead of the two nights he had planned. They were days filled with patriotic fiestas. At the end there was a gala bullfight, despite his adversion to such spectacles, and he himself faced a heifer that tore the cape from his hands and brought a shout of fear from the crowd. Now, on the third visit, his painful destiny was fulfilled, and the passage of the days confirmed this to a maddening degree. The rains became more frequent and more desolate, and life was reduced to waiting for news of further reversals. One night, in the lucidity of advanced insomnia, he was heard by Jose Palacios as he sighed in the hammock: