The General in His Labyrinth

  "The truth is I've never been there or anywhere else on Martinique," he said.

  "Et alors?" she said.

  "I prepared and spent years learning about it," said the General, "because I knew I would need it one day in order to please the most beautiful woman from those islands."

  He was dressed in embossed cotton trousers, a satin tunic, and red slippers, and he spoke without pause, his voice broken but eloquent. She noticed the breath of cologne floating through the dining room. He confessed it was a weakness of his, to the point where his enemies accused him of having spent eight thousand pesos of public funds on cologne. He was as weak as he had been the day before, but only his meager body betrayed the severity of his illness.

  In the company of men the General was capable of swearing like the most shameless horse thief, but the mere presence of a woman was enough to refine his manners and language to the point of affectation. He himself uncorked, decanted, and served a grande classe Burgundy that the Count described without hesitation as a velvet caress. They were serving the coffee when Captain Iturbide whispered something in his ear. He listened with utmost gravity, but then he leaned back in his chair and laughed out loud.

  "Listen to this, please," he said. "A delegation from Cartagena has arrived for my funeral."

  He had them come in. Montilla and his companions had no other recourse than to go along with his joke. The aides-de-camp called in the bagpipers from San Jacinto who had been in the vicinity since the previous night, and a group of old men and women danced the cumbia in honor of the guests. Camille was amazed at the elegance of that folk dance of African origin, and she wanted to learn it. The General had a reputation as a fine dancer, and some of his dining companions remembered that on his last visit he had danced the cumbia like a master, but when Camille asked him to join her, he declined the honor. "Three years is a long time," he said, smiling. She danced alone after she was shown two or three steps. Then, when the music stopped for a moment, they heard sudden cheering, a series of fearful explosions, and the sound of gunfire. Camille was frightened.

  The Count said in all seriousness:

  "Damn it, it's a revolution!"

  "You can't imagine how much we need one." The General laughed. "Sad to say, it's only a cockfight."

  Almost without thinking about it, he finished his coffee and with a circular gesture of his hand invited all of them to the cockpit.

  "Come with me, Montilla, so you can see how dead I am," he said.

  And so at two o'clock in the afternoon he visited the cockpit, accompanied by a large group with the Count de Raigecourt in the lead. But in that kind of gathering, composed only of men, everyone noticed Camille, not the General. No one could believe that so dazzling a woman was not one of his many lovers, and in a place forbidden to women, above all when they were told she had come with the Count, for it was well known that the General had other men accompany his clandestine lovers in order to cloud the truth.

  The second fight was horrifying. A red cock scratched out his opponent's eyes with a pair of well-aimed spurs. But the blinded one did not surrender. He attacked the other cock in ferocious rage until he tore off his head and ate it with great pecks of his bill.

  "I never imagined a fiesta could be so bloody," said Camille. "But I love it."

  The General explained that it was even bloodier when the audience provoked the roosters with obscene shouts and fired their weapons in the air, but that afternoon they were inhibited by the presence of a woman, above all one so beautiful. He gave her a flirtatious look and said: "And so the fault is yours." She laughed in amusement:

  "It's yours, Excellency, for having governed this country for so many years and not making a law that would require men to behave the same whether there are women present or not."

  He began to lose his patience.

  "I beg you not to call me Excellency," he said. "I'm satisfied with being reasonable."

  That night, as he was floating in the futile water of the bath, Jose Palacios said: "She's the best-looking woman we've seen." The General did not open his eyes.

  "She's abominable," he said.

  His appearance in the cockpit, according to widespread opinion, was a premeditated action taken to counteract the differing versions of his illness, which had become so serious in recent days that no one doubted the rumor of his death. It had its effect, for the mail leaving Cartagena carried the news of his good health along various routes, and his followers celebrated with public fiestas that were more defiant than jubilant.

  The General had succeeded in deceiving even his own body, for his animation continued in the days that followed, and he permitted himself to sit again at the gaming table with his aides-de-camp, who whiled away the tedium with endless games of cards. Andres Ibarra, who was the youngest and most joyful and still preserved a romantic sense of war, had written during this time to a lover in Quito: "I prefer death in your arms to this peace without you." They played for days and nights on end, sometimes absorbed in the enigma of the cards, sometimes shouting their disagreements, and always pursued by the mosquitoes that during the rainy season assaulted them even in broad daylight, despite the dung fires the orderlies kept burning. He had not played since the evil night in Guaduas, for the harsh incident with Wilson had left a bitterness that he wanted to erase from his heart, but in the hammock he listened to their shouts, their confidences, their memories of war during the idleness of an elusive peace. One night he walked around the house a few times and could not resist the temptation to stop in the corridor. He signaled those facing him to keep quiet, and came up behind Andres Ibarra. As if they were falcon's claws, he placed a hand on each of his shoulders and asked:

  "Tell me something, Cousin: do you think I look like a dead man too?"

  Ibarra, accustomed to his ways, did not turn around to look at him.

  "Not me, General," he said.

  "Well, either you're blind or you're lying," he said.

  "Or my back is turned," said Ibarra.

  The General became interested in the game, sat down, and after a while began to play. For everyone it was like a return to normalcy, not only that night but on the following nights as well. "While we're waiting for the passport," as the General said. Nevertheless, Jose Palacios told him again that despite the ritual of the cards, despite his personal attention, despite himself, the officers of his entourage were sick to death of all their coming and going to nowhere.

  No one was more concerned than he for the fate of his officers, for the daily minutiae as well as the broad horizon of their destiny, but when problems had no solution he resolved them by deceiving himself. Ever since the incident with Wilson, and then all along the river, he had interrupted his own suffering to think about them. Wilson's conduct was unspeakable, and only very deep frustration could have inspired such harshness. "He's as good a soldier as his father," the General had said when he saw him fighting at Junin. "And more modest," he had added when Wilson refused the promotion to colonel granted him by Field Marshal Sucre after the battle of Tarqui, which he had obliged him to accept.

  The regimen he imposed on all of them, in peace as well as war, required not only heroic discipline but a loyalty that almost demanded clairvoyance. They were fighting men but not barracks soldiers, for they had fought so much they had almost not had time to make camp. There were all kinds of men among them, but the nucleus of those who won independence, the ones closest to the General, were the flower of American aristocracy, who had been educated in the schools of princes. They had spent their lives fighting, far from their homes, their wives, their children, far from everything, and necessity had turned them into politicians and officeholders. They were all Venezuelans except Iturbide and the European aides-de-camp, and almost all of them were related to the General by blood or by marriage: Fernando, Jose Laurencio, the Ibarras, Briceno Mendez. The links of class or blood identified and unified them.

  One was different from the rest: Jose Laurencio Silva was the son of a m
idwife from the town of El Tinaco, on Los Llanos, and a fisherman on the river. Through his father and his mother he was a dark-skinned member of the lower class of pardo half-breeds, but the General had married him to Felicia, another of his nieces. During his career he had risen from a sixteen-year-old volunteer in the liberating army to a field general at the age of fifty-eight, and he had suffered more than fifteen serious wounds and numerous minor ones, inflicted by a variety of weapons, in fifty-two battles in almost all the campaigns for independence. The only difficulty he encountered as a pardo was his rejection by a lady of the local aristocracy during a gala ball. The General then requested that they repeat the waltz, and he danced it with Silva himself.

  At the opposite extreme was General O'Leary, who was tall and blond and had an elegant appearance, enhanced by his Florentine uniforms. He had come to Venezuela at the age of eighteen as a second lieutenant in the Red Hussars and spent his entire career fighting in almost all the battles of the wars for independence. He too, like the others, had suffered his moment of disgrace: when the General sent him to find a formula for reconciliation, he had agreed with Santander in the latter's dispute with Jose Antonio Paez. The General refused to speak to him, leaving him to his fate for fourteen months, until his anger cooled.

  The personal merits of each of them were undeniable. The difficulty was that the General was never conscious of the barricade of power that he himself maintained with them, which became even more insurmountable the more he thought he was being accessible and kind. But on the night when Jose Palacios made him see their state of mind, he played cards as an absolute equal, losing with good grace until the officers allowed themselves to express their feelings.

  It was clear they were not burdened by old frustrations. They did not care about the sense of defeat that took hold of them even after winning a war. They did not care about the slowness he imposed on their promotions to avoid the appearance of privilege, and they did not care about their uprooted, wandering life or the misfortunes of occasional love. Military salaries had been reduced by two thirds because of the nation's financial straits, and still their pay was three months late, and then it was issued in government bonds of uncertain value, which they sold at a loss to speculators. Nevertheless, they did not care, as they did not care about the General's leaving, slamming the door with a noise that would echo around the world, or about his abandoning them to the mercy of their enemies. Not at all: glory was for others. What they could not endure was the uncertainty he had inspired in them ever since his decision to renounce power, which became more and more unbearable the more he continued to slog his way through this endless journey to nowhere.

  That night the General felt so gratified as he was taking his bath that he told Jose Palacios there was not the slightest shadow between himself and his officers. Yet the impression he left with the officers was that they had inspired neither gratitude nor guilt in the General but rather a germ of mistrust.

  Above all Jose Maria Carreno, who since the night of their conversation on the barge had continued to show his rancor and without realizing it had fed the rumor that he was in touch with the Venezuelan separatists. Or, as they said at the time, that he was a turncoat. Four years earlier the General had expelled him from his heart, as he had expelled O'Leary, Montilla, Briceno Mendez, Santana, and so many others, on the mere suspicion that he desired popularity at the expense of the army. As he had done four years before, the General had him followed now, smelled out his tracks, listened to all the gossip brewing against him, in an effort to glimpse some light in the darkness of his own doubts.

  One night when he did not know if Carreno was asleep or awake, he heard him say in the adjoining room that for the sake of the nation's health even treason was legitimate. Then the General took him by the arm, walked him to the patio, and subjected him to the irresistible magic of his charm with a calculated intimacy that he called on only in times of emergency. Carreno confessed the truth. In fact, it made him bitter that the General would leave his work adrift, with no concern for how orphaned they all felt. But his plans to defect were loyal. Weary of searching for a ray of hope on this blind men's journey, incapable of living bereft of a soul, he had decided to flee to Venezuela and lead an armed movement in favor of integration.

  "I can think of nothing more meritorious," he concluded.

  "And do you really think you'll be better treated in Venezuela?" the General asked him.

  Carreno did not dare to say yes.

  "Well, but at least there I'm in my own country," he said.

  "Don't be an ass," said the General. "For us America is our own country, and it's all the same: hopeless."

  He did not allow him to say anything more. He spoke to him at length, revealing in every word what seemed to be his heart, although neither Carreno nor anyone else would ever know if it really was. At last he patted him on the shoulder and left him in the darkness.

  "Stop hallucinating, Carreno," he said. "It's all gone to hell."

  ON WEDNESDAY, June 16, he received the news that the government had confirmed the pension for life granted him by the Congress. He wrote his acknowledgment to President Mosquera in a formal letter that was not free of irony, and when he finished dictating he said to Fernando, imitating Jose Palacios' majestic plural and ceremonial emphasis: "We are rich." On Tuesday, June 22, he received the passport to leave the country, and he waved it in the air, saying: "We are free." Two days later, when he awoke from an hour of restless sleep, he opened his eyes in the hammock and said: "We are sad." Then he decided to leave for Cartagena without delay, taking advantage of the cool, cloudy day. His only specific order was that the officers in his entourage should travel in civilian clothes and carry no weapons. He gave no explanation, no sign that would permit conjecture regarding his motives, and he allowed no time for saying goodbye to anyone. They started out as soon as his personal guards were ready, leaving behind the baggage that would follow with the rest of the traveling party.

  On his journeys the General was in the habit of making casual stops to inquire about the problems of the people he met along the way. He asked about everything: the age of their children, the nature of their illnesses, the condition of their business, what they thought about everything. On this occasion he did not say a word, he did not change his pace, he did not cough, he did not give signs of fatigue, and he had nothing but a glass of port all day. At about four o'clock in the afternoon the old convent on La Popa Hill was outlined on the horizon. It was the season for public prayers, and from the King's Highway they saw the lines of pilgrims like arriera ants ascending along the rugged precipice. A short while later they spied in the distance the eternal stain of turkey buzzards circling the public market and the waters of the slaughterhouse. In sight of the walls the General motioned to Jose Maria Carreno, who approached and offered his robust falconer's stump for him to lean on. "I have a confidential mission for you," the General told him in a very low voice. "As soon as we arrive, find out where Sucre's gotten to." He gave him his customary farewell pat on the shoulder and concluded:

  "Just between us, of course."

  A large party led by Montilla was waiting for them on the King's Highway, and the General found himself obliged to finish the journey in the Spanish governor's old carriage pulled by a team of lighthearted mules. Although the sun was low, the great mangrove branches seemed to boil in the heat of the dead swamps surrounding the city, whose pestilential stink was less bearable than that of the bay, corrupted for over a century by the blood and offal from the slaughterhouse. When they passed through the Media Luna Gate a gale of startled turkey buzzards rose from the open-air market. There were still traces of the panic caused that morning by a rabid dog that had bitten several people of various ages, among them a white woman from Castile, who had been snooping where she had no business being, and some children from the slave quarter, who had managed to stone the dog to death themselves. The body was hanging from a tree at the school door. General Montilla had it burned,
not only for reasons of hygiene but also to prevent people from trying to exorcise the dog's evil spell with African magic.

  The population of the walled district, called by an urgent summons, had taken to the streets. The afternoons were turning translucent and slow in the June solstice, and on the balconies there were garlands of flowers and women dressed in the exaggerated popular style of Madrid, and the bells in the cathedral, the music of the regimental bands, and the artillery salutes thundered all the way to the sea, but nothing could mitigate the misery they wanted to hide. As he waved his hat in greeting from the rickety carriage, the General could not help seeing himself in a pitiful light when he compared this impoverished reception to his triumphal entry into Caracas in August of 1813, when he was crowned with laurels in a carriage drawn by the six most beautiful maidens in the city and surrounded by a weeping multitude that eternalized him that day with the name of his glory: The Liberator. Caracas was still a remote town in the colonial provinces, and it was ugly, sad, and commonplace, but the afternoons in Avila tore at his nostalgia.

  The two memories did not seem to belong to the same life, for the very noble and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, which had been capital of the viceregency several times and had been celebrated a thousand times as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, was not even a shadow of what it once had been. It had suffered nine military sieges by land and by sea and had been sacked on various occasions by pirates and generals. Nevertheless, nothing had devastated it as much as the battles for independence followed by the factional wars. The wealthy families from its golden age had fled. The former slaves had been set adrift in a useless freedom, and from the marquises' palaces taken over by the poverty-stricken, rats as big as cats poured onto the rubbish heaps of the streets. The cordon of invincible bastions that the King of Spain had wanted to view with his telescopes from the watchtowers of his palace could not even be imagined among the brambles. The commerce that had been the most flourishing in the seventeenth century because of the slave traffic was reduced to a handful of ruined shops. It was impossible to reconcile glory with the stench from the open sewers. The General sighed into Montilla's ear: