"The only thing lacking is for me to die," he said.
The girl persisted.
"People say you've always been like this but now it suits you to let them know about it."
He did not concede to her testimony. He continued to offer conclusive proofs of his illness, while she drifted in and out of an easy slumber and answered him as she slept without losing the thread of the dialogue. He did not even touch her all night: it was enough for him to feel the warm sun of her adolescence. Then, just outside the window, Captain Iturbide began to sing: "If the tempest continues and the hurricane blows, put your arms round my neck, let the sea swallow us." It was a song from another time, when his stomach could still endure the awful evocative power of ripe guavas and the rigors of a woman in the dark. The General and the girl listened to it together, almost with devotion, but she fell asleep in the middle of the next song, and a short while later he fell into an unquiet stupor. The silence was so pure after the music that the dogs began to bark when she stood and tiptoed away in order not to awaken the General. He heard her feeling for the latch in the dark.
"You're leaving a virgin," he said.
She answered with a festive laugh:
"No one is a virgin after a night with Your Excellency."
She left, as they all did. For of all the women who passed through his life, many of them for a few brief hours, there was none to whom he had even suggested the idea of staying. In his urgencies of love he was capable of changing the world in order to go to them. Once satisfied, he was content with the illusion that he would keep them in his memory, give himself to them from a distance in passionate letters, send them extravagant gifts to protect himself from oblivion, but, with an emotion that resembled vanity more than love, he would not commit the least part of his life to them.
As soon as he was alone that night he got up to join Iturbide, who was still talking with other officers around the fire in the patio. He had him sing until dawn, accompanied on the guitar by Colonel Jose de la Cruz Paredes, and because of the songs he requested, all of them realized he was in a bad humor.
He had returned from his second trip to Europe with an enthusiasm for the fashionable tunes of the day, which he sang at the top of his voice and danced with insuperable grace at the weddings of well-born mestizos in Caracas. The war changed his taste. The romantic popular songs that had led him by the hand through the countless doubts of his first love affairs were replaced by sumptuous waltzes and triumphal marches. That night in Cartagena he again requested the songs of his youth, some so old he had to teach them to Iturbide, who was too young to remember them. The audience slipped away as the General bled inside, and he was left alone with Iturbide beside the embers.
It was a strange night, without a star in the sky, and a sea wind was blowing, heavy with the weeping of orphans and the fragrance of decay. Iturbide was a man of great silences, as inspired in his unblinking contemplation of frozen ashes as in his ability to sing all night without stopping. The General, as he poked the fire with a stick, broke the spell:
"What are they saying in Mexico?"
"I don't have anyone there," said Iturbide. "I'm an exile."
"All of us here are exiles," said the General. "I've lived in Venezuela only six years since this began, and the rest of the time has been spent heading off calamities in half the world. You can't imagine what I'd give right now to be eating an hervido in San Mateo."
His mind must have truly flown away to the sugar mills of his childhood, for his silence was deep as he watched the dying fire. When he spoke again he was back on solid ground. "The damn problem is that we stopped being Spaniards and then we went here and there and everywhere in countries that change their names and governments so much from one day to the next we don't know where the hell we come from," he said. He contemplated the ashes again for a long time and asked in a different tone of voice:
"And since there are so many countries in this world, how did it occur to you to come here?"
Iturbide's answer had a long preamble. "At military school they taught us to make war on paper," he said. "We fought with little lead soldiers on plaster maps. On Sundays they would take us to the nearby meadows, along with the cows and the ladies coming back from Mass, and the Colonel would shoot the cannon so we could grow accustomed to the shock of the explosion and the smell of gunpowder. Imagine, the most famous teacher was a disabled Englishman who taught us how to fall off our horses when we were killed."
The General interrupted him.
"And you wanted real war."
"Your war, General," said Iturbide. "But it'll be two years since the army accepted me, and I still don't know what a flesh-and-blood battle is like."
The General still had not looked him in the face. "Well, you chose the wrong destiny," he said. "The only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your own mother." From the shadows Jose Palacios reminded him that it was almost dawn. Then he scattered the ashes with the stick, and as he stood up, clutching Iturbide's arm, he said:
"If I were you I'd get out of here as fast as I could before dishonor caught up with me."
Until the day he died Jose Palacios insisted that the house at the foot of La Popa was possessed by evil spirits. They were still settling in when the ship's officer, Jose Tomas Machado, arrived from Venezuela with the news that several military cantonments had disavowed the separatist government and that a new party in favor of the General was gaining strength. He received Machado alone and listened to him with attention, but he was not very enthusiastic. "The news is good, but it comes too late," he said. "And as for me, what can a poor invalid do against the whole world?" He gave instructions to lodge the emissary with all honors, but he did not promise him a reply.
"I do not expect health for our native land," he said.
Nevertheless, as soon as he said goodbye to Captain Machado, the General turned to Carreno and asked him: "Did you locate Sucre?" Yes, he had left Santa Fe de Bogota in the middle of May, in a rush to spend his saint's day with his wife and daughter.
"He left in plenty of time," concluded Carreno, "because President Mosquera passed him on the Popayan road."
"I can't believe it!" said the General, surprised. "He traveled by land?"
"That's right, General."
"Merciful God!" he said.
It was a presentiment. That same night he received the news that on June 4 Field Marshal Sucre had been ambushed and assassinated by a bullet in the back as he was traveling the dark stretch of road at Berruecos. Montilla arrived with the bad news when the General had finished his evening bath, and he did not listen to the entire report. He slapped his forehead and tore at the tablecloth where the supper dishes still lay, maddened by one of his biblical rages.
"Fuck it!" he shouted.
The echoes of his outburst were still resonating through the house when he regained control of himself. He fell into the chair, bellowing, "It was Obando." And he repeated it many times: "It was Obando, the Spaniards' paid assassin." He referred to General Jose Maria Obando, the commander of Pasto, on the southern frontier of New Granada, who had thus deprived the General of his only possible successor and assured for himself the presidency of the Republic that had been cut to pieces in order to hand it over to Santander. In his memoirs one of the conspirators recounted that as he was leaving the house on the main square of Santa Fe de Bogota where the crime had been planned, he had suffered a disturbance in his soul when he saw Field Marshal Sucre in the icy fog of nightfall, wearing his black wool greatcoat and his poor man's hat as he walked alone, his hands in his pockets, through the atrium of the cathedral.
On the night he learned of Sucre's death the General vomited blood. Jose Palacios hid the fact, as he had in Honda when he surprised the General on all fours washing the bathroom floor with a sponge. He kept the two secrets without being asked to, thinking it was not appropriate to add more bad news when there was already so much of it.
On a night like this, in Guayaquil, th
e General had become aware of his premature aging. He still wore his hair down to his shoulders and for convenience tied it at the back of his neck with a ribbon for his battles in war and in love, but on that occasion he realized his hair was almost white and his face was withered and sad. "If you saw me you wouldn't recognize me," he had written to a friend. "I'm forty-one years old, but I look like an old man of sixty." That night he cut his hair. A short while later, in Potosi, trying to hold back the gale winds of fugitive youth escaping between his fingers, he shaved off his mustache and sideburns.
After the assassination of Sucre he had no further dressing table artifices to hide his age. The house at the foot of La Popa sank into mourning. The officers stopped playing cards and spent the nights talking until all hours in the patio, around the perpetual fire intended to drive away the mosquitoes, or lying in hammocks hung at different levels in the common bedroom.
The General gave himself over to distilling his bitterness drop by drop. He chose two or three of his officers at random, and he kept them awake, showing them the worst of what he kept hidden in his festering heart. He made them listen once again to the old tale about the time his armies were at the verge of dissolution because of the niggardliness with which Santander, as appointed President of Colombia, resisted sending him troops and money to complete the liberation of Peru.
"He's a miser and a skinflint by nature," he said, "but his reasoning was even more perverse: he didn't have the brains to see beyond the colonial borders."
He repeated for the thousandth time the old story that the fatal blow to integration was inviting the United States to the Congress of Panama, as Santander had done on his own account, when it was a question of nothing less than proclaiming the unity of America.
"It was like inviting the cat to the mice's fiesta," he said. "And all because the United States threatened to accuse us of turning the continent into a league of popular states opposed to the Holy Alliance. What an honor!"
He repeated one more time his horror at the inconceivable sangfroid with which Santander accomplished his purposes. "He's as cold as a dead fish," he said. He repeated for the thousandth time his diatribe against the loans Santander received from London, and the complacency with which he sponsored the corruption of his friends. Each time he recalled him, in private or in public, he added poison to a political atmosphere that did not seem able to contain another drop. But he could not restrain himself.
"That was how the world began to fall apart," he said.
He had been so rigorous in his handling of public funds that he could not return to this subject without losing his temper. As President he had decreed the death penalty for any official employee who misappropriated or stole more than ten pesos. Yet he was so openhanded with his personal wealth that in a few years he spent a large portion of the fortune he inherited from his parents on the wars for independence. His earnings were divided among the war widows and the men disabled in battle. He gave his nieces and nephews the sugar plantations he had inherited, he gave his sisters the house in Caracas, and most of his lands he divided among the numerous slaves he freed before the abolition of slavery. He refused the million pesos offered him by the Congress of Lima in the euphoria of liberation. A few days before his renunciation he presented to a friend in financial difficulties the Monserrate estate awarded him by the government so he would have a worthy place to live. In Apure he got up from the hammock where he was sleeping and presented it to a scout so he could sweat out his fever, while he slept on the ground wrapped in a battle cloak. The twenty thousand duros in hard cash that he wanted to pay out of his own funds to the Quaker educator Joseph Lancaster was not his personal debt but the state's. He left the horses he loved so well with friends--even Palomo Blanco, the best-known and most glorious, who stayed behind in Bolivia to preside over the stables of Field Marshal de Santa Cruz. And therefore the topic of embezzled loans drove him unrestrained to the extremes of perfidy.
"Cassandro came out clean, of course, just as he did on September 25, because he's a wizard at observing good form," he would say to anyone who would listen. "But his friends took back to England the same money the English had lent the nation at savage interest, and they increased it and made a profit through usury."
He revealed to everyone, all night long, the muddiest depths of his soul. At dawn of the fourth day, when the crisis seemed to have become eternal, he appeared at the patio door in the same clothes he was wearing when he received news of the crime, called General Briceno Mendez aside, and spoke with him alone until the first roosters crowed, the General in his hammock with the mosquito netting and Briceno Mendez in another that Jose Palacios hung beside it. Perhaps neither of them was aware of how much they had abandoned the sedentary habits of peace and returned in a few days to the uncertain nights of military camp. That conversation made it clear to the General that the disquiet and desires expressed by Jose Maria Carreno in Turbaco were not his alone but were shared by most of the Venezuelan officers. After the actions of the New Granadans against them, they felt more Venezuelan than ever but were prepared to die for integration. If the General had ordered them to fight in Venezuela, they would have hurried there in droves. And Briceno Mendez would have been the first.
Those were the worst days. The only visitor the General agreed to receive was the Pole, Colonel Miecieslaw Napierski, hero of the battle of Friedland and survivor of the disaster at Leipzig, who had come with a recommendation from General Poniatowski to join the Army of Colombia.
"You've come too late," the General had told him. "There's nothing left here."
After the death of Sucre there was less than nothing. This is what he said to Napierski, and this is what Napierski said in his travel journal, which a great New Granadan poet would recover for history one hundred eighty years later. Napierski had arrived aboard the Shannon. The ship's captain accompanied him to the General's house, and the General spoke to them of his desire to travel to Europe, but neither one could detect in him a real disposition to sail. As the frigate would make a stop in La Guayra and return to Cartagena before sailing for Kingston, the General gave the captain a letter for his Venezuelan agent in the negotiations concerning the Aroa Mines, hoping he would send him money on the return trip. But the frigate came back without a reply, which disheartened him so much that nobody thought to ask him if he was leaving.
There was not a single piece of consolatory news. Jose Palacios, for his part, was careful not to make the reports they received worse and tried to hold back as much as possible. Something that concerned the officers of the entourage, which they hid from the General in order not to complete his mortification, was that the hussars and grenadiers of the guard were sowing the fiery seed of an immortal gonorrhea. It had begun with two women who passed through the entire garrison during the nights in Honda, and the soldiers had continued to disseminate it wherever they went with their dissolute lovemaking. At that moment none of the troops had escaped, although there was no academic medicine or witch doctor's artifice they had not tried.
The measures that Jose Palacios took to protect his master from unnecessary bitterness were not infallible. One night a note without a salutation was passed from hand to hand, and no one knew how it reached the General's hammock. He read it without his spectacles, holding it at arm's length, and then he put it in the candle flame and held it there between his fingers until it was consumed.
It was from Josefa Sagrario. She had arrived on Monday with her husband and children on the way to Mompox, encouraged by the news that the General had been deposed and was leaving the country. He never revealed what the message said, but he showed signs of great restlessness all night, and at dawn he sent Josefa Sagrario a proposal of reconciliation. She resisted his pleas and continued her journey as planned without a moment's vacillation. Her only motive, as she told Jose Palacios, was that it seemed senseless to make peace with a man she already considered dead.
That week it was learned that Manuela Saenz' personal war for the
return of the General had broken out in Santa Fe de Bogota. In an attempt to make her life impossible, the Ministry of the Interior had asked her to turn over the archives she had in her care. She refused and set in motion a campaign of provocations that drove the government mad. In the company of two of her warrior slavewomen she fomented scandals, distributed pamphlets glorifying the General, and erased the charcoal slogans scrawled on public walls. It was common knowledge that she entered barracks wearing the uniform of a colonel and was as apt to take part in the soldiers' fiestas as in the officers' conspiracies. The most serious rumor was that right under Urdaneta's nose, she was promoting an armed rebellion to reestablish the absolute power of the General.
It was difficult to believe he had the strength for such an enterprise. The fevers at nightfall were becoming more and more punctual, and his cough was heartrending. One dawn Jose Palacios heard him shout: "Cunt of a country!" He burst into the bedroom, alarmed by an exclamation that the General reproached his officers for using, and found him with his cheek bathed in blood. He had cut himself shaving, and he was not as indignant at the mishap itself as at his own clumsiness. The apothecary who treated him, brought in on an emergency call by Colonel Wilson, found him in such despair that he tried to calm him with some drops of belladonna. The General stopped him short.
"Let me be," he said. "Despair is the health of the damned."
His sister Maria Antonia wrote to him from Caracas. "Everyone complains about your refusing to come and settle this disorder," she said. The village priests had decided in his favor, desertions from the army were uncontrollable, and the mountains were full of armed men who said they wanted no one but him. "This is a fandango for lunatics who can't get along even after they've made their revolution," his sister said. For while some people clamored for him, every morning the walls in half the country were painted with insulting slogans. His family, said the broadsides, should be exterminated to the fifth generation.