The General in His Labyrinth

  "Thank you," he would say, "but I can still do it myself."

  One day he could not. He was about to descend a flight of stairs alone when the world disappeared. "I lost my footing, I don't know how, I was half dead," he told a friend. It was worse than that: it was a miracle he did not kill himself, because the fainting spell threw him against the side of the stairs, and he did not roll all the way down only because his body was so light.

  Dr. Gastelbondo rushed him to Barranca de San Nicolas in the carriage of Don Bartolome Molinares, who had housed the General on an earlier visit and had ready for him the same large, airy bedroom facing Calle Ancha. On the way a thick substance that gave him no peace began to ooze from his left tear duct. He was detached from everything as he traveled, and at times he seemed to be praying when in reality he was murmuring entire stanzas from his favorite poems. The doctor wiped his eye with his handkerchief, surprised that the General did not do it himself since he was so punctilious about his personal cleanliness. He barely roused himself at the entrance to the city when a herd of runaway cows almost trampled the carriage and did, in fact, overturn the berlin belonging to the parish priest, who somersaulted into the air and then leaped to his feet, white with sand from head to toe, and with his forehead and hands bloodied. When he recovered from the shock, the grenadiers had to open a path through the idle onlookers and naked children who wanted only to enjoy the accident and had no idea of the identity of the passenger who looked like a seated corpse in the darkness of the carriage.

  The doctor introduced the priest as one of the few who had supported the General in the days when the bishops thundered against him from their pulpits and he was excommunicated for being a lecherous Mason. The General did not seem to understand what had happened and only became aware of the world when he saw blood on the cassock of the priest, who asked him to intervene with his authority to keep cows from wandering loose in a city where it was no longer possible to walk in safety because of all the carriages on public thoroughfares.

  "Don't let it bother you, Your Reverence," he said without looking at him. "It's the same all over the country."

  The eleven o'clock sun hung motionless over the sand-pits of the wide, desolate streets, and the entire city reverberated with heat. The General was glad he did not have to spend more time there than necessary to recuperate from the fall, and he wanted to go out sailing on a day when the seas were rough, because the French manual said that seasickness was good for ridding the body of bilious humors and cleansing the stomach. He soon recovered from the fall, but it was not so easy to arrange for a boat and bad weather.

  In a fury at his body's recalcitrance, the General did not have strength for any social or political activity, and if he received visitors they were old friends who came to the city to say goodbye. The house was large and as cool as November would allow, and its owners converted it into his personal hospital. Don Bartolome Molinares was one of the many people ruined by the wars that had left him with nothing but the position of postmaster, which he had held for the past ten years without pay. He was such a kindhearted man that the General had called him Papa ever since his previous visit to the city. His wife, a splendid-looking woman with an indomitable matriarchal vocation, spent her hours making bobbin lace, which she sold at a good price on the European ships, but from the moment the General arrived she devoted all her time to him, to the point where she came into conflict with Fernanda Barriga because she put olive oil in his lentils, convinced that it was good for diseases of the chest, and he was obliged to eat them out of gratitude.

  What bothered the General most during this time was the oozing tear duct, which kept him in a somber frame of mind until he at last agreed to chamomile eyewashes. After that he joined the card games, an ephemeral consolation for the torment of the mosquitoes and the sorrows of twilight. During a half-serious conversation with the owners of the house, he surprised them by declaring, in one of his few crises of repentance, that one good agreement was worth a thousand successful lawsuits.

  "In politics too?" asked Senor Molinares.

  "Above all in politics," said the General. "Our not making peace with Santander has ruined us all."

  "As long as you have friends there is hope," said Molinares.

  "On the contrary," said the General. "It was not the perfidy of my enemies but the diligence of my friends that destroyed my glory. It was they who launched me on the calamity of the Ocana Convention, who entangled me in the disaster of the monarchy, who obliged me first to seek reelection with the same arguments they later used to force my renunciation, and who now hold me captive in this country when I no longer have any reason to be here."

  The rain became eternal, and the humidity began to open cracks in his memory. The heat was so intense that even at night the General had to change his drenched shirt several times. "I feel as if I've been cooked in a double boiler," he complained. One afternoon he spent more than three hours sitting on the balcony and watching the debris of the poor districts wash down the street--the household utensils and dead animals swept away by the torrent of a seismic downpour that endeavored to pull up houses by their roots.

  Commander Juan Glen, the prefect of the city, arrived in the middle of the storm with the news that he had arrested a woman in Senor Visbal's service for selling as holy relics the hair the General had cut off in Soledad. Once again he became despondent at the sorrowful thought that everything of his would turn into goods for sale.

  "They already treat me as if I had died," he said.

  Senora Molinares had pulled her rocking chair up to the card table so she could hear every word.

  "They treat you like what you are," she said. "A saint."

  "Well," he said, "if that's the case, they should let that poor innocent go."

  He did not read again. If he had to write letters he was satisfied with giving instructions to Fernando, and he did not even look at the few he had to sign. He spent the morning on the balcony, contemplating the sand desert of the streets, watching the water burro pass by, and the brazen, cheerful black woman who sold sun-dried mojarra fish, and the children leaving school at the stroke of eleven, and the parish priest in his tattered, patched cassock, who blessed him from the atrium of the church and was melting in the heat. At one o'clock, while the others were taking their siestas, he walked along the putrefying gutters, frightening away with his mere shadow the flocks of turkey buzzards from the market, greeting the few people who recognized him even though he was half dead and wore civilian clothes, walking as far as the grenadiers' barracks, a large shed of cane and mud that faced the river port. He was concerned for the morale of the troops, who were rotting with a boredom that seemed far too evident in the disorder of the barracks, where the stench had become unbearable. But a sergeant, who appeared to be in a stupor because of the suffocating afternoon heat, left him flabbergasted with the truth.

  "What's fucked us up isn't morale, Excellency," he told him. "It's gonorrhea."

  Only then did he learn the facts. The local doctors, having exhausted their science with distracting enemas and milk sugar palliatives, had passed the problem on to the military authorities, who could not agree on what to do. The whole city was aware of the danger that threatened it, and the glorious Army of the Republic was seen as the emissary of a plague. The General, less alarmed than had been feared, resolved the matter with one stroke by imposing an absolute quarantine.

  When the lack of news, either good or bad, began to drive him to despair, a courier on horseback brought an obscure message from General Montilla in Santa Marta: "The man is ours and negotiations are going well." The General thought the message so strange, and its form so irregular, that he interpreted it as a staff matter of the greatest significance, perhaps related to the Riohacha campaign, to which he attributed a historic importance that no one wished to contemplate.

  Ever since governmental neglect destroyed the systems of ciphered messages that had proved so useful during the first conspiracies against Spai
n, it was normal at this time to intentionally obscure messages and muddle military dispatches for reasons of security. The idea that the military were deceiving him was a long-standing concern of his that was shared by Montilla, and this further complicated the enigma of the message and intensified the General's uneasiness. And therefore he sent Jose Palacios to Santa Marta on the pretext that he was buying fresh fruits and vegetables and a few bottles of dry sherry and pale beer not available in the local market. But the real purpose was to decipher the mystery. It was very simple: Montilla meant that Miranda Lyndsay's husband had been transferred from the prison in Honda to the one in Cartagena and that his pardon was a matter of days. The General felt so cheated by the simplicity of the enigma that he did not even take pleasure in the service he had rendered his Jamaican savior.

  Early in November the Bishop of Santa Marta, in a letter written by his own hand, informed him that it had been he, with his apostolic mediation, who had at last soothed tempers in the nearby town of La Cienaga, where an attempt at civil insurrection in support of Riohacha had taken place the week before. The General thanked him, also in his own hand, and he asked Montilla to do the same, but he did not like the Bishop's haste in calling in the debt.

  Relations between the General and Monsignor Estevez had never been very easy. Beneath his meek good shepherd's crozier, the Bishop was a passionate but unenlightened politician, opposed deep in his heart to the Republic, opposed to the integration of the continent and to everything connected with the General's political thinking. In the Admirable Congress, where he had served as vice-president, the Bishop had understood very well that his real duty was to obstruct Sucre's power, and he had done so with more malice than efficiency, both in the election of officials and in their shared mission to find an amicable solution to the conflict with Venezuela. Senor and Senora Molinares, who knew about these disagreements, were not at all surprised when the General greeted them at four o'clock tea with one of his prophetic parables:

  "What will become of our children in a country where revolutions are ended by the diligence of a bishop?"

  Senora Molinares replied with an affectionate but firm reproach:

  "Even if Your Excellency is right, I don't want to hear it," she said. "We're old-style Catholics."

  He recovered without delay:

  "Much more old-style than the Bishop, no doubt, who hasn't reestablished order in La Cienaga for the love of God but in order to keep his parishioners united in the war against Cartagena."

  "We're opposed to Cartagena's tyranny here too," said Senor Molinares.

  "I know," he said. "Every Colombian is an enemy country."

  In Soledad the General had asked Montilla to send a light boat to the neighboring port of Sabanilla for him to use in his plan to expel bile by means of seasickness. Montilla had delayed satisfying his request because Don Joaquin de Mier, a Spanish republican and the partner of Commodore Elbers, had promised him one of the steamboats pressed into occasional service on the Magdalena River. When this proved impossible, Montilla sent an English merchant ship that arrived unannounced in Santa Marta in mid-November. As soon as he heard the news, the General let it be known that he would take advantage of the opportunity to leave the country. "I'm determined to go anywhere rather than die here," he said. Then he was shaken by the presentiment that Camille was waiting for him, watching the horizon from a flower-filled balcony facing the sea, and he sighed:

  "They love me in Jamaica."

  He instructed Jose Palacios to begin packing, and that night he stayed up very late trying to find some papers that he wanted to take with him at all costs. He was so exhausted that he slept for three hours. At dawn, when his eyes were already open, he became conscious of where he was only when Jose Palacios announced the saint's day.

  "I dreamed I was in Santa Marta," he said. "It was a very clean city, with white houses that were all the same, but the mountain blocked the view of the sea."

  "Then it wasn't Santa Marta," said Jose Palacios. "It was Caracas."

  For the General's dream had revealed to him that they would not go to Jamaica. Fernando had been in the port since early that morning arranging the details of the voyage, and on his return he found his uncle dictating a letter to Wilson in which he requested a new passport from Urdaneta because the one issued by the deposed government was worthless. That was the only explanation he gave for canceling the trip.

  Nevertheless, everyone agreed that the real reason was the news he received that morning concerning operations in Riohacha, which did nothing but make the earlier reports even more calamitous. The nation was falling apart from one ocean to the other, the specter of civil war raged over its ruins, and nothing was as distasteful to the General as running from adversity. "There is no sacrifice we are not prepared to make to save Riohacha," he said. Dr. Gastelbondo, more disturbed by what disturbed the invalid than by his incurable diseases, was the only man who knew how to tell him the truth without mortifying him.

  "The world's coming to an end and you worry about Riohacha," he said. "We never dreamed we'd be so honored."

  His reply was immediate:

  "The fate of the world depends on Riohacha."

  He really thought it did, and he could not disguise his uneasiness at the fact that they had planned to take Maracaibo by this time but instead were further than ever from victory. And as December approached with its topaz afternoons, he feared not only that Riohacha, and perhaps the entire coast, would be lost but that Venezuela would mount an expedition to destroy the last vestiges of his illusions.

  The weather had begun to change during the previous week, and where there had been mournful rains a diaphanous sky opened, and the nights were full of stars. The General remained detached from the marvels of the world, at times preoccupied in the hammock, at times playing cards with no concern for his luck. Then, when they were playing in the drawing room, a breeze laden with sea roses blew the cards out of their hands and made the window latches jump. Senora Molinares, exalted by this premature announcement of the providential season, exclaimed: "It's December!" Wilson and Jose Laurencio Silva hurried to close the windows in order to prevent the breeze from carrying away the house. The General was the only one who remained preoccupied with his fixed idea.

  "December already, and we're still in the same place," he said. "They're right when they say it's better to have bad sergeants than useless generals."

  He continued playing, and in the middle of the game he put his cards to one side and told Jose Laurencio Silva to prepare everything for traveling. Colonel Wilson, who on the previous day had unloaded his luggage for the second time, was perplexed.

  "The boat left," he said.

  The General knew that. "It wasn't the right one," he said. "We have to go to Riohacha, to see if we can persuade our illustrious generals to decide to win at last." Before leaving the table he felt obliged to justify himself to his hosts.

  "By now it's not even a necessity of war," he told them, "but a question of honor."

  And so he sailed at eight o'clock in the morning of December 1 on the brigantine Manuel, which Senor Joaquin de Mier placed at his disposal to use however he pleased: to take a sail to expel bile, to convalesce from his many illnesses and countless sorrows on Senor Mier's sugar plantation at San Pedro Alejandrino, or to continue straight on to Riohacha to attempt once again the redemption of the Americas. General Mariano Montilla, who arrived on the brigantine with General Jose Maria Carreno, arranged for the Manuel to be escorted by the North American frigate Grampus, which, in addition to being well armed, had on board a good surgeon, Dr. Night. Nevertheless, when Montilla saw the General's pitiable condition, he did not want to be guided by Dr. Night's judgment alone, and he consulted his local physician.

  "I don't believe he'll even survive the crossing," said Dr. Gastelbondo. "But let him go: anything's better than living like this."

  The channels through Cienaga Grande, the great swamp, were slow and hot and gave off fatal vapors, and so
they traveled on the open sea, taking advantage of the first trade winds from the north, which were early and benign that year. A cabin was ready for him on the well-maintained square-sailed brigantine, which was clean and comfortable and had a lighthearted way in the water.

  The General boarded in good spirits and wanted to remain on deck to see the estuary of the Great Magdalena River, whose mud gave an ashen color to the water for many leagues out to sea. He was wearing old corduroy trousers, the Andean cap, and an English sailor's jacket given him by the captain of the frigate, and his appearance improved in the sunlight and the vagabond breeze. In his honor the frigate's crew caught a gigantic shark, in whose belly they found a variety of metal objects, including a pair of spurs. He enjoyed everything with a tourist's pleasure until he was overcome by fatigue and sank down into his own soul. Then he signaled Jose Palacios to approach and whispered in his ear:

  "Papa Molinares must be burning the mattress and burying the spoons by now."

  Toward midday they passed Cienaga Grande, a vast extension of muddy waters where all the birds of the air fought over a school of golden mojarra. On the burning saltpeter plain between the swamp and the sea, where the light was clearer and the air was purer, there were fishing villages with tackle spread out to dry in the patios, and beyond them lay the mysterious town of La Cienaga, whose diurnal phantoms had caused the disciples of Humboldt to doubt their science. On the other side of Cienaga Grande rose the crown of eternal ice on the Sierra Nevada.

  The high-spirited brigantine, almost flying over the water in the silence of the sails, was so quick and stable that it did not cause the convulsion desired by the General to expel the bile from his body. Nevertheless, when they passed a ridge of the Sierra that extended toward the sea, the water turned rough and the wind blustered. The General observed those changes with growing anticipation, for the world began to spin with the carrion birds circling overhead, an icy perspiration soaked his shirt, and his eyes filled with tears. Montilla and Wilson had to hold him, for he was so light that a sudden wave could have swept him overboard. At dusk, when they entered the calm waters of Santa Marta Bay, there was nothing left for him to expel from his ravaged body, and he lay exhausted in the captain's bunk, moribund but in the rapture of a dream come true. General Montilla was so disturbed by his condition that before proceeding with disembarkation he had Dr. Night see him again, and the physician decided that the General should be carried to land in a litter.