The General in His Labyrinth

  Aside from the Santa Martans' total lack of interest in everything that smacked of officialdom, there were other reasons why so few people were waiting on the dock. Santa Marta had been one of the most difficult cities to lure to the republican cause. Even after independence was confirmed at the battle of Boyaca, Viceroy Samano took refuge there to await reinforcements from Spain. The General himself had attempted to liberate Santa Marta several times, and only Montilla succeeded, after the Republic was already established. Royalist rancor was added to the animosity everyone felt toward Cartagena for being the central government's favored city, a feeling the General fomented without realizing it because of his passion for the Cartagenans. The strongest reason, however, even for many of his loyal supporters, was the summary execution of Admiral Jose Prudencio Padilla, who, to make matters even worse, had been as much a mulatto as General Piar. The bitter feelings deepened with the takeover of power by Urdaneta, who had been president of the court-martial that issued the death sentence. And so the bells in the cathedral did not ring as planned and no one could explain why, and the cannon in El Morro Fortress fired no salute because that morning it was discovered that the powder in the arsenal was wet. The soldiers had toiled until just before the General's arrival so he would not see the "Long Live Jose Prudencio" scrawled in charcoal on the side of the cathedral. The official announcements of his arrival had almost no effect on the handful of men in the port. The most notable absence was that of Bishop Estevez, the first and most eminent of the dignitaries who had been informed.

  Don Joaquin de Mier would remember until the end of his long life the dreadful creature carried ashore in a litter in the lethargy of early evening, wrapped in a woolen blanket, wearing one cap over another and both pulled down to his eyebrows, and with hardly a breath of life. Nevertheless, what he remembered best was his burning hand, his labored breathing, the supernatural elegance with which he left the litter and stood, holding himself upright with the help of his aides-de-camp, to greet them all, one by one, with their titles and complete names. Then he allowed himself to be carried to the berlin and collapsed on the seat, his listless head resting on the back but his avid eyes drinking in the life that for him was passing just one time and forever on the other side of the window.

  The line of carriages had only to cross the avenue to reach the old customhouse that had been reserved for him. It was about to strike eight o'clock on a Wednesday, but the first December breezes brought a Saturday air to the promenade along the bay. The streets were broad and dirty, and the masonry houses with their continuous balconies were better preserved than those in the rest of the country. Whole families had brought out furniture and sat on the sidewalks, and some even received their visitors in the middle of the street. The clouds of fireflies among the trees lit the seafront avenue with a phosphorescent brilliance more intense than the lamplight.

  The recently restored old customhouse, the first in the country, had been built two hundred ninety-nine years before. The bedroom on the second floor, with a view of the bay, had been prepared for the General, but he preferred to spend most of the time in the principal drawing room, where the only rings for hanging a hammock were located. In the same room was the rough, carved mahogany table where his embalmed body would lie in state sixteen days later, wearing the blue tunic of his rank without the eight buttons of pure gold that someone would tear off in the confusion of death.

  He was the only one who did not seem to believe he was so close to that fate. But Dr. Alexandre Prosper Reverend, the French physician brought by General Montilla on an emergency call at nine o'clock in the evening, did not need to take his pulse to know he had begun to die years before. Because of the weakness of his neck, the contraction of his chest, and the yellowness of his face, the doctor thought it was a case of damaged lungs, which was confirmed by his observations in the days that followed. In the initial private interview, held half in Spanish and half in French, he established that the patient possessed a masterful talent for distorting his symptoms and misinterpreting his pain, and was using the little breath he had left in an effort not to cough or spit during the consultation. The initial diagnosis was confirmed by clinical examination. But beginning with that night's medical bulletin, the first of the thirty-three he would issue during the next two weeks, the physician attributed as much importance to moral torment as to physical calamities.

  Dr. Reverend, at thirty-four, was self-confident, well educated, and well dressed. He had arrived six years earlier, disenchanted with the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France, and he spoke and wrote correct, fluent Spanish, but the General took advantage of the first opportunity to demonstrate his good French. The doctor captivated him at once.

  "Your Excellency has a Parisian accent," he told him.

  "The Rue Vivienne," he said, becoming animated. "How did you know?"

  "I pride myself on guessing the very street in Paris where a person grew up, just by his accent," said the physician, "although I was born and raised in a village in Normandy."

  "Good cheese but bad wine," said the General.

  "Perhaps it's the secret of our good health," said the doctor.

  He gained the General's confidence with his painless sounding of the boyish side of his spirit. He gained it even more when, instead of prescribing new medicines, he administered by his own hand a spoonful of the syrup prepared by Dr. Gastelbondo to alleviate his cough, and a tranquilizing pill that the General took with no resistance because his desire to sleep was so great. They continued chatting about this and that until the soporific took effect and the doctor tiptoed out of the room. General Montilla, who accompanied him to his house along with other officers, was alarmed when the doctor told him he planned to sleep in his clothes in the event an emergency arose in the middle of the night.

  Reverend and Night held several meetings that week but came to no agreement. Reverend was convinced the General suffered from a pulmonary lesion whose origin was an ill-treated catarrh. Because of his color and evening fevers, Dr. Night was convinced it was a case of chronic malaria. They did agree, nevertheless, on the gravity of his condition. They requested other doctors to settle their differences, but the three from Santa Marta, and others from the province, refused to cooperate, giving no explanation. And therefore Drs. Reverend and Night agreed on a compromise treatment based on pectoral balms for catarrh and doses of quinine for malaria.

  The patient's condition had deteriorated even further over the weekend because of a glass of donkey's milk he drank on his own account without the doctors' knowledge. His mother would drink it warm with honey, and gave it to him when he was very young to ease his cough. But that soothing taste, associated in so intimate a way with his earliest memories, disturbed his bile and devastated his body, and his prostration was so pronounced that Dr. Night sailed earlier than planned in order to send a specialist from Jamaica. He in fact sent two, who were very qualified, and he did so with a speed that was incredible for the time, but they arrived too late.

  With it all, the General's state of mind did not correspond to his prostration, for he behaved as if the diseases that were killing him were no more than trivial annoyances. He spent the nights awake in the hammock contemplating the turns of the light in El Morro Fortress, enduring pain so his moans would not betray him, always staring at the splendor of the bay that he had considered the most beautiful in the world.

  "My eyes hurt from looking at it so much," he would say.

  During the day he made an effort to show the diligence of other times, and he would call Ibarra, or Wilson, or Fernando, or whoever was close by, to give instructions concerning the letters he no longer had the patience to dictate. Only Jose Palacios had a heart lucid enough to realize that these pressing matters were the urgencies of his last days. For he was arranging the destiny of those near to him, and even of some who were not in Santa Marta. He forgot the quarrel with his former secretary, General Juan Jose Santana, and obtained a position for him in the foreign se
rvice so he could enjoy his new life as a married man. He paid well-deserved tribute to the good heart of General Jose Maria Carreno and set him on the path that would bring him, in time, to the designated presidency of Venezuela. He requested Urdaneta to provide service documents for Andres Ibarra and Jose Laurencio Silva so they could at least enjoy a regular income in the future. Silva became General in Chief and Secretary of the Army and Navy in his own country and died at the age of eighty-two, his sight clouded by the cataracts he had feared so much, and living on a certificate of disability he obtained after arduous efforts to prove his combat service by means of his numerous scars.

  The General also attempted to convince Pedro Briceno Mendez to return to New Granada to become Minister of War, but the rush of history did not give him time. He left his nephew Fernando a legacy to facilitate his career in public administration. He advised General Diego Ibarra, his first aide-de-camp and one of the few people with whom he used the intimate form of address in private and in public, to go where he would be more useful than in Venezuela. On his deathbed he would even ask General Justo Briceno, toward whom he still felt some resentment, for the last favor of his life.

  His officers may never have imagined to what extent this distribution of benefits joined their destinies. For better or worse, all of them would share the rest of their lives, including the historical irony of being reunited in Venezuela five years later, fighting at the side of Commander Pedro Carujo in a military adventure intended to achieve the Bolivarist idea of integration.

  These were not political maneuvers but legacies to his orphans, which was confirmed by Wilson in the surprising statement the General dictated in a letter to Urdaneta: "The Riohacha enterprise is lost." That same afternoon the General received a note from Bishop Estevez the Unpredictable, who asked him to use his good offices with the central government to have Santa Marta and Riohacha declared departments, thus putting an end to their historic discord with Cartagena. The General made a dispirited gesture when Jose Laurencio Silva finished reading him the letter. "The only ideas that occur to Colombians are for ways to divide the nation," he said. Later, as he dispatched back correspondence with Fernando, he was even more bitter.

  "Don't even answer it," he told him. "Let them wait until I'm six feet under, and then they can do whatever they like."

  His constant longing to change the weather kept him on the brink of dementia. If it was humid he wanted it dry, if it was cold he wanted it milder, if it was mountain weather he wanted it coastal. This heightened his perpetual restless desire to have the window opened to let in the air and to have it closed again, to have the easy chair moved into the light and to have it moved back again, and he seemed to find relief only by swaying in the hammock with the meager strength remaining to him.

  The days in Santa Marta became so dismal that when the General calmed down somewhat and repeated his desire to leave for Senor de Mier's country house, Dr. Reverend was the first to encourage him, aware that these were the final symptoms of a prostration from which there was no return. The night before the journey the General wrote to a friend: "I will die in a couple of months at the latest." It was a revelation to all of them, because on very few occasions in his life, and even less in recent years, had anyone heard him mention death.

  La Florida de San Pedro Alejandrino, a league from Santa Marta in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was a sugar plantation with a mill for making brown sugar loaves. The General rode in Senor de Mier's berlin along the dusty road. Ten days later the shell of his body, wrapped in his old upland blanket and lying in an oxcart, would travel the same road in the opposite direction. Long before he saw the house he smelled the breeze, heavy with hot molasses, and he was ensnared by nostalgia.

  "It's the smell of San Mateo," he sighed.

  The San Mateo Plantation, twenty-four leagues from Caracas, was the center of his longing. There he lost his father at the age of three, his mother at the age of nine, and his wife at the age of twenty. He had been married in Spain to his kinswoman, a beautiful girl of the American aristocracy, and his only dream then was to be happy with her while he increased his immense fortune as master of life and property on the San Mateo Plantation. It was never established with any certainty if the death of his wife eight months after the wedding was caused by a malignant fever or a domestic accident. For him it meant his birth into history, for he had been a rich young gentleman from the colonies, dazzled by mundane pleasures and without the slightest interest in politics, but at that moment he became, with no transition, the man he would be for the rest of his life. He never spoke of his dead wife again, he never recalled her, he never tried to replace her. Almost every night of his life he dreamed about the house at San Mateo, and he often dreamed of his father and mother, his brother and sisters, but he never dreamed about her, for he had buried her at the bottom of a watertight oblivion as a brutal means of living without her. All that could stir her momentary memory was the smell of molasses at San Pedro Alejandrino, the impassivity of the slaves in the mills, who did not cast so much as a pitying glance in his direction, the immense trees around the house that had just been whitewashed to receive him, the other mill in his life, where an ineluctable destiny was taking him to die.

  "Her name was Maria Teresa Rodriguez del Toro y Alayza," he said without warning.

  Senor de Mier was at a loss.

  "Who?" he asked.

  "The woman who was my wife," he said, and then his reaction was immediate: "But forget it, please: it was a misfortune of my youth."

  That was all he said.

  The bedroom that had been prepared for him gave rise to another deviation of memory, causing him to examine it with meticulous attention as if each object were a revelation. In addition to the canopied bed there was a mahogany bureau, a mahogany night table with a marble top, and an armchair covered in red velvet. On the wall next to the window was an octagonal clock with Roman numerals, which had stopped at seven minutes past one.

  "We've been here before," he said.

  Later, when Jose Palacios wound the clock and set it for the correct time, the General lay down in the hammock, trying to sleep for a moment. Only then did he see the clear, blue Sierra Nevada through the window, like a painting hung on the wall, and his memory wandered to other rooms from so many other lives.

  "I've never felt so close to home," he said.

  His sleep was sound the first night at San Pedro Alejandrino, and the next day he seemed to have recovered so well from his maladies that he visited the mills, admired the breeding of the oxen, tasted the honey, and surprised everyone with his knowledge of the arts of milling sugar. General Montilla, astonished at such a change, asked Reverend to tell him the truth, and the latter explained that the General's imaginary improvement was frequent in dying men. The end was a matter of days, perhaps hours. Stunned by the bad news, Montilla smashed the bare wall with his fist and broke his hand. For the rest of his life it would never be the same again. He had often lied to the General, always in good faith and for trivial political reasons. From that day on he lied to him out of charity and instructed those who had access to the General to do the same.

  That week eight high-ranking officers expelled from Venezuela for activities against the government arrived in Santa Marta. Among them were several great heroes of the epic of liberation: Nicolas Silva, Trinidad Portocarrero, Julian Infante. Montilla asked them not only to keep bad news from the dying General but to enhance the good in search of solace for the most serious of his many misfortunes. They went even further and made so encouraging a report on the situation in their country that they were able to rekindle the old fire in his eyes. The General returned to the topic of Riohacha, banished from conversation for the past week, and he spoke again of Venezuela as an imminent possibility.

  "We've never had a better opportunity to start over again on the right path," he said. And he concluded with irrefutable conviction: "The day I set foot in the Aragua Valley, the entire Venezuelan nation will rise up
in my favor."

  In a single afternoon he outlined a new military strategy in the presence of the visiting officers, who offered the assistance of their compassionate enthusiasm. Nevertheless, for the rest of the night they had to listen to him declaim in a prophetic tone just how they would rebuild from the beginning, and this time forever, the vast empire of his dreams. Montilla was the only one who dared to dispute the utter disbelief of those who thought they were listening to the ravings of a madman.

  "Watch out," he told them. "That's what they thought at Casacoima."

  For no one had forgotten July 4, 1817, when the General had been forced to spend the night in the waters of Casacoima Lagoon, together with a small group of officers, Briceno Mendez among them, hiding from the Spanish troops who had almost taken them by surprise in open country. Half naked and shivering with fever, he suddenly began to declaim at the top of his voice each step he would take in the future: the immediate capture of Angostura, the crossing of the Andes to liberate New Granada and later Venezuela and to found Colombia, and at last the conquest of the immense southern territories all the way to Peru. "Then we will climb Chimborazo and plant on its snow-covered peaks the tricolor of an America that is forever great, united, and free," he concluded. Those who heard him in Casacoima also thought he had lost his mind, and nevertheless it was a prophecy fulfilled in every detail in less than five years.