The General in His Labyrinth

  Sad to say, the prophecy at San Pedro Alejandrino was no more than a vision of dire things to come. The sufferings held at bay during the first week rushed headlong into a violent windstorm of total annihilation. By this time the General had grown so small that the cuffs of his shirtsleeves had to be turned up again and an inch was cut off the corduroy trousers. He could not sleep more than three hours in the early evening, and the rest of the night he spent strangled by coughing, or hallucinating in his delirium, or driven to despair by the recurrent attacks of hiccuping that had begun in Santa Marta and were becoming more and more tenacious. In the afternoon, while the others napped, he endured his agony by looking through the window at the snowy peaks of the Sierra.

  He had crossed the Atlantic four times and ridden through the liberated territories on horseback more than anyone would ever do again, and he had never made a will, which was unheard-of at that time. "I have nothing to leave anyone," he would say. When he was preparing for his departure in Santa Fe de Bogota, General Pedro Alcantara Herran had recommended he do so, with the argument that it was a normal precaution for every traveler, and the General had told him, more in seriousness than in jest, that death was not part of his immediate plans. Nevertheless, at San Pedro Alejandrino, it was he who took the initiative and dictated rough drafts of his last will and testament. No one ever knew if it was a reasoned act or the stumbling of his afflicted heart.

  Because Fernando was ill, he began by dictating to Jose Laurencio Silva a series of somewhat disordered notes that did not express his desires so much as his disillusionment: America is ungovernable, the man who serves a revolution plows the sea, this nation will fall inevitably into the hands of the unruly mob and then will pass into the hands of almost indistinguishable petty tyrants of every color and race, and many other lugubrious thoughts that had already circulated as separate ideas in letters to various friends.

  He continued dictating for several hours, as if he were in a clairvoyant trance, hardly stopping for the attacks of coughing. Jose Laurencio Silva could not keep up with him, and Andres Ibarra could not make the effort of writing with his left hand for very long. When all the secretaries and aides-de-camp were exhausted, one man, a cavalry lieutenant named Nicolas Mariano de Paz, was still standing, and he copied out the dictation with meticulous care and a fair hand until there was no paper left. He asked for more, but it took so long to arrive that he continued copying on the wall until it was almost covered with writing. The General was so grateful that he presented him with the two pistols for duels of love that had belonged to General Lorenzo Carcamo.

  It was his final wish that his remains be taken to Venezuela, that the two books owned by Napoleon be entrusted to the University of Caracas, that eight thousand pesos be given to Jose Palacios in recognition of his constant service, that the papers he had left with Senor Pavajeau in Cartagena be burned, that the medal with which the Congress of Bolivia had honored him be returned to its place of origin, that the gold sword encrusted with precious gems given him by Field Marshal Sucre be restored to the Field Marshal's widow, and that the rest of his possessions, including the Aroa Mines, be divided among his two sisters and the children of his dead brother. There was not enough for other bequests, because these same possessions had to be used to pay outstanding debts, both large and small, including the recurrent nightmare of the twenty thousand duros owed to Professor Lancaster.

  Among the prescribed clauses, he had been careful to include an exceptional one in which he thanked Sir Robert Wilson for the good behavior and fidelity of his son. It was not the distinction that was strange but his not having written one as well for General O'Leary, who would not be present at his death only because he could not arrive in time from Cartagena, where by the General's order he had remained at the disposal of President Urdaneta.

  Both names would be forever linked to the General's. Wilson would later be British charge d'affaires in Lima, and then in Caracas, and would continue his frontline participation in the political and military affairs of both countries. O'Leary would move to Kingston and later to Santa Fe de Bogota, where he would serve as his nation's consul for many years and die at the age of fifty-one, having collected in thirty-four volumes an enormous testimony of his life with the General of the Americas. His was a quiet and fruitful twilight, which he summarized in a single sentence: "After The Liberator died and his great work was destroyed, I retired to Jamaica, where I dedicated myself to arranging his papers and writing my memoirs."

  From the day the General dictated his will, the doctor made exhaustive use of all the palliatives known to his science: mustard plasters on his feet, spinal massages, anodyne poultices over his entire body. He ameliorated the General's congenital constipation with enemas of immediate but devastating effect. Fearing a cerebral congestion, he subjected him to blistering plasters in order to drain the catarrh accumulated in his head. This treatment consisted of plasters made of blister beetle, a caustic insect that, when ground and applied to the skin, produced blisters capable of absorbing medicines. Dr. Reverend applied five blistering plasters to the back of the neck and one to the calf of the dying General. A century and a half later, numerous physicians would still think that the immediate cause of death had been these irritating plasters that provoked a urinary disorder in which micturition was at first involuntary, then painful, and at last bloody, until the bladder was left dry and adhered to the pelvis, as Dr. Reverend confirmed in the autopsy.

  The General's sense of smell had become so acute that he obliged the doctor and the pharmacist, Augusto Tomasin, to keep their distance because they smelled of liniment. Then he had the room sprinkled with more cologne than ever, and he continued to take the illusory baths, to shave with his own hand, to clean his teeth with fierce savagery in a superhuman effort to defend himself against the obscene filth of death.

  Colonel Luis Peru de Lacroix visited Santa Marta during the second week in December. He was a young veteran of Napoleon's armies who until a short while before had been aide-de-camp to the General, and after his visit the first thing he did was to write the truth to Manuela Saenz. As soon as she received the letter Manuela set out on the journey to Santa Marta, but in Guaduas they told her she was a whole lifetime too late. The news erased her from the world. She sank into her own shadows, her only obligations the two chests of the General's papers that she managed to hide in a safe place in Santa Fe de Bogota until, on her instructions, Daniel O'Leary rescued them several years later. General Santander, in one of his first governmental acts, exiled her from the country. Manuela submitted to her fate with festering dignity, first in Jamaica and then in a dismal pilgrimage that would end in Paita, a sordid port on the Pacific where whaling ships from all the oceans came to anchor. There she endured oblivion with embroideries, mule drivers' cigars, and little candies, which she made and sold to sailors for as long as the arthritis in her hands allowed. Dr. Thorne, her husband, was knifed to death in an empty lot in Lima during a robbery in which the little he had with him was stolen, and in his will he left Manuela a sum equal to the dowry she had brought to the marriage, but she never received it. Three memorable visitors consoled her abandonment: the tutor Simon Rodriguez, with whom she shared the ashes of glory, the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was returning from the struggle against the dictatorship of Rosas in Argentina, and the novelist Herman Melville, who was wandering the oceans of the world gathering information for Moby-Dick. When she was old and confined by a broken hip to her hammock, she would give card readings and advice to lovers. She died in an epidemic of the plague at the age of fifty-nine, and her cabin was burned by the health officials, along with the General's precious papers, which included his intimate letters. Her only mementos of him, according to what she told Peru de Lacroix, were a lock of his hair and a glove.

  Peru de Lacroix found La Florida de San Pedro Alejandrino already disordered by death. The house was adrift. The officers slept whenever fatigue overcame them and were so irritable that the prudent
Jose Laurencio Silva went so far as to draw his sword in response to Dr. Reverend's demands for silence. Fernanda Barriga did not have the strength or good humor to attend to so many requests for food at the least expected times. The most demoralized played cards day and night, with no concern for the fact that everything they shouted could be heard by the dying man in the next room. One afternoon, while the General was lying in a feverish stupor, someone on the terrace bellowed his rage at the abusive charge of twelve pesos and twenty-three centavos for half a dozen boards, two hundred twenty-five nails, six hundred common tacks and fifty gilded ones, ten yards of madapollam, ten yards of manila ribbon and six yards of black.

  It was a shouted litany, which other voices tried to silence but which in the end filled the entire hacienda. Dr. Reverend was in the bedroom changing the bandages on General Montilla's fractured hand, and both of them realized that the sick man, in the lucidity of light sleep, was listening to the list of charges. Montilla went to the window and roared at the top of his voice:

  "Shut up, damn it!"

  The General intervened without opening his eyes.

  "Leave them alone," he said. "After all, by now there aren't any costs I can't hear."

  Only Jose Palacios knew that the General did not need to hear any more to realize that the shouted sums came out of the two hundred fifty-three pesos, seven reales, and three cuartillos in the public collection for his funeral gathered by the municipality from private individuals and from the slaughterhouse and prison funds, and that the lists were of materials for making his coffin and building his tomb. From that time on, Jose Palacios, following Montilla's orders, took responsibility for keeping everyone out of the bedroom, regardless of rank, title, or dignity, and he imposed on himself so drastic a regimen of caring for the patient that it differed very little from his own death.

  "If they had given me power like this from the beginning, the man would have lived to be a hundred," he said.

  Fernanda Barriga attempted to enter the bedroom.

  "This poor orphan liked women so much," she said, "he can't die without one at his bedside, even if she's as old and ugly and useless as I am."

  They would not permit it. And so she sat outside the window, trying to sanctify the pagan ravings of the dying man with her prayers. And there she stayed, living on public charity, submerged in eternal mourning, until the age of a hundred and one.

  Just after dark on Wednesday it was she who scattered flowers along the road and led the chanting when the priest from the neighboring village of Mamatoco arrived with the viaticum. He was preceded by a double row of barefoot Indian women wearing cassocks of raw linen and crowns of crape myrtle, who lit his way with oil lamps and sang prayers for the dead in their own language. They walked the path that Fernanda, at their head, was carpeting with flower petals, and it was so hair-raising a moment that no one dared to stop them. The General sat up in bed when he heard them come in the bedroom, shielded his eyes from the light with his arm, and made them leave with a shout:

  "Get those altar lights out of here: this looks like a procession of lost souls."

  Trying to keep the evil mood in the house from killing the doomed man, Fernando brought a band of street musicians from Mamatoco, who played without stopping for an entire day under the tamarind trees in the patio. The General responded well to the calming effect of the music. "La Trinitaria," his favorite contredanse, was repeated several times. It had become popular because in another time he distributed copies of the score wherever he went.

  The slaves stopped the mills and watched the General for a long while through the vines at the window. He was wrapped in a white sheet, more emaciated and ashen than after death, and he kept time to the music with his head, which was bristling with a new growth of hair. After each piece he applauded with the conventional propriety he had learned at the Paris Opera.

  At noon, animated by the music, he drank a cup of broth and ate a ground mixture of arrowroot and boiled chicken. Afterwards, in the hammock, he asked for a hand mirror, looked at himself, and said: "With these eyes I won't die." The almost abandoned hope that Dr. Reverend could perform a miracle was reborn in everyone. But when he seemed better, the invalid confused General Sarda with one of the thirty-eight Spanish officers whom Santander had ordered shot without trial in a single day following the battle of Boyaca. Later he suffered a sudden relapse, from which he never recovered, and he shouted with the little voice left to him to get the musicians away from the house, where they could not disturb the silence of his death agony. When he was calm again he ordered Wilson to compose a letter to General Justo Briceno, asking him as an almost posthumous homage to make peace with General Urdaneta in order to save the country from the horrors of anarchy. The only part he dictated was the heading: "I am writing this letter to you in the final moments of my life."

  He talked with Fernando until very late that night, and for the first time he advised him regarding the future. The idea of their writing his memoirs together would not be realized, but his nephew had lived by his side long enough to attempt to write them as a simple act of love, so that his children would have an idea of those years of glory and disaster. "O'Leary will write something if he doesn't change his mind," the General said. "But it will be different." Fernando was then twenty-six years old, and he would live to the age of eighty-eight without writing anything more than a few disordered pages, for fate granted him the immense good fortune of losing his memory.

  Jose Palacios had been in the bedroom while the General dictated his will. Neither he nor anyone else said a word during an act imbued with sacramental solemnity. But that night, while the General was in the emollient bath, Jose Palacios pleaded with him to change his bequest.

  "We have always been poor and we haven't needed anything," he told him.

  "The truth is just the opposite," said the General. "We have always been rich and we haven't anything left."

  Both extremes were true. Jose Palacios had entered his service when he was very young, by order of the General's mother, who was his owner, and he had not been emancipated in a formal way. He was left floating in a civil limbo in which he was never paid a salary and his status was not defined, but his personal needs formed part of the private needs of the General, with whom he identified even in his manner of dressing and eating and in his exaggerated sobriety. The General was not willing to leave him adrift without military rank or a certificate of disability, and at an age when he was not disposed to start a new life. And so there was no alternative: the legacy of eight thousand pesos was not only irrevocable but unrenounceable.

  "It's the fitting thing," concluded the General.

  Jose Palacios' reply was abrupt:

  "The fitting thing is for us to die together."

  And in fact that is what happened, for he managed his money as badly as the General managed his. After his death Jose Palacios remained in Cartagena de Indias at the mercy of public charity, attempted to drown his memories in alcohol, and succumbed to its pleasures. He died at the age of seventy-six in a den of beggars who were veterans of the liberating army, writhing in the mud with the torments of delirium tremens.

  The General was so ill when he awoke on December 10 that they called Bishop Estevez with all urgency in the event he wanted to make his confession. The Bishop rushed to the house, and such was the importance he gave to the interview that he wore full episcopal attire. But by order of the General it took place behind closed doors and without witnesses and lasted only fourteen minutes. No one ever learned a word they said. The Bishop hurried away in a state of consternation, climbed into his carriage without saying goodbye, and would not officiate at the funeral despite many requests, or even attend the burial. The General was so weak he could not get out of the hammock unassisted, and the doctor had to lift him in his arms like an infant and prop him against the pillows on the bed so he would not be strangled by coughing. When at last he caught his breath he had everyone leave so he could talk to the doctor alone.

&n
bsp; "I never imagined this damn business was serious enough to even think about last rites," he said. "And I don't have the good fortune to believe in the afterlife."

  "It's not a question of that," said Reverend. "It has been demonstrated that settling matters of conscience inspires a state of mind in the patient that facilitates the physician's task."

  The General paid no attention to the masterful reply, because he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness.

  "Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!"

  He examined the room with the clairvoyance of his last days, and for the first time he saw the truth: the final borrowed bed, the pitiful dressing table whose clouded, patient mirror would not reflect his image again, the chipped porcelain washbasin with the water and towel and soap meant for other hands, the heartless speed of the octagonal clock racing toward the ineluctable appointment at seven minutes past one on his final afternoon of December 17. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.

  My Thanks

  For many years I listened to Alvaro Mutis discussing his plan to write about Simon Bolivar's final voyage along the Magdalena River. When he published "El Ultimo Rostro" [The Last Face], a fragment of the projected book, the story seemed so ripe, and its style and tone so polished, that I expected to read it in its complete form very soon afterwards. Nevertheless, two years later I had the impression that he had relegated it to oblivion, as so many writers do even with our best-loved dreams, and only then did I dare ask for his permission to write it myself. It was a direct hit after a ten-year ambush. Therefore my first thanks go to him.