The General in His Labyrinth

  "These conflicts are the natural state of my amiable madwoman," he said.

  Jose Palacios did not hide his vexation at the lack of consideration shown in the programming of the three days in Honda. The most surprising invitation was to visit the silver mines at Santa Ana, six leagues away, but more surprising was that the General accepted, and much more surprising was that he went down to a subterranean gallery. Even worse: on the way back, despite his high fever and a head about to explode with migraine, he went swimming in a backwater of the river. The days were long gone when he would wager that he could cross a rushing torrent on the plains with one hand tied and still beat the most skillful swimmer. In any case, this time he swam for half an hour without tiring, but those who saw his scrawny ribs and rachitic legs did not understand how he stayed alive with so little body.

  On the last night, the municipal government held a gala ball in his honor, which he declined to attend because of fatigue after his excursion. Secluded in the bedroom with Fernando since five o'clock that afternoon, he dictated the reply to General Domingo Caycedo and had his nephew read aloud several more pages of Lima's gallant adventures, in some of which he had been the protagonist. Then he took a lukewarm bath and lay motionless in the hammock, listening to the strains of music wafting in from the ball in his honor. Jose Palacios thought he was asleep, when he heard him say:

  "Do you remember that waltz?"

  He whistled several measures to remind the steward of the music, but he could not identify it. "It was the waltz they played the night we arrived in Lima from Chuquisaca," said the General. Jose Palacios did not remember it, but he would never forget the glorious night of February 8, 1826. That morning Lima had given them an imperial reception, and the General responded with a sentence he repeated without fail at every toast: "There is not a single Spaniard left in the vast territory of Peru." That day confirmed the independence of the huge continent which he proposed to turn, according to his own words, into the most immense, or most extraordinary, or most invincible league of nations the world had ever seen. For him the emotions of the fiesta were associated with the waltz he had asked them to repeat as many times as necessary so that every lady in Lima would have the opportunity to dance to it with him. His officers, who wore the most dazzling uniforms the city had ever seen, did their best to follow his example, for they all waltzed admirably--a memory that endured in the hearts of their partners much longer than any glories of war.

  On the last night in Honda they opened the fiesta with the victory waltz, and he waited in the hammock for them to repeat it. But when it was clear they would not, he leaped up, put on the same riding clothes he had worn on the excursion to the mines, and presented himself at the ball without being announced. He danced for almost three hours and had them repeat the piece each time he changed partners, attempting perhaps to reconstitute the splendor of long ago out of the ashes of his memories. Gone were the years of illusion when everyone dropped with exhaustion and only he and his last partner were left to dance until dawn in the deserted ballroom. Dancing was for him so dominant a passion that he would dance without a partner when one was not at hand, or he would dance alone to music he whistled himself, and he would express his moments of great jubilation by dancing on the dining room table. On the last night in Honda his strength was so diminished that during intermissions he had to inhale the fumes from the handkerchief soaked with cologne in order to revive, but he danced with so much enthusiasm and such youthful skill that without intending to, he confounded the tales of his fatal illness.

  Not long after midnight, when he returned to the house, they reported that a woman was waiting for him in the reception room. Elegant and haughty, emitting the fragrance of spring, she wore a long-sleeved velvet dress, riding boots of the finest cordovan leather, and the silk-veiled hat of a medieval lady. The General made her a formal bow, intrigued by the nature and hour of the visit. Without saying a word she held up a reliquary hanging around her neck on a long chain, and he recognized it in astonishment.

  "Miranda Lyndsay!" he said.

  "It's me," she said, "although I'm no longer the same."

  The grave, warm voice like a cello, rippled by just the slightest trace of her native English, must have awakened unrepeatable memories in him. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the sentry standing guard at the door, and he sat down facing her, so close their knees almost touched, and took both her hands in his.

  They had met fifteen years earlier in Kingston, during his second exile, at an informal luncheon in the home of the English merchant Maxwell Hyslop. She was the only child of Sir London Lyndsay, an English diplomat who had retired to a sugar plantation in Jamaica to write the six volumes of memoirs that nobody read. Despite the unquestionable beauty of Miranda and the susceptible heart of the young exile, at that time he was too immersed in his dreams and too involved with another woman to notice anyone else.

  She would always remember him as a bony, pale man who seemed much older than his thirty-two years, who had the coarse sideburns and mustache of a mulatto and hair that hung down to his shoulders. Like all the young men of the native aristocracy, he was dressed in the English style: a white cravat, a jacket too heavy for the climate, and the Romantics' gardenia in his lapel. Dressed in this fashion on a libertine night in 1810, he was mistaken by a gallant whore in a London brothel for a Greek pederast.

  For better or worse, what was most memorable about him were his dazzling eyes and his endless, exhausting talk in the strident voice of a bird of prey. Strangest of all, he kept his eyes lowered and held the attention of his table companions without looking straight at them. He spoke with the cadence and diction of the Canary Islands and in the educated forms of Madrid, which he alternated that day with an elementary but comprehensible English in honor of two guests who did not understand Spanish.

  During the luncheon he paid attention to no one except his own phantoms. He spoke without pause in an erudite, declamatory style, delivering raw prophetic sentences, many of which would appear in an epic proclamation published some days later in a Kingston newspaper, which history would consecrate as The Jamaica Letter. "It is not the Spaniards but our own lack of unity that has brought us again to slavery," he said. Speaking of the greatness, the resources, and the talents of America, he repeated several times: "We are the human race in miniature." When she returned home her father asked Miranda about the conspirator who so disquieted Spanish agents on the island, and she summed him up in a single sentence: "He feels he's Bonaparte."

  Some days later he received an unexpected message with detailed instructions for meeting her in a deserted spot, alone and on foot, the following Saturday night at nine o'clock. That challenge endangered not only his own life but the fate of the Americas as well, for at that time he was the last resort of a shattered insurrection. After five years of troubled independence, Spain had just reconquered the Viceregency of New Granada and the Captaincy General of Venezuela, territories that did not offer resistance to the ferocious onslaught of General Pablo Morillo, called The Pacifier. The supreme command of the patriots had been eliminated by the simple formula of hanging every man who could read and write.

  Of all the generation of enlightened Americans who sowed the seeds of independence from Mexico to Rio de la Plata, he was the most convinced, the most tenacious, the most farseeing, the one who best reconciled the ingenuity of politics and the intuition of warfare. He lived in a rented two-bedroom house with his military aides, two adolescent former slaves who continued to serve him after their emancipation, and Jose Palacios. Going off at night, on foot and without an escort, to meet a stranger was a senseless risk and historical folly as well. But despite all the value he placed on his life and his cause, nothing tempted him more than the enigma of a beautiful woman.

  Miranda was waiting for him on horseback in the prearranged place, she too was alone, and he sat behind her on the horse as she rode along an invisible path. Lightning and thunder far out to sea threatened rain. A pack o
f dark-colored dogs, barking in the shadows, ran between the feet of the horse, but she kept them at bay with the soft words she whispered to them in English. They passed very close to the sugar plantation where Sir London Lyndsay was writing the memories that no one but him would remember, they forded a rocky stream, and when they were on the other side they entered a pine forest at the end of which lay an abandoned hermitage. There they dismounted, and she led him by the hand through the dark oratory to the ruined sacristy, dimly lit by a torch set in the wall and containing no other furniture but two rough-hewn logs. Only then did each see the other's face. He was in shirtsleeves, his hair was tied back at the nape of the neck in a pigtail, and Miranda found him more youthful and attractive than at the luncheon.

  He took no initiative, for his method of seduction did not follow a set pattern, but each case, above all the first move, was distinctive. "In the preambles to love no error can be rectified," he had said. On this occasion he must have been convinced that all obstacles had been surmounted ahead of time, since the decision had been hers.

  He was wrong. Along with her beauty Miranda possessed a dignity difficult to ignore, so that a fair amount of time went by before he realized he had to take the initiative on this occasion too. She had invited him to sit down, and just as they were to do fifteen years later in Honda, they faced each other, sitting so close on the rough-hewn trunks that their knees almost touched. He took her by the hands, pulled her toward him, and tried to kiss her. She allowed him to draw near until she felt the warmth of his breath, and then she moved her face away.

  "All in good time," she said.

  The same words cut off his many subsequent attempts. At midnight, when the rain began to filter in through the cracks in the roof, they were still sitting opposite each other, holding hands while he recited a poem he had recently been composing in his mind. The lines were metrical, well-rhymed royal octaves combining the flattery of love and the bluster of war. She was moved, and she mentioned three names in an effort to guess the author.

  "It's by a soldier," he said.

  "A fighting soldier or a salon soldier?" she asked.

  "Both," he said. "The greatest and most solitary soldier who ever lived."

  She remembered what she had said to her father after Mr. Hyslop's luncheon.

  "That can only be Bonaparte," she said.

  "Close," said the General, "but the moral difference is enormous, because the author of the poem did not allow himself to be crowned."

  As the years passed and news of him reached her, she would ask herself with growing amazement if he had been aware that his clever sally was the prefiguration of his own life. But that night she did not even suspect it, involved as she was in the almost impossible task of holding him off without offending him, of not giving in to the advances that grew more pressing as dawn approached. She went as far as allowing him a few casual kisses, but nothing more.

  "All in good time," she said to him.

  "At three o'clock this afternoon I am leaving forever on the packet boat to Haiti," he said.

  She shattered his cunning with a charming laugh.

  "In the first place, the packet boat doesn't leave until Friday," she said. "And besides, the cake you ordered yesterday from Senora Turner has to be brought to your supper tonight with the woman who hates me most in this world."

  The woman who hated her most in this world was named Julia Cobier, a beautiful and wealthy Dominican who was also an exile in Jamaica and in whose house, they said, he had spent more than one night. That evening just the two of them were going to celebrate her birthday.

  "You're better informed than my spies," he said.

  "And why not assume instead that I am one of your spies?" she said.

  He did not understand her remark until six o'clock that morning, when he returned to his house and found the body of his friend Felix Amestoy, who had bled to death in the hammock where he would have been lying if it had not been for the counterfeit tryst. Sleep had overcome Amestoy as he waited for the General's return in order to give him an urgent message, and one of the former slaves, paid by the Spaniards, stabbed him eleven times in the belief he was the General. Miranda had learned of the planned assassination and could think of no more astute way to prevent it. He attempted to thank her in person, but she did not respond to his messages. Before leaving for Puerto Principe in a corsair's schooner, he sent Jose Palacios to her with the precious reliquary he had inherited from his mother, along with an unsigned note consisting of a single line:

  "I am condemned to a theatrical destiny."

  Miranda never forgot or understood that hermetic sentence of the young warrior who, in the years that followed, returned to his country with the help of General Alexandre Petion, President of the Free Republic of Haiti, crossed the Andes with a mounted troop of barefoot plainsmen, defeated the royalists at Boyaca Bridge, and for the second time and forever liberated New Granada, and then his native Venezuela, and at last the rugged southern territories all the way to their borders with the Empire of Brazil. She followed his career, above all through the tales of travelers who never wearied of recounting his exploits. When the independence of the former Spanish colonies was established, Miranda married an English surveyor who changed professions and settled in New Granada to plant Jamaican sugarcane in the Honda Valley, where she had been the day before when she heard that her old friend, the Kingston exile, was only three leagues from her house. But she reached the mines when the General had already started on his way back to Honda, and she had to ride another half day to catch up with him.

  She would not have recognized him on the street without the sideburns and mustache of his youth, with his white thinning hair and that look of final turmoil which gave her the terrifying impression she was talking to a dead man. Miranda had intended to raise her veil to speak with him once the danger of being recognized on the street was behind her, but she was held back by her horror that in her face he too would see the ravages of time. As soon as the preliminary courtesies were over, she went straight to the point:

  "I've come to ask you a favor."

  "I am at your service," he said.

  "The father of my five children is serving a long prison term for killing a man," she said.

  "With honor?"

  "In an open duel," she said, and hurried to explain: "Because of jealousy."

  "Unfounded, of course," he said.

  "No, founded," she said.

  But it was all in the past now, even him, and the only thing she asked for mercy's sake was that he exercise his power to put an end to her husband's imprisonment. All he could find to say was the truth:

  "I am ill and destitute, as you can see, but there is nothing in this world I wouldn't do for you."

  He had Captain Ibarra come in to take notes on the details of the case, and he promised to do everything in his waning power to obtain the pardon. That same night he exchanged ideas with Colonel Posada Gutierrez, in absolute confidence and with nothing in writing, but everything was held in abeyance until they knew what the new government would be like. He accompanied Miranda to the portico of the house, where an escort of six emancipated slaves was waiting for her, and he kissed her hand in farewell.

  "It was a happy night," she said.

  He could not resist the temptation:

  "This one or the other?"

  "Both," she said.

  She mounted a fresh horse, as handsome and well outfitted as a viceroy's, and she rode away at full gallop without a backward glance. He waited in the doorway until she was lost from view at the end of the street, but he was still seeing her in his dreams when Jose Palacios woke him at dawn for the start of their river journey.

  Seven years before, he had granted special rights to a German, Commodore Johann B. Elbers, to initiate steam navigation. He himself had traveled in one of the vessels from Barranca Nueva to Puerto Real by way of Ocana, and he had recognized it as a comfortable and safe form of transportation. Nevertheless, Commodore Elb
ers believed the business was not worth the effort if not backed by exclusive rights, and General Santander granted them without conditions when he occupied the presidency. Two years later, invested with absolute powers by the National Congress, the General broke the agreement with one of his prophetic statements: "If we leave the monopoly in the hands of the Germans, they will end up transferring it to the United States." Then he declared total freedom of river navigation throughout the country. And therefore when he attempted to obtain a steamship in the event he decided to make the journey, he encountered delays and circumlocutions that bore too close a resemblance to revenge, and when it was time to leave he had to settle for the traditional barges.

  Since five o'clock that morning the port had been full of people on horseback and on foot, recruited by the Governor in great haste from the nearby streets to simulate a send-off like those of other times. Numerous launches sailed around the docks, loaded with lighthearted women shouting provocations at the soldiers of the guard, who responded with obscene compliments. The General arrived at six with the official delegation. He had left the Governor's house on foot, walking at a very slow pace, his mouth covered by a handkerchief soaked in cologne.

  The day promised to be cloudy. The shops along the commercial street had been open since dawn, and some did business almost in the open air among the ruined shells of houses destroyed by an earthquake twenty years before. The General waved his handkerchief to those who greeted him from the windows, but they were the minority, because the majority watched him pass in silence, astounded by his deteriorated condition. He was in shirtsleeves, wearing his one pair of Wellington boots and a white straw hat. In the atrium of the church the priest had stood on a chair to deliver a speech, but General Carreno stopped him. The General walked up to him and shook his hand.