The General in His Labyrinth

  When they turned the corner one glance should have been enough for him to realize he would not survive the slope, but he began the ascent, clutching the arm of General Carreno, until it became apparent he could not go on. Then they tried to convince him to use the sedan chair that Posada Gutierrez had ready in the event he needed it.

  "No, General, I beg of you," he said in consternation. "Spare me this humiliation."

  He reached the top of the incline, more by strength of will than of body, and he still had enough energy to descend to the dock without help. There he said goodbye with a pleasant remark for each member of the official delegation. And he did so with a feigned smile so they would not notice that on this May 15 with its ineluctable roses he was starting out on his return trip to the void. As a memento he gave Governor Posada Gutierrez a gold medal engraved with his profile, thanked him for all his kindness in a voice strong enough to be heard by everyone, and embraced him with true emotion. Then he was in the stern of the barge waving goodbye with his hat, not looking at anyone in the clusters of people making their farewells from the shore, not seeing the disorder of the launches around the barges or the naked children swimming like shad under the water. He continued to wave the hat toward a fixed point, with a distant expression on his face, until all that could be seen was the stump of the church tower rising above the ruined walls. Then he went inside the shelter on the barge, sat on the hammock, and stretched his legs so that Jose Palacios could help him take off his boots.

  "Now we'll see if they really believe we've gone," he said.

  The flotilla was composed of eight barges of varying sizes, and a special barge for him and his entourage, with a helmsman in the stern and eight oarsmen who propelled it with poles made of guaiacum wood. Unlike ordinary barges, with a cargo shed of palm in the center, on this one they had set up a canvas tent so he could hang his hammock in the shade, lined it on the inside with printed cotton cloth and roofed it with rush matting, and cut four windows to increase the ventilation and light. It was furnished with a small table for writing or playing cards, a bookcase, and an earthen water jar with a stone filter. The man responsible for the flotilla, selected from among the best on the river, was Casildo Santos, a former captain in the battalion of the Marksmen of the Guard who had a voice like thunder, a pirate's patch over his left eye, and a somewhat undaunted notion of his authority.

  May was the first of the good months for Commodore Elbers' ships, but the good months were not the best ones for barges. The mortal heat, the biblical storms, the treacherous currents, the menace of wild animals and predatory insects at night, all seemed to conspire against the comfort of the passengers. An additional torment for someone made sensitive by ill health was the pestilential stink of the strips of salted meat and smoked fish that had been hung by mistake on the overhead beams of the presidential barge, which he ordered removed as soon as he noticed them when he came on board. Having learned in this way that the General could not bear even the odor of food, Captain Santos had the provisioning barge with its pens of live chickens and pigs moved to last place in the flotilla, and from the very first day of navigation, when the General devoured two plates of cornmeal mush with great delight, it was established he would not eat anything else during the voyage.

  "This seems to have been prepared by the magical hand of Fernanda the Seventh," he said.

  And it was. His personal cook for the last few years, the Quitena Fernanda Barriga, whom he called Fernanda the Seventh when she obliged him to eat something he did not like, was on board without his knowledge. She was an imperturbable, fat, sharp-tongued Indian whose greatest virtue was not good seasoning in the kitchen but an instinct for pleasing the General at the table. He had resolved that she would stay in Santa Fe de Bogota with Manuela Saenz, who made her part of her domestic staff, but in Guaduas General Carreno sent for her with great urgency after Jose Palacios announced to him in alarm that the General had not eaten a full meal since the eve of his departure. She had arrived in Honda in the early hours of the morning, and they hid her on the provisioning barge to wait for the right moment to make her appearance. This presented itself sooner than expected because of the pleasure the General felt when he ate the cornmeal mush, his favorite food since his health began to decline.

  The first day of navigation might have been the last. Night fell at two o'clock in the afternoon, the water raged, thunder and lightning shook the earth, and the oarsmen seemed incapable of keeping the boats from breaking apart against the cliffs. From his tent the General observed the rescue operation directed at the top of his lungs by Captain Santos, whose naval ingenuity did not-seem adequate to this kind of emergency. He observed first with curiosity and then with indomitable apprehension, and at the culminating moment of danger he realized that the Captain had given the wrong order. Allowing himself to be carried along by instinct, he made his way through the wind and the rain, and at the very edge of the abyss he countermanded the Captain's order.

  "Not that way!" he shouted. "To the right, the right, damn it!"

  The oarsmen responded to the shattered voice still full of an irresistible authority, and without realizing it he took over command until the crisis had passed. Jose Palacios hurried to cover him with a blanket. Wilson and Ibarra held him upright where he stood. Captain Santos moved to one side, conscious once again of having confused port and starboard, and waited with a soldier's humility until the General looked around for him and found him with a wavering glance.

  "You'll forgive me, Captain," he said to him.

  But he was not at peace with himself. That night, around the fires they lit on the wide beach where they pulled ashore for the first time to sleep, he told stories of memorable naval disasters. He told about his brother Juan Vicente, Fernando's father, who drowned in a shipwreck on his return from Washington, where he had purchased a shipment of arms and ammunition for the First Republic. He told about almost suffering the same fate when his horse died between his legs as he was crossing the swollen waters of the Arauca and he was pulled along head over heels with his boot caught in the stirrup until his guide managed to cut the straps. He told about finding a capsized boat in the rapids of the Orinoco on his way to Angostura, soon after he had assured the independence of New Granada, and seeing an officer he did not know swimming to shore. He was told it was General Sucre. He replied in indignation: "There is no General Sucre." But in fact it was Antonio Jose de Sucre, who had been promoted a short while before to the rank of general of the liberating army, and with whom he had maintained an intimate friendship ever since.

  "I knew about that meeting," said General Carreno, "but not about the shipwreck."

  "I may be confusing it with Sucre's first shipwreck, when he escaped from Cartagena with Morillo in pursuit and stayed afloat God knows how for almost twenty-four hours," he said. And he added, not quite to the point: "What I'm trying to do is to make Captain Santos understand somehow my impertinence this afternoon."

  In the early hours of the morning, when everyone was sleeping, the entire jungle shuddered to an unaccompanied song that could only come straight from the soul. The General bolted upright in the hammock. "It's Iturbide," murmured Jose Palacios in the half-light. No sooner had he spoken than a brutal commanding voice interrupted the song.

  Agustin de Iturbide was the oldest son of a Mexican general in the wars for independence who had proclaimed himself Emperor of his country but took over a year to reach office. The General had felt a distinct affection for him from the first time he saw him, standing at attention, trembling, unable to control the shaking of his hands at finding himself face-to-face with the idol of his youth. He was twenty-two years old at the time. Before he was seventeen his father had been shot in a dusty, hot village in the Mexican provinces a few hours after returning from exile unaware he had been tried in absentia and condemned to death for high treason.

  Three things affected the General from the very beginning. One was that Agustin had the watch, made of gold and precious
gems, sent to him by his father as he stood at the wall where they shot him, which he wore on a chain around his neck so that no one could doubt how much he honored him. Another was the candor with which he told him that his father, dressed in rags so he would not be recognized by the guards at the port, had been betrayed by the elegance with which he rode a horse. The third was how he sang.

  The Mexican government had placed every kind of obstacle in the way of his joining the Army of Colombia, convinced that his training in the arts of war was part of a monarchist conspiracy, supported by the General, to crown him Emperor of Mexico with the pretender's rights of a hereditary prince. The General risked a serious diplomatic incident, not only by inducting young Agustin with his military titles but by making him his aide-de-camp. Agustin was worthy of his confidence, although he never enjoyed a day of happiness and only the habit of singing allowed him to survive his precarious position.

  And therefore when someone silenced him in the jungles of the Magdalena the General, wrapped in a blanket, got up from the hammock, crossed the camp, lit by the fires of the guards, and went out to join him. He found him sitting on the bank watching the river go by.

  "Continue singing, Captain," he said.

  He sat next to him, and when he knew the words of the song he accompanied him in his thin voice. He had never heard anyone sing with so much love, and he could not remember anyone so sad who could still produce so much happiness around him. With Fernando and Andres, who had been his classmates at the military school in Georgetown, Iturbide had formed a trio that brought a youthful air to the General's surroundings, so impoverished by the barrenness typical of barracks.

  Agustin and the General continued singing until the clamor of the jungle animals startled the alligators sleeping on the shore, and the very heart of the water thrashed as if in cataclysm. The General remained seated on the ground, stunned by the awesome awakening of all of nature, until a ribbon of orange appeared on the horizon and it was light. Then he leaned on Iturbide's shoulder in order to stand up.

  "Thank you, Captain," he said to him. "With ten men singing like you, we could save the world."

  "Ah, General," sighed Iturbide. "What I wouldn't give if my mother could hear you say that."

  On the second day of the voyage they saw well-kept haciendas with blue meadowlands and handsome horses running free, but then the jungle began, and everything became contiguous and unchanging. Earlier they had started to pass rafts made of enormous tree trunks that the woodcutters who lived on the riverbanks were taking to Cartagena de Indias to sell. They were so slow they seemed unmoving in the current, and entire families with their children and animals traveled on them with only the meager protection from the sun provided by simple lean-tos made of palm. At some bends in the jungle they could already see the first devastation caused by the steamship crews in order to feed the boilers.

  "The fish will have to learn to walk on land because the water will disappear," he said.

  The heat grew intolerable during the day and the raucous screams of the monkeys and birds became maddening, but the nights were silent and cool. On the broad beaches the alligators lay motionless for hours on end, their jaws open to catch butterflies. Next to the deserted settlements they could see corn plantings, and skeletal dogs that barked as the vessels passed by, and even in the uninhabited wilds there were tapir traps, and fishing nets drying in the sun, but there was no sign of any human being.

  Idleness was painful after so many years of wars, bitter governments, and trivial loves. The little life with which the General began the day was spent meditating in the hammock. His immediate reply to President Caycedo had brought his correspondence up-to-date, but he passed the time dictating inconsequential letters. During the first few days Fernando finished reading aloud the gossip-laden chronicles of Lima, and could not interest him in anything else.

  It was the last book he read in its entirety. He had been a reader of imperturbable voracity during the respites after battles and the rests after love, but a reader without order or method. He read at any hour, in whatever light was available, sometimes strolling under the trees, sometimes on horseback under the equatorial sun, sometimes in dim coaches rattling over cobbled pavements, sometimes swaying in the hammock as he dictated a letter. A bookseller in Lima had been surprised at the abundance and variety of works he selected from a general catalogue that listed everything from Greek philosophers to a treatise on chiromancy. In his youth he read the Romantics under the influence of his tutor, Simon Rodriguez, and he continued to devour them as if he were reading himself and his own idealistic, intense temperament. They were impassioned readings that marked him for the rest of his life. In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times. The bookcases in the various houses he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.

  Even before his eyes began to fail he had his secretaries read to him, and then he read no other way because of the annoyance that eyeglasses caused him. But his interest in what he read was decreasing at the same time, and as always he attributed this to a cause beyond his control.

  "The fact is there are fewer and fewer good books," he would say.

  Jose Palacios was the only one who showed no signs of boredom in the torpor of the voyage, and the heat and discomfort in no way affected his elegant manners and dress or his meticulous service. He was six years younger than the General, in whose house he had been born a slave through the misadventure of an African woman and a Spaniard, from whom he had inherited his carrot-red hair, the freckles on his face and hands, and his light-blue eyes. In contrast to his natural sobriety, he owned the most complete and expensive wardrobe in the entire entourage. He had spent his entire life with the General--his two exiles, his campaigns from beginning to end, and all his battles in the front line--and always as a civilian, for he never acknowledged his right to wear a military uniform.

  The worst part of the voyage was forced immobility. One afternoon the General was so desperate with pacing the narrow confines of the canvas tent that he had the boat stop so he could take a walk. In the hardened mud they saw tracks that seemed to be those of a bird as large as an ostrich and at least as heavy as an ox, but this seemed normal to the oarsmen, who said there were men roaming that desolate place who were as big as ceiba trees and had the crests and claws of roosters. He scoffed at the legend, as he scoffed at everything that had the slightest glimmer of the supernatural, but his walk took longer than expected and they had to make camp against the judgment of the captain and even his military aides, who considered the place dangerous and unhealthy. He spent a sleepless night, tortured by the heat and the clouds of mosquitoes that seemed to fly through the suffocating nets, unsettled by the fearful roars of a puma that kept them on the alert all night. At about two o'clock in the morning he went to chat with the groups standing watch around the bonfires. Only at dawn, as he contemplated the vast swamps gilded by the rising sun, did he renounce the dream that had kept him awake.

  "All right," he said, "we'll have to leave without seeing our friends with the rooster claws."

  Just as they weighed anchor a filthy, emaciated dog, suffering from mange and a paralyzed paw, leaped onto the barge. The General's two dogs attacked him, but the invalid defended himself with suicidal ferocity and refused to surrender even when he was covered with blood and his throat had been torn open. The General gave orders to keep him, and Jose Palacios took charge of him, as he had done so m
any times with so many other stray dogs.

  That same day they rescued a German who had been abandoned on an island of sand for beating one of his oarsmen. When he came on board he represented himself as an astronomer and a botanist, but in conversation it became evident he knew nothing about either science. On the other hand, he had seen with his own eyes the men with rooster claws, and he was determined to capture one alive, put it in a cage, and exhibit it in Europe as a phenomenon comparable only to the Spider Woman of the Americas, who had caused such a sensation in the ports of Andalusia a century before.

  "Take me instead," the General said to him. "I assure you you'll earn more money showing me in a cage as the biggest damn fool in history."

  At first he had thought him an agreeable charlatan, but that changed when the German began to tell indecent jokes about the shameless pederasty of Baron Alexander von Humboldt. "We should leave him on the beach again," he said to Jose Palacios. In the afternoon they came across the mail launch sailing upstream, and the General used all his charm to have the mail agent open the sacks of official correspondence and give him his letters. And then he asked him to please take the German to the port of Nare, and the agent agreed even though the launch was overloaded. That night, while Fernando was reading the letters to him, the General growled:

  "That motherfucker isn't worth a single hair on Humboldt's head."

  He had been thinking about the Baron even before they rescued the German, for he could not imagine how he had survived in that untamed wild. He had met him during his years in Paris, after Humboldt's return from his trip through the equinoctial countries, and he had been as astonished by the splendor of his beauty, the likes of which he had never seen in any woman, as by his intelligence and erudition. On the other hand, what he had found least convincing was the Baron's certainty that the Spanish colonies in America were ripe for independence. He had said as much without a tremor in his voice, at a time when the thought had not occurred to the General even as an idle Sunday fantasy.