The General in His Labyrinth Read online

  "Things must be very bad," he said, "and getting even worse for me if this could happen only a block from here and they could make me think it was a fiesta."

  The truth was that even his most intimate friends did not believe he was abandoning either power or the country. The city was too small and his own people too punctilious not to know the two great flaws in his dubious departure: he did not have enough money to go anywhere with such a large entourage, and having been President of the Republic, he could not leave the country before a year had passed without the permission of the government, and he had not even had the guile to request it. The order to pack, which he gave in an obvious manner so that anyone who wanted to could hear it, was not taken as decisive proof even by Jose Palacios, for on other occasions he had gone to the extreme of leaving a house empty in order to feign his departure, and it had always been a clever political maneuver. His military aides felt that the symptoms of disillusionment had been too evident during the last year. Nevertheless, the same thing had occurred before, and when they least expected it they had seen him awaken with new spirit and take up again the thread of his life with more enthusiasm than ever. Jose Palacios, who always followed these unpredictable changes at close range, said it in his own way: "Only my master knows what my master is thinking."

  His repeated renunciations of power had been incorporated into popular song, beginning with the first one, an ambiguous statement in the very speech with which he had assumed the presidency: "My first day of peace will be my last one in power." In the years that followed, his renunciations were reiterated so many times, and in such dissimilar circumstances, that no one ever knew again which to believe. The most sensational of all had occurred two years earlier, on the night of September 25, when he escaped unharmed from an attempt to assassinate him right in the bedroom of Government House. The congressional delegation that visited him at dawn, after he had spent six hours under a bridge, exposed to the weather, found him wrapped in a woolen blanket with his feet in a basin of hot water, but not as shaken by fever as by disillusion. He announced that the conspiracy would not be investigated, that no one would be prosecuted, and that the Congress designated for the coming year would meet without delay to elect another President of the Republic.

  "After that," he concluded, "I will leave Colombia forever."

  Nevertheless, the investigation took place, the guilty were judged with an iron hand, and fourteen were shot in the main square. The Constituent Congress of January 2 did not meet for another sixteen months, and no one spoke again of his resignation. But during that time there was no foreign visitor, or chance companion, or casual acquaintance, to whom he did not say: "I will go where I am wanted."

  The public announcements of his fatal disease were also not taken as valid evidence of his departure. No one doubted he was ill. On the contrary, since his last return from the southern wars everyone who had seen him pass beneath the floral arches was struck by the astounding idea that he had returned only to die. Instead of Palomo Blanco, his historic horse, he came back riding a poor bald mule with trappings of straw, his hair had turned gray and his forehead was furrowed by passing storm clouds, and he wore a dirty tunic with a torn sleeve. The glory had left his body. At the gloomy reception held for him that night at Government House he was morose and uncommunicative, and no one ever knew if it was political perversity or simple distraction that made him greet one of his ministers by another's name.

  Not even his moribund appearance was enough to make anyone believe he was leaving--for six years they had said he was dying, and still he preserved intact his desire to rule. The first report had been brought by a British naval officer who chanced to see him in the Pativilca Desert north of Lima at the height of the war for the liberation of the south. He found him lying on the floor of a miserable hut that served as an improvised headquarters, wrapped in a barracan cloak, with a rag tied around his head because he could not bear the cold in his bones during the hellish noonday heat, and too weak even to chase away the hens pecking the ground around him. After an awkward conversation interrupted by outbursts of dementia, he said goodbye to his visitor with dramatic pathos:

  "Go and tell the world how you saw me die covered with chicken shit on these inhospitable sands."

  They said his illness was a kind of madness caused by the mercurial desert sun. Then they said he was dying in Guayaquil, and later in Quito, of a gastric fever whose most alarming symptom was lack of interest in the world and absolute spiritual calm. No one ever learned the scientific basis for these reports, for he had always been opposed to medical science, and he diagnosed and treated himself according to Donostierre's La medecine a votre maniere, a French manual of home remedies that Jose Palacios carried wherever he went as an oracle for understanding and curing any disturbance of body or soul.

  In any case, there had never been a death agony more fruitful than his. For while they thought he was dying in Pativilca he crossed the Andean peaks again, conquered at Junin, completed the liberation of all of Spanish America with the final victory at Ayacucho, created the Republic of Bolivia, and was happier in Lima and more intoxicated with glory than he had ever been before or would ever be again. As a consequence, the repeated announcements that he at last was leaving power and country because of illness, and the formal public ceremonies that seemed to confirm them, were no more than idle repetitions of a drama too often seen to be believed.

  A few days after his return, at the end of a bitter meeting of the Council of State, he took Field Marshal Antonio Jose de Sucre by the arm. "Stay with me," he said. He led him to his private office, where he received only a select few, and he almost forced him to sit in his personal armchair.

  "That place is more yours now than mine," he said.

  The Field Marshal of Ayacucho, his intimate friend, was well aware of the state of the nation, but the General gave him a detailed accounting before he came to the point. In a few days the Constituent Congress would meet to elect the President of the Republic and approve a new constitution in a belated effort to save the golden dream of continental unity. Peru, dominated by a reactionary aristocracy, seemed irretrievable. General Andres de Santa Cruz was leading Bolivia by the nose down a path of his own making. Venezuela, under the imperious rule of General Jose Antonio Paez, had just proclaimed its autonomy. General Juan Jose Flores, Prefect General in the south, had united Guayaquil and Quito to create the independent Republic of Ecuador. The Republic of Colombia, the embryo of an immense, unified nation, had been reduced to the size of the former Viceregency of New Granada. Sixteen million Americans who had just begun their life of freedom were at the mercy of local tyrants.

  "In short," the General concluded, "everything we created with our hands is being trampled on by others."

  "It's destiny's joke," said Field Marshal Sucre. "It seems we planted the ideal of independence so deep that now these countries are trying to win their independence from each other."

  The General's response was spirited.

  "Don't repeat the enemy's vile remarks," he said, "even when they're as accurate as that one."

  Field Marshal Sucre apologized. He was intelligent, methodical, shy, and superstitious, and he had a sweetness in his face that old smallpox scars could not diminish. The General, who loved him so well, had said of him that he feigned a modesty he did not possess. He was a hero at Pichincha, Tumusla, and Tarqui, and not long after his twenty-ninth birthday he had commanded the glorious battle of Ayacucho, which destroyed the last Spanish stronghold in South America. But more than for these achievements he was notable for the goodness of his heart in victory and for his talent as a statesman. At that moment he had renounced his offices, used no military markings of any kind, and wore a black wool greatcoat that reached down to his ankles and always had its collar turned up to protect him against the stabbing glacial winds from the nearby hills. His only involvement with the nation, and he desired it to be his last, was to participate in the Constituent Congress as a deputy from Qu
ito. He was thirty-five years old, as healthy as a rock, and mad with love for Dona Mariana Carcelen, the Marquise of Solanda, a beautiful and vivacious Quitena just out of adolescence whom he had married by proxy two years earlier and with whom he had a six-month-old daughter.

  The General could not imagine anyone better qualified to succeed him as President of the Republic. He knew he was five years too young for the office, according to a constitutional limitation imposed by General Rafael Urdaneta in order to block Sucre's way. Nevertheless, the General was taking secret steps to amend the amendment.

  "Accept," he said to him, "and I will stay on as Generalissimo, circling the government like a bull round a herd of cows."

  His appearance was feeble but his determination was powerful. Nevertheless, the Field Marshal had known for some time that the General's seat would never be his. A short while before, when the possibility of becoming president was first suggested to him, he had said he would never govern a nation whose structure and future direction were growing more and more hazardous. In his opinion, the first step toward correction was to distance the military from power, and he wanted to propose to the Congress that no general could become president for the next four years, perhaps with the intention of blocking Urdaneta's way. But the strongest opponents of this amendment would be the strongest men of all: the generals themselves.

  "I am too tired to work without a compass," said Sucre. "Besides, Your Excellency knows as well as I do that what will be needed here is not a president but a breaker of insurrections."

  He would attend the Constituent Congress, of course, and he would even accept the honor of presiding if it was offered to him. But nothing more. Fourteen years of wars had taught him there was no greater victory than being alive. The presidency of Bolivia, that vast, unexplored country which he had founded and governed with a wise hand, had taught him the capriciousness of power. The wisdom of his heart had taught him the vanity of glory. "And therefore no, Excellency," he concluded. On June 13, the Feast of Saint Anthony, he would be in Quito with his wife and daughter to celebrate with them not only that saint's day but all the others the future might hold in store for him. His determination to live for them, and only for them, in the joy of love, had been made this past Christmas.

  "It is all I ask of life," he said.

  The General was livid. "I thought nothing could surprise me anymore," he said. And he looked into his eyes.

  "Is this your last word?"

  "The next to last," said Sucre. "My last word is my eternal gratitude for all Your Excellency's kindness."

  The General slapped his own thigh to wake himself out of an irredeemable dream.

  "Good," he said. "You have just made the last decision of my life for me."

  That night he composed his resignation under the demoralizing effect of an emetic prescribed by a chance physician to calm his biliousness. On January 20 he opened the Constituent Congress with a farewell address in which he praised its president, Field Marshal Sucre, as the worthiest of generals. The praise drew an ovation from the Congress, but a deputy who was near Urdaneta whispered in his ear: "That means there's a general worthier than you." The General's remark and the deputy's malice were like two burning nails in the heart of General Rafael Urdaneta.

  And with reason. Even if Urdaneta did not enjoy Sucre's immense military achievements or his great powers to charm, there was no reason to think he was any less worthy. His presence of mind and his constancy had been extolled by the General himself, his fidelity and his love for him had been proved many times over, and he was one of the few men in this world who dared tell him to his face the truths he was afraid to hear. Conscious of his mistake, the General tried to make amends in the galley proofs, and in his own hand he changed "the worthiest of generals" to read "one of the worthiest." The correction did not mitigate Urdaneta's rancor.

  Days later, at a meeting between the General and loyal deputies, Urdaneta accused him of pretending to leave while secretly trying to be reelected. Three years earlier General Jose Antonio Paez had seized power in the Department of Venezuela in a first attempt at separation from Colombia. The General went to Caracas and effected a reconciliation with Paez in a public embrace amid hymns of jubilation and ringing bells, and he created a special made-to-measure regime for Paez that allowed him to rule however he pleased. "That's where the disaster began," said Urdaneta. For the accommodation had not only led to poisoned relations with the New Granadans but also infected them with the germ of separatism. Now, Urdaneta concluded, the greatest service the General could render the nation would be to renounce without delay the habit of command and leave the country. The General replied with comparable vehemence. But Urdaneta was an upright man who spoke with skill and passion, and he left everyone with the impression that they had witnessed the ruin of a deep, long-standing friendship.

  The General repeated his resignation and designated Don Domingo Caycedo as Interim President until Congress elected a permanent leader. On March I he left Government House by the service entrance in order to avoid the guests who were toasting his successor with champagne, and he drove in a borrowed carriage to Fucha Manor, an idyllic retreat on the outskirts of the city which the provisional President had lent to him. The simple knowledge that he was no more than an ordinary citizen intensified the devastating effects of the emetic. He was half awake when he asked Jose Palacios to prepare the materials he would need to write his memoirs. Jose Palacios brought him ink and enough paper for forty years of memories, and he advised Fernando, the General's nephew and secretary, so that he would be ready to offer his services on the following Monday at four o'clock in the morning, which was the General's best time for thinking, with all his rancor fresh and raw. According to what he had often told his nephew, he wanted to begin with his oldest memory, a dream he had on the Hacienda San Mateo, in Venezuela, not long after his third birthday. He dreamed that a black mule with gold teeth had come inside and gone through the house from the principal reception room to the pantries, eating without haste everything in its path while the family and slaves were taking their siestas, until at last it had eaten the curtains, the rugs, the lamps, the vases, the table service and linen in the dining room, the saints in the altars, the wardrobes and chests with all their contents, the pots in the kitchens, the doors and windows with their hinges and bolts, and all the furniture from the portico to the bedrooms, and the only thing left intact was the oval of his mother's dressing table mirror, floating in its own space.

  But he felt so content in the house at Fucha, and the air was so soft under a sky of hurrying clouds, that he did not mention his memoirs again but used the dawns to walk the fragrant paths of the savanna. Those who visited him in the days that followed had the impression he had recuperated, and the officers above all, his most loyal friends, urged him to remain in the presidency even if it was by military coup. He discouraged them with the argument that power by force was unworthy of his glory, but he did not seem to reject altogether the hope of being confirmed by a legitimate decision of Congress. Jose Palacios repeated: "Only my master knows what my master is thinking."

  Manuela continued to live a few steps from San Carlos Palace, the presidential residence, with her ear tuned to the talk in the streets. She came to Fucha two or three times a week, more often if she had urgent news, bringing marzipan and sweets fresh from the convents, and bars of chocolate with cinnamon for their four o'clock tea. She almost never brought the newspapers, because the General had become so susceptible to criticism that any trivial misgiving could unhinge him. On the other hand, she reported intrigues in infinite detail, the betrayals in the salons and the prognostications of the rumor mills, and he had to listen to these with his guts in a knot even when they were critical of him, because she was the only person permitted to tell him the truth. When they did not have a great deal to say to each other they reviewed his correspondence, or she read to him, or they played cards with the aides-de-camp, but they always had lunch alone.

 
; They had met in Quito eight years before at a gala ball to celebrate the liberation, when she was still the wife of Dr. James Thorne, an English gentleman who had become established among the aristocrats of Lima during the final days of the viceregency. In addition to being the last woman with whom the General maintained a long-term liaison after the death of his wife, twenty-seven years earlier, she was also his confidante, the guardian of his archives, his most impassioned reader, and a member of his staff with the rank of colonel. The days were long past when she had been ready to bite off his ear during a jealous quarrel, but their most trivial conversations still tended to end with the explosions of hatred and the tender reconciliations of a great love affair. Manuela did not sleep at the manor house. She left early enough so that darkness would not take her by surprise en route, above all during that season of brief twilights.