The General in His Labyrinth Read online

  In contrast to what had occurred at La Magdalena Manor in Lima, where he had to invent pretexts for keeping her at a distance while he took his pleasure with ladies who were highborn and with others who were less so, at Fucha Manor he showed signs of not being able to live without her. He would watch the road she had to travel, he plagued Jose Palacios, asking him the time every few seconds, requesting that he change the placement of his armchair, that he stir up the fire, that he put it out, that he light it again, and he was impatient and ill-humored until he saw her coach appear from behind the hills and light up his life. But he showed signs of the same agitation when her visit lasted longer than expected. When it was time for siesta they would get into bed without closing the door, without undressing, without sleeping, and more than once they made the mistake of attempting one final lovemaking, for he refused to admit he no longer had enough bodily substance to gratify her soul.

  During this time his tenacious insomnia showed signs of disruption. He would fall asleep at any hour, in the middle of a sentence while dictating a letter, or during a card game, and even he was not really certain if they were sudden bursts of sleep or brief fainting spells, but as soon as he lay down he felt overcome by a crisis of lucidity. He would just slip into a mire of half-sleep at daybreak, until he was awakened again by the wind of peace in the trees. Then he did not resist the temptation to put off dictating his memoirs for yet another morning in order to take a solitary walk that sometimes lasted until lunchtime.

  He would go without an escort, without the two faithful dogs that had accompanied him even on the battlefield, without any of his epic horses, which had already been sold to the battalion of hussars to increase his travel funds. He would walk to the nearby river over the blanket of decayed leaves on the interminable tree-lined paths, protected from the icy savanna winds by the vicuna poncho, the boots lined with raw wool, and the green silk cap he used to wear only for sleeping. He would sit for a long while to meditate in the shade of the weeping willows, facing the narrow bridge made of loose planks, absorbed in the river currents he had once compared to the destiny of men, in a rhetorical simile worthy of his childhood tutor, Don Simon Rodriguez. One of his guards would follow him, unseen, until he returned soaked with dew and with a thread of breath almost too thin for him to climb the steps to the portico, haggard and dazed but with the eyes of a happy madman. He felt so content during those evasive walks that the hidden guards would hear him through the trees, singing the soldiers' songs he used to sing in the years of his legendary glories and his Homeric defeats. Those who knew him best asked themselves the reason for his high spirits when Manuela herself doubted he would be confirmed another time as President of the Republic by a Constituent Congress even he had described as admirable.

  On the day of the election, during his morning walk, he saw a greyhound without its owner chasing quail through the hedges. He called to it with a street-corner whistle, and the animal made an abrupt stop, looked for him with ears erect, and found him with his poncho almost dragging on the ground, his cap worthy of a Florentine pontiff, forsaken by God between the swift-moving clouds and the immense plain. It smelled him with painstaking care while he caressed its coat with his fingertips, but then the dog leaped away in a sudden rush, looked into his eyes with its golden eyes, growled with suspicion, and fled in fear. He followed along an unfamiliar path that ended in a poor suburb of muddy narrow streets and red-roofed adobe houses from whose patios rose the smell of milking. He heard the sudden shout:

  "Skinny Shanks!"

  He did not have time to dodge the cow manure that was hurled at him from a stable, smashed into the middle of his chest, and spattered his face. But it was the words more than the explosion of dung that woke him from the stupor in which he had lived since leaving the presidential residence. He knew the nickname the New Granadans had given him: it was the name of a madman famous for his theatrical uniforms. Even one of the senators who called themselves liberals had used the name in Congress in his absence, and only two men had stood up to protest. But he had never heard it in person. He began to wipe his face with the edge of the poncho, and had not yet finished when the unseen guard who was following him ran out from between the trees with his sword drawn to punish the insult. He turned on him in a burning flash of anger.

  "And what the hell are you doing here?" he asked.

  The officer snapped to attention.

  "I'm following orders, Excellency."

  "I'm not your excellency," he replied.

  He stripped him of his ranks and titles with so much rage that the officer considered himself fortunate that the General no longer had the strength for a more savage reprisal. Even Jose Palacios, who understood him so well, found it difficult to understand his severity.

  It was a disastrous day. He spent the morning walking around the house as distraught as when he was waiting for Manuela, but he concealed from no one that this time his longing was not for her but for news from the Congress. Minute by minute he attempted to calculate the detailed progress of the session. When Jose Palacios answered that it was ten o'clock, he said: "No matter how the demagogues want to go on braying, they must have begun voting by now." Then, after a long period of reflection, he wondered aloud: "Who can know what a man like Urdaneta is thinking?" Jose Palacios knew that the General knew, because Urdaneta was still proclaiming far and wide the cause and extent of his resentment. Once, as Jose Palacios happened to be walking past, the General asked in an offhand manner: "Whom do you think Sucre will vote for?" Jose Palacios knew as well as he that Field Marshal Sucre could not vote because he was on a congressional mission to Venezuela with the Bishop of Santa Marta, Monsignor Jose Maria Estevez, to negotiate the terms of that country's separation. And so he did not stop when he answered: "You know that better than anyone, Senor." The General smiled for the first time since he had returned from his abominable walk.

  Despite his erratic appetite he almost always sat at the table before eleven o'clock to eat a boiled egg with a glass of port, or to pick at a wedge of cheese, but that day he watched the road from the terrace while the others had lunch, and he was so absorbed not even Jose Palacios dared to disturb him. It was past three o'clock when he heard the sound of the mules' hooves before he saw Manuela's carriage coming over the hills, and he leaped from the chair. He ran to receive her, he opened the door to help her down, and from the moment he saw her face he knew. Don Joaquin Mosquera, the oldest son of an illustrious family from Popayan, had been elected President of the Republic by unanimous vote.

  His reaction was not so much anger or disillusion as astonishment, for he himself had suggested the name of Don Joaquin Mosquera to the Congress in the certainty he would not accept. He sank into deep thought, and he did not speak again until tea. "Not a single vote for me?" he asked. Not a single one. Nevertheless, the official delegation of devoted deputies who visited him later explained that his followers had agreed to make the vote unanimous so he would not appear to be the loser in a bitter contest. He was so irritated, he did not seem to appreciate the subtlety of that gallant maneuver. He thought, instead, it would have been worthier of his glory if they had accepted his resignation the first time he offered it.

  "The long and short of it is," he sighed, "that the demagogues have won again, and twice over."

  Nevertheless, he was very careful to hide his consternation until he said goodbye to them on the portico. But their coaches had not been lost from view when he was struck down by a crisis of coughing that kept the manor house in a state of alarm until nightfall. One of the members of the official delegation had said that the decision of the Congress had been so prudent it had saved the Republic. He ignored the remark, but that night, while Manuela was obliging him to drink a cup of broth, he said to her: "No congress ever saved a republic." Before going to bed he assembled his aides and servants, and with the solemnity that was customary in his dubious renunciations he announced:

  "Tomorrow I leave the country."

  It wa
s not tomorrow, but four days later. In the meantime he recovered his lost equanimity, dictated a farewell proclamation in which he did not betray the wounds to his heart, and returned to the city to prepare for the journey. General Pedro Alcantara Herran, Minister of the Army and Navy in the new government, brought him to his house on Calle La Ensenanza, not so much to offer hospitality as to protect him from the death threats that were becoming more and more alarming.

  Before leaving Santa Fe de Bogota he liquidated the little of value he still owned in order to increase his treasury. In addition to the horses, he sold a silver service dating back to the lavish days of Potosi, which was appraised at two thousand five hundred pesos by the Mint for the simple value of the metal, without taking into account the beauty of its workmanship or its historic importance. When the final reckoning was made, he had seventeen thousand six hundred pesos and sixty centavos in cash, a draft for eight thousand pesos drawn on the public treasury of Cartagena, a pension for life granted him by the Congress, and a little over six hundred ounces of gold distributed among various trunks. This was the woeful remnant of a personal fortune that on the day of his birth had been considered among the greatest in the Americas.

  On the morning of their departure, in the bags that Jose Palacios packed without haste while the General finished dressing, there were only two well-worn sets of underclothing, two changes of shirt, the battle tunic with a double row of buttons that were supposed to have been made from the gold of Atahualpa, the silk cap for sleeping, and a red hood that Field Marshal Sucre had brought him from Bolivia. His footwear consisted of his house slippers and the patent-leather boots he would be wearing. In his personal trunks Jose Palacios was carrying, along with the chest of medicines and a few other articles of value, Rousseau's Social Contract and The Art of War by the Italian general Raimundo Montecuccoli, two bibliographical treasures that had belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte and had been given to him by Sir Robert Wilson, the father of his aide-de-camp. There was so little that it all fit into a soldier's knapsack. When he saw it as he was about to go to the room where the official delegation was waiting, he said:

  "We never would have believed, my dear Jose, that so much glory could fit into a shoe."

  His seven pack mules, however, were carrying chests full of medals and gold tableware and numerous objects of a certain value, ten trunks of private papers, two of books he had read and at least five of clothing, and several chests with all manner of good and bad things that no one had the patience to tally. All of this, however, was not even a shadow of the baggage he had brought with him on his return from Lima three years earlier, when he was invested with triple power as President of Bolivia and Colombia and Dictator of Peru: a drove of pack animals carrying seventy-two trunks and over four hundred chests with countless objects whose value had not been established. On that occasion he had left in Quito more than six hundred books, which he never attempted to recover.

  It was almost six o'clock. The millenarian drizzle had stopped for a moment, but the world was still cloudy and cold, and the house, taken over by the troops, had begun to emit a foul barracks smell. The hussars and the grenadiers scrambled to their feet when they saw the taciturn General approaching from the end of the corridor, surrounded by his aides-de-camp and looking green in the light of dawn, his poncho thrown across his shoulder and his broad-brimmed hat making the shadows of his face even deeper. Following an old Andean superstition he covered his mouth with a handkerchief soaked in cologne as protection against harmful drafts caused by abrupt exposure to the weather. He did not wear any insignia of his rank, and there was no trace left of the immense authority he had once possessed, but the magic halo of power distinguished him from the noisy retinue of officers. He walked toward the drawing room at an unhurried pace along the corridor, lined with straw matting, that encircled the interior garden, indifferent to the soldiers of the guard who snapped to attention as he passed. Before entering the drawing room he tucked the handkerchief into his cuff, as only clerics did now, and handed his hat to one of the aides-de-camp.

  In addition to those who had kept watch in the house, other civilians and soldiers had been arriving since dawn. They were drinking coffee in scattered groups, and their somber clothing and hushed voices had rarefied the atmosphere with a mournful solemnity. The sudden sharp voice of a diplomat rose above the whispers:

  "This looks like a funeral."

  No sooner had he spoken than he sensed the cloud of cologne saturating the air in the room behind him. Then he turned, holding a cup of steaming coffee between his thumb and forefinger, and he was disturbed by the thought that the phantom who had just walked in might have heard his impertinence. But no: although the General's last visit to Europe had been twenty-four years earlier, when he was very young, his fond European memories were sharper than his resentment. And so the diplomat was the first he approached, in order to greet him with the extreme courtesy he believed the English deserved.

  "I hope there is not much fog this fall in Hyde Park," he said.

  The diplomat experienced a moment's hesitation, for in recent days he had heard that the General was going to three different places, and none of them was London. But he recovered in an instant.

  "We will try to have the sun shining night and day for Your Excellency," he said.

  The new President was not there, for the Congress had elected him in absentia and he would need more than a month to arrive from Popayan. In his stead was General Domingo Caycedo, the Vice-President-elect, of whom it had been said that any office in the Republic was too restrictive for him because he had the bearing and distinction of a king. The General greeted him with great deference and said in jest:

  "Do you know I don't have permission to leave the country?"

  Everyone greeted his statement with laughter, although everyone knew it was not a joke. General Caycedo promised he would send a valid passport to Honda by the next post.

  The official delegation was composed of the Archbishop of the city and other notable men and high-ranking officials with their wives. The civilians wore chaps and the military wore riding boots, for their intention was to accompany the illustrious exile for several leagues. The General kissed the Archbishop's ring and the ladies' hands, and shook the gentlemen's hands without effusiveness, an absolute master of well-bred ceremony but a total stranger to the kind favored in that ambiguous city, about which he had said on more than one occasion: "This isn't my theater." He greeted them all in turn as he walked through the room, and for each he had a phrase learned with all due deliberation in the manuals of etiquette, but he looked no one in the eye. His voice was metallic and cracked with fever, and his Caribbean accent, which so many years of travels and the tribulations of war had not softened, sounded even harsher compared to the lush diction of the Andeans.

  When he completed his greetings, the Interim President handed him a paper signed by numerous distinguished New Granadans expressing the nation's gratitude for so many years of service. In yet another tribute to local formality he pretended to read it before the silent company, for he could not have seen it without spectacles and unless the handwriting were larger. And yet when he pretended to have finished, he directed a few brief words of gratitude to the delegation, which were so appropriate to the occasion that no one could have said he had not read the document. Then he looked around the room, and without hiding a certain amount of concern, he asked:

  "Didn't Urdaneta come?"

  The Interim President informed him that General Rafael Urdaneta had left with the rebel troops in support of General Jose Laurencio Silva's precautionary mission. Then someone let his voice be heard above the others:

  "Sucre didn't come either."

  He could not ignore the malicious intention of that unsolicited report. His eyes, which had been dimmed and aloof until that moment, flashed with feverish intensity and he replied, not knowing to whom:

  "The Field Marshal of Ayacucho was not informed of the time of our departure, so as not to
interfere with his mission."

  It was apparent he did not know that Field Marshal Sucre had returned two days earlier from his failed mission to Venezuela, where he had not been allowed to enter his own country. No one had told him the General was leaving, perhaps because it had not occurred to anyone that he was not the first to know. Jose Palacios learned this at a difficult moment, and then he forgot it in the confusion of their final days. He did not discount, of course, the dreadful idea that Field Marshal Sucre might feel resentful at not being informed.

  In the adjoining dining room the table was laid with a splendid American breakfast: tamales in corn husks, blood sausage with rice, eggs scrambled in casserole, a rich variety of pastries on lace cloths, and pots of hot chocolate as thick as perfumed paste. The hosts had delayed breakfast in the event he agreed to preside over the table, although they knew that in the morning he took nothing but the infusion of poppies and gum arabic. In any case, the lady of the house fulfilled her obligations by inviting him to sit in the armchair reserved for him at the head of the table, but he declined the honor and addressed everyone with a formal smile.

  "My road is a long one," he said. "Enjoy your meal."

  He stood on tiptoe to take his leave of the Interim President, who responded with an enormous embrace that allowed everyone to see how small the General's body was, how forsaken and defenseless he looked when it was time for farewells. Then he shook all the gentlemen's hands again and kissed the ladies' hands. Someone attempted to detain him until the weather cleared, although both of them knew it would not clear for the rest of the century. Moreover, his desire to leave without delay was so evident that attempting to keep him seemed an impertinence. The master of the house walked with him to the stables through the invisible drizzle in the garden. He had tried to assist the General by holding his arm with his fingertips, as if it were made of glass, and he was amazed at the tension of the energy coursing beneath his skin like a secret torrent that bore no relationship to the impoverishment of his body. Representatives of the government, the diplomatic corps, and the armed forces, with mud up to their ankles and their cloaks soaked with rain, were waiting to accompany him on the first stage of his journey. No one was certain, however, who was there for the sake of friendship, who in order to protect him, and who to be sure that in fact he was leaving.