The General in His Labyrinth Read online

  Faced with this state of the world, the General tended to his insomnia by walking naked through the deserted rooms of the old hacienda mansion, which was transfigured by brilliant moonlight. Most of the horses that died the day before had been burned at a good distance from the house, but the stench of decay was still intolerable. The troops had not sung again after the death-ridden marches of the past week, and even he felt incapable of preventing the sentries from falling asleep with hunger. Then all at once, at the end of a gallery open to the vast blue plains, he saw Queen Maria Luisa sitting on the floor. A beautiful mulatta in the flower of her youth and with the profile of an idol, she was wrapped in a flower-embroidered shawl that reached down to her feet and was smoking a long cigar. The sight of him frightened her, and she made a cross with her index finger and thumb and pointed it in his direction.

  "Whether you come from God or the devil," she said, "what do you want?"

  "You," he said.

  He smiled, and she was to remember the flash of his teeth in the moonlight. He embraced her with all his strength, holding her so she could not move while he nibbled with soft kisses at her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks, her neck, until he had quieted her. Then he removed the shawl, and it took his breath away. She too was naked, for her grandmother, who slept in the same room, took her clothes to keep her from going out to smoke, not realizing that at dawn she would escape wrapped in the shawl. The General carried her to the hammock, giving her no respite from his soothing kisses, and she gave herself to him not out of desire or love but out of fear. She was a virgin. Only after she regained her courage did she say:

  "I'm a slave, sir."

  "Not anymore," he said. "Love has made you free."

  In the morning he bought her from the owner of the hacienda for one hundred pesos taken from his impoverished treasury and granted her unconditional freedom. Before he left he could not resist the temptation of presenting her with a public dilemma. He was in the back patio of the house with a group of officers who sat any way they could on the backs of pack animals, the only survivors of the slaughter. Another body of troops, under the command of Brigadier General Jose Antonio Paez, who had arrived the night before, was assembled to see them off.

  The General gave a brief farewell speech in which he underplayed the drama of the situation, and he was preparing to leave when he saw Queen Maria Luisa in her new condition as a free and well-wooed woman. She had just bathed, and under the Llano sky she looked beautiful and radiant, dressed all in starched white with the lace petticoats and skimpy blouse of a slavewoman. He asked her with good humor:

  "Are you staying or coming with us?"

  She answered with an enchanting smile:

  "I'm staying, sir."

  Unanimous laughter greeted her reply. The master of the house, a Spaniard who was an early convert to the cause of independence and an old acquaintance, was helpless with laughter as he tossed him the little leather purse with the hundred pesos. He caught it in midair.

  "Keep them for the cause, Excellency," the Spaniard said. "The girl is free in any case."

  General Jose Antonio Paez, whose faunlike expression harmonized with his shirt patched in many colors, burst into expansive laughter.

  "Now you see, General," he said. "This is what we get for acting like liberators."

  He assented to what they said and took his leave of everyone with a wide circle of his hand. Then he said a sportsmanlike goodbye to Queen Maria Luisa, and that was the last he heard of her. As far as Jose Palacios could remember, before a year of full moons had gone by, the General claimed he was reliving that night, without the miraculous appearance of Queen Maria Luisa, sad to say. And always on a night of defeat.

  At five o'clock, when Jose Palacios brought him his first tisane, he found him resting with his eyes open. But the General tried to stand up with such force that he almost fell on his face and suffered a severe attack of coughing. He sat on the hammock, holding his head in his hands and coughing until the crisis passed. Then he began to drink the steaming infusion, and his humor improved with the first sip.

  "I was dreaming about Cassandro all night," he said.

  It was his secret name for the New Granadan, General Francisco de Paula Santander, who had been his great friend at one time and his greatest gainsayer of all time, his chief of staff from the very beginning of the war and the man he appointed President of Colombia during the cruel campaigns for the liberation of Quito and Peru and the founding of Bolivia. More for reasons of historical necessity than of vocation, Santander was an effective and brave soldier, with a rare fondness for cruelty, but his civic virtues and his excellent academic training were the mainstays of his glory. He was without a doubt the second man in the movement for independence and the first in the legal codification of the Republic, on which he imprinted forever the stamp of his formalist, conservative spirit.

  On one of the many occasions when the General planned to resign, he had said to Santander that he was abandoning the presidency with confidence because "I am leaving you here, my other self, and perhaps my better self." He had never, either by reasoned intention or by force of circumstance, placed so much confidence in any man. It was he who distinguished Santander with the title The Man of Law. Nevertheless, the person who had merited all this had been living in exile in Paris for the past two years because of his unproved complicity in a plot to assassinate the General.

  This is what happened. On September 25, 1828, at the stroke of midnight, twelve civilians and twenty-six soldiers forced the great door of Government House in Santa Fe de Bogota, cut the throats of two of the President's bloodhounds, wounded several sentries, slashed the arm of Captain Andres Ibarra with a saber, shot to death the Scotsman Colonel William Fergusson, a member of the British Legion and an aide-de-camp to the President, who had called him as valiant as Caesar, and reached the presidential bedroom, shouting "Long live liberty!" and "Death to the tyrant!"

  The rebels would justify the attempt by referring to the extraordinary powers of obvious dictatorial intent that the General had assumed three months before in order to thwart the Santanderist victory at the Ocana Convention. The vice-presidency of the Republic, which Santander had occupied for seven years, was abolished. Santander told a friend about it in a sentence typical of his personal style: "I have had the pleasure of being buried under the ruins of the Constitution of 1821." He was then thirty-six years old. He had been named Plenipotentiary Minister to Washington but had postponed his departure several times, perhaps in anticipation of the conspiracy's success.

  The General and Manuela Saenz were just beginning a night of reconciliation. They had spent the weekend in the village of Soacha, two and a half leagues away, and had returned on Monday in separate coaches after a lovers' quarrel that was more virulent than usual because he remained deaf to her warnings of a plot to kill him, something everyone was talking about and only he refused to believe. She had not accepted the insistent messages he sent to her house that night from San Carlos Palace across the street, but at nine o'clock, after three very urgent messages, she put waterproof boots over her shoes, covered her head with a shawl, and crossed the street flooded by rain. She found him floating face up in the fragrant waters of the bath, unattended by Jose Palacios, and if she did not believe he was dead it was because she had often seen him meditating in that state of grace. He recognized her footsteps and spoke without opening his eyes.

  "There is going to be an insurrection," he said.

  Irony did not disguise her anger.

  "Congratulations," she said. "There could be ten, since you give such a cordial welcome to warnings."

  "I only believe in portents," he said.

  He permitted himself the joke because his chief of staff, who had already told the conspirators the password for the night so they could deceive the palace guard, had given him his word that the conspiracy had failed. And therefore he was in good humor as he rose from the tub.

  "Don't worry," he said. "It seems the
little fairies got cold feet."

  He was naked and she was half dressed, and they were just beginning their love play in bed when they heard the first shouts, the first shots, and the cannons thundering against loyal barracks. Manuela helped him to dress as quickly as possible, put her waterproof boots on his feet since the General had sent his only pair of boots to be polished, and helped him to escape out the balcony with a saber and a pistol but no protection against the eternal rain. As soon as he reached the street he pointed his cocked pistol at an approaching shadow: "Who goes there?" It was his steward returning home, grief-stricken by the news that they had killed his master. Resolved to share his fate to the end, Jose Palacios hid with him under Carmen Bridge in the brambles along the San Agustin River until loyal troops quelled the uprising.

  With the same shrewdness and courage she had already demonstrated during other historic emergencies, Manuela Saenz received the attackers who forced the bedroom door. They asked for the President, and she replied that he was in the council room. They asked why the door to the balcony was open on a wintry night, and she said she had opened it to see what the noises were in the street. They asked why the bed was warm, and she said she had lain down without undressing to wait for the President. As she played for time with her parsimonious replies, she puffed great clouds of smoke from the cheapest kind of wagon driver's cigar to cover the fresh scent of cologne that still lingered in the room.

  A tribunal presided over by General Rafael Urdaneta established that General Santander was the secret intelligence behind the conspiracy and condemned him to death. His enemies would say that the sentence was more than fair, not so much for Santander's culpability in the assassination attempt as for his cynicism in being the first to appear in the main square to embrace and congratulate the President, who sat on horseback in the drizzling rain, without a shirt and with his tunic ripped and soaked through, surrounded by the cheers of the troops and the common people who arrived en masse from the poor suburbs clamoring for the death of the assassins. "All the conspirators will be punished to some degree," the General said in a letter to Field Marshal Sucre. "Santander is the principal one, but also the most fortunate, because my generosity protects him." And in fact, exercising his absolute powers, he commuted the death sentence to exile in Paris. On the other hand, Admiral Jose Prudencio Padilla, imprisoned in Santa Fe de Bogota for a failed rebellion in Cartagena de Indias, was shot on insufficient evidence.

  Jose Palacios did not know when his master's dreams about General Santander were real and when they were imaginary. Once, in Guayaquil, he said he dreamed about Santander's holding an open book on his round belly, but instead of reading he tore out the pages and ate them one by one, taking great delight in chomping them with as much noise as if he were a goat. Another time, in Cucuta, he dreamed he saw him covered with cockroaches. Another time, on the country estate of Monserrate in Santa Fe de Bogota, he woke up screaming because he dreamed that while they were having lunch together General Santander plucked out his own eyeballs because they interfered with his eating and placed them on the table. And so at dawn near Guaduas, when the General said he had dreamed once again about Santander, Jose Palacios did not even ask for the plot of the dream but tried instead to console him with reality.

  "There's a whole ocean between him and us," he said.

  But the General cut him off with a sharp glance.

  "Not anymore," he said. "I'm certain that stupid bastard Joaquin Mosquera will let him come back."

  That thought had tormented him since his last return to the country, when his definitive renunciation of power presented itself as a question of honor. "I prefer exile or death to the dishonor of leaving my glory in the hands of the Academy of San Bartolome," he had said to Jose Palacios. Nevertheless, the antidote contained its own poison, for the closer he came to the final decision, the more certain he grew that as soon as he was gone, General Santander, the most eminent graduate of that den of quibbling lawyers, would be called home from exile.

  "That one's really a slippery bastard," he said.

  He had no trace of fever, and he felt so strong he asked Jose Palacios for pen and paper, put on his spectacles, and wrote six lines to Manuela Saenz in his own hand. This was bound to seem strange even to someone who was as accustomed as Jose Palacios to his impulsive actions, and could be understood only as a portent or an attack of unendurable inspiration. For it not only contradicted his decision on the previous Friday never to write another letter for the rest of his life, but it was also contrary to his custom of waking his secretaries at any hour to attend to back correspondence, or to dictate a proclamation, or to put in order the ideas that occurred to him in the ruminations of his insomnia. It seemed even stranger since the letter was of no apparent urgency, and he added only a rather cryptic sentence to his parting advice: "Be careful what you do, for if you're not, your ruination will be the ruination of us both." He wrote it in his slapdash way, as if he had given it no thought, and when he finished he continued to sway in his hammock, engrossed, holding the letter in his hand.

  "There is great power in the irresistible force of love," he sighed without warning. "Who said that?"

  "Nobody," said Jose Palacios.

  He did not know how to read or write, and he had refused to learn, with the simple argument that there was no greater wisdom than a donkey's. But on the other hand, he could remember any sentence he had ever heard, and he did not remember that one.

  "Then I said it myself," said the General, "but let's say it was Field Marshal Sucre."

  No one was better suited than Fernando for those times of crisis. He was the most willing and patient of the General's many clerks, although not the most brilliant, and he bore with stoicism the arbitrariness of his schedule or the irritability of his insomnia. The General would wake Fernando at any hour to have him read aloud from a dull book or take notes on urgent extemporizations, which ended in the trash the next morning. The General had fathered no children during his countless nights of love (although he said he had proofs he was not sterile), and on the death of his brother he had taken charge of Fernando. He had sent him with outstanding letters of introduction to the Military Academy at Georgetown, where General Lafayette expressed the sentiments of admiration and respect his uncle inspired in him. Later he attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He was not the successor the General perhaps had dreamed of, for academic subjects bored him, and he was delighted to exchange them for life in the open air and the sedentary arts of gardening. When he completed his studies the General called him back to Santa Fe de Bogota and soon discovered his virtues as a secretary, not only because of his beautiful handwriting and his command of spoken and written English, but also because he was unique in his ability to invent the kinds of devices used in serialized novels to keep the reader in suspense, and when he read aloud he would improvise audacious episodes to add spice to soporific paragraphs. Like everyone in the service of the General, Fernando had suffered his moment of misfortune, when he attributed to Cicero a sentence by Demosthenes that his uncle later cited in a speech. He was more severe with his nephew than with the others, since he was who he was, but he pardoned him before he had completed his punishment.

  Colonel Joaquin Posada Gutierrez, the governor of the province, had ridden out two days ahead of the traveling party, to announce their arrival in the towns where they would spend the night and to caution the authorities regarding the serious state of the General's health. But those who saw him arrive in Guaduas on Monday afternoon accepted as true the persistent rumor that the Governor's reports, and even the journey itself, were nothing more than a political ruse.

  The General was invincible once more. He rode into town on the main street, his shirt unbuttoned and a Gypsy bandanna tied around his head to absorb the perspiration, waving his hat amid the cheers and the fireworks and the church bell that drowned out the music, sitting on a nimble-footed mule that once and for all stripped the parade of any pretension to solemni
ty. The only house where the windows stayed closed was the nuns' academy, and in the afternoon the rumor would fly that they had forbidden the girls to participate in the welcome, but he advised those who told him the story not to believe convent gossip.

  On the previous night Jose Palacios had given the shirt the General wore when he sweat out his fever to an orderly for laundering. He in turn gave it to the soldiers who went down to the river at dawn to wash clothes, but when it was time to leave, no one knew anything about it. During the trip to Guaduas, and even while the fiesta was going on, Jose Palacios had succeeded in establishing that the innkeeper had taken the unwashed shirt so that the miracle-working Indian could demonstrate his powers. And when the General returned, Jose Palacios informed him of the innkeeper's breach of faith, reminding him that he had no shirts other than the one he was wearing. He took the news with a certain philosophical resignation.

  "Superstitions are harder to uproot than love," he said.

  "The strange thing is we haven't had a fever since last night," said Jose Palacios. "What if the witch doctor is a real magician?"

  He found no immediate reply, and he allowed himself to be carried away by deep reflection as he swayed in the hammock to the rhythm of his thoughts. "The truth is I haven't had another headache," he said. "My mouth doesn't taste bitter, and I don't feel as if I were about to fall off a tower." But in the end he slapped his knees and sat up with a resolute movement.

  "Don't put any more confusion in my head," he said.

  Two servants carried a large pot of boiling water with aromatic leaves into the bedroom, and Jose Palacios prepared the evening bath, confident the General would soon go to bed because of his weariness after a day of traveling. But the bath grew cold while he dictated a letter to Gabriel Camacho, the husband of his niece Valentina Palacios, and his agent in Caracas for the sale of the Aroa Mines, a copper deposit he had inherited from his parents. Even he did not seem to have a clear idea of his destination, for in one sentence he said he was going to Curacao while Camacho brought this piece of business to a successful conclusion, and in another he asked that he write to him in London in care of Sir Robert Wilson, with a copy for Mr. Maxwell Hyslop in Jamaica, to be sure he received one of the letters even if the other was lost.