The General in His Labyrinth

by Gabriel García Márquez

  The departure from Cartagena had been preceded by the pressing demands of combat. There was no time for official farewells, and he informed very few friends in advance. On his instructions, Fernando and Jose Palacios left half the baggage in the care of friends and commercial establishments to avoid carrying unnecessary encumbrances to an uncertain war. They left ten trunks of private papers with the local merchant Don Juan Pavajeau, along with instructions to send them to an address in Paris that would be given to him later. On the receipt it was stipulated that Senor Pavajeau would burn the papers in the event the owner could not reclaim them because of circumstances beyond his control.

  In the banking establishment of Busch and Company, Fernando deposited two hundred ounces of gold that he discovered at the eleventh hour, with no clue as to their origin, among his uncle's writing implements. He also deposited with Juan de Francisco Martin a chest containing thirty-five gold medals, as well as a velvet pouch with two hundred ninety-four large silver medals, sixty-seven small ones, and ninety-six medium-size ones, and an identical pouch with forty commemorative medals of silver and gold, some with the General's profile. He also left with him the gold table settings they had brought from Mompox in an old wine crate, some well-worn bed linen, two trunks of books, a sword studded with diamonds, and a useless rifle. Among many other, smaller items, the vestiges of times gone by, there were several pairs of old spectacles, which increased in strength from the time the General first discovered his incipient farsightedness, when he had difficulty shaving at the age of thirty-nine, until the moment his arm was not long enough for him to read.

  Jose Palacios, for his part, left in the care of Don Juan de Dios Amador a chest that had traveled everywhere with them for several years but whose contents were not known. It was typical of the General: at one moment he could not resist a voracious desire for the most unexpected objects or for men with no outstanding merits, and then, after a time, he had to drag them along with him, not knowing how to get rid of them. He had carried that chest from Lima to Santa Fe de Bogota in 1826, and he still had it with him after the September 25 attempt, when he returned to the south for his last war. "We can't leave it behind when we don't even know if it's ours," he would say. When he returned to Santa Fe de Bogota for the last time, ready to present his definitive renunciation to the Constituent Congress, the chest was part of the little that remained of his former imperial baggage. At last they decided to open it in Cartagena during a general inventory of his goods, and inside they discovered a jumble of personal items that had long since been given up for lost. There were four hundred fifteen ounces of gold coined in Colombia, a portrait of General George Washington and a lock of his hair, a gold snuffbox given to him by the King of England, a gold case with diamond keys containing a reliquary, and the great star of Bolivia encrusted with diamonds. Jose Palacios left all of it, described and annotated, in the house of Juan de Francisco Martin and requested the usual receipt. Their baggage was then reduced to a more rational size, although they still had three of the four trunks with his everyday clothing, another containing ten worn cotton and linen tablecloths, and a chest with gold and silver place settings of unmatched styles, which the General did not want to leave behind or sell, in the event that they needed to set the table for meritorious guests sometime in the future. He had often been advised to auction these articles in order to increase his scant resources, but he always refused, with the argument that they belonged to the state.

  With lightened baggage and a reduced entourage, they traveled as far as Turbaco on the first day. They continued the next day in good weather, but before noon they had to take refuge under a roadside shelter, where they spent the night exposed to rain and the malignant winds out of the swamps. The General complained of pains in the spleen and the liver, and Jose Palacios prepared a potion from the French manual, but the pains became more severe and his fever increased. At dawn he was so prostrate that they carried him, unconscious, to the town of Soledad, where an old friend, Don Pedro Juan Visbal, took him into his house. There he remained for over a month, suffering all manner of pains made worse by the oppressive October rains.

  Soledad was well named; its solitude consisted of four burning, desolate streets lined with the houses of the poor, located some two leagues from the place once called Barranca de San Nicolas, which in a few years would become the most prosperous and hospitable city in the country and would later be named Barranquilla. The General could not have found a more peaceful spot or a house more favorable to his health: six Andalusian balconies flooded it with light, and the patio was well suited to meditation under the centenarian ceiba tree. The bedroom window overlooked the deserted little square with its ruined church and the houses painted in holiday colors, with roofs of bitter palm.

  But domestic peace did not help him either. The first night he suffered a slight attack of vertigo, but he refused to admit that it was new evidence of his prostration. In accordance with the French manual, he described his illness as an attack of black bile aggravated by a general chill, and a recurrence of rheumatism brought on by exposure. This multiple diagnosis increased his querulous diatribes against simultaneous medicines for different illnesses, for he said that the ones that were good for some ailments were bad for the others. But he also recognized that no medication helps the man who refuses to take it, and he complained every day about not having a good doctor, although he refused to be examined by the many who were sent to him.

  In a letter he wrote to his father during this time, Colonel Wilson said that the General could die at any moment but that his rejection of doctors was the result of lucidity, not contempt. In reality, said Wilson, disease was the only enemy the General feared, and he refused to confront it so that he would not be distracted from the greatest enterprise of his life. "Attending to an illness is like working on a ship," the General had told him. Four years earlier, in Lima, O'Leary had suggested that he accept thorough medical treatment while he was preparing the Constitution of Bolivia, and his reply was decisive:

  "You can't win two races at the same time."

  He seemed convinced that continual movement and self-reliance were a charm against disease. Fernanda Barriga had been in the habit of tying a bib around his neck and feeding him with a spoon, as if he were a child, and he would accept the food and chew it in silence and even open his mouth again when he had finished. But now he took the plate and spoon from her and ate with his own hand, without a bib, so that everyone would know he did not need anyone. It broke Jose Palacios' heart when he found the General attempting to do for himself the domestic chores that his servants or orderlies or aides-de-camp had always done for him, and Jose Palacios was not consoled to see him spill a flask of ink over himself while trying to fill an inkwell. This was something extraordinary, because everyone marveled that the General's hands did not tremble no matter how sick he was, and that his wrist was so steady he still cut and buffed his nails once a week and shaved himself every day.

  In his paradise in Lima he had spent a joyous night with a young girl who was covered with fine, straight down over every millimeter of her Bedouin skin. At dawn, while he was shaving, he looked at her lying naked in the bed, adrift in the peaceful sleep of a satisfied woman, and he could not resist the temptation of possessing her forever with a sacramental act. He covered her from head to foot with shaving lather, and with a pleasure like that of love he shaved her clean with his razor, sometimes using his right hand and sometimes his left as he shaved every part of her body, even the eyebrows that grew together, and left her doubly naked inside her magnificent newborn's body. She asked, her soul in shreds, if he really loved her, and he answered with the same ritual phrase he had strewn without pity in so many hearts throughout his life:

  "More than anyone else in this world."

  In the town of Soledad, again while he was shaving, he submitted to the same sacrificial rite. He began by cutting off one of the few limp white locks of hair he had left, obeying what seemed to be a child
ish impulse. And then he cut off another in a more conscious way, and after that all of them at random, as if he were cutting grass, while through the cracks in his voice he declaimed his favorite stanzas from La Araucana. Jose Palacios came into the bedroom to see whom he was talking to and found him shaving his lathered skull. Not a hair was left on his head.

  The exorcism did not redeem him. He wore the silk cap during the day, and at night he put on the red hood, but he could not moderate the icy gusts of despondency. He got up to pace through the darkness in the enormous moonlit house, only now he could not walk naked on hot nights but wrapped himself in a blanket so he would not shiver with cold. During the day the blanket was not enough, and he resolved to wear the red hood over the silk cap.

  The military's quibbling intrigues and the abuses of the politicians exasperated him so much that one afternoon he decided with a blow to the table that he could not endure any of them any longer. "Tell them I'm consumptive so they won't come back," he shouted. His determination was so drastic that he forbade military uniforms and rituals in the house. But he could not survive without them, so that the consolatory interviews and sterile secret meetings continued as always, against his own orders. And then he felt so ill that he agreed to a doctor's visit on the condition that he not examine him or ask him questions about his pains or attempt to give him anything to drink.

  "Just to talk," he said.

  The physician selected could not have been more to his liking. Hercules Gastelbondo was an immense, placid old man, anointed with contentment, whose skull was radiant with total baldness and who possessed the patience of a drowned man, which in itself alleviated the suffering of others. His incredulity and scientific daring were famous all along the coast. He prescribed chocolate cream with melted cheese for disturbances of the bile, he advised lovemaking during the languors of digestion as a fine palliative promoting long life, and he smoked endless wagon drivers' cigars, which he rolled with rag paper and prescribed to his patients for all sorts of equivocations of the body. The patients themselves said he never effected a complete cure but entertained them instead with his florid eloquence. He would break into plebeian laughter.

  "Other doctors lose as many patients as I do," he would say. "But with me they die happier."

  He arrived in the carriage of Senor Bartolome Molinares, which came and went several times a day carrying all kinds of spontaneous visitors until the General prohibited their coming without an invitation. He arrived dressed in wrinkled white linen, making his way through the rain, his pockets overflowing with things to eat, and carrying an umbrella so full of holes that it invited more water than it held back. The first thing he did after the formal greetings was to beg pardon for the stench of his half-smoked cigar. The General, who could not abide tobacco smoke, not then or ever, had already forgiven him.

  "I'm used to it," he said. "Manuela smokes cigars more disgusting than yours, even in bed, and of course she's closer to me than you are when she blows the smoke."

  Dr. Gastelbondo seized an opportunity that burned his soul.

  "Of course," he said. "How is she?"

  "Who?"

  "Dona Manuela."

  The General's reply was abrupt.

  "All right."

  And he changed the subject in so obvious a manner that the doctor laughed out loud to conceal his impertinence. There was no doubt the General knew that none of his gallant escapades was safe from the gossip of his entourage. He never boasted about his conquests, but there had been so many, and they had been so flagrant, that the secrets of his bedroom were public knowledge. An ordinary letter took three months to travel from Lima to Caracas, but the gossip about his adventures seemed to fly with the speed of thought. Scandal followed him like a second shadow, and his lovers were marked forever with a cross of ashes, but he complied with the useless duty of protecting his secrets of love under a sacred code. No one ever heard an indiscretion from him regarding a woman he had made love to except Jose Palacios, who was his accomplice in everything--not even to satisfy a curiosity as innocent as Dr. Gastelbondo's, not even concerning Manuela Saenz, whose intimacy with him was so public that there was little left to hide.

  Except for that momentary unpleasantness, Dr. Gastelbondo was a providential presence. He revived him with his learned lunacies, he shared with him the honey-dipped candies, the almond-paste confections, the chocolate and cassava drops he carried in his pockets, which the General accepted out of courtesy and ate out of distraction. One day he complained that these salon sweets were good only for staving off hunger but not for gaining back weight, which is what he desired. "Don't worry, Excellency," the doctor replied. "Everything that enters the mouth adds weight, and everything that leaves it is debased." The argument seemed so amusing to the General that he agreed to drink a large glass of wine and a cup of arrowroot with the doctor.

  Nevertheless, the humor improved by the doctor with so much painstaking care was disturbed by bad news. Someone told the General that, fearing contagion, the owner of the house where he had lived in Cartagena had burned the cot he slept in, the mattress and the sheets, and everything that had passed through his hands during his stay. He ordered Don Juan de Dios Amador to use the money he had left with him to reimburse the owner for the destroyed items as if they were new and to pay for the rental of the house. But not even this could appease his bitterness.

  He felt worse a few days later when he learned that Don Joaquin Mosquera had passed through the area on his way to the United States and had not deigned to visit him. By questioning various people without concealing his disquiet, he learned that in fact Mosquera had been on the coast for more than a week while he waited for the ship, seen many mutual friends as well as some enemies, and expressed to all of them his resentment of what he termed the General's ingratitude. At the moment they weighed anchor, when he was already in the launch that would carry him to the ship, he had summarized his fixed idea for everyone who came to see him off.

  "Never forget," he told them. "That man doesn't love anybody."

  Jose Palacios knew how sensitive the General was to such reproaches. Nothing pained or bewildered him more than people casting doubt on his affections, and he was capable of parting oceans and moving mountains with the terrible power of his charm until he convinced them of their error. During the plenitude of his glory, Delfina Guardiola, the belle of Angostura, became enraged by his inconstancy and slammed the doors of her house in his face. "You're a great man, General, greater than anyone," she told him. "But love is still too big for you." He climbed through the kitchen window and spent three days with her, and he almost lost a battle as well as his life while he was persuading Delfina to trust in his heart.

  Mosquera was beyond his reach, but he spoke about his rancor to everyone he could find. He never wearied of asking how a man had the right to talk of love who had permitted the General to be notified by official communique that Venezuela had resolved to repudiate and exile him. "He should be thankful I didn't respond and saved him from the condemnation of history," he shouted. He recalled everything he had done for Mosquera, how much he had helped him become who he was, how he had been obliged to tolerate the stupidities of his rural narcissism. At last he wrote a long, desperate letter to a mutual friend to make certain the sound of his indignation would reach Mosquera anywhere in the world.

  On the other hand, the news he did not receive shrouded him like an invisible fog. Urdaneta still had not answered his letters. Briceno Mendez, his man in Venezuela, had sent him a letter along with some of the Jamaican fruits he was so fond of, but the messenger had drowned. The inaction of Justo Briceno, his man on the eastern frontier, drove him to despair. Urdaneta's silence had cast a shadow over the country. The death of Fernandez Madrid, his correspondent in London, had cast a shadow over the world.

  What the General did not know was that while Urdaneta sent him no news, he maintained an active correspondence with the officers of his entourage, encouraging them to extract from him an unequiv
ocal response. He wrote to O'Leary: "I need to know once and for all if the General does or does not accept the presidency, or if we will spend the rest of our lives chasing after an unreachable phantom." O'Leary as well as others around him tried to hold casual conversations that would provide some answer for Urdaneta, but the General's evasions were insurmountable.

  When at last definitive news was received from Riohacha, it was more serious than any evil premonition. General Manuel Valdes, according to plan, had taken the city without resistance on October 20, but the following week Carujo wiped out two of his reconnaissance companies. Valdes presented what was intended as an honorable resignation to Montilla, but the General thought it ignoble. "That swine, he's dying of fright," he said. In only two weeks they were to attempt the capture of Maracaibo, according to the original plan, but simple control of Riohacha was by now an impossible dream.

  "God damn it!" shouted the General. "The cream of my generals haven't been able to put down a barracks revolt."