The General in His Labyrinth

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Nevertheless, the news that affected him most was that the people fled at the approach of government troops because they identified them with the General, whom they considered the murderer of Admiral Padilla, an idol in his native Riohacha. This calamity, moreover, seemed to coincide with others throughout the country. Anarchy and chaos raged everywhere, and Urdaneta's government was incapable of controlling them.

  On the day he found the General hurling biblical curses at a special emissary who had just brought the latest news from Santa Fe de Bogota, Dr. Gastelbondo was amazed once again at the revivifying power of rage. "The government's not worth shit! Instead of engaging the people and the men who matter, it paralyzes them," the General shouted. "It will fall again, and it will not rise up a third time, because the men who form it and the masses who sustain it will be exterminated."

  The physician's attempts to calm him were futile, for when he finished lashing out against the government he began, at the top of his lungs, to go down the black list of his staff. He said that Colonel Joaquin Barriga, hero of three major battles, was capable of anything: "Even murder." He said that General Pedro Margueytio, whom he suspected of taking part in the conspiracy to kill Sucre, was not competent to command troops. He slashed General Gonzalez, his most devoted follower in Cauca, with a brutal: "His diseases are feebleness and farting." He collapsed, gasping, into the rocking chair to give his heart the rest it had needed for twenty years. Then he saw Dr. Gastelbondo standing paralyzed with astonishment in the doorway, and he raised his voice.

  "After all," he said, "what can you expect of a man who gambled away two houses at dice?"

  Dr. Gastelbondo was perplexed.

  "Whom are we talking about?" he asked.

  "Urdaneta," said the General. "He lost them in Maracaibo to a navy commander, but he made it appear on the documents as if he had sold them."

  He took in the air he needed. "Of course they're all saints compared to the slippery bastard Santander," he continued. "His friends stole money from the English loans, they bought state bonds for a tenth of their real value, and the state bought them back at one hundred percent." He explained that in any event he had not opposed the loans for fear of corruption but because he knew they threatened the independence that had cost so much blood.

  "I despise debt more than I do the Spanish," he said. "That's why I warned Santander that whatever good we had done for the nation would be worthless if we took on debt because we would go on paying interest till the end of time. Now it's clear: debt will destroy us in the end."

  In the early days of the current government he not only had agreed with Urdaneta's decision to respect the lives of the defeated but had celebrated it as a new war ethic: "Our present enemies should not do to us what we did to the Spanish." That is, wage war to the death. But during his dark nights in Soledad he reminded Urdaneta in a terrible letter that every civil war had been won by the side that was most savage.

  "Believe me, my dear Doctor," he told the physician. "Our authority and our lives cannot be saved except at the cost of our enemies' blood."

  Then, with as little warning as when it began, his rage passed without a trace, and the General undertook the historical absolution of the officers he had just insulted. "In any case, I am the one who is wrong," he said. "They only wanted to win independence, something immediate and concrete, and damned if they haven't done that very well!" He stretched out a hand that was just skin and bone so the doctor could help him to stand, and he concluded with a sigh:

  "But I've become lost in a dream, searching for something that doesn't exist."

  It was during this time that he decided Iturbide's fate. Toward the end of October Iturbide received a letter from his mother, who still lived in Georgetown, telling him that the progress made by the liberal forces in Mexico had moved the family further and further away from any hope of repatriation. This uncertainty, added to the doubts he had carried with him since childhood, became unbearable. One afternoon, when the General was walking along the corridor leaning on Iturbide's arm, he happened to evoke an unexpected memory.

  "I have only one bad recollection of Mexico," he said. "In Veracruz the harbor captain's mastiffs tore apart two pups I was taking with me to Spain."

  In any event, he said, that was his first experience of the world, and it had marked him forever. Veracruz was supposed to be a brief stopover on his first trip to Europe, in February 1799, but his stay lasted almost two months because of an English blockade of Havana, which was the next port of call. The delay gave him time to travel by coach to Mexico City, climbing almost three thousand meters between snowcapped volcanoes and hallucinatory deserts, which were nothing like the pastoral dawns of the Aragua Valley, where he had lived until then. "I thought it was how the moon must look," he said. In Mexico City he was amazed at the purity of the air, dazzled by the profusion and cleanliness of the public markets, where red maguey worms, armadillos, river worms, mosquito eggs, grasshoppers, the larvae of black ants, wildcats, water beetles in honey, corn wasps, cultivated iguanas, rattlesnakes, all kinds of birds, midget dogs, and a strain of beans that jumped without stopping, as if they had a life of their own, were all sold as food. "They eat everything that moves," he said. He was astounded by the clear waters of the numerous canals crossing the city, the boats painted in Sunday colors, the splendor and abundance of the flowers. But he was depressed by the short February days, the taciturn Indians, the eternal drizzle, everything that would later oppress his heart in Santa Fe de Bogota, in Lima, in La Paz, up and down the entire length and height of the Andes, which he suffered then for the first time. The Bishop, to whom he brought letters of introduction, took him by the hand to an audience with the Viceroy, who seemed more episcopal than the Bishop and paid almost no attention to the thin, dark boy who dressed like a dandy and declared his admiration for the French Revolution. "It could have cost me my life," the General said in amusement. "But perhaps I thought one had to say something about politics to a viceroy, and at the age of sixteen that was all I knew." Before continuing his journey he wrote to his uncle, Don Pedro Palacio y Sojo, the first of his letters that would be preserved. "My handwriting was so bad even I couldn't read it," he said, weak with laughter. "But I explained to my uncle that the fatigue of travel made it look the way it did." In a page and a half he made forty spelling mistakes, two of them in the same word: "sunn" for "son."

  Iturbide could not comment, for his memory had nothing to remember. All he retained of Mexico was a recollection of misfortunes that had worsened his congenital melancholy, and the General had reason to understand this.

  "Don't stay with Urdaneta," he told him. "And don't go with your family to the United States. It's omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all."

  The effect of his words was to throw yet another doubt into a swamp of uncertainty. Iturbide exclaimed:

  "Don't frighten me, General!"

  "Don't be frightened," said the General in a calm voice. "Go to Mexico, even if they kill you or even if you die. And go now while you're still young, because one day it will be too late, and then you won't feel at home here or there. You'll feel like a stranger everywhere, and that's worse than being dead." He looked him straight in the eye, placed his open hand on his own chest, and concluded:

  "Just look at me."

  And so Iturbide left at the beginning of December with two letters for Urdaneta. In one of them the General said that Iturbide, Wilson, and Fernando were the most trustworthy people in his house. He stayed in Santa Fe de Bogota with no fixed destination until April of the following year, when Urdaneta was deposed by a Santanderist conspiracy. With her exemplary persistence, his mother arranged for him to be named secretary of the Mexican legation in Washington. He spent the rest of his life in the oblivion of public service, and nothing was heard of the family until thirty-two years later, when Maximilian of Hapsburg, installed as Emperor of Mexico by French arms, adopted two Iturbide boys of the third ge
neration and named them as successors to his chimerical throne.

  In the General's second letter to Urdaneta he asked that all his past and future letters be destroyed so that no trace would remain of his dark hours. Urdaneta did not oblige the General, who had made a similar request to General Santander five years before: "Don't have my letters published, whether I'm alive or dead, because they are written with a good deal of freedom and disorder." He was not obliged by Santander either, whose letters, unlike those of the General, were perfect in form and content, and it was evident at first glance that he wrote them with the awareness that their ultimate destination was history.

  Starting with the letter from Veracruz and ending with the last one he dictated, six days before his death, the General wrote at least ten thousand letters, some in his own hand, others dictated to his secretaries, still others composed by them according to his instructions. A little over three thousand letters and some eight thousand documents with his signature have been preserved. Sometimes he drove his secretaries mad. Or vice versa. Once he thought a letter he had just dictated was not written in a fair hand, and instead of ordering another copy he himself added a line about the secretary: "As you must realize, Martell is more imbecilic than ever today." In 1817, on the eve of his departure from Angostura to complete the liberation of the continent, he brought his governmental affairs up-to-date with fourteen documents dictated in a single sitting. Perhaps this was the origin of the legend, which has never been disproved, that he would dictate several letters to several different secretaries at the same time.

  October was reduced to the sound of rain. He did not leave his room again, and Dr. Gastelbondo had to call on his most learned resources so that he would permit the doctor to visit and feed him. During the General's pensive siestas, when he lay in the hammock without moving and contemplated the rain in the deserted square, Jose Palacios had the impression that he was calling to mind even the smallest details of his past life.

  "Merciful God," he sighed one afternoon. "What has happened to Manuela!"

  "All we know is that she's well, because we haven't heard anything about her," said Jose Palacios.

  For a silence had surrounded her ever since Urdaneta assumed power. The General had not written to her again, but he instructed Fernando to keep her up-to-date on their journey. Her last letter had arrived late in August, and it contained so much confidential news concerning preparations for the military coup that between her illegible writing and the deliberate obfuscation of facts in order to throw the enemy off the track, it was not easy to unravel its mysteries.

  Forgetting the General's good advice, and with thorough and perhaps excessive jubilation, Manuela had assumed her role as the nation's leading Bolivarist and unleashed her own paper war against the government. President Mosquera did not dare take action against her, but he did not prevent his ministers from doing so. Manuela responded to the aggressions of the official press with printed diatribes that she distributed on horseback, escorted by her slavewomen, along the Calle Real. Her lance at the ready, she pursued those who distributed broadsides against the General down the cobbled alleys of the outlying districts, and with even more insulting slogans she covered over the painted insults that appeared every day on the walls.

  In the end, the official war was waged against her in her own name. But she did not flinch. Her confidants inside the government informed her, on a day of patriotic fiestas, that fireworks were being mounted on the main square with a caricature of the General dressed as the king of fools. Manuela and her slavewomen rode rough-shod over the guards and knocked down the structure in a cavalry charge. Then the Mayor himself, at the head of a squad of soldiers, tried to arrest her in her bed, but she was waiting for them with a pair of cocked pistols, and mediation by friends of both parties was all that prevented an even greater misfortune.

  The only thing that placated her was General Urdaneta's assumption of power. She had a true friend in him, and Urdaneta had in her his most enthusiastic accomplice. When she was alone in Santa Fe de Bogota, while the General was fighting in the south against the Peruvian invaders, Urdaneta was the trusted friend who saw to her safety and attended to her needs. When the General made his unfortunate statement in the Admirable Congress, it was Manuela who convinced him to write to Urdaneta: "I offer you all my old friendship and an absolute and heartfelt reconciliation." Urdaneta accepted the gallant offer, and after the military coup Manuela returned the favor. She disappeared from public life in so absolute a fashion that by the beginning of October the rumor was circulating that she had gone to the United States, and no one disputed it. And therefore Jose Palacios was right: Manuela was fine, because they had heard nothing about her.

  During one of those meticulous examinations of the past, when he was lost in the rain, sick of waiting and not knowing for what or for whom, or why, the General touched bottom: he cried in his sleep. When Jose Palacios heard the quiet sobs he thought they came from the stray dog picked up on the river. But they came from his master. He was disconcerted because during their long years of intimacy he had seen him cry only once, and that had been with rage, not with sorrow. He called Captain Ibarra, who was standing watch in the corridor, and he too listened to the sound of tears.

  "That will help him," said Ibarra.

  "It will help all of us," said Jose Palacios.

  The General slept later than usual. He was not awakened by either the birds in the nearby orchard or the church bells, and Jose Palacios bent over the hammock several times to see if he was breathing. When he opened his eyes it was past eight o'clock, and the heat had begun.

  "Saturday, October 16," said Jose Palacios. "The Day of Purity."

  The General got up from the hammock and looked through the window at the solitary, dusty square, the church with the peeling walls, the turkey buzzards fighting over the remains of a dead dog. The harshness of the early sun announced a day of suffocating heat.

  "Let's get out of here," said the General. "I don't want to hear the shots of the firing squad."

  Jose Palacios shuddered. He had lived that moment in another place and another time, and the General, just as he had been then, was barefoot on the rough bricks of the floor, wearing long underpants and the sleeping cap on his shaved head. It was an old dream repeated in reality.

  "We won't hear them," said Jose Palacios, and he added with deliberate precision: "General Piar was shot in Angostura, and not today at five in the afternoon but on a day like today thirteen years ago."

  General Manuel Piar, a hard mulatto from Curacao who at the age of thirty-five had earned as much glory as anyone in the national militias, had put the General's authority to the test at a time when the liberating army required its forces united as never before in order to stop Morillo's advances. Piar called on blacks, mulattoes, zambos, and all the destitute of the country to resist the white aristocracy of Caracas, personified by the General. Piar's popularity and messianic aura were comparable only to those of Jose Antonio Paez, or the royalist Boves, and he even made a favorable impression on some white officers in the liberating army. The General had exhausted all his arts of persuasion, and on his orders Piar was arrested and brought to Angostura, the provisional capital, where the General was entrenched with the officers close to him, several of whom would accompany him on his final journey along the Magdalena River. A court-martial named by him, which included friends of Piar, passed summary judgment. Jose Maria Carreno acted as prosecutor. Piar's official advocate did not have to lie when he praised him as one of the outstanding heroes in the struggle against the power of Spain. He was declared guilty of desertion, insurrection, and treason, and was condemned to death and the loss of his military titles. Knowing his merits, no one believed that the sentence would be confirmed by the General, least of all at a time when Morillo had recaptured several provinces and morale was so low among the patriots that there was fear of a rout. The General was subjected to every kind of pressure, he listened with cordiality to the opinions of hi
s closest friends, Briceno Mendez among them, but his determination was unshakable. He revoked the sentence of demotion and confirmed the sentence of death by firing squad, which he made even worse by ordering a public execution. It was an endless night when anything evil could happen. On October 16, at five o'clock in the afternoon, the sentence was carried out under the brutal sun in the main square of Angostura, the city that Piar himself had wrested from the Spanish six months before. The commander of the firing squad had ordered the removal of the remains of a dead dog that the turkey buzzards were devouring, and he had the gates closed to keep stray animals from disrupting the dignity of the execution. He denied Piar the final honor of giving the order to fire and blindfolded him against his will, but he could not prevent him from bidding farewell to the world with a kiss to the crucifix and a salute to the flag.

  The General had refused to witness the execution. The only man with him in his house was Jose Palacios, who saw him struggling to hold back the tears when he heard the volley. In his proclamation to the troops he said: "Yesterday was a day of sorrow for me." For the rest of his life he would repeat that it was a political necessity that saved the country, persuaded the rebels, and avoided civil war. In any case, it was the most savage use of power in his life, but the most opportune as well, for with it he consolidated his authority, unified his command, and cleared the road to his glory.

  Thirteen years later, in the town of Soledad, he did not even seem to realize that he had been the victim of one of time's caprices. He continued to look out at the square until an old woman in rags crossed the plaza, leading a burro loaded down with coconuts to be sold for their milk, and the turkey buzzards were frightened away by their shadows. Then he returned to the hammock with a sigh of relief, and without anyone's asking he gave the answer that Jose Palacios had wanted to hear ever since the tragic night in Angostura.

  "I would do it again," he said.

  THE GREATEST DANGER was walking, not because of the risk of a fall but because the effort it cost him was too evident. On the other hand, it was reasonable for someone to help him up and down the stairs in the house even if he was capable of doing it alone. Nevertheless, when he in fact needed an arm to lean on he did not allow anyone to offer him one.