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The General In His Labyrinth Free Download
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
THE Full general IN HIS LABYRINTH
Contents
The General in His Labyrinth
My Thanks
Brief Chronology: Simon Bolivar
Virtually THE AUTHOR
Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Republic of colombia, in 1927. He studied at the University of Bogota and later worked equally a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and every bit a strange correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York. He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including Optics of a Bluish Dog (1947), Leaf Storm (1955), No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), In Evil Hour (1962), Big Mama's Funeral (1962), Ane Hundred Years of Confinement (1967), Innocent Erendira and Other Stories (1972), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Decease Foretold (1981), Love in the Fourth dimension of Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989), Strange Pilgrims (1992), Of Love and Other Demons (1994) and Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005). Many of his books are published by Penguin. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He lives in Mexico City.
FOR ALVARO MUTIS,
who gave me the idea for writing this book
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE Full general IN HIS LABYRINTH
'Breathtaking. A superb fictional re-creation of Bolivar's last month' Observer
'A fascinating literary tour de forcefulness and a moving tribute to an boggling homo' Margaret Atwood 'The brilliance and dazzler of his imagery, the narrative tension coursing through his pages ... makes it hard to put downwardly' Daily Telegraph
'Bolivar'due south concluding months take him down the neat Colombian river, the Magdalena, where the crocodiles on the banks laze with their mouths open to grab butterflies. Information technology is wonderfully evoked' Guardian
'Sentence for sentence, there is inappreciably some other writer in the earth so generous with incidental pleasures' Independent
'The nigh important author of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton
'Of all the living authors known to me, just ane is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Sun Telegraph
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no i else tin can do' Salman Rushdie
'1 of this century's nigh evocative writers' Anne Tyler
It seems that the devil controls the business organisation of my life.
(LETTER TO SANTANDER, AUGUST iv, 1823)
JOSE PALACIOS, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned. He knew this was one of the many ways the General meditated, simply the ecstasy in which he lay drifting seemed that of a man no longer of this world. He did not dare come closer but chosen to him in a hushful vocalism, complying with the order to awaken him before five and then they could get out at dawn. The General came out of his trance and saw in the one-half-calorie-free the clear blue eyes, the curly squirrel-colored hair, the impassive dignity of the steward who attended him every day and who held in his mitt a cup of the curative infusion of poppies and gum arabic. The General'due south hands lacked strength when he grasped the handles of the tub, but he rose up from the medicinal waters in a dolphin-like rush that was surprising in so wasted a body.
"Let's go," he said, "equally fast equally nosotros can. No i loves us here."
Jose Palacios had heard him say this so many times and on so many different occasions that he however did not believe information technology was true, even though the pack animals were ready in the stables and the members of the official delegation were beginning to assemble. In any event, he helped him to dry out and draped the square poncho from the uplands over his naked body because the trembling of his hands fabricated the cup rattle. Months before, while putting on a pair of chamois trousers he had not worn since his Babylonian nights in Lima, the General discovered he was losing superlative also as weight. Even his nakedness was distinctive, for his body was stake and his confront and hands seemed scorched by exposure to the weather. He had turned xl-six this by July, simply his rough Caribbean area curls were already ashen, his bones were twisted by premature erstwhile age, and he had deteriorated so much he did non seem capable of lasting until the following July. However his resolute gestures appeared to be those of a man less damaged by life, and he strode without stopping in a circumvolve around aught. He drank the tea in five scorching swallows that almost blistered his tongue, avoiding his own watery trail along the frayed rush mats on the floor, and it was equally if he had drunkard the magic potion of resurrection. Only he did non say a discussion until five o'clock had sounded in the bell tower of the nearby cathedral.
"Sabbatum, May 8, 1830, the Mean solar day of the Blessed Virgin, Mediatrix of all Grace," announced the steward. "It has been raining since three o'clock in the morning time."
"Since three o'clock in the morning of the seventeenth century," said the General, his voice nevertheless shaken by the bitter breath of insomnia. And he added, in all seriousness: "I didn't hear the roosters."
"There are no roosters here," said Jose Palacios.
"In that location's nada hither," said the General. "It'due south the land of the infidel."
For they were in Santa Atomic number 26 de Bogota, urban center of the Holy Organized religion, two thousand six hundred meters to a higher place the level of the distant ocean, and the clangorous sleeping room with its blank walls, exposed to the icy winds that filtered through ill-plumbing equipment windows, was not the most favorable for anyone's health. Jose Palacios placed the basin of lather on the marble superlative of the dressing table, along with the red velvet case that held the shaving implements, all of golden metallic. He put the modest candleholder with its candle on a ledge near the mirror so the General would have enough low-cal, and he brought the brazier to warm his feet. So he handed him the glasses with squared lenses and thin silvery frames that he e'er carried for him in his jacket pocket. The Full general put them on and began to shave, guiding the razor with as much skill in his left mitt as in his correct, for his ambidexterity was natural to him, and he showed astonishing control of the same wrist that minutes before could not concord a cup. He finished shaving by touch, still walking around the room, for he tried to see himself in the mirror every bit niggling equally possible and then he would non take to expect into his own eyes. Then he plucked the hairs in his nose and ears, polished his perfect teeth with charcoal powder on a silver-handled silk brush, trimmed and buffed the nails on his fingers and toes, and at final took off the poncho and poured a large vial of cologne over his entire body, rubbing it in with both hands until the flask was empty. That dawn he officiated at the daily mass of his ablutions with more frenetic severity than usual, trying to purge his torso and spirit of 20 years of fruitless wars and the disillusionments of power.
The final visitor he received the night before was Manuela Saenz, the bold Quitena who loved him but was non going to follow him to his decease. Every bit always she would remain backside, charged with keeping the General informed of everything that happened in his absenteeism, since for some time he had trusted no one but her. He left in her care some articles whose only value was that they had belonged to him, as well as some of his most prized books and two chests containing his personal athenaeum. The previous day, during their brief formal farewell, he had said to her: "I love y'all a great deal, only I volition love you lot even more if y'all bear witness more judgment at present than ever before." She understood this as some other of the many homages he had paid to her in their eight years of ardent dearest. Of all the people he knew, she was the only 1 who believed him: this time it was true that he was leaving. But she was also the but person who had at least one telling reason for expecting him to return.
They had not intended to see each other once more before the journey. Nevertheless, the lady of the house wanted to present them with the gift of a terminal, secret cheerio, and she had Manuela, dressed in a cavalry compatible, enter through the main stable doors in guild to sidestep the prejudice
s of the overpious local community. Not because they were clandestine lovers, for they were lovers in the total light of day and with great public scandal, but to preserve at all costs the skilful proper noun of the house. He was even more careful, for he ordered Jose Palacios not to shut the door to the bordering room that was a necessary passageway for the household servants and where the aides-de-army camp on guard duty played cards until long after the visit was over.
Manuela read to him for two hours. She had been young until a short time before, when her mankind began to overtake her age. She smoked a crewman's pipage, used the verbena h2o favored past the war machine every bit her perfume, dressed in men's article of clothing, and spent fourth dimension with soldiers, but her croaking phonation however suited the penumbra of beloved. She read by the scant calorie-free of the candle, sitting in an armchair that diameter the concluding viceroy'due south coat of arms, and he listened to her in bed, lying on his dorsum, dressed in the civilian clothes he wore at home and covered past the vicuna poncho. Only the rhythm of his breathing indicated that he was non comatose. The book, by the Peruvian Noe Calzadillas, was entitled A Reading of News and Gossip Circulating in Lima in the Year of Our Lord 1826, and she read with a theatrical emphasis that matched the author'southward style very well.
For the next hour her phonation was all that could be heard in the sleeping firm. Only after the last lookout man a sudden chorus of men'due south laughter erupted, rousing all the dogs in the courtyard. He opened his eyes, more than intrigued than disturbed, and she closed the volume in her lap, mark the page with her thumb.
"Those are your friends," she said to him.
"I have no friends," he said. "And if I practice have any left it won't be for long."
"Well, at that place they are outside, standing guard so you won't be killed," she said.
That was how the Full general learned what the whole city already knew: not one just several assassination plots against him were brewing, and his last supporters were in the house to try to thwart them. The entrance and the corridors around the interior garden were held by hussars and grenadiers, the Venezuelans who would back-trail him to the port of Cartagena de Indias, where he was to board a sailing ship to Europe. Two of them had placed their sleeping mats across the principal doorway to the sleeping room, and the aides-de-army camp would continue playing cards in the adjoining room after Manuela finished reading, but surrounded by so many soldiers of uncertain origin and diverse graphic symbol, this was not the time for feeling safe about anything. He showed no reaction to the bad news, and with a moving ridge of his manus he ordered Manuela to continue reading.
He e'er considered decease an unavoidable professional gamble. He had fought all his wars in the front lines, without suffering a scratch, and he had moved through enemy burn with such thoughtless serenity that even his officers accepted the easy explanation that he believed himself invulnerable. He had emerged unharmed from every assassination plot against him, and on several occasions his life had been saved because he was not sleeping in his own bed. He did not employ an escort, and he ate and drank with no concern for what was offered him, or where. Only Manuela knew that his disinterest was not lack of awareness or fatalism, but rather the melancholy certainty that he would die in his bed, poor and naked and without the consolation of public gratitude.
The but noteworthy alter he made that night in the ritual of his insomnia was that he did not take a hot bath earlier getting into bed. Jose Palacios had prepared it early, with water steeped in medicinal leaves to heal the General'due south body and facilitate expectoration, and had kept it at a good temperature for whenever he might desire it. But he did non want it. He took 2 laxative pills for his chronic constipation and settled down to doze to the soothing murmur of Lima's gallant gossip. So, without warning or apparent crusade, he was overcome by an set on of coughing that seemed to shake the very foundations of the firm. The officers gambling in the adjacent room were stunned. Ane of them, the Irishman Belford Hinton Wilson, came to the door in case he was needed, and he saw the Full general lying face up downwards on the bed, trying to vomit up his insides. Manuela was holding his caput over the bowl. Jose Palacios, the only man authorized to enter his bedroom without knocking, stood on the alert, next to the bed, until the crisis passed. And so, with his optics total of tears, the Full general took a deep breath and pointed to the dressing tabular array.
"Those graveyard flowers are to blame," he said.
As e'er, for he always establish some unpredictable crusade for his misfortunes. Manuela, who knew him amend than anyone, made a sign to Jose Palacios to take away the vase with the morn'south withered spikenards. The General stretched out again on the bed and closed his eyes, and she resumed reading in the same tone as before. Merely when it seemed to her that he had fallen asleep did she identify the book on the night tabular array, kiss his brow, seared with fever, and whisper to Jose Palacios that after six o'clock that forenoon she would be waiting for a last goodbye at Cuatro Esquinas, where the King's Highway to Honda began. She wrapped herself in a boxing cloak and tiptoed out of the sleeping accommodation. Then the Full general opened his eyes and said to Jose Palacios in a sparse voice:
"Tell Wilson to take her domicile."
The order was carried out confronting Manuela'south will, for she idea she could protect herself ameliorate than a squadron of lancers. Jose Palacios lit their mode to the stables, around an interior garden with a stone fountain, where the start spikenards of the dawn were beginning to open. The rain had stopped and the wind no longer whistled through the copse, just in that location was not a single star in the frozen sky. Colonel Belford Wilson repeated the countersign as he walked in social club to tranquility the sentries lying on harbinger mats in the corridor. When he passed the window of the master reception room, Jose Palacios saw the master of the business firm serving coffee to the group of friends, military and civilian, who had volunteered to stand watch until the moment of departure.
When he returned to the sleeping room he establish the Full general in the clutches of delirium. He heard him utter disconnected phrases that all fit together into one: "Nobody understood anything." His torso burned in a bonfire of fever, and he was farting stony, foul-smelling gas. The adjacent day not even the General would be able to tell if he had been talking in his sleep or raving while awake, and he would non retrieve anything he said. These were what he called "my crises of dementia." They no longer alarmed anyone, since he had suffered them for over four years without whatever medico risking a scientific explanation, and the following 24-hour interval would observe him risen from the ashes with his reason intact. Jose Palacios wrapped him in a coating, left the candle called-for on the marble top of the dressing table, and went out without endmost the door and so he could continue watching from the adjoining room. He knew he would recover erstwhile at daybreak and immerse himself in the icy waters of the bath in an effort to restore the strength that had been ravaged past the horror of his nightmares.
It was the end of a clamorous day. A garrison of seven hundred eighty-nine hussars and grenadiers had rebelled on the pretext of demanding payment of wages they had not received for the past three months. But the real reason was this: nigh of them were from Venezuela, and many had fought wars for the liberation of four dissimilar nations, but in recent weeks they had been the victims of and so much vituperation and provocation on the streets that they had crusade to fear for their safety after the General left the country. The disharmonize was settled by payment of their travel expenses and a thousand aureate pesos instead of the seventy thousand the insurgents had asked for, and at dusk they had marched away to their native country, followed past a pack of women with their baggage and all their children and domestic animals. The din of the bass drums and the military brass band could non drown out the tumultuous shouting of the mobs that set their dogs on them and hurled strings of firecrackers at their feet to make them intermission stride, actions they had never taken against enemy troops. Eleven years earlier, after iii long centuries of Spanish domination, the fell Viceroy Don Juan Samano had fled through those same streets bearded every bit a pilgrim, merely his trunks were full of gilded statues and uncut emeralds, sacred toucans and bright stained-glass butterflies from Muzo, and at that place was no lack of people to weep for him from their balconies and throw flowers
in his path and offer him heartfelt wishes for a at-home body of water and a prosperous voyage.
Without moving from the house that had been lent to him past the Government minister of the Regular army and Navy, the General had played a secret part in negotiating the disharmonize, and in the finish he had ordered General Jose Laurencio Silva, his nephew by marriage and a trusted aide, to go out with the rebellious troops as a guarantee that at that place would be no new disturbances before they reached the Venezuelan border. He did not see the parade under his balcony, but he had heard the bugles and the drumrolls, and the raucous yells of the throngs in the street, whose shouts he could non empathize. He attributed so footling importance to them that he reviewed back correspondence with his secretaries and dictated a letter of the alphabet to Grand Marshal Don Andres de Santa Cruz, the President of Republic of bolivia, in which he appear his withdrawal from ability but was not very certain whether he would travel abroad. "I won't write another letter for the rest of my life," he said when he had finished. Subsequently, while he was sweating his siesta fever, the sound of distant disturbances penetrated his sleep, and he was startled awake past a series of explosions that could just every bit well have been insurgency as fireworks. Merely when he asked nearly it he was told it was a fiesta. That was all: "It's a fiesta, General." And no i, not even Jose Palacios, would take dared to explain just what fiesta it was.
Only when Manuela told him that night during her visit did he learn that it was the followers of his political enemies, the demagogue party as he called them, who, with the compliance of the constabulary, were roaming the streets and inciting the artisans' guilds against him. It was Friday, market place twenty-four hour period, which made information technology easier to create disorder in the main square. A heavier rain than usual, accompanied past thunder and lightning, dispersed the rioters at nightfall. Only the impairment was washed. Students from the Academy of San Bartolome had assaulted and seized the offices of the Supreme Court in order to forcefulness a public trial of the General, and they had slashed with bayonets and and then hurled down from the balustrade his life-size portrait painted in oils by a veteran of the liberating army. The mobs, drunkard on corn liquor, had looted the shops along the Calle Real as well as the bars in the poor suburbs that had not closed downwards in time, and in the main square they shot a general stuffed with sawdust, which did not need the long blue tunic with gold buttons for everyone to know who it was. They accused him of existence the secret instigator of the military insurgence in a belated attempt to regain the power he had exercised for twelve uninterrupted years and that the Congress had taken away from him by unanimous vote. They accused him of wanting to be president for life and so he could appoint a European prince every bit his successor. They accused him of pretending to travel away when in reality he was going to the Venezuelan border and planned to render at the head of the insurgent troops in guild to seize power. Public walls were plastered with papeluchas, the popular name for the calumniating broadsides printed confronting him, and his best-known followers remained in hiding in other people'due south houses until passions cooled. The press devoted to General Francisco de Paula Santander, his principal enemy, had taken to its bosom the rumor that the General's mysterious and very well publicized illness, and the tedious, ostentatious show he made of leaving, were mere political ruses to make people beg him to stay. That night, while Manuela Saenz recounted details of the perilous day, the soldiers of the Acting President were trying to wipe away a sentence scrawled in charcoal on the wall of the Episcopal Palace: "He won't leave and he won't dice." The General sighed.
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