The General in His Labyrinth

Freedom is often the first casualty of war.

I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.

He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes ad his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness, 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!

I go to seek a great perhaps

Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.

But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!

I have no friends," he said. "And if I do have any left it won't be for long.

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.

You're a great man, General, greater than anyone," she told him. "But love is still too big for you.

There is great power in the irresistible force of love.

I'm at the mercy of a destiny that isn't mine.

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.

And there's nothing more dangerous than a written memoir.

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

[F]or fate granted him the immense good fortune of losing his memory.

America is half a world gone mad.

I'm old, sick, tired, disillusioned, harassed, slandered, and unappreciated.

Even before his eyes began to fail he had his secretaries read to him, and then he read no other way because of the annoyance that eyeglasses caused him. But his interest in what he read was decreasing at the same time, and as always he attributed this to a cause beyond his control. "The fact is there are fewer and fewer good books," he would say.

He finished shaving by touch, still walking around the room, for he tried to see himself in the mirror as little as possible so he would not have to look into his own eyes.

Let me be, he said. Despair is the health of the damned.

Someone had told the General that when a dog died it had to be replaced without delay by another just like it, and with the same name, so you could go on believing it was the same animal. He did not agree. He always wanted them to be distinctive so he could remember them all with their own identities, their yearning eyes and eager spirits, and could mourn their deaths.

Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.

Don't stay with Urdanetea, 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 only wars here will be civil wars, and those are like killing your own mother.

That dawn he officiated at the daily mass of his ablutions with more frenetic severity than usual, trying to purge his body and spirit of twenty years of fruitless wars and the disillusionments of power.