ecstasy and meditation that suggests a priestly ritual. One of the women with whom the General sleeps, Queen Marie Louise, is described as a virgin with the profile of an idol—an allusion to the Virgin Mary. The General rides a mule into the last towns on his journey towards death, echoing Christ's entry into Jerusalem. He dies of mysterious and unknown causes, and the people burn his belongings in fear of catching his illness. In Rodríguez Vergara's view, "Bolívar was sacrificed as a scapegoat to purge the guilt of the community." René Girard has interpreted the recurrence of rain in the novel as one of the purifying rituals the community must undergo in order to wash away the contagion of violence. The fiestas may represent another ritual of purification and also symbolize war. Fiestas are held to honour the General when he arrives at a town, but at other times, political demonstrations against the General are mistaken for a fiesta. According to Rodríguez Vergara, this shows how "information is manipulated" and "depicts an atmosphere where fiesta and war are synonymous". Melancholy and mourning Latin American cultural theorist Carlos J. Alonso, drawing on Freudian theory, argues that the novel is essentially a therapeutic device, designed to help move Latin America past its problematic experience of modernity. He compares this to the way the healing state of mourning replaces grief in the process of recovering from a death. Both activities are mechanisms for dealing with loss. Alonso believes that The General in his Labyrinth, by almost entirely centering the novel on the General's death, forces the reader to confront the horror of this process. In Alonso's view, the reader is meant to pass from "a melancholy relationship vis-a-vis the figure of Bolívar to a relationship that has the therapeutic qualities of mourning instead". Latin America's history and culture, Alonso suggests, began with the loss of Bolívar's dream of a united continent and as a result has developed under a melancholy shadow ever since. Thus, by forcing the reader to return to the origin of modernity in Latin America and confront its death in the most horrific way, García Márquez compels the reader to move from melancholy to mourning, "so that the phantom of the lost object of modernity may cease to rule the libidinal economy of Spanish American cultural discourse and historical life". Challenging history García Márquez comments on the nature of