The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Barranquilla, undated

  You will mock me, but I cannot stop thinking of you. And sympathizing with you, for you will have had to return to the one you do not love, while I move inexorably away from the one I adore.1 Are my words excessive, my feelings illegitimate? . . . We disembarked yesterday; today we are crossing the sandy plain that separates us from Salgar, where the steamer that will take us to our destination awaits. The sight of the Great Atlantic Ocean, route of my future, supplies much welcome calm. . . . I am traveling with a likable foreigner, ignorant of our language but very willing to learn it.

  He has opened his travel diary and shown me cuttings from the Panama Star that describe, I believe, the advances of the railroad. In reply, I have tried to make him understand that the very same iron track, able to conquer the dense jungle palm by palm, was also the object of my most profound admiration; I do not know, however, if I managed to convey that to him.

  Letter from Antonia de Narváez to Miguel Altamirano, place not specified, Christmas Day

  Your words are excessive and your feelings illegitimate. Ours, sir, was an encounter the reasons for which I have not yet ascertained and furthermore refuse to explore; I regret nothing, but why pretend interest in what is nothing more than an accident? It does not seem that our destiny is to find each other; I assure you, in any case, that I shall do what is in my power to keep that from occurring. . . . My life is here, my good sir, and here I must stay, just as I must stay at my husband’s side. I cannot accept your claim, in an act of incredible arrogance, to know where my heart lies. I find myself obliged to remind you that, in spite of the ineffable event, you, Don Miguel, do not know me. Are my words cruel? Take them as you please.

  Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Colón, January 29, 1855

  At last it has happened: the Railroad has been inaugurated, and it was my privilege to witness such a great step forward toward Progress. The ceremony, in my modest opinion, was not as lavish as the event warranted; but the whole town came out to celebrate, the unofficial representatives of all Humanity, and in these streets one hears all the languages man’s genius has created.2 . . . In the crowd, veritable Ark of human races, I was surprised to recognize a certain Melo-supporting lieutenant, whose name is not worth writing down. He was banished to Panama as punishment for participating in the coup, yes, the very one that my humble services contributed to toppling. When he told me, I confess, I was flabbergasted. Panama, punishment for rebels? The Isthmus, Residence of the Future, a place to banish enemies of democracy? Little could I find to contradict him. I had to bow to the evidence; what I consider a prize, one of the greatest my worthless life has granted me, is for my own government a disaster just short of the gallows. . . . Your words, dear lady, are daggers that pierce my heart. Spurn me, but do not repudiate me; insult me, but do not ignore me. I am, since that night, your deferential servant, and I do not close the door to our reencounter. . . . The Isthmus’s climate is marvelous. The skies are clear, the air sweet. Its reputation, I can now say, is a tremendous injustice.

  Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Colón, April 1, 1855

  The climate is lethal. It never stops raining, the houses flood; the rivers burst their banks and people sleep in the treetops; above puddles of still water swarm clouds of mosquitoes that look like locusts from ancient Babylon; the train carriages have to be cared for as if they were babes in arms for fear they’ll be devoured by the humidity. Plague reigns over the Isthmus, and sick men wander the city, some begging for a glass of water to bring down the fever, others dragging themselves to the hospital doors, under the illusion that a miracle will save their lives. . . . A few days ago we recovered the corpse of Lieutenant Campillo; now it is justifiable to commit his name to paper, though not for that any less painful. 3 . . . I must assume that your reply has gone astray; the reverse would be inadmissible. Dear lady, there is a conspiracy of fate that prevents my forgetting, for I am constantly crossing paths with messengers of memory. The lives of the locals begin each morning with the sacred ritual of coffee and quinine, which protects them from the phantoms of fever; and I myself have adopted the customs of those I visit, for I judge them healthy. So what can I do if every tiny grain brings me the flavor of our night? What can I do?

  Letter from Antonia de Narváez to Miguel Altamirano, Honda, May 10, 1855

  Do not write to me, sir, and do not seek me. I consider this exchange closed and what was between us forgotten. My husband has died; know this, Don Miguel Altamirano, from this day on I am dead to you.4

  Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Colón, July 29, 1855

  With my face disfigured by incredulity, I read over your terse message. Do you really expect me to obey your orders? By issuing them, do you seek to put my feelings to the test? You leave me, my dear lady, in an impossible situation, for complying with your directive would be to destroy my love, and not doing so would be to go against you. . . . You have no reason to doubt my words; the death of Mr. William Beckman, honorable man and favored guest of our nation, has deeply saddened me. You are excessively sparing with your words, my dear, and I do not know if it would be rash to inquire into the circumstances of the tragedy on the same page as I transmit my most sincere condolences to you . . . . I do so desire to see you again . . . but I cannot dare request your presence, and at times I think that perhaps it is this that has offended you. If this is the case, I beg you to understand me: here there are no women or children. So insalubrious is this land, that men prefer solitude during the course of their stay. They know, because experience has shown it to be so, that bringing their family with them is to condemn them to death as efficiently as running a machete through their chests.5 These men, who have come to cross from one ocean to another toward gold mines in the land of California, are in search of instant riches, it’s true, and they are willing to stake their own lives on it; but not those of their loved ones, for to whom would they return with their pockets filled with gold dust? No, my dear lady; if we are to see one another again, it will be in a more pleasant spot. That is why I await your summons; a word, a single one, and I shall be at your side. Until that moment, until you concede me the grace of your company,

  I remain yours,

  Miguel Altamirano

  Eloísa dear: this letter received no reply.

  Nor did the next.

  Nor did the next.

  And thus ended the correspondence, at least as far as this tale is concerned, between the two individuals who with time and certain circumstances I have grown accustomed to calling my parents. The reader of the preceding pages will look in vain for a reference to Antonia de Narváez’s pregnancy, not to mention to the birth of her son. The letters I have not copied also take meticulous care to hide the first nauseas, the protruding belly, and, of course, the details of the birth. So Miguel Altamirano would wait a long time before finding out that his sperm had got its way, that a son of his had been born in the country’s interior.

  My date of birth was always a small domestic mystery. My mother celebrated my birthday indiscriminately on July 20, August 7, and September 12; I, as a simple matter of dignity, have never celebrated it. As for places, I can say the following: unlike the majority of human beings, I know that of my conception but not that of my birth. Antonia de Narváez once told me, and then regretted having done so, that I was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá, in a gigantic bed covered in uncured hides and beside a chair whose back was carved with a certain noble coat of arms. On sad days, my mother rescinded that version: I had been born in the middle of the Muddy Magdalene, on a barge that sailed from Honda to La Dorada, between bundles of tobacco and oarsmen frightened at the spectacle of that deranged white woman and her open legs. But, in light of all the evidence, that birth most likely took place on the solid riverbank ground of the predictable city of Honda and, to be precise, in that very room of the Beckman guest house where the owner, the
good-natured man who would have been my stepfather, put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger upon learning that what was in that swollen belly was not his.

  I have always thought admirable the coldness with which my mother says in her letter, “My husband has died,” when in reality she is referring to a horrid suicide that tormented her for decades and for which she would never stop feeling in part guilty. Long before his miserable cuckolded tropical fate, Beckman had asked—you know how these adventurers’ last requests are—to be buried in the Muddy Magdalene; and early one morning his body was taken out by a lighter to the middle of the river and thrown overboard so he could sink into the adjective-riddled waters of that unbearable song. As the years went by he became the protagonist of my childhood nightmares: a mummy wrapped in canvas who came up onto the beach, leaking water through the hole in the back of his head and half devoured by the bocachico fish, to punish me for lying to my elders or for killing birds with stones, for swearing or for that time I tore the wings off a fly and told it to fuck off on foot. The white figure of the suicide Beckman, my putative and dead father, was my worst nocturnal threat until I was able to read, for the first of many times, the story of a certain Captain Ahab.

  (The mind generates associations that the pen cannot accept. Now, while I write, I remember one of the last things my mother told me. Shortly before dying in Paita, Manuela Sáenz received a visit from a half-mad Gringo who was passing through Peru. The Gringo, without even removing his wide-brimmed hat, told her he was writing a novel about whales. Were there whales to be seen around there? Manuela Sáenz didn’t know what to say. She died on November 23, 1856, thinking not of Simón Bolívar but of the white whales of a failed novelist.)

  So without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name, I’ll simply say that I was baptized—yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account—as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant, and a little while later, after a confession or two from my tormented mother, I became José de Narváez, son of an unknown father. All that, of course, before arriving at the surname that belonged to me by blood.

  The thing is that I began, finally, to exist; I begin to exist in these pages, and my tale will be told in the first person from now on.

  I’m the one doing the telling. I’m the one who counts. I am that I am. Me. Me. Me.

  Now, having presented the written correspondence that took place between my parents, I must concern myself with another quite different form of correspondence: that between twin souls, yes, that doppelgänger correspondence. I hear murmurs in the audience. Intelligent readers, readers who are always one step ahead of the narrator, you will already be intuiting what’s coming here; you’re already guessing that a shadow is beginning to be cast over my life, the shadow of Joseph Conrad.

  And so it is: because now that time has passed and I can see events clearly, arrange them on the map of my life, I am aware of the traversing lines, the subtle parallels that have kept us connected since my birth. Here is the proof: it doesn’t matter how determined I am to tell the story of my life; doing so, inevitably, is telling the others. By virtue of physical affinities, according to experts, twins who have been separated at birth spend their lives feeling the pains and anxieties that overwhelm the other, even if they’ve never laid eyes on each other and even if an ocean separates them. On the level of metaphysical affinities, which are exactly what interest me, it takes on a different complexion but also happens. Yes, there is no doubt that this happens, too. Conrad and Altamirano, two incarnations of the same Joe, two versions of the same fate, bear witness to the fact.

  No more philosophy! No more abstractions, demand the skeptics. Examples! We want examples! All right then, my pockets are full of them, and nothing seems easier to me than pulling out a few to sate the journalistic thirst of certain nonconformist spirits. . . . I can tell you that in December 1857 a child is born in Poland, he is baptized Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and his father dedicates a poem to him: “To my son born in the 85th year of the Muscovite Oppression.” In Colombia, a little boy, also called José, receives a box of pastels as a Christmas present and spends several days drawing soldiers without body armor humiliating the Spanish oppressors. While I, at the age of six, was writing my first compositions for a tutor from Bogotá (one of them about a bumblebee that flew over the river), Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who was not yet four, wrote to his father: “I don’t like it much when the mosquitoes bite.”

  More examples, Readers of the Jury?

  In 1863, I was listening to the grown-ups talking about the Liberal revolution and its result, the secular and socialist Rionegro Constitution; in the same year, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was also witness to a revolution in the adult world around him, that of the Polish nationalists against the Russian Tsar, a revolution that sent many of his relatives to prison, exile, or in front of a firing squad. While I, at the age of fifteen, began to ask questions about the identity of my father—in other words, began to bring him to life—Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski watched as his gave way little by little to tuberculosis—in other words, to death. By 1871 or ’72, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had already begun to announce his desire to leave Poland and become a sailor, although he had never in his life seen the sea. And it must have been around then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, that I began to threaten to leave my mother home and the city of Honda, to disappear forever from her sight, unless . . . If she didn’t want to lose me forever, it would be best . . .

  That’s how it was: I went directly from peaceful doubt to savage inquisition. What happened in my head was very simple. My usual doubts, with which I’d maintained a cordial and diplomatic relationship as a child, a sort of nonaggression pact, suddenly began to rebel against all peace initiatives and to launch offensives whose objective, invariably, was my poor blackmailed mother. Who? I asked. When? Why?

  Who? (Stubborn tone.)

  How? (Irreverent tone.)

  Where? (Frankly aggressive tone.)

  Our negotiations went on for months; summit meetings took place in the kitchen of the Beckman guest house, among the saucepans and burned oil and the penetrating smell of fried mojarra, while my mother barked orders at Rosita, the household cook. Antonia de Narváez never committed the vulgarity of telling me my father had died, of turning him into a hero of the civil war—a position to which every Colombian can aspire sooner or later—or a victim of some poetic accident, a fall off a fine horse, a duel over lost honor. No, I always knew the man existed somewhere, and my mother summed up and sentenced the matter with a platitude: “The thing is that somewhere isn’t here.” It took me an entire afternoon, the length of time it takes to cook the stew for dinner, to find out where that somewhere was. Then, for the first time, that word that had been so hard for me as a child (itsmess, I used to say, my tongue tangled up, in geography classes) acquired a certain reality for me, became tangible. There, in that twisted and deformed arm that stuck out of the territory of my country, in that inaccessible appendix out of God’s hands and separate from the rest of the nation by a jungle whose fevers killed with just the mention of its name, that little hell where there were more illnesses than settlers, and where the only hint of human life was a primitive train that helped fortune hunters get from New York to California in less time than it would take them to cross their own country, there, in Panama, lived my father.

  Panama. For my mother, as for most Colombians—who tend to act just like their governments, to harbor the same irrationalities, feel the same dislikes—Panama was a place as real as Calcutta or Berdichev or Kinshasa, a word that marks a map and little more. The railroad had brought the Panamanians ou
t of oblivion, true, but only in a momentary and painfully brief way. A satellite: that was Panama. And the political regime didn’t help much. The country was around about fifty years old, more or less, and here began to act its age. The midlife crisis, that mysterious age when men take lovers who could be their daughters and women heat up for no reason, affected the country in its own way: New Granada became federal. Like a poet or a cabaret artist, it took a new pseudonym: the United States of Colombia. Well then, Panama was one of those states, and it floated in the orbit of the Great Lady in Crisis more due to the mere pull of gravity than anything else. Which was an elegant way of saying that powerful Colombians, the moneyed merchants of Honda or Mompós, the politicians of Santa Fe or the military officers all over the country, didn’t give a damn about the State of Panama, much less about the state of Panama.

  And in that place lived my father.

  What?

  Why?

  Who with?

  For a couple of years as long as centuries, during those eternal cooking sessions that resulted in an extremely complicated roast of veal or a simple rice soup with agua de panela, I gradually perfected my interrogator’s technique, and Antonia de Narváez softened like potatoes in a stew before the insistence of my questions. Thus I heard her speak of La Opinión Comunera or El Granadino Temporal; thus I found out about the sinking of the Union, and I even paid good money so an oarsman would take me out on a lighter to see the smokestacks; thus I found out about the encounter on the Isabel, and my mother’s tale had the taste of quinine and the smell of rubbing alcohol. Another round of questions. What had happened in the two decades since then? What else did she know of him? Had there been no further contact in all these years? What was my father doing in 1860, while General Mosquera declared himself Supreme Director of War and the entire country was submerged—yes, Eloísa dear: once more—in the blood of the two parties? What was he doing, with whom was he dining, what was he talking about, while Liberal soldiers arrived at the Beckman guest house one week and Conservatives the next, while my mother fed one lot and tended the wounds of the others like a perfect Florence Nightingale of the Tropical Lowlands? What did he think and write in the following years, during which his radical, atheist, and rationalist comrades made friends with the power my father had pursued since his youth? His ideals prevailed, the clergy (blight of our time) had been stripped of their useless and unproductive hectares, and the illustrious Archbishop (director in chief of the blight) was duly incarcerated. Had my father’s pen not left a trace of that in the press? How was that possible?