The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  I began to confront a dreadful possibility: my father, who had barely begun to be born for me, could already be dead. And Antonia de Narváez must have seen me looking desperate, must have feared I would don an absurd, Hamlet-like mourning for a father I’d never known, and wanted to spare me those unwarranted laments. Compassionate, or maybe blackmailed, or maybe both at once, my mother confessed that, every year, round about December 16, she received a couple of pages with which Miguel Altamirano kept her up to date with his life. None of the letters received a reply, she continued to confess (I was shocked to see she felt not the slightest guilt). Antonia de Narváez had burned them all, even the latest one, but not before reading them the way one reads a serial by Dumas or Dickens: taking an interest in the fate of the protagonist, yes, but always aware that neither the pathetic moron David Copperfield nor the poor, weepy Lady of the Camellias existed in reality, that their happiness or their disgraces, as moving as they might be to us, have no effect whatsoever on the lives of flesh-and-blood people.

  “Well then, tell me,” I said.

  And she told me.

  She told me that, a few months after his arrival in Colón, Miguel Altamirano found that his reputation as an incendiary writer and champion of Progress preceded him and, almost before he realized, found himself contracted by the Panama Star, the same newspaper the ill-fated Mr. Jennings had been reading on board the Isabel. She told me the mission my father was charged with was very simple: he had to wander around the city, visit the offices of the Panama Railroad Company, even board the train as often as he liked to cross the Isthmus to Panama City, and then write about what a great marvel the railway was and the vast benefits it had brought and would continue to bring to the foreign investors as well as to the local inhabitants. She told me my father knew perfectly well that they were using him as a propagandist, but the good of the cause, from his point of view, justified it all; and with time he gradually realized, also, that years after the inauguration of the railway the streets still remained unpaved, and their only decoration continued to be dead animals and rotting garbage. I repeat: he realized. But none of that affected his unshakable faith, as if the simple image of the train going from one side to the other erased those elements of the landscape. That symptom, mentioned in passing like a simple character trait, would acquire extraordinary importance years later.

  All this my mother told me.

  And kept telling me.

  She told me that in a matter of five years my father had become a sort of pampered son of Panamanian society: the Company’s shareholders feted him like an ambassador, senators from Bogotá took him to lunch to ask his advice, and every official of the state government, each and every member of that rancid isthmian aristocracy, from the Herreras to the Arosemenas, from the Arangos to the Menocals, aspired to have him as husband to their daughter. She told me, finally, that what Miguel Altamirano was paid for his columns was barely sufficient for his confirmed bachelor’s lifestyle, but that didn’t prevent him from spending his mornings offering his services free of charge caring for the sick in the Colón hospital. “The hospital is the largest building in the city,” my mother with her good memory recalled my father writing in one of his lost letters. “That gives an idea of the salubriousness of the environment. But all progress toward the future has its down sides, my dear, and this one was not to be the exception.”

  But that was not all that Antonia de Narváez told me. Like any novelist, my mother had left the most important thing until the end.

  Miguel Altamirano was with Blas Arosemena the February morning when the Nipsic, a steam sloop carrying North American marines and Panamanian macheteros, picked him up in Colón and took him to Caledonia Bay. Don Blas had arrived at his house the previous night and said to him: “Pack for several days. Tomorrow we’re going on an expedition.” Miguel Altamirano obeyed, and four days later he was entering the Darien Jungle, accompanied by ninety-seven men, and for a week he walked behind them in the perpetual twilight of the rain forest, and saw the shirtless men who blazed the trail with clean machete blows, while others, the white men in their straw hats and blue-flannel shirts, wrote in their notebooks about everything they saw: the depth of the Chucunaque River when they tried to wade across it, but also the affection that scorpions felt for canvas shoes; the geological constitution of a ravine, but also the taste of roast monkey washed down with whiskey. A Gringo called Jeremy, veteran of the War of Secession, lent my father his rifle, because no man should be unarmed in these places, and told him that the rifle had fought in Chickamauga, where the forests were no less dense than here and the visibility shorter than the distance an arrow flies. My father, victim of his adventurer’s instincts, was fascinated.

  One of those nights they camped beside a rock polished by the Indians and covered with burgundy-colored hieroglyphics—the same Indians who, armed with poison-tipped arrows, with faces marked by such seriousness as my father had never seen, had guided them for a good part of the route. My father was standing up, observing in stunned silence the figure of a man with both arms raised facing a jaguar or maybe a puma; and then, as he listened to the arguments that would arise between a Confederate lieutenant and a small, bespectacled botanist, he felt all of a sudden that this crossing justified his life. “The enthusiasm kept me awake,” he wrote to Antonia de Narváez. Although Antonia de Narváez was of the opinion that it wasn’t the enthusiasm but rather the gnats, I felt I came to understand my father at that moment. On that page, lost long ago in my mother’s purges, surely written in haste and still under the influence of the expedition, Miguel Altamirano had found the profound meaning of his existence. “They want to part the land as Moses parted the sea. They want to separate the continent in two and realize the distant dreams of Balboa and Humboldt. Common sense and all the explorations undertaken dictate that the idea of a canal between the two oceans is impossible. Dear Lady, I make this promise to you with all the solemnity of which I am capable: I shall not die without having seen that canal.”

  Readers of the Jury: you know, as does the whole British Empire, the famous anecdote we’ve so often been told by the world-famous Joseph Conrad about the origins of his passion for Africa. Do you remember? The scene has an exquisite romanticism, but it won’t be me who satirizes that aspect of his tale. Joseph Conrad is still a child, he is still Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and the map of Africa is a blank space whose contents—its rivers, its mountains—are completely unknown; a place of bright obscurity, a true deposit of mysteries. The boy Korzeniowski puts a finger on the empty map and says, “I shall go there.” So then, what the map of Africa was to the boy Korzeniowski, the image of my father in Panama was to me. My father crossing the Darien Jungle, along with a group of madmen who wondered if they could build a canal there; my father sitting in the Colón hospital beside a patient with dysentery. The letters that Antonia de Narváez had brought back to life by memory, no doubt making mistakes with precise details, chronologies, and the odd proper name, had become in my head a space comparable to the Africa of my friend Korzeniowski: a continent without contents. My mother’s narration had drawn a border around Miguel Altamirano’s life; but what that border confined became, as the months and years went by, my very own heart of darkness. Readers of the Jury: I, José Altamirano, was twenty-one years old when I put a finger on my own blank map and pronounced, excited and trembling, my own I shall go there.

  At the end of August 1876, a few leagues from the door of my house, I boarded the American steamship Selfridge, without saying good-bye to Antonia de Narváez, and followed the same route my father had covered after scattering his sperm. Sixteen years had passed since the last Colombian civil war, in which the Liberals had killed more, not because their army was better or braver, but because it was their turn. The regular massacre of compatriots is our version of the changing of the guard: it’s done every so often, generally following the same criteria as children at play (“It’s my turn to govern,” “No, it’s my turn”); a
nd it happened that the moment of my departure for Panama coincided with another changing of the guard, as usual under the stage directions of the Angel of History. I sailed a Magdalena colonized or dominated by the alternating traffic of the two warring parties, or by barges filled not with cacao or tobacco, but with dead soldiers whose putrid stench was stronger than the smoke coming out of the funnels. And I came out onto the Caribbean Sea at Barranquilla, and sighted the Cerro de la Popa from the deck and also the city walls of Cartagena, and I probably had some innocent thought (I may have wondered, for example, if my father had seen the same view, and what he’d thought upon seeing it).

  But I could not have imagined that a ship sailing under a French flag had just passed through this walled port, en route from Marseille with stops in Saint-Pierre, Puerto Cabello, Santa Marta, and Sabanilla, and now heading for the city some of its passengers knew as Aspinwall and others as Colón. I sailed across the wake of the Saint-Antoine but didn’t know it; and when I arrived that night in Colón, I also didn’t know my steamer had passed less than two leagues from that sailing ship comfortably anchored in Limón Bay. Other things I didn’t know: that the Saint-Antoine was making that trip clandestinely and would not keep a record of it in the logbook; that its cargo was not what was declared either but seven thousand contraband rifles for the Conservative revolutionaries; and that one of the smugglers was a young man two years my junior, a steward with a nominal salary, of noble birth, Catholic beliefs, and timid appearance, whose surname was unpronounceable to the rest of the crew and whose head was already beginning, clandestinely, to archive what he saw and heard, to conserve anecdotes, to classify characters. Because his head (although the young man did not yet know it) was the head of a storyteller. Do I need to tell you what is so obvious? It was a certain Korzeniowski, by the name of Józef, by the name of Teodor, by the name of Konrad.

  III

  Joseph Conrad Asks for Help

  Yes, my dear Joseph, yes: I was there, in Colón, while you were. . . . I was not a witness, but that, given the nature of our almost telepathic relationship, of the invisible threads that kept us on the same wavelength, was not necessary. Why does that seem so implausible to you, my dear Joseph? Don’t you know, as I do, that our encounter was programmed by the Angel of History, the great metteur-en-scène, the expert puppeteer? Don’t you know that no one escapes his destiny, and didn’t you write it several times in several places? Don’t you know our relationship already forms part of history, and history is renowned for never bowing to the irksome obligation of plausibility?

  But now I must go back in time. I warn you now that further on I’ll move ahead again, and then back again, and so on alternately, successively, and stubbornly. (I’ll get fed up with this temporal navigation, but I don’t have too many options. How to remember without getting worn down by the past? To put it another way: How does a body manage to endure the weight of his memory?) Anyway, I’m going back.

  Shortly befo0re docking, young Korzeniowski avails himself of a moment of calm, he leans on the rail of the Saint-Antoine and allows his gaze to wander at random over the landscape. It is his third voyage to the Caribbean, but never before has he passed by the Gulf of Urabá, never has he seen the coastlines of the Isthmus. After passing the gulf, approaching Limón Bay, Korzeniowski distinguishes three uninhabited islands, three caymans half submerged in the water, enjoying the sun and pursuing any ray that pierces the veil of clouds at this time of year. Later he’ll ask and will be told: yes, the three islands, yes, they have names. They’ll tell him: the archipelago of the Mulatas. They’ll tell him: Great Mulata, Little Mulata, and Isla Hermosa. Or that, at least, is what he will remember years later, in London, when he tries to revive the details of that voyage. . . . And then he’ll wonder if his own memory has been faithful to him, if it hasn’t failed him, whether he really saw a ragged old palm tree on Little Mulata, whether someone actually told him there was a freshwater spring on Great Mulata issuing from the side of a ravine. The Saint-Antoine continues its approach to Limón Bay; night falls, and Korzeniowski senses that the play of light on the sea is starting to deceive his eyes, for Isla Hermosa appears to be little more than a flat, gray rock, smoking (or is it a mirage?) from the heat accumulated during the day. Then night swallows the earth, and eyes have appeared on the coast: the bonfires of the Cuna Indians are the only things visible from the ship, beacons that do not guide or help but confuse and frighten.

  I, too, saw the Cunas’ fires lighting up the night, of course, but let me say in a good loud voice: I saw nothing else. No islands, no palm trees, much less any steaming rocks. Because that night, the night of my arrival in Colón hours after young Korzeniowski arrived, a dense fog had fallen over the bay that only abated to give way to the most extraordinary downpour I had ever chanced to see up to that moment. The deck of the ship was lashed with harsh gusts of rain, and I swear I feared at some point, in my ignorance, that it would extinguish the boilers. As if that weren’t enough, there were so many ships taking up the few moorings in Colón, that the Selfridge could not dock, and we spent that night on board. Let us begin, readers, to put to rest a few tropical myths: it is not true that there are no mosquitoes far from land. Those of the Panama coast are able, to judge by what I saw that night, to cross entire bays to force incautious passengers to take shelter under their nets. In five words: it was an unbearable night.

  Dawn broke at last, at last the clouds of mosquitoes and the real clouds scattered, and the passengers and crew of the Selfridge spent the day on deck, taking the sun just like caimans or the Mulatas, waiting for the good news that they could dock. But night fell again, and the clouds returned, the real ones and the others; and the docks of Colón remained as full as a sailors’ brothel. The resurrection occurred on the third day. The sky had cleared miraculously, and in the cool night air (that luxury article) the Selfridge managed to find a bed in the brothel. Passengers and crew burst ashore like a downpour, and I set foot for the first time on the land of my maledictions.

  I came to Colón because I was told that here I would find my father, the well-known Miguel Altamirano; but as soon as my smelly feet, my damp, stiff boots, stepped into the Schizophrenic City, all the nobility of the classic theme—all those stories of Oedipus and Laius, Telemachus and Odysseus—went very quickly to hell. It won’t be me who tries to disguise the truth at this stage in life: walking into the commotion of the city, the Father Quest turned into the last of my priorities. I confess, yes, I confess I was distracted. I allowed Colón to distract me.

  My first impression was of a city too small for the chaos it harbored. The serpent of the railway line rested about ten meters from the waters of the bay, and seemed ready to slide into them and sink forever at the slightest tremor of the earth. The stevedores shouted unintelligibly and without that seeming to matter to them: the Babel my father had evoked, far from being overcome, remained alive and kicking on the docks that separated the railroad from the shore. I thought: This is the world. Hotels that didn’t receive guests but went out hunting for them; American saloons where men drank whiskey, played poker, and talked with bullets; Jamaican slums; Chinese butcher shops; in the middle of everything, the private house of an old railway employee. I was twenty-one years old, dear reader, and the long, black braid of the Chinese man who sold meat over the counter and liquor under it, or Maggs & Oates pawnshop and its display window on the main street with the most gigantic jewels I’d ever seen, or the West Indian cobblers’ shops where they danced soca were for me like notifications of a disorderly and magnificent world, allusions to countless sins, welcome letters from Gomorrah.

  That night I did something for the first time that I would repeat many years later and on another continent: arrive in an unknown city and look for a hotel at night. I confess: I didn’t look too closely at where I was staying, and I wasn’t intimidated by the fact that the owner/ receptionist held a Winchester as he pushed the visitors’ book toward me. Sleepwalking, I went outside again, mad
e my way between mules and carts and carts with mules to a two-storey saloon. Above the wooden sign—GENERAL GRANT, it read—waved the stars and stripes. I leaned on the bar, ordered what the man next to me had ordered, but before the mustached bartender had poured my whiskey, I had already turned around: the saloon and its customers were a better spectacle.

  I saw two Gringos having a knife fight with three Panamanians. I saw a whore they called Francisca—hips that had already opened for one or more children, worn-out tits, a certain bitterness in her expression, and a comb out of place in her hair—and imagined that she’d committed the error of accompanying her husband on his Panama adventure and that in a matter of months the poor little man had gone to swell the statistics of the Colón hospital. I saw a group of sailors, bare-chested thugs in unbuttoned, dark, knitted shirts, who surrounded her and solicited her in their language, insistently but not impolitely, and I saw or noticed that the woman enjoyed that unusual and now exotic moment when a man treated her with something resembling respect. I saw a cart driver come in and start asking for help to move a dead mule off the railway tracks; I saw a group of Americans look him over, from under their broad-brimmed hats, before rolling up the bright sleeves of their shirts and going out to help.