The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  And nevertheless, there is an event that escapes my comprehension: in spite of Eloísa’s birth, in spite of the great care that determined her slow and laborious survival, the annulled world kept spinning, the country kept moving with insolent independence, in the Isthmus of Panama life went on with complete indifference to what was happening to its most loyal subjects. How to talk about politics thinking at the same time of those years, evoking moments that in my memory belong exclusively to my daughter? How to get down to work recuperating events of a national character, when the only thing that interested me at the time was seeing Eloísa gain one more gram and then another? Every day, Charlotte and I took her, all wrapped up in freshly boiled linens, to Tang’s butcher shop and unwrapped her to place her like a fillet steak or a piece of liver in the big bowl of his scales. On the other side of the high wooden counter Tang put the weights on, those solid rust-colored discs, and for us parents there was no greater pleasure than seeing the Chinese butcher look through his shiny lacquered box for a bigger weight, because the previous one hadn’t been heavy enough. . . . I bring this memory into my tale and immediately wonder: How do I search out, in the midst of my warm personal memories, the aridity of public memories?

  Self-sacrificing man that I am, I’ll try, dear readers, I’ll try.

  Because in my country things were about to happen of the sort that historians always end up recording in their books, asking with sonorous question marks how on earth we could have come to this and then answering I know, I have the answer. Which, of course, isn’t all that clever, for even the most muddle-headed person would have sensed something odd in the air during those years. There were prophecies everywhere: one had only to interpret them. I don’t know what my father might have thought, but I should have recognized the imminent tragedy the day when my nation of poets was no longer able to write poetry. When the Republic of Colombia lost its ear, mistook literary taste, and rejected the most basic lyric rules, I should have sounded the alarm, shouted man overboard, stop the ship. I should have stolen a lifeboat and descended immediately, though I might have run the risk of not finding terra firma, the day I first heard the verses of the National Anthem.

  Ah, those verses . . . Where did I hear them first? It’s more important to ask myself now: Where did those words come from, words that nobody understood and which would have struck any literary critic as worse than terrible literature, more like the product of an unstable mind? Readers, let us go over the traces of the crime (against poetry, against decency). The year is 1887: one José Domingo Torres, a civil servant whose foremost talent was setting up nativity scenes at Christmas time, decides to become a theater director, and also decides that for the next national holiday a Patriotic Poem Produced by Presidential Plume shall be sung. And this for those blessed not to know it: the President of our Republic, Don Rafael Núñez, was in the habit of whiling away his free time composing adolescent verse. He was following a deeply entrenched Colombian tradition: when he wasn’t signing new accords with the Vatican to satisfy the elevated morals of his second wife—and to persuade Colombian society to forgive him for the sin of having married a second time, abroad and in a civil ceremony—President Núñez put on his pajamas, with a nightcap and everything, threw a poncho on top of that against the cold of Bogotá, ordered a cup of chocolate with cheese, and sat down to vomit lines of verse. And one November afternoon, the Bogotá Varieties Theater witnesses a group of profoundly disconcerted young people, through no fault of their own, intoning these ineffable stanzas:From the fields of Boyacá

  An unconquered hero

  Is crowned with each new shoot

  The genius of glory.

  The virile breath

  Of bare-chested soldiers

  Serves as their shield

  And wins the victory.

  Meanwhile, in Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps devotes all his time to that protracted task: accepting. He accepted that the Canal would not be ready in time but would require several more years. He accepted that the billions of francs put up by the French would be insufficient: they needed six hundred million more. He accepted that the idea of a sea-level canal was a technical impossibility and an error of judgment; he accepted that the Panama Canal would be constructed by means of a system of locks. . . . He accepted and accepted and kept accepting: this proud man made more concessions in two weeks than he’d made in his entire life. However—and this is quite a large however—it wasn’t enough. What nobody (where nobody means “de Lesseps”) had imagined had happened: the French were fed up. The day the bonds that would save the Canal Company went on sale, an anonymous note arrived at all the European newspapers saying that Ferdinand de Lesseps had died. It wasn’t true, of course; but the damage was done. The sale of bonds failed. The lottery had failed. When they announced the dissolution of the Canal Company and named a liquidator to take charge of its machines, my father was in the offices of the Star & Herald, begging them to take him back, offering to write the first five articles for free if they would give him space in their pages again. Witnesses assure me they saw him cry. And meanwhile, all over Colombia the people were singing:A lock of the virgin’s hair

  Torn out in agony

  Of her deceased love

  Around the cypress branch entwined.

  Beneath a cold tombstone

  Her hope she mourns

  While a glorious halo of pride

  Her pale countenance enshrined.

  Work on the Panama Canal, the Great Trench, was officially interrupted or stopped in May of 1889. The French began to leave; in the port of Colón the trunks and hemp sacks and wooden crates piled up daily, and the porters couldn’t cope with all the work of getting the moment’s luggage onto the moment’s steamer. The Lafayette seemed to have tripled its weekly runs during that exodus (because that’s what it was, an exodus, what happened in the Isthmus, the French like a persecuted race fleeing in search of friendlier lands). The French city of Christophe Colomb was gradually deserted, as if the plague had invaded and exterminated its residents; it was a ghost town coming into being, but it happened before our eyes, and in itself the spectacle would have fascinated anyone. The recently emptied houses all took on the same smell of freshly washed cupboards; Charlotte and I liked to take Eloísa by the hand and go for walks through the abandoned houses and look through the drawers for a revealing diary full of secrets (something we never did find) or some old garment that Eloísa could use to play dress-up (something we found quite often). On the walls of the houses were marks from nails, rectangles of a whiter white where a portrait of the grandfather who fought with Napoleon had been. The French sold everything that wasn’t indispensable, not to reduce the dimensions of their belongings, but because, from the moment they knew they could leave, Panama became a wretched place they needed to forget as soon as possible and whose objects were capable of carrying curses with them. One of those belongings, sold at public auction a little while later, was a still life the owners had bought, out of charity, from a Canal worker. The man was a poor unhinged Frenchman who claimed to be a banker and also a painter, but who was really no more than a vandal. He claimed to be related to Flora Tristan, which would have interested my mother; he’d disembarked in Panama City, on his way from Peru, and was arrested there for urinating in public. He left in a matter of weeks, frightened off by the mosquitoes and the labor conditions. The world later learned more about his life, and perhaps his name will not be unknown to my readers. He was called Paul Gauguin.Thus the country was formed

  Thermopylae springing forth,

  The Cyclops constellation

  From the night sky shining down.

  While the trembling flower

  Seeks a safe shelter,

  From the menacing gale

  Beneath the laurel crown.

  The uninhabited houses of Christophe Colomb began to fall to pieces (I’m not saying it was partly the fault of the anthem, but you never know). After every rainy season, a whole wall would give way in some s
ector of the city, the wood so rotten it wouldn’t break but bent like rubber, the beams eaten through to the center by termites. Our strolls through the houses had to end: one afternoon in June, in the middle of a downpour, a Cuna Indian slipped into the former house of the engineer Vilar while waiting for the weather to clear; reaching under a wardrobe out of curiosity, he received two bites from a rather small coral snake and died before he got back to Colón. No one could explain why snakes were so interested in the empty houses of Christophe Colomb, but as the years passed the city began to fill with these visitors, bushmasters and fer-de-lances, perhaps just looking for food. My father, who after the publication of the famous Canal payroll in the Star & Herald had become a sort of undesirable, a pariah of isthmian journalism, wrote during those days a short article about two Indians who met in the house of the engineer Debray to test which of them knew the best antidotes. They covered the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb from one end to the other, going into every house and sticking their hands under every wardrobe and every basket and every loose floorboard, getting bitten by as many snakes as they could find to then prove their skill with verbena, with guaco, and even with ipecacuanha . My father recounted how toward the end of the night one of the Indians had crawled under one of the houses, and felt a bite but had not managed to identify the snake. The other let him die: that was his way of winning the contest. And the winner celebrated his victory in the Colón jailhouse, sentenced by a Panamanian judge for culpable homicide.

  Readers of the Jury: this passage, despite appearances, is not an ingenious touch of local color on the part of the narrator, anxious as he is to please audiences in England and even in continental Europe. No, the anecdote of the Indians and the snakes plays an active role in my narration, for that antidote competition marks my father’s disgrace like a boundary stone. Miguel Altamirano wrote a simple chronicle about the Panamanian Indians and the valuable medical information that had come down to them through their traditions; but he did not manage to get it published. And thus, with all the irony implied by what I am about to write, this apolitical and banal tale, this inoffensive anecdote that had nothing to do with the Church, with History, or with the Inter-oceanic Canal, was his ruin. He sent it to Bogotá, where the taste for exoticism and adventure was greater, but seven daily papers (four Conservative, three Liberal) turned it down. He sent it to a newspaper in Mexico and another in Cuba but didn’t even get a reply. And my seventy-year-old father began shutting himself up inside himself (wounded boar, hibernating bear), convinced that everyone was his enemy, that the whole world had turned its back on him as part of a conspiracy led by Pope Leo XIII and the Archbishop of Bogotá, José Telésforo Paul, against the forces of Progress. When I went to visit him, I was met by a resentful, sour-faced, embittered figure: the shadow of a silver beard dominated his face, his restless hands trembling and keeping busy with idle pastimes. Miguel Altamirano, the man who in other times had been able, with a column or a pamphlet, to generate enough hatred that a presbyter would call for his death, now spent his hours inoffensively interchanging the lines of that patriotic song as if he could take revenge on someone like that. The verses he composed might be irreverent:A lock of the virgin’s hair

  Torn out in agony

  The virile breath

  Serving as shield.

  But there were also verses of intense political criticism:From the fields of Boyacá

  The genius of glory

  Seeks a safe shelter

  Beneath the laurel crown.

  And there were also some that were simply absurd:Thermopylae springing forth

  And win the victory.

  The Cyclops constellation

  Her pale countenance surrounds.

  Playing with paper, playing with words, spending the day as a child spends it, laughing at things no one else understands (because no one else was there to hear the explanations or, of course, the laughter), my father entered his own decline, his personal sinking. “Clearly,” he’d say when I went to see him, “the little poem lends itself to anything.” And he’d show me his latest discoveries. Yes, we’d laugh together; but his laughter was tinged with the new ingredient of bitterness, by the melancholy that had killed so many visitors to the Isthmus; and by the time I took my leave of him, when I decided it was time to go home where the miracle of domestic happiness awaited me—my concubine Charlotte, my bastard Eloísa—by that time I was fully aware that in my absence and without my help and in spite of the switched-around lines of the National Anthem, that night my father would sink back down again. His routine had become an alternation of sinking and resurgence. Had I wanted to see it, I would have realized that sooner or later one of those sinkings would be the last. And no, I didn’t want to see it. Drugged by my own mysterious well-being, fruit of the mysterious events of the Chagres River and generated by the mysterious joys of fatherhood, I grew blind to the appeals for help Miguel Altamirano sent my way, the flares he let off from his ship, and I was surprised to find that the power of refraction could be hereditary, that I too was capable of certain blindnesses. . . . For me, Colón turned into the place where I allowed myself to fall in love and to cultivate the idea of a family; I didn’t notice—I didn’t want to notice—that for my father Colón did not exist, nor did Panama exist, nor was life possible, if the Canal did not exist.

  And so we arrive at one of the fundamental crossroads of my life. For if there, in a rented house in Christophe Colomb, a man manipulates lines written by another on a piece of paper, thousands of kilometers away, in a rented house in Bessborough Gardens, London, another prepares to write the first pages of his first novel. In Christophe Colomb a life made of explorations through jungles and rivers is dying away; for the man in Bessborough Gardens the explorations—in another jungle, down another river—are just about to begin.

  The Angel of History, expert puppeteer, begins to move the strings above our unsuspecting heads: unbeknownst to us, Joseph Conrad and José Altamirano begin to edge closer. My duty, as Historian of Parallel Lines, is to trace an itinerary. And I now devote myself to that task. We are in September of 1889, Conrad has just finished breakfast, and something happens to him at that moment: his hand grasps the bell and rings it, so someone will come and clear the table and take the tray away. He lights his pipe and looks out the window. It’s a veiled and misty day, with the odd flash of fiery sunlight here and there on the houses opposite. “I was not at all certain that I wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to write about.” And then he picks up a pen and . . . writes. He writes two hundred words about a man called Almayer. His life as a novelist has just begun; but his life as a sailor, which has not yet ended, is in trouble. It has been several months since Captain Joseph K. returned from his last voyage, and he has still not managed to obtain a captaincy anywhere. There is a project: travel to Africa to captain a steamer for the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. But the project is stalled . . . as is also, apparently for good, the project of the Inter-oceanic Canal. Has it failed? wonders Miguel Altamirano in Colón. All the stage lights now focus on that fateful space of time: the twelve months of 1890.

  JANUARY. Taking advantage of the dry season, Miguel Altamirano hires a lighter and sails up the Chagres to Gatún. It is his first outing in sixty days, if you don’t count the occasional foray down Front Street (no longer bedecked with flags or banners in every language, having ceased to be a boulevard in the center of the world in the space of a couple of months and gone back to being a lost wagon track of the colonized tropics) or his daily stroll to the statue of Christopher Columbus and back. He gets the same impression every time: the city is a ghost town, it is populated by the ghosts of its dead, the living hang around like ghosts. Abandoned by the French, German, Russian, and Italian engineers, by the Jamaican and Liberian laborers, by the North American adventurers who’d fallen from grace and looked for work on the Canal, by the Chinese and the sons of the Chinese and the sons of those sons who fea
r neither melancholia nor malaria, the city that until recently was the center of the world has now turned into an empty hide, like that of a dead cow devoured by vultures. The Cubans and Venezuelans have gone home: there’s nothing for them to do here. Panama has died, thinks Miguel Altamirano. Viva Panama. His intention is to go to see the machines, which he visited seven years ago with the engineer Madinier, but he changes his mind at the last minute. Something has overcome him—fear, sadness, an overwhelming sense of failure—something he can’t quite pinpoint.

  FEBRUARY. On the advice of his uncle Tadeusz, Conrad writes to another of his maternal uncles: Aleksander Poradowski, hero of the revolution against the Tsar’s empire, who was sentenced to death after the insurrection of 1863 and managed to flee Poland thanks, paradoxically, to the help of a Russian accomplice. Aleksander lives in Brussels; his wife, Marguerite, is a cultured and attractive woman who talks intelligently about books, who also writes terrible novels, and who, most of all, has all the contacts in the world with the Société du Haut-Congo. Conrad announces that he intends to travel soon to Poland to visit Tadeusz, and that he will have to travel by way of Brussels; his uncle tells him he’ll be welcome but warns that he is in poor health and might not be able to perform all his duties as host. Conrad writes: “I leave London tomorrow, Friday, at nine a.m. and should arrive in Brussels at five-thirty in the afternoon.” But when he arrives he finds himself faced with another piece of fate’s foul play: Aleksander dies two days later. Disappointed, Captain Joseph K. travels on to Poland. He does not even attend the funeral.