The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  I felt it with total conviction. The simple force of my will, I thought, had managed to keep the Angel of History far away and marginalized. The war, in this country of windbags, was something that happened in telegrams, in letters exchanged by generals, in the capitulations that were being signed from one end of the Republic to the other. After Peralonso, the revolutionary General Vargas Santos was proclaimed “Provisional President of the Republic.” Mere words (and excessively optimistic ones). From the Panamanian city of David, the revolutionary General Belisario Porras protested before the Conservative government for the “acts of banditry” committed by government soldiers. Mere words. The Liberal command complained of the “flagellations” and “tortures” inflicted on prisoners captured “in their houses” and without “weapons in their hands.”

  Mere words, mere words, mere words.

  I concede, however, that the words made their sounds from closer and closer. (Words pursue, they can wound, they’re dangerous; words, in spite of being the empty kind of words that Colombians tend to pronounce, can sometimes explode in our mouths, and we mustn’t underestimate them.) The war had now landed in Panama, and in Colón the sound of nearby gunshots reached us and also news of them, the agitation of the prisons crammed with political prisoners and rumors of mistreatment, the smell of the dead that began to be left scattered over the Isthmus, from Chiriquí to Aguadulce. But in my Schizophrenic City, the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb remained firmly installed in a parallel world. Christophe Colomb was a ghost town, and was, to be specific, a French ghost town: What good could a place like that be to a Colombian civil war? As long as we didn’t leave it—I remember having thought—my two women and I would be safe. . . . But maybe (as I’ve implied elsewhere using other words but finding the exact formula is the writer’s task) my enthusiasm was premature. For at the same time, in the distance, the ill-fated department of Santander, cradle of the war, was flooded with blood, and that battle mysteriously set in motion the hypocritical and backstabbing mechanisms of politics. In other words, a conspiracy was set in motion by which the Gorgon and the Angel of History prepared to invade, in collaboration and without any consideration whatsoever, the paradise of the Altamirano-Madinier household.

  It happened in a place called Palonegro. Barely recovered from the bullet wound to his thigh, General Herrera had advanced northward as part of the revolutionary vanguard. In Bucaramanga he took the opportunity to toss out a new crop of words: “Injustice is an everlasting seed of rebellion,” and things like that. But there was no rhetoric worthy of May 11, when eight thousand revolutionaries found themselves up against twenty thousand government troops, and what followed . . . How to explain what followed? No, the numbers are of no use to me (those old standbys so beloved of journalists like my father), and statistics, though they travel so well by telegraph, are of no use either. I can say that the combat lasted fourteen hours; I can talk of the seven thousand dead. But numbers don’t decompose, nor are statistics a breeding ground for pestilence. For fourteen days the air of Palonegro filled with the fetid stench of rotting eyes, and the vultures had time to peck open the cloth of the uniforms, and the field became covered in pale naked corpses, with broken bellies and spilled entrails staining the green of the meadow. For fourteen days the smell of death penetrated the nostrils of men too young to recognize it or to know why their mucous membranes were stinging or why it wouldn’t go away even when they rubbed gunpowder into their mustaches. Wounded revolutionaries fled down the Torcoroma trail and collapsed like milestones along the escape route, so one could have kept track of their fate simply by observing the flight paths of the vultures.

  The fate of the escaped generals was immediate exile: Vargas Santos and Uribe Uribe left Riohacha for Caracas; General Herrera fled by way of Ecuador, managing to escape the government troops but not the willful, stubborn words. In a message that pursued him until it caught up with him, Vargas Santos entrusted him with directing the war in the departments of Cauca and Panama.

  From Panama it was possible to win the war.

  In Panama the liberation of the country would begin.

  General Herrera agreed, as was to be expected. In a matter of weeks he had put together an expeditionary army—three hundred Liberals who’d been defeated in the battles of the south and of the Pacific coast anxious for an opportunity to avenge themselves and avenge their dead—but they lacked a ship to get them to the Isthmus. At that moment the deus ex machina (so at home in the theater of history) brought him good news: idly anchored in the port of Guayaquil was a ship called the Iris, full of cattle and destined for El Salvador. Herrera inspected the vessel and discovered the most important technical attribute: the owner, the firm of Benjamin Bloom & Co., had put it up for sale. Without delay, the General gave his word, signed promissory contracts of sale, toasted the business with a glass of agua de panela with lemon while the Salvadoran Captain and his first mate raised recurrent glasses of aguardiente de caña. At the beginning of October, filled with as many young revolutionary soldiers as cows, each of whose four stomachs seemed to come to an agreement to suffer simultaneously from diarrhea, the Iris set sail from Guayaquil.

  One of the soldiers interests us in particular: the camera approaches, laboriously avoiding one or two cows’ backs, passes under a soft, freckled udder, and avoids the whip of a treacherous tail, and its gray image shows us the immaculate, frightened (and hidden among the cow pies) face of a certain Anatolio Calderón. Anatolio would have his nineteenth birthday flanked by the cows of the Iris, as the ship passed the coast of Tumaco, but his shyness wouldn’t allow anyone to find out. He’d been born on a hacienda in Zipaquirá, son of an Indian servant who died giving birth to him and the owner of the property, Don Felipe de Roux, rebellious bourgeois and socialist dilettante. Don Felipe had sold the family estates and set sail for Paris before his illegitimate son reached puberty, but not without leaving him enough money to study whatever he wanted in any university in the country. Anatolio enrolled in the Externado University to study law, although deep down he would rather have read literature at the University of Rosario and followed in the footsteps of Julio Flórez, the Divine Poet. When General Herrera went through Bogotá, after the Battle of Peralonso, and was received as a hero by the young Liberals, Anatolio was among those, blazing with patriotic fervor, who leaned out of the windows of the university. He saluted the General, and the General singled him out from among all the students to return his salute (or at least so it seemed to him). When the parade had finished, Anatolio went down to the street and found, among the paving stones, a lost Liberal horseshoe. The find struck him as a sign of good luck. Anatolio cleaned the mud and dried shit off the horseshoe and put it in his pocket.

  But war is not always as orderly as it seems when narrated, and young Anatolio did not join up with General Herrera’s revolutionary army at that moment. He carried on with his studies, determined to change the country by way of the very laws the Conservative governments had trampled on. But on July 31, 1900, one of those same Conservatives visited the quasi-nonagenarian Don Manuel Sanclemente’s tropical retreat, and in less decent words than mine told him that a useless old man mustn’t hold the reins of the nation, and then and there declared him removed from Bolívar’s throne. The coup d’état was perpetrated in a matter of hours; and before the week was out, six law students had left the university, packed their things, and gone in search of the first Liberal battalion prepared to enlist them. Of the six students, three died in the Battle of Popayán, one was taken prisoner and transferred back to the Panóptico Prison in Bogotá, and two escaped to the south, went round the Galeras volcano to avoid the Conservative troops, and made it to Ecuador. One of those was Anatolio. After wandering the battlefields for so many months, Anatolio had nothing but one rusty horseshoe, a leather canteen, and a Julio Flórez book whose brown covers had become impregnated with sweat. The day the commanding officer of the Cauca battalion, Colonel Clodomiro Arias, notified him that the battalion woul
d be incorporated into General Benjamín Herrera’s army, Anatolio was reading and rereading the lines of “Everything Comes to Us Late.”And glory, that nymph of fate,

  dances only on sepulchers.

  Everything comes to us late

  . . . even death!

  Suddenly, he began to feel an itching in his eyes. He read the lines, realized he felt like crying, and wondered if the most terrible thing had happened, if war had turned him into a coward. Days later, hiding among the cows of the Iris for fear that someone—Sergeant Major Latorre, for example—might look him in the eye and notice the cowardice that had settled in there, Anatolio thought of the mother he never knew, cursed the day he’d considered joining the revolutionary army, and felt a violent urge to go home and eat a hot meal. And instead here he was, smelling the vapors of cow dung, breathing the saline humidity of the Pacific, but most of all scared to death of what awaited him in Panama.

  The Iris arrived in El Salvador on October 20. General Herrera met the ship’s owners in Acajutla and signed a sales agreement that was more like a bond: if the revolution was successful, the Liberal government would pay the gentlemen of Bloom & Co. the sum of sixteen thousand pounds sterling; if they lost, the ship would form part of the “contingencies of war.” There, in the Salvadoran port, General Herrera had them disembark in a strict order—cattle, soldiers, crew—and climbed up on a wooden crate so everyone could hear as he ceremoniously rechristened the ship. The Iris would henceforth be called the Almirante Padilla. Anatolio took note of the change but also noted that he was still scared. He thought of José Prudencio Padilla, Guajiran martyr of Colombian independence, and said to himself that he didn’t want to be a martyr to absolutely anything, that he wasn’t interested in dying in order to be honored by decree, and much less so for some half-mad military man who would name a ship after him. In December, after putting into port at Tumaco to pick up a contingent of fifteen hundred soldiers, a hundred and fifteen cases of ammunition, and nine hundred and ninety-seven projectiles for the cannon mounted on the prow, the Almirante Padilla put into port in Panama. It was Christmas Eve and the heat was dry and pleasant. The soldiers had not even disembarked when the news reached them: the Liberal forces had been destroyed across the entire Isthmus. While up on deck they recited the novena; Anatolio stayed hidden in the bowels of the ship and wept with fear.

  With the arrival of Herrera’s troops in the Isthmus, the war began to take on a different aspect. Under the orders of Colonel Clodomiro Arias, Anatolio participated in the taking of Tonosí, disembarked in Anton, and liberated the forces of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo from the siege of La Negrita, but in none of those places did he stop considering desertion. Anatolio took part in the Battle of Aguadulce; one night when the moon was full, while General Belisario Porras’s revolutionary forces took the Vigia hill and advanced toward Pocri, those of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo destroyed the government battalions guarding the city, the Sanchez and the Farias. At noon the next day, the enemy started to send emissaries to request ceasefires in order to bury their dead, to negotiate more or less honorable capitulations. Anatolio was part of this historical date in which the balance appeared to shift to the revolutionary side, during which for a few hours the revolutionaries believed in that pipe dream: definitive triumph. The Cauca battalion buried eighty-nine of their men, and Anatolio took personal charge of several bodies; but what he would remember forever did not come from his side but from the government side: the smell of roasting flesh that invaded the air when the medic of the Farias battalion began to incinerate, one at a time, the hundred and sixty-seven Conservative corpses he preferred not to bury.

  The smell stayed with him all the way to Panama City, Herrera’s army’s next objective. It soon seemed to him that even the pages of Julio Flórez’s book were impregnated with the stench of Conservatives reduced to ashes, and if he read a line like “Why do you fill the air I breathe?” the air would immediately fill with incinerated nerves, muscles, and fat. But the battalion kept advancing, indifferent; no one sensed the hell that was overwhelming Anatolio, no one looked him in the eye and discovered the cowardice lurking there. Less than fifty kilometers from Panama City, Colonel Clodomiro Arias divided his battalion: some carried on with him toward the capital, planning to camp at a prudent distance and wait for the arrival of the reinforcements the Almirante Padilla would deposit east of Chame; the others, including Anatolio, would carry on northward under the orders of Sergeant Major Latorre. Their mission was to get to the railway at Las Cascadas and guard the line against any attempt to obstruct the free circulation of trains. General Herrera wanted to send a clear message to the marines waiting in the North American steamships—the Iowa off the coast of Panama City, the Marietta off Colón—like a ghostly presence: there was no need for them to disembark, because the Liberal army would ensure that neither the railway nor the Canal works were in any danger. Anatolio, part of this placation strategy, pitched his tent in the place chosen by Sergeant Major Latorre. That night, he was awakened by three shots. The sentinel had mistaken the frenetic movements of a wildcat for a governmental counterattack and had fired three times in the air. It was a false alarm; but Anatolio, sitting on top of his only blanket, felt a new warmth between his thighs and realized he’d wet himself. By the time the camp had calmed down and his tent mates had gone back to sleep, Anatolio had already wrapped the horseshoe and the Julio Flórez book in a dirty shirt, and begun to do—under the protection of the shadows—what he should have done a long time earlier. Before the birds started to wake up in the dense treetops, Anatolio had already become a deserter.

  Meanwhile, General Herrera received the first news of the executions. Aristides Fernández, Minister of War, had ordered Tomás Lawson, Juan Vidal, Benjamín Mañozca, and fourteen more generals of the revolution to face the firing squad. That wasn’t all: on board the Almirante Padilla and in the Aguadulce camp, the general staff of the Liberal army received the circular that the Minister had printed and sent to all the governmental commanding officers, all the Conservative mayors and governors, ordering them to shoot without trial any and all armed revolutionaries they captured. But Anatolio never found out: he had already gone into the jungle, he’d already descended the Central Cordillera on his own, making short-lived fires to frighten off the poisonous snakes and mosquitoes, eating monkeys that he hunted with his army-issue rifle or threatening the Indians of La Chorrera in order to get boiled yucca or coconut milk.

  The war, very much in spite of its deserters, continued its course. In Panama City everyone was talking about the letter that General Herrera had written to the provincial governor, complaining again of the “treatment inflicted on the Liberal prisoners” who had been “tortured as much in the flesh as had their dignity and spirits been ill-treated”; but Anatolio knew nothing of the letter, or of the disdain with which the provincial governor redirected it to Aristides Fernández, or of the Minister of War’s reply, which consisted of seven selective executions in the same plaza where the Canal Company’s office had stood, and where the Grand Hotel still stood, converted into government barracks and ad hoc dungeon. Like a one-man expedition (like Stanley penetrating the Congo), Anatolio had discovered Lake Gatún. He started round it with the vague notion that he’d eventually arrive at the Atlantic, but soon realized that he’d have to use the train if he wanted to get there before the month was out. He had got it into his head—his head obscured by the phantoms of cowardice—that from Colón, that Caribbean Gomorrah, he’d be able to find a ship willing to get him out of the country, a captain willing to look the other way as he disembarked in Kingston or Martinique, in Havana or Puerto Cabello, and he would finally be able to start a new life far away from war, that place where normal, ordinary men—good sons, good fathers, good friends—wet their trousers. The port of Colón, he thought, was the place where nobody notices anybody, where with a little bit of luck he would go unnoticed. To arrive without being discovered, find a steamer or a sailing ship, no matter
what the cargo or flag: nothing else mattered.

  Colón had been in the hands of government forces for almost a year. The defeats of San Pablo and Buena Vista had left General De la Rosa’s Liberal battalions seriously decimated and the city unprotected. When the gunboat Próspero Pinzón appeared in the waters of the bay, full of enemy troops, De la Rosa knew he’d lost the city. General Ignacio Foliaco, in command of the gunboat, threatened to bombard the city as well as the French hamlet of Christophe Colomb, which was even more within range. De la Rosa rejected the threat. “From my side not a shot will be fired,” he sent word. “You’ll see how you look entering the city after having flattened it with cannonballs.” But before Foliaco could carry out his threat, De la Rosa received a visit from four captains—two North Americans, one English, and one French—who had assumed the role of mediators to avoid possible damage to the railway system. The captains brought a proposal for dialogue; De la Rosa accepted. The British cruiser Tribune served as the meeting place and negotiation table for Foliaco and De la Rosa; five days later, De la Rosa met on board the Marietta with General Albán, that leader of the government forces in the Isthmus who was called “the madman” and not in jest. In the presence of the ship’s Captain, Francis Delano, and Thomas Perry, commander of the cruiser Iowa, General De la Rosa signed the surrender. Before evening fell, the troops of the Próspero Pinzón had disembarked in Puerto Cristóbal, occupied the Mayor’s office, and distributed government proclamations. Eleven months later, Anatolio Calderón headed for this occupied city.