The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  At the beginning of September, Conrad receives a visit from an old enemy: gout, that aristocratic affliction that, like his surnames, is inherited from his family. The cause of that particular crisis, which for Conrad is one of the most terrible in his long history as victim of the disease, lies in the tale he’s working on, in the anguish and fears and ghosts provoked by the unmanageable material he is confronting. Conrad spends ten whole days in bed, devastated by the pain in his joints, by the irrefutable conviction that his right foot is in flames and the big toe of that foot the epicenter of the blaze. For those ten days he requires the company of Miss Hallowes, the selfless woman who acts as his secretary so Conrad can dictate the pages he can’t write by hand. Miss Hallowes puts up with the incomprehensible irascibility of this haughty man; the secretary doesn’t know it, but what Conrad dictates to her from his bed, what he dictates with his feet uncovered in spite of the cold—they hurt him so much he can’t even bear the weight of the covers on them—provokes hitherto unknown levels of nervous tension, pressure, and depression in the novelist. “I feel like I’m walking a tightrope,” he writes at the time. “If I falter I am lost.” With the arrival of autumn he has the increasingly frequent feeling of losing his balance, that the rope is about to snap.

  And then he asks for help.

  He writes to Cunninghame Graham and asks after Pérez Triana.

  He writes to his editor at Heinemann and asks after Pérez Triana.

  Little by little we begin to draw nearer.

  The United States Senate took less than two months to ratify the Herrán–Hay Treaty: there were newspapers arriving in the bay again, long parties in the streets of Colón-Aspinwall again, and for a few moments it seemed that its ratification by the Colombian Congress, the only remaining formality, would happen almost automatically. But taking a step back and watching events with a tiny degree of coolness (as I regarded them from the house in Christophe Colomb; I will not use the word cynicism, nor will I object to others using it) was all that was needed to notice, in these festive and jubilant streets, at the railway crossings or on the walls of every public building, the same geological faults that had divided Colombians since Colombians could recall. The Conservatives supported the Treaty unconditionally; the Liberals, ever the wet blankets, dared to raise the strangest ideas, like that the payment was small and the length of the concession was large, and to the most audacious it seemed a tiny bit confusing, but just a tiny bit, that the famous ten-kilometer strip should be governed by U.S. law.

  “Sovereignty,” José Vicente Concha, that crazy old man, shouted absurdly from somewhere. “Colonialism.”

  Readers of the Jury, allow me to tell you a secret: beneath colored lamps and the music of hastily gathered bands (beneath the drunken enthusiasm reigning in Colón-Gomorrah), the pure and deep divisions of the War of a Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days continued to shudder like tectonic plates. But—a curious thing—only we cynics could detect this; only those of us who’d been vaccinated against any sort of reconciliation or camaraderie, only those of us who dared in silence to profane the Sacred Word of the Wisconsin received the true revelation: the war, in Panama, was far from over. It remained active in underground ways; at some point—I thought prophetically—that clandestine or submerged war would surface like a cursed white whale, to take some air or look for food or kill fictional captains, and the result would be invariably disastrous.

  So, in the middle of May, the whale surfaced. The Indian Victoriano Lorenzo, who had fought for the Liberals in the war and trained guerrillas who drove the government troops mad, had escaped from his prison on board the Bogotá. He had received some terrible news: the victors all over the Isthmus, and especially those of his native land, were expecting him to be tried for war crimes. Lorenzo decided not to sit and bide his time until a trial he knew would be corrupt, and spent a week waiting for an opportune night. One Friday, as evening fell, a vicious thunderstorm bucketed down over Panama; Victoriano Lorenzo decided there would be no better moment, and in the middle of the cloudy night dived through the curtains of rainwater (those heavy drops that hurt your head) into the sea, swam to the port and hid out in General Domingo González’s Panama City house. But refugee life didn’t last long: not twenty-four hours had passed when the stubborn government forces were already knocking down the door of the house.

  Victoriano Lorenzo did not return to the cells of the Bogotá but was taken to an airtight vault and chained up there until the arrival in the city of General Pedro Sicard Briceño, military commander of Panama. Unusual demonstrations of efficiency on the part of General Sicard: on May 13, during the night, he decided that the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo would be tried by verbal court-martial; by noon on the fourteenth, posters were up informing the general public; on the fifteenth, at five in the afternoon, Lorenzo was killed by thirty-six bullets shot from a distance of ten paces by a firing squad. Usual demonstrations of cunning on the part of the same General: the defense was put under the charge of a sixteen-year-old trainee; no witnesses were allowed to speak in favor of the accused; the sentence of capital punishment was carried out with deliberate haste, to prevent the President from having time to receive the telegrams pleading for mercy that the Panamanian authorities from both parties sent. For the Liberals of Colón the whole trial had a certain stale (or rather rotten) taste, and the fact that a firing squad enacted the sentence did not prevent many from recalling the crossbeam set up across the railway lines and Pedro Prestán’s hanging body, his hat still on his head.

  The Panama newspapers, gagged (for a change) by a Conservative decree, at first kept an obliging silence. But on July 23 all of Colón awoke papered. I walked down the quagmires we had for streets, skirted the cargo docks, and darted through the fruit stalls in the market, I even visited the hospital, and everywhere saw the same thing: on the telegraph poles, a poster announced the imminent publication, in the Liberal newspaper El Lápiz (number 85, special eight-page edition), of an article on the murder of Victoriano Lorenzo. The advertisement caused two immediate responses (which did not appear posted anywhere). Secretary of Government Aristides Arjona decreed resolution number 127A, declaring that the description of a sentence issued by a military tribunal as “murder” to be in contravention of the 6th ordinance of the 4th article of the legislative decree of January 26. And while the resolution provided for a caution to be issued against the publisher of the newspaper as set out in the 1st ordinance of the 7th article of the same decree, and by virtue of that caution publication of the newspaper was suspended until further notice, Colonel Carlos Fajardo and General José María Restrepo Briceño, much more expeditious, visited Pacífico Vega’s printing press, recognized the publisher of the newspaper, and beat the hell out of him with their boots, swords, and batons, not before spilling and stamping on the type, destroying the presses, and publicly burning the existing stocks of El Lápiz (number 85, special eight-page edition). The newspaper was subversive and must be punished. So ordered.

  And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As time goes by it seems increasingly clear to me that it was at that moment, at nine-fifteen on that July evening, that the map of the Republic began to crack. All earthquakes have an epicenter, don’t they? Well then, this is the one that interests me. The Liberal newspapers, indignant over the execution of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo, took the aggression of the military boot (and sword, and baton) very badly; but nothing had prepared us for the words that appeared in El Istmeño the following Saturday, and that arrived in Colón on the morning’s first train. I’m not going to inflict on my tolerant readers the entire contents of that new explosive charge; it’s enough to know that they harked back to the times of the Spanish Empire, when the name of Colombia “resounded in human ears with incomparable fame,” and Panama, seeking “a golden future,” did not hesitate to join that nation. The rest of the text (published between an advertisement for a herbal remedy for gaining weight and another for a manual on learning hypnoti
sm) was a long declaration of regret; and after wondering like a resentful lover if Colombia had reciprocated the affection Panama had lavished upon it, the shameless author—who with every phrase gave new meaning to the word corny—wondered if the Isthmus of Panama was happy belonging to Colombia. “Would it not be more content separate from the Republic and constituting itself as a sovereign and independent Republic of its own?” Immediate reply: Secretary of Government Aristides Arjona decreed resolution number 35 of the year of Our Lord 1903, declaring that those questions expressed “subversive ideas contrary to national integrity” and violated the 1st ordinance of the 4th article of decree 84 of the same year. Therefore El Istmeño had earned the corresponding sanctions, and publication was suspended for a period of six months. So ordered.

  In spite of the sanctions, fines, and suspensions, there was no longer anything to be done: the idea was left floating in the air like an observation balloon. In the Darien Jungle, I swear, though I’ve not seen it, the land began to open (geology receiving orders from politics), and Central America began to float free toward the ocean; in Colón, I swear, with full knowledge of proceedings, it was like a new word had entered the citizens’ lexicon. . . . One walked among the ruckus and smells of Front Street and could hear it in all the accents of Spanish, from the Caribbean Spanish of Cartagena to the purest bogotáno, from the Cuban to the Costa Rican. “Separation?” people asked each other on the street. “Independence?” These words, still abstract, still uncut, made their way up north as well; weeks later the steamship New Hampshire arrived in Colón, with a particular edition of New York World in its hold. A long article about the question of the Canal contained, among other explosive charges, the following:Information has reached this city that the State of Panama, which embraces all the proposed Canal Zone, stands ready to secede from Colombia and enter into a Canal Treaty with the United States. The State of Panama will secede if the Colombian Congress fails to ratify the Canal Treaty.

  The anonymous text was widely read in Bogotá, and very soon came to form part of the government’s worst nightmares. “What the Gringos want is to frighten us,” said one of those battle-hardened congressmen. “And we’re not going to give them that pleasure.” On August 17, those nightmares leapt from the unconscious to reality: on a day of unbearably strong wind, a wind that made the deputies’ hats fly from their heads, that forced open the finest umbrellas and inconsiderately ruined the ladies’ hairstyles—and made one or two suffer a wee bit of embarrassment—the Colombian Congress unanimously rejected the Herrán-Hay Treaty. Neither of the two representatives from the Isthmus was present for the vote, but no one seemed to care too much. Washington trembled with fury. “Those contemptible little creatures in Bogotá ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future,” said President Roosevelt, and days later added: “We may have to give a lesson to those jackrabbits.”

  On August 18, Colón awoke in mourning. The deserted streets seemed to be preparing for a state funeral (which was not all that far from the truth); days later, one of the few Liberal newspapers that had survived Aristides Arjona’s purges published a cartoon I still have; in fact, I have it here, in front of me, while I write. It has several scenes and is not terribly clear. In the background is the capital of Colombia; a little lower down, a coffin on a funeral carriage, and on the coffin the words: HERRÁN-HAY TREATY. Sitting on a rock, a man wearing a Colombian peasant hat weeps disconsolately, and standing next to him, leaning on his cane, Uncle Sam looks at a woman pointing the way to Nicaragua. . . . If I have described it in detail, it’s not, dear readers, on a whim. In the weeks after August 17, those weeks that, seeing what they presaged, passed almost masochistically slowly, in all of Panama people talked of the Treaty’s death or demise, never of its rejection or failure to be approved. The Treaty was an old friend and had died of a sudden heart attack, and in Colón the rich paid for Masses to lament its passing from the world of the living, and some paid more so the priest would include in his words the promise of resurrection. Those days—when the Canal in our heads turned into some sort of Jesus Christ the Savior, capable of miracles, dead at the hands of impious men and who would rise from the dead—have remained associated with the cartoon in my memory.

  I could swear that the cartoon was in my pocket that morning, at the end of October, when I arrived at the Railroad Company docks, having spent the night wandering the tolerant streets and fallen asleep on the veranda of my house (on the wooden floorboards, not in the hammock, so I wouldn’t wake Eloísa with the creaking sound the beams made whenever someone lay down in it). It hadn’t been, I must confess, an easy night: after Charlotte’s death, the days of greatest pain had passed by then, or seemed to have passed, and it seemed possible again that a certain normality, a normal and shared grief, could be established between my daughter and myself; but when I got home, after dark in Christophe Colomb, I heard a too-familiar humming, a music that Charlotte used to sing on her happiest days (those days when she did not regret her decision to stay in Panama). It was a childish tune, the words of which I never knew, because Charlotte didn’t remember them; it was a tune that to me always seemed too sad for its ostensible aim of getting an unruly child to sleep. And when my footsteps followed the humming, on arriving at Eloísa’s room, I came across the frightful image of my wife, who had returned from the dead and was more beautiful than ever, and it took me a second to discern Eloísa’s features beneath her makeup, Eloísa’s adolescent body beneath a long African dress, Eloísa’s hair beneath a green African scarf: Eloísa playing dress-up in her dead mother’s clothes. I can barely imagine my little girl’s dismay when she saw me leap toward her (perhaps she thought I was going to embrace her) and slap her across the face, not too hard, but enough to knock one end of the scarf off her head so it lay over her right shoulder like a lock of hair out of place.

  The sun was already making itself felt when I began to wait, with the salty wind hitting me in the chest, for the first North American steamer to dock. It turned out to be the Yucatán, en route from New York. And there I was, regretting what had happened with Eloísa, thinking without wanting to think of Charlotte, breathing that warm air while the dockers brought the bundles of the foreign newspapers down to the port, when Dr. Manuel Amador came down off the ship. I wish I’d never seen him, wish I’d never noticed him, wish, having noticed him, that I hadn’t been able to deduce what I deduced.

  What I must now tell is painful. Who can blame me for looking away, for trying to postpone the suffering as I’m going to do. Yes, I know: I should follow the chronological order of events, but nothing forbids me from taking a leap into the immediate future. . . . Barely a week after that chance meeting with Manuel Amador (a dreadful week), I found myself on my way to London. What forbids me this conjuring trick that hides or defers the least pleasant days in my memory? In fact, is there some contract that obliges me to tell them? Does every individual not reserve the right not to testify against himself? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time I hid, I pretended to forget, those troublesome events. I have already spoken of my arrival in London and my meeting with Santiago Pérez Triana. Well, the story I’ve told up to now is the story I told Pérez Triana over the course of that afternoon in November 1903. The story I told Pérez Triana went this far. Here it stops, here it ends. No one forced me to tell him the rest, nothing suggested that doing so could be beneficial to me. The story Pérez Triana knew ended on this line, with this word.

  Santiago Pérez Triana listened to my censored story during lunch, coffee, and an almost four-hour stroll that took us from Regent’s Park to Cleopatra’s Needle, crossing St. John’s Wood and into Hyde Park, with a detour to see the daring people ice skating along the edges of the Serpentine. This was the story; and Pérez Triana found it so interesting, that, at the end of that afternoon, insisting that all exiles were brothers, that voluntary expatriates and banished refugees were of the same species, offered to put me up in his house indefinit
ely: I could help him with secretarial tasks while I got myself settled in London, although he was very careful not to go into any detail about the tasks he’d entrust to me. Then he accompanied me to Trenton’s, where he paid for the night I’d spent in the hotel and also paid for the night that was beginning. “Get some rest,” he said, “get your things in order, as I shall mine. Unfortunately, neither my house nor my wife is well disposed to receiving guests at such short notice. I’ll make all the necessary arrangements to have someone come and collect your things. That will be in the late morning. And you, dear friend, I’ll expect tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock sharp. By then I’ll have arranged what needs to be arranged. And you shall join my household as if you’d been raised in it.”

  What happened until five the next day has no importance; the world didn’t exist until five in the afternoon. Arrival at the hotel in the nocturnal fog. Emotional exhaustion: eleven hours of sleep. Awaken slowly. Late, light lunch. Leave, omnibus, Baker Street, park just about to be illuminated by the gaseous light of the street lamps. A couple strolls by, arm in arm. It has begun to drizzle.