The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  At five o’clock I was in front of 45 Avenue Road. The housekeeper showed me in; she did not speak to me, and I didn’t manage to figure out if she was Colombian as well. I had to wait half an hour before my host came down to greet me. I imagine what he must have seen: a man not much younger than himself but from whom he was separated by several layers of hierarchy—he, a famous paradigm of the ruling class; I, an outcast—sitting in the reading chair, with a round hat on his lap and a copy of Down the Orinoco in a Canoe in his hand. Pérez Triana saw me reading without any spectacles and told me he envied me. I was wearing . . . What was I wearing that day? I was dressed like a young man: a short-collared shirt, boots so shiny the light from outside drew a silver line on the leather, a pompous, exaggerated knot in my tie. At that time I had started to grow a sparse and still blond beard, darker on the chin and sideburns, almost invisible over my bulging cheeks. When I saw Pérez Triana come in, I jumped to my feet and returned the book to the pile of three on the side table, apologizing for having picked it up. “That’s what it’s there for,” he said. “But I should change it for something more recent, shouldn’t I? Have you read Boylesve’s latest? George Gissing’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he kept talking as if he were alone. “Yes, I really must. I mustn’t inflict my clumsy amateur attempts at writing on every visitor, and much less when that clumsiness was perpetrated months ago.” And thus, as gently as one accompanies a convalescent, he took me by the arm and led me to another smaller room, at the back of the house. Standing next to the bookshelves, a man with weathered skin, a thick, dark beard and pointed mustache, looked over the titles on the leather spines with his left hand in the pocket of his checked jacket. He turned round as he heard us come in, held his right hand out to me, and in the handshake he gave me I felt the calloused hand of a man of experience, the firm grip of that hand that knew the elegance of calligraphy as well as it did eighty-nine ways to knot a rope, and I felt that the contact of our two hands was like the collision of two planets.

  “My name is Joseph Conrad,” the man introduced himself. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  IX

  The Confessions of José Altamirano

  I talked. You better believe I talked. I talked without stopping, desperately: I told him everything, the whole history of my country, the whole story of its violent people and their pacific victims (the history, I mean, of its convulsions). That November night in 1903, while the temperature plummeted precipitously in Regent’s Park and the trees obeyed autumn’s alopecic tendencies, and while Santiago Pérez Triana watched us, a cup of tea in his hand—steaming up his glasses every time he took a sip—marveling at the twists of fate that had made him a witness of that meeting, that night, no one could have shut me up. Then and there I knew my place in the world. Pérez Triana’s sitting room, a place made out of the accumulated remains of Colombian politics, of its games and disloyalties, of its infinite and never well-pondered cruelty, was the scene of my epiphany.

  Readers of the Jury, Eloísa dear: at some imprecise moment of that autumn night, the figure of Joseph Conrad—a man who asks me questions and will use my answers to write the history of Colombia, or the history of Costaguana, or the history of Colombia-Costaguana, or the history of Costaguana-Colombia—began to acquire for me an unexpected importance. I have often tried to locate that moment in the chronology of my own life, and recording it, I would very much like to use one of my solemn phrases of a Great Events Participant: “While in Russia the Party of the Workers divided into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in London I opened my heart to a Polish writer.” Or: “Cuba leased the base at Guantánamo to the United States, and at the same time José Altamirano presented the history of Colombia to Joseph Conrad.” But I can’t do it. Writing these sentences is impossible, because I don’t know at what moment I opened my heart to him, nor when I handed over the history of my Republic. As the bogotáno biscuits Pérez Triana’s servant had baked were served? Maybe, but maybe not. As a faint-hearted sleet began to fall on the porch and the London sky prepared to drop the year’s first snowfall on the living and the dead? I don’t know, I couldn’t say. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is the intuition I had. And it was this: there, at 45 Avenue Road, under the auspices of Santiago Pérez Triana, I would answer Conrad’s questions, satisfy his curiosity; I’d tell him what I knew, all that I’d seen and all that I’d done, and in exchange he (faithfully, nobly) would tell my life story. And then . . . then the things that happen when one’s life is written in golden letters on the notice board of destiny would happen.

  History will absolve me, I thought, or I believe I thought (the phrase was not an original one). But I actually meant: “Joseph Conrad, absolve me.” Because it was in his hands. I was in his hands.

  And now, finally, the moment has come. There is no sense in putting it off: I must speak of this guilt. “I could tell you episodes of the separatist revolution that would astound you,” says a character in the Damn Conradian Book. Well then, I can do that, too, I plan to do that, too. And so I return to the image of the Yucatán. I return to Manuel Amador.

  I had met him, alongside my father, at the banquets Panama City offered years before for Ferdinand de Lesseps. How old was Don Manuel Amador? Seventy? Seventy-five? What had he been doing in New York, this man who was famous for his hatred of foreign travel? Why had no one come to meet him? Why was he in such a hurry and so reluctant to talk, why did he seem tense, why was he determined to be on the first train leaving for Panama City? Then I noticed that he wasn’t alone: one person had come to meet him, and had even boarded the Yucatán to accompany him (in view of his age, no doubt). It was Herbert Prescott, assistant superintendent of the Railroad Company. Prescott worked in the Railroad offices in Panama City, but it didn’t strike me as odd that he should have crossed the whole Isthmus to come and meet an old friend; Prescott, furthermore, knew me well (my father had been the Company’s prime publicist for several years) but nevertheless kept walking when I approached to say hello to Manuel Amador. I thought nothing of it; I concentrated on the Doctor. He looked so haggard I instinctively stretched out a hand to help him with the briefcase that looked too heavy for him, but Amador snatched the case out of my reach and I didn’t insist. It took me several years to understand what happened that day on the Company dock. I had to wait a long time to find out the historical contents of that briefcase, but it took only a couple of days to understand what was happening in my schizophrenic city.

  There are good readers and bad readers of reality; there are men able to hear the secret murmur of events better than others. . . . From the moment I saw him flee from the Company dock, I didn’t stop thinking about Dr. Amador. His nerves had been clearly legible, as had his haste to get to Panama City; also the company of Herbert Prescott, who a few days later (on October 31 or November 1, I don’t know precisely) would return briefly, accompanied by four engine drivers, to take all the idle rolling stock from Colón station to Panama City. Everyone saw the empty trains leave, but no one thought for a second that it was anything other than some routine maintenance procedure. Anyway, the Gringos had always stood out for their rather strange ways of behaving, and I suppose even the witnesses had forgotten about it in a matter of hours. But the trains had gone. Colón was left without trains.

  By November 2, however, it was no longer possible to avoid the force of events. While I was at the port waiting for my newspapers to arrive in some passenger steamer, what showed up on the horizon was something else entirely: a gunboat with a U.S. flag. It was the Nashville, which had arrived in record time from Kingston, and hadn’t yet been announced in the port of Colón (the Nashville became one more event, an event anchored innocently in the bay, ready to be interpreted). To me, an obsessive observer, the text of the story was completed the following morning: before the first glimmers of dawn, the lights of the Cartagena, battleship, and the Alexander Bixio, merchant steamer, were visible from the port; both, of course, were as Colombian as Panama. Bef
ore lunch—it was a sunny day, the still waters of Limón Bay sparkled pacifically, and I was planning to pick up Eloísa from school and share a grilled mojarra fish while we watched the ships—I guessed what the cargo was. It wasn’t very difficult to find out that those two ships, veterans of the War of a Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days, were bringing five hundred government soldiers under the command of Generals Juan B. Tovar and Ramón Amaya to Panamanian soil.

  I didn’t say anything to Eloísa. Before falling asleep I had associated the hasty and almost clandestine presence of the five hundred soldiers with the trains that Prescott had taken to Panama City. And before dawn broke the certainty that a revolution would take place in Panama City that very day woke me. Before night falls, I thought, the Isthmus of Panama—that place where my father had lived his heyday and his decline, the place where I’d met my father, fallen in love, and had a daughter—before night falls, I said to myself, the Isthmus will have declared its independence from Colombia. The idea of a fractured map frightened me, of course, and imagining the blood and death every revolution brings with it frightened me. . . . It was no later than seven when I threw on a cotton shirt and a felt hat and began to walk toward the Railroad Company. I confess: I wasn’t very sure of my intentions, if I even had in mind anything as complex as an intention. But I knew at that moment there was no better place in the world than the Company offices, there was nowhere I would rather have found myself on that November morning.

  When I arrived at the offices, in that stone building resembling a colonial prison, I found them deserted. This, moreover, was logical: if there were no trains in the terminus station, why should there be any engine drivers, mechanics or ticket collectors, or any passengers? But I didn’t leave, I didn’t go looking for anyone, because in some obscure way I had guessed something would happen in this place. I was still formulating these absurd deliberations when three figures came in through the stone arches: Generals Tovar and Amaya were walking together, their pace almost synchronized, and the uniforms they wore seemed about to succumb to the bristling weight of belts, epaulettes, medals, and swords. The third man was Colonel James Shaler, superintendent of the Railroad Company, one of the most popular and respected Gringos in the whole Isthmus and an old acquaintance of my father’s. It was obvious from his greeting, halfway between affectionate and concerned, that Colonel Shaler wasn’t expecting to see me there. But I wasn’t prepared to move: I ignored the hints and brush-offs, and went as far as to raise one hand to my forehead to salute the governmental generals. Just then, on the other side of the building, the tapping of the telegraph began. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but the Railroad Company had the only means of communication between Colón and Panama City. Colonel Shaler found himself obliged to answer the incoming message. Reluctantly, he left me alone with the generals. We were in the entrance hall of the building, barely protected from the killing heat that by then, just after eight in the morning, was beginning to come in through the wide door. None of us spoke: we all feared revealing too much. The generals arched their eyebrows the way children do when they suspect a salesman is trying to trick them. And at that moment I understood.

  I understood that Colonel James Shaler and assistant superintendent Herbert Prescott were party to the conspiracy; I understood that Dr. Manuel Amador was one of its leaders. I understood that the conspirators had received news of the imminent arrival of government troops on board the Cartagena and the Alexander Bixio, and I understood that they’d requested help (I didn’t know who from), and the unexpected arrival of the gunboat Nashville was that help or part of that help. I understood that the success or failure of the revolution that was just then beginning in Panama City depended on the five hundred soldiers of the Tiradores battalion, under the command of Generals Tovar and Amaya, being able to board a train and cross the Isthmus to put it down before it was too late, and I understood that the Panama City conspirators had understood that, too. I understood that Herbert Prescott had moved the empty trains out of Colón for the same reason that now, after receiving a telegram the contents of which were not difficult to imagine, Colonel Shaler was trying to convince Tovar and Amaya to board on their own, without their troops, the only available train, a single coach and locomotive, and calmly proceed to Panama City. “Your troops will catch up with you as soon as I can get a train, I promise,” Colonel Shaler was saying to General Tovar, “but meanwhile, with this heat, there’s no reason for you gentlemen to stay here.” Yes, that’s what he said, and I understood why he said it. And at exactly half past nine in the morning, when Generals Tovar and Amaya fell into the trap and climbed aboard the superintendent’s private coach, along with fifteen of their adjutants, subordinates, and messengers, I understood that there, in the railway station, history was about to perpetrate the separation of the Isthmus of Panama and at the same time the disgrace, the profound and irreparable disgrace, of the Republic of Colombia. Readers of the Jury, Eloísa dear, the time for my proud and guilty confession has arrived: I understood all that, I understood that a word of mine could have given the conspirators away and avoided the revolution, and nevertheless I remained silent, I kept quiet with the most silent of silences that had ever been, the most damaging and most malicious. Because Colombia had ruined my life, because I wanted revenge on my country and its meddling, despotic, murderous history.

  I had more than one chance to speak. Today I have to ask myself: Would General Tovar have believed me if I, a complete stranger, had told him that the shortage of trains was a revolutionary strategy, that the promise to send the battalion in the first available trains was false, and that by separating from their five hundred men the generals were submitting to the revolution and losing the Isthmus out of pure naïveté? Would he have believed me? Well, the question is merely rhetorical, for this was never my intention. And I remember the moment when I saw them all (General Tovar, General Amaya, and their men) sitting in Colonel Shaler’s luxurious carriage, basking in the privileged treatment, receiving complimentary glasses of juice and plates of bitesized pieces of papaya while waiting for departure time, satisfied at finally having earned the Americans’ respect. Dear readers, it was not out of cynicism or sadism or simple egotism that I climbed aboard the coach and insisted on shaking hands with the two government generals. I was moved by something less comprehensible and decidedly less explicable: the proximity to the Great Event and, of course, my participation in it, my silent role in Panama’s independence or, to be more precise and also more honest, in Colombia’s disgrace. To have the chance to speak again, even the horrible temptation to speak, and not to do so: my historical and political destiny was then reduced, and would be forever reduced, to that delicate, catastrophic, and vengeful silence.

  Colonel James Shaler’s private train began to spit out steam seconds later. The whistle blew a couple of hoarse notes; I was still on board, amazed at the cosmic ironies of which I was the victim, when the landscape outside the window began to move backward. I said a hurried farewell, wished the generals luck, and leapt down onto Front Street. The carriage began to take the generals away; behind, waving the most hypocritical handkerchief in the history of humanity, was Colonel Shaler. I stood beside him as we both engaged in that strange revolutionary task: seeing off a train. The back door of the carriage grew smaller and smaller until there was just a black dot above the rails, then a cloud of gray smoke, and finally not even that: the lines of iron converging, stubborn and determined on the green horizon. Without looking at me, as if not speaking to me, Colonel Shaler said, “I’ve heard a lot about your father, Altamirano.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “It’s a shame what happened to him, because the man was on the right side. We’re living in complicated times. Besides, I don’t know much about journalism.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “He wanted what we all want. He wanted progress.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “If he had lived to see independence, his sympa
thies would have been with it.”

  I was grateful that he wasn’t attempting fictions, or half-truths, or concealment strategies. I was grateful he respected my talents (my talents as a reader of the real, as an interpreter of immediate reality).

  I said, “His sympathies would have been with those who made the Canal, Colonel.”

  “Altamirano,” said Shaler, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Ask away, Colonel.”

  “You know this is serious, right?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know people are risking their lives, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I’ll make it easy for you. Either you’re with us, with independence and progress, or you’re against us. It would be best if you decided right now. This Colombia of yours is a backward country . . . .”

  “It’s not my Colombia, Colonel.”

  “Does it seem fair to keep the rest behind? Does it seem fair that all these people should be screwed just because that congress of crooks hasn’t managed to get their own slice of the Canal?”

  “It doesn’t seem fair, Colonel.”

  “It’s really not fair, is it?”

  “It’s really not fair.”

  “Good. I’m glad we agree on this, Altamirano. Your father was a good man. He would have done whatever it took to see this Canal. Mark my words, Altamirano, mark my words: the Canal will be built and we’re the ones who’ll build it.”

  “You’ll build it, Colonel.”

  “But we’ll need your help. The patriots, no, the heroes of Panama City will need your help. Are you going to lend us a hand, Altamirano? Can we or can we not count on you?”

  I think my head moved, I think I nodded. In any case, Shaler’s satisfaction at my consent was reflected in his voice and in his face, and at the back of my mind my thirst for revenge was quenched, the organ of the lowest instincts was satisfied again.