The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  A tired old mule went by pulling a cart. On the back a child with a dirty face and bare feet sat with his legs hanging over the edge. He waved good-bye to us. But Colonel Shaler didn’t see, because he’d already left.

  And after that, there was no going back. Colonel Shaler must have had magic powers, because with those few words he had magnetized me, turned me into a satellite. During the hours that followed I found myself touched, much to my chagrin, by the waters of the revolution, and there was nothing I could do about it. My will, I seem to recall now, did not have much to do with it: the whirlwind—no, the vortex—of events involved me irremediably. The ingenuous generals went to Panama City; the Tiradores battalion remained in Colón under the command of Colonel Eliseo Torres, a small man with an insolent voice who still looked baby-faced despite the mustache that cast a shadow on both sides of his serpent’s mouth. Readers of the Jury: allow me to show you the sound, faint but very evident, of the least noisy revolution in the history of humanity, a march marked by the inevitable rhythm of the clock. And you’ll have to be witnesses to that unbearable mechanism.

  At 9:35 on the morning of November 3, Herbert Prescott receives in Panama City the telegram that says GENERALS LEFT WITHOUT BATTALION STOP ARRIVING 11 AM STOP TAKE AGREED ACTIONS. At 10:30, Dr. Manuel Amador visits the Liberals Carlos Mendoza and Eusebio Morales, in charge of composing the Declaration of Independence and the Manifesto of the Junta of the Provisional Government. At 11:00: Generals Tovar and Amaya are met with profuse, cordial greetings by Domingo Díaz, the provincial governor, and seven illustrious citizens. At 3:00 p.m., General Tovar receives an anonymous letter telling him to trust no one. Rumors of revolutionary meetings in Panama City proliferate, and the General goes to see Governor Díaz to ask him to order the superintendents of the Railroad to transport the Tiradores battalion immediately to Panama City. At 3:15: Tovar receives the reply to his request. From Colón, Colonel James Shaler refuses to allow his trains to be used to transport the Tiradores battalion, arguing that the government owes large sums of money to the Railroad Company. Tovar, a man with a subtle though perhaps slow sense of smell, begins to get a whiff of something strange, heads for the Chiriquí barracks, headquarters of the National Guard, for detailed discussions of the situation with General Esteban Huertas, commander of the guard.

  At 5:00, Generals Tovar, Amaya, and Huertas have sat down on a pine bench outside the barracks, a few steps from the oak door. Tovar and Amaya, concerned by the rumors, begin to discuss military solutions that can be carried out without the support of the Tiradores battalion, captive of the debts. At this, Huertas stands up, gives some excuse, and leaves. Suddenly, a small contingent of eight soldiers bearing Grass rifles arrives. The generals suspect nothing. In the barracks, meanwhile, Huertas orders Captain Marco Salazar to arrest Generals Tovar and Amaya. Salazar, in turn, orders the soldiers to carry out the arrest. The generals suspect something. And at that moment, the eight Grass rifles swing through the air and aim at Tovar’s and Amaya’s heads. “I think something’s gone wrong,” says Tovar, or maybe Amaya. “Traitors! Turncoats!” shouts Amaya, or maybe it’s Tovar. According to some versions, that’s when they both say in unison: “I suspected as much.”

  At 6:05, revolutionary demonstrations begin to occupy the streets of Panama City. Collective shouts go up: “Viva Panamá Libre! Long live General Huertas! Long live President Roosevelt!” And most of all: “Long live the Canal!” The governmental military, in fear, load their weapons. One of them, General Francisco de Paula Castro, is discovered hidden in a stinking latrine. He has his breeches up, all the buttons of his uniform well fixed in their buttonholes, so the excuse offered (which makes reference to certain intestinal upset) loses validity; nevertheless, this Francisco would go down in history as the General Who Was Scared Shitless. At 8:07: Colonel Jorge Martinez, in command of the cruiser Bogotá anchored in the revolutionary city’s bay, receives news of the occurrences on land and sends Dr. Manuel Amador, leader of the insurgents, the following message: “Either you hand the generals over to me or I’ll bomb Panama City.” Amador, excited by the revolution, loses his composure and replies: “Do whatever the hell you want, if you’ve got the balls.” At 8:38: Colonel Martinez examines his balls and finds them full of fifteen-pound shells. He approaches the shore, loads his cannons, and fires nine times. The first shell lands in El Chorrillo neighborhood, on Sun Hao Wah (Chinese, killed on impact) and a few meters from Octavio Preciado (Panamanian, killed by heart attack provoked by the fright). Shell number two destroys the house of Ignacio Molino (Panamanian, absent at the time) and number three hits a building on West Twelfth Street, killing Babieca (Panamanian, percheron horse). Shells number four through nine do not cause any damage whatsoever.

  At 9:01: the Revolutionary Junta, meeting in the Panama City’s Hotel Central, presents the flag of the future Republic. It has been designed by Dr. Manuel Amador’s son (applause) and sewn by Dr. Manuel Amador’s wife (applause and gazes of admiration). At 9:03: explanation of the symbols. The red square represents the Liberal Party. The blue square represents the Conservative Party. The stars, well, the stars will be something like peace between the parties, or the eternal concord of the new Republic, or some pretty little idea along those lines—they’d have to come to an agreement or put it to a vote. At 9:33: Dr. Manuel Amador reveals details of his trip to New York in search of North American support for the secession of Panama to those who don’t know about it. He speaks of a Frenchman, a certain Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who advised him on all the practical details of the revolution, and even supplied him with a briefcase with the following contents: a declaration of independence, a model constitution for new countries, and some military instructions. The audience applauds with admiration. Those French sure know how to do things, damn it. At 9:45: the Revolutionary Junta proposes they send a telegram to his Excellency the President of the United States with the following text: SEPARATION MOVEMENT PANAMA REST OF COLOMBIA HOPES RECOGNITION YOUR GOVERNMENT FOR OUR CAUSE. But the conspirators’ joy was premature. The revolution was not yet sealed. It still needed my intervention, which was lateral and superfluous and in any case dispensable, as also had been my treasonous silence, but it nevertheless stained me forever, contaminated me as cholera contaminates water. It was the moment when my crucified country (or maybe it was the new resurrected country?) chose me as evangelist.

  “You shall testify,” I was told. And that’s what I’m doing.

  Dawn was cloudy on November 4. Before seven I left without saying good-bye to you, dear Eloísa, who was sleeping faceup; I leaned down to give you a kiss on the forehead, and saw the first sign of the day’s stifling, humid heat in your damp hair, a few locks sticking to the white skin of your neck. Later I would learn that at that very moment Colonel Eliseo Torres, delegated commander of the Tiradores battalion, was urinating under a chestnut tree, and it was there, with one hand leaning on the trunk, that he found out about the generals’ detention in Panama City. He went immediately to the Railroad Company offices; indignant, he demanded Colonel Shaler assign a train to take the Tiradores battalion across the Isthmus. Colonel Shaler could have invoked the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty—as he in fact later did—and his obligation, established in that text, to maintain neutrality in any political conflict, but he did not. The only answer he gave was that the Colombian government had still not paid him the money it owed, and furthermore, to be honest, Colonel Shaler did not like to be spoken to in that tone of voice. “I’m sorry, but I cannot help you,” said Colonel Shaler at the same time as I leaned down to kiss my little girl (careful not to wake her), and it’s not impossible that as I did so, I would have thought of Charlotte and the happiness that had been snatched away from us by the Colombian war. Eloísa dear, my face close to yours, I smelled your breath and pitied your motherlessness and wondered if it was my fault in some obscure way. All events, I’ve learned over time, are connected: everything is a consequence of everything else.

  The telephone ran
g at seven in the Company offices. While I was walking slowly through the streets of Christophe Colomb, taking my time, breathing the heavy morning air, and wondering what face my schizophrenic city would be wearing the day after the beginning of the revolution, from the Panama City station three of the conspirators were speaking to Colonel Eliseo Torres to suggest that he lay down his weapons. “Surrender to the revolution, but also to the evidence,” one of them told him. “The oppression of the central government has been defeated.” But Colonel Torres was not prepared to bow to the pressures of the separatists. He threatened to attack Panama City; he threatened to torch Colón as Pedro Prestán had done. José Agustín Arango, who was the conspirators’ spokesman at that moment, informed him that Panama City had already embarked on the path to liberty and did not fear confrontation. “Your aggression will be repelled with the might of a just cause,” he said (Colombians have always been good at grand phrases for precise moments). The call ended abruptly, with Colonel Eliseo Torres throwing the telephone with such force that it chipped the wood of the desk. The echo of the blow resounded through the high-ceilinged hallways of the Company and reached my ears (I was at the port, twenty meters from the Company entrance), but I didn’t know, I couldn’t have known, what it was about. Did I even wonder? I don’t think so; I think at that moment I was distracted or rather absorbed by the color the Caribbean takes on overcast days. Limón Bay was not part of the immensity of the Atlantic, but a greenish-gray mirror, and on that mirror floated, in the distance, the silhouette of what looked like a toy model of the battleship Nashville. You could hear only a few seagulls, only the lapping of the waves against the breakwaters and the deserted docks.

  Colón resembled a besieged city. In a way it was, of course, and would continue to be as long as the soldiers of the Tiradores carried on patrolling the muddy streets. Besides, the revolutionaries in Panama City were well aware that independence was only illusory while government troops remained on isthmian territory, and that was the reason for the phone calls and frenetic telegrams that went back and forth between the two cities. “As long as Torres remains in Colón,” José Agustín Arango said to Colonel Shaler, “there is no republic in Panama.” Around half past seven, at the time I was casually approaching a man selling bananas, Arango was dictating a telegraphic message for Porfirio Meléndez, leader of the separatist revolution in Colón. I asked the man if he knew what was going on in the Isthmus, and he shook his head. “Panama is seceding from Colombia,” I told him.

  His skin was leathery, his voice worn out, his decaying breath hit me in a dense wave: “I’ve been selling fruit at the railway for fifty years, boss,” he said to me. “As long as there are Gringos with money, I couldn’t care less about the rest.”

  A few meters from us, Porfirio Meléndez was receiving this telegram: AS SOON AS TORRES AND TIRADORES BATTALION LEAVE COLÓN PROCLAIM REPUBLIC OF PANAMA. Inside the Railroad Company offices the air was filled with bells and clatter and tense voices and heels on wooden floorboards. José Gabriel Duque, publisher and editor of the Star & Herald, had contributed a thousand dollars in cash to be used for the Colón chapter of the Revolution, and Porfirio Meléndez received it shortly before the following text made its way through the Company’s machines: CONTACT COLONEL TORRES STOP TELL HIM REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA OFFERS TROOPS MONEY AND PASSAGE TO BARRANQUILLA STOP ONLY CONDITION COMPLETE ABANDONMENT OF ARMS AND SWEAR NOT TO TAKE UP ARMED STRUGGLE AGAIN.

  “He’ll never accept,” said Meléndez. And he was right.

  Torres had made camp in the middle of the street. The word camp, of course, was a bit grand for those tents set up on top of the broken or missing paving stones of Front Street. Across the road from the 4th of July saloon and Maggs & Oates pawnshop were the five hundred soldiers, and what was stranger still, the wives of the higher-ranking officers. They could be seen leaving before dawn and returning with saucepans full of river water; they were seen chatting among themselves with their legs tightly crossed under their petticoats, covering their mouths with a hand when they laughed. Anyway, two messengers from Porfirio Meléndez arrived at this makeshift camp, two smooth-chested young men in rope-soled sandals who had to fix their eyes on the horse shit on the ground to keep from staring at the officers’ wives. Colonel Eliseo Torres received from their tiny hands a letter hurriedly composed at the Railroad Company. “The Panamanian revolution wants to avoid unnecessary bloodshed,” read Colonel Torres, “and in this spirit of reconciliation and future peace, we invite you, Honorable Colonel, to surrender your weapons with no injury whatsoever to your dignity.”

  Colonel Torres returned the open letter to the younger of the two messengers (his greasy fingerprints remained on the edge of the page). “Tell that traitor he can stick his revolution up his ass,” he replied. But then he thought better of it. “No, wait. Tell him that I, Colonel Eliseo Torres, send word that he has two hours to liberate the generals detained in Panama City. That if he does not, the Tiradores battalion will not only burn Colón to the ground but will also shoot every Gringo we can find, including women and children.” Readers of the Jury: by the time this ultimatum reached the Railroad Company, by the time the most barbaric message he’d ever had to hear reached the ears of Colonel Shaler, I had already finished my conversation with the banana seller, finished my stroll through the port, I had already seen the silvery flash of the dead fish floating on their sides, washing up on the beach, crossed the railway lines stepping on the rails with the arch of my foot with an infantile delight, like that of children sucking their thumbs, and was walking toward Front Street, breathing the air of the deserted besieged city, the air of days that change history.

  Colonel James Shaler, for his part, had summoned Mr. Jessie Hyatt, U.S. Vice Consul in Colón, and between the two of them they were deciding whether Colonel Torres’s threats should be believed or treated as the impetuous flailing of a man in dire political straits. It was not a difficult decision (the image of children slaughtered and women raped by Colombian soldiers came to mind). So seconds later, when I passed the front door of the offices—still not knowing what was happening within—Vice Consul Hyatt had already given the order, and a secretary who spoke no Spanish in spite of having spent twenty-five months in Panama was climbing the stairs to wave a red, white, and blue flag from the roof. Now I think that if I’d looked up at that moment I probably could have seen it. But that doesn’t matter: the flag, without my witnessing, waved in the humid air; and immediately, while Colonel Shaler ordered that the most prominent U.S. citizens be taken to the Freight House, the battleship Nashville docked with great noises from its boilers, huge displacement of Caribbean water, in the port of Colón, and seventy-five marines in impeccable white uniforms—knee-high boots, rifles tilted over their chests—disembarked in perfect order and occupied Freight House, positioning themselves on top of the goods wagons, under the arches of the railway entrance, ready to defend U.S. citizens from any attack. On the other side of the Isthmus there were immediate reactions: when he found out about the landing, Dr. Manuel Amador met with General Huertas, the man who had arrested the generals, and they were preparing to send revolutionary troops to Colón with the sole mission of helping the marines. It was not yet nine in the morning and already Colón-Aspinwall-Gomorrah, that schizophrenic city, was a powder keg ready to explode. It didn’t explode at ten. It didn’t explode at eleven. But at twenty past twelve, or thereabouts, Colonel Eliseo Torres arrived at Front Street and, as the bugle sounded, ordered the Tiradores battalion to fall in and line up in battle formation. He was preparing to eliminate the Nashville marines, to take by force the few available trains in the station and cross the Isthmus to put down the rebellion by the traitors to the nation.

  Colonel Torres had gone deaf; the clock, faithful to its habits, continued its impassive ticking; at around one o’clock, General Alejandro Ortiz came from headquarters to dissuade him, but there was no getting through to him; General Orondaste Martinez tried at one-thirty, but Torres remained installed in a
parallel reality where neither reason nor prudence could reach him.

  “The Gringos are already under protection,” General Martinez told him.

  “Well, they won’t be under mine,” said Torres.

  “The women and children have gone aboard a neutral ship,” said Martinez, “which is anchored in the harbor. You’re making a fool of yourself, Colonel Torres, and I’ve come to prevent your reputation from sinking any lower.” Martinez explained that the Nashville had loaded its cannons and had them aimed at the Tiradores battalion’s encampment. “The Cartagena scampered off like a rabbit, Colonel,” he said. “You and your men have been left alone. Colonel Torres, do the sensible thing, please. Fall out of this ridiculous formation, save the lives of your men and let us invite you for a drink.”

  Those preliminary negotiations—carried out in the dense midday heat, in an atmosphere that seemed to dehydrate the soldiers like pieces of fruit left out in the sun—lasted five minutes. In this space of time, Colonel Torres accepted a summit meeting (in the summit of the Hotel Suizo, just across Front Street), and in the hotel restaurant drank three glasses of papaya juice and ate a sliced watermelon, and still had time to threaten to blow Martinez’s unpatriotic brains out. The bugler serving as his aide, however, didn’t eat anything, because no one offered him anything and his position prevented him from speaking unless his superior officer gave him permission. Then General Alejandro Ortiz joined the delegation. He explained the situation to Colonel Torres: the Tiradores battalion was decapitated; Generals Tovar and Amaya were still prisoners in Panama City, where the revolution was triumphing; all resistance against the independence movement was futile, since it implied confronting the army of the United States as well as the three hundred thousand dollars the Roosevelt government had offered to the cause of the new Republic; Colonel Torres could assume the reality of events or embark on a quixotic crusade that even his own government had given up for lost. By the time of the fourth glass of papaya juice, Colonel Torres began to weaken; by three o’clock in the afternoon he consented to meet Colonel James Shaler at the Railroad Company, and before five he’d agreed to withdraw his troops (the powder in the powder keg) from Front Street and set up camp outside the city. The chosen place was the abandoned hamlet of Christophe Colomb, where just one man lived with his daughter.