The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  After taking from the Isthmus the last fallback of Colombian central power, after guaranteeing with its departure that Panamanian independence was definitive and irrevocable, the Orinoco put into port at Cartagena and stopped there for a few hours. I remember the spotty face of a corporal who gambled away his last paycheck on a game of poker dice. I remember the scene kicked up by a lieutenant’s wife in the dining room (according to some, there was another woman involved). I remember Colonel Torres ordering a subordinate to spend thirty days in the brig for suggesting there was money somewhere on board, American money that had been paid in exchange for that desertion, and that the soldiers were owed a share of it.

  The next morning, with the first light on the pink horizon, the Orinoco arrived in Barranquilla.

  By the afternoon of November 6, the government of President Theodore Roosevelt had granted the Republic of Panama its first formal recognition, and the Marblehead, the Wyoming, and the Concord, of the U.S. Pacific fleet, headed for the Isthmus to protect the nascent Republic from Colombian restoration efforts. Meanwhile, I found a ticket for the passenger steamer Hood, of the Royal Mail, that plied the Barranquilla–London route, from the mouth of the Magdalena to the belly of the Thames, and prepared to embark on that journey which did not include my daughter. How could I condemn Eloísa to exile and uprootedness, too? No, my broken country had broken me inside, but she, seventeen years old, had the right to a life free of that rupture, free of the voluntary ostracism and phantoms of exile (for she, flesh of my flesh, was also flesh of Colón flesh, as I was not). And I, of course, could no longer give her that life. My adored Eloísa: if you are reading these lines, if you have read those that precede them, you’ve witnessed all the forces that overcame us, and perhaps you’ve understood the extreme acts a man must carry out to defeat them. You’ve heard me talk of Angels and Gorgons, of the desperate battles I fought against them for the control of my own minuscule and banal life, and you can perhaps testify to the honesty of my private war and can forgive the cruelties this war has led me to commit. And you can especially understand that there was no longer a place for me in the wastelands I was able to escape, those cannibal lands where I no longer recognized myself, that no longer belonged to me the way a homeland belongs to a satisfied man, to a clean conscience.

  Later came the arrival, the encounter with Santiago Pérez Triana, those events I have put, as meticulously as I was able, before the reader . . . . Joseph Conrad left the house at 45 Avenue Road at about six in the morning, after spending a sleepless night listening to my story. Over the years I have reconstructed the days that followed: I knew that after seeing me, he had gone not to his residence at Pent Farm but to a London flat near Kensington High Street, a cheap and dark place he and his wife had rented and where he habitually met Ford Madox Ford to write, in collaboration (and effortlessly), the adventure novels that might pull them out of poverty. By the time he arrived at the flat, Joseph Conrad already knew that Nostromo, that problematic novel, was no longer the simple story of Italians in the Caribbean it had been up till then, and would rather examine up close the traumatic birth of a new country in traumatized Latin America, which he’d just been told about in doubtless hyperbolic terms, doubtless contaminated by tropical magic, by the tendency to mythologizing that oppresses those poor people who don’t understand politics. Jessie received him in tears: Borys had a fever of thirty-nine degrees, the doctor hadn’t arrived, Borys wouldn’t eat or drink, London was a city of uncaring, distant people. But Conrad didn’t listen to her complaints: he went straight to that desk that wasn’t his and, seeing that dawn was slow in breaking, lit that lamp that wasn’t his, and began to take notes on what he’d heard over the course of the night. The next day, after a breakfast he ate but didn’t taste, he began to incorporate the new material into the manuscript. He was very excited; like Poland, like the Poland of his childhood, the Poland his parents had died for, this little land of Panama, this little province transformed into a republic by inscrutable arts, was a pawn on the board of world politics, a victim of forces that exceeded it. . . . “And apropos, what do you think of the Yankee Conquistadores in Panama?” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham just before Christmas. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  The first installment of Nostromo appeared in T.P.’s Weekly in January 1904, more or less at the same time that the Panama Canal Company sold all its properties to the United States, without a single Colombian representative even allowed to participate in the negotiations, and twenty days after my desperate country had made the Panamanians this humiliating proposal: Panama City would be the new capital of Colombia if the Isthmus rejoined Colombian territory. While Panama refused outright like a spurned lover (batting eyelashes, listing past grievances, arms akimbo and fists on hips), Santiago Pérez Triana gave me directions to the nearest newsagent and forced me to look through my pocket for those coins whose confusing denominations I still hadn’t mastered and separate out, into another pocket, the exact cost of the Weekly. Then he sent me outside with an affectionate pat on the back. “My esteemed Altamirano, don’t come back without that magazine,” he said. And then, more seriously: “I congratulate you. You are now part of the memory of mankind.”

  But that’s not how it went.

  I was not part of mankind’s memory.

  I remember the slanted, blinding light on the street when I found the place, that winter light that cast no shadows yet dazzled me, reflecting off the paper of the magazines on sale and, depending on the angle, the glass of the recently cleaned windows. I remember the mix of excitement and terror (a mute, cold terror, terror of the new) as I went back outside after paying. I remember the misty and a little unreal quality that the rest of the objects in the world took on for me, the passersby, the lampposts, the occasional carriages, the park’s threatening railings. However, I don’t remember the reasons I postponed reading, I don’t remember having guessed that the contents of the magazine would not be what I was expecting, I don’t remember having had any reasons to allow that implausible intuition into my head, I don’t remember suspicion or persecution accompanying me during that long circular walk around Regent’s Park. . . . Yes, that’s right: I carried the magazine in my pocket all day, patting my side occasionally to make sure it was still there, as if the one I’d bought was the only copy in the world, as if the dangerous nature of its contents would be neutralized if I kept it in my power. But what had to happen (everyone knows it) ended up happening. Nothing can be delayed forever. No one can find reasons to put off forever something as innocent, as peaceful, as inoffensive, as the reading of a book.

  So at about four, when the sky was already beginning to darken, I sat down on one of the park benches at the same time as an incipient snowfall began over London and perhaps over all of Imperial England. I opened the magazine, I read that word that will pursue me till the end of my days. Nostromo: three bland syllables, one repeated and insistent vowel like an eye that keeps watch on us. . . . I carried on, between oranges and galleons, between sunken rocks and mountains that sink their heads in the clouds, and began to wander like a sleepwalker through the story of that fictitious republic, and I traveled through descriptions and events that I knew and at the same time did not know, that seemed my own and alien at the same time, and I saw the Colombian wars, the Colombian dead, the landscape of Colón and Santa Marta, the sea and its color and the mountain and its dangers, and there it was, at last, the discord that had always been. . . . But there was something missing in that tale: an absence was more visible than all those presences. I remember my desperate search, the frenzy of my eyes going over each page of the magazine, the heat I felt in my armpits and whiskers as I entered into that painful truth.

  Then I knew.

  I knew I would see Conrad again.

  I knew there would be a second encounter.

  I knew this encounter could not be postponed.

  In a matter of minutes I had arrived at Kensington High Street, and a newspaper seller directed me to Go
rdon Place, where the novelist lived. There was hardly any light left (an old man was going along with a ladder, climbing up and down the movable steps, lighting the street lamps) when I knocked on his door. I didn’t reply to the questions the unsuspecting woman who answered the door asked me; I brushed against her apron as I passed, I ran up the steps as fast as my legs could carry me. I don’t remember what ideas, what indignation went through my head while I opened doors and crossed hallways, but I know for certain that nothing had prepared me for what I found.

  There were two dark rooms, or they’d gone dark in the premature January dusk. A door connected them, and that door was open at the moment of my arrival, but it was obvious that its function was to remain stubbornly, constantly, and inevitably closed most of the time. In the back room, contained by the door frame, there was a desk of dark wood, and on top of the desk a pile of papers and a paraffin lamp; in the other room, the one I’d just burst into, a little boy with long brown hair slept on a miserable-looking cot (he was breathing laboriously, snoring a little), and the other bed in view was occupied by a woman in street clothes, a woman with an inelegant and chubby-cheeked face who was not lying down but reclining against a backrest, and who had some sort of board across her lap that after a couple of seconds (after my eyes adjusted to the interior lighting) turned into a portable desk. From her closed hand emerged a black-tipped pen, and it was as I focused on her and the inkcovered pages that I heard the voice.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Joseph Conrad was standing in the corner of the room; he was wearing leather slippers and a housecoat of dark silk; he was wearing, most of all, an expression of intense, almost inhuman concentration. In my head the pieces fell into place: I had interrupted him. To be more precise: I had interrupted his dictation. To be even more precise: while the first scenes of Nostromo were getting wrinkled in my pocket, in that room Conrad was dictating the last ones. And his wife, Jessie, was in charge of putting the story—the story of José Altamirano—onto the blank pages.

  “You,” I said, “owe me an explanation.”

  “I owe you nothing,” said Conrad. “Leave immediately. I’ll call someone, I’m warning you.”

  I took the copy of the Weekly out of my pocket. “This is false. This is not what I told you.”

  “This, my dear sir, is a novel.”

  “It’s not my story. It’s not the story of my country.”

  “Of course not,” said Conrad. “It’s the story of my country. It’s the story of Costaguana.”

  Jessie watched us. Her expression was one of attentive confusion, like one who’s arrived late to the theater. She started to speak, and her voice was weaker than I’d expected: “Who . . . ?” But she didn’t finish the question. She tried to move, and a grimace of pain exploded across her face, as if a cord had broken inside her body.

  Conrad then invited me into the backroom; the door was closed, and through the wood we could hear the woman’s sobs.

  “She’s had an accident,” said Conrad. “Both knees. Both knees dislocated. It’s serious.”

  “It was my life,” I said. “I entrusted it to you, I trusted you.”

  “A fall. She was out shopping, she’d gone to Barker’s, she slipped. Seems silly, doesn’t it? That’s why we are in London,” said Conrad. “She must be examined every day, the doctors come every day. We do not know if she’ll need surgery.”

  It was as if he’d stopped listening to me, this man who’d spent a whole night doing nothing else. “You’ve eliminated me from my own life,” I said. “You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me.” I waved the Weekly in the air again, and then threw it down on his desk. “Here,” I whispered, my back to the thief, “I do not exist.”

  It was true. In the Republic of Costaguana, José Altamirano did not exist. My tale lived there, the tale of my life and my land, but the land was another, it had another name, and I had been removed from it, erased like an unmentionable sin, obliterated without pity like a dangerous witness. Joseph Conrad told me of the terrible effort of dictating the story under the present conditions, and dictating it to Jessie, whose pain prevented her from working with due concentration. “I could dictate a thousand words an hour,” he told me. “It’s easy. The novel is easy. But Jessie gets distracted. She cries. I wonder if she’ll be left an invalid, if she’ll have to use crutches for the rest of her life. I’ll soon be forced to hire a secretary. The boy is ill. Debts pile up on my desk, and I must submit this manuscript on time to avoid greater disasters. And then you came along, answered a number of questions, told me a number of more or less useful things, and I have used them as my intuition and knowledge of this trade dictated. Think of this, Altamirano, and tell me: Do you really believe your little sensitivities have the slightest importance? Do you really think so?” In the other room the bed boards creaked, and it was presumably Jessie who emitted those timid groans of pain as genuine as they were selfless. “Do you really believe your pathetic life has anything to do with this book?”

  I approached his desk. I noticed then that there wasn’t one pile of papers but two: one of them consisted of marked-up pages, with crossings out, marginal notes, dark arrows, wavy lines eliminating whole paragraphs; the other was a stack of typed pages that had been corrected several times. My corrected life, I thought. And also: My misappropriated life. “Stop it,” I said to Conrad.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “You can do it. Stop it all.” I picked up the manuscript. My hands moved with an impulse that seemed beyond my control. “I’ll burn it,” I said. In two steps I was at the window; with a hand on the catch, I said, “I’ll throw it out.”

  Conrad crossed his arms behind his back. “My tale is now on its way, dear friend. It is already on the street. Right now, as you and I speak, there are people reading the story of the wars and revolutions of that country, the story of that province that secedes over a silver mine, the history of the South American Republic that does not exist. And there is nothing you can do about it.”

  “But the republic does exist,” I said, or rather beseeched him. “The province does exist. But the silver mine is really a canal, a canal between two oceans. I know because I know it. I was born in that republic, I lived in that province. I am guilty of its misfortunes.”

  Conrad didn’t answer. I returned the manuscript to his desk, and doing so was like a concession, like the laying down of weapons by a warrior chief. At what moment does a man concede defeat? What happens in his head to convince him to give up? I would have liked to ask those things.

  Instead, I asked: “How does it all end?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How does the history of Costaguana end?”

  “I’m afraid you already know that, my dear Altamirano,” said Conrad. “It’s all here, in this chapter, and it might not be what you’re expecting. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing that you don’t know.” He paused and added: “I can read it to you, if you like.”

  I went over to the window, which by then was a darkened square. And I don’t know why, but there, looking out toward the street, refusing like a child what was going on behind my back, I felt safe. It was a false sensation, of course, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared.

  “Read,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  Life out on the street began to die down. The intense cold was reflected in the faces of passersby. My eyes and mind were distracted by the image of a little girl playing with her dog on the icy pavement—dark red coat, a scarf that looked thin from the distance—and while that confident voice began to speak to me of the destiny of those characters (and obliged me to some extent to attend the revelation of my own destiny), the snow fell in dense flakes on the pavement and melted immediately, forming little stars of damp that vanished straightaway. Then I thought of you, Eloísa, and of what I’d done to us; without asking permission I opened the window, leaned outside, and looked up so the falling snow would wet my eyes, so the snow would camouflage my tears, so Santiago P
érez Triana would not notice I’d been crying when he saw me. Suddenly, only you mattered; I realized, not without some terror, that only you would ever matter. And I knew: there, among gusts of icy wind, I knew what my punishment was. I knew that, many years later, when time had left behind my conversation with Joseph Conrad, I would go on remembering that afternoon when I disappeared from history by magic, I would go on being aware of the magnitude of my loss but also of the irreparable damage the events of my life had caused us, and most of all I would go on waking up in the middle of the night wondering, as I’m wondering now, where you might be, Eloísa, what kind of life you will have had, what place you will have occupied in the unfortunate history of Costaguana.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It’s possible The Secret History of Costaguana arose from Nostromo, which I read for the first time in Francis and Suzanne Laurenty’s house (Xhoris, Belgium) during the summer of 1998; it’s possible that it came from the essay “El Nostromo de Joseph Conrad,” which Malcolm Deas included in his book Del poder y la gramatica, which I read in Barcelona at the beginning of the year 2000; and it’s possible that it came from an informative article that Alejandro Gaviria published in the Colombian journal El Malpensante in December 2001. But it is also possible (and this is my preferred possibility) that the first hunch of the novel came into being in the year 2003, while I was writing, for my friend Conrado Zuluaga, a brief biography of Joseph Conrad. The opportune commission obliged me to revise, out of rigor or curiosity, Conrad’s letters and novels, as well as Deas’s and Gaviria’s texts and many others, and at some point it struck me as implausible that this novel had not been written before, which is undoubtedly the best reason someone can have for writing a novel. Among the fifty or so books I read in order to write this one, it would be dishonest not to mention Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives by Frederick Karl, The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century by Ian Watt, History of Fifty Years of Misrule by José Avellanos, and 1903: Adiós, Panama by Enrique Santos Molano. It would be unjust to forget certain phrases that accompanied the writing of the novel as guides or as tutors and that would have been epigraphs if it hadn’t seemed to me, in a capricious and rather untenable way, that they would break the chronological autonomy of my tale. From the story “Guayaquil” by Borges: “It may be that one cannot speak about the Caribbean republic without echoing, however remotely, the monumental style of its most famous historian, Captain Józef Korzeniowski.” From A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes: “We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept, we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.” From Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia: “The only things that are mine are things whose history I know.” Joyce’s “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” was useless to me; it’s fine for Stephen Dedalus, but José Altamirano, I think, would feel closer to notions of farce or vaudeville.