Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE
I - Upside-down Frogs, Chinamen, and Civil Wars
II - The Revelations of Antonia de Narváez
III - Joseph Conrad Asks for Help
PART TWO
IV - The Mysterious Laws of Refraction
V - Sarah Bernhardt and the French Curse
VI - In the Belly of the Elephant
PART THREE
VII - A Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days, or The Brief Life of a ...
VIII - The Lesson of Great Events
IX - The Confessions of José Altamirano
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR
ALSO BY JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ
The Informers
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First published in the United States 2011
Copyright © 2007 by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
English translation © 2010 by Anne McLean
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vásquez, Juan Gabriel, date.
[Historia secreta de Costaguana. English.]
The secret history of Costaguana / Juan Gabriel Vásquez ; translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-53524-0
1. Colombians—England—London—Fiction. 2. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Fiction. 3. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924. Nostromo—Fiction. 4. Novelists, English—20th century—Fiction. 5. Fiction—Authorship—Fiction. 6. Colombia—Fiction. I. McLean, Anne, date. II. Title. PQ8180.32.A797H
863.7—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.
While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assume any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Martina and Carlota,
who brought their own book with them
when they arrived
I want to talk to you of the work I am engaged on now.
I hardly dare avow my audacity—but I am placing it in
South America in a Republic I call Costaguana.
—Joseph Conrad
Letter to Robert Cunninghame Graham
PART ONE
There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves.
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
I
Upside-down Frogs, Chinamen, and Civil Wars
Let’s just come right out and say it: the man has died. No, that won’t do. I’ll be more precise: the Novelist (with a capital N) has died. You all know who I mean. Don’t you? Well, I’ll try again: the Great English Novelist has died. The Great English Novelist—Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer—has died. The Great English-language Novelist—Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer, who went from failed suicide to living classic, from common gunrunner to Jewel of the British Crown—has died. Ladies and gentlemen: Joseph Conrad has died. I receive the news familiarly, as one might receive an old friend, then realize, not without some sadness, that I’ve spent my whole life waiting for it.
I begin writing this with all the London broadsheets (their microscopic print, their uneven, narrow columns) spread out over my green leather desktop. Through the press, which has played such diverse roles over the course of my life—threatening to ruin it at times, and at others granting what little luster it has—I am informed of the heart attack and its circumstances: the visit from Nurse Vinten, the shout heard from downstairs, the body falling out of the chair. Through enterprising journalism I attend the funeral in Canterbury; through the impertinences of reporters I watch them lower the body and place the stone, that headstone beset with errors (a K out of place, a vowel wrong in one of the names). Today, August 7, 1924, while in my distant Colombia they are celebrating one hundred and five years since the Battle of Boyacá, here in England they mourn, without pomp and ceremony, the passing of the Great Novelist. While in Colombia they commemorate the victory of the armies of independence over the forces of the Spanish Empire, here, in this ground of another empire, the man has been buried forever, the man who robbed me . . .
But no.
Not yet.
It’s still too soon.
It’s too soon to explain the forms and qualities of that theft; it’s too soon to explain what merchandise was stolen, what motives the thief had, what damage the victim suffered. I hear the questions clamoring from the stalls: What can a famous novelist have in common with a poor, anonymous, exiled Colombian? Readers: have patience. You don’t want to know everything at the beginning; do not investigate, do not ask, for this narrator, like a benevolent father, will gradually provide the necessary information as the tale proceeds. . . . In other words, leave it all in my hands. I’ll decide when and how to tell what I want to tell, when to hide, when to reveal, when to lose myself in the nooks and crannies of my memory for the mere pleasure of doing so. Here I shall tell you of implausible murders and unpredictable hangings, elegant declarations of war and slovenly peace accords, of fires and floods and intriguing ships and conspiratorial trains; but somehow all that I tell you will be aimed at explaining and explaining to myself, link by link, the chain of events that provoked the encounter for which my life was destined.
For that’s how it is: the disagreeable business of destiny has its share of responsibility in all this. Conrad and I, who were born countless meridians apart, our lives marked by the difference of the hemispheres, had a common future that would have been obvious from the first moment, even to the most skeptical person. When this happens, when the paths of two men born in distant places are destined to cross, a map can be drawn a posteriori. Most often the encounter is singular: Franz Ferdinand encounters Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo and is shot dead along with his wife, the nineteenth century, and all those European certainties; General Rafael Uribe Uribe encounters two peasants, Galarza and C
arvajal, in Bogotá and shortly thereafter dies near the Plaza de Bolívar, with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders. Conrad and I met only once, but long ago we had been on the verge of doing so. Twenty-seven years passed between the two events. The aborted encounter, which was on the verge of taking place but which never happened, occurred in 1876, in the Colombian province of Panama; the other meeting—the actual one, the fateful one—happened at the end of November 1903. And it happened here: in the chaotic, imperial, and decadent city of London. Here, in the city where I write and where death predictably awaits me, city of gray skies and the smell of coal in which I arrived for reasons not easy, yet obligatory, to explain.
I came to London, like so many people have come to so many places, fleeing from the history that was my lot, or rather, from the history of the country that was my lot. In other words, I came to London because here history had ceased some time ago: nothing happened in these lands anymore, everything had already been invented and done; they’d already had all the ideas, all the empires had arisen and they’d fought all the wars, and I would be forever safe from the disasters that Great Moments can impress onto Small Lives. Coming here was, therefore, a legitimate act of self-defense; the jury that judges me will have to take that into consideration.
For I, too, shall be accused in this book; I, too, shall sit on the timeworn bench, although the patient reader will have to cover more than a few pages to discover of what I accuse myself. I, who came in flight from Big History, now go back a whole century to the core of my little story, and shall attempt to investigate the roots of my disgrace. During that night, the night of our encounter, Conrad listened to me tell my story; and now, dear readers—readers who shall judge me, Readers of the Jury—it’s your turn. For the success of my tale rests on this supposition: you will have to know all that Conrad knew.
(But there is someone else . . . Eloísa, you, too, will have to get to know these reminiscences, these confessions. You, too, will have to deliver, when the time comes, your own pardon or your own guilty verdict.)
My story begins in February 1820, five months after Simón Bolívar made his victorious entrance into the capital of my recently liberated country. Every story has a father, and this one begins with the birth of mine: Don Miguel Felipe Rodrigo Lazaro del Niño Jesús Altamirano. Miguel Altamirano, known to his friends as the Last Renaissance Man, was born in the schizophrenic city of Santa Fe de Bogotá, which from here on in will be called either Santa Fe or Bogotá or even That Shit Hole; while my grandmother tugged hard on the midwife’s hair and let out screams that frightened the slaves, a few steps away the law was approved by which Bolívar, in his capacity as father of the nation, chose the name for that country fresh out of the oven, and the country was solemnly baptized. So the Republic of Colombia—schizophrenic country that will later be called New Granada or the United States of Colombia or even That Shit Hole—was a babe in arms, and the corpses of the executed Spaniards were still fresh; but there is no historical event that marks or distinguishes my father’s birth, except for the superfluous ceremony of that baptism.
My father was—as I have already said—the Last Renaissance Man. I cannot say he was of blue blood, because that hue was no longer acceptable in the new republic, but what flowed through his veins was magenta, shall we say, or maybe purple. His tutor, a frail and sickly man who had been educated in Madrid, educated my father in turn with the Quixote and Garcilaso; but the young Altamirano, who by the age of twelve was already a consummate rebel (as well as a terrible literary critic), strove to reject the literature of the Spaniards, the Voice of the Occupation, and in the end succeeded in doing so. He learned English to read Thomas Malory, and one of his first published poems, a hyperromantic and mawkish creation comparing Lord Byron to Simón Bolívar, appeared under the signature Lancelot of the Lake. My father discovered later that Byron had in fact wanted to come and fight with Bolívar, and it was only chance that finally took him to Greece; and what he henceforth felt for Romantics, from England and anywhere else, began to replace little by little the devotions and loyalties his elders had left him as his birthright.
Not that this was difficult, for by the age of twenty the Latin American Byron was already orphaned. His mother had been killed by smallpox; his father (in a much more elegant way) by Christianity. My grandfather, an illustrious colonel who had fought against the dragoons of many Spanish regiments, was stationed in the southern provinces when the progressive government decreed the closure of four convents, and saw the first riots in defense of religion at bayonet point. One of those Catholic, apostolic, and Roman bayonets, one of those steel points engaged on the crusade for the faith, stabbed him months later; the news of his death arrived in Bogotá at the same time as the city was preparing to repel an attack by those same Catholic revolutionaries. But Bogotá or Santa Fe was, like the rest of the country, divided, and my father would never forget it: leaning out of a window at the university, he saw the people of Santa Fe in procession carrying a figure of Christ dressed in a general’s uniform, heard the shouts of “Death to the Jews,” and marveled at the thought that they referred to his stabbed father, and then returned to the classroom routine, in time to observe his fellow students stabbing with sharp, pointed instruments cadavers recently arrived from the battlefields. For there was nothing at that time, absolutely nothing, the Latin American Byron liked more than being a first-hand witness to the fascinating advances of medical science.
He had enrolled in the Faculty of Law, in obedience to my grandfather’s wishes, but after a while devoted only the first part of his days to the legal codes. Like a Don Juan divided between two lovers, my father went from the ordeal of waking at five in the morning to listen to lectures on codified crimes and methods of acquiring dominion to the hidden or secret or parallel life he began after lunch. My father had purchased, for the exorbitant price of half a real, a hat with a doctor’s rosette, so as not to be detected by the university police, and each day, until five in the afternoon, he hid out in the Faculty of Medicine and spent hours watching young men like himself, young men of his age and no more intelligent, carry out bold explorations into unknown regions of the human body. My father wanted to see how his friend Ricardo Rueda was able to deliver single-handedly the twins clandestinely born to an Andalusian gypsy, as well as to operate on the appendix of the nephew of Don José Ignacio de Márquez, professor of Roman law. And while this went on, a few blocks from the university other procedures were being carried out that were not surgical but whose consequences were no less serious, for in the velvet-covered armchairs of a ministry sat two men with a quill pen signing the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty. In accordance with article XXXV, the country that was now called New Granada granted to the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of the province of Panama, and the United States undertook, among other things, to maintain strict neutrality in questions of internal politics. And here begins the disorder, here begins . . .
But no.
Not yet.
I’ll reveal more on the subject in a few pages.
The Last Renaissance Man earned a law degree, he did, but I hasten to say that he never practiced: he was too busy with the absorbing vocation of Enlightenment and Progress. By the age of thirty he had not been linked to a single young lady, but his file as founder of Benthamist/revolutionary /socialist/Girondist newspapers expanded scandalously. There was no bishop he had not insulted; there was no respectable family who had not forbidden his entrance into their home or his courting of their daughters. (At La Merced College, a recently founded school for the most distinguished señoritas, his name was anathema.) Little by little my father specialized in the delicate art of earning disfavor and doors slammed in his face, and Santa Fe society joined willingly in the great slamming. My father did not worry: at that time the country he lived in had become unrecognizable—its borders had changed or were threatening to change, it had a different name, its political consti
tution was as mobile as a donna—and the government for which my grandfather had died had turned, for this reader of Lamartine and Saint-Simon, into the most reactionary of afflictions.
Enter Miguel Altamirano, activist, idealist, optimist; Miguel Altamirano, more than liberal, radical, anticlerical. During the elections of 1849, my father was one of those who purchased the material for the banners that hung all over Bogotá with the slogan VIVA LÓPEZ, TERROR OF THE CONSERVATIVES; he was one of those who gathered outside Congress to intimidate (successfully) the men who were going to elect a new president; once López, candidate of the young revolutionaries, was elected, he was one of those who demanded from the columns of the newspaper of the moment—I don’t remember which one it was at the time, whether The Martyr or The Struggle—the expulsion of the Jesuits. Reaction of the reactionary society: eighty little girls dressed in white with flowers in their hands assembled in front of the Palace to oppose the measure; in his newspaper, my father called them “Instruments of Obscurantism.” Two hundred ladies of unquestionable lineage repeated the demonstration, and my father distributed a pamphlet entitled Hell Hath No Fury Like a Jesuit Scorned. The priests of that New Granada, deprived of authority and privileges, hardened their positions as the months went by, and the sensation of harassment increased. My father, in response, joined the Estrella del Tequendama Masonic lodge: the secret meetings gave him a sense of conspiring (ergo of being alive), and the fact that the elders exempted him from the initiation trials made him think that Freemasonry was a sort of natural habitat. Through his efforts the temple managed to catechize two young priests; his patrons recognized these achievements with advanced promotions. And at some point in that brief process, my father, young soldier in search of battles, found one that appeared minor at first glance, almost trivial, but which would, albeit indirectly, change his life.
The Secret History of Costaguana Page 1