Down the Orinoco in a Canoe was translated into English and published by Heinemann, with a prologue by the Scottish adventurer, dilettante writer, and socialist leader Robert Cunninghame Graham, whose perception of Bogotá as a kind of Chibcha Athens still strikes me as more ingenious than fitting. The book appeared in 1902; in November 1903, a few hours before I knocked on his door—one exile requesting help from another, a disciple in search of a master—Pérez Triana had received a letter from Sydney Pawling, his editor. “One last thing I should like to mention, Mr. Triana,” it read. “As you will no doubt know, Mr. Conrad, whose magnificent Typhoon we published this past April, is immersed in a difficult project relating to current Latin American reality. Aware of his own limited knowledge of the subject, Mr. Conrad has sought out and received the aid of Mr. Cunninghame Graham to pursue the work; but he has also read your book, and has now requested I ask you, Mr. Triana, if you would be prepared to answer a few questions that Mr. Conrad would like to send you by way of us.”
Joseph Conrad has read me, thinks Pérez Triana. Joseph Conrad wants my help.
Pérez Triana opens the drawer and takes out a blank sheet and another Perfection envelope. (He likes this invention, so simple and at once so ingenious: you had to pass your tongue along the flap as ever, but the glue was not there, it was on the envelope itself. His family physician, Dr. Thomas Wilmot, had told him of it after describing various tongue infections, and Pérez Triana had gone immediately to the stationer’s in Charing Cross. He had to look after his health, of course; how many envelopes a day could a man like him end up licking?) He wrote: “My delay in replying to your letter, Mr. Pawling, is utterly inexcusable. Do relate to Mr. Conrad my absolute availability to answer as many questions as he cares to send me, no matter how lengthy.” And then he put the paper in the envelope and licked the flap.
But he did not send the letter at once. A few hours later he would be pleased he hadn’t. He threw that letter into the wastepaper basket, took out another piece of paper, and wrote again the same lines about tardiness and availability, but then added: “Pass on to Mr. Conrad, however, that certain recent events allow me now to have other ways of helping him. I do not presume to know better than the author what his needs might be, but the information he could receive from an exile of long standing, by way of a questionnaire sent by third parties, is invariably inferior to what he could be given in person by a direct witness to events. Well then, what I can offer is even better than a witness. I offer him a victim, Mr. Pawling. A victim.”
What had happened between the two letters?
A man from his distant country had arrived to visit him. A man had told him a story.
That man, of course, was me.
That story is the one that you, dear Eloísa, are reading at this moment.
PART TWO
The words one knows so well have a nightmarish meaning in this country. Liberty, democracy, patriotism, government—all of them have a flavor of folly and murder.
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
IV
The Mysterious Laws of Refraction
I spent two whole days looking for my father, following his faint but still visible trail, his slimy snail trail, through the streets of Colón. But I was not successful. I didn’t want to leave messages, notes, warnings, because I’m fond of surprises and I suspected—for no reason, of course—that this fondness came from my paternal side. In the hospital the mulatta nurses spoke of my father with (it seemed to me) too much familiarity; they told me at once, between impertinent giggles, that he’d been there that morning and had spent at least three hours chatting with a tubercular young man, but they didn’t know what his next destination was; when I spoke to the tubercular young man, I found out several things, but not my father’s whereabouts. He’d been born in Bogotá and was a lawyer by profession, that oh so frequent combination in my centralist and pettifogging country; two weeks after arriving in Colón he’d woken up with a swelling under his jaw; by the time of my visit, the infection had left the inflamed gland and invaded the lungs and blood; he had, in the best of cases, a few months to live. “That fellow’s a friend of yours?” he said, half opening his bile-colored eyes. “Well, tell him I’ll be expecting him tomorrow. Tell him not to leave me abandoned here. In those three hours he looked after me better than all these damn doctors. Tell him, OK? Tell him that before I die I want to know what the hell happens to D’Artagnan.” And as he pronounced the guttural r, with a zeal for correctness that struck me as at the very least curious in the case of a dying man, he brought his left hand up to his inflamed gland, covering it as if it hurt.
In the offices of the Railroad Company—which some natives called by its English name, giving me the strange sensation of living in two countries at once, or of crossing an invisible border over and over again—the North Americans confused me with a potential ticket buyer and conscientiously sent me to the ticket office, shaking the cuffs of their impeccable shirtsleeves in the direction of the street, and one of them even donning his felt hat to accompany me to the place. That whole exchange was in English; it was only after saying good-bye that I realized it, with rather greater surprise than modesty allows me to confess. In the place the impeccable cuff had indicated, a finely clothed arm moved to inform me that no, tickets were no longer sold there, then at another window a sweaty forehead told me that I should simply board the train and someone would come by to ask for my ticket. “But no, I’m looking for—” “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. In the carriage they’ll ask for it.” And meanwhile, the heat was afflicting me like poison; as I crossed a threshold and entering any shade, a solitary drop of sweat trickled down my side, beneath my clothes; and in the street I marveled that a Chinese man could wear black while not a single pore on his face seemed open. I sought refuge in a liquor store full of gambling cart drivers in whose hands an innocent pair of dice managed to seem like high-stakes poker. And it was then, at the hottest hour of the day, with Front Street empty of pedestrians—only a lunatic or a recent arrival would dare to walk out in the sun at that moment—that I saw him. A restaurant door opened; a decadent place was revealed, a wall covered in mirrors; and through the door came a rash creature. Like in the old joke about twins who meet in the street and recognize each other instantly, I recognized my father.
You, readers of romantic novels; you, sensitive victims of our melodramatic culture, now await a standard reunion scene, with initial gestures of skepticism, lachrymose concessions to the physical evidence, sweaty embraces in the middle of the street, resounding promises to make up for lost time. Well then, allow me to say that I’m (not) sorry to disappoint you. There was no reunion whatsoever, because there was no union to renew; there was no promise, because for my father and for me there’d been no time lost. Yes, there are some things that dissociate me from a certain English novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer. My father did not teach me to read Shakespeare or Victor Hugo on our estate in Poland, nor did I immortalize the scene in my memoirs (surely exaggerating it along the way, it has to be said); he did not await me in bed when, the two of us living in cold Kraków, I returned from school to console him over the death of my mother in exile. . . . Please, understand: my father was my mother’s story. A character, a version, and little more. Well then, there, in the middle of the scorching street, that father in his fifties spoke through the already graying beard that covered his face and defined his features. Or rather the absence of them: for the whiskers of his mustache covered his lips (and had turned yellow, or perhaps always had been), and those on his cheeks went so close to his eyes that my father could have looked at them himself with a little effort. And through that curtain of smoke, from that gray Birnam Wood advancing toward the deforested regions of his face, spoke my father’s invisible mouth: “So I have a son.” Hands clasped behind his back and his gaze fixed on the ground, on the waves of heat at the height of his shiny boots, he began to walk. I understood that I should follow him, and from
behind, like a geisha following her lord, I heard him add: “Not a bad thing, at my age. Not bad at all.”
And that’s how it began: it was that simple. Thus I had a father, and he a son.
His house was on the north side of Manzanillo Island, in the makeshift and yet ostentatious city the founders of the railroad—which is to say, Aspinwall-Colón—had built for their employees. A ghetto surrounded by groves of trees, a luxurious hamlet on stilts, the city of the Panama Railroad Company was an oasis of salubriousness in the swamp of the island, and to enter it was to breathe a different air: the clean air of the Caribbean instead of the sickly vapors of the Chagres River. The white-walled, red-roofed house, paint peeling off the walls from the humidity and screen doors dirty with the accumulated bodies of mosquitoes, had belonged to a certain Watts, an engineer murdered five days after the inauguration of the railway, when, during a dry summer on his way back from buying two barrels of fresh water in Gatún, he was stabbed by mule thieves (or maybe water thieves); and my idealistic father, inheriting it, had felt that he inherited much more than walls and hammocks and mosquito nets. . . . But if someone—his recently discovered son, for example—had asked him what that legacy consisted of, he wouldn’t have known how to answer; instead, he would have taken out of a Spanish trunk, covered in leather and closed with a lock strong enough to guard a dungeon in times of the Inquisition, the semi-complete collection of his articles published since his arrival in Colón-Aspinwall. That’s what he did with me. In many more words and a few gestures, I asked him: Who are you? And he, without a single word and with the simple gesture of opening the chest and leaving it open, tried to answer the question. And the results, at least for me, were the first big surprise of the many that awaited me in the city of Colón. Do share, readers, my filial astonishment, such a literary thing. For there, lying in a hammock in San Jacinto and with a sherry cobbler in my free hand, I embarked on the task of reviewing my father’s articles, that is, of finding out who this Miguel Altamirano was, into whose life I had just burst. And what did I discover? I discovered a symptom, or a complex, as one of these new Freudian disciples who accost us from everywhere would say. Let’s see if I can explain it. I must be able to explain it.
I discovered that over the course of two decades my father had produced, from his mahogany desk—bare but for the skeleton of a hand on a marble pedestal—a scale model of the Isthmus. No, model is not the word, or perhaps it is the applicable word to the first years of his journalistic labors; but starting from some imprecise moment (futile, from a scientific point of view, to try to date it), what was represented in my father’s articles was more than a distortion, a version—again the damned little word—of Panamanian reality. And that version, I began to realize as I read, only touched on objective reality at certain select points, the way a merchant ship only concerns itself with certain ports. In his writings, my father did not fear for a moment changing what was already known or what everyone remembered. With good reason, besides: in Panama, which after all was a state of Colombia, almost no one knew, and most of all, no one remembered. Now I can say it: that was my first contact with the notion, which would so often appear in my future life, that reality is a frail enemy to the power of the pen, that anyone can found a utopia simply by arming himself with good rhetoric. In the beginning was the word: the contents of that biblical vacuity were revealed to me there, in the port of Colón, in front of my father’s desk. Reality real like a creature of ink and paper: that discovery, for someone of my age, is of the sort that shakes worlds, transforms beliefs, makes atheists devout and vice versa.
Let’s clear this up once and for all: it’s not that my father wrote lies. Surprised and at the same time full of admiration, over the first few months of life with my father I began to notice the strange illness that a few years back had begun to guide his perception and, therefore, his pen. Panamanian reality entered his eyes as if from a stick for measuring water depth from the shore: it folded, it bent, folded at the beginning and bent afterward, or vice versa. The phenomenon is called “refraction,” as more competent people have told me. Well then, my father’s pen was the largest refractive lens of the Sovereign State of Panama; only the fact that Panama was in itself a place so prone to refraction can explain why nobody, I mean nobody, seemed to notice. At first I thought, as any respectful son would, that the fault was mine, that I had inherited the worst of distortions: my mother’s cynicism. But I soon accepted the obvious.
In Miguel Altamirano’s first articles, the railway’s dead had been almost ten thousand; in one from 1863 the sum was less than half that, and toward 1870 he wrote about “the two thousand five hundred martyrs to our well-being.” In 1856 my father was one of those who wrote with an indignant wealth of detail of an incident that happened near the stations, when a certain Jack Oliver refused to pay a certain José Luna the price of a slice of watermelon, and for several hours Panamanians of the neighborhood shot it out with Gringo train passengers, at a cost of fifteen dead and an indemnity the Colombian government had to pay in installments to the government of the victims. Examining my father’s articles: in one from 1867, the fifteen dead had become nine; in 1872 he mentions nineteen wounded, seven of them seriously, but not a word about deaths; and in one of his most recently published texts—April 15 the year of my arrival—my father recalled “the tragedy of the nine victims” (and he even turns the watermelon into an orange, though I don’t know what that could mean). Readers of the Jury, I now reach for a phrase that is the resource of lazy writers and say: examples abound. But I am interested in leaving a record of one in particular, the first of those to occur in my presence.
I have already mentioned Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse and his expedition to the Darien; but I have not mentioned the results. That November morning, my father presented himself at the anchorage of the port of Colón to see off the Lafayette and the eighteen explorers, and then he wrote for the Star & Herald (which the Panama Star was now called) a page-and-a-half-long panegyric, wishing good luck to the pioneers and courage to the conquerors in that first step toward the Inter-oceanic Canal. I was with him at that moment; I went with him. Six months later, my father returned to the port to welcome back the delegation of pioneers and conquerors, and again I was with him; and there, in the same port, he found, or we found, that two of the men had died of malaria in the jungle, and two others on the high sea, and that the rain had made several of the routes impassable, so the terrains the expedition wanted to investigate remained convincingly virginal. The conquerors returned to Colón dehydrated, ill, and depressed, and most of all victims of a resounding failure; but two days later Miguel Altamirano’s version appeared in the newspaper:THE WYSE EXPEDITION IS AN UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS
THE LONG ROAD TO THE CANAL BEGINS
The French Lieutenant had not managed to establish the best route for a task of such magnitude, but my father wrote: “All doubts have been dispelled.” The French Lieutenant had not managed to establish whether a canal with culverts and locks would be better than one at sea level, but my father wrote: “For the science of engineering, the Darien Jungle has ceased to hold secrets.” And no one contradicted him. The laws of refraction are a complicated business.
But it’s the same all over and the same thing was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. So now we travel to Marseille. The reason? I would like to show, simply to be fair, that others also have the enviable capacity to distort truths (and more: they manage to do so with greater success, with better guarantees of impunity). Now I return to Korzeniowski, and I do so rather overwhelmed by shame and excusing myself in advance for the direction this tale is about to take. Who could have told me that one day my pen would be occupied with such shocking matters? But there is no way to avoid it. Sensitive readers, people of delicate constitutions, demure ladies and innocent children: I beg or suggest that you close your eyes, cover your ears (in other words, skip to the next chapter), because here I shall refer, more than to young Korzeni
owski himself, to the most private of his parts.
We are in the month of March in 1877, and in the city of Marseille, Korzeniowski’s anus is suffering. No, let us be frank or, at least, more scientifically precise: he has an abscess. It is, in all probability, the most well-documented anal abscess in the history of anal abscesses, for it appears, at least, in two of the young sailor’s letters, two of those from a friend, one of his uncle’s, and in the first officer’s report. Before such proliferation, I have often asked myself the inevitable question: Are there allusions to the anal abscess in the literary oeuvre of Joseph Conrad? Dear readers, I confess: if they are there, I have not found them. Of course, I don’t share the opinion of a certain critic (George Gallaher, Illustrated London News, November 1921, page 199), according to whom that abscess is the “true heart of darkness,” nor do I believe that in real life it was Korzeniowski who, in an attack of private discomfort, cried out, “The horror! The horror!” Be that as it may, no abscess, anal or any other kind, has had such intense consequences from a metaphysical point of view as that which oppresses Korzeniowski that spring. For due to its pain he is obliged to remain on land while his ship, the Saint-Antoine , sails again to the Caribbean.
The Secret History of Costaguana Page 9