Let’s imagine: as she sinks, Charlotte loses her shoes, so when she gets to the riverbed, the bare skin of her feet touches the sand. . . . Imagine: the pressure of the water in her ears and on her closed eyes, or maybe they’re not closed but wide open, and maybe they see trout swim by and water snakes, weeds, sticks, or branches broken off trees by the humidity. Imagine the weight that rushes against Charlotte’s airless chest, against her small breasts and shrunken nipples, oppressed by the cold water. Imagine that all the pores of her skin close like stubborn little mouths, tired of swallowing water and aware that very soon they’ll be able to resist no longer, that death by drowning is right around the corner. Let’s imagine what Charlotte is imagining: the life she managed to have—a husband, a son who learned to talk before he died, a few sexual, social, or economic satisfactions—and most of all the life she won’t have, that which is never easy to imagine, because imagination (let’s be honest) doesn’t really get us that far. Charlotte starts to wonder what it feels like to drown, which of her senses will disappear first, if there’s pain in this death and where this pain will be located. She already lacks air: the weight against her chest has increased; her cheeks have contracted: the air that had been in them has been consumed by the involuntary voracity—no, by the gluttony—of her lungs. Charlotte feels that her brain is turning off.
And then something goes through her head.
Or: something goes on in her head.
What is it? It is a memory, an idea, an emotion. It is something (unique) to which I, despite my prerogatives as narrator of this tale, do not have access. With a shrug of her narrow shoulders, of her elegant arms, Charlotte shakes off her husband’s coat. Lumps of lignite, slabs of schist fall to the bottom. Immediately, with the swiftness of a freed buoy, Charlotte’s body lifts off the riverbed of the Chagres.
Her body begins to emerge.
Her ears hurt. Saliva returns to her throat.
I anticipate all my curious readers’ doubts and questions: no, Charlotte would never speak of what she thought (or imagined, or felt, or simply saw) a few seconds before what would have been a terrible death in the depths of the Chagres River. I, who am so given to speculation, in this case have been unable to speculate, and as the years have gone by this incapacity has become more firmly ingrained. . . . Any hypothesis on what happened pales in the face of that reality: Charlotte decided to go on living, and when she came out on the cloudy green surface of the Chagres, she was already a new woman (and had probably already decided she’d take the secret with her to her grave). This process of radical renovation cannot be emphasized too much, the reinvention with a capital R of herself that the Widow of the Canal undertook after her head—puffing and panting, her mouth gulping for air with the desperation of a landed salmon—appeared again in the superficial world of the Isthmus, that world she had come to despise and which she now forgave. I’m not afraid to record the physical manifestations of that transformation: the color of her eyes became lighter, her voice took on a graver tone, and her chestnut-colored hair grew down to her waist, as if the water of the Chagres River had formed a perpetual cascade down her back. Charlotte Madinier, who, as she sank into the Chagres River with her pockets bulging with Panamanian geology, had been a beautiful but wasted woman, when revived—because that’s what it was, a resurrection, that occurred that day—seemed to return to the disturbing beauty of a not too distant adolescence. It was an almost mythic event. Charlotte Madinier as a Siren of the Chagres River. Charlotte Madinier as a Panamanian Faust. Readers of the Jury, did you want to witness another Metamorphosis? This one is unpredictable and also without precedents; this is the most powerful I’ve ever seen, because it eventually involved me. For the new woman did not just rise from the bottom of the Chagres, which was a portent in itself, but carried out a deed even more portentous: she entered my life.
And she was transformed, of course she was. There is no doubt: at the end of the convulsive decade of the 1880s, Metamorphosis was in the spirit of the times. On the other side of the world, in Calcutta, Korzeniowski was suffering a series of subtle identity shifts and was beginning—just like that—to sign his contracts as Conrad; the Widow of the Canal did not change her name, for we had a tacit agreement according to which she would keep her married name and I would understand her reasons without her having to explain them to me, but she would change her attire. She opened the doors of her house in Christophe Colomb, took the skirts and capes down from the windows, and I accompanied her to the Liberian neighborhood and helped her exchange her heavy, stubbornly dark Parisian clothes for green and blue and yellow cotton shifts, which gave her pale skin the tone of unripe fruit. Another bonfire in the middle of the street: but this time the bonfire was one of exorcism and not purification, the attempt to cast out the demons of past lives. There, in the port of Colón, during the final days of 1885, Charlotte began a reincarnation in which I participated. The initiation ceremony (the details of which, out of chivalry, I must keep to myself) took place one Saturday night, and was fed by certain shared solitudes, by nostalgias that remained unshared and by the guaranteed fuel of French brandy. In my private dictionary, which might not correspond with those of all my readers, reincarnation means “returning to the carnal.” I returned every Saturday; every Saturday Charlotte Madinier’s generous flesh awaited me ravenously, with the desperate abandon of one with nothing to lose. But never, not in those days of initiation or later, did I manage to find out what happened at the bottom of the Chagres River.
I spent the night of New Year’s Eve in Charlotte’s house, not in my father’s, and the first sentence I heard in 1886 was a plea inside of which lurked an order: “Don’t ever leave again.” I obeyed (willingly, I should add); at the age of thirty-one I found myself, suddenly and unexpectedly, cohabiting with a widow who barely spoke a couple of words of Spanish, colonizing her youthful body like an explorer who doesn’t know he’s not the first and feeling myself to be brazenly, convincingly, dangerously happy. Our place of residence and Charlotte’s nationality, those two items of census data, constituted a sort of moral safe conduct, carte blanche to move through the rigid system of the Panamanian bourgeoisie to which, much to our dismay, we still belonged. Dear readers: I’m not talking, however, about impunity. On one occasion, the Jesuit priest, Father Federico Ladrón de Guevara, called Charlotte a “woman of sullied reputation” and stressed that France was historically a “lair of Liberals and nurturer of anti-Christian revolutions.” I remember it well because it was then, as if trying to respond to those accusations, that Charlotte summoned me one night to the veranda. The first April downpour had just fallen, and the air was still thick with the earth’s dampness, with the smell of dead worms and stagnant ditch water, with clouds of mosquitoes like floating nets. The most redundant phrase tends to be the one that announces humanity’s defining moments: “I have something to tell you,” says the person who—obviously—has something to say. Charlotte was faithful to this tradition of superfluity. “I have something to tell you,” she said. I thought she was going to confess once and for all what had happened at the bottom of the Chagres River, that stubborn incorruptible mystery; but she, lying in the hammock and wearing an orange shift and a red scarf wrapped around her head, turned her back to me but held my hand and, as the heavens opened and unleashed another downpour, told me she was pregnant.
Our private history is sometimes capable of the most remarkable symmetries. In Charlotte’s belly, a new Altamirano announced its presence with the will to continue the isthmian branch of the lineage; at the same time my father, Altamirano Senior, began to back away, to leave the world like a mortally wounded boar. Like a hibernating bear. Like whichever animal you’d prefer to use for the simile.
He began to distance himself from me. Charlotte, the new Charlotte, retained (in spite of her reincarnation) enormous contempt for my father. Do I need to spell it out? Something inside her blamed Miguel Altamirano for the deaths of her son and her husband. He, for his part, d
id not manage to grasp it. The idea that there was a direct link between his Selective Blindness and the deaths of the Madiniers would have struck him as absurd and indemonstrable. If someone had told him that the two Madiniers had been murdered, and that the weapon (in one of the murders, at least) was a certain open letter that appeared on a certain day in a certain newspaper, my father, I swear, would not have understood the reference. Miguel Altamirano shed a couple of tears for the extinction, at the hands of Panama, of a whole family; but they were innocent tears, since they weren’t guilty, and also innocent, since they were not wise. Miguel Altamirano elevated predictable defense mechanisms—denial and rejection—to the level of an art form. And the process extended to other parts of his life. For the news from the European press had begun to reach us, and to my indignant father, enraged and frustrated, the only way to preserve his sanity was to pretend that certain things were not certain.
Now, for the space of a few pages, my tale transforms into a very personalized collection of press cuttings, something you, Readers of the Jury, will appreciate, I think, in particular. Imagine the gray pages of these newspapers, the cramped columns, the tiny and sometimes incomplete letters . . . What excessive power those dead characters have! How much can they affect a man’s life! The twenty-six letters of the alphabet had traditionally been on my father’s side; now, suddenly, a few seditious and subversive words were agitating the political panorama of the Republic of Journalism.
Round about the same time that Pedro Prestán’s neck snapped, The Economist of London warned the entire world, but in particular the shareholders, that the Canal Company had become a suicidal venture. At the same time as Liberal and rebel forces were capitulating in Los Guamos, and bringing the civil war to an end, a long report in The Economist said that de Lesseps had deliberately duped the French, and finished by saying: “The Canal will never be finished, among other reasons because finishing it was never the intention of the speculators.” France, Ferdinand de Lesseps’s beloved hexagone, began little by little to turn its hexagonal back on the Canal Company. My father received this news in the streets of Colón (in the Company offices, at the port where some newspapers came in) openmouthed and slavering like a tired bull, each article another banderilla. But I don’t believe—I can’t believe—that he was prepared for the final sword thrust, the pitiless stab in the neck that fate had in store. I understood that the world had stopped being my father’s, or that my father had stopped belonging to this world, when in the space of a few days two decisive things happened: in Bogotá they reformed the Constitution; in The Economist they published the famous denunciation of the press. In Bogotá, President Rafael Núñez, a strange turncoat who’d gone from the most radical Liberalism to the staunchest Conservatism, put the name of God, “the source of all authority,” back into the Constitution. In London, The Economist made this absurd accusation: “If the Canal does not advance, and if the French had not noticed the monstrous swindle they have been the victims of before, it is because Monsieur de Lesseps and the Canal Company have invested more money in buying journalists than excavators, spent more on bribes than on engineers.”
Dear readers of the gutter press, dear lovers of cheap scandal, dear spectators fascinated by the misfortunes of others: the denunciation in The Economist was like a bag of shit that someone threw as hard as they could against a fan. The room—let’s think, for example, of the offices on rue Caumartin—was soiled from floor to ceiling. Heads rolled at every newspaper: publishers, editors, reporters, whom the pertinent investigations revealed all to have been on the Canal’s payroll. And the shit, whose volatile properties are very little recognized, crossed the ocean and reached Colón, also splattering the walls of the Correo del Istmo (three reporters on salary) and those of El Panameño (two reporters and two editors), and most of all ending up on the face of one poor innocent man who suffered from Refraction Syndrome. The Star & Herald was the newspaper in charge of translating The Economist’s denunciation and did so with unusual alacrity. My father experienced the event as a betrayal in every sense of the word. And one day, while in Bogotá, Núñez, the metamorphosed President, declared that education in Colombia would either be Catholic or would not be, in Colón Miguel Altamirano feels like he’s been the victim of an accident, a stray bullet from a skirmish in the street, a lightning bolt that splits a tree and drops it on the head of a passerby. It is incomprehensible to him that the Star & Herald could accuse all those journalists who’d written about the Canal (who’d only described what they’d seen) of venality, and in a mere thirty lines go from that accusation to a more direct one of fraud (against those whose only interest had been to collaborate in the cause of Progress). It’s incomprehensible.
FRANCE BEGINS TO EMERGE FROM UNDER DE LESSEPS’S SPELL read the headline in Le Figaro. And that was the general feeling: de Lesseps was a cheap conjurer, a circus magician and, at best, a high-quality hypnotist. But whatever the designation conferred, beneath it—sleeping a long siesta like a hibernating bear—persisted the idea that the terms of construction of the Canal, from cost to duration, by way of engineering, had been a monstrous lie. “It would not have been possible,” said the journalist, “had it not been for the solicitous collaboration of the print media and its unscrupulous writers.” But my father defended himself: “In an endeavor of this magnitude,” he wrote in the Bulletin, “contretemps are part of day-to-day life. The virtue of our workers does not lie in an absence of obstacles, but in the heroism with which they’ve overcome them and will continue to overcome them.” My idealistic father, who at times seemed to recover the vigor he’d had at twenty, wrote: “The Canal is a work of the Human Spirit; it needs humanity’s support in order to reach a successful conclusion.” My comparativist father looked to other great human undertakings—the argument of the Suez Canal now seemed stale—and wrote: “Did the Brooklyn Bridge not cost eight times as much as expected? Did the Thames Tunnel not cost triple its original budget? The Canal’s story is humanity’s story, and humanity cannot dwell on debates about centimes.” My optimistic father, the same man who years before had left the comforts of his native city to put his shoulder to the wheel where it was most needed, kept writing: “Give us time and give us francs.” Around then one of our daily downpours fell on the Isthmus, no worse or any friendlier than those that fell every year; but this time the excavated earth absorbed the rainwater, got swept by the current, and returned to its place, wet and stubborn and impossible like a gigantic clay balcony ripped off the side of a hilltop cottage. In one afternoon of intense Panamanian rain, three months of work were lost. “Give us time,” wrote my idealist-optimist father, “give us francs.”
The last item in my press anthology (in my files, clippings fight for me to quote them, elbow each other out of the way, stick fingers in each other’s eyes) appeared in La Nación, the newspaper of the ruling party. For all practical purposes—known and future ones—that text was a threat. Yes, of course we all knew of the badly disguised hostility the central government harbored against the French in general and de Lesseps in particular; we knew the government, after months and more months of meticulously bleeding the Public Treasury dry, had asked the Canal Company for a loan, and the Company had refused to lend them any money. Telegrams came and went, telegrams so dry the ink absorbed into the paper once they were read, and this was known. It was also known that the fact had generated resentment, and in the Presidential Palace this phrase was heard: “We should have given this to the Gringos, who really are our friends.” But we could not predict the profound satisfaction that seemed to emanate from that page.
CANAL COMPANY ON THE BRINK OF BANKRUPTCY read the headline. The body of the article explained that many Panamanian families had mortgaged properties, sold family jewels, and plundered savings accounts to invest everything in Canal stocks. And the last sentence was this one: “In the case of collapse, it will be obvious who is responsible for the absolute ruin of hundreds of our fellow countrymen.” And then it transcribed
an extensive list of writers and journalists who had “lied, deceived, and defrauded” the public with their reports.
The list was alphabetical.
There was just one name under the letter A.
For Miguel Altamirano, it was the beginning of the end.
Now my memory and my pen, irremediable addicts to the vicissitudes of politics (fascinated by the stone horrors left in the Gorgon’s wake), must address without distractions those terrible years that begin with the strange lines from a national anthem and end with a thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of a war. But an almost supernatural event paralyzed the political evolution of the country, or paralyzes it in my memory. On September 23, 1886, after six and a half months of pregnancy, Eloísa Altamirano was born, a baby girl so small that my two hands could cover her completely, so scrawny that her legs still showed the curve of her bones and the only thing visible of her genitals was the tiny point of her clitoris. Eloísa was born so weak that her mouth was unable to wrestle with her mother’s nipples, and she had to be fed with spoonfuls of twice-boiled milk for the first six weeks. Readers of the Jury, common readers of breeding age, fathers and mothers everywhere: the arrival of Eloísa paralyzed the entire world, or rather annulled it, erased it pitilessly the way color is erased from the world of a blind man. . . . Out there, the Canal Company made desperate attempts to stay afloat, issuing new bonds and even organizing peripatetic lotteries to recapitalize the business, but none of that mattered to me: my task consisted in boiling Eloísa’s spoon, holding her cheeks with two fingers to make sure the milk didn’t spill, massaging her throat with the tip of my index finger to help her swallow; I am indifferent to the knowledge that Conrad was writing his first story, “The Black Mate,” at the time. Shortly before he turned twenty-nine, Conrad passed his captaincy exam in London, and was transformed for us into Captain Joseph K.; but that seems banal to me compared with the moment when Eloísa first put a bumpy nipple in her mouth and, after weeks and weeks of slow learning and gradual strengthening of her jaw, sucked so strongly that she cut it with her gums and made it bleed.
The Secret History of Costaguana Page 15