The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  MARCH. On the seventh, Miguel Altamirano arrives very early at the train station. His intention is to go to Panama City, and at eight o’clock on the dot he has boarded the train as he had done so often over the last thirty years, settling down in one of the coaches at the back without telling anyone and opening a book for the journey. Out the window he sees a black man sitting on a barrel; he sees a mule cart cross the railway lines and stop over the rails long enough for the mules to shit. Miguel Altamirano distracts himself watching, on one side of the train, the sea and the distant ships in Limón Bay and, on the other side, the crowds stamping their heels on the paving stones waiting for the train to start moving. But then Miguel Altamirano receives the first slap of his new position in Panama: the ticket collector comes through asking to see all tickets, and when he arrives at Altamirano’s place, instead of tipping his hat and greeting him as usual, holds out a rude hand. Altamirano looks at the fingertips grimy from handling the paper of the tickets and says, “I don’t have one.” He doesn’t say that for thirty years he has traveled courtesy of the Railroad Company. He just says, “I don’t have one.” The ticket collector shouts at him to get off; Miguel Altamirano, gathering the last grams of dignity he has left, stands up and says he’ll get off when he feels like it. A moment or two later the ticket collector reappears, this time accompanied by two cargadores, and between the three of them they lift the passenger up and shove him off the train. Altamirano falls on the paving stones. He hears murmurs that turn into laughter. He looks at his trousers: they are torn at the knee, and through the rip he sees the skin scraped by the blow and a stain of blood and dirt that will soon be infected.

  APRIL. After two months in Poland, two months devoted to visiting for the first time in fifteen years the place where he was born and the places he lived until his voluntary exile, Captain Joseph K. returns to Brussels. He knows that his aunt Marguerite has recommended him to the authorities of the Société du Haut-Congo. But when he arrives he is surprised by a stroke of luck: a Danish captain named Freiesleben, in charge of one of the company’s steamboats, has died suddenly and his position is available. Captain Joseph K. is not intimidated by the idea of replacing a dead man. On paper, the trip to Africa will last three years. Conrad hurries back to London, arranges his things, returns to Brussels, takes the train to the port of Bordeaux, and embarks on the Ville de Maceio en route to Boma, port of entry to the Belgian Congo. From the first port of call in Tenerife, he writes: “The screw turns and carries me off to the unknown. Happily, there is another me who prowls through Europe, who is with you at this moment. Who will get to Poland ahead of you. Another me who moves about with great ease; who can even be in two places at once.” From Freetown, he writes: “Fever and dysentery! There are others who are sent home in a hurry at the end of a year, so that they shouldn’t die in the Congo. God forbid!” From the port of call in Libreville, he writes: “For a long time I no longer have been interested in the goal to which my road leads. I go along it with my head lowered, cursing the stones. Now I am interested in another traveler: this makes me forget the petty miseries of my own path. While awaiting the inevitable fever, I am very well.”

  MAY. Miguel Altamirano travels to Panama City to visit the head offices of the Star & Herald. He is prepared to humiliate himself if necessary in order to be allowed to return to the pages of the newspaper. But the necessity does not arise: a novice editor, a baby-faced young man who turns out to be a son of the Herrera family, receives him and asks him if he’d like to review a book that is causing a sensation in Paris. Miguel Altamirano accepts, obviously, his curiosity piqued: the Star & Herald does not devote much space to reviews of foreign books. The young man hands him a five hundred and seventy-two–page volume, recently published by Dentu: La dernière bataille, it is called, and bears this subtitle: New Psychological and Social Study. The author is a certain Edouard Drumont, founder and promoter of the National Anti-Semite League of France and author of La France juive and also of La France juive devant l’opinion. Miguel Altamirano has never heard of him; on the train back to Colón, he begins to read the book, a leather-bound volume with a red spine and the name of a bookshop on the frontispiece. Before the train has gone as far as Miraflores, his hands have already begun to tremble, and the other passengers in the carriage see him lift his eyes off the page and look out the window with an incredulous expression (or is it indignant, or perhaps irate?). He understands why they’ve assigned him this book. La dernière bataille is a history of the construction of the Inter-oceanic Canal, where history should be understood as diatribe. De Lesseps is called a “delinquent” and “poor devil,” “great fraud” and “compulsive liar.” “The Isthmus has become a vast cemetery,” it says, and also: “The blame for the disaster belongs to the Jewish financiers, plague of our society, and to their monstrous accomplices: corrupt journalists the world over.” Miguel Altamirano senses that he is being derided; he feels like the target where the arrow has landed, and sees in that commission a conspiracy on a grand scale to ridicule him, at best, or deliberately drive him mad, at worst. (All of a sudden, all the fingers in the train lift up and point at him.) When they get to Culebra, where the train stops briefly, he throws the book out the window, he sees it fly through the foliage of the trees—imagines or perhaps hears the small crashing of the leaves—and land with a liquid sound in a small mud puddle. Then he looks up almost by accident, and his gaze, heavy with exhaustion, falls onto the abandoned French machines, the dredgers and excavators. It is as if he were seeing them for the first time.

  JUNE. Captain Joseph K. disembarks, finally, in Boma. Almost immediately he sets off for Kinshasa, in the interior, to assume the captaincy of the steamboat he’s been assigned: the Florida. In Matadi he meets Roger Casement, an Irishman in the service of the Société du Haut-Congo, in charge of recruiting labor, but whose most important work so far has been that of exploring the Congolese landscape with an eye to the construction of a railway between Matadi and Stanley Pool. The railway will be a real advance of progress: it will facilitate free trade and improve the living conditions of Africans. Conrad prepares to cover the same ground that the future railway will cross. He writes to his aunt Marguerite: “I leave tomorrow, on foot. Not an ass here but your very humble servant.” Prosper Harou, the Société’s guide, approaches him and says: “Pack for several days, Monsieur Conrad. We’re going on an expedition.” Captain Joseph K. obeys, and two days later is entering the Congo jungle in a caravan of thirty-one men, and for thirty-six days walks behind them in the inclement humidity of the African heat, and watches the black, half-naked men open a trail with their machetes while this white man in a loose shirt notes in his travel diary—and in English—everything he sees: the depth of the Congo River when they try to wade across it but also the trill of the birds, one resembling a flute, another the baying of a hound; the general gray-yellowish tone the dry grass gives to the landscape but also the great height of the oil palms. The journey is unbearable: the murderous heat, the humidity, the clouds of flies and mosquitoes the size of grapes, the lack of drinking water, and the constant threat of tropical diseases make that penetration of the jungle into a true descent into hell. Thus concludes the month of June for Captain Joseph K. On July 3 he writes: “Saw at a camp place the dead body of a Bakongo.” On July 4 he writes: “Saw another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of meditative repose.” On July 24 he writes: “A white man died here.” On July 29 he writes: “On the road today passed a skeleton tied to a post. Also white man’s grave.”

  JULY. The most scandalous details of the financial disaster of the Canal have begun to come to light. My father discovers through the print media that de Lesseps, his old idol, his model for life, has retired from Parisian life. The police have searched the rue Caumartin offices and soon will do the same to the private houses of those involved: no one doubts that the search will reveal frauds and lies and embezzlements at the highest level of French politics. On the fourteenth, the Republic�
�s national holiday, documents and declarations are published in Paris and reproduced in New York and in Bogotá, in Washington and in Panama City. Among other revelations, the following emerge. More than thirty deputies of the French Parliament received bribes to take decisions in favor of the Canal. More than three million francs were invested in “buying good press.” Under the heading “Publicity” the Canal Company accepted a transfer of ten million francs divided into hundreds of checks made out to the bearer. When the destination of those checks was investigated, it was found that several of them had ended up in the editorial departments of Panamanian newspapers. On the twenty-first, at an informal lunch given by the representatives of the central government (a governor, a colonel, and a bishop), my father denies ever having seen one of those checks. An uncomfortable silence descends over the table.

  AUGUST. Captain Joseph K. arrives in Kinshasa to take command of the Florida. But the Florida has sunk; and Conrad then embarks on the Roi des Belges, in the capacity of supernumerary, for a reconnaissance journey up the Congo River. During the trip what hasn’t happened yet happens: he gets ill. He suffers three attacks of fever, two of dysentery and one of nostalgia. Then he discovers that his mission, when he arrives in Stanley Falls, will be to relieve the agent of the interior station, who is gravely ill with dysentery. His name is Georges Antoine Klein; he is twenty-seven years old; he is a conventional young man, full of hopes and plans for the future, and eager to return to Europe. Conrad and Klein speak very little at the interior station. On September 6, with Klein on board and very ill, the Roi des Belges begins its journey downriver. The Captain of the boat has also fallen ill, and for the first part of the trip Captain Joseph K. takes charge. Then, under his captaincy and to some degree under his responsibility, Klein dies. His death will accompany Joseph K. for the rest of his life.

  SEPTEMBER. In the Christophe Colomb house, which has undergone an extraordinary rebirth since I began living in it, we are celebrating Eloísa’s birthday. Miguel Altamirano has been to Chez Michel, the pastry shop of one of the few bold Frenchmen who decided to stay in the ghost town of Colón, and has brought his granddaughter a cake in the shape of the number 4, with three layers of cream inside and a shell of caramelized sugar on the outside. After dinner, we all go out on the veranda. A few days earlier Charlotte had hung over the railings a jaguar hide with white edges, yellow flanks, brown spots, and a brown stripe along its backbone. My father is leaning on the railing and begins to stroke the spotted pelt, his gaze lost in the tops of the palm trees. Charlotte is behind him, showing a servant from Cartagena how to serve coffee in a set of four cups from Limoges. I have stretched out in the hammock. Eloísa, in my arms, has fallen asleep, and her half-open mouth emits a tiny clean-scented little snoring that I enjoy as it reaches my face. And at that moment, without turning around and without stopping his stroking of the little jaguar, my father speaks, and what he says could be directed at me but also at Charlotte: “I killed him, you know. I killed the engineer.” Charlotte bursts into tears.

  OCTOBER. Back in Kinshasa, Conrad writes: “Everything here is repellent to me. Men and things, but above all men.” One of those men is Camille Delcommune, manager of the station and Conrad’s immediate superior. The aversion Delcommune feels for this English sailor—for Conrad, by this time, is already an English sailor—is comparable only to that which the sailor feels toward Delcommune. In those conditions, Captain Joseph K. realizes that his future in Africa is rather dim and not too promising. There are no possibilities of promotion, much less of an increase in salary. However, he has signed a contract for three years, and that reality is inescapable. What to do? Conrad, ashamed but defeated, decides to provoke a quarrel in order to resign and return to London. But he does not have to resort to this extreme: a crisis of dysentery—quite real, besides—presents a better pretext.

  NOVEMBER. On the twentieth my father asks me to come with him to see the machines. “But you’ve seen them so many times,” I tell him, and he replies, “No, I don’t want to see the ones here. Let’s go to Culebra, where the big ones are.” I don’t dare tell him the railway fare has become, overnight, too expensive for him to afford, now that he’s unemployed, and always has been for me. What he says, however, is true: at the moment when they stopped for good, the Canal works were divided into five sectors, from Colón to Panama City. The Culebra sector, the one that caused the engineers the most problems, consists of two kilometers of unpredictable and disobedient geography, and that was where the best dredgers were assembled as well as the most powerful excavators the Canal Company had acquired during the final years. And that’s what my father wanted to see on that November 20: the abandoned remains of the biggest failure in human history. At that moment I didn’t yet know that my father had attempted that nostalgic pilgrimage before. In spite of the profound sadness I notice in his voice, in spite of the tiredness that weighs down every movement of his body, I think the matter of going to see rusty hulks is just a disappointed man’s whim, and I brush him off the way you might shoo away a fly. “You go on your own,” I tell him. “And then you can tell me how you got on.”

  DECEMBER. On the fourth, after a grueling six-week journey—the long duration the result of his terrible state of health—Conrad has returned to Matadi. He had to be carried in a hammock on the shoulders of younger, stronger men, and the humiliation adds to the exhaustion. On his way back to London, Captain Joseph K. stops again in Brussels. But Brussels has changed in those months: it is no longer the white-walled, lethally boring city Conrad had known before; now it is the center of a slave-holding, exploitative, murderous empire; now it is a place that turns men into ghosts, a real industry of degradation. Conrad has seen the degradation of the colony, and in his head those Congolese images begin to mix, as if he were drunk, with the death of his mother in exile, the failure of his insurrectionist father, the imperialist despotism of Tsarist Russia, the betrayal of Poland by the European powers. Just as the Europeans had divided up the Polish cake, thinks Conrad, now they will divide up the Congo, and then no doubt the rest of the world. As if replying to those images that torment him, those fears that he has undoubtedly inherited from his father, his health deteriorates: Captain Joseph K. goes from rheumatism in his left arm to cardiac palpitations, from Congolese dysentery to Panamanian malaria. His uncle Tadeusz writes: “I’ve found your writing so changed—which I attribute to the fever and dysentery—that since then there is no happiness in my thoughts.”

  The day of his pilgrimage to Culebra, several American passengers saw my father take the eight o’clock train on his own, and heard him making comments to nobody each time one of the work stations passed by the windows, from Gatún to Emperador. As they passed near Matachín they heard him explain that the name of the place came from the Chinamen who’d died and were buried around there, and as they passed Bohío Soldado they heard him translate both words into English—Hut, Soldier—without offering the slightest explanation. At midday, while the train filled with the smells of the meals the passengers had improvised for the journey, they saw him alight in Culebra, slip down the railway embankment, and disappear into the jungle. A Cuna Indian who was collecting plants with his son caught sight of him then, and his way of walking struck him as so odd—the careless way he kicked a piece of rotten wood that could have been the refuge of a poisonous snake, the worn-out way he bent down to look for a stone to throw at the monkeys—that he followed him to where the Frenchmen’s machines were. Miguel Altamirano arrived at the excavation, the gigantic gray and muddy trench that looked like a meteor’s point of impact, and contemplated it from the edge the way a general studies a battlefield. Then, as if someone had defied the Isthmus’s rules, it began to rain.

  Instead of sheltering under the closest tree, whose impenetrable foliage would have provided a perfect umbrella, Miguel Altamirano began to walk in the rain, along the edge of the trench, until arriving at an enormous creature covered in creepers that towered ten meters above the ground. It was a
steam-powered excavator. The downpours of the last eighteen months had covered it in a patina of rust, as thick and hard as coral, but that was only visible after pulling away the three handbreadths of tropical vegetation that covered it all over, the vines and leaves with which the jungle was pulling it down into the earth. Miguel Altamirano approached the shovel and caressed it as if it were an old elephant’s trunk. He walked around the machine slowly, stopping beside each leg, pulling the leaves away with his hands and touching each of the buckets that his arms could reach: the old elephant was ill, and my father circled it in search of symptoms. He soon found the elephant’s belly, a little shed that served as the monstrous tank of the excavator’s engine room, and there he took shelter. He did not come out again. When, after a fruitless two-day search of Colón and the surrounding area, I managed to discover his whereabouts, I found him lying on the damp floor of the excavator. Fate decreed it would rain that day as well, so I lay down beside my dead father and closed my eyes to feel what he would have felt during his last moments: the murderous clatter of the rain on the hollow metal of the buckets, the smell of the hibiscus, the shirt soaked through with the cold of the wet rust, and the exhaustion, the pitiless exhaustion.