The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  PART THREE

  The birth of another South American Republic. One more or less, what does it matter?

  Joseph Conrad, Nostromo

  VII

  A Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days, or The Brief Life of a Certain Anatolio Calderón

  The saddest thing about my father’s death, it sometimes occurs to me (I still think of it often), was the fact that he wasn’t survived by anyone prepared to observe a decent mourning. In our house in Christophe Colomb there was no black clothing or any desire to wear any, and Charlotte and I had a tacit agreement to spare Eloísa contact with that death. I don’t think it was a protective impulse but rather the notion that Miguel Altamirano hadn’t been very present in our lives during those last years and it was futile to give the little girl a grandfather after that grandfather had died. So my father began to sink into oblivion as soon as his funeral was over, and I did absolutely nothing to prevent it.

  By stipulation of the Bishop of Panama, my Masonic father was denied an ecclesiastical burial. He was buried in unconsecrated ground, beneath a gravelly headstone, among the Chinese and the atheists, unbaptized Africans, and all sorts of excommunicated people. He was buried, scandalizing those who knew, with a certain hand amputated a long time before from a certain Asian cadaver. The Colón gravedigger, a man who had already seen it all in this life, received the death certificate from the judicial authorities and handed it to me the way a bellhop gives you a message in a hotel. It was written on Canal Company stationery, which seemed anachronistic and somewhat disdainful; but the gravedigger explained that the stationery was already printed and paid for, and he preferred to keep using it than to let hundreds of perfectly usable sheets of paper rot away in an attic. So my father’s particulars appeared above dotted lines, beside the words Noms, Prénoms, Nationalité. Beside Profession ou emploi, someone had written: Journalist . Beside Cause du décès, it read: Natural causes. I thought of going to the authorities to make it a matter of public record that Miguel Altamirano had died of disillusionment, though I was prepared to accept melancholy, but Charlotte persuaded me that I would be wasting my time.

  When nine months of mourning had passed, Charlotte and I realized we hadn’t visited Miguel Altamirano’s grave even once. The first anniversary of his death arrived without our noticing, and we mentioned it with faces contorted by guilty expressions, hands full of remorse fluttering in the air. The second anniversary went by unnoticed by either of us, and it took the arrival of the news of the trials in Paris for my father’s memory to make a brief, momentary appearance in the organized well-being of our household. Let’s see how I can explain this: by way of some sort of cosmic result of my father’s death, the house in Christophe Colomb and its three residents had become detached from the land of Panama and was now located outside the territories of Political Life. In Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles were mercilessly interrogated by the hungry pack of swindled shareholders, thousands of families who had mortgaged their houses and sold their jewels to rescue the Canal in which they’d invested all their money; but that news reached me through a thick wall of glass, or from the virtual reality of a silent film: I see the actors’ faces, I see their lips moving, but I can’t understand what they’re saying, or perhaps I don’t care . . . . The French President, Sadi Carnot, shaken by the financial scandal of the Company and its various economic debacles, had found himself obliged to form a new government, and the ripples of the waves of such an event must have reached the beaches of Colón; but the Altamirano-Madinier household, apolitical and to some apathetic, remained on the margins. My two women and I lived in a parallel reality where uppercase letters did not exist: there were no Great Events, there were no Wars or Nations or Historic Moments. Our most important events, the humble peaks of our life, were very different during that time. Two examples: Eloísa learns to count to twenty in three languages; Charlotte, one night, is able to talk of Julien without collapsing.

  Meanwhile, time passed (as they say in novels) and Political Life was up to its usual tricks in Bogotá. The President Poet, Author of the Glorious Anthem, had stretched out his finger and designated his successor: Don Miguel Antonio Caro, illustrious exemplar of the South American Athens who drafted Homeric translations with one hand and draconian laws with the other. Don Miguel Antonio’s favorite pastimes were opening Greek classics and closing Liberal newspapers . . . and banishing, banishing, banishing. “We are not short of disoriented individualities,” he said in one of his first speeches. “But the vehement perorations of the revolutionary school have no echo in the country.” His own finger pointed dozens of disoriented individualities, hundreds of revolutionaries, down the road to forced exile. But in the apolitical, apathetic, and historical house in Christophe Colomb, Caro’s name was never heard, despite the fact that many he banished were Panamanian Liberals. The unbearable pressure of the censorship measures was not complained of, despite the fact that several newspapers in the Isthmus suffered under them. One of those days was the hundredth anniversary of the famous day when the famous Robespierre made his famous remark: “History is fiction.” But we, who lived in the fiction that there was no history, paid scant attention to that anniversary so important to others. . . . Charlotte and I took it upon ourselves to complete Eloísa’s education, which basically took the form of reading together (and sometimes in costume) from all the fables we could find, from Rafael Pombo to good old La Fontaine. On the floorboards of our house, I was the grasshopper and Eloísa was the ant, and between the two of us we forced Charlotte to put on a bow tie and play the Outgoing Tadpole. At the same time, I made myself, dear Eloísa, this solemn promise: never again would I allow Politics to have free access to my life. Before the onslaught of Politics that had destroyed my father’s life and so often disrupted my country, I would defend as best I could my new family’s integrity. On any of the issues that would define the immediate future of my country, the Arosemenas or the Arangos or the Menocals (or the Jamaican with his blunderbuss, the Gringo with his railroad, or the lost bogotáno from the tailor’s shop) asked me: “And what do you think?” And I would answer with an oft-repeated, mechanical phrase: “I’m not interested in politics.”

  “Will you vote Liberal?”

  “I’m not interested in politics.”

  “Will you vote Conservative?”

  “I’m not interested in politics.”

  “Who are you? Where are you from? Who do you love? Who do you hate?”

  “I’m not interested in politics.”

  Readers of the Jury: how naïve I was. Did I truly think I would manage to avoid the influences of that ubiquitous and omnipotent monster? I wondered how to live in peace, how to perpetuate the happiness I’d been granted, without noticing that in my country these are political questions. Reality soon disabused me, for in those days a group of conspirators met in Bogotá, prepared to capture President Caro, depose him as if he were an old monarch, and set off the Liberal revolution. . . . But they did so with such enthusiasm that they were discovered and detained by the police before they had time to say a word. The government continued its repressive measures; uprisings, in answer to these measures, continued in various parts of the country. I kept Charlotte and Eloísa shut up at home in Christophe Colomb; I stocked up on provisions and drinking water and boarded up all the doors and windows with planks stolen from the ownerless houses. And that’s what I was doing when I got the news that another war had broken out.

  I hasten to say: it was a tiny war, a sort of prototype of a war or an amateur war. Government forces took less than sixty days to subdue the revolutionaries; the echo of the Battle of Bocas del Toro, the only clash of any importance the Isthmus saw, ricocheted off our boarded-up windows. The memory of Pedro Prestán and his broken-necked hanging body was fresh in Panamanian minds; when the echo reached us from Bocas of those Liberal gunshots so timid they turned back in midair, many of us began to think of more executions, of more bodies hanged over the railway line
s.

  But none of that happened.

  However . . . in this story there’s always a however, and here it is. The war barely touched the isthmian coasts, but it touched them; the war stayed with us for just a few hours, but there it was. And most important: that amateur war opened the appetites of Colombians; it was like the carrot before the horse, and from that moment on I knew something more serious was waiting for us round the corner. . . . Feeling in the air the appetite for warmongering, I wondered if staying holed up in my apolitical house would be enough, and immediately answered that it would, that it couldn’t be otherwise. Watching the sleeping Eloísa—whose legs lengthened desperately under my scrutiny, whose bones mysteriously changed coordinates—and watching Charlotte’s naked body when she went out into the yard under the palm tree to shower with that watering can that looked like it had just been brought from l’Orangerie, I thought: Yes, yes, yes, we’re safe, no one can touch us, we have stationed ourselves outside of history and we are invulnerable in our apolitical house. But it is time for a confession: at the same time I thought of our invulnerability, I felt in my stomach an intestinal upset that resembled hunger pangs. The emptiness began to recur at night when we turned out the lamps. It came to me in dreams or when I thought of my father’s death. It took me a week to identify the sensation and admit, with some surprise, that I was afraid.

  Did I speak of my fear to Charlotte? Did I tell Eloísa? Of course not: fear, like phantoms, does more damage when invoked. For years I kept it by my side like a forbidden pet, feeding it in spite of myself (or was it the fear itself, tropical parasite, that fed off me like a pitiless orchid?) but without admitting its presence. In London, Captain Joseph K. also faced small personal and unprecedented terrors. “My uncle died on the 11th of this month,” he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska, “and it seems everything has died in me, as though he carried off my soul with him.” The months that followed were an attempt to recover his lost soul; it was around that time that Conrad met Jessie George, an English typist who had two very obvious qualities for the Polish writer: she was a typist and she was English. A few months later, Conrad proposed to her with this invincible argument: “After all, my dear, I’ll not live long.” Yes, Conrad had seen it, he’d seen the chasm that opened at his feet, he’d felt that strange form of hunger and had run for shelter like a dog in a thunderstorm. That’s what I should have done: run, cleared off, packed up my things and my family, taken them by the hand and evacuated without a backward glance. After writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad had been plunged into new depths of depression and bad health; but I didn’t know it, I didn’t realize other abysses were opening at my feet. On Good Friday in 1899, Conrad wrote: “My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself—and it will devour me.” If I had been able to pick up the prophetic-telepathic waves those words were sending, maybe I would have tried to decipher them, figure out what the monster was (but now I can imagine, and so can the reader) and what to do to keep it from devouring us. But I didn’t know how to interpret the thousand portents that filled the air during those years, I didn’t know how to read the warnings in the text of events, and the warnings that Conrad, my kindred spirit, sent telepathically from so far away, did not reach me.

  “Man is an evil animal,” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham around that time. “His perversity must be organized.” And then: “Crime is a necessary condition of organized existence. Society is essentially criminal—or it wouldn’t exist.” Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, why didn’t your words reach me? Dear Conrad, why didn’t you give me a chance to protect myself from the evil men and their organized perversity? “I am like a man who has lost his gods,” you said at the time. And I didn’t know how, dear Joseph K.: I didn’t know how to see in your words the loss of mine.

  On October 17, 1899, shortly after my daughter Eloísa menstruated for the first time, the department of Santander saw the longest and bloodiest civil war in the history of Colombia.

  The Angel of History’s modus operandi was basically the same as usual. The Angel is a brilliant serial killer: once he has found a good way to get men to kill each other he never gives it up, he clings to it with the faith and obstinacy of a St. Bernard. . . . For the war of 1899, the Angel spent about four months humiliating the Liberals. First he used the Conservative President Don Miguel Antonio Caro. Until his arrival in power, the national army had been composed of some six thousand troops; Caro increased the manpower to the legal maximum, ten thousand men, and in the space of two years quadrupled military expenditure. “The government has a duty to assure the peace,” he said, while he filled his little ant’s cave with nine thousand five hundred and fifty machetes with scabbards, five thousand and ninety Winchester 44 carbines, three thousand eight hundred and forty-one Gras 60 rifles, with well-polished bayonets. He was an ambidextrous and able man: with one hand he translated a bit of Montesquieu—for example: “Peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic”—and with the other signed recruitment decrees. In the streets of Bogotá he mobilized farm workers and hungry peasants in exchange for two reales a day, while their wives sat against the wall and waited for the money to go and buy potatoes for lunch; priests walked around the city promising adolescent boys eternal blessings in exchange for their service to the nation.

  Soon the Angel, already bored by this Conservative President, decided to change him for another; to better affront the Liberals, he put Don Manuel Antonio Sanclemente in charge, an old man of eighty-four, who shortly after being sworn in received an order not open to appeal from his personal doctor to leave the city. “It gets so cold here, this playing-President lark could cost you a hefty price,” he told him. “Go on down to the tropical lowlands and leave this business to the young folk.” And the President obeyed: he moved to Anapoima, a little village with a tropical climate where his octogenarian lungs caused him fewer problems and his octogenarian blood pressure went down. Of course the country was then left without a government, but that little detail wasn’t going to intimidate the Conservatives. . . . In a matter of days, the Minister of State in Bogotá invented a rubber stamp with a facsimile of the President’s signature, and distributed copies to all interested parties, so that Sanclemente’s presence in the capital was no longer necessary: every senator signed his own proposed laws, every minister validated any decrees he felt like validating, for it took only a blow from the magic stamp to bring them to life. And thus, amid the Angel’s resounding guffaws, the new government evolved, to the indignation and dishonor of the Liberals. Then, one October morning, patience went astray in the department of Santander, and a general with many wars behind him fired the first shots of the revolution.

  From the beginning we realized this war was different. In Panama the memory of the war of ’85 was still vivid, and Panamanians were determined to take their destiny into their own hands this time. So Panama, the Isthmus detached from Colombian reality, the Caribbean Switzerland, joined in the hostilities as soon as it could. Several towns of the isthmian interior rose up in arms two days after the first shots; before a week was out, the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo had armed a force of three hundred men and started his own guerrilla war in the mountains of Cocle. When the news reached Colón, I was having lunch in the same mirrored restaurant from which I’d seen my father emerge a quarter of a century earlier. I was with Charlotte and Eloísa, who was gradually turning into an adolescent of dark and perturbing beauty, and the three of us heard a Jamaican waiter say, “Well, what difference is one more war going to make? The world’s coming to an end anyway.”

  It was a commonly held conviction among Panamanians that on December 31 the Final Judgment would begin, that the world wasn’t designed to see the twentieth century. (Every comet, every shooting star seen from Colón, seemed to confirm these prophecies.) And for several months the prophecies gained strength: the last days of the century witnessed battles bloodier than any seen since independence. The coordinates of
the country were flooded with blood, and that blood was all Liberal: in every military clash, the revolution was destroyed by the numerical superiority of the government armies. In Bucaramanga, General Rafael Uribe Uribe, at the head of a mixed army of fed-up peasants and rebellious university students, was received with shots fired from the tower of the church of San Laureano. “Long live the Immaculate Conception!” shouted the snipers after each young Liberal death. In Pasto, Father Ezequiel Moreno fired up the Conservative soldiers: “Be like the Maccabees! Defend the rights of Jesus Christ! Kill the Masonic beasts without mercy!” Scenes were also staged on the Muddy Magdalene: in front of the port of Gamarra, Liberal ships were sunk by government cannons, and four hundred and ninety-nine revolutionary soldiers burned to death amid the flaming wood of the hulls, and those who didn’t burn to death drowned in the river, and those who made it to the shore before they drowned were shot without any sort of trial and their bodies left to rot beside the morning’s catfish. And gathered in the telegraph office, the people of Colón awaited the definitive telegram: PROPHECY TRUE STOP COMETS AND ECLIPSES WERE RIGHT STOP ENTIRE WORLD NEARS END. In the Republic of Colombia, the new century was greeted without any celebrations whatsoever. But the telegram never arrived.

  Others arrived, however. (As you’ll soon realize, my dear readers, a good part of the war of ’99 was waged in Morse code.) DISASTER FOR REVOLUTIONARIES IN TUNJA. REVOLUTIONARY DISASTER IN CÚCUTA. REVOLUTIONARY DISASTER IN TUMACO . . . In the midst of this disastrous telegraphic landscape, no one believed the news of the Liberal victory in Peralonso. No one believed that a Liberal army of three thousand poorly armed men—one thousand Remington rifles, five hundred machetes, and an artillery corps that had made its own cannons out of aqueduct pipes—could have stood up on an equal footing to twelve thousand government soldiers who had allowed themselves the luxury of wearing brand-new uniforms intended for the day the revolution was defeated. GOVERNMENT ROUT IN PERALONSO STOP URIBE DURÁN HERRERA MARCH TRIUMPHANT TOWARD PAMPLONA said the telegram, and nobody believed it could be true. General Benjamín Herrera took a bullet in the thigh and won the battle from a stretcher; he was four years my senior but could already call himself a war hero. That was at Christmas; and on January 1, Colón awoke to find the world still in its place. The French Curse had expired. And I, Eloísa dear, felt that my apolitical house was an invincible fortress.