The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  Anatolio got to the railway shortly before midnight. Between La Chorrera and the first bridge over the waters of Lake Gatún he’d found a little hamlet of ten or twelve huts whose straw roofs touched the ground, and with his loaded rifle pointed in the face of a woman, managed to get her husband (supposing it was her husband) to hand over a cotton shirt that seemed to be his single belonging, and put it on instead of the black jacket with nine buttons that was his soldier’s uniform. Dressed like that, he waited for the morning train before the bridge, hidden behind the carcass of an abandoned dredger; when he saw the locomotive pass, he leapt aboard the last freight car, and the first thing he did was throw his felt hat into the water so it wouldn’t give him away. Lying on his back on top of three hundred bunches of bananas, Anatolio watched the sky of the Isthmus pass by above his head, the invading branches of the guácimo trees, the cocobolos filled with colorful birds; and the warm breeze of a day without rain messed his straight hair and slipped inside his shirt, the friendly clatter of the train rocked and didn’t threaten him; and during those three hours of the journey he felt so calm, so unpredictably relaxed, that he fell asleep and forgot for an instant the stabbings of fear. The grinding of the carriages as the train switched gears woke him. They were stopping, he thought, they were arriving somewhere. He peeked over the side of the car and the luminous image of the bay, the reflection of the afternoon sun on the water of the Caribbean, hurt his eyes but also made him feel briefly happy. Anatolio grabbed his bundle, leaned with difficulty on the squashed bananas, and jumped. When he landed, his body rolled and Anatolio hurt himself with the horseshoe, tore the shirt on invisible pebbles, and pierced the thumb of his left hand on a thorn, but none of that mattered to him, because he’d finally arrived at his destination. Now it was just a question of finding somewhere to spend the night, and in the morning, as a legitimate passenger or as a stowaway, his new life would have begun.

  He was at the foot of Mount Hope. Although he might not have known, he was at that moment very close to the four thousand graves of the railway workers who’d died in the first months of the construction, half a century before. Anatolio thought of waiting until dark before approaching the city, but the six o’clock mosquitoes forced him to get ahead of himself. As the sun set he’d already begun to advance toward the north, between the remains of the French Canal, on his right, and Limón Bay, on his left. These were genuine wastelands, and Anatolio felt sure he wouldn’t be seen as long as he stayed there, because no government soldier would venture into those quagmires—the rain had loosened the earth from the former trench—unless he’d received a direct order. After the distance he’d traveled, the leather of his boots had started to smell, and the swamps weren’t helping matters. Anatolio began to feel a pressing need to find a dry place to take them off and clean the insides with a cloth, because he could feel the skin between his toes riddled with fungus. His shirt smelled of bananas and moss, of its original owner’s sweat, and of the wet ground he’d rolled down. And his gray-and-black-checked trousers, those trousers that had earned him the mockery of his comrades in arms, began to reek unbearably, as if it had been a furious wildcat and not a poor student who pissed in them. Anatolio had become distracted by the impertinent festival of his own smells when he suddenly found himself surrounded by darkened houses.

  His first instinct was to jump under the closest veranda and hide behind the posts, but he soon realized that the place—it looked like a neighborhood of Colón, but it wasn’t: Colón was farther north—was abandoned. He stood up straight again. Anatolio began to walk casually down the single muddy street, chose a dark house at random, and went inside. He felt his way along the walls, went all around, but he didn’t find any food, didn’t find any drinking water, didn’t find any blankets or clothes at all; instead he did hear something moving across the floorboards that could have been a rat, and his head filled with other possible images, snakes or scorpions that would attack him while he slept. Then, as he went back outside again, he saw light shining out of a window, ten or so houses along. He looked up: yes, there were the poles and cables; the glow was coming from electric lights, which incredibly were still working. Anatolio felt apprehensive but also relieved. One house, at least, was inhabited. His hand closed over his rifle. He climbed the porch steps (saw a hammock hanging empty), found the door open, and pushed the screen door. He saw the luxurious furniture, shelves with books and some newspapers and a cupboard with glass doors full of clean crystal, and then he heard a woman’s voice, two voices talking amid the sounds of fine china. He followed the voices to the kitchen and discovered that he’d been mistaken: it wasn’t two women, it was just one (white but dressed in a black woman’s clothes) who was singing in an incomprehensible language. Seeing him come in, the woman dropped the saucepan, which crashed to the floor spitting out potatoes, vegetables, and pieces of stewed fish that splashed Anatolio. At first she didn’t move; she stayed still, her black eyes fixed on him, without saying a word. Anatolio explained that he didn’t want to hurt her, but that he was going to spend the night in her house and that he needed clothes, food, and all the money she had. She nodded, as if she perfectly understood those needs, and it seemed that everything was going to be fine, until Anatolio took his eye off her for a second, and when he looked back, he saw her gathering up her dress in both hands, with a movement that revealed her pale calves, and take off running for the door. Anatolio managed to feel pity, a fleeting pity, but he thought inevitably of the firing squad that awaited him if he was captured. He raised his rifle and fired, and the bullet pierced the woman near her liver and ended up lodged in the living room cabinet.

  Anatolio didn’t know where he was and could not have known that the abandoned houses (all except one) of Christophe Colomb were barely a hundred paces from the port, that more than five military vessels of four different nationalities were anchored in the bay, among them the Próspero Pinzón, and that—as is at the very least logical—thirty government sentries of the Mompox and Granaderos battalions were patrolling the wharf. Not a single one of them did not hear the shot. Following the orders of Sergeant Major Gilberto Durán Salazar, they divided into two groups to enter Christophe Colomb and encircle the enemy, and it didn’t take them long to find the only light on the street and follow it like a squadron of moths. They had not finished surrounding the house when a window opened and an armed silhouette leaned out. Then some of them swept the side wall of the house with bullets and others entered knocking down the screen door and also opening fire indiscriminately, wounding the enemy in both legs but taking him alive. They dragged him to the middle of the street, there where years before all the belongings of an engineer who’d died of yellow fever had been burned in a bonfire, sat him in a chair taken from the same house, on a velvet cushion, and tied his hands behind the wicker back. They formed a firing squad, the Sergeant Major gave the order, and the squad fired. Then one of the soldiers discovered another body in the house, that of the woman, and took her outside to leave her there, so everyone would know the fate of those who gave shelter to Liberals, not to mention cowards. And there, leaning against the chair like a rag doll, her clothes dirty with the executed deserter’s blood, Eloísa and I found her, having spent the afternoon in Colón watching the performance of a Haitian fire-eater, a black man with bulging eyes who claimed to be invulnerable to burns by the grace of the spirits.

  VIII

  The Lesson of Great Events

  Pain has no history, or rather, pain is outside history, because it situates its victim in a parallel reality where nothing else exists. Pain doesn’t have political commitments; pain is not Conservative, it’s not Liberal; it’s not Catholic or Federalist or Centralist or Masonic. Pain wipes everything out. Nothing else exists, I’ve said; and it’s true that for me—I can insist without grandiloquence—nothing else existed in those days: the image of that rag doll, found in front of my invaded house, that empty doll, broken on the inside, began to haunt me at night. I can’t call it
Charlotte, I can’t, because that wasn’t Charlotte, because Charlotte had left that bullet-ridden body. I began to be frightened: concrete fear (of the armies that would return one day to finish the job and murder my daughter) and abstract, intangible fear as well (of the dark, of noises that might be a rat or a rotten mango falling off a tree in the next street, but that gave rise in my terrorized imagination to the silhouettes of uniformed men, of hands pointing rifles). I couldn’t sleep. I spent the nocturnal hours listening to Eloísa cry in the next room, and left her to her weeping, to her own bewildered pain; I refused to console her. Nothing would have been easier than to take the ten steps to her room and her bed, to hug her and weep with her, but I didn’t do it. We were alone: we suddenly felt irrevocably alone. And nothing would have been easier for me than to ease my solitude at the same time as consoling my daughter. But I didn’t do it; I left her alone, so she would find her own way to comprehend what the violent death of a loved one means, that black pit that opens in the world. How can I justify myself? I was afraid Eloísa would ask for explanations I wouldn’t be able to supply. “We’re at war,” I would have said, aware of the poverty, the futility of that answer, “and these things happen in wars.” Of course, that explanation didn’t convince me either. But something inside me went on believing that refusing to offer those slight comforts to my daughter, refusing to search out her company (and perhaps her involuntary protection), would eventually expose the cruel joke of which we were the object, and one of these days the heartless joker would appear at the door and reveal Charlotte’s actual whereabouts, regretting that his cruel joke hadn’t had the desired effect.

  It was during those days that I began to spend the nights walking to the port, sometimes getting as far as the Railroad Company, and later the Freight House, that Company warehouse from which I’d have been evicted at gunpoint had I been discovered. Colón, in those wartime nights, was a cold, blue city; walking around it alone, defying tacit or declared curfews depending on the day and the vicissitudes of the war, a civilian (though a lost and desperate civilian) running countless risks. I was too much of a coward to take my tired head’s suicidal pursuits seriously, but I can confess that several times I went so far as to imagine a scenario in which I’d fling myself bare-chested with knife in hand at the men of the Mompox battalion, shouting “Long Live the Liberal Party!” and force them to receive my onslaught with bullets or bayonets. I never did, of course, never did anything of the sort. My act of greatest daring, during those dazed nights, was to visit the side streets of Colón the Widow of the Canal had visited, according to legend, and once I was sure I saw Charlotte turn a corner in the company of an African man in a hat, and ran after the specter until I realized I’d lost a shoe between the cobblestones and my scraped heel was bleeding.

  I changed. Pain alters us; it’s the agent of slight but terrifying disruptions. After several weeks during which I grew gradually familiar with the night, I allowed myself the private exoticism of visiting the Europeans’ brothels, and more than once made use of their women (relics in their forties from de Lesseps’s times, in some cases heirs of these relics, girls with surnames like Michaud or Henrion who didn’t know who Napoleon Bonaparte was or why the French Canal had failed). Later, back in that house where Charlotte survived in a thousand phantasmagorical ways, in her clothes that Eloísa had begun to wear or in the destruction still visible if you looked closely at the glass door of the cabinet, something I can only call shame would descend upon me. At those moments I felt incapable of looking Eloísa in the face, and she, out of some kind of last respect she held for me, was incapable of formulating a single one of the questions that were (clearly) crowding the tip of her tongue. I sensed that my actions were destroying the affection between us, that my behavior was tearing down the bridges that united us. But I accepted it. Life had accustomed me to the idea of collateral victims. Charlotte was one. My relationship with my daughter, one more. We are at war, I thought. In war these things happen.

  I attributed to the war, then, the obvious fracture of the bridges, the gap that opened between my daughter and myself from that time on like some sort of biblical sea. The school suspended services with shameless frequency, and Eloísa, who learned to battle with the absence of her mother with much more talent than I did, began to have free time and to enjoy it in ways that didn’t involve me. She didn’t make me part of her life (I don’t blame her: my sadness, the bottomless pit of my grief, was a rebuff to any invitation), or rather, her life evolved in directions I didn’t understand. And in rare moments of lucidity—nights of mourning and fear can be rich in revelations—I managed to glimpse that something more concrete than Charlotte’s death had come into play. But I didn’t manage to give it a name. Busy as I was with the memory of my shredded happiness, with attempts to accept the reality of the devastation, to process the information of my shattered life and dominate the anguish of nocturnal solitude, I didn’t manage to name it. . . . And I realized this: in the long Colón nights, on my long walks, sweaty and smelly, through streets that just a little while ago I’d strolled well dressed and fragrant, names of things were disappearing. Insomnia gradually takes away the memory of things: I forgot to wash, forgot to clean my teeth, and I remembered (that is, remembered that I’d forgotten) when it was already too late; the Chinese butcher, the Gringo soldier at the station, the man who sold sugar cane on Sundays from his beach stall, raised their hands instinctively to their faces at the blast of the breath of my greeting, or took a step back as if pushed when I opened my mouth . . . . I lived outside of conscience; I also lived outside the tangible world around me: I experienced my being a widower like exile, but without ever figuring out where I’d been expelled from, where I was forbidden to return. On better days I could glimpse a slight hope: just as I’d forgotten the most basic rules of urban life, maybe the despair itself was forgettable.

  And that was how the Political Gorgon finally invaded the Altamirano-Madinier household. That was how History, incarnate in the particular destiny of a cowardly and confused soldier, dashed my pretensions to neutrality, my attempts at separation, my eagerness for studied apathy. The lesson I learned from Great Events was clear and easy: you won’t escape, they told me, it’s impossible for you to escape. It was a real show of strength, as well, for at the same time the Gorgon ruined my illusory plans for earthly happiness, it also ruined those of my country. Now I could go into detail about those days of disorientation and despair, about the anguish painted on Eloísa’s face when she looked straight at me, about my lack of interest in remedying that anguish. Were we talking about shipwrecks? That was when mine happened. But now, after the painful lessons the Gorgon and the Angel have taught me, how can I attend to those banalities? How can I talk about my pain and that of my daughter, of the nights of apolitical tears, of the outside-of-history solitude that overtook me, heavy as a wet poncho? The death of Charlotte—my lifesaver, my last resort—at the hands of the War of a Thousand Days was a memorandum in which someone reminded me of the hierarchies that must be respected. Someone, Angel or Gorgon, reminded me that beside the Republic of Colombia and its vicissitudes my minuscule life was a grain of salt, a frivolous and unimportant matter, the tale the idiot tells, the sound, the fury, and so on. Someone called me to order to make me realize that in Colombia more important things than my thwarted happiness were happening.

  An essentially Colombian paradox: after a brilliant campaign by which he managed to recapture almost the entire Isthmus of Panama, the revolutionary General Benjamín Herrera found himself suddenly forced to sign a peace treaty in which his army and his party came out the losers from every angle. What had happened? I thought of the words my father had said to me on a certain day in 1885: when Colón was destroyed by fire and war and yet the Canal—that unfinished Canal—was spared, I told him we’d had good luck and he said no, we’d had Gringo ships. Well then, the War of a Thousand Days was special for several reasons (for its hundred thousand dead, for having left the Nati
onal Treasury in complete ruin, for having humiliated half the population of Colombia and turned the other half into voluntary humiliators); but it was also special for less conspicuous and, another paradox, more serious circumstances. No more beating about the bush: the War of a Thousand Days, which actually lasted one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight, was special for having been resolved from start to finish in the bowels of foreign ships. Generals Foliaco and De la Rosa did not negotiate aboard the Próspero Pinzón but on the HMS Tribune; Generals Foliaco and Albán did not negotiate on the Cartagena, which arrived around the same time in Colón, but on the USS Marietta. After the surrender of my Schizophrenic City, where did they arrange the prisoner swaps? Not on the Almirante Padilla, but on the Philadelphia. And last but not least: after the various peace proposals made by Benjamín Herrera and his isthmian revolutionaries, after the radical refusal of those proposals on the part of the stubborn Conservative government, where was the negotiation table that led to the Treaty? Where did they sign the little piece of paper that put an end to the one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of relentless slaughter? It was not on board the Liberal Cauca, or on the Conservative Boyaca: it was on the USS Wisconsin, which was neither one nor the other but was much more. . . . We Colombians were taken by the hand of our big brothers, the Grown-up Countries. Our fate was played for on the gaming tables of other houses. In those poker games that resolved the most important issues of our history, we Colombians, Readers of the Jury, just sat there like statues.