The Secret History of Costaguana

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  November 12,1902. The postcard that commemorates that disastrous date is well known (everyone’s inherited the image from their victorious or defeated fathers or grandfathers; there’s no one in Colombia who doesn’t have a copy of that memento mori on a nationwide scale). Mine was printed by Maduro & Sons, Panama, and measures fourteen by ten centimeters. Along the bottom edge in red letters appear the names of the participants. From left to right and from Conservative to Liberal: General Victor Salazar. General Alfredo Vásquez Cobo. Doctor Eusebio Morales. General Lucas Caballero. General Benjamín Herrera. But then we remember (those who have the postcard) that there is among these figures—the Conservatives with mustaches, the others bearded—a notable absence, a kind of emptiness that opens in the middle of the image. For Admiral Silas Casey, the great architect of the Wisconsin Treaty, the one in charge of talking to those on the right and convincing them to meet with those on the left, is not in it. He’s not there. Nevertheless, his northerly presence is felt in every corner of the yellowing image, in each of its silver cells. The dark and vaguely baroque tablecloth is the property of Silas Casey; on the table are piled, as if this has nothing to do with them, the untidy papers of the Treaty that will change forever the history of Colombia, will change forever what it means to be Colombian, and it is Silas Casey who put them there just a few minutes before. And now I’ll concentrate on the rest of the scene. General Herrera appears to be separated from the table, as if the bigger boys won’t let him play; General Caballero, in the name of the revolutionaries, is signing. And I say, Bring me a movie camera! Because I need to fly over the scene, enter the Wisconsin through the skylight, and float above the table with its baroque cloth, and read that preamble, in which the signatories establish, with perfectly straight faces, that they have gathered there to “put an end to the bloodshed,” to “procure the reestablishment of peace in the Republic,” and above all so that the Republic of Colombia “can bring to a satisfactory conclusion the negotiations pending on the Panama Canal.”

  Four words, Readers of the Jury, just four words: Negotiations. Pending . Panama. Canal. On paper, of course, they seem inoffensive; but there is a newly made bomb in them, a charge of nitroglycerine from which there is now no possible escape. In 1902, while José Altamirano, a little man without historical importance, fought tooth and nail for the recuperation of his tiny life, while he, an insignificant father of a daughter, forced himself to ford the river of shit his life as a widower (and his motherless daughter’s) had become, the negotiations that had been going on between the United States and the Republic of Colombia had already claimed the health of two ambassadors in Washington; my country began by putting Carlos Martínez Silva in charge, and months later Martínez Silva was retired from the post, without having advanced matters in the slightest, and died of physical exhaustion, pale, haggard, and gray, so tired he even gave up talking in his final days. His replacement was José Vicente Concha, former Minister of War, an unsubtle and rather brutal man who faced up to the negotiations with an iron will and was steelily defeated in a few months; subject to great nervous excitement, Concha suffered a violent crisis before leaving for Bogotá, and the port authorities in New York were forced to restrain him in a straitjacket while he shouted at the top of his lungs words that no one understood: Soberanía, Imperio, Colonialismo. Concha died a short time later, in his bed in Bogotá, ill and hallucinating, occasionally cursing in languages he didn’t know (and the lack of knowledge of which had been one of his main problems as a negotiator of international treaties). His wife said he spent his final days talking of the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty of 1846, or arguing over articles and conditions with an invisible interlocutor who was sometimes President Roosevelt and at others an anonymous man who in his delirium he called Boss and whose identity has never been, nor will it ever be, established.

  “Sovereignty,” shouted poor Concha without being understood by anyone. “Empire. Colonialism.”

  On November 23, the ink not yet dry on the Wisconsin Treaty, came the turn of Tomás Herrán, chargé d’affaires of the Colombian legation in Washington and destined to go down in history as the Last of the Negotiators. And while there, in Caribbean America, Eloísa and I began, after enormous efforts, to find our way through the labyrinths of sorrow, in icy North America, Don Tomás Herrán, a sad-looking, reserved sixty-year-old who spoke four languages and was equally indecisive in all of them, was trying to do the same through the labyrinths of the Treaty. That’s how Christmas went by in Colón: for Panamanians, the signing of the Treaty was a matter of life or death, and during the last days of 1902, when they hadn’t yet replaced the telegraph wires destroyed by the war, it didn’t seem unusual for me to leave the house at six in the morning (I could rarely sleep) and find myself in the port waiting with the crowds for the first steamers and their cargo of U.S. papers (the French were no longer news). That was an especially dry and hot season, and before the first roosters crowed, the heat had already driven me out of bed. My daybreak ritual consisted of a cup of coffee, a spoonful of quinine, and a cold shower, which I depended on to exorcise the night’s demons, the recurring image of Charlotte sitting dead beside an executed deserter, the memory of the appalling silence Eloísa kept at the sight of her mother’s body, the memory of the pressure of her hand on mine, the memory of her crying and shaking, the memory of . . . Dear reader, my private exorcisms were not always successful. Then I’d reach for the extreme remedy of whiskey, and more than a few times managed to get the stabbings of fear to stop with the first seethings of alcohol in the pit of my stomach.

  In January celebrations burst out in the streets of Colón. After doubts and reticence, after bloodless tugs and slackenings, the U.S. Secretary of State John Hay issued an ultimatum that seemed to come from the mouth of President Roosevelt: “If this isn’t signed now,” he said, “we’ll build the Canal in Nicaragua.” A hasty order came from Bogotá. Fortyeight hours later, in the middle of the night, Tomás Herrán wrapped himself up in a black woolen cloak and, defying the biting winter wind, walked to Hay’s house.

  The Treaty was signed in the first fifteen minutes of his visit, between glasses of brandy. The Canal Company was authorized to sell to the United States the rights and concessions relating to the works. Colombia guaranteed the United States complete control of a ten-kilometerwide zone between Colón and Panama City. The cession was for a space of one hundred years. In exchange, the United States would pay ten million dollars. The protection of the Canal would be Colombia’s responsibility; but if Colombia was unable to do so effectively, the United States reserved the right to intervene . . .

  Et cetera. Et cetera. A long et cetera.

  Three days later, the arrival of the papers that carried the news was celebrated as if the times of Ferdinand de Lesseps were back for the Isthmus. Paper lanterns adorned the streets, tropical orchestras spontaneously emerged to fill the air with the metallic sound of their trombones and tubas and trumpets. Eloísa, who at sixteen years of age was already wiser than me, dragged me forcibly to Front Street, where people were drinking toasts with whatever was at hand. In front of the great stone arch of the railway offices people were dancing and waving the flags of the two signatory nations: yes, the air was again impregnated with patriotism, and yes, I had difficulties breathing again. And then, as we walked between the offices and the sleeping carriages, Eloísa turned around and said to me, “Grandfather would have enjoyed this.”

  “What do you know?” I barked at her. “You hardly even knew him.”

  Yes, that’s what I said. It was a cruel retort; Eloísa withstood it unblinkingly, perhaps because she understood better than I the complexity of what I was feeling at that moment, perhaps because she was starting to become sadly resigned to my tormented-widower’s reactions. I looked at her: she had turned into a living portrait of Charlotte (her small breasts, her tone of voice); she’d had enough presence of mind to cut her hair short like a boy, trying to reduce as much as possible the resemblance that tor
mented me; however, at that moment I felt a gap opening up between us (a Darien Jungle) or that an insuperable obstruction (a Sierra Nevada) arose between us. She was turning into someone else: the woman she was becoming was colonizing her territory, appropriating the city in ways that I, an incomer, could not imagine. Of course, Eloísa was right: Miguel Altamirano would have liked to have witnessed that night, written about it even if no one would publish the article, left a record of the Great Event for the benefit of future generations. That’s what I was thinking all night, in the 4th of July saloon, while I drank half a bottle of whiskey with a banker from San Francisco and his lover, next to the statue of Columbus, where the Haitian fire-eater was still performing his spectacle. And as we walked back home, along the shore of Limón Bay, seeing the lights of the ships flickering in the distance like fireflies over the black sheet of the night, I felt for the first time at the back of my mouth the bitter taste of resentment.

  Eloísa was walking with both hands clasped around my arm, like when she was a little girl; our feet were stepping on the same ground where the deserter Anatolio Calderón had stepped, but neither of us spoke of that disgrace that was still with us, that would never, never leave us alone, that would sleep in our house like a pet until the end of time. But as we crossed the dark street of the ghost town of Christophe Colomb, it was as if all the ghosts of my past came out to meet me. I didn’t think the word, but as I climbed the porch steps the notion of revenge had already installed itself in my mind. Not only would I not flee from the Angel of History again, not only would I not seek a submissive distance from the Gorgon of Politics, but I would make them my slaves: I would burn the wings of one, decapitate the other. There, lying in the hammock at midnight on January 24, I declared war on them.

  And while this was happening in the tropical heat, up there, in the frigid fog of perfidious Albion, Joseph Conrad was having a little tantrum.

  He’d been invited to London to meet an American (a banker, just like the man in the 4th of July: the correspondence is insignificant but no less deserving of mention). The banker says he’s a great admirer of the maritime novels: he recites the beginning of Almayer’s Folly from memory, feels like a close friend of Lord Jim although the novel had struck him as “dense and tedious.” In the middle of dinner, the banker asks Conrad “when he’d spin some more yarns about the sea,” and Conrad explodes: he’s sick of being seen as a writer of little adventures, a Jules Verne of the Southern Seas. He protests and complains, explains himself too much undoubtedly, but at the end of the argument the banker, who can smell the need for money the way dogs can smell fear, offers him a deal: Conrad will write a commissioned novel of around one hundred thousand words with a maritime setting; the banker, as well as paying him, will arrange for publication by Harper’s Magazine. Conrad accepts (the tantrum has reached its end), mostly because he already has the subject for the novel, and has even written a few notes for it.

  These are not easy days. For months now, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford have been writing a four-handed, romantic, adventure novel, the most obvious object of which is to make (quick, immediate) money to alleviate both their financial difficulties. But the collaboration has not gone well: it’s taken much longer than they planned, and has created situations of tension between the friends and their wives that little by little have poisoned the cordial atmosphere between them. Complaints and apologies, accusations and alibis, go back and forth. “I’m doing my damnedest,” writes Conrad. Blackwood’s, the magazine that was to publish the novel, has now turned it down; debts pile up on his desk and represent, to Conrad, a real threat against his family. Tormented by the guilt of his neglected responsibilities, he sees his wife as a widow and his sons as orphans; they depend on him and he has nothing to give them. His health does not make matters any easier: he has one attack of gout after another, and when it’s not gout it’s dysentery, and when it’s not dysentery it’s rheumatism. As if that weren’t enough, nostalgia for the sea overwhelms him more and more each day, and during those days he has seriously considered the possibility of looking for a captain’s post and returning to his old life. “What I wouldn’t give for a cutter and the River Fatshan,” he writes, “or that magnificent dilapidated ship between the Mozambique Canal and Zanzibar!” In these conditions, the banker’s commission is a cause for gratitude.

  The idea has been growing gradually in his head. It started as a short story, something about the length of “Youth,” maybe, or “Amy Foster” at most, but Conrad misjudged the elements (or perhaps he was aware that short stories don’t sell well) and the original concept swelled as the days and months went by, going from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand words, going from a single setting to two or three, and all that before he’d started actually writing it. During those days the project disappears from Conrad’s letters and conversations. At the time of the proposal, Conrad knows little about it, but one of the things he does know is that the story will be a hundred thousand words long, and that its protagonists will be a group of Italians. His memory has returned to the admired figure of Dominic Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica; his memory goes back to 1876, the year of his travels to the ports of the Caribbean, the year of his experiences as a gunrunner in Panama, the year of experiences that led him to the (secret and never confessed) suicide attempt. In those initial notes, Cervoni has been transformed into a capataz of cargadores who has ended up working in a Caribbean port. His name is Gian Battista, and his surname is Nostromo. Around that time Conrad reads the maritime memoirs of a certain Benton Williams, and finds there the story of a man who has stolen a shipment of silver. That story and the image of Cervoni blend in his head. . . . Maybe (he thinks) his Nostromo doesn’t need to be a thief; maybe circumstances have led him to the booty by chance, and he takes advantage of them. But what circumstances? In what situation can a decent man find himself forced to steal a shipment of silver? Conrad doesn’t know. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine motives, construct scenes, assemble psychologies. But he fails.

  In March 1902, Conrad had written: “Nostromo shall be a first-rate story.” Months later his enthusiasm had declined: “There is no help and no hope; there is only the duty to try, to try everlastingly with no regard for success.” One day, in the middle of an unusual burst of optimism and shortly after the conversation with the banker, he takes out a blank sheet of paper, puts the number 1 on the top right-hand corner, and in capital letters writes: “NOSTROMO. PART FIRST. THE ISABELS.” But nothing more happens; the words do not come to him. Conrad immediately notices something is wrong. He crosses out “THE ISABELS” and writes: “THE SILVER OF THE MINE.” And then, for reasons that are inexplicable, the images and memories, the oranges he saw in Puerto Cabello and the stories of galleons he heard when they put into port at Cartagena, the waters of Limón Bay, its mirror-like stillness and islands that are really the Mulatas crowd into his head. It’s that moment again: the book has begun. Conrad experiences it with excitement, but he knows the excitement will not last, that soon it’ll be replaced by the most assiduous visitors to his desk: his linguistic uncertainties, architectural anguish, and financial anxieties. This novel must succeed, thinks Conrad; otherwise, bankruptcy awaits him.

  I’ve lost track of the nights I’ve spent imagining, like a man obsessed, the writing of the novel; and once, I confess, I imagined that Conrad’s desk caught fire again like it caught fire while he was writing Romance (or maybe it was The Mirror of the Sea, who can remember?), taking with it a good part of the manuscript; but I imagined that this time it was the story of Nostromo, the good silver thief, that was lost to the flames. I close my eyes, I picture the scene, the desk that belonged to Ford Madox Ford’s father, the paraffin lamp exploding and the flammable paper burning to cinders in seconds, consuming the sentences of exquisite calligraphy but halting grammar. I also imagine the presence of Jessie Conrad (who comes in with a cup of tea for the patient), or little Borys, whose unbearable crying slows down the already problematic writing of
the novel. I close my eyes again. There’s Conrad, sitting in front of a smudged page that has not been burned, remembering the things he saw in Colón, on the railway lines, in Panama City. There he is, transforming the little he knows or remembers about Colombia, or, rather, transforming Colombia into a fictional country, a country whose history Conrad can invent with impunity. There he is, marveling at the course events in the book have taken from the starting point of those distant memories. He writes to his friend Cunninghame Graham (May 9): “I want to talk to you of the work I am engaged on now. I hardly dare avow my audacity—but I am placing it in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana. However, the book is mostly about Italians.” Conrad, astute eliminator of his own footprints, makes no mention of Colombia, the original convulsive Republic disguised behind the Costaguanan speculations. A little while later he insists on the suffering Colombia/Costaguana is causing him (July 8): “I am dying over the curst Nostromo thing. All my memories of Central America seem to slip away.” And even more: “I just had a glimpse twenty-five years ago—a short glance. That is not enough pour bâtir un roman dessus.” If Nostromo is a building, the architect Conrad needs to find a new supplier of raw material. London, luckily for him, is full of Costaguanans. Will it be necessary to resort to those men, exiles like him, men—like him—whose place in the world is roving and vague?

  As the days pass and the written pages pile up on the desk, he realizes that the story of Nostromo, the Italian sailor, has lost its direction: its foundations are weak, its plot banal. Summer arrives, a fainthearted, bland summer, and Conrad devotes it to voracious, desperate reading, in an attempt to season his paltry memories. Will you allow me an inventory? He reads the Caribbean maritime memoirs of Frederick Benton Williams and the Paraguayan terrestrial memoirs of George Frederick Masterman. He reads Cunninghame Graham’s books (Hernando de Soto, Vanished Arcadia), and books that Cunninghame Graham recommends: Wild Scenes in South America, by Ramón Páez, and Down the Orinoco in a Canoe, by Santiago Pérez Triana. His memories and his readings intermingle: Conrad no longer knows what he lived and what he has read. At night, nights when the threat of depression turns into deep and dark oceans of insomnia, he tries to establish the difference (and fails); by day, he fights tooth and nail with the fiendish English language. And all the time he wonders: What is it, what’s it like, this Republic whose story I’m trying to tell? What is Costaguana? What the devil is Colombia?