Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

(The mind generates associations that the pen cannot accept. Now, while I write, I remember one of the last things my mother told me. Shortly before dying in Paita, Manuela Sáenz received a visit from a half-mad Gringo who was passing through Peru. The Gringo, without even removing his wide-brimmed hat, told her he was writing a novel about whales. Were there whales to be seen around there? Manuela Sáenz didn’t know what to say. She died on November 23, 1856, thinking not of Simón Bolívar but of the white whales of a failed novelist.)

So without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name , I’ll simply say that I was baptized — yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account — as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant, and a little while later, after a confession or two from my tormented mother, I became José de Narváez, son of an unknown father. All that, of course, before arriving at the surname that belonged to me by blood.

The thing is that I began, finally, to exist; I begin to exist in these pages, and my tale will be told in the first person from now on.

I’m the one doing the telling. I’m the one who counts. I am that I am. Me. Me. Me.

Now, having presented the written correspondence that took place between my parents, I must concern myself with another quite different form of correspondence: that between twin souls, yes, that doppelgänger correspondence. I hear murmurs in the audience. Intelligent readers, readers who are always one step ahead of the narrator, you will already be intuiting what’s coming here; you’re already guessing that a shadow is beginning to be cast over my life, the shadow of Joseph Conrad.

And so it is: because now that time has passed and I can see events clearly, arrange them on the map of my life, I am aware of the traversing lines, the subtle parallels that have kept us connected since my birth. Here is the proof: it doesn’t matter how determined I am to tell the story of my life; doing so, inevitably, is telling the others. By virtue of physical affinities, according to experts, twins who have been separated at birth spend their lives feeling the pains and anxieties that overwhelm the other, even if they’ve never laid eyes on each other and even if an ocean separates them. On the level of metaphysical affinities, which are exactly what interest me, it takes on a different complexion but also happens. Yes, there is no doubt that this happens, too. Conrad and Altamirano, two incarnations of the same Joe, two versions of the same fate, bear witness to the fact.

No more philosophy! No more abstractions, demand the skeptics. Examples! We want examples! All right then, my pockets are full of them, and nothing seems easier to me than pulling out a few to sate the journalistic thirst of certain nonconformist spirits. . I can tell you that in December 1857 a child is born in Poland, he is baptized Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and his father dedicates a poem to him: “To my son born in the 85th year of the Muscovite Oppression.” In Colombia, a little boy, also called José, receives a box of pastels as a Christmas present and spends several days drawing soldiers without body armor humiliating the Spanish oppressors. While I, at the age of six, was writing my first compositions for a tutor from Bogotá (one of them about a bumblebee that flew over the river), Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who was not yet four, wrote to his father: “I don’t like it much when the mosquitoes bite.”

More examples, Readers of the Jury?

In 1863, I was listening to the grown-ups talking about the Liberal revolution and its result, the secular and socialist Rionegro Constitution; in the same year, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was also witness to a revolution in the adult world around him, that of the Polish nationalists against the Russian Tsar, a revolution that sent many of his relatives to prison, exile, or in front of a firing squad. While I, at the age of fifteen, began to ask questions about the identity of my father — in other words, began to bring him to life — Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski watched as his gave way little by little to tuberculosis — in other words, to death. By 1871 or ’72, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had already begun to announce his desire to leave Poland and become a sailor, although he had never in his life seen the sea. And it must have been around then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, that I began to threaten to leave my mother home and the city of Honda, to disappear forever from her sight, unless. . If she didn’t want to lose me forever, it would be best. .

That’s how it was: I went directly from peaceful doubt to savage inquisition. What happened in my head was very simple. My usual doubts, with which I’d maintained a cordial and diplomatic relationship as a child, a sort of nonaggression pact, suddenly began to rebel against all peace initiatives and to launch offensives whose objective, invariably, was my poor blackmailed mother. Who? I asked. When? Why?

Who? (Stubborn tone.)

How? (Irreverent tone.)

Where? (Frankly aggressive tone.)

Our negotiations went on for months; summit meetings took place in the kitchen of the Beckman guest house, among the saucepans and burned oil and the penetrating smell of fried mojarra , while my mother barked orders at Rosita, the household cook. Antonia de Narváez never committed the vulgarity of telling me my father had died, of turning him into a hero of the civil war — a position to which every Colombian can aspire sooner or later — or a victim of some poetic accident, a fall off a fine horse, a duel over lost honor. No, I always knew the man existed somewhere, and my mother summed up and sentenced the matter with a platitude: “The thing is that somewhere isn’t here.” It took me an entire afternoon, the length of time it takes to cook the stew for dinner, to find out where that somewhere was. Then, for the first time, that word that had been so hard for me as a child ( itsmess , I used to say, my tongue tangled up, in geography classes) acquired a certain reality for me, became tangible. There, in that twisted and deformed arm that stuck out of the territory of my country, in that inaccessible appendix out of God’s hands and separate from the rest of the nation by a jungle whose fevers killed with just the mention of its name, that little hell where there were more illnesses than settlers, and where the only hint of human life was a primitive train that helped fortune hunters get from New York to California in less time than it would take them to cross their own country, there, in Panama, lived my father.

Panama. For my mother, as for most Colombians — who tend to act just like their governments, to harbor the same irrationalities, feel the same dislikes — Panama was a place as real as Calcutta or Berdichev or Kinshasa, a word that marks a map and little more. The railroad had brought the Panamanians out of oblivion, true, but only in a momentary and painfully brief way. A satellite: that was Panama. And the political regime didn’t help much. The country was around about fifty years old, more or less, and here began to act its age. The midlife crisis, that mysterious age when men take lovers who could be their daughters and women heat up for no reason, affected the country in its own way: New Granada became federal. Like a poet or a cabaret artist, it took a new pseudonym: the United States of Colombia. Well then, Panama was one of those states, and it floated in the orbit of the Great Lady in Crisis more due to the mere pull of gravity than anything else. Which was an elegant way of saying that powerful Colombians, the moneyed merchants of Honda or Mompós, the politicians of Santa Fe or the military officers all over the country, didn’t give a damn about the State of Panama, much less about the state of Panama.