Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

And in that place lived my father.

What?

Why?

Who with?

For a couple of years as long as centuries, during those eternal cooking sessions that resulted in an extremely complicated roast of veal or a simple rice soup with agua de panela , I gradually perfected my interrogator’s technique, and Antonia de Narváez softened like potatoes in a stew before the insistence of my questions. Thus I heard her speak of La Opinión Comunera or El Granadino Temporal ; thus I found out about the sinking of the Union , and I even paid good money so an oarsman would take me out on a lighter to see the smokestacks; thus I found out about the encounter on the Isabel , and my mother’s tale had the taste of quinine and the smell of rubbing alcohol. Another round of questions. What had happened in the two decades since then? What else did she know of him? Had there been no further contact in all these years? What was my father doing in 1860, while General Mosquera declared himself Supreme Director of War and the entire country was submerged — yes, Eloísa dear: once more — in the blood of the two parties? What was he doing, with whom was he dining, what was he talking about, while Liberal soldiers arrived at the Beckman guest house one week and Conservatives the next, while my mother fed one lot and tended the wounds of the others like a perfect Florence Nightingale of the Tropical Lowlands? What did he think and write in the following years, during which his radical, atheist, and rationalist comrades made friends with the power my father had pursued since his youth? His ideals prevailed, the clergy (blight of our time) had been stripped of their useless and unproductive hectares, and the illustrious Archbishop (director in chief of the blight) was duly incarcerated. Had my father’s pen not left a trace of that in the press? How was that possible?

I began to confront a dreadful possibility: my father, who had barely begun to be born for me, could already be dead. And Antonia de Narváez must have seen me looking desperate, must have feared I would don an absurd, Hamlet-like mourning for a father I’d never known, and wanted to spare me those unwarranted laments. Compassionate, or maybe blackmailed, or maybe both at once, my mother confessed that, every year, round about December 16, she received a couple of pages with which Miguel Altamirano kept her up to date with his life. None of the letters received a reply, she continued to confess (I was shocked to see she felt not the slightest guilt). Antonia de Narváez had burned them all, even the latest one, but not before reading them the way one reads a serial by Dumas or Dickens: taking an interest in the fate of the protagonist, yes, but always aware that neither the pathetic moron David Copperfield nor the poor, weepy Lady of the Camellias existed in reality, that their happiness or their disgraces, as moving as they might be to us, have no effect whatsoever on the lives of flesh-and-blood people.

“Well then, tell me,” I said.

And she told me.

She told me that, a few months after his arrival in Colón, Miguel Altamirano found that his reputation as an incendiary writer and champion of Progress preceded him and, almost before he realized, found himself contracted by the Panama Star , the same newspaper the ill-fated Mr. Jennings had been reading on board the Isabel . She told me the mission my father was charged with was very simple: he had to wander around the city, visit the offices of the Panama Railroad Company, even board the train as often as he liked to cross the Isthmus to Panama City, and then write about what a great marvel the railway was and the vast benefits it had brought and would continue to bring to the foreign investors as well as to the local inhabitants. She told me my father knew perfectly well that they were using him as a propagandist, but the good of the cause, from his point of view, justified it all; and with time he gradually realized, also, that years after the inauguration of the railway the streets still remained unpaved, and their only decoration continued to be dead animals and rotting garbage. I repeat: he realized. But none of that affected his unshakable faith, as if the simple image of the train going from one side to the other erased those elements of the landscape. That symptom, mentioned in passing like a simple character trait, would acquire extraordinary importance years later.

All this my mother told me.

And kept telling me.

She told me that in a matter of five years my father had become a sort of pampered son of Panamanian society: the Company’s shareholders feted him like an ambassador, senators from Bogotá took him to lunch to ask his advice, and every official of the state government, each and every member of that rancid isthmian aristocracy, from the Herreras to the Arosemenas, from the Arangos to the Menocals, aspired to have him as husband to their daughter. She told me, finally, that what Miguel Altamirano was paid for his columns was barely sufficient for his confirmed bachelor’s lifestyle, but that didn’t prevent him from spending his mornings offering his services free of charge caring for the sick in the Colón hospital. “The hospital is the largest building in the city,” my mother with her good memory recalled my father writing in one of his lost letters. “That gives an idea of the salubriousness of the environment. But all progress toward the future has its down sides, my dear, and this one was not to be the exception.”

But that was not all that Antonia de Narváez told me. Like any novelist, my mother had left the most important thing until the end.

Miguel Altamirano was with Blas Arosemena the February morning when the Nipsic , a steam sloop carrying North American marines and Panamanian macheteros , picked him up in Colón and took him to Caledonia Bay. Don Blas had arrived at his house the previous night and said to him: “Pack for several days. Tomorrow we’re going on an expedition.” Miguel Altamirano obeyed, and four days later he was entering the Darien Jungle, accompanied by ninety-seven men, and for a week he walked behind them in the perpetual twilight of the rain forest, and saw the shirtless men who blazed the trail with clean machete blows, while others, the white men in their straw hats and blue-flannel shirts, wrote in their notebooks about everything they saw: the depth of the Chucunaque River when they tried to wade across it, but also the affection that scorpions felt for canvas shoes; the geological constitution of a ravine, but also the taste of roast monkey washed down with whiskey. A Gringo called Jeremy, veteran of the War of Secession, lent my father his rifle, because no man should be unarmed in these places, and told him that the rifle had fought in Chickamauga, where the forests were no less dense than here and the visibility shorter than the distance an arrow flies. My father, victim of his adventurer’s instincts, was fascinated.

One of those nights they camped beside a rock polished by the Indians and covered with burgundy-colored hieroglyphics — the same Indians who, armed with poison-tipped arrows, with faces marked by such seriousness as my father had never seen, had guided them for a good part of the route. My father was standing up, observing in stunned silence the figure of a man with both arms raised facing a jaguar or maybe a puma; and then, as he listened to the arguments that would arise between a Confederate lieutenant and a small, bespectacled botanist, he felt all of a sudden that this crossing justified his life. “The enthusiasm kept me awake,” he wrote to Antonia de Narváez. Although Antonia de Narváez was of the opinion that it wasn’t the enthusiasm but rather the gnats, I felt I came to understand my father at that moment. On that page, lost long ago in my mother’s purges, surely written in haste and still under the influence of the expedition, Miguel Altamirano had found the profound meaning of his existence. “They want to part the land as Moses parted the sea. They want to separate the continent in two and realize the distant dreams of Balboa and Humboldt. Common sense and all the explorations undertaken dictate that the idea of a canal between the two oceans is impossible. Dear Lady, I make this promise to you with all the solemnity of which I am capable: I shall not die without having seen that canal.”