Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Dawn broke at last, at last the clouds of mosquitoes and the real clouds scattered, and the passengers and crew of the Selfridge spent the day on deck, taking the sun just like caimans or the Mulatas, waiting for the good news that they could dock. But night fell again, and the clouds returned, the real ones and the others; and the docks of Colón remained as full as a sailors’ brothel. The resurrection occurred on the third day. The sky had cleared miraculously, and in the cool night air (that luxury article) the Selfridge managed to find a bed in the brothel. Passengers and crew burst ashore like a downpour, and I set foot for the first time on the land of my maledictions.

I came to Colón because I was told that here I would find my father, the well-known Miguel Altamirano; but as soon as my smelly feet, my damp, stiff boots, stepped into the Schizophrenic City, all the nobility of the classic theme — all those stories of Oedipus and Laius, Telemachus and Odysseus — went very quickly to hell. It won’t be me who tries to disguise the truth at this stage in life: walking into the commotion of the city, the Father Quest turned into the last of my priorities. I confess, yes, I confess I was distracted. I allowed Colón to distract me.

My first impression was of a city too small for the chaos it harbored. The serpent of the railway line rested about ten meters from the waters of the bay, and seemed ready to slide into them and sink forever at the slightest tremor of the earth. The stevedores shouted unintelligibly and without that seeming to matter to them: the Babel my father had evoked, far from being overcome, remained alive and kicking on the docks that separated the railroad from the shore. I thought: This is the world. Hotels that didn’t receive guests but went out hunting for them; American saloons where men drank whiskey, played poker, and talked with bullets; Jamaican slums; Chinese butcher shops; in the middle of everything, the private house of an old railway employee. I was twenty-one years old, dear reader, and the long, black braid of the Chinese man who sold meat over the counter and liquor under it, or Maggs & Oates pawnshop and its display window on the main street with the most gigantic jewels I’d ever seen, or the West Indian cobblers’ shops where they danced soca were for me like notifications of a disorderly and magnificent world, allusions to countless sins, welcome letters from Gomorrah.

That night I did something for the first time that I would repeat many years later and on another continent: arrive in an unknown city and look for a hotel at night. I confess: I didn’t look too closely at where I was staying, and I wasn’t intimidated by the fact that the owner/ receptionist held a Winchester as he pushed the visitors’ book toward me. Sleepwalking, I went outside again, made my way between mules and carts and carts with mules to a two-storey saloon. Above the wooden sign — GENERAL GRANT, it read — waved the stars and stripes. I leaned on the bar, ordered what the man next to me had ordered, but before the mustached bartender had poured my whiskey, I had already turned around: the saloon and its customers were a better spectacle.

I saw two Gringos having a knife fight with three Panamanians. I saw a whore they called Francisca — hips that had already opened for one or more children, worn-out tits, a certain bitterness in her expression, and a comb out of place in her hair — and imagined that she’d committed the error of accompanying her husband on his Panama adventure and that in a matter of months the poor little man had gone to swell the statistics of the Colón hospital. I saw a group of sailors, bare-chested thugs in unbuttoned, dark, knitted shirts, who surrounded her and solicited her in their language, insistently but not impolitely, and I saw or noticed that the woman enjoyed that unusual and now exotic moment when a man treated her with something resembling respect. I saw a cart driver come in and start asking for help to move a dead mule off the railway tracks; I saw a group of Americans look him over, from under their broad-brimmed hats, before rolling up the bright sleeves of their shirts and going out to help.

I saw all that.

But there was something I didn’t see. And the things we don’t see tend to be the ones that affect us most. (This epigram has been sponsored by the Angel of History.)

I didn’t see a small man, a mouse who looked like a notary, approach the bar and ask for the attention of the drinkers. I didn’t hear him explain in laborious English that he had purchased two tickets for the next morning’s train to Panama City, that during the course of the day his young son had died of cholera, and that now he wanted to recoup the fifty dollars he’d spent on the tickets to prevent the child’s being tossed into a pauper’s grave. I didn’t see that the Captain of the French sailors approached him and asked him to repeat all that he’d just said, to make sure he’d understood, and I did not see the moment that one of his subordinates, a broad-chested man of about forty, rummaged through a leather bag, came over to the Captain, and put the money for the tickets, in U.S. dollars tied with a velvet ribbon, in his hand. The transaction didn’t last longer than a drink of whiskey (I, concerned with my own, didn’t see it). But in that short space of time something had happened beside me, almost touching me, something. . Let’s look for the appropriate figure: Did the wing of destiny brush my face? The ghost of encounters to come? No, I’ll explain it as it happened, without meddling tropes. Readers, pity me, or mock me if you wish: I did not see the scene, the scene passed me by, and, logically, I didn’t know it had happened. I didn’t know one of those men was called Escarras and that he was Captain of the Saint-Antoine . This might not seem much; the problem is that I also didn’t know that his right-hand man, the broad-chested forty-year-old, was called Dominic Cervoni, or that one of his companions that night of binges and business, a young steward who distractedly observed the scene, was called Józef Korzeniowski, or that many years later that distracted young man — when he was no longer called Korzeniowski, but Conrad — would use the sailor — calling him not Cervoni, but Nostromo — to the ends for which he’d become famous. . “A oneeyed giant would not have had the ghost of a chance against Dominic Cervoni, of Corsica, not Ithaca,” a mature and prematurely nostalgic novelist would write years later. Conrad admired Cervoni as any disciple admires any master; Cervoni, for his part, had voluntarily taken on the role of godfather of adventure for the disoriented young Pole. That was the relationship that united them: Cervoni in charge of the sentimental education of that apprentice sailor and amateur smuggler. But that night I did not know that Cervoni was Cervoni, or that Conrad was Conrad.

I’m the man who didn’t see.

I’m the man who didn’t know.

I’m the man who wasn’t there.

Yes, that’s me: the anti-witness.

The list of things I didn’t see and didn’t know either is much longer: I could fill several pages and label them: IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED TO ME WITHOUT MY REALIZING. I didn’t know that after buying the tickets Captain Escarras and his crew returned to the Saint-Antoine for a few hours’ rest. I didn’t know that before dawn Cervoni would load four rowboats and, along with six other oarsmen (Korzeniowski among them), would return to the port more or less at the same time as I was leaving the General Grant, not drunk but a little queasy. While I spent a couple of hours wandering the heaving streets of Colón-Aspinwall-Gomorrah, Dominic Cervoni directed the maneuvers of the four boats up to the railway-loading piers, where a group of cargadores awaited him in the shadows; and while I was returning to the hotel, preparing to get up early and begin my Father Quest, the stevedores moved the contents of those stealthy nocturnal transports, carried them under the arches of the depot, packed them into the freight cars of the train to Panama City (and in doing so heard the clatter of the barrels and the thud of the wood, without asking what, or for whom, or where), and covered them with tarpaulins, so they wouldn’t be ruined by one of those sudden downpours, trademark of life in the Isthmus.