Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Readers of the Jury: allow me to give you a very brief lesson in Colombian politics, to synthesize the pages turned up till now and prepare you for those to come. The most important event in the history of my country, as you’ll perhaps have noticed, was not the birth of its Liberator, or its independence, or any of those fabrications for high school textbooks. Nor was it a catastrophe on an individual level like those that frequently mark the destinies of other lands either: no Henry wanted to marry some Boleyn, no Booth killed any Lincoln. No, the moment that would define the fate of Colombia for all history, as always happens in this land of philologists and grammarians and bloodthirsty dictators who translate The Iliad , was a moment made of words. More precisely, of names. A double baptism took place at some imprecise moment of the nineteenth century. The gathered parents of the two chubby-cheeked and already spoiled infants, those two little boys smelling since birth of vomit and liquid shit, agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal. Those children grew up and multiplied in constant rivalry; the rival generations have succeeded each other with the energy of rabbits and the obstinacy of cockroaches. . and in August of 1893, as part of that indisputable inheritance, former — Liberal — President Santiago Pérez Manosalva, a man who in other times had won the respect of General Ulysses S. Grant, was banished with a total lack of consideration by the — Conservative — regime of Miguel Antonio Caro. His son, Santiago Pérez Triana, inherited the condition of undesirable, more or less the way one inherits premature baldness or a hooked nose.

Perhaps a recap would not go amiss, as I’m not forgetting that some of my readers do not have the good fortune of being Colombian. It was all the fault of the subversive columns that the former — Liberal — President wrote in El Relator , real depth charges that would have breached and sunk in a matter of seconds any European government. El Relator was the pampered son of the family: a newspaper founded for the sole reason of dislodging the Conservatives from power and closed in a timely fashion, with decrees worthy of tyranny, by those who did not want to be dislodged. It was not the only one: former President Pérez — eyelids drooping, beard so thick his mouth was completely hidden — used to convoke clandestine meetings with other journalistic conspirators in his house on Carrera Sexta in Santa Fe de Bogotá. And thus, while on the other side of the street the Bordadita church filled with praying godos , the Pérez’s drawing room filled with the editors of El Contemporáneo, El Tábano, and El 93 , all newspapers closed down under charges of supporting the anarchist camp and preparing for civil war.

Well now: politics in Colombia, Readers of the Jury, is a strange class game. Behind the word motivation is the word whim ; behind decision is tantrum . The matter that concerns us happened according to these simple rules, and it also happened as swiftly as mistakes usually happen. . At the beginning of August, Miguel Antonio Caro, Supreme Whimsical One of the Nation, has heard by chance that El Relator would be prepared to moderate its stance if it were allowed to go back into circulation. There is something in this news that tastes of victory to him: the Conservative Regeneration, which has set out censorship laws tougher than any ever seen in the democratic world, has defeated the written subversion of Liberal atheism. That’s what Caro thinks; but El Relator shakes him out of his deception with the next day’s edition, defying the censorship with one of the strongest invectives the institutions of the Conservative Regeneration have ever received. President Caro — inevitably — feels deceived. No one has promised him anything, but something terrible happened in his world, in his tiny little private world, made of Latin classics and a deep disdain for all who are not on his side: reality has not conformed to his fantasies. The President pounds and stamps on the wooden floors of the San Carlos Palace, hurls his rattle to the ground, pouts and throws tantrums, and refuses to eat his lunch. . and nevertheless reality is still there: El Relator still exists and is still his enemy. Those with him then listen to him say that Santiago Pérez Manosalva, former President of Colombia, is a liar and a fake and a man who doesn’t keep his word. They listen to him predict with the certainty of an oracle that that Liberal without a nation or a god will take the country to war and that banishment is the only way to prevent it. The definitive decree, the decree that fixes his expulsion, is dated 14 August.

The father complied, of course — the death penalty for exiles who didn’t go into exile was common currency in Caro’s Colombia — and left for Paris, natural homing instinct for the Latin American haute bourgeoisie. The son, after receiving the first threats, tried to leave the country by going down from Bogotá to the Magdalena River and embarking at the port of Honda on the first steamer prepared to take him to Barranquilla, and from there to European exile. “The truth is, I didn’t feel I was in danger,” he would tell me much later, when our relationship allowed this tone and these confidences. “I was leaving Colombia because, after the affront to my father, the atmosphere had become unbreathable; I was going to punish, in my own way, the country’s ingratitude. But when I arrived at Honda, a foul village with a population of three and savage temperatures, I realized how mistaken I was.” At night in London, Pérez Triana kept dreaming that the police who arrested him in Honda took him back to the Ciega — the most feared prison on the Magdalena — but in the dream the youngest policeman explained, smoothing the down on his upper lip, what hadn’t been explained in reality: that the orders had come from the capital. But what orders? On what charges? In the dream it was as impossible to find out as it had been in reality. Pérez Triana had never spoken to anyone, not even to Gertrud, about the hours he spent in the Ciega, in the darkness of a cell, his eyes watering with the stench of human shit and soaked to the skin by the corrosive humidity of the tropics. He would have needed more than one hand to count the cases of yellow fever he had word of during his very short imprisonment. At some point, he thought, it would be his turn: each mosquito, each microbe was his enemy. He was then sure he’d been sentenced to death.

The prisoner had no way of knowing, but at dawn on his second day in the Ciega, while he grudgingly accepted the arepa without cheese that was all there was for breakfast, the Bogotá lawyer Francisco Sanin, who was vacationing at the time in Honda, received news of his imprisonment. By the time Sanin arrived at the Ciega, Pérez Triana had sweated so much that the starched collar of his shirt no longer pressed against his throat; he had the feeling, impossible to confirm, that his cheeks were sagging, but he passed a hand over his face and found only rough traces of stubble. Sanin weighed the situation, asked about the charges, and received evasive answers, and his complaints reached Bogotá and returned with neither replies nor solutions. Then it occurred to him that the only solution lay in a lie. At some stage, operating as a businessman in the United States, Pérez Triana had had to sign some letters of loyalty. Sanin wrote to the U.S. envoy, a certain MacKinney, citing those letters and telling him one of his citizens was in danger of dying in an insalubrious prison. It was a risky lie, but it worked: MacKinney believed every word with the candor of a small child and protested before the relevant judge, raising his voice and pounding the desk, and in a matter of hours Pérez Triana found himself on his way to Bogotá, looking back over his shoulder, confoundedly grateful for the power that Uncle Sam’s husky voice has in these submissive latitudes. This time (he was thinking) there was no room for doubt, there was no anticipated nostalgia. He had to flee; every detail of his mistreated person pointed him toward the path to flight. If the Magdalena River route was forbidden him, he would search out less obvious ways. And so he fled through the Eastern Plains, he disguised himself as a priest and baptized incautious Indians along the way, he paddled down three rivers and saw animals he’d never seen and reached the Caribbean without having been recognized by anyone but also feeling that he no longer recognized himself. And then he told the whole story in a book.