Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Down the Orinoco in a Canoe was translated into English and published by Heinemann, with a prologue by the Scottish adventurer, dilettante writer, and socialist leader Robert Cunninghame Graham, whose perception of Bogotá as a kind of Chibcha Athens still strikes me as more ingenious than fitting. The book appeared in 1902; in November 1903, a few hours before I knocked on his door — one exile requesting help from another, a disciple in search of a master — Pérez Triana had received a letter from Sydney Pawling, his editor. “One last thing I should like to mention, Mr. Triana,” it read. “As you will no doubt know, Mr. Conrad, whose magnificent Typhoon we published this past April, is immersed in a difficult project relating to current Latin American reality. Aware of his own limited knowledge of the subject, Mr. Conrad has sought out and received the aid of Mr. Cunninghame Graham to pursue the work; but he has also read your book, and has now requested I ask you, Mr. Triana, if you would be prepared to answer a few questions that Mr. Conrad would like to send you by way of us.”

Joseph Conrad has read me , thinks Pérez Triana. Joseph Conrad wants my help .

Pérez Triana opens the drawer and takes out a blank sheet and another Perfection envelope. (He likes this invention, so simple and at once so ingenious: you had to pass your tongue along the flap as ever, but the glue was not there, it was on the envelope itself. His family physician, Dr. Thomas Wilmot, had told him of it after describing various tongue infections, and Pérez Triana had gone immediately to the stationer’s in Charing Cross. He had to look after his health, of course; how many envelopes a day could a man like him end up licking?) He wrote: “My delay in replying to your letter, Mr. Pawling, is utterly inexcusable. Do relate to Mr. Conrad my absolute availability to answer as many questions as he cares to send me, no matter how lengthy.” And then he put the paper in the envelope and licked the flap.

But he did not send the letter at once. A few hours later he would be pleased he hadn’t. He threw that letter into the wastepaper basket, took out another piece of paper, and wrote again the same lines about tardiness and availability, but then added: “Pass on to Mr. Conrad, however, that certain recent events allow me now to have other ways of helping him. I do not presume to know better than the author what his needs might be, but the information he could receive from an exile of long standing, by way of a questionnaire sent by third parties, is invariably inferior to what he could be given in person by a direct witness to events. Well then, what I can offer is even better than a witness. I offer him a victim, Mr. Pawling. A victim.”

What had happened between the two letters?

A man from his distant country had arrived to visit him. A man had told him a story.

That man, of course, was me.

That story is the one that you, dear Eloísa, are reading at this moment.

I spent two whole days looking for my father, following his faint but still visible trail, his slimy snail trail, through the streets of Colón. But I was not successful. I didn’t want to leave messages, notes, warnings, because I’m fond of surprises and I suspected — for no reason, of course — that this fondness came from my paternal side. In the hospital the mulatta nurses spoke of my father with (it seemed to me) too much familiarity; they told me at once, between impertinent giggles, that he’d been there that morning and had spent at least three hours chatting with a tubercular young man, but they didn’t know what his next destination was; when I spoke to the tubercular young man, I found out several things, but not my father’s whereabouts. He’d been born in Bogotá and was a lawyer by profession, that oh so frequent combination in my centralist and pettifogging country; two weeks after arriving in Colón he’d woken up with a swelling under his jaw; by the time of my visit, the infection had left the inflamed gland and invaded the lungs and blood; he had, in the best of cases, a few months to live. “That fellow’s a friend of yours?” he said, half opening his bile-colored eyes. “Well, tell him I’ll be expecting him tomorrow. Tell him not to leave me abandoned here. In those three hours he looked after me better than all these damn doctors. Tell him, OK? Tell him that before I die I want to know what the hell happens to D’Artagnan.” And as he pronounced the guttural r , with a zeal for correctness that struck me as at the very least curious in the case of a dying man, he brought his left hand up to his inflamed gland, covering it as if it hurt.

In the offices of the Railroad Company — which some natives called by its English name, giving me the strange sensation of living in two countries at once, or of crossing an invisible border over and over again — the North Americans confused me with a potential ticket buyer and conscientiously sent me to the ticket office, shaking the cuffs of their impeccable shirtsleeves in the direction of the street, and one of them even donning his felt hat to accompany me to the place. That whole exchange was in English; it was only after saying good-bye that I realized it, with rather greater surprise than modesty allows me to confess. In the place the impeccable cuff had indicated, a finely clothed arm moved to inform me that no, tickets were no longer sold there, then at another window a sweaty forehead told me that I should simply board the train and someone would come by to ask for my ticket. “But no, I’m looking for—” “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. In the carriage they’ll ask for it.” And meanwhile, the heat was afflicting me like poison; as I crossed a threshold and entering any shade, a solitary drop of sweat trickled down my side, beneath my clothes; and in the street I marveled that a Chinese man could wear black while not a single pore on his face seemed open. I sought refuge in a liquor store full of gambling cart drivers in whose hands an innocent pair of dice managed to seem like high-stakes poker. And it was then, at the hottest hour of the day, with Front Street empty of pedestrians — only a lunatic or a recent arrival would dare to walk out in the sun at that moment — that I saw him. A restaurant door opened; a decadent place was revealed, a wall covered in mirrors; and through the door came a rash creature. Like in the old joke about twins who meet in the street and recognize each other instantly, I recognized my father.

You, readers of romantic novels; you, sensitive victims of our melodramatic culture, now await a standard reunion scene, with initial gestures of skepticism, lachrymose concessions to the physical evidence, sweaty embraces in the middle of the street, resounding promises to make up for lost time. Well then, allow me to say that I’m (not) sorry to disappoint you. There was no re union whatsoever, because there was no union to renew; there was no promise, because for my father and for me there’d been no time lost. Yes, there are some things that dissociate me from a certain English novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer. My father did not teach me to read Shakespeare or Victor Hugo on our estate in Poland, nor did I immortalize the scene in my memoirs (surely exaggerating it along the way, it has to be said); he did not await me in bed when, the two of us living in cold Kraków, I returned from school to console him over the death of my mother in exile. . Please, understand: my father was my mother’s story. A character, a version, and little more. Well then, there, in the middle of the scorching street, that father in his fifties spoke through the already graying beard that covered his face and defined his features. Or rather the absence of them: for the whiskers of his mustache covered his lips (and had turned yellow, or perhaps always had been), and those on his cheeks went so close to his eyes that my father could have looked at them himself with a little effort. And through that curtain of smoke, from that gray Birnam Wood advancing toward the deforested regions of his face, spoke my father’s invisible mouth: “So I have a son.” Hands clasped behind his back and his gaze fixed on the ground, on the waves of heat at the height of his shiny boots, he began to walk. I understood that I should follow him, and from behind, like a geisha following her lord, I heard him add: “Not a bad thing, at my age. Not bad at all.”