Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

The supposed pneumonia kept me laid up in bed for ten weeks. I suffered the shivers not thinking and not knowing that another man, in another part of the world, was suffering them, too, at that precise instant; and when I sweated whole rivers, was it not more sensible to attribute it to the supposed pneumonia instead of thinking of the metaphysical resonances of someone else’s distant sweating? The days of the supposed pneumonia are associated in my memory with the Altamirano guest house; my father confined me to his house — he sequestered me, kept me in quarantine — for he knew what so many people said in so many different words but which could be synthesized in these: in Panama, the unhealthy, feverish, contagious Panama of that time, going into the hospital meant never coming out. “Ill on arrival, dead on departure” was the refrain that summed the matter up (and that went round Colón in every language, from Spanish to English to Caribbean Creole). So the white-walled, red-roofed house, bathed by sea air, with treatments from Miguel Altamirano, amateur physician, became my private little sanatorium. My Magic Mountain, in other words. And I, Juan Castorp or Hans Altamirano, received in the sanatorium the various lessons my father lavished on me.

So time passed, as they say in novels.

And so (stubbornly) it continued to pass.

There, in the place of my isolation, my father would arrive to tell me of the magnificent things that were happening all over the world. One pertinent clarification: my father the optimist referred to almost anything related to the by then ubiquitous subject of the Inter-oceanic Canal as magnificent things ; by all over the world he meant Colón, Panama City, and the piece of terra more or less firma that stretched between them, that strip where the railway ran and that, for reasons the reader can already imagine, would soon become something like the Apple of Western Discord. Nothing else existed then. Nothing else was worth talking about, or maybe it was that nothing was happening in any other part of the world. For example (it’s just an example), my father didn’t tell me that on one of those days a U.S. warship had arrived in Limón Bay, armed to the teeth and determined to cross the Isthmus. He didn’t tell me that Colonel Ricardo Herrera, commander of the Colón Sappers battalion, had to declare that he “would not consent to their crossing Colombian territory as they intended,” and even went so far as to threaten the Gringos with “the armed defense of the sovereignty of Colombia.” He didn’t tell me that the commander of the North American troops finally gave up his attempt and crossed the Isthmus by train, like everyone else. It was a banal incident, of course; years later, as will be seen, that unusual attack of Sovereign Pride would take on importance (a metaphorical importance, shall we say?), but my father could not know it, and so he condemned me to ignorance as well.

On the other hand, I was one of the first people to know, through my father’s news and with a wealth of detail, that Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse had traveled to Bogotá on an urgent mission, covering the four hundred kilometers in ten days by the Buenaventura route, and that he’d arrived smelling of shit and in terrible need of a razor. And thus I also discovered that two days later, clean-shaven and cologne-scented, he’d had an interview in Bogotá with Don Eustorgio Salgar, Secretary of Foreign Relations, and had obtained from the government of the United States of Colombia the exclusive privilege, valid for ninety-nine years, to construct the Fucking Canal. Thus I found out that Wyse, with the concession in his pocket, had traveled to New York to buy from the Gringos the results of their isthmian expeditions; thus I found out that the Gringos had roundly refused to sell them and, what’s more, had refused to show a single map or reveal a single measurement, share a single piece of geological data or even listen to the proposals of the French. “Negotiations are advancing,” wrote my refracting father in the Star & Herald . “They advance like a locomotive, and nothing can stop them.”

Now, when I remember those distant days, I see them as the last period of tranquillity my life would know. (This melodramatic declaration contains less melodrama than it seems at first: for someone born in the tropical isolation in which I was born, in that Remote Kingdom of Humidity that is the city of Honda, any halfway worldly experience is an example of rare intensity; in the hands of someone less timid, that pastoral, riverbank childhood could be material for many cheap lines of verse, things like The turbulent waters of my plains childhood or The turbulent childhood of these plains waters or even The young and plainly turbulent water .) But what I want to say is this: those first years of my life in Colón, beside my newfound father — who seemed no less improvised and makeshift than the house on stilts he lived in — were moments of relative peace, although at the time I didn’t realize it. My crystal ball did not allow me to see what was coming. How could I have foreseen what was going to happen, anticipate the Cascade of Great Events waiting for us around the corner, concentrated as I was on that novelty that excluded everything else: the acquisition of a father? I will now write something very rash, and I hope it will be tolerated: in those days, talking with Miguel Altamirano and sharing his activities and enjoying his attentions, I felt that I had found my place in the world. (I didn’t feel it with much conviction; I didn’t go so far as to delight in such temerity. In the end, as often happens, it turned out that I was wrong.)

In exchange for his care, Miguel Altamirano demanded nothing but my unconditional attention, the presence of the blank face of the listener. My father was a talker in search of an audience; he sought an ideal listener possessed of a no less ideal insomnia, and everything seemed to indicate that he’d found him in his son. For months, long after my chest had overcome the supposed pneumonia, my father kept talking to me as he had done while I was ill. I don’t know why, but my illness and my seclusion in the Magic Mountain had provoked curious pedagogical enthusiasms, and those enthusiasms carried on afterward. My father gave me his hammock, as he would a convalescent, and brought a chair over to the wooden porch steps; and there, both of us immersed in the dense, damp heat of the Panamanian night, as soon as the mosquitoes’ habits allowed, under the occasional flutter of a hungry bat, the monologue began. “Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself,” wrote a certain novelist, who never even met my father, much later in a certain Damn Book. But the description is apt: my father, enamored of his own voice and his own ideas, used me the way a tennis player uses a practice wall.

So a strange routine settled over my new life. During the day, I walked the baking streets of Colón, accompanying my father on his labors as Chronicler of the Isthmus like a witness to a witness, visiting and revisiting the offices of the Railroad Company with such assiduity that they became for me a second home (like a grandmother’s house, for example, a place we are always welcome and where there is always a plate for us on the table), and during the no less baking nights I attended the Altamirano Lectures on “The Inter-oceanic Canal and the Future of Humanity.” During the day, we visited the white wooden offices of the Star & Herald , and my father would receive commissions or suggestions or missions that we would go straight out to fulfill; during the night, my father explained to me why a canal built at sea level was better, cheaper, and less problematic than one built with locks, and how anyone who said the opposite was simply an enemy of progress. During the day, my figure soaked in sweat accompanied the figure of my father to visit an engine driver and listen to him talk about how the Railroad Company had changed his life, in spite of having been attacked more times than he could remember in his years of work and having, to prove it, scars of a dozen knife wounds still visible in his torso (“Touch them, sir, go ahead and touch them, doesn’t bother me”); during the night, I found out with a wealth of detail that Panama was a better territory than Nicaragua for opening the Canal, in spite of the Gringos’ expeditions producing the opposite findings (“Out of pure spite toward Colombia,” according to my father). During the day. . During the night. . During the day. . et cetera.