Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

I had no reason to know it, but at that time meetings were taking place at 184 boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris, between representatives of more than twenty countries, including the United States of Colombia. For two weeks they had devoted themselves to doing the same thing my father and I did in the Colón nights: discuss the plausibility (and the difficulties and the implications) of constructing a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Among the distinguished orators was Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, who was still stopping in the middle of the street, like a mangy dog, to scratch bites from isthmian mosquitoes, or waking up screaming in horror after being visited, during a sweaty dream, by one of the dead engineers from the Darien Jungle. In spite of having failed on his expedition, in spite of lacking engineering knowledge, Lieutenant Wyse — recently shaved and with the concession signed by Eustorgio Salgar safely tucked into the pocket of his jacket — ventured that Panama was the only place on Earth able to host the colossal undertaking of an inter-oceanic canal. He also ventured that constructing a canal at sea level was the only method able to bring the project to a successful conclusion. To a question about the monstrous volume of the Chagres River, the history of its floods that seemed taken from Genesis, and the inventory of shipwrecks that lay on its bed as if it weren’t a river but a mini Bermuda Triangle, he replied: “A French engineer does not know the word problem.” His opinion, backed up by the heroic figure of Ferdinand de Lesseps, maker of Suez, convinced the delegates. Seventy-eight of them, of which seventy-four were personal friends of de Lesseps, voted unreservedly in favor of Wyse’s project.

There followed several tributes, banquets all over Paris, but one interests me in particular. In the Café Riche, representing the illustrious Colombian community, a certain Alberto Urdaneta organized a lavish banquet: two musical ensembles, silver dinner service, a liveried servant for each diner, and even a couple of interpreters who circulated throughout the salon to facilitate communication among the guests. His intention was to commemorate both Colombian independence and de Lesseps’s victory over the delegates of the boulevard Saint-Germain Congress. The banquet was a sort of quintessence of Colombianness and of Colombia, that country where everybody — I mean, every body — is a poet, and anybody who isn’t is an orator. And so it was: there was poetry, and there were also speeches. On the back of the gilded lithographed menu were portraits of Bolívar and Santander. Behind Bolívar, three verses which themselves resembled gilded lithographs and that were, viewed from whichever angle, as close as you can get to political masturbation, so much so that I think them superfluous here. Behind Santander, on the other hand, was this gem of adolescent versification, a quartet that could have come out of the composition book of a refined señorita from one of the finest private schools in Bogotá.

Courageous, unwavering skipper

Proud monarchs you cut down to size

Now your foot wears a magistrate’s slipper

And your hand is unflinching and wise.

The speech was the responsibility (in a manner of speaking) of a certain Quijano Wallis. The orator said: “Thus as the sons of Arabia who, wherever they may find themselves on this earth, overcoming the distance in spirit, bow toward their holy city, so, too, we send our thoughts across the Atlantic, where they are warmed in the tropical sun, and fall to our knees on our beloved beaches to greet and bless Colombia on her day of rejoicing. Our fathers made us independent from the Mother Country; Monsieur de Lesseps will make universal commerce independent of the obstacle of the Isthmus and perhaps free Colombia forever from civil discord.”

His thought, I suppose, crossed the Atlantic, warmed itself, and knelt and greeted and blessed and all those things. . And at the end of that year, in the hottest and driest season, the ones who did cross the Atlantic (without kneeling, to be sure) were the French. The Star & Herald commissioned my father to write — in prose, if at all possible — about Ferdinand de Lesseps and his team of Gallic heroes. After all, the representatives of the government, the bankers and journalists, the analysts of our incipient economy and historians of our incipient republic, all were for once in perfect agreement: for Colón, that was the Most Important Visit since the long-ago day when Cristóbal Colón himself accidentally discovered our convulsive lands.

From the moment de Lesseps disembarked from the Lafayette , speaking perfect Spanish with everyone, looking with his curious, sleepy feline gaze, throwing left and right a smile the likes of which Panamanians had never seen in their lives, flaunting a full head of white hair that made him look like a half-finished Santa Claus, my father didn’t let him out of his sight for an instant. In the evening he walked a few steps from his prey down the main street of Colón, passing beneath tissue-paper lanterns that seemed about to burst into flames, in front of the railway station and later in front of the dock where Korzeniowski and Cervoni had unloaded the contraband weapons, in front of the hotel where his son had stayed his first night in Colón, before he knew he had a son, and in front of the premises where the most famous piece of watermelon in the world was sold and where diners and other onlookers died under gunfire. The next morning he spied on him from a prudent distance and saw him go out with three velvet-clad children beneath the unbearable sun, and saw the children running happily among the carrion on the streets and the smell of rotting fruit, and running up to startle a flock of black buzzards snacking on a newborn donkey a few steps from the sea. He saw him catch an Indian woman off guard on the Pacific Mail pier (when the band hired by the Mayor exploded into metallic sounds to celebrate his arrival) and try to dance with her to music that was not danceable but rather martial, and when the woman yanked herself away from him and crouched down at the edge of the sea to wash her hands with a look of disgust, de Lesseps kept smiling, and what’s more, began to chuckle and shout out his love for the tropics and the bright, the radiant ( radieux ) future awaiting them.

De Lesseps climbed aboard the train to Panama City and my father climbed up after him, and when the train arrived at the Chagres River, he saw him shout to the man in charge and order him to stop the locomotive because he, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had to take home a glass of the enemy’s water, and the entire delegation — the Gringos, the Colombians, the French — raised glasses and toasted the victory of the Canal and the defeat of the Chagres River, and while the glasses clinked in the air one of de Lesseps’s envoys jogged through the hamlet of Gatún, along muddy paths and across pastures that came up to his knees, and arrived at an improvised dock where a canoe rested, and crouched down beside the canoe as the Indian woman had crouched down by the pier and collected in a recently emptied champagne glass a greenish liquid that came out full of slimy algae and dead flies. The only time my father spoke to de Lesseps was when the train passed Mount Hope, where employees had buried their dead during the construction of the railway, and he decided to speak to him in a burst of enthusiasm about the Chinamen in barrels of ice he’d had sent to Bogotá—“Where?” asked de Lesseps. “Bogotá,” repeated my father — and that, if they hadn’t been of use to the student doctors in the university of the capital, they would surely have ended up here, under this earth, under the orchids and mushrooms. Then he shook hands with de Lesseps and said, “Pleasure to meet you,” or “Pleasure to make your acquaintance” (pleasure, in any case, was present in his phrase), and swiftly returned to the edge of the group, trying not to disturb, and from the edge observing de Lesseps during the rest of the journey of that fortunate train, that historic train, through the leafy darkness of the jungle.