Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

He followed him closely when de Lesseps visited the old church of Santo Domingo, whose arch defied the laws of gravity and of architecture, and took note of every admiring comment the admiring tourist came out with. He followed him while de Lesseps shook the hands of the Mayor and military officials in the Panama City station (neither the Mayor nor the officers would wash their hands for the rest of the day). He followed him while he walked through the recently swept and cleaned streets, under French flags sewn ad hoc by the wives of the most distinguished politicians (just as years later another flag would be sewn, the first one of a country that perhaps began to exist the very afternoon when de Lesseps visited the city, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves or jump to conclusions), and he accompanied him to the Grand Hotel, a colonial cloister recently opened with every luxury along one of the longest flanks of the cathedral plaza, whose paving stones — those of the plaza, of course, not the hotel — were normally occupied by carriages pulled by old horses, the noise of their hooves on the stones, and this time by baby-faced soldiers dressed in white and as silent as nervous children about to take their first communion. In the Grand Hotel, before my father’s fascinated gaze, the welcome banquet was held with French food and a pianist brought from Bogotá—“From where?” asked de Lesseps. “From Bogotá,” he was told — to play a barcarole or some gentle polonaise while the local leaders of the Liberal Party told de Lesseps what Victor Hugo had said, that the constitution of the United States of Colombia was made for a country of angels, not human beings, or something along those lines. For those Colombian politicians, who barely sixty years before were inhabitants of a colony, the mere attention of that prophet, author of The Last Day of a Condemned Man and of Les Misérables , the defense counsel of humanity, was the greatest praise in the world, and they wanted de Lesseps to know it: because the attention of de Lesseps was also the greatest praise in the world. De Lesseps asked a banal question, his eyes widened slightly at an anecdote, and the colonized suddenly felt that their entire existence would take on new meaning. If Ferdinand de Lesseps had wished, they would have danced a mapalé or a cumbia right there for him, or better yet a cancan, so he wouldn’t go away thinking we were all Indians here. For there, in the Isthmus of Panama, the colonial spirit floated in the air, like tuberculosis. Or maybe, it occurred to me at some point, Colombia had never stopped being a colony, and time and politics simply swapped one colonizer for another. For the colony, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

When the banquet was over, my father, who had already reserved a room with a view of the interior patio and its fountain where brightly colored fish swam, followed de Lesseps until he saw him retire at last, and was getting ready to retire as well when the door to the billiard room opened and a young man with a waxed mustache and chalk stains on his fingers came out into the corridor and began to speak to him as if he’d known him his whole life. He was part of the Lafayette delegation, had arrived with Monsieur de Lesseps, and would be part of the press office of the Compagnie back in Paris. People had spoken to him very highly of my father’s journalistic work, he said, and even Monsieur de Lesseps had a very good impression from meeting him. He had read some of his articles about the Railroad, his columns in the Star & Herald , and now he would like to propose a permanent connection to the Magnificent Canal Venture. “A pen like yours would be a great help to us in the struggle against Skepticism, which is, as you know so well, the worst enemy of Progress.” And before the night was over, my father found himself playing a three-cushion frame with a group of Frenchmen (and, by the way, losing by several caroms and tearing the imported baize), and he would forever associate the resplendent green of that baize and the clinking of the immaculate ivory balls with the moment when he said yes, that he accepted and felt it an honor to do so, that starting tomorrow he would be the Panama correspondent of the Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique . The Bulletin , to its friends.

And the next morning, before going to stand by the hotel entrance to wait for de Lesseps’s departure, before accompanying him to the hotel dining room where three elite engineers were waiting to talk about the Canal and its problems and its possibilities, before going out with him and getting in the same dugout as him to navigate two or three bends of the enemy Chagres beneath a pulverizing sun, before all that, my father told me what I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. He did so with the evident (and very problematic) feeling of having begun to form part of history, of having begun to imitate the Angel, and perhaps, in a certain sense, he wasn’t wrong. Of course I didn’t speak to my father of the Refractive Effect of his journalism or of the possible impact that effect might have had on the decision of those Frenchmen thirsty for contracted propaganda; I asked him, instead, what opinion he’d formed of that Old Diplomatic Fox, a man who to me was the bearer of a smile much more dangerous than any furrowed brow, author of handshakes more lethal than a stabbing, and at my impudent question and comments my father turned serious, very serious, more serious than I’d ever seen him, and said, with something halfway between frustration and pride: “He’s the man I would have liked to be.”

“Let there be a canal,” said de Lesseps, and the Canal. . began to come into being. But this did not happen before his sleepy feline eyes: the Great Man returned to Paris — and his return in perfect health was tangible proof that the murderous Panamanian climate was nothing but a myth — and from the offices on rue Caumartin acted as general in chief of an army of engineers managed from the distance, an army sent to these savage tropics to defeat the guerrillas of the Climate, to achieve the subjugation of treacherous Hydrology. And my father would be the narrator of that clash, yes sir, the Thucydides of that war. For Miguel Altamirano, something obvious emerged in those days, vivid and prophetic like a solar eclipse: his manifest destiny, which only now, at sixty-some years of age, was being revealed to him, was to leave written testimony to the supreme victory of Man over the Forces of Nature. Because that’s what the Inter-oceanic Canal was: the battlefield where Nature, legendary enemy of Progress, would at last sign an unconditional surrender.

In January 1881, while Korzeniowski was sailing Australian seas, the good old Lafayette entered those of Panama, bringing a shipment that my father described in his article as a Noah’s Ark for modern times. Down the gangplank came not pairs of all the animals in creation but something much more definitive: fifty engineers and their families. And for a couple of hours there were more École Polytechnique graduates in the port of Colón than porters to take them to the hotel. On February 1, one of those engineers, a certain Armand Reclus, wrote to the rue Caumartin offices: TRAVAIL COMMENCÉ. The two glorious words of the telegram reproduced like rabbits in every newspaper in the hexagone of France; that night my father stayed on Front Street in Colón, going from the General Grant to the nearest Jamaican shack, and from there to the groups of inoffensive drunks (and others who were a little less so) to the loading docks, until dawn reminded him of his respectable age. He arrived at the house on stilts with the first light, drunk on brandy but also on guarapo , because he’d shared toasts and drinks with anyone willing to humor him. “Three cheers for de Lesseps and three cheers for the Canal!” he shouted.