Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

And all of Colón seemed to respond: “Hurrah!”

Eloísa, dear: if my tale had taken place in these cinematographic times (ah, the cinematographer: a creature my father would have liked), the camera would focus right now on a window of Jefferson House, which was, let’s be frank, the only hotel in all of Colón worthy of the engineers from the Lafayette . The camera approaches the window, hovers briefly over the slide rules, protractors, and compasses, moves to focus on the fast-asleep face of a five-year-old child and the trickle of saliva that darkens the red velvet of the cushion, and after passing through a closed door — nothing is forbidden the magic of cameras — captures the last movements of a couple at the height of ecstasy. That they’re not local is obvious from their respective levels of perspiration. I will refer to the woman at length a few lines further on, but for now it is important to note that her eyes are closed, that she’s covering her husband’s mouth to keep him from waking the child with the inevitable (and imminent) noises of his orgasm, and that her small breasts have always been a cause of disputes between her and her bodices. As for the man: between his thorax and that of his wife is an angle of thirty degrees; his pelvis moves with the precision and the invincible regularity of a piston; and his ability to conserve these variables — the angle and the frequency of movement — is due, in large part, to his ingenious use of a lever of the third kind. In which, as everyone knows, the Power is between the Weight and the Fulcrum. Yes, my intelligent readers, you have guessed: the man was an engineer.

His name was Gustave Madinier. He had graduated with honors first from the Polytechnique and later from the École des Ponts et Chaussées; during his brilliant career, he had found himself obliged on more than one occasion to repeat that he was no relation to the other Madinier, the one who fought with Napoleon at Vincennes and later developed a mathematical theory of fire. No, our Madinier, our dear Gustave, who at this very moment is ejaculating into his wife while reciting to himself, “Give me a lever and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the earth,” was responsible for twenty-nine bridges that cover the French Republic, or rather her rivers and lakes, from Perpignan to Calais. He was the author of two books: Les fleuves et leur franchissement and Pour une nouvelle théorie des câbles ; his works had caught the attention of the Suez team, and his participation was decisive in the construction of the new city of Ismaelia. Coming to Panama as part of the Compagnie du Canal had been, for him, as natural as having children after marriage.

And now that we’re on that subject: Gustave Madinier had married Charlotte de la Môle in early 1876, that magic year for my father and for me, and five months later Julien was born, weighing 3,200 grams and generating an equal number of malicious comments. Charlotte de la Môle, the woman whose small breasts were a challenge for any bodice, had been a challenge for her husband, too: she was stubborn, willful, and unbearably attractive. (Gustave liked the way her breasts contracted to her ribs when she was cold, because it gave him the feeling he was fornicating with a very young girl. But these were guilty pleasures; Gustave was not proud of them, and only once, while drunk, had he confessed them to his wife.) The fact of the matter was that the collective voyage to Panama had been Charlotte’s idea, and she hadn’t needed more than a couple of couplings to convince the engineer. And there, in the room in the Jefferson House, while her husband falls into a satisfied sleep and begins to snore, Charlotte feels that she made the right decision, for she knows that behind every great engineer stands a very determined woman. Yes, their first images of Colón — its putrefying odors, the unbearable assiduousness of its insects, the chaos of its streets — had provoked a brief disenchantment; but soon the woman fixed her gaze on the clear sky, and the dry heat of February opened her pores and entered her blood, and she liked that. Charlotte did not know that the heat was not always dry, the sky not always clear. Someone, some charitable soul, should have told her. No one did.

It was during those days that Sarah Bernhardt arrived. Readers’ eyes widen, skeptical comments are uttered, but it’s true: Sarah Bernhardt was there. The actress’s visit was another symptom of the navelization of Panama, the sudden displacement of the Isthmus to the very center of the world. . La Bernhardt arrived, for a change, in that dispenser of French figures that was the Lafayette , and stayed in Colón only long enough to catch the train to Panama City (and earn her brief inclusion in this book). In a tiny and sweltering theater, set up in haste in one of the lateral salons of the Grand Hotel, before an audience made up entirely, with one exception, of French people, Sarah Bernhardt appeared on a stage with two chairs and, with the help of a young amateur actor she’d brought with her from Paris, recited, from memory and without a slip, all the speeches of Racine’s Phèdre . A week later she’d taken the train again, but in the opposite direction, and returned to Europe without having spoken to a single Panamanian. . but securing, nevertheless, a place in my tale. For that night, the night of Phèdre , two people applauded more than the rest. One was Charlotte Madinier, for whom the presence of Sarah Bernhardt had been like a balsam against the unbearable tedium of life in the Isthmus. The other was the man in charge of registering every beneficial or worthwhile experience that occurred as a consequence (directly or indirectly) of the construction of the Canal: Miguel Altamirano.

I’ll tell it plainly: Charlotte Madinier and Miguel Altamirano met that night, exchanged names and pleasantries and even classical alexandrines, but it was quite some time before they would see each other again. Something, in any case, quite normal: she was a married woman, and all her time was taken up in being respectably bored; he, for his part, was never still, because at that time there was never an instant when there wasn’t something happening in Panama worthy of review in the Bulletin . Charlotte met my father, forgot him straightaway, and carried on with her own routine, and from the vantage point of that routine watched the dry February air grow denser as the weeks passed, and one night in May she awoke in a fright, because she thought the city was being bombed. She looked out the window: it was raining. Her husband looked out with her, and in a glance calculated that in the forty-five minutes the downpour lasted more water had fallen than fell on France in a whole year. Charlotte saw the flooded streets, the banana peels and palm leaves that passed floating in the current, and every once in a while caught sight of more intimidating objects: a dead rat, for example, or a human turd. Identical downpours occurred eleven more times over the course of the month, and Charlotte, who watched from her seclusion as Colón turned into a swamp over which flew insects of all sizes, began to wonder if the trip hadn’t been a mistake.

And then one day in July, her son woke up with chills. Julien was shaking violently, as if his bed had a life of its own, and the chattering of his teeth was perfectly audible in spite of the downpour lashing the terrace. Gustave was at the Canal construction site, evaluating the damage caused by the rains; Charlotte, dressed in the still-damp clothes she’d had laundered the previous day, carried the child in her arms and arrived at the hospital in a dilapidated buggy. The chills had ceased, but as she laid Julien down in the bed he’d been assigned, Charlotte put the back of her hand against his forehead more out of instinct than anything else, and in the same instant realized the boy was burning up with fever and that his eyes had rolled back in his head. Julien moved his mouth like a grazing cow; he stuck out his dry tongue and there was no saliva in his mouth. But Charlotte could not find enough water to quench his thirst (which, in the middle of a downpour, was nothing if not ironic). Gustave arrived mid-afternoon, having run all over the city asking in French if anyone had seen his wife, and had finally decided, in order to exhaust all possibilities, to go to the hospital. Sitting in hard wooden chairs with backs that fell off if you leaned on them, Gustave and Charlotte spent the night, sleeping upright when exhaustion overcame them, taking turns in a sort of private superstition to take Julien’s temperature. At dawn, Charlotte was awakened by silence. It had stopped raining and her husband was doubled over asleep, his head between his knees, his arms hanging down to the floor. She reached out her hand and felt a wave of relief at finding the fever had gone down. And then she tried, without success, to wake Julien up.