Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Allow me to say it again: these were convulsive times. No, dear readers, I’m not referring to that spoiled idea of politicians who have nothing else to say. I’m not referring to the elections that the Conservatives stole in the Colombian State of Santander, getting rid of Liberal votes and fabricating Conservative ones where there weren’t any; nor am I referring to the Liberal reaction already beginning to think of armed revolutions, of convening revolutionary juntas and raising revolutionary funds. No, Eloísa dear: I’m not referring to the fear of another civil war between Conservatives and Liberals, the constant fear that accompanied Colombians like a faithful dog, and that would not take long, not very long at all, to materialize again. . I’m not referring to the declarations in a secret session of a certain radical leader, who assured the Senate of the Republic that he had news that “the United States had resolved to take possession of the Isthmus of Panama,” much less to the reply of an unsuspecting Conservative for whom “the alarmist voices” should not frighten the nation, for “the Panamanian is happy as a citizen of this Republic, and would never swap his honorable poverty for the soulless comforts of those gold diggers.” No, I’m not referring to any of that. When I say these were convulsive times, I’m referring to less metaphorical and much more literal convulsions. Let us put it clearly: Panama was a place where things shook.

In the space of one year, the inhabitants of the Isthmus took fright at each explosion of the imported dynamite, and very soon grew accustomed to each explosion of imported dynamite: Panama was a place where things shook. There were months when Panamanians were dropping to their knees and beginning to pray every time the steam-powered dredgers opened the earth, and then the dredgers began to form part of the auditory landscape and Panamanians stopped kneeling, for Panama was a place where things shook. . In the yellow-fever wards, the beds reverberated on the wooden floors, lifted by the force of the shivering, and nobody, nobody was surprised: Panama, Readers of the Jury, was a place where things shook.

Well then: on September 7, 1882, came the great shake.

It was 3:29 in the morning when the movements started. I hasten to say they did not last more than a minute; but in that short minute I managed to think first of dynamite, then that this was no time to be setting charges in the Canal zone, then of the French machines, and I ruled them out for the same reason. At that moment a ceramic flowerpot, which had belonged to Mr. Watts, the previous resident of the house on stilts, and which had slept peacefully on top of the cupboard until then, walked four hand spans and threw itself off the edge. The whole cupboard fell immediately after that (crash of crockery smashing, shards of glass scattered dangerously across the floor). My father and I barely had time to grab the bony hand of the dead Chinaman and a drawer from the filing cabinet and get out of the house before the earthquake broke the stilts and the house came down, clumsy and heavy and hulking like a shot buffalo. And at the same time, not far from the residential neighborhood of the Panama Railroad Company, the Madiniers went outside, both in pajamas and both frightened, before the portraits of Julien were smashed against the floor of Jefferson House, and before, luckily, Jefferson House — or at least its façade — crashed to the street, raising a dust cloud that made several of the witnesses sneeze.

The earthquake of 1882, which for many was a new episode of the French Curse, brought down the Colón church as if it were made of cards, ripped up the railway sleepers for 150 meters, and ran down Front Street tearing it as if with a dull knife. Its first consequence: my father got down to work. The bed of the Great Trench collapsed and the walls of the excavation collapsed, ruining a good deal of the work already done, and an encampment near Miraflores disappeared — instruments, personnel, and a steam-powered digger — into the earth that opened as the dynamite had not been able to open it. And in the midst of that disconsolate panorama, my father wrote: “No one is worried, no one is wary, work proceeds without the slightest delay.”

In his writings that followed, did he mention the Colón City Hall, of which not one stone remained on top of another? Did he mention the roofs of the Grand Hotel that buried the general headquarters of the Company, several maps, a contractor recently arrived from the United States, and one or two engineers? No, my father did not see any of that. The reason: at that moment he had acquired, definitively now, the famous Colombian illness of SB (Selective Blindness), also known as PB (Partial Blindness) and even as RIP (Retinopathy due to Interests of a Political nature). For him — and, in consequence, for the readers of the Bulletin , actual and potential shareholders — the Canal works would be finished in half the time predicted and would cost half the anticipated money; the machines that were working were double the existing number but had cost half as much; the cubic meters of earth excavated per month, which was never more than 200,000, was transformed in the Bulletin reports to a good million with all its zeros in place. De Lesseps was happy. The shareholders — actual ones, potential ones — too. Three cheers for France, and three cheers for the Canal, damn it.

Meanwhile, in the Isthmus, the War for Progress was being fought on three fronts: the construction of the Canal, the repair of the railway, and the reconstruction of Colón and Panama City, and Thucydides reported the news in detail (with the details his RIP allowed him to see). Now that the house on stilts had fallen down, I witnessed for the first time the practical effects of my father’s Blindness: not four days passed before he was allocated one of the picturesque habitations of Christophe Colomb, the hamlet built for the white technicians of the Canal Company. It was a prefabricated construction, set down beside the sea with its own hammock and brightly colored blinds like a doll’s house, and we would live in it at no charge whatsoever. It was regal treatment, and my father felt at the back of his neck the unsubtle blow of the Flattery of the Powerful, that which in other places is known under different aliases: sweetener or bribe, enticement or kickback.

The satisfaction, besides, was double: four houses along the way, almost simultaneously, another couple displaced by the earthquake moved in, Gustave and Charlotte Madinier. Everyone was agreed that getting out of that horrible hotel full of dark memories would bring about notable benefits, tabula rasa and all that. In the evenings, after dinner, my father walked the fifty meters that separated us from the Madiniers’ little house, or they walked over to ours, and we sat on the veranda with brandy and cigars to watch the yellow moon dissolve in the waters of Limón Bay and be glad that Monsieur Madinier had decided to stay. Dear readers, I don’t know how to explain it, but something had happened after the earthquake. A transformation of our lives, maybe, or maybe the beginning of a new life.

They say in Panama that the nights in Colón favor intimacies. The causes are, I suppose, scientifically indemonstrable. There is something in the melancholy moan of a certain owl that seems always to be saying “ Ya acabó —All done”; there is something in the darkness of the nights that makes you feel you could reach up a hand and grab a piece of the Great Bear; and most of all (to leave off the schmaltz) there is something very tangible in the immediacy of danger, whose incarnations are not limited to a bored jaguar who decides to make an excursion out of the jungle, or the occasional scorpion who sneaks into your shoe, or the violence of Colón-Gomorrah, where since the arrival of the French there were more machetes and revolvers than picks and shovels. Danger in Colón is a daily and protean creature, and one becomes accustomed to its smell and soon forgets its presence. Fear unites; in Panama, we were afraid although we did not know it. And that’s why, it occurs to me now, that a night facing Limón Bay, as long as the sky was clear and the rainy season was over, was able to produce intimate friendships. That’s how it was for us: under my secretarial gaze, my father and the Madiniers spent one hundred and forty-five evenings of friendship and confessions. Gustave confessed that the Canal works were an almost inhuman challenge, but confronting that challenge was an honor and a privilege. Charlotte confessed that the image of Julien, her dead son, no longer tormented her but rather kept her company in moments of solitude, like a guardian angel. The Madiniers confessed (in unison and slightly out of tune) that never, since their marriage, had they felt so close.