Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

“We owe it to you, Monsieur Altamirano,” said the engineer.

“Sir,” said my diplomatic father, “Colombia owes you so much more.”

“It’s the earthquake you owe,” I said.

“None of that,” said Charlotte. “We owe it to Sarah Bernhardt.”

And laughter. And toasts. And alexandrine verses.

At the end of April, my father asked the engineer to take him to see the machines. They left at dawn, after a spoonful of whiskey with quinine to avert what Panamanians called a temperature and the French paludisme , and they took a dugout down the Chagres to go over to the excavations at Gatún. The machines were my father’s latest love: a steam-powered digger could absorb his attention for long minutes; a North American dredger, like the ones that had arrived at the beginning of that year, could arouse sighs from him like the ones my mother had surely aroused on the Isabel (but that was another time). One of those dredgers, parked a kilometer from Gatún like a gigantic beer barrel, was the dugout’s first port of call. The rowers approached the shore and stuck their oars into the riverbed so my father could contemplate, still and hypnotized in spite of the harassment of the mosquitoes, the magic of the hulking great thing. Panama was a place where things shook: the chains of the monster sounded like a medieval prisoner’s shackles, the iron buckets jolted as they lifted the extracted earth, and then came the spitting of pressurized water that launched the earth away from the work site with a hissing that gave him goose bumps. My father took attentive notes on all of that, and began to think of comparisons taken from some book on dinosaurs or from Gulliver’s Travels , when he turned around to thank Madinier but found him with his head between his knees. The engineer said the whiskey had not agreed with him. They decided to go back.

That evening they gathered (we gathered) on the veranda, and the ritual of cigars and brandy was repeated. Madinier said he felt much better; he didn’t know what had happened, he said, he was going to have to take better care of his stomach from then on. He had a couple of drinks, and Charlotte thought it was because of the alcohol when she saw him stand up in the middle of the conversation to go and lie down in the hammock. My father and Charlotte were not talking about Sarah Bernhardt or about Racine’s Phèdre or about the improvised theater in the Grand Hotel, because now they were friends, now they felt like friends, and they didn’t need those codes. They were talking, not without nostalgia, of their pasts in other places; until now they hadn’t realized that my father was also a stranger in Panama, that he had also gone through the processes of the recent arrival — the efforts to learn, the anxiousness to adapt — and having that in common stimulated them. Charlotte told how she’d met Gustave. They had attended a more or less private sort of celebration in the Jardin des Plantes; they were celebrating the departure of a team of engineers to Suez. There they had met, said Charlotte, and soon they were lost on purpose in Buffon’s labyrinth, just so they could talk without anyone interrupting them. Charlotte was repeating what Gustave had explained to her that evening — that in order to get out of a labyrinth, if the walls are all connected, you need only keep the same hand on one of the walls, and sooner or later you would find the exit or return to the entrance — when she stopped mid-sentence and her flat chest was as still as the surface of a lake. My father and I turned instinctively to look at what she was looking at, and this is what we saw: the hammock, swollen under the weight of the engineer Gustave Madinier, molded to the curve of his buttocks and the angle of his elbows, had begun to tremble, and the beams from which it hung creaked desperately. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it yet: Panama, dear readers, was a place where things shook.

In a matter of minutes the chills stopped and the fever and thirst began. But there was something new: with the little lucidity he had left, Madinier began to say that his head ached, and the pain was so savage that at one point he asked my father to shoot him, for pity’s sake, to shoot him. Charlotte refused to let us take him to the hospital, in spite of my father’s insistence, and what we did was lift up the aching body and carry it to my bed, which was the closest to the veranda. And there, on my linen sheets recently purchased at half price from a West Indian shopkeeper, Gustave Madinier spent the night. His wife stayed with him as she had stayed with Julien, and undoubtedly the memory of Julien plagued her during the night. When dawn broke, and Gustave told her that his head was feeling better, that there was no longer such terrible pain in his legs and back, just a vague restlessness, Charlotte didn’t even notice the yellowish tone that had invaded his skin and eyes, but let herself be swept up with relief. She admitted she should sleep a little; the exhaustion kept her slumbering well into the evening. It was already dark when I chanced to see the moment when her husband began to vomit a black and viscous substance that could not be blood, no, sir, I swear it could not be blood.

Gustave Madinier’s death was sadly famous in the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb. The neighbors obliged my father to burn the linen sheets, along with every glass/cup/piece of cutlery that might have entered into contact with the contaminated lips of the poor engineer; the same obligation held, obviously, for Charlotte. Of course, the stubborn and willfull woman put up some resistance at first: she was not going to part with those memories, she wasn’t going to burn the last mementos of her husband without putting up a fight. The French Consul in Colón had to come and force her, by way of an insolent decree adorned with all the stamps in the world, to carry out that purifying bonfire in front of everyone. (The Consul would die of yellow fever, with spasms and black vomit, three weeks later; but that small piece of poetic justice is not relevant now.) My father and I were the labor force for that inquisitional ceremony; and in the middle of the main street of Christophe Colomb a pile gradually grew of blankets and ties, of boar-bristle hairbrushes and straight razors, treatises on Resistance Theory and family photo albums, untrimmed editions of Les fleuves et leur franchissement and of Pour une nouvelle théorie des câbles , crystal goblets and porcelain plates, and even a loaf of rye bread with dirty bite marks. It all burned with a mixture of smells, with black smoke, and once the flames died down a scorched, dark mass remained. I saw my father hug Charlotte Madinier and then get a pail, walk to the edge of the bay, and return with enough water to extinguish the last fading embers. When he came back, when he emptied the pail over the recognizable cover of an album of picture cards that had been blue velvet, Charlotte was no longer there.

She lived four doors down from us, but we lost sight of her. Every day, after the burning, my father and I passed by her veranda and rapped on the wooden frame of the screen door. But there was never an answer. It was futile to try to peek indiscreetly: Charlotte had covered the windows with dark clothing (Parisian capes, long taffeta skirts). It must have been about five or six months after the engineer’s death when we saw her go out, very early, and leave the door open. My father followed her; I followed my father. Charlotte walked toward the port carrying in her right hand — for the left was covered up to the wrist in a badly wrapped bandage — a small case like the ones doctors use. She didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear my father’s words, his greetings, his reiterated condolences; when she arrived at Front Street, she headed, like a horse heading home, to the Maggs & Oates pawnshop. She handed over the case and received in exchange a sum that seemed previously agreed upon (on some of the notes was a drawing of a railway, on others a map, on still others an old ex-President); and all this she did with her face turned toward Limón Bay and her eyes fixed on the Bordeaux , a steamer that had anchored in the bay thirty days earlier and now floated there deserted, for the entire crew had died of fever. “Je m’en vais,” repeated Charlotte with her eyes very wide. My father followed her all the way back home and all she said was: “Je m’en vais.” My father climbed the porch steps behind her and managed to receive a solid whiff of human filth, and all she said was: “Je m’en vais.”