Juan Vasquez: The Secret History of Costaguana

“Medieval!” shouted my father from some printed page or other. “Rancid Papist!” But to no avail: Father Valenzuela’s network of loyalties was solid, and soon the parishioners from neighboring towns, Chía and Bosa and Zipaquirá, did what they could to prevent the students from the sinful capital having recourse to other morgues. The university’s civil authorities came under pressure from the heads of (good) families, and before anyone realized, they had yielded before the blackmail. Upon the university dissection tables crowded the open frogs — the white, porous bellies slit by the scalpel in a violet line — and in the kitchen half the chickens were destined for the stew pot and the other half for the operating room. The Embargo on Bodies became a topic of conversation in the salons and in a matter of weeks was taking up significant space in the newspapers. My father declared the foundation of the New Materialism, and in several manifestos quoted conversations with different authorities: “On the dissection table,” said one, “the tip of my scalpel has never encountered a soul.” Others, more daring (and often anonymous): “The Holy Trinity is something else now: the Holy Spirit has been replaced by Laplace.” The followers, whether voluntary or not, of Father Valenzuela founded in their turn the Old Spiritualism, and produced their own share of witnesses and publicity phrases. They were able to release one accurate and convincing fact: Pascal and Newton had been faithful and practicing Christians. They were able to release a slogan, cheap but no less effective for it: TWO CUPS OF SCIENCE LEAD TO ATHEISM, BUT THREE CUPS LEAD TO FAITH. And thus the matter progressed (or rather did not).

The city watched the vultures squabble. The corpses of cholera victims, which had been leaving the San Juan de Dios Hospital, sporadically, for the last year, were viewed with the avarice of merchants by the radical students, but also by Father Valenzuela’s crusading followers. When one of the patients admitted with fever and vomiting became too thirsty or too cold, word began to circulate and the political forces to prepare themselves: Father Valenzuela came to perform the last rites, and in the midst of them obliged the patient (with bluish skin, eyes sunk deep into the head) to sign a testament containing the unambiguous clause “I die in Christ; I deny my body to science.” My father published an article accusing the priests of denying the patients divine absolution unless they signed those prefabricated testaments; and the priests replied accusing the Materialists of denying those same patients not absolution but tartar emetic. And in the midst of those foul debates, no one stopped to wonder how the illness had managed to climb to 2,600 meters above sea level or whence it had arrived.

Then fate intervened, as tends to happen in history and will happen often in mine, and did so disguised as a foreigner, as a man-fromelsewhere. (Which increased the fears of the Spiritualists. Enclosed as they were on an inaccessible plateau, ten days’ travel away from the Caribbean coast — which in winter could be double — Father Valenzuela’s followers had ensconced themselves in the condition of blinkered horses, and all that came from outside seemed to them worthy of meticulous suspicion.) During those days my father was seen meeting a man who was not from the city. They were seen coming out of the Observatory, or going together to the Commission for Cleanliness and Sanitation, or even entering my grandparents’ house to hold secret conversations among the nettles of the patio, far from the servants. But the servants, two widowed freedwomen and their adolescent children, had arts my father could not have anticipated, and so the street, and then the block, and then the neighborhood, began to find out that the man was tongue-tied when he spoke (by Beelzebub, said Valenzuela), that he was the owner of a train, and that he had come to sell to the University of Bogotá as many dead Chinamen as it wanted to buy.

“If the local dead are forbidden,” my father was heard to say, “then foreign dead will have to be used. If Christian dead are forbidden, we’ll have to avail ourselves of others.”

And that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the Old Spiritualism.

Among the suspicious was Presbyter Echavarría, of the Santo Tomás Church, a younger man than Valenzuela and more, yes, much more energetic.

And the foreigner?

The man from elsewhere?

Some words on that character or, rather, some clarifications. He was not actually tongue-tied but spoke Spanish with a Boston accent; he was not the owner of a train but the representative of the Panama Railroad Company, and he did not come to sell dead Chinamen to the university but rather. . Well, all right: he did come to sell dead Chinamen to the university, or at least that was one of his various missions as ambassador in the capital. Need I state the obvious? His mission was a success. My father and the Materialists had found themselves with their backs against the wall, or rather the opposing side had pushed them there; they were desperate, of course, because this was more than a debate in the press: it was a fundamental battle in the long struggle of Light against Darkness. The appearance of the man from the Company — Clarence was his name, and he was the son of Protestants — was providential. The arrangement did not come about immediately: a number of letters, a number of authorizations, a number of incentives (Valenzuela said bribes) were needed, but in July, there arrived from Honda, and before that from Barranquilla, and before that from the brand-new city of Colón, founded only a few months earlier, fifteen barrels full of ice. In each one came a Chinese coolie doubled over and recently deceased from dysentery or malaria, or even cholera, which in Bogotá was now a thing of the past. Many other nameless cadavers were leaving Panama for many other destinations, and this would continue to happen until the railway works came out the other side of the swamp they were in at the time, until they reached some land where it would be possible to build a cemetery able to withstand the ravages of the climate until Judgment Day.

And the dead Chinamen had a story to tell. Calm yourself, Eloísa dear: this is not one of those books where the dead speak, or where beautiful women ascend to the sky, or priests rise above the ground after drinking a steaming potion. But I hope I’ll be granted some license, and I hope it’ll not be just this once. The university paid an undisclosed sum for the dead Chinamen, but according to some it was not more than three pesos per corpse; in other words, a seamstress could buy herself a cadaver with three months’ work. Soon young surgeons were able to sink their scalpels into the yellow skin; and lying there, cold and pale, launched on a race against their own rate of decomposition, the Chinese workers began to speak of the Panama railroad. They said things that everyone now knows, but which in those days were fresh pieces of news for the great majority of the thirty thousand inhabitants of the capital. The scene now begins to move northward (in space) and recede a few years (in time). And thus, without any other tricks than my own sovereignty over this tale, we arrive at Coloma, California. The year is 1848. More precisely, it is January 24. The carpenter James Marshall has traveled the long and winding trail from New Jersey to conquer the world’s frontier and build a saw mill there. While excavating, he notices that something sparkles in the earth.

And the world goes mad. All of a sudden, the east coast of the United States realizes that the Route to the Gold goes through that obscure isthmus, province of that obscure country that is always changing its name, that mass of murderous jungle whose particular blessing is being the narrowest point of Central America. A year has not yet passed and the Falcon steamship is approaching the Panamanian Limón Bay, solemnly entering the mouth of the Panamanian Chagres River, carrying hundreds of Gringos who clatter pans and rifles and pickaxes every time they move like mobile orchestras and ask loudly where the hell the Pacific is. Some guess; of these, there are those who arrive at their destination. But others fall by the wayside, killed by fever — not gold fever, but the other one — beside the dead mules, dead men and mules back to back in the green river mud, defeated by the heat of those swamps where the trees do not permit the light to pass through. This is how it is: this corrected version of El Dorado, this Gold Trail in the process of being opened, is a place where the sun does not exist, where the heat wilts bodies, where one waves a finger through the air and the finger ends up soaking wet as if it had just come out of the river. This place is hell, but it is a watery hell. And meanwhile the gold calls, and some way must be found to cross hell. I take in the whole country in a single glance: at the same time as my father is calling for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Bogotá, in the Panamanian jungle step by step, sleeper by sleeper, dead worker by dead worker, the miracle of the railroad begins to make its way.