Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Charlotte Madinier had decided to leave, yes, but she couldn’t or didn’t want to do so immediately. During the day, she was seen walking alone around Colón, after visiting her husband’s grave in the cemetery and even passing by the hospital like a shadow and staying for hours in front of the bed of any fever victim, watching him with such intensity that she would end up disturbing him and asking the nurses why the chart said gastritis when the truth was obviously quite different. There were people who saw her asking the railway passengers for alms; some saw her defy all laws of decency by stopping to chat with a French prostitute from the Maison Dorée, famous all over the Caribbean. I don’t know who first called her the Widow of the Canal, but the nickname stuck with the persistence of an epidemic, and even my father began to use it after a while. (I suspect that for him it didn’t have the scornful and slightly heartless tone it had for the rest; my father spoke of the Widow of the Canal with respect, as if in truth the engineer’s tomb contained a code of the fate of the Isthmus.) The Widow of the Canal, as tends to happen in the Talkative Tropics, began to turn into a legend. She was seen in Gatún, kneeling in the mud to speak to a child, and in the Culebra Pass, discussing the latest advances of the works with the laborers. It was said she didn’t have the money for the passage, and that’s why she hadn’t left; and from then on she was often seen in the Callejón de Botellas charging Canal workers for a quick fuck, and giving others, not so quick and free as well, to the recently arrived workers from Liberia. But the Widow of the Canal, deaf to and distant from rumors, kept wandering the streets of Colón, saying “Je m’en vais” to anyone who would listen and in every tone of voice possible, but never going. Until the day when. .

But no.

Not yet.

It’s still too soon.

Later I’ll get to the curious destiny of the Widow of the Canal. Now it’s more important to deal with other rumors that took place far from there, and which the Widow of the Canal did not hear either. For now the demanding lady Politics peremptorily requires my attention and I, at least for the duration of this book, am her deferential servant. In the rest of the country, politicians were making speeches about the “imminent danger to social order” and “the threatened peace.” But in Panama no one heard their words. The politicians kept talking with suspicious determination of “interior commotion,” of the “revolutions” that were being hatched in the country and of their “somber accompaniment of misfortunes.” But in Colón, and more so in that ghetto of Colón formed by the employees of the Canal Company, we were all deaf to and distant from those speeches. The politicians spoke of the country’s destiny using alarmist words: “Regeneration or Catastrophe,” but their words got snagged in the Darien Jungle or drowned in one of our oceans. Finally, the fatal rumor, the rumor of rumors, arrived in Panama; and so we inhabitants of the Isthmus found out that, in that remote land to which the Isthmus belonged, an election had been held, a party had won in confusing circumstances, another party was rather unhappy. What bad losers the Liberals were! exclaimed the (Conservative) Panamanian priests in the salons of Colón. The facts were simple: some votes had gone missing, some people had difficulties getting to the polling stations, and some who were going to vote Liberal changed their minds at the last minute, thanks to the opportune and divine intervention of that bastion of democracy, the Priesthood. What blame could be ascribed to the Conservative government for such electoral vicissitudes? And that’s what the topic was in the salons of Colón when they received the detailed report of what was going on outside: the armed uprising of the dissenters.

The country, incredibly, was at war.

The first victories belonged to the rebels. The Liberal General Gaitán Obeso took Honda and therefore control of the boats that navigated the Magdalena and entered Barranquilla. His successes were immediate. The Caribbean coast was close to falling into the red hands of the revolution; then, for the first time in history, the writers of that long comedy that is Colombian democracy decided to give a small role, just a couple of easy lines, to the State of Panama. Panama would be the defender of that coast; the martyrs destined to rescue the country from the hands of the Masonic devil would sail from Panama. And one fine day, a contingent of veteran soldiers gathered at the port of Colón under the command of the Governor of Panama, General Ramón Santodomingo, and set sail swiftly for Cartagena, ready to make history. From the port, Miguel Altamirano and his son saw them leave. They weren’t the only ones, of course: onlookers of all nationalities crowded around the port, talking in all languages, asking in all languages what was going on there and why. Among the onlookers there was one who knew well what was going on, and who had decided to make use of it, to take advantage of the absence of soldiers. . And at the end of March, the mulatto lawyer Pedro Prestán, in command of thirteen barefoot West Indians, dressed in rags and armed with machetes, declared himself General of the Revolution and Civil and Military Chief of Panama.

The war, Eloísa dear, had finally arrived in our neutral province, in this place that until then had been known as the Caribbean Switzerland. After half a century of wooing the Isthmus, of knocking on her isthmian doors, war had managed to force them open. And its consequences. . yes, here come the disastrous consequences, but first an instant of pithy and cut-price philosophy. Colombia — as we know — is a schizophrenic country, and Colón-Aspinwall had inherited the schizophrenia. In truth, Aspinwall-Colón had a mysterious capacity to double, to multiply, to divide, to be one and another at the same time, cohabitating without too much effort. Allow me to take a brief leap into the future of my narration, and along the way to ruin all the effects of suspense and narrative strategy, to tell how this episode ends: the Colón fire. I was in the new house of the French city, lying in the hammock (which had become like a second skin to me), holding in my hand an open copy of Jorge Isaacs’s novel María , which had just come off the boat from Bogotá, when the sky behind the book turned yellow, not like feverish eyes but like the mustard that works for some as an antidote.

I ran outside. A long time before getting to Front Street, the air stopped moving and I felt the first slap of heat that wasn’t tropical. At the entrance to the Callejón de Botellas, where legend had seen the Widow of the Canal conversing with the Liberians, I caught the scent of burned flesh, and soon saw emerge out of the shadows the figure of a mule lying on its side, the back legs already charred, the long tongue spread over fragments of green glass. It wasn’t me, but rather my body, that approached the flames like an alligator hypnotized by a burning torch. People ran past me, pushing the hot air, like expulsions from the bellows of a balloon, into my face: the smell of flesh shook me again. But this time it didn’t come from any mule but from the body of mesié Robay, a Haitian beggar of unknown age, family, and place of residence, who had arrived in Colón before all of us and had specialized in stealing meat from the Chinese butchers. I remember I bent down to vomit, and as my face got close to the paving stones they felt so hot that I didn’t dare touch them. Then a strong and constant wind began to blow from the north, and the fire traveled on the wind. . In a matter of hours, during the evening and night of March 31, 1885, Colón, the city that had survived the floods and the earthquake, was turned into charred planks of wood.