Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

The reader will imagine our great surprise when, in that country of impunities, in that world capital of irresponsibility that is Colombia, the one who’d started the fire was put on trial a short time later. My father and I, I remember, turned pale with shock when we learned how events had transpired; but paler still shortly afterward, sitting at the table on the veranda at home, when we realized our evaluations of what had happened were radically different, for our versions of events were different. In other words, conflicting stories were circulating about the Colón fire.

What are you saying, Mr. Narrator? the audience protests. Facts don’t have versions, the truth is but one. To which I can only answer by telling what was told that midday, in the recently burned tropical heat, in my Panamanian house. My version and that of my father coincided at the beginning of the story: we both knew, as did every Colónial who was keeping up with events in the city, the origin of the Colón fire. Pedro Prestán, that mulatto and Liberal lawyer, has risen in arms against the distant Conservative government, only to realize almost immediately that he doesn’t have enough weapons; when he finds out that a shipment of two hundred rifles is coming from the United States on board a private boat, Prestán buys it at a good price; but the shipment is intercepted by an opportunistic and not at all neutral North American frigate that had received very clear instructions from Washington to defend the Conservative government. Prestán, in reprisal, has three North Americans arrested, including the Consul. Meanwhile, Conservative troops disembark in Colón and oblige the rebels to retreat; meanwhile, American marines disembark in the city and also oblige the rebels to retreat. The rebels, in retreat, realize that defeat is near. . And here occurs the schizophrenic attack of Panama politics. Here my version of subsequent events separates from that of my father. The inconsistent Angel of History gives us two different gospels, and the chroniclers will carry on banging their heads against a brick wall till the end of their days, because it is simply impossible to know which deserves the credence of posterity. And thus it is that there, at the Altamiranos’ table, Pedro Prestán splits in two.

Seeing himself defeated, Prestán One, charismatic leader and anti-imperialist national hero, flees by sea toward Curettage to join the Liberal troops fighting there, and the Conservative soldiers, on the orders of their own government and in connivance with the Wicked Marines, torch Colón and put the blame on the charismatic leader. Prestán Two, who after all is little more than a resentful murderer, decides to satisfy his deep-seated pyromania, because nothing seems more attractive to him than attacking the interests of the whites and burning down the city he’s lived in for the last few years. . Before escaping, Prestán One manages to hear the cannon blasts the frigate Galena unleashes on Colón and which, in a matter of hours, will have started the conflagration. Before escaping, Prestán Two gives orders to his West Indian machete men to wipe the city off the map, for Colón prefers death to occupation. The months pass for Prestán One, and they also pass for Prestán Two. And in August of that same year, 1885, Prestán One is arrested in Cartagena, taken to Colón, court-martialed, and found guilty of the fire on irrefutable evidence, having been given full procedural guarantees and the right to a learned, competent lawyer free of racial or class prejudices.

Prestán Two, on the other hand, was not so lucky. The court-martial that tried him did not hear witnesses for the defense; it did not investigate the version that was going round the city — and had earned the credibility of the French Consul, no less — according to which the man responsible for the fire was a certain George Burt, former general manager of the Railroad Company and agent provocateur; it didn’t manage to produce any other witnesses than one North American, one Frenchman, a German and an Italian, none of whom spoke a word of Spanish, whereupon their declarations were never translated or made public; and it did not establish why, if Pedro Prestán’s motive was hatred of the North Americans and the French, the only properties in Colón that were not damaged by the fire were the Railroad Company and the Canal Company.

On August 18, 1885, Prestán One was sentenced to death.

What a coincidence: so was Prestán Two.

Readers of the Jury: I was there. Politics, that Gorgon that turns to stone those who look it in the eye, passed very close by me this time, refusing to be ignored: The morning of the eighteenth, the authorities of the Conservative government, victorious in the Umpteenth Civil War, drove Pedro Prestán to the railway lines, guarded at regular intervals (and without anyone finding it odd) by U.S. Marines armed with cannons. From the second floor of a fire-damaged building I saw four laborers, mulatto like the condemned man, erect a wooden archway in a couple of hours; then a freight platform appeared, rolling along the rails without making any noise. Pedro Prestán mounted the platform, or rather was shoved onto it, and behind him climbed a man who was not wearing a hood but who would undoubtedly act as hangman. There, under the arch of cheap wood, Prestán looked like a lost child: his clothes were suddenly too big for him; his bowler hat seemed about to fall off his head. The hangman put down a canvas bag that he’d been carrying and took a rope out of it so well greased that from the distance it looked like a snake (absurdly I thought they were going to kill Prestán with its venomous bite). The hangman threw the rope over the crossbeam and put the other end, delicately, around the condemned man’s neck, as if afraid of scratching his skin. He tightened the slip knot; he climbed down off the platform. And then, along the rails of the Panama Railroad, the platform slid away with a whistle, and the body of Prestán was left hanging in midair. The noise of his neck breaking blended in with that of the tug of the rope, the jolt of the wood. It was cheap wood, and Panama, in any case, was a place where things shook.

The execution of Pedro Prestán, in those days when the Constitution for Angels with its explicit prohibition of the death penalty was still in force, was a real shock for many. (There were later another seventy-five shocks, when seventy-five citizens of Colón, arrested by the Conservative troops, were lined up with their backs to the charred remains of the walls and shot without the courtesy of a trial.) Of course my father, in his article for the Bulletin , took out his Refraction stick and rearranged reality as he so well knew how. And so, the French shareholder, so concerned about the political convulsions of that remote country and the damage they could cause his investments, found out about the “regrettable fire” that, after an “unforeseeable, inadvertent accident,” burned down “a few unimportant shanties” and several “cardboard shacks that had been on the verge of falling down anyway.” After the fire, “sixteen Panamanians were admitted to the hospital with breathing troubles,” wrote my father (the breathing trouble consisted of the fact that they were not breathing, because the sixteen Panamanians were dead). In my father’s article, the Canal workers were “true war heroes” who had defended the “Eighth Wonder” tooth and nail, and whose enemy was “fearsome nature” (no mention was made of fearsome democracies). Thus it was: through the workings and grace of Refraction, the war of 1885 never existed for the French investors, nor was Pedro Prestán hanged above the railway lines the French used to transport materials. The defeated rebel General Rafael Aizpuru, after listening to the clamor of several notable Panamanians, had offered to declare the independence of Panama if the United States would recognize him as its leader: Miguel Altamirano did not report that.