Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Like the installations of the two companies, the hamlet of Christophe Colomb was unscathed, as if a firebreak had separated it from the city in flames, and my father and I, who were already starting to feel like nomads on a domestic scale, didn’t have to move again. Shortly after the fire, while the employees of the railway/gallows were busy rebuilding the city, I told my father that we’d had good luck, and he answered with a cryptic expression on his face that must have been melancholy. “It wasn’t luck,” he said. “What we had were Gringo ships.” Under the paternal vigilance of the USS Galena and the USS Shenandoah , under the irrefutable authority of the USS Swatara and the USS Tennessee , works on the Great Trench tried to carry on. But things were no longer as they had been. Something had changed that month of August when the Colombian war arrived in the Isthmus, that ill-fated month when Pedro Prestán was executed. I will say it quickly and without anesthesia: I felt that something had begun to sink. The shareholders, the readers of the Bulletin , had begun to listen to those grotesque rumors: that their brothers, their cousins, their sons, were dying by the dozens in Panama. Could it be true, they wondered, if the Bulletin says the opposite? Workers and engineers arrived from the Isthmus at Marseille or Le Havre, and the first thing they did upon disembarking was to come out with contemptible slander, saying that work was not advancing as had been foreseen, or that costs were rising at a scandalous rate. . Incredibly, those baseless falsehoods began to leak into the credulous minds of the French. And meanwhile, my country was beginning to shed its name and constitution like a snake sheds its skin, and sink headfirst into the darkest years of its history.

My country would sink metaphorically, of course, just as the sinking of the Canal Company (of which more later) would be metaphorical. But there were other much more literal sinkings in those days; the qualities of each, of course, depended on the object sinking. On the other side of the Atlantic, for example, the sailing ship Annie Frost sank, which wouldn’t have had any significance if you, dear Korzeniowski, had not shamelessly invented for yourself a role in the shipwreck. Yes, I know: you needed money, and Uncle Tadeusz was the nearest bank and the one that requested the fewest guarantees; so you wrote an urgent telegram: SHIPWRECKED STOP ALL LOST STOP NEED HELP. . And since the correspondences that overwhelm me have not ceased, even though I’ve left the space of a few pages to put them on the record, allow me to note one of them now. For while Korzeniowski was pretending to have been on board a sinking ship, another sinking of perhaps more modest proportions was taking place but with much more immediate consequences.

One early morning in the dry season, Charlotte Madinier rented a dugout — undoubtedly similar to the one that had once carried her husband and my father — and, without anyone seeing, paddled herself along the Chagres River. She was wearing a coat that had belonged to her husband and that she’d saved from the famous postmortem burn; she had the pockets stuffed full with a collection of rocks her husband had accumulated over the early days of the explorations. I sneak into her head and I find, in the midst of fears and nostalgia and disorderly thoughts, the words Je m’en vais repeated like a mantra and piling up on top of one another; in her pockets I find chunks of basalt and slabs of limestone. Then Charlotte puts her hands in her pockets, with the left she clutches a large piece of granite and with the right a ball of blue clay the size of an apple. She drops into the water, backward, as if lying down, and the Panamanian ground, the oldest geological formation of the American continent, drags her to the bottom in a matter of seconds.

Let’s imagine: as she sinks, Charlotte loses her shoes, so when she gets to the riverbed, the bare skin of her feet touches the sand. . Imagine: the pressure of the water in her ears and on her closed eyes, or maybe they’re not closed but wide open, and maybe they see trout swim by and water snakes, weeds, sticks, or branches broken off trees by the humidity. Imagine the weight that rushes against Charlotte’s airless chest, against her small breasts and shrunken nipples, oppressed by the cold water. Imagine that all the pores of her skin close like stubborn little mouths, tired of swallowing water and aware that very soon they’ll be able to resist no longer, that death by drowning is right around the corner. Let’s imagine what Charlotte is imagining: the life she managed to have — a husband, a son who learned to talk before he died, a few sexual, social, or economic satisfactions — and most of all the life she won’t have, that which is never easy to imagine, because imagination (let’s be honest) doesn’t really get us that far. Charlotte starts to wonder what it feels like to drown, which of her senses will disappear first, if there’s pain in this death and where this pain will be located. She already lacks air: the weight against her chest has increased; her cheeks have contracted: the air that had been in them has been consumed by the involuntary voracity — no, by the gluttony — of her lungs. Charlotte feels that her brain is turning off.

And then something goes through her head.

Or: something goes on in her head.

What is it? It is a memory, an idea, an emotion. It is something (unique) to which I, despite my prerogatives as narrator of this tale, do not have access. With a shrug of her narrow shoulders, of her elegant arms, Charlotte shakes off her husband’s coat. Lumps of lignite, slabs of schist fall to the bottom. Immediately, with the swiftness of a freed buoy, Charlotte’s body lifts off the riverbed of the Chagres.

Her body begins to emerge.

Her ears hurt. Saliva returns to her throat.

I anticipate all my curious readers’ doubts and questions: no, Charlotte would never speak of what she thought (or imagined, or felt, or simply saw) a few seconds before what would have been a terrible death in the depths of the Chagres River. I, who am so given to speculation, in this case have been unable to speculate, and as the years have gone by this incapacity has become more firmly ingrained. . Any hypothesis on what happened pales in the face of that reality: Charlotte decided to go on living, and when she came out on the cloudy green surface of the Chagres, she was already a new woman (and had probably already decided she’d take the secret with her to her grave). This process of radical renovation cannot be emphasized too much, the reinvention with a capital R of herself that the Widow of the Canal undertook after her head — puffing and panting, her mouth gulping for air with the desperation of a landed salmon — appeared again in the superficial world of the Isthmus, that world she had come to despise and which she now forgave. I’m not afraid to record the physical manifestations of that transformation: the color of her eyes became lighter, her voice took on a graver tone, and her chestnut-colored hair grew down to her waist, as if the water of the Chagres River had formed a perpetual cascade down her back. Charlotte Madinier, who, as she sank into the Chagres River with her pockets bulging with Panamanian geology, had been a beautiful but wasted woman, when revived — because that’s what it was, a resurrection, that occurred that day — seemed to return to the disturbing beauty of a not too distant adolescence. It was an almost mythic event. Charlotte Madinier as a Siren of the Chagres River. Charlotte Madinier as a Panamanian Faust. Readers of the Jury, did you want to witness another Metamorphosis? This one is unpredictable and also without precedents; this is the most powerful I’ve ever seen, because it eventually involved me. For the new woman did not just rise from the bottom of the Chagres, which was a portent in itself, but carried out a deed even more portentous: she entered my life.