Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Self-sacrificing man that I am, I’ll try, dear readers, I’ll try.

Because in my country things were about to happen of the sort that historians always end up recording in their books, asking with sonorous question marks how on earth we could have come to this and then answering I know, I have the answer. Which, of course, isn’t all that clever, for even the most muddle-headed person would have sensed something odd in the air during those years. There were prophecies everywhere: one had only to interpret them. I don’t know what my father might have thought, but I should have recognized the imminent tragedy the day when my nation of poets was no longer able to write poetry. When the Republic of Colombia lost its ear, mistook literary taste, and rejected the most basic lyric rules, I should have sounded the alarm, shouted man overboard, stop the ship. I should have stolen a lifeboat and descended immediately, though I might have run the risk of not finding terra firma, the day I first heard the verses of the National Anthem.

Ah, those verses. . Where did I hear them first? It’s more important to ask myself now: Where did those words come from, words that nobody understood and which would have struck any literary critic as worse than terrible literature, more like the product of an unstable mind? Readers, let us go over the traces of the crime (against poetry, against decency). The year is 1887: one José Domingo Torres, a civil servant whose foremost talent was setting up nativity scenes at Christmas time, decides to become a theater director, and also decides that for the next national holiday a Patriotic Poem Produced by Presidential Plume shall be sung. And this for those blessed not to know it: the President of our Republic, Don Rafael Núñez, was in the habit of whiling away his free time composing adolescent verse. He was following a deeply entrenched Colombian tradition: when he wasn’t signing new accords with the Vatican to satisfy the elevated morals of his second wife — and to persuade Colombian society to forgive him for the sin of having married a second time, abroad and in a civil ceremony — President Núñez put on his pajamas, with a nightcap and everything, threw a poncho on top of that against the cold of Bogotá, ordered a cup of chocolate with cheese, and sat down to vomit lines of verse. And one November afternoon, the Bogotá Varieties Theater witnesses a group of profoundly disconcerted young people, through no fault of their own, intoning these ineffable stanzas:

From the fields of Boyacá

An unconquered hero

Is crowned with each new shoot

The genius of glory.

The virile breath

Of bare-chested soldiers

Serves as their shield

And wins the victory.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps devotes all his time to that protracted task: accepting. He accepted that the Canal would not be ready in time but would require several more years. He accepted that the billions of francs put up by the French would be insufficient: they needed six hundred million more. He accepted that the idea of a sea-level canal was a technical impossibility and an error of judgment; he accepted that the Panama Canal would be constructed by means of a system of locks. . He accepted and accepted and kept accepting: this proud man made more concessions in two weeks than he’d made in his entire life. However — and this is quite a large however — it wasn’t enough. What nobody (where nobody means “de Lesseps”) had imagined had happened: the French were fed up. The day the bonds that would save the Canal Company went on sale, an anonymous note arrived at all the European newspapers saying that Ferdinand de Lesseps had died. It wasn’t true, of course; but the damage was done. The sale of bonds failed. The lottery had failed. When they announced the dissolution of the Canal Company and named a liquidator to take charge of its machines, my father was in the offices of the Star & Herald , begging them to take him back, offering to write the first five articles for free if they would give him space in their pages again. Witnesses assure me they saw him cry. And meanwhile, all over Colombia the people were singing:

A lock of the virgin’s hair

Torn out in agony

Of her deceased love

Around the cypress branch entwined.

Beneath a cold tombstone

Her hope she mourns

While a glorious halo of pride

Her pale countenance enshrined.

Work on the Panama Canal, the Great Trench, was officially interrupted or stopped in May of 1889. The French began to leave; in the port of Colón the trunks and hemp sacks and wooden crates piled up daily, and the porters couldn’t cope with all the work of getting the moment’s luggage onto the moment’s steamer. The Lafayette seemed to have tripled its weekly runs during that exodus (because that’s what it was, an exodus, what happened in the Isthmus, the French like a persecuted race fleeing in search of friendlier lands). The French city of Christophe Colomb was gradually deserted, as if the plague had invaded and exterminated its residents; it was a ghost town coming into being, but it happened before our eyes, and in itself the spectacle would have fascinated anyone. The recently emptied houses all took on the same smell of freshly washed cupboards; Charlotte and I liked to take Eloísa by the hand and go for walks through the abandoned houses and look through the drawers for a revealing diary full of secrets (something we never did find) or some old garment that Eloísa could use to play dress-up (something we found quite often). On the walls of the houses were marks from nails, rectangles of a whiter white where a portrait of the grandfather who fought with Napoleon had been. The French sold everything that wasn’t indispensable, not to reduce the dimensions of their belongings, but because, from the moment they knew they could leave, Panama became a wretched place they needed to forget as soon as possible and whose objects were capable of carrying curses with them. One of those belongings, sold at public auction a little while later, was a still life the owners had bought, out of charity, from a Canal worker. The man was a poor unhinged Frenchman who claimed to be a banker and also a painter, but who was really no more than a vandal. He claimed to be related to Flora Tristan, which would have interested my mother; he’d disembarked in Panama City, on his way from Peru, and was arrested there for urinating in public. He left in a matter of weeks, frightened off by the mosquitoes and the labor conditions. The world later learned more about his life, and perhaps his name will not be unknown to my readers. He was called Paul Gauguin.

Thus the country was formed

Thermopylae springing forth,

The Cyclops constellation

From the night sky shining down.

While the trembling flower

Seeks a safe shelter,

From the menacing gale

Beneath the laurel crown.

The uninhabited houses of Christophe Colomb began to fall to pieces (I’m not saying it was partly the fault of the anthem, but you never know). After every rainy season, a whole wall would give way in some sector of the city, the wood so rotten it wouldn’t break but bent like rubber, the beams eaten through to the center by termites. Our strolls through the houses had to end: one afternoon in June, in the middle of a downpour, a Cuna Indian slipped into the former house of the engineer Vilar while waiting for the weather to clear; reaching under a wardrobe out of curiosity, he received two bites from a rather small coral snake and died before he got back to Colón. No one could explain why snakes were so interested in the empty houses of Christophe Colomb, but as the years passed the city began to fill with these visitors, bushmasters and fer-de-lances, perhaps just looking for food. My father, who after the publication of the famous Canal payroll in the Star & Herald had become a sort of undesirable, a pariah of isthmian journalism, wrote during those days a short article about two Indians who met in the house of the engineer Debray to test which of them knew the best antidotes. They covered the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb from one end to the other, going into every house and sticking their hands under every wardrobe and every basket and every loose floorboard, getting bitten by as many snakes as they could find to then prove their skill with verbena, with guaco , and even with ipecacuanha . My father recounted how toward the end of the night one of the Indians had crawled under one of the houses, and felt a bite but had not managed to identify the snake. The other let him die: that was his way of winning the contest. And the winner celebrated his victory in the Colón jailhouse, sentenced by a Panamanian judge for culpable homicide.