Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

And the fifteen Chinese coolies who later rest on the long dissection tables at the University of Bogotá, after having taught a distracted trainee the location of the liver and the length of the large intestine, those fifteen Chinamen who now begin to develop black stains on their backs (if they are faceup) or on their chests (if they’re facedown), those fifteen Chinamen say in chorus and with pride: We were there. We cleared a way through the jungle, we dug in those swamps, we laid the iron and the sleepers. One of those fifteen Chinamen tells his story to my father, and my father, leaning over the rigor mortis while he examines out of pure Renaissance-man curiosity what is there under a rib, listens with more attention than he thinks. And what is under that rib? My father asks for forceps, and after a while the forceps emerge from the body carrying a splinter of bamboo. And now the talkative and impertinent Chinaman begins to tell my father of the patience with which he had sharpened the stick, of the skillful decency with which he had stuck it into the muddy earth, of the force with which he had thrown himself onto the sharpened point.

A suicide? my father asks (let’s admit it is not a very intelligent question). No, replies the Chinaman, he had not killed himself, the sadness had killed him, and before the sadness the malaria. . Watching his ill workmates hang themselves with the ropes used in the construction of the railway or steal the foreman’s pistol to shoot themselves with had killed him, seeing that in those swamps it was not possible to construct a decent cemetery had killed him, and knowing the jungle’s victims would end up scattered around the world in barrels of ice had killed him. I, says the Chinaman, his skin now almost blue, his stench almost unbearable, I, who in life have built the Panama Railroad, in death shall help to finance it, as will the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight dead workers, Chinese, blacks, and Irish, who are visiting the universities and hospitals of the world right now. Oh, how a body travels. .

All this the dead Chinaman tells my father.

But what my father hears is slightly different.

My father does not hear a story of personal tragedies, does not see the dead Chinaman as the nameless worker of no fixed address for whom no grave is possible. He sees him as a martyr, and sees the history of the railway as a true epic. The train versus the jungle, man versus nature. . The dead Chinaman is an emissary from the future, an outpost of Progress. The Chinaman tells him that the passenger infected with cholera, directly responsible for the two thousand deaths in Cartagena and hundreds in Bogotá, was on board that ship, the Falcon ; but my father admires the passenger who had left everything to pursue the promise of gold through the murderous jungle. The Chinaman tells my father about the saloons and brothels proliferating in Panama since the foreigners began to arrive; for my father, each drunken worker is an Arthurian knight, each whore an Amazon. The seventy thousand railway sleepers are seventy thousand prophecies of the vanguard. The iron line that crosses the Isthmus is the navel of the world. The dead Chinaman is no longer simply an emissary from the future: he is a herald angel, thinks my father, and he has come to make him see, amid the fallen leaves of his sad life in Bogotá, the vague but luminous promise of a better life.

Speaking for the defense: It was not out of madness that my father cut the dead Chinaman’s hand off. It was not out of madness — my father had never felt saner in his life — that he had it cleaned by one of the Chapinero butchers and put it out in the sun (the scant Bogotá sun) to dry. He had it mounted with bronze screws on a small pedestal that looked like marble, and kept it on one of the shelves of his library, between a tattered edition of Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany and a miniature oil painting of my grandmother with a large ornamental comb in her hair, by an artist of the Gregorio Vásquez school. The index finger, slightly outstretched, points with each of its bare phalanges toward the path my father would have to take.

Friends who visited my father during this time said yes, it was true that the carpal and the metacarpal bones pointed toward the Isthmus of Panama the way a Muslim bows in the direction of Mecca. And I, in spite of how much I might want to launch my tale in the direction indicated by the desiccated finger, must first concentrate on other incidents in the life of my father, who stepped out one fine day of that year of Our Lord 1845 to discover through the word on the street that he had been excommunicated. So much time had passed since the Battle of the Bodies that it took him a while to associate one matter with the other. One Sunday, while my father was receiving the title of Venerable pro Tempore in the Masonic lodge, Presbyter Echavarría mentioned him by name from the accusing pulpit of Santo Tomás Church. Miguel Altamirano had the blood of innocents on his hands. Miguel Altamirano dealt in souls of the dead and was in league with the Devil. Miguel Altamirano, declared Father Echavarría before his audience of faithful and fanatics, was a formal enemy of God and the Church.

My father, as suited the circumstances and as precedents suggested, took the matter as a joke. A few meters from the ostentatious front door of the church was the humbler and particularly nonsanctum door to the printer’s; the same Sunday, late that night, my father delivered his column for El Comunero .

(Or was it El Temporal ? These precisions are perhaps superfluous, but no less tormenting for me not to be able to keep track of the leaflets and newspapers published by my father. La Opinión? El Granadino? La Opinión Granadina ? or El Comunero Temporal ? It is futile. Readers of the Jury, please forgive my poor memory.)

Anyway, whichever newspaper it was, my father delivered his column. The following is not a literal reproduction, but merely what my memory has preserved, though I believe it corresponds quite accurately to the spirit of those words. “A certain backward cleric, one of those who have transformed faith into superstition and Christian rites into sectarian paganism, has assumed the right to excommunicate me, going over the head of the prelate’s judgment and, most of all, that of common sense,” he wrote for all of Bogotá society to read. “The undersigned, in his capacity as Doctor of Earthly Laws, Spokesman of Public Opinion, and Defender of Civilized Values, has received comprehensive and sufficient authority from the community he represents, which has decided to pay the cleric back in kind. And thus Presbyter Echavarría, whom God does not hold in his Glory, is hereby excommunicated from the communion of civilized men. From the Santo Tomás pulpit, he has expelled us from his communion; we, from the pulpit of Gutenberg, expel him from ours. Let it be solemnly enacted.”

The rest of the week went by without incident. But the following Saturday, my father and his radical comrades had gathered at the Café Le Boulevardier, near the cloister of the University of Bogotá, with the members of a Spanish theater company who were on a Latin American tour. The work they had staged, a sort of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme where the gentleman was replaced by a seminarian assaulted by doubts, had already been denounced by the Archbishop, and that was good enough for El Comunero or El Granadino . My father, as editor (as well) of the Varieties section, had proposed an extensive interview with the actors; that evening, once the interview was over — the reporter put away his notebook and his Waterloo pen that a friend had brought him from London — and between one brandy and the next, they spoke of the Echavarría affair. The actors made their own speculations about the Sunday Mass and had started wagering whole reales on the contents of the next day’s sermon when it suddenly began to rain heavily, and the people in the street flocked like chickens: under the eaves, into the doorways, completely blocking the entrance to the café. The place filled with the smell of damp ponchos; beneath trousers and boots that dripped water the café floor became slippery. Then a soprano voice ordered my father to stand, to give up his seat.