Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

“Will you vote Liberal?”

“I’m not interested in politics.”

“Will you vote Conservative?”

“I’m not interested in politics.”

“Who are you? Where are you from? Who do you love? Who do you hate?”

“I’m not interested in politics.”

Readers of the Jury: how naïve I was. Did I truly think I would manage to avoid the influences of that ubiquitous and omnipotent monster? I wondered how to live in peace, how to perpetuate the happiness I’d been granted, without noticing that in my country these are political questions. Reality soon disabused me, for in those days a group of conspirators met in Bogotá, prepared to capture President Caro, depose him as if he were an old monarch, and set off the Liberal revolution. . But they did so with such enthusiasm that they were discovered and detained by the police before they had time to say a word. The government continued its repressive measures; uprisings, in answer to these measures, continued in various parts of the country. I kept Charlotte and Eloísa shut up at home in Christophe Colomb; I stocked up on provisions and drinking water and boarded up all the doors and windows with planks stolen from the ownerless houses. And that’s what I was doing when I got the news that another war had broken out.

I hasten to say: it was a tiny war, a sort of prototype of a war or an amateur war. Government forces took less than sixty days to subdue the revolutionaries; the echo of the Battle of Bocas del Toro, the only clash of any importance the Isthmus saw, ricocheted off our boarded-up windows. The memory of Pedro Prestán and his broken-necked hanging body was fresh in Panamanian minds; when the echo reached us from Bocas of those Liberal gunshots so timid they turned back in midair, many of us began to think of more executions, of more bodies hanged over the railway lines.

But none of that happened.

However. . in this story there’s always a however , and here it is. The war barely touched the isthmian coasts, but it touched them; the war stayed with us for just a few hours, but there it was. And most important: that amateur war opened the appetites of Colombians; it was like the carrot before the horse, and from that moment on I knew something more serious was waiting for us round the corner. . Feeling in the air the appetite for warmongering, I wondered if staying holed up in my apolitical house would be enough, and immediately answered that it would, that it couldn’t be otherwise. Watching the sleeping Eloísa — whose legs lengthened desperately under my scrutiny, whose bones mysteriously changed coordinates — and watching Charlotte’s naked body when she went out into the yard under the palm tree to shower with that watering can that looked like it had just been brought from l’Orangerie, I thought: Yes, yes, yes, we’re safe, no one can touch us, we have stationed ourselves outside of history and we are invulnerable in our apolitical house. But it is time for a confession: at the same time I thought of our invulnerability, I felt in my stomach an intestinal upset that resembled hunger pangs. The emptiness began to recur at night when we turned out the lamps. It came to me in dreams or when I thought of my father’s death. It took me a week to identify the sensation and admit, with some surprise, that I was afraid.

Did I speak of my fear to Charlotte? Did I tell Eloísa? Of course not: fear, like phantoms, does more damage when invoked. For years I kept it by my side like a forbidden pet, feeding it in spite of myself (or was it the fear itself, tropical parasite, that fed off me like a pitiless orchid?) but without admitting its presence. In London, Captain Joseph K. also faced small personal and unprecedented terrors. “My uncle died on the 11th of this month,” he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska, “and it seems everything has died in me, as though he carried off my soul with him.” The months that followed were an attempt to recover his lost soul; it was around that time that Conrad met Jessie George, an English typist who had two very obvious qualities for the Polish writer: she was a typist and she was English. A few months later, Conrad proposed to her with this invincible argument: “After all, my dear, I’ll not live long.” Yes, Conrad had seen it, he’d seen the chasm that opened at his feet, he’d felt that strange form of hunger and had run for shelter like a dog in a thunderstorm. That’s what I should have done: run, cleared off, packed up my things and my family, taken them by the hand and evacuated without a backward glance. After writing Heart of Darkness , Conrad had been plunged into new depths of depression and bad health; but I didn’t know it, I didn’t realize other abysses were opening at my feet. On Good Friday in 1899, Conrad wrote: “My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me.” If I had been able to pick up the prophetic-telepathic waves those words were sending, maybe I would have tried to decipher them, figure out what the monster was (but now I can imagine, and so can the reader) and what to do to keep it from devouring us. But I didn’t know how to interpret the thousand portents that filled the air during those years, I didn’t know how to read the warnings in the text of events, and the warnings that Conrad, my kindred spirit, sent telepathically from so far away, did not reach me.

“Man is an evil animal,” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham around that time. “His perversity must be organized.” And then: “Crime is a necessary condition of organized existence. Society is essentially criminal — or it wouldn’t exist.” Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, why didn’t your words reach me? Dear Conrad, why didn’t you give me a chance to protect myself from the evil men and their organized perversity? “I am like a man who has lost his gods,” you said at the time. And I didn’t know how, dear Joseph K.: I didn’t know how to see in your words the loss of mine.

On October 17, 1899, shortly after my daughter Eloísa menstruated for the first time, the department of Santander saw the longest and bloodiest civil war in the history of Colombia.

The Angel of History’s modus operandi was basically the same as usual. The Angel is a brilliant serial killer: once he has found a good way to get men to kill each other he never gives it up, he clings to it with the faith and obstinacy of a St. Bernard. . For the war of 1899, the Angel spent about four months humiliating the Liberals. First he used the Conservative President Don Miguel Antonio Caro. Until his arrival in power, the national army had been composed of some six thousand troops; Caro increased the manpower to the legal maximum, ten thousand men, and in the space of two years quadrupled military expenditure. “The government has a duty to assure the peace,” he said, while he filled his little ant’s cave with nine thousand five hundred and fifty machetes with scabbards, five thousand and ninety Winchester 44 carbines, three thousand eight hundred and forty-one Gras 60 rifles, with well-polished bayonets. He was an ambidextrous and able man: with one hand he translated a bit of Montesquieu — for example: “Peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic”—and with the other signed recruitment decrees. In the streets of Bogotá he mobilized farm workers and hungry peasants in exchange for two reales a day, while their wives sat against the wall and waited for the money to go and buy potatoes for lunch; priests walked around the city promising adolescent boys eternal blessings in exchange for their service to the nation.

Soon the Angel, already bored by this Conservative President, decided to change him for another; to better affront the Liberals, he put Don Manuel Antonio Sanclemente in charge, an old man of eighty-four, who shortly after being sworn in received an order not open to appeal from his personal doctor to leave the city. “It gets so cold here, this playing-President lark could cost you a hefty price,” he told him. “Go on down to the tropical lowlands and leave this business to the young folk.” And the President obeyed: he moved to Anapoima, a little village with a tropical climate where his octogenarian lungs caused him fewer problems and his octogenarian blood pressure went down. Of course the country was then left without a government, but that little detail wasn’t going to intimidate the Conservatives. . In a matter of days, the Minister of State in Bogotá invented a rubber stamp with a facsimile of the President’s signature, and distributed copies to all interested parties, so that Sanclemente’s presence in the capital was no longer necessary: every senator signed his own proposed laws, every minister validated any decrees he felt like validating, for it took only a blow from the magic stamp to bring them to life. And thus, amid the Angel’s resounding guffaws, the new government evolved, to the indignation and dishonor of the Liberals. Then, one October morning, patience went astray in the department of Santander, and a general with many wars behind him fired the first shots of the revolution.