Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

The fate of the escaped generals was immediate exile: Vargas Santos and Uribe Uribe left Riohacha for Caracas; General Herrera fled by way of Ecuador, managing to escape the government troops but not the willful, stubborn words. In a message that pursued him until it caught up with him, Vargas Santos entrusted him with directing the war in the departments of Cauca and Panama.

From Panama it was possible to win the war.

In Panama the liberation of the country would begin.

General Herrera agreed, as was to be expected. In a matter of weeks he had put together an expeditionary army — three hundred Liberals who’d been defeated in the battles of the south and of the Pacific coast anxious for an opportunity to avenge themselves and avenge their dead — but they lacked a ship to get them to the Isthmus. At that moment the deus ex machina (so at home in the theater of history) brought him good news: idly anchored in the port of Guayaquil was a ship called the Iris , full of cattle and destined for El Salvador. Herrera inspected the vessel and discovered the most important technical attribute: the owner, the firm of Benjamin Bloom & Co., had put it up for sale. Without delay, the General gave his word, signed promissory contracts of sale, toasted the business with a glass of agua de panela with lemon while the Salvadoran Captain and his first mate raised recurrent glasses of aguardiente de caña . At the beginning of October, filled with as many young revolutionary soldiers as cows, each of whose four stomachs seemed to come to an agreement to suffer simultaneously from diarrhea, the Iris set sail from Guayaquil.

One of the soldiers interests us in particular: the camera approaches, laboriously avoiding one or two cows’ backs, passes under a soft, freckled udder, and avoids the whip of a treacherous tail, and its gray image shows us the immaculate, frightened (and hidden among the cow pies) face of a certain Anatolio Calderón. Anatolio would have his nineteenth birthday flanked by the cows of the Iris , as the ship passed the coast of Tumaco, but his shyness wouldn’t allow anyone to find out. He’d been born on a hacienda in Zipaquirá, son of an Indian servant who died giving birth to him and the owner of the property, Don Felipe de Roux, rebellious bourgeois and socialist dilettante. Don Felipe had sold the family estates and set sail for Paris before his illegitimate son reached puberty, but not without leaving him enough money to study whatever he wanted in any university in the country. Anatolio enrolled in the Externado University to study law, although deep down he would rather have read literature at the University of Rosario and followed in the footsteps of Julio Flórez, the Divine Poet. When General Herrera went through Bogotá, after the Battle of Peralonso, and was received as a hero by the young Liberals, Anatolio was among those, blazing with patriotic fervor, who leaned out of the windows of the university. He saluted the General, and the General singled him out from among all the students to return his salute (or at least so it seemed to him). When the parade had finished, Anatolio went down to the street and found, among the paving stones, a lost Liberal horseshoe. The find struck him as a sign of good luck. Anatolio cleaned the mud and dried shit off the horseshoe and put it in his pocket.

But war is not always as orderly as it seems when narrated, and young Anatolio did not join up with General Herrera’s revolutionary army at that moment. He carried on with his studies, determined to change the country by way of the very laws the Conservative governments had trampled on. But on July 31, 1900, one of those same Conservatives visited the quasi-nonagenarian Don Manuel Sanclemente’s tropical retreat, and in less decent words than mine told him that a useless old man mustn’t hold the reins of the nation, and then and there declared him removed from Bolívar’s throne. The coup d’état was perpetrated in a matter of hours; and before the week was out, six law students had left the university, packed their things, and gone in search of the first Liberal battalion prepared to enlist them. Of the six students, three died in the Battle of Popayán, one was taken prisoner and transferred back to the Panóptico Prison in Bogotá, and two escaped to the south, went round the Galeras volcano to avoid the Conservative troops, and made it to Ecuador. One of those was Anatolio. After wandering the battlefields for so many months, Anatolio had nothing but one rusty horseshoe, a leather canteen, and a Julio Flórez book whose brown covers had become impregnated with sweat. The day the commanding officer of the Cauca battalion, Colonel Clodomiro Arias, notified him that the battalion would be incorporated into General Benjamín Herrera’s army, Anatolio was reading and rereading the lines of “Everything Comes to Us Late.”

And glory, that nymph of fate,

dances only on sepulchers.

Everything comes to us late

. . even death!

Suddenly, he began to feel an itching in his eyes. He read the lines, realized he felt like crying, and wondered if the most terrible thing had happened, if war had turned him into a coward. Days later, hiding among the cows of the Iris for fear that someone — Sergeant Major Latorre, for example — might look him in the eye and notice the cowardice that had settled in there, Anatolio thought of the mother he never knew, cursed the day he’d considered joining the revolutionary army, and felt a violent urge to go home and eat a hot meal. And instead here he was, smelling the vapors of cow dung, breathing the saline humidity of the Pacific, but most of all scared to death of what awaited him in Panama.

The Iris arrived in El Salvador on October 20. General Herrera met the ship’s owners in Acajutla and signed a sales agreement that was more like a bond: if the revolution was successful, the Liberal government would pay the gentlemen of Bloom & Co. the sum of sixteen thousand pounds sterling; if they lost, the ship would form part of the “contingencies of war.” There, in the Salvadoran port, General Herrera had them disembark in a strict order — cattle, soldiers, crew — and climbed up on a wooden crate so everyone could hear as he ceremoniously rechristened the ship. The Iris would henceforth be called the Almirante Padilla . Anatolio took note of the change but also noted that he was still scared. He thought of José Prudencio Padilla, Guajiran martyr of Colombian independence, and said to himself that he didn’t want to be a martyr to absolutely anything, that he wasn’t interested in dying in order to be honored by decree, and much less so for some half-mad military man who would name a ship after him. In December, after putting into port at Tumaco to pick up a contingent of fifteen hundred soldiers, a hundred and fifteen cases of ammunition, and nine hundred and ninety-seven projectiles for the cannon mounted on the prow, the Almirante Padilla put into port in Panama. It was Christmas Eve and the heat was dry and pleasant. The soldiers had not even disembarked when the news reached them: the Liberal forces had been destroyed across the entire Isthmus. While up on deck they recited the novena; Anatolio stayed hidden in the bowels of the ship and wept with fear.

With the arrival of Herrera’s troops in the Isthmus, the war began to take on a different aspect. Under the orders of Colonel Clodomiro Arias, Anatolio participated in the taking of Tonosí, disembarked in Anton, and liberated the forces of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo from the siege of La Negrita, but in none of those places did he stop considering desertion. Anatolio took part in the Battle of Aguadulce; one night when the moon was full, while General Belisario Porras’s revolutionary forces took the Vigia hill and advanced toward Pocri, those of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo destroyed the government battalions guarding the city, the Sanchez and the Farias. At noon the next day, the enemy started to send emissaries to request ceasefires in order to bury their dead, to negotiate more or less honorable capitulations. Anatolio was part of this historical date in which the balance appeared to shift to the revolutionary side, during which for a few hours the revolutionaries believed in that pipe dream: definitive triumph. The Cauca battalion buried eighty-nine of their men, and Anatolio took personal charge of several bodies; but what he would remember forever did not come from his side but from the government side: the smell of roasting flesh that invaded the air when the medic of the Farias battalion began to incinerate, one at a time, the hundred and sixty-seven Conservative corpses he preferred not to bury.