Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

The smell stayed with him all the way to Panama City, Herrera’s army’s next objective. It soon seemed to him that even the pages of Julio Flórez’s book were impregnated with the stench of Conservatives reduced to ashes, and if he read a line like “Why do you fill the air I breathe?” the air would immediately fill with incinerated nerves, muscles, and fat. But the battalion kept advancing, indifferent; no one sensed the hell that was overwhelming Anatolio, no one looked him in the eye and discovered the cowardice lurking there. Less than fifty kilometers from Panama City, Colonel Clodomiro Arias divided his battalion: some carried on with him toward the capital, planning to camp at a prudent distance and wait for the arrival of the reinforcements the Almirante Padilla would deposit east of Chame; the others, including Anatolio, would carry on northward under the orders of Sergeant Major Latorre. Their mission was to get to the railway at Las Cascadas and guard the line against any attempt to obstruct the free circulation of trains. General Herrera wanted to send a clear message to the marines waiting in the North American steamships — the Iowa off the coast of Panama City, the Marietta off Colón — like a ghostly presence: there was no need for them to disembark, because the Liberal army would ensure that neither the railway nor the Canal works were in any danger. Anatolio, part of this placation strategy, pitched his tent in the place chosen by Sergeant Major Latorre. That night, he was awakened by three shots. The sentinel had mistaken the frenetic movements of a wildcat for a governmental counterattack and had fired three times in the air. It was a false alarm; but Anatolio, sitting on top of his only blanket, felt a new warmth between his thighs and realized he’d wet himself. By the time the camp had calmed down and his tent mates had gone back to sleep, Anatolio had already wrapped the horseshoe and the Julio Flórez book in a dirty shirt, and begun to do — under the protection of the shadows — what he should have done a long time earlier. Before the birds started to wake up in the dense treetops, Anatolio had already become a deserter.

Meanwhile, General Herrera received the first news of the executions. Aristides Fernández, Minister of War, had ordered Tomás Lawson, Juan Vidal, Benjamín Mañozca, and fourteen more generals of the revolution to face the firing squad. That wasn’t all: on board the Almirante Padilla and in the Aguadulce camp, the general staff of the Liberal army received the circular that the Minister had printed and sent to all the governmental commanding officers, all the Conservative mayors and governors, ordering them to shoot without trial any and all armed revolutionaries they captured. But Anatolio never found out: he had already gone into the jungle, he’d already descended the Central Cordillera on his own, making short-lived fires to frighten off the poisonous snakes and mosquitoes, eating monkeys that he hunted with his army-issue rifle or threatening the Indians of La Chorrera in order to get boiled yucca or coconut milk.

The war, very much in spite of its deserters, continued its course. In Panama City everyone was talking about the letter that General Herrera had written to the provincial governor, complaining again of the “treatment inflicted on the Liberal prisoners” who had been “tortured as much in the flesh as had their dignity and spirits been ill-treated”; but Anatolio knew nothing of the letter, or of the disdain with which the provincial governor redirected it to Aristides Fernández, or of the Minister of War’s reply, which consisted of seven selective executions in the same plaza where the Canal Company’s office had stood, and where the Grand Hotel still stood, converted into government barracks and ad hoc dungeon. Like a one-man expedition (like Stanley penetrating the Congo), Anatolio had discovered Lake Gatún. He started round it with the vague notion that he’d eventually arrive at the Atlantic, but soon realized that he’d have to use the train if he wanted to get there before the month was out. He had got it into his head — his head obscured by the phantoms of cowardice — that from Colón, that Caribbean Gomorrah, he’d be able to find a ship willing to get him out of the country, a captain willing to look the other way as he disembarked in Kingston or Martinique, in Havana or Puerto Cabello, and he would finally be able to start a new life far away from war, that place where normal, ordinary men — good sons, good fathers, good friends — wet their trousers. The port of Colón, he thought, was the place where nobody notices anybody, where with a little bit of luck he would go unnoticed. To arrive without being discovered, find a steamer or a sailing ship, no matter what the cargo or flag: nothing else mattered.

Colón had been in the hands of government forces for almost a year. The defeats of San Pablo and Buena Vista had left General De la Rosa’s Liberal battalions seriously decimated and the city unprotected. When the gunboat Próspero Pinzón appeared in the waters of the bay, full of enemy troops, De la Rosa knew he’d lost the city. General Ignacio Foliaco, in command of the gunboat, threatened to bombard the city as well as the French hamlet of Christophe Colomb, which was even more within range. De la Rosa rejected the threat. “From my side not a shot will be fired,” he sent word. “You’ll see how you look entering the city after having flattened it with cannonballs.” But before Foliaco could carry out his threat, De la Rosa received a visit from four captains — two North Americans, one English, and one French — who had assumed the role of mediators to avoid possible damage to the railway system. The captains brought a proposal for dialogue; De la Rosa accepted. The British cruiser Tribune served as the meeting place and negotiation table for Foliaco and De la Rosa; five days later, De la Rosa met on board the Marietta with General Albán, that leader of the government forces in the Isthmus who was called “the madman” and not in jest. In the presence of the ship’s Captain, Francis Delano, and Thomas Perry, commander of the cruiser Iowa , General De la Rosa signed the surrender. Before evening fell, the troops of the Próspero Pinzón had disembarked in Puerto Cristóbal, occupied the Mayor’s office, and distributed government proclamations. Eleven months later, Anatolio Calderón headed for this occupied city.

Anatolio got to the railway shortly before midnight. Between La Chorrera and the first bridge over the waters of Lake Gatún he’d found a little hamlet of ten or twelve huts whose straw roofs touched the ground, and with his loaded rifle pointed in the face of a woman, managed to get her husband (supposing it was her husband) to hand over a cotton shirt that seemed to be his single belonging, and put it on instead of the black jacket with nine buttons that was his soldier’s uniform. Dressed like that, he waited for the morning train before the bridge, hidden behind the carcass of an abandoned dredger; when he saw the locomotive pass, he leapt aboard the last freight car, and the first thing he did was throw his felt hat into the water so it wouldn’t give him away. Lying on his back on top of three hundred bunches of bananas, Anatolio watched the sky of the Isthmus pass by above his head, the invading branches of the guácimo trees, the cocobolos filled with colorful birds; and the warm breeze of a day without rain messed his straight hair and slipped inside his shirt, the friendly clatter of the train rocked and didn’t threaten him; and during those three hours of the journey he felt so calm, so unpredictably relaxed, that he fell asleep and forgot for an instant the stabbings of fear. The grinding of the carriages as the train switched gears woke him. They were stopping, he thought, they were arriving somewhere. He peeked over the side of the car and the luminous image of the bay, the reflection of the afternoon sun on the water of the Caribbean, hurt his eyes but also made him feel briefly happy. Anatolio grabbed his bundle, leaned with difficulty on the squashed bananas, and jumped. When he landed, his body rolled and Anatolio hurt himself with the horseshoe, tore the shirt on invisible pebbles, and pierced the thumb of his left hand on a thorn, but none of that mattered to him, because he’d finally arrived at his destination. Now it was just a question of finding somewhere to spend the night, and in the morning, as a legitimate passenger or as a stowaway, his new life would have begun.