Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

He was at the foot of Mount Hope. Although he might not have known, he was at that moment very close to the four thousand graves of the railway workers who’d died in the first months of the construction, half a century before. Anatolio thought of waiting until dark before approaching the city, but the six o’clock mosquitoes forced him to get ahead of himself. As the sun set he’d already begun to advance toward the north, between the remains of the French Canal, on his right, and Limón Bay, on his left. These were genuine wastelands, and Anatolio felt sure he wouldn’t be seen as long as he stayed there, because no government soldier would venture into those quagmires — the rain had loosened the earth from the former trench — unless he’d received a direct order. After the distance he’d traveled, the leather of his boots had started to smell, and the swamps weren’t helping matters. Anatolio began to feel a pressing need to find a dry place to take them off and clean the insides with a cloth, because he could feel the skin between his toes riddled with fungus. His shirt smelled of bananas and moss, of its original owner’s sweat, and of the wet ground he’d rolled down. And his gray-and-black-checked trousers, those trousers that had earned him the mockery of his comrades in arms, began to reek unbearably, as if it had been a furious wildcat and not a poor student who pissed in them. Anatolio had become distracted by the impertinent festival of his own smells when he suddenly found himself surrounded by darkened houses.

His first instinct was to jump under the closest veranda and hide behind the posts, but he soon realized that the place — it looked like a neighborhood of Colón, but it wasn’t: Colón was farther north — was abandoned. He stood up straight again. Anatolio began to walk casually down the single muddy street, chose a dark house at random, and went inside. He felt his way along the walls, went all around, but he didn’t find any food, didn’t find any drinking water, didn’t find any blankets or clothes at all; instead he did hear something moving across the floorboards that could have been a rat, and his head filled with other possible images, snakes or scorpions that would attack him while he slept. Then, as he went back outside again, he saw light shining out of a window, ten or so houses along. He looked up: yes, there were the poles and cables; the glow was coming from electric lights, which incredibly were still working. Anatolio felt apprehensive but also relieved. One house, at least, was inhabited. His hand closed over his rifle. He climbed the porch steps (saw a hammock hanging empty), found the door open, and pushed the screen door. He saw the luxurious furniture, shelves with books and some newspapers and a cupboard with glass doors full of clean crystal, and then he heard a woman’s voice, two voices talking amid the sounds of fine china. He followed the voices to the kitchen and discovered that he’d been mistaken: it wasn’t two women, it was just one (white but dressed in a black woman’s clothes) who was singing in an incomprehensible language. Seeing him come in, the woman dropped the saucepan, which crashed to the floor spitting out potatoes, vegetables, and pieces of stewed fish that splashed Anatolio. At first she didn’t move; she stayed still, her black eyes fixed on him, without saying a word. Anatolio explained that he didn’t want to hurt her, but that he was going to spend the night in her house and that he needed clothes, food, and all the money she had. She nodded, as if she perfectly understood those needs, and it seemed that everything was going to be fine, until Anatolio took his eye off her for a second, and when he looked back, he saw her gathering up her dress in both hands, with a movement that revealed her pale calves, and take off running for the door. Anatolio managed to feel pity, a fleeting pity, but he thought inevitably of the firing squad that awaited him if he was captured. He raised his rifle and fired, and the bullet pierced the woman near her liver and ended up lodged in the living room cabinet.

Anatolio didn’t know where he was and could not have known that the abandoned houses (all except one) of Christophe Colomb were barely a hundred paces from the port, that more than five military vessels of four different nationalities were anchored in the bay, among them the Próspero Pinzón , and that — as is at the very least logical — thirty government sentries of the Mompox and Granaderos battalions were patrolling the wharf. Not a single one of them did not hear the shot. Following the orders of Sergeant Major Gilberto Durán Salazar, they divided into two groups to enter Christophe Colomb and encircle the enemy, and it didn’t take them long to find the only light on the street and follow it like a squadron of moths. They had not finished surrounding the house when a window opened and an armed silhouette leaned out. Then some of them swept the side wall of the house with bullets and others entered knocking down the screen door and also opening fire indiscriminately, wounding the enemy in both legs but taking him alive. They dragged him to the middle of the street, there where years before all the belongings of an engineer who’d died of yellow fever had been burned in a bonfire, sat him in a chair taken from the same house, on a velvet cushion, and tied his hands behind the wicker back. They formed a firing squad, the Sergeant Major gave the order, and the squad fired. Then one of the soldiers discovered another body in the house, that of the woman, and took her outside to leave her there, so everyone would know the fate of those who gave shelter to Liberals, not to mention cowards. And there, leaning against the chair like a rag doll, her clothes dirty with the executed deserter’s blood, Eloísa and I found her, having spent the afternoon in Colón watching the performance of a Haitian fire-eater, a black man with bulging eyes who claimed to be invulnerable to burns by the grace of the spirits.

Pain has no history, or rather, pain is outside history, because it situates its victim in a parallel reality where nothing else exists. Pain doesn’t have political commitments; pain is not Conservative, it’s not Liberal; it’s not Catholic or Federalist or Centralist or Masonic. Pain wipes everything out. Nothing else exists, I’ve said; and it’s true that for me — I can insist without grandiloquence — nothing else existed in those days: the image of that rag doll, found in front of my invaded house, that empty doll, broken on the inside, began to haunt me at night. I can’t call it Charlotte, I can’t, because that wasn’t Charlotte, because Charlotte had left that bullet-ridden body. I began to be frightened: concrete fear (of the armies that would return one day to finish the job and murder my daughter) and abstract, intangible fear as well (of the dark, of noises that might be a rat or a rotten mango falling off a tree in the next street, but that gave rise in my terrorized imagination to the silhouettes of uniformed men, of hands pointing rifles). I couldn’t sleep. I spent the nocturnal hours listening to Eloísa cry in the next room, and left her to her weeping, to her own bewildered pain; I refused to console her. Nothing would have been easier than to take the ten steps to her room and her bed, to hug her and weep with her, but I didn’t do it. We were alone: we suddenly felt irrevocably alone. And nothing would have been easier for me than to ease my solitude at the same time as consoling my daughter. But I didn’t do it; I left her alone, so she would find her own way to comprehend what the violent death of a loved one means, that black pit that opens in the world. How can I justify myself? I was afraid Eloísa would ask for explanations I wouldn’t be able to supply. “We’re at war,” I would have said, aware of the poverty, the futility of that answer, “and these things happen in wars.” Of course, that explanation didn’t convince me either. But something inside me went on believing that refusing to offer those slight comforts to my daughter, refusing to search out her company (and perhaps her involuntary protection), would eventually expose the cruel joke of which we were the object, and one of these days the heartless joker would appear at the door and reveal Charlotte’s actual whereabouts, regretting that his cruel joke hadn’t had the desired effect.