Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

It was during those days that I began to spend the nights walking to the port, sometimes getting as far as the Railroad Company, and later the Freight House, that Company warehouse from which I’d have been evicted at gunpoint had I been discovered. Colón, in those wartime nights, was a cold, blue city; walking around it alone, defying tacit or declared curfews depending on the day and the vicissitudes of the war, a civilian (though a lost and desperate civilian) running countless risks. I was too much of a coward to take my tired head’s suicidal pursuits seriously, but I can confess that several times I went so far as to imagine a scenario in which I’d fling myself bare-chested with knife in hand at the men of the Mompox battalion, shouting “Long Live the Liberal Party!” and force them to receive my onslaught with bullets or bayonets. I never did, of course, never did anything of the sort. My act of greatest daring, during those dazed nights, was to visit the side streets of Colón the Widow of the Canal had visited, according to legend, and once I was sure I saw Charlotte turn a corner in the company of an African man in a hat, and ran after the specter until I realized I’d lost a shoe between the cobblestones and my scraped heel was bleeding.

I changed. Pain alters us; it’s the agent of slight but terrifying disruptions. After several weeks during which I grew gradually familiar with the night, I allowed myself the private exoticism of visiting the Europeans’ brothels, and more than once made use of their women (relics in their forties from de Lesseps’s times, in some cases heirs of these relics, girls with surnames like Michaud or Henrion who didn’t know who Napoleon Bonaparte was or why the French Canal had failed). Later, back in that house where Charlotte survived in a thousand phantasmagorical ways, in her clothes that Eloísa had begun to wear or in the destruction still visible if you looked closely at the glass door of the cabinet, something I can only call shame would descend upon me. At those moments I felt incapable of looking Eloísa in the face, and she, out of some kind of last respect she held for me, was incapable of formulating a single one of the questions that were (clearly) crowding the tip of her tongue. I sensed that my actions were destroying the affection between us, that my behavior was tearing down the bridges that united us. But I accepted it. Life had accustomed me to the idea of collateral victims. Charlotte was one. My relationship with my daughter, one more. We are at war, I thought. In war these things happen.

I attributed to the war, then, the obvious fracture of the bridges, the gap that opened between my daughter and myself from that time on like some sort of biblical sea. The school suspended services with shameless frequency, and Eloísa, who learned to battle with the absence of her mother with much more talent than I did, began to have free time and to enjoy it in ways that didn’t involve me. She didn’t make me part of her life (I don’t blame her: my sadness, the bottomless pit of my grief, was a rebuff to any invitation), or rather, her life evolved in directions I didn’t understand. And in rare moments of lucidity — nights of mourning and fear can be rich in revelations — I managed to glimpse that something more concrete than Charlotte’s death had come into play. But I didn’t manage to give it a name. Busy as I was with the memory of my shredded happiness, with attempts to accept the reality of the devastation, to process the information of my shattered life and dominate the anguish of nocturnal solitude, I didn’t manage to name it. . And I realized this: in the long Colón nights, on my long walks, sweaty and smelly, through streets that just a little while ago I’d strolled well dressed and fragrant, names of things were disappearing. Insomnia gradually takes away the memory of things: I forgot to wash, forgot to clean my teeth, and I remembered (that is, remembered that I’d forgotten) when it was already too late; the Chinese butcher, the Gringo soldier at the station, the man who sold sugar cane on Sundays from his beach stall, raised their hands instinctively to their faces at the blast of the breath of my greeting, or took a step back as if pushed when I opened my mouth. . I lived outside of conscience; I also lived outside the tangible world around me: I experienced my being a widower like exile, but without ever figuring out where I’d been expelled from, where I was forbidden to return. On better days I could glimpse a slight hope: just as I’d forgotten the most basic rules of urban life, maybe the despair itself was forgettable.

And that was how the Political Gorgon finally invaded the Altamirano-Madinier household. That was how History, incarnate in the particular destiny of a cowardly and confused soldier, dashed my pretensions to neutrality, my attempts at separation, my eagerness for studied apathy. The lesson I learned from Great Events was clear and easy: you won’t escape, they told me, it’s impossible for you to escape. It was a real show of strength, as well, for at the same time the Gorgon ruined my illusory plans for earthly happiness, it also ruined those of my country. Now I could go into detail about those days of disorientation and despair, about the anguish painted on Eloísa’s face when she looked straight at me, about my lack of interest in remedying that anguish. Were we talking about shipwrecks? That was when mine happened. But now, after the painful lessons the Gorgon and the Angel have taught me, how can I attend to those banalities? How can I talk about my pain and that of my daughter, of the nights of apolitical tears, of the outside-of-history solitude that overtook me, heavy as a wet poncho? The death of Charlotte — my lifesaver, my last resort — at the hands of the War of a Thousand Days was a memorandum in which someone reminded me of the hierarchies that must be respected. Someone, Angel or Gorgon, reminded me that beside the Republic of Colombia and its vicissitudes my minuscule life was a grain of salt, a frivolous and unimportant matter, the tale the idiot tells, the sound, the fury, and so on. Someone called me to order to make me realize that in Colombia more important things than my thwarted happiness were happening.

An essentially Colombian paradox: after a brilliant campaign by which he managed to recapture almost the entire Isthmus of Panama, the revolutionary General Benjamín Herrera found himself suddenly forced to sign a peace treaty in which his army and his party came out the losers from every angle. What had happened? I thought of the words my father had said to me on a certain day in 1885: when Colón was destroyed by fire and war and yet the Canal — that unfinished Canal — was spared, I told him we’d had good luck and he said no, we’d had Gringo ships. Well then, the War of a Thousand Days was special for several reasons (for its hundred thousand dead, for having left the National Treasury in complete ruin, for having humiliated half the population of Colombia and turned the other half into voluntary humiliators); but it was also special for less conspicuous and, another paradox, more serious circumstances. No more beating about the bush: the War of a Thousand Days, which actually lasted one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight, was special for having been resolved from start to finish in the bowels of foreign ships. Generals Foliaco and De la Rosa did not negotiate aboard the Próspero Pinzón but on the HMS Tribune ; Generals Foliaco and Albán did not negotiate on the Cartagena , which arrived around the same time in Colón, but on the USS Marietta . After the surrender of my Schizophrenic City, where did they arrange the prisoner swaps? Not on the Almirante Padilla , but on the Philadelphia . And last but not least: after the various peace proposals made by Benjamín Herrera and his isthmian revolutionaries, after the radical refusal of those proposals on the part of the stubborn Conservative government, where was the negotiation table that led to the Treaty? Where did they sign the little piece of paper that put an end to the one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of relentless slaughter? It was not on board the Liberal Cauca , or on the Conservative Boyaca : it was on the USS Wisconsin , which was neither one nor the other but was much more. . We Colombians were taken by the hand of our big brothers, the Grown-up Countries. Our fate was played for on the gaming tables of other houses. In those poker games that resolved the most important issues of our history, we Colombians, Readers of the Jury, just sat there like statues.