Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

“What do you know?” I barked at her. “You hardly even knew him.”

Yes, that’s what I said. It was a cruel retort; Eloísa withstood it unblinkingly, perhaps because she understood better than I the complexity of what I was feeling at that moment, perhaps because she was starting to become sadly resigned to my tormented-widower’s reactions. I looked at her: she had turned into a living portrait of Charlotte (her small breasts, her tone of voice); she’d had enough presence of mind to cut her hair short like a boy, trying to reduce as much as possible the resemblance that tormented me; however, at that moment I felt a gap opening up between us (a Darien Jungle) or that an insuperable obstruction (a Sierra Nevada) arose between us. She was turning into someone else: the woman she was becoming was colonizing her territory, appropriating the city in ways that I, an incomer, could not imagine. Of course, Eloísa was right: Miguel Altamirano would have liked to have witnessed that night, written about it even if no one would publish the article, left a record of the Great Event for the benefit of future generations. That’s what I was thinking all night, in the 4th of July saloon, while I drank half a bottle of whiskey with a banker from San Francisco and his lover, next to the statue of Columbus, where the Haitian fire-eater was still performing his spectacle. And as we walked back home, along the shore of Limón Bay, seeing the lights of the ships flickering in the distance like fireflies over the black sheet of the night, I felt for the first time at the back of my mouth the bitter taste of resentment.

Eloísa was walking with both hands clasped around my arm, like when she was a little girl; our feet were stepping on the same ground where the deserter Anatolio Calderón had stepped, but neither of us spoke of that disgrace that was still with us, that would never, never leave us alone, that would sleep in our house like a pet until the end of time. But as we crossed the dark street of the ghost town of Christophe Colomb, it was as if all the ghosts of my past came out to meet me. I didn’t think the word, but as I climbed the porch steps the notion of revenge had already installed itself in my mind. Not only would I not flee from the Angel of History again, not only would I not seek a submissive distance from the Gorgon of Politics, but I would make them my slaves: I would burn the wings of one, decapitate the other. There, lying in the hammock at midnight on January 24, I declared war on them.

And while this was happening in the tropical heat, up there, in the frigid fog of perfidious Albion, Joseph Conrad was having a little tantrum.

He’d been invited to London to meet an American (a banker, just like the man in the 4th of July: the correspondence is insignificant but no less deserving of mention). The banker says he’s a great admirer of the maritime novels: he recites the beginning of Almayer’s Folly from memory, feels like a close friend of Lord Jim although the novel had struck him as “dense and tedious.” In the middle of dinner, the banker asks Conrad “when he’d spin some more yarns about the sea,” and Conrad explodes: he’s sick of being seen as a writer of little adventures, a Jules Verne of the Southern Seas. He protests and complains, explains himself too much undoubtedly, but at the end of the argument the banker, who can smell the need for money the way dogs can smell fear, offers him a deal: Conrad will write a commissioned novel of around one hundred thousand words with a maritime setting; the banker, as well as paying him, will arrange for publication by Harper’s Magazine . Conrad accepts (the tantrum has reached its end), mostly because he already has the subject for the novel, and has even written a few notes for it.

These are not easy days. For months now, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford have been writing a four-handed, romantic, adventure novel, the most obvious object of which is to make (quick, immediate) money to alleviate both their financial difficulties. But the collaboration has not gone well: it’s taken much longer than they planned, and has created situations of tension between the friends and their wives that little by little have poisoned the cordial atmosphere between them. Complaints and apologies, accusations and alibis, go back and forth. “I’m doing my damnedest,” writes Conrad. Blackwood’s , the magazine that was to publish the novel, has now turned it down; debts pile up on his desk and represent, to Conrad, a real threat against his family. Tormented by the guilt of his neglected responsibilities, he sees his wife as a widow and his sons as orphans; they depend on him and he has nothing to give them. His health does not make matters any easier: he has one attack of gout after another, and when it’s not gout it’s dysentery, and when it’s not dysentery it’s rheumatism. As if that weren’t enough, nostalgia for the sea overwhelms him more and more each day, and during those days he has seriously considered the possibility of looking for a captain’s post and returning to his old life. “What I wouldn’t give for a cutter and the River Fatshan,” he writes, “or that magnificent dilapidated ship between the Mozambique Canal and Zanzibar!” In these conditions, the banker’s commission is a cause for gratitude.

The idea has been growing gradually in his head. It started as a short story, something about the length of “Youth,” maybe, or “Amy Foster” at most, but Conrad misjudged the elements (or perhaps he was aware that short stories don’t sell well) and the original concept swelled as the days and months went by, going from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand words, going from a single setting to two or three, and all that before he’d started actually writing it. During those days the project disappears from Conrad’s letters and conversations. At the time of the proposal, Conrad knows little about it, but one of the things he does know is that the story will be a hundred thousand words long, and that its protagonists will be a group of Italians. His memory has returned to the admired figure of Dominic Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica; his memory goes back to 1876, the year of his travels to the ports of the Caribbean, the year of his experiences as a gunrunner in Panama, the year of experiences that led him to the (secret and never confessed) suicide attempt. In those initial notes, Cervoni has been transformed into a capataz of cargadores who has ended up working in a Caribbean port. His name is Gian Battista, and his surname is Nostromo. Around that time Conrad reads the maritime memoirs of a certain Benton Williams, and finds there the story of a man who has stolen a shipment of silver. That story and the image of Cervoni blend in his head. . Maybe (he thinks) his Nostromo doesn’t need to be a thief; maybe circumstances have led him to the booty by chance, and he takes advantage of them. But what circumstances? In what situation can a decent man find himself forced to steal a shipment of silver? Conrad doesn’t know. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine motives, construct scenes, assemble psychologies. But he fails.

In March 1902, Conrad had written: “Nostromo shall be a first-rate story.” Months later his enthusiasm had declined: “There is no help and no hope; there is only the duty to try, to try everlastingly with no regard for success.” One day, in the middle of an unusual burst of optimism and shortly after the conversation with the banker, he takes out a blank sheet of paper, puts the number 1 on the top right-hand corner, and in capital letters writes: “NOSTROMO. PART FIRST. THE ISABELS.” But nothing more happens; the words do not come to him. Conrad immediately notices something is wrong. He crosses out “THE ISABELS” and writes: “THE SILVER OF THE MINE.” And then, for reasons that are inexplicable, the images and memories, the oranges he saw in Puerto Cabello and the stories of galleons he heard when they put into port at Cartagena, the waters of Limón Bay, its mirror-like stillness and islands that are really the Mulatas crowd into his head. It’s that moment again: the book has begun. Conrad experiences it with excitement, but he knows the excitement will not last, that soon it’ll be replaced by the most assiduous visitors to his desk: his linguistic uncertainties, architectural anguish, and financial anxieties. This novel must succeed, thinks Conrad; otherwise, bankruptcy awaits him.