Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

I’ve lost track of the nights I’ve spent imagining, like a man obsessed, the writing of the novel; and once, I confess, I imagined that Conrad’s desk caught fire again like it caught fire while he was writing Romance (or maybe it was The Mirror of the Sea , who can remember?), taking with it a good part of the manuscript; but I imagined that this time it was the story of Nostromo , the good silver thief, that was lost to the flames. I close my eyes, I picture the scene, the desk that belonged to Ford Madox Ford’s father, the paraffin lamp exploding and the flammable paper burning to cinders in seconds, consuming the sentences of exquisite calligraphy but halting grammar. I also imagine the presence of Jessie Conrad (who comes in with a cup of tea for the patient), or little Borys, whose unbearable crying slows down the already problematic writing of the novel. I close my eyes again. There’s Conrad, sitting in front of a smudged page that has not been burned, remembering the things he saw in Colón, on the railway lines, in Panama City. There he is, transforming the little he knows or remembers about Colombia, or, rather, transforming Colombia into a fictional country, a country whose history Conrad can invent with impunity. There he is, marveling at the course events in the book have taken from the starting point of those distant memories. He writes to his friend Cunninghame Graham (May 9): “I want to talk to you of the work I am engaged on now. I hardly dare avow my audacity — but I am placing it in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana. However, the book is mostly about Italians.” Conrad, astute eliminator of his own footprints, makes no mention of Colombia, the original convulsive Republic disguised behind the Costaguanan speculations. A little while later he insists on the suffering Colombia/Costaguana is causing him (July 8): “I am dying over the curst Nostromo thing. All my memories of Central America seem to slip away.” And even more: “I just had a glimpse twenty-five years ago — a short glance. That is not enough pour bâtir un roman dessus .” If Nostromo is a building, the architect Conrad needs to find a new supplier of raw material. London, luckily for him, is full of Costaguanans. Will it be necessary to resort to those men, exiles like him, men — like him — whose place in the world is roving and vague?

As the days pass and the written pages pile up on the desk, he realizes that the story of Nostromo, the Italian sailor, has lost its direction: its foundations are weak, its plot banal. Summer arrives, a fainthearted, bland summer, and Conrad devotes it to voracious, desperate reading, in an attempt to season his paltry memories. Will you allow me an inventory? He reads the Caribbean maritime memoirs of Frederick Benton Williams and the Paraguayan terrestrial memoirs of George Frederick Masterman. He reads Cunninghame Graham’s books ( Hernando de Soto, Vanished Arcadia ), and books that Cunninghame Graham recommends: Wild Scenes in South America , by Ramón Páez, and Down the Orinoco in a Canoe , by Santiago Pérez Triana. His memories and his readings intermingle: Conrad no longer knows what he lived and what he has read. At night, nights when the threat of depression turns into deep and dark oceans of insomnia, he tries to establish the difference (and fails); by day, he fights tooth and nail with the fiendish English language. And all the time he wonders: What is it, what’s it like, this Republic whose story I’m trying to tell? What is Costaguana? What the devil is Colombia?

At the beginning of September, Conrad receives a visit from an old enemy: gout, that aristocratic affliction that, like his surnames, is inherited from his family. The cause of that particular crisis, which for Conrad is one of the most terrible in his long history as victim of the disease, lies in the tale he’s working on, in the anguish and fears and ghosts provoked by the unmanageable material he is confronting. Conrad spends ten whole days in bed, devastated by the pain in his joints, by the irrefutable conviction that his right foot is in flames and the big toe of that foot the epicenter of the blaze. For those ten days he requires the company of Miss Hallowes, the selfless woman who acts as his secretary so Conrad can dictate the pages he can’t write by hand. Miss Hallowes puts up with the incomprehensible irascibility of this haughty man; the secretary doesn’t know it, but what Conrad dictates to her from his bed, what he dictates with his feet uncovered in spite of the cold — they hurt him so much he can’t even bear the weight of the covers on them — provokes hitherto unknown levels of nervous tension, pressure, and depression in the novelist. “I feel like I’m walking a tightrope,” he writes at the time. “If I falter I am lost.” With the arrival of autumn he has the increasingly frequent feeling of losing his balance, that the rope is about to snap.

And then he asks for help.

He writes to Cunninghame Graham and asks after Pérez Triana.

He writes to his editor at Heinemann and asks after Pérez Triana.

Little by little we begin to draw nearer.

The United States Senate took less than two months to ratify the Herrán — Hay Treaty: there were newspapers arriving in the bay again, long parties in the streets of Colón-Aspinwall again, and for a few moments it seemed that its ratification by the Colombian Congress, the only remaining formality, would happen almost automatically. But taking a step back and watching events with a tiny degree of coolness (as I regarded them from the house in Christophe Colomb; I will not use the word cynicism , nor will I object to others using it) was all that was needed to notice, in these festive and jubilant streets, at the railway crossings or on the walls of every public building, the same geological faults that had divided Colombians since Colombians could recall. The Conservatives supported the Treaty unconditionally; the Liberals, ever the wet blankets, dared to raise the strangest ideas, like that the payment was small and the length of the concession was large, and to the most audacious it seemed a tiny bit confusing, but just a tiny bit, that the famous ten-kilometer strip should be governed by U.S. law.

“Sovereignty,” José Vicente Concha, that crazy old man, shouted absurdly from somewhere. “Colonialism.”

Readers of the Jury, allow me to tell you a secret: beneath colored lamps and the music of hastily gathered bands (beneath the drunken enthusiasm reigning in Colón-Gomorrah), the pure and deep divisions of the War of a Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days continued to shudder like tectonic plates. But — a curious thing — only we cynics could detect this; only those of us who’d been vaccinated against any sort of reconciliation or camaraderie, only those of us who dared in silence to profane the Sacred Word of the Wisconsin received the true revelation: the war, in Panama, was far from over. It remained active in underground ways; at some point — I thought prophetically — that clandestine or submerged war would surface like a cursed white whale, to take some air or look for food or kill fictional captains, and the result would be invariably disastrous.

So, in the middle of May, the whale surfaced. The Indian Victoriano Lorenzo, who had fought for the Liberals in the war and trained guerrillas who drove the government troops mad, had escaped from his prison on board the Bogotá . He had received some terrible news: the victors all over the Isthmus, and especially those of his native land, were expecting him to be tried for war crimes. Lorenzo decided not to sit and bide his time until a trial he knew would be corrupt, and spent a week waiting for an opportune night. One Friday, as evening fell, a vicious thunderstorm bucketed down over Panama; Victoriano Lorenzo decided there would be no better moment, and in the middle of the cloudy night dived through the curtains of rainwater (those heavy drops that hurt your head) into the sea, swam to the port and hid out in General Domingo González’s Panama City house. But refugee life didn’t last long: not twenty-four hours had passed when the stubborn government forces were already knocking down the door of the house.