Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

I could swear that the cartoon was in my pocket that morning, at the end of October, when I arrived at the Railroad Company docks, having spent the night wandering the tolerant streets and fallen asleep on the veranda of my house (on the wooden floorboards, not in the hammock, so I wouldn’t wake Eloísa with the creaking sound the beams made whenever someone lay down in it). It hadn’t been, I must confess, an easy night: after Charlotte’s death, the days of greatest pain had passed by then, or seemed to have passed, and it seemed possible again that a certain normality, a normal and shared grief, could be established between my daughter and myself; but when I got home, after dark in Christophe Colomb, I heard a too-familiar humming, a music that Charlotte used to sing on her happiest days (those days when she did not regret her decision to stay in Panama). It was a childish tune, the words of which I never knew, because Charlotte didn’t remember them; it was a tune that to me always seemed too sad for its ostensible aim of getting an unruly child to sleep. And when my footsteps followed the humming, on arriving at Eloísa’s room, I came across the frightful image of my wife, who had returned from the dead and was more beautiful than ever, and it took me a second to discern Eloísa’s features beneath her makeup, Eloísa’s adolescent body beneath a long African dress, Eloísa’s hair beneath a green African scarf: Eloísa playing dress-up in her dead mother’s clothes. I can barely imagine my little girl’s dismay when she saw me leap toward her (perhaps she thought I was going to embrace her) and slap her across the face, not too hard, but enough to knock one end of the scarf off her head so it lay over her right shoulder like a lock of hair out of place.

The sun was already making itself felt when I began to wait, with the salty wind hitting me in the chest, for the first North American steamer to dock. It turned out to be the Yucatán , en route from New York. And there I was, regretting what had happened with Eloísa, thinking without wanting to think of Charlotte, breathing that warm air while the dockers brought the bundles of the foreign newspapers down to the port, when Dr. Manuel Amador came down off the ship. I wish I’d never seen him, wish I’d never noticed him, wish, having noticed him, that I hadn’t been able to deduce what I deduced.

What I must now tell is painful. Who can blame me for looking away, for trying to postpone the suffering as I’m going to do. Yes, I know: I should follow the chronological order of events, but nothing forbids me from taking a leap into the immediate future. . Barely a week after that chance meeting with Manuel Amador (a dreadful week), I found myself on my way to London. What forbids me this conjuring trick that hides or defers the least pleasant days in my memory? In fact, is there some contract that obliges me to tell them? Does every individual not reserve the right not to testify against himself? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time I hid, I pretended to forget, those troublesome events. I have already spoken of my arrival in London and my meeting with Santiago Pérez Triana. Well, the story I’ve told up to now is the story I told Pérez Triana over the course of that afternoon in November 1903. The story I told Pérez Triana went this far. Here it stops, here it ends. No one forced me to tell him the rest, nothing suggested that doing so could be beneficial to me. The story Pérez Triana knew ended on this line, with this word.

Santiago Pérez Triana listened to my censored story during lunch, coffee, and an almost four-hour stroll that took us from Regent’s Park to Cleopatra’s Needle, crossing St. John’s Wood and into Hyde Park, with a detour to see the daring people ice skating along the edges of the Serpentine. This was the story; and Pérez Triana found it so interesting, that, at the end of that afternoon, insisting that all exiles were brothers, that voluntary expatriates and banished refugees were of the same species, offered to put me up in his house indefinitely: I could help him with secretarial tasks while I got myself settled in London, although he was very careful not to go into any detail about the tasks he’d entrust to me. Then he accompanied me to Trenton’s, where he paid for the night I’d spent in the hotel and also paid for the night that was beginning. “Get some rest,” he said, “get your things in order, as I shall mine. Unfortunately, neither my house nor my wife is well disposed to receiving guests at such short notice. I’ll make all the necessary arrangements to have someone come and collect your things. That will be in the late morning. And you, dear friend, I’ll expect tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock sharp. By then I’ll have arranged what needs to be arranged. And you shall join my household as if you’d been raised in it.”

What happened until five the next day has no importance; the world didn’t exist until five in the afternoon. Arrival at the hotel in the nocturnal fog. Emotional exhaustion: eleven hours of sleep. Awaken slowly. Late, light lunch. Leave, omnibus, Baker Street, park just about to be illuminated by the gaseous light of the street lamps. A couple strolls by, arm in arm. It has begun to drizzle.

At five o’clock I was in front of 45 Avenue Road. The housekeeper showed me in; she did not speak to me, and I didn’t manage to figure out if she was Colombian as well. I had to wait half an hour before my host came down to greet me. I imagine what he must have seen: a man not much younger than himself but from whom he was separated by several layers of hierarchy — he, a famous paradigm of the ruling class; I, an outcast — sitting in the reading chair, with a round hat on his lap and a copy of Down the Orinoco in a Canoe in his hand. Pérez Triana saw me reading without any spectacles and told me he envied me. I was wearing. . What was I wearing that day? I was dressed like a young man: a short-collared shirt, boots so shiny the light from outside drew a silver line on the leather, a pompous, exaggerated knot in my tie. At that time I had started to grow a sparse and still blond beard, darker on the chin and sideburns, almost invisible over my bulging cheeks. When I saw Pérez Triana come in, I jumped to my feet and returned the book to the pile of three on the side table, apologizing for having picked it up. “That’s what it’s there for,” he said. “But I should change it for something more recent, shouldn’t I? Have you read Boylesve’s latest? George Gissing’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he kept talking as if he were alone. “Yes, I really must. I mustn’t inflict my clumsy amateur attempts at writing on every visitor, and much less when that clumsiness was perpetrated months ago.” And thus, as gently as one accompanies a convalescent, he took me by the arm and led me to another smaller room, at the back of the house. Standing next to the bookshelves, a man with weathered skin, a thick, dark beard and pointed mustache, looked over the titles on the leather spines with his left hand in the pocket of his checked jacket. He turned round as he heard us come in, held his right hand out to me, and in the handshake he gave me I felt the calloused hand of a man of experience, the firm grip of that hand that knew the elegance of calligraphy as well as it did eighty-nine ways to knot a rope, and I felt that the contact of our two hands was like the collision of two planets.

“My name is Joseph Conrad,” the man introduced himself. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

I talked. You better believe I talked . I talked without stopping, desperately: I told him everything, the whole history of my country, the whole story of its violent people and their pacific victims (the history, I mean, of its convulsions). That November night in 1903, while the temperature plummeted precipitously in Regent’s Park and the trees obeyed autumn’s alopecic tendencies, and while Santiago Pérez Triana watched us, a cup of tea in his hand — steaming up his glasses every time he took a sip — marveling at the twists of fate that had made him a witness of that meeting, that night, no one could have shut me up. Then and there I knew my place in the world. Pérez Triana’s sitting room, a place made out of the accumulated remains of Colombian politics, of its games and disloyalties, of its infinite and never well-pondered cruelty, was the scene of my epiphany.