Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

Eloísa and I were taking our siestas when the Tiradores battalion arrived, and the noise woke us both up at once. We saw them come into our street, five hundred soldiers, their faces stifled with the heat of their uniforms, necks swollen and tense, sweat running down their sideburns. They carried their rifles halfheartedly (bayonets pointing to the ground) and dragged their boots as if every step were a whole campaign. On the other side of the Isthmus, the separatists launched their manifesto. The Isthmus of Panama had been governed by Colombia “by the narrow criteria that long ago the European nations applied to their colonies,” in view of which it decided “to reclaim its sovereignty,” “create its own fate,” and “fulfil the role the situation of its territory demands.” Meanwhile, our little ghost town filled with the sounds of canteens and cooking pots, the clatter of bayonets being dismantled and rifles being cleaned with great care. The hamlet where my father had lived, where Charlotte and the engineer Madinier had lived, the place where the Colombian civil war had arrived to kill Charlotte and along the way give me a valuable lesson on the might of Great Events, now became again one of history’s stages. The air was permeated with the smell of unwashed bodies, of clothing showing signs of the weight of the days; the more modest soldiers went behind the pillars to defecate out of view, but during that November evening it was more common to see them walk around the house, drop their trousers facing the street, find a comfortable spot under a palm tree, and crouch down with a defiant look on their faces. The smell of human shit floated through Christophe Colomb with the same shameless intensity as had French perfume years before.

“How long are they going to stay?” asked Eloísa.

“Until the Gringos kick them out,” I said.

“They’re armed,” said Eloísa.

That they were: the danger had not passed; the powder keg had not yet been defused. Colonel Eliseo Torres, suspecting or foreseeing that the whole matter — his confinement to an abandoned neighborhood of old houses, bordered by the bay on three sides and Colón on the other — was nothing but an ambush, had posted ten guards to patrol round the whole hamlet. So that night we had to endure the noise of their caged beasts’ footsteps passing by our veranda at regular intervals. Over the course of that night Eloísa and I spent besieged by the Colombian military, and beyond them by the separatist revolution, it occurred to me that perhaps, just perhaps, my life in the Isthmus had finished, that perhaps my life, as I’d known it, no longer existed. Colombia had taken everything from me; the last remnant of my previous life, of what could have been and was not, was this seventeen-year-old woman who looked at me with a terrified expression each time a soldier’s shout reached our ears, at each hostile and paranoid Who goes there? followed by a shot fired in the air, a shot (I thought Eloísa must be thinking) like the one that had killed her mother. “I’m scared, Papá ,” Eloísa said. And that night she slept with me, like when she was a little girl. And to me Eloísa, in spite of the shapes filling out her nightgown, was a little girl, Readers of the Jury, was still my little girl.

I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was talking to Charlotte’s memory, asking her what I should do, but I got no answer: Charlotte’s memory had turned inscrutable and unfriendly, looked away when she heard my voice, refused to advise me. Panama, meanwhile, shifted beneath my feet. Panama had once been said to be “flesh of Colombian flesh, blood of Colombian blood,” and for me it was impossible not to think of my Eloísa, who slept at my side now unafraid (falsely convinced that I could protect her from anything), when remembering the flesh of the Isthmus that was about to be amputated a few kilometers from our shared bed. You were flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, Eloísa; that’s what I was thinking as I lay beside you, head resting on my elbow, and looked closely at you, closer than we’d been since you were a babe in arms, recently recovered from the risks of your extreme prematurity. . And I think that’s when I realized.

I realized that you were also flesh of the flesh of your land, I realized that you belonged to this country the way an animal belongs to its particular landscape (made for certain colors, certain temperatures, certain fruit or prey). You were Colónian as I never was, Eloísa dear: your mannerisms, your accent, your different appetites reminded me with the insistence and fanaticism of a nun. Each of your movements said to me: I am from here. And seeing you up close, seeing your eyelids vibrating like the wings of a dragonfly, at first I thought I envied you, that I envied your instinctive rootedness — because it hadn’t been a decision, because you’d been born with it the way one is born with a mole or one eye a different color from the other — then, seeing how placidly you slept in this land of Colón that seemed to blend with your body, I thought I would have liked to ask you about your dreams, and finally thought again of Charlotte, who never belonged to Colón or to the province of Panama or much less to the convulsive Republic of Colombia, the country that had exterminated her family. . And I thought of what had happened at the bottom of the Chagres River that afternoon when she decided it was worthwhile to go on living. Charlotte had taken that secret to the grave, or the grave had come looking for her before she’d had time to reveal it to me, but it had always made me happy (briefly, secretly happy) to think that I had something to do with that deep decision in the depths. Thinking of that I laid my head on your chest, Eloísa, and the scent of your naked underarm reached me, and I felt so calm for a moment, so deceitfully and artificially calm, that I ended up falling asleep.

The martial maneuvers that, according to Eloísa, the Tiradores battalion carried out in front of our house did not wake me up. I slept dreamlessly, without any notion of time; and then Panamanian reality came flooding in. At about noon, Colonel Shaler was standing on my front porch, beside the hammock that had belonged to my father, pounding on the screen door so hard he might have knocked it off its hinges. Before starting to wonder where Eloísa had gone on this exceptional day when all the schools were closed, the smell of the fish stew she was cooking in the kitchen reached my nose. I barely had time to pull on a pair of boots and a decent shirt and answer the door. Behind Shaler, far enough back not to be able to hear his words, was Colonel Eliseo Torres, duly accompanied by his bugler.

Shaler said: “Lend us your table, Altamirano, and serve us some coffee, for the love of God. You won’t regret it, I swear. At this table history is going to be made.”

It was a heavy oak table, with round legs and a drawer with iron rings on each of the longest edges. Shaler and Torres sat on opposite sides, each in front of a drawer, and I sat at the head of the table where I always sat; the bugler stood out on the porch looking at the street occupied by the Tiradores soldiers, as if the battalion still expected a treacherous attack from the revolutionaries or the marines. So we were sitting, and were still settling into the heavy chairs, when Colonel Shaler put both hands, like gigantic water spiders, on the table and began to speak with his tongue tangled by the stubbornness of his accent but with the persuasive powers of a hypnotist.

“Honorable Colonel Torres, allow me to speak frankly: yours is a lost cause.”

“What?”

“The independence of Panama is a fait accompli.”

Torres leapt to his feet, his eyebrows arched indignantly, and attempted an unconvincing protest: “I haven’t come here to—” But Shaler cut him off.