Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

I set the book on top of you and walked down the porch steps. It was six o’clock in the evening, the sun had sunk into Lake Gatún, and the Orinoco , that shitty ship, was beginning to fill with shitty soldiers from a shitty battalion, and in one of its compartments was a shipment of enough dollars to break a continent in two, open geological faults, and disrupt borders, not to mention lives. I stayed on deck until the port of Colón was out of sight, until the lights of the Cunas that Korzeniowski had seen years before, as he approached our shores, had disappeared from sight. The landscape I’d been part of for more than a quarter of a century disappeared suddenly, devoured by the distance and the mists of the night, and with it disappeared the life I led there. Yes, Readers of the Jury, I know very well it was my ship that was moving; but there, on the deck of the Orinoco , I could have sworn that before my eyes the Isthmus of Panama had separated from the continent and was beginning to float away, like a lighter, and I knew inside that adrift lighter was my daughter. I confess it willingly: I don’t know what I would have done, Eloísa, if I had seen you, if you had woken up in time and, understanding everything in a flash of lucidity or clairvoyance, had rushed to the port to beg me with your hands or eyes not to go, not to leave you, my only daughter, who still needed me.

After taking from the Isthmus the last fallback of Colombian central power, after guaranteeing with its departure that Panamanian independence was definitive and irrevocable, the Orinoco put into port at Cartagena and stopped there for a few hours. I remember the spotty face of a corporal who gambled away his last paycheck on a game of poker dice. I remember the scene kicked up by a lieutenant’s wife in the dining room (according to some, there was another woman involved). I remember Colonel Torres ordering a subordinate to spend thirty days in the brig for suggesting there was money somewhere on board, American money that had been paid in exchange for that desertion, and that the soldiers were owed a share of it.

The next morning, with the first light on the pink horizon, the Orinoco arrived in Barranquilla.

By the afternoon of November 6, the government of President Theodore Roosevelt had granted the Republic of Panama its first formal recognition, and the Marblehead , the Wyoming , and the Concord , of the U.S. Pacific fleet, headed for the Isthmus to protect the nascent Republic from Colombian restoration efforts. Meanwhile, I found a ticket for the passenger steamer Hood , of the Royal Mail, that plied the Barranquilla — London route, from the mouth of the Magdalena to the belly of the Thames, and prepared to embark on that journey which did not include my daughter. How could I condemn Eloísa to exile and uprootedness, too? No, my broken country had broken me inside, but she, seventeen years old, had the right to a life free of that rupture, free of the voluntary ostracism and phantoms of exile (for she, flesh of my flesh, was also flesh of Colón flesh, as I was not). And I, of course, could no longer give her that life. My adored Eloísa: if you are reading these lines, if you have read those that precede them, you’ve witnessed all the forces that overcame us, and perhaps you’ve understood the extreme acts a man must carry out to defeat them. You’ve heard me talk of Angels and Gorgons, of the desperate battles I fought against them for the control of my own minuscule and banal life, and you can perhaps testify to the honesty of my private war and can forgive the cruelties this war has led me to commit. And you can especially understand that there was no longer a place for me in the wastelands I was able to escape, those cannibal lands where I no longer recognized myself, that no longer belonged to me the way a homeland belongs to a satisfied man, to a clean conscience.

Later came the arrival, the encounter with Santiago Pérez Triana, those events I have put, as meticulously as I was able, before the reader. . Joseph Conrad left the house at 45 Avenue Road at about six in the morning, after spending a sleepless night listening to my story. Over the years I have reconstructed the days that followed: I knew that after seeing me, he had gone not to his residence at Pent Farm but to a London flat near Kensington High Street, a cheap and dark place he and his wife had rented and where he habitually met Ford Madox Ford to write, in collaboration (and effortlessly), the adventure novels that might pull them out of poverty. By the time he arrived at the flat, Joseph Conrad already knew that Nostromo , that problematic novel, was no longer the simple story of Italians in the Caribbean it had been up till then, and would rather examine up close the traumatic birth of a new country in traumatized Latin America, which he’d just been told about in doubtless hyperbolic terms, doubtless contaminated by tropical magic, by the tendency to mythologizing that oppresses those poor people who don’t understand politics. Jessie received him in tears: Borys had a fever of thirty-nine degrees, the doctor hadn’t arrived, Borys wouldn’t eat or drink, London was a city of uncaring, distant people. But Conrad didn’t listen to her complaints: he went straight to that desk that wasn’t his and, seeing that dawn was slow in breaking, lit that lamp that wasn’t his, and began to take notes on what he’d heard over the course of the night. The next day, after a breakfast he ate but didn’t taste, he began to incorporate the new material into the manuscript. He was very excited; like Poland, like the Poland of his childhood, the Poland his parents had died for, this little land of Panama, this little province transformed into a republic by inscrutable arts, was a pawn on the board of world politics, a victim of forces that exceeded it. . “And apropos, what do you think of the Yankee Conquistadores in Panama?” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham just before Christmas. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

The first installment of Nostromo appeared in T.P.’s Weekly in January 1904, more or less at the same time that the Panama Canal Company sold all its properties to the United States, without a single Colombian representative even allowed to participate in the negotiations, and twenty days after my desperate country had made the Panamanians this humiliating proposal: Panama City would be the new capital of Colombia if the Isthmus rejoined Colombian territory. While Panama refused outright like a spurned lover (batting eyelashes, listing past grievances, arms akimbo and fists on hips), Santiago Pérez Triana gave me directions to the nearest newsagent and forced me to look through my pocket for those coins whose confusing denominations I still hadn’t mastered and separate out, into another pocket, the exact cost of the Weekly . Then he sent me outside with an affectionate pat on the back. “My esteemed Altamirano, don’t come back without that magazine,” he said. And then, more seriously: “I congratulate you. You are now part of the memory of mankind.”

But that’s not how it went.

I was not part of mankind’s memory.

I remember the slanted, blinding light on the street when I found the place, that winter light that cast no shadows yet dazzled me, reflecting off the paper of the magazines on sale and, depending on the angle, the glass of the recently cleaned windows. I remember the mix of excitement and terror (a mute, cold terror, terror of the new) as I went back outside after paying. I remember the misty and a little unreal quality that the rest of the objects in the world took on for me, the passersby, the lampposts, the occasional carriages, the park’s threatening railings. However, I don’t remember the reasons I postponed reading, I don’t remember having guessed that the contents of the magazine would not be what I was expecting, I don’t remember having had any reasons to allow that implausible intuition into my head, I don’t remember suspicion or persecution accompanying me during that long circular walk around Regent’s Park. . Yes, that’s right: I carried the magazine in my pocket all day, patting my side occasionally to make sure it was still there, as if the one I’d bought was the only copy in the world, as if the dangerous nature of its contents would be neutralized if I kept it in my power. But what had to happen (everyone knows it) ended up happening. Nothing can be delayed forever. No one can find reasons to put off forever something as innocent, as peaceful, as inoffensive, as the reading of a book.