Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

So at about four, when the sky was already beginning to darken, I sat down on one of the park benches at the same time as an incipient snowfall began over London and perhaps over all of Imperial England. I opened the magazine, I read that word that will pursue me till the end of my days. Nostromo : three bland syllables, one repeated and insistent vowel like an eye that keeps watch on us. . I carried on, between oranges and galleons, between sunken rocks and mountains that sink their heads in the clouds, and began to wander like a sleepwalker through the story of that fictitious republic, and I traveled through descriptions and events that I knew and at the same time did not know, that seemed my own and alien at the same time, and I saw the Colombian wars, the Colombian dead, the landscape of Colón and Santa Marta, the sea and its color and the mountain and its dangers, and there it was, at last, the discord that had always been. . But there was something missing in that tale: an absence was more visible than all those presences. I remember my desperate search, the frenzy of my eyes going over each page of the magazine, the heat I felt in my armpits and whiskers as I entered into that painful truth.

Then I knew.

I knew I would see Conrad again.

I knew there would be a second encounter.

I knew this encounter could not be postponed.

In a matter of minutes I had arrived at Kensington High Street, and a newspaper seller directed me to Gordon Place, where the novelist lived. There was hardly any light left (an old man was going along with a ladder, climbing up and down the movable steps, lighting the street lamps) when I knocked on his door. I didn’t reply to the questions the unsuspecting woman who answered the door asked me; I brushed against her apron as I passed, I ran up the steps as fast as my legs could carry me. I don’t remember what ideas, what indignation went through my head while I opened doors and crossed hallways, but I know for certain that nothing had prepared me for what I found.

There were two dark rooms, or they’d gone dark in the premature January dusk. A door connected them, and that door was open at the moment of my arrival, but it was obvious that its function was to remain stubbornly, constantly, and inevitably closed most of the time. In the back room, contained by the door frame, there was a desk of dark wood, and on top of the desk a pile of papers and a paraffin lamp; in the other room, the one I’d just burst into, a little boy with long brown hair slept on a miserable-looking cot (he was breathing laboriously, snoring a little), and the other bed in view was occupied by a woman in street clothes, a woman with an inelegant and chubby-cheeked face who was not lying down but reclining against a backrest, and who had some sort of board across her lap that after a couple of seconds (after my eyes adjusted to the interior lighting) turned into a portable desk. From her closed hand emerged a black-tipped pen, and it was as I focused on her and the inkcovered pages that I heard the voice.

“What are you doing here?”

Joseph Conrad was standing in the corner of the room; he was wearing leather slippers and a housecoat of dark silk; he was wearing, most of all, an expression of intense, almost inhuman concentration. In my head the pieces fell into place: I had interrupted him. To be more precise: I had interrupted his dictation. To be even more precise: while the first scenes of Nostromo were getting wrinkled in my pocket, in that room Conrad was dictating the last ones. And his wife, Jessie, was in charge of putting the story — the story of José Altamirano — onto the blank pages.

“You,” I said, “owe me an explanation.”

“I owe you nothing,” said Conrad. “Leave immediately. I’ll call someone, I’m warning you.”

I took the copy of the Weekly out of my pocket. “This is false. This is not what I told you.”

“This, my dear sir, is a novel.”

“It’s not my story. It’s not the story of my country.”

“Of course not,” said Conrad. “It’s the story of my country. It’s the story of Costaguana.”

Jessie watched us. Her expression was one of attentive confusion, like one who’s arrived late to the theater. She started to speak, and her voice was weaker than I’d expected: “Who. .?” But she didn’t finish the question. She tried to move, and a grimace of pain exploded across her face, as if a cord had broken inside her body.

Conrad then invited me into the backroom; the door was closed, and through the wood we could hear the woman’s sobs.

“She’s had an accident,” said Conrad. “Both knees. Both knees dislocated. It’s serious.”

“It was my life,” I said. “I entrusted it to you, I trusted you.”

“A fall. She was out shopping, she’d gone to Barker’s, she slipped. Seems silly, doesn’t it? That’s why we are in London,” said Conrad. “She must be examined every day, the doctors come every day. We do not know if she’ll need surgery.”

It was as if he’d stopped listening to me, this man who’d spent a whole night doing nothing else. “You’ve eliminated me from my own life,” I said. “You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me.” I waved the Weekly in the air again, and then threw it down on his desk. “Here,” I whispered, my back to the thief, “I do not exist.”

It was true. In the Republic of Costaguana, José Altamirano did not exist. My tale lived there, the tale of my life and my land, but the land was another, it had another name, and I had been removed from it, erased like an unmentionable sin, obliterated without pity like a dangerous witness. Joseph Conrad told me of the terrible effort of dictating the story under the present conditions, and dictating it to Jessie, whose pain prevented her from working with due concentration. “I could dictate a thousand words an hour,” he told me. “It’s easy. The novel is easy. But Jessie gets distracted. She cries. I wonder if she’ll be left an invalid, if she’ll have to use crutches for the rest of her life. I’ll soon be forced to hire a secretary. The boy is ill. Debts pile up on my desk, and I must submit this manuscript on time to avoid greater disasters. And then you came along, answered a number of questions, told me a number of more or less useful things, and I have used them as my intuition and knowledge of this trade dictated. Think of this, Altamirano, and tell me: Do you really believe your little sensitivities have the slightest importance? Do you really think so?” In the other room the bed boards creaked, and it was presumably Jessie who emitted those timid groans of pain as genuine as they were selfless. “Do you really believe your pathetic life has anything to do with this book?”

I approached his desk. I noticed then that there wasn’t one pile of papers but two: one of them consisted of marked-up pages, with crossings out, marginal notes, dark arrows, wavy lines eliminating whole paragraphs; the other was a stack of typed pages that had been corrected several times. My corrected life , I thought. And also: My misappropriated life . “Stop it,” I said to Conrad.

“That’s impossible.”

“You can do it. Stop it all.” I picked up the manuscript. My hands moved with an impulse that seemed beyond my control. “I’ll burn it,” I said. In two steps I was at the window; with a hand on the catch, I said, “I’ll throw it out.”

Conrad crossed his arms behind his back. “My tale is now on its way, dear friend. It is already on the street. Right now, as you and I speak, there are people reading the story of the wars and revolutions of that country, the story of that province that secedes over a silver mine, the history of the South American Republic that does not exist. And there is nothing you can do about it.”