Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

“But the republic does exist,” I said, or rather beseeched him. “The province does exist. But the silver mine is really a canal, a canal between two oceans. I know because I know it. I was born in that republic, I lived in that province. I am guilty of its misfortunes.”

Conrad didn’t answer. I returned the manuscript to his desk, and doing so was like a concession, like the laying down of weapons by a warrior chief. At what moment does a man concede defeat? What happens in his head to convince him to give up? I would have liked to ask those things.

Instead, I asked: “How does it all end?”

“Pardon?”

“How does the history of Costaguana end?”

“I’m afraid you already know that, my dear Altamirano,” said Conrad. “It’s all here, in this chapter, and it might not be what you’re expecting. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing that you don’t know.” He paused and added: “I can read it to you, if you like.”

I went over to the window, which by then was a darkened square. And I don’t know why, but there, looking out toward the street, refusing like a child what was going on behind my back, I felt safe. It was a false sensation, of course, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared.

“Read,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Life out on the street began to die down. The intense cold was reflected in the faces of passersby. My eyes and mind were distracted by the image of a little girl playing with her dog on the icy pavement — dark red coat, a scarf that looked thin from the distance — and while that confident voice began to speak to me of the destiny of those characters (and obliged me to some extent to attend the revelation of my own destiny), the snow fell in dense flakes on the pavement and melted immediately, forming little stars of damp that vanished straightaway. Then I thought of you, Eloísa, and of what I’d done to us; without asking permission I opened the window, leaned outside, and looked up so the falling snow would wet my eyes, so the snow would camouflage my tears, so Santiago Pérez Triana would not notice I’d been crying when he saw me. Suddenly, only you mattered; I realized, not without some terror, that only you would ever matter. And I knew: there, among gusts of icy wind, I knew what my punishment was. I knew that, many years later, when time had left behind my conversation with Joseph Conrad, I would go on remembering that afternoon when I disappeared from history by magic, I would go on being aware of the magnitude of my loss but also of the irreparable damage the events of my life had caused us, and most of all I would go on waking up in the middle of the night wondering, as I’m wondering now, where you might be, Eloísa, what kind of life you will have had, what place you will have occupied in the unfortunate history of Costaguana.

It’s possible The Secret History of Costaguana arose from Nostromo , which I read for the first time in Francis and Suzanne Laurenty’s house (Xhoris, Belgium) during the summer of 1998; it’s possible that it came from the essay “El Nostromo de Joseph Conrad,” which Malcolm Deas included in his book Del poder y la gramatica , which I read in Barcelona at the beginning of the year 2000; and it’s possible that it came from an informative article that Alejandro Gaviria published in the Colombian journal El Malpensante in December 2001. But it is also possible (and this is my preferred possibility) that the first hunch of the novel came into being in the year 2003, while I was writing, for my friend Conrado Zuluaga, a brief biography of Joseph Conrad. The opportune commission obliged me to revise, out of rigor or curiosity, Conrad’s letters and novels, as well as Deas’s and Gaviria’s texts and many others, and at some point it struck me as implausible that this novel had not been written before, which is undoubtedly the best reason someone can have for writing a novel. Among the fifty or so books I read in order to write this one, it would be dishonest not to mention Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives by Frederick Karl, The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century by Ian Watt, History of Fifty Years of Misrule by José Avellanos, and 1903: Adiós, Panama by Enrique Santos Molano. It would be unjust to forget certain phrases that accompanied the writing of the novel as guides or as tutors and that would have been epigraphs if it hadn’t seemed to me, in a capricious and rather untenable way, that they would break the chronological autonomy of my tale. From the story “Guayaquil” by Borges: “It may be that one cannot speak about the Caribbean republic without echoing, however remotely, the monumental style of its most famous historian, Captain Józef Korzeniowski.” From A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes: “We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept, we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.” From Artificial Respiration by Ricardo Piglia: “The only things that are mine are things whose history I know.” Joyce’s “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” was useless to me; it’s fine for Stephen Dedalus, but José Altamirano, I think, would feel closer to notions of farce or vaudeville.

Be that as it may, the first pages of the novel were written in January 2004. Over the course of the more or less two years that passed until the definitive version, many people got involved in its composition, voluntarily or involuntarily, directly or (very) indirectly, facilitating the writing on some occasions and life on others and on rare occasions both, and here I would like to record my gratitude and acknowledgments. They are, in the first place, Hernán Montoya and Socorro de Montoya, whose generosity can never be repaid with these couple of lines. And then Enrique de Hériz and Yolanda Cespedosa, Fanny Velandia, Justin Webster and Assumpta Ayuso, Alfredo Vásquez, Amaya Elezcano, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Mercedes Casanovas, María Lynch, Gerardo Marín, Juan Villoro, Pilar Reyes and Mario Jursich, Mathias Enard, Rodrigo Fresán, Pere Sureda and Antonia González, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Ramón González and Magda Anglès, Ximena Godoy, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Camila Loew, and Israel Vela.

This book owes something to all these people, and at the same time owes everything (as do I) to Mariana.

J.G.V.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the critically acclaimed, award-winning Colombian author of The Informers . He has translated works by E. M. Forster, Victor Hugo, and John Dos Passos, among others, into Spanish. His fiction has been translated into fourteen languages.

Educated in Colombia, and in Paris at the Sorbonne, he now teaches in Barcelona, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters.

Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Héctor Abad, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Two of her translations have been awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas, in 2004, and Evelio Rosero’s The Armies , in 2009.

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The reader would do well to refer to the letter from Simón Bolívar to Manuela Sáenz (April 20, 1825). The two texts are curiously similar. Were the words lodged in his unconscious, or did my father seek to establish a complicity at once carnal and literary with Antonia de Narváez? Was he sure that Antonia de Narváez would catch the allusion? Impossible to know.