Juan Vasquez: The Secret History of Costaguana

Only then did my father recognize him: he was a member of the Estrella del Tequendama lodge.

So after throwing together a few basic necessities, including the murderous pistol and the bony hand, my father sought refuge at the brothers Acosta’s press. He found that several of his fellows had had the same idea: the new opposition was already beginning to organize to return the country to democracy. Death to the tyrant, they shouted (or rather whispered prudently, because there was no sense in alerting the patrols). The fact is that there, that night, among printers and bookbinders, who only went through the motions of seeming impartial, among those lead characters, who looked so peaceful but could stir up entire revolutions when set, surrounded by hundreds or perhaps thousands of wooden drawers that seemed to contain all the protests, threats, manifestos and countermanifestos, accusations and denunciations and vindications of the political world, several radical leaders had gathered to leave the occupied capital together and plan with the armies of other provinces the campaign to recover it. They received my father as if the most natural thing in the world would be to entrust him with the captaincy of a regiment and told him of their plans. My father joined them, in part because the company made him feel safe, in part for the emotion of camaraderie that always seizes idealists; but at the back of his mind he had already made a decision, and his intention remained the same from the beginning of the journey.

Here I speed up. For as I have at times devoted several pages to the events of a single day, at this moment my tale demands I cover in a few lines what happened in several months. Accompanied by a servant, protected by the darkness of the savannah night and well armed, the defenders of the institutions left Bogotá. They climbed the Guadalupe Hill to deserted plateaux where even the frailejón plants froze to death, descending into the tropical lowlands on stubborn, hungry mules they had purchased along the way; they arrived at the Magdalena River, and after eight hours in an unstable dugout they entered Honda and declared it the headquarters of the resistance. During the months that followed, my father recruited men, stockpiled weapons and organized squads, marched as one of General Franco’s volunteers and returned defeated from Zipaquirá, listened to General Herrera predict his own death and then saw the prophecy fulfilled, tried to organize an alternative government in Ibagué and failed in the attempt, ordered the convocation of the Congress the dictator had dispersed, singlehandedly raised a battalion of young bogotáno or santafereño exiles and incorporated it into General Lopez’s army, received over the course of the final days the belated but victorious news that arrived from Bosa and Las Cruces and Los Egidos, heard that on December 3 the nine thousand men of the army entered Santa Fe de Bogotá, and then, while his comrades were celebrating the news by eating trout a la diabla and drinking more brandy than my father had ever seen, thought he would celebrate with them, drink his own brandy and finish his trout, and then tell them the truth: he would not take part in the march of triumph, he would not enter the recovered city.

Yes, he would explain: he wasn’t interested in returning, because the city, although now regained for democracy, was still lost to him. He would never return to live in it, he’d tell them, for his life there seemed finished, as if it belonged to another man. In Bogotá he had killed, in Bogotá he had hidden, nothing remained for him in Bogotá. But they wouldn’t understand, of course, and those who did understand would refuse to believe him or try to convince him otherwise with phrases like the city of your forefathers or of your struggles or the city where you were born , and he would have to show them, as irrefutable and incontrovertible proof of his new destiny, the hand of the dead Chinaman, the index finger that always points, as if by magic, toward the province of Panama.

At nine in the morning on December 17, while in Bogotá General Melo’s life was spared, in the river port of Honda my father boarded an English steamer called the Isabel , belonging to the John Dixon Powles Company, which plied the route from the interior to the Caribbean on a regular basis. Eight days later, having spent Christmas Eve on board, he arrived in Colón, the Panamanian port not yet three years old but already a member of the Schizophrenic Places Club. The founders had elected to baptize the city with the Spanish surname of Don Christopher Columbus, the disoriented Genoese sailor who by pure chance bumped into a Caribbean island and nevertheless passed into history as the discoverer of the continent; but the Gringos who were constructing the railroad did not read the ordinance, or perhaps they read it but didn’t understand it — their Spanish, surely, was not as good as they thought — and ended up conferring their own name upon the city: Aspinwall. Whereupon Colón became Colón for Colombians and Aspinwall for the Gringos, and Colón-Aspinwall for the rest of the world (the spirit of conciliation has never been lacking in Latin America). And it was in this embryonic, ambiguous city, this city with no past, that Miguel Altamirano arrived.

But before telling of his arrival and all that happened in consequence, I should like and must speak of a couple without whose assistance, I can assure you, I would not be what I am. And I say this, as you’ll see, literally.

Sometime around 1835, the engineer William Beckman (New Orleans, 1801–Honda, 1855) had gone up the Magdalena River on a private, profit-seeking mission, and months later founded a company of boats and barges for the commercial exploitation of the region. He soon became a daily spectacle for the ports’ inhabitants: blond, almost albino, Beckman filled a big dugout with ten tons of merchandise, covered the wooden cases with ox hides and slept on top of them, beneath a little canopy of palm leaves on which his skin and therefore his life depended, and went up and down the river like that, from Honda to Buenavista, from Nare to Puerto Berrio. After five years of considerable success, during which he had come to dominate the coffee and cacao trade between the provinces along the river, Beckman (true to his adventurer’s nature, after all) decided to invest his not terribly abundant riches in the risky venture of Don Francisco Montoya, who was then in England commissioning a steamer adapted to the Magdalena River. The Union , built in the Royal Shipyards, came up the river in January 1842 as far as La Dorada, six leagues from Honda, and was received by mayors and military officers with honors a minister would envy. She was filled with cases of tobacco—“Enough to get all of the United Kingdom addicted,” Beckman would comment recalling those years — and sailed without incident to the mouth of the Miel River. . where that English steamer, just like all the rest of the characters in this book, had her encounter with the ever impertinent (tedious, meddlesome) Angel of History. Beckman wasn’t even aware that the civil war of the day (“Is it another or the same one?” he asked) had come that far; but he had to bow to the evidence, for in a matter of hours the Union had become embroiled in combat with boats of vague political allegiances, a cannonball had broken the boilers, and dozens of tons of tobacco, as well as all the engineer’s capital, sank without ever knowing the reasons for the attack.

I said they sank. Not exactly: the Union almost reached the riverbank after the cannon blast, and did not sink entirely. For years, her two chimneys were visible to passengers on the river, breaking the yellow waters like lost Easter Island statues, like sophisticated wooden menhirs. My father definitely saw them; I saw them when my turn came. . and Engineer Beckman saw them and would continue to see them with some frequency, for he never returned to New Orleans. By the time of the semi-sinking, he had already fallen in love, had already asked for that hand — which for him did not indicate travels, but stillness — and would marry in the days immediately following his bankruptcy, offering his bride a cheap honeymoon on the opposite bank of the river. Great disappointment on the part of the young lady’s (good) family, bogotános of limited means and boundless aspirations, social climbers who would have put any Rastignac to shame, who customarily spent long periods in their hacienda in Honda and had thought themselves so fortunate when that rich Gringo had laid those pale-browed blue eyes on the rebellious daughter of the house. And who was the lucky girl? A twenty-year-old called Antonia de Narváez, amateur toreador in the Santo Patrón running of the bulls, occasional gambler, and steadfast cynic.