Juan Vasquez - The Secret History of Costaguana

What do we know of Antonia de Narváez? That she had wanted to travel to Paris, but not to meet Flora Tristán, which she thought would be a waste of time, but to read de Sade in the original. That she had made herself briefly famous in the salons of the capital for publicly disparaging the memory of Policarpa Salavarrieta (“Dying for the country is for people with nothing better to do,” she’d said). That she had used what little influence her family had to get inside the Palace of Government, which conceded her a permit and threw her out after ten minutes, when she asked the Bishop where the famous bed was, the one where Manuela Sáenz, the most celebrated mistress in Colombian history, had screwed the Liberator.

Readers of the Jury: I can hear your perplexity from here, and am prepared to alleviate it. Would you tolerate a brief review of that fundamental historic moment? Doña Manuela Sáenz, from Quito originally, had left her legitimate (and oh-so-boring) husband, a certain James or Jaime Thorne; in 1822, the Liberator Simón Bolívar makes his triumphant entrance into Quito; shortly thereafter, ditto with Manuela. We are dealing with an extraordinary woman: she is skillful on horseback and handles weapons magnificently; as Bolívar is able to see for himself during the exploits of independence, Manuela rides as well as she shoots. Pessimistic in view of social condemnation, Bolívar writes to her: “Nothing in the world can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor.” Manuela responds by arriving unannounced at his house and showing him, with a few thrusts of her hips, just what she thinks of those auspices. And on September 25, 1828, while the Liberator and his Libertadora take multiple mutual liberties in the presidential bed of that incipient Colombia, a group of envious conspirators — generals no longer young whose wives neither ride nor shoot — decide that this coitus shall be interruptus: they attempt to assassinate Bolívar. With Manuela’s help, Simón leaps out of the window and escapes to hide under a bridge. So then, that was the notorious bed Antonia de Narváez wanted to see as if it were a relic, which, to be honest, perhaps it was.

And in December 1854, the night my father celebrates with trout and brandy the victory of the democratic armies over the dictatorship of Melo, Antonia de Narváez tells this anecdote. As simple as that. She remembers the anecdote of the bed, and she tells it.

By that time, Antonia had been married to Mr. William Beckman for twelve years; that is, as many years as her husband was older than his wife. After the Union disaster, Beckman had accepted a portion of his in-laws’ property — three or four acres on the riverbank — and had built a house with whitewashed walls and seven rooms in which to receive occasional travelers, including the crew of the odd North American steamer, who, after so many ports where no one had understood them, longed to hear their language again if only for a single night. The house was surrounded by banana trees and fields of cassava; but its most important source of income, what kept food on the couple’s table, came from one of the best patronized firewood suppliers on the Magdalena. That was how Antonia de Narváez de Beckman filled her days, a woman who in other lands and in another life would have been burned at the stake or maybe made a fortune writing erotic novels under a pseudonym: giving room and board to the river’s travelers and wood to the boilers of its steamships. Oh, yes, she also filled them by listening to the unbearable songs her husband, lover of the local landscape, came up with while accompanying himself on a wretched banjo:

In the wilds of fair Colombia, near the equinoctial line,

Where the summer lasts forever and the sultry sun doth shine,

There is a charming valley where the grass is always green,

Through which flow the rapid waters of the Muddy Magdalene.

My father also knew this song, my father also found out from it that Colombia is a place neighboring the equator where the summer is eternal (the author, obviously, never got as far as Bogotá). But we were talking about my father. Miguel Altamirano never told me if he’d learned the song the very night of the victory, but that night the inevitable happened: brandy, banjo, ballad. The Beckman house, natural habitat of foreigners, a meeting place for people passing through, played host that night as drunken soldiers went down to Caracolí beach and assembled, with the acquiescence (and the shirts, and the trousers) of the place’s owner, a straw-stuffed effigy of the defeated dictator. I don’t know how many times I’ve imagined the hours that followed. The soldiers begin to collapse on the damp sand of the river, overcome by the local chicha —the brandy was reserved for officers, a matter of hierarchy — the hosts and two or three high-ranking guests, among whom was my father, extinguish the bonfire in which the remains of the dictator lie scorched and return to the drawing room. The servants prepare a cold agua de panela ; the conversation begins to turn to the respective past lives in Bogotá of those present. And at that moment, while Manuela Sáenz lies ill in a remote Peruvian city, Antonia de Narváez laughingly tells of the day she went to look at the bed where Manuela Sáenz loved Bolívar. And then it is as if my father has just seen her for the first time, as if she, being seen, were seeing my father for the first time. The idealist and the cynic had shared alcohol and food all evening, but when speaking of the Liberator’s lover, they notice each other’s existence for the first time. One of the two recalled the lyric then circulating in the young Republic:

Bolívar, sword displayed:

“Manuela, here stands my blade.”

“SimÓn, I will chase it,

And moistly I’ll encase it.”

And that was like the sealing wax on a secret letter. I cannot be sure whether Antonia and my father blushed when realizing the (obscene) symbolic charge the figures of Manuela and Simón had taken on for them; nor do I want to go to the trouble of imagining it, so I’ll not subject you, Readers of the Jury, to the qualities and forms this sort of dance entailed, the complete match that can happen between two people without their backsides even for an instant lifting up off their seats. But in those final hours, before each retired to his or her room, across the solid walnut table flew ingenious comments (from the male), tinkling laughter (from the other), exchanges of witticisms that are the human version of dogs sniffing each other’s tails. For Mr. Beckman, who had not yet read Dangerous Liaisons , those civilized mating rituals went unnoticed.

And all over a simple anecdote about Manuela Sáenz.

That night and the nights that follow, my father, with that capacity progressives have to find great personalities and praiseworthy causes where there are neither the former nor the latter, thinks on what he has seen: a woman who is intelligent and sharp and even a little racy, a woman who deserves a better fate. But my father is human, in spite of all that has been suggested, and also thinks of the physical and potentially tangible side of the matter: a woman with black eyebrows, shapely but thick like. . Her face adorned by those gold earrings that had belonged to. . And all that set off by a cotton shawl that covered a chest firm like. . The reader will have noticed by now: my father was not a born narrator, like myself, and we cannot ask too much agility of him when it comes to finding the best simile for a pair of eyebrows or breasts, or remembering the origins of some humble family jewels; but it pleases me that my father never forgot that simple white shawl Antonia always wore at night. The temperatures in Honda, so violent during the day, plummet when darkness comes, and bring colds and rheumatism to the unwary. A white shawl is one of the ways the locals defend themselves from the cruel unforeseen tropical eventualities: indigestion, yellow fever, malignant fever, a simple temperature. It’s rare for the locals to find themselves affected by these ailments (residence creates immunities); but for someone from Bogotá it is normal, almost a daily occurrence, and the guest houses, in these places where finding a doctor can take days, tend to be prepared to treat less severe cases. And one night, while in the rest of Honda Christians were finishing their novena prayers, my father, who had not yet read The Imaginary Invalid , thinks his head feels heavy.