Juan Vasquez: The Secret History of Costaguana

Let’s just come right out and say it: the man has died. No, that won’t do. I’ll be more precise: the Novelist (with a capital N ) has died. You all know who I mean. Don’t you? Well, I’ll try again: the Great English Novelist has died. The Great English Novelist — Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer — has died. The Great English-language Novelist — Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer, who went from failed suicide to living classic, from common gunrunner to Jewel of the British Crown — has died. Ladies and gentlemen: Joseph Conrad has died. I receive the news familiarly, as one might receive an old friend, then realize, not without some sadness, that I’ve spent my whole life waiting for it.

I begin writing this with all the London broadsheets (their microscopic print, their uneven, narrow columns) spread out over my green leather desktop. Through the press, which has played such diverse roles over the course of my life — threatening to ruin it at times, and at others granting what little luster it has — I am informed of the heart attack and its circumstances: the visit from Nurse Vinten, the shout heard from downstairs, the body falling out of the chair. Through enterprising journalism I attend the funeral in Canterbury; through the impertinences of reporters I watch them lower the body and place the stone, that headstone beset with errors (a K out of place, a vowel wrong in one of the names). Today, August 7, 1924, while in my distant Colombia they are celebrating one hundred and five years since the Battle of Boyacá, here in England they mourn, without pomp and ceremony, the passing of the Great Novelist. While in Colombia they commemorate the victory of the armies of independence over the forces of the Spanish Empire, here, in this ground of another empire, the man has been buried forever, the man who robbed me. .

But no.

Not yet.

It’s still too soon.

It’s too soon to explain the forms and qualities of that theft; it’s too soon to explain what merchandise was stolen, what motives the thief had, what damage the victim suffered. I hear the questions clamoring from the stalls: What can a famous novelist have in common with a poor, anonymous, exiled Colombian? Readers: have patience. You don’t want to know everything at the beginning; do not investigate, do not ask, for this narrator, like a benevolent father, will gradually provide the necessary information as the tale proceeds. . In other words, leave it all in my hands. I’ll decide when and how to tell what I want to tell, when to hide, when to reveal, when to lose myself in the nooks and crannies of my memory for the mere pleasure of doing so. Here I shall tell you of implausible murders and unpredictable hangings, elegant declarations of war and slovenly peace accords, of fires and floods and intriguing ships and conspiratorial trains; but somehow all that I tell you will be aimed at explaining and explaining to myself, link by link, the chain of events that provoked the encounter for which my life was destined.

For that’s how it is: the disagreeable business of destiny has its share of responsibility in all this. Conrad and I, who were born countless meridians apart, our lives marked by the difference of the hemispheres, had a common future that would have been obvious from the first moment, even to the most skeptical person. When this happens, when the paths of two men born in distant places are destined to cross, a map can be drawn a posteriori. Most often the encounter is singular: Franz Ferdinand encounters Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo and is shot dead along with his wife, the nineteenth century, and all those European certainties; General Rafael Uribe Uribe encounters two peasants, Galarza and Carvajal, in Bogotá and shortly thereafter dies near the Plaza de Bolívar, with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders. Conrad and I met only once, but long ago we had been on the verge of doing so. Twenty-seven years passed between the two events. The aborted encounter, which was on the verge of taking place but which never happened, occurred in 1876, in the Colombian province of Panama; the other meeting — the actual one, the fateful one — happened at the end of November 1903. And it happened here: in the chaotic, imperial, and decadent city of London. Here, in the city where I write and where death predictably awaits me, city of gray skies and the smell of coal in which I arrived for reasons not easy, yet obligatory, to explain.

I came to London, like so many people have come to so many places, fleeing from the history that was my lot, or rather, from the history of the country that was my lot. In other words, I came to London because here history had ceased some time ago: nothing happened in these lands anymore, everything had already been invented and done; they’d already had all the ideas, all the empires had arisen and they’d fought all the wars, and I would be forever safe from the disasters that Great Moments can impress onto Small Lives. Coming here was, therefore, a legitimate act of self-defense; the jury that judges me will have to take that into consideration.

For I, too, shall be accused in this book; I, too, shall sit on the timeworn bench, although the patient reader will have to cover more than a few pages to discover of what I accuse myself. I, who came in flight from Big History, now go back a whole century to the core of my little story, and shall attempt to investigate the roots of my disgrace. During that night, the night of our encounter, Conrad listened to me tell my story; and now, dear readers — readers who shall judge me, Readers of the Jury — it’s your turn. For the success of my tale rests on this supposition: you will have to know all that Conrad knew.

(But there is someone else. . Eloísa, you, too, will have to get to know these reminiscences, these confessions. You, too, will have to deliver, when the time comes, your own pardon or your own guilty verdict.)

My story begins in February 1820, five months after Simón Bolívar made his victorious entrance into the capital of my recently liberated country. Every story has a father, and this one begins with the birth of mine: Don Miguel Felipe Rodrigo Lazaro del Niño Jesús Altamirano. Miguel Altamirano, known to his friends as the Last Renaissance Man, was born in the schizophrenic city of Santa Fe de Bogotá, which from here on in will be called either Santa Fe or Bogotá or even That Shit Hole; while my grandmother tugged hard on the midwife’s hair and let out screams that frightened the slaves, a few steps away the law was approved by which Bolívar, in his capacity as father of the nation, chose the name for that country fresh out of the oven, and the country was solemnly baptized. So the Republic of Colombia — schizophrenic country that will later be called New Granada or the United States of Colombia or even That Shit Hole — was a babe in arms, and the corpses of the executed Spaniards were still fresh; but there is no historical event that marks or distinguishes my father’s birth, except for the superfluous ceremony of that baptism.