The Secret History of Costaguana (15 page)

When the banquet was over, my father, who had already reserved a room with a view of the interior patio and its fountain where brightly colored fish swam, followed de Lesseps until he saw him retire at last, and was getting ready to retire as well when the door to the billiard room opened and a young man with a waxed mustache and chalk stains on his fingers came out into the corridor and began to speak to him as if he’d known him his whole life. He was part of the
Lafayette
delegation, had arrived with Monsieur de Lesseps, and would be part of the press office of the Compagnie back in Paris. People had spoken to him very highly of my father’s journalistic work, he said, and even Monsieur de Lesseps had a very good impression from meeting him. He had read some of his articles about the Railroad, his columns in the
Star & Herald
, and now he would like to propose a permanent connection to the Magnificent Canal Venture. “A pen like yours would be a great help to us in the struggle against Skepticism, which is, as you know so well, the worst enemy of Progress.” And before the night was over, my father found himself playing a three-cushion frame with a group of Frenchmen (and, by the way, losing by several caroms and tearing the imported baize), and he would forever associate the resplendent green of that baize and the clinking of the immaculate ivory balls with the moment when he said yes, that he accepted and felt it an honor to do so, that starting tomorrow he would be the Panama correspondent of the
Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique
. The
Bulletin
, to its friends.

And the next morning, before going to stand by the hotel entrance to wait for de Lesseps’s departure, before accompanying him to the hotel dining room where three elite engineers were waiting to talk about the Canal and its problems and its possibilities, before going out with him and getting in the same dugout as him to navigate two or three bends of the enemy Chagres beneath a pulverizing sun, before all that, my father told me what I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. He did so with the evident (and very problematic) feeling of having begun to form part of history, of having begun to imitate the Angel, and perhaps, in a certain sense, he wasn’t wrong. Of course I didn’t speak to my father of the Refractive Effect of his journalism or of the possible impact that effect might have had on the decision of those Frenchmen thirsty for contracted propaganda; I asked him, instead, what opinion he’d formed of that Old Diplomatic Fox, a man who to me was the bearer of a smile much more dangerous than any furrowed brow, author of handshakes more lethal than a stabbing, and at my impudent question and comments my father turned serious, very serious, more serious than I’d ever seen him, and said, with something halfway between frustration and pride: “He’s the man I would have liked to be.”

“Let there be a canal,”
said de Lesseps, and the Canal . . . began to come into being. But this did not happen before his sleepy feline eyes: the Great Man returned to Paris—and his return in perfect health was tangible proof that the murderous Panamanian climate was nothing but a myth—and from the offices on rue Caumartin acted as general in chief of an army of engineers managed from the distance, an army sent to these savage tropics to defeat the guerrillas of the Climate, to achieve the subjugation of treacherous Hydrology. And my father would be the narrator of that clash, yes sir, the Thucydides of that war. For Miguel Altamirano, something obvious emerged in those days, vivid and prophetic like a solar eclipse: his manifest destiny, which only now, at sixty-some years of age, was being revealed to him, was to leave written testimony to the supreme victory of Man over the Forces of Nature. Because that’s what the Inter-oceanic Canal was: the battlefield where Nature, legendary enemy of Progress, would at last sign an unconditional surrender.

In January 1881, while Korzeniowski was sailing Australian seas, the good old
Lafayette
entered those of Panama, bringing a shipment that my father described in his article as a Noah’s Ark for modern times. Down the gangplank came not pairs of all the animals in creation but something much more definitive: fifty engineers and their families. And for a couple of hours there were more École Polytechnique graduates in the port of Colón than porters to take them to the hotel. On February 1, one of those engineers, a certain Armand Reclus, wrote to the rue Caumartin offices: TRAVAIL COMMENCÉ. The two glorious words of the telegram reproduced like rabbits in every newspaper in the
hexagone
of France; that night my father stayed on Front Street in Colón, going from the General Grant to the nearest Jamaican shack, and from there to the groups of inoffensive drunks (and others who were a little less so) to the loading docks, until dawn reminded him of his respectable age. He arrived at the house on stilts with the first light, drunk on brandy but also on
guarapo
, because he’d shared toasts and drinks with anyone willing to humor him. “Three cheers for de Lesseps and three cheers for the Canal!” he shouted.

And all of Colón seemed to respond: “Hurrah!”

Eloísa, dear: if my tale had taken place in these cinematographic times (ah, the cinematographer: a creature my father would have liked), the camera would focus right now on a window of Jefferson House, which was, let’s be frank, the only hotel in all of Colón worthy of the engineers from the
Lafayette
. The camera approaches the window, hovers briefly over the slide rules, protractors, and compasses, moves to focus on the fast-asleep face of a five-year-old child and the trickle of saliva that darkens the red velvet of the cushion, and after passing through a closed door—nothing is forbidden the magic of cameras—captures the last movements of a couple at the height of ecstasy. That they’re not local is obvious from their respective levels of perspiration. I will refer to the woman at length a few lines further on, but for now it is important to note that her eyes are closed, that she’s covering her husband’s mouth to keep him from waking the child with the inevitable (and imminent) noises of his orgasm, and that her small breasts have always been a cause of disputes between her and her bodices. As for the man: between his thorax and that of his wife is an angle of thirty degrees; his pelvis moves with the precision and the invincible regularity of a piston; and his ability to conserve these variables—the angle and the frequency of movement—is due, in large part, to his ingenious use of a lever of the third kind. In which, as everyone knows, the Power is between the Weight and the Fulcrum. Yes, my intelligent readers, you have guessed: the man was an engineer.

His name was Gustave Madinier. He had graduated with honors first from the Polytechnique and later from the École des Ponts et Chaussées; during his brilliant career, he had found himself obliged on more than one occasion to repeat that he was no relation to the other Madinier, the one who fought with Napoleon at Vincennes and later developed a mathematical theory of fire. No, our Madinier, our dear Gustave, who at this very moment is ejaculating into his wife while reciting to himself, “Give me a lever and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the earth,” was responsible for twenty-nine bridges that cover the French Republic, or rather her rivers and lakes, from Perpignan to Calais. He was the author of two books:
Les fleuves et leur franchissement
and
Pour une nouvelle théorie des câbles
; his works had caught the attention of the Suez team, and his participation was decisive in the construction of the new city of Ismaelia. Coming to Panama as part of the Compagnie du Canal had been, for him, as natural as having children after marriage.

And now that we’re on that subject: Gustave Madinier had married Charlotte de la Môle in early 1876, that magic year for my father and for me, and five months later Julien was born, weighing 3,200 grams and generating an equal number of malicious comments. Charlotte de la Môle, the woman whose small breasts were a challenge for any bodice, had been a challenge for her husband, too: she was stubborn, willful, and unbearably attractive. (Gustave liked the way her breasts contracted to her ribs when she was cold, because it gave him the feeling he was fornicating with a very young girl. But these were guilty pleasures; Gustave was not proud of them, and only once, while drunk, had he confessed them to his wife.) The fact of the matter was that the collective voyage to Panama had been Charlotte’s idea, and she hadn’t needed more than a couple of couplings to convince the engineer. And there, in the room in the Jefferson House, while her husband falls into a satisfied sleep and begins to snore, Charlotte feels that she made the right decision, for she knows that behind every great engineer stands a very determined woman. Yes, their first images of Colón—its putrefying odors, the unbearable assiduousness of its insects, the chaos of its streets—had provoked a brief disenchantment; but soon the woman fixed her gaze on the clear sky, and the dry heat of February opened her pores and entered her blood, and she liked that. Charlotte did not know that the heat was not always dry, the sky not always clear. Someone, some charitable soul, should have told her. No one did.

It was during those days that Sarah Bernhardt arrived. Readers’ eyes widen, skeptical comments are uttered, but it’s true: Sarah Bernhardt was there. The actress’s visit was another symptom of the navelization of Panama, the sudden displacement of the Isthmus to the very center of the world. . . . La Bernhardt arrived, for a change, in that dispenser of French figures that was the
Lafayette
, and stayed in Colón only long enough to catch the train to Panama City (and earn her brief inclusion in this book). In a tiny and sweltering theater, set up in haste in one of the lateral salons of the Grand Hotel, before an audience made up entirely, with one exception, of French people, Sarah Bernhardt appeared on a stage with two chairs and, with the help of a young amateur actor she’d brought with her from Paris, recited, from memory and without a slip, all the speeches of Racine’s
Phèdre
. A week later she’d taken the train again, but in the opposite direction, and returned to Europe without having spoken to a single Panamanian . . . but securing, nevertheless, a place in my tale. For that night, the night of
Phèdre
, two people applauded more than the rest. One was Charlotte Madinier, for whom the presence of Sarah Bernhardt had been like a balsam against the unbearable tedium of life in the Isthmus. The other was the man in charge of registering every beneficial or worthwhile experience that occurred as a consequence (directly or indirectly) of the construction of the Canal: Miguel Altamirano.

I’ll tell it plainly: Charlotte Madinier and Miguel Altamirano met that night, exchanged names and pleasantries and even classical alexandrines, but it was quite some time before they would see each other again. Something, in any case, quite normal: she was a married woman, and all her time was taken up in being respectably bored; he, for his part, was never still, because at that time there was never an instant when there wasn’t something happening in Panama worthy of review in the
Bulletin
. Charlotte met my father, forgot him straightaway, and carried on with her own routine, and from the vantage point of that routine watched the dry February air grow denser as the weeks passed, and one night in May she awoke in a fright, because she thought the city was being bombed. She looked out the window: it was raining. Her husband looked out with her, and in a glance calculated that in the forty-five minutes the downpour lasted more water had fallen than fell on France in a whole year. Charlotte saw the flooded streets, the banana peels and palm leaves that passed floating in the current, and every once in a while caught sight of more intimidating objects: a dead rat, for example, or a human turd. Identical downpours occurred eleven more times over the course of the month, and Charlotte, who watched from her seclusion as Colón turned into a swamp over which flew insects of all sizes, began to wonder if the trip hadn’t been a mistake.

And then one day in July, her son woke up with chills. Julien was shaking violently, as if his bed had a life of its own, and the chattering of his teeth was perfectly audible in spite of the downpour lashing the terrace. Gustave was at the Canal construction site, evaluating the damage caused by the rains; Charlotte, dressed in the still-damp clothes she’d had laundered the previous day, carried the child in her arms and arrived at the hospital in a dilapidated buggy. The chills had ceased, but as she laid Julien down in the bed he’d been assigned, Charlotte put the back of her hand against his forehead more out of instinct than anything else, and in the same instant realized the boy was burning up with fever and that his eyes had rolled back in his head. Julien moved his mouth like a grazing cow; he stuck out his dry tongue and there was no saliva in his mouth. But Charlotte could not find enough water to quench his thirst (which, in the middle of a downpour, was nothing if not ironic). Gustave arrived mid-afternoon, having run all over the city asking in French if anyone had seen his wife, and had finally decided, in order to exhaust all possibilities, to go to the hospital. Sitting in hard wooden chairs with backs that fell off if you leaned on them, Gustave and Charlotte spent the night, sleeping upright when exhaustion overcame them, taking turns in a sort of private superstition to take Julien’s temperature. At dawn, Charlotte was awakened by silence. It had stopped raining and her husband was doubled over asleep, his head between his knees, his arms hanging down to the floor. She reached out her hand and felt a wave of relief at finding the fever had gone down. And then she tried, without success, to wake Julien up.

 

A
nd once again I write this phrase I’ve written so often: enter Miguel Altamirano.

My father insisted on being the one to accompany the Madiniers through those diabolical proceedings: take the child out of the hospital, put him in a coffin, put the coffin in the ground. “It was Sarah Bernhardt’s ghost’s fault,” my father would tell me much later, trying to explain the reasons (which remained unexplained) he’d dived headfirst into the suffering of a couple he barely knew. The Madiniers felt a gratitude I should call eternal: in the midst of their loss and the disorientation of loss, my father had served them as interpreter, undertaker, lawyer, and messenger. There were days when the presence of mourning overwhelmed him; he would think at those moments that his task was complete, that he was intruding; but Charlotte asked him not to go, not to leave them, to keep helping them with the simple help of his company, and Gustave put a hand on his shoulder with the gesture of a brother-in-arms: “You’re all we have,” he said . . . and then Sarah Bernhardt went past, dropped a line from
Phèdre
and continued on her way. And my father was unable to leave: the Madiniers were like puppies, and they depended on him to confront that inhospitable and incomprehensible isthmian world in which Julien no longer was.