The Secret History of Costaguana (4 page)

And then he heard someone say: “That’s him.”

He turned around and saw that the shape was dividing into two. From one side, a cassocked figure that was not Father Echavarría already had his back to him and was leaving the church; from the other, a man in a poncho and hat, a sort of giant bell with legs, began to walk up the center aisle toward the chancel. My father imagined that, beneath the straw hat, in that black space where human features would soon emerge, the eyes of the man were scrutinizing him. My father looked around. From an oil painting he was being watched by a bearded man who was sticking his index finger (well covered with flesh and skin, unlike the one on his Chinaman’s dead hand) into Christ’s open wound. In another painting was a man with wings and a woman who kept her page in a book with another finger just as fleshed out: my father recognized the Annunciation, but the angel was not Chinese. No one seemed prepared to get him out of this fix; the man in the poncho, meanwhile, approached silently, as if sliding over a sheet of oil. My father saw he was wearing rope-soled shoes, saw the rolled-up trousers, and saw, hanging beneath the edge of the poncho, the dirty point of a knife.

Neither of the two spoke. My father knew he could not kill the man there, not because at the age of thirty-four he had never killed anybody (there is always a first time, and my father handled a pistol as well as anyone), but because to do so without witnesses would be like condemning himself in advance. He needed people to see: to see the provocation, the attack, the legitimate defense. He stood up, went out to the side aisle of the nave, and began to take big steps toward the front door; instead of following him, the man in the poncho returned down the central aisle, and pew by pew they walked, tracing parallel lines, while my father was thinking what to do when they ran out of pews. He counted them quickly: six pews, now five, now four.

Three pews.

Now two.

Now one.

My father put his hand in his pocket and cocked the pistol. As they both neared the church door, as the parallel lines converged, the man swept his poncho out of the way and pulled back the hand that held the knife. My father raised the cocked pistol, pointed at the center of the man’s chest, thought of the sad consequences of what he was about to do, thought of the passersby who would invade the church as soon as they heard the shot, thought of the court that would condemn him for voluntary homicide on the basis of testimony from those passersby, thought of my grandfather stabbed by the bayonet and the Chinaman stabbed by the bamboo stake, thought of the firing squad that would shoot him against a rough wall, and said to himself that he was not made for the court or the gallows, that it would be a question of honor to kill his attacker but that the next bullet would be for his own chest.

Then he fired.

“Then I fired,” my father would tell me.

But he did not hear the shot from his own pistol, or rather it seemed that his shot produced such an echo as had never before been heard, a reverberation unprecedented in the world, because at that moment, from the Plaza Bolívar, arrived the thunder of other explosions from many other guns. It was just past midnight, the date was April 17, and the honorable General José María Melo had just led a military coup and declared himself dictator of that poor confused republic.

 

T
hat’s how it is: the Angel of History saved my father, even though, as will be seen, he did so in a transitory way, simply by swapping one of his enemies for another. My father fired, but no one heard his shot. When he went outside, all the doors were closed and all the balconies deserted; the air smelled of gunpowder and horse shit, and in the distance there were now shouts and heels on cobblestones to be heard and, of course, insistent gunfire. “I knew that very instant. They were the sounds that announced a civil war,” my father would tell me in an oracular tone. . . . He liked to assume those poses, and many times over the course of our life together (which was not long) he put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me, arching a solemn eyebrow, to tell me that he had predicted this, that he had guessed that. He told me of some event he had witnessed indirectly and then said, “You could see it coming a mile off.” Or rather, “I don’t know how they failed to realize.” Yes, that was my father: the man who, after a certain age, beaten senseless by Great Events—saved on a few occasions, damned on most—ends up developing that curious defense mechanism of predicting things many years after they’d happened.

But allow me a brief aside, another digression. Because I have always believed that on that night the history of my country demonstrated that it at least has a sense of humor. I have spoken of the Great Incident. I take out the magnifying glass and examine it more closely. What do I see? To what does my father owe his improbable impunity? Briefly: One night in January, General Melo drunkenly leaves a military banquet, and when he gets to the Plaza Santander, where his barracks are, runs into a corporal called Quirós, a poor unkempt lad walking the streets at that hour without a pass. The General gives him a good dressing-down, the Corporal forgets himself and responds with insolence, and General Melo sees no better punishment than drawing his sword then and there and cutting his throat in one slash. Great scandal in Bogotá society; great condemnations of militarism and violence. The public prosecutor accuses; the judge is on the point of issuing an arrest warrant against the accused. Melo thinks, with impeccable reasoning: the best defense is not just a good offense, it’s dictatorship. He had the army of war veterans under his command, and he put it to use in his service. Who could blame him?

Well now, I admit, this is no more than a cheap joke, typical gossip—our national sport—but caveat emptor, and I tell it anyway. It is true that in some versions Corporal Quirós arrives late back to the barracks after finding himself involved in a street brawl and is already injured when he runs into Melo; in others, Quirós finds out about the accusations against the General and from his death bed absolves him of all responsibility. (Isn’t that version pretty? It has all that master-and-disciple, mentor-and-protégé mystery. It is gentlemanly, and my father was no doubt fond of it.) But beyond these various explanations, one single thing is irrefutable: General Melo, with his cowlick and double-chinned Mona Lisa face, was the instrument that history used to split its sides laughing at the fate of our young republics, those badly finished inventions for which no patent could be taken out. My father had killed someone, but that fact would pass into nonexistence when another man, to avoid his own indictment as a common criminal, decided to take by force those things of which every Colombian speaks with pride: Liberty, Democracy, and the Institutions. And the Angel of History, sitting in the stalls in his Phrygian cap, burst out laughing so hard he fell off his seat.

Readers of the Jury: I do not know who first compared history to the theater (that distinction does not belong to me), but one thing is sure: that lucid soul was not aware of the tragicomic nature of our Colombian scenario, created by mediocre dramatists, fabricated by sloppy set designers, produced by unscrupulous impresarios. Colombia is a play in five acts that someone tried to write in classical verse but that came out composed of the most vulgar prose, performed by actors with exaggerated gestures and terrible diction. . . . Well, I return now to that small theater (I shall do so often) and return to my scene: doors and balconies barred, the streets near the Palace of Government transformed into a ghost town. No one heard the shot that thundered between the cold stone walls, no one saw my father leave Santo Tomás Church, no one saw him slip like a shadow through the streets to his home, no one saw him arrive so late that night with a still-warm pistol in his pocket. The small incident had been obliterated by the Big Event: the minuscule death of some anonymous resident of the Egipto neighborhood, by the Superlative Deaths that are the patrimony of Our Lady War. But I have said before that my father did nothing but change enemies, and that’s how it was: once his ecclesiastic pursuer was eliminated, my father found himself pursued by the military. In the new Bogotá of Melo and his allies, radicals like my father were feared for their formidable capacity for disorder—they had not specialized in revolutions and political riots in vain—and twenty-four hours hadn’t yet passed since the man in the poncho, or rather his corpse, had collapsed in Santo Tomás Church, when arrests began all over the city. The radicals, university students or members of Congress, received armed and not particularly pleasant visits from Melo’s men; the cells filled up; several leaders were already fearing for their lives.

My father did not hear this news from his comrades. A lieutenant of the seditious army arrived at his house in the middle of the night and woke him up by banging his rifle butt against the window frame. “I thought my life had ended in that instant,” my father would tell me much later. But that was not the case: across the Lieutenant’s face, a grimace drifted between pride and guilt. My father, resigned, opened the door, but the man did not enter. Before dawn, the Lieutenant told him, a squad of soldiers would be coming to arrest him.

“And how do you know?” my father asked.

“I know because it’s my squad,” said the Lieutenant, “and I have issued the order.”

And he took his leave with a Masonic salute.

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.