The Secret History of Costaguana (7 page)

The thing is that I began, finally, to exist; I begin to exist in these pages, and my tale will be told in the first person from now on.

I’m the one doing the telling. I’m the one who counts. I am that I am. Me. Me. Me.

Now, having presented the written correspondence that took place between my parents, I must concern myself with another quite different form of correspondence: that between twin souls, yes, that doppelgänger correspondence. I hear murmurs in the audience. Intelligent readers, readers who are always one step ahead of the narrator, you will already be intuiting what’s coming here; you’re already guessing that a shadow is beginning to be cast over my life, the shadow of Joseph Conrad.

And so it is: because now that time has passed and I can see events clearly, arrange them on the map of my life, I am aware of the traversing lines, the subtle parallels that have kept us connected since my birth. Here is the proof: it doesn’t matter how determined I am to tell the story of my life; doing so, inevitably, is telling the others. By virtue of physical affinities, according to experts, twins who have been separated at birth spend their lives feeling the pains and anxieties that overwhelm the other, even if they’ve never laid eyes on each other and even if an ocean separates them. On the level of metaphysical affinities, which are exactly what interest me, it takes on a different complexion but also happens. Yes, there is no doubt that this happens, too. Conrad and Altamirano, two incarnations of the same Joe, two versions of the same fate, bear witness to the fact.

No more philosophy! No more abstractions, demand the skeptics. Examples! We want examples! All right then, my pockets are full of them, and nothing seems easier to me than pulling out a few to sate the journalistic thirst of certain nonconformist spirits. . . . I can tell you that in December 1857 a child is born in Poland, he is baptized Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and his father dedicates a poem to him: “To my son born in the 85th year of the Muscovite Oppression.” In Colombia, a little boy, also called José, receives a box of pastels as a Christmas present and spends several days drawing soldiers without body armor humiliating the Spanish oppressors. While I, at the age of six, was writing my first compositions for a tutor from Bogotá (one of them about a bumblebee that flew over the river), Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who was not yet four, wrote to his father: “I don’t like it much when the mosquitoes bite.”

More examples, Readers of the Jury?

In 1863, I was listening to the grown-ups talking about the Liberal revolution and its result, the secular and socialist Rionegro Constitution; in the same year, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was also witness to a revolution in the adult world around him, that of the Polish nationalists against the Russian Tsar, a revolution that sent many of his relatives to prison, exile, or in front of a firing squad. While I, at the age of fifteen, began to ask questions about the identity of my father—in other words, began to bring him to life—Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski watched as his gave way little by little to tuberculosis—in other words, to death. By 1871 or ’72, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had already begun to announce his desire to leave Poland and become a sailor, although he had never in his life seen the sea. And it must have been around then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, that I began to threaten to leave my mother home and the city of Honda, to disappear forever from her sight, unless . . . If she didn’t want to lose me forever, it would be best . . .

That’s how it was: I went directly from peaceful doubt to savage inquisition. What happened in my head was very simple. My usual doubts, with which I’d maintained a cordial and diplomatic relationship as a child, a sort of nonaggression pact, suddenly began to rebel against all peace initiatives and to launch offensives whose objective, invariably, was my poor blackmailed mother. Who? I asked. When? Why?

Who? (Stubborn tone.)

How? (Irreverent tone.)

Where? (Frankly aggressive tone.)

Our negotiations went on for months; summit meetings took place in the kitchen of the Beckman guest house, among the saucepans and burned oil and the penetrating smell of fried
mojarra
, while my mother barked orders at Rosita, the household cook. Antonia de Narváez never committed the vulgarity of telling me my father had died, of turning him into a hero of the civil war—a position to which every Colombian can aspire sooner or later—or a victim of some poetic accident, a fall off a fine horse, a duel over lost honor. No, I always knew the man existed somewhere, and my mother summed up and sentenced the matter with a platitude: “The thing is that somewhere isn’t here.” It took me an entire afternoon, the length of time it takes to cook the stew for dinner, to find out where that somewhere was. Then, for the first time, that word that had been so hard for me as a child (
itsmess
, I used to say, my tongue tangled up, in geography classes) acquired a certain reality for me, became tangible. There, in that twisted and deformed arm that stuck out of the territory of my country, in that inaccessible appendix out of God’s hands and separate from the rest of the nation by a jungle whose fevers killed with just the mention of its name, that little hell where there were more illnesses than settlers, and where the only hint of human life was a primitive train that helped fortune hunters get from New York to California in less time than it would take them to cross their own country, there, in Panama, lived my father.

Panama. For my mother, as for most Colombians—who tend to act just like their governments, to harbor the same irrationalities, feel the same dislikes—Panama was a place as real as Calcutta or Berdichev or Kinshasa, a word that marks a map and little more. The railroad had brought the Panamanians out of oblivion, true, but only in a momentary and painfully brief way. A satellite: that was Panama. And the political regime didn’t help much. The country was around about fifty years old, more or less, and here began to act its age. The midlife crisis, that mysterious age when men take lovers who could be their daughters and women heat up for no reason, affected the country in its own way: New Granada became federal. Like a poet or a cabaret artist, it took a new pseudonym: the United States of Colombia. Well then, Panama was one of those states, and it floated in the orbit of the Great Lady in Crisis more due to the mere pull of gravity than anything else. Which was an elegant way of saying that powerful Colombians, the moneyed merchants of Honda or Mompós, the politicians of Santa Fe or the military officers all over the country, didn’t give a damn about the State of Panama, much less about the state of Panama.

And in that place lived my father.

What?

Why?

Who with?

For a couple of years as long as centuries, during those eternal cooking sessions that resulted in an extremely complicated roast of veal or a simple rice soup with
agua de panela
, I gradually perfected my interrogator’s technique, and Antonia de Narváez softened like potatoes in a stew before the insistence of my questions. Thus I heard her speak of
La Opinión Comunera
or
El Granadino Temporal
; thus I found out about the sinking of the
Union
, and I even paid good money so an oarsman would take me out on a lighter to see the smokestacks; thus I found out about the encounter on the
Isabel
, and my mother’s tale had the taste of quinine and the smell of rubbing alcohol. Another round of questions. What had happened in the two decades since then? What else did she know of him? Had there been no further contact in all these years? What was my father doing in 1860, while General Mosquera declared himself Supreme Director of War and the entire country was submerged—yes, Eloísa dear: once more—in the blood of the two parties? What was he doing, with whom was he dining, what was he talking about, while Liberal soldiers arrived at the Beckman guest house one week and Conservatives the next, while my mother fed one lot and tended the wounds of the others like a perfect Florence Nightingale of the Tropical Lowlands? What did he think and write in the following years, during which his radical, atheist, and rationalist comrades made friends with the power my father had pursued since his youth? His ideals prevailed, the clergy (blight of our time) had been stripped of their useless and unproductive hectares, and the illustrious Archbishop (director in chief of the blight) was duly incarcerated. Had my father’s pen not left a trace of that in the press? How was that possible?

I began to confront a dreadful possibility: my father, who had barely begun to be born for me, could already be dead. And Antonia de Narváez must have seen me looking desperate, must have feared I would don an absurd, Hamlet-like mourning for a father I’d never known, and wanted to spare me those unwarranted laments. Compassionate, or maybe blackmailed, or maybe both at once, my mother confessed that, every year, round about December 16, she received a couple of pages with which Miguel Altamirano kept her up to date with his life. None of the letters received a reply, she continued to confess (I was shocked to see she felt not the slightest guilt). Antonia de Narváez had burned them all, even the latest one, but not before reading them the way one reads a serial by Dumas or Dickens: taking an interest in the fate of the protagonist, yes, but always aware that neither the pathetic moron David Copperfield nor the poor, weepy Lady of the Camellias existed in reality, that their happiness or their disgraces, as moving as they might be to us, have no effect whatsoever on the lives of flesh-and-blood people.

“Well then, tell me,” I said.

And she told me.

She told me that, a few months after his arrival in Colón, Miguel Altamirano found that his reputation as an incendiary writer and champion of Progress preceded him and, almost before he realized, found himself contracted by the
Panama Star
, the same newspaper the ill-fated Mr. Jennings had been reading on board the
Isabel
. She told me the mission my father was charged with was very simple: he had to wander around the city, visit the offices of the Panama Railroad Company, even board the train as often as he liked to cross the Isthmus to Panama City, and then write about what a great marvel the railway was and the vast benefits it had brought and would continue to bring to the foreign investors as well as to the local inhabitants. She told me my father knew perfectly well that they were using him as a propagandist, but the good of the cause, from his point of view, justified it all; and with time he gradually realized, also, that years after the inauguration of the railway the streets still remained unpaved, and their only decoration continued to be dead animals and rotting garbage. I repeat: he realized. But none of that affected his unshakable faith, as if the simple image of the train going from one side to the other erased those elements of the landscape. That symptom, mentioned in passing like a simple character trait, would acquire extraordinary importance years later.

All this my mother told me.

And kept telling me.

She told me that in a matter of five years my father had become a sort of pampered son of Panamanian society: the Company’s shareholders feted him like an ambassador, senators from Bogotá took him to lunch to ask his advice, and every official of the state government, each and every member of that rancid isthmian aristocracy, from the Herreras to the Arosemenas, from the Arangos to the Menocals, aspired to have him as husband to their daughter. She told me, finally, that what Miguel Altamirano was paid for his columns was barely sufficient for his confirmed bachelor’s lifestyle, but that didn’t prevent him from spending his mornings offering his services free of charge caring for the sick in the Colón hospital. “The hospital is the largest building in the city,” my mother with her good memory recalled my father writing in one of his lost letters. “That gives an idea of the salubriousness of the environment. But all progress toward the future has its down sides, my dear, and this one was not to be the exception.”

But that was not all that Antonia de Narváez told me. Like any novelist, my mother had left the most important thing until the end.

Miguel Altamirano was with Blas Arosemena the February morning when the
Nipsic
, a steam sloop carrying North American marines and Panamanian
macheteros
, picked him up in Colón and took him to Caledonia Bay. Don Blas had arrived at his house the previous night and said to him: “Pack for several days. Tomorrow we’re going on an expedition.” Miguel Altamirano obeyed, and four days later he was entering the Darien Jungle, accompanied by ninety-seven men, and for a week he walked behind them in the perpetual twilight of the rain forest, and saw the shirtless men who blazed the trail with clean machete blows, while others, the white men in their straw hats and blue-flannel shirts, wrote in their notebooks about everything they saw: the depth of the Chucunaque River when they tried to wade across it, but also the affection that scorpions felt for canvas shoes; the geological constitution of a ravine, but also the taste of roast monkey washed down with whiskey. A Gringo called Jeremy, veteran of the War of Secession, lent my father his rifle, because no man should be unarmed in these places, and told him that the rifle had fought in Chickamauga, where the forests were no less dense than here and the visibility shorter than the distance an arrow flies. My father, victim of his adventurer’s instincts, was fascinated.

One of those nights they camped beside a rock polished by the Indians and covered with burgundy-colored hieroglyphics—the same Indians who, armed with poison-tipped arrows, with faces marked by such seriousness as my father had never seen, had guided them for a good part of the route. My father was standing up, observing in stunned silence the figure of a man with both arms raised facing a jaguar or maybe a puma; and then, as he listened to the arguments that would arise between a Confederate lieutenant and a small, bespectacled botanist, he felt all of a sudden that this crossing justified his life. “The enthusiasm kept me awake,” he wrote to Antonia de Narváez. Although Antonia de Narváez was of the opinion that it wasn’t the enthusiasm but rather the gnats, I felt I came to understand my father at that moment. On that page, lost long ago in my mother’s purges, surely written in haste and still under the influence of the expedition, Miguel Altamirano had found the profound meaning of his existence. “They want to part the land as Moses parted the sea. They want to separate the continent in two and realize the distant dreams of Balboa and Humboldt. Common sense and all the explorations undertaken dictate that the idea of a canal between the two oceans is impossible. Dear Lady, I make this promise to you with all the solemnity of which I am capable: I shall not die without having seen that canal.”