The Secret History of Costaguana (12 page)

And that’s how it began: it was that simple. Thus I had a father, and he a son.

His house was on the north side of Manzanillo Island, in the makeshift and yet ostentatious city the founders of the railroad—which is to say, Aspinwall-Colón—had built for their employees. A ghetto surrounded by groves of trees, a luxurious hamlet on stilts, the city of the Panama Railroad Company was an oasis of salubriousness in the swamp of the island, and to enter it was to breathe a different air: the clean air of the Caribbean instead of the sickly vapors of the Chagres River. The white-walled, red-roofed house, paint peeling off the walls from the humidity and screen doors dirty with the accumulated bodies of mosquitoes, had belonged to a certain Watts, an engineer murdered five days after the inauguration of the railway, when, during a dry summer on his way back from buying two barrels of fresh water in Gatún, he was stabbed by mule thieves (or maybe water thieves); and my idealistic father, inheriting it, had felt that he inherited much more than walls and hammocks and mosquito nets. . . . But if someone—his recently discovered son, for example—had asked him what that legacy consisted of, he wouldn’t have known how to answer; instead, he would have taken out of a Spanish trunk, covered in leather and closed with a lock strong enough to guard a dungeon in times of the Inquisition, the semi-complete collection of his articles published since his arrival in Colón-Aspinwall. That’s what he did with me. In many more words and a few gestures, I asked him: Who are you? And he, without a single word and with the simple gesture of opening the chest and leaving it open, tried to answer the question. And the results, at least for me, were the first big surprise of the many that awaited me in the city of Colón. Do share, readers, my filial astonishment, such a literary thing. For there, lying in a hammock in San Jacinto and with a sherry cobbler in my free hand, I embarked on the task of reviewing my father’s articles, that is, of finding out who this Miguel Altamirano was, into whose life I had just burst. And what did I discover? I discovered a symptom, or a complex, as one of these new Freudian disciples who accost us from everywhere would say. Let’s see if I can explain it. I must be able to explain it.

I discovered that over the course of two decades my father had produced, from his mahogany desk—bare but for the skeleton of a hand on a marble pedestal—a scale model of the Isthmus. No,
model
is not the word, or perhaps it is the applicable word to the first years of his journalistic labors; but starting from some imprecise moment (futile, from a scientific point of view, to try to date it), what was represented in my father’s articles was more than a distortion, a version—again the damned little word—of Panamanian reality. And that version, I began to realize as I read, only touched on objective reality at certain select points, the way a merchant ship only concerns itself with certain ports. In his writings, my father did not fear for a moment changing what was already known or what everyone remembered. With good reason, besides: in Panama, which after all was a state of Colombia, almost no one knew, and most of all, no one remembered. Now I can say it: that was my first contact with the notion, which would so often appear in my future life, that reality is a frail enemy to the power of the pen, that anyone can found a utopia simply by arming himself with good rhetoric.
In the beginning was the word
: the contents of that biblical vacuity were revealed to me there, in the port of Colón, in front of my father’s desk. Reality real like a creature of ink and paper: that discovery, for someone of my age, is of the sort that shakes worlds, transforms beliefs, makes atheists devout and vice versa.

Let’s clear this up once and for all: it’s not that my father wrote lies. Surprised and at the same time full of admiration, over the first few months of life with my father I began to notice the strange illness that a few years back had begun to guide his perception and, therefore, his pen. Panamanian reality entered his eyes as if from a stick for measuring water depth from the shore: it folded, it bent, folded at the beginning and bent afterward, or vice versa. The phenomenon is called “refraction,” as more competent people have told me. Well then, my father’s pen was the largest refractive lens of the Sovereign State of Panama; only the fact that Panama was in itself a place so prone to refraction can explain why nobody, I mean
nobody
, seemed to notice. At first I thought, as any respectful son would, that the fault was mine, that I had inherited the worst of distortions: my mother’s cynicism. But I soon accepted the obvious.

In Miguel Altamirano’s first articles, the railway’s dead had been almost ten thousand; in one from 1863 the sum was less than half that, and toward 1870 he wrote about “the two thousand five hundred martyrs to our well-being.” In 1856 my father was one of those who wrote with an indignant wealth of detail of an incident that happened near the stations, when a certain Jack Oliver refused to pay a certain José Luna the price of a slice of watermelon, and for several hours Panamanians of the neighborhood shot it out with Gringo train passengers, at a cost of fifteen dead and an indemnity the Colombian government had to pay in installments to the government of the victims. Examining my father’s articles: in one from 1867, the fifteen dead had become nine; in 1872 he mentions nineteen wounded, seven of them seriously, but not a word about deaths; and in one of his most recently published texts—April 15 the year of my arrival—my father recalled “the tragedy of the nine victims” (and he even turns the watermelon into an orange, though I don’t know what that could mean). Readers of the Jury, I now reach for a phrase that is the resource of lazy writers and say: examples abound. But I am interested in leaving a record of one in particular, the first of those to occur in my presence.

I have already mentioned Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse and his expedition to the Darien; but I have not mentioned the results. That November morning, my father presented himself at the anchorage of the port of Colón to see off the
Lafayette
and the eighteen explorers, and then he wrote for the
Star & Herald
(which the
Panama Star
was now called) a page-and-a-half-long panegyric, wishing good luck to the pioneers and courage to the conquerors in that first step toward the Inter-oceanic Canal. I was with him at that moment; I went with him. Six months later, my father returned to the port to welcome back the delegation of pioneers and conquerors, and again I was with him; and there, in the same port, he found, or we found, that two of the men had died of malaria in the jungle, and two others on the high sea, and that the rain had made several of the routes impassable, so the terrains the expedition wanted to investigate remained convincingly virginal. The conquerors returned to Colón dehydrated, ill, and depressed, and most of all victims of a resounding failure; but two days later Miguel Altamirano’s version appeared in the newspaper:

The French Lieutenant had not managed to establish the best route for a task of such magnitude, but my father wrote: “All doubts have been dispelled.” The French Lieutenant had not managed to establish whether a canal with culverts and locks would be better than one at sea level, but my father wrote: “For the science of engineering, the Darien Jungle has ceased to hold secrets.” And no one contradicted him. The laws of refraction are a complicated business.

But it’s the same all over and the same thing was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. So now we travel to Marseille. The reason? I would like to show, simply to be fair, that others also have the enviable capacity to distort truths (and more: they manage to do so with greater success, with better guarantees of impunity). Now I return to Korzeniowski, and I do so rather overwhelmed by shame and excusing myself in advance for the direction this tale is about to take. Who could have told me that one day my pen would be occupied with such shocking matters? But there is no way to avoid it. Sensitive readers, people of delicate constitutions, demure ladies and innocent children: I beg or suggest that you close your eyes, cover your ears (in other words, skip to the next chapter), because here I shall refer, more than to young Korzeniowski himself, to the most private of his parts.

We are in the month of March in 1877, and in the city of Marseille, Korzeniowski’s anus is suffering. No, let us be frank or, at least, more scientifically precise: he has an abscess. It is, in all probability, the most well-documented anal abscess in the history of anal abscesses, for it appears, at least, in two of the young sailor’s letters, two of those from a friend, one of his uncle’s, and in the first officer’s report. Before such proliferation, I have often asked myself the inevitable question: Are there allusions to the anal abscess in the literary oeuvre of Joseph Conrad? Dear readers, I confess: if they are there, I have not found them. Of course, I don’t share the opinion of a certain critic (George Gallaher,
Illustrated London News
, November 1921, page 199), according to whom that abscess is the “true heart of darkness,” nor do I believe that in real life it was Korzeniowski who, in an attack of private discomfort, cried out, “The horror! The horror!” Be that as it may, no abscess, anal or any other kind, has had such intense consequences from a metaphysical point of view as that which oppresses Korzeniowski that spring. For due to its pain he is obliged to remain on land while his ship, the
Saint-Antoine
, sails again to the Caribbean.

During these days of enforced terra firma, a disconsolate and mortally bored Korzeniowski devotes himself to theoretical studies of technical materials to qualify as a ship’s mate. But this training is theoretical in more than one sense, for what happens in practice is quite different: Korzeniowski spends his time walking around the
vieux port
and frequenting people with questionable reputations. Summer begins and Korzeniowski tries to complement his education: in his very poor room at 18 rue Sainte, between two applications of Madame Fagot’s ointment, he receives English lessons from one Henry Grand, who lives at number 22 of the same street; in the Café Bodoul, between two drinks or two cigars, he receives lessons in politics from the Nostalgic Realists. The anal abscess does not prevent him from noticing that the followers of Monsieur Déléstang are right: King Alfonso XII, who is the same age as our Polish sailor, is no more than a puppet of Republican atheists, and the only legitimate owner of the crown of Spain is Don Carlos, the poor, pursued Catholic who had to hide on the other side of the French border. This, of course, is only one way of seeing things; the other is that Korzeniowski doesn’t give a fig about the Carlists, the monarchy, the Republic, and Spain in general; but the anal abscess that has left him on land has also deprived him of the salary he had anticipated. . . .

Korzeniowski suddenly finds himself short of funds. How will he buy his good brandy, the good Havana cigars he’s grown accustomed to on recent voyages? European politics then provides an opportunity he cannot waste: smuggling rifles for the Colombian Conservatives had gone so well, had worked so easily, that now Korzeniowski accepts the invitation of a certain Captain Duteuil. He puts a thousand francs on the table to get weapons to the Carlists; after a few days, the investment produces a return of four hundred. “Viva Don Carlos!” shouts Korzeniowski through the streets of Marseille, producing a sort of involuntary echo from a certain bellicose Conservative and Colombian general. Death to the Republic! Death to Alfonso XII! Korzeniowski, enthusiastic about his talent for business, invests for a second time in the Carlist crusade. But the contraband for political-ends market is capricious and variable, and this time the young investor loses it all. While another dose of ointment is applied, this time prepared by a friend of Madame Fagot’s, Korzeniowski thinks: It is all the fault of the abscess. Viva Madame Fagot’s friend! Death to anal abscesses!

It is then that he meets Paula de Somogyi, Hungarian actress, lover of the aspirant Don Carlos, activist for his restitution to the throne and
belle dame sans merci
. Paula is beautiful and closer in age to the contrabandist than to the pretender; and what happens in romantic novels happens to Korzeniowski, when the disoriented young man and Don Carlos’s brazen lover become involved. They have clandestine and frequent encounters in portside hotels. To keep from being recognized, Paula covers her head with a hood, in the best Milady de Winter style; Korzeniowski enters and leaves through the window, and becomes an habitué of the rooftops of Marseille . . . . But the paradise of clandestine love cannot endure (it’s one of the laws of romanticism). Enter John Young Mason Key Blunt, an American adventurer who had lived in Panama during the gold rush and made himself rich, in those days before the railway, taking prospectors from one side of the Isthmus to the other. Blunt—who would have imagined?—had taken a liking to the Hungarian. He pursues her, he hounds her in scenes worthy of a cabaret (she with her back against a wall, he wrapping his arms around her while speaking fish-scented obscenities too close to her face). But Paula is a virtuous woman, and her religion only allows her to have one lover; so she tells Korzeniowski all about it, holding the back of her hand against her forehead and leaning back her head. The young man knows that his honor and that of the woman he has fallen in love with leave him no alternative. He challenges Blunt to a duel to the death. In the tranquillity of the Marseille siesta, shots are suddenly heard. Korzeniowski lifts a hand to his chest: “I’m dying,” he says. And then, as is obvious, he does not die.

Oh, dear Conrad, what an impetuous lad you were. . . . (You don’t mind if I address you informally, do you, dear Conrad? We know each other so well, after all, and we’re so close. . . . ) Later you would leave written evidence of these activities, of your own voyage as a Mediterranean gunrunner on the
Tremolino
, of the encounter with the coast guard—someone had denounced the smugglers—and of the death of César, the informant, at the hands of his own uncle, none other than Dominic Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica. But
written evidence
is undoubtedly a condescending and generous phrase, dear Conrad, because the truth is this: despite the passing of the years, which turn everything true, I do not manage to believe a single word of what you say. I don’t believe you were a witness to the moment Cervoni murdered his own nephew; I don’t believe the nephew sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean with the weight of the ten thousand francs he’d stolen. Let’s admit, dear Conrad, that you have been deft in the art of rewriting your own life; your little white lies—and another few running closer to beige—have passed into your official biography unquestioned. How often did you speak of your duel, dear Conrad? How many times did you tell that romantic and also sterilized story to your wife and sons? Jessie believed it till the end of her days, and so did Borys and John Conrad, convinced that their father was a musketeer for modern times: noble like Athos, kind like Porthos, and religious like Aramis. But the truth is different and, most of all, much more prosaic. It’s true, Readers of the Jury, that on Conrad’s chest was the scar of a bullet wound; but the similarities between Conradian reality and real reality end there. As in so many other cases, real reality has been left buried under the verbiage of the novelist’s profuse imagination. Readers of the Jury: I am here, again, to give the contradictory version, to dispel the verbiage, to bring discord into the tranquil house of received truths.