The Secret History of Costaguana (14 page)

On the other hand, I was one of the first people to know, through my father’s news and with a wealth of detail, that Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse had traveled to Bogotá on an urgent mission, covering the four hundred kilometers in ten days by the Buenaventura route, and that he’d arrived smelling of shit and in terrible need of a razor. And thus I also discovered that two days later, clean-shaven and cologne-scented, he’d had an interview in Bogotá with Don Eustorgio Salgar, Secretary of Foreign Relations, and had obtained from the government of the United States of Colombia the exclusive privilege, valid for ninety-nine years, to construct the Fucking Canal. Thus I found out that Wyse, with the concession in his pocket, had traveled to New York to buy from the Gringos the results of their isthmian expeditions; thus I found out that the Gringos had roundly refused to sell them and, what’s more, had refused to show a single map or reveal a single measurement, share a single piece of geological data or even listen to the proposals of the French. “Negotiations are advancing,” wrote my refracting father in the
Star & Herald
. “They advance like a locomotive, and nothing can stop them.”

Now, when I remember those distant days, I see them as the last period of tranquillity my life would know. (This melodramatic declaration contains less melodrama than it seems at first: for someone born in the tropical isolation in which I was born, in that Remote Kingdom of Humidity that is the city of Honda, any halfway worldly experience is an example of rare intensity; in the hands of someone less timid, that pastoral, riverbank childhood could be material for many cheap lines of verse, things like
The turbulent waters of my plains childhood
or
The turbulent childhood of these plains waters
or even
The young and plainly turbulent water
.) But what I want to say is this: those first years of my life in Colón, beside my newfound father—who seemed no less improvised and makeshift than the house on stilts he lived in—were moments of relative peace, although at the time I didn’t realize it. My crystal ball did not allow me to see what was coming. How could I have foreseen what was going to happen, anticipate the Cascade of Great Events waiting for us around the corner, concentrated as I was on that novelty that excluded everything else: the acquisition of a father? I will now write something very rash, and I hope it will be tolerated: in those days, talking with Miguel Altamirano and sharing his activities and enjoying his attentions, I felt that I had found my place in the world. (I didn’t feel it with much conviction; I didn’t go so far as to delight in such temerity. In the end, as often happens, it turned out that I was wrong.)

In exchange for his care, Miguel Altamirano demanded nothing but my unconditional attention, the presence of the blank face of the listener. My father was a talker in search of an audience; he sought an ideal listener possessed of a no less ideal insomnia, and everything seemed to indicate that he’d found him in his son. For months, long after my chest had overcome the supposed pneumonia, my father kept talking to me as he had done while I was ill. I don’t know why, but my illness and my seclusion in the Magic Mountain had provoked curious pedagogical enthusiasms, and those enthusiasms carried on afterward. My father gave me his hammock, as he would a convalescent, and brought a chair over to the wooden porch steps; and there, both of us immersed in the dense, damp heat of the Panamanian night, as soon as the mosquitoes’ habits allowed, under the occasional flutter of a hungry bat, the monologue began. “Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself,” wrote a certain novelist, who never even met my father, much later in a certain Damn Book. But the description is apt: my father, enamored of his own voice and his own ideas, used me the way a tennis player uses a practice wall.

So a strange routine settled over my new life. During the day, I walked the baking streets of Colón, accompanying my father on his labors as Chronicler of the Isthmus like a witness to a witness, visiting and revisiting the offices of the Railroad Company with such assiduity that they became for me a second home (like a grandmother’s house, for example, a place we are always welcome and where there is always a plate for us on the table), and during the no less baking nights I attended the Altamirano Lectures on “The Inter-oceanic Canal and the Future of Humanity.” During the day, we visited the white wooden offices of the
Star & Herald
, and my father would receive commissions or suggestions or missions that we would go straight out to fulfill; during the night, my father explained to me why a canal built at sea level was better, cheaper, and less problematic than one built with locks, and how anyone who said the opposite was simply an enemy of progress. During the day, my figure soaked in sweat accompanied the figure of my father to visit an engine driver and listen to him talk about how the Railroad Company had changed his life, in spite of having been attacked more times than he could remember in his years of work and having, to prove it, scars of a dozen knife wounds still visible in his torso (“Touch them, sir, go ahead and touch them, doesn’t bother me”); during the night, I found out with a wealth of detail that Panama was a better territory than Nicaragua for opening the Canal, in spite of the Gringos’ expeditions producing the opposite findings (“Out of pure spite toward Colombia,” according to my father). During the day . . . During the night . . . During the day . . . et cetera.

I had no reason to know it, but at that time meetings were taking place at 184 boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris, between representatives of more than twenty countries, including the United States of Colombia. For two weeks they had devoted themselves to doing the same thing my father and I did in the Colón nights: discuss the plausibility (and the difficulties and the implications) of constructing a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Among the distinguished orators was Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, who was still stopping in the middle of the street, like a mangy dog, to scratch bites from isthmian mosquitoes, or waking up screaming in horror after being visited, during a sweaty dream, by one of the dead engineers from the Darien Jungle. In spite of having failed on his expedition, in spite of lacking engineering knowledge, Lieutenant Wyse—recently shaved and with the concession signed by Eustorgio Salgar safely tucked into the pocket of his jacket—ventured that Panama was the only place on Earth able to host the colossal undertaking of an inter-oceanic canal. He also ventured that constructing a canal at sea level was the only method able to bring the project to a successful conclusion. To a question about the monstrous volume of the Chagres River, the history of its floods that seemed taken from Genesis, and the inventory of shipwrecks that lay on its bed as if it weren’t a river but a mini Bermuda Triangle, he replied: “A French engineer does not know the word problem.” His opinion, backed up by the heroic figure of Ferdinand de Lesseps, maker of Suez, convinced the delegates. Seventy-eight of them, of which seventy-four were personal friends of de Lesseps, voted unreservedly in favor of Wyse’s project.

There followed several tributes, banquets all over Paris, but one interests me in particular. In the Café Riche, representing the illustrious Colombian community, a certain Alberto Urdaneta organized a lavish banquet: two musical ensembles, silver dinner service, a liveried servant for each diner, and even a couple of interpreters who circulated throughout the salon to facilitate communication among the guests. His intention was to commemorate both Colombian independence and de Lesseps’s victory over the delegates of the boulevard Saint-Germain Congress. The banquet was a sort of quintessence of Colombianness and of Colombia, that country where everybody—I mean,
every
body—is a poet, and anybody who isn’t is an orator. And so it was: there was poetry, and there were also speeches. On the back of the gilded lithographed menu were portraits of Bolívar and Santander. Behind Bolívar, three verses which themselves resembled gilded lithographs and that were, viewed from whichever angle, as close as you can get to political masturbation, so much so that I think them superfluous here. Behind Santander, on the other hand, was this gem of adolescent versification, a quartet that could have come out of the composition book of a refined señorita from one of the finest private schools in Bogotá.

The speech was the responsibility (in a manner of speaking) of a certain Quijano Wallis. The orator said: “Thus as the sons of Arabia who, wherever they may find themselves on this earth, overcoming the distance in spirit, bow toward their holy city, so, too, we send our thoughts across the Atlantic, where they are warmed in the tropical sun, and fall to our knees on our beloved beaches to greet and bless Colombia on her day of rejoicing. Our fathers made us independent from the Mother Country; Monsieur de Lesseps will make universal commerce independent of the obstacle of the Isthmus and perhaps free Colombia forever from civil discord.”

His thought, I suppose, crossed the Atlantic, warmed itself, and knelt and greeted and blessed and all those things. . . . And at the end of that year, in the hottest and driest season, the ones who did cross the Atlantic (without kneeling, to be sure) were the French. The
Star & Herald
commissioned my father to write—in prose, if at all possible—about Ferdinand de Lesseps and his team of Gallic heroes. After all, the representatives of the government, the bankers and journalists, the analysts of our incipient economy and historians of our incipient republic, all were for once in perfect agreement: for Colón, that was the Most Important Visit since the long-ago day when Cristóbal Colón himself accidentally discovered our convulsive lands.

From the moment de Lesseps disembarked from the
Lafayette
, speaking perfect Spanish with everyone, looking with his curious, sleepy feline gaze, throwing left and right a smile the likes of which Panamanians had never seen in their lives, flaunting a full head of white hair that made him look like a half-finished Santa Claus, my father didn’t let him out of his sight for an instant. In the evening he walked a few steps from his prey down the main street of Colón, passing beneath tissue-paper lanterns that seemed about to burst into flames, in front of the railway station and later in front of the dock where Korzeniowski and Cervoni had unloaded the contraband weapons, in front of the hotel where his son had stayed his first night in Colón, before he knew he had a son, and in front of the premises where the most famous piece of watermelon in the world was sold and where diners and other onlookers died under gunfire. The next morning he spied on him from a prudent distance and saw him go out with three velvet-clad children beneath the unbearable sun, and saw the children running happily among the carrion on the streets and the smell of rotting fruit, and running up to startle a flock of black buzzards snacking on a newborn donkey a few steps from the sea. He saw him catch an Indian woman off guard on the Pacific Mail pier (when the band hired by the Mayor exploded into metallic sounds to celebrate his arrival) and try to dance with her to music that was not danceable but rather martial, and when the woman yanked herself away from him and crouched down at the edge of the sea to wash her hands with a look of disgust, de Lesseps kept smiling, and what’s more, began to chuckle and shout out his love for the tropics and the bright, the radiant (
radieux
) future awaiting them.

De Lesseps climbed aboard the train to Panama City and my father climbed up after him, and when the train arrived at the Chagres River, he saw him shout to the man in charge and order him to stop the locomotive because he, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had to take home a glass of the enemy’s water, and the entire delegation—the Gringos, the Colombians, the French—raised glasses and toasted the victory of the Canal and the defeat of the Chagres River, and while the glasses clinked in the air one of de Lesseps’s envoys jogged through the hamlet of Gatún, along muddy paths and across pastures that came up to his knees, and arrived at an improvised dock where a canoe rested, and crouched down beside the canoe as the Indian woman had crouched down by the pier and collected in a recently emptied champagne glass a greenish liquid that came out full of slimy algae and dead flies. The only time my father spoke to de Lesseps was when the train passed Mount Hope, where employees had buried their dead during the construction of the railway, and he decided to speak to him in a burst of enthusiasm about the Chinamen in barrels of ice he’d had sent to Bogotá—“Where?” asked de Lesseps. “Bogotá,” repeated my father—and that, if they hadn’t been of use to the student doctors in the university of the capital, they would surely have ended up here, under this earth, under the orchids and mushrooms. Then he shook hands with de Lesseps and said, “Pleasure to meet you,” or “Pleasure to make your acquaintance” (pleasure, in any case, was present in his phrase), and swiftly returned to the edge of the group, trying not to disturb, and from the edge observing de Lesseps during the rest of the journey of that fortunate train, that historic train, through the leafy darkness of the jungle.

He followed him closely when de Lesseps visited the old church of Santo Domingo, whose arch defied the laws of gravity and of architecture, and took note of every admiring comment the admiring tourist came out with. He followed him while de Lesseps shook the hands of the Mayor and military officials in the Panama City station (neither the Mayor nor the officers would wash their hands for the rest of the day). He followed him while he walked through the recently swept and cleaned streets, under French flags sewn ad hoc by the wives of the most distinguished politicians (just as years later another flag would be sewn, the first one of a country that perhaps began to exist the very afternoon when de Lesseps visited the city, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves or jump to conclusions), and he accompanied him to the Grand Hotel, a colonial cloister recently opened with every luxury along one of the longest flanks of the cathedral plaza, whose paving stones—those of the plaza, of course, not the hotel—were normally occupied by carriages pulled by old horses, the noise of their hooves on the stones, and this time by baby-faced soldiers dressed in white and as silent as nervous children about to take their first communion. In the Grand Hotel, before my father’s fascinated gaze, the welcome banquet was held with French food and a pianist brought from Bogotá—“From where?” asked de Lesseps. “From Bogotá,” he was told—to play a barcarole or some gentle polonaise while the local leaders of the Liberal Party told de Lesseps what Victor Hugo had said, that the constitution of the United States of Colombia was made for a country of angels, not human beings, or something along those lines. For those Colombian politicians, who barely sixty years before were inhabitants of a colony, the mere attention of that prophet, author of
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
and of
Les Misérables
, the defense counsel of humanity, was the greatest praise in the world, and they wanted de Lesseps to know it: because the attention of de Lesseps was also the greatest praise in the world. De Lesseps asked a banal question, his eyes widened slightly at an anecdote, and the colonized suddenly felt that their entire existence would take on new meaning. If Ferdinand de Lesseps had wished, they would have danced a
mapalé
or a
cumbia
right there for him, or better yet a cancan, so he wouldn’t go away thinking we were all Indians here. For there, in the Isthmus of Panama, the colonial spirit floated in the air, like tuberculosis. Or maybe, it occurred to me at some point, Colombia had never stopped being a colony, and time and politics simply swapped one colonizer for another. For the colony, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.