The Secret History of Costaguana (16 page)

Maybe it was around then that people in Colón began to speak of the French Curse. Between May and September, as well as the Madiniers’ son, twenty-two Canal workers, nine engineers, and three engineers’ wives fell victim to the killer fevers of the Isthmus. It carried on raining—the sky turned black at two in the afternoon, and the downpour began almost immediately, not falling in drops but solid and dense, like a heavy wool poncho coming down through the air—but the work carried on, in spite of the earth excavated one day being found back in the trench the next morning due to the weight of the rain. The Chagres River rose so much in one weekend that the railway had to stop running, because the line was under thirty centimeters of water and weeds; and with the railway paralyzed, the Canal was paralyzed, too. The engineers met in the mediocre restaurant of the Jefferson House Hotel or in the 4th of July, a saloon with tables wide enough for them to spread out their topographical maps and architectonic plans—and perhaps play a quick hand of poker on top of the maps and plans—and there they spent hours arguing about where they’d carry on the works when it finally cleared up. It would frequently happen that the engineers would say adieu at the end of an afternoon, arranging to meet the next morning at the excavations, only to discover the next morning that one of them had been admitted to the hospital with an attack of chills, or was at the hospital watching over his wife’s fever, or was with his wife at the hospital attending to their child and regretting ever having come to Panama. Few survived.

And here I enter conflictive terrain: in spite of all that, in spite of his relationship with the Madiniers, my father (or rather his strange Refractive Pen) wrote that “the rare cases of yellow fever that have presented among the heroic artisans of the Canal” had been “imported from other places.” And since no one stopped him, he carried on writing: “No one denies that tropical plagues have been present among the non-local population; but one or two deaths, especially among the workers who came from Martinique or Haiti, should not be cause for unjustified alarm.” His chronicles/reports/articles were read only in France. And there, in France, the relatives of the Canal read them and were reassured, and the shareholders kept buying shares because all was going well in Panama. . . . I have often thought that my father would have made himself rich if he’d patented that invention: the Journalism of Refraction, so much abused since then. But I am unjust in thinking that. After all, in this lay his extraordinary gift: in not being aware of the gap—no, the immense crater—between the truth and his version of it.

Yellow fever carried on killing tirelessly, and killing French recent arrivals most of all. For the Bishop of Panama, that was sufficient proof: the plague was choosing, the plague had intelligence. The Bishop described a long hand that arrived at night in the houses of the dissolute—the impious, adulterers, drinkers—and took away their children as if Colón were the Egypt of the Old Testament. “Men of upright morals have nothing to fear,” he said, and for my father his words had the taste of old battles against Presbyter Echavarría: it was as though time were repeating itself. But then Don Jaime Sosa, the Bishop’s cousin and administrator of the old cathedral of Porto Bello, a relic of colonial times, said one day that he was feeling bad, then that he was thirsty, and three days later he was buried, in spite of having been bathed by the Bishop himself in a solution of whiskey, mustard, and holy water.

During those months funerals became part of the daily routine, like meals, for the fever dead were buried in a matter of hours to prevent their decomposing fluids from carrying the fever on the wind. The French began walking around with their hands over their mouths, or tying an improvised mask of fine cloth over their mouths and noses like the outlaws of legend; and one afternoon, masked to his cheekbones, a few meters from his masked wife, Gustave Madinier—defeated by the climate, the mourning, the fear of the incomprehensible and treacherous fever—sent my father a farewell note. “It is time to return home,” he wrote. “My wife and I need a change of air. You know, sir, you will always be in our hearts.”

Well now: I would have understood. You, hypocritical readers, my fellows, my brothers, would have understood, even if only out of simple human sympathy. But not my father, whose head was beginning to circulate on different rails, pulled by independent locomotives . . . I invade his head and this is what I find: a multitude of dead engineers, a number of other deserters, and an abandoned half-built canal. If hell is personal, a distinct space for each biography (made out of our worst fears, the ones that are not interchangeable), that was my father’s: the image of the works abandoned, of the cranes and steam-powered excavators rotting under moss and rust, the excavated earth returning from the deposits in the freight cars to their damp origins on the jungle floor. The Great Trench of the Inter-oceanic Canal forsaken by its constructors: this, Readers of the Jury, was Miguel Altamirano’s worst nightmare. And Miguel Altamirano was not about to let such a hell establish itself in reality. So there, beside the ghost of Sarah Bernhardt who tossed him Racine’s alexandrines at the least provocation, my father steadied his hand to write these lines: “Honor, Monsieur Madinier, the memory of your only son. Bring the works to completion and little Julien will forever have this Canal as his monument.” By the way, when Gustave Madinier read these lines, it was not in a private note, but on the front page of the
Star & Herald
, beneath a headline that was little less than blackmail: OPEN LETTER TO GUSTAVE MADINIER.

And one December afternoon, as the sun of the dry season—which had returned with that strange December talent of making us forget past rains, making us believe that in reality Panama is like this—shone over the streets of Colón and over the whole zone of the Great Trench of the Canal, in Jefferson House an engineer and his wife unpack trunks. The clothes go back in the wardrobes and the implements back on the desk, and the portraits of the dead child go back onto the dresser.

And there they stayed, at least until some unpredictable force knocked them off.

After all, these were convulsive times.

Allow me to say it again: these were convulsive times. No, dear readers, I’m not referring to that spoiled idea of politicians who have nothing else to say. I’m not referring to the elections that the Conservatives stole in the Colombian State of Santander, getting rid of Liberal votes and fabricating Conservative ones where there weren’t any; nor am I referring to the Liberal reaction already beginning to think of armed revolutions, of convening revolutionary juntas and raising revolutionary funds. No, Eloísa dear: I’m not referring to the fear of another civil war between Conservatives and Liberals, the constant fear that accompanied Colombians like a faithful dog, and that would not take long, not very long at all, to materialize again. . . . I’m not referring to the declarations in a secret session of a certain radical leader, who assured the Senate of the Republic that he had news that “the United States had resolved to take possession of the Isthmus of Panama,” much less to the reply of an unsuspecting Conservative for whom “the alarmist voices” should not frighten the nation, for “the Panamanian is happy as a citizen of this Republic, and would never swap his honorable poverty for the soulless comforts of those gold diggers.” No, I’m not referring to any of that. When I say these were convulsive times, I’m referring to less metaphorical and much more literal convulsions. Let us put it clearly: Panama was a place where things shook.

In the space of one year, the inhabitants of the Isthmus took fright at each explosion of the imported dynamite, and very soon grew accustomed to each explosion of imported dynamite: Panama was a place where things shook. There were months when Panamanians were dropping to their knees and beginning to pray every time the steam-powered dredgers opened the earth, and then the dredgers began to form part of the auditory landscape and Panamanians stopped kneeling, for Panama was a place where things shook. . . . In the yellow-fever wards, the beds reverberated on the wooden floors, lifted by the force of the shivering, and nobody, nobody was surprised: Panama, Readers of the Jury, was a place where things shook.

Well then: on September 7, 1882, came the great shake.

It was 3:29 in the morning when the movements started. I hasten to say they did not last more than a minute; but in that short minute I managed to think first of dynamite, then that this was no time to be setting charges in the Canal zone, then of the French machines, and I ruled them out for the same reason. At that moment a ceramic flowerpot, which had belonged to Mr. Watts, the previous resident of the house on stilts, and which had slept peacefully on top of the cupboard until then, walked four hand spans and threw itself off the edge. The whole cupboard fell immediately after that (crash of crockery smashing, shards of glass scattered dangerously across the floor). My father and I barely had time to grab the bony hand of the dead Chinaman and a drawer from the filing cabinet and get out of the house before the earthquake broke the stilts and the house came down, clumsy and heavy and hulking like a shot buffalo. And at the same time, not far from the residential neighborhood of the Panama Railroad Company, the Madiniers went outside, both in pajamas and both frightened, before the portraits of Julien were smashed against the floor of Jefferson House, and before, luckily, Jefferson House—or at least its façade—crashed to the street, raising a dust cloud that made several of the witnesses sneeze.

The earthquake of 1882, which for many was a new episode of the French Curse, brought down the Colón church as if it were made of cards, ripped up the railway sleepers for 150 meters, and ran down Front Street tearing it as if with a dull knife. Its first consequence: my father got down to work. The bed of the Great Trench collapsed and the walls of the excavation collapsed, ruining a good deal of the work already done, and an encampment near Miraflores disappeared—instruments, personnel, and a steam-powered digger—into the earth that opened as the dynamite had not been able to open it. And in the midst of that disconsolate panorama, my father wrote: “No one is worried, no one is wary, work proceeds without the slightest delay.”

In his writings that followed, did he mention the Colón City Hall, of which not one stone remained on top of another? Did he mention the roofs of the Grand Hotel that buried the general headquarters of the Company, several maps, a contractor recently arrived from the United States, and one or two engineers? No, my father did not see any of that. The reason: at that moment he had acquired, definitively now, the famous Colombian illness of SB (Selective Blindness), also known as PB (Partial Blindness) and even as RIP (Retinopathy due to Interests of a Political nature). For him—and, in consequence, for the readers of the
Bulletin
, actual and potential shareholders—the Canal works would be finished in half the time predicted and would cost half the anticipated money; the machines that were working were double the existing number but had cost half as much; the cubic meters of earth excavated per month, which was never more than 200,000, was transformed in the
Bulletin
reports to a good million with all its zeros in place. De Lesseps was happy. The shareholders—actual ones, potential ones—too. Three cheers for France, and three cheers for the Canal, damn it.

Meanwhile, in the Isthmus, the War for Progress was being fought on three fronts: the construction of the Canal, the repair of the railway, and the reconstruction of Colón and Panama City, and Thucydides reported the news in detail (with the details his RIP allowed him to see). Now that the house on stilts had fallen down, I witnessed for the first time the practical effects of my father’s Blindness: not four days passed before he was allocated one of the picturesque habitations of Christophe Colomb, the hamlet built for the white technicians of the Canal Company. It was a prefabricated construction, set down beside the sea with its own hammock and brightly colored blinds like a doll’s house, and we would live in it at no charge whatsoever. It was regal treatment, and my father felt at the back of his neck the unsubtle blow of the Flattery of the Powerful, that which in other places is known under different aliases: sweetener or bribe, enticement or kickback.

The satisfaction, besides, was double: four houses along the way, almost simultaneously, another couple displaced by the earthquake moved in, Gustave and Charlotte Madinier. Everyone was agreed that getting out of that horrible hotel full of dark memories would bring about notable benefits, tabula rasa and all that. In the evenings, after dinner, my father walked the fifty meters that separated us from the Madiniers’ little house, or they walked over to ours, and we sat on the veranda with brandy and cigars to watch the yellow moon dissolve in the waters of Limón Bay and be glad that Monsieur Madinier had decided to stay. Dear readers, I don’t know how to explain it, but something had happened after the earthquake. A transformation of our lives, maybe, or maybe the beginning of a new life.

They say in Panama that the nights in Colón favor intimacies. The causes are, I suppose, scientifically indemonstrable. There is something in the melancholy moan of a certain owl that seems always to be saying “
Ya acabó
—All done”; there is something in the darkness of the nights that makes you feel you could reach up a hand and grab a piece of the Great Bear; and most of all (to leave off the schmaltz) there is something very tangible in the immediacy of danger, whose incarnations are not limited to a bored jaguar who decides to make an excursion out of the jungle, or the occasional scorpion who sneaks into your shoe, or the violence of Colón-Gomorrah, where since the arrival of the French there were more machetes and revolvers than picks and shovels. Danger in Colón is a daily and protean creature, and one becomes accustomed to its smell and soon forgets its presence. Fear unites; in Panama, we were afraid although we did not know it. And that’s why, it occurs to me now, that a night facing Limón Bay, as long as the sky was clear and the rainy season was over, was able to produce intimate friendships. That’s how it was for us: under my secretarial gaze, my father and the Madiniers spent one hundred and forty-five evenings of friendship and confessions. Gustave confessed that the Canal works were an almost inhuman challenge, but confronting that challenge was an honor and a privilege. Charlotte confessed that the image of Julien, her dead son, no longer tormented her but rather kept her company in moments of solitude, like a guardian angel. The Madiniers confessed (in unison and slightly out of tune) that never, since their marriage, had they felt so close.