The Secret History of Costaguana (20 page)

The last item in my press anthology (in my files, clippings fight for me to quote them, elbow each other out of the way, stick fingers in each other’s eyes) appeared in
La Nación
, the newspaper of the ruling party. For all practical purposes—known and future ones—that text was a threat. Yes, of course we all knew of the badly disguised hostility the central government harbored against the French in general and de Lesseps in particular; we knew the government, after months and more months of meticulously bleeding the Public Treasury dry, had asked the Canal Company for a loan, and the Company had refused to lend them any money. Telegrams came and went, telegrams so dry the ink absorbed into the paper once they were read, and this was known. It was also known that the fact had generated resentment, and in the Presidential Palace this phrase was heard: “We should have given this to the Gringos, who really are our friends.” But we could not predict the profound satisfaction that seemed to emanate from that page.

CANAL COMPANY ON THE BRINK OF BANKRUPTCY read the headline. The body of the article explained that many Panamanian families had mortgaged properties, sold family jewels, and plundered savings accounts to invest everything in Canal stocks. And the last sentence was this one: “In the case of collapse, it will be obvious who is responsible for the absolute ruin of hundreds of our fellow countrymen.” And then it transcribed an extensive list of writers and journalists who had “lied, deceived, and defrauded” the public with their reports.

The list was alphabetical.

There was just one name under the letter
A
.

For Miguel Altamirano, it was the beginning of the end.

 

N
ow my memory and my pen, irremediable addicts to the vicissitudes of politics (fascinated by the stone horrors left in the Gorgon’s wake), must address without distractions those terrible years that begin with the strange lines from a national anthem and end with a thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of a war. But an almost supernatural event paralyzed the political evolution of the country, or paralyzes it in my memory. On September 23, 1886, after six and a half months of pregnancy, Eloísa Altamirano was born, a baby girl so small that my two hands could cover her completely, so scrawny that her legs still showed the curve of her bones and the only thing visible of her genitals was the tiny point of her clitoris. Eloísa was born so weak that her mouth was unable to wrestle with her mother’s nipples, and she had to be fed with spoonfuls of twice-boiled milk for the first six weeks. Readers of the Jury, common readers of breeding age, fathers and mothers everywhere: the arrival of Eloísa paralyzed the entire world, or rather annulled it, erased it pitilessly the way color is erased from the world of a blind man. . . . Out there, the Canal Company made desperate attempts to stay afloat, issuing new bonds and even organizing peripatetic lotteries to recapitalize the business, but none of that mattered to me: my task consisted in boiling Eloísa’s spoon, holding her cheeks with two fingers to make sure the milk didn’t spill, massaging her throat with the tip of my index finger to help her swallow; I am indifferent to the knowledge that Conrad was writing his first story, “The Black Mate,” at the time. Shortly before he turned twenty-nine, Conrad passed his captaincy exam in London, and was transformed for us into Captain Joseph K.; but that seems banal to me compared with the moment when Eloísa first put a bumpy nipple in her mouth and, after weeks and weeks of slow learning and gradual strengthening of her jaw, sucked so strongly that she cut it with her gums and made it bleed.

And nevertheless, there is an event that escapes my comprehension: in spite of Eloísa’s birth, in spite of the great care that determined her slow and laborious survival, the annulled world kept spinning, the country kept moving with insolent independence, in the Isthmus of Panama life went on with complete indifference to what was happening to its most loyal subjects. How to talk about politics thinking at the same time of those years, evoking moments that in my memory belong exclusively to my daughter? How to get down to work recuperating events of a national character, when the only thing that interested me at the time was seeing Eloísa gain one more gram and then another? Every day, Charlotte and I took her, all wrapped up in freshly boiled linens, to Tang’s butcher shop and unwrapped her to place her like a fillet steak or a piece of liver in the big bowl of his scales. On the other side of the high wooden counter Tang put the weights on, those solid rust-colored discs, and for us parents there was no greater pleasure than seeing the Chinese butcher look through his shiny lacquered box for a bigger weight, because the previous one hadn’t been heavy enough. . . . I bring this memory into my tale and immediately wonder: How do I search out, in the midst of my warm personal memories, the aridity of public memories?

Self-sacrificing man that I am, I’ll try, dear readers, I’ll try.

 

B
ecause in my country things were about to happen of the sort that historians always end up recording in their books, asking with sonorous question marks how on earth we could have come to this and then answering I know, I have the answer. Which, of course, isn’t all that clever, for even the most muddle-headed person would have sensed something odd in the air during those years. There were prophecies everywhere: one had only to interpret them. I don’t know what my father might have thought, but I should have recognized the imminent tragedy the day when my nation of poets was no longer able to write poetry. When the Republic of Colombia lost its ear, mistook literary taste, and rejected the most basic lyric rules, I should have sounded the alarm, shouted man overboard, stop the ship. I should have stolen a lifeboat and descended immediately, though I might have run the risk of not finding terra firma, the day I first heard the verses of the National Anthem.

Ah, those verses . . . Where did I hear them first? It’s more important to ask myself now: Where did those words come from, words that nobody understood and which would have struck any literary critic as worse than terrible literature, more like the product of an unstable mind? Readers, let us go over the traces of the crime (against poetry, against decency). The year is 1887: one José Domingo Torres, a civil servant whose foremost talent was setting up nativity scenes at Christmas time, decides to become a theater director, and also decides that for the next national holiday a Patriotic Poem Produced by Presidential Plume shall be sung. And this for those blessed not to know it: the President of our Republic, Don Rafael Núñez, was in the habit of whiling away his free time composing adolescent verse. He was following a deeply entrenched Colombian tradition: when he wasn’t signing new accords with the Vatican to satisfy the elevated morals of his second wife—and to persuade Colombian society to forgive him for the sin of having married a second time, abroad and in a civil ceremony—President Núñez put on his pajamas, with a nightcap and everything, threw a poncho on top of that against the cold of Bogotá, ordered a cup of chocolate with cheese, and sat down to vomit lines of verse. And one November afternoon, the Bogotá Varieties Theater witnesses a group of profoundly disconcerted young people, through no fault of their own, intoning these ineffable stanzas:

Meanwhile, in Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps devotes all his time to that protracted task: accepting. He accepted that the Canal would not be ready in time but would require several more years. He accepted that the billions of francs put up by the French would be insufficient: they needed six hundred million more. He accepted that the idea of a sea-level canal was a technical impossibility and an error of judgment; he accepted that the Panama Canal would be constructed by means of a system of locks. . . . He accepted and accepted and kept accepting: this proud man made more concessions in two weeks than he’d made in his entire life. However—and this is quite a large however—it wasn’t enough. What nobody (where
nobody
means “de Lesseps”) had imagined had happened: the French were fed up. The day the bonds that would save the Canal Company went on sale, an anonymous note arrived at all the European newspapers saying that Ferdinand de Lesseps had died. It wasn’t true, of course; but the damage was done. The sale of bonds failed. The lottery had failed. When they announced the dissolution of the Canal Company and named a liquidator to take charge of its machines, my father was in the offices of the
Star & Herald
, begging them to take him back, offering to write the first five articles for free if they would give him space in their pages again. Witnesses assure me they saw him cry. And meanwhile, all over Colombia the people were singing:

Work on the Panama Canal, the Great Trench, was officially interrupted or stopped in May of 1889. The French began to leave; in the port of Colón the trunks and hemp sacks and wooden crates piled up daily, and the porters couldn’t cope with all the work of getting the moment’s luggage onto the moment’s steamer. The
Lafayette
seemed to have tripled its weekly runs during that exodus (because that’s what it was, an exodus, what happened in the Isthmus, the French like a persecuted race fleeing in search of friendlier lands). The French city of Christophe Colomb was gradually deserted, as if the plague had invaded and exterminated its residents; it was a ghost town coming into being, but it happened before our eyes, and in itself the spectacle would have fascinated anyone. The recently emptied houses all took on the same smell of freshly washed cupboards; Charlotte and I liked to take Eloísa by the hand and go for walks through the abandoned houses and look through the drawers for a revealing diary full of secrets (something we never did find) or some old garment that Eloísa could use to play dress-up (something we found quite often). On the walls of the houses were marks from nails, rectangles of a whiter white where a portrait of the grandfather who fought with Napoleon had been. The French sold everything that wasn’t indispensable, not to reduce the dimensions of their belongings, but because, from the moment they knew they could leave, Panama became a wretched place they needed to forget as soon as possible and whose objects were capable of carrying curses with them. One of those belongings, sold at public auction a little while later, was a still life the owners had bought, out of charity, from a Canal worker. The man was a poor unhinged Frenchman who claimed to be a banker and also a painter, but who was really no more than a vandal. He claimed to be related to Flora Tristan, which would have interested my mother; he’d disembarked in Panama City, on his way from Peru, and was arrested there for urinating in public. He left in a matter of weeks, frightened off by the mosquitoes and the labor conditions. The world later learned more about his life, and perhaps his name will not be unknown to my readers. He was called Paul Gauguin.

The uninhabited houses of Christophe Colomb began to fall to pieces (I’m not saying it was partly the fault of the anthem, but you never know). After every rainy season, a whole wall would give way in some sector of the city, the wood so rotten it wouldn’t break but bent like rubber, the beams eaten through to the center by termites. Our strolls through the houses had to end: one afternoon in June, in the middle of a downpour, a Cuna Indian slipped into the former house of the engineer Vilar while waiting for the weather to clear; reaching under a wardrobe out of curiosity, he received two bites from a rather small coral snake and died before he got back to Colón. No one could explain why snakes were so interested in the empty houses of Christophe Colomb, but as the years passed the city began to fill with these visitors, bushmasters and fer-de-lances, perhaps just looking for food. My father, who after the publication of the famous Canal payroll in the
Star & Herald
had become a sort of undesirable, a pariah of isthmian journalism, wrote during those days a short article about two Indians who met in the house of the engineer Debray to test which of them knew the best antidotes. They covered the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb from one end to the other, going into every house and sticking their hands under every wardrobe and every basket and every loose floorboard, getting bitten by as many snakes as they could find to then prove their skill with verbena, with
guaco
, and even with
ipecacuanha
. My father recounted how toward the end of the night one of the Indians had crawled under one of the houses, and felt a bite but had not managed to identify the snake. The other let him die: that was his way of winning the contest. And the winner celebrated his victory in the Colón jailhouse, sentenced by a Panamanian judge for culpable homicide.

Readers of the Jury: this passage, despite appearances, is not an ingenious touch of local color on the part of the narrator, anxious as he is to please audiences in England and even in continental Europe. No, the anecdote of the Indians and the snakes plays an active role in my narration, for that antidote competition marks my father’s disgrace like a boundary stone. Miguel Altamirano wrote a simple chronicle about the Panamanian Indians and the valuable medical information that had come down to them through their traditions; but he did not manage to get it published. And thus, with all the irony implied by what I am about to write, this apolitical and banal tale, this inoffensive anecdote that had nothing to do with the Church, with History, or with the Inter-oceanic Canal, was his ruin. He sent it to Bogotá, where the taste for exoticism and adventure was greater, but seven daily papers (four Conservative, three Liberal) turned it down. He sent it to a newspaper in Mexico and another in Cuba but didn’t even get a reply. And my seventy-year-old father began shutting himself up inside himself (wounded boar, hibernating bear), convinced that everyone was his enemy, that the whole world had turned its back on him as part of a conspiracy led by Pope Leo XIII and the Archbishop of Bogotá, José Telésforo Paul, against the forces of Progress. When I went to visit him, I was met by a resentful, sour-faced, embittered figure: the shadow of a silver beard dominated his face, his restless hands trembling and keeping busy with idle pastimes. Miguel Altamirano, the man who in other times had been able, with a column or a pamphlet, to generate enough hatred that a presbyter would call for his death, now spent his hours inoffensively interchanging the lines of that patriotic song as if he could take revenge on someone like that. The verses he composed might be irreverent: