The Secret History of Costaguana (21 page)

But there were also verses of intense political criticism:

And there were also some that were simply absurd:

Playing with paper, playing with words, spending the day as a child spends it, laughing at things no one else understands (because no one else was there to hear the explanations or, of course, the laughter), my father entered his own decline, his personal sinking. “Clearly,” he’d say when I went to see him, “the little poem lends itself to anything.” And he’d show me his latest discoveries. Yes, we’d laugh together; but his laughter was tinged with the new ingredient of bitterness, by the melancholy that had killed so many visitors to the Isthmus; and by the time I took my leave of him, when I decided it was time to go home where the miracle of domestic happiness awaited me—my concubine Charlotte, my bastard Eloísa—by that time I was fully aware that in my absence and without my help and in spite of the switched-around lines of the National Anthem, that night my father would sink back down again. His routine had become an alternation of sinking and resurgence. Had I wanted to see it, I would have realized that sooner or later one of those sinkings would be the last. And no, I didn’t want to see it. Drugged by my own mysterious well-being, fruit of the mysterious events of the Chagres River and generated by the mysterious joys of fatherhood, I grew blind to the appeals for help Miguel Altamirano sent my way, the flares he let off from his ship, and I was surprised to find that the power of refraction could be hereditary, that I too was capable of certain blindnesses. . . . For me, Colón turned into the place where I allowed myself to fall in love and to cultivate the idea of a family; I didn’t notice—I didn’t want to notice—that for my father Colón did not exist, nor did Panama exist, nor was life possible, if the Canal did not exist.

And so we arrive at one of the fundamental crossroads of my life. For if there, in a rented house in Christophe Colomb, a man manipulates lines written by another on a piece of paper, thousands of kilometers away, in a rented house in Bessborough Gardens, London, another prepares to write the first pages of his first novel. In Christophe Colomb a life made of explorations through jungles and rivers is dying away; for the man in Bessborough Gardens the explorations—in another jungle, down another river—are just about to begin.

The Angel of History, expert puppeteer, begins to move the strings above our unsuspecting heads: unbeknownst to us, Joseph Conrad and José Altamirano begin to edge closer. My duty, as Historian of Parallel Lines, is to trace an itinerary. And I now devote myself to that task. We are in September of 1889, Conrad has just finished breakfast, and something happens to him at that moment: his hand grasps the bell and rings it, so someone will come and clear the table and take the tray away. He lights his pipe and looks out the window. It’s a veiled and misty day, with the odd flash of fiery sunlight here and there on the houses opposite. “I was not at all certain that I wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to write about.” And then he picks up a pen and . . . writes. He writes two hundred words about a man called Almayer. His life as a novelist has just begun; but his life as a sailor, which has not yet ended, is in trouble. It has been several months since Captain Joseph K. returned from his last voyage, and he has still not managed to obtain a captaincy anywhere. There is a project: travel to Africa to captain a steamer for the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. But the project is stalled . . . as is also, apparently for good, the project of the Inter-oceanic Canal. Has it failed? wonders Miguel Altamirano in Colón. All the stage lights now focus on that fateful space of time: the twelve months of 1890.

 

J
ANUARY. Taking advantage of the dry season, Miguel Altamirano hires a lighter and sails up the Chagres to Gatún. It is his first outing in sixty days, if you don’t count the occasional foray down Front Street (no longer bedecked with flags or banners in every language, having ceased to be a boulevard in the center of the world in the space of a couple of months and gone back to being a lost wagon track of the colonized tropics) or his daily stroll to the statue of Christopher Columbus and back. He gets the same impression every time: the city is a ghost town, it is populated by the ghosts of its dead, the living hang around like ghosts. Abandoned by the French, German, Russian, and Italian engineers, by the Jamaican and Liberian laborers, by the North American adventurers who’d fallen from grace and looked for work on the Canal, by the Chinese and the sons of the Chinese and the sons of those sons who fear neither melancholia nor malaria, the city that until recently was the center of the world has now turned into an empty hide, like that of a dead cow devoured by vultures. The Cubans and Venezuelans have gone home: there’s nothing for them to do here. Panama has died, thinks Miguel Altamirano. Viva Panama. His intention is to go to see the machines, which he visited seven years ago with the engineer Madinier, but he changes his mind at the last minute. Something has overcome him—fear, sadness, an overwhelming sense of failure—something he can’t quite pinpoint.

 

F
EBRUARY. On the advice of his uncle Tadeusz, Conrad writes to another of his maternal uncles: Aleksander Poradowski, hero of the revolution against the Tsar’s empire, who was sentenced to death after the insurrection of 1863 and managed to flee Poland thanks, paradoxically, to the help of a Russian accomplice. Aleksander lives in Brussels; his wife, Marguerite, is a cultured and attractive woman who talks intelligently about books, who also writes terrible novels, and who, most of all, has all the contacts in the world with the Société du Haut-Congo. Conrad announces that he intends to travel soon to Poland to visit Tadeusz, and that he will have to travel by way of Brussels; his uncle tells him he’ll be welcome but warns that he is in poor health and might not be able to perform all his duties as host. Conrad writes: “I leave London tomorrow, Friday, at nine a.m. and should arrive in Brussels at five-thirty in the afternoon.” But when he arrives he finds himself faced with another piece of fate’s foul play: Aleksander dies two days later. Disappointed, Captain Joseph K. travels on to Poland. He does not even attend the funeral.

 

M
ARCH. On the seventh, Miguel Altamirano arrives very early at the train station. His intention is to go to Panama City, and at eight o’clock on the dot he has boarded the train as he had done so often over the last thirty years, settling down in one of the coaches at the back without telling anyone and opening a book for the journey. Out the window he sees a black man sitting on a barrel; he sees a mule cart cross the railway lines and stop over the rails long enough for the mules to shit. Miguel Altamirano distracts himself watching, on one side of the train, the sea and the distant ships in Limón Bay and, on the other side, the crowds stamping their heels on the paving stones waiting for the train to start moving. But then Miguel Altamirano receives the first slap of his new position in Panama: the ticket collector comes through asking to see all tickets, and when he arrives at Altamirano’s place, instead of tipping his hat and greeting him as usual, holds out a rude hand. Altamirano looks at the fingertips grimy from handling the paper of the tickets and says, “I don’t have one.” He doesn’t say that for thirty years he has traveled courtesy of the Railroad Company. He just says, “I don’t have one.” The ticket collector shouts at him to get off; Miguel Altamirano, gathering the last grams of dignity he has left, stands up and says he’ll get off when he feels like it. A moment or two later the ticket collector reappears, this time accompanied by two
cargadores
, and between the three of them they lift the passenger up and shove him off the train. Altamirano falls on the paving stones. He hears murmurs that turn into laughter. He looks at his trousers: they are torn at the knee, and through the rip he sees the skin scraped by the blow and a stain of blood and dirt that will soon be infected.

 

A
PRIL. After two months in Poland, two months devoted to visiting for the first time in fifteen years the place where he was born and the places he lived until his voluntary exile, Captain Joseph K. returns to Brussels. He knows that his aunt Marguerite has recommended him to the authorities of the Société du Haut-Congo. But when he arrives he is surprised by a stroke of luck: a Danish captain named Freiesleben, in charge of one of the company’s steamboats, has died suddenly and his position is available. Captain Joseph K. is not intimidated by the idea of replacing a dead man. On paper, the trip to Africa will last three years. Conrad hurries back to London, arranges his things, returns to Brussels, takes the train to the port of Bordeaux, and embarks on the
Ville de Maceio
en route to Boma, port of entry to the Belgian Congo. From the first port of call in Tenerife, he writes: “The screw turns and carries me off to the unknown. Happily, there is another me who prowls through Europe, who is with you at this moment. Who will get to Poland ahead of you. Another me who moves about with great ease; who can even be in two places at once.” From Freetown, he writes: “Fever and dysentery! There are others who are sent home in a hurry at the end of a year, so that they shouldn’t die in the Congo. God forbid!” From the port of call in Libreville, he writes: “For a long time I no longer have been interested in the goal to which my road leads. I go along it with my head lowered, cursing the stones. Now I am interested in another traveler: this makes me forget the petty miseries of my own path. While awaiting the inevitable fever, I am very well.”

 

M
AY. Miguel Altamirano travels to Panama City to visit the head offices of the
Star & Herald
. He is prepared to humiliate himself if necessary in order to be allowed to return to the pages of the newspaper. But the necessity does not arise: a novice editor, a baby-faced young man who turns out to be a son of the Herrera family, receives him and asks him if he’d like to review a book that is causing a sensation in Paris. Miguel Altamirano accepts, obviously, his curiosity piqued: the
Star & Herald
does not devote much space to reviews of foreign books. The young man hands him a five hundred and seventy-two–page volume, recently published by Dentu:
La dernière bataille
, it is called, and bears this subtitle:
New Psychological and Social Study
. The author is a certain Edouard Drumont, founder and promoter of the National Anti-Semite League of France and author of
La France juive
and also of
La France juive devant l’opinion
. Miguel Altamirano has never heard of him; on the train back to Colón, he begins to read the book, a leather-bound volume with a red spine and the name of a bookshop on the frontispiece. Before the train has gone as far as Miraflores, his hands have already begun to tremble, and the other passengers in the carriage see him lift his eyes off the page and look out the window with an incredulous expression (or is it indignant, or perhaps irate?). He understands why they’ve assigned him this book.
La dernière bataille
is a history of the construction of the Inter-oceanic Canal, where
history
should be understood as
diatribe
. De Lesseps is called a “delinquent” and “poor devil,” “great fraud” and “compulsive liar.” “The Isthmus has become a vast cemetery,” it says, and also: “The blame for the disaster belongs to the Jewish financiers, plague of our society, and to their monstrous accomplices: corrupt journalists the world over.” Miguel Altamirano senses that he is being derided; he feels like the target where the arrow has landed, and sees in that commission a conspiracy on a grand scale to ridicule him, at best, or deliberately drive him mad, at worst. (All of a sudden, all the fingers in the train lift up and point at him.) When they get to Culebra, where the train stops briefly, he throws the book out the window, he sees it fly through the foliage of the trees—imagines or perhaps hears the small crashing of the leaves—and land with a liquid sound in a small mud puddle. Then he looks up almost by accident, and his gaze, heavy with exhaustion, falls onto the abandoned French machines, the dredgers and excavators. It is as if he were seeing them for the first time.

 

J
UNE. Captain Joseph K. disembarks, finally, in Boma. Almost immediately he sets off for Kinshasa, in the interior, to assume the captaincy of the steamboat he’s been assigned: the
Florida
. In Matadi he meets Roger Casement, an Irishman in the service of the Société du Haut-Congo, in charge of recruiting labor, but whose most important work so far has been that of exploring the Congolese landscape with an eye to the construction of a railway between Matadi and Stanley Pool. The railway will be a real advance of progress: it will facilitate free trade and improve the living conditions of Africans. Conrad prepares to cover the same ground that the future railway will cross. He writes to his aunt Marguerite: “I leave tomorrow, on foot. Not an ass here but your very humble servant.” Prosper Harou, the Société’s guide, approaches him and says: “Pack for several days, Monsieur Conrad. We’re going on an expedition.” Captain Joseph K. obeys, and two days later is entering the Congo jungle in a caravan of thirty-one men, and for thirty-six days walks behind them in the inclement humidity of the African heat, and watches the black, half-naked men open a trail with their machetes while this white man in a loose shirt notes in his travel diary—and in English—everything he sees: the depth of the Congo River when they try to wade across it but also the trill of the birds, one resembling a flute, another the baying of a hound; the general gray-yellowish tone the dry grass gives to the landscape but also the great height of the oil palms. The journey is unbearable: the murderous heat, the humidity, the clouds of flies and mosquitoes the size of grapes, the lack of drinking water, and the constant threat of tropical diseases make that penetration of the jungle into a true descent into hell. Thus concludes the month of June for Captain Joseph K. On July 3 he writes: “Saw at a camp place the dead body of a Bakongo.” On July 4 he writes: “Saw another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of meditative repose.” On July 24 he writes: “A white man died here.” On July 29 he writes: “On the road today passed a skeleton tied to a post. Also white man’s grave.”