The Secret History of Costaguana (22 page)

 

J
ULY. The most scandalous details of the financial disaster of the Canal have begun to come to light. My father discovers through the print media that de Lesseps, his old idol, his model for life, has retired from Parisian life. The police have searched the rue Caumartin offices and soon will do the same to the private houses of those involved: no one doubts that the search will reveal frauds and lies and embezzlements at the highest level of French politics. On the fourteenth, the Republic’s national holiday, documents and declarations are published in Paris and reproduced in New York and in Bogotá, in Washington and in Panama City. Among other revelations, the following emerge. More than thirty deputies of the French Parliament received bribes to take decisions in favor of the Canal. More than three million francs were invested in “buying good press.” Under the heading “Publicity” the Canal Company accepted a transfer of ten million francs divided into hundreds of checks made out to the bearer. When the destination of those checks was investigated, it was found that several of them had ended up in the editorial departments of Panamanian newspapers. On the twenty-first, at an informal lunch given by the representatives of the central government (a governor, a colonel, and a bishop), my father denies ever having seen one of those checks. An uncomfortable silence descends over the table.

 

A
UGUST. Captain Joseph K. arrives in Kinshasa to take command of the
Florida
. But the
Florida
has sunk; and Conrad then embarks on the
Roi des Belges
, in the capacity of supernumerary, for a reconnaissance journey up the Congo River. During the trip what hasn’t happened yet happens: he gets ill. He suffers three attacks of fever, two of dysentery and one of nostalgia. Then he discovers that his mission, when he arrives in Stanley Falls, will be to relieve the agent of the interior station, who is gravely ill with dysentery. His name is Georges Antoine Klein; he is twenty-seven years old; he is a conventional young man, full of hopes and plans for the future, and eager to return to Europe. Conrad and Klein speak very little at the interior station. On September 6, with Klein on board and very ill, the
Roi des Belges
begins its journey downriver. The Captain of the boat has also fallen ill, and for the first part of the trip Captain Joseph K. takes charge. Then, under his captaincy and to some degree under his responsibility, Klein dies. His death will accompany Joseph K. for the rest of his life.

 

S
EPTEMBER. In the Christophe Colomb house, which has undergone an extraordinary rebirth since I began living in it, we are celebrating Eloísa’s birthday. Miguel Altamirano has been to Chez Michel, the pastry shop of one of the few bold Frenchmen who decided to stay in the ghost town of Colón, and has brought his granddaughter a cake in the shape of the number 4, with three layers of cream inside and a shell of caramelized sugar on the outside. After dinner, we all go out on the veranda. A few days earlier Charlotte had hung over the railings a jaguar hide with white edges, yellow flanks, brown spots, and a brown stripe along its backbone. My father is leaning on the railing and begins to stroke the spotted pelt, his gaze lost in the tops of the palm trees. Charlotte is behind him, showing a servant from Cartagena how to serve coffee in a set of four cups from Limoges. I have stretched out in the hammock. Eloísa, in my arms, has fallen asleep, and her half-open mouth emits a tiny clean-scented little snoring that I enjoy as it reaches my face. And at that moment, without turning around and without stopping his stroking of the little jaguar, my father speaks, and what he says could be directed at me but also at Charlotte: “I killed him, you know. I killed the engineer.” Charlotte bursts into tears.

 

O
CTOBER. Back in Kinshasa, Conrad writes: “Everything here is repellent to me. Men and things, but above all men.” One of those men is Camille Delcommune, manager of the station and Conrad’s immediate superior. The aversion Delcommune feels for this English sailor—for Conrad, by this time, is already an English sailor—is comparable only to that which the sailor feels toward Delcommune. In those conditions, Captain Joseph K. realizes that his future in Africa is rather dim and not too promising. There are no possibilities of promotion, much less of an increase in salary. However, he has signed a contract for three years, and that reality is inescapable. What to do? Conrad, ashamed but defeated, decides to provoke a quarrel in order to resign and return to London. But he does not have to resort to this extreme: a crisis of dysentery—quite real, besides—presents a better pretext.

 

N
OVEMBER. On the twentieth my father asks me to come with him to see the machines. “But you’ve seen them so many times,” I tell him, and he replies, “No, I don’t want to see the ones here. Let’s go to Culebra, where the big ones are.” I don’t dare tell him the railway fare has become, overnight, too expensive for him to afford, now that he’s unemployed, and always has been for me. What he says, however, is true: at the moment when they stopped for good, the Canal works were divided into five sectors, from Colón to Panama City. The Culebra sector, the one that caused the engineers the most problems, consists of two kilometers of unpredictable and disobedient geography, and that was where the best dredgers were assembled as well as the most powerful excavators the Canal Company had acquired during the final years. And that’s what my father wanted to see on that November 20: the abandoned remains of the biggest failure in human history. At that moment I didn’t yet know that my father had attempted that nostalgic pilgrimage before. In spite of the profound sadness I notice in his voice, in spite of the tiredness that weighs down every movement of his body, I think the matter of going to see rusty hulks is just a disappointed man’s whim, and I brush him off the way you might shoo away a fly. “You go on your own,” I tell him. “And then you can tell me how you got on.”

 

D
ECEMBER. On the fourth, after a grueling six-week journey—the long duration the result of his terrible state of health—Conrad has returned to Matadi. He had to be carried in a hammock on the shoulders of younger, stronger men, and the humiliation adds to the exhaustion. On his way back to London, Captain Joseph K. stops again in Brussels. But Brussels has changed in those months: it is no longer the white-walled, lethally boring city Conrad had known before; now it is the center of a slave-holding, exploitative, murderous empire; now it is a place that turns men into ghosts, a real industry of degradation. Conrad has seen the degradation of the colony, and in his head those Congolese images begin to mix, as if he were drunk, with the death of his mother in exile, the failure of his insurrectionist father, the imperialist despotism of Tsarist Russia, the betrayal of Poland by the European powers. Just as the Europeans had divided up the Polish cake, thinks Conrad, now they will divide up the Congo, and then no doubt the rest of the world. As if replying to those images that torment him, those fears that he has undoubtedly inherited from his father, his health deteriorates: Captain Joseph K. goes from rheumatism in his left arm to cardiac palpitations, from Congolese dysentery to Panamanian malaria. His uncle Tadeusz writes: “I’ve found your writing so changed—which I attribute to the fever and dysentery—that since then there is no happiness in my thoughts.”

 

T
he day of his pilgrimage to Culebra, several American passengers saw my father take the eight o’clock train on his own, and heard him making comments to nobody each time one of the work stations passed by the windows, from Gatún to Emperador. As they passed near Matachín they heard him explain that the name of the place came from the Chinamen who’d died and were buried around there, and as they passed Bohío Soldado they heard him translate both words into English—
Hut
,
Soldier
—without offering the slightest explanation. At midday, while the train filled with the smells of the meals the passengers had improvised for the journey, they saw him alight in Culebra, slip down the railway embankment, and disappear into the jungle. A Cuna Indian who was collecting plants with his son caught sight of him then, and his way of walking struck him as so odd—the careless way he kicked a piece of rotten wood that could have been the refuge of a poisonous snake, the worn-out way he bent down to look for a stone to throw at the monkeys—that he followed him to where the Frenchmen’s machines were. Miguel Altamirano arrived at the excavation, the gigantic gray and muddy trench that looked like a meteor’s point of impact, and contemplated it from the edge the way a general studies a battlefield. Then, as if someone had defied the Isthmus’s rules, it began to rain.

Instead of sheltering under the closest tree, whose impenetrable foliage would have provided a perfect umbrella, Miguel Altamirano began to walk in the rain, along the edge of the trench, until arriving at an enormous creature covered in creepers that towered ten meters above the ground. It was a steam-powered excavator. The downpours of the last eighteen months had covered it in a patina of rust, as thick and hard as coral, but that was only visible after pulling away the three handbreadths of tropical vegetation that covered it all over, the vines and leaves with which the jungle was pulling it down into the earth. Miguel Altamirano approached the shovel and caressed it as if it were an old elephant’s trunk. He walked around the machine slowly, stopping beside each leg, pulling the leaves away with his hands and touching each of the buckets that his arms could reach: the old elephant was ill, and my father circled it in search of symptoms. He soon found the elephant’s belly, a little shed that served as the monstrous tank of the excavator’s engine room, and there he took shelter. He did not come out again. When, after a fruitless two-day search of Colón and the surrounding area, I managed to discover his whereabouts, I found him lying on the damp floor of the excavator. Fate decreed it would rain that day as well, so I lay down beside my dead father and closed my eyes to feel what he would have felt during his last moments: the murderous clatter of the rain on the hollow metal of the buckets, the smell of the hibiscus, the shirt soaked through with the cold of the wet rust, and the exhaustion, the pitiless exhaustion.

Joseph Conrad,
Nostromo

The saddest thing
about my father’s death, it sometimes occurs to me (I still think of it often), was the fact that he wasn’t survived by anyone prepared to observe a decent mourning. In our house in Christophe Colomb there was no black clothing or any desire to wear any, and Charlotte and I had a tacit agreement to spare Eloísa contact with that death. I don’t think it was a protective impulse but rather the notion that Miguel Altamirano hadn’t been very present in our lives during those last years and it was futile to give the little girl a grandfather after that grandfather had died. So my father began to sink into oblivion as soon as his funeral was over, and I did absolutely nothing to prevent it.

By stipulation of the Bishop of Panama, my Masonic father was denied an ecclesiastical burial. He was buried in unconsecrated ground, beneath a gravelly headstone, among the Chinese and the atheists, unbaptized Africans, and all sorts of excommunicated people. He was buried, scandalizing those who knew, with a certain hand amputated a long time before from a certain Asian cadaver. The Colón gravedigger, a man who had already seen it all in this life, received the death certificate from the judicial authorities and handed it to me the way a bellhop gives you a message in a hotel. It was written on Canal Company stationery, which seemed anachronistic and somewhat disdainful; but the gravedigger explained that the stationery was already printed and paid for, and he preferred to keep using it than to let hundreds of perfectly usable sheets of paper rot away in an attic. So my father’s particulars appeared above dotted lines, beside the words
Noms
,
Prénoms
,
Nationalité
. Beside
Profession ou emploi
, someone had written:
Journalist
. Beside
Cause du décès
, it read:
Natural causes
. I thought of going to the authorities to make it a matter of public record that Miguel Altamirano had died of disillusionment, though I was prepared to accept melancholy, but Charlotte persuaded me that I would be wasting my time.

When nine months of mourning had passed, Charlotte and I realized we hadn’t visited Miguel Altamirano’s grave even once. The first anniversary of his death arrived without our noticing, and we mentioned it with faces contorted by guilty expressions, hands full of remorse fluttering in the air. The second anniversary went by unnoticed by either of us, and it took the arrival of the news of the trials in Paris for my father’s memory to make a brief, momentary appearance in the organized well-being of our household. Let’s see how I can explain this: by way of some sort of cosmic result of my father’s death, the house in Christophe Colomb and its three residents had become detached from the land of Panama and was now located outside the territories of Political Life. In Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles were mercilessly interrogated by the hungry pack of swindled shareholders, thousands of families who had mortgaged their houses and sold their jewels to rescue the Canal in which they’d invested all their money; but that news reached me through a thick wall of glass, or from the virtual reality of a silent film: I see the actors’ faces, I see their lips moving, but I can’t understand what they’re saying, or perhaps I don’t care . . . . The French President, Sadi Carnot, shaken by the financial scandal of the Company and its various economic debacles, had found himself obliged to form a new government, and the ripples of the waves of such an event must have reached the beaches of Colón; but the Altamirano-Madinier household, apolitical and to some apathetic, remained on the margins. My two women and I lived in a parallel reality where uppercase letters did not exist: there were no Great Events, there were no Wars or Nations or Historic Moments. Our most important events, the humble peaks of our life, were very different during that time. Two examples: Eloísa learns to count to twenty in three languages; Charlotte, one night, is able to talk of Julien without collapsing.