The Secret History of Costaguana (25 page)

Meanwhile, General Herrera received the first news of the executions. Aristides Fernández, Minister of War, had ordered Tomás Lawson, Juan Vidal, Benjamín Mañozca, and fourteen more generals of the revolution to face the firing squad. That wasn’t all: on board the
Almirante Padilla
and in the Aguadulce camp, the general staff of the Liberal army received the circular that the Minister had printed and sent to all the governmental commanding officers, all the Conservative mayors and governors, ordering them to shoot without trial any and all armed revolutionaries they captured. But Anatolio never found out: he had already gone into the jungle, he’d already descended the Central Cordillera on his own, making short-lived fires to frighten off the poisonous snakes and mosquitoes, eating monkeys that he hunted with his army-issue rifle or threatening the Indians of La Chorrera in order to get boiled yucca or coconut milk.

The war, very much in spite of its deserters, continued its course. In Panama City everyone was talking about the letter that General Herrera had written to the provincial governor, complaining again of the “treatment inflicted on the Liberal prisoners” who had been “tortured as much in the flesh as had their dignity and spirits been ill-treated”; but Anatolio knew nothing of the letter, or of the disdain with which the provincial governor redirected it to Aristides Fernández, or of the Minister of War’s reply, which consisted of seven selective executions in the same plaza where the Canal Company’s office had stood, and where the Grand Hotel still stood, converted into government barracks and ad hoc dungeon. Like a one-man expedition (like Stanley penetrating the Congo), Anatolio had discovered Lake Gatún. He started round it with the vague notion that he’d eventually arrive at the Atlantic, but soon realized that he’d have to use the train if he wanted to get there before the month was out. He had got it into his head—his head obscured by the phantoms of cowardice—that from Colón, that Caribbean Gomorrah, he’d be able to find a ship willing to get him out of the country, a captain willing to look the other way as he disembarked in Kingston or Martinique, in Havana or Puerto Cabello, and he would finally be able to start a new life far away from war, that place where normal, ordinary men—good sons, good fathers, good friends—wet their trousers. The port of Colón, he thought, was the place where nobody notices anybody, where with a little bit of luck he would go unnoticed. To arrive without being discovered, find a steamer or a sailing ship, no matter what the cargo or flag: nothing else mattered.

Colón had been in the hands of government forces for almost a year. The defeats of San Pablo and Buena Vista had left General De la Rosa’s Liberal battalions seriously decimated and the city unprotected. When the gunboat
Próspero Pinzón
appeared in the waters of the bay, full of enemy troops, De la Rosa knew he’d lost the city. General Ignacio Foliaco, in command of the gunboat, threatened to bombard the city as well as the French hamlet of Christophe Colomb, which was even more within range. De la Rosa rejected the threat. “From my side not a shot will be fired,” he sent word. “You’ll see how you look entering the city after having flattened it with cannonballs.” But before Foliaco could carry out his threat, De la Rosa received a visit from four captains—two North Americans, one English, and one French—who had assumed the role of mediators to avoid possible damage to the railway system. The captains brought a proposal for dialogue; De la Rosa accepted. The British cruiser
Tribune
served as the meeting place and negotiation table for Foliaco and De la Rosa; five days later, De la Rosa met on board the
Marietta
with General Albán, that leader of the government forces in the Isthmus who was called “the madman” and not in jest. In the presence of the ship’s Captain, Francis Delano, and Thomas Perry, commander of the cruiser
Iowa
, General De la Rosa signed the surrender. Before evening fell, the troops of the
Próspero Pinzón
had disembarked in Puerto Cristóbal, occupied the Mayor’s office, and distributed government proclamations. Eleven months later, Anatolio Calderón headed for this occupied city.

Anatolio got to the railway shortly before midnight. Between La Chorrera and the first bridge over the waters of Lake Gatún he’d found a little hamlet of ten or twelve huts whose straw roofs touched the ground, and with his loaded rifle pointed in the face of a woman, managed to get her husband (supposing it was her husband) to hand over a cotton shirt that seemed to be his single belonging, and put it on instead of the black jacket with nine buttons that was his soldier’s uniform. Dressed like that, he waited for the morning train before the bridge, hidden behind the carcass of an abandoned dredger; when he saw the locomotive pass, he leapt aboard the last freight car, and the first thing he did was throw his felt hat into the water so it wouldn’t give him away. Lying on his back on top of three hundred bunches of bananas, Anatolio watched the sky of the Isthmus pass by above his head, the invading branches of the
guácimo
trees, the
cocobolos
filled with colorful birds; and the warm breeze of a day without rain messed his straight hair and slipped inside his shirt, the friendly clatter of the train rocked and didn’t threaten him; and during those three hours of the journey he felt so calm, so unpredictably relaxed, that he fell asleep and forgot for an instant the stabbings of fear. The grinding of the carriages as the train switched gears woke him. They were stopping, he thought, they were arriving somewhere. He peeked over the side of the car and the luminous image of the bay, the reflection of the afternoon sun on the water of the Caribbean, hurt his eyes but also made him feel briefly happy. Anatolio grabbed his bundle, leaned with difficulty on the squashed bananas, and jumped. When he landed, his body rolled and Anatolio hurt himself with the horseshoe, tore the shirt on invisible pebbles, and pierced the thumb of his left hand on a thorn, but none of that mattered to him, because he’d finally arrived at his destination. Now it was just a question of finding somewhere to spend the night, and in the morning, as a legitimate passenger or as a stowaway, his new life would have begun.

He was at the foot of Mount Hope. Although he might not have known, he was at that moment very close to the four thousand graves of the railway workers who’d died in the first months of the construction, half a century before. Anatolio thought of waiting until dark before approaching the city, but the six o’clock mosquitoes forced him to get ahead of himself. As the sun set he’d already begun to advance toward the north, between the remains of the French Canal, on his right, and Limón Bay, on his left. These were genuine wastelands, and Anatolio felt sure he wouldn’t be seen as long as he stayed there, because no government soldier would venture into those quagmires—the rain had loosened the earth from the former trench—unless he’d received a direct order. After the distance he’d traveled, the leather of his boots had started to smell, and the swamps weren’t helping matters. Anatolio began to feel a pressing need to find a dry place to take them off and clean the insides with a cloth, because he could feel the skin between his toes riddled with fungus. His shirt smelled of bananas and moss, of its original owner’s sweat, and of the wet ground he’d rolled down. And his gray-and-black-checked trousers, those trousers that had earned him the mockery of his comrades in arms, began to reek unbearably, as if it had been a furious wildcat and not a poor student who pissed in them. Anatolio had become distracted by the impertinent festival of his own smells when he suddenly found himself surrounded by darkened houses.

His first instinct was to jump under the closest veranda and hide behind the posts, but he soon realized that the place—it looked like a neighborhood of Colón, but it wasn’t: Colón was farther north—was abandoned. He stood up straight again. Anatolio began to walk casually down the single muddy street, chose a dark house at random, and went inside. He felt his way along the walls, went all around, but he didn’t find any food, didn’t find any drinking water, didn’t find any blankets or clothes at all; instead he did hear something moving across the floorboards that could have been a rat, and his head filled with other possible images, snakes or scorpions that would attack him while he slept. Then, as he went back outside again, he saw light shining out of a window, ten or so houses along. He looked up: yes, there were the poles and cables; the glow was coming from electric lights, which incredibly were still working. Anatolio felt apprehensive but also relieved. One house, at least, was inhabited. His hand closed over his rifle. He climbed the porch steps (saw a hammock hanging empty), found the door open, and pushed the screen door. He saw the luxurious furniture, shelves with books and some newspapers and a cupboard with glass doors full of clean crystal, and then he heard a woman’s voice, two voices talking amid the sounds of fine china. He followed the voices to the kitchen and discovered that he’d been mistaken: it wasn’t two women, it was just one (white but dressed in a black woman’s clothes) who was singing in an incomprehensible language. Seeing him come in, the woman dropped the saucepan, which crashed to the floor spitting out potatoes, vegetables, and pieces of stewed fish that splashed Anatolio. At first she didn’t move; she stayed still, her black eyes fixed on him, without saying a word. Anatolio explained that he didn’t want to hurt her, but that he was going to spend the night in her house and that he needed clothes, food, and all the money she had. She nodded, as if she perfectly understood those needs, and it seemed that everything was going to be fine, until Anatolio took his eye off her for a second, and when he looked back, he saw her gathering up her dress in both hands, with a movement that revealed her pale calves, and take off running for the door. Anatolio managed to feel pity, a fleeting pity, but he thought inevitably of the firing squad that awaited him if he was captured. He raised his rifle and fired, and the bullet pierced the woman near her liver and ended up lodged in the living room cabinet.

Anatolio didn’t know where he was and could not have known that the abandoned houses (all except one) of Christophe Colomb were barely a hundred paces from the port, that more than five military vessels of four different nationalities were anchored in the bay, among them the
Próspero Pinzón
, and that—as is at the very least logical—thirty government sentries of the Mompox and Granaderos battalions were patrolling the wharf. Not a single one of them did not hear the shot. Following the orders of Sergeant Major Gilberto Durán Salazar, they divided into two groups to enter Christophe Colomb and encircle the enemy, and it didn’t take them long to find the only light on the street and follow it like a squadron of moths. They had not finished surrounding the house when a window opened and an armed silhouette leaned out. Then some of them swept the side wall of the house with bullets and others entered knocking down the screen door and also opening fire indiscriminately, wounding the enemy in both legs but taking him alive. They dragged him to the middle of the street, there where years before all the belongings of an engineer who’d died of yellow fever had been burned in a bonfire, sat him in a chair taken from the same house, on a velvet cushion, and tied his hands behind the wicker back. They formed a firing squad, the Sergeant Major gave the order, and the squad fired. Then one of the soldiers discovered another body in the house, that of the woman, and took her outside to leave her there, so everyone would know the fate of those who gave shelter to Liberals, not to mention cowards. And there, leaning against the chair like a rag doll, her clothes dirty with the executed deserter’s blood, Eloísa and I found her, having spent the afternoon in Colón watching the performance of a Haitian fire-eater, a black man with bulging eyes who claimed to be invulnerable to burns by the grace of the spirits.

Pain has no history, or rather,
pain is outside history, because it situates its victim in a parallel reality where nothing else exists. Pain doesn’t have political commitments; pain is not Conservative, it’s not Liberal; it’s not Catholic or Federalist or Centralist or Masonic. Pain wipes everything out. Nothing else exists, I’ve said; and it’s true that for me—I can insist without grandiloquence—nothing else existed in those days: the image of that rag doll, found in front of my invaded house, that empty doll, broken on the inside, began to haunt me at night. I can’t call it Charlotte, I can’t, because that wasn’t Charlotte, because Charlotte had left that bullet-ridden body. I began to be frightened: concrete fear (of the armies that would return one day to finish the job and murder my daughter) and abstract, intangible fear as well (of the dark, of noises that might be a rat or a rotten mango falling off a tree in the next street, but that gave rise in my terrorized imagination to the silhouettes of uniformed men, of hands pointing rifles). I couldn’t sleep. I spent the nocturnal hours listening to Eloísa cry in the next room, and left her to her weeping, to her own bewildered pain; I refused to console her. Nothing would have been easier than to take the ten steps to her room and her bed, to hug her and weep with her, but I didn’t do it. We were alone: we suddenly felt irrevocably alone. And nothing would have been easier for me than to ease my solitude at the same time as consoling my daughter. But I didn’t do it; I left her alone, so she would find her own way to comprehend what the violent death of a loved one means, that black pit that opens in the world. How can I justify myself? I was afraid Eloísa would ask for explanations I wouldn’t be able to supply. “We’re at war,” I would have said, aware of the poverty, the futility of that answer, “and these things happen in wars.” Of course, that explanation didn’t convince me either. But something inside me went on believing that refusing to offer those slight comforts to my daughter, refusing to search out her company (and perhaps her involuntary protection), would eventually expose the cruel joke of which we were the object, and one of these days the heartless joker would appear at the door and reveal Charlotte’s actual whereabouts, regretting that his cruel joke hadn’t had the desired effect.