The Secret History of Costaguana (10 page)

The bullets—of various calibers—hit Salgar in various parts of his body: they perforate both lungs, his cheek and tongue; they destroy one of his knees and reopen the almost closed wound in his left hand, burning nerves, scorching tendons, crossing through the carpel tunnel the way a boat crosses a canal. The Chassepot floats in the air for a second and falls into the rough waters of the Atrato; it sinks, and before touching bottom is swept a few meters ahead by the current. Following it, falling backward, the corpse of a man (sixty-nine kilograms in weight) who was a slave and will not now be free.

At the moment Fidel Emiliano Salgar lands on the sandy riverbed, startling a ray and receiving a sting—not that the dead body feels anything, not that his tissues retract in reaction to the venom, not that his muscles suffer fevers or his blood is contaminated—at that very moment, the apprentice sailor Korzeniowski, on board the
Saint-Antoine
, takes one last look at the coastline of the port of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. Several days have gone by since, having completed the rifles-to-overthrow-Liberal-governments mission, they left Colón and the territorial waters of the United States of Colombia. And, since this seems to be the chapter of things unknown, I better state what Korzeniowski doesn’t know at that moment.

He doesn’t know the names or ages of the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims of the Chassepots. He doesn’t even know there were one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims of the Chassepots. He doesn’t know that the contraband will have been in vain, that the Liberal and Masonic government will win the war against the Conservative Catholics and it will take another war—or a resumption of the same one—to alter that state of things. He doesn’t know what Monsieur Déléstang will think, in Marseille, when he finds out about it, or if he’ll go on to interfere in other crusades. He doesn’t know that one of the gutter press newspapers,
La Justicia
, will invent many years later an absurd version of his sojourn on the Colombian coast: in it, Korzeniowski takes charge of all the negotiations and sells the weapons to a certain Lorenzo Daza, delegate of the Liberal government who later “gives them up for lost” and resells them “for double their price” to the Conservative revolutionaries. Korzeniowski, who doesn’t even know who Daza is, carries on with his gaze fixed on Martinique, and carries on not knowing things. He doesn’t know that the coastline of Saint-Pierre will not ever be the same, at least not for him, for the city known as Old Paris will be erased from the map in a quarter of a century, completely obliterated like an undesirable historical fact (but this is not the time to speak of that disaster). He doesn’t know that, in a matter of hours, when they sail between St. Thomas and Port-au-Prince, he will meet the violence of the East Wind and the West Wind, and doesn’t know that much later he’ll write about that violence. Between Port-au-Prince and Marseille he will turn nineteen, and won’t know that at home awaits the most difficult chain of events of his youth, events that will culminate, for him, with a gunshot to the heart.

And while that birthday unfolds on board the
Saint-Antoine
, with songs and embraces from Cervoni, in another vessel somewhere else other things (or shall I say: correspondences) are happening. Allow me to introduce the steamer
Lafayette
, flagship of the French West Indies line that will play extremely important roles in our small tragedy. Aboard, Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, illegitimate son of a famous mother (in the worst sense) and unknown father (in the only sense), this Lieutenant Wyse, dear readers, is preparing to leave on an expedition. His mission is to search through the Colombian Darien Jungle for the best place to open an inter-oceanic canal, which some—in Paris, in New York, in Bogotá itself—have begun to call That Fucking Canal. I’ll say it once and for all: for reasons that will soon become apparent, for reasons impossible to reduce to the golden cage of a single pretty phrase, at that moment it wasn’t just the Canal that began to be fucked up but my entire life.

Chronology is an untamed beast; the reader doesn’t know what inhuman labors I’ve gone through to give my tale a more or less organized appearance (I don’t rule out having failed in the attempt). My problems with the beast can be reduced to one alone. You’ll see, with the passing of the years and the reflection on the subjects of this book, which I’m now writing, I have discovered what undoubtedly comes as no surprise to anyone: that stories in the world, all the stories that are known and told and remembered, all those little stories that for some reason matter to us and which gradually fit together without us noticing to compose the fearful fresco of Great History, they are juxtaposed, touching, intersecting: none of them exists on their own. How to wrest a linear tale from this? Impossible, I fear. Here is a humble revelation, the lesson I’ve learned through brushing up against world events: silence is invention, lies are constructed by what’s not said, and since my intention is to tell faithfully, my cannibalistic tale must include everything, as many stories as can fit in the mouth, big ones and little ones. Well then, in the days before the departure of the
Lafayette
one of the latter occurred: the encounter between another two travelers. It was a few meters from the port of Colón and, therefore, from Lieutenant Wyse and his men. And in the next chapter, if my life has not ended by then, if there is still enough strength in my hand to hold my pen, I’ll have to concentrate on it. (At my age, which is more or less the age of a dead novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer, there’s no point in making plans too far ahead.)

 

B
ut first, responding to the peculiar order events have in my tale, I must concern myself with another matter, or rather with another man. Let’s call him a facilitator; let’s call him an intermediary. It’s obvious, I think: if I’m going to devote so many pages to describing my encounter with Joseph Conrad, it’s at least necessary that I explain a little who the person responsible for our meeting was, the host of my disgrace, the man who fostered the theft . . .

But it’s still too early to speak of the theft.

Let us return, readers, to the year 1903. The location is a dock on the Thames: a passenger steamer has arrived from the Caribbean port of Barranquilla, in the convulsive Republic of Colombia. A passenger descends from the ship carrying all his worldly goods: a small trunk of clothes and personal items, more fitting to someone who plans to spend a couple of weeks away from home than to someone who’ll never return to his homeland. Let’s say that it is not the trunk of an émigré but of a traveler, and not just from its humble size but because its owner does not yet know that he has arrived to stay. . . . Of that first evening in London I remember details: the advertising flyer, received from a dark hand on the dock itself, on which were listed the services and virtues of Trenton’s Hotel, Bridgewater Square, Barbican; the supplements that had to be paid, one for the use of electricity, another for cleaning my boots; the fruitful negotiation with the night porter, from whom I demanded a special rate, with breakfast included, in spite of the fact that my identity documents were neither North American nor colonial. The next morning, more memories: a pocket map I bought for tuppence, a folded map with covers the color of bile; bread with marmalade and two cups of cocoa that I had in the dining room of the hotel while searching through those white streets and yellow streets for the address I had written down in my journalist’s notebook. A bus left me in Baker Street; I crossed Regent’s Park instead of going around it, and through already bare trees and slushy paths I arrived at the street I was looking for. It was not difficult to find the number.

I still have the map I used that morning: its thin spine has been devoured by moths, its streaked pages resemble a crop of fungi for scientific use. But objects speak to me, dictate things to me; they call me to account when I lie, and in the opposite case they offer willingly to serve as proof. Well then, the first thing this old, unusable, out-ofdate (London changes every year) map announces is the encounter with the aforementioned intermediary. But who was Santiago Pérez Triana, the famous Colombian negotiator who in time would become plenipotentiary ambassador to the courts of Madrid and London? Who was that man, one of so many who in Colombia inherit that undesirable and dangerous monster: a Political Life? The answer, which will strike some of you as strange, is: I don’t care. The important thing is not who that man was but rather what version I am prepared to give of his life, what role I want him to play in this tale of mine. So right now I make use of my narrator’s prerogatives, I take the magic potion of omniscience and enter, not for the first time, the head—and the biography—of another person.

In those years, a Colombian arriving in London necessarily called on Santiago Pérez Triana, at 45 Avenue Road. Pérez Triana, son of a former president and secret writer of children’s stories, political target and amateur tenor, had arrived in the city a few years before and presided with his toad face and anecdotes in four languages over a table designed for an audience: his dinners, his soirees in the Victorian drawing room, were small tributes in his own honor, masterful speeches destined to exhibit his talents as Athenian orator long before the addresses that distinguished him at the courts of The Hague. The evenings in that dining room, or in the special room where coffee was taken, were always the same: Pérez Triana took off his round-framed spectacles to light a cigar, straightened his bow tie while the cups of his private audience were filled to the brim, and began to speak. He spoke of his life in Heidelberg or of the opera in Madrid, of his readings of Henry James, of his friendship with Rubén Dario and Miguel de Unamuno. He recited his own poems: “Sepulchers Safeguard My Secrets” could burst out all of a sudden, or “I Have Heard the Crowds Moan.” And his guests, Liberal politicians or erudite businessmen of the Bogotá bourgeoisie, applauded like trained seals. Pérez Triana nodded with modesty, closed his eyes already worn out like the slots in a piggy bank, calmed spirits with a gesture of his pudgy hand as if tossing a couple of sardines to the seals. And he would go on without wasting time to the next anecdote, to the next poem.

But at night, when everyone had gone, Pérez Triana would be enveloped by a distant and almost affectionate dread, a sort of tame but fearsome animal that still stayed with him even after all these years. It was a well-defined physical sensation: an intestinal discomfort similar to the moments preceding hunger. When he felt it coming on, the first thing the man would do was to make sure Gertrud, his wife, was asleep; he would immediately leave the dark bedroom and go down to his library, in his green dressing gown and leather slippers, and light all the lamps in the place. From his drawing room he could see the black stain that in the morning would be Regent’s Park, but Pérez Triana didn’t much like to look out at the street, except to confirm the rectangle of light that his window projected onto the dark pavement or the comforting presence of his own disheveled silhouette. He settled down at his desk, opened a wooden box with adjustable compartments, took out a few blank sheets of paper and a few Perfection-brand envelopes, and wrote long and always solemn letters in which he asked how things were in Colombia, who else had died in the most recent civil war, what was really happening in Panama. And the news came back to him in North American envelopes: from New York, from Boston, even from San Francisco. This was, as everyone knew, the only way to evade the censors. Pérez Triana knew as well as his correspondents did that a letter addressed to him would be opened and its contents read by governmental authorities and no one could do anything about it; if the authority considered it necessary, the letter would be lost before arriving at its destination, and could still provoke more or less unpleasant questioning for the sender. So his accomplices in Bogotá soon grew accustomed to the routine of transcribing the news by hand; they also grew accustomed to receiving envelopes bearing U.S. stamps, inside of which appeared, as if playing hide-and-seek, the handwriting of their banished friend. And one of the questions most often repeated in the clandestine letters from London was this: Do you think that I can come back now? No, Santiago, his friends replied. You shouldn’t come back yet.

Readers of the Jury: allow me to give you a very brief lesson in Colombian politics, to synthesize the pages turned up till now and prepare you for those to come. The most important event in the history of my country, as you’ll perhaps have noticed, was not the birth of its Liberator, or its independence, or any of those fabrications for high school textbooks. Nor was it a catastrophe on an individual level like those that frequently mark the destinies of other lands either: no Henry wanted to marry some Boleyn, no Booth killed any Lincoln. No, the moment that would define the fate of Colombia for all history, as always happens in this land of philologists and grammarians and bloodthirsty dictators who translate
The Iliad
, was a moment made of words. More precisely, of names. A double baptism took place at some imprecise moment of the nineteenth century. The gathered parents of the two chubby-cheeked and already spoiled infants, those two little boys smelling since birth of vomit and liquid shit, agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal. Those children grew up and multiplied in constant rivalry; the rival generations have succeeded each other with the energy of rabbits and the obstinacy of cockroaches . . . and in August of 1893, as part of that indisputable inheritance, former—Liberal—President Santiago Pérez Manosalva, a man who in other times had won the respect of General Ulysses S. Grant, was banished with a total lack of consideration by the—Conservative—regime of Miguel Antonio Caro. His son, Santiago Pérez Triana, inherited the condition of undesirable, more or less the way one inherits premature baldness or a hooked nose.