The Secret History of Costaguana (11 page)

Perhaps a recap would not go amiss, as I’m not forgetting that some of my readers do not have the good fortune of being Colombian. It was all the fault of the subversive columns that the former—Liberal—President wrote in
El Relator
, real depth charges that would have breached and sunk in a matter of seconds any European government.
El Relator
was the pampered son of the family: a newspaper founded for the sole reason of dislodging the Conservatives from power and closed in a timely fashion, with decrees worthy of tyranny, by those who did not want to be dislodged. It was not the only one: former President Pérez—eyelids drooping, beard so thick his mouth was completely hidden—used to convoke clandestine meetings with other journalistic conspirators in his house on Carrera Sexta in Santa Fe de Bogotá. And thus, while on the other side of the street the Bordadita church filled with praying
godos
, the Pérez’s drawing room filled with the editors of
El Contemporáneo
,
El Tábano,
and
El 93
, all newspapers closed down under charges of supporting the anarchist camp and preparing for civil war.

Well now: politics in Colombia, Readers of the Jury, is a strange class game. Behind the word
motivation
is the word
whim
; behind
decision
is
tantrum
. The matter that concerns us happened according to these simple rules, and it also happened as swiftly as mistakes usually happen. . . . At the beginning of August, Miguel Antonio Caro, Supreme Whimsical One of the Nation, has heard by chance that
El Relator
would be prepared to moderate its stance if it were allowed to go back into circulation. There is something in this news that tastes of victory to him: the Conservative Regeneration, which has set out censorship laws tougher than any ever seen in the democratic world, has defeated the written subversion of Liberal atheism. That’s what Caro thinks; but
El Relator
shakes him out of his deception with the next day’s edition, defying the censorship with one of the strongest invectives the institutions of the Conservative Regeneration have ever received. President Caro—inevitably—feels deceived. No one has promised him anything, but something terrible happened in his world, in his tiny little private world, made of Latin classics and a deep disdain for all who are not on his side: reality has not conformed to his fantasies. The President pounds and stamps on the wooden floors of the San Carlos Palace, hurls his rattle to the ground, pouts and throws tantrums, and refuses to eat his lunch . . . and nevertheless reality is still there:
El Relator
still exists and is still his enemy. Those with him then listen to him say that Santiago Pérez Manosalva, former President of Colombia, is a liar and a fake and a man who doesn’t keep his word. They listen to him predict with the certainty of an oracle that that Liberal without a nation or a god will take the country to war and that banishment is the only way to prevent it. The definitive decree, the decree that fixes his expulsion, is dated 14 August.

The father complied, of course—the death penalty for exiles who didn’t go into exile was common currency in Caro’s Colombia—and left for Paris, natural homing instinct for the Latin American haute bourgeoisie. The son, after receiving the first threats, tried to leave the country by going down from Bogotá to the Magdalena River and embarking at the port of Honda on the first steamer prepared to take him to Barranquilla, and from there to European exile. “The truth is, I didn’t feel I was in danger,” he would tell me much later, when our relationship allowed this tone and these confidences. “I was leaving Colombia because, after the affront to my father, the atmosphere had become unbreathable; I was going to punish, in my own way, the country’s ingratitude. But when I arrived at Honda, a foul village with a population of three and savage temperatures, I realized how mistaken I was.” At night in London, Pérez Triana kept dreaming that the police who arrested him in Honda took him back to the Ciega—the most feared prison on the Magdalena—but in the dream the youngest policeman explained, smoothing the down on his upper lip, what hadn’t been explained in reality: that the orders had come from the capital. But what orders? On what charges? In the dream it was as impossible to find out as it had been in reality. Pérez Triana had never spoken to anyone, not even to Gertrud, about the hours he spent in the Ciega, in the darkness of a cell, his eyes watering with the stench of human shit and soaked to the skin by the corrosive humidity of the tropics. He would have needed more than one hand to count the cases of yellow fever he had word of during his very short imprisonment. At some point, he thought, it would be his turn: each mosquito, each microbe was his enemy. He was then sure he’d been sentenced to death.

The prisoner had no way of knowing, but at dawn on his second day in the Ciega, while he grudgingly accepted the
arepa
without cheese that was all there was for breakfast, the Bogotá lawyer Francisco Sanin, who was vacationing at the time in Honda, received news of his imprisonment. By the time Sanin arrived at the Ciega, Pérez Triana had sweated so much that the starched collar of his shirt no longer pressed against his throat; he had the feeling, impossible to confirm, that his cheeks were sagging, but he passed a hand over his face and found only rough traces of stubble. Sanin weighed the situation, asked about the charges, and received evasive answers, and his complaints reached Bogotá and returned with neither replies nor solutions. Then it occurred to him that the only solution lay in a lie. At some stage, operating as a businessman in the United States, Pérez Triana had had to sign some letters of loyalty. Sanin wrote to the U.S. envoy, a certain MacKinney, citing those letters and telling him one of his citizens was in danger of dying in an insalubrious prison. It was a risky lie, but it worked: MacKinney believed every word with the candor of a small child and protested before the relevant judge, raising his voice and pounding the desk, and in a matter of hours Pérez Triana found himself on his way to Bogotá, looking back over his shoulder, confoundedly grateful for the power that Uncle Sam’s husky voice has in these submissive latitudes. This time (he was thinking) there was no room for doubt, there was no anticipated nostalgia. He had to flee; every detail of his mistreated person pointed him toward the path to flight. If the Magdalena River route was forbidden him, he would search out less obvious ways. And so he fled through the Eastern Plains, he disguised himself as a priest and baptized incautious Indians along the way, he paddled down three rivers and saw animals he’d never seen and reached the Caribbean without having been recognized by anyone but also feeling that he no longer recognized himself. And then he told the whole story in a book.

Down the Orinoco in a Canoe
was translated into English and published by Heinemann, with a prologue by the Scottish adventurer, dilettante writer, and socialist leader Robert Cunninghame Graham, whose perception of Bogotá as a kind of Chibcha Athens still strikes me as more ingenious than fitting. The book appeared in 1902; in November 1903, a few hours before I knocked on his door—one exile requesting help from another, a disciple in search of a master—Pérez Triana had received a letter from Sydney Pawling, his editor. “One last thing I should like to mention, Mr. Triana,” it read. “As you will no doubt know, Mr. Conrad, whose magnificent
Typhoon
we published this past April, is immersed in a difficult project relating to current Latin American reality. Aware of his own limited knowledge of the subject, Mr. Conrad has sought out and received the aid of Mr. Cunninghame Graham to pursue the work; but he has also read your book, and has now requested I ask you, Mr. Triana, if you would be prepared to answer a few questions that Mr. Conrad would like to send you by way of us.”

Joseph Conrad has read me
, thinks Pérez Triana.
Joseph Conrad wants my help
.

Pérez Triana opens the drawer and takes out a blank sheet and another Perfection envelope. (He likes this invention, so simple and at once so ingenious: you had to pass your tongue along the flap as ever, but the glue was not there, it was on the envelope itself. His family physician, Dr. Thomas Wilmot, had told him of it after describing various tongue infections, and Pérez Triana had gone immediately to the stationer’s in Charing Cross. He had to look after his health, of course; how many envelopes a day could a man like him end up licking?) He wrote: “My delay in replying to your letter, Mr. Pawling, is utterly inexcusable. Do relate to Mr. Conrad my absolute availability to answer as many questions as he cares to send me, no matter how lengthy.” And then he put the paper in the envelope and licked the flap.

But he did not send the letter at once. A few hours later he would be pleased he hadn’t. He threw that letter into the wastepaper basket, took out another piece of paper, and wrote again the same lines about tardiness and availability, but then added: “Pass on to Mr. Conrad, however, that certain recent events allow me now to have other ways of helping him. I do not presume to know better than the author what his needs might be, but the information he could receive from an exile of long standing, by way of a questionnaire sent by third parties, is invariably inferior to what he could be given in person by a direct witness to events. Well then, what I can offer is even better than a witness. I offer him a victim, Mr. Pawling. A victim.”

What had happened between the two letters?

A man from his distant country had arrived to visit him. A man had told him a story.

That man, of course, was me.

That story is the one that you, dear Eloísa, are reading at this moment.

Joseph Conrad,
Nostromo

I spent two whole days looking
for my father, following his faint but still visible trail, his slimy snail trail, through the streets of Colón. But I was not successful. I didn’t want to leave messages, notes, warnings, because I’m fond of surprises and I suspected—for no reason, of course—that this fondness came from my paternal side. In the hospital the mulatta nurses spoke of my father with (it seemed to me) too much familiarity; they told me at once, between impertinent giggles, that he’d been there that morning and had spent at least three hours chatting with a tubercular young man, but they didn’t know what his next destination was; when I spoke to the tubercular young man, I found out several things, but not my father’s whereabouts. He’d been born in Bogotá and was a lawyer by profession, that oh so frequent combination in my centralist and pettifogging country; two weeks after arriving in Colón he’d woken up with a swelling under his jaw; by the time of my visit, the infection had left the inflamed gland and invaded the lungs and blood; he had, in the best of cases, a few months to live. “That fellow’s a friend of yours?” he said, half opening his bile-colored eyes. “Well, tell him I’ll be expecting him tomorrow. Tell him not to leave me abandoned here. In those three hours he looked after me better than all these damn doctors. Tell him, OK? Tell him that before I die I want to know what the hell happens to D’Artagnan.” And as he pronounced the guttural
r
, with a zeal for correctness that struck me as at the very least curious in the case of a dying man, he brought his left hand up to his inflamed gland, covering it as if it hurt.

In the offices of the Railroad Company—which some natives called by its English name, giving me the strange sensation of living in two countries at once, or of crossing an invisible border over and over again—the North Americans confused me with a potential ticket buyer and conscientiously sent me to the ticket office, shaking the cuffs of their impeccable shirtsleeves in the direction of the street, and one of them even donning his felt hat to accompany me to the place. That whole exchange was in English; it was only after saying good-bye that I realized it, with rather greater surprise than modesty allows me to confess. In the place the impeccable cuff had indicated, a finely clothed arm moved to inform me that no, tickets were no longer sold there, then at another window a sweaty forehead told me that I should simply board the train and someone would come by to ask for my ticket. “But no, I’m looking for—” “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. In the carriage they’ll ask for it.” And meanwhile, the heat was afflicting me like poison; as I crossed a threshold and entering any shade, a solitary drop of sweat trickled down my side, beneath my clothes; and in the street I marveled that a Chinese man could wear black while not a single pore on his face seemed open. I sought refuge in a liquor store full of gambling cart drivers in whose hands an innocent pair of dice managed to seem like high-stakes poker. And it was then, at the hottest hour of the day, with Front Street empty of pedestrians—only a lunatic or a recent arrival would dare to walk out in the sun at that moment—that I saw him. A restaurant door opened; a decadent place was revealed, a wall covered in mirrors; and through the door came a rash creature. Like in the old joke about twins who meet in the street and recognize each other instantly, I recognized my father.

You, readers of romantic novels; you, sensitive victims of our melodramatic culture, now await a standard reunion scene, with initial gestures of skepticism, lachrymose concessions to the physical evidence, sweaty embraces in the middle of the street, resounding promises to make up for lost time. Well then, allow me to say that I’m (not) sorry to disappoint you. There was no
re
union whatsoever, because there was no union to renew; there was no promise, because for my father and for me there’d been no time lost. Yes, there are some things that dissociate me from a certain English novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer. My father did not teach me to read Shakespeare or Victor Hugo on our estate in Poland, nor did I immortalize the scene in my memoirs (surely exaggerating it along the way, it has to be said); he did not await me in bed when, the two of us living in cold Kraków, I returned from school to console him over the death of my mother in exile. . . . Please, understand: my father was my mother’s story. A character, a version, and little more. Well then, there, in the middle of the scorching street, that father in his fifties spoke through the already graying beard that covered his face and defined his features. Or rather the absence of them: for the whiskers of his mustache covered his lips (and had turned yellow, or perhaps always had been), and those on his cheeks went so close to his eyes that my father could have looked at them himself with a little effort. And through that curtain of smoke, from that gray Birnam Wood advancing toward the deforested regions of his face, spoke my father’s invisible mouth: “So I have a son.” Hands clasped behind his back and his gaze fixed on the ground, on the waves of heat at the height of his shiny boots, he began to walk. I understood that I should follow him, and from behind, like a geisha following her lord, I heard him add: “Not a bad thing, at my age. Not bad at all.”