The Secret History of Costaguana (13 page)

The young Korzeniowski. I can see him now, and I’d like my readers to see him, too. Photos of the time show a baby-faced lad, smooth hair, long, straight brows, almond-colored eyes: a young man who regards his aristocratic origins at once with pride and affected disdain; he was five-foot-eight but at this time appears shorter due simply to timidity. Look at him, readers: Korzeniowski is first and foremost a boy who has lost his bearings . . . and that’s not all. He has lost his faith in people; he’s lost all his money, wagering it on the habit-forming horse of contraband. Captain Duteuil had betrayed him: he’d taken his money and fled to Buenos Aires. Do you see him, readers? Korzeniowski, disoriented, wanders round the port of Marseille with an anal abscess and not a single coin in his pockets. . . . The world, thinks Korzeniowski, has suddenly turned into a difficult place, and all through the fault of money. He had quarreled with Monsieur Déléstang; he would never again step on a ship of his fleet. All paths seem closed to him. Korzeniowski thinks—it is to be thought that he thinks—of his uncle Tadeusz, the man whose money has kept him afloat since he left Poland. Uncle Tadeusz writes regularly; for Korzeniowski his letters should be a source of joy (contact with the homeland and so on), but in truth they torment him. Each letter is a judgment; after each reading, Korzeniowski is found guilty and condemned. “In two years you have by your transgressions used up your maintenance for the whole third year,” his uncle writes. “If the allowance that I have allotted you does not suffice, earn some money—and you will have it. If, however, you cannot earn it, then content yourself with what you get from the labor of others—until you are able to supplant it with your own earnings, and gratify yourself.” Uncle Tadeusz makes him feel useless, childish, irresponsible. Uncle Tadeusz has suddenly come to represent all that is detestable about Poland, every constraint, every restriction that had forced Korzeniowski to escape. “Hoping that it is the first and last time you cause me so much trouble, you have my embrace and my blessing.” First time, thinks Korzeniowski, last time. First. Last.

At the age of twenty, Korzeniowski has learned what it means to get into debt up to his neck. While waiting for the profits from the smuggled guns, he’d lived on the money of others; with other people’s money he’d bought the basic necessities for a trip that never came off. And that’s when he turns, for the last time—first, last—to his friend Richard Fecht. He takes a loan of eight hundred francs and leaves for Villa Franca. His intention: to join up with a North American squadron that was anchored there. What follows happens very quickly, and will continue happening very quickly in Korzeniowski’s mind, and also in Conrad’s, for the rest of his life. On the U.S. ships there are no available places: Korzeniowski, Polish citizen with no military papers, no stable employment, no certificates of good conduct, without a single piece of testimony to his skills on deck, is turned away. The Korzeniowskis are rash, passionate, impulsive: Apollo, his father, had been imprisoned for conspiring against the Russian Empire, for organizing several mutinies, and he had staked his life on a patriotic ideal; but the desperate young sailor does not think of him when he manages to get a lift to Monte Carlo, where he will stake his life for—shall we say?—less altruistic motives. Korzeniowski closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he finds himself standing before a roulette wheel. Welcome to Roulettenbourg, he thinks ironically. He doesn’t know where he’s heard that name before, sardonic code of hardened gamblers. But he doesn’t exert himself in pursuit of the memory. His concentration is elsewhere: the ball has begun to spin.

Korzeniowski takes his money, all his money. Then he pushes the chips across the smooth surface of the table; the chips settle contentedly on a black-colored diamond.
“Les jeux sont faits,”
shouts a voice. And as the roulette spins and on it the black ball, black like the diamond under the chips, Korzeniowski is surprised to recall words not his own and whose providence is unknown.

No, he does not recall them: the words have invaded him, they have taken him by storm. They are Russian words, the language of the empire that killed his father. Where do they come from? Who is speaking, and to whom? “If one begins cautiously,” says the new and mysterious voice rising in his head, “. . . and can I, can I be such a baby! Can I fail to understand that I am a lost man?” The roulette spins, the colors disappear, but in Korzeniowski’s head the voice persists and keeps talking: “But—can I not rise again! Yes! I have only for once to be prudent and patient and—that is all! I have only for once to show willpower and in one hour I can transform my destiny! The great thing is willpower. Only remember what happened to me seven months ago at Roulettenbourg just before my final failure.” There it is, thinks Korzeniowski: that strange word. He doesn’t know what Roulettenbourg is or where it is; he doesn’t know who, from deep in his head, mentions this ignoble place. Is it something I’ve heard, something I’ve read, something I’ve dreamed? Who’s there? wonders Korzeniowski. And the voice: “Oh! it was a remarkable instance of determination; I had lost everything, then, everything . . .” Who is it, who’s speaking? asks Korzeniowski. And the voice: “I was going out of the casino, I looked, there was still one gulden in my waistcoat pocket. Then I shall have something for dinner, I thought. But after I had gone a hundred paces I changed my mind and went back.” The roulette is coming to a stop. Who are you? asks Korzeniowski. And the voice: “There really is something peculiar in the feeling when, alone in a strange land, far from your home and from friends, not knowing whether you will have anything to eat that day, you stake your last gulden, your very last! I won, and twenty minutes later I went out of the casino, having a hundred and seventy guldens in my pocket. That’s a fact! That’s what the last gulden can sometimes do! And what if I had lost heart then? What if I had not dared to risk it?” But who are you? asks Korzeniowski. And the voice: “Tomorrow, tomorrow it will all be over!”

The roulette has stopped.

“Rouge!”
shouts a man’s bow tie.

“Rouge,”
repeats Korzeniowski.

He has lost everything.

Back in Marseille, he knows very well what he should do. He invites his friend Fecht to his apartment on rue Sainte for tea. There is no tea in the house, nor money to buy any, but that doesn’t matter.
Rouge. Red. Rodz
, he thinks.
Tomorrow it will all be over
. He goes out for a stroll around the port, he approaches an English sailing ship and stretches out his arm, as if to touch it, as if the sailing ship were a newborn donkey. There in front of the sailing ship and the Mediterranean, Korzeniowski suffers a violent attack of sadness. His sadness is that of skepticism, disorientation, the complete loss of a place in the world. He had arrived in Marseille drawn by adventure, and by the desire to break with a life that didn’t include adventure, but now he feels lost. An exhaustion that is not physical undermines him from within. Now he realizes that over the last seven days he has not slept seven whole hours. He raises his head and looks at the cloudy sky extending behind the sailing ship’s three masts; there, in the middle of the subtle racket of the port, the universe presents itself as a series of incomprehensible images. A few minutes after five, Korzeniowski is back in his room. Madame Fagot asks if he might not have the money he owes her. “One more day, please,” Korzeniowski says, “one more day.” And he thinks:
Tomorrow it will all be over
.

The first thing he does upon entering his room is to open the only window. A solitary, dense gust of sea air rushes in and the smell almost makes him cry. He opens his trunk of personal belongings and from the bottom extracts a book of names and addresses—all the people he has known in his short life—and places it delicately, like a sleeping child, on the bedspread, so it would catch any visitor’s eye. In the trunk he has also found a revolver: it is a Chamelot-Delvigne with six metal cartridges, but Korzeniowski opens the drum and removes five of them. At that moment he hears voices: it’s Fecht, who has arrived for tea unaware there is no tea to be had; Fecht, courteous as ever, greets Madame Fagot and asks after her daughters. Korzeniowski hears footsteps climbing the stairs and sits down on the bed. He leans against the wall, lifting up his shirt at the same time, and as he puts the cold barrel of the revolver against his chest, in the place where he imagines his heart must be, he feels his nipples harden and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end like a furious cat’s.
Tomorrow it will all be over
, he thinks, and at that moment a light comes on in his head: it’s a line from a novel, yes, the last line of a Russian novel, and the mysterious words that he’d been hearing in the casino are the last words of that novel. He thinks of the title,
Igrok
, and it strikes him as too elementary, almost insipid. He wonders if Dostoevsky is still alive. Strange, he thinks, that the image of an author he finds unpleasant should be the last thing that passes through his head.

Konrad Korzeniowski smiles as he considers this idea, and then he fires.

 

T
he Chamelot-Delvigne’s bullet goes through Korzeniowski’s body without touching a single vital organ, zigzagging improbably to avoid arteries, tracing ninety-degree angles if necessary to miss lungs and thus postpone the death of the desperate young man. The bedspread and pillow are soaked in blood, blood splashes the walls and headboard. Minutes later, the friend Fecht will find first the wounded man and then the address book, and will write the famous telegram to Uncle Tadeusz that will later become a synthesis of the young man’s situation: KONRAD BLESSÉ ENVOYEZ ARGENT. Uncle Tadeusz will travel from Kiev to Marseille on express trains, and upon arrival will pay the debts that must be paid—discovering as he does so that the creditors are several—as well as the medical bills. Korzeniowski will recover gradually, and after a few years, once he has made a more or less profitable profession out of lying, he will begin to lie about the origin of the scar on his chest as well. He will never confess the true circumstances of the injury; he will never find himself obliged to do so. . . . Let’s get to the point: once Uncle Tadeusz was dead, once Richard Fecht was dead, the failed suicide of Joseph Conrad disappeared from world events. And I myself was deceived . . . for at the beginning of 1878 I was the victim of a sharp chest pain, which at that moment, before the unpredictable law of my correspondences with Joseph Conrad was revealed to me, was diagnosed as the main symptom of a light form of pneumonia. Many years later—when I at last discovered the invisible ties that bind me to my kindred spirit, and was able to interpret correctly the most important events of my life—I prided myself at first that the monstrous pain, which attacked me accompanied by a dry (to begin with) and (eventually) productive cough, overwhelming me with breathing difficulties and loss of sleep, should have been the noble echo of a duel, a sort of participation in the chivalrous history of humanity. Finding out the truth, I confess, was a slight disappointment. Suicide is not noble. As if that weren’t enough: suicide is not very Catholic. And Korzeniowski/Conrad, Catholic and noble, knew it. If not, Readers of the Jury, he would not have taken the trouble to hide it.

The supposed pneumonia kept me laid up in bed for ten weeks. I suffered the shivers not thinking and not knowing that another man, in another part of the world, was suffering them, too, at that precise instant; and when I sweated whole rivers, was it not more sensible to attribute it to the supposed pneumonia instead of thinking of the metaphysical resonances of someone else’s distant sweating? The days of the supposed pneumonia are associated in my memory with the Altamirano guest house; my father confined me to his house—he sequestered me, kept me in quarantine—for he knew what so many people said in so many different words but which could be synthesized in these: in Panama, the unhealthy, feverish, contagious Panama of that time, going into the hospital meant never coming out. “Ill on arrival, dead on departure” was the refrain that summed the matter up (and that went round Colón in every language, from Spanish to English to Caribbean Creole). So the white-walled, red-roofed house, bathed by sea air, with treatments from Miguel Altamirano, amateur physician, became my private little sanatorium. My Magic Mountain, in other words. And I, Juan Castorp or Hans Altamirano, received in the sanatorium the various lessons my father lavished on me.

So time passed, as they say in novels.

And so (stubbornly) it continued to pass.

There, in the place of my isolation, my father would arrive to tell me of the magnificent things that were happening all over the world. One pertinent clarification: my father the optimist referred to almost anything related to the by then ubiquitous subject of the Inter-oceanic Canal as
magnificent things
; by
all over the world
he meant Colón, Panama City, and the piece of terra more or less firma that stretched between them, that strip where the railway ran and that, for reasons the reader can already imagine, would soon become something like the Apple of Western Discord. Nothing else existed then. Nothing else was worth talking about, or maybe it was that nothing was happening in any other part of the world. For example (it’s just an example), my father didn’t tell me that on one of those days a U.S. warship had arrived in Limón Bay, armed to the teeth and determined to cross the Isthmus. He didn’t tell me that Colonel Ricardo Herrera, commander of the Colón Sappers battalion, had to declare that he “would not consent to their crossing Colombian territory as they intended,” and even went so far as to threaten the Gringos with “the armed defense of the sovereignty of Colombia.” He didn’t tell me that the commander of the North American troops finally gave up his attempt and crossed the Isthmus by train, like everyone else. It was a banal incident, of course; years later, as will be seen, that unusual attack of Sovereign Pride would take on importance (a metaphorical importance, shall we say?), but my father could not know it, and so he condemned me to ignorance as well.