The Secret History of Costaguana (17 page)

“We owe it to you, Monsieur Altamirano,” said the engineer.

“Sir,” said my diplomatic father, “Colombia owes you so much more.”

“It’s the earthquake you owe,” I said.

“None of that,” said Charlotte. “We owe it to Sarah Bernhardt.”

And laughter. And toasts. And alexandrine verses.

At the end of April, my father asked the engineer to take him to see the machines. They left at dawn, after a spoonful of whiskey with quinine to avert what Panamanians called a temperature and the French
paludisme
, and they took a dugout down the Chagres to go over to the excavations at Gatún. The machines were my father’s latest love: a steam-powered digger could absorb his attention for long minutes; a North American dredger, like the ones that had arrived at the beginning of that year, could arouse sighs from him like the ones my mother had surely aroused on the
Isabel
(but that was another time). One of those dredgers, parked a kilometer from Gatún like a gigantic beer barrel, was the dugout’s first port of call. The rowers approached the shore and stuck their oars into the riverbed so my father could contemplate, still and hypnotized in spite of the harassment of the mosquitoes, the magic of the hulking great thing. Panama was a place where things shook: the chains of the monster sounded like a medieval prisoner’s shackles, the iron buckets jolted as they lifted the extracted earth, and then came the spitting of pressurized water that launched the earth away from the work site with a hissing that gave him goose bumps. My father took attentive notes on all of that, and began to think of comparisons taken from some book on dinosaurs or from
Gulliver’s Travels
, when he turned around to thank Madinier but found him with his head between his knees. The engineer said the whiskey had not agreed with him. They decided to go back.

That evening they gathered (we gathered) on the veranda, and the ritual of cigars and brandy was repeated. Madinier said he felt much better; he didn’t know what had happened, he said, he was going to have to take better care of his stomach from then on. He had a couple of drinks, and Charlotte thought it was because of the alcohol when she saw him stand up in the middle of the conversation to go and lie down in the hammock. My father and Charlotte were not talking about Sarah Bernhardt or about Racine’s
Phèdre
or about the improvised theater in the Grand Hotel, because now they were friends, now they felt like friends, and they didn’t need those codes. They were talking, not without nostalgia, of their pasts in other places; until now they hadn’t realized that my father was also a stranger in Panama, that he had also gone through the processes of the recent arrival—the efforts to learn, the anxiousness to adapt—and having that in common stimulated them. Charlotte told how she’d met Gustave. They had attended a more or less private sort of celebration in the Jardin des Plantes; they were celebrating the departure of a team of engineers to Suez. There they had met, said Charlotte, and soon they were lost on purpose in Buffon’s labyrinth, just so they could talk without anyone interrupting them. Charlotte was repeating what Gustave had explained to her that evening—that in order to get out of a labyrinth, if the walls are all connected, you need only keep the same hand on one of the walls, and sooner or later you would find the exit or return to the entrance—when she stopped mid-sentence and her flat chest was as still as the surface of a lake. My father and I turned instinctively to look at what she was looking at, and this is what we saw: the hammock, swollen under the weight of the engineer Gustave Madinier, molded to the curve of his buttocks and the angle of his elbows, had begun to tremble, and the beams from which it hung creaked desperately. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it yet: Panama, dear readers, was a place where things shook.

In a matter of minutes the chills stopped and the fever and thirst began. But there was something new: with the little lucidity he had left, Madinier began to say that his head ached, and the pain was so savage that at one point he asked my father to shoot him, for pity’s sake, to shoot him. Charlotte refused to let us take him to the hospital, in spite of my father’s insistence, and what we did was lift up the aching body and carry it to my bed, which was the closest to the veranda. And there, on my linen sheets recently purchased at half price from a West Indian shopkeeper, Gustave Madinier spent the night. His wife stayed with him as she had stayed with Julien, and undoubtedly the memory of Julien plagued her during the night. When dawn broke, and Gustave told her that his head was feeling better, that there was no longer such terrible pain in his legs and back, just a vague restlessness, Charlotte didn’t even notice the yellowish tone that had invaded his skin and eyes, but let herself be swept up with relief. She admitted she should sleep a little; the exhaustion kept her slumbering well into the evening. It was already dark when I chanced to see the moment when her husband began to vomit a black and viscous substance that could not be blood, no, sir, I swear it could not be blood.

Gustave Madinier’s death was sadly famous in the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb. The neighbors obliged my father to burn the linen sheets, along with every glass/cup/piece of cutlery that might have entered into contact with the contaminated lips of the poor engineer; the same obligation held, obviously, for Charlotte. Of course, the stubborn and willfull woman put up some resistance at first: she was not going to part with those memories, she wasn’t going to burn the last mementos of her husband without putting up a fight. The French Consul in Colón had to come and force her, by way of an insolent decree adorned with all the stamps in the world, to carry out that purifying bonfire in front of everyone. (The Consul would die of yellow fever, with spasms and black vomit, three weeks later; but that small piece of poetic justice is not relevant now.) My father and I were the labor force for that inquisitional ceremony; and in the middle of the main street of Christophe Colomb a pile gradually grew of blankets and ties, of boar-bristle hairbrushes and straight razors, treatises on Resistance Theory and family photo albums, untrimmed editions of
Les fleuves et leur franchissement
and of
Pour une nouvelle théorie des câbles
, crystal goblets and porcelain plates, and even a loaf of rye bread with dirty bite marks. It all burned with a mixture of smells, with black smoke, and once the flames died down a scorched, dark mass remained. I saw my father hug Charlotte Madinier and then get a pail, walk to the edge of the bay, and return with enough water to extinguish the last fading embers. When he came back, when he emptied the pail over the recognizable cover of an album of picture cards that had been blue velvet, Charlotte was no longer there.

She lived four doors down from us, but we lost sight of her. Every day, after the burning, my father and I passed by her veranda and rapped on the wooden frame of the screen door. But there was never an answer. It was futile to try to peek indiscreetly: Charlotte had covered the windows with dark clothing (Parisian capes, long taffeta skirts). It must have been about five or six months after the engineer’s death when we saw her go out, very early, and leave the door open. My father followed her; I followed my father. Charlotte walked toward the port carrying in her right hand—for the left was covered up to the wrist in a badly wrapped bandage—a small case like the ones doctors use. She didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear my father’s words, his greetings, his reiterated condolences; when she arrived at Front Street, she headed, like a horse heading home, to the Maggs & Oates pawnshop. She handed over the case and received in exchange a sum that seemed previously agreed upon (on some of the notes was a drawing of a railway, on others a map, on still others an old ex-President); and all this she did with her face turned toward Limón Bay and her eyes fixed on the
Bordeaux
, a steamer that had anchored in the bay thirty days earlier and now floated there deserted, for the entire crew had died of fever.
“Je m’en vais,”
repeated Charlotte with her eyes very wide. My father followed her all the way back home and all she said was:
“Je m’en vais.”
My father climbed the porch steps behind her and managed to receive a solid whiff of human filth, and all she said was:
“Je m’en vais.”

Charlotte Madinier had decided to leave, yes, but she couldn’t or didn’t want to do so immediately. During the day, she was seen walking alone around Colón, after visiting her husband’s grave in the cemetery and even passing by the hospital like a shadow and staying for hours in front of the bed of any fever victim, watching him with such intensity that she would end up disturbing him and asking the nurses why the chart said gastritis when the truth was obviously quite different. There were people who saw her asking the railway passengers for alms; some saw her defy all laws of decency by stopping to chat with a French prostitute from the Maison Dorée, famous all over the Caribbean. I don’t know who first called her the Widow of the Canal, but the nickname stuck with the persistence of an epidemic, and even my father began to use it after a while. (I suspect that for him it didn’t have the scornful and slightly heartless tone it had for the rest; my father spoke of the Widow of the Canal with respect, as if in truth the engineer’s tomb contained a code of the fate of the Isthmus.) The Widow of the Canal, as tends to happen in the Talkative Tropics, began to turn into a legend. She was seen in Gatún, kneeling in the mud to speak to a child, and in the Culebra Pass, discussing the latest advances of the works with the laborers. It was said she didn’t have the money for the passage, and that’s why she hadn’t left; and from then on she was often seen in the Callejón de Botellas charging Canal workers for a quick fuck, and giving others, not so quick and free as well, to the recently arrived workers from Liberia. But the Widow of the Canal, deaf to and distant from rumors, kept wandering the streets of Colón, saying
“Je m’en vais”
to anyone who would listen and in every tone of voice possible, but never going. Until the day when . . .

But no.

Not yet.

It’s still too soon.

Later I’ll get to the curious destiny of the Widow of the Canal. Now it’s more important to deal with other rumors that took place far from there, and which the Widow of the Canal did not hear either. For now the demanding lady Politics peremptorily requires my attention and I, at least for the duration of this book, am her deferential servant. In the rest of the country, politicians were making speeches about the “imminent danger to social order” and “the threatened peace.” But in Panama no one heard their words. The politicians kept talking with suspicious determination of “interior commotion,” of the “revolutions” that were being hatched in the country and of their “somber accompaniment of misfortunes.” But in Colón, and more so in that ghetto of Colón formed by the employees of the Canal Company, we were all deaf to and distant from those speeches. The politicians spoke of the country’s destiny using alarmist words: “Regeneration or Catastrophe,” but their words got snagged in the Darien Jungle or drowned in one of our oceans. Finally, the fatal rumor, the rumor of rumors, arrived in Panama; and so we inhabitants of the Isthmus found out that, in that remote land to which the Isthmus belonged, an election had been held, a party had won in confusing circumstances, another party was rather unhappy. What bad losers the Liberals were! exclaimed the (Conservative) Panamanian priests in the salons of Colón. The facts were simple: some votes had gone missing, some people had difficulties getting to the polling stations, and some who were going to vote Liberal changed their minds at the last minute, thanks to the opportune and divine intervention of that bastion of democracy, the Priesthood. What blame could be ascribed to the Conservative government for such electoral vicissitudes? And that’s what the topic was in the salons of Colón when they received the detailed report of what was going on outside: the armed uprising of the dissenters.

The country, incredibly, was at war.

The first victories belonged to the rebels. The Liberal General Gaitán Obeso took Honda and therefore control of the boats that navigated the Magdalena and entered Barranquilla. His successes were immediate. The Caribbean coast was close to falling into the red hands of the revolution; then, for the first time in history, the writers of that long comedy that is Colombian democracy decided to give a small role, just a couple of easy lines, to the State of Panama. Panama would be the defender of that coast; the martyrs destined to rescue the country from the hands of the Masonic devil would sail from Panama. And one fine day, a contingent of veteran soldiers gathered at the port of Colón under the command of the Governor of Panama, General Ramón Santodomingo, and set sail swiftly for Cartagena, ready to make history. From the port, Miguel Altamirano and his son saw them leave. They weren’t the only ones, of course: onlookers of all nationalities crowded around the port, talking in all languages, asking in all languages what was going on there and why. Among the onlookers there was one who knew well what was going on, and who had decided to make use of it, to take advantage of the absence of soldiers. . . . And at the end of March, the mulatto lawyer Pedro Prestán, in command of thirteen barefoot West Indians, dressed in rags and armed with machetes, declared himself General of the Revolution and Civil and Military Chief of Panama.

The war, Eloísa dear, had finally arrived in our neutral province, in this place that until then had been known as the Caribbean Switzerland. After half a century of wooing the Isthmus, of knocking on her isthmian doors, war had managed to force them open. And its consequences . . . yes, here come the disastrous consequences, but first an instant of pithy and cut-price philosophy. Colombia—as we know—is a schizophrenic country, and Colón-Aspinwall had inherited the schizophrenia. In truth, Aspinwall-Colón had a mysterious capacity to double, to multiply, to divide, to be one and another at the same time, cohabitating without too much effort. Allow me to take a brief leap into the future of my narration, and along the way to ruin all the effects of suspense and narrative strategy, to tell how this episode ends: the Colón fire. I was in the new house of the French city, lying in the hammock (which had become like a second skin to me), holding in my hand an open copy of Jorge Isaacs’s novel
María
, which had just come off the boat from Bogotá, when the sky behind the book turned yellow, not like feverish eyes but like the mustard that works for some as an antidote.