The Secret History of Costaguana (18 page)

I ran outside. A long time before getting to Front Street, the air stopped moving and I felt the first slap of heat that wasn’t tropical. At the entrance to the Callejón de Botellas, where legend had seen the Widow of the Canal conversing with the Liberians, I caught the scent of burned flesh, and soon saw emerge out of the shadows the figure of a mule lying on its side, the back legs already charred, the long tongue spread over fragments of green glass. It wasn’t me, but rather my body, that approached the flames like an alligator hypnotized by a burning torch. People ran past me, pushing the hot air, like expulsions from the bellows of a balloon, into my face: the smell of flesh shook me again. But this time it didn’t come from any mule but from the body of
mesié
Robay, a Haitian beggar of unknown age, family, and place of residence, who had arrived in Colón before all of us and had specialized in stealing meat from the Chinese butchers. I remember I bent down to vomit, and as my face got close to the paving stones they felt so hot that I didn’t dare touch them. Then a strong and constant wind began to blow from the north, and the fire traveled on the wind. . . . In a matter of hours, during the evening and night of March 31, 1885, Colón, the city that had survived the floods and the earthquake, was turned into charred planks of wood.

The reader will imagine our great surprise when, in that country of impunities, in that world capital of irresponsibility that is Colombia, the one who’d started the fire was put on trial a short time later. My father and I, I remember, turned pale with shock when we learned how events had transpired; but paler still shortly afterward, sitting at the table on the veranda at home, when we realized our evaluations of what had happened were radically different, for our versions of events were different. In other words, conflicting stories were circulating about the Colón fire.

What are you saying, Mr. Narrator? the audience protests. Facts don’t have versions, the truth is but one. To which I can only answer by telling what was told that midday, in the recently burned tropical heat, in my Panamanian house. My version and that of my father coincided at the beginning of the story: we both knew, as did every
Colónial
who was keeping up with events in the city, the origin of the Colón fire. Pedro Prestán, that mulatto and Liberal lawyer, has risen in arms against the distant Conservative government, only to realize almost immediately that he doesn’t have enough weapons; when he finds out that a shipment of two hundred rifles is coming from the United States on board a private boat, Prestán buys it at a good price; but the shipment is intercepted by an opportunistic and not at all neutral North American frigate that had received very clear instructions from Washington to defend the Conservative government. Prestán, in reprisal, has three North Americans arrested, including the Consul. Meanwhile, Conservative troops disembark in Colón and oblige the rebels to retreat; meanwhile, American marines disembark in the city and also oblige the rebels to retreat. The rebels, in retreat, realize that defeat is near . . . . And here occurs the schizophrenic attack of Panama politics. Here my version of subsequent events separates from that of my father. The inconsistent Angel of History gives us two different gospels, and the chroniclers will carry on banging their heads against a brick wall till the end of their days, because it is simply impossible to know which deserves the credence of posterity. And thus it is that there, at the Altamiranos’ table, Pedro Prestán splits in two.

Seeing himself defeated, Prestán One, charismatic leader and anti-imperialist national hero, flees by sea toward Curettage to join the Liberal troops fighting there, and the Conservative soldiers, on the orders of their own government and in connivance with the Wicked Marines, torch Colón and put the blame on the charismatic leader. Prestán Two, who after all is little more than a resentful murderer, decides to satisfy his deep-seated pyromania, because nothing seems more attractive to him than attacking the interests of the whites and burning down the city he’s lived in for the last few years. . . . Before escaping, Prestán One manages to hear the cannon blasts the frigate
Galena
unleashes on Colón and which, in a matter of hours, will have started the conflagration. Before escaping, Prestán Two gives orders to his West Indian machete men to wipe the city off the map, for Colón prefers death to occupation. The months pass for Prestán One, and they also pass for Prestán Two. And in August of that same year, 1885, Prestán One is arrested in Cartagena, taken to Colón, court-martialed, and found guilty of the fire on irrefutable evidence, having been given full procedural guarantees and the right to a learned, competent lawyer free of racial or class prejudices.

Prestán Two, on the other hand, was not so lucky. The court-martial that tried him did not hear witnesses for the defense; it did not investigate the version that was going round the city—and had earned the credibility of the French Consul, no less—according to which the man responsible for the fire was a certain George Burt, former general manager of the Railroad Company and agent provocateur; it didn’t manage to produce any other witnesses than one North American, one Frenchman, a German and an Italian, none of whom spoke a word of Spanish, whereupon their declarations were never translated or made public; and it did not establish why, if Pedro Prestán’s motive was hatred of the North Americans and the French, the only properties in Colón that were not damaged by the fire were the Railroad Company and the Canal Company.

On August 18, 1885, Prestán One was sentenced to death.

What a coincidence: so was Prestán Two.

Readers of the Jury: I was there. Politics, that Gorgon that turns to stone those who look it in the eye, passed very close by me this time, refusing to be ignored: The morning of the eighteenth, the authorities of the Conservative government, victorious in the Umpteenth Civil War, drove Pedro Prestán to the railway lines, guarded at regular intervals (and without anyone finding it odd) by U.S. Marines armed with cannons. From the second floor of a fire-damaged building I saw four laborers, mulatto like the condemned man, erect a wooden archway in a couple of hours; then a freight platform appeared, rolling along the rails without making any noise. Pedro Prestán mounted the platform, or rather was shoved onto it, and behind him climbed a man who was not wearing a hood but who would undoubtedly act as hangman. There, under the arch of cheap wood, Prestán looked like a lost child: his clothes were suddenly too big for him; his bowler hat seemed about to fall off his head. The hangman put down a canvas bag that he’d been carrying and took a rope out of it so well greased that from the distance it looked like a snake (absurdly I thought they were going to kill Prestán with its venomous bite). The hangman threw the rope over the crossbeam and put the other end, delicately, around the condemned man’s neck, as if afraid of scratching his skin. He tightened the slip knot; he climbed down off the platform. And then, along the rails of the Panama Railroad, the platform slid away with a whistle, and the body of Prestán was left hanging in midair. The noise of his neck breaking blended in with that of the tug of the rope, the jolt of the wood. It was cheap wood, and Panama, in any case, was a place where things shook.

The execution of Pedro Prestán, in those days when the Constitution for Angels with its explicit prohibition of the death penalty was still in force, was a real shock for many. (There were later another seventy-five shocks, when seventy-five citizens of Colón, arrested by the Conservative troops, were lined up with their backs to the charred remains of the walls and shot without the courtesy of a trial.) Of course my father, in his article for the
Bulletin
, took out his Refraction stick and rearranged reality as he so well knew how. And so, the French shareholder, so concerned about the political convulsions of that remote country and the damage they could cause his investments, found out about the “regrettable fire” that, after an “unforeseeable, inadvertent accident,” burned down “a few unimportant shanties” and several “cardboard shacks that had been on the verge of falling down anyway.” After the fire, “sixteen Panamanians were admitted to the hospital with breathing troubles,” wrote my father (the breathing trouble consisted of the fact that they were not breathing, because the sixteen Panamanians were dead). In my father’s article, the Canal workers were “true war heroes” who had defended the “Eighth Wonder” tooth and nail, and whose enemy was “fearsome nature” (no mention was made of fearsome democracies). Thus it was: through the workings and grace of Refraction, the war of 1885 never existed for the French investors, nor was Pedro Prestán hanged above the railway lines the French used to transport materials. The defeated rebel General Rafael Aizpuru, after listening to the clamor of several notable Panamanians, had offered to declare the independence of Panama if the United States would recognize him as its leader: Miguel Altamirano did not report that.

Like the installations of the two companies, the hamlet of Christophe Colomb was unscathed, as if a firebreak had separated it from the city in flames, and my father and I, who were already starting to feel like nomads on a domestic scale, didn’t have to move again. Shortly after the fire, while the employees of the railway/gallows were busy rebuilding the city, I told my father that we’d had good luck, and he answered with a cryptic expression on his face that must have been melancholy. “It wasn’t luck,” he said. “What we had were Gringo ships.” Under the paternal vigilance of the USS
Galena
and the USS
Shenandoah
, under the irrefutable authority of the USS
Swatara
and the USS
Tennessee
, works on the Great Trench tried to carry on. But things were no longer as they had been. Something had changed that month of August when the Colombian war arrived in the Isthmus, that ill-fated month when Pedro Prestán was executed. I will say it quickly and without anesthesia: I felt that something had begun to sink. The shareholders, the readers of the
Bulletin
, had begun to listen to those grotesque rumors: that their brothers, their cousins, their sons, were dying by the dozens in Panama. Could it be true, they wondered, if the
Bulletin
says the opposite? Workers and engineers arrived from the Isthmus at Marseille or Le Havre, and the first thing they did upon disembarking was to come out with contemptible slander, saying that work was not advancing as had been foreseen, or that costs were rising at a scandalous rate. . . . Incredibly, those baseless falsehoods began to leak into the credulous minds of the French. And meanwhile, my country was beginning to shed its name and constitution like a snake sheds its skin, and sink headfirst into the darkest years of its history.

My country would sink metaphorically,
of course, just as the sinking of the Canal Company (of which more later) would be metaphorical. But there were other much more literal sinkings in those days; the qualities of each, of course, depended on the object sinking. On the other side of the Atlantic, for example, the sailing ship
Annie Frost
sank, which wouldn’t have had any significance if you, dear Korzeniowski, had not shamelessly invented for yourself a role in the shipwreck. Yes, I know: you needed money, and Uncle Tadeusz was the nearest bank and the one that requested the fewest guarantees; so you wrote an urgent telegram: SHIPWRECKED STOP ALL LOST STOP NEED HELP . . . And since the correspondences that overwhelm me have not ceased, even though I’ve left the space of a few pages to put them on the record, allow me to note one of them now. For while Korzeniowski was pretending to have been on board a sinking ship, another sinking of perhaps more modest proportions was taking place but with much more immediate consequences.

One early morning in the dry season, Charlotte Madinier rented a dugout—undoubtedly similar to the one that had once carried her husband and my father—and, without anyone seeing, paddled herself along the Chagres River. She was wearing a coat that had belonged to her husband and that she’d saved from the famous postmortem burn; she had the pockets stuffed full with a collection of rocks her husband had accumulated over the early days of the explorations. I sneak into her head and I find, in the midst of fears and nostalgia and disorderly thoughts, the words
Je m’en vais
repeated like a mantra and piling up on top of one another; in her pockets I find chunks of basalt and slabs of limestone. Then Charlotte puts her hands in her pockets, with the left she clutches a large piece of granite and with the right a ball of blue clay the size of an apple. She drops into the water, backward, as if lying down, and the Panamanian ground, the oldest geological formation of the American continent, drags her to the bottom in a matter of seconds.

Let’s imagine: as she sinks, Charlotte loses her shoes, so when she gets to the riverbed, the bare skin of her feet touches the sand. . . . Imagine: the pressure of the water in her ears and on her closed eyes, or maybe they’re not closed but wide open, and maybe they see trout swim by and water snakes, weeds, sticks, or branches broken off trees by the humidity. Imagine the weight that rushes against Charlotte’s airless chest, against her small breasts and shrunken nipples, oppressed by the cold water. Imagine that all the pores of her skin close like stubborn little mouths, tired of swallowing water and aware that very soon they’ll be able to resist no longer, that death by drowning is right around the corner. Let’s imagine what Charlotte is imagining: the life she managed to have—a husband, a son who learned to talk before he died, a few sexual, social, or economic satisfactions—and most of all the life she won’t have, that which is never easy to imagine, because imagination (let’s be honest) doesn’t really get us that far. Charlotte starts to wonder what it feels like to drown, which of her senses will disappear first, if there’s pain in this death and where this pain will be located. She already lacks air: the weight against her chest has increased; her cheeks have contracted: the air that had been in them has been consumed by the involuntary voracity—no, by the gluttony—of her lungs. Charlotte feels that her brain is turning off.