The Secret History of Costaguana (26 page)

It was during those days that I began to spend the nights walking to the port, sometimes getting as far as the Railroad Company, and later the Freight House, that Company warehouse from which I’d have been evicted at gunpoint had I been discovered. Colón, in those wartime nights, was a cold, blue city; walking around it alone, defying tacit or declared curfews depending on the day and the vicissitudes of the war, a civilian (though a lost and desperate civilian) running countless risks. I was too much of a coward to take my tired head’s suicidal pursuits seriously, but I can confess that several times I went so far as to imagine a scenario in which I’d fling myself bare-chested with knife in hand at the men of the Mompox battalion, shouting “Long Live the Liberal Party!” and force them to receive my onslaught with bullets or bayonets. I never did, of course, never did anything of the sort. My act of greatest daring, during those dazed nights, was to visit the side streets of Colón the Widow of the Canal had visited, according to legend, and once I was sure I saw Charlotte turn a corner in the company of an African man in a hat, and ran after the specter until I realized I’d lost a shoe between the cobblestones and my scraped heel was bleeding.

I changed. Pain alters us; it’s the agent of slight but terrifying disruptions. After several weeks during which I grew gradually familiar with the night, I allowed myself the private exoticism of visiting the Europeans’ brothels, and more than once made use of their women (relics in their forties from de Lesseps’s times, in some cases heirs of these relics, girls with surnames like Michaud or Henrion who didn’t know who Napoleon Bonaparte was or why the French Canal had failed). Later, back in that house where Charlotte survived in a thousand phantasmagorical ways, in her clothes that Eloísa had begun to wear or in the destruction still visible if you looked closely at the glass door of the cabinet, something I can only call shame would descend upon me. At those moments I felt incapable of looking Eloísa in the face, and she, out of some kind of last respect she held for me, was incapable of formulating a single one of the questions that were (clearly) crowding the tip of her tongue. I sensed that my actions were destroying the affection between us, that my behavior was tearing down the bridges that united us. But I accepted it. Life had accustomed me to the idea of collateral victims. Charlotte was one. My relationship with my daughter, one more. We are at war, I thought. In war these things happen.

I attributed to the war, then, the obvious fracture of the bridges, the gap that opened between my daughter and myself from that time on like some sort of biblical sea. The school suspended services with shameless frequency, and Eloísa, who learned to battle with the absence of her mother with much more talent than I did, began to have free time and to enjoy it in ways that didn’t involve me. She didn’t make me part of her life (I don’t blame her: my sadness, the bottomless pit of my grief, was a rebuff to any invitation), or rather, her life evolved in directions I didn’t understand. And in rare moments of lucidity—nights of mourning and fear can be rich in revelations—I managed to glimpse that something more concrete than Charlotte’s death had come into play. But I didn’t manage to give it a name. Busy as I was with the memory of my shredded happiness, with attempts to accept the reality of the devastation, to process the information of my shattered life and dominate the anguish of nocturnal solitude, I didn’t manage to name it. . . . And I realized this: in the long Colón nights, on my long walks, sweaty and smelly, through streets that just a little while ago I’d strolled well dressed and fragrant, names of things were disappearing. Insomnia gradually takes away the memory of things: I forgot to wash, forgot to clean my teeth, and I remembered (that is, remembered that I’d forgotten) when it was already too late; the Chinese butcher, the Gringo soldier at the station, the man who sold sugar cane on Sundays from his beach stall, raised their hands instinctively to their faces at the blast of the breath of my greeting, or took a step back as if pushed when I opened my mouth . . . . I lived outside of conscience; I also lived outside the tangible world around me: I experienced my being a widower like exile, but without ever figuring out where I’d been expelled from, where I was forbidden to return. On better days I could glimpse a slight hope: just as I’d forgotten the most basic rules of urban life, maybe the despair itself was forgettable.

And that was how the Political Gorgon finally invaded the Altamirano-Madinier household. That was how History, incarnate in the particular destiny of a cowardly and confused soldier, dashed my pretensions to neutrality, my attempts at separation, my eagerness for studied apathy. The lesson I learned from Great Events was clear and easy: you won’t escape, they told me, it’s impossible for you to escape. It was a real show of strength, as well, for at the same time the Gorgon ruined my illusory plans for earthly happiness, it also ruined those of my country. Now I could go into detail about those days of disorientation and despair, about the anguish painted on Eloísa’s face when she looked straight at me, about my lack of interest in remedying that anguish. Were we talking about shipwrecks? That was when mine happened. But now, after the painful lessons the Gorgon and the Angel have taught me, how can I attend to those banalities? How can I talk about my pain and that of my daughter, of the nights of apolitical tears, of the outside-of-history solitude that overtook me, heavy as a wet poncho? The death of Charlotte—my lifesaver, my last resort—at the hands of the War of a Thousand Days was a memorandum in which someone reminded me of the hierarchies that must be respected. Someone, Angel or Gorgon, reminded me that beside the Republic of Colombia and its vicissitudes my minuscule life was a grain of salt, a frivolous and unimportant matter, the tale the idiot tells, the sound, the fury, and so on. Someone called me to order to make me realize that in Colombia more important things than my thwarted happiness were happening.

An essentially Colombian paradox: after a brilliant campaign by which he managed to recapture almost the entire Isthmus of Panama, the revolutionary General Benjamín Herrera found himself suddenly forced to sign a peace treaty in which his army and his party came out the losers from every angle. What had happened? I thought of the words my father had said to me on a certain day in 1885: when Colón was destroyed by fire and war and yet the Canal—that unfinished Canal—was spared, I told him we’d had good luck and he said no, we’d had Gringo ships. Well then, the War of a Thousand Days was special for several reasons (for its hundred thousand dead, for having left the National Treasury in complete ruin, for having humiliated half the population of Colombia and turned the other half into voluntary humiliators); but it was also special for less conspicuous and, another paradox, more serious circumstances. No more beating about the bush: the War of a Thousand Days, which actually lasted one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight, was special for having been resolved from start to finish in the bowels of foreign ships. Generals Foliaco and De la Rosa did not negotiate aboard the
Próspero Pinzón
but on the HMS
Tribune
; Generals Foliaco and Albán did not negotiate on the
Cartagena
, which arrived around the same time in Colón, but on the USS
Marietta
. After the surrender of my Schizophrenic City, where did they arrange the prisoner swaps? Not on the
Almirante Padilla
, but on the
Philadelphia
. And last but not least: after the various peace proposals made by Benjamín Herrera and his isthmian revolutionaries, after the radical refusal of those proposals on the part of the stubborn Conservative government, where was the negotiation table that led to the Treaty? Where did they sign the little piece of paper that put an end to the one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of relentless slaughter? It was not on board the Liberal
Cauca
, or on the Conservative
Boyaca
: it was on the USS
Wisconsin
, which was neither one nor the other but was much more. . . . We Colombians were taken by the hand of our big brothers, the Grown-up Countries. Our fate was played for on the gaming tables of other houses. In those poker games that resolved the most important issues of our history, we Colombians, Readers of the Jury, just sat there like statues.

November 12,1902. The postcard that commemorates that disastrous date is well known (everyone’s inherited the image from their victorious or defeated fathers or grandfathers; there’s no one in Colombia who doesn’t have a copy of that memento mori on a nationwide scale). Mine was printed by Maduro & Sons, Panama, and measures fourteen by ten centimeters. Along the bottom edge in red letters appear the names of the participants. From left to right and from Conservative to Liberal: General Victor Salazar. General Alfredo Vásquez Cobo. Doctor Eusebio Morales. General Lucas Caballero. General Benjamín Herrera. But then we remember (those who have the postcard) that there is among these figures—the Conservatives with mustaches, the others bearded—a notable absence, a kind of emptiness that opens in the middle of the image. For Admiral Silas Casey, the great architect of the
Wisconsin
Treaty, the one in charge of talking to those on the right and convincing them to meet with those on the left, is not in it. He’s not there. Nevertheless, his northerly presence is felt in every corner of the yellowing image, in each of its silver cells. The dark and vaguely baroque tablecloth is the property of Silas Casey; on the table are piled, as if this has nothing to do with them, the untidy papers of the Treaty that will change forever the history of Colombia, will change forever what it means to be Colombian, and it is Silas Casey who put them there just a few minutes before. And now I’ll concentrate on the rest of the scene. General Herrera appears to be separated from the table, as if the bigger boys won’t let him play; General Caballero, in the name of the revolutionaries, is signing. And I say, Bring me a movie camera! Because I need to fly over the scene, enter the
Wisconsin
through the skylight, and float above the table with its baroque cloth, and read that preamble, in which the signatories establish, with perfectly straight faces, that they have gathered there to “put an end to the bloodshed,” to “procure the reestablishment of peace in the Republic,” and above all so that the Republic of Colombia “can bring to a satisfactory conclusion the negotiations pending on the Panama Canal.”

Four words, Readers of the Jury, just four words:
Negotiations
.
Pending
.
Panama
.
Canal
. On paper, of course, they seem inoffensive; but there is a newly made bomb in them, a charge of nitroglycerine from which there is now no possible escape. In 1902, while José Altamirano, a little man without historical importance, fought tooth and nail for the recuperation of his tiny life, while he, an insignificant father of a daughter, forced himself to ford the river of shit his life as a widower (and his motherless daughter’s) had become, the negotiations that had been going on between the United States and the Republic of Colombia had already claimed the health of two ambassadors in Washington; my country began by putting Carlos Martínez Silva in charge, and months later Martínez Silva was retired from the post, without having advanced matters in the slightest, and died of physical exhaustion, pale, haggard, and gray, so tired he even gave up talking in his final days. His replacement was José Vicente Concha, former Minister of War, an unsubtle and rather brutal man who faced up to the negotiations with an iron will and was steelily defeated in a few months; subject to great nervous excitement, Concha suffered a violent crisis before leaving for Bogotá, and the port authorities in New York were forced to restrain him in a straitjacket while he shouted at the top of his lungs words that no one understood:
Soberanía
,
Imperio
,
Colonialismo
. Concha died a short time later, in his bed in Bogotá, ill and hallucinating, occasionally cursing in languages he didn’t know (and the lack of knowledge of which had been one of his main problems as a negotiator of international treaties). His wife said he spent his final days talking of the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty of 1846, or arguing over articles and conditions with an invisible interlocutor who was sometimes President Roosevelt and at others an anonymous man who in his delirium he called Boss and whose identity has never been, nor will it ever be, established.

“Sovereignty,” shouted poor Concha without being understood by anyone. “Empire. Colonialism.”

On November 23, the ink not yet dry on the
Wisconsin
Treaty, came the turn of Tomás Herrán, chargé d’affaires of the Colombian legation in Washington and destined to go down in history as the Last of the Negotiators. And while there, in Caribbean America, Eloísa and I began, after enormous efforts, to find our way through the labyrinths of sorrow, in icy North America, Don Tomás Herrán, a sad-looking, reserved sixty-year-old who spoke four languages and was equally indecisive in all of them, was trying to do the same through the labyrinths of the Treaty. That’s how Christmas went by in Colón: for Panamanians, the signing of the Treaty was a matter of life or death, and during the last days of 1902, when they hadn’t yet replaced the telegraph wires destroyed by the war, it didn’t seem unusual for me to leave the house at six in the morning (I could rarely sleep) and find myself in the port waiting with the crowds for the first steamers and their cargo of U.S. papers (the French were no longer news). That was an especially dry and hot season, and before the first roosters crowed, the heat had already driven me out of bed. My daybreak ritual consisted of a cup of coffee, a spoonful of quinine, and a cold shower, which I depended on to exorcise the night’s demons, the recurring image of Charlotte sitting dead beside an executed deserter, the memory of the appalling silence Eloísa kept at the sight of her mother’s body, the memory of the pressure of her hand on mine, the memory of her crying and shaking, the memory of . . . Dear reader, my private exorcisms were not always successful. Then I’d reach for the extreme remedy of whiskey, and more than a few times managed to get the stabbings of fear to stop with the first seethings of alcohol in the pit of my stomach.