The Secret History of Costaguana (3 page)

And the fifteen Chinese coolies who later rest on the long dissection tables at the University of Bogotá, after having taught a distracted trainee the location of the liver and the length of the large intestine, those fifteen Chinamen who now begin to develop black stains on their backs (if they are faceup) or on their chests (if they’re facedown), those fifteen Chinamen say in chorus and with pride: We were there. We cleared a way through the jungle, we dug in those swamps, we laid the iron and the sleepers. One of those fifteen Chinamen tells his story to my father, and my father, leaning over the rigor mortis while he examines out of pure Renaissance-man curiosity what is there under a rib, listens with more attention than he thinks. And what is under that rib? My father asks for forceps, and after a while the forceps emerge from the body carrying a splinter of bamboo. And now the talkative and impertinent Chinaman begins to tell my father of the patience with which he had sharpened the stick, of the skillful decency with which he had stuck it into the muddy earth, of the force with which he had thrown himself onto the sharpened point.

A suicide? my father asks (let’s admit it is not a very intelligent question). No, replies the Chinaman, he had not killed himself, the sadness had killed him, and before the sadness the malaria. . . . Watching his ill workmates hang themselves with the ropes used in the construction of the railway or steal the foreman’s pistol to shoot themselves with had killed him, seeing that in those swamps it was not possible to construct a decent cemetery had killed him, and knowing the jungle’s victims would end up scattered around the world in barrels of ice had killed him. I, says the Chinaman, his skin now almost blue, his stench almost unbearable, I, who in life have built the Panama Railroad, in death shall help to finance it, as will the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight dead workers, Chinese, blacks, and Irish, who are visiting the universities and hospitals of the world right now. Oh, how a body travels . . .

All this the dead Chinaman tells my father.

But what my father hears is slightly different.

My father does not hear a story of personal tragedies, does not see the dead Chinaman as the nameless worker of no fixed address for whom no grave is possible. He sees him as a martyr, and sees the history of the railway as a true epic. The train versus the jungle, man versus nature . . . The dead Chinaman is an emissary from the future, an outpost of Progress. The Chinaman tells him that the passenger infected with cholera, directly responsible for the two thousand deaths in Cartagena and hundreds in Bogotá, was on board that ship, the
Falcon
; but my father admires the passenger who had left everything to pursue the promise of gold through the murderous jungle. The Chinaman tells my father about the saloons and brothels proliferating in Panama since the foreigners began to arrive; for my father, each drunken worker is an Arthurian knight, each whore an Amazon. The seventy thousand railway sleepers are seventy thousand prophecies of the vanguard. The iron line that crosses the Isthmus is the navel of the world. The dead Chinaman is no longer simply an emissary from the future: he is a herald angel, thinks my father, and he has come to make him see, amid the fallen leaves of his sad life in Bogotá, the vague but luminous promise of a better life.

Speaking for the defense: It was not out of madness that my father cut the dead Chinaman’s hand off. It was not out of madness—my father had never felt saner in his life—that he had it cleaned by one of the Chapinero butchers and put it out in the sun (the scant Bogotá sun) to dry. He had it mounted with bronze screws on a small pedestal that looked like marble, and kept it on one of the shelves of his library, between a tattered edition of Engels’s
The Peasant War in Germany
and a miniature oil painting of my grandmother with a large ornamental comb in her hair, by an artist of the Gregorio Vásquez school. The index finger, slightly outstretched, points with each of its bare phalanges toward the path my father would have to take.

Friends who visited my father during this time said yes, it was true that the carpal and the metacarpal bones pointed toward the Isthmus of Panama the way a Muslim bows in the direction of Mecca. And I, in spite of how much I might want to launch my tale in the direction indicated by the desiccated finger, must first concentrate on other incidents in the life of my father, who stepped out one fine day of that year of Our Lord 1845 to discover through the word on the street that he had been excommunicated. So much time had passed since the Battle of the Bodies that it took him a while to associate one matter with the other. One Sunday, while my father was receiving the title of Venerable pro Tempore in the Masonic lodge, Presbyter Echavarría mentioned him by name from the accusing pulpit of Santo Tomás Church. Miguel Altamirano had the blood of innocents on his hands. Miguel Altamirano dealt in souls of the dead and was in league with the Devil. Miguel Altamirano, declared Father Echavarría before his audience of faithful and fanatics, was a formal enemy of God and the Church.

 

M
y father, as suited the circumstances and as precedents suggested, took the matter as a joke. A few meters from the ostentatious front door of the church was the humbler and particularly nonsanctum door to the printer’s; the same Sunday, late that night, my father delivered his column for
El Comunero
.

(Or was it
El Temporal
? These precisions are perhaps superfluous, but no less tormenting for me not to be able to keep track of the leaflets and newspapers published by my father.
La Opinión
?
El Granadino
?
La Opinión Granadina
? or
El Comunero Temporal
? It is futile. Readers of the Jury, please forgive my poor memory.)

Anyway, whichever newspaper it was, my father delivered his column. The following is not a literal reproduction, but merely what my memory has preserved, though I believe it corresponds quite accurately to the spirit of those words. “A certain backward cleric, one of those who have transformed faith into superstition and Christian rites into sectarian paganism, has assumed the right to excommunicate me, going over the head of the prelate’s judgment and, most of all, that of common sense,” he wrote for all of Bogotá society to read. “The undersigned, in his capacity as Doctor of Earthly Laws, Spokesman of Public Opinion, and Defender of Civilized Values, has received comprehensive and sufficient authority from the community he represents, which has decided to pay the cleric back in kind. And thus Presbyter Echavarría, whom God does not hold in his Glory, is hereby excommunicated from the communion of civilized men. From the Santo Tomás pulpit, he has expelled us from his communion; we, from the pulpit of Gutenberg, expel him from ours. Let it be solemnly enacted.”

The rest of the week went by without incident. But the following Saturday, my father and his radical comrades had gathered at the Café Le Boulevardier, near the cloister of the University of Bogotá, with the members of a Spanish theater company who were on a Latin American tour. The work they had staged, a sort of
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme
where the gentleman was replaced by a seminarian assaulted by doubts, had already been denounced by the Archbishop, and that was good enough for
El Comunero
or
El Granadino
. My father, as editor (as well) of the Varieties section, had proposed an extensive interview with the actors; that evening, once the interview was over—the reporter put away his notebook and his Waterloo pen that a friend had brought him from London—and between one brandy and the next, they spoke of the Echavarría affair. The actors made their own speculations about the Sunday Mass and had started wagering whole
reales
on the contents of the next day’s sermon when it suddenly began to rain heavily, and the people in the street flocked like chickens: under the eaves, into the doorways, completely blocking the entrance to the café. The place filled with the smell of damp ponchos; beneath trousers and boots that dripped water the café floor became slippery. Then a soprano voice ordered my father to stand, to give up his seat.

My father had never seen Presbyter Echavarría: the news of his excommunication had reached him by way of third parties, and the dispute, until that moment, had gone no further than the confines of the printed page. Looking up, he found himself facing a long, perfectly dry cassock and a closed black umbrella, its tip in a puddle of water shiny and silver like mercury, the handle easily supporting the weight of effeminate hands. The soprano spoke again: “The chair, heretic.” I must believe what my father would tell me years later: that if he did not respond it was not out of insolence, but that the vaudevillian situation—the priest entering a café, the dry priest where all were wet, the priest whose womanly voice undermined his imperious manner—surprised him so much that he didn’t know how to do so. Echavarría interpreted the silence as disdain and returned to the attack:

“The chair, heathen.”

“Come again?”

“The chair, blasphemer. The chair, murderous Jew.”

Then he hit my father lightly on the knee with the tip of his umbrella, once, maybe twice; and at that moment all hell broke loose.

Like a jack-in-the-box, my father swatted away the umbrella (the palm of his hand was left wet and a little red) and stood up. Echavarría let some reaction out from between incensed teeth, “But how dare you,” or words to that effect. As he said it, my father, who had perhaps experienced a fleeting second of good sense, was already turning around to collect his jacket and leave without a glance at his companions, and did not see the moment when the priest went to slap him; nor did he see—this he would say many times, begging to be believed—his own hand, closing of its own accord and landing with all the strength of his pivoting shoulders, on the indignant and pursed little mouth, on the hairless and powdered lip of Presbyter Echavarría. The chin emitted a hollow crunch, the cassock swept backward, as if floating, the boots beneath the cassock slipped in the puddle, and the umbrella fell to the floor a brief second before its owner.

“You should have seen,” my father told me much later, facing the sea, brandy in hand. “At that moment the silence was louder than the downpour.”

The actors stood up. My father’s radical comrades stood up. And this I have thought every time I remember this story: if my father had been alone, or if he had not been in a place frequented by university men, he would have found himself confronted by a furious crowd ready to skewer him on the spot for the affront; but in spite of the odd isolated and anonymous insult emerging from the crowd, in spite of the lethal looks from the two strangers who helped Echavarría to his feet, who recovered his umbrella for him, who brushed off his cassock (with an extra pat or two on the ministerial buttocks), nothing happened. Echavarría left the Boulevardier hurling insults that no one had ever heard a clergyman in Santa Fe de Bogotá say, and threats worthy of a sailor from Marseille, but there ended the latest run-in. My father reached up to touch his face, confirmed that his cheek was hot, said good night to his companions, and walked home in the rain. Two days later, in the early morning before first light, someone knocked on his door. The servant opened the door and saw no one. The reason was obvious: the knocks were not those of someone coming to call, but those of a hammer nailing up a notice.

The anonymous tract did not carry an imprint, but in other respects its contents were quite clear: all the faithful who read those lines were exhorted not to speak to the heretic Miguel Altamirano, to refuse him bread, water, and shelter; it declared that the heretic Miguel Altamirano was considered to be possessed by demons; and it proclaimed that killing him without qualms, as one would a dog, would be a virtuous act, worthy of divine favor.

My father tore it off the door, went back inside, looked for the key to the storage room under the stairs, and took out one of the two pistols that had arrived in my grandfather’s trunk. On his way out he took care, thinking to eliminate any revealing traces, to pull off all the scraps of paper still stuck to the wood of the door under the nail; but then he realized the precaution was useless, because he came upon the same notice ten or fifteen times in the short walk from his house to the printing press that turned out
La Opinión
. More than that, along the way he also came upon accusing fingers and voices, the powerful prosecution of the Catholics who now, without any actual proceedings taking place, had declared him their enemy. My father, accustomed to attracting attention, was not quite so used to attracting malevolence. The public prosecutors appeared on the wooden balconies (crosses dangling over their chests), and the fact that they did not dare to shout at him was not a relief to my father, but rather confirmation that darker fates than mere public disgrace awaited. He walked into the printer’s with the crumpled notice in his hand, asking the brothers Acosta, the owners of the press, if they could identify the machines responsible: to no avail. He spent the afternoon in the Commerce Club, tried to find out what his comrades thought, and heard that the radical societies had already reached a decision: they would respond with blood and fire, burning down the church and killing every cleric, if Miguel Altamirano was to suffer any attack. He felt less alone, but he also felt that the city was about to suffer a catastrophe. And so that night he made his way to Santo Tomás Church to look for Father Echavarría, walking beneath yellow street lamps that lit up the gleaming white walls of the houses, thinking that two men who had exchanged insults can, just as easily, exchange apologies; but the church was deserted.

Or almost.

Because in one of the last pews was a shape, or what my father, blinded as he entered by the sudden darkness, for the time the retina with all its rods and cones takes to accommodate to the new conditions, had taken for a shape. After strolling up one of the aisles toward the chancel, after going behind—into areas where he was an intruder—and looking for the door to the presbytery and descending the two worn stone steps and stretching out a prudent and polite knuckle to knock a couple of times, my father selected a random pew, one that had a view of the gilding on the altar, and sat down to wait, although he really did not know what words he could use to convince that fanatic.