The Secret History of Costaguana (5 page)

But before telling of his arrival and all that happened in consequence, I should like and must speak of a couple without whose assistance, I can assure you, I would not be what I am. And I say this, as you’ll see, literally.

Sometime around 1835, the engineer William Beckman (New Orleans, 1801–Honda, 1855) had gone up the Magdalena River on a private, profit-seeking mission, and months later founded a company of boats and barges for the commercial exploitation of the region. He soon became a daily spectacle for the ports’ inhabitants: blond, almost albino, Beckman filled a big dugout with ten tons of merchandise, covered the wooden cases with ox hides and slept on top of them, beneath a little canopy of palm leaves on which his skin and therefore his life depended, and went up and down the river like that, from Honda to Buenavista, from Nare to Puerto Berrio. After five years of considerable success, during which he had come to dominate the coffee and cacao trade between the provinces along the river, Beckman (true to his adventurer’s nature, after all) decided to invest his not terribly abundant riches in the risky venture of Don Francisco Montoya, who was then in England commissioning a steamer adapted to the Magdalena River. The
Union
, built in the Royal Shipyards, came up the river in January 1842 as far as La Dorada, six leagues from Honda, and was received by mayors and military officers with honors a minister would envy. She was filled with cases of tobacco—“Enough to get all of the United Kingdom addicted,” Beckman would comment recalling those years—and sailed without incident to the mouth of the Miel River . . . where that English steamer, just like all the rest of the characters in this book, had her encounter with the ever impertinent (tedious, meddlesome) Angel of History. Beckman wasn’t even aware that the civil war of the day (“Is it another or the same one?” he asked) had come that far; but he had to bow to the evidence, for in a matter of hours the
Union
had become embroiled in combat with boats of vague political allegiances, a cannonball had broken the boilers, and dozens of tons of tobacco, as well as all the engineer’s capital, sank without ever knowing the reasons for the attack.

I said they sank. Not exactly: the
Union
almost reached the riverbank after the cannon blast, and did not sink entirely. For years, her two chimneys were visible to passengers on the river, breaking the yellow waters like lost Easter Island statues, like sophisticated wooden menhirs. My father definitely saw them; I saw them when my turn came . . . and Engineer Beckman saw them and would continue to see them with some frequency, for he never returned to New Orleans. By the time of the semi-sinking, he had already fallen in love, had already asked for that hand—which for him did not indicate travels, but stillness—and would marry in the days immediately following his bankruptcy, offering his bride a cheap honeymoon on the opposite bank of the river. Great disappointment on the part of the young lady’s (good) family,
bogotános
of limited means and boundless aspirations, social climbers who would have put any Rastignac to shame, who customarily spent long periods in their hacienda in Honda and had thought themselves so fortunate when that rich Gringo had laid those pale-browed blue eyes on the rebellious daughter of the house. And who was the lucky girl? A twenty-year-old called Antonia de Narváez, amateur toreador in the Santo Patrón running of the bulls, occasional gambler, and steadfast cynic.

What do we know of Antonia de Narváez? That she had wanted to travel to Paris, but not to meet Flora Tristán, which she thought would be a waste of time, but to read de Sade in the original. That she had made herself briefly famous in the salons of the capital for publicly disparaging the memory of Policarpa Salavarrieta (“Dying for the country is for people with nothing better to do,” she’d said). That she had used what little influence her family had to get inside the Palace of Government, which conceded her a permit and threw her out after ten minutes, when she asked the Bishop where the famous bed was, the one where Manuela Sáenz, the most celebrated mistress in Colombian history, had screwed the Liberator.

Readers of the Jury: I can hear your perplexity from here, and am prepared to alleviate it. Would you tolerate a brief review of that fundamental historic moment? Doña Manuela Sáenz, from Quito originally, had left her legitimate (and oh-so-boring) husband, a certain James or Jaime Thorne; in 1822, the Liberator Simón Bolívar makes his triumphant entrance into Quito; shortly thereafter, ditto with Manuela. We are dealing with an extraordinary woman: she is skillful on horseback and handles weapons magnificently; as Bolívar is able to see for himself during the exploits of independence, Manuela rides as well as she shoots. Pessimistic in view of social condemnation, Bolívar writes to her: “Nothing in the world can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor.” Manuela responds by arriving unannounced at his house and showing him, with a few thrusts of her hips, just what she thinks of those auspices. And on September 25, 1828, while the Liberator and his
Libertadora
take multiple mutual liberties in the presidential bed of that incipient Colombia, a group of envious conspirators—generals no longer young whose wives neither ride nor shoot—decide that this coitus shall be interruptus: they attempt to assassinate Bolívar. With Manuela’s help, Simón leaps out of the window and escapes to hide under a bridge. So then, that was the notorious bed Antonia de Narváez wanted to see as if it were a relic, which, to be honest, perhaps it was.

And in December 1854, the night my father celebrates with trout and brandy the victory of the democratic armies over the dictatorship of Melo, Antonia de Narváez tells this anecdote. As simple as that. She remembers the anecdote of the bed, and she tells it.

 

B
y that time, Antonia had been married to Mr. William Beckman for twelve years; that is, as many years as her husband was older than his wife. After the
Union
disaster, Beckman had accepted a portion of his in-laws’ property—three or four acres on the riverbank—and had built a house with whitewashed walls and seven rooms in which to receive occasional travelers, including the crew of the odd North American steamer, who, after so many ports where no one had understood them, longed to hear their language again if only for a single night. The house was surrounded by banana trees and fields of cassava; but its most important source of income, what kept food on the couple’s table, came from one of the best patronized firewood suppliers on the Magdalena. That was how Antonia de Narváez de Beckman filled her days, a woman who in other lands and in another life would have been burned at the stake or maybe made a fortune writing erotic novels under a pseudonym: giving room and board to the river’s travelers and wood to the boilers of its steamships. Oh, yes, she also filled them by listening to the unbearable songs her husband, lover of the local landscape, came up with while accompanying himself on a wretched banjo:

My father also knew this song, my father also found out from it that Colombia is a place neighboring the equator where the summer is eternal (the author, obviously, never got as far as Bogotá). But we were talking about my father. Miguel Altamirano never told me if he’d learned the song the very night of the victory, but that night the inevitable happened: brandy, banjo, ballad. The Beckman house, natural habitat of foreigners, a meeting place for people passing through, played host that night as drunken soldiers went down to Caracolí beach and assembled, with the acquiescence (and the shirts, and the trousers) of the place’s owner, a straw-stuffed effigy of the defeated dictator. I don’t know how many times I’ve imagined the hours that followed. The soldiers begin to collapse on the damp sand of the river, overcome by the local
chicha
—the brandy was reserved for officers, a matter of hierarchy—the hosts and two or three high-ranking guests, among whom was my father, extinguish the bonfire in which the remains of the dictator lie scorched and return to the drawing room. The servants prepare a cold
agua de panela
; the conversation begins to turn to the respective past lives in Bogotá of those present. And at that moment, while Manuela Sáenz lies ill in a remote Peruvian city, Antonia de Narváez laughingly tells of the day she went to look at the bed where Manuela Sáenz loved Bolívar. And then it is as if my father has just seen her for the first time, as if she, being seen, were seeing my father for the first time. The idealist and the cynic had shared alcohol and food all evening, but when speaking of the Liberator’s lover, they notice each other’s existence for the first time. One of the two recalled the lyric then circulating in the young Republic:

And that was like the sealing wax on a secret letter. I cannot be sure whether Antonia and my father blushed when realizing the (obscene) symbolic charge the figures of Manuela and Simón had taken on for them; nor do I want to go to the trouble of imagining it, so I’ll not subject you, Readers of the Jury, to the qualities and forms this sort of dance entailed, the complete match that can happen between two people without their backsides even for an instant lifting up off their seats. But in those final hours, before each retired to his or her room, across the solid walnut table flew ingenious comments (from the male), tinkling laughter (from the other), exchanges of witticisms that are the human version of dogs sniffing each other’s tails. For Mr. Beckman, who had not yet read
Dangerous Liaisons
, those civilized mating rituals went unnoticed.

And all over a simple anecdote about Manuela Sáenz.

That night and the nights that follow, my father, with that capacity progressives have to find great personalities and praiseworthy causes where there are neither the former nor the latter, thinks on what he has seen: a woman who is intelligent and sharp and even a little racy, a woman who deserves a better fate. But my father is human, in spite of all that has been suggested, and also thinks of the physical and potentially tangible side of the matter: a woman with black eyebrows, shapely but thick like . . . Her face adorned by those gold earrings that had belonged to . . . And all that set off by a cotton shawl that covered a chest firm like . . . The reader will have noticed by now: my father was not a born narrator, like myself, and we cannot ask too much agility of him when it comes to finding the best simile for a pair of eyebrows or breasts, or remembering the origins of some humble family jewels; but it pleases me that my father never forgot that simple white shawl Antonia always wore at night. The temperatures in Honda, so violent during the day, plummet when darkness comes, and bring colds and rheumatism to the unwary. A white shawl is one of the ways the locals defend themselves from the cruel unforeseen tropical eventualities: indigestion, yellow fever, malignant fever, a simple temperature. It’s rare for the locals to find themselves affected by these ailments (residence creates immunities); but for someone from Bogotá it is normal, almost a daily occurrence, and the guest houses, in these places where finding a doctor can take days, tend to be prepared to treat less severe cases. And one night, while in the rest of Honda Christians were finishing their novena prayers, my father, who had not yet read
The Imaginary Invalid
, thinks his head feels heavy.

And here, to our (not very great) surprise, the versions contradict each other. According to my father, he had left the Beckman guest house two nights before, because the
Isabel
had already arrived in port and the provisioning stopover—wood, coffee, fresh fish—was lasting longer than expected due to some damage to the boilers. According to Antonia de Narváez, the damage to the boilers never existed, my father was still a guest, and that afternoon he hired two porters to carry his things onto the
Isabel
, but he had not yet spent his first night aboard the English steamer. According to my father, it was ten at night when he paid a boy in red trousers, a fisherman’s son, to go to the Gringo’s guest house and tell the lady there was a feverish man on board. According to Antonia de Narváez, the porters were the ones who told her, exchanging mocking glances and still playing with the half a
real
they’d received as a tip. The two versions come to agree, at least, on one fact, which in any case has left verifiable consequences and the denial of which, from a historic point of view, would be futile.

Armed with a doctor’s bag, Antonia de Narváez boarded the
Isabel
and from among the two hundred and seven cabins found the feverish man without asking; when she went in she found him lying on a canvas cot, not on the comfortable main bed, and covered with a blanket. She felt his forehead and did not notice a temperature of any kind; nevertheless, she took a bottle of quinine out of her medical bag and told my father that yes, he did have a bit of a temperature, that he should take five grains with his morning coffee. My father asked her whether a sponge bath with rubbing alcohol wasn’t advisable in these cases. Antonia de Narváez agreed, took two more bottles out of her bag, rolled up her sleeves, and asked the patient to remove his shirt, and for my father the penetrating smell of surgical spirit would remain forever associated with the moment when Antonia de Narváez, her hands still wet, pulled back the blanket, untied the white shawl around her neck, and with a slightly lewd movement, lifted her petticoats and straddled him atop his woolen underwear.

It was December 16 and the clock struck eleven; exactly forty-nine and a half years had passed—it’s a shame that the symmetries so dear to history couldn’t have given us a nice round half-century—since the city of Honda, which once had been a spoiled daughter of the Spaniards and key point of colonial commerce, was destroyed by an earthquake at eleven at night on June 16, 1805. The ruins still existed that night: a short distance from the
Isabel
were the arches of the convents, the stone corners that once were whole walls; and now I can imagine, because no rule of credibility forbids me, that the violent jolts of the camp bed might have evoked those ruins for the lovers. I know, I know: Credibility might be keeping mum, but Good Taste leaps up to reproach me for such a concession to sentimentality. But we’ll do without her opinion for an instant: everyone’s entitled to one moment of kitsch in this life, and this is mine . . . because starting from this instant, I am physically present in my tale. Although to say
physically
might be a bit of hyperbole.