The Secret History of Costaguana (8 page)

Readers of the Jury: you know, as does the whole British Empire, the famous anecdote we’ve so often been told by the world-famous Joseph Conrad about the origins of his passion for Africa. Do you remember? The scene has an exquisite romanticism, but it won’t be me who satirizes that aspect of his tale. Joseph Conrad is still a child, he is still Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and the map of Africa is a blank space whose contents—its rivers, its mountains—are completely unknown; a place of bright obscurity, a true deposit of mysteries. The boy Korzeniowski puts a finger on the empty map and says, “I shall go there.” So then, what the map of Africa was to the boy Korzeniowski, the image of my father in Panama was to me. My father crossing the Darien Jungle, along with a group of madmen who wondered if they could build a canal there; my father sitting in the Colón hospital beside a patient with dysentery. The letters that Antonia de Narváez had brought back to life by memory, no doubt making mistakes with precise details, chronologies, and the odd proper name, had become in my head a space comparable to the Africa of my friend Korzeniowski: a continent without contents. My mother’s narration had drawn a border around Miguel Altamirano’s life; but what that border confined became, as the months and years went by, my very own heart of darkness. Readers of the Jury: I, José Altamirano, was twenty-one years old when I put a finger on my own blank map and pronounced, excited and trembling, my own
I shall go there
.

 

A
t the end of August 1876, a few leagues from the door of my house, I boarded the American steamship
Selfridge
, without saying good-bye to Antonia de Narváez, and followed the same route my father had covered after scattering his sperm. Sixteen years had passed since the last Colombian civil war, in which the Liberals had killed more, not because their army was better or braver, but because it was their turn. The regular massacre of compatriots is our version of the changing of the guard: it’s done every so often, generally following the same criteria as children at play (“It’s my turn to govern,” “No, it’s my turn”); and it happened that the moment of my departure for Panama coincided with another changing of the guard, as usual under the stage directions of the Angel of History. I sailed a Magdalena colonized or dominated by the alternating traffic of the two warring parties, or by barges filled not with cacao or tobacco, but with dead soldiers whose putrid stench was stronger than the smoke coming out of the funnels. And I came out onto the Caribbean Sea at Barranquilla, and sighted the Cerro de la Popa from the deck and also the city walls of Cartagena, and I probably had some innocent thought (I may have wondered, for example, if my father had seen the same view, and what he’d thought upon seeing it).

But I could not have imagined that a ship sailing under a French flag had just passed through this walled port, en route from Marseille with stops in Saint-Pierre, Puerto Cabello, Santa Marta, and Sabanilla, and now heading for the city some of its passengers knew as Aspinwall and others as Colón. I sailed across the wake of the
Saint-Antoine
but didn’t know it; and when I arrived that night in Colón, I also didn’t know my steamer had passed less than two leagues from that sailing ship comfortably anchored in Limón Bay. Other things I didn’t know: that the
Saint-Antoine
was making that trip clandestinely and would not keep a record of it in the logbook; that its cargo was not what was declared either but seven thousand contraband rifles for the Conservative revolutionaries; and that one of the smugglers was a young man two years my junior, a steward with a nominal salary, of noble birth, Catholic beliefs, and timid appearance, whose surname was unpronounceable to the rest of the crew and whose head was already beginning, clandestinely, to archive what he saw and heard, to conserve anecdotes, to classify characters. Because his head (although the young man did not yet know it) was the head of a storyteller. Do I need to tell you what is so obvious? It was a certain Korzeniowski, by the name of Józef, by the name of Teodor, by the name of Konrad.

Yes, my dear Joseph, yes:
I was there, in Colón, while you were. . . . I was not a witness, but that, given the nature of our almost telepathic relationship, of the invisible threads that kept us on the same wavelength, was not necessary. Why does that seem so implausible to you, my dear Joseph? Don’t you know, as I do, that our encounter was programmed by the Angel of History, the great
metteur-en-scène
, the expert puppeteer? Don’t you know that no one escapes his destiny, and didn’t you write it several times in several places? Don’t you know our relationship already forms part of history, and history is renowned for never bowing to the irksome obligation of plausibility?

But now I must go back in time. I warn you now that further on I’ll move ahead again, and then back again, and so on alternately, successively, and stubbornly. (I’ll get fed up with this temporal navigation, but I don’t have too many options. How to remember without getting worn down by the past? To put it another way: How does a body manage to endure the weight of his memory?) Anyway, I’m going back.

 

S
hortly befo0re docking, young Korzeniowski avails himself of a moment of calm, he leans on the rail of the
Saint-Antoine
and allows his gaze to wander at random over the landscape. It is his third voyage to the Caribbean, but never before has he passed by the Gulf of Urabá, never has he seen the coastlines of the Isthmus. After passing the gulf, approaching Limón Bay, Korzeniowski distinguishes three uninhabited islands, three caymans half submerged in the water, enjoying the sun and pursuing any ray that pierces the veil of clouds at this time of year. Later he’ll ask and will be told: yes, the three islands, yes, they have names. They’ll tell him: the archipelago of the Mulatas. They’ll tell him: Great Mulata, Little Mulata, and Isla Hermosa. Or that, at least, is what he will remember years later, in London, when he tries to revive the details of that voyage. . . . And then he’ll wonder if his own memory has been faithful to him, if it hasn’t failed him, whether he really saw a ragged old palm tree on Little Mulata, whether someone actually told him there was a freshwater spring on Great Mulata issuing from the side of a ravine. The
Saint-Antoine
continues its approach to Limón Bay; night falls, and Korzeniowski senses that the play of light on the sea is starting to deceive his eyes, for Isla Hermosa appears to be little more than a flat, gray rock, smoking (or is it a mirage?) from the heat accumulated during the day. Then night swallows the earth, and eyes have appeared on the coast: the bonfires of the Cuna Indians are the only things visible from the ship, beacons that do not guide or help but confuse and frighten.

I, too, saw the Cunas’ fires lighting up the night, of course, but let me say in a good loud voice: I saw nothing else. No islands, no palm trees, much less any steaming rocks. Because that night, the night of my arrival in Colón hours after young Korzeniowski arrived, a dense fog had fallen over the bay that only abated to give way to the most extraordinary downpour I had ever chanced to see up to that moment. The deck of the ship was lashed with harsh gusts of rain, and I swear I feared at some point, in my ignorance, that it would extinguish the boilers. As if that weren’t enough, there were so many ships taking up the few moorings in Colón, that the
Selfridge
could not dock, and we spent that night on board. Let us begin, readers, to put to rest a few tropical myths: it is not true that there are no mosquitoes far from land. Those of the Panama coast are able, to judge by what I saw that night, to cross entire bays to force incautious passengers to take shelter under their nets. In five words: it was an unbearable night.

Dawn broke at last, at last the clouds of mosquitoes and the real clouds scattered, and the passengers and crew of the
Selfridge
spent the day on deck, taking the sun just like caimans or the Mulatas, waiting for the good news that they could dock. But night fell again, and the clouds returned, the real ones and the others; and the docks of Colón remained as full as a sailors’ brothel. The resurrection occurred on the third day. The sky had cleared miraculously, and in the cool night air (that luxury article) the
Selfridge
managed to find a bed in the brothel. Passengers and crew burst ashore like a downpour, and I set foot for the first time on the land of my maledictions.

I came to Colón because I was told that here I would find my father, the well-known Miguel Altamirano; but as soon as my smelly feet, my damp, stiff boots, stepped into the Schizophrenic City, all the nobility of the classic theme—all those stories of Oedipus and Laius, Telemachus and Odysseus—went very quickly to hell. It won’t be me who tries to disguise the truth at this stage in life: walking into the commotion of the city, the Father Quest turned into the last of my priorities. I confess, yes, I confess I was distracted. I allowed Colón to distract me.

My first impression was of a city too small for the chaos it harbored. The serpent of the railway line rested about ten meters from the waters of the bay, and seemed ready to slide into them and sink forever at the slightest tremor of the earth. The stevedores shouted unintelligibly and without that seeming to matter to them: the Babel my father had evoked, far from being overcome, remained alive and kicking on the docks that separated the railroad from the shore. I thought: This is the world. Hotels that didn’t receive guests but went out hunting for them; American saloons where men drank whiskey, played poker, and talked with bullets; Jamaican slums; Chinese butcher shops; in the middle of everything, the private house of an old railway employee. I was twenty-one years old, dear reader, and the long, black braid of the Chinese man who sold meat over the counter and liquor under it, or Maggs & Oates pawnshop and its display window on the main street with the most gigantic jewels I’d ever seen, or the West Indian cobblers’ shops where they danced soca were for me like notifications of a disorderly and magnificent world, allusions to countless sins, welcome letters from Gomorrah.

That night I did something for the first time that I would repeat many years later and on another continent: arrive in an unknown city and look for a hotel at night. I confess: I didn’t look too closely at where I was staying, and I wasn’t intimidated by the fact that the owner/ receptionist held a Winchester as he pushed the visitors’ book toward me. Sleepwalking, I went outside again, made my way between mules and carts and carts with mules to a two-storey saloon. Above the wooden sign—GENERAL GRANT, it read—waved the stars and stripes. I leaned on the bar, ordered what the man next to me had ordered, but before the mustached bartender had poured my whiskey, I had already turned around: the saloon and its customers were a better spectacle.

I saw two Gringos having a knife fight with three Panamanians. I saw a whore they called Francisca—hips that had already opened for one or more children, worn-out tits, a certain bitterness in her expression, and a comb out of place in her hair—and imagined that she’d committed the error of accompanying her husband on his Panama adventure and that in a matter of months the poor little man had gone to swell the statistics of the Colón hospital. I saw a group of sailors, bare-chested thugs in unbuttoned, dark, knitted shirts, who surrounded her and solicited her in their language, insistently but not impolitely, and I saw or noticed that the woman enjoyed that unusual and now exotic moment when a man treated her with something resembling respect. I saw a cart driver come in and start asking for help to move a dead mule off the railway tracks; I saw a group of Americans look him over, from under their broad-brimmed hats, before rolling up the bright sleeves of their shirts and going out to help.

I saw all that.

But there was something I didn’t see. And the things we don’t see tend to be the ones that affect us most. (This epigram has been sponsored by the Angel of History.)

I didn’t see a small man, a mouse who looked like a notary, approach the bar and ask for the attention of the drinkers. I didn’t hear him explain in laborious English that he had purchased two tickets for the next morning’s train to Panama City, that during the course of the day his young son had died of cholera, and that now he wanted to recoup the fifty dollars he’d spent on the tickets to prevent the child’s being tossed into a pauper’s grave. I didn’t see that the Captain of the French sailors approached him and asked him to repeat all that he’d just said, to make sure he’d understood, and I did not see the moment that one of his subordinates, a broad-chested man of about forty, rummaged through a leather bag, came over to the Captain, and put the money for the tickets, in U.S. dollars tied with a velvet ribbon, in his hand. The transaction didn’t last longer than a drink of whiskey (I, concerned with my own, didn’t see it). But in that short space of time something had happened beside me, almost touching me, something . . . Let’s look for the appropriate figure: Did the wing of destiny brush my face? The ghost of encounters to come? No, I’ll explain it as it happened, without meddling tropes. Readers, pity me, or mock me if you wish: I did not see the scene, the scene passed me by, and, logically, I didn’t know it had happened. I didn’t know one of those men was called Escarras and that he was Captain of the
Saint-Antoine
. This might not seem much; the problem is that I also didn’t know that his right-hand man, the broad-chested forty-year-old, was called Dominic Cervoni, or that one of his companions that night of binges and business, a young steward who distractedly observed the scene, was called Józef Korzeniowski, or that many years later that distracted young man—when he was no longer called Korzeniowski, but Conrad—would use the sailor—calling him not Cervoni, but Nostromo—to the ends for which he’d become famous . . . “A oneeyed giant would not have had the ghost of a chance against Dominic Cervoni, of Corsica, not Ithaca,” a mature and prematurely nostalgic novelist would write years later. Conrad admired Cervoni as any disciple admires any master; Cervoni, for his part, had voluntarily taken on the role of godfather of adventure for the disoriented young Pole. That was the relationship that united them: Cervoni in charge of the sentimental education of that apprentice sailor and amateur smuggler. But that night I did not know that Cervoni was Cervoni, or that Conrad was Conrad.