The Secret History of Costaguana (9 page)

I’m the man who didn’t see.

I’m the man who didn’t know.

I’m the man who wasn’t there.

Yes, that’s me: the anti-witness.

The list of things I didn’t see and didn’t know either is much longer: I could fill several pages and label them: IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED TO ME WITHOUT MY REALIZING. I didn’t know that after buying the tickets Captain Escarras and his crew returned to the
Saint-Antoine
for a few hours’ rest. I didn’t know that before dawn Cervoni would load four rowboats and, along with six other oarsmen (Korzeniowski among them), would return to the port more or less at the same time as I was leaving the General Grant, not drunk but a little queasy. While I spent a couple of hours wandering the heaving streets of Colón-Aspinwall-Gomorrah, Dominic Cervoni directed the maneuvers of the four boats up to the railway-loading piers, where a group of
cargadores
awaited him in the shadows; and while I was returning to the hotel, preparing to get up early and begin my Father Quest, the stevedores moved the contents of those stealthy nocturnal transports, carried them under the arches of the depot, packed them into the freight cars of the train to Panama City (and in doing so heard the clatter of the barrels and the thud of the wood, without asking what, or for whom, or where), and covered them with tarpaulins, so they wouldn’t be ruined by one of those sudden downpours, trademark of life in the Isthmus.

All this passed me by, almost without touching me. It’s a flimsy consolation to think that, even though I wasn’t present, I could have been (as if that would authenticate me). If a few hours later, instead of sleeping the sleep of the dead in the uncomfortable folding bed in my room, I had looked out from the hotel balcony, I would have seen Korzeniowski and Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica and the Telemachus of Berdichev, climb aboard the last carriage of the train with the tickets purchased the evening before from the poor little mouse in the saloon. If I had stood on the balcony until eight that morning, I would have seen the ticket collectors lean out between the carriages—their hats pulled down firmly on their heads—to announce the departure punctually, and I would have smelled the smoke of the locomotive and heard the screech from its smokestack. The train would have pulled out right under my nose, taking Cervoni and Korzeniowski, among other passengers, and, in the freight cars, the one thousand two hundred and ninety-three breech-loading, bolt-action Chassepot rifles, which had crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the
Saint-Antoine
and which had, themselves, a good story to tell.

Yes, Readers of the Jury, in my democratic tale things also have a voice, and will also be allowed to take the floor. (Oh, the tricks a poor narrator must resort to in order to tell what he doesn’t know, to fill his uncertainties with something interesting. . . . ) Well, I wonder: if, instead of snoring in my room,
ad portas
of a terrible headache, I had gone down to the station and mixed with the travelers, and I had meddled in the freight car and interrogated one of the Chassepots, any one of them, one chosen at random for the objectives of my limitless curiosity, what story would it have told me? In a certain Conradian novel whose name I do not care to remember, a certain rather affected character, a certain Frenchified Creole, asks: “What do I know of military rifles?” And I, now, put myself on the other side with a much more interesting (forgive my modesty) question: What do rifles know of us?

 

T
he Chassepot brought by Korzeniowski to Colombian lands was manufactured in the Toulon armories in 1866. In 1870 it was taken as army-issue weapon to the Battle of Wissembourg and used, under the orders of General Douay, by soldier Pierre-Henri Desfourgues, who dexterously aimed it at Boris Seeler (1849) and Karl Heinz Waldraff (1851). Pierre-Henri Desfourgues was wounded by a Dreyse and removed from the front; in the hospital, he received the news that Mademoiselle Henriette Arnaud (1850), his fiancée, was breaking their engagement to marry Monsieur Jacques-Philippe Lambert (1821), presumably for financial reasons. Pierre-Henri Desfourgues cried for twenty-seven consecutive nights, at the end of which he introduced the barrel of the Chassepot (11 millimeters) into his own mouth, till it touched his uvula (7 millimeters) with the sight (4 millimeters), and squeezed the trigger (10 millimeters).

The Chassepot was inherited by Alphonse Desfourgues, Pierre-Henri’s first cousin, who turned up armed with it for the defense of Mars-la-Tour. Alphonse shot it sixteen times during the course of the battle; not once did he hit a target. The Chassepot was then taken from him (in a rude way, apparently) by Captain Julien Roba (1839), who from the Metz Fortress successfully shot cavalrymen Friedrich Strecket, Ivo Schmitt, and Dieter Dorrestein (all 1848). Emboldened, Captain Roba joined the vanguard and withstood five hours of the attack of two Prussian regiments. He died after taking a bullet from a Snider-Enfield. No one has been able to explain what a Snider-Enfield was doing in the hands of a Prussian of the 7th Armored Division (Georg Schlink, 1844).

During the Battle of Gravelotte, the Chassepot changed hands one hundred and forty-five times and fired five hundred and ninety-nine bullets, of which two hundred and thirty-one missed, one hundred and ninety-seven killed, and one hundred and seventy-one caused injuries. Between the hours of 2:10 and 7:30 p.m. it lay abandoned in a trench in Saint-Privat. Jean-Marie Ray (1847), under the orders of General Canrobert, had replaced a dead gunner on a
mitrailleuse
and died in his turn. Recovered after the battle, the Chassepot had the luck to fight in Sedan, under Napoleon III; like Napoleon III it was defeated and taken prisoner. Difference: while Napoleon went into exile in England, the Chassepot served Konrad Deresser (1829), artillery captain of the Prussian 11th Regiment, during the siege of Paris. In Deresser’s hands, it was present in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles and witnessed the proclamation of the German Empire; hanging over Deresser’s back, it was present in the Louis XIV Salon and witnessed the suggestive glances of Madame Isabelle Lafourie; at Deresser’s feet, it was present in the woods behind the Palace, and witnessed the way the Captain’s pelvis responded to those glances. Days later, Deresser moved to Paris as part of the German occupation; Madame Lafourie, in her capacity as occupied territory, became a regular creditor of his favors (January 29, February 12, February 13, March 2, March 15 at 6:30 and at 6:55 p.m., April 1). April 2: Monsieur Lafourie enters a room on rue de l’Arcade by surprise and by force. April 3: Konrad Deresser receives Monsieur Lafourie’s seconds. April 4: The Chassepot waits on the side, while Monsieur Lafourie and Captain Deresser each take a Galand revolver (1868, made in Belgium). Both Galands fire, but only Deresser is hit by a bullet (10.4 millimeters) and falls the full span of his height (1,750 millimeters). On April 5, 1871, Monsieur Lafourie sells the defeated man’s Chassepot on the black market. Which is far from an honorable way to behave.

For five years, two months, and twenty-one days, the Chassepot disappears. But at the end of June 1876 it is acquired, along with another one thousand two hundred and ninety-two rifles, veterans like itself of the Franco-Prussian War, by Frédéric Fontaigne. Fontaigne—it is a secret to no one—works as member of staff in charge of various matters for a firm called Déléstang & Fils, owner of a fleet of sailing ships based in Marseille, as well as playing the straw man for Monsieur Déléstang, aristocrat and amateur banker, fanatic conservative, nostalgic realist, and ardent ultra-Catholic. Monsieur Déléstang has decided to give the Chassepot a particular destiny. After spending fourteen days and nights in a deposit in the
vieux port
of Marseille, the rifle embarked in one of the company’s ships: the
Saint-Antoine
.

The Atlantic crossing follows, without incident. The ship anchors in Limón Bay, Panama, United States of Colombia. The Chassepot is taken by boat to the railway depot (this has already been mentioned). On board freight car number 3 (this, on the other hand, has not), it covers the fifteen leagues between Colón and Panama City, where it is the object of a clandestine transaction. Night has just fallen. At the Waterfront Market, under an awning among bunches of Urubá bananas, a meeting is held between the Polish steward Józef Korzeniowski, the Corsican adventurer Dominic Cervoni, the Conservative General Juan Luis De la Pava, and the interpreter Leovigildo Toro. While General De la Pava hands over the sum agreed, through multiple intermediaries, with Déléstang & Fils, the Chassepot and the one thousand two hundred and ninety-two like it are taken to the port in mule-drawn carts and loaded onto the
Helena
steamship, whose Pacific route comes from California, via Nicaragua, and has as its final destination the port of Lima, Peru. Hours later, on board the
Helena
, General De la Pava gets repeatedly drunk and, to shouts of “Death to the Government! Death to President Aquileo Parra! Death to the damned Liberal Party!” shoots six shots into the air with the Smith & Wesson model 3 revolver he bought in Panama from a California miner (Bartholomew J. Jackson, 1834). On August 24, the steamer reaches port in the city of Buenaventura, on the Pacific coast of Colombia.

And so, covering the difficult trail from Buenaventura to Tuluá on muleback—the mules walk sometimes two or three days in a row without resting, and one of them collapses on the way up the Cordillera—the contraband arrives, under General De la Pava’s supervision, at the front at Los Chancos. It is August 30, and it is almost midnight; General Joaquin María Córdoba, who will command the battle against the monster of Liberal atheism, sleeps peacefully in his tent but wakes when he hears the sound of mules and carts. He congratulates De la Pava; he makes his generals kneel and pray for the Déléstang family, pronouncing the surname variously as Delestón, Colestén, and Del Hostal. In a matter of minutes the four thousand and forty-seven Conservative soldiers are reciting the Sacred Heart of Jesus in which they trust and requesting eternal health for the crusaders of Marseille, their distant benefactors. The following morning, after years of inactivity on the noble stages of war, the Chassepot is placed in the hands of Ruperto Abello (1849), brother-in-law of the Buga parish priest, and goes back into combat.

At 6:47 a.m., its shot pierces the throat of Wenceslao Serrano, an artisan from Ibagué. At 8:13, it hits the right quadriceps of Silvestre E. Vargas, fisherman from La Dorada, making him fall; and at 8:15, after a failed reloading attempt, its bayonet is plunged into the thorax of the same Vargas, between the second and third ribs. It is 9:30 when its shot perforates the right lung of Miguel Carvajal Cotes,
chicha
producer; it is 9:54 when it blows apart the neck of Mateo Luis Noguera, a young journalist from Popayán who would have written great novels had he lived longer. The Chassepot kills Agustin Iturralde at 10:12, Ramón Mosquera at 10:29, Jesús María Santander at 10:56. And at 12:44, Vicente Noguera, older brother of Mateo Luis and first reader of his first poems—“Elegy for My Donkey” and “Immortal Jubilation”—who has followed Ruperto Abello for three hours across the battlefield, disobeying the orders of General Julián Trujillo and exposing himself to a court-martial that will later absolve him, takes cover behind Barrabás, his own dead horse, and fires. He does not do so with the Spenser rifle that had been issued to him before the battle but with the 20-caliber Remington that his father used to take when he went hunting in the Cauca River Valley. The bullet hits Ruperto Abello’s left ear, destroys the cartilage, breaks the cheekbone, and exits through the eye (green and celebrated in his family). Abello dies instantly; the Chassepot remains in the grass, among cow pies from a dairy herd.

Like Abello, two thousand one hundred and seven Conservative soldiers, many of them bearers of contraband Chassepots, die in Los Chancos. On the other side, one thousand three hundred and five Liberal soldiers die by the smuggled bullets of those rifles. Scouring the battlefield as part of the victorious army, young Fidel Emiliano Salgar, General Trujillo’s ex-slave, picks up the Chassepot and takes it with him as the Liberals advance toward the State of Antioquia. The Battle of Los Chancos, one of the bloodiest in the 1876 civil war, has left a profound mark on Salgar’s soul, as well as a profound hole in his left hand (produced by the rusty bayonet of Marceliano Jiménez, farm laborer). If Fidel Emiliano Salgar were a poet and French, he would undoubtedly have embarked on a sonnet called “L’ennui de la guerre.” But Salgar was neither French nor a poet, and he has no way of sublimating the unbearable tension of the last few days or the persistent image of every one of the dead men he has seen. Armed with the Chassepot, Salgar begins to talk to himself; and that night, after using the same bayonet that killed Silvestre E. Vargas to kill the sentinel (Estanislao Acosta González, 1859), Salgar reveals—by the look in his eye, by his gestures—that he has gone mad.

The Chassepot’s life ends shortly thereafter.

Correctly aimed, the rifle allows Salgar to terrorize several of his battalion comrades and enjoy doing so (it’s like a small revenge). Many of them let him be, in spite of the danger an unstable and armed man represented to a military contingent, because the magnitude of his madness was not visible from outside. By the night of September 25, the battalion, Salgar, and the rifle have crossed the State of Antioquia and arrived at the banks of the Atrato River, as part of their reconquest of Conservative territory. Night catches them at the Hacienda Miraflores. Salgar, barefoot and shirtless, points the gun at General Anzoátegui, who had been sleeping in his tent, and they walk toward the river; Salgar manages to push off in a dugout he finds on the bank, all the time with the bayonet pressed against the General’s ribs and his eyes loose and turbulent like those of a broken doll. But the dugout has gone barely ten meters into the current of the Atrato when the guards arrive at the riverbank and form an authentic firing squad. In the midst of his cloudy reasoning, Salgar raises the Chassepot, aims at the General’s head, and his last shot pierces the skull before anyone has time to do anything. The rest of the soldiers, whose names no longer matter, open fire.