The Secret History of Costaguana (32 page)

The martial maneuvers that, according to Eloísa, the Tiradores battalion carried out in front of our house did not wake me up. I slept dreamlessly, without any notion of time; and then Panamanian reality came flooding in. At about noon, Colonel Shaler was standing on my front porch, beside the hammock that had belonged to my father, pounding on the screen door so hard he might have knocked it off its hinges. Before starting to wonder where Eloísa had gone on this exceptional day when all the schools were closed, the smell of the fish stew she was cooking in the kitchen reached my nose. I barely had time to pull on a pair of boots and a decent shirt and answer the door. Behind Shaler, far enough back not to be able to hear his words, was Colonel Eliseo Torres, duly accompanied by his bugler.

Shaler said: “Lend us your table, Altamirano, and serve us some coffee, for the love of God. You won’t regret it, I swear. At this table history is going to be made.”

It was a heavy oak table, with round legs and a drawer with iron rings on each of the longest edges. Shaler and Torres sat on opposite sides, each in front of a drawer, and I sat at the head of the table where I always sat; the bugler stood out on the porch looking at the street occupied by the Tiradores soldiers, as if the battalion still expected a treacherous attack from the revolutionaries or the marines. So we were sitting, and were still settling into the heavy chairs, when Colonel Shaler put both hands, like gigantic water spiders, on the table and began to speak with his tongue tangled by the stubbornness of his accent but with the persuasive powers of a hypnotist.

“Honorable Colonel Torres, allow me to speak frankly: yours is a lost cause.”

“What?”

“The independence of Panama is a fait accompli.”

Torres leapt to his feet, his eyebrows arched indignantly, and attempted an unconvincing protest: “I haven’t come here to—” But Shaler cut him off.

“Sit down, man, don’t be foolish,” he said. “You have come here to listen to offers. And I have a very good one, Colonel.”

Colonel Torres tried to interrupt him—his hand went up, his throat emitted a snarl—but Shaler, consummate hypnotist, shut him up with his gaze. Before the day was out, he explained, the battleships
Dixie
and
Maryland
would appear in Limón Bay, full to the gunnels with U.S. Marines. The
Cartagena
had fled at the slightest sign of confrontation, and that should give him an idea of the central government’s position. On the other hand, nobody could shout about independence as long as the Tiradores remained physically present on the Isthmus, and the
Cartagena
was the battalion’s only means of transport. “But this morning things have changed, Colonel Torres,” said Shaler. “If you look out toward the port, you’ll see anchored in the distance a steamship with a Colombian flag. It’s the
Orinoco
, a passenger ship.” Colonel Shaler steadied his spider-like hands on the dark wood of the oak table, on each side of a coffee served in French porcelain, and said that the
Orinoco
would be sailing for Barranquilla at half past seven that evening. “Colonel Torres: I’ve been authorized to offer you the sum of eight thousand U.S. dollars if you and your men can be on board by then.”

“But this is a bribe,” said Torres.

“Certainly not,” said Shaler. “That money is for rations for your troops, who well deserve it.”

And at that moment, like a punctual extra in a theater play—and we already know, Readers of the Jury, who was angelically directing ours—the revolutionaries’ agent in Colón, Porfirio Meléndez, appeared on my front porch. He was accompanied by a
cargador
from the Freight House carrying a chest on his shoulders, like he would a small child (as if the
cargador
was a proud father and the leather chest his son who wanted to see the parade).

“Is this it?” asked Shaler.

“This is it,” said Meléndez.

“Lunch is almost ready,” said Eloísa.

“I’ll let you know,” I told her.

The
cargador
dropped the chest on the table and the cups jumped in their saucers, splashing the coffee left in them and coming perilously close to getting chipped. Colonel Shaler explained that inside were eight thousand dollars removed from the coffers of the Panama Railroad Company under the guarantee of the Brandon Bank of Panama City. Colonel Torres stood up, walked to the porch, and said something to his bugler, who immediately disappeared. Then he returned to the negotiating table (to my dining-room table, awaiting a fish stew and finding itself involuntarily transformed into a negotiating table). He did not say a single word, but Shaler the hypnotist didn’t need words at that moment. He understood. He understood perfectly.

Porfirio Meléndez opened the chest.

“Count it,” he said to Torres. But Torres had folded his arms and did not move.

“Altamirano,” said Shaler, “you’re the host of this meeting. You represent neutrality, you’re the judge. Count the money, please.”

Readers of the Jury: the Angel of History’s sense of humor, that sublime comedian, was confirmed for the umpteenth time on that fifth of November 1903, between one and four in the afternoon, in the Altamirano-Madinier house in the Christophe Colomb neighborhood of the future Republic of Panama. During those hours I, evangelist of the crucifixion of Colombia, handled a greater quantity of U.S. dollars than I had ever in my life seen in one place. The acrid, metallic smell of the dollars stuck to my hands, these clumsy hands that were not used to touching what they held that afternoon. My hands don’t know—have never known—how to shuffle cards for poker; imagine how they felt faced with what fate brought before them that day. . . . Eloísa, who had stopped in the frame of the kitchen door with a wooden spoon in her hand, ready to give me a taste of the stew, witnessed my quasi-notarial labor. And something happened at that moment, because I was unable to look her in the eye.
I am flesh of Colón flesh
. Eloísa did not remind me out loud, but she didn’t have to: she didn’t have to pronounce those words for me to hear them.
I am blood of Panamanian blood
. We did not share that, Eloísa dear, that’s what separated us. In the middle of the revolution that would carry off Panama, I realized that you, too, could be dragged far away from me; the Isthmus was detaching itself from the continent and beginning to distance itself from Colombia, floating in the Caribbean Sea like an abandoned lighter, and carrying off my daughter, my daughter who had fallen asleep inside, under the palm leaves, on top of the cases of coffee covered in ox hides like my stepfather used to use in happier times, when he traded up and down the Magdalena River. . . . My hands moved, passing worn bills and piling up silver coins, but I could have paused to tell her to go ahead and eat her lunch, or given her a complicit or perhaps cheerful glance so we understood each other, but none of that happened. I kept counting with my head bowed, like a medieval thief about to be decapitated, and after a certain point the movements became so automatic that my mind could occupy itself with the other thoughts pushing and shoving their way in. I wondered if my mother had died in pain, what my father would have thought if he’d seen me at this juncture. . . . I thought of the dead engineer, of his dead son, of the profound irony that yellow fever should have given me the only love I’d ever known. . . . All the images were ways of avoiding the limitless humiliation that was overwhelming me. And then, at some moment, my humiliated voice began to give out figures almost of its own accord. Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven. Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight. Seven thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. The end.

Colonel Shaler left as soon as Torres declared himself satisfied with the receipt of his money for rationing his troops; before leaving, he said to Torres: “Send one of your men to the Company offices before six to collect the tickets. Tell him to ask for me, I’ll be expecting him.” Then he said good-bye to me with a rather casual salute. “Altamirano, you’ve been of great service to us,” he said. “The Republic of Panama is grateful.” He turned toward Eloísa and clicked his heels. “Señorita, a pleasure,” he said, and she nodded, still with the wooden spoon in hand, and soon went back into the kitchen to serve lunch, because life had to go on.

Now you can understand, Eloísa: it was the most bitter fish stew I’ve ever eaten. The yucca and the
arracacha
tasted like much-handled coins. The flesh of the fish did not smell of onion or coriander but of dirty dollar bills. Eloísa and I lunched as the street filled with soldiers’ movements, the laborious drive of the battalion taking down their tents and packing up their equipment and beginning to depart Christophe Colomb for the Railroad Company wharf, to leave the way open for the revolution. Later the sky cleared and a merciless sunlight fell over Colón like a herald of the dry season. Eloísa, I remember perfectly the expression of serenity, of complete confidence, with which you went to your room, picking up the copy of
María
you were reading, and lay down in your hammock. “Wake me up when it gets dark,” you said. And in a matter of minutes you’d fallen asleep, with your index finger stuck between the pages of the novel, looking like the Virgin receiving the Annunciation.

Eloísa dear: God knows, if he exists, that I did all I could to let you catch me in the act. My body, my hands, took on a deliberate slowness in the process of taking out of the utility room (which in the houses on stilts of Christophe Colomb was barely a corner in the kitchen) the smallest trunk, one I could carry without help. I dragged it instead of picking it up, perhaps intending that the noise might wake you, and when I dropped it onto the bed, I didn’t worry about the creaking of the wood. Eloísa, I even allowed myself time to choose certain outfits, discard some, carefully fold the others . . . all to try to give you time to wake up. I looked on the desk that had belonged to Miguel Altamirano for a leather bookmark; you didn’t notice when I took the book out of your hands taking care not to lose your place. And there, standing next to your sleeping body that did not sway in your hammock, beside your breathing so quiet that the movements of your chest and shoulders were not visible at first glance, I looked through the novel for the letter in which María confesses to Efraín that she is ill, that she is slowly dying. He, from London, comes to believe that only his return can save her and sets off immediately; a short time later he passes through Panama, crosses the Isthmus, and boards the schooner
Emilia López
that takes him to Buenaventura. At that moment, on the brink of doing what I was planning to do, I felt for Efraín the most intense sympathy I’ve ever felt for anyone in my life, because I seemed to see in his fictional destiny an inverted and distorted version of my real destiny. By way of Panama, he returns from London to find his beloved; from Panama, I was beginning to flee, leaving behind that budding woman who was my entire life, and London was one of my probable destinations.

I set the book on top of you and walked down the porch steps. It was six o’clock in the evening, the sun had sunk into Lake Gatún, and the
Orinoco
, that shitty ship, was beginning to fill with shitty soldiers from a shitty battalion, and in one of its compartments was a shipment of enough dollars to break a continent in two, open geological faults, and disrupt borders, not to mention lives. I stayed on deck until the port of Colón was out of sight, until the lights of the Cunas that Korzeniowski had seen years before, as he approached our shores, had disappeared from sight. The landscape I’d been part of for more than a quarter of a century disappeared suddenly, devoured by the distance and the mists of the night, and with it disappeared the life I led there. Yes, Readers of the Jury, I know very well it was my ship that was moving; but there, on the deck of the
Orinoco
, I could have sworn that before my eyes the Isthmus of Panama had separated from the continent and was beginning to float away, like a lighter, and I knew inside that adrift lighter was my daughter. I confess it willingly: I don’t know what I would have done, Eloísa, if I had seen you, if you had woken up in time and, understanding everything in a flash of lucidity or clairvoyance, had rushed to the port to beg me with your hands or eyes not to go, not to leave you, my only daughter, who still needed me.

After taking from the Isthmus the last fallback of Colombian central power, after guaranteeing with its departure that Panamanian independence was definitive and irrevocable, the
Orinoco
put into port at Cartagena and stopped there for a few hours. I remember the spotty face of a corporal who gambled away his last paycheck on a game of poker dice. I remember the scene kicked up by a lieutenant’s wife in the dining room (according to some, there was another woman involved). I remember Colonel Torres ordering a subordinate to spend thirty days in the brig for suggesting there was money somewhere on board, American money that had been paid in exchange for that desertion, and that the soldiers were owed a share of it.

The next morning, with the first light on the pink horizon, the
Orinoco
arrived in Barranquilla.

 

B
y the afternoon of November 6, the government of President Theodore Roosevelt had granted the Republic of Panama its first formal recognition, and the
Marblehead
, the
Wyoming
, and the
Concord
, of the U.S. Pacific fleet, headed for the Isthmus to protect the nascent Republic from Colombian restoration efforts. Meanwhile, I found a ticket for the passenger steamer
Hood
, of the Royal Mail, that plied the Barranquilla–London route, from the mouth of the Magdalena to the belly of the Thames, and prepared to embark on that journey which did not include my daughter. How could I condemn Eloísa to exile and uprootedness, too? No, my broken country had broken me inside, but she, seventeen years old, had the right to a life free of that rupture, free of the voluntary ostracism and phantoms of exile (for she, flesh of my flesh, was also flesh of Colón flesh, as I was not). And I, of course, could no longer give her that life. My adored Eloísa: if you are reading these lines, if you have read those that precede them, you’ve witnessed all the forces that overcame us, and perhaps you’ve understood the extreme acts a man must carry out to defeat them. You’ve heard me talk of Angels and Gorgons, of the desperate battles I fought against them for the control of my own minuscule and banal life, and you can perhaps testify to the honesty of my private war and can forgive the cruelties this war has led me to commit. And you can especially understand that there was no longer a place for me in the wastelands I was able to escape, those cannibal lands where I no longer recognized myself, that no longer belonged to me the way a homeland belongs to a satisfied man, to a clean conscience.