The Secret History of Costaguana (34 page)

It’s possible
The Secret History of Costaguana
arose from
Nostromo
, which I read for the first time in Francis and Suzanne Laurenty’s house (Xhoris, Belgium) during the summer of 1998; it’s possible that it came from the essay “El
Nostromo
de Joseph Conrad,” which Malcolm Deas included in his book
Del poder y la gramatica
, which I read in Barcelona at the beginning of the year 2000; and it’s possible that it came from an informative article that Alejandro Gaviria published in the Colombian journal
El Malpensante
in December 2001. But it is also possible (and this is my preferred possibility) that the first hunch of the novel came into being in the year 2003, while I was writing, for my friend Conrado Zuluaga, a brief biography of Joseph Conrad. The opportune commission obliged me to revise, out of rigor or curiosity, Conrad’s letters and novels, as well as Deas’s and Gaviria’s texts and many others, and at some point it struck me as implausible that this novel had not been written before, which is undoubtedly the best reason someone can have for writing a novel. Among the fifty or so books I read in order to write this one, it would be dishonest not to mention
Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives
by Frederick Karl,
The Path Between the Seas
by David McCullough,
Conrad in the Nineteenth Century
by Ian Watt,
History of Fifty Years of Misrule
by José Avellanos, and
1903: Adiós, Panama
by Enrique Santos Molano. It would be unjust to forget certain phrases that accompanied the writing of the novel as guides or as tutors and that would have been epigraphs if it hadn’t seemed to me, in a capricious and rather untenable way, that they would break the chronological autonomy of my tale. From the story “Guayaquil” by Borges: “It may be that one cannot speak about the Caribbean republic without echoing, however remotely, the monumental style of its most famous historian, Captain Józef Korzeniowski.” From
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
by Julian Barnes: “We make up a story to cover the facts we don’t know or can’t accept, we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.” From
Artificial Respiration
by Ricardo Piglia: “The only things that are mine are things whose history I know.” Joyce’s “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” was useless to me; it’s fine for Stephen Dedalus, but José Altamirano, I think, would feel closer to notions of farce or vaudeville.

Be that as it may, the first pages of the novel were written in January 2004. Over the course of the more or less two years that passed until the definitive version, many people got involved in its composition, voluntarily or involuntarily, directly or (very) indirectly, facilitating the writing on some occasions and life on others and on rare occasions both, and here I would like to record my gratitude and acknowledgments. They are, in the first place, Hernán Montoya and Socorro de Montoya, whose generosity can never be repaid with these couple of lines. And then Enrique de Hériz and Yolanda Cespedosa, Fanny Velandia, Justin Webster and Assumpta Ayuso, Alfredo Vásquez, Amaya Elezcano, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Mercedes Casanovas, María Lynch, Gerardo Marín, Juan Villoro, Pilar Reyes and Mario Jursich, Mathias Enard, Rodrigo Fresán, Pere Sureda and Antonia González, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Ramón González and Magda Anglès, Ximena Godoy, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Camila Loew, and Israel Vela.

This book owes something to all these people, and at the same time owes everything (as do I) to Mariana.

 

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the critically acclaimed, award-winning Colombian author of
The Informers
. He has translated works by E. M. Forster, Victor Hugo, and John Dos Passos, among others, into Spanish. His fiction has been translated into fourteen languages.

Educated in Colombia, and in Paris at the Sorbonne, he now teaches in Barcelona, where he lives with his wife and twin daughters.

Anne McLean has translated Latin American and Spanish novels, short stories, memoirs, and other writings by authors including Julio Cortázar, Ignacio Martínez de Pisón, Héctor Abad, Enrique Vila-Matas, and Tomás Eloy Martínez. Two of her translations have been awarded the
Independent
Foreign Fiction Prize:
Soldiers of Salamis
by Javier Cercas, in 2004, and Evelio Rosero’s
The Armies
, in 2009.