The Secret History of Costaguana

I. Upside-down Frogs, Chinamen, and Civil Wars

Let’s just come right out and say it: the man has died. No, that won’t do. I’ll be more precise: the Novelist (with a capital N) has died. You all know who I mean. Don’t you? Well, I’ll try again: the Great English Novelist has died. The Great English Novelist — Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer — has died. The Great English-language Novelist — Polish by birth, sailor before he became a writer, who went from failed suicide to living classic, from common gunrunner to Jewel of the British Crown — has died. Ladies and gentlemen: Joseph Conrad has died. I receive the news familiarly, as one might receive an old friend, then realize, not without some sadness, that I’ve spent my whole life waiting for it.

I begin writing this with all the London broadsheets (their microscopic print, their uneven, narrow columns) spread out over my green leather desktop. Through the press, which has played such diverse roles over the course of my life — threatening to ruin it at times, and at others granting what little luster it has — I am informed of the heart attack and its circumstances: the visit from Nurse Vinten, the shout heard from downstairs, the body falling out of the chair. Through enterprising journalism I attend the funeral in Canterbury; through the impertinences of reporters I watch them lower the body and place the stone, that headstone beset with errors (a K out of place, a vowel wrong in one of the names). Today, August 7, 1924, while in my distant Colombia they are celebrating one hundred and five years since the Battle of Boyacá, here in England they mourn, without pomp and ceremony, the passing of the Great Novelist. While in Colombia they commemorate the victory of the armies of independence over the forces of the Spanish Empire, here, in this ground of another empire, the man has been buried forever, the man who robbed me. .

But no.

Not yet.

It’s still too soon.

It’s too soon to explain the forms and qualities of that theft; it’s too soon to explain what merchandise was stolen, what motives the thief had, what damage the victim suffered. I hear the questions clamoring from the stalls: What can a famous novelist have in common with a poor, anonymous, exiled Colombian? Readers: have patience. You don’t want to know everything at the beginning; do not investigate, do not ask, for this narrator, like a benevolent father, will gradually provide the necessary information as the tale proceeds. . In other words, leave it all in my hands. I’ll decide when and how to tell what I want to tell, when to hide, when to reveal, when to lose myself in the nooks and crannies of my memory for the mere pleasure of doing so. Here I shall tell you of implausible murders and unpredictable hangings, elegant declarations of war and slovenly peace accords, of fires and floods and intriguing ships and conspiratorial trains; but somehow all that I tell you will be aimed at explaining and explaining to myself, link by link, the chain of events that provoked the encounter for which my life was destined.

For that’s how it is: the disagreeable business of destiny has its share of responsibility in all this. Conrad and I, who were born countless meridians apart, our lives marked by the difference of the hemispheres, had a common future that would have been obvious from the first moment, even to the most skeptical person. When this happens, when the paths of two men born in distant places are destined to cross, a map can be drawn a posteriori. Most often the encounter is singular: Franz Ferdinand encounters Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo and is shot dead along with his wife, the nineteenth century, and all those European certainties; General Rafael Uribe Uribe encounters two peasants, Galarza and Carvajal, in Bogotá and shortly thereafter dies near the Plaza de Bolívar, with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders. Conrad and I met only once, but long ago we had been on the verge of doing so. Twenty-seven years passed between the two events. The aborted encounter, which was on the verge of taking place but which never happened, occurred in 1876, in the Colombian province of Panama; the other meeting — the actual one, the fateful one — happened at the end of November 1903. And it happened here: in the chaotic, imperial, and decadent city of London. Here, in the city where I write and where death predictably awaits me, city of gray skies and the smell of coal in which I arrived for reasons not easy, yet obligatory, to explain.

I came to London, like so many people have come to so many places, fleeing from the history that was my lot, or rather, from the history of the country that was my lot. In other words, I came to London because here history had ceased some time ago: nothing happened in these lands anymore, everything had already been invented and done; they’d already had all the ideas, all the empires had arisen and they’d fought all the wars, and I would be forever safe from the disasters that Great Moments can impress onto Small Lives. Coming here was, therefore, a legitimate act of self-defense; the jury that judges me will have to take that into consideration.

For I, too, shall be accused in this book; I, too, shall sit on the timeworn bench, although the patient reader will have to cover more than a few pages to discover of what I accuse myself. I, who came in flight from Big History, now go back a whole century to the core of my little story, and shall attempt to investigate the roots of my disgrace. During that night, the night of our encounter, Conrad listened to me tell my story; and now, dear readers — readers who shall judge me, Readers of the Jury — it’s your turn. For the success of my tale rests on this supposition: you will have to know all that Conrad knew.

(But there is someone else. . Eloísa, you, too, will have to get to know these reminiscences, these confessions. You, too, will have to deliver, when the time comes, your own pardon or your own guilty verdict.)

My story begins in February 1820, five months after Simón Bolívar made his victorious entrance into the capital of my recently liberated country. Every story has a father, and this one begins with the birth of mine: Don Miguel Felipe Rodrigo Lazaro del Niño Jesús Altamirano. Miguel Altamirano, known to his friends as the Last Renaissance Man, was born in the schizophrenic city of Santa Fe de Bogotá, which from here on in will be called either Santa Fe or Bogotá or even That Shit Hole; while my grandmother tugged hard on the midwife’s hair and let out screams that frightened the slaves, a few steps away the law was approved by which Bolívar, in his capacity as father of the nation, chose the name for that country fresh out of the oven, and the country was solemnly baptized. So the Republic of Colombia — schizophrenic country that will later be called New Granada or the United States of Colombia or even That Shit Hole — was a babe in arms, and the corpses of the executed Spaniards were still fresh; but there is no historical event that marks or distinguishes my father’s birth, except for the superfluous ceremony of that baptism.

My father was — as I have already said — the Last Renaissance Man. I cannot say he was of blue blood, because that hue was no longer acceptable in the new republic, but what flowed through his veins was magenta, shall we say, or maybe purple. His tutor, a frail and sickly man who had been educated in Madrid, educated my father in turn with the Quixote and Garcilaso; but the young Altamirano, who by the age of twelve was already a consummate rebel (as well as a terrible literary critic), strove to reject the literature of the Spaniards, the Voice of the Occupation, and in the end succeeded in doing so. He learned English to read Thomas Malory, and one of his first published poems, a hyperromantic and mawkish creation comparing Lord Byron to Simón Bolívar, appeared under the signature Lancelot of the Lake. My father discovered later that Byron had in fact wanted to come and fight with Bolívar, and it was only chance that finally took him to Greece; and what he henceforth felt for Romantics, from England and anywhere else, began to replace little by little the devotions and loyalties his elders had left him as his birthright.

Not that this was difficult, for by the age of twenty the Latin American Byron was already orphaned. His mother had been killed by smallpox; his father (in a much more elegant way) by Christianity. My grandfather, an illustrious colonel who had fought against the dragoons of many Spanish regiments, was stationed in the southern provinces when the progressive government decreed the closure of four convents, and saw the first riots in defense of religion at bayonet point. One of those Catholic, apostolic, and Roman bayonets, one of those steel points engaged on the crusade for the faith, stabbed him months later; the news of his death arrived in Bogotá at the same time as the city was preparing to repel an attack by those same Catholic revolutionaries. But Bogotá or Santa Fe was, like the rest of the country, divided, and my father would never forget it: leaning out of a window at the university, he saw the people of Santa Fe in procession carrying a figure of Christ dressed in a general’s uniform, heard the shouts of “Death to the Jews,” and marveled at the thought that they referred to his stabbed father, and then returned to the classroom routine, in time to observe his fellow students stabbing with sharp, pointed instruments cadavers recently arrived from the battlefields. For there was nothing at that time, absolutely nothing, the Latin American Byron liked more than being a first-hand witness to the fascinating advances of medical science.

He had enrolled in the Faculty of Law, in obedience to my grandfather’s wishes, but after a while devoted only the first part of his days to the legal codes. Like a Don Juan divided between two lovers, my father went from the ordeal of waking at five in the morning to listen to lectures on codified crimes and methods of acquiring dominion to the hidden or secret or parallel life he began after lunch. My father had purchased, for the exorbitant price of half a real, a hat with a doctor’s rosette, so as not to be detected by the university police, and each day, until five in the afternoon, he hid out in the Faculty of Medicine and spent hours watching young men like himself, young men of his age and no more intelligent, carry out bold explorations into unknown regions of the human body. My father wanted to see how his friend Ricardo Rueda was able to deliver single-handedly the twins clandestinely born to an Andalusian gypsy, as well as to operate on the appendix of the nephew of Don José Ignacio de Márquez, professor of Roman law. And while this went on, a few blocks from the university other procedures were being carried out that were not surgical but whose consequences were no less serious, for in the velvet-covered armchairs of a ministry sat two men with a quill pen signing the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty. In accordance with article XXXV, the country that was now called New Granada granted to the United States the exclusive right of transit across the Isthmus of the province of Panama, and the United States undertook, among other things, to maintain strict neutrality in questions of internal politics. And here begins the disorder, here begins. .

But no.

Not yet.

I’ll reveal more on the subject in a few pages.

The Last Renaissance Man earned a law degree, he did, but I hasten to say that he never practiced: he was too busy with the absorbing vocation of Enlightenment and Progress. By the age of thirty he had not been linked to a single young lady, but his file as founder of Benthamist/revolutionary /socialist/Girondist newspapers expanded scandalously. There was no bishop he had not insulted; there was no respectable family who had not forbidden his entrance into their home or his courting of their daughters. (At La Merced College, a recently founded school for the most distinguished señoritas, his name was anathema.) Little by little my father specialized in the delicate art of earning disfavor and doors slammed in his face, and Santa Fe society joined willingly in the great slamming. My father did not worry: at that time the country he lived in had become unrecognizable — its borders had changed or were threatening to change, it had a different name, its political constitution was as mobile as a donna—and the government for which my grandfather had died had turned, for this reader of Lamartine and Saint-Simon, into the most reactionary of afflictions.

Enter Miguel Altamirano, activist, idealist, optimist; Miguel Altamirano, more than liberal, radical, anticlerical. During the elections of 1849, my father was one of those who purchased the material for the banners that hung all over Bogotá with the slogan VIVA LÓPEZ, TERROR OF THE CONSERVATIVES; he was one of those who gathered outside Congress to intimidate (successfully) the men who were going to elect a new president; once López, candidate of the young revolutionaries, was elected, he was one of those who demanded from the columns of the newspaper of the moment — I don’t remember which one it was at the time, whether The Martyr or The Struggle—the expulsion of the Jesuits. Reaction of the reactionary society: eighty little girls dressed in white with flowers in their hands assembled in front of the Palace to oppose the measure; in his newspaper, my father called them “Instruments of Obscurantism.” Two hundred ladies of unquestionable lineage repeated the demonstration, and my father distributed a pamphlet entitled Hell Hath No Fury Like a Jesuit Scorned. The priests of that New Granada, deprived of authority and privileges, hardened their positions as the months went by, and the sensation of harassment increased. My father, in response, joined the Estrella del Tequendama Masonic lodge: the secret meetings gave him a sense of conspiring (ergo of being alive), and the fact that the elders exempted him from the initiation trials made him think that Freemasonry was a sort of natural habitat. Through his efforts the temple managed to catechize two young priests; his patrons recognized these achievements with advanced promotions. And at some point in that brief process, my father, young soldier in search of battles, found one that appeared minor at first glance, almost trivial, but which would, albeit indirectly, change his life.

In September 1852, while it seemed to rain for forty days and forty nights all over New Granada, my father heard from an old friend from the Faculty of Medicine, liberal like him but less quarrelsome, of the Most Recent Outrage Against the God of Progress: Father Eustorgio Valenzuela, who had declared himself the spiritual guardian of the University of Bogotá, had unofficially banned the use of human cadavers for pedagogical, anatomical, and academic purposes. Surgical apprentices could practice on frogs or mice or rabbits, said the priest, but the human body, creation of divine hand and will, sacred receptacle of the soul, was inviolable and should be respected.

“Medieval!” shouted my father from some printed page or other. “Rancid Papist!” But to no avail: Father Valenzuela’s network of loyalties was solid, and soon the parishioners from neighboring towns, Chía and Bosa and Zipaquirá, did what they could to prevent the students from the sinful capital having recourse to other morgues. The university’s civil authorities came under pressure from the heads of (good) families, and before anyone realized, they had yielded before the blackmail. Upon the university dissection tables crowded the open frogs — the white, porous bellies slit by the scalpel in a violet line — and in the kitchen half the chickens were destined for the stew pot and the other half for the operating room. The Embargo on Bodies became a topic of conversation in the salons and in a matter of weeks was taking up significant space in the newspapers. My father declared the foundation of the New Materialism, and in several manifestos quoted conversations with different authorities: “On the dissection table,” said one, “the tip of my scalpel has never encountered a soul.” Others, more daring (and often anonymous): “The Holy Trinity is something else now: the Holy Spirit has been replaced by Laplace.” The followers, whether voluntary or not, of Father Valenzuela founded in their turn the Old Spiritualism, and produced their own share of witnesses and publicity phrases. They were able to release one accurate and convincing fact: Pascal and Newton had been faithful and practicing Christians. They were able to release a slogan, cheap but no less effective for it: TWO CUPS OF SCIENCE LEAD TO ATHEISM, BUT THREE CUPS LEAD TO FAITH. And thus the matter progressed (or rather did not).

The city watched the vultures squabble. The corpses of cholera victims, which had been leaving the San Juan de Dios Hospital, sporadically, for the last year, were viewed with the avarice of merchants by the radical students, but also by Father Valenzuela’s crusading followers. When one of the patients admitted with fever and vomiting became too thirsty or too cold, word began to circulate and the political forces to prepare themselves: Father Valenzuela came to perform the last rites, and in the midst of them obliged the patient (with bluish skin, eyes sunk deep into the head) to sign a testament containing the unambiguous clause “I die in Christ; I deny my body to science.” My father published an article accusing the priests of denying the patients divine absolution unless they signed those prefabricated testaments; and the priests replied accusing the Materialists of denying those same patients not absolution but tartar emetic. And in the midst of those foul debates, no one stopped to wonder how the illness had managed to climb to 2,600 meters above sea level or whence it had arrived.

Then fate intervened, as tends to happen in history and will happen often in mine, and did so disguised as a foreigner, as a man-fromelsewhere. (Which increased the fears of the Spiritualists. Enclosed as they were on an inaccessible plateau, ten days’ travel away from the Caribbean coast — which in winter could be double — Father Valenzuela’s followers had ensconced themselves in the condition of blinkered horses, and all that came from outside seemed to them worthy of meticulous suspicion.) During those days my father was seen meeting a man who was not from the city. They were seen coming out of the Observatory, or going together to the Commission for Cleanliness and Sanitation, or even entering my grandparents’ house to hold secret conversations among the nettles of the patio, far from the servants. But the servants, two widowed freedwomen and their adolescent children, had arts my father could not have anticipated, and so the street, and then the block, and then the neighborhood, began to find out that the man was tongue-tied when he spoke (by Beelzebub, said Valenzuela), that he was the owner of a train, and that he had come to sell to the University of Bogotá as many dead Chinamen as it wanted to buy.

“If the local dead are forbidden,” my father was heard to say, “then foreign dead will have to be used. If Christian dead are forbidden, we’ll have to avail ourselves of others.”

And that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the Old Spiritualism.

Among the suspicious was Presbyter Echavarría, of the Santo Tomás Church, a younger man than Valenzuela and more, yes, much more energetic.

And the foreigner?

The man from elsewhere?

Some words on that character or, rather, some clarifications. He was not actually tongue-tied but spoke Spanish with a Boston accent; he was not the owner of a train but the representative of the Panama Railroad Company, and he did not come to sell dead Chinamen to the university but rather. . Well, all right: he did come to sell dead Chinamen to the university, or at least that was one of his various missions as ambassador in the capital. Need I state the obvious? His mission was a success. My father and the Materialists had found themselves with their backs against the wall, or rather the opposing side had pushed them there; they were desperate, of course, because this was more than a debate in the press: it was a fundamental battle in the long struggle of Light against Darkness. The appearance of the man from the Company — Clarence was his name, and he was the son of Protestants — was providential. The arrangement did not come about immediately: a number of letters, a number of authorizations, a number of incentives (Valenzuela said bribes) were needed, but in July, there arrived from Honda, and before that from Barranquilla, and before that from the brand-new city of Colón, founded only a few months earlier, fifteen barrels full of ice. In each one came a Chinese coolie doubled over and recently deceased from dysentery or malaria, or even cholera, which in Bogotá was now a thing of the past. Many other nameless cadavers were leaving Panama for many other destinations, and this would continue to happen until the railway works came out the other side of the swamp they were in at the time, until they reached some land where it would be possible to build a cemetery able to withstand the ravages of the climate until Judgment Day.

And the dead Chinamen had a story to tell. Calm yourself, Eloísa dear: this is not one of those books where the dead speak, or where beautiful women ascend to the sky, or priests rise above the ground after drinking a steaming potion. But I hope I’ll be granted some license, and I hope it’ll not be just this once. The university paid an undisclosed sum for the dead Chinamen, but according to some it was not more than three pesos per corpse; in other words, a seamstress could buy herself a cadaver with three months’ work. Soon young surgeons were able to sink their scalpels into the yellow skin; and lying there, cold and pale, launched on a race against their own rate of decomposition, the Chinese workers began to speak of the Panama railroad. They said things that everyone now knows, but which in those days were fresh pieces of news for the great majority of the thirty thousand inhabitants of the capital. The scene now begins to move northward (in space) and recede a few years (in time). And thus, without any other tricks than my own sovereignty over this tale, we arrive at Coloma, California. The year is 1848. More precisely, it is January 24. The carpenter James Marshall has traveled the long and winding trail from New Jersey to conquer the world’s frontier and build a saw mill there. While excavating, he notices that something sparkles in the earth.

And the world goes mad. All of a sudden, the east coast of the United States realizes that the Route to the Gold goes through that obscure isthmus, province of that obscure country that is always changing its name, that mass of murderous jungle whose particular blessing is being the narrowest point of Central America. A year has not yet passed and the Falcon steamship is approaching the Panamanian Limón Bay, solemnly entering the mouth of the Panamanian Chagres River, carrying hundreds of Gringos who clatter pans and rifles and pickaxes every time they move like mobile orchestras and ask loudly where the hell the Pacific is. Some guess; of these, there are those who arrive at their destination. But others fall by the wayside, killed by fever — not gold fever, but the other one — beside the dead mules, dead men and mules back to back in the green river mud, defeated by the heat of those swamps where the trees do not permit the light to pass through. This is how it is: this corrected version of El Dorado, this Gold Trail in the process of being opened, is a place where the sun does not exist, where the heat wilts bodies, where one waves a finger through the air and the finger ends up soaking wet as if it had just come out of the river. This place is hell, but it is a watery hell. And meanwhile the gold calls, and some way must be found to cross hell. I take in the whole country in a single glance: at the same time as my father is calling for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Bogotá, in the Panamanian jungle step by step, sleeper by sleeper, dead worker by dead worker, the miracle of the railroad begins to make its way.

And the fifteen Chinese coolies who later rest on the long dissection tables at the University of Bogotá, after having taught a distracted trainee the location of the liver and the length of the large intestine, those fifteen Chinamen who now begin to develop black stains on their backs (if they are faceup) or on their chests (if they’re facedown), those fifteen Chinamen say in chorus and with pride: We were there. We cleared a way through the jungle, we dug in those swamps, we laid the iron and the sleepers. One of those fifteen Chinamen tells his story to my father, and my father, leaning over the rigor mortis while he examines out of pure Renaissance-man curiosity what is there under a rib, listens with more attention than he thinks. And what is under that rib? My father asks for forceps, and after a while the forceps emerge from the body carrying a splinter of bamboo. And now the talkative and impertinent Chinaman begins to tell my father of the patience with which he had sharpened the stick, of the skillful decency with which he had stuck it into the muddy earth, of the force with which he had thrown himself onto the sharpened point.

A suicide? my father asks (let’s admit it is not a very intelligent question). No, replies the Chinaman, he had not killed himself, the sadness had killed him, and before the sadness the malaria. . Watching his ill workmates hang themselves with the ropes used in the construction of the railway or steal the foreman’s pistol to shoot themselves with had killed him, seeing that in those swamps it was not possible to construct a decent cemetery had killed him, and knowing the jungle’s victims would end up scattered around the world in barrels of ice had killed him. I, says the Chinaman, his skin now almost blue, his stench almost unbearable, I, who in life have built the Panama Railroad, in death shall help to finance it, as will the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-eight dead workers, Chinese, blacks, and Irish, who are visiting the universities and hospitals of the world right now. Oh, how a body travels. .

All this the dead Chinaman tells my father.

But what my father hears is slightly different.

My father does not hear a story of personal tragedies, does not see the dead Chinaman as the nameless worker of no fixed address for whom no grave is possible. He sees him as a martyr, and sees the history of the railway as a true epic. The train versus the jungle, man versus nature. . The dead Chinaman is an emissary from the future, an outpost of Progress. The Chinaman tells him that the passenger infected with cholera, directly responsible for the two thousand deaths in Cartagena and hundreds in Bogotá, was on board that ship, the Falcon; but my father admires the passenger who had left everything to pursue the promise of gold through the murderous jungle. The Chinaman tells my father about the saloons and brothels proliferating in Panama since the foreigners began to arrive; for my father, each drunken worker is an Arthurian knight, each whore an Amazon. The seventy thousand railway sleepers are seventy thousand prophecies of the vanguard. The iron line that crosses the Isthmus is the navel of the world. The dead Chinaman is no longer simply an emissary from the future: he is a herald angel, thinks my father, and he has come to make him see, amid the fallen leaves of his sad life in Bogotá, the vague but luminous promise of a better life.

Speaking for the defense: It was not out of madness that my father cut the dead Chinaman’s hand off. It was not out of madness — my father had never felt saner in his life — that he had it cleaned by one of the Chapinero butchers and put it out in the sun (the scant Bogotá sun) to dry. He had it mounted with bronze screws on a small pedestal that looked like marble, and kept it on one of the shelves of his library, between a tattered edition of Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany and a miniature oil painting of my grandmother with a large ornamental comb in her hair, by an artist of the Gregorio Vásquez school. The index finger, slightly outstretched, points with each of its bare phalanges toward the path my father would have to take.

Friends who visited my father during this time said yes, it was true that the carpal and the metacarpal bones pointed toward the Isthmus of Panama the way a Muslim bows in the direction of Mecca. And I, in spite of how much I might want to launch my tale in the direction indicated by the desiccated finger, must first concentrate on other incidents in the life of my father, who stepped out one fine day of that year of Our Lord 1845 to discover through the word on the street that he had been excommunicated. So much time had passed since the Battle of the Bodies that it took him a while to associate one matter with the other. One Sunday, while my father was receiving the title of Venerable pro Tempore in the Masonic lodge, Presbyter Echavarría mentioned him by name from the accusing pulpit of Santo Tomás Church. Miguel Altamirano had the blood of innocents on his hands. Miguel Altamirano dealt in souls of the dead and was in league with the Devil. Miguel Altamirano, declared Father Echavarría before his audience of faithful and fanatics, was a formal enemy of God and the Church.

My father, as suited the circumstances and as precedents suggested, took the matter as a joke. A few meters from the ostentatious front door of the church was the humbler and particularly nonsanctum door to the printer’s; the same Sunday, late that night, my father delivered his column for El Comunero.

(Or was it El Temporal? These precisions are perhaps superfluous, but no less tormenting for me not to be able to keep track of the leaflets and newspapers published by my father. La Opinión? El Granadino? La Opinión Granadina? or El Comunero Temporal? It is futile. Readers of the Jury, please forgive my poor memory.)

Anyway, whichever newspaper it was, my father delivered his column. The following is not a literal reproduction, but merely what my memory has preserved, though I believe it corresponds quite accurately to the spirit of those words. “A certain backward cleric, one of those who have transformed faith into superstition and Christian rites into sectarian paganism, has assumed the right to excommunicate me, going over the head of the prelate’s judgment and, most of all, that of common sense,” he wrote for all of Bogotá society to read. “The undersigned, in his capacity as Doctor of Earthly Laws, Spokesman of Public Opinion, and Defender of Civilized Values, has received comprehensive and sufficient authority from the community he represents, which has decided to pay the cleric back in kind. And thus Presbyter Echavarría, whom God does not hold in his Glory, is hereby excommunicated from the communion of civilized men. From the Santo Tomás pulpit, he has expelled us from his communion; we, from the pulpit of Gutenberg, expel him from ours. Let it be solemnly enacted.”

The rest of the week went by without incident. But the following Saturday, my father and his radical comrades had gathered at the Café Le Boulevardier, near the cloister of the University of Bogotá, with the members of a Spanish theater company who were on a Latin American tour. The work they had staged, a sort of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme where the gentleman was replaced by a seminarian assaulted by doubts, had already been denounced by the Archbishop, and that was good enough for El Comunero or El Granadino. My father, as editor (as well) of the Varieties section, had proposed an extensive interview with the actors; that evening, once the interview was over — the reporter put away his notebook and his Waterloo pen that a friend had brought him from London — and between one brandy and the next, they spoke of the Echavarría affair. The actors made their own speculations about the Sunday Mass and had started wagering whole reales on the contents of the next day’s sermon when it suddenly began to rain heavily, and the people in the street flocked like chickens: under the eaves, into the doorways, completely blocking the entrance to the café. The place filled with the smell of damp ponchos; beneath trousers and boots that dripped water the café floor became slippery. Then a soprano voice ordered my father to stand, to give up his seat.

My father had never seen Presbyter Echavarría: the news of his excommunication had reached him by way of third parties, and the dispute, until that moment, had gone no further than the confines of the printed page. Looking up, he found himself facing a long, perfectly dry cassock and a closed black umbrella, its tip in a puddle of water shiny and silver like mercury, the handle easily supporting the weight of effeminate hands. The soprano spoke again: “The chair, heretic.” I must believe what my father would tell me years later: that if he did not respond it was not out of insolence, but that the vaudevillian situation — the priest entering a café, the dry priest where all were wet, the priest whose womanly voice undermined his imperious manner — surprised him so much that he didn’t know how to do so. Echavarría interpreted the silence as disdain and returned to the attack:

“The chair, heathen.”

“Come again?”

“The chair, blasphemer. The chair, murderous Jew.”

Then he hit my father lightly on the knee with the tip of his umbrella, once, maybe twice; and at that moment all hell broke loose.

Like a jack-in-the-box, my father swatted away the umbrella (the palm of his hand was left wet and a little red) and stood up. Echavarría let some reaction out from between incensed teeth, “But how dare you,” or words to that effect. As he said it, my father, who had perhaps experienced a fleeting second of good sense, was already turning around to collect his jacket and leave without a glance at his companions, and did not see the moment when the priest went to slap him; nor did he see — this he would say many times, begging to be believed — his own hand, closing of its own accord and landing with all the strength of his pivoting shoulders, on the indignant and pursed little mouth, on the hairless and powdered lip of Presbyter Echavarría. The chin emitted a hollow crunch, the cassock swept backward, as if floating, the boots beneath the cassock slipped in the puddle, and the umbrella fell to the floor a brief second before its owner.

“You should have seen,” my father told me much later, facing the sea, brandy in hand. “At that moment the silence was louder than the downpour.”

The actors stood up. My father’s radical comrades stood up. And this I have thought every time I remember this story: if my father had been alone, or if he had not been in a place frequented by university men, he would have found himself confronted by a furious crowd ready to skewer him on the spot for the affront; but in spite of the odd isolated and anonymous insult emerging from the crowd, in spite of the lethal looks from the two strangers who helped Echavarría to his feet, who recovered his umbrella for him, who brushed off his cassock (with an extra pat or two on the ministerial buttocks), nothing happened. Echavarría left the Boulevardier hurling insults that no one had ever heard a clergyman in Santa Fe de Bogotá say, and threats worthy of a sailor from Marseille, but there ended the latest run-in. My father reached up to touch his face, confirmed that his cheek was hot, said good night to his companions, and walked home in the rain. Two days later, in the early morning before first light, someone knocked on his door. The servant opened the door and saw no one. The reason was obvious: the knocks were not those of someone coming to call, but those of a hammer nailing up a notice.

The anonymous tract did not carry an imprint, but in other respects its contents were quite clear: all the faithful who read those lines were exhorted not to speak to the heretic Miguel Altamirano, to refuse him bread, water, and shelter; it declared that the heretic Miguel Altamirano was considered to be possessed by demons; and it proclaimed that killing him without qualms, as one would a dog, would be a virtuous act, worthy of divine favor.

My father tore it off the door, went back inside, looked for the key to the storage room under the stairs, and took out one of the two pistols that had arrived in my grandfather’s trunk. On his way out he took care, thinking to eliminate any revealing traces, to pull off all the scraps of paper still stuck to the wood of the door under the nail; but then he realized the precaution was useless, because he came upon the same notice ten or fifteen times in the short walk from his house to the printing press that turned out La Opinión. More than that, along the way he also came upon accusing fingers and voices, the powerful prosecution of the Catholics who now, without any actual proceedings taking place, had declared him their enemy. My father, accustomed to attracting attention, was not quite so used to attracting malevolence. The public prosecutors appeared on the wooden balconies (crosses dangling over their chests), and the fact that they did not dare to shout at him was not a relief to my father, but rather confirmation that darker fates than mere public disgrace awaited. He walked into the printer’s with the crumpled notice in his hand, asking the brothers Acosta, the owners of the press, if they could identify the machines responsible: to no avail. He spent the afternoon in the Commerce Club, tried to find out what his comrades thought, and heard that the radical societies had already reached a decision: they would respond with blood and fire, burning down the church and killing every cleric, if Miguel Altamirano was to suffer any attack. He felt less alone, but he also felt that the city was about to suffer a catastrophe. And so that night he made his way to Santo Tomás Church to look for Father Echavarría, walking beneath yellow street lamps that lit up the gleaming white walls of the houses, thinking that two men who had exchanged insults can, just as easily, exchange apologies; but the church was deserted.

Or almost.

Because in one of the last pews was a shape, or what my father, blinded as he entered by the sudden darkness, for the time the retina with all its rods and cones takes to accommodate to the new conditions, had taken for a shape. After strolling up one of the aisles toward the chancel, after going behind — into areas where he was an intruder — and looking for the door to the presbytery and descending the two worn stone steps and stretching out a prudent and polite knuckle to knock a couple of times, my father selected a random pew, one that had a view of the gilding on the altar, and sat down to wait, although he really did not know what words he could use to convince that fanatic.

And then he heard someone say: “That’s him.”

He turned around and saw that the shape was dividing into two. From one side, a cassocked figure that was not Father Echavarría already had his back to him and was leaving the church; from the other, a man in a poncho and hat, a sort of giant bell with legs, began to walk up the center aisle toward the chancel. My father imagined that, beneath the straw hat, in that black space where human features would soon emerge, the eyes of the man were scrutinizing him. My father looked around. From an oil painting he was being watched by a bearded man who was sticking his index finger (well covered with flesh and skin, unlike the one on his Chinaman’s dead hand) into Christ’s open wound. In another painting was a man with wings and a woman who kept her page in a book with another finger just as fleshed out: my father recognized the Annunciation, but the angel was not Chinese. No one seemed prepared to get him out of this fix; the man in the poncho, meanwhile, approached silently, as if sliding over a sheet of oil. My father saw he was wearing rope-soled shoes, saw the rolled-up trousers, and saw, hanging beneath the edge of the poncho, the dirty point of a knife.

Neither of the two spoke. My father knew he could not kill the man there, not because at the age of thirty-four he had never killed anybody (there is always a first time, and my father handled a pistol as well as anyone), but because to do so without witnesses would be like condemning himself in advance. He needed people to see: to see the provocation, the attack, the legitimate defense. He stood up, went out to the side aisle of the nave, and began to take big steps toward the front door; instead of following him, the man in the poncho returned down the central aisle, and pew by pew they walked, tracing parallel lines, while my father was thinking what to do when they ran out of pews. He counted them quickly: six pews, now five, now four.

Three pews.

Now two.

Now one.

My father put his hand in his pocket and cocked the pistol. As they both neared the church door, as the parallel lines converged, the man swept his poncho out of the way and pulled back the hand that held the knife. My father raised the cocked pistol, pointed at the center of the man’s chest, thought of the sad consequences of what he was about to do, thought of the passersby who would invade the church as soon as they heard the shot, thought of the court that would condemn him for voluntary homicide on the basis of testimony from those passersby, thought of my grandfather stabbed by the bayonet and the Chinaman stabbed by the bamboo stake, thought of the firing squad that would shoot him against a rough wall, and said to himself that he was not made for the court or the gallows, that it would be a question of honor to kill his attacker but that the next bullet would be for his own chest.

Then he fired.

“Then I fired,” my father would tell me.

But he did not hear the shot from his own pistol, or rather it seemed that his shot produced such an echo as had never before been heard, a reverberation unprecedented in the world, because at that moment, from the Plaza Bolívar, arrived the thunder of other explosions from many other guns. It was just past midnight, the date was April 17, and the honorable General José María Melo had just led a military coup and declared himself dictator of that poor confused republic.

That’s how it is: the Angel of History saved my father, even though, as will be seen, he did so in a transitory way, simply by swapping one of his enemies for another. My father fired, but no one heard his shot. When he went outside, all the doors were closed and all the balconies deserted; the air smelled of gunpowder and horse shit, and in the distance there were now shouts and heels on cobblestones to be heard and, of course, insistent gunfire. “I knew that very instant. They were the sounds that announced a civil war,” my father would tell me in an oracular tone. . He liked to assume those poses, and many times over the course of our life together (which was not long) he put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me, arching a solemn eyebrow, to tell me that he had predicted this, that he had guessed that. He told me of some event he had witnessed indirectly and then said, “You could see it coming a mile off.” Or rather, “I don’t know how they failed to realize.” Yes, that was my father: the man who, after a certain age, beaten senseless by Great Events — saved on a few occasions, damned on most — ends up developing that curious defense mechanism of predicting things many years after they’d happened.

But allow me a brief aside, another digression. Because I have always believed that on that night the history of my country demonstrated that it at least has a sense of humor. I have spoken of the Great Incident. I take out the magnifying glass and examine it more closely. What do I see? To what does my father owe his improbable impunity? Briefly: One night in January, General Melo drunkenly leaves a military banquet, and when he gets to the Plaza Santander, where his barracks are, runs into a corporal called Quirós, a poor unkempt lad walking the streets at that hour without a pass. The General gives him a good dressing-down, the Corporal forgets himself and responds with insolence, and General Melo sees no better punishment than drawing his sword then and there and cutting his throat in one slash. Great scandal in Bogotá society; great condemnations of militarism and violence. The public prosecutor accuses; the judge is on the point of issuing an arrest warrant against the accused. Melo thinks, with impeccable reasoning: the best defense is not just a good offense, it’s dictatorship. He had the army of war veterans under his command, and he put it to use in his service. Who could blame him?

Well now, I admit, this is no more than a cheap joke, typical gossip — our national sport — but caveat emptor, and I tell it anyway. It is true that in some versions Corporal Quirós arrives late back to the barracks after finding himself involved in a street brawl and is already injured when he runs into Melo; in others, Quirós finds out about the accusations against the General and from his death bed absolves him of all responsibility. (Isn’t that version pretty? It has all that master-and-disciple, mentor-and-protégé mystery. It is gentlemanly, and my father was no doubt fond of it.) But beyond these various explanations, one single thing is irrefutable: General Melo, with his cowlick and double-chinned Mona Lisa face, was the instrument that history used to split its sides laughing at the fate of our young republics, those badly finished inventions for which no patent could be taken out. My father had killed someone, but that fact would pass into nonexistence when another man, to avoid his own indictment as a common criminal, decided to take by force those things of which every Colombian speaks with pride: Liberty, Democracy, and the Institutions. And the Angel of History, sitting in the stalls in his Phrygian cap, burst out laughing so hard he fell off his seat.

Readers of the Jury: I do not know who first compared history to the theater (that distinction does not belong to me), but one thing is sure: that lucid soul was not aware of the tragicomic nature of our Colombian scenario, created by mediocre dramatists, fabricated by sloppy set designers, produced by unscrupulous impresarios. Colombia is a play in five acts that someone tried to write in classical verse but that came out composed of the most vulgar prose, performed by actors with exaggerated gestures and terrible diction. . Well, I return now to that small theater (I shall do so often) and return to my scene: doors and balconies barred, the streets near the Palace of Government transformed into a ghost town. No one heard the shot that thundered between the cold stone walls, no one saw my father leave Santo Tomás Church, no one saw him slip like a shadow through the streets to his home, no one saw him arrive so late that night with a still-warm pistol in his pocket. The small incident had been obliterated by the Big Event: the minuscule death of some anonymous resident of the Egipto neighborhood, by the Superlative Deaths that are the patrimony of Our Lady War. But I have said before that my father did nothing but change enemies, and that’s how it was: once his ecclesiastic pursuer was eliminated, my father found himself pursued by the military. In the new Bogotá of Melo and his allies, radicals like my father were feared for their formidable capacity for disorder — they had not specialized in revolutions and political riots in vain — and twenty-four hours hadn’t yet passed since the man in the poncho, or rather his corpse, had collapsed in Santo Tomás Church, when arrests began all over the city. The radicals, university students or members of Congress, received armed and not particularly pleasant visits from Melo’s men; the cells filled up; several leaders were already fearing for their lives.

My father did not hear this news from his comrades. A lieutenant of the seditious army arrived at his house in the middle of the night and woke him up by banging his rifle butt against the window frame. “I thought my life had ended in that instant,” my father would tell me much later. But that was not the case: across the Lieutenant’s face, a grimace drifted between pride and guilt. My father, resigned, opened the door, but the man did not enter. Before dawn, the Lieutenant told him, a squad of soldiers would be coming to arrest him.

“And how do you know?” my father asked.

“I know because it’s my squad,” said the Lieutenant, “and I have issued the order.”

And he took his leave with a Masonic salute.

Only then did my father recognize him: he was a member of the Estrella del Tequendama lodge.

So after throwing together a few basic necessities, including the murderous pistol and the bony hand, my father sought refuge at the brothers Acosta’s press. He found that several of his fellows had had the same idea: the new opposition was already beginning to organize to return the country to democracy. Death to the tyrant, they shouted (or rather whispered prudently, because there was no sense in alerting the patrols). The fact is that there, that night, among printers and bookbinders, who only went through the motions of seeming impartial, among those lead characters, who looked so peaceful but could stir up entire revolutions when set, surrounded by hundreds or perhaps thousands of wooden drawers that seemed to contain all the protests, threats, manifestos and countermanifestos, accusations and denunciations and vindications of the political world, several radical leaders had gathered to leave the occupied capital together and plan with the armies of other provinces the campaign to recover it. They received my father as if the most natural thing in the world would be to entrust him with the captaincy of a regiment and told him of their plans. My father joined them, in part because the company made him feel safe, in part for the emotion of camaraderie that always seizes idealists; but at the back of his mind he had already made a decision, and his intention remained the same from the beginning of the journey.

Here I speed up. For as I have at times devoted several pages to the events of a single day, at this moment my tale demands I cover in a few lines what happened in several months. Accompanied by a servant, protected by the darkness of the savannah night and well armed, the defenders of the institutions left Bogotá. They climbed the Guadalupe Hill to deserted plateaux where even the frailejón plants froze to death, descending into the tropical lowlands on stubborn, hungry mules they had purchased along the way; they arrived at the Magdalena River, and after eight hours in an unstable dugout they entered Honda and declared it the headquarters of the resistance. During the months that followed, my father recruited men, stockpiled weapons and organized squads, marched as one of General Franco’s volunteers and returned defeated from Zipaquirá, listened to General Herrera predict his own death and then saw the prophecy fulfilled, tried to organize an alternative government in Ibagué and failed in the attempt, ordered the convocation of the Congress the dictator had dispersed, singlehandedly raised a battalion of young bogotáno or santafereño exiles and incorporated it into General Lopez’s army, received over the course of the final days the belated but victorious news that arrived from Bosa and Las Cruces and Los Egidos, heard that on December 3 the nine thousand men of the army entered Santa Fe de Bogotá, and then, while his comrades were celebrating the news by eating trout a la diabla and drinking more brandy than my father had ever seen, thought he would celebrate with them, drink his own brandy and finish his trout, and then tell them the truth: he would not take part in the march of triumph, he would not enter the recovered city.

Yes, he would explain: he wasn’t interested in returning, because the city, although now regained for democracy, was still lost to him. He would never return to live in it, he’d tell them, for his life there seemed finished, as if it belonged to another man. In Bogotá he had killed, in Bogotá he had hidden, nothing remained for him in Bogotá. But they wouldn’t understand, of course, and those who did understand would refuse to believe him or try to convince him otherwise with phrases like the city of your forefathers or of your struggles or the city where you were born, and he would have to show them, as irrefutable and incontrovertible proof of his new destiny, the hand of the dead Chinaman, the index finger that always points, as if by magic, toward the province of Panama.

II. The Revelations of Antonia de Narváez

At nine in the morning on December 17, while in Bogotá General Melo’s life was spared, in the river port of Honda my father boarded an English steamer called the Isabel, belonging to the John Dixon Powles Company, which plied the route from the interior to the Caribbean on a regular basis. Eight days later, having spent Christmas Eve on board, he arrived in Colón, the Panamanian port not yet three years old but already a member of the Schizophrenic Places Club. The founders had elected to baptize the city with the Spanish surname of Don Christopher Columbus, the disoriented Genoese sailor who by pure chance bumped into a Caribbean island and nevertheless passed into history as the discoverer of the continent; but the Gringos who were constructing the railroad did not read the ordinance, or perhaps they read it but didn’t understand it — their Spanish, surely, was not as good as they thought — and ended up conferring their own name upon the city: Aspinwall. Whereupon Colón became Colón for Colombians and Aspinwall for the Gringos, and Colón-Aspinwall for the rest of the world (the spirit of conciliation has never been lacking in Latin America). And it was in this embryonic, ambiguous city, this city with no past, that Miguel Altamirano arrived.

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.

By 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:

In the wilds of fair Colombia, near the equinoctial line,

Where the summer lasts forever and the sultry sun doth shine,

There is a charming valley where the grass is always green,

Through which flow the rapid waters of the Muddy Magdalene.

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:

Bolívar, sword displayed:

“Manuela, here stands my blade.”

“SimÓn, I will chase it,

And moistly I’ll encase it.”

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.

Aboard the Isabel, my father and Antonia de Narváez reproduce, in 1854, the tremors of 1805; aboard Antonia de Narváez, biology, treacherous biology, begins to do its stuff with heats and fluids; and in his room, abed and protected by a muslin mosquito net, Mr. Beckman, who has not yet read Madame Bovary, sighs with contentment, harboring not the slightest suspicion, closes his eyes to listen to the silence of the river, and almost by accident begins to sing softly to himself:

The forest on your banks by the flood and earthquake torn

Is madly on your bosom to the mighty Ocean borne.

May you still roll for ages and your grass be always green

And your waters aye be cool and sweet, oh Muddy Magdalene.

Oh, the forests on the riverbank, the cool, sweet waters. . Today, while I write not far from the Thames, I measure the distance between the two rivers, and marvel that this is the distance of my life. I have ended my days, dear Eloísa, in English lands. And now I feel I have a right to ask: Is it not very appropriate that an English steamer should have been the scene of my conception? The circle closes, the snake bites his own tail, all those clichés.

The preceding I write for the benefit of my more subtle readers, those who appreciate the art of allusion and suggestion. For the cruder among you, I write simply: yes, you have understood. Antonia de Narváez was my mother.

Yes, yes, yes: you have understood.

I, José Altamirano, am a bastard son.

After their encounter on the camp bed of the Isabel, after the faked fever and authentic orgasms, my father and Antonia de Narváez began a very brief correspondence, the most important instances of which I must now present as part of my argument (i.e., reasoning used to convince another) and also my argument (i.e., subject matter of a book). But I must do so by first clarifying certain points. This labor of family archaeology I’ve carried out — I can already hear the objections I’ve heard all my life: mine was not really a family, I have no right to this respectable noun — is based, on occasion, on tangible documents; and that is why, Readers of the Jury, you have and will have in some passages of the narration the uncomfortable responsibilities of a judge.

Journalism is the court of our days. And therefore: I declare that the following documents are perfectly genuine. It’s true that I am Colombian, and that all Colombians are liars, but I must declare the following (and here I place my right hand on the Bible or the book that serves in its place): what I am about to write is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No one will object if here and there I gloss certain passages, which, out of context, might be obscure. But I have not inserted a single word, nor altered any emphasis, nor changed any meaning. So help me God.

Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Barranquilla, undated

You will mock me, but I cannot stop thinking of you. And sympathizing with you, for you will have had to return to the one you do not love, while I move inexorably away from the one I adore.¹ Are my words excessive, my feelings illegitimate?. . We disembarked yesterday; today we are crossing the sandy plain that separates us from Salgar, where the steamer that will take us to our destination awaits. The sight of the Great Atlantic Ocean, route of my future, supplies much welcome calm. . I am traveling with a likable foreigner, ignorant of our language but very willing to learn it.

He has opened his travel diary and shown me cuttings from the Panama Star that describe, I believe, the advances of the railroad. In reply, I have tried to make him understand that the very same iron track, able to conquer the dense jungle palm by palm, was also the object of my most profound admiration; I do not know, however, if I managed to convey that to him.

Letter from Antonia de Narváez to Miguel Altamirano, place not specified, Christmas Day

Your words are excessive and your feelings illegitimate. Ours, sir, was an encounter the reasons for which I have not yet ascertained and furthermore refuse to explore; I regret nothing, but why pretend interest in what is nothing more than an accident? It does not seem that our destiny is to find each other; I assure you, in any case, that I shall do what is in my power to keep that from occurring. . My life is here, my good sir, and here I must stay, just as I must stay at my husband’s side. I cannot accept your claim, in an act of incredible arrogance, to know where my heart lies. I find myself obliged to remind you that, in spite of the ineffable event, you, Don Miguel, do not know me. Are my words cruel? Take them as you please.

Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Colón, January 29, 1855

At last it has happened: the Railroad has been inaugurated, and it was my privilege to witness such a great step forward toward Progress. The ceremony, in my modest opinion, was not as lavish as the event warranted; but the whole town came out to celebrate, the unofficial representatives of all Humanity, and in these streets one hears all the languages man’s genius has created.². . In the crowd, veritable Ark of human races, I was surprised to recognize a certain Melo-supporting lieutenant, whose name is not worth writing down. He was banished to Panama as punishment for participating in the coup, yes, the very one that my humble services contributed to toppling. When he told me, I confess, I was flabbergasted. Panama, punishment for rebels? The Isthmus, Residence of the Future, a place to banish enemies of democracy? Little could I find to contradict him. I had to bow to the evidence; what I consider a prize, one of the greatest my worthless life has granted me, is for my own government a disaster just short of the gallows. . Your words, dear lady, are daggers that pierce my heart. Spurn me, but do not repudiate me; insult me, but do not ignore me. I am, since that night, your deferential servant, and I do not close the door to our reencounter. . The Isthmus’s climate is marvelous. The skies are clear, the air sweet. Its reputation, I can now say, is a tremendous injustice.

Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Colón, April 1, 1855

The climate is lethal. It never stops raining, the houses flood; the rivers burst their banks and people sleep in the treetops; above puddles of still water swarm clouds of mosquitoes that look like locusts from ancient Babylon; the train carriages have to be cared for as if they were babes in arms for fear they’ll be devoured by the humidity. Plague reigns over the Isthmus, and sick men wander the city, some begging for a glass of water to bring down the fever, others dragging themselves to the hospital doors, under the illusion that a miracle will save their lives. . A few days ago we recovered the corpse of Lieutenant Campillo; now it is justifiable to commit his name to paper, though not for that any less painful. ³. . I must assume that your reply has gone astray; the reverse would be inadmissible. Dear lady, there is a conspiracy of fate that prevents my forgetting, for I am constantly crossing paths with messengers of memory. The lives of the locals begin each morning with the sacred ritual of coffee and quinine, which protects them from the phantoms of fever; and I myself have adopted the customs of those I visit, for I judge them healthy. So what can I do if every tiny grain brings me the flavor of our night? What can I do?

Letter from Antonia de Narváez to Miguel Altamirano, Honda, May 10, 1855

Do not write to me, sir, and do not seek me. I consider this exchange closed and what was between us forgotten. My husband has died; know this, Don Miguel Altamirano, from this day on I am dead to you.⁴

Letter from Miguel Altamirano to Antonia de Narváez, Colón, July 29, 1855

With my face disfigured by incredulity, I read over your terse message. Do you really expect me to obey your orders? By issuing them, do you seek to put my feelings to the test? You leave me, my dear lady, in an impossible situation, for complying with your directive would be to destroy my love, and not doing so would be to go against you. . You have no reason to doubt my words; the death of Mr. William Beckman, honorable man and favored guest of our nation, has deeply saddened me. You are excessively sparing with your words, my dear, and I do not know if it would be rash to inquire into the circumstances of the tragedy on the same page as I transmit my most sincere condolences to you. . I do so desire to see you again. . but I cannot dare request your presence, and at times I think that perhaps it is this that has offended you. If this is the case, I beg you to understand me: here there are no women or children. So insalubrious is this land, that men prefer solitude during the course of their stay. They know, because experience has shown it to be so, that bringing their family with them is to condemn them to death as efficiently as running a machete through their chests.⁵ These men, who have come to cross from one ocean to another toward gold mines in the land of California, are in search of instant riches, it’s true, and they are willing to stake their own lives on it; but not those of their loved ones, for to whom would they return with their pockets filled with gold dust? No, my dear lady; if we are to see one another again, it will be in a more pleasant spot. That is why I await your summons; a word, a single one, and I shall be at your side. Until that moment, until you concede me the grace of your company,

I remain yours,

Miguel Altamirano

Eloísa dear: this letter received no reply.

Nor did the next.

Nor did the next.

And thus ended the correspondence, at least as far as this tale is concerned, between the two individuals who with time and certain circumstances I have grown accustomed to calling my parents. The reader of the preceding pages will look in vain for a reference to Antonia de Narváez’s pregnancy, not to mention to the birth of her son. The letters I have not copied also take meticulous care to hide the first nauseas, the protruding belly, and, of course, the details of the birth. So Miguel Altamirano would wait a long time before finding out that his sperm had got its way, that a son of his had been born in the country’s interior.

My date of birth was always a small domestic mystery. My mother celebrated my birthday indiscriminately on July 20, August 7, and September 12; I, as a simple matter of dignity, have never celebrated it. As for places, I can say the following: unlike the majority of human beings, I know that of my conception but not that of my birth. Antonia de Narváez once told me, and then regretted having done so, that I was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá, in a gigantic bed covered in uncured hides and beside a chair whose back was carved with a certain noble coat of arms. On sad days, my mother rescinded that version: I had been born in the middle of the Muddy Magdalene, on a barge that sailed from Honda to La Dorada, between bundles of tobacco and oarsmen frightened at the spectacle of that deranged white woman and her open legs. But, in light of all the evidence, that birth most likely took place on the solid riverbank ground of the predictable city of Honda and, to be precise, in that very room of the Beckman guest house where the owner, the good-natured man who would have been my stepfather, put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger upon learning that what was in that swollen belly was not his.

I have always thought admirable the coldness with which my mother says in her letter, “My husband has died,” when in reality she is referring to a horrid suicide that tormented her for decades and for which she would never stop feeling in part guilty. Long before his miserable cuckolded tropical fate, Beckman had asked — you know how these adventurers’ last requests are — to be buried in the Muddy Magdalene; and early one morning his body was taken out by a lighter to the middle of the river and thrown overboard so he could sink into the adjective-riddled waters of that unbearable song. As the years went by he became the protagonist of my childhood nightmares: a mummy wrapped in canvas who came up onto the beach, leaking water through the hole in the back of his head and half devoured by the bocachico fish, to punish me for lying to my elders or for killing birds with stones, for swearing or for that time I tore the wings off a fly and told it to fuck off on foot. The white figure of the suicide Beckman, my putative and dead father, was my worst nocturnal threat until I was able to read, for the first of many times, the story of a certain Captain Ahab.

(The mind generates associations that the pen cannot accept. Now, while I write, I remember one of the last things my mother told me. Shortly before dying in Paita, Manuela Sáenz received a visit from a half-mad Gringo who was passing through Peru. The Gringo, without even removing his wide-brimmed hat, told her he was writing a novel about whales. Were there whales to be seen around there? Manuela Sáenz didn’t know what to say. She died on November 23, 1856, thinking not of Simón Bolívar but of the white whales of a failed novelist.)

So without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name, I’ll simply say that I was baptized — yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account — as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant, and a little while later, after a confession or two from my tormented mother, I became José de Narváez, son of an unknown father. All that, of course, before arriving at the surname that belonged to me by blood.

The thing is that I began, finally, to exist; I begin to exist in these pages, and my tale will be told in the first person from now on.

I’m the one doing the telling. I’m the one who counts. I am that I am. Me. Me. Me.

Now, having presented the written correspondence that took place between my parents, I must concern myself with another quite different form of correspondence: that between twin souls, yes, that doppelgänger correspondence. I hear murmurs in the audience. Intelligent readers, readers who are always one step ahead of the narrator, you will already be intuiting what’s coming here; you’re already guessing that a shadow is beginning to be cast over my life, the shadow of Joseph Conrad.

And so it is: because now that time has passed and I can see events clearly, arrange them on the map of my life, I am aware of the traversing lines, the subtle parallels that have kept us connected since my birth. Here is the proof: it doesn’t matter how determined I am to tell the story of my life; doing so, inevitably, is telling the others. By virtue of physical affinities, according to experts, twins who have been separated at birth spend their lives feeling the pains and anxieties that overwhelm the other, even if they’ve never laid eyes on each other and even if an ocean separates them. On the level of metaphysical affinities, which are exactly what interest me, it takes on a different complexion but also happens. Yes, there is no doubt that this happens, too. Conrad and Altamirano, two incarnations of the same Joe, two versions of the same fate, bear witness to the fact.

No more philosophy! No more abstractions, demand the skeptics. Examples! We want examples! All right then, my pockets are full of them, and nothing seems easier to me than pulling out a few to sate the journalistic thirst of certain nonconformist spirits. . I can tell you that in December 1857 a child is born in Poland, he is baptized Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and his father dedicates a poem to him: “To my son born in the 85th year of the Muscovite Oppression.” In Colombia, a little boy, also called José, receives a box of pastels as a Christmas present and spends several days drawing soldiers without body armor humiliating the Spanish oppressors. While I, at the age of six, was writing my first compositions for a tutor from Bogotá (one of them about a bumblebee that flew over the river), Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who was not yet four, wrote to his father: “I don’t like it much when the mosquitoes bite.”

More examples, Readers of the Jury?

In 1863, I was listening to the grown-ups talking about the Liberal revolution and its result, the secular and socialist Rionegro Constitution; in the same year, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was also witness to a revolution in the adult world around him, that of the Polish nationalists against the Russian Tsar, a revolution that sent many of his relatives to prison, exile, or in front of a firing squad. While I, at the age of fifteen, began to ask questions about the identity of my father — in other words, began to bring him to life — Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski watched as his gave way little by little to tuberculosis — in other words, to death. By 1871 or ’72, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski had already begun to announce his desire to leave Poland and become a sailor, although he had never in his life seen the sea. And it must have been around then, when I was sixteen or seventeen, that I began to threaten to leave my mother home and the city of Honda, to disappear forever from her sight, unless. . If she didn’t want to lose me forever, it would be best. .

That’s how it was: I went directly from peaceful doubt to savage inquisition. What happened in my head was very simple. My usual doubts, with which I’d maintained a cordial and diplomatic relationship as a child, a sort of nonaggression pact, suddenly began to rebel against all peace initiatives and to launch offensives whose objective, invariably, was my poor blackmailed mother. Who? I asked. When? Why?

Who? (Stubborn tone.)

How? (Irreverent tone.)

Where? (Frankly aggressive tone.)

Our negotiations went on for months; summit meetings took place in the kitchen of the Beckman guest house, among the saucepans and burned oil and the penetrating smell of fried mojarra, while my mother barked orders at Rosita, the household cook. Antonia de Narváez never committed the vulgarity of telling me my father had died, of turning him into a hero of the civil war — a position to which every Colombian can aspire sooner or later — or a victim of some poetic accident, a fall off a fine horse, a duel over lost honor. No, I always knew the man existed somewhere, and my mother summed up and sentenced the matter with a platitude: “The thing is that somewhere isn’t here.” It took me an entire afternoon, the length of time it takes to cook the stew for dinner, to find out where that somewhere was. Then, for the first time, that word that had been so hard for me as a child (itsmess, I used to say, my tongue tangled up, in geography classes) acquired a certain reality for me, became tangible. There, in that twisted and deformed arm that stuck out of the territory of my country, in that inaccessible appendix out of God’s hands and separate from the rest of the nation by a jungle whose fevers killed with just the mention of its name, that little hell where there were more illnesses than settlers, and where the only hint of human life was a primitive train that helped fortune hunters get from New York to California in less time than it would take them to cross their own country, there, in Panama, lived my father.

Panama. For my mother, as for most Colombians — who tend to act just like their governments, to harbor the same irrationalities, feel the same dislikes — Panama was a place as real as Calcutta or Berdichev or Kinshasa, a word that marks a map and little more. The railroad had brought the Panamanians out of oblivion, true, but only in a momentary and painfully brief way. A satellite: that was Panama. And the political regime didn’t help much. The country was around about fifty years old, more or less, and here began to act its age. The midlife crisis, that mysterious age when men take lovers who could be their daughters and women heat up for no reason, affected the country in its own way: New Granada became federal. Like a poet or a cabaret artist, it took a new pseudonym: the United States of Colombia. Well then, Panama was one of those states, and it floated in the orbit of the Great Lady in Crisis more due to the mere pull of gravity than anything else. Which was an elegant way of saying that powerful Colombians, the moneyed merchants of Honda or Mompós, the politicians of Santa Fe or the military officers all over the country, didn’t give a damn about the State of Panama, much less about the state of Panama.

And in that place lived my father.

What?

Why?

Who with?

For a couple of years as long as centuries, during those eternal cooking sessions that resulted in an extremely complicated roast of veal or a simple rice soup with agua de panela, I gradually perfected my interrogator’s technique, and Antonia de Narváez softened like potatoes in a stew before the insistence of my questions. Thus I heard her speak of La Opinión Comunera or El Granadino Temporal; thus I found out about the sinking of the Union, and I even paid good money so an oarsman would take me out on a lighter to see the smokestacks; thus I found out about the encounter on the Isabel, and my mother’s tale had the taste of quinine and the smell of rubbing alcohol. Another round of questions. What had happened in the two decades since then? What else did she know of him? Had there been no further contact in all these years? What was my father doing in 1860, while General Mosquera declared himself Supreme Director of War and the entire country was submerged — yes, Eloísa dear: once more — in the blood of the two parties? What was he doing, with whom was he dining, what was he talking about, while Liberal soldiers arrived at the Beckman guest house one week and Conservatives the next, while my mother fed one lot and tended the wounds of the others like a perfect Florence Nightingale of the Tropical Lowlands? What did he think and write in the following years, during which his radical, atheist, and rationalist comrades made friends with the power my father had pursued since his youth? His ideals prevailed, the clergy (blight of our time) had been stripped of their useless and unproductive hectares, and the illustrious Archbishop (director in chief of the blight) was duly incarcerated. Had my father’s pen not left a trace of that in the press? How was that possible?

I began to confront a dreadful possibility: my father, who had barely begun to be born for me, could already be dead. And Antonia de Narváez must have seen me looking desperate, must have feared I would don an absurd, Hamlet-like mourning for a father I’d never known, and wanted to spare me those unwarranted laments. Compassionate, or maybe blackmailed, or maybe both at once, my mother confessed that, every year, round about December 16, she received a couple of pages with which Miguel Altamirano kept her up to date with his life. None of the letters received a reply, she continued to confess (I was shocked to see she felt not the slightest guilt). Antonia de Narváez had burned them all, even the latest one, but not before reading them the way one reads a serial by Dumas or Dickens: taking an interest in the fate of the protagonist, yes, but always aware that neither the pathetic moron David Copperfield nor the poor, weepy Lady of the Camellias existed in reality, that their happiness or their disgraces, as moving as they might be to us, have no effect whatsoever on the lives of flesh-and-blood people.

“Well then, tell me,” I said.

And she told me.

She told me that, a few months after his arrival in Colón, Miguel Altamirano found that his reputation as an incendiary writer and champion of Progress preceded him and, almost before he realized, found himself contracted by the Panama Star, the same newspaper the ill-fated Mr. Jennings had been reading on board the Isabel. She told me the mission my father was charged with was very simple: he had to wander around the city, visit the offices of the Panama Railroad Company, even board the train as often as he liked to cross the Isthmus to Panama City, and then write about what a great marvel the railway was and the vast benefits it had brought and would continue to bring to the foreign investors as well as to the local inhabitants. She told me my father knew perfectly well that they were using him as a propagandist, but the good of the cause, from his point of view, justified it all; and with time he gradually realized, also, that years after the inauguration of the railway the streets still remained unpaved, and their only decoration continued to be dead animals and rotting garbage. I repeat: he realized. But none of that affected his unshakable faith, as if the simple image of the train going from one side to the other erased those elements of the landscape. That symptom, mentioned in passing like a simple character trait, would acquire extraordinary importance years later.

All this my mother told me.

And kept telling me.

She told me that in a matter of five years my father had become a sort of pampered son of Panamanian society: the Company’s shareholders feted him like an ambassador, senators from Bogotá took him to lunch to ask his advice, and every official of the state government, each and every member of that rancid isthmian aristocracy, from the Herreras to the Arosemenas, from the Arangos to the Menocals, aspired to have him as husband to their daughter. She told me, finally, that what Miguel Altamirano was paid for his columns was barely sufficient for his confirmed bachelor’s lifestyle, but that didn’t prevent him from spending his mornings offering his services free of charge caring for the sick in the Colón hospital. “The hospital is the largest building in the city,” my mother with her good memory recalled my father writing in one of his lost letters. “That gives an idea of the salubriousness of the environment. But all progress toward the future has its down sides, my dear, and this one was not to be the exception.”

But that was not all that Antonia de Narváez told me. Like any novelist, my mother had left the most important thing until the end.

Miguel Altamirano was with Blas Arosemena the February morning when the Nipsic, a steam sloop carrying North American marines and Panamanian macheteros, picked him up in Colón and took him to Caledonia Bay. Don Blas had arrived at his house the previous night and said to him: “Pack for several days. Tomorrow we’re going on an expedition.” Miguel Altamirano obeyed, and four days later he was entering the Darien Jungle, accompanied by ninety-seven men, and for a week he walked behind them in the perpetual twilight of the rain forest, and saw the shirtless men who blazed the trail with clean machete blows, while others, the white men in their straw hats and blue-flannel shirts, wrote in their notebooks about everything they saw: the depth of the Chucunaque River when they tried to wade across it, but also the affection that scorpions felt for canvas shoes; the geological constitution of a ravine, but also the taste of roast monkey washed down with whiskey. A Gringo called Jeremy, veteran of the War of Secession, lent my father his rifle, because no man should be unarmed in these places, and told him that the rifle had fought in Chickamauga, where the forests were no less dense than here and the visibility shorter than the distance an arrow flies. My father, victim of his adventurer’s instincts, was fascinated.

One of those nights they camped beside a rock polished by the Indians and covered with burgundy-colored hieroglyphics — the same Indians who, armed with poison-tipped arrows, with faces marked by such seriousness as my father had never seen, had guided them for a good part of the route. My father was standing up, observing in stunned silence the figure of a man with both arms raised facing a jaguar or maybe a puma; and then, as he listened to the arguments that would arise between a Confederate lieutenant and a small, bespectacled botanist, he felt all of a sudden that this crossing justified his life. “The enthusiasm kept me awake,” he wrote to Antonia de Narváez. Although Antonia de Narváez was of the opinion that it wasn’t the enthusiasm but rather the gnats, I felt I came to understand my father at that moment. On that page, lost long ago in my mother’s purges, surely written in haste and still under the influence of the expedition, Miguel Altamirano had found the profound meaning of his existence. “They want to part the land as Moses parted the sea. They want to separate the continent in two and realize the distant dreams of Balboa and Humboldt. Common sense and all the explorations undertaken dictate that the idea of a canal between the two oceans is impossible. Dear Lady, I make this promise to you with all the solemnity of which I am capable: I shall not die without having seen that canal.”

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.

At 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.

III. Joseph Conrad Asks for Help

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.

Shortly 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.

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?

The 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.

The bullets — of various calibers — hit Salgar in various parts of his body: they perforate both lungs, his cheek and tongue; they destroy one of his knees and reopen the almost closed wound in his left hand, burning nerves, scorching tendons, crossing through the carpel tunnel the way a boat crosses a canal. The Chassepot floats in the air for a second and falls into the rough waters of the Atrato; it sinks, and before touching bottom is swept a few meters ahead by the current. Following it, falling backward, the corpse of a man (sixty-nine kilograms in weight) who was a slave and will not now be free.

At the moment Fidel Emiliano Salgar lands on the sandy riverbed, startling a ray and receiving a sting — not that the dead body feels anything, not that his tissues retract in reaction to the venom, not that his muscles suffer fevers or his blood is contaminated — at that very moment, the apprentice sailor Korzeniowski, on board the Saint-Antoine, takes one last look at the coastline of the port of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. Several days have gone by since, having completed the rifles-to-overthrow-Liberal-governments mission, they left Colón and the territorial waters of the United States of Colombia. And, since this seems to be the chapter of things unknown, I better state what Korzeniowski doesn’t know at that moment.

He doesn’t know the names or ages of the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims of the Chassepots. He doesn’t even know there were one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims of the Chassepots. He doesn’t know that the contraband will have been in vain, that the Liberal and Masonic government will win the war against the Conservative Catholics and it will take another war — or a resumption of the same one — to alter that state of things. He doesn’t know what Monsieur Déléstang will think, in Marseille, when he finds out about it, or if he’ll go on to interfere in other crusades. He doesn’t know that one of the gutter press newspapers, La Justicia, will invent many years later an absurd version of his sojourn on the Colombian coast: in it, Korzeniowski takes charge of all the negotiations and sells the weapons to a certain Lorenzo Daza, delegate of the Liberal government who later “gives them up for lost” and resells them “for double their price” to the Conservative revolutionaries. Korzeniowski, who doesn’t even know who Daza is, carries on with his gaze fixed on Martinique, and carries on not knowing things. He doesn’t know that the coastline of Saint-Pierre will not ever be the same, at least not for him, for the city known as Old Paris will be erased from the map in a quarter of a century, completely obliterated like an undesirable historical fact (but this is not the time to speak of that disaster). He doesn’t know that, in a matter of hours, when they sail between St. Thomas and Port-au-Prince, he will meet the violence of the East Wind and the West Wind, and doesn’t know that much later he’ll write about that violence. Between Port-au-Prince and Marseille he will turn nineteen, and won’t know that at home awaits the most difficult chain of events of his youth, events that will culminate, for him, with a gunshot to the heart.

And while that birthday unfolds on board the Saint-Antoine, with songs and embraces from Cervoni, in another vessel somewhere else other things (or shall I say: correspondences) are happening. Allow me to introduce the steamer Lafayette, flagship of the French West Indies line that will play extremely important roles in our small tragedy. Aboard, Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, illegitimate son of a famous mother (in the worst sense) and unknown father (in the only sense), this Lieutenant Wyse, dear readers, is preparing to leave on an expedition. His mission is to search through the Colombian Darien Jungle for the best place to open an inter-oceanic canal, which some — in Paris, in New York, in Bogotá itself — have begun to call That Fucking Canal. I’ll say it once and for all: for reasons that will soon become apparent, for reasons impossible to reduce to the golden cage of a single pretty phrase, at that moment it wasn’t just the Canal that began to be fucked up but my entire life.

Chronology is an untamed beast; the reader doesn’t know what inhuman labors I’ve gone through to give my tale a more or less organized appearance (I don’t rule out having failed in the attempt). My problems with the beast can be reduced to one alone. You’ll see, with the passing of the years and the reflection on the subjects of this book, which I’m now writing, I have discovered what undoubtedly comes as no surprise to anyone: that stories in the world, all the stories that are known and told and remembered, all those little stories that for some reason matter to us and which gradually fit together without us noticing to compose the fearful fresco of Great History, they are juxtaposed, touching, intersecting: none of them exists on their own. How to wrest a linear tale from this? Impossible, I fear. Here is a humble revelation, the lesson I’ve learned through brushing up against world events: silence is invention, lies are constructed by what’s not said, and since my intention is to tell faithfully, my cannibalistic tale must include everything, as many stories as can fit in the mouth, big ones and little ones. Well then, in the days before the departure of the Lafayette one of the latter occurred: the encounter between another two travelers. It was a few meters from the port of Colón and, therefore, from Lieutenant Wyse and his men. And in the next chapter, if my life has not ended by then, if there is still enough strength in my hand to hold my pen, I’ll have to concentrate on it. (At my age, which is more or less the age of a dead novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer, there’s no point in making plans too far ahead.)

But first, responding to the peculiar order events have in my tale, I must concern myself with another matter, or rather with another man. Let’s call him a facilitator; let’s call him an intermediary. It’s obvious, I think: if I’m going to devote so many pages to describing my encounter with Joseph Conrad, it’s at least necessary that I explain a little who the person responsible for our meeting was, the host of my disgrace, the man who fostered the theft. .

But it’s still too early to speak of the theft.

Let us return, readers, to the year 1903. The location is a dock on the Thames: a passenger steamer has arrived from the Caribbean port of Barranquilla, in the convulsive Republic of Colombia. A passenger descends from the ship carrying all his worldly goods: a small trunk of clothes and personal items, more fitting to someone who plans to spend a couple of weeks away from home than to someone who’ll never return to his homeland. Let’s say that it is not the trunk of an émigré but of a traveler, and not just from its humble size but because its owner does not yet know that he has arrived to stay. . Of that first evening in London I remember details: the advertising flyer, received from a dark hand on the dock itself, on which were listed the services and virtues of Trenton’s Hotel, Bridgewater Square, Barbican; the supplements that had to be paid, one for the use of electricity, another for cleaning my boots; the fruitful negotiation with the night porter, from whom I demanded a special rate, with breakfast included, in spite of the fact that my identity documents were neither North American nor colonial. The next morning, more memories: a pocket map I bought for tuppence, a folded map with covers the color of bile; bread with marmalade and two cups of cocoa that I had in the dining room of the hotel while searching through those white streets and yellow streets for the address I had written down in my journalist’s notebook. A bus left me in Baker Street; I crossed Regent’s Park instead of going around it, and through already bare trees and slushy paths I arrived at the street I was looking for. It was not difficult to find the number.

I still have the map I used that morning: its thin spine has been devoured by moths, its streaked pages resemble a crop of fungi for scientific use. But objects speak to me, dictate things to me; they call me to account when I lie, and in the opposite case they offer willingly to serve as proof. Well then, the first thing this old, unusable, out-ofdate (London changes every year) map announces is the encounter with the aforementioned intermediary. But who was Santiago Pérez Triana, the famous Colombian negotiator who in time would become plenipotentiary ambassador to the courts of Madrid and London? Who was that man, one of so many who in Colombia inherit that undesirable and dangerous monster: a Political Life? The answer, which will strike some of you as strange, is: I don’t care. The important thing is not who that man was but rather what version I am prepared to give of his life, what role I want him to play in this tale of mine. So right now I make use of my narrator’s prerogatives, I take the magic potion of omniscience and enter, not for the first time, the head — and the biography — of another person.

In those years, a Colombian arriving in London necessarily called on Santiago Pérez Triana, at 45 Avenue Road. Pérez Triana, son of a former president and secret writer of children’s stories, political target and amateur tenor, had arrived in the city a few years before and presided with his toad face and anecdotes in four languages over a table designed for an audience: his dinners, his soirees in the Victorian drawing room, were small tributes in his own honor, masterful speeches destined to exhibit his talents as Athenian orator long before the addresses that distinguished him at the courts of The Hague. The evenings in that dining room, or in the special room where coffee was taken, were always the same: Pérez Triana took off his round-framed spectacles to light a cigar, straightened his bow tie while the cups of his private audience were filled to the brim, and began to speak. He spoke of his life in Heidelberg or of the opera in Madrid, of his readings of Henry James, of his friendship with Rubén Dario and Miguel de Unamuno. He recited his own poems: “Sepulchers Safeguard My Secrets” could burst out all of a sudden, or “I Have Heard the Crowds Moan.” And his guests, Liberal politicians or erudite businessmen of the Bogotá bourgeoisie, applauded like trained seals. Pérez Triana nodded with modesty, closed his eyes already worn out like the slots in a piggy bank, calmed spirits with a gesture of his pudgy hand as if tossing a couple of sardines to the seals. And he would go on without wasting time to the next anecdote, to the next poem.

But at night, when everyone had gone, Pérez Triana would be enveloped by a distant and almost affectionate dread, a sort of tame but fearsome animal that still stayed with him even after all these years. It was a well-defined physical sensation: an intestinal discomfort similar to the moments preceding hunger. When he felt it coming on, the first thing the man would do was to make sure Gertrud, his wife, was asleep; he would immediately leave the dark bedroom and go down to his library, in his green dressing gown and leather slippers, and light all the lamps in the place. From his drawing room he could see the black stain that in the morning would be Regent’s Park, but Pérez Triana didn’t much like to look out at the street, except to confirm the rectangle of light that his window projected onto the dark pavement or the comforting presence of his own disheveled silhouette. He settled down at his desk, opened a wooden box with adjustable compartments, took out a few blank sheets of paper and a few Perfection-brand envelopes, and wrote long and always solemn letters in which he asked how things were in Colombia, who else had died in the most recent civil war, what was really happening in Panama. And the news came back to him in North American envelopes: from New York, from Boston, even from San Francisco. This was, as everyone knew, the only way to evade the censors. Pérez Triana knew as well as his correspondents did that a letter addressed to him would be opened and its contents read by governmental authorities and no one could do anything about it; if the authority considered it necessary, the letter would be lost before arriving at its destination, and could still provoke more or less unpleasant questioning for the sender. So his accomplices in Bogotá soon grew accustomed to the routine of transcribing the news by hand; they also grew accustomed to receiving envelopes bearing U.S. stamps, inside of which appeared, as if playing hide-and-seek, the handwriting of their banished friend. And one of the questions most often repeated in the clandestine letters from London was this: Do you think that I can come back now? No, Santiago, his friends replied. You shouldn’t come back yet.

Readers of the Jury: allow me to give you a very brief lesson in Colombian politics, to synthesize the pages turned up till now and prepare you for those to come. The most important event in the history of my country, as you’ll perhaps have noticed, was not the birth of its Liberator, or its independence, or any of those fabrications for high school textbooks. Nor was it a catastrophe on an individual level like those that frequently mark the destinies of other lands either: no Henry wanted to marry some Boleyn, no Booth killed any Lincoln. No, the moment that would define the fate of Colombia for all history, as always happens in this land of philologists and grammarians and bloodthirsty dictators who translate The Iliad, was a moment made of words. More precisely, of names. A double baptism took place at some imprecise moment of the nineteenth century. The gathered parents of the two chubby-cheeked and already spoiled infants, those two little boys smelling since birth of vomit and liquid shit, agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal. Those children grew up and multiplied in constant rivalry; the rival generations have succeeded each other with the energy of rabbits and the obstinacy of cockroaches. . and in August of 1893, as part of that indisputable inheritance, former — Liberal — President Santiago Pérez Manosalva, a man who in other times had won the respect of General Ulysses S. Grant, was banished with a total lack of consideration by the — Conservative — regime of Miguel Antonio Caro. His son, Santiago Pérez Triana, inherited the condition of undesirable, more or less the way one inherits premature baldness or a hooked nose.

Perhaps a recap would not go amiss, as I’m not forgetting that some of my readers do not have the good fortune of being Colombian. It was all the fault of the subversive columns that the former — Liberal — President wrote in El Relator, real depth charges that would have breached and sunk in a matter of seconds any European government. El Relator was the pampered son of the family: a newspaper founded for the sole reason of dislodging the Conservatives from power and closed in a timely fashion, with decrees worthy of tyranny, by those who did not want to be dislodged. It was not the only one: former President Pérez — eyelids drooping, beard so thick his mouth was completely hidden — used to convoke clandestine meetings with other journalistic conspirators in his house on Carrera Sexta in Santa Fe de Bogotá. And thus, while on the other side of the street the Bordadita church filled with praying godos, the Pérez’s drawing room filled with the editors of El Contemporáneo, El Tábano, and El 93, all newspapers closed down under charges of supporting the anarchist camp and preparing for civil war.

Well now: politics in Colombia, Readers of the Jury, is a strange class game. Behind the word motivation is the word whim; behind decision is tantrum. The matter that concerns us happened according to these simple rules, and it also happened as swiftly as mistakes usually happen. . At the beginning of August, Miguel Antonio Caro, Supreme Whimsical One of the Nation, has heard by chance that El Relator would be prepared to moderate its stance if it were allowed to go back into circulation. There is something in this news that tastes of victory to him: the Conservative Regeneration, which has set out censorship laws tougher than any ever seen in the democratic world, has defeated the written subversion of Liberal atheism. That’s what Caro thinks; but El Relator shakes him out of his deception with the next day’s edition, defying the censorship with one of the strongest invectives the institutions of the Conservative Regeneration have ever received. President Caro — inevitably — feels deceived. No one has promised him anything, but something terrible happened in his world, in his tiny little private world, made of Latin classics and a deep disdain for all who are not on his side: reality has not conformed to his fantasies. The President pounds and stamps on the wooden floors of the San Carlos Palace, hurls his rattle to the ground, pouts and throws tantrums, and refuses to eat his lunch. . and nevertheless reality is still there: El Relator still exists and is still his enemy. Those with him then listen to him say that Santiago Pérez Manosalva, former President of Colombia, is a liar and a fake and a man who doesn’t keep his word. They listen to him predict with the certainty of an oracle that that Liberal without a nation or a god will take the country to war and that banishment is the only way to prevent it. The definitive decree, the decree that fixes his expulsion, is dated 14 August.

The father complied, of course — the death penalty for exiles who didn’t go into exile was common currency in Caro’s Colombia — and left for Paris, natural homing instinct for the Latin American haute bourgeoisie. The son, after receiving the first threats, tried to leave the country by going down from Bogotá to the Magdalena River and embarking at the port of Honda on the first steamer prepared to take him to Barranquilla, and from there to European exile. “The truth is, I didn’t feel I was in danger,” he would tell me much later, when our relationship allowed this tone and these confidences. “I was leaving Colombia because, after the affront to my father, the atmosphere had become unbreathable; I was going to punish, in my own way, the country’s ingratitude. But when I arrived at Honda, a foul village with a population of three and savage temperatures, I realized how mistaken I was.” At night in London, Pérez Triana kept dreaming that the police who arrested him in Honda took him back to the Ciega — the most feared prison on the Magdalena — but in the dream the youngest policeman explained, smoothing the down on his upper lip, what hadn’t been explained in reality: that the orders had come from the capital. But what orders? On what charges? In the dream it was as impossible to find out as it had been in reality. Pérez Triana had never spoken to anyone, not even to Gertrud, about the hours he spent in the Ciega, in the darkness of a cell, his eyes watering with the stench of human shit and soaked to the skin by the corrosive humidity of the tropics. He would have needed more than one hand to count the cases of yellow fever he had word of during his very short imprisonment. At some point, he thought, it would be his turn: each mosquito, each microbe was his enemy. He was then sure he’d been sentenced to death.

The prisoner had no way of knowing, but at dawn on his second day in the Ciega, while he grudgingly accepted the arepa without cheese that was all there was for breakfast, the Bogotá lawyer Francisco Sanin, who was vacationing at the time in Honda, received news of his imprisonment. By the time Sanin arrived at the Ciega, Pérez Triana had sweated so much that the starched collar of his shirt no longer pressed against his throat; he had the feeling, impossible to confirm, that his cheeks were sagging, but he passed a hand over his face and found only rough traces of stubble. Sanin weighed the situation, asked about the charges, and received evasive answers, and his complaints reached Bogotá and returned with neither replies nor solutions. Then it occurred to him that the only solution lay in a lie. At some stage, operating as a businessman in the United States, Pérez Triana had had to sign some letters of loyalty. Sanin wrote to the U.S. envoy, a certain MacKinney, citing those letters and telling him one of his citizens was in danger of dying in an insalubrious prison. It was a risky lie, but it worked: MacKinney believed every word with the candor of a small child and protested before the relevant judge, raising his voice and pounding the desk, and in a matter of hours Pérez Triana found himself on his way to Bogotá, looking back over his shoulder, confoundedly grateful for the power that Uncle Sam’s husky voice has in these submissive latitudes. This time (he was thinking) there was no room for doubt, there was no anticipated nostalgia. He had to flee; every detail of his mistreated person pointed him toward the path to flight. If the Magdalena River route was forbidden him, he would search out less obvious ways. And so he fled through the Eastern Plains, he disguised himself as a priest and baptized incautious Indians along the way, he paddled down three rivers and saw animals he’d never seen and reached the Caribbean without having been recognized by anyone but also feeling that he no longer recognized himself. And then he told the whole story in a book.

Down the Orinoco in a Canoe was translated into English and published by Heinemann, with a prologue by the Scottish adventurer, dilettante writer, and socialist leader Robert Cunninghame Graham, whose perception of Bogotá as a kind of Chibcha Athens still strikes me as more ingenious than fitting. The book appeared in 1902; in November 1903, a few hours before I knocked on his door — one exile requesting help from another, a disciple in search of a master — Pérez Triana had received a letter from Sydney Pawling, his editor. “One last thing I should like to mention, Mr. Triana,” it read. “As you will no doubt know, Mr. Conrad, whose magnificent Typhoon we published this past April, is immersed in a difficult project relating to current Latin American reality. Aware of his own limited knowledge of the subject, Mr. Conrad has sought out and received the aid of Mr. Cunninghame Graham to pursue the work; but he has also read your book, and has now requested I ask you, Mr. Triana, if you would be prepared to answer a few questions that Mr. Conrad would like to send you by way of us.”

Joseph Conrad has read me, thinks Pérez Triana. Joseph Conrad wants my help.

Pérez Triana opens the drawer and takes out a blank sheet and another Perfection envelope. (He likes this invention, so simple and at once so ingenious: you had to pass your tongue along the flap as ever, but the glue was not there, it was on the envelope itself. His family physician, Dr. Thomas Wilmot, had told him of it after describing various tongue infections, and Pérez Triana had gone immediately to the stationer’s in Charing Cross. He had to look after his health, of course; how many envelopes a day could a man like him end up licking?) He wrote: “My delay in replying to your letter, Mr. Pawling, is utterly inexcusable. Do relate to Mr. Conrad my absolute availability to answer as many questions as he cares to send me, no matter how lengthy.” And then he put the paper in the envelope and licked the flap.

But he did not send the letter at once. A few hours later he would be pleased he hadn’t. He threw that letter into the wastepaper basket, took out another piece of paper, and wrote again the same lines about tardiness and availability, but then added: “Pass on to Mr. Conrad, however, that certain recent events allow me now to have other ways of helping him. I do not presume to know better than the author what his needs might be, but the information he could receive from an exile of long standing, by way of a questionnaire sent by third parties, is invariably inferior to what he could be given in person by a direct witness to events. Well then, what I can offer is even better than a witness. I offer him a victim, Mr. Pawling. A victim.”

What had happened between the two letters?

A man from his distant country had arrived to visit him. A man had told him a story.

That man, of course, was me.

That story is the one that you, dear Eloísa, are reading at this moment.