The Secret History of Costaguana

IV. The Mysterious Laws of Refraction

I spent two whole days looking for my father, following his faint but still visible trail, his slimy snail trail, through the streets of Colón. But I was not successful. I didn’t want to leave messages, notes, warnings, because I’m fond of surprises and I suspected — for no reason, of course — that this fondness came from my paternal side. In the hospital the mulatta nurses spoke of my father with (it seemed to me) too much familiarity; they told me at once, between impertinent giggles, that he’d been there that morning and had spent at least three hours chatting with a tubercular young man, but they didn’t know what his next destination was; when I spoke to the tubercular young man, I found out several things, but not my father’s whereabouts. He’d been born in Bogotá and was a lawyer by profession, that oh so frequent combination in my centralist and pettifogging country; two weeks after arriving in Colón he’d woken up with a swelling under his jaw; by the time of my visit, the infection had left the inflamed gland and invaded the lungs and blood; he had, in the best of cases, a few months to live. “That fellow’s a friend of yours?” he said, half opening his bile-colored eyes. “Well, tell him I’ll be expecting him tomorrow. Tell him not to leave me abandoned here. In those three hours he looked after me better than all these damn doctors. Tell him, OK? Tell him that before I die I want to know what the hell happens to D’Artagnan.” And as he pronounced the guttural r, with a zeal for correctness that struck me as at the very least curious in the case of a dying man, he brought his left hand up to his inflamed gland, covering it as if it hurt.

In the offices of the Railroad Company — which some natives called by its English name, giving me the strange sensation of living in two countries at once, or of crossing an invisible border over and over again — the North Americans confused me with a potential ticket buyer and conscientiously sent me to the ticket office, shaking the cuffs of their impeccable shirtsleeves in the direction of the street, and one of them even donning his felt hat to accompany me to the place. That whole exchange was in English; it was only after saying good-bye that I realized it, with rather greater surprise than modesty allows me to confess. In the place the impeccable cuff had indicated, a finely clothed arm moved to inform me that no, tickets were no longer sold there, then at another window a sweaty forehead told me that I should simply board the train and someone would come by to ask for my ticket. “But no, I’m looking for—” “Don’t worry, nothing will happen. In the carriage they’ll ask for it.” And meanwhile, the heat was afflicting me like poison; as I crossed a threshold and entering any shade, a solitary drop of sweat trickled down my side, beneath my clothes; and in the street I marveled that a Chinese man could wear black while not a single pore on his face seemed open. I sought refuge in a liquor store full of gambling cart drivers in whose hands an innocent pair of dice managed to seem like high-stakes poker. And it was then, at the hottest hour of the day, with Front Street empty of pedestrians — only a lunatic or a recent arrival would dare to walk out in the sun at that moment — that I saw him. A restaurant door opened; a decadent place was revealed, a wall covered in mirrors; and through the door came a rash creature. Like in the old joke about twins who meet in the street and recognize each other instantly, I recognized my father.

You, readers of romantic novels; you, sensitive victims of our melodramatic culture, now await a standard reunion scene, with initial gestures of skepticism, lachrymose concessions to the physical evidence, sweaty embraces in the middle of the street, resounding promises to make up for lost time. Well then, allow me to say that I’m (not) sorry to disappoint you. There was no reunion whatsoever, because there was no union to renew; there was no promise, because for my father and for me there’d been no time lost. Yes, there are some things that dissociate me from a certain English novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer. My father did not teach me to read Shakespeare or Victor Hugo on our estate in Poland, nor did I immortalize the scene in my memoirs (surely exaggerating it along the way, it has to be said); he did not await me in bed when, the two of us living in cold Kraków, I returned from school to console him over the death of my mother in exile. . Please, understand: my father was my mother’s story. A character, a version, and little more. Well then, there, in the middle of the scorching street, that father in his fifties spoke through the already graying beard that covered his face and defined his features. Or rather the absence of them: for the whiskers of his mustache covered his lips (and had turned yellow, or perhaps always had been), and those on his cheeks went so close to his eyes that my father could have looked at them himself with a little effort. And through that curtain of smoke, from that gray Birnam Wood advancing toward the deforested regions of his face, spoke my father’s invisible mouth: “So I have a son.” Hands clasped behind his back and his gaze fixed on the ground, on the waves of heat at the height of his shiny boots, he began to walk. I understood that I should follow him, and from behind, like a geisha following her lord, I heard him add: “Not a bad thing, at my age. Not bad at all.”

And that’s how it began: it was that simple. Thus I had a father, and he a son.

His house was on the north side of Manzanillo Island, in the makeshift and yet ostentatious city the founders of the railroad — which is to say, Aspinwall-Colón — had built for their employees. A ghetto surrounded by groves of trees, a luxurious hamlet on stilts, the city of the Panama Railroad Company was an oasis of salubriousness in the swamp of the island, and to enter it was to breathe a different air: the clean air of the Caribbean instead of the sickly vapors of the Chagres River. The white-walled, red-roofed house, paint peeling off the walls from the humidity and screen doors dirty with the accumulated bodies of mosquitoes, had belonged to a certain Watts, an engineer murdered five days after the inauguration of the railway, when, during a dry summer on his way back from buying two barrels of fresh water in Gatún, he was stabbed by mule thieves (or maybe water thieves); and my idealistic father, inheriting it, had felt that he inherited much more than walls and hammocks and mosquito nets. . But if someone — his recently discovered son, for example — had asked him what that legacy consisted of, he wouldn’t have known how to answer; instead, he would have taken out of a Spanish trunk, covered in leather and closed with a lock strong enough to guard a dungeon in times of the Inquisition, the semi-complete collection of his articles published since his arrival in Colón-Aspinwall. That’s what he did with me. In many more words and a few gestures, I asked him: Who are you? And he, without a single word and with the simple gesture of opening the chest and leaving it open, tried to answer the question. And the results, at least for me, were the first big surprise of the many that awaited me in the city of Colón. Do share, readers, my filial astonishment, such a literary thing. For there, lying in a hammock in San Jacinto and with a sherry cobbler in my free hand, I embarked on the task of reviewing my father’s articles, that is, of finding out who this Miguel Altamirano was, into whose life I had just burst. And what did I discover? I discovered a symptom, or a complex, as one of these new Freudian disciples who accost us from everywhere would say. Let’s see if I can explain it. I must be able to explain it.

I discovered that over the course of two decades my father had produced, from his mahogany desk — bare but for the skeleton of a hand on a marble pedestal — a scale model of the Isthmus. No, model is not the word, or perhaps it is the applicable word to the first years of his journalistic labors; but starting from some imprecise moment (futile, from a scientific point of view, to try to date it), what was represented in my father’s articles was more than a distortion, a version — again the damned little word — of Panamanian reality. And that version, I began to realize as I read, only touched on objective reality at certain select points, the way a merchant ship only concerns itself with certain ports. In his writings, my father did not fear for a moment changing what was already known or what everyone remembered. With good reason, besides: in Panama, which after all was a state of Colombia, almost no one knew, and most of all, no one remembered. Now I can say it: that was my first contact with the notion, which would so often appear in my future life, that reality is a frail enemy to the power of the pen, that anyone can found a utopia simply by arming himself with good rhetoric. In the beginning was the word: the contents of that biblical vacuity were revealed to me there, in the port of Colón, in front of my father’s desk. Reality real like a creature of ink and paper: that discovery, for someone of my age, is of the sort that shakes worlds, transforms beliefs, makes atheists devout and vice versa.

Let’s clear this up once and for all: it’s not that my father wrote lies. Surprised and at the same time full of admiration, over the first few months of life with my father I began to notice the strange illness that a few years back had begun to guide his perception and, therefore, his pen. Panamanian reality entered his eyes as if from a stick for measuring water depth from the shore: it folded, it bent, folded at the beginning and bent afterward, or vice versa. The phenomenon is called “refraction,” as more competent people have told me. Well then, my father’s pen was the largest refractive lens of the Sovereign State of Panama; only the fact that Panama was in itself a place so prone to refraction can explain why nobody, I mean nobody, seemed to notice. At first I thought, as any respectful son would, that the fault was mine, that I had inherited the worst of distortions: my mother’s cynicism. But I soon accepted the obvious.

In Miguel Altamirano’s first articles, the railway’s dead had been almost ten thousand; in one from 1863 the sum was less than half that, and toward 1870 he wrote about “the two thousand five hundred martyrs to our well-being.” In 1856 my father was one of those who wrote with an indignant wealth of detail of an incident that happened near the stations, when a certain Jack Oliver refused to pay a certain José Luna the price of a slice of watermelon, and for several hours Panamanians of the neighborhood shot it out with Gringo train passengers, at a cost of fifteen dead and an indemnity the Colombian government had to pay in installments to the government of the victims. Examining my father’s articles: in one from 1867, the fifteen dead had become nine; in 1872 he mentions nineteen wounded, seven of them seriously, but not a word about deaths; and in one of his most recently published texts — April 15 the year of my arrival — my father recalled “the tragedy of the nine victims” (and he even turns the watermelon into an orange, though I don’t know what that could mean). Readers of the Jury, I now reach for a phrase that is the resource of lazy writers and say: examples abound. But I am interested in leaving a record of one in particular, the first of those to occur in my presence.

I have already mentioned Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse and his expedition to the Darien; but I have not mentioned the results. That November morning, my father presented himself at the anchorage of the port of Colón to see off the Lafayette and the eighteen explorers, and then he wrote for the Star & Herald (which the Panama Star was now called) a page-and-a-half-long panegyric, wishing good luck to the pioneers and courage to the conquerors in that first step toward the Inter-oceanic Canal. I was with him at that moment; I went with him. Six months later, my father returned to the port to welcome back the delegation of pioneers and conquerors, and again I was with him; and there, in the same port, he found, or we found, that two of the men had died of malaria in the jungle, and two others on the high sea, and that the rain had made several of the routes impassable, so the terrains the expedition wanted to investigate remained convincingly virginal. The conquerors returned to Colón dehydrated, ill, and depressed, and most of all victims of a resounding failure; but two days later Miguel Altamirano’s version appeared in the newspaper:

THE WYSE EXPEDITION IS AN UNQUALIFIED SUCCESS

THE LONG ROAD TO THE CANAL BEGINS

The French Lieutenant had not managed to establish the best route for a task of such magnitude, but my father wrote: “All doubts have been dispelled.” The French Lieutenant had not managed to establish whether a canal with culverts and locks would be better than one at sea level, but my father wrote: “For the science of engineering, the Darien Jungle has ceased to hold secrets.” And no one contradicted him. The laws of refraction are a complicated business.

But it’s the same all over and the same thing was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. So now we travel to Marseille. The reason? I would like to show, simply to be fair, that others also have the enviable capacity to distort truths (and more: they manage to do so with greater success, with better guarantees of impunity). Now I return to Korzeniowski, and I do so rather overwhelmed by shame and excusing myself in advance for the direction this tale is about to take. Who could have told me that one day my pen would be occupied with such shocking matters? But there is no way to avoid it. Sensitive readers, people of delicate constitutions, demure ladies and innocent children: I beg or suggest that you close your eyes, cover your ears (in other words, skip to the next chapter), because here I shall refer, more than to young Korzeniowski himself, to the most private of his parts.

We are in the month of March in 1877, and in the city of Marseille, Korzeniowski’s anus is suffering. No, let us be frank or, at least, more scientifically precise: he has an abscess. It is, in all probability, the most well-documented anal abscess in the history of anal abscesses, for it appears, at least, in two of the young sailor’s letters, two of those from a friend, one of his uncle’s, and in the first officer’s report. Before such proliferation, I have often asked myself the inevitable question: Are there allusions to the anal abscess in the literary oeuvre of Joseph Conrad? Dear readers, I confess: if they are there, I have not found them. Of course, I don’t share the opinion of a certain critic (George Gallaher, Illustrated London News, November 1921, page 199), according to whom that abscess is the “true heart of darkness,” nor do I believe that in real life it was Korzeniowski who, in an attack of private discomfort, cried out, “The horror! The horror!” Be that as it may, no abscess, anal or any other kind, has had such intense consequences from a metaphysical point of view as that which oppresses Korzeniowski that spring. For due to its pain he is obliged to remain on land while his ship, the Saint-Antoine, sails again to the Caribbean.

During these days of enforced terra firma, a disconsolate and mortally bored Korzeniowski devotes himself to theoretical studies of technical materials to qualify as a ship’s mate. But this training is theoretical in more than one sense, for what happens in practice is quite different: Korzeniowski spends his time walking around the vieux port and frequenting people with questionable reputations. Summer begins and Korzeniowski tries to complement his education: in his very poor room at 18 rue Sainte, between two applications of Madame Fagot’s ointment, he receives English lessons from one Henry Grand, who lives at number 22 of the same street; in the Café Bodoul, between two drinks or two cigars, he receives lessons in politics from the Nostalgic Realists. The anal abscess does not prevent him from noticing that the followers of Monsieur Déléstang are right: King Alfonso XII, who is the same age as our Polish sailor, is no more than a puppet of Republican atheists, and the only legitimate owner of the crown of Spain is Don Carlos, the poor, pursued Catholic who had to hide on the other side of the French border. This, of course, is only one way of seeing things; the other is that Korzeniowski doesn’t give a fig about the Carlists, the monarchy, the Republic, and Spain in general; but the anal abscess that has left him on land has also deprived him of the salary he had anticipated. .

Korzeniowski suddenly finds himself short of funds. How will he buy his good brandy, the good Havana cigars he’s grown accustomed to on recent voyages? European politics then provides an opportunity he cannot waste: smuggling rifles for the Colombian Conservatives had gone so well, had worked so easily, that now Korzeniowski accepts the invitation of a certain Captain Duteuil. He puts a thousand francs on the table to get weapons to the Carlists; after a few days, the investment produces a return of four hundred. “Viva Don Carlos!” shouts Korzeniowski through the streets of Marseille, producing a sort of involuntary echo from a certain bellicose Conservative and Colombian general. Death to the Republic! Death to Alfonso XII! Korzeniowski, enthusiastic about his talent for business, invests for a second time in the Carlist crusade. But the contraband for political-ends market is capricious and variable, and this time the young investor loses it all. While another dose of ointment is applied, this time prepared by a friend of Madame Fagot’s, Korzeniowski thinks: It is all the fault of the abscess. Viva Madame Fagot’s friend! Death to anal abscesses!

It is then that he meets Paula de Somogyi, Hungarian actress, lover of the aspirant Don Carlos, activist for his restitution to the throne and belle dame sans merci. Paula is beautiful and closer in age to the contrabandist than to the pretender; and what happens in romantic novels happens to Korzeniowski, when the disoriented young man and Don Carlos’s brazen lover become involved. They have clandestine and frequent encounters in portside hotels. To keep from being recognized, Paula covers her head with a hood, in the best Milady de Winter style; Korzeniowski enters and leaves through the window, and becomes an habitué of the rooftops of Marseille. . But the paradise of clandestine love cannot endure (it’s one of the laws of romanticism). Enter John Young Mason Key Blunt, an American adventurer who had lived in Panama during the gold rush and made himself rich, in those days before the railway, taking prospectors from one side of the Isthmus to the other. Blunt — who would have imagined? — had taken a liking to the Hungarian. He pursues her, he hounds her in scenes worthy of a cabaret (she with her back against a wall, he wrapping his arms around her while speaking fish-scented obscenities too close to her face). But Paula is a virtuous woman, and her religion only allows her to have one lover; so she tells Korzeniowski all about it, holding the back of her hand against her forehead and leaning back her head. The young man knows that his honor and that of the woman he has fallen in love with leave him no alternative. He challenges Blunt to a duel to the death. In the tranquillity of the Marseille siesta, shots are suddenly heard. Korzeniowski lifts a hand to his chest: “I’m dying,” he says. And then, as is obvious, he does not die.

Oh, dear Conrad, what an impetuous lad you were. . (You don’t mind if I address you informally, do you, dear Conrad? We know each other so well, after all, and we’re so close. . ) Later you would leave written evidence of these activities, of your own voyage as a Mediterranean gunrunner on the Tremolino, of the encounter with the coast guard — someone had denounced the smugglers — and of the death of César, the informant, at the hands of his own uncle, none other than Dominic Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica. But written evidence is undoubtedly a condescending and generous phrase, dear Conrad, because the truth is this: despite the passing of the years, which turn everything true, I do not manage to believe a single word of what you say. I don’t believe you were a witness to the moment Cervoni murdered his own nephew; I don’t believe the nephew sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean with the weight of the ten thousand francs he’d stolen. Let’s admit, dear Conrad, that you have been deft in the art of rewriting your own life; your little white lies — and another few running closer to beige — have passed into your official biography unquestioned. How often did you speak of your duel, dear Conrad? How many times did you tell that romantic and also sterilized story to your wife and sons? Jessie believed it till the end of her days, and so did Borys and John Conrad, convinced that their father was a musketeer for modern times: noble like Athos, kind like Porthos, and religious like Aramis. But the truth is different and, most of all, much more prosaic. It’s true, Readers of the Jury, that on Conrad’s chest was the scar of a bullet wound; but the similarities between Conradian reality and real reality end there. As in so many other cases, real reality has been left buried under the verbiage of the novelist’s profuse imagination. Readers of the Jury: I am here, again, to give the contradictory version, to dispel the verbiage, to bring discord into the tranquil house of received truths.

The young Korzeniowski. I can see him now, and I’d like my readers to see him, too. Photos of the time show a baby-faced lad, smooth hair, long, straight brows, almond-colored eyes: a young man who regards his aristocratic origins at once with pride and affected disdain; he was five-foot-eight but at this time appears shorter due simply to timidity. Look at him, readers: Korzeniowski is first and foremost a boy who has lost his bearings. . and that’s not all. He has lost his faith in people; he’s lost all his money, wagering it on the habit-forming horse of contraband. Captain Duteuil had betrayed him: he’d taken his money and fled to Buenos Aires. Do you see him, readers? Korzeniowski, disoriented, wanders round the port of Marseille with an anal abscess and not a single coin in his pockets. . The world, thinks Korzeniowski, has suddenly turned into a difficult place, and all through the fault of money. He had quarreled with Monsieur Déléstang; he would never again step on a ship of his fleet. All paths seem closed to him. Korzeniowski thinks — it is to be thought that he thinks — of his uncle Tadeusz, the man whose money has kept him afloat since he left Poland. Uncle Tadeusz writes regularly; for Korzeniowski his letters should be a source of joy (contact with the homeland and so on), but in truth they torment him. Each letter is a judgment; after each reading, Korzeniowski is found guilty and condemned. “In two years you have by your transgressions used up your maintenance for the whole third year,” his uncle writes. “If the allowance that I have allotted you does not suffice, earn some money — and you will have it. If, however, you cannot earn it, then content yourself with what you get from the labor of others — until you are able to supplant it with your own earnings, and gratify yourself.” Uncle Tadeusz makes him feel useless, childish, irresponsible. Uncle Tadeusz has suddenly come to represent all that is detestable about Poland, every constraint, every restriction that had forced Korzeniowski to escape. “Hoping that it is the first and last time you cause me so much trouble, you have my embrace and my blessing.” First time, thinks Korzeniowski, last time. First. Last.

At the age of twenty, Korzeniowski has learned what it means to get into debt up to his neck. While waiting for the profits from the smuggled guns, he’d lived on the money of others; with other people’s money he’d bought the basic necessities for a trip that never came off. And that’s when he turns, for the last time — first, last — to his friend Richard Fecht. He takes a loan of eight hundred francs and leaves for Villa Franca. His intention: to join up with a North American squadron that was anchored there. What follows happens very quickly, and will continue happening very quickly in Korzeniowski’s mind, and also in Conrad’s, for the rest of his life. On the U.S. ships there are no available places: Korzeniowski, Polish citizen with no military papers, no stable employment, no certificates of good conduct, without a single piece of testimony to his skills on deck, is turned away. The Korzeniowskis are rash, passionate, impulsive: Apollo, his father, had been imprisoned for conspiring against the Russian Empire, for organizing several mutinies, and he had staked his life on a patriotic ideal; but the desperate young sailor does not think of him when he manages to get a lift to Monte Carlo, where he will stake his life for — shall we say? — less altruistic motives. Korzeniowski closes his eyes. When he opens them again, he finds himself standing before a roulette wheel. Welcome to Roulettenbourg, he thinks ironically. He doesn’t know where he’s heard that name before, sardonic code of hardened gamblers. But he doesn’t exert himself in pursuit of the memory. His concentration is elsewhere: the ball has begun to spin.

Korzeniowski takes his money, all his money. Then he pushes the chips across the smooth surface of the table; the chips settle contentedly on a black-colored diamond. “Les jeux sont faits,” shouts a voice. And as the roulette spins and on it the black ball, black like the diamond under the chips, Korzeniowski is surprised to recall words not his own and whose providence is unknown.

No, he does not recall them: the words have invaded him, they have taken him by storm. They are Russian words, the language of the empire that killed his father. Where do they come from? Who is speaking, and to whom? “If one begins cautiously,” says the new and mysterious voice rising in his head, “. . and can I, can I be such a baby! Can I fail to understand that I am a lost man?” The roulette spins, the colors disappear, but in Korzeniowski’s head the voice persists and keeps talking: “But — can I not rise again! Yes! I have only for once to be prudent and patient and — that is all! I have only for once to show willpower and in one hour I can transform my destiny! The great thing is willpower. Only remember what happened to me seven months ago at Roulettenbourg just before my final failure.” There it is, thinks Korzeniowski: that strange word. He doesn’t know what Roulettenbourg is or where it is; he doesn’t know who, from deep in his head, mentions this ignoble place. Is it something I’ve heard, something I’ve read, something I’ve dreamed? Who’s there? wonders Korzeniowski. And the voice: “Oh! it was a remarkable instance of determination; I had lost everything, then, everything. .” Who is it, who’s speaking? asks Korzeniowski. And the voice: “I was going out of the casino, I looked, there was still one gulden in my waistcoat pocket. Then I shall have something for dinner, I thought. But after I had gone a hundred paces I changed my mind and went back.” The roulette is coming to a stop. Who are you? asks Korzeniowski. And the voice: “There really is something peculiar in the feeling when, alone in a strange land, far from your home and from friends, not knowing whether you will have anything to eat that day, you stake your last gulden, your very last! I won, and twenty minutes later I went out of the casino, having a hundred and seventy guldens in my pocket. That’s a fact! That’s what the last gulden can sometimes do! And what if I had lost heart then? What if I had not dared to risk it?” But who are you? asks Korzeniowski. And the voice: “Tomorrow, tomorrow it will all be over!”

The roulette has stopped.

“Rouge!” shouts a man’s bow tie.

“Rouge,” repeats Korzeniowski.

Rouge. Red. Rodz.

He has lost everything.

Back in Marseille, he knows very well what he should do. He invites his friend Fecht to his apartment on rue Sainte for tea. There is no tea in the house, nor money to buy any, but that doesn’t matter. Rouge. Red. Rodz, he thinks. Tomorrow it will all be over. He goes out for a stroll around the port, he approaches an English sailing ship and stretches out his arm, as if to touch it, as if the sailing ship were a newborn donkey. There in front of the sailing ship and the Mediterranean, Korzeniowski suffers a violent attack of sadness. His sadness is that of skepticism, disorientation, the complete loss of a place in the world. He had arrived in Marseille drawn by adventure, and by the desire to break with a life that didn’t include adventure, but now he feels lost. An exhaustion that is not physical undermines him from within. Now he realizes that over the last seven days he has not slept seven whole hours. He raises his head and looks at the cloudy sky extending behind the sailing ship’s three masts; there, in the middle of the subtle racket of the port, the universe presents itself as a series of incomprehensible images. A few minutes after five, Korzeniowski is back in his room. Madame Fagot asks if he might not have the money he owes her. “One more day, please,” Korzeniowski says, “one more day.” And he thinks: Tomorrow it will all be over.

The first thing he does upon entering his room is to open the only window. A solitary, dense gust of sea air rushes in and the smell almost makes him cry. He opens his trunk of personal belongings and from the bottom extracts a book of names and addresses — all the people he has known in his short life — and places it delicately, like a sleeping child, on the bedspread, so it would catch any visitor’s eye. In the trunk he has also found a revolver: it is a Chamelot-Delvigne with six metal cartridges, but Korzeniowski opens the drum and removes five of them. At that moment he hears voices: it’s Fecht, who has arrived for tea unaware there is no tea to be had; Fecht, courteous as ever, greets Madame Fagot and asks after her daughters. Korzeniowski hears footsteps climbing the stairs and sits down on the bed. He leans against the wall, lifting up his shirt at the same time, and as he puts the cold barrel of the revolver against his chest, in the place where he imagines his heart must be, he feels his nipples harden and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end like a furious cat’s. Tomorrow it will all be over, he thinks, and at that moment a light comes on in his head: it’s a line from a novel, yes, the last line of a Russian novel, and the mysterious words that he’d been hearing in the casino are the last words of that novel. He thinks of the title, Igrok, and it strikes him as too elementary, almost insipid. He wonders if Dostoevsky is still alive. Strange, he thinks, that the image of an author he finds unpleasant should be the last thing that passes through his head.

Konrad Korzeniowski smiles as he considers this idea, and then he fires.

The Chamelot-Delvigne’s bullet goes through Korzeniowski’s body without touching a single vital organ, zigzagging improbably to avoid arteries, tracing ninety-degree angles if necessary to miss lungs and thus postpone the death of the desperate young man. The bedspread and pillow are soaked in blood, blood splashes the walls and headboard. Minutes later, the friend Fecht will find first the wounded man and then the address book, and will write the famous telegram to Uncle Tadeusz that will later become a synthesis of the young man’s situation: KONRAD BLESSÉ ENVOYEZ ARGENT. Uncle Tadeusz will travel from Kiev to Marseille on express trains, and upon arrival will pay the debts that must be paid — discovering as he does so that the creditors are several — as well as the medical bills. Korzeniowski will recover gradually, and after a few years, once he has made a more or less profitable profession out of lying, he will begin to lie about the origin of the scar on his chest as well. He will never confess the true circumstances of the injury; he will never find himself obliged to do so. . Let’s get to the point: once Uncle Tadeusz was dead, once Richard Fecht was dead, the failed suicide of Joseph Conrad disappeared from world events. And I myself was deceived. . for at the beginning of 1878 I was the victim of a sharp chest pain, which at that moment, before the unpredictable law of my correspondences with Joseph Conrad was revealed to me, was diagnosed as the main symptom of a light form of pneumonia. Many years later — when I at last discovered the invisible ties that bind me to my kindred spirit, and was able to interpret correctly the most important events of my life — I prided myself at first that the monstrous pain, which attacked me accompanied by a dry (to begin with) and (eventually) productive cough, overwhelming me with breathing difficulties and loss of sleep, should have been the noble echo of a duel, a sort of participation in the chivalrous history of humanity. Finding out the truth, I confess, was a slight disappointment. Suicide is not noble. As if that weren’t enough: suicide is not very Catholic. And Korzeniowski/Conrad, Catholic and noble, knew it. If not, Readers of the Jury, he would not have taken the trouble to hide it.

The supposed pneumonia kept me laid up in bed for ten weeks. I suffered the shivers not thinking and not knowing that another man, in another part of the world, was suffering them, too, at that precise instant; and when I sweated whole rivers, was it not more sensible to attribute it to the supposed pneumonia instead of thinking of the metaphysical resonances of someone else’s distant sweating? The days of the supposed pneumonia are associated in my memory with the Altamirano guest house; my father confined me to his house — he sequestered me, kept me in quarantine — for he knew what so many people said in so many different words but which could be synthesized in these: in Panama, the unhealthy, feverish, contagious Panama of that time, going into the hospital meant never coming out. “Ill on arrival, dead on departure” was the refrain that summed the matter up (and that went round Colón in every language, from Spanish to English to Caribbean Creole). So the white-walled, red-roofed house, bathed by sea air, with treatments from Miguel Altamirano, amateur physician, became my private little sanatorium. My Magic Mountain, in other words. And I, Juan Castorp or Hans Altamirano, received in the sanatorium the various lessons my father lavished on me.

So time passed, as they say in novels.

And so (stubbornly) it continued to pass.

There, in the place of my isolation, my father would arrive to tell me of the magnificent things that were happening all over the world. One pertinent clarification: my father the optimist referred to almost anything related to the by then ubiquitous subject of the Inter-oceanic Canal as magnificent things; by all over the world he meant Colón, Panama City, and the piece of terra more or less firma that stretched between them, that strip where the railway ran and that, for reasons the reader can already imagine, would soon become something like the Apple of Western Discord. Nothing else existed then. Nothing else was worth talking about, or maybe it was that nothing was happening in any other part of the world. For example (it’s just an example), my father didn’t tell me that on one of those days a U.S. warship had arrived in Limón Bay, armed to the teeth and determined to cross the Isthmus. He didn’t tell me that Colonel Ricardo Herrera, commander of the Colón Sappers battalion, had to declare that he “would not consent to their crossing Colombian territory as they intended,” and even went so far as to threaten the Gringos with “the armed defense of the sovereignty of Colombia.” He didn’t tell me that the commander of the North American troops finally gave up his attempt and crossed the Isthmus by train, like everyone else. It was a banal incident, of course; years later, as will be seen, that unusual attack of Sovereign Pride would take on importance (a metaphorical importance, shall we say?), but my father could not know it, and so he condemned me to ignorance as well.

On the other hand, I was one of the first people to know, through my father’s news and with a wealth of detail, that Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse had traveled to Bogotá on an urgent mission, covering the four hundred kilometers in ten days by the Buenaventura route, and that he’d arrived smelling of shit and in terrible need of a razor. And thus I also discovered that two days later, clean-shaven and cologne-scented, he’d had an interview in Bogotá with Don Eustorgio Salgar, Secretary of Foreign Relations, and had obtained from the government of the United States of Colombia the exclusive privilege, valid for ninety-nine years, to construct the Fucking Canal. Thus I found out that Wyse, with the concession in his pocket, had traveled to New York to buy from the Gringos the results of their isthmian expeditions; thus I found out that the Gringos had roundly refused to sell them and, what’s more, had refused to show a single map or reveal a single measurement, share a single piece of geological data or even listen to the proposals of the French. “Negotiations are advancing,” wrote my refracting father in the Star & Herald. “They advance like a locomotive, and nothing can stop them.”

Now, when I remember those distant days, I see them as the last period of tranquillity my life would know. (This melodramatic declaration contains less melodrama than it seems at first: for someone born in the tropical isolation in which I was born, in that Remote Kingdom of Humidity that is the city of Honda, any halfway worldly experience is an example of rare intensity; in the hands of someone less timid, that pastoral, riverbank childhood could be material for many cheap lines of verse, things like The turbulent waters of my plains childhood or The turbulent childhood of these plains waters or even The young and plainly turbulent water.) But what I want to say is this: those first years of my life in Colón, beside my newfound father — who seemed no less improvised and makeshift than the house on stilts he lived in — were moments of relative peace, although at the time I didn’t realize it. My crystal ball did not allow me to see what was coming. How could I have foreseen what was going to happen, anticipate the Cascade of Great Events waiting for us around the corner, concentrated as I was on that novelty that excluded everything else: the acquisition of a father? I will now write something very rash, and I hope it will be tolerated: in those days, talking with Miguel Altamirano and sharing his activities and enjoying his attentions, I felt that I had found my place in the world. (I didn’t feel it with much conviction; I didn’t go so far as to delight in such temerity. In the end, as often happens, it turned out that I was wrong.)

In exchange for his care, Miguel Altamirano demanded nothing but my unconditional attention, the presence of the blank face of the listener. My father was a talker in search of an audience; he sought an ideal listener possessed of a no less ideal insomnia, and everything seemed to indicate that he’d found him in his son. For months, long after my chest had overcome the supposed pneumonia, my father kept talking to me as he had done while I was ill. I don’t know why, but my illness and my seclusion in the Magic Mountain had provoked curious pedagogical enthusiasms, and those enthusiasms carried on afterward. My father gave me his hammock, as he would a convalescent, and brought a chair over to the wooden porch steps; and there, both of us immersed in the dense, damp heat of the Panamanian night, as soon as the mosquitoes’ habits allowed, under the occasional flutter of a hungry bat, the monologue began. “Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself,” wrote a certain novelist, who never even met my father, much later in a certain Damn Book. But the description is apt: my father, enamored of his own voice and his own ideas, used me the way a tennis player uses a practice wall.

So a strange routine settled over my new life. During the day, I walked the baking streets of Colón, accompanying my father on his labors as Chronicler of the Isthmus like a witness to a witness, visiting and revisiting the offices of the Railroad Company with such assiduity that they became for me a second home (like a grandmother’s house, for example, a place we are always welcome and where there is always a plate for us on the table), and during the no less baking nights I attended the Altamirano Lectures on “The Inter-oceanic Canal and the Future of Humanity.” During the day, we visited the white wooden offices of the Star & Herald, and my father would receive commissions or suggestions or missions that we would go straight out to fulfill; during the night, my father explained to me why a canal built at sea level was better, cheaper, and less problematic than one built with locks, and how anyone who said the opposite was simply an enemy of progress. During the day, my figure soaked in sweat accompanied the figure of my father to visit an engine driver and listen to him talk about how the Railroad Company had changed his life, in spite of having been attacked more times than he could remember in his years of work and having, to prove it, scars of a dozen knife wounds still visible in his torso (“Touch them, sir, go ahead and touch them, doesn’t bother me”); during the night, I found out with a wealth of detail that Panama was a better territory than Nicaragua for opening the Canal, in spite of the Gringos’ expeditions producing the opposite findings (“Out of pure spite toward Colombia,” according to my father). During the day. . During the night. . During the day. . et cetera.

I had no reason to know it, but at that time meetings were taking place at 184 boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris, between representatives of more than twenty countries, including the United States of Colombia. For two weeks they had devoted themselves to doing the same thing my father and I did in the Colón nights: discuss the plausibility (and the difficulties and the implications) of constructing a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Among the distinguished orators was Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, who was still stopping in the middle of the street, like a mangy dog, to scratch bites from isthmian mosquitoes, or waking up screaming in horror after being visited, during a sweaty dream, by one of the dead engineers from the Darien Jungle. In spite of having failed on his expedition, in spite of lacking engineering knowledge, Lieutenant Wyse — recently shaved and with the concession signed by Eustorgio Salgar safely tucked into the pocket of his jacket — ventured that Panama was the only place on Earth able to host the colossal undertaking of an inter-oceanic canal. He also ventured that constructing a canal at sea level was the only method able to bring the project to a successful conclusion. To a question about the monstrous volume of the Chagres River, the history of its floods that seemed taken from Genesis, and the inventory of shipwrecks that lay on its bed as if it weren’t a river but a mini Bermuda Triangle, he replied: “A French engineer does not know the word problem.” His opinion, backed up by the heroic figure of Ferdinand de Lesseps, maker of Suez, convinced the delegates. Seventy-eight of them, of which seventy-four were personal friends of de Lesseps, voted unreservedly in favor of Wyse’s project.

There followed several tributes, banquets all over Paris, but one interests me in particular. In the Café Riche, representing the illustrious Colombian community, a certain Alberto Urdaneta organized a lavish banquet: two musical ensembles, silver dinner service, a liveried servant for each diner, and even a couple of interpreters who circulated throughout the salon to facilitate communication among the guests. His intention was to commemorate both Colombian independence and de Lesseps’s victory over the delegates of the boulevard Saint-Germain Congress. The banquet was a sort of quintessence of Colombianness and of Colombia, that country where everybody — I mean, everybody — is a poet, and anybody who isn’t is an orator. And so it was: there was poetry, and there were also speeches. On the back of the gilded lithographed menu were portraits of Bolívar and Santander. Behind Bolívar, three verses which themselves resembled gilded lithographs and that were, viewed from whichever angle, as close as you can get to political masturbation, so much so that I think them superfluous here. Behind Santander, on the other hand, was this gem of adolescent versification, a quartet that could have come out of the composition book of a refined señorita from one of the finest private schools in Bogotá.

Courageous, unwavering skipper

Proud monarchs you cut down to size

Now your foot wears a magistrate’s slipper

And your hand is unflinching and wise.

The speech was the responsibility (in a manner of speaking) of a certain Quijano Wallis. The orator said: “Thus as the sons of Arabia who, wherever they may find themselves on this earth, overcoming the distance in spirit, bow toward their holy city, so, too, we send our thoughts across the Atlantic, where they are warmed in the tropical sun, and fall to our knees on our beloved beaches to greet and bless Colombia on her day of rejoicing. Our fathers made us independent from the Mother Country; Monsieur de Lesseps will make universal commerce independent of the obstacle of the Isthmus and perhaps free Colombia forever from civil discord.”

His thought, I suppose, crossed the Atlantic, warmed itself, and knelt and greeted and blessed and all those things. . And at the end of that year, in the hottest and driest season, the ones who did cross the Atlantic (without kneeling, to be sure) were the French. The Star & Herald commissioned my father to write — in prose, if at all possible — about Ferdinand de Lesseps and his team of Gallic heroes. After all, the representatives of the government, the bankers and journalists, the analysts of our incipient economy and historians of our incipient republic, all were for once in perfect agreement: for Colón, that was the Most Important Visit since the long-ago day when Cristóbal Colón himself accidentally discovered our convulsive lands.

From the moment de Lesseps disembarked from the Lafayette, speaking perfect Spanish with everyone, looking with his curious, sleepy feline gaze, throwing left and right a smile the likes of which Panamanians had never seen in their lives, flaunting a full head of white hair that made him look like a half-finished Santa Claus, my father didn’t let him out of his sight for an instant. In the evening he walked a few steps from his prey down the main street of Colón, passing beneath tissue-paper lanterns that seemed about to burst into flames, in front of the railway station and later in front of the dock where Korzeniowski and Cervoni had unloaded the contraband weapons, in front of the hotel where his son had stayed his first night in Colón, before he knew he had a son, and in front of the premises where the most famous piece of watermelon in the world was sold and where diners and other onlookers died under gunfire. The next morning he spied on him from a prudent distance and saw him go out with three velvet-clad children beneath the unbearable sun, and saw the children running happily among the carrion on the streets and the smell of rotting fruit, and running up to startle a flock of black buzzards snacking on a newborn donkey a few steps from the sea. He saw him catch an Indian woman off guard on the Pacific Mail pier (when the band hired by the Mayor exploded into metallic sounds to celebrate his arrival) and try to dance with her to music that was not danceable but rather martial, and when the woman yanked herself away from him and crouched down at the edge of the sea to wash her hands with a look of disgust, de Lesseps kept smiling, and what’s more, began to chuckle and shout out his love for the tropics and the bright, the radiant (radieux) future awaiting them.

De Lesseps climbed aboard the train to Panama City and my father climbed up after him, and when the train arrived at the Chagres River, he saw him shout to the man in charge and order him to stop the locomotive because he, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had to take home a glass of the enemy’s water, and the entire delegation — the Gringos, the Colombians, the French — raised glasses and toasted the victory of the Canal and the defeat of the Chagres River, and while the glasses clinked in the air one of de Lesseps’s envoys jogged through the hamlet of Gatún, along muddy paths and across pastures that came up to his knees, and arrived at an improvised dock where a canoe rested, and crouched down beside the canoe as the Indian woman had crouched down by the pier and collected in a recently emptied champagne glass a greenish liquid that came out full of slimy algae and dead flies. The only time my father spoke to de Lesseps was when the train passed Mount Hope, where employees had buried their dead during the construction of the railway, and he decided to speak to him in a burst of enthusiasm about the Chinamen in barrels of ice he’d had sent to Bogotá—“Where?” asked de Lesseps. “Bogotá,” repeated my father — and that, if they hadn’t been of use to the student doctors in the university of the capital, they would surely have ended up here, under this earth, under the orchids and mushrooms. Then he shook hands with de Lesseps and said, “Pleasure to meet you,” or “Pleasure to make your acquaintance” (pleasure, in any case, was present in his phrase), and swiftly returned to the edge of the group, trying not to disturb, and from the edge observing de Lesseps during the rest of the journey of that fortunate train, that historic train, through the leafy darkness of the jungle.

He followed him closely when de Lesseps visited the old church of Santo Domingo, whose arch defied the laws of gravity and of architecture, and took note of every admiring comment the admiring tourist came out with. He followed him while de Lesseps shook the hands of the Mayor and military officials in the Panama City station (neither the Mayor nor the officers would wash their hands for the rest of the day). He followed him while he walked through the recently swept and cleaned streets, under French flags sewn ad hoc by the wives of the most distinguished politicians (just as years later another flag would be sewn, the first one of a country that perhaps began to exist the very afternoon when de Lesseps visited the city, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves or jump to conclusions), and he accompanied him to the Grand Hotel, a colonial cloister recently opened with every luxury along one of the longest flanks of the cathedral plaza, whose paving stones — those of the plaza, of course, not the hotel — were normally occupied by carriages pulled by old horses, the noise of their hooves on the stones, and this time by baby-faced soldiers dressed in white and as silent as nervous children about to take their first communion. In the Grand Hotel, before my father’s fascinated gaze, the welcome banquet was held with French food and a pianist brought from Bogotá—“From where?” asked de Lesseps. “From Bogotá,” he was told — to play a barcarole or some gentle polonaise while the local leaders of the Liberal Party told de Lesseps what Victor Hugo had said, that the constitution of the United States of Colombia was made for a country of angels, not human beings, or something along those lines. For those Colombian politicians, who barely sixty years before were inhabitants of a colony, the mere attention of that prophet, author of The Last Day of a Condemned Man and of Les Misérables, the defense counsel of humanity, was the greatest praise in the world, and they wanted de Lesseps to know it: because the attention of de Lesseps was also the greatest praise in the world. De Lesseps asked a banal question, his eyes widened slightly at an anecdote, and the colonized suddenly felt that their entire existence would take on new meaning. If Ferdinand de Lesseps had wished, they would have danced a mapalé or a cumbia right there for him, or better yet a cancan, so he wouldn’t go away thinking we were all Indians here. For there, in the Isthmus of Panama, the colonial spirit floated in the air, like tuberculosis. Or maybe, it occurred to me at some point, Colombia had never stopped being a colony, and time and politics simply swapped one colonizer for another. For the colony, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

When the banquet was over, my father, who had already reserved a room with a view of the interior patio and its fountain where brightly colored fish swam, followed de Lesseps until he saw him retire at last, and was getting ready to retire as well when the door to the billiard room opened and a young man with a waxed mustache and chalk stains on his fingers came out into the corridor and began to speak to him as if he’d known him his whole life. He was part of the Lafayette delegation, had arrived with Monsieur de Lesseps, and would be part of the press office of the Compagnie back in Paris. People had spoken to him very highly of my father’s journalistic work, he said, and even Monsieur de Lesseps had a very good impression from meeting him. He had read some of his articles about the Railroad, his columns in the Star & Herald, and now he would like to propose a permanent connection to the Magnificent Canal Venture. “A pen like yours would be a great help to us in the struggle against Skepticism, which is, as you know so well, the worst enemy of Progress.” And before the night was over, my father found himself playing a three-cushion frame with a group of Frenchmen (and, by the way, losing by several caroms and tearing the imported baize), and he would forever associate the resplendent green of that baize and the clinking of the immaculate ivory balls with the moment when he said yes, that he accepted and felt it an honor to do so, that starting tomorrow he would be the Panama correspondent of the Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique. The Bulletin, to its friends.

And the next morning, before going to stand by the hotel entrance to wait for de Lesseps’s departure, before accompanying him to the hotel dining room where three elite engineers were waiting to talk about the Canal and its problems and its possibilities, before going out with him and getting in the same dugout as him to navigate two or three bends of the enemy Chagres beneath a pulverizing sun, before all that, my father told me what I hadn’t seen with my own eyes. He did so with the evident (and very problematic) feeling of having begun to form part of history, of having begun to imitate the Angel, and perhaps, in a certain sense, he wasn’t wrong. Of course I didn’t speak to my father of the Refractive Effect of his journalism or of the possible impact that effect might have had on the decision of those Frenchmen thirsty for contracted propaganda; I asked him, instead, what opinion he’d formed of that Old Diplomatic Fox, a man who to me was the bearer of a smile much more dangerous than any furrowed brow, author of handshakes more lethal than a stabbing, and at my impudent question and comments my father turned serious, very serious, more serious than I’d ever seen him, and said, with something halfway between frustration and pride: “He’s the man I would have liked to be.”

V. Sarah Bernhardt and the French Curse

“Let there be a canal,” said de Lesseps, and the Canal. . began to come into being. But this did not happen before his sleepy feline eyes: the Great Man returned to Paris — and his return in perfect health was tangible proof that the murderous Panamanian climate was nothing but a myth — and from the offices on rue Caumartin acted as general in chief of an army of engineers managed from the distance, an army sent to these savage tropics to defeat the guerrillas of the Climate, to achieve the subjugation of treacherous Hydrology. And my father would be the narrator of that clash, yes sir, the Thucydides of that war. For Miguel Altamirano, something obvious emerged in those days, vivid and prophetic like a solar eclipse: his manifest destiny, which only now, at sixty-some years of age, was being revealed to him, was to leave written testimony to the supreme victory of Man over the Forces of Nature. Because that’s what the Inter-oceanic Canal was: the battlefield where Nature, legendary enemy of Progress, would at last sign an unconditional surrender.

In January 1881, while Korzeniowski was sailing Australian seas, the good old Lafayette entered those of Panama, bringing a shipment that my father described in his article as a Noah’s Ark for modern times. Down the gangplank came not pairs of all the animals in creation but something much more definitive: fifty engineers and their families. And for a couple of hours there were more École Polytechnique graduates in the port of Colón than porters to take them to the hotel. On February 1, one of those engineers, a certain Armand Reclus, wrote to the rue Caumartin offices: TRAVAIL COMMENCÉ. The two glorious words of the telegram reproduced like rabbits in every newspaper in the hexagone of France; that night my father stayed on Front Street in Colón, going from the General Grant to the nearest Jamaican shack, and from there to the groups of inoffensive drunks (and others who were a little less so) to the loading docks, until dawn reminded him of his respectable age. He arrived at the house on stilts with the first light, drunk on brandy but also on guarapo, because he’d shared toasts and drinks with anyone willing to humor him. “Three cheers for de Lesseps and three cheers for the Canal!” he shouted.

And all of Colón seemed to respond: “Hurrah!”

Eloísa, dear: if my tale had taken place in these cinematographic times (ah, the cinematographer: a creature my father would have liked), the camera would focus right now on a window of Jefferson House, which was, let’s be frank, the only hotel in all of Colón worthy of the engineers from the Lafayette. The camera approaches the window, hovers briefly over the slide rules, protractors, and compasses, moves to focus on the fast-asleep face of a five-year-old child and the trickle of saliva that darkens the red velvet of the cushion, and after passing through a closed door — nothing is forbidden the magic of cameras — captures the last movements of a couple at the height of ecstasy. That they’re not local is obvious from their respective levels of perspiration. I will refer to the woman at length a few lines further on, but for now it is important to note that her eyes are closed, that she’s covering her husband’s mouth to keep him from waking the child with the inevitable (and imminent) noises of his orgasm, and that her small breasts have always been a cause of disputes between her and her bodices. As for the man: between his thorax and that of his wife is an angle of thirty degrees; his pelvis moves with the precision and the invincible regularity of a piston; and his ability to conserve these variables — the angle and the frequency of movement — is due, in large part, to his ingenious use of a lever of the third kind. In which, as everyone knows, the Power is between the Weight and the Fulcrum. Yes, my intelligent readers, you have guessed: the man was an engineer.

His name was Gustave Madinier. He had graduated with honors first from the Polytechnique and later from the École des Ponts et Chaussées; during his brilliant career, he had found himself obliged on more than one occasion to repeat that he was no relation to the other Madinier, the one who fought with Napoleon at Vincennes and later developed a mathematical theory of fire. No, our Madinier, our dear Gustave, who at this very moment is ejaculating into his wife while reciting to himself, “Give me a lever and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the earth,” was responsible for twenty-nine bridges that cover the French Republic, or rather her rivers and lakes, from Perpignan to Calais. He was the author of two books: Les fleuves et leur franchissement and Pour une nouvelle théorie des câbles; his works had caught the attention of the Suez team, and his participation was decisive in the construction of the new city of Ismaelia. Coming to Panama as part of the Compagnie du Canal had been, for him, as natural as having children after marriage.

And now that we’re on that subject: Gustave Madinier had married Charlotte de la Môle in early 1876, that magic year for my father and for me, and five months later Julien was born, weighing 3,200 grams and generating an equal number of malicious comments. Charlotte de la Môle, the woman whose small breasts were a challenge for any bodice, had been a challenge for her husband, too: she was stubborn, willful, and unbearably attractive. (Gustave liked the way her breasts contracted to her ribs when she was cold, because it gave him the feeling he was fornicating with a very young girl. But these were guilty pleasures; Gustave was not proud of them, and only once, while drunk, had he confessed them to his wife.) The fact of the matter was that the collective voyage to Panama had been Charlotte’s idea, and she hadn’t needed more than a couple of couplings to convince the engineer. And there, in the room in the Jefferson House, while her husband falls into a satisfied sleep and begins to snore, Charlotte feels that she made the right decision, for she knows that behind every great engineer stands a very determined woman. Yes, their first images of Colón — its putrefying odors, the unbearable assiduousness of its insects, the chaos of its streets — had provoked a brief disenchantment; but soon the woman fixed her gaze on the clear sky, and the dry heat of February opened her pores and entered her blood, and she liked that. Charlotte did not know that the heat was not always dry, the sky not always clear. Someone, some charitable soul, should have told her. No one did.

It was during those days that Sarah Bernhardt arrived. Readers’ eyes widen, skeptical comments are uttered, but it’s true: Sarah Bernhardt was there. The actress’s visit was another symptom of the navelization of Panama, the sudden displacement of the Isthmus to the very center of the world. . La Bernhardt arrived, for a change, in that dispenser of French figures that was the Lafayette, and stayed in Colón only long enough to catch the train to Panama City (and earn her brief inclusion in this book). In a tiny and sweltering theater, set up in haste in one of the lateral salons of the Grand Hotel, before an audience made up entirely, with one exception, of French people, Sarah Bernhardt appeared on a stage with two chairs and, with the help of a young amateur actor she’d brought with her from Paris, recited, from memory and without a slip, all the speeches of Racine’s Phèdre. A week later she’d taken the train again, but in the opposite direction, and returned to Europe without having spoken to a single Panamanian. . but securing, nevertheless, a place in my tale. For that night, the night of Phèdre, two people applauded more than the rest. One was Charlotte Madinier, for whom the presence of Sarah Bernhardt had been like a balsam against the unbearable tedium of life in the Isthmus. The other was the man in charge of registering every beneficial or worthwhile experience that occurred as a consequence (directly or indirectly) of the construction of the Canal: Miguel Altamirano.

I’ll tell it plainly: Charlotte Madinier and Miguel Altamirano met that night, exchanged names and pleasantries and even classical alexandrines, but it was quite some time before they would see each other again. Something, in any case, quite normal: she was a married woman, and all her time was taken up in being respectably bored; he, for his part, was never still, because at that time there was never an instant when there wasn’t something happening in Panama worthy of review in the Bulletin. Charlotte met my father, forgot him straightaway, and carried on with her own routine, and from the vantage point of that routine watched the dry February air grow denser as the weeks passed, and one night in May she awoke in a fright, because she thought the city was being bombed. She looked out the window: it was raining. Her husband looked out with her, and in a glance calculated that in the forty-five minutes the downpour lasted more water had fallen than fell on France in a whole year. Charlotte saw the flooded streets, the banana peels and palm leaves that passed floating in the current, and every once in a while caught sight of more intimidating objects: a dead rat, for example, or a human turd. Identical downpours occurred eleven more times over the course of the month, and Charlotte, who watched from her seclusion as Colón turned into a swamp over which flew insects of all sizes, began to wonder if the trip hadn’t been a mistake.

And then one day in July, her son woke up with chills. Julien was shaking violently, as if his bed had a life of its own, and the chattering of his teeth was perfectly audible in spite of the downpour lashing the terrace. Gustave was at the Canal construction site, evaluating the damage caused by the rains; Charlotte, dressed in the still-damp clothes she’d had laundered the previous day, carried the child in her arms and arrived at the hospital in a dilapidated buggy. The chills had ceased, but as she laid Julien down in the bed he’d been assigned, Charlotte put the back of her hand against his forehead more out of instinct than anything else, and in the same instant realized the boy was burning up with fever and that his eyes had rolled back in his head. Julien moved his mouth like a grazing cow; he stuck out his dry tongue and there was no saliva in his mouth. But Charlotte could not find enough water to quench his thirst (which, in the middle of a downpour, was nothing if not ironic). Gustave arrived mid-afternoon, having run all over the city asking in French if anyone had seen his wife, and had finally decided, in order to exhaust all possibilities, to go to the hospital. Sitting in hard wooden chairs with backs that fell off if you leaned on them, Gustave and Charlotte spent the night, sleeping upright when exhaustion overcame them, taking turns in a sort of private superstition to take Julien’s temperature. At dawn, Charlotte was awakened by silence. It had stopped raining and her husband was doubled over asleep, his head between his knees, his arms hanging down to the floor. She reached out her hand and felt a wave of relief at finding the fever had gone down. And then she tried, without success, to wake Julien up.

And once again I write this phrase I’ve written so often: enter Miguel Altamirano.

My father insisted on being the one to accompany the Madiniers through those diabolical proceedings: take the child out of the hospital, put him in a coffin, put the coffin in the ground. “It was Sarah Bernhardt’s ghost’s fault,” my father would tell me much later, trying to explain the reasons (which remained unexplained) he’d dived headfirst into the suffering of a couple he barely knew. The Madiniers felt a gratitude I should call eternal: in the midst of their loss and the disorientation of loss, my father had served them as interpreter, undertaker, lawyer, and messenger. There were days when the presence of mourning overwhelmed him; he would think at those moments that his task was complete, that he was intruding; but Charlotte asked him not to go, not to leave them, to keep helping them with the simple help of his company, and Gustave put a hand on his shoulder with the gesture of a brother-in-arms: “You’re all we have,” he said. . and then Sarah Bernhardt went past, dropped a line from Phèdre and continued on her way. And my father was unable to leave: the Madiniers were like puppies, and they depended on him to confront that inhospitable and incomprehensible isthmian world in which Julien no longer was.

Maybe it was around then that people in Colón began to speak of the French Curse. Between May and September, as well as the Madiniers’ son, twenty-two Canal workers, nine engineers, and three engineers’ wives fell victim to the killer fevers of the Isthmus. It carried on raining — the sky turned black at two in the afternoon, and the downpour began almost immediately, not falling in drops but solid and dense, like a heavy wool poncho coming down through the air — but the work carried on, in spite of the earth excavated one day being found back in the trench the next morning due to the weight of the rain. The Chagres River rose so much in one weekend that the railway had to stop running, because the line was under thirty centimeters of water and weeds; and with the railway paralyzed, the Canal was paralyzed, too. The engineers met in the mediocre restaurant of the Jefferson House Hotel or in the 4th of July, a saloon with tables wide enough for them to spread out their topographical maps and architectonic plans — and perhaps play a quick hand of poker on top of the maps and plans — and there they spent hours arguing about where they’d carry on the works when it finally cleared up. It would frequently happen that the engineers would say adieu at the end of an afternoon, arranging to meet the next morning at the excavations, only to discover the next morning that one of them had been admitted to the hospital with an attack of chills, or was at the hospital watching over his wife’s fever, or was with his wife at the hospital attending to their child and regretting ever having come to Panama. Few survived.

And here I enter conflictive terrain: in spite of all that, in spite of his relationship with the Madiniers, my father (or rather his strange Refractive Pen) wrote that “the rare cases of yellow fever that have presented among the heroic artisans of the Canal” had been “imported from other places.” And since no one stopped him, he carried on writing: “No one denies that tropical plagues have been present among the non-local population; but one or two deaths, especially among the workers who came from Martinique or Haiti, should not be cause for unjustified alarm.” His chronicles/reports/articles were read only in France. And there, in France, the relatives of the Canal read them and were reassured, and the shareholders kept buying shares because all was going well in Panama. . I have often thought that my father would have made himself rich if he’d patented that invention: the Journalism of Refraction, so much abused since then. But I am unjust in thinking that. After all, in this lay his extraordinary gift: in not being aware of the gap — no, the immense crater — between the truth and his version of it.

Yellow fever carried on killing tirelessly, and killing French recent arrivals most of all. For the Bishop of Panama, that was sufficient proof: the plague was choosing, the plague had intelligence. The Bishop described a long hand that arrived at night in the houses of the dissolute — the impious, adulterers, drinkers — and took away their children as if Colón were the Egypt of the Old Testament. “Men of upright morals have nothing to fear,” he said, and for my father his words had the taste of old battles against Presbyter Echavarría: it was as though time were repeating itself. But then Don Jaime Sosa, the Bishop’s cousin and administrator of the old cathedral of Porto Bello, a relic of colonial times, said one day that he was feeling bad, then that he was thirsty, and three days later he was buried, in spite of having been bathed by the Bishop himself in a solution of whiskey, mustard, and holy water.

During those months funerals became part of the daily routine, like meals, for the fever dead were buried in a matter of hours to prevent their decomposing fluids from carrying the fever on the wind. The French began walking around with their hands over their mouths, or tying an improvised mask of fine cloth over their mouths and noses like the outlaws of legend; and one afternoon, masked to his cheekbones, a few meters from his masked wife, Gustave Madinier — defeated by the climate, the mourning, the fear of the incomprehensible and treacherous fever — sent my father a farewell note. “It is time to return home,” he wrote. “My wife and I need a change of air. You know, sir, you will always be in our hearts.”

Well now: I would have understood. You, hypocritical readers, my fellows, my brothers, would have understood, even if only out of simple human sympathy. But not my father, whose head was beginning to circulate on different rails, pulled by independent locomotives. . I invade his head and this is what I find: a multitude of dead engineers, a number of other deserters, and an abandoned half-built canal. If hell is personal, a distinct space for each biography (made out of our worst fears, the ones that are not interchangeable), that was my father’s: the image of the works abandoned, of the cranes and steam-powered excavators rotting under moss and rust, the excavated earth returning from the deposits in the freight cars to their damp origins on the jungle floor. The Great Trench of the Inter-oceanic Canal forsaken by its constructors: this, Readers of the Jury, was Miguel Altamirano’s worst nightmare. And Miguel Altamirano was not about to let such a hell establish itself in reality. So there, beside the ghost of Sarah Bernhardt who tossed him Racine’s alexandrines at the least provocation, my father steadied his hand to write these lines: “Honor, Monsieur Madinier, the memory of your only son. Bring the works to completion and little Julien will forever have this Canal as his monument.” By the way, when Gustave Madinier read these lines, it was not in a private note, but on the front page of the Star & Herald, beneath a headline that was little less than blackmail: OPEN LETTER TO GUSTAVE MADINIER.

And one December afternoon, as the sun of the dry season — which had returned with that strange December talent of making us forget past rains, making us believe that in reality Panama is like this — shone over the streets of Colón and over the whole zone of the Great Trench of the Canal, in Jefferson House an engineer and his wife unpack trunks. The clothes go back in the wardrobes and the implements back on the desk, and the portraits of the dead child go back onto the dresser.

And there they stayed, at least until some unpredictable force knocked them off.

After all, these were convulsive times.

Allow me to say it again: these were convulsive times. No, dear readers, I’m not referring to that spoiled idea of politicians who have nothing else to say. I’m not referring to the elections that the Conservatives stole in the Colombian State of Santander, getting rid of Liberal votes and fabricating Conservative ones where there weren’t any; nor am I referring to the Liberal reaction already beginning to think of armed revolutions, of convening revolutionary juntas and raising revolutionary funds. No, Eloísa dear: I’m not referring to the fear of another civil war between Conservatives and Liberals, the constant fear that accompanied Colombians like a faithful dog, and that would not take long, not very long at all, to materialize again. . I’m not referring to the declarations in a secret session of a certain radical leader, who assured the Senate of the Republic that he had news that “the United States had resolved to take possession of the Isthmus of Panama,” much less to the reply of an unsuspecting Conservative for whom “the alarmist voices” should not frighten the nation, for “the Panamanian is happy as a citizen of this Republic, and would never swap his honorable poverty for the soulless comforts of those gold diggers.” No, I’m not referring to any of that. When I say these were convulsive times, I’m referring to less metaphorical and much more literal convulsions. Let us put it clearly: Panama was a place where things shook.

In the space of one year, the inhabitants of the Isthmus took fright at each explosion of the imported dynamite, and very soon grew accustomed to each explosion of imported dynamite: Panama was a place where things shook. There were months when Panamanians were dropping to their knees and beginning to pray every time the steam-powered dredgers opened the earth, and then the dredgers began to form part of the auditory landscape and Panamanians stopped kneeling, for Panama was a place where things shook. . In the yellow-fever wards, the beds reverberated on the wooden floors, lifted by the force of the shivering, and nobody, nobody was surprised: Panama, Readers of the Jury, was a place where things shook.

Well then: on September 7, 1882, came the great shake.

It was 3:29 in the morning when the movements started. I hasten to say they did not last more than a minute; but in that short minute I managed to think first of dynamite, then that this was no time to be setting charges in the Canal zone, then of the French machines, and I ruled them out for the same reason. At that moment a ceramic flowerpot, which had belonged to Mr. Watts, the previous resident of the house on stilts, and which had slept peacefully on top of the cupboard until then, walked four hand spans and threw itself off the edge. The whole cupboard fell immediately after that (crash of crockery smashing, shards of glass scattered dangerously across the floor). My father and I barely had time to grab the bony hand of the dead Chinaman and a drawer from the filing cabinet and get out of the house before the earthquake broke the stilts and the house came down, clumsy and heavy and hulking like a shot buffalo. And at the same time, not far from the residential neighborhood of the Panama Railroad Company, the Madiniers went outside, both in pajamas and both frightened, before the portraits of Julien were smashed against the floor of Jefferson House, and before, luckily, Jefferson House — or at least its façade — crashed to the street, raising a dust cloud that made several of the witnesses sneeze.

The earthquake of 1882, which for many was a new episode of the French Curse, brought down the Colón church as if it were made of cards, ripped up the railway sleepers for 150 meters, and ran down Front Street tearing it as if with a dull knife. Its first consequence: my father got down to work. The bed of the Great Trench collapsed and the walls of the excavation collapsed, ruining a good deal of the work already done, and an encampment near Miraflores disappeared — instruments, personnel, and a steam-powered digger — into the earth that opened as the dynamite had not been able to open it. And in the midst of that disconsolate panorama, my father wrote: “No one is worried, no one is wary, work proceeds without the slightest delay.”

In his writings that followed, did he mention the Colón City Hall, of which not one stone remained on top of another? Did he mention the roofs of the Grand Hotel that buried the general headquarters of the Company, several maps, a contractor recently arrived from the United States, and one or two engineers? No, my father did not see any of that. The reason: at that moment he had acquired, definitively now, the famous Colombian illness of SB (Selective Blindness), also known as PB (Partial Blindness) and even as RIP (Retinopathy due to Interests of a Political nature). For him — and, in consequence, for the readers of the Bulletin, actual and potential shareholders — the Canal works would be finished in half the time predicted and would cost half the anticipated money; the machines that were working were double the existing number but had cost half as much; the cubic meters of earth excavated per month, which was never more than 200,000, was transformed in the Bulletin reports to a good million with all its zeros in place. De Lesseps was happy. The shareholders — actual ones, potential ones — too. Three cheers for France, and three cheers for the Canal, damn it.

Meanwhile, in the Isthmus, the War for Progress was being fought on three fronts: the construction of the Canal, the repair of the railway, and the reconstruction of Colón and Panama City, and Thucydides reported the news in detail (with the details his RIP allowed him to see). Now that the house on stilts had fallen down, I witnessed for the first time the practical effects of my father’s Blindness: not four days passed before he was allocated one of the picturesque habitations of Christophe Colomb, the hamlet built for the white technicians of the Canal Company. It was a prefabricated construction, set down beside the sea with its own hammock and brightly colored blinds like a doll’s house, and we would live in it at no charge whatsoever. It was regal treatment, and my father felt at the back of his neck the unsubtle blow of the Flattery of the Powerful, that which in other places is known under different aliases: sweetener or bribe, enticement or kickback.

The satisfaction, besides, was double: four houses along the way, almost simultaneously, another couple displaced by the earthquake moved in, Gustave and Charlotte Madinier. Everyone was agreed that getting out of that horrible hotel full of dark memories would bring about notable benefits, tabula rasa and all that. In the evenings, after dinner, my father walked the fifty meters that separated us from the Madiniers’ little house, or they walked over to ours, and we sat on the veranda with brandy and cigars to watch the yellow moon dissolve in the waters of Limón Bay and be glad that Monsieur Madinier had decided to stay. Dear readers, I don’t know how to explain it, but something had happened after the earthquake. A transformation of our lives, maybe, or maybe the beginning of a new life.

They say in Panama that the nights in Colón favor intimacies. The causes are, I suppose, scientifically indemonstrable. There is something in the melancholy moan of a certain owl that seems always to be saying “Ya acabó—All done”; there is something in the darkness of the nights that makes you feel you could reach up a hand and grab a piece of the Great Bear; and most of all (to leave off the schmaltz) there is something very tangible in the immediacy of danger, whose incarnations are not limited to a bored jaguar who decides to make an excursion out of the jungle, or the occasional scorpion who sneaks into your shoe, or the violence of Colón-Gomorrah, where since the arrival of the French there were more machetes and revolvers than picks and shovels. Danger in Colón is a daily and protean creature, and one becomes accustomed to its smell and soon forgets its presence. Fear unites; in Panama, we were afraid although we did not know it. And that’s why, it occurs to me now, that a night facing Limón Bay, as long as the sky was clear and the rainy season was over, was able to produce intimate friendships. That’s how it was for us: under my secretarial gaze, my father and the Madiniers spent one hundred and forty-five evenings of friendship and confessions. Gustave confessed that the Canal works were an almost inhuman challenge, but confronting that challenge was an honor and a privilege. Charlotte confessed that the image of Julien, her dead son, no longer tormented her but rather kept her company in moments of solitude, like a guardian angel. The Madiniers confessed (in unison and slightly out of tune) that never, since their marriage, had they felt so close.

“We owe it to you, Monsieur Altamirano,” said the engineer.

“Sir,” said my diplomatic father, “Colombia owes you so much more.”

“It’s the earthquake you owe,” I said.

“None of that,” said Charlotte. “We owe it to Sarah Bernhardt.”

And laughter. And toasts. And alexandrine verses.

At the end of April, my father asked the engineer to take him to see the machines. They left at dawn, after a spoonful of whiskey with quinine to avert what Panamanians called a temperature and the French paludisme, and they took a dugout down the Chagres to go over to the excavations at Gatún. The machines were my father’s latest love: a steam-powered digger could absorb his attention for long minutes; a North American dredger, like the ones that had arrived at the beginning of that year, could arouse sighs from him like the ones my mother had surely aroused on the Isabel (but that was another time). One of those dredgers, parked a kilometer from Gatún like a gigantic beer barrel, was the dugout’s first port of call. The rowers approached the shore and stuck their oars into the riverbed so my father could contemplate, still and hypnotized in spite of the harassment of the mosquitoes, the magic of the hulking great thing. Panama was a place where things shook: the chains of the monster sounded like a medieval prisoner’s shackles, the iron buckets jolted as they lifted the extracted earth, and then came the spitting of pressurized water that launched the earth away from the work site with a hissing that gave him goose bumps. My father took attentive notes on all of that, and began to think of comparisons taken from some book on dinosaurs or from Gulliver’s Travels, when he turned around to thank Madinier but found him with his head between his knees. The engineer said the whiskey had not agreed with him. They decided to go back.

That evening they gathered (we gathered) on the veranda, and the ritual of cigars and brandy was repeated. Madinier said he felt much better; he didn’t know what had happened, he said, he was going to have to take better care of his stomach from then on. He had a couple of drinks, and Charlotte thought it was because of the alcohol when she saw him stand up in the middle of the conversation to go and lie down in the hammock. My father and Charlotte were not talking about Sarah Bernhardt or about Racine’s Phèdre or about the improvised theater in the Grand Hotel, because now they were friends, now they felt like friends, and they didn’t need those codes. They were talking, not without nostalgia, of their pasts in other places; until now they hadn’t realized that my father was also a stranger in Panama, that he had also gone through the processes of the recent arrival — the efforts to learn, the anxiousness to adapt — and having that in common stimulated them. Charlotte told how she’d met Gustave. They had attended a more or less private sort of celebration in the Jardin des Plantes; they were celebrating the departure of a team of engineers to Suez. There they had met, said Charlotte, and soon they were lost on purpose in Buffon’s labyrinth, just so they could talk without anyone interrupting them. Charlotte was repeating what Gustave had explained to her that evening — that in order to get out of a labyrinth, if the walls are all connected, you need only keep the same hand on one of the walls, and sooner or later you would find the exit or return to the entrance — when she stopped mid-sentence and her flat chest was as still as the surface of a lake. My father and I turned instinctively to look at what she was looking at, and this is what we saw: the hammock, swollen under the weight of the engineer Gustave Madinier, molded to the curve of his buttocks and the angle of his elbows, had begun to tremble, and the beams from which it hung creaked desperately. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it yet: Panama, dear readers, was a place where things shook.

In a matter of minutes the chills stopped and the fever and thirst began. But there was something new: with the little lucidity he had left, Madinier began to say that his head ached, and the pain was so savage that at one point he asked my father to shoot him, for pity’s sake, to shoot him. Charlotte refused to let us take him to the hospital, in spite of my father’s insistence, and what we did was lift up the aching body and carry it to my bed, which was the closest to the veranda. And there, on my linen sheets recently purchased at half price from a West Indian shopkeeper, Gustave Madinier spent the night. His wife stayed with him as she had stayed with Julien, and undoubtedly the memory of Julien plagued her during the night. When dawn broke, and Gustave told her that his head was feeling better, that there was no longer such terrible pain in his legs and back, just a vague restlessness, Charlotte didn’t even notice the yellowish tone that had invaded his skin and eyes, but let herself be swept up with relief. She admitted she should sleep a little; the exhaustion kept her slumbering well into the evening. It was already dark when I chanced to see the moment when her husband began to vomit a black and viscous substance that could not be blood, no, sir, I swear it could not be blood.

Gustave Madinier’s death was sadly famous in the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb. The neighbors obliged my father to burn the linen sheets, along with every glass/cup/piece of cutlery that might have entered into contact with the contaminated lips of the poor engineer; the same obligation held, obviously, for Charlotte. Of course, the stubborn and willfull woman put up some resistance at first: she was not going to part with those memories, she wasn’t going to burn the last mementos of her husband without putting up a fight. The French Consul in Colón had to come and force her, by way of an insolent decree adorned with all the stamps in the world, to carry out that purifying bonfire in front of everyone. (The Consul would die of yellow fever, with spasms and black vomit, three weeks later; but that small piece of poetic justice is not relevant now.) My father and I were the labor force for that inquisitional ceremony; and in the middle of the main street of Christophe Colomb a pile gradually grew of blankets and ties, of boar-bristle hairbrushes and straight razors, treatises on Resistance Theory and family photo albums, untrimmed editions of Les fleuves et leur franchissement and of Pour une nouvelle théorie des câbles, crystal goblets and porcelain plates, and even a loaf of rye bread with dirty bite marks. It all burned with a mixture of smells, with black smoke, and once the flames died down a scorched, dark mass remained. I saw my father hug Charlotte Madinier and then get a pail, walk to the edge of the bay, and return with enough water to extinguish the last fading embers. When he came back, when he emptied the pail over the recognizable cover of an album of picture cards that had been blue velvet, Charlotte was no longer there.

She lived four doors down from us, but we lost sight of her. Every day, after the burning, my father and I passed by her veranda and rapped on the wooden frame of the screen door. But there was never an answer. It was futile to try to peek indiscreetly: Charlotte had covered the windows with dark clothing (Parisian capes, long taffeta skirts). It must have been about five or six months after the engineer’s death when we saw her go out, very early, and leave the door open. My father followed her; I followed my father. Charlotte walked toward the port carrying in her right hand — for the left was covered up to the wrist in a badly wrapped bandage — a small case like the ones doctors use. She didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear my father’s words, his greetings, his reiterated condolences; when she arrived at Front Street, she headed, like a horse heading home, to the Maggs & Oates pawnshop. She handed over the case and received in exchange a sum that seemed previously agreed upon (on some of the notes was a drawing of a railway, on others a map, on still others an old ex-President); and all this she did with her face turned toward Limón Bay and her eyes fixed on the Bordeaux, a steamer that had anchored in the bay thirty days earlier and now floated there deserted, for the entire crew had died of fever. “Je m’en vais,” repeated Charlotte with her eyes very wide. My father followed her all the way back home and all she said was: “Je m’en vais.” My father climbed the porch steps behind her and managed to receive a solid whiff of human filth, and all she said was: “Je m’en vais.”

Charlotte Madinier had decided to leave, yes, but she couldn’t or didn’t want to do so immediately. During the day, she was seen walking alone around Colón, after visiting her husband’s grave in the cemetery and even passing by the hospital like a shadow and staying for hours in front of the bed of any fever victim, watching him with such intensity that she would end up disturbing him and asking the nurses why the chart said gastritis when the truth was obviously quite different. There were people who saw her asking the railway passengers for alms; some saw her defy all laws of decency by stopping to chat with a French prostitute from the Maison Dorée, famous all over the Caribbean. I don’t know who first called her the Widow of the Canal, but the nickname stuck with the persistence of an epidemic, and even my father began to use it after a while. (I suspect that for him it didn’t have the scornful and slightly heartless tone it had for the rest; my father spoke of the Widow of the Canal with respect, as if in truth the engineer’s tomb contained a code of the fate of the Isthmus.) The Widow of the Canal, as tends to happen in the Talkative Tropics, began to turn into a legend. She was seen in Gatún, kneeling in the mud to speak to a child, and in the Culebra Pass, discussing the latest advances of the works with the laborers. It was said she didn’t have the money for the passage, and that’s why she hadn’t left; and from then on she was often seen in the Callejón de Botellas charging Canal workers for a quick fuck, and giving others, not so quick and free as well, to the recently arrived workers from Liberia. But the Widow of the Canal, deaf to and distant from rumors, kept wandering the streets of Colón, saying “Je m’en vais” to anyone who would listen and in every tone of voice possible, but never going. Until the day when. .

But no.

Not yet.

It’s still too soon.

Later I’ll get to the curious destiny of the Widow of the Canal. Now it’s more important to deal with other rumors that took place far from there, and which the Widow of the Canal did not hear either. For now the demanding lady Politics peremptorily requires my attention and I, at least for the duration of this book, am her deferential servant. In the rest of the country, politicians were making speeches about the “imminent danger to social order” and “the threatened peace.” But in Panama no one heard their words. The politicians kept talking with suspicious determination of “interior commotion,” of the “revolutions” that were being hatched in the country and of their “somber accompaniment of misfortunes.” But in Colón, and more so in that ghetto of Colón formed by the employees of the Canal Company, we were all deaf to and distant from those speeches. The politicians spoke of the country’s destiny using alarmist words: “Regeneration or Catastrophe,” but their words got snagged in the Darien Jungle or drowned in one of our oceans. Finally, the fatal rumor, the rumor of rumors, arrived in Panama; and so we inhabitants of the Isthmus found out that, in that remote land to which the Isthmus belonged, an election had been held, a party had won in confusing circumstances, another party was rather unhappy. What bad losers the Liberals were! exclaimed the (Conservative) Panamanian priests in the salons of Colón. The facts were simple: some votes had gone missing, some people had difficulties getting to the polling stations, and some who were going to vote Liberal changed their minds at the last minute, thanks to the opportune and divine intervention of that bastion of democracy, the Priesthood. What blame could be ascribed to the Conservative government for such electoral vicissitudes? And that’s what the topic was in the salons of Colón when they received the detailed report of what was going on outside: the armed uprising of the dissenters.

The country, incredibly, was at war.

The first victories belonged to the rebels. The Liberal General Gaitán Obeso took Honda and therefore control of the boats that navigated the Magdalena and entered Barranquilla. His successes were immediate. The Caribbean coast was close to falling into the red hands of the revolution; then, for the first time in history, the writers of that long comedy that is Colombian democracy decided to give a small role, just a couple of easy lines, to the State of Panama. Panama would be the defender of that coast; the martyrs destined to rescue the country from the hands of the Masonic devil would sail from Panama. And one fine day, a contingent of veteran soldiers gathered at the port of Colón under the command of the Governor of Panama, General Ramón Santodomingo, and set sail swiftly for Cartagena, ready to make history. From the port, Miguel Altamirano and his son saw them leave. They weren’t the only ones, of course: onlookers of all nationalities crowded around the port, talking in all languages, asking in all languages what was going on there and why. Among the onlookers there was one who knew well what was going on, and who had decided to make use of it, to take advantage of the absence of soldiers. . And at the end of March, the mulatto lawyer Pedro Prestán, in command of thirteen barefoot West Indians, dressed in rags and armed with machetes, declared himself General of the Revolution and Civil and Military Chief of Panama.

The war, Eloísa dear, had finally arrived in our neutral province, in this place that until then had been known as the Caribbean Switzerland. After half a century of wooing the Isthmus, of knocking on her isthmian doors, war had managed to force them open. And its consequences. . yes, here come the disastrous consequences, but first an instant of pithy and cut-price philosophy. Colombia — as we know — is a schizophrenic country, and Colón-Aspinwall had inherited the schizophrenia. In truth, Aspinwall-Colón had a mysterious capacity to double, to multiply, to divide, to be one and another at the same time, cohabitating without too much effort. Allow me to take a brief leap into the future of my narration, and along the way to ruin all the effects of suspense and narrative strategy, to tell how this episode ends: the Colón fire. I was in the new house of the French city, lying in the hammock (which had become like a second skin to me), holding in my hand an open copy of Jorge Isaacs’s novel María, which had just come off the boat from Bogotá, when the sky behind the book turned yellow, not like feverish eyes but like the mustard that works for some as an antidote.

I ran outside. A long time before getting to Front Street, the air stopped moving and I felt the first slap of heat that wasn’t tropical. At the entrance to the Callejón de Botellas, where legend had seen the Widow of the Canal conversing with the Liberians, I caught the scent of burned flesh, and soon saw emerge out of the shadows the figure of a mule lying on its side, the back legs already charred, the long tongue spread over fragments of green glass. It wasn’t me, but rather my body, that approached the flames like an alligator hypnotized by a burning torch. People ran past me, pushing the hot air, like expulsions from the bellows of a balloon, into my face: the smell of flesh shook me again. But this time it didn’t come from any mule but from the body of mesié Robay, a Haitian beggar of unknown age, family, and place of residence, who had arrived in Colón before all of us and had specialized in stealing meat from the Chinese butchers. I remember I bent down to vomit, and as my face got close to the paving stones they felt so hot that I didn’t dare touch them. Then a strong and constant wind began to blow from the north, and the fire traveled on the wind. . In a matter of hours, during the evening and night of March 31, 1885, Colón, the city that had survived the floods and the earthquake, was turned into charred planks of wood.

The reader will imagine our great surprise when, in that country of impunities, in that world capital of irresponsibility that is Colombia, the one who’d started the fire was put on trial a short time later. My father and I, I remember, turned pale with shock when we learned how events had transpired; but paler still shortly afterward, sitting at the table on the veranda at home, when we realized our evaluations of what had happened were radically different, for our versions of events were different. In other words, conflicting stories were circulating about the Colón fire.

What are you saying, Mr. Narrator? the audience protests. Facts don’t have versions, the truth is but one. To which I can only answer by telling what was told that midday, in the recently burned tropical heat, in my Panamanian house. My version and that of my father coincided at the beginning of the story: we both knew, as did every Colónial who was keeping up with events in the city, the origin of the Colón fire. Pedro Prestán, that mulatto and Liberal lawyer, has risen in arms against the distant Conservative government, only to realize almost immediately that he doesn’t have enough weapons; when he finds out that a shipment of two hundred rifles is coming from the United States on board a private boat, Prestán buys it at a good price; but the shipment is intercepted by an opportunistic and not at all neutral North American frigate that had received very clear instructions from Washington to defend the Conservative government. Prestán, in reprisal, has three North Americans arrested, including the Consul. Meanwhile, Conservative troops disembark in Colón and oblige the rebels to retreat; meanwhile, American marines disembark in the city and also oblige the rebels to retreat. The rebels, in retreat, realize that defeat is near. . And here occurs the schizophrenic attack of Panama politics. Here my version of subsequent events separates from that of my father. The inconsistent Angel of History gives us two different gospels, and the chroniclers will carry on banging their heads against a brick wall till the end of their days, because it is simply impossible to know which deserves the credence of posterity. And thus it is that there, at the Altamiranos’ table, Pedro Prestán splits in two.

Seeing himself defeated, Prestán One, charismatic leader and anti-imperialist national hero, flees by sea toward Curettage to join the Liberal troops fighting there, and the Conservative soldiers, on the orders of their own government and in connivance with the Wicked Marines, torch Colón and put the blame on the charismatic leader. Prestán Two, who after all is little more than a resentful murderer, decides to satisfy his deep-seated pyromania, because nothing seems more attractive to him than attacking the interests of the whites and burning down the city he’s lived in for the last few years. . Before escaping, Prestán One manages to hear the cannon blasts the frigate Galena unleashes on Colón and which, in a matter of hours, will have started the conflagration. Before escaping, Prestán Two gives orders to his West Indian machete men to wipe the city off the map, for Colón prefers death to occupation. The months pass for Prestán One, and they also pass for Prestán Two. And in August of that same year, 1885, Prestán One is arrested in Cartagena, taken to Colón, court-martialed, and found guilty of the fire on irrefutable evidence, having been given full procedural guarantees and the right to a learned, competent lawyer free of racial or class prejudices.

Prestán Two, on the other hand, was not so lucky. The court-martial that tried him did not hear witnesses for the defense; it did not investigate the version that was going round the city — and had earned the credibility of the French Consul, no less — according to which the man responsible for the fire was a certain George Burt, former general manager of the Railroad Company and agent provocateur; it didn’t manage to produce any other witnesses than one North American, one Frenchman, a German and an Italian, none of whom spoke a word of Spanish, whereupon their declarations were never translated or made public; and it did not establish why, if Pedro Prestán’s motive was hatred of the North Americans and the French, the only properties in Colón that were not damaged by the fire were the Railroad Company and the Canal Company.

On August 18, 1885, Prestán One was sentenced to death.

What a coincidence: so was Prestán Two.

Readers of the Jury: I was there. Politics, that Gorgon that turns to stone those who look it in the eye, passed very close by me this time, refusing to be ignored: The morning of the eighteenth, the authorities of the Conservative government, victorious in the Umpteenth Civil War, drove Pedro Prestán to the railway lines, guarded at regular intervals (and without anyone finding it odd) by U.S. Marines armed with cannons. From the second floor of a fire-damaged building I saw four laborers, mulatto like the condemned man, erect a wooden archway in a couple of hours; then a freight platform appeared, rolling along the rails without making any noise. Pedro Prestán mounted the platform, or rather was shoved onto it, and behind him climbed a man who was not wearing a hood but who would undoubtedly act as hangman. There, under the arch of cheap wood, Prestán looked like a lost child: his clothes were suddenly too big for him; his bowler hat seemed about to fall off his head. The hangman put down a canvas bag that he’d been carrying and took a rope out of it so well greased that from the distance it looked like a snake (absurdly I thought they were going to kill Prestán with its venomous bite). The hangman threw the rope over the crossbeam and put the other end, delicately, around the condemned man’s neck, as if afraid of scratching his skin. He tightened the slip knot; he climbed down off the platform. And then, along the rails of the Panama Railroad, the platform slid away with a whistle, and the body of Prestán was left hanging in midair. The noise of his neck breaking blended in with that of the tug of the rope, the jolt of the wood. It was cheap wood, and Panama, in any case, was a place where things shook.

The execution of Pedro Prestán, in those days when the Constitution for Angels with its explicit prohibition of the death penalty was still in force, was a real shock for many. (There were later another seventy-five shocks, when seventy-five citizens of Colón, arrested by the Conservative troops, were lined up with their backs to the charred remains of the walls and shot without the courtesy of a trial.) Of course my father, in his article for the Bulletin, took out his Refraction stick and rearranged reality as he so well knew how. And so, the French shareholder, so concerned about the political convulsions of that remote country and the damage they could cause his investments, found out about the “regrettable fire” that, after an “unforeseeable, inadvertent accident,” burned down “a few unimportant shanties” and several “cardboard shacks that had been on the verge of falling down anyway.” After the fire, “sixteen Panamanians were admitted to the hospital with breathing troubles,” wrote my father (the breathing trouble consisted of the fact that they were not breathing, because the sixteen Panamanians were dead). In my father’s article, the Canal workers were “true war heroes” who had defended the “Eighth Wonder” tooth and nail, and whose enemy was “fearsome nature” (no mention was made of fearsome democracies). Thus it was: through the workings and grace of Refraction, the war of 1885 never existed for the French investors, nor was Pedro Prestán hanged above the railway lines the French used to transport materials. The defeated rebel General Rafael Aizpuru, after listening to the clamor of several notable Panamanians, had offered to declare the independence of Panama if the United States would recognize him as its leader: Miguel Altamirano did not report that.

Like the installations of the two companies, the hamlet of Christophe Colomb was unscathed, as if a firebreak had separated it from the city in flames, and my father and I, who were already starting to feel like nomads on a domestic scale, didn’t have to move again. Shortly after the fire, while the employees of the railway/gallows were busy rebuilding the city, I told my father that we’d had good luck, and he answered with a cryptic expression on his face that must have been melancholy. “It wasn’t luck,” he said. “What we had were Gringo ships.” Under the paternal vigilance of the USS Galena and the USS Shenandoah, under the irrefutable authority of the USS Swatara and the USS Tennessee, works on the Great Trench tried to carry on. But things were no longer as they had been. Something had changed that month of August when the Colombian war arrived in the Isthmus, that ill-fated month when Pedro Prestán was executed. I will say it quickly and without anesthesia: I felt that something had begun to sink. The shareholders, the readers of the Bulletin, had begun to listen to those grotesque rumors: that their brothers, their cousins, their sons, were dying by the dozens in Panama. Could it be true, they wondered, if the Bulletin says the opposite? Workers and engineers arrived from the Isthmus at Marseille or Le Havre, and the first thing they did upon disembarking was to come out with contemptible slander, saying that work was not advancing as had been foreseen, or that costs were rising at a scandalous rate. . Incredibly, those baseless falsehoods began to leak into the credulous minds of the French. And meanwhile, my country was beginning to shed its name and constitution like a snake sheds its skin, and sink headfirst into the darkest years of its history.

VI. In the Belly of the Elephant

My country would sink metaphorically, of course, just as the sinking of the Canal Company (of which more later) would be metaphorical. But there were other much more literal sinkings in those days; the qualities of each, of course, depended on the object sinking. On the other side of the Atlantic, for example, the sailing ship Annie Frost sank, which wouldn’t have had any significance if you, dear Korzeniowski, had not shamelessly invented for yourself a role in the shipwreck. Yes, I know: you needed money, and Uncle Tadeusz was the nearest bank and the one that requested the fewest guarantees; so you wrote an urgent telegram: SHIPWRECKED STOP ALL LOST STOP NEED HELP. . And since the correspondences that overwhelm me have not ceased, even though I’ve left the space of a few pages to put them on the record, allow me to note one of them now. For while Korzeniowski was pretending to have been on board a sinking ship, another sinking of perhaps more modest proportions was taking place but with much more immediate consequences.

One early morning in the dry season, Charlotte Madinier rented a dugout — undoubtedly similar to the one that had once carried her husband and my father — and, without anyone seeing, paddled herself along the Chagres River. She was wearing a coat that had belonged to her husband and that she’d saved from the famous postmortem burn; she had the pockets stuffed full with a collection of rocks her husband had accumulated over the early days of the explorations. I sneak into her head and I find, in the midst of fears and nostalgia and disorderly thoughts, the words Je m’en vais repeated like a mantra and piling up on top of one another; in her pockets I find chunks of basalt and slabs of limestone. Then Charlotte puts her hands in her pockets, with the left she clutches a large piece of granite and with the right a ball of blue clay the size of an apple. She drops into the water, backward, as if lying down, and the Panamanian ground, the oldest geological formation of the American continent, drags her to the bottom in a matter of seconds.

Let’s imagine: as she sinks, Charlotte loses her shoes, so when she gets to the riverbed, the bare skin of her feet touches the sand. . Imagine: the pressure of the water in her ears and on her closed eyes, or maybe they’re not closed but wide open, and maybe they see trout swim by and water snakes, weeds, sticks, or branches broken off trees by the humidity. Imagine the weight that rushes against Charlotte’s airless chest, against her small breasts and shrunken nipples, oppressed by the cold water. Imagine that all the pores of her skin close like stubborn little mouths, tired of swallowing water and aware that very soon they’ll be able to resist no longer, that death by drowning is right around the corner. Let’s imagine what Charlotte is imagining: the life she managed to have — a husband, a son who learned to talk before he died, a few sexual, social, or economic satisfactions — and most of all the life she won’t have, that which is never easy to imagine, because imagination (let’s be honest) doesn’t really get us that far. Charlotte starts to wonder what it feels like to drown, which of her senses will disappear first, if there’s pain in this death and where this pain will be located. She already lacks air: the weight against her chest has increased; her cheeks have contracted: the air that had been in them has been consumed by the involuntary voracity — no, by the gluttony — of her lungs. Charlotte feels that her brain is turning off.

And then something goes through her head.

Or: something goes on in her head.

What is it? It is a memory, an idea, an emotion. It is something (unique) to which I, despite my prerogatives as narrator of this tale, do not have access. With a shrug of her narrow shoulders, of her elegant arms, Charlotte shakes off her husband’s coat. Lumps of lignite, slabs of schist fall to the bottom. Immediately, with the swiftness of a freed buoy, Charlotte’s body lifts off the riverbed of the Chagres.

Her body begins to emerge.

Her ears hurt. Saliva returns to her throat.

I anticipate all my curious readers’ doubts and questions: no, Charlotte would never speak of what she thought (or imagined, or felt, or simply saw) a few seconds before what would have been a terrible death in the depths of the Chagres River. I, who am so given to speculation, in this case have been unable to speculate, and as the years have gone by this incapacity has become more firmly ingrained. . Any hypothesis on what happened pales in the face of that reality: Charlotte decided to go on living, and when she came out on the cloudy green surface of the Chagres, she was already a new woman (and had probably already decided she’d take the secret with her to her grave). This process of radical renovation cannot be emphasized too much, the reinvention with a capital R of herself that the Widow of the Canal undertook after her head — puffing and panting, her mouth gulping for air with the desperation of a landed salmon — appeared again in the superficial world of the Isthmus, that world she had come to despise and which she now forgave. I’m not afraid to record the physical manifestations of that transformation: the color of her eyes became lighter, her voice took on a graver tone, and her chestnut-colored hair grew down to her waist, as if the water of the Chagres River had formed a perpetual cascade down her back. Charlotte Madinier, who, as she sank into the Chagres River with her pockets bulging with Panamanian geology, had been a beautiful but wasted woman, when revived — because that’s what it was, a resurrection, that occurred that day — seemed to return to the disturbing beauty of a not too distant adolescence. It was an almost mythic event. Charlotte Madinier as a Siren of the Chagres River. Charlotte Madinier as a Panamanian Faust. Readers of the Jury, did you want to witness another Metamorphosis? This one is unpredictable and also without precedents; this is the most powerful I’ve ever seen, because it eventually involved me. For the new woman did not just rise from the bottom of the Chagres, which was a portent in itself, but carried out a deed even more portentous: she entered my life.

And she was transformed, of course she was. There is no doubt: at the end of the convulsive decade of the 1880s, Metamorphosis was in the spirit of the times. On the other side of the world, in Calcutta, Korzeniowski was suffering a series of subtle identity shifts and was beginning — just like that — to sign his contracts as Conrad; the Widow of the Canal did not change her name, for we had a tacit agreement according to which she would keep her married name and I would understand her reasons without her having to explain them to me, but she would change her attire. She opened the doors of her house in Christophe Colomb, took the skirts and capes down from the windows, and I accompanied her to the Liberian neighborhood and helped her exchange her heavy, stubbornly dark Parisian clothes for green and blue and yellow cotton shifts, which gave her pale skin the tone of unripe fruit. Another bonfire in the middle of the street: but this time the bonfire was one of exorcism and not purification, the attempt to cast out the demons of past lives. There, in the port of Colón, during the final days of 1885, Charlotte began a reincarnation in which I participated. The initiation ceremony (the details of which, out of chivalry, I must keep to myself) took place one Saturday night, and was fed by certain shared solitudes, by nostalgias that remained unshared and by the guaranteed fuel of French brandy. In my private dictionary, which might not correspond with those of all my readers, reincarnation means “returning to the carnal.” I returned every Saturday; every Saturday Charlotte Madinier’s generous flesh awaited me ravenously, with the desperate abandon of one with nothing to lose. But never, not in those days of initiation or later, did I manage to find out what happened at the bottom of the Chagres River.

I spent the night of New Year’s Eve in Charlotte’s house, not in my father’s, and the first sentence I heard in 1886 was a plea inside of which lurked an order: “Don’t ever leave again.” I obeyed (willingly, I should add); at the age of thirty-one I found myself, suddenly and unexpectedly, cohabiting with a widow who barely spoke a couple of words of Spanish, colonizing her youthful body like an explorer who doesn’t know he’s not the first and feeling myself to be brazenly, convincingly, dangerously happy. Our place of residence and Charlotte’s nationality, those two items of census data, constituted a sort of moral safe conduct, carte blanche to move through the rigid system of the Panamanian bourgeoisie to which, much to our dismay, we still belonged. Dear readers: I’m not talking, however, about impunity. On one occasion, the Jesuit priest, Father Federico Ladrón de Guevara, called Charlotte a “woman of sullied reputation” and stressed that France was historically a “lair of Liberals and nurturer of anti-Christian revolutions.” I remember it well because it was then, as if trying to respond to those accusations, that Charlotte summoned me one night to the veranda. The first April downpour had just fallen, and the air was still thick with the earth’s dampness, with the smell of dead worms and stagnant ditch water, with clouds of mosquitoes like floating nets. The most redundant phrase tends to be the one that announces humanity’s defining moments: “I have something to tell you,” says the person who — obviously — has something to say. Charlotte was faithful to this tradition of superfluity. “I have something to tell you,” she said. I thought she was going to confess once and for all what had happened at the bottom of the Chagres River, that stubborn incorruptible mystery; but she, lying in the hammock and wearing an orange shift and a red scarf wrapped around her head, turned her back to me but held my hand and, as the heavens opened and unleashed another downpour, told me she was pregnant.

Our private history is sometimes capable of the most remarkable symmetries. In Charlotte’s belly, a new Altamirano announced its presence with the will to continue the isthmian branch of the lineage; at the same time my father, Altamirano Senior, began to back away, to leave the world like a mortally wounded boar. Like a hibernating bear. Like whichever animal you’d prefer to use for the simile.

He began to distance himself from me. Charlotte, the new Charlotte, retained (in spite of her reincarnation) enormous contempt for my father. Do I need to spell it out? Something inside her blamed Miguel Altamirano for the deaths of her son and her husband. He, for his part, did not manage to grasp it. The idea that there was a direct link between his Selective Blindness and the deaths of the Madiniers would have struck him as absurd and indemonstrable. If someone had told him that the two Madiniers had been murdered, and that the weapon (in one of the murders, at least) was a certain open letter that appeared on a certain day in a certain newspaper, my father, I swear, would not have understood the reference. Miguel Altamirano shed a couple of tears for the extinction, at the hands of Panama, of a whole family; but they were innocent tears, since they weren’t guilty, and also innocent, since they were not wise. Miguel Altamirano elevated predictable defense mechanisms — denial and rejection — to the level of an art form. And the process extended to other parts of his life. For the news from the European press had begun to reach us, and to my indignant father, enraged and frustrated, the only way to preserve his sanity was to pretend that certain things were not certain.

Now, for the space of a few pages, my tale transforms into a very personalized collection of press cuttings, something you, Readers of the Jury, will appreciate, I think, in particular. Imagine the gray pages of these newspapers, the cramped columns, the tiny and sometimes incomplete letters. . What excessive power those dead characters have! How much can they affect a man’s life! The twenty-six letters of the alphabet had traditionally been on my father’s side; now, suddenly, a few seditious and subversive words were agitating the political panorama of the Republic of Journalism.

Round about the same time that Pedro Prestán’s neck snapped, The Economist of London warned the entire world, but in particular the shareholders, that the Canal Company had become a suicidal venture. At the same time as Liberal and rebel forces were capitulating in Los Guamos, and bringing the civil war to an end, a long report in The Economist said that de Lesseps had deliberately duped the French, and finished by saying: “The Canal will never be finished, among other reasons because finishing it was never the intention of the speculators.” France, Ferdinand de Lesseps’s beloved hexagone, began little by little to turn its hexagonal back on the Canal Company. My father received this news in the streets of Colón (in the Company offices, at the port where some newspapers came in) openmouthed and slavering like a tired bull, each article another banderilla. But I don’t believe — I can’t believe — that he was prepared for the final sword thrust, the pitiless stab in the neck that fate had in store. I understood that the world had stopped being my father’s, or that my father had stopped belonging to this world, when in the space of a few days two decisive things happened: in Bogotá they reformed the Constitution; in The Economist they published the famous denunciation of the press. In Bogotá, President Rafael Núñez, a strange turncoat who’d gone from the most radical Liberalism to the staunchest Conservatism, put the name of God, “the source of all authority,” back into the Constitution. In London, The Economist made this absurd accusation: “If the Canal does not advance, and if the French had not noticed the monstrous swindle they have been the victims of before, it is because Monsieur de Lesseps and the Canal Company have invested more money in buying journalists than excavators, spent more on bribes than on engineers.”

Dear readers of the gutter press, dear lovers of cheap scandal, dear spectators fascinated by the misfortunes of others: the denunciation in The Economist was like a bag of shit that someone threw as hard as they could against a fan. The room — let’s think, for example, of the offices on rue Caumartin — was soiled from floor to ceiling. Heads rolled at every newspaper: publishers, editors, reporters, whom the pertinent investigations revealed all to have been on the Canal’s payroll. And the shit, whose volatile properties are very little recognized, crossed the ocean and reached Colón, also splattering the walls of the Correo del Istmo (three reporters on salary) and those of El Panameño (two reporters and two editors), and most of all ending up on the face of one poor innocent man who suffered from Refraction Syndrome. The Star & Herald was the newspaper in charge of translating The Economist’s denunciation and did so with unusual alacrity. My father experienced the event as a betrayal in every sense of the word. And one day, while in Bogotá, Núñez, the metamorphosed President, declared that education in Colombia would either be Catholic or would not be, in Colón Miguel Altamirano feels like he’s been the victim of an accident, a stray bullet from a skirmish in the street, a lightning bolt that splits a tree and drops it on the head of a passerby. It is incomprehensible to him that the Star & Herald could accuse all those journalists who’d written about the Canal (who’d only described what they’d seen) of venality, and in a mere thirty lines go from that accusation to a more direct one of fraud (against those whose only interest had been to collaborate in the cause of Progress). It’s incomprehensible.

FRANCE BEGINS TO EMERGE FROM UNDER DE LESSEPS’S SPELL read the headline in Le Figaro. And that was the general feeling: de Lesseps was a cheap conjurer, a circus magician and, at best, a high-quality hypnotist. But whatever the designation conferred, beneath it — sleeping a long siesta like a hibernating bear — persisted the idea that the terms of construction of the Canal, from cost to duration, by way of engineering, had been a monstrous lie. “It would not have been possible,” said the journalist, “had it not been for the solicitous collaboration of the print media and its unscrupulous writers.” But my father defended himself: “In an endeavor of this magnitude,” he wrote in the Bulletin, “contretemps are part of day-to-day life. The virtue of our workers does not lie in an absence of obstacles, but in the heroism with which they’ve overcome them and will continue to overcome them.” My idealistic father, who at times seemed to recover the vigor he’d had at twenty, wrote: “The Canal is a work of the Human Spirit; it needs humanity’s support in order to reach a successful conclusion.” My comparativist father looked to other great human undertakings — the argument of the Suez Canal now seemed stale — and wrote: “Did the Brooklyn Bridge not cost eight times as much as expected? Did the Thames Tunnel not cost triple its original budget? The Canal’s story is humanity’s story, and humanity cannot dwell on debates about centimes.” My optimistic father, the same man who years before had left the comforts of his native city to put his shoulder to the wheel where it was most needed, kept writing: “Give us time and give us francs.” Around then one of our daily downpours fell on the Isthmus, no worse or any friendlier than those that fell every year; but this time the excavated earth absorbed the rainwater, got swept by the current, and returned to its place, wet and stubborn and impossible like a gigantic clay balcony ripped off the side of a hilltop cottage. In one afternoon of intense Panamanian rain, three months of work were lost. “Give us time,” wrote my idealist-optimist father, “give us francs.”

The last item in my press anthology (in my files, clippings fight for me to quote them, elbow each other out of the way, stick fingers in each other’s eyes) appeared in La Nación, the newspaper of the ruling party. For all practical purposes — known and future ones — that text was a threat. Yes, of course we all knew of the badly disguised hostility the central government harbored against the French in general and de Lesseps in particular; we knew the government, after months and more months of meticulously bleeding the Public Treasury dry, had asked the Canal Company for a loan, and the Company had refused to lend them any money. Telegrams came and went, telegrams so dry the ink absorbed into the paper once they were read, and this was known. It was also known that the fact had generated resentment, and in the Presidential Palace this phrase was heard: “We should have given this to the Gringos, who really are our friends.” But we could not predict the profound satisfaction that seemed to emanate from that page.

CANAL COMPANY ON THE BRINK OF BANKRUPTCY read the headline. The body of the article explained that many Panamanian families had mortgaged properties, sold family jewels, and plundered savings accounts to invest everything in Canal stocks. And the last sentence was this one: “In the case of collapse, it will be obvious who is responsible for the absolute ruin of hundreds of our fellow countrymen.” And then it transcribed an extensive list of writers and journalists who had “lied, deceived, and defrauded” the public with their reports.

The list was alphabetical.

There was just one name under the letter A.

For Miguel Altamirano, it was the beginning of the end.

Now my memory and my pen, irremediable addicts to the vicissitudes of politics (fascinated by the stone horrors left in the Gorgon’s wake), must address without distractions those terrible years that begin with the strange lines from a national anthem and end with a thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of a war. But an almost supernatural event paralyzed the political evolution of the country, or paralyzes it in my memory. On September 23, 1886, after six and a half months of pregnancy, Eloísa Altamirano was born, a baby girl so small that my two hands could cover her completely, so scrawny that her legs still showed the curve of her bones and the only thing visible of her genitals was the tiny point of her clitoris. Eloísa was born so weak that her mouth was unable to wrestle with her mother’s nipples, and she had to be fed with spoonfuls of twice-boiled milk for the first six weeks. Readers of the Jury, common readers of breeding age, fathers and mothers everywhere: the arrival of Eloísa paralyzed the entire world, or rather annulled it, erased it pitilessly the way color is erased from the world of a blind man. . Out there, the Canal Company made desperate attempts to stay afloat, issuing new bonds and even organizing peripatetic lotteries to recapitalize the business, but none of that mattered to me: my task consisted in boiling Eloísa’s spoon, holding her cheeks with two fingers to make sure the milk didn’t spill, massaging her throat with the tip of my index finger to help her swallow; I am indifferent to the knowledge that Conrad was writing his first story, “The Black Mate,” at the time. Shortly before he turned twenty-nine, Conrad passed his captaincy exam in London, and was transformed for us into Captain Joseph K.; but that seems banal to me compared with the moment when Eloísa first put a bumpy nipple in her mouth and, after weeks and weeks of slow learning and gradual strengthening of her jaw, sucked so strongly that she cut it with her gums and made it bleed.

And nevertheless, there is an event that escapes my comprehension: in spite of Eloísa’s birth, in spite of the great care that determined her slow and laborious survival, the annulled world kept spinning, the country kept moving with insolent independence, in the Isthmus of Panama life went on with complete indifference to what was happening to its most loyal subjects. How to talk about politics thinking at the same time of those years, evoking moments that in my memory belong exclusively to my daughter? How to get down to work recuperating events of a national character, when the only thing that interested me at the time was seeing Eloísa gain one more gram and then another? Every day, Charlotte and I took her, all wrapped up in freshly boiled linens, to Tang’s butcher shop and unwrapped her to place her like a fillet steak or a piece of liver in the big bowl of his scales. On the other side of the high wooden counter Tang put the weights on, those solid rust-colored discs, and for us parents there was no greater pleasure than seeing the Chinese butcher look through his shiny lacquered box for a bigger weight, because the previous one hadn’t been heavy enough. . I bring this memory into my tale and immediately wonder: How do I search out, in the midst of my warm personal memories, the aridity of public memories?

Self-sacrificing man that I am, I’ll try, dear readers, I’ll try.

Because in my country things were about to happen of the sort that historians always end up recording in their books, asking with sonorous question marks how on earth we could have come to this and then answering I know, I have the answer. Which, of course, isn’t all that clever, for even the most muddle-headed person would have sensed something odd in the air during those years. There were prophecies everywhere: one had only to interpret them. I don’t know what my father might have thought, but I should have recognized the imminent tragedy the day when my nation of poets was no longer able to write poetry. When the Republic of Colombia lost its ear, mistook literary taste, and rejected the most basic lyric rules, I should have sounded the alarm, shouted man overboard, stop the ship. I should have stolen a lifeboat and descended immediately, though I might have run the risk of not finding terra firma, the day I first heard the verses of the National Anthem.

Ah, those verses. . Where did I hear them first? It’s more important to ask myself now: Where did those words come from, words that nobody understood and which would have struck any literary critic as worse than terrible literature, more like the product of an unstable mind? Readers, let us go over the traces of the crime (against poetry, against decency). The year is 1887: one José Domingo Torres, a civil servant whose foremost talent was setting up nativity scenes at Christmas time, decides to become a theater director, and also decides that for the next national holiday a Patriotic Poem Produced by Presidential Plume shall be sung. And this for those blessed not to know it: the President of our Republic, Don Rafael Núñez, was in the habit of whiling away his free time composing adolescent verse. He was following a deeply entrenched Colombian tradition: when he wasn’t signing new accords with the Vatican to satisfy the elevated morals of his second wife — and to persuade Colombian society to forgive him for the sin of having married a second time, abroad and in a civil ceremony — President Núñez put on his pajamas, with a nightcap and everything, threw a poncho on top of that against the cold of Bogotá, ordered a cup of chocolate with cheese, and sat down to vomit lines of verse. And one November afternoon, the Bogotá Varieties Theater witnesses a group of profoundly disconcerted young people, through no fault of their own, intoning these ineffable stanzas:

From the fields of Boyacá

An unconquered hero

Is crowned with each new shoot

The genius of glory.

The virile breath

Of bare-chested soldiers

Serves as their shield

And wins the victory.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps devotes all his time to that protracted task: accepting. He accepted that the Canal would not be ready in time but would require several more years. He accepted that the billions of francs put up by the French would be insufficient: they needed six hundred million more. He accepted that the idea of a sea-level canal was a technical impossibility and an error of judgment; he accepted that the Panama Canal would be constructed by means of a system of locks. . He accepted and accepted and kept accepting: this proud man made more concessions in two weeks than he’d made in his entire life. However — and this is quite a large however — it wasn’t enough. What nobody (where nobody means “de Lesseps”) had imagined had happened: the French were fed up. The day the bonds that would save the Canal Company went on sale, an anonymous note arrived at all the European newspapers saying that Ferdinand de Lesseps had died. It wasn’t true, of course; but the damage was done. The sale of bonds failed. The lottery had failed. When they announced the dissolution of the Canal Company and named a liquidator to take charge of its machines, my father was in the offices of the Star & Herald, begging them to take him back, offering to write the first five articles for free if they would give him space in their pages again. Witnesses assure me they saw him cry. And meanwhile, all over Colombia the people were singing:

A lock of the virgin’s hair

Torn out in agony

Of her deceased love

Around the cypress branch entwined.

Beneath a cold tombstone

Her hope she mourns

While a glorious halo of pride

Her pale countenance enshrined.

Work on the Panama Canal, the Great Trench, was officially interrupted or stopped in May of 1889. The French began to leave; in the port of Colón the trunks and hemp sacks and wooden crates piled up daily, and the porters couldn’t cope with all the work of getting the moment’s luggage onto the moment’s steamer. The Lafayette seemed to have tripled its weekly runs during that exodus (because that’s what it was, an exodus, what happened in the Isthmus, the French like a persecuted race fleeing in search of friendlier lands). The French city of Christophe Colomb was gradually deserted, as if the plague had invaded and exterminated its residents; it was a ghost town coming into being, but it happened before our eyes, and in itself the spectacle would have fascinated anyone. The recently emptied houses all took on the same smell of freshly washed cupboards; Charlotte and I liked to take Eloísa by the hand and go for walks through the abandoned houses and look through the drawers for a revealing diary full of secrets (something we never did find) or some old garment that Eloísa could use to play dress-up (something we found quite often). On the walls of the houses were marks from nails, rectangles of a whiter white where a portrait of the grandfather who fought with Napoleon had been. The French sold everything that wasn’t indispensable, not to reduce the dimensions of their belongings, but because, from the moment they knew they could leave, Panama became a wretched place they needed to forget as soon as possible and whose objects were capable of carrying curses with them. One of those belongings, sold at public auction a little while later, was a still life the owners had bought, out of charity, from a Canal worker. The man was a poor unhinged Frenchman who claimed to be a banker and also a painter, but who was really no more than a vandal. He claimed to be related to Flora Tristan, which would have interested my mother; he’d disembarked in Panama City, on his way from Peru, and was arrested there for urinating in public. He left in a matter of weeks, frightened off by the mosquitoes and the labor conditions. The world later learned more about his life, and perhaps his name will not be unknown to my readers. He was called Paul Gauguin.

Thus the country was formed

Thermopylae springing forth,

The Cyclops constellation

From the night sky shining down.

While the trembling flower

Seeks a safe shelter,

From the menacing gale

Beneath the laurel crown.

The uninhabited houses of Christophe Colomb began to fall to pieces (I’m not saying it was partly the fault of the anthem, but you never know). After every rainy season, a whole wall would give way in some sector of the city, the wood so rotten it wouldn’t break but bent like rubber, the beams eaten through to the center by termites. Our strolls through the houses had to end: one afternoon in June, in the middle of a downpour, a Cuna Indian slipped into the former house of the engineer Vilar while waiting for the weather to clear; reaching under a wardrobe out of curiosity, he received two bites from a rather small coral snake and died before he got back to Colón. No one could explain why snakes were so interested in the empty houses of Christophe Colomb, but as the years passed the city began to fill with these visitors, bushmasters and fer-de-lances, perhaps just looking for food. My father, who after the publication of the famous Canal payroll in the Star & Herald had become a sort of undesirable, a pariah of isthmian journalism, wrote during those days a short article about two Indians who met in the house of the engineer Debray to test which of them knew the best antidotes. They covered the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb from one end to the other, going into every house and sticking their hands under every wardrobe and every basket and every loose floorboard, getting bitten by as many snakes as they could find to then prove their skill with verbena, with guaco, and even with ipecacuanha. My father recounted how toward the end of the night one of the Indians had crawled under one of the houses, and felt a bite but had not managed to identify the snake. The other let him die: that was his way of winning the contest. And the winner celebrated his victory in the Colón jailhouse, sentenced by a Panamanian judge for culpable homicide.

Readers of the Jury: this passage, despite appearances, is not an ingenious touch of local color on the part of the narrator, anxious as he is to please audiences in England and even in continental Europe. No, the anecdote of the Indians and the snakes plays an active role in my narration, for that antidote competition marks my father’s disgrace like a boundary stone. Miguel Altamirano wrote a simple chronicle about the Panamanian Indians and the valuable medical information that had come down to them through their traditions; but he did not manage to get it published. And thus, with all the irony implied by what I am about to write, this apolitical and banal tale, this inoffensive anecdote that had nothing to do with the Church, with History, or with the Inter-oceanic Canal, was his ruin. He sent it to Bogotá, where the taste for exoticism and adventure was greater, but seven daily papers (four Conservative, three Liberal) turned it down. He sent it to a newspaper in Mexico and another in Cuba but didn’t even get a reply. And my seventy-year-old father began shutting himself up inside himself (wounded boar, hibernating bear), convinced that everyone was his enemy, that the whole world had turned its back on him as part of a conspiracy led by Pope Leo XIII and the Archbishop of Bogotá, José Telésforo Paul, against the forces of Progress. When I went to visit him, I was met by a resentful, sour-faced, embittered figure: the shadow of a silver beard dominated his face, his restless hands trembling and keeping busy with idle pastimes. Miguel Altamirano, the man who in other times had been able, with a column or a pamphlet, to generate enough hatred that a presbyter would call for his death, now spent his hours inoffensively interchanging the lines of that patriotic song as if he could take revenge on someone like that. The verses he composed might be irreverent:

A lock of the virgin’s hair

Torn out in agony

The virile breath

Serving as shield.

But there were also verses of intense political criticism:

From the fields of Boyacá

The genius of glory

Seeks a safe shelter

Beneath the laurel crown.

And there were also some that were simply absurd:

Thermopylae springing forth

And win the victory.

The Cyclops constellation

Her pale countenance surrounds.

Playing with paper, playing with words, spending the day as a child spends it, laughing at things no one else understands (because no one else was there to hear the explanations or, of course, the laughter), my father entered his own decline, his personal sinking. “Clearly,” he’d say when I went to see him, “the little poem lends itself to anything.” And he’d show me his latest discoveries. Yes, we’d laugh together; but his laughter was tinged with the new ingredient of bitterness, by the melancholy that had killed so many visitors to the Isthmus; and by the time I took my leave of him, when I decided it was time to go home where the miracle of domestic happiness awaited me — my concubine Charlotte, my bastard Eloísa — by that time I was fully aware that in my absence and without my help and in spite of the switched-around lines of the National Anthem, that night my father would sink back down again. His routine had become an alternation of sinking and resurgence. Had I wanted to see it, I would have realized that sooner or later one of those sinkings would be the last. And no, I didn’t want to see it. Drugged by my own mysterious well-being, fruit of the mysterious events of the Chagres River and generated by the mysterious joys of fatherhood, I grew blind to the appeals for help Miguel Altamirano sent my way, the flares he let off from his ship, and I was surprised to find that the power of refraction could be hereditary, that I too was capable of certain blindnesses. . For me, Colón turned into the place where I allowed myself to fall in love and to cultivate the idea of a family; I didn’t notice — I didn’t want to notice — that for my father Colón did not exist, nor did Panama exist, nor was life possible, if the Canal did not exist.

And so we arrive at one of the fundamental crossroads of my life. For if there, in a rented house in Christophe Colomb, a man manipulates lines written by another on a piece of paper, thousands of kilometers away, in a rented house in Bessborough Gardens, London, another prepares to write the first pages of his first novel. In Christophe Colomb a life made of explorations through jungles and rivers is dying away; for the man in Bessborough Gardens the explorations — in another jungle, down another river — are just about to begin.

The Angel of History, expert puppeteer, begins to move the strings above our unsuspecting heads: unbeknownst to us, Joseph Conrad and José Altamirano begin to edge closer. My duty, as Historian of Parallel Lines, is to trace an itinerary. And I now devote myself to that task. We are in September of 1889, Conrad has just finished breakfast, and something happens to him at that moment: his hand grasps the bell and rings it, so someone will come and clear the table and take the tray away. He lights his pipe and looks out the window. It’s a veiled and misty day, with the odd flash of fiery sunlight here and there on the houses opposite. “I was not at all certain that I wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to write about.” And then he picks up a pen and. . writes. He writes two hundred words about a man called Almayer. His life as a novelist has just begun; but his life as a sailor, which has not yet ended, is in trouble. It has been several months since Captain Joseph K. returned from his last voyage, and he has still not managed to obtain a captaincy anywhere. There is a project: travel to Africa to captain a steamer for the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. But the project is stalled. . as is also, apparently for good, the project of the Inter-oceanic Canal. Has it failed? wonders Miguel Altamirano in Colón. All the stage lights now focus on that fateful space of time: the twelve months of 1890.

JANUARY. Taking advantage of the dry season, Miguel Altamirano hires a lighter and sails up the Chagres to Gatún. It is his first outing in sixty days, if you don’t count the occasional foray down Front Street (no longer bedecked with flags or banners in every language, having ceased to be a boulevard in the center of the world in the space of a couple of months and gone back to being a lost wagon track of the colonized tropics) or his daily stroll to the statue of Christopher Columbus and back. He gets the same impression every time: the city is a ghost town, it is populated by the ghosts of its dead, the living hang around like ghosts. Abandoned by the French, German, Russian, and Italian engineers, by the Jamaican and Liberian laborers, by the North American adventurers who’d fallen from grace and looked for work on the Canal, by the Chinese and the sons of the Chinese and the sons of those sons who fear neither melancholia nor malaria, the city that until recently was the center of the world has now turned into an empty hide, like that of a dead cow devoured by vultures. The Cubans and Venezuelans have gone home: there’s nothing for them to do here. Panama has died, thinks Miguel Altamirano. Viva Panama. His intention is to go to see the machines, which he visited seven years ago with the engineer Madinier, but he changes his mind at the last minute. Something has overcome him — fear, sadness, an overwhelming sense of failure — something he can’t quite pinpoint.

FEBRUARY. On the advice of his uncle Tadeusz, Conrad writes to another of his maternal uncles: Aleksander Poradowski, hero of the revolution against the Tsar’s empire, who was sentenced to death after the insurrection of 1863 and managed to flee Poland thanks, paradoxically, to the help of a Russian accomplice. Aleksander lives in Brussels; his wife, Marguerite, is a cultured and attractive woman who talks intelligently about books, who also writes terrible novels, and who, most of all, has all the contacts in the world with the Société du Haut-Congo. Conrad announces that he intends to travel soon to Poland to visit Tadeusz, and that he will have to travel by way of Brussels; his uncle tells him he’ll be welcome but warns that he is in poor health and might not be able to perform all his duties as host. Conrad writes: “I leave London tomorrow, Friday, at nine a.m. and should arrive in Brussels at five-thirty in the afternoon.” But when he arrives he finds himself faced with another piece of fate’s foul play: Aleksander dies two days later. Disappointed, Captain Joseph K. travels on to Poland. He does not even attend the funeral.

MARCH. On the seventh, Miguel Altamirano arrives very early at the train station. His intention is to go to Panama City, and at eight o’clock on the dot he has boarded the train as he had done so often over the last thirty years, settling down in one of the coaches at the back without telling anyone and opening a book for the journey. Out the window he sees a black man sitting on a barrel; he sees a mule cart cross the railway lines and stop over the rails long enough for the mules to shit. Miguel Altamirano distracts himself watching, on one side of the train, the sea and the distant ships in Limón Bay and, on the other side, the crowds stamping their heels on the paving stones waiting for the train to start moving. But then Miguel Altamirano receives the first slap of his new position in Panama: the ticket collector comes through asking to see all tickets, and when he arrives at Altamirano’s place, instead of tipping his hat and greeting him as usual, holds out a rude hand. Altamirano looks at the fingertips grimy from handling the paper of the tickets and says, “I don’t have one.” He doesn’t say that for thirty years he has traveled courtesy of the Railroad Company. He just says, “I don’t have one.” The ticket collector shouts at him to get off; Miguel Altamirano, gathering the last grams of dignity he has left, stands up and says he’ll get off when he feels like it. A moment or two later the ticket collector reappears, this time accompanied by two cargadores, and between the three of them they lift the passenger up and shove him off the train. Altamirano falls on the paving stones. He hears murmurs that turn into laughter. He looks at his trousers: they are torn at the knee, and through the rip he sees the skin scraped by the blow and a stain of blood and dirt that will soon be infected.

APRIL. After two months in Poland, two months devoted to visiting for the first time in fifteen years the place where he was born and the places he lived until his voluntary exile, Captain Joseph K. returns to Brussels. He knows that his aunt Marguerite has recommended him to the authorities of the Société du Haut-Congo. But when he arrives he is surprised by a stroke of luck: a Danish captain named Freiesleben, in charge of one of the company’s steamboats, has died suddenly and his position is available. Captain Joseph K. is not intimidated by the idea of replacing a dead man. On paper, the trip to Africa will last three years. Conrad hurries back to London, arranges his things, returns to Brussels, takes the train to the port of Bordeaux, and embarks on the Ville de Maceio en route to Boma, port of entry to the Belgian Congo. From the first port of call in Tenerife, he writes: “The screw turns and carries me off to the unknown. Happily, there is another me who prowls through Europe, who is with you at this moment. Who will get to Poland ahead of you. Another me who moves about with great ease; who can even be in two places at once.” From Freetown, he writes: “Fever and dysentery! There are others who are sent home in a hurry at the end of a year, so that they shouldn’t die in the Congo. God forbid!” From the port of call in Libreville, he writes: “For a long time I no longer have been interested in the goal to which my road leads. I go along it with my head lowered, cursing the stones. Now I am interested in another traveler: this makes me forget the petty miseries of my own path. While awaiting the inevitable fever, I am very well.”

MAY. Miguel Altamirano travels to Panama City to visit the head offices of the Star & Herald. He is prepared to humiliate himself if necessary in order to be allowed to return to the pages of the newspaper. But the necessity does not arise: a novice editor, a baby-faced young man who turns out to be a son of the Herrera family, receives him and asks him if he’d like to review a book that is causing a sensation in Paris. Miguel Altamirano accepts, obviously, his curiosity piqued: the Star & Herald does not devote much space to reviews of foreign books. The young man hands him a five hundred and seventy-two — page volume, recently published by Dentu: La dernière bataille, it is called, and bears this subtitle: New Psychological and Social Study. The author is a certain Edouard Drumont, founder and promoter of the National Anti-Semite League of France and author of La France juive and also of La France juive devant l’opinion. Miguel Altamirano has never heard of him; on the train back to Colón, he begins to read the book, a leather-bound volume with a red spine and the name of a bookshop on the frontispiece. Before the train has gone as far as Miraflores, his hands have already begun to tremble, and the other passengers in the carriage see him lift his eyes off the page and look out the window with an incredulous expression (or is it indignant, or perhaps irate?). He understands why they’ve assigned him this book. La dernière bataille is a history of the construction of the Inter-oceanic Canal, where history should be understood as diatribe. De Lesseps is called a “delinquent” and “poor devil,” “great fraud” and “compulsive liar.” “The Isthmus has become a vast cemetery,” it says, and also: “The blame for the disaster belongs to the Jewish financiers, plague of our society, and to their monstrous accomplices: corrupt journalists the world over.” Miguel Altamirano senses that he is being derided; he feels like the target where the arrow has landed, and sees in that commission a conspiracy on a grand scale to ridicule him, at best, or deliberately drive him mad, at worst. (All of a sudden, all the fingers in the train lift up and point at him.) When they get to Culebra, where the train stops briefly, he throws the book out the window, he sees it fly through the foliage of the trees — imagines or perhaps hears the small crashing of the leaves — and land with a liquid sound in a small mud puddle. Then he looks up almost by accident, and his gaze, heavy with exhaustion, falls onto the abandoned French machines, the dredgers and excavators. It is as if he were seeing them for the first time.

JUNE. Captain Joseph K. disembarks, finally, in Boma. Almost immediately he sets off for Kinshasa, in the interior, to assume the captaincy of the steamboat he’s been assigned: the Florida. In Matadi he meets Roger Casement, an Irishman in the service of the Société du Haut-Congo, in charge of recruiting labor, but whose most important work so far has been that of exploring the Congolese landscape with an eye to the construction of a railway between Matadi and Stanley Pool. The railway will be a real advance of progress: it will facilitate free trade and improve the living conditions of Africans. Conrad prepares to cover the same ground that the future railway will cross. He writes to his aunt Marguerite: “I leave tomorrow, on foot. Not an ass here but your very humble servant.” Prosper Harou, the Société’s guide, approaches him and says: “Pack for several days, Monsieur Conrad. We’re going on an expedition.” Captain Joseph K. obeys, and two days later is entering the Congo jungle in a caravan of thirty-one men, and for thirty-six days walks behind them in the inclement humidity of the African heat, and watches the black, half-naked men open a trail with their machetes while this white man in a loose shirt notes in his travel diary — and in English — everything he sees: the depth of the Congo River when they try to wade across it but also the trill of the birds, one resembling a flute, another the baying of a hound; the general gray-yellowish tone the dry grass gives to the landscape but also the great height of the oil palms. The journey is unbearable: the murderous heat, the humidity, the clouds of flies and mosquitoes the size of grapes, the lack of drinking water, and the constant threat of tropical diseases make that penetration of the jungle into a true descent into hell. Thus concludes the month of June for Captain Joseph K. On July 3 he writes: “Saw at a camp place the dead body of a Bakongo.” On July 4 he writes: “Saw another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of meditative repose.” On July 24 he writes: “A white man died here.” On July 29 he writes: “On the road today passed a skeleton tied to a post. Also white man’s grave.”

JULY. The most scandalous details of the financial disaster of the Canal have begun to come to light. My father discovers through the print media that de Lesseps, his old idol, his model for life, has retired from Parisian life. The police have searched the rue Caumartin offices and soon will do the same to the private houses of those involved: no one doubts that the search will reveal frauds and lies and embezzlements at the highest level of French politics. On the fourteenth, the Republic’s national holiday, documents and declarations are published in Paris and reproduced in New York and in Bogotá, in Washington and in Panama City. Among other revelations, the following emerge. More than thirty deputies of the French Parliament received bribes to take decisions in favor of the Canal. More than three million francs were invested in “buying good press.” Under the heading “Publicity” the Canal Company accepted a transfer of ten million francs divided into hundreds of checks made out to the bearer. When the destination of those checks was investigated, it was found that several of them had ended up in the editorial departments of Panamanian newspapers. On the twenty-first, at an informal lunch given by the representatives of the central government (a governor, a colonel, and a bishop), my father denies ever having seen one of those checks. An uncomfortable silence descends over the table.

AUGUST. Captain Joseph K. arrives in Kinshasa to take command of the Florida. But the Florida has sunk; and Conrad then embarks on the Roi des Belges, in the capacity of supernumerary, for a reconnaissance journey up the Congo River. During the trip what hasn’t happened yet happens: he gets ill. He suffers three attacks of fever, two of dysentery and one of nostalgia. Then he discovers that his mission, when he arrives in Stanley Falls, will be to relieve the agent of the interior station, who is gravely ill with dysentery. His name is Georges Antoine Klein; he is twenty-seven years old; he is a conventional young man, full of hopes and plans for the future, and eager to return to Europe. Conrad and Klein speak very little at the interior station. On September 6, with Klein on board and very ill, the Roi des Belges begins its journey downriver. The Captain of the boat has also fallen ill, and for the first part of the trip Captain Joseph K. takes charge. Then, under his captaincy and to some degree under his responsibility, Klein dies. His death will accompany Joseph K. for the rest of his life.

SEPTEMBER. In the Christophe Colomb house, which has undergone an extraordinary rebirth since I began living in it, we are celebrating Eloísa’s birthday. Miguel Altamirano has been to Chez Michel, the pastry shop of one of the few bold Frenchmen who decided to stay in the ghost town of Colón, and has brought his granddaughter a cake in the shape of the number 4, with three layers of cream inside and a shell of caramelized sugar on the outside. After dinner, we all go out on the veranda. A few days earlier Charlotte had hung over the railings a jaguar hide with white edges, yellow flanks, brown spots, and a brown stripe along its backbone. My father is leaning on the railing and begins to stroke the spotted pelt, his gaze lost in the tops of the palm trees. Charlotte is behind him, showing a servant from Cartagena how to serve coffee in a set of four cups from Limoges. I have stretched out in the hammock. Eloísa, in my arms, has fallen asleep, and her half-open mouth emits a tiny clean-scented little snoring that I enjoy as it reaches my face. And at that moment, without turning around and without stopping his stroking of the little jaguar, my father speaks, and what he says could be directed at me but also at Charlotte: “I killed him, you know. I killed the engineer.” Charlotte bursts into tears.

OCTOBER. Back in Kinshasa, Conrad writes: “Everything here is repellent to me. Men and things, but above all men.” One of those men is Camille Delcommune, manager of the station and Conrad’s immediate superior. The aversion Delcommune feels for this English sailor — for Conrad, by this time, is already an English sailor — is comparable only to that which the sailor feels toward Delcommune. In those conditions, Captain Joseph K. realizes that his future in Africa is rather dim and not too promising. There are no possibilities of promotion, much less of an increase in salary. However, he has signed a contract for three years, and that reality is inescapable. What to do? Conrad, ashamed but defeated, decides to provoke a quarrel in order to resign and return to London. But he does not have to resort to this extreme: a crisis of dysentery — quite real, besides — presents a better pretext.

NOVEMBER. On the twentieth my father asks me to come with him to see the machines. “But you’ve seen them so many times,” I tell him, and he replies, “No, I don’t want to see the ones here. Let’s go to Culebra, where the big ones are.” I don’t dare tell him the railway fare has become, overnight, too expensive for him to afford, now that he’s unemployed, and always has been for me. What he says, however, is true: at the moment when they stopped for good, the Canal works were divided into five sectors, from Colón to Panama City. The Culebra sector, the one that caused the engineers the most problems, consists of two kilometers of unpredictable and disobedient geography, and that was where the best dredgers were assembled as well as the most powerful excavators the Canal Company had acquired during the final years. And that’s what my father wanted to see on that November 20: the abandoned remains of the biggest failure in human history. At that moment I didn’t yet know that my father had attempted that nostalgic pilgrimage before. In spite of the profound sadness I notice in his voice, in spite of the tiredness that weighs down every movement of his body, I think the matter of going to see rusty hulks is just a disappointed man’s whim, and I brush him off the way you might shoo away a fly. “You go on your own,” I tell him. “And then you can tell me how you got on.”

DECEMBER. On the fourth, after a grueling six-week journey — the long duration the result of his terrible state of health — Conrad has returned to Matadi. He had to be carried in a hammock on the shoulders of younger, stronger men, and the humiliation adds to the exhaustion. On his way back to London, Captain Joseph K. stops again in Brussels. But Brussels has changed in those months: it is no longer the white-walled, lethally boring city Conrad had known before; now it is the center of a slave-holding, exploitative, murderous empire; now it is a place that turns men into ghosts, a real industry of degradation. Conrad has seen the degradation of the colony, and in his head those Congolese images begin to mix, as if he were drunk, with the death of his mother in exile, the failure of his insurrectionist father, the imperialist despotism of Tsarist Russia, the betrayal of Poland by the European powers. Just as the Europeans had divided up the Polish cake, thinks Conrad, now they will divide up the Congo, and then no doubt the rest of the world. As if replying to those images that torment him, those fears that he has undoubtedly inherited from his father, his health deteriorates: Captain Joseph K. goes from rheumatism in his left arm to cardiac palpitations, from Congolese dysentery to Panamanian malaria. His uncle Tadeusz writes: “I’ve found your writing so changed — which I attribute to the fever and dysentery — that since then there is no happiness in my thoughts.”

The day of his pilgrimage to Culebra, several American passengers saw my father take the eight o’clock train on his own, and heard him making comments to nobody each time one of the work stations passed by the windows, from Gatún to Emperador. As they passed near Matachín they heard him explain that the name of the place came from the Chinamen who’d died and were buried around there, and as they passed Bohío Soldado they heard him translate both words into English—Hut, Soldier—without offering the slightest explanation. At midday, while the train filled with the smells of the meals the passengers had improvised for the journey, they saw him alight in Culebra, slip down the railway embankment, and disappear into the jungle. A Cuna Indian who was collecting plants with his son caught sight of him then, and his way of walking struck him as so odd — the careless way he kicked a piece of rotten wood that could have been the refuge of a poisonous snake, the worn-out way he bent down to look for a stone to throw at the monkeys — that he followed him to where the Frenchmen’s machines were. Miguel Altamirano arrived at the excavation, the gigantic gray and muddy trench that looked like a meteor’s point of impact, and contemplated it from the edge the way a general studies a battlefield. Then, as if someone had defied the Isthmus’s rules, it began to rain.

Instead of sheltering under the closest tree, whose impenetrable foliage would have provided a perfect umbrella, Miguel Altamirano began to walk in the rain, along the edge of the trench, until arriving at an enormous creature covered in creepers that towered ten meters above the ground. It was a steam-powered excavator. The downpours of the last eighteen months had covered it in a patina of rust, as thick and hard as coral, but that was only visible after pulling away the three handbreadths of tropical vegetation that covered it all over, the vines and leaves with which the jungle was pulling it down into the earth. Miguel Altamirano approached the shovel and caressed it as if it were an old elephant’s trunk. He walked around the machine slowly, stopping beside each leg, pulling the leaves away with his hands and touching each of the buckets that his arms could reach: the old elephant was ill, and my father circled it in search of symptoms. He soon found the elephant’s belly, a little shed that served as the monstrous tank of the excavator’s engine room, and there he took shelter. He did not come out again. When, after a fruitless two-day search of Colón and the surrounding area, I managed to discover his whereabouts, I found him lying on the damp floor of the excavator. Fate decreed it would rain that day as well, so I lay down beside my dead father and closed my eyes to feel what he would have felt during his last moments: the murderous clatter of the rain on the hollow metal of the buckets, the smell of the hibiscus, the shirt soaked through with the cold of the wet rust, and the exhaustion, the pitiless exhaustion.