The Secret History of Costaguana

VII. A Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days, or The Brief Life of a Certain Anatolio Calderón

The saddest thing about my father’s death, it sometimes occurs to me (I still think of it often), was the fact that he wasn’t survived by anyone prepared to observe a decent mourning. In our house in Christophe Colomb there was no black clothing or any desire to wear any, and Charlotte and I had a tacit agreement to spare Eloísa contact with that death. I don’t think it was a protective impulse but rather the notion that Miguel Altamirano hadn’t been very present in our lives during those last years and it was futile to give the little girl a grandfather after that grandfather had died. So my father began to sink into oblivion as soon as his funeral was over, and I did absolutely nothing to prevent it.

By stipulation of the Bishop of Panama, my Masonic father was denied an ecclesiastical burial. He was buried in unconsecrated ground, beneath a gravelly headstone, among the Chinese and the atheists, unbaptized Africans, and all sorts of excommunicated people. He was buried, scandalizing those who knew, with a certain hand amputated a long time before from a certain Asian cadaver. The Colón gravedigger, a man who had already seen it all in this life, received the death certificate from the judicial authorities and handed it to me the way a bellhop gives you a message in a hotel. It was written on Canal Company stationery, which seemed anachronistic and somewhat disdainful; but the gravedigger explained that the stationery was already printed and paid for, and he preferred to keep using it than to let hundreds of perfectly usable sheets of paper rot away in an attic. So my father’s particulars appeared above dotted lines, beside the words Noms, Prénoms, Nationalité. Beside Profession ou emploi, someone had written: Journalist. Beside Cause du décès, it read: Natural causes. I thought of going to the authorities to make it a matter of public record that Miguel Altamirano had died of disillusionment, though I was prepared to accept melancholy, but Charlotte persuaded me that I would be wasting my time.

When nine months of mourning had passed, Charlotte and I realized we hadn’t visited Miguel Altamirano’s grave even once. The first anniversary of his death arrived without our noticing, and we mentioned it with faces contorted by guilty expressions, hands full of remorse fluttering in the air. The second anniversary went by unnoticed by either of us, and it took the arrival of the news of the trials in Paris for my father’s memory to make a brief, momentary appearance in the organized well-being of our household. Let’s see how I can explain this: by way of some sort of cosmic result of my father’s death, the house in Christophe Colomb and its three residents had become detached from the land of Panama and was now located outside the territories of Political Life. In Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles were mercilessly interrogated by the hungry pack of swindled shareholders, thousands of families who had mortgaged their houses and sold their jewels to rescue the Canal in which they’d invested all their money; but that news reached me through a thick wall of glass, or from the virtual reality of a silent film: I see the actors’ faces, I see their lips moving, but I can’t understand what they’re saying, or perhaps I don’t care. . The French President, Sadi Carnot, shaken by the financial scandal of the Company and its various economic debacles, had found himself obliged to form a new government, and the ripples of the waves of such an event must have reached the beaches of Colón; but the Altamirano-Madinier household, apolitical and to some apathetic, remained on the margins. My two women and I lived in a parallel reality where uppercase letters did not exist: there were no Great Events, there were no Wars or Nations or Historic Moments. Our most important events, the humble peaks of our life, were very different during that time. Two examples: Eloísa learns to count to twenty in three languages; Charlotte, one night, is able to talk of Julien without collapsing.

Meanwhile, time passed (as they say in novels) and Political Life was up to its usual tricks in Bogotá. The President Poet, Author of the Glorious Anthem, had stretched out his finger and designated his successor: Don Miguel Antonio Caro, illustrious exemplar of the South American Athens who drafted Homeric translations with one hand and draconian laws with the other. Don Miguel Antonio’s favorite pastimes were opening Greek classics and closing Liberal newspapers. . and banishing, banishing, banishing. “We are not short of disoriented individualities,” he said in one of his first speeches. “But the vehement perorations of the revolutionary school have no echo in the country.” His own finger pointed dozens of disoriented individualities, hundreds of revolutionaries, down the road to forced exile. But in the apolitical, apathetic, and historical house in Christophe Colomb, Caro’s name was never heard, despite the fact that many he banished were Panamanian Liberals. The unbearable pressure of the censorship measures was not complained of, despite the fact that several newspapers in the Isthmus suffered under them. One of those days was the hundredth anniversary of the famous day when the famous Robespierre made his famous remark: “History is fiction.” But we, who lived in the fiction that there was no history, paid scant attention to that anniversary so important to others. . Charlotte and I took it upon ourselves to complete Eloísa’s education, which basically took the form of reading together (and sometimes in costume) from all the fables we could find, from Rafael Pombo to good old La Fontaine. On the floorboards of our house, I was the grasshopper and Eloísa was the ant, and between the two of us we forced Charlotte to put on a bow tie and play the Outgoing Tadpole. At the same time, I made myself, dear Eloísa, this solemn promise: never again would I allow Politics to have free access to my life. Before the onslaught of Politics that had destroyed my father’s life and so often disrupted my country, I would defend as best I could my new family’s integrity. On any of the issues that would define the immediate future of my country, the Arosemenas or the Arangos or the Menocals (or the Jamaican with his blunderbuss, the Gringo with his railroad, or the lost bogotáno from the tailor’s shop) asked me: “And what do you think?” And I would answer with an oft-repeated, mechanical phrase: “I’m not interested in politics.”

“Will you vote Liberal?”

“I’m not interested in politics.”

“Will you vote Conservative?”

“I’m not interested in politics.”

“Who are you? Where are you from? Who do you love? Who do you hate?”

“I’m not interested in politics.”

Readers of the Jury: how naïve I was. Did I truly think I would manage to avoid the influences of that ubiquitous and omnipotent monster? I wondered how to live in peace, how to perpetuate the happiness I’d been granted, without noticing that in my country these are political questions. Reality soon disabused me, for in those days a group of conspirators met in Bogotá, prepared to capture President Caro, depose him as if he were an old monarch, and set off the Liberal revolution. . But they did so with such enthusiasm that they were discovered and detained by the police before they had time to say a word. The government continued its repressive measures; uprisings, in answer to these measures, continued in various parts of the country. I kept Charlotte and Eloísa shut up at home in Christophe Colomb; I stocked up on provisions and drinking water and boarded up all the doors and windows with planks stolen from the ownerless houses. And that’s what I was doing when I got the news that another war had broken out.

I hasten to say: it was a tiny war, a sort of prototype of a war or an amateur war. Government forces took less than sixty days to subdue the revolutionaries; the echo of the Battle of Bocas del Toro, the only clash of any importance the Isthmus saw, ricocheted off our boarded-up windows. The memory of Pedro Prestán and his broken-necked hanging body was fresh in Panamanian minds; when the echo reached us from Bocas of those Liberal gunshots so timid they turned back in midair, many of us began to think of more executions, of more bodies hanged over the railway lines.

But none of that happened.

However. . in this story there’s always a however, and here it is. The war barely touched the isthmian coasts, but it touched them; the war stayed with us for just a few hours, but there it was. And most important: that amateur war opened the appetites of Colombians; it was like the carrot before the horse, and from that moment on I knew something more serious was waiting for us round the corner. . Feeling in the air the appetite for warmongering, I wondered if staying holed up in my apolitical house would be enough, and immediately answered that it would, that it couldn’t be otherwise. Watching the sleeping Eloísa — whose legs lengthened desperately under my scrutiny, whose bones mysteriously changed coordinates — and watching Charlotte’s naked body when she went out into the yard under the palm tree to shower with that watering can that looked like it had just been brought from l’Orangerie, I thought: Yes, yes, yes, we’re safe, no one can touch us, we have stationed ourselves outside of history and we are invulnerable in our apolitical house. But it is time for a confession: at the same time I thought of our invulnerability, I felt in my stomach an intestinal upset that resembled hunger pangs. The emptiness began to recur at night when we turned out the lamps. It came to me in dreams or when I thought of my father’s death. It took me a week to identify the sensation and admit, with some surprise, that I was afraid.

Did I speak of my fear to Charlotte? Did I tell Eloísa? Of course not: fear, like phantoms, does more damage when invoked. For years I kept it by my side like a forbidden pet, feeding it in spite of myself (or was it the fear itself, tropical parasite, that fed off me like a pitiless orchid?) but without admitting its presence. In London, Captain Joseph K. also faced small personal and unprecedented terrors. “My uncle died on the 11th of this month,” he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska, “and it seems everything has died in me, as though he carried off my soul with him.” The months that followed were an attempt to recover his lost soul; it was around that time that Conrad met Jessie George, an English typist who had two very obvious qualities for the Polish writer: she was a typist and she was English. A few months later, Conrad proposed to her with this invincible argument: “After all, my dear, I’ll not live long.” Yes, Conrad had seen it, he’d seen the chasm that opened at his feet, he’d felt that strange form of hunger and had run for shelter like a dog in a thunderstorm. That’s what I should have done: run, cleared off, packed up my things and my family, taken them by the hand and evacuated without a backward glance. After writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad had been plunged into new depths of depression and bad health; but I didn’t know it, I didn’t realize other abysses were opening at my feet. On Good Friday in 1899, Conrad wrote: “My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me.” If I had been able to pick up the prophetic-telepathic waves those words were sending, maybe I would have tried to decipher them, figure out what the monster was (but now I can imagine, and so can the reader) and what to do to keep it from devouring us. But I didn’t know how to interpret the thousand portents that filled the air during those years, I didn’t know how to read the warnings in the text of events, and the warnings that Conrad, my kindred spirit, sent telepathically from so far away, did not reach me.

“Man is an evil animal,” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham around that time. “His perversity must be organized.” And then: “Crime is a necessary condition of organized existence. Society is essentially criminal — or it wouldn’t exist.” Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, why didn’t your words reach me? Dear Conrad, why didn’t you give me a chance to protect myself from the evil men and their organized perversity? “I am like a man who has lost his gods,” you said at the time. And I didn’t know how, dear Joseph K.: I didn’t know how to see in your words the loss of mine.

On October 17, 1899, shortly after my daughter Eloísa menstruated for the first time, the department of Santander saw the longest and bloodiest civil war in the history of Colombia.

The Angel of History’s modus operandi was basically the same as usual. The Angel is a brilliant serial killer: once he has found a good way to get men to kill each other he never gives it up, he clings to it with the faith and obstinacy of a St. Bernard. . For the war of 1899, the Angel spent about four months humiliating the Liberals. First he used the Conservative President Don Miguel Antonio Caro. Until his arrival in power, the national army had been composed of some six thousand troops; Caro increased the manpower to the legal maximum, ten thousand men, and in the space of two years quadrupled military expenditure. “The government has a duty to assure the peace,” he said, while he filled his little ant’s cave with nine thousand five hundred and fifty machetes with scabbards, five thousand and ninety Winchester 44 carbines, three thousand eight hundred and forty-one Gras 60 rifles, with well-polished bayonets. He was an ambidextrous and able man: with one hand he translated a bit of Montesquieu — for example: “Peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic”—and with the other signed recruitment decrees. In the streets of Bogotá he mobilized farm workers and hungry peasants in exchange for two reales a day, while their wives sat against the wall and waited for the money to go and buy potatoes for lunch; priests walked around the city promising adolescent boys eternal blessings in exchange for their service to the nation.

Soon the Angel, already bored by this Conservative President, decided to change him for another; to better affront the Liberals, he put Don Manuel Antonio Sanclemente in charge, an old man of eighty-four, who shortly after being sworn in received an order not open to appeal from his personal doctor to leave the city. “It gets so cold here, this playing-President lark could cost you a hefty price,” he told him. “Go on down to the tropical lowlands and leave this business to the young folk.” And the President obeyed: he moved to Anapoima, a little village with a tropical climate where his octogenarian lungs caused him fewer problems and his octogenarian blood pressure went down. Of course the country was then left without a government, but that little detail wasn’t going to intimidate the Conservatives. . In a matter of days, the Minister of State in Bogotá invented a rubber stamp with a facsimile of the President’s signature, and distributed copies to all interested parties, so that Sanclemente’s presence in the capital was no longer necessary: every senator signed his own proposed laws, every minister validated any decrees he felt like validating, for it took only a blow from the magic stamp to bring them to life. And thus, amid the Angel’s resounding guffaws, the new government evolved, to the indignation and dishonor of the Liberals. Then, one October morning, patience went astray in the department of Santander, and a general with many wars behind him fired the first shots of the revolution.

From the beginning we realized this war was different. In Panama the memory of the war of ’85 was still vivid, and Panamanians were determined to take their destiny into their own hands this time. So Panama, the Isthmus detached from Colombian reality, the Caribbean Switzerland, joined in the hostilities as soon as it could. Several towns of the isthmian interior rose up in arms two days after the first shots; before a week was out, the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo had armed a force of three hundred men and started his own guerrilla war in the mountains of Cocle. When the news reached Colón, I was having lunch in the same mirrored restaurant from which I’d seen my father emerge a quarter of a century earlier. I was with Charlotte and Eloísa, who was gradually turning into an adolescent of dark and perturbing beauty, and the three of us heard a Jamaican waiter say, “Well, what difference is one more war going to make? The world’s coming to an end anyway.”

It was a commonly held conviction among Panamanians that on December 31 the Final Judgment would begin, that the world wasn’t designed to see the twentieth century. (Every comet, every shooting star seen from Colón, seemed to confirm these prophecies.) And for several months the prophecies gained strength: the last days of the century witnessed battles bloodier than any seen since independence. The coordinates of the country were flooded with blood, and that blood was all Liberal: in every military clash, the revolution was destroyed by the numerical superiority of the government armies. In Bucaramanga, General Rafael Uribe Uribe, at the head of a mixed army of fed-up peasants and rebellious university students, was received with shots fired from the tower of the church of San Laureano. “Long live the Immaculate Conception!” shouted the snipers after each young Liberal death. In Pasto, Father Ezequiel Moreno fired up the Conservative soldiers: “Be like the Maccabees! Defend the rights of Jesus Christ! Kill the Masonic beasts without mercy!” Scenes were also staged on the Muddy Magdalene: in front of the port of Gamarra, Liberal ships were sunk by government cannons, and four hundred and ninety-nine revolutionary soldiers burned to death amid the flaming wood of the hulls, and those who didn’t burn to death drowned in the river, and those who made it to the shore before they drowned were shot without any sort of trial and their bodies left to rot beside the morning’s catfish. And gathered in the telegraph office, the people of Colón awaited the definitive telegram: PROPHECY TRUE STOP COMETS AND ECLIPSES WERE RIGHT STOP ENTIRE WORLD NEARS END. In the Republic of Colombia, the new century was greeted without any celebrations whatsoever. But the telegram never arrived.

Others arrived, however. (As you’ll soon realize, my dear readers, a good part of the war of ’99 was waged in Morse code.) DISASTER FOR REVOLUTIONARIES IN TUNJA. REVOLUTIONARY DISASTER IN CÚCUTA. REVOLUTIONARY DISASTER IN TUMACO. . In the midst of this disastrous telegraphic landscape, no one believed the news of the Liberal victory in Peralonso. No one believed that a Liberal army of three thousand poorly armed men — one thousand Remington rifles, five hundred machetes, and an artillery corps that had made its own cannons out of aqueduct pipes — could have stood up on an equal footing to twelve thousand government soldiers who had allowed themselves the luxury of wearing brand-new uniforms intended for the day the revolution was defeated. GOVERNMENT ROUT IN PERALONSO STOP URIBE DURÁN HERRERA MARCH TRIUMPHANT TOWARD PAMPLONA said the telegram, and nobody believed it could be true. General Benjamín Herrera took a bullet in the thigh and won the battle from a stretcher; he was four years my senior but could already call himself a war hero. That was at Christmas; and on January 1, Colón awoke to find the world still in its place. The French Curse had expired. And I, Eloísa dear, felt that my apolitical house was an invincible fortress.

I felt it with total conviction. The simple force of my will, I thought, had managed to keep the Angel of History far away and marginalized. The war, in this country of windbags, was something that happened in telegrams, in letters exchanged by generals, in the capitulations that were being signed from one end of the Republic to the other. After Peralonso, the revolutionary General Vargas Santos was proclaimed “Provisional President of the Republic.” Mere words (and excessively optimistic ones). From the Panamanian city of David, the revolutionary General Belisario Porras protested before the Conservative government for the “acts of banditry” committed by government soldiers. Mere words. The Liberal command complained of the “flagellations” and “tortures” inflicted on prisoners captured “in their houses” and without “weapons in their hands.”

Mere words, mere words, mere words.

I concede, however, that the words made their sounds from closer and closer. (Words pursue, they can wound, they’re dangerous; words, in spite of being the empty kind of words that Colombians tend to pronounce, can sometimes explode in our mouths, and we mustn’t underestimate them.) The war had now landed in Panama, and in Colón the sound of nearby gunshots reached us and also news of them, the agitation of the prisons crammed with political prisoners and rumors of mistreatment, the smell of the dead that began to be left scattered over the Isthmus, from Chiriquí to Aguadulce. But in my Schizophrenic City, the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb remained firmly installed in a parallel world. Christophe Colomb was a ghost town, and was, to be specific, a French ghost town: What good could a place like that be to a Colombian civil war? As long as we didn’t leave it — I remember having thought — my two women and I would be safe. . But maybe (as I’ve implied elsewhere using other words but finding the exact formula is the writer’s task) my enthusiasm was premature. For at the same time, in the distance, the ill-fated department of Santander, cradle of the war, was flooded with blood, and that battle mysteriously set in motion the hypocritical and backstabbing mechanisms of politics. In other words, a conspiracy was set in motion by which the Gorgon and the Angel of History prepared to invade, in collaboration and without any consideration whatsoever, the paradise of the Altamirano-Madinier household.

It happened in a place called Palonegro. Barely recovered from the bullet wound to his thigh, General Herrera had advanced northward as part of the revolutionary vanguard. In Bucaramanga he took the opportunity to toss out a new crop of words: “Injustice is an everlasting seed of rebellion,” and things like that. But there was no rhetoric worthy of May 11, when eight thousand revolutionaries found themselves up against twenty thousand government troops, and what followed. . How to explain what followed? No, the numbers are of no use to me (those old standbys so beloved of journalists like my father), and statistics, though they travel so well by telegraph, are of no use either. I can say that the combat lasted fourteen hours; I can talk of the seven thousand dead. But numbers don’t decompose, nor are statistics a breeding ground for pestilence. For fourteen days the air of Palonegro filled with the fetid stench of rotting eyes, and the vultures had time to peck open the cloth of the uniforms, and the field became covered in pale naked corpses, with broken bellies and spilled entrails staining the green of the meadow. For fourteen days the smell of death penetrated the nostrils of men too young to recognize it or to know why their mucous membranes were stinging or why it wouldn’t go away even when they rubbed gunpowder into their mustaches. Wounded revolutionaries fled down the Torcoroma trail and collapsed like milestones along the escape route, so one could have kept track of their fate simply by observing the flight paths of the vultures.

The fate of the escaped generals was immediate exile: Vargas Santos and Uribe Uribe left Riohacha for Caracas; General Herrera fled by way of Ecuador, managing to escape the government troops but not the willful, stubborn words. In a message that pursued him until it caught up with him, Vargas Santos entrusted him with directing the war in the departments of Cauca and Panama.

From Panama it was possible to win the war.

In Panama the liberation of the country would begin.

General Herrera agreed, as was to be expected. In a matter of weeks he had put together an expeditionary army — three hundred Liberals who’d been defeated in the battles of the south and of the Pacific coast anxious for an opportunity to avenge themselves and avenge their dead — but they lacked a ship to get them to the Isthmus. At that moment the deus ex machina (so at home in the theater of history) brought him good news: idly anchored in the port of Guayaquil was a ship called the Iris, full of cattle and destined for El Salvador. Herrera inspected the vessel and discovered the most important technical attribute: the owner, the firm of Benjamin Bloom & Co., had put it up for sale. Without delay, the General gave his word, signed promissory contracts of sale, toasted the business with a glass of agua de panela with lemon while the Salvadoran Captain and his first mate raised recurrent glasses of aguardiente de caña. At the beginning of October, filled with as many young revolutionary soldiers as cows, each of whose four stomachs seemed to come to an agreement to suffer simultaneously from diarrhea, the Iris set sail from Guayaquil.

One of the soldiers interests us in particular: the camera approaches, laboriously avoiding one or two cows’ backs, passes under a soft, freckled udder, and avoids the whip of a treacherous tail, and its gray image shows us the immaculate, frightened (and hidden among the cow pies) face of a certain Anatolio Calderón. Anatolio would have his nineteenth birthday flanked by the cows of the Iris, as the ship passed the coast of Tumaco, but his shyness wouldn’t allow anyone to find out. He’d been born on a hacienda in Zipaquirá, son of an Indian servant who died giving birth to him and the owner of the property, Don Felipe de Roux, rebellious bourgeois and socialist dilettante. Don Felipe had sold the family estates and set sail for Paris before his illegitimate son reached puberty, but not without leaving him enough money to study whatever he wanted in any university in the country. Anatolio enrolled in the Externado University to study law, although deep down he would rather have read literature at the University of Rosario and followed in the footsteps of Julio Flórez, the Divine Poet. When General Herrera went through Bogotá, after the Battle of Peralonso, and was received as a hero by the young Liberals, Anatolio was among those, blazing with patriotic fervor, who leaned out of the windows of the university. He saluted the General, and the General singled him out from among all the students to return his salute (or at least so it seemed to him). When the parade had finished, Anatolio went down to the street and found, among the paving stones, a lost Liberal horseshoe. The find struck him as a sign of good luck. Anatolio cleaned the mud and dried shit off the horseshoe and put it in his pocket.

But war is not always as orderly as it seems when narrated, and young Anatolio did not join up with General Herrera’s revolutionary army at that moment. He carried on with his studies, determined to change the country by way of the very laws the Conservative governments had trampled on. But on July 31, 1900, one of those same Conservatives visited the quasi-nonagenarian Don Manuel Sanclemente’s tropical retreat, and in less decent words than mine told him that a useless old man mustn’t hold the reins of the nation, and then and there declared him removed from Bolívar’s throne. The coup d’état was perpetrated in a matter of hours; and before the week was out, six law students had left the university, packed their things, and gone in search of the first Liberal battalion prepared to enlist them. Of the six students, three died in the Battle of Popayán, one was taken prisoner and transferred back to the Panóptico Prison in Bogotá, and two escaped to the south, went round the Galeras volcano to avoid the Conservative troops, and made it to Ecuador. One of those was Anatolio. After wandering the battlefields for so many months, Anatolio had nothing but one rusty horseshoe, a leather canteen, and a Julio Flórez book whose brown covers had become impregnated with sweat. The day the commanding officer of the Cauca battalion, Colonel Clodomiro Arias, notified him that the battalion would be incorporated into General Benjamín Herrera’s army, Anatolio was reading and rereading the lines of “Everything Comes to Us Late.”

And glory, that nymph of fate,

dances only on sepulchers.

Everything comes to us late

. . even death!

Suddenly, he began to feel an itching in his eyes. He read the lines, realized he felt like crying, and wondered if the most terrible thing had happened, if war had turned him into a coward. Days later, hiding among the cows of the Iris for fear that someone — Sergeant Major Latorre, for example — might look him in the eye and notice the cowardice that had settled in there, Anatolio thought of the mother he never knew, cursed the day he’d considered joining the revolutionary army, and felt a violent urge to go home and eat a hot meal. And instead here he was, smelling the vapors of cow dung, breathing the saline humidity of the Pacific, but most of all scared to death of what awaited him in Panama.

The Iris arrived in El Salvador on October 20. General Herrera met the ship’s owners in Acajutla and signed a sales agreement that was more like a bond: if the revolution was successful, the Liberal government would pay the gentlemen of Bloom & Co. the sum of sixteen thousand pounds sterling; if they lost, the ship would form part of the “contingencies of war.” There, in the Salvadoran port, General Herrera had them disembark in a strict order — cattle, soldiers, crew — and climbed up on a wooden crate so everyone could hear as he ceremoniously rechristened the ship. The Iris would henceforth be called the Almirante Padilla. Anatolio took note of the change but also noted that he was still scared. He thought of José Prudencio Padilla, Guajiran martyr of Colombian independence, and said to himself that he didn’t want to be a martyr to absolutely anything, that he wasn’t interested in dying in order to be honored by decree, and much less so for some half-mad military man who would name a ship after him. In December, after putting into port at Tumaco to pick up a contingent of fifteen hundred soldiers, a hundred and fifteen cases of ammunition, and nine hundred and ninety-seven projectiles for the cannon mounted on the prow, the Almirante Padilla put into port in Panama. It was Christmas Eve and the heat was dry and pleasant. The soldiers had not even disembarked when the news reached them: the Liberal forces had been destroyed across the entire Isthmus. While up on deck they recited the novena; Anatolio stayed hidden in the bowels of the ship and wept with fear.

With the arrival of Herrera’s troops in the Isthmus, the war began to take on a different aspect. Under the orders of Colonel Clodomiro Arias, Anatolio participated in the taking of Tonosí, disembarked in Anton, and liberated the forces of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo from the siege of La Negrita, but in none of those places did he stop considering desertion. Anatolio took part in the Battle of Aguadulce; one night when the moon was full, while General Belisario Porras’s revolutionary forces took the Vigia hill and advanced toward Pocri, those of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo destroyed the government battalions guarding the city, the Sanchez and the Farias. At noon the next day, the enemy started to send emissaries to request ceasefires in order to bury their dead, to negotiate more or less honorable capitulations. Anatolio was part of this historical date in which the balance appeared to shift to the revolutionary side, during which for a few hours the revolutionaries believed in that pipe dream: definitive triumph. The Cauca battalion buried eighty-nine of their men, and Anatolio took personal charge of several bodies; but what he would remember forever did not come from his side but from the government side: the smell of roasting flesh that invaded the air when the medic of the Farias battalion began to incinerate, one at a time, the hundred and sixty-seven Conservative corpses he preferred not to bury.

The smell stayed with him all the way to Panama City, Herrera’s army’s next objective. It soon seemed to him that even the pages of Julio Flórez’s book were impregnated with the stench of Conservatives reduced to ashes, and if he read a line like “Why do you fill the air I breathe?” the air would immediately fill with incinerated nerves, muscles, and fat. But the battalion kept advancing, indifferent; no one sensed the hell that was overwhelming Anatolio, no one looked him in the eye and discovered the cowardice lurking there. Less than fifty kilometers from Panama City, Colonel Clodomiro Arias divided his battalion: some carried on with him toward the capital, planning to camp at a prudent distance and wait for the arrival of the reinforcements the Almirante Padilla would deposit east of Chame; the others, including Anatolio, would carry on northward under the orders of Sergeant Major Latorre. Their mission was to get to the railway at Las Cascadas and guard the line against any attempt to obstruct the free circulation of trains. General Herrera wanted to send a clear message to the marines waiting in the North American steamships — the Iowa off the coast of Panama City, the Marietta off Colón — like a ghostly presence: there was no need for them to disembark, because the Liberal army would ensure that neither the railway nor the Canal works were in any danger. Anatolio, part of this placation strategy, pitched his tent in the place chosen by Sergeant Major Latorre. That night, he was awakened by three shots. The sentinel had mistaken the frenetic movements of a wildcat for a governmental counterattack and had fired three times in the air. It was a false alarm; but Anatolio, sitting on top of his only blanket, felt a new warmth between his thighs and realized he’d wet himself. By the time the camp had calmed down and his tent mates had gone back to sleep, Anatolio had already wrapped the horseshoe and the Julio Flórez book in a dirty shirt, and begun to do — under the protection of the shadows — what he should have done a long time earlier. Before the birds started to wake up in the dense treetops, Anatolio had already become a deserter.

Meanwhile, General Herrera received the first news of the executions. Aristides Fernández, Minister of War, had ordered Tomás Lawson, Juan Vidal, Benjamín Mañozca, and fourteen more generals of the revolution to face the firing squad. That wasn’t all: on board the Almirante Padilla and in the Aguadulce camp, the general staff of the Liberal army received the circular that the Minister had printed and sent to all the governmental commanding officers, all the Conservative mayors and governors, ordering them to shoot without trial any and all armed revolutionaries they captured. But Anatolio never found out: he had already gone into the jungle, he’d already descended the Central Cordillera on his own, making short-lived fires to frighten off the poisonous snakes and mosquitoes, eating monkeys that he hunted with his army-issue rifle or threatening the Indians of La Chorrera in order to get boiled yucca or coconut milk.

The war, very much in spite of its deserters, continued its course. In Panama City everyone was talking about the letter that General Herrera had written to the provincial governor, complaining again of the “treatment inflicted on the Liberal prisoners” who had been “tortured as much in the flesh as had their dignity and spirits been ill-treated”; but Anatolio knew nothing of the letter, or of the disdain with which the provincial governor redirected it to Aristides Fernández, or of the Minister of War’s reply, which consisted of seven selective executions in the same plaza where the Canal Company’s office had stood, and where the Grand Hotel still stood, converted into government barracks and ad hoc dungeon. Like a one-man expedition (like Stanley penetrating the Congo), Anatolio had discovered Lake Gatún. He started round it with the vague notion that he’d eventually arrive at the Atlantic, but soon realized that he’d have to use the train if he wanted to get there before the month was out. He had got it into his head — his head obscured by the phantoms of cowardice — that from Colón, that Caribbean Gomorrah, he’d be able to find a ship willing to get him out of the country, a captain willing to look the other way as he disembarked in Kingston or Martinique, in Havana or Puerto Cabello, and he would finally be able to start a new life far away from war, that place where normal, ordinary men — good sons, good fathers, good friends — wet their trousers. The port of Colón, he thought, was the place where nobody notices anybody, where with a little bit of luck he would go unnoticed. To arrive without being discovered, find a steamer or a sailing ship, no matter what the cargo or flag: nothing else mattered.

Colón had been in the hands of government forces for almost a year. The defeats of San Pablo and Buena Vista had left General De la Rosa’s Liberal battalions seriously decimated and the city unprotected. When the gunboat Próspero Pinzón appeared in the waters of the bay, full of enemy troops, De la Rosa knew he’d lost the city. General Ignacio Foliaco, in command of the gunboat, threatened to bombard the city as well as the French hamlet of Christophe Colomb, which was even more within range. De la Rosa rejected the threat. “From my side not a shot will be fired,” he sent word. “You’ll see how you look entering the city after having flattened it with cannonballs.” But before Foliaco could carry out his threat, De la Rosa received a visit from four captains — two North Americans, one English, and one French — who had assumed the role of mediators to avoid possible damage to the railway system. The captains brought a proposal for dialogue; De la Rosa accepted. The British cruiser Tribune served as the meeting place and negotiation table for Foliaco and De la Rosa; five days later, De la Rosa met on board the Marietta with General Albán, that leader of the government forces in the Isthmus who was called “the madman” and not in jest. In the presence of the ship’s Captain, Francis Delano, and Thomas Perry, commander of the cruiser Iowa, General De la Rosa signed the surrender. Before evening fell, the troops of the Próspero Pinzón had disembarked in Puerto Cristóbal, occupied the Mayor’s office, and distributed government proclamations. Eleven months later, Anatolio Calderón headed for this occupied city.

Anatolio got to the railway shortly before midnight. Between La Chorrera and the first bridge over the waters of Lake Gatún he’d found a little hamlet of ten or twelve huts whose straw roofs touched the ground, and with his loaded rifle pointed in the face of a woman, managed to get her husband (supposing it was her husband) to hand over a cotton shirt that seemed to be his single belonging, and put it on instead of the black jacket with nine buttons that was his soldier’s uniform. Dressed like that, he waited for the morning train before the bridge, hidden behind the carcass of an abandoned dredger; when he saw the locomotive pass, he leapt aboard the last freight car, and the first thing he did was throw his felt hat into the water so it wouldn’t give him away. Lying on his back on top of three hundred bunches of bananas, Anatolio watched the sky of the Isthmus pass by above his head, the invading branches of the guácimo trees, the cocobolos filled with colorful birds; and the warm breeze of a day without rain messed his straight hair and slipped inside his shirt, the friendly clatter of the train rocked and didn’t threaten him; and during those three hours of the journey he felt so calm, so unpredictably relaxed, that he fell asleep and forgot for an instant the stabbings of fear. The grinding of the carriages as the train switched gears woke him. They were stopping, he thought, they were arriving somewhere. He peeked over the side of the car and the luminous image of the bay, the reflection of the afternoon sun on the water of the Caribbean, hurt his eyes but also made him feel briefly happy. Anatolio grabbed his bundle, leaned with difficulty on the squashed bananas, and jumped. When he landed, his body rolled and Anatolio hurt himself with the horseshoe, tore the shirt on invisible pebbles, and pierced the thumb of his left hand on a thorn, but none of that mattered to him, because he’d finally arrived at his destination. Now it was just a question of finding somewhere to spend the night, and in the morning, as a legitimate passenger or as a stowaway, his new life would have begun.

He was at the foot of Mount Hope. Although he might not have known, he was at that moment very close to the four thousand graves of the railway workers who’d died in the first months of the construction, half a century before. Anatolio thought of waiting until dark before approaching the city, but the six o’clock mosquitoes forced him to get ahead of himself. As the sun set he’d already begun to advance toward the north, between the remains of the French Canal, on his right, and Limón Bay, on his left. These were genuine wastelands, and Anatolio felt sure he wouldn’t be seen as long as he stayed there, because no government soldier would venture into those quagmires — the rain had loosened the earth from the former trench — unless he’d received a direct order. After the distance he’d traveled, the leather of his boots had started to smell, and the swamps weren’t helping matters. Anatolio began to feel a pressing need to find a dry place to take them off and clean the insides with a cloth, because he could feel the skin between his toes riddled with fungus. His shirt smelled of bananas and moss, of its original owner’s sweat, and of the wet ground he’d rolled down. And his gray-and-black-checked trousers, those trousers that had earned him the mockery of his comrades in arms, began to reek unbearably, as if it had been a furious wildcat and not a poor student who pissed in them. Anatolio had become distracted by the impertinent festival of his own smells when he suddenly found himself surrounded by darkened houses.

His first instinct was to jump under the closest veranda and hide behind the posts, but he soon realized that the place — it looked like a neighborhood of Colón, but it wasn’t: Colón was farther north — was abandoned. He stood up straight again. Anatolio began to walk casually down the single muddy street, chose a dark house at random, and went inside. He felt his way along the walls, went all around, but he didn’t find any food, didn’t find any drinking water, didn’t find any blankets or clothes at all; instead he did hear something moving across the floorboards that could have been a rat, and his head filled with other possible images, snakes or scorpions that would attack him while he slept. Then, as he went back outside again, he saw light shining out of a window, ten or so houses along. He looked up: yes, there were the poles and cables; the glow was coming from electric lights, which incredibly were still working. Anatolio felt apprehensive but also relieved. One house, at least, was inhabited. His hand closed over his rifle. He climbed the porch steps (saw a hammock hanging empty), found the door open, and pushed the screen door. He saw the luxurious furniture, shelves with books and some newspapers and a cupboard with glass doors full of clean crystal, and then he heard a woman’s voice, two voices talking amid the sounds of fine china. He followed the voices to the kitchen and discovered that he’d been mistaken: it wasn’t two women, it was just one (white but dressed in a black woman’s clothes) who was singing in an incomprehensible language. Seeing him come in, the woman dropped the saucepan, which crashed to the floor spitting out potatoes, vegetables, and pieces of stewed fish that splashed Anatolio. At first she didn’t move; she stayed still, her black eyes fixed on him, without saying a word. Anatolio explained that he didn’t want to hurt her, but that he was going to spend the night in her house and that he needed clothes, food, and all the money she had. She nodded, as if she perfectly understood those needs, and it seemed that everything was going to be fine, until Anatolio took his eye off her for a second, and when he looked back, he saw her gathering up her dress in both hands, with a movement that revealed her pale calves, and take off running for the door. Anatolio managed to feel pity, a fleeting pity, but he thought inevitably of the firing squad that awaited him if he was captured. He raised his rifle and fired, and the bullet pierced the woman near her liver and ended up lodged in the living room cabinet.

Anatolio didn’t know where he was and could not have known that the abandoned houses (all except one) of Christophe Colomb were barely a hundred paces from the port, that more than five military vessels of four different nationalities were anchored in the bay, among them the Próspero Pinzón, and that — as is at the very least logical — thirty government sentries of the Mompox and Granaderos battalions were patrolling the wharf. Not a single one of them did not hear the shot. Following the orders of Sergeant Major Gilberto Durán Salazar, they divided into two groups to enter Christophe Colomb and encircle the enemy, and it didn’t take them long to find the only light on the street and follow it like a squadron of moths. They had not finished surrounding the house when a window opened and an armed silhouette leaned out. Then some of them swept the side wall of the house with bullets and others entered knocking down the screen door and also opening fire indiscriminately, wounding the enemy in both legs but taking him alive. They dragged him to the middle of the street, there where years before all the belongings of an engineer who’d died of yellow fever had been burned in a bonfire, sat him in a chair taken from the same house, on a velvet cushion, and tied his hands behind the wicker back. They formed a firing squad, the Sergeant Major gave the order, and the squad fired. Then one of the soldiers discovered another body in the house, that of the woman, and took her outside to leave her there, so everyone would know the fate of those who gave shelter to Liberals, not to mention cowards. And there, leaning against the chair like a rag doll, her clothes dirty with the executed deserter’s blood, Eloísa and I found her, having spent the afternoon in Colón watching the performance of a Haitian fire-eater, a black man with bulging eyes who claimed to be invulnerable to burns by the grace of the spirits.

VIII. The Lesson of Great Events

Pain has no history, or rather, pain is outside history, because it situates its victim in a parallel reality where nothing else exists. Pain doesn’t have political commitments; pain is not Conservative, it’s not Liberal; it’s not Catholic or Federalist or Centralist or Masonic. Pain wipes everything out. Nothing else exists, I’ve said; and it’s true that for me — I can insist without grandiloquence — nothing else existed in those days: the image of that rag doll, found in front of my invaded house, that empty doll, broken on the inside, began to haunt me at night. I can’t call it Charlotte, I can’t, because that wasn’t Charlotte, because Charlotte had left that bullet-ridden body. I began to be frightened: concrete fear (of the armies that would return one day to finish the job and murder my daughter) and abstract, intangible fear as well (of the dark, of noises that might be a rat or a rotten mango falling off a tree in the next street, but that gave rise in my terrorized imagination to the silhouettes of uniformed men, of hands pointing rifles). I couldn’t sleep. I spent the nocturnal hours listening to Eloísa cry in the next room, and left her to her weeping, to her own bewildered pain; I refused to console her. Nothing would have been easier than to take the ten steps to her room and her bed, to hug her and weep with her, but I didn’t do it. We were alone: we suddenly felt irrevocably alone. And nothing would have been easier for me than to ease my solitude at the same time as consoling my daughter. But I didn’t do it; I left her alone, so she would find her own way to comprehend what the violent death of a loved one means, that black pit that opens in the world. How can I justify myself? I was afraid Eloísa would ask for explanations I wouldn’t be able to supply. “We’re at war,” I would have said, aware of the poverty, the futility of that answer, “and these things happen in wars.” Of course, that explanation didn’t convince me either. But something inside me went on believing that refusing to offer those slight comforts to my daughter, refusing to search out her company (and perhaps her involuntary protection), would eventually expose the cruel joke of which we were the object, and one of these days the heartless joker would appear at the door and reveal Charlotte’s actual whereabouts, regretting that his cruel joke hadn’t had the desired effect.

It was during those days that I began to spend the nights walking to the port, sometimes getting as far as the Railroad Company, and later the Freight House, that Company warehouse from which I’d have been evicted at gunpoint had I been discovered. Colón, in those wartime nights, was a cold, blue city; walking around it alone, defying tacit or declared curfews depending on the day and the vicissitudes of the war, a civilian (though a lost and desperate civilian) running countless risks. I was too much of a coward to take my tired head’s suicidal pursuits seriously, but I can confess that several times I went so far as to imagine a scenario in which I’d fling myself bare-chested with knife in hand at the men of the Mompox battalion, shouting “Long Live the Liberal Party!” and force them to receive my onslaught with bullets or bayonets. I never did, of course, never did anything of the sort. My act of greatest daring, during those dazed nights, was to visit the side streets of Colón the Widow of the Canal had visited, according to legend, and once I was sure I saw Charlotte turn a corner in the company of an African man in a hat, and ran after the specter until I realized I’d lost a shoe between the cobblestones and my scraped heel was bleeding.

I changed. Pain alters us; it’s the agent of slight but terrifying disruptions. After several weeks during which I grew gradually familiar with the night, I allowed myself the private exoticism of visiting the Europeans’ brothels, and more than once made use of their women (relics in their forties from de Lesseps’s times, in some cases heirs of these relics, girls with surnames like Michaud or Henrion who didn’t know who Napoleon Bonaparte was or why the French Canal had failed). Later, back in that house where Charlotte survived in a thousand phantasmagorical ways, in her clothes that Eloísa had begun to wear or in the destruction still visible if you looked closely at the glass door of the cabinet, something I can only call shame would descend upon me. At those moments I felt incapable of looking Eloísa in the face, and she, out of some kind of last respect she held for me, was incapable of formulating a single one of the questions that were (clearly) crowding the tip of her tongue. I sensed that my actions were destroying the affection between us, that my behavior was tearing down the bridges that united us. But I accepted it. Life had accustomed me to the idea of collateral victims. Charlotte was one. My relationship with my daughter, one more. We are at war, I thought. In war these things happen.

I attributed to the war, then, the obvious fracture of the bridges, the gap that opened between my daughter and myself from that time on like some sort of biblical sea. The school suspended services with shameless frequency, and Eloísa, who learned to battle with the absence of her mother with much more talent than I did, began to have free time and to enjoy it in ways that didn’t involve me. She didn’t make me part of her life (I don’t blame her: my sadness, the bottomless pit of my grief, was a rebuff to any invitation), or rather, her life evolved in directions I didn’t understand. And in rare moments of lucidity — nights of mourning and fear can be rich in revelations — I managed to glimpse that something more concrete than Charlotte’s death had come into play. But I didn’t manage to give it a name. Busy as I was with the memory of my shredded happiness, with attempts to accept the reality of the devastation, to process the information of my shattered life and dominate the anguish of nocturnal solitude, I didn’t manage to name it. . And I realized this: in the long Colón nights, on my long walks, sweaty and smelly, through streets that just a little while ago I’d strolled well dressed and fragrant, names of things were disappearing. Insomnia gradually takes away the memory of things: I forgot to wash, forgot to clean my teeth, and I remembered (that is, remembered that I’d forgotten) when it was already too late; the Chinese butcher, the Gringo soldier at the station, the man who sold sugar cane on Sundays from his beach stall, raised their hands instinctively to their faces at the blast of the breath of my greeting, or took a step back as if pushed when I opened my mouth. . I lived outside of conscience; I also lived outside the tangible world around me: I experienced my being a widower like exile, but without ever figuring out where I’d been expelled from, where I was forbidden to return. On better days I could glimpse a slight hope: just as I’d forgotten the most basic rules of urban life, maybe the despair itself was forgettable.

And that was how the Political Gorgon finally invaded the Altamirano-Madinier household. That was how History, incarnate in the particular destiny of a cowardly and confused soldier, dashed my pretensions to neutrality, my attempts at separation, my eagerness for studied apathy. The lesson I learned from Great Events was clear and easy: you won’t escape, they told me, it’s impossible for you to escape. It was a real show of strength, as well, for at the same time the Gorgon ruined my illusory plans for earthly happiness, it also ruined those of my country. Now I could go into detail about those days of disorientation and despair, about the anguish painted on Eloísa’s face when she looked straight at me, about my lack of interest in remedying that anguish. Were we talking about shipwrecks? That was when mine happened. But now, after the painful lessons the Gorgon and the Angel have taught me, how can I attend to those banalities? How can I talk about my pain and that of my daughter, of the nights of apolitical tears, of the outside-of-history solitude that overtook me, heavy as a wet poncho? The death of Charlotte — my lifesaver, my last resort — at the hands of the War of a Thousand Days was a memorandum in which someone reminded me of the hierarchies that must be respected. Someone, Angel or Gorgon, reminded me that beside the Republic of Colombia and its vicissitudes my minuscule life was a grain of salt, a frivolous and unimportant matter, the tale the idiot tells, the sound, the fury, and so on. Someone called me to order to make me realize that in Colombia more important things than my thwarted happiness were happening.

An essentially Colombian paradox: after a brilliant campaign by which he managed to recapture almost the entire Isthmus of Panama, the revolutionary General Benjamín Herrera found himself suddenly forced to sign a peace treaty in which his army and his party came out the losers from every angle. What had happened? I thought of the words my father had said to me on a certain day in 1885: when Colón was destroyed by fire and war and yet the Canal — that unfinished Canal — was spared, I told him we’d had good luck and he said no, we’d had Gringo ships. Well then, the War of a Thousand Days was special for several reasons (for its hundred thousand dead, for having left the National Treasury in complete ruin, for having humiliated half the population of Colombia and turned the other half into voluntary humiliators); but it was also special for less conspicuous and, another paradox, more serious circumstances. No more beating about the bush: the War of a Thousand Days, which actually lasted one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight, was special for having been resolved from start to finish in the bowels of foreign ships. Generals Foliaco and De la Rosa did not negotiate aboard the Próspero Pinzón but on the HMS Tribune; Generals Foliaco and Albán did not negotiate on the Cartagena, which arrived around the same time in Colón, but on the USS Marietta. After the surrender of my Schizophrenic City, where did they arrange the prisoner swaps? Not on the Almirante Padilla, but on the Philadelphia. And last but not least: after the various peace proposals made by Benjamín Herrera and his isthmian revolutionaries, after the radical refusal of those proposals on the part of the stubborn Conservative government, where was the negotiation table that led to the Treaty? Where did they sign the little piece of paper that put an end to the one thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of relentless slaughter? It was not on board the Liberal Cauca, or on the Conservative Boyaca: it was on the USS Wisconsin, which was neither one nor the other but was much more. . We Colombians were taken by the hand of our big brothers, the Grown-up Countries. Our fate was played for on the gaming tables of other houses. In those poker games that resolved the most important issues of our history, we Colombians, Readers of the Jury, just sat there like statues.

November 12,1902. The postcard that commemorates that disastrous date is well known (everyone’s inherited the image from their victorious or defeated fathers or grandfathers; there’s no one in Colombia who doesn’t have a copy of that memento mori on a nationwide scale). Mine was printed by Maduro & Sons, Panama, and measures fourteen by ten centimeters. Along the bottom edge in red letters appear the names of the participants. From left to right and from Conservative to Liberal: General Victor Salazar. General Alfredo Vásquez Cobo. Doctor Eusebio Morales. General Lucas Caballero. General Benjamín Herrera. But then we remember (those who have the postcard) that there is among these figures — the Conservatives with mustaches, the others bearded — a notable absence, a kind of emptiness that opens in the middle of the image. For Admiral Silas Casey, the great architect of the Wisconsin Treaty, the one in charge of talking to those on the right and convincing them to meet with those on the left, is not in it. He’s not there. Nevertheless, his northerly presence is felt in every corner of the yellowing image, in each of its silver cells. The dark and vaguely baroque tablecloth is the property of Silas Casey; on the table are piled, as if this has nothing to do with them, the untidy papers of the Treaty that will change forever the history of Colombia, will change forever what it means to be Colombian, and it is Silas Casey who put them there just a few minutes before. And now I’ll concentrate on the rest of the scene. General Herrera appears to be separated from the table, as if the bigger boys won’t let him play; General Caballero, in the name of the revolutionaries, is signing. And I say, Bring me a movie camera! Because I need to fly over the scene, enter the Wisconsin through the skylight, and float above the table with its baroque cloth, and read that preamble, in which the signatories establish, with perfectly straight faces, that they have gathered there to “put an end to the bloodshed,” to “procure the reestablishment of peace in the Republic,” and above all so that the Republic of Colombia “can bring to a satisfactory conclusion the negotiations pending on the Panama Canal.”

Four words, Readers of the Jury, just four words: Negotiations. Pending. Panama. Canal. On paper, of course, they seem inoffensive; but there is a newly made bomb in them, a charge of nitroglycerine from which there is now no possible escape. In 1902, while José Altamirano, a little man without historical importance, fought tooth and nail for the recuperation of his tiny life, while he, an insignificant father of a daughter, forced himself to ford the river of shit his life as a widower (and his motherless daughter’s) had become, the negotiations that had been going on between the United States and the Republic of Colombia had already claimed the health of two ambassadors in Washington; my country began by putting Carlos Martínez Silva in charge, and months later Martínez Silva was retired from the post, without having advanced matters in the slightest, and died of physical exhaustion, pale, haggard, and gray, so tired he even gave up talking in his final days. His replacement was José Vicente Concha, former Minister of War, an unsubtle and rather brutal man who faced up to the negotiations with an iron will and was steelily defeated in a few months; subject to great nervous excitement, Concha suffered a violent crisis before leaving for Bogotá, and the port authorities in New York were forced to restrain him in a straitjacket while he shouted at the top of his lungs words that no one understood: Soberanía, Imperio, Colonialismo. Concha died a short time later, in his bed in Bogotá, ill and hallucinating, occasionally cursing in languages he didn’t know (and the lack of knowledge of which had been one of his main problems as a negotiator of international treaties). His wife said he spent his final days talking of the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty of 1846, or arguing over articles and conditions with an invisible interlocutor who was sometimes President Roosevelt and at others an anonymous man who in his delirium he called Boss and whose identity has never been, nor will it ever be, established.

“Sovereignty,” shouted poor Concha without being understood by anyone. “Empire. Colonialism.”

On November 23, the ink not yet dry on the Wisconsin Treaty, came the turn of Tomás Herrán, chargé d’affaires of the Colombian legation in Washington and destined to go down in history as the Last of the Negotiators. And while there, in Caribbean America, Eloísa and I began, after enormous efforts, to find our way through the labyrinths of sorrow, in icy North America, Don Tomás Herrán, a sad-looking, reserved sixty-year-old who spoke four languages and was equally indecisive in all of them, was trying to do the same through the labyrinths of the Treaty. That’s how Christmas went by in Colón: for Panamanians, the signing of the Treaty was a matter of life or death, and during the last days of 1902, when they hadn’t yet replaced the telegraph wires destroyed by the war, it didn’t seem unusual for me to leave the house at six in the morning (I could rarely sleep) and find myself in the port waiting with the crowds for the first steamers and their cargo of U.S. papers (the French were no longer news). That was an especially dry and hot season, and before the first roosters crowed, the heat had already driven me out of bed. My daybreak ritual consisted of a cup of coffee, a spoonful of quinine, and a cold shower, which I depended on to exorcise the night’s demons, the recurring image of Charlotte sitting dead beside an executed deserter, the memory of the appalling silence Eloísa kept at the sight of her mother’s body, the memory of the pressure of her hand on mine, the memory of her crying and shaking, the memory of. . Dear reader, my private exorcisms were not always successful. Then I’d reach for the extreme remedy of whiskey, and more than a few times managed to get the stabbings of fear to stop with the first seethings of alcohol in the pit of my stomach.

In January celebrations burst out in the streets of Colón. After doubts and reticence, after bloodless tugs and slackenings, the U.S. Secretary of State John Hay issued an ultimatum that seemed to come from the mouth of President Roosevelt: “If this isn’t signed now,” he said, “we’ll build the Canal in Nicaragua.” A hasty order came from Bogotá. Fortyeight hours later, in the middle of the night, Tomás Herrán wrapped himself up in a black woolen cloak and, defying the biting winter wind, walked to Hay’s house.

The Treaty was signed in the first fifteen minutes of his visit, between glasses of brandy. The Canal Company was authorized to sell to the United States the rights and concessions relating to the works. Colombia guaranteed the United States complete control of a ten-kilometerwide zone between Colón and Panama City. The cession was for a space of one hundred years. In exchange, the United States would pay ten million dollars. The protection of the Canal would be Colombia’s responsibility; but if Colombia was unable to do so effectively, the United States reserved the right to intervene. .

Et cetera. Et cetera. A long et cetera.

Three days later, the arrival of the papers that carried the news was celebrated as if the times of Ferdinand de Lesseps were back for the Isthmus. Paper lanterns adorned the streets, tropical orchestras spontaneously emerged to fill the air with the metallic sound of their trombones and tubas and trumpets. Eloísa, who at sixteen years of age was already wiser than me, dragged me forcibly to Front Street, where people were drinking toasts with whatever was at hand. In front of the great stone arch of the railway offices people were dancing and waving the flags of the two signatory nations: yes, the air was again impregnated with patriotism, and yes, I had difficulties breathing again. And then, as we walked between the offices and the sleeping carriages, Eloísa turned around and said to me, “Grandfather would have enjoyed this.”

“What do you know?” I barked at her. “You hardly even knew him.”

Yes, that’s what I said. It was a cruel retort; Eloísa withstood it unblinkingly, perhaps because she understood better than I the complexity of what I was feeling at that moment, perhaps because she was starting to become sadly resigned to my tormented-widower’s reactions. I looked at her: she had turned into a living portrait of Charlotte (her small breasts, her tone of voice); she’d had enough presence of mind to cut her hair short like a boy, trying to reduce as much as possible the resemblance that tormented me; however, at that moment I felt a gap opening up between us (a Darien Jungle) or that an insuperable obstruction (a Sierra Nevada) arose between us. She was turning into someone else: the woman she was becoming was colonizing her territory, appropriating the city in ways that I, an incomer, could not imagine. Of course, Eloísa was right: Miguel Altamirano would have liked to have witnessed that night, written about it even if no one would publish the article, left a record of the Great Event for the benefit of future generations. That’s what I was thinking all night, in the 4th of July saloon, while I drank half a bottle of whiskey with a banker from San Francisco and his lover, next to the statue of Columbus, where the Haitian fire-eater was still performing his spectacle. And as we walked back home, along the shore of Limón Bay, seeing the lights of the ships flickering in the distance like fireflies over the black sheet of the night, I felt for the first time at the back of my mouth the bitter taste of resentment.

Eloísa was walking with both hands clasped around my arm, like when she was a little girl; our feet were stepping on the same ground where the deserter Anatolio Calderón had stepped, but neither of us spoke of that disgrace that was still with us, that would never, never leave us alone, that would sleep in our house like a pet until the end of time. But as we crossed the dark street of the ghost town of Christophe Colomb, it was as if all the ghosts of my past came out to meet me. I didn’t think the word, but as I climbed the porch steps the notion of revenge had already installed itself in my mind. Not only would I not flee from the Angel of History again, not only would I not seek a submissive distance from the Gorgon of Politics, but I would make them my slaves: I would burn the wings of one, decapitate the other. There, lying in the hammock at midnight on January 24, I declared war on them.

And while this was happening in the tropical heat, up there, in the frigid fog of perfidious Albion, Joseph Conrad was having a little tantrum.

He’d been invited to London to meet an American (a banker, just like the man in the 4th of July: the correspondence is insignificant but no less deserving of mention). The banker says he’s a great admirer of the maritime novels: he recites the beginning of Almayer’s Folly from memory, feels like a close friend of Lord Jim although the novel had struck him as “dense and tedious.” In the middle of dinner, the banker asks Conrad “when he’d spin some more yarns about the sea,” and Conrad explodes: he’s sick of being seen as a writer of little adventures, a Jules Verne of the Southern Seas. He protests and complains, explains himself too much undoubtedly, but at the end of the argument the banker, who can smell the need for money the way dogs can smell fear, offers him a deal: Conrad will write a commissioned novel of around one hundred thousand words with a maritime setting; the banker, as well as paying him, will arrange for publication by Harper’s Magazine. Conrad accepts (the tantrum has reached its end), mostly because he already has the subject for the novel, and has even written a few notes for it.

These are not easy days. For months now, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford have been writing a four-handed, romantic, adventure novel, the most obvious object of which is to make (quick, immediate) money to alleviate both their financial difficulties. But the collaboration has not gone well: it’s taken much longer than they planned, and has created situations of tension between the friends and their wives that little by little have poisoned the cordial atmosphere between them. Complaints and apologies, accusations and alibis, go back and forth. “I’m doing my damnedest,” writes Conrad. Blackwood’s, the magazine that was to publish the novel, has now turned it down; debts pile up on his desk and represent, to Conrad, a real threat against his family. Tormented by the guilt of his neglected responsibilities, he sees his wife as a widow and his sons as orphans; they depend on him and he has nothing to give them. His health does not make matters any easier: he has one attack of gout after another, and when it’s not gout it’s dysentery, and when it’s not dysentery it’s rheumatism. As if that weren’t enough, nostalgia for the sea overwhelms him more and more each day, and during those days he has seriously considered the possibility of looking for a captain’s post and returning to his old life. “What I wouldn’t give for a cutter and the River Fatshan,” he writes, “or that magnificent dilapidated ship between the Mozambique Canal and Zanzibar!” In these conditions, the banker’s commission is a cause for gratitude.

The idea has been growing gradually in his head. It started as a short story, something about the length of “Youth,” maybe, or “Amy Foster” at most, but Conrad misjudged the elements (or perhaps he was aware that short stories don’t sell well) and the original concept swelled as the days and months went by, going from twenty-five thousand to eighty thousand words, going from a single setting to two or three, and all that before he’d started actually writing it. During those days the project disappears from Conrad’s letters and conversations. At the time of the proposal, Conrad knows little about it, but one of the things he does know is that the story will be a hundred thousand words long, and that its protagonists will be a group of Italians. His memory has returned to the admired figure of Dominic Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica; his memory goes back to 1876, the year of his travels to the ports of the Caribbean, the year of his experiences as a gunrunner in Panama, the year of experiences that led him to the (secret and never confessed) suicide attempt. In those initial notes, Cervoni has been transformed into a capataz of cargadores who has ended up working in a Caribbean port. His name is Gian Battista, and his surname is Nostromo. Around that time Conrad reads the maritime memoirs of a certain Benton Williams, and finds there the story of a man who has stolen a shipment of silver. That story and the image of Cervoni blend in his head. . Maybe (he thinks) his Nostromo doesn’t need to be a thief; maybe circumstances have led him to the booty by chance, and he takes advantage of them. But what circumstances? In what situation can a decent man find himself forced to steal a shipment of silver? Conrad doesn’t know. He closes his eyes and tries to imagine motives, construct scenes, assemble psychologies. But he fails.

In March 1902, Conrad had written: “Nostromo shall be a first-rate story.” Months later his enthusiasm had declined: “There is no help and no hope; there is only the duty to try, to try everlastingly with no regard for success.” One day, in the middle of an unusual burst of optimism and shortly after the conversation with the banker, he takes out a blank sheet of paper, puts the number 1 on the top right-hand corner, and in capital letters writes: “NOSTROMO. PART FIRST. THE ISABELS.” But nothing more happens; the words do not come to him. Conrad immediately notices something is wrong. He crosses out “THE ISABELS” and writes: “THE SILVER OF THE MINE.” And then, for reasons that are inexplicable, the images and memories, the oranges he saw in Puerto Cabello and the stories of galleons he heard when they put into port at Cartagena, the waters of Limón Bay, its mirror-like stillness and islands that are really the Mulatas crowd into his head. It’s that moment again: the book has begun. Conrad experiences it with excitement, but he knows the excitement will not last, that soon it’ll be replaced by the most assiduous visitors to his desk: his linguistic uncertainties, architectural anguish, and financial anxieties. This novel must succeed, thinks Conrad; otherwise, bankruptcy awaits him.

I’ve lost track of the nights I’ve spent imagining, like a man obsessed, the writing of the novel; and once, I confess, I imagined that Conrad’s desk caught fire again like it caught fire while he was writing Romance (or maybe it was The Mirror of the Sea, who can remember?), taking with it a good part of the manuscript; but I imagined that this time it was the story of Nostromo, the good silver thief, that was lost to the flames. I close my eyes, I picture the scene, the desk that belonged to Ford Madox Ford’s father, the paraffin lamp exploding and the flammable paper burning to cinders in seconds, consuming the sentences of exquisite calligraphy but halting grammar. I also imagine the presence of Jessie Conrad (who comes in with a cup of tea for the patient), or little Borys, whose unbearable crying slows down the already problematic writing of the novel. I close my eyes again. There’s Conrad, sitting in front of a smudged page that has not been burned, remembering the things he saw in Colón, on the railway lines, in Panama City. There he is, transforming the little he knows or remembers about Colombia, or, rather, transforming Colombia into a fictional country, a country whose history Conrad can invent with impunity. There he is, marveling at the course events in the book have taken from the starting point of those distant memories. He writes to his friend Cunninghame Graham (May 9): “I want to talk to you of the work I am engaged on now. I hardly dare avow my audacity — but I am placing it in South America in a Republic I call Costaguana. However, the book is mostly about Italians.” Conrad, astute eliminator of his own footprints, makes no mention of Colombia, the original convulsive Republic disguised behind the Costaguanan speculations. A little while later he insists on the suffering Colombia/Costaguana is causing him (July 8): “I am dying over the curst Nostromo thing. All my memories of Central America seem to slip away.” And even more: “I just had a glimpse twenty-five years ago — a short glance. That is not enough pour bâtir un roman dessus.” If Nostromo is a building, the architect Conrad needs to find a new supplier of raw material. London, luckily for him, is full of Costaguanans. Will it be necessary to resort to those men, exiles like him, men — like him — whose place in the world is roving and vague?

As the days pass and the written pages pile up on the desk, he realizes that the story of Nostromo, the Italian sailor, has lost its direction: its foundations are weak, its plot banal. Summer arrives, a fainthearted, bland summer, and Conrad devotes it to voracious, desperate reading, in an attempt to season his paltry memories. Will you allow me an inventory? He reads the Caribbean maritime memoirs of Frederick Benton Williams and the Paraguayan terrestrial memoirs of George Frederick Masterman. He reads Cunninghame Graham’s books (Hernando de Soto, Vanished Arcadia), and books that Cunninghame Graham recommends: Wild Scenes in South America, by Ramón Páez, and Down the Orinoco in a Canoe, by Santiago Pérez Triana. His memories and his readings intermingle: Conrad no longer knows what he lived and what he has read. At night, nights when the threat of depression turns into deep and dark oceans of insomnia, he tries to establish the difference (and fails); by day, he fights tooth and nail with the fiendish English language. And all the time he wonders: What is it, what’s it like, this Republic whose story I’m trying to tell? What is Costaguana? What the devil is Colombia?

At the beginning of September, Conrad receives a visit from an old enemy: gout, that aristocratic affliction that, like his surnames, is inherited from his family. The cause of that particular crisis, which for Conrad is one of the most terrible in his long history as victim of the disease, lies in the tale he’s working on, in the anguish and fears and ghosts provoked by the unmanageable material he is confronting. Conrad spends ten whole days in bed, devastated by the pain in his joints, by the irrefutable conviction that his right foot is in flames and the big toe of that foot the epicenter of the blaze. For those ten days he requires the company of Miss Hallowes, the selfless woman who acts as his secretary so Conrad can dictate the pages he can’t write by hand. Miss Hallowes puts up with the incomprehensible irascibility of this haughty man; the secretary doesn’t know it, but what Conrad dictates to her from his bed, what he dictates with his feet uncovered in spite of the cold — they hurt him so much he can’t even bear the weight of the covers on them — provokes hitherto unknown levels of nervous tension, pressure, and depression in the novelist. “I feel like I’m walking a tightrope,” he writes at the time. “If I falter I am lost.” With the arrival of autumn he has the increasingly frequent feeling of losing his balance, that the rope is about to snap.

And then he asks for help.

He writes to Cunninghame Graham and asks after Pérez Triana.

He writes to his editor at Heinemann and asks after Pérez Triana.

Little by little we begin to draw nearer.

The United States Senate took less than two months to ratify the Herrán — Hay Treaty: there were newspapers arriving in the bay again, long parties in the streets of Colón-Aspinwall again, and for a few moments it seemed that its ratification by the Colombian Congress, the only remaining formality, would happen almost automatically. But taking a step back and watching events with a tiny degree of coolness (as I regarded them from the house in Christophe Colomb; I will not use the word cynicism, nor will I object to others using it) was all that was needed to notice, in these festive and jubilant streets, at the railway crossings or on the walls of every public building, the same geological faults that had divided Colombians since Colombians could recall. The Conservatives supported the Treaty unconditionally; the Liberals, ever the wet blankets, dared to raise the strangest ideas, like that the payment was small and the length of the concession was large, and to the most audacious it seemed a tiny bit confusing, but just a tiny bit, that the famous ten-kilometer strip should be governed by U.S. law.

“Sovereignty,” José Vicente Concha, that crazy old man, shouted absurdly from somewhere. “Colonialism.”

Readers of the Jury, allow me to tell you a secret: beneath colored lamps and the music of hastily gathered bands (beneath the drunken enthusiasm reigning in Colón-Gomorrah), the pure and deep divisions of the War of a Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days continued to shudder like tectonic plates. But — a curious thing — only we cynics could detect this; only those of us who’d been vaccinated against any sort of reconciliation or camaraderie, only those of us who dared in silence to profane the Sacred Word of the Wisconsin received the true revelation: the war, in Panama, was far from over. It remained active in underground ways; at some point — I thought prophetically — that clandestine or submerged war would surface like a cursed white whale, to take some air or look for food or kill fictional captains, and the result would be invariably disastrous.

So, in the middle of May, the whale surfaced. The Indian Victoriano Lorenzo, who had fought for the Liberals in the war and trained guerrillas who drove the government troops mad, had escaped from his prison on board the Bogotá. He had received some terrible news: the victors all over the Isthmus, and especially those of his native land, were expecting him to be tried for war crimes. Lorenzo decided not to sit and bide his time until a trial he knew would be corrupt, and spent a week waiting for an opportune night. One Friday, as evening fell, a vicious thunderstorm bucketed down over Panama; Victoriano Lorenzo decided there would be no better moment, and in the middle of the cloudy night dived through the curtains of rainwater (those heavy drops that hurt your head) into the sea, swam to the port and hid out in General Domingo González’s Panama City house. But refugee life didn’t last long: not twenty-four hours had passed when the stubborn government forces were already knocking down the door of the house.

Victoriano Lorenzo did not return to the cells of the Bogotá but was taken to an airtight vault and chained up there until the arrival in the city of General Pedro Sicard Briceño, military commander of Panama. Unusual demonstrations of efficiency on the part of General Sicard: on May 13, during the night, he decided that the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo would be tried by verbal court-martial; by noon on the fourteenth, posters were up informing the general public; on the fifteenth, at five in the afternoon, Lorenzo was killed by thirty-six bullets shot from a distance of ten paces by a firing squad. Usual demonstrations of cunning on the part of the same General: the defense was put under the charge of a sixteen-year-old trainee; no witnesses were allowed to speak in favor of the accused; the sentence of capital punishment was carried out with deliberate haste, to prevent the President from having time to receive the telegrams pleading for mercy that the Panamanian authorities from both parties sent. For the Liberals of Colón the whole trial had a certain stale (or rather rotten) taste, and the fact that a firing squad enacted the sentence did not prevent many from recalling the crossbeam set up across the railway lines and Pedro Prestán’s hanging body, his hat still on his head.

The Panama newspapers, gagged (for a change) by a Conservative decree, at first kept an obliging silence. But on July 23 all of Colón awoke papered. I walked down the quagmires we had for streets, skirted the cargo docks, and darted through the fruit stalls in the market, I even visited the hospital, and everywhere saw the same thing: on the telegraph poles, a poster announced the imminent publication, in the Liberal newspaper El Lápiz (number 85, special eight-page edition), of an article on the murder of Victoriano Lorenzo. The advertisement caused two immediate responses (which did not appear posted anywhere). Secretary of Government Aristides Arjona decreed resolution number 127A, declaring that the description of a sentence issued by a military tribunal as “murder” to be in contravention of the 6th ordinance of the 4th article of the legislative decree of January 26. And while the resolution provided for a caution to be issued against the publisher of the newspaper as set out in the 1st ordinance of the 7th article of the same decree, and by virtue of that caution publication of the newspaper was suspended until further notice, Colonel Carlos Fajardo and General José María Restrepo Briceño, much more expeditious, visited Pacífico Vega’s printing press, recognized the publisher of the newspaper, and beat the hell out of him with their boots, swords, and batons, not before spilling and stamping on the type, destroying the presses, and publicly burning the existing stocks of El Lápiz (number 85, special eight-page edition). The newspaper was subversive and must be punished. So ordered.

And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. As time goes by it seems increasingly clear to me that it was at that moment, at nine-fifteen on that July evening, that the map of the Republic began to crack. All earthquakes have an epicenter, don’t they? Well then, this is the one that interests me. The Liberal newspapers, indignant over the execution of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo, took the aggression of the military boot (and sword, and baton) very badly; but nothing had prepared us for the words that appeared in El Istmeño the following Saturday, and that arrived in Colón on the morning’s first train. I’m not going to inflict on my tolerant readers the entire contents of that new explosive charge; it’s enough to know that they harked back to the times of the Spanish Empire, when the name of Colombia “resounded in human ears with incomparable fame,” and Panama, seeking “a golden future,” did not hesitate to join that nation. The rest of the text (published between an advertisement for a herbal remedy for gaining weight and another for a manual on learning hypnotism) was a long declaration of regret; and after wondering like a resentful lover if Colombia had reciprocated the affection Panama had lavished upon it, the shameless author — who with every phrase gave new meaning to the word corny—wondered if the Isthmus of Panama was happy belonging to Colombia. “Would it not be more content separate from the Republic and constituting itself as a sovereign and independent Republic of its own?” Immediate reply: Secretary of Government Aristides Arjona decreed resolution number 35 of the year of Our Lord 1903, declaring that those questions expressed “subversive ideas contrary to national integrity” and violated the 1st ordinance of the 4th article of decree 84 of the same year. Therefore El Istmeño had earned the corresponding sanctions, and publication was suspended for a period of six months. So ordered.

In spite of the sanctions, fines, and suspensions, there was no longer anything to be done: the idea was left floating in the air like an observation balloon. In the Darien Jungle, I swear, though I’ve not seen it, the land began to open (geology receiving orders from politics), and Central America began to float free toward the ocean; in Colón, I swear, with full knowledge of proceedings, it was like a new word had entered the citizens’ lexicon. . One walked among the ruckus and smells of Front Street and could hear it in all the accents of Spanish, from the Caribbean Spanish of Cartagena to the purest bogotáno, from the Cuban to the Costa Rican. “Separation?” people asked each other on the street. “Independence?” These words, still abstract, still uncut, made their way up north as well; weeks later the steamship New Hampshire arrived in Colón, with a particular edition of New York World in its hold. A long article about the question of the Canal contained, among other explosive charges, the following:

Information has reached this city that the State of Panama, which embraces all the proposed Canal Zone, stands ready to secede from Colombia and enter into a Canal Treaty with the United States. The State of Panama will secede if the Colombian Congress fails to ratify the Canal Treaty.

The anonymous text was widely read in Bogotá, and very soon came to form part of the government’s worst nightmares. “What the Gringos want is to frighten us,” said one of those battle-hardened congressmen. “And we’re not going to give them that pleasure.” On August 17, those nightmares leapt from the unconscious to reality: on a day of unbearably strong wind, a wind that made the deputies’ hats fly from their heads, that forced open the finest umbrellas and inconsiderately ruined the ladies’ hairstyles — and made one or two suffer a wee bit of embarrassment — the Colombian Congress unanimously rejected the Herrán-Hay Treaty. Neither of the two representatives from the Isthmus was present for the vote, but no one seemed to care too much. Washington trembled with fury. “Those contemptible little creatures in Bogotá ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future,” said President Roosevelt, and days later added: “We may have to give a lesson to those jackrabbits.”

On August 18, Colón awoke in mourning. The deserted streets seemed to be preparing for a state funeral (which was not all that far from the truth); days later, one of the few Liberal newspapers that had survived Aristides Arjona’s purges published a cartoon I still have; in fact, I have it here, in front of me, while I write. It has several scenes and is not terribly clear. In the background is the capital of Colombia; a little lower down, a coffin on a funeral carriage, and on the coffin the words: HERRÁN-HAY TREATY. Sitting on a rock, a man wearing a Colombian peasant hat weeps disconsolately, and standing next to him, leaning on his cane, Uncle Sam looks at a woman pointing the way to Nicaragua. . If I have described it in detail, it’s not, dear readers, on a whim. In the weeks after August 17, those weeks that, seeing what they presaged, passed almost masochistically slowly, in all of Panama people talked of the Treaty’s death or demise, never of its rejection or failure to be approved. The Treaty was an old friend and had died of a sudden heart attack, and in Colón the rich paid for Masses to lament its passing from the world of the living, and some paid more so the priest would include in his words the promise of resurrection. Those days — when the Canal in our heads turned into some sort of Jesus Christ the Savior, capable of miracles, dead at the hands of impious men and who would rise from the dead — have remained associated with the cartoon in my memory.

I could swear that the cartoon was in my pocket that morning, at the end of October, when I arrived at the Railroad Company docks, having spent the night wandering the tolerant streets and fallen asleep on the veranda of my house (on the wooden floorboards, not in the hammock, so I wouldn’t wake Eloísa with the creaking sound the beams made whenever someone lay down in it). It hadn’t been, I must confess, an easy night: after Charlotte’s death, the days of greatest pain had passed by then, or seemed to have passed, and it seemed possible again that a certain normality, a normal and shared grief, could be established between my daughter and myself; but when I got home, after dark in Christophe Colomb, I heard a too-familiar humming, a music that Charlotte used to sing on her happiest days (those days when she did not regret her decision to stay in Panama). It was a childish tune, the words of which I never knew, because Charlotte didn’t remember them; it was a tune that to me always seemed too sad for its ostensible aim of getting an unruly child to sleep. And when my footsteps followed the humming, on arriving at Eloísa’s room, I came across the frightful image of my wife, who had returned from the dead and was more beautiful than ever, and it took me a second to discern Eloísa’s features beneath her makeup, Eloísa’s adolescent body beneath a long African dress, Eloísa’s hair beneath a green African scarf: Eloísa playing dress-up in her dead mother’s clothes. I can barely imagine my little girl’s dismay when she saw me leap toward her (perhaps she thought I was going to embrace her) and slap her across the face, not too hard, but enough to knock one end of the scarf off her head so it lay over her right shoulder like a lock of hair out of place.

The sun was already making itself felt when I began to wait, with the salty wind hitting me in the chest, for the first North American steamer to dock. It turned out to be the Yucatán, en route from New York. And there I was, regretting what had happened with Eloísa, thinking without wanting to think of Charlotte, breathing that warm air while the dockers brought the bundles of the foreign newspapers down to the port, when Dr. Manuel Amador came down off the ship. I wish I’d never seen him, wish I’d never noticed him, wish, having noticed him, that I hadn’t been able to deduce what I deduced.

What I must now tell is painful. Who can blame me for looking away, for trying to postpone the suffering as I’m going to do. Yes, I know: I should follow the chronological order of events, but nothing forbids me from taking a leap into the immediate future. . Barely a week after that chance meeting with Manuel Amador (a dreadful week), I found myself on my way to London. What forbids me this conjuring trick that hides or defers the least pleasant days in my memory? In fact, is there some contract that obliges me to tell them? Does every individual not reserve the right not to testify against himself? After all, it wouldn’t be the first time I hid, I pretended to forget, those troublesome events. I have already spoken of my arrival in London and my meeting with Santiago Pérez Triana. Well, the story I’ve told up to now is the story I told Pérez Triana over the course of that afternoon in November 1903. The story I told Pérez Triana went this far. Here it stops, here it ends. No one forced me to tell him the rest, nothing suggested that doing so could be beneficial to me. The story Pérez Triana knew ended on this line, with this word.

Santiago Pérez Triana listened to my censored story during lunch, coffee, and an almost four-hour stroll that took us from Regent’s Park to Cleopatra’s Needle, crossing St. John’s Wood and into Hyde Park, with a detour to see the daring people ice skating along the edges of the Serpentine. This was the story; and Pérez Triana found it so interesting, that, at the end of that afternoon, insisting that all exiles were brothers, that voluntary expatriates and banished refugees were of the same species, offered to put me up in his house indefinitely: I could help him with secretarial tasks while I got myself settled in London, although he was very careful not to go into any detail about the tasks he’d entrust to me. Then he accompanied me to Trenton’s, where he paid for the night I’d spent in the hotel and also paid for the night that was beginning. “Get some rest,” he said, “get your things in order, as I shall mine. Unfortunately, neither my house nor my wife is well disposed to receiving guests at such short notice. I’ll make all the necessary arrangements to have someone come and collect your things. That will be in the late morning. And you, dear friend, I’ll expect tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock sharp. By then I’ll have arranged what needs to be arranged. And you shall join my household as if you’d been raised in it.”

What happened until five the next day has no importance; the world didn’t exist until five in the afternoon. Arrival at the hotel in the nocturnal fog. Emotional exhaustion: eleven hours of sleep. Awaken slowly. Late, light lunch. Leave, omnibus, Baker Street, park just about to be illuminated by the gaseous light of the street lamps. A couple strolls by, arm in arm. It has begun to drizzle.

At five o’clock I was in front of 45 Avenue Road. The housekeeper showed me in; she did not speak to me, and I didn’t manage to figure out if she was Colombian as well. I had to wait half an hour before my host came down to greet me. I imagine what he must have seen: a man not much younger than himself but from whom he was separated by several layers of hierarchy — he, a famous paradigm of the ruling class; I, an outcast — sitting in the reading chair, with a round hat on his lap and a copy of Down the Orinoco in a Canoe in his hand. Pérez Triana saw me reading without any spectacles and told me he envied me. I was wearing. . What was I wearing that day? I was dressed like a young man: a short-collared shirt, boots so shiny the light from outside drew a silver line on the leather, a pompous, exaggerated knot in my tie. At that time I had started to grow a sparse and still blond beard, darker on the chin and sideburns, almost invisible over my bulging cheeks. When I saw Pérez Triana come in, I jumped to my feet and returned the book to the pile of three on the side table, apologizing for having picked it up. “That’s what it’s there for,” he said. “But I should change it for something more recent, shouldn’t I? Have you read Boylesve’s latest? George Gissing’s?” He didn’t wait for an answer; he kept talking as if he were alone. “Yes, I really must. I mustn’t inflict my clumsy amateur attempts at writing on every visitor, and much less when that clumsiness was perpetrated months ago.” And thus, as gently as one accompanies a convalescent, he took me by the arm and led me to another smaller room, at the back of the house. Standing next to the bookshelves, a man with weathered skin, a thick, dark beard and pointed mustache, looked over the titles on the leather spines with his left hand in the pocket of his checked jacket. He turned round as he heard us come in, held his right hand out to me, and in the handshake he gave me I felt the calloused hand of a man of experience, the firm grip of that hand that knew the elegance of calligraphy as well as it did eighty-nine ways to knot a rope, and I felt that the contact of our two hands was like the collision of two planets.

“My name is Joseph Conrad,” the man introduced himself. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

IX. The Confessions of José Altamirano

I talked. You better believe I talked. I talked without stopping, desperately: I told him everything, the whole history of my country, the whole story of its violent people and their pacific victims (the history, I mean, of its convulsions). That November night in 1903, while the temperature plummeted precipitously in Regent’s Park and the trees obeyed autumn’s alopecic tendencies, and while Santiago Pérez Triana watched us, a cup of tea in his hand — steaming up his glasses every time he took a sip — marveling at the twists of fate that had made him a witness of that meeting, that night, no one could have shut me up. Then and there I knew my place in the world. Pérez Triana’s sitting room, a place made out of the accumulated remains of Colombian politics, of its games and disloyalties, of its infinite and never well-pondered cruelty, was the scene of my epiphany.

Readers of the Jury, Eloísa dear: at some imprecise moment of that autumn night, the figure of Joseph Conrad — a man who asks me questions and will use my answers to write the history of Colombia, or the history of Costaguana, or the history of Colombia-Costaguana, or the history of Costaguana-Colombia — began to acquire for me an unexpected importance. I have often tried to locate that moment in the chronology of my own life, and recording it, I would very much like to use one of my solemn phrases of a Great Events Participant: “While in Russia the Party of the Workers divided into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, in London I opened my heart to a Polish writer.” Or: “Cuba leased the base at Guantánamo to the United States, and at the same time José Altamirano presented the history of Colombia to Joseph Conrad.” But I can’t do it. Writing these sentences is impossible, because I don’t know at what moment I opened my heart to him, nor when I handed over the history of my Republic. As the bogotáno biscuits Pérez Triana’s servant had baked were served? Maybe, but maybe not. As a faint-hearted sleet began to fall on the porch and the London sky prepared to drop the year’s first snowfall on the living and the dead? I don’t know, I couldn’t say. But that doesn’t matter; what matters is the intuition I had. And it was this: there, at 45 Avenue Road, under the auspices of Santiago Pérez Triana, I would answer Conrad’s questions, satisfy his curiosity; I’d tell him what I knew, all that I’d seen and all that I’d done, and in exchange he (faithfully, nobly) would tell my life story. And then. . then the things that happen when one’s life is written in golden letters on the notice board of destiny would happen.

History will absolve me, I thought, or I believe I thought (the phrase was not an original one). But I actually meant: “Joseph Conrad, absolve me.” Because it was in his hands. I was in his hands.

And now, finally, the moment has come. There is no sense in putting it off: I must speak of this guilt. “I could tell you episodes of the separatist revolution that would astound you,” says a character in the Damn Conradian Book. Well then, I can do that, too, I plan to do that, too. And so I return to the image of the Yucatán. I return to Manuel Amador.

I had met him, alongside my father, at the banquets Panama City offered years before for Ferdinand de Lesseps. How old was Don Manuel Amador? Seventy? Seventy-five? What had he been doing in New York, this man who was famous for his hatred of foreign travel? Why had no one come to meet him? Why was he in such a hurry and so reluctant to talk, why did he seem tense, why was he determined to be on the first train leaving for Panama City? Then I noticed that he wasn’t alone: one person had come to meet him, and had even boarded the Yucatán to accompany him (in view of his age, no doubt). It was Herbert Prescott, assistant superintendent of the Railroad Company. Prescott worked in the Railroad offices in Panama City, but it didn’t strike me as odd that he should have crossed the whole Isthmus to come and meet an old friend; Prescott, furthermore, knew me well (my father had been the Company’s prime publicist for several years) but nevertheless kept walking when I approached to say hello to Manuel Amador. I thought nothing of it; I concentrated on the Doctor. He looked so haggard I instinctively stretched out a hand to help him with the briefcase that looked too heavy for him, but Amador snatched the case out of my reach and I didn’t insist. It took me several years to understand what happened that day on the Company dock. I had to wait a long time to find out the historical contents of that briefcase, but it took only a couple of days to understand what was happening in my schizophrenic city.

There are good readers and bad readers of reality; there are men able to hear the secret murmur of events better than others. . From the moment I saw him flee from the Company dock, I didn’t stop thinking about Dr. Amador. His nerves had been clearly legible, as had his haste to get to Panama City; also the company of Herbert Prescott, who a few days later (on October 31 or November 1, I don’t know precisely) would return briefly, accompanied by four engine drivers, to take all the idle rolling stock from Colón station to Panama City. Everyone saw the empty trains leave, but no one thought for a second that it was anything other than some routine maintenance procedure. Anyway, the Gringos had always stood out for their rather strange ways of behaving, and I suppose even the witnesses had forgotten about it in a matter of hours. But the trains had gone. Colón was left without trains.

By November 2, however, it was no longer possible to avoid the force of events. While I was at the port waiting for my newspapers to arrive in some passenger steamer, what showed up on the horizon was something else entirely: a gunboat with a U.S. flag. It was the Nashville, which had arrived in record time from Kingston, and hadn’t yet been announced in the port of Colón (the Nashville became one more event, an event anchored innocently in the bay, ready to be interpreted). To me, an obsessive observer, the text of the story was completed the following morning: before the first glimmers of dawn, the lights of the Cartagena, battleship, and the Alexander Bixio, merchant steamer, were visible from the port; both, of course, were as Colombian as Panama. Before lunch — it was a sunny day, the still waters of Limón Bay sparkled pacifically, and I was planning to pick up Eloísa from school and share a grilled mojarra fish while we watched the ships — I guessed what the cargo was. It wasn’t very difficult to find out that those two ships, veterans of the War of a Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days, were bringing five hundred government soldiers under the command of Generals Juan B. Tovar and Ramón Amaya to Panamanian soil.

I didn’t say anything to Eloísa. Before falling asleep I had associated the hasty and almost clandestine presence of the five hundred soldiers with the trains that Prescott had taken to Panama City. And before dawn broke the certainty that a revolution would take place in Panama City that very day woke me. Before night falls, I thought, the Isthmus of Panama — that place where my father had lived his heyday and his decline, the place where I’d met my father, fallen in love, and had a daughter — before night falls, I said to myself, the Isthmus will have declared its independence from Colombia. The idea of a fractured map frightened me, of course, and imagining the blood and death every revolution brings with it frightened me. . It was no later than seven when I threw on a cotton shirt and a felt hat and began to walk toward the Railroad Company. I confess: I wasn’t very sure of my intentions, if I even had in mind anything as complex as an intention. But I knew at that moment there was no better place in the world than the Company offices, there was nowhere I would rather have found myself on that November morning.

When I arrived at the offices, in that stone building resembling a colonial prison, I found them deserted. This, moreover, was logical: if there were no trains in the terminus station, why should there be any engine drivers, mechanics or ticket collectors, or any passengers? But I didn’t leave, I didn’t go looking for anyone, because in some obscure way I had guessed something would happen in this place. I was still formulating these absurd deliberations when three figures came in through the stone arches: Generals Tovar and Amaya were walking together, their pace almost synchronized, and the uniforms they wore seemed about to succumb to the bristling weight of belts, epaulettes, medals, and swords. The third man was Colonel James Shaler, superintendent of the Railroad Company, one of the most popular and respected Gringos in the whole Isthmus and an old acquaintance of my father’s. It was obvious from his greeting, halfway between affectionate and concerned, that Colonel Shaler wasn’t expecting to see me there. But I wasn’t prepared to move: I ignored the hints and brush-offs, and went as far as to raise one hand to my forehead to salute the governmental generals. Just then, on the other side of the building, the tapping of the telegraph began. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but the Railroad Company had the only means of communication between Colón and Panama City. Colonel Shaler found himself obliged to answer the incoming message. Reluctantly, he left me alone with the generals. We were in the entrance hall of the building, barely protected from the killing heat that by then, just after eight in the morning, was beginning to come in through the wide door. None of us spoke: we all feared revealing too much. The generals arched their eyebrows the way children do when they suspect a salesman is trying to trick them. And at that moment I understood.

I understood that Colonel James Shaler and assistant superintendent Herbert Prescott were party to the conspiracy; I understood that Dr. Manuel Amador was one of its leaders. I understood that the conspirators had received news of the imminent arrival of government troops on board the Cartagena and the Alexander Bixio, and I understood that they’d requested help (I didn’t know who from), and the unexpected arrival of the gunboat Nashville was that help or part of that help. I understood that the success or failure of the revolution that was just then beginning in Panama City depended on the five hundred soldiers of the Tiradores battalion, under the command of Generals Tovar and Amaya, being able to board a train and cross the Isthmus to put it down before it was too late, and I understood that the Panama City conspirators had understood that, too. I understood that Herbert Prescott had moved the empty trains out of Colón for the same reason that now, after receiving a telegram the contents of which were not difficult to imagine, Colonel Shaler was trying to convince Tovar and Amaya to board on their own, without their troops, the only available train, a single coach and locomotive, and calmly proceed to Panama City. “Your troops will catch up with you as soon as I can get a train, I promise,” Colonel Shaler was saying to General Tovar, “but meanwhile, with this heat, there’s no reason for you gentlemen to stay here.” Yes, that’s what he said, and I understood why he said it. And at exactly half past nine in the morning, when Generals Tovar and Amaya fell into the trap and climbed aboard the superintendent’s private coach, along with fifteen of their adjutants, subordinates, and messengers, I understood that there, in the railway station, history was about to perpetrate the separation of the Isthmus of Panama and at the same time the disgrace, the profound and irreparable disgrace, of the Republic of Colombia. Readers of the Jury, Eloísa dear, the time for my proud and guilty confession has arrived: I understood all that, I understood that a word of mine could have given the conspirators away and avoided the revolution, and nevertheless I remained silent, I kept quiet with the most silent of silences that had ever been, the most damaging and most malicious. Because Colombia had ruined my life, because I wanted revenge on my country and its meddling, despotic, murderous history.

I had more than one chance to speak. Today I have to ask myself: Would General Tovar have believed me if I, a complete stranger, had told him that the shortage of trains was a revolutionary strategy, that the promise to send the battalion in the first available trains was false, and that by separating from their five hundred men the generals were submitting to the revolution and losing the Isthmus out of pure naïveté? Would he have believed me? Well, the question is merely rhetorical, for this was never my intention. And I remember the moment when I saw them all (General Tovar, General Amaya, and their men) sitting in Colonel Shaler’s luxurious carriage, basking in the privileged treatment, receiving complimentary glasses of juice and plates of bitesized pieces of papaya while waiting for departure time, satisfied at finally having earned the Americans’ respect. Dear readers, it was not out of cynicism or sadism or simple egotism that I climbed aboard the coach and insisted on shaking hands with the two government generals. I was moved by something less comprehensible and decidedly less explicable: the proximity to the Great Event and, of course, my participation in it, my silent role in Panama’s independence or, to be more precise and also more honest, in Colombia’s disgrace. To have the chance to speak again, even the horrible temptation to speak, and not to do so: my historical and political destiny was then reduced, and would be forever reduced, to that delicate, catastrophic, and vengeful silence.

Colonel James Shaler’s private train began to spit out steam seconds later. The whistle blew a couple of hoarse notes; I was still on board, amazed at the cosmic ironies of which I was the victim, when the landscape outside the window began to move backward. I said a hurried farewell, wished the generals luck, and leapt down onto Front Street. The carriage began to take the generals away; behind, waving the most hypocritical handkerchief in the history of humanity, was Colonel Shaler. I stood beside him as we both engaged in that strange revolutionary task: seeing off a train. The back door of the carriage grew smaller and smaller until there was just a black dot above the rails, then a cloud of gray smoke, and finally not even that: the lines of iron converging, stubborn and determined on the green horizon. Without looking at me, as if not speaking to me, Colonel Shaler said, “I’ve heard a lot about your father, Altamirano.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“It’s a shame what happened to him, because the man was on the right side. We’re living in complicated times. Besides, I don’t know much about journalism.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“He wanted what we all want. He wanted progress.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

“If he had lived to see independence, his sympathies would have been with it.”

I was grateful that he wasn’t attempting fictions, or half-truths, or concealment strategies. I was grateful he respected my talents (my talents as a reader of the real, as an interpreter of immediate reality).

I said, “His sympathies would have been with those who made the Canal, Colonel.”

“Altamirano,” said Shaler, “can I ask you a question?”

“Ask away, Colonel.”

“You know this is serious, right?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know people are risking their lives, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’ll make it easy for you. Either you’re with us, with independence and progress, or you’re against us. It would be best if you decided right now. This Colombia of yours is a backward country. . ”

“It’s not my Colombia, Colonel.”

“Does it seem fair to keep the rest behind? Does it seem fair that all these people should be screwed just because that congress of crooks hasn’t managed to get their own slice of the Canal?”

“It doesn’t seem fair, Colonel.”

“It’s really not fair, is it?”

“It’s really not fair.”

“Good. I’m glad we agree on this, Altamirano. Your father was a good man. He would have done whatever it took to see this Canal. Mark my words, Altamirano, mark my words: the Canal will be built and we’re the ones who’ll build it.”

“You’ll build it, Colonel.”

“But we’ll need your help. The patriots, no, the heroes of Panama City will need your help. Are you going to lend us a hand, Altamirano? Can we or can we not count on you?”

I think my head moved, I think I nodded. In any case, Shaler’s satisfaction at my consent was reflected in his voice and in his face, and at the back of my mind my thirst for revenge was quenched, the organ of the lowest instincts was satisfied again.

A tired old mule went by pulling a cart. On the back a child with a dirty face and bare feet sat with his legs hanging over the edge. He waved good-bye to us. But Colonel Shaler didn’t see, because he’d already left.

And after that, there was no going back. Colonel Shaler must have had magic powers, because with those few words he had magnetized me, turned me into a satellite. During the hours that followed I found myself touched, much to my chagrin, by the waters of the revolution, and there was nothing I could do about it. My will, I seem to recall now, did not have much to do with it: the whirlwind — no, the vortex — of events involved me irremediably. The ingenuous generals went to Panama City; the Tiradores battalion remained in Colón under the command of Colonel Eliseo Torres, a small man with an insolent voice who still looked baby-faced despite the mustache that cast a shadow on both sides of his serpent’s mouth. Readers of the Jury: allow me to show you the sound, faint but very evident, of the least noisy revolution in the history of humanity, a march marked by the inevitable rhythm of the clock. And you’ll have to be witnesses to that unbearable mechanism.

At 9:35 on the morning of November 3, Herbert Prescott receives in Panama City the telegram that says GENERALS LEFT WITHOUT BATTALION STOP ARRIVING 11 AM STOP TAKE AGREED ACTIONS. At 10:30, Dr. Manuel Amador visits the Liberals Carlos Mendoza and Eusebio Morales, in charge of composing the Declaration of Independence and the Manifesto of the Junta of the Provisional Government. At 11:00: Generals Tovar and Amaya are met with profuse, cordial greetings by Domingo Díaz, the provincial governor, and seven illustrious citizens. At 3:00 p.m., General Tovar receives an anonymous letter telling him to trust no one. Rumors of revolutionary meetings in Panama City proliferate, and the General goes to see Governor Díaz to ask him to order the superintendents of the Railroad to transport the Tiradores battalion immediately to Panama City. At 3:15: Tovar receives the reply to his request. From Colón, Colonel James Shaler refuses to allow his trains to be used to transport the Tiradores battalion, arguing that the government owes large sums of money to the Railroad Company. Tovar, a man with a subtle though perhaps slow sense of smell, begins to get a whiff of something strange, heads for the Chiriquí barracks, headquarters of the National Guard, for detailed discussions of the situation with General Esteban Huertas, commander of the guard.

At 5:00, Generals Tovar, Amaya, and Huertas have sat down on a pine bench outside the barracks, a few steps from the oak door. Tovar and Amaya, concerned by the rumors, begin to discuss military solutions that can be carried out without the support of the Tiradores battalion, captive of the debts. At this, Huertas stands up, gives some excuse, and leaves. Suddenly, a small contingent of eight soldiers bearing Grass rifles arrives. The generals suspect nothing. In the barracks, meanwhile, Huertas orders Captain Marco Salazar to arrest Generals Tovar and Amaya. Salazar, in turn, orders the soldiers to carry out the arrest. The generals suspect something. And at that moment, the eight Grass rifles swing through the air and aim at Tovar’s and Amaya’s heads. “I think something’s gone wrong,” says Tovar, or maybe Amaya. “Traitors! Turncoats!” shouts Amaya, or maybe it’s Tovar. According to some versions, that’s when they both say in unison: “I suspected as much.”

At 6:05, revolutionary demonstrations begin to occupy the streets of Panama City. Collective shouts go up: “Viva Panamá Libre! Long live General Huertas! Long live President Roosevelt!” And most of all: “Long live the Canal!” The governmental military, in fear, load their weapons. One of them, General Francisco de Paula Castro, is discovered hidden in a stinking latrine. He has his breeches up, all the buttons of his uniform well fixed in their buttonholes, so the excuse offered (which makes reference to certain intestinal upset) loses validity; nevertheless, this Francisco would go down in history as the General Who Was Scared Shitless. At 8:07: Colonel Jorge Martinez, in command of the cruiser Bogotá anchored in the revolutionary city’s bay, receives news of the occurrences on land and sends Dr. Manuel Amador, leader of the insurgents, the following message: “Either you hand the generals over to me or I’ll bomb Panama City.” Amador, excited by the revolution, loses his composure and replies: “Do whatever the hell you want, if you’ve got the balls.” At 8:38: Colonel Martinez examines his balls and finds them full of fifteen-pound shells. He approaches the shore, loads his cannons, and fires nine times. The first shell lands in El Chorrillo neighborhood, on Sun Hao Wah (Chinese, killed on impact) and a few meters from Octavio Preciado (Panamanian, killed by heart attack provoked by the fright). Shell number two destroys the house of Ignacio Molino (Panamanian, absent at the time) and number three hits a building on West Twelfth Street, killing Babieca (Panamanian, percheron horse). Shells number four through nine do not cause any damage whatsoever.

At 9:01: the Revolutionary Junta, meeting in the Panama City’s Hotel Central, presents the flag of the future Republic. It has been designed by Dr. Manuel Amador’s son (applause) and sewn by Dr. Manuel Amador’s wife (applause and gazes of admiration). At 9:03: explanation of the symbols. The red square represents the Liberal Party. The blue square represents the Conservative Party. The stars, well, the stars will be something like peace between the parties, or the eternal concord of the new Republic, or some pretty little idea along those lines — they’d have to come to an agreement or put it to a vote. At 9:33: Dr. Manuel Amador reveals details of his trip to New York in search of North American support for the secession of Panama to those who don’t know about it. He speaks of a Frenchman, a certain Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who advised him on all the practical details of the revolution, and even supplied him with a briefcase with the following contents: a declaration of independence, a model constitution for new countries, and some military instructions. The audience applauds with admiration. Those French sure know how to do things, damn it. At 9:45: the Revolutionary Junta proposes they send a telegram to his Excellency the President of the United States with the following text: SEPARATION MOVEMENT PANAMA REST OF COLOMBIA HOPES RECOGNITION YOUR GOVERNMENT FOR OUR CAUSE. But the conspirators’ joy was premature. The revolution was not yet sealed. It still needed my intervention, which was lateral and superfluous and in any case dispensable, as also had been my treasonous silence, but it nevertheless stained me forever, contaminated me as cholera contaminates water. It was the moment when my crucified country (or maybe it was the new resurrected country?) chose me as evangelist.

“You shall testify,” I was told. And that’s what I’m doing.

Dawn was cloudy on November 4. Before seven I left without saying good-bye to you, dear Eloísa, who was sleeping faceup; I leaned down to give you a kiss on the forehead, and saw the first sign of the day’s stifling, humid heat in your damp hair, a few locks sticking to the white skin of your neck. Later I would learn that at that very moment Colonel Eliseo Torres, delegated commander of the Tiradores battalion, was urinating under a chestnut tree, and it was there, with one hand leaning on the trunk, that he found out about the generals’ detention in Panama City. He went immediately to the Railroad Company offices; indignant, he demanded Colonel Shaler assign a train to take the Tiradores battalion across the Isthmus. Colonel Shaler could have invoked the Mallarino-Bidlack Treaty — as he in fact later did — and his obligation, established in that text, to maintain neutrality in any political conflict, but he did not. The only answer he gave was that the Colombian government had still not paid him the money it owed, and furthermore, to be honest, Colonel Shaler did not like to be spoken to in that tone of voice. “I’m sorry, but I cannot help you,” said Colonel Shaler at the same time as I leaned down to kiss my little girl (careful not to wake her), and it’s not impossible that as I did so, I would have thought of Charlotte and the happiness that had been snatched away from us by the Colombian war. Eloísa dear, my face close to yours, I smelled your breath and pitied your motherlessness and wondered if it was my fault in some obscure way. All events, I’ve learned over time, are connected: everything is a consequence of everything else.

The telephone rang at seven in the Company offices. While I was walking slowly through the streets of Christophe Colomb, taking my time, breathing the heavy morning air, and wondering what face my schizophrenic city would be wearing the day after the beginning of the revolution, from the Panama City station three of the conspirators were speaking to Colonel Eliseo Torres to suggest that he lay down his weapons. “Surrender to the revolution, but also to the evidence,” one of them told him. “The oppression of the central government has been defeated.” But Colonel Torres was not prepared to bow to the pressures of the separatists. He threatened to attack Panama City; he threatened to torch Colón as Pedro Prestán had done. José Agustín Arango, who was the conspirators’ spokesman at that moment, informed him that Panama City had already embarked on the path to liberty and did not fear confrontation. “Your aggression will be repelled with the might of a just cause,” he said (Colombians have always been good at grand phrases for precise moments). The call ended abruptly, with Colonel Eliseo Torres throwing the telephone with such force that it chipped the wood of the desk. The echo of the blow resounded through the high-ceilinged hallways of the Company and reached my ears (I was at the port, twenty meters from the Company entrance), but I didn’t know, I couldn’t have known, what it was about. Did I even wonder? I don’t think so; I think at that moment I was distracted or rather absorbed by the color the Caribbean takes on overcast days. Limón Bay was not part of the immensity of the Atlantic, but a greenish-gray mirror, and on that mirror floated, in the distance, the silhouette of what looked like a toy model of the battleship Nashville. You could hear only a few seagulls, only the lapping of the waves against the breakwaters and the deserted docks.

Colón resembled a besieged city. In a way it was, of course, and would continue to be as long as the soldiers of the Tiradores carried on patrolling the muddy streets. Besides, the revolutionaries in Panama City were well aware that independence was only illusory while government troops remained on isthmian territory, and that was the reason for the phone calls and frenetic telegrams that went back and forth between the two cities. “As long as Torres remains in Colón,” José Agustín Arango said to Colonel Shaler, “there is no republic in Panama.” Around half past seven, at the time I was casually approaching a man selling bananas, Arango was dictating a telegraphic message for Porfirio Meléndez, leader of the separatist revolution in Colón. I asked the man if he knew what was going on in the Isthmus, and he shook his head. “Panama is seceding from Colombia,” I told him.

His skin was leathery, his voice worn out, his decaying breath hit me in a dense wave: “I’ve been selling fruit at the railway for fifty years, boss,” he said to me. “As long as there are Gringos with money, I couldn’t care less about the rest.”

A few meters from us, Porfirio Meléndez was receiving this telegram: AS SOON AS TORRES AND TIRADORES BATTALION LEAVE COLÓN PROCLAIM REPUBLIC OF PANAMA. Inside the Railroad Company offices the air was filled with bells and clatter and tense voices and heels on wooden floorboards. José Gabriel Duque, publisher and editor of the Star & Herald, had contributed a thousand dollars in cash to be used for the Colón chapter of the Revolution, and Porfirio Meléndez received it shortly before the following text made its way through the Company’s machines: CONTACT COLONEL TORRES STOP TELL HIM REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA OFFERS TROOPS MONEY AND PASSAGE TO BARRANQUILLA STOP ONLY CONDITION COMPLETE ABANDONMENT OF ARMS AND SWEAR NOT TO TAKE UP ARMED STRUGGLE AGAIN.

“He’ll never accept,” said Meléndez. And he was right.

Torres had made camp in the middle of the street. The word camp, of course, was a bit grand for those tents set up on top of the broken or missing paving stones of Front Street. Across the road from the 4th of July saloon and Maggs & Oates pawnshop were the five hundred soldiers, and what was stranger still, the wives of the higher-ranking officers. They could be seen leaving before dawn and returning with saucepans full of river water; they were seen chatting among themselves with their legs tightly crossed under their petticoats, covering their mouths with a hand when they laughed. Anyway, two messengers from Porfirio Meléndez arrived at this makeshift camp, two smooth-chested young men in rope-soled sandals who had to fix their eyes on the horse shit on the ground to keep from staring at the officers’ wives. Colonel Eliseo Torres received from their tiny hands a letter hurriedly composed at the Railroad Company. “The Panamanian revolution wants to avoid unnecessary bloodshed,” read Colonel Torres, “and in this spirit of reconciliation and future peace, we invite you, Honorable Colonel, to surrender your weapons with no injury whatsoever to your dignity.”

Colonel Torres returned the open letter to the younger of the two messengers (his greasy fingerprints remained on the edge of the page). “Tell that traitor he can stick his revolution up his ass,” he replied. But then he thought better of it. “No, wait. Tell him that I, Colonel Eliseo Torres, send word that he has two hours to liberate the generals detained in Panama City. That if he does not, the Tiradores battalion will not only burn Colón to the ground but will also shoot every Gringo we can find, including women and children.” Readers of the Jury: by the time this ultimatum reached the Railroad Company, by the time the most barbaric message he’d ever had to hear reached the ears of Colonel Shaler, I had already finished my conversation with the banana seller, finished my stroll through the port, I had already seen the silvery flash of the dead fish floating on their sides, washing up on the beach, crossed the railway lines stepping on the rails with the arch of my foot with an infantile delight, like that of children sucking their thumbs, and was walking toward Front Street, breathing the air of the deserted besieged city, the air of days that change history.

Colonel James Shaler, for his part, had summoned Mr. Jessie Hyatt, U.S. Vice Consul in Colón, and between the two of them they were deciding whether Colonel Torres’s threats should be believed or treated as the impetuous flailing of a man in dire political straits. It was not a difficult decision (the image of children slaughtered and women raped by Colombian soldiers came to mind). So seconds later, when I passed the front door of the offices — still not knowing what was happening within — Vice Consul Hyatt had already given the order, and a secretary who spoke no Spanish in spite of having spent twenty-five months in Panama was climbing the stairs to wave a red, white, and blue flag from the roof. Now I think that if I’d looked up at that moment I probably could have seen it. But that doesn’t matter: the flag, without my witnessing, waved in the humid air; and immediately, while Colonel Shaler ordered that the most prominent U.S. citizens be taken to the Freight House, the battleship Nashville docked with great noises from its boilers, huge displacement of Caribbean water, in the port of Colón, and seventy-five marines in impeccable white uniforms — knee-high boots, rifles tilted over their chests — disembarked in perfect order and occupied Freight House, positioning themselves on top of the goods wagons, under the arches of the railway entrance, ready to defend U.S. citizens from any attack. On the other side of the Isthmus there were immediate reactions: when he found out about the landing, Dr. Manuel Amador met with General Huertas, the man who had arrested the generals, and they were preparing to send revolutionary troops to Colón with the sole mission of helping the marines. It was not yet nine in the morning and already Colón-Aspinwall-Gomorrah, that schizophrenic city, was a powder keg ready to explode. It didn’t explode at ten. It didn’t explode at eleven. But at twenty past twelve, or thereabouts, Colonel Eliseo Torres arrived at Front Street and, as the bugle sounded, ordered the Tiradores battalion to fall in and line up in battle formation. He was preparing to eliminate the Nashville marines, to take by force the few available trains in the station and cross the Isthmus to put down the rebellion by the traitors to the nation.

Colonel Torres had gone deaf; the clock, faithful to its habits, continued its impassive ticking; at around one o’clock, General Alejandro Ortiz came from headquarters to dissuade him, but there was no getting through to him; General Orondaste Martinez tried at one-thirty, but Torres remained installed in a parallel reality where neither reason nor prudence could reach him.

“The Gringos are already under protection,” General Martinez told him.

“Well, they won’t be under mine,” said Torres.

“The women and children have gone aboard a neutral ship,” said Martinez, “which is anchored in the harbor. You’re making a fool of yourself, Colonel Torres, and I’ve come to prevent your reputation from sinking any lower.” Martinez explained that the Nashville had loaded its cannons and had them aimed at the Tiradores battalion’s encampment. “The Cartagena scampered off like a rabbit, Colonel,” he said. “You and your men have been left alone. Colonel Torres, do the sensible thing, please. Fall out of this ridiculous formation, save the lives of your men and let us invite you for a drink.”

Those preliminary negotiations — carried out in the dense midday heat, in an atmosphere that seemed to dehydrate the soldiers like pieces of fruit left out in the sun — lasted five minutes. In this space of time, Colonel Torres accepted a summit meeting (in the summit of the Hotel Suizo, just across Front Street), and in the hotel restaurant drank three glasses of papaya juice and ate a sliced watermelon, and still had time to threaten to blow Martinez’s unpatriotic brains out. The bugler serving as his aide, however, didn’t eat anything, because no one offered him anything and his position prevented him from speaking unless his superior officer gave him permission. Then General Alejandro Ortiz joined the delegation. He explained the situation to Colonel Torres: the Tiradores battalion was decapitated; Generals Tovar and Amaya were still prisoners in Panama City, where the revolution was triumphing; all resistance against the independence movement was futile, since it implied confronting the army of the United States as well as the three hundred thousand dollars the Roosevelt government had offered to the cause of the new Republic; Colonel Torres could assume the reality of events or embark on a quixotic crusade that even his own government had given up for lost. By the time of the fourth glass of papaya juice, Colonel Torres began to weaken; by three o’clock in the afternoon he consented to meet Colonel James Shaler at the Railroad Company, and before five he’d agreed to withdraw his troops (the powder in the powder keg) from Front Street and set up camp outside the city. The chosen place was the abandoned hamlet of Christophe Colomb, where just one man lived with his daughter.

Eloísa and I were taking our siestas when the Tiradores battalion arrived, and the noise woke us both up at once. We saw them come into our street, five hundred soldiers, their faces stifled with the heat of their uniforms, necks swollen and tense, sweat running down their sideburns. They carried their rifles halfheartedly (bayonets pointing to the ground) and dragged their boots as if every step were a whole campaign. On the other side of the Isthmus, the separatists launched their manifesto. The Isthmus of Panama had been governed by Colombia “by the narrow criteria that long ago the European nations applied to their colonies,” in view of which it decided “to reclaim its sovereignty,” “create its own fate,” and “fulfil the role the situation of its territory demands.” Meanwhile, our little ghost town filled with the sounds of canteens and cooking pots, the clatter of bayonets being dismantled and rifles being cleaned with great care. The hamlet where my father had lived, where Charlotte and the engineer Madinier had lived, the place where the Colombian civil war had arrived to kill Charlotte and along the way give me a valuable lesson on the might of Great Events, now became again one of history’s stages. The air was permeated with the smell of unwashed bodies, of clothing showing signs of the weight of the days; the more modest soldiers went behind the pillars to defecate out of view, but during that November evening it was more common to see them walk around the house, drop their trousers facing the street, find a comfortable spot under a palm tree, and crouch down with a defiant look on their faces. The smell of human shit floated through Christophe Colomb with the same shameless intensity as had French perfume years before.

“How long are they going to stay?” asked Eloísa.

“Until the Gringos kick them out,” I said.

“They’re armed,” said Eloísa.

That they were: the danger had not passed; the powder keg had not yet been defused. Colonel Eliseo Torres, suspecting or foreseeing that the whole matter — his confinement to an abandoned neighborhood of old houses, bordered by the bay on three sides and Colón on the other — was nothing but an ambush, had posted ten guards to patrol round the whole hamlet. So that night we had to endure the noise of their caged beasts’ footsteps passing by our veranda at regular intervals. Over the course of that night Eloísa and I spent besieged by the Colombian military, and beyond them by the separatist revolution, it occurred to me that perhaps, just perhaps, my life in the Isthmus had finished, that perhaps my life, as I’d known it, no longer existed. Colombia had taken everything from me; the last remnant of my previous life, of what could have been and was not, was this seventeen-year-old woman who looked at me with a terrified expression each time a soldier’s shout reached our ears, at each hostile and paranoid Who goes there? followed by a shot fired in the air, a shot (I thought Eloísa must be thinking) like the one that had killed her mother. “I’m scared, Papá,” Eloísa said. And that night she slept with me, like when she was a little girl. And to me Eloísa, in spite of the shapes filling out her nightgown, was a little girl, Readers of the Jury, was still my little girl.

I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was talking to Charlotte’s memory, asking her what I should do, but I got no answer: Charlotte’s memory had turned inscrutable and unfriendly, looked away when she heard my voice, refused to advise me. Panama, meanwhile, shifted beneath my feet. Panama had once been said to be “flesh of Colombian flesh, blood of Colombian blood,” and for me it was impossible not to think of my Eloísa, who slept at my side now unafraid (falsely convinced that I could protect her from anything), when remembering the flesh of the Isthmus that was about to be amputated a few kilometers from our shared bed. You were flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, Eloísa; that’s what I was thinking as I lay beside you, head resting on my elbow, and looked closely at you, closer than we’d been since you were a babe in arms, recently recovered from the risks of your extreme prematurity. . And I think that’s when I realized.

I realized that you were also flesh of the flesh of your land, I realized that you belonged to this country the way an animal belongs to its particular landscape (made for certain colors, certain temperatures, certain fruit or prey). You were Colónian as I never was, Eloísa dear: your mannerisms, your accent, your different appetites reminded me with the insistence and fanaticism of a nun. Each of your movements said to me: I am from here. And seeing you up close, seeing your eyelids vibrating like the wings of a dragonfly, at first I thought I envied you, that I envied your instinctive rootedness — because it hadn’t been a decision, because you’d been born with it the way one is born with a mole or one eye a different color from the other — then, seeing how placidly you slept in this land of Colón that seemed to blend with your body, I thought I would have liked to ask you about your dreams, and finally thought again of Charlotte, who never belonged to Colón or to the province of Panama or much less to the convulsive Republic of Colombia, the country that had exterminated her family. . And I thought of what had happened at the bottom of the Chagres River that afternoon when she decided it was worthwhile to go on living. Charlotte had taken that secret to the grave, or the grave had come looking for her before she’d had time to reveal it to me, but it had always made me happy (briefly, secretly happy) to think that I had something to do with that deep decision in the depths. Thinking of that I laid my head on your chest, Eloísa, and the scent of your naked underarm reached me, and I felt so calm for a moment, so deceitfully and artificially calm, that I ended up falling asleep.

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“The independence of Panama is a fait accompli.”

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

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

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

“But this is a bribe,” said Torres.

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

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

“Is this it?” asked Shaler.

“This is it,” said Meléndez.

“Lunch is almost ready,” said Eloísa.

“I’ll let you know,” I told her.

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

Porfirio Meléndez opened the chest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later came the arrival, the encounter with Santiago Pérez Triana, those events I have put, as meticulously as I was able, before the reader. . Joseph Conrad left the house at 45 Avenue Road at about six in the morning, after spending a sleepless night listening to my story. Over the years I have reconstructed the days that followed: I knew that after seeing me, he had gone not to his residence at Pent Farm but to a London flat near Kensington High Street, a cheap and dark place he and his wife had rented and where he habitually met Ford Madox Ford to write, in collaboration (and effortlessly), the adventure novels that might pull them out of poverty. By the time he arrived at the flat, Joseph Conrad already knew that Nostromo, that problematic novel, was no longer the simple story of Italians in the Caribbean it had been up till then, and would rather examine up close the traumatic birth of a new country in traumatized Latin America, which he’d just been told about in doubtless hyperbolic terms, doubtless contaminated by tropical magic, by the tendency to mythologizing that oppresses those poor people who don’t understand politics. Jessie received him in tears: Borys had a fever of thirty-nine degrees, the doctor hadn’t arrived, Borys wouldn’t eat or drink, London was a city of uncaring, distant people. But Conrad didn’t listen to her complaints: he went straight to that desk that wasn’t his and, seeing that dawn was slow in breaking, lit that lamp that wasn’t his, and began to take notes on what he’d heard over the course of the night. The next day, after a breakfast he ate but didn’t taste, he began to incorporate the new material into the manuscript. He was very excited; like Poland, like the Poland of his childhood, the Poland his parents had died for, this little land of Panama, this little province transformed into a republic by inscrutable arts, was a pawn on the board of world politics, a victim of forces that exceeded it. . “And apropos, what do you think of the Yankee Conquistadores in Panama?” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham just before Christmas. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

The first installment of Nostromo appeared in T.P.’s Weekly in January 1904, more or less at the same time that the Panama Canal Company sold all its properties to the United States, without a single Colombian representative even allowed to participate in the negotiations, and twenty days after my desperate country had made the Panamanians this humiliating proposal: Panama City would be the new capital of Colombia if the Isthmus rejoined Colombian territory. While Panama refused outright like a spurned lover (batting eyelashes, listing past grievances, arms akimbo and fists on hips), Santiago Pérez Triana gave me directions to the nearest newsagent and forced me to look through my pocket for those coins whose confusing denominations I still hadn’t mastered and separate out, into another pocket, the exact cost of the Weekly. Then he sent me outside with an affectionate pat on the back. “My esteemed Altamirano, don’t come back without that magazine,” he said. And then, more seriously: “I congratulate you. You are now part of the memory of mankind.”

But that’s not how it went.

I was not part of mankind’s memory.

I remember the slanted, blinding light on the street when I found the place, that winter light that cast no shadows yet dazzled me, reflecting off the paper of the magazines on sale and, depending on the angle, the glass of the recently cleaned windows. I remember the mix of excitement and terror (a mute, cold terror, terror of the new) as I went back outside after paying. I remember the misty and a little unreal quality that the rest of the objects in the world took on for me, the passersby, the lampposts, the occasional carriages, the park’s threatening railings. However, I don’t remember the reasons I postponed reading, I don’t remember having guessed that the contents of the magazine would not be what I was expecting, I don’t remember having had any reasons to allow that implausible intuition into my head, I don’t remember suspicion or persecution accompanying me during that long circular walk around Regent’s Park. . Yes, that’s right: I carried the magazine in my pocket all day, patting my side occasionally to make sure it was still there, as if the one I’d bought was the only copy in the world, as if the dangerous nature of its contents would be neutralized if I kept it in my power. But what had to happen (everyone knows it) ended up happening. Nothing can be delayed forever. No one can find reasons to put off forever something as innocent, as peaceful, as inoffensive, as the reading of a book.

So at about four, when the sky was already beginning to darken, I sat down on one of the park benches at the same time as an incipient snowfall began over London and perhaps over all of Imperial England. I opened the magazine, I read that word that will pursue me till the end of my days. Nostromo: three bland syllables, one repeated and insistent vowel like an eye that keeps watch on us. . I carried on, between oranges and galleons, between sunken rocks and mountains that sink their heads in the clouds, and began to wander like a sleepwalker through the story of that fictitious republic, and I traveled through descriptions and events that I knew and at the same time did not know, that seemed my own and alien at the same time, and I saw the Colombian wars, the Colombian dead, the landscape of Colón and Santa Marta, the sea and its color and the mountain and its dangers, and there it was, at last, the discord that had always been. . But there was something missing in that tale: an absence was more visible than all those presences. I remember my desperate search, the frenzy of my eyes going over each page of the magazine, the heat I felt in my armpits and whiskers as I entered into that painful truth.

Then I knew.

I knew I would see Conrad again.

I knew there would be a second encounter.

I knew this encounter could not be postponed.

In a matter of minutes I had arrived at Kensington High Street, and a newspaper seller directed me to Gordon Place, where the novelist lived. There was hardly any light left (an old man was going along with a ladder, climbing up and down the movable steps, lighting the street lamps) when I knocked on his door. I didn’t reply to the questions the unsuspecting woman who answered the door asked me; I brushed against her apron as I passed, I ran up the steps as fast as my legs could carry me. I don’t remember what ideas, what indignation went through my head while I opened doors and crossed hallways, but I know for certain that nothing had prepared me for what I found.

There were two dark rooms, or they’d gone dark in the premature January dusk. A door connected them, and that door was open at the moment of my arrival, but it was obvious that its function was to remain stubbornly, constantly, and inevitably closed most of the time. In the back room, contained by the door frame, there was a desk of dark wood, and on top of the desk a pile of papers and a paraffin lamp; in the other room, the one I’d just burst into, a little boy with long brown hair slept on a miserable-looking cot (he was breathing laboriously, snoring a little), and the other bed in view was occupied by a woman in street clothes, a woman with an inelegant and chubby-cheeked face who was not lying down but reclining against a backrest, and who had some sort of board across her lap that after a couple of seconds (after my eyes adjusted to the interior lighting) turned into a portable desk. From her closed hand emerged a black-tipped pen, and it was as I focused on her and the inkcovered pages that I heard the voice.

“What are you doing here?”

Joseph Conrad was standing in the corner of the room; he was wearing leather slippers and a housecoat of dark silk; he was wearing, most of all, an expression of intense, almost inhuman concentration. In my head the pieces fell into place: I had interrupted him. To be more precise: I had interrupted his dictation. To be even more precise: while the first scenes of Nostromo were getting wrinkled in my pocket, in that room Conrad was dictating the last ones. And his wife, Jessie, was in charge of putting the story — the story of José Altamirano — onto the blank pages.

“You,” I said, “owe me an explanation.”

“I owe you nothing,” said Conrad. “Leave immediately. I’ll call someone, I’m warning you.”

I took the copy of the Weekly out of my pocket. “This is false. This is not what I told you.”

“This, my dear sir, is a novel.”

“It’s not my story. It’s not the story of my country.”

“Of course not,” said Conrad. “It’s the story of my country. It’s the story of Costaguana.”

Jessie watched us. Her expression was one of attentive confusion, like one who’s arrived late to the theater. She started to speak, and her voice was weaker than I’d expected: “Who. .?” But she didn’t finish the question. She tried to move, and a grimace of pain exploded across her face, as if a cord had broken inside her body.

Conrad then invited me into the backroom; the door was closed, and through the wood we could hear the woman’s sobs.

“She’s had an accident,” said Conrad. “Both knees. Both knees dislocated. It’s serious.”

“It was my life,” I said. “I entrusted it to you, I trusted you.”

“A fall. She was out shopping, she’d gone to Barker’s, she slipped. Seems silly, doesn’t it? That’s why we are in London,” said Conrad. “She must be examined every day, the doctors come every day. We do not know if she’ll need surgery.”

It was as if he’d stopped listening to me, this man who’d spent a whole night doing nothing else. “You’ve eliminated me from my own life,” I said. “You, Joseph Conrad, have robbed me.” I waved the Weekly in the air again, and then threw it down on his desk. “Here,” I whispered, my back to the thief, “I do not exist.”

It was true. In the Republic of Costaguana, José Altamirano did not exist. My tale lived there, the tale of my life and my land, but the land was another, it had another name, and I had been removed from it, erased like an unmentionable sin, obliterated without pity like a dangerous witness. Joseph Conrad told me of the terrible effort of dictating the story under the present conditions, and dictating it to Jessie, whose pain prevented her from working with due concentration. “I could dictate a thousand words an hour,” he told me. “It’s easy. The novel is easy. But Jessie gets distracted. She cries. I wonder if she’ll be left an invalid, if she’ll have to use crutches for the rest of her life. I’ll soon be forced to hire a secretary. The boy is ill. Debts pile up on my desk, and I must submit this manuscript on time to avoid greater disasters. And then you came along, answered a number of questions, told me a number of more or less useful things, and I have used them as my intuition and knowledge of this trade dictated. Think of this, Altamirano, and tell me: Do you really believe your little sensitivities have the slightest importance? Do you really think so?” In the other room the bed boards creaked, and it was presumably Jessie who emitted those timid groans of pain as genuine as they were selfless. “Do you really believe your pathetic life has anything to do with this book?”

I approached his desk. I noticed then that there wasn’t one pile of papers but two: one of them consisted of marked-up pages, with crossings out, marginal notes, dark arrows, wavy lines eliminating whole paragraphs; the other was a stack of typed pages that had been corrected several times. My corrected life, I thought. And also: My misappropriated life. “Stop it,” I said to Conrad.

“That’s impossible.”

“You can do it. Stop it all.” I picked up the manuscript. My hands moved with an impulse that seemed beyond my control. “I’ll burn it,” I said. In two steps I was at the window; with a hand on the catch, I said, “I’ll throw it out.”

Conrad crossed his arms behind his back. “My tale is now on its way, dear friend. It is already on the street. Right now, as you and I speak, there are people reading the story of the wars and revolutions of that country, the story of that province that secedes over a silver mine, the history of the South American Republic that does not exist. And there is nothing you can do about it.”

“But the republic does exist,” I said, or rather beseeched him. “The province does exist. But the silver mine is really a canal, a canal between two oceans. I know because I know it. I was born in that republic, I lived in that province. I am guilty of its misfortunes.”

Conrad didn’t answer. I returned the manuscript to his desk, and doing so was like a concession, like the laying down of weapons by a warrior chief. At what moment does a man concede defeat? What happens in his head to convince him to give up? I would have liked to ask those things.

Instead, I asked: “How does it all end?”

“Pardon?”

“How does the history of Costaguana end?”

“I’m afraid you already know that, my dear Altamirano,” said Conrad. “It’s all here, in this chapter, and it might not be what you’re expecting. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing that you don’t know.” He paused and added: “I can read it to you, if you like.”

I went over to the window, which by then was a darkened square. And I don’t know why, but there, looking out toward the street, refusing like a child what was going on behind my back, I felt safe. It was a false sensation, of course, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared.

“Read,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Life out on the street began to die down. The intense cold was reflected in the faces of passersby. My eyes and mind were distracted by the image of a little girl playing with her dog on the icy pavement — dark red coat, a scarf that looked thin from the distance — and while that confident voice began to speak to me of the destiny of those characters (and obliged me to some extent to attend the revelation of my own destiny), the snow fell in dense flakes on the pavement and melted immediately, forming little stars of damp that vanished straightaway. Then I thought of you, Eloísa, and of what I’d done to us; without asking permission I opened the window, leaned outside, and looked up so the falling snow would wet my eyes, so the snow would camouflage my tears, so Santiago Pérez Triana would not notice I’d been crying when he saw me. Suddenly, only you mattered; I realized, not without some terror, that only you would ever matter. And I knew: there, among gusts of icy wind, I knew what my punishment was. I knew that, many years later, when time had left behind my conversation with Joseph Conrad, I would go on remembering that afternoon when I disappeared from history by magic, I would go on being aware of the magnitude of my loss but also of the irreparable damage the events of my life had caused us, and most of all I would go on waking up in the middle of the night wondering, as I’m wondering now, where you might be, Eloísa, what kind of life you will have had, what place you will have occupied in the unfortunate history of Costaguana.