The Secret History of Costaguana

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1

The reader would do well to refer to the letter from Simón Bolívar to Manuela Sáenz (April 20, 1825). The two texts are curiously similar. Were the words lodged in his unconscious, or did my father seek to establish a complicity at once carnal and literary with Antonia de Narváez? Was he sure that Antonia de Narváez would catch the allusion? Impossible to know.

2

In my father’s correspondence, as in the newspaper he’d run later and from which I’ll quote the odd fragment, if I can bring myself to, these excited references to anything that suggests the clash of cultures, the melting pot of civilizations, appear frequently. I am surprised, in fact, that in this letter he does not speak of his enthusiasm for the Creole spoken in Panama, which in other documents appears as “unique language of civilized man,” “instrument of peace between peoples,” and even, in moments of particular grandiloquence, “victor over Babel.”

3

My father avoids going into details of the Lieutenant’s death. It’s possible he mentioned the events leading up to it in another letter, and that this letter did not arrive. Lieutenant Campillo’s fate is quite well known: he lost his mind, went off alone into the Darien Jungle and did not return. There was speculation at the time that he was trying to return clandestinely to Bogotá. Since he had no friends, his absence was a long time in alarming anyone. In March an expedition went out in search of him; the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, and the actual cause of death was never ascertained.

4

This letter does not contain anything else of interest. To be precise: this letter does not contain anything else.

5

My father does not say so, but the foreigner who traveled with him on board the Isabel died around that time. His surname was Jennings; I haven’t found his first name anywhere. Jennings committed the error of bringing his young and pregnant wife, who survived no more than six months. After the death of her husband, Mrs. Jennings, already infected with the fever as well, was hired as a barmaid in an infamous casino, and there she was seen serving drinks to gold prospectors with arms so pale it was impossible to distinguish them from her blouse, her chest and hips so scrawny from the disease they did not even provoke passes from any drunken gamblers.