All this my mother told me.
And kept telling me.
She told me that in a matter of five years my father had become a sort of pampered son of Panamanian society: the Company’s shareholders feted him like an ambassador, senators from Bogotá took him to lunch to ask his advice, and every official of the state government, each and every member of that rancid isthmian aristocracy, from the Herreras to the Arosemenas, from the Arangos to the Menocals, aspired to have him as husband to their daughter. She told me, finally, that what Miguel Altamirano was paid for his columns was barely sufficient for his confirmed bachelor’s lifestyle, but that didn’t prevent him from spending his mornings offering his services free of charge caring for the sick in the Colón hospital. “The hospital is the largest building in the city,” my mother with her good memory recalled my father writing in one of his lost letters. “That gives an idea of the salubriousness of the environment. But all progress toward the future has its down sides, my dear, and this one was not to be the exception.”
But that was not all that Antonia de Narváez told me. Like any novelist, my mother had left the most important thing until the end.
Miguel Altamirano was with Blas Arosemena the February morning when the Nipsic, a steam sloop carrying North American marines and Panamanian macheteros, picked him up in Colón and took him to Caledonia Bay. Don Blas had arrived at his house the previous night and said to him: “Pack for several days. Tomorrow we’re going on an expedition.” Miguel Altamirano obeyed, and four days later he was entering the Darien Jungle, accompanied by ninety-seven men, and for a week he walked behind them in the perpetual twilight of the rain forest, and saw the shirtless men who blazed the trail with clean machete blows, while others, the white men in their straw hats and blue-flannel shirts, wrote in their notebooks about everything they saw: the depth of the Chucunaque River when they tried to wade across it, but also the affection that scorpions felt for canvas shoes; the geological constitution of a ravine, but also the taste of roast monkey washed down with whiskey. A Gringo called Jeremy, veteran of the War of Secession, lent my father his rifle, because no man should be unarmed in these places, and told him that the rifle had fought in Chickamauga, where the forests were no less dense than here and the visibility shorter than the distance an arrow flies. My father, victim of his adventurer’s instincts, was fascinated.
One of those nights they camped beside a rock polished by the Indians and covered with burgundy-colored hieroglyphics — the same Indians who, armed with poison-tipped arrows, with faces marked by such seriousness as my father had never seen, had guided them for a good part of the route. My father was standing up, observing in stunned silence the figure of a man with both arms raised facing a jaguar or maybe a puma; and then, as he listened to the arguments that would arise between a Confederate lieutenant and a small, bespectacled botanist, he felt all of a sudden that this crossing justified his life. “The enthusiasm kept me awake,” he wrote to Antonia de Narváez. Although Antonia de Narváez was of the opinion that it wasn’t the enthusiasm but rather the gnats, I felt I came to understand my father at that moment. On that page, lost long ago in my mother’s purges, surely written in haste and still under the influence of the expedition, Miguel Altamirano had found the profound meaning of his existence. “They want to part the land as Moses parted the sea. They want to separate the continent in two and realize the distant dreams of Balboa and Humboldt. Common sense and all the explorations undertaken dictate that the idea of a canal between the two oceans is impossible. Dear Lady, I make this promise to you with all the solemnity of which I am capable: I shall not die without having seen that canal.”
Readers of the Jury: you know, as does the whole British Empire, the famous anecdote we’ve so often been told by the world-famous Joseph Conrad about the origins of his passion for Africa. Do you remember? The scene has an exquisite romanticism, but it won’t be me who satirizes that aspect of his tale. Joseph Conrad is still a child, he is still Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, and the map of Africa is a blank space whose contents — its rivers, its mountains — are completely unknown; a place of bright obscurity, a true deposit of mysteries. The boy Korzeniowski puts a finger on the empty map and says, “I shall go there.” So then, what the map of Africa was to the boy Korzeniowski, the image of my father in Panama was to me. My father crossing the Darien Jungle, along with a group of madmen who wondered if they could build a canal there; my father sitting in the Colón hospital beside a patient with dysentery. The letters that Antonia de Narváez had brought back to life by memory, no doubt making mistakes with precise details, chronologies, and the odd proper name, had become in my head a space comparable to the Africa of my friend Korzeniowski: a continent without contents. My mother’s narration had drawn a border around Miguel Altamirano’s life; but what that border confined became, as the months and years went by, my very own heart of darkness. Readers of the Jury: I, José Altamirano, was twenty-one years old when I put a finger on my own blank map and pronounced, excited and trembling, my own I shall go there.
At the end of August 1876, a few leagues from the door of my house, I boarded the American steamship Selfridge, without saying good-bye to Antonia de Narváez, and followed the same route my father had covered after scattering his sperm. Sixteen years had passed since the last Colombian civil war, in which the Liberals had killed more, not because their army was better or braver, but because it was their turn. The regular massacre of compatriots is our version of the changing of the guard: it’s done every so often, generally following the same criteria as children at play (“It’s my turn to govern,” “No, it’s my turn”); and it happened that the moment of my departure for Panama coincided with another changing of the guard, as usual under the stage directions of the Angel of History. I sailed a Magdalena colonized or dominated by the alternating traffic of the two warring parties, or by barges filled not with cacao or tobacco, but with dead soldiers whose putrid stench was stronger than the smoke coming out of the funnels. And I came out onto the Caribbean Sea at Barranquilla, and sighted the Cerro de la Popa from the deck and also the city walls of Cartagena, and I probably had some innocent thought (I may have wondered, for example, if my father had seen the same view, and what he’d thought upon seeing it).
But I could not have imagined that a ship sailing under a French flag had just passed through this walled port, en route from Marseille with stops in Saint-Pierre, Puerto Cabello, Santa Marta, and Sabanilla, and now heading for the city some of its passengers knew as Aspinwall and others as Colón. I sailed across the wake of the Saint-Antoine but didn’t know it; and when I arrived that night in Colón, I also didn’t know my steamer had passed less than two leagues from that sailing ship comfortably anchored in Limón Bay. Other things I didn’t know: that the Saint-Antoine was making that trip clandestinely and would not keep a record of it in the logbook; that its cargo was not what was declared either but seven thousand contraband rifles for the Conservative revolutionaries; and that one of the smugglers was a young man two years my junior, a steward with a nominal salary, of noble birth, Catholic beliefs, and timid appearance, whose surname was unpronounceable to the rest of the crew and whose head was already beginning, clandestinely, to archive what he saw and heard, to conserve anecdotes, to classify characters. Because his head (although the young man did not yet know it) was the head of a storyteller. Do I need to tell you what is so obvious? It was a certain Korzeniowski, by the name of Józef, by the name of Teodor, by the name of Konrad.