I saw all that.
But there was something I didn’t see. And the things we don’t see tend to be the ones that affect us most. (This epigram has been sponsored by the Angel of History.)
I didn’t see a small man, a mouse who looked like a notary, approach the bar and ask for the attention of the drinkers. I didn’t hear him explain in laborious English that he had purchased two tickets for the next morning’s train to Panama City, that during the course of the day his young son had died of cholera, and that now he wanted to recoup the fifty dollars he’d spent on the tickets to prevent the child’s being tossed into a pauper’s grave. I didn’t see that the Captain of the French sailors approached him and asked him to repeat all that he’d just said, to make sure he’d understood, and I did not see the moment that one of his subordinates, a broad-chested man of about forty, rummaged through a leather bag, came over to the Captain, and put the money for the tickets, in U.S. dollars tied with a velvet ribbon, in his hand. The transaction didn’t last longer than a drink of whiskey (I, concerned with my own, didn’t see it). But in that short space of time something had happened beside me, almost touching me, something. . Let’s look for the appropriate figure: Did the wing of destiny brush my face? The ghost of encounters to come? No, I’ll explain it as it happened, without meddling tropes. Readers, pity me, or mock me if you wish: I did not see the scene, the scene passed me by, and, logically, I didn’t know it had happened. I didn’t know one of those men was called Escarras and that he was Captain of the Saint-Antoine. This might not seem much; the problem is that I also didn’t know that his right-hand man, the broad-chested forty-year-old, was called Dominic Cervoni, or that one of his companions that night of binges and business, a young steward who distractedly observed the scene, was called Józef Korzeniowski, or that many years later that distracted young man — when he was no longer called Korzeniowski, but Conrad — would use the sailor — calling him not Cervoni, but Nostromo — to the ends for which he’d become famous. . “A oneeyed giant would not have had the ghost of a chance against Dominic Cervoni, of Corsica, not Ithaca,” a mature and prematurely nostalgic novelist would write years later. Conrad admired Cervoni as any disciple admires any master; Cervoni, for his part, had voluntarily taken on the role of godfather of adventure for the disoriented young Pole. That was the relationship that united them: Cervoni in charge of the sentimental education of that apprentice sailor and amateur smuggler. But that night I did not know that Cervoni was Cervoni, or that Conrad was Conrad.
I’m the man who didn’t see.
I’m the man who didn’t know.
I’m the man who wasn’t there.
Yes, that’s me: the anti-witness.
The list of things I didn’t see and didn’t know either is much longer: I could fill several pages and label them: IMPORTANT THINGS THAT HAPPENED TO ME WITHOUT MY REALIZING. I didn’t know that after buying the tickets Captain Escarras and his crew returned to the Saint-Antoine for a few hours’ rest. I didn’t know that before dawn Cervoni would load four rowboats and, along with six other oarsmen (Korzeniowski among them), would return to the port more or less at the same time as I was leaving the General Grant, not drunk but a little queasy. While I spent a couple of hours wandering the heaving streets of Colón-Aspinwall-Gomorrah, Dominic Cervoni directed the maneuvers of the four boats up to the railway-loading piers, where a group of cargadores awaited him in the shadows; and while I was returning to the hotel, preparing to get up early and begin my Father Quest, the stevedores moved the contents of those stealthy nocturnal transports, carried them under the arches of the depot, packed them into the freight cars of the train to Panama City (and in doing so heard the clatter of the barrels and the thud of the wood, without asking what, or for whom, or where), and covered them with tarpaulins, so they wouldn’t be ruined by one of those sudden downpours, trademark of life in the Isthmus.
All this passed me by, almost without touching me. It’s a flimsy consolation to think that, even though I wasn’t present, I could have been (as if that would authenticate me). If a few hours later, instead of sleeping the sleep of the dead in the uncomfortable folding bed in my room, I had looked out from the hotel balcony, I would have seen Korzeniowski and Cervoni, the Ulysses of Corsica and the Telemachus of Berdichev, climb aboard the last carriage of the train with the tickets purchased the evening before from the poor little mouse in the saloon. If I had stood on the balcony until eight that morning, I would have seen the ticket collectors lean out between the carriages — their hats pulled down firmly on their heads — to announce the departure punctually, and I would have smelled the smoke of the locomotive and heard the screech from its smokestack. The train would have pulled out right under my nose, taking Cervoni and Korzeniowski, among other passengers, and, in the freight cars, the one thousand two hundred and ninety-three breech-loading, bolt-action Chassepot rifles, which had crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Saint-Antoine and which had, themselves, a good story to tell.
Yes, Readers of the Jury, in my democratic tale things also have a voice, and will also be allowed to take the floor. (Oh, the tricks a poor narrator must resort to in order to tell what he doesn’t know, to fill his uncertainties with something interesting. . ) Well, I wonder: if, instead of snoring in my room, ad portas of a terrible headache, I had gone down to the station and mixed with the travelers, and I had meddled in the freight car and interrogated one of the Chassepots, any one of them, one chosen at random for the objectives of my limitless curiosity, what story would it have told me? In a certain Conradian novel whose name I do not care to remember, a certain rather affected character, a certain Frenchified Creole, asks: “What do I know of military rifles?” And I, now, put myself on the other side with a much more interesting (forgive my modesty) question: What do rifles know of us?
The Chassepot brought by Korzeniowski to Colombian lands was manufactured in the Toulon armories in 1866. In 1870 it was taken as army-issue weapon to the Battle of Wissembourg and used, under the orders of General Douay, by soldier Pierre-Henri Desfourgues, who dexterously aimed it at Boris Seeler (1849) and Karl Heinz Waldraff (1851). Pierre-Henri Desfourgues was wounded by a Dreyse and removed from the front; in the hospital, he received the news that Mademoiselle Henriette Arnaud (1850), his fiancée, was breaking their engagement to marry Monsieur Jacques-Philippe Lambert (1821), presumably for financial reasons. Pierre-Henri Desfourgues cried for twenty-seven consecutive nights, at the end of which he introduced the barrel of the Chassepot (11 millimeters) into his own mouth, till it touched his uvula (7 millimeters) with the sight (4 millimeters), and squeezed the trigger (10 millimeters).
The Chassepot was inherited by Alphonse Desfourgues, Pierre-Henri’s first cousin, who turned up armed with it for the defense of Mars-la-Tour. Alphonse shot it sixteen times during the course of the battle; not once did he hit a target. The Chassepot was then taken from him (in a rude way, apparently) by Captain Julien Roba (1839), who from the Metz Fortress successfully shot cavalrymen Friedrich Strecket, Ivo Schmitt, and Dieter Dorrestein (all 1848). Emboldened, Captain Roba joined the vanguard and withstood five hours of the attack of two Prussian regiments. He died after taking a bullet from a Snider-Enfield. No one has been able to explain what a Snider-Enfield was doing in the hands of a Prussian of the 7th Armored Division (Georg Schlink, 1844).