The Chassepot’s life ends shortly thereafter.
Correctly aimed, the rifle allows Salgar to terrorize several of his battalion comrades and enjoy doing so (it’s like a small revenge). Many of them let him be, in spite of the danger an unstable and armed man represented to a military contingent, because the magnitude of his madness was not visible from outside. By the night of September 25, the battalion, Salgar, and the rifle have crossed the State of Antioquia and arrived at the banks of the Atrato River, as part of their reconquest of Conservative territory. Night catches them at the Hacienda Miraflores. Salgar, barefoot and shirtless, points the gun at General Anzoátegui, who had been sleeping in his tent, and they walk toward the river; Salgar manages to push off in a dugout he finds on the bank, all the time with the bayonet pressed against the General’s ribs and his eyes loose and turbulent like those of a broken doll. But the dugout has gone barely ten meters into the current of the Atrato when the guards arrive at the riverbank and form an authentic firing squad. In the midst of his cloudy reasoning, Salgar raises the Chassepot, aims at the General’s head, and his last shot pierces the skull before anyone has time to do anything. The rest of the soldiers, whose names no longer matter, open fire.
The bullets — of various calibers — hit Salgar in various parts of his body: they perforate both lungs, his cheek and tongue; they destroy one of his knees and reopen the almost closed wound in his left hand, burning nerves, scorching tendons, crossing through the carpel tunnel the way a boat crosses a canal. The Chassepot floats in the air for a second and falls into the rough waters of the Atrato; it sinks, and before touching bottom is swept a few meters ahead by the current. Following it, falling backward, the corpse of a man (sixty-nine kilograms in weight) who was a slave and will not now be free.
At the moment Fidel Emiliano Salgar lands on the sandy riverbed, startling a ray and receiving a sting — not that the dead body feels anything, not that his tissues retract in reaction to the venom, not that his muscles suffer fevers or his blood is contaminated — at that very moment, the apprentice sailor Korzeniowski, on board the Saint-Antoine, takes one last look at the coastline of the port of Saint-Pierre in Martinique. Several days have gone by since, having completed the rifles-to-overthrow-Liberal-governments mission, they left Colón and the territorial waters of the United States of Colombia. And, since this seems to be the chapter of things unknown, I better state what Korzeniowski doesn’t know at that moment.
He doesn’t know the names or ages of the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims of the Chassepots. He doesn’t even know there were one thousand three hundred and thirty-five victims of the Chassepots. He doesn’t know that the contraband will have been in vain, that the Liberal and Masonic government will win the war against the Conservative Catholics and it will take another war — or a resumption of the same one — to alter that state of things. He doesn’t know what Monsieur Déléstang will think, in Marseille, when he finds out about it, or if he’ll go on to interfere in other crusades. He doesn’t know that one of the gutter press newspapers, La Justicia, will invent many years later an absurd version of his sojourn on the Colombian coast: in it, Korzeniowski takes charge of all the negotiations and sells the weapons to a certain Lorenzo Daza, delegate of the Liberal government who later “gives them up for lost” and resells them “for double their price” to the Conservative revolutionaries. Korzeniowski, who doesn’t even know who Daza is, carries on with his gaze fixed on Martinique, and carries on not knowing things. He doesn’t know that the coastline of Saint-Pierre will not ever be the same, at least not for him, for the city known as Old Paris will be erased from the map in a quarter of a century, completely obliterated like an undesirable historical fact (but this is not the time to speak of that disaster). He doesn’t know that, in a matter of hours, when they sail between St. Thomas and Port-au-Prince, he will meet the violence of the East Wind and the West Wind, and doesn’t know that much later he’ll write about that violence. Between Port-au-Prince and Marseille he will turn nineteen, and won’t know that at home awaits the most difficult chain of events of his youth, events that will culminate, for him, with a gunshot to the heart.
And while that birthday unfolds on board the Saint-Antoine, with songs and embraces from Cervoni, in another vessel somewhere else other things (or shall I say: correspondences) are happening. Allow me to introduce the steamer Lafayette, flagship of the French West Indies line that will play extremely important roles in our small tragedy. Aboard, Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, illegitimate son of a famous mother (in the worst sense) and unknown father (in the only sense), this Lieutenant Wyse, dear readers, is preparing to leave on an expedition. His mission is to search through the Colombian Darien Jungle for the best place to open an inter-oceanic canal, which some — in Paris, in New York, in Bogotá itself — have begun to call That Fucking Canal. I’ll say it once and for alclass="underline" for reasons that will soon become apparent, for reasons impossible to reduce to the golden cage of a single pretty phrase, at that moment it wasn’t just the Canal that began to be fucked up but my entire life.
Chronology is an untamed beast; the reader doesn’t know what inhuman labors I’ve gone through to give my tale a more or less organized appearance (I don’t rule out having failed in the attempt). My problems with the beast can be reduced to one alone. You’ll see, with the passing of the years and the reflection on the subjects of this book, which I’m now writing, I have discovered what undoubtedly comes as no surprise to anyone: that stories in the world, all the stories that are known and told and remembered, all those little stories that for some reason matter to us and which gradually fit together without us noticing to compose the fearful fresco of Great History, they are juxtaposed, touching, intersecting: none of them exists on their own. How to wrest a linear tale from this? Impossible, I fear. Here is a humble revelation, the lesson I’ve learned through brushing up against world events: silence is invention, lies are constructed by what’s not said, and since my intention is to tell faithfully, my cannibalistic tale must include everything, as many stories as can fit in the mouth, big ones and little ones. Well then, in the days before the departure of the Lafayette one of the latter occurred: the encounter between another two travelers. It was a few meters from the port of Colón and, therefore, from Lieutenant Wyse and his men. And in the next chapter, if my life has not ended by then, if there is still enough strength in my hand to hold my pen, I’ll have to concentrate on it. (At my age, which is more or less the age of a dead novelist, Polish by birth and sailor before he became a writer, there’s no point in making plans too far ahead.)
But first, responding to the peculiar order events have in my tale, I must concern myself with another matter, or rather with another man. Let’s call him a facilitator; let’s call him an intermediary. It’s obvious, I think: if I’m going to devote so many pages to describing my encounter with Joseph Conrad, it’s at least necessary that I explain a little who the person responsible for our meeting was, the host of my disgrace, the man who fostered the theft. .