The first thing he does upon entering his room is to open the only window. A solitary, dense gust of sea air rushes in and the smell almost makes him cry. He opens his trunk of personal belongings and from the bottom extracts a book of names and addresses — all the people he has known in his short life — and places it delicately, like a sleeping child, on the bedspread, so it would catch any visitor’s eye. In the trunk he has also found a revolver: it is a Chamelot-Delvigne with six metal cartridges, but Korzeniowski opens the drum and removes five of them. At that moment he hears voices: it’s Fecht, who has arrived for tea unaware there is no tea to be had; Fecht, courteous as ever, greets Madame Fagot and asks after her daughters. Korzeniowski hears footsteps climbing the stairs and sits down on the bed. He leans against the wall, lifting up his shirt at the same time, and as he puts the cold barrel of the revolver against his chest, in the place where he imagines his heart must be, he feels his nipples harden and the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end like a furious cat’s. Tomorrow it will all be over, he thinks, and at that moment a light comes on in his head: it’s a line from a novel, yes, the last line of a Russian novel, and the mysterious words that he’d been hearing in the casino are the last words of that novel. He thinks of the title, Igrok, and it strikes him as too elementary, almost insipid. He wonders if Dostoevsky is still alive. Strange, he thinks, that the image of an author he finds unpleasant should be the last thing that passes through his head.
Konrad Korzeniowski smiles as he considers this idea, and then he fires.
The Chamelot-Delvigne’s bullet goes through Korzeniowski’s body without touching a single vital organ, zigzagging improbably to avoid arteries, tracing ninety-degree angles if necessary to miss lungs and thus postpone the death of the desperate young man. The bedspread and pillow are soaked in blood, blood splashes the walls and headboard. Minutes later, the friend Fecht will find first the wounded man and then the address book, and will write the famous telegram to Uncle Tadeusz that will later become a synthesis of the young man’s situation: KONRAD BLESSÉ ENVOYEZ ARGENT. Uncle Tadeusz will travel from Kiev to Marseille on express trains, and upon arrival will pay the debts that must be paid — discovering as he does so that the creditors are several — as well as the medical bills. Korzeniowski will recover gradually, and after a few years, once he has made a more or less profitable profession out of lying, he will begin to lie about the origin of the scar on his chest as well. He will never confess the true circumstances of the injury; he will never find himself obliged to do so. . Let’s get to the point: once Uncle Tadeusz was dead, once Richard Fecht was dead, the failed suicide of Joseph Conrad disappeared from world events. And I myself was deceived. . for at the beginning of 1878 I was the victim of a sharp chest pain, which at that moment, before the unpredictable law of my correspondences with Joseph Conrad was revealed to me, was diagnosed as the main symptom of a light form of pneumonia. Many years later — when I at last discovered the invisible ties that bind me to my kindred spirit, and was able to interpret correctly the most important events of my life — I prided myself at first that the monstrous pain, which attacked me accompanied by a dry (to begin with) and (eventually) productive cough, overwhelming me with breathing difficulties and loss of sleep, should have been the noble echo of a duel, a sort of participation in the chivalrous history of humanity. Finding out the truth, I confess, was a slight disappointment. Suicide is not noble. As if that weren’t enough: suicide is not very Catholic. And Korzeniowski/Conrad, Catholic and noble, knew it. If not, Readers of the Jury, he would not have taken the trouble to hide it.
The supposed pneumonia kept me laid up in bed for ten weeks. I suffered the shivers not thinking and not knowing that another man, in another part of the world, was suffering them, too, at that precise instant; and when I sweated whole rivers, was it not more sensible to attribute it to the supposed pneumonia instead of thinking of the metaphysical resonances of someone else’s distant sweating? The days of the supposed pneumonia are associated in my memory with the Altamirano guest house; my father confined me to his house — he sequestered me, kept me in quarantine — for he knew what so many people said in so many different words but which could be synthesized in these: in Panama, the unhealthy, feverish, contagious Panama of that time, going into the hospital meant never coming out. “Ill on arrival, dead on departure” was the refrain that summed the matter up (and that went round Colón in every language, from Spanish to English to Caribbean Creole). So the white-walled, red-roofed house, bathed by sea air, with treatments from Miguel Altamirano, amateur physician, became my private little sanatorium. My Magic Mountain, in other words. And I, Juan Castorp or Hans Altamirano, received in the sanatorium the various lessons my father lavished on me.
So time passed, as they say in novels.
And so (stubbornly) it continued to pass.
There, in the place of my isolation, my father would arrive to tell me of the magnificent things that were happening all over the world. One pertinent clarification: my father the optimist referred to almost anything related to the by then ubiquitous subject of the Inter-oceanic Canal as magnificent things; by all over the world he meant Colón, Panama City, and the piece of terra more or less firma that stretched between them, that strip where the railway ran and that, for reasons the reader can already imagine, would soon become something like the Apple of Western Discord. Nothing else existed then. Nothing else was worth talking about, or maybe it was that nothing was happening in any other part of the world. For example (it’s just an example), my father didn’t tell me that on one of those days a U.S. warship had arrived in Limón Bay, armed to the teeth and determined to cross the Isthmus. He didn’t tell me that Colonel Ricardo Herrera, commander of the Colón Sappers battalion, had to declare that he “would not consent to their crossing Colombian territory as they intended,” and even went so far as to threaten the Gringos with “the armed defense of the sovereignty of Colombia.” He didn’t tell me that the commander of the North American troops finally gave up his attempt and crossed the Isthmus by train, like everyone else. It was a banal incident, of course; years later, as will be seen, that unusual attack of Sovereign Pride would take on importance (a metaphorical importance, shall we say?), but my father could not know it, and so he condemned me to ignorance as well.
On the other hand, I was one of the first people to know, through my father’s news and with a wealth of detail, that Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse had traveled to Bogotá on an urgent mission, covering the four hundred kilometers in ten days by the Buenaventura route, and that he’d arrived smelling of shit and in terrible need of a razor. And thus I also discovered that two days later, clean-shaven and cologne-scented, he’d had an interview in Bogotá with Don Eustorgio Salgar, Secretary of Foreign Relations, and had obtained from the government of the United States of Colombia the exclusive privilege, valid for ninety-nine years, to construct the Fucking Canal. Thus I found out that Wyse, with the concession in his pocket, had traveled to New York to buy from the Gringos the results of their isthmian expeditions; thus I found out that the Gringos had roundly refused to sell them and, what’s more, had refused to show a single map or reveal a single measurement, share a single piece of geological data or even listen to the proposals of the French. “Negotiations are advancing,” wrote my refracting father in the Star & Herald. “They advance like a locomotive, and nothing can stop them.”