Now, when I remember those distant days, I see them as the last period of tranquillity my life would know. (This melodramatic declaration contains less melodrama than it seems at first: for someone born in the tropical isolation in which I was born, in that Remote Kingdom of Humidity that is the city of Honda, any halfway worldly experience is an example of rare intensity; in the hands of someone less timid, that pastoral, riverbank childhood could be material for many cheap lines of verse, things like The turbulent waters of my plains childhood or The turbulent childhood of these plains waters or even The young and plainly turbulent water.) But what I want to say is this: those first years of my life in Colón, beside my newfound father — who seemed no less improvised and makeshift than the house on stilts he lived in — were moments of relative peace, although at the time I didn’t realize it. My crystal ball did not allow me to see what was coming. How could I have foreseen what was going to happen, anticipate the Cascade of Great Events waiting for us around the corner, concentrated as I was on that novelty that excluded everything else: the acquisition of a father? I will now write something very rash, and I hope it will be tolerated: in those days, talking with Miguel Altamirano and sharing his activities and enjoying his attentions, I felt that I had found my place in the world. (I didn’t feel it with much conviction; I didn’t go so far as to delight in such temerity. In the end, as often happens, it turned out that I was wrong.)
In exchange for his care, Miguel Altamirano demanded nothing but my unconditional attention, the presence of the blank face of the listener. My father was a talker in search of an audience; he sought an ideal listener possessed of a no less ideal insomnia, and everything seemed to indicate that he’d found him in his son. For months, long after my chest had overcome the supposed pneumonia, my father kept talking to me as he had done while I was ill. I don’t know why, but my illness and my seclusion in the Magic Mountain had provoked curious pedagogical enthusiasms, and those enthusiasms carried on afterward. My father gave me his hammock, as he would a convalescent, and brought a chair over to the wooden porch steps; and there, both of us immersed in the dense, damp heat of the Panamanian night, as soon as the mosquitoes’ habits allowed, under the occasional flutter of a hungry bat, the monologue began. “Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself,” wrote a certain novelist, who never even met my father, much later in a certain Damn Book. But the description is apt: my father, enamored of his own voice and his own ideas, used me the way a tennis player uses a practice wall.
So a strange routine settled over my new life. During the day, I walked the baking streets of Colón, accompanying my father on his labors as Chronicler of the Isthmus like a witness to a witness, visiting and revisiting the offices of the Railroad Company with such assiduity that they became for me a second home (like a grandmother’s house, for example, a place we are always welcome and where there is always a plate for us on the table), and during the no less baking nights I attended the Altamirano Lectures on “The Inter-oceanic Canal and the Future of Humanity.” During the day, we visited the white wooden offices of the Star & Herald, and my father would receive commissions or suggestions or missions that we would go straight out to fulfill; during the night, my father explained to me why a canal built at sea level was better, cheaper, and less problematic than one built with locks, and how anyone who said the opposite was simply an enemy of progress. During the day, my figure soaked in sweat accompanied the figure of my father to visit an engine driver and listen to him talk about how the Railroad Company had changed his life, in spite of having been attacked more times than he could remember in his years of work and having, to prove it, scars of a dozen knife wounds still visible in his torso (“Touch them, sir, go ahead and touch them, doesn’t bother me”); during the night, I found out with a wealth of detail that Panama was a better territory than Nicaragua for opening the Canal, in spite of the Gringos’ expeditions producing the opposite findings (“Out of pure spite toward Colombia,” according to my father). During the day. . During the night. . During the day. . et cetera.
I had no reason to know it, but at that time meetings were taking place at 184 boulevard Saint-Germain, in Paris, between representatives of more than twenty countries, including the United States of Colombia. For two weeks they had devoted themselves to doing the same thing my father and I did in the Colón nights: discuss the plausibility (and the difficulties and the implications) of constructing a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Among the distinguished orators was Lieutenant Lucien Napoléon Bonaparte Wyse, who was still stopping in the middle of the street, like a mangy dog, to scratch bites from isthmian mosquitoes, or waking up screaming in horror after being visited, during a sweaty dream, by one of the dead engineers from the Darien Jungle. In spite of having failed on his expedition, in spite of lacking engineering knowledge, Lieutenant Wyse — recently shaved and with the concession signed by Eustorgio Salgar safely tucked into the pocket of his jacket — ventured that Panama was the only place on Earth able to host the colossal undertaking of an inter-oceanic canal. He also ventured that constructing a canal at sea level was the only method able to bring the project to a successful conclusion. To a question about the monstrous volume of the Chagres River, the history of its floods that seemed taken from Genesis, and the inventory of shipwrecks that lay on its bed as if it weren’t a river but a mini Bermuda Triangle, he replied: “A French engineer does not know the word problem.” His opinion, backed up by the heroic figure of Ferdinand de Lesseps, maker of Suez, convinced the delegates. Seventy-eight of them, of which seventy-four were personal friends of de Lesseps, voted unreservedly in favor of Wyse’s project.
There followed several tributes, banquets all over Paris, but one interests me in particular. In the Café Riche, representing the illustrious Colombian community, a certain Alberto Urdaneta organized a lavish banquet: two musical ensembles, silver dinner service, a liveried servant for each diner, and even a couple of interpreters who circulated throughout the salon to facilitate communication among the guests. His intention was to commemorate both Colombian independence and de Lesseps’s victory over the delegates of the boulevard Saint-Germain Congress. The banquet was a sort of quintessence of Colombianness and of Colombia, that country where everybody — I mean, everybody — is a poet, and anybody who isn’t is an orator. And so it was: there was poetry, and there were also speeches. On the back of the gilded lithographed menu were portraits of Bolívar and Santander. Behind Bolívar, three verses which themselves resembled gilded lithographs and that were, viewed from whichever angle, as close as you can get to political masturbation, so much so that I think them superfluous here. Behind Santander, on the other hand, was this gem of adolescent versification, a quartet that could have come out of the composition book of a refined señorita from one of the finest private schools in Bogotá.
Courageous, unwavering skipper
Proud monarchs you cut down to size
Now your foot wears a magistrate’s slipper