And your hand is unflinching and wise.
The speech was the responsibility (in a manner of speaking) of a certain Quijano Wallis. The orator said: “Thus as the sons of Arabia who, wherever they may find themselves on this earth, overcoming the distance in spirit, bow toward their holy city, so, too, we send our thoughts across the Atlantic, where they are warmed in the tropical sun, and fall to our knees on our beloved beaches to greet and bless Colombia on her day of rejoicing. Our fathers made us independent from the Mother Country; Monsieur de Lesseps will make universal commerce independent of the obstacle of the Isthmus and perhaps free Colombia forever from civil discord.”
His thought, I suppose, crossed the Atlantic, warmed itself, and knelt and greeted and blessed and all those things. . And at the end of that year, in the hottest and driest season, the ones who did cross the Atlantic (without kneeling, to be sure) were the French. The Star & Herald commissioned my father to write — in prose, if at all possible — about Ferdinand de Lesseps and his team of Gallic heroes. After all, the representatives of the government, the bankers and journalists, the analysts of our incipient economy and historians of our incipient republic, all were for once in perfect agreement: for Colón, that was the Most Important Visit since the long-ago day when Cristóbal Colón himself accidentally discovered our convulsive lands.
From the moment de Lesseps disembarked from the Lafayette, speaking perfect Spanish with everyone, looking with his curious, sleepy feline gaze, throwing left and right a smile the likes of which Panamanians had never seen in their lives, flaunting a full head of white hair that made him look like a half-finished Santa Claus, my father didn’t let him out of his sight for an instant. In the evening he walked a few steps from his prey down the main street of Colón, passing beneath tissue-paper lanterns that seemed about to burst into flames, in front of the railway station and later in front of the dock where Korzeniowski and Cervoni had unloaded the contraband weapons, in front of the hotel where his son had stayed his first night in Colón, before he knew he had a son, and in front of the premises where the most famous piece of watermelon in the world was sold and where diners and other onlookers died under gunfire. The next morning he spied on him from a prudent distance and saw him go out with three velvet-clad children beneath the unbearable sun, and saw the children running happily among the carrion on the streets and the smell of rotting fruit, and running up to startle a flock of black buzzards snacking on a newborn donkey a few steps from the sea. He saw him catch an Indian woman off guard on the Pacific Mail pier (when the band hired by the Mayor exploded into metallic sounds to celebrate his arrival) and try to dance with her to music that was not danceable but rather martial, and when the woman yanked herself away from him and crouched down at the edge of the sea to wash her hands with a look of disgust, de Lesseps kept smiling, and what’s more, began to chuckle and shout out his love for the tropics and the bright, the radiant (radieux) future awaiting them.
De Lesseps climbed aboard the train to Panama City and my father climbed up after him, and when the train arrived at the Chagres River, he saw him shout to the man in charge and order him to stop the locomotive because he, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had to take home a glass of the enemy’s water, and the entire delegation — the Gringos, the Colombians, the French — raised glasses and toasted the victory of the Canal and the defeat of the Chagres River, and while the glasses clinked in the air one of de Lesseps’s envoys jogged through the hamlet of Gatún, along muddy paths and across pastures that came up to his knees, and arrived at an improvised dock where a canoe rested, and crouched down beside the canoe as the Indian woman had crouched down by the pier and collected in a recently emptied champagne glass a greenish liquid that came out full of slimy algae and dead flies. The only time my father spoke to de Lesseps was when the train passed Mount Hope, where employees had buried their dead during the construction of the railway, and he decided to speak to him in a burst of enthusiasm about the Chinamen in barrels of ice he’d had sent to Bogotá—“Where?” asked de Lesseps. “Bogotá,” repeated my father — and that, if they hadn’t been of use to the student doctors in the university of the capital, they would surely have ended up here, under this earth, under the orchids and mushrooms. Then he shook hands with de Lesseps and said, “Pleasure to meet you,” or “Pleasure to make your acquaintance” (pleasure, in any case, was present in his phrase), and swiftly returned to the edge of the group, trying not to disturb, and from the edge observing de Lesseps during the rest of the journey of that fortunate train, that historic train, through the leafy darkness of the jungle.
He followed him closely when de Lesseps visited the old church of Santo Domingo, whose arch defied the laws of gravity and of architecture, and took note of every admiring comment the admiring tourist came out with. He followed him while de Lesseps shook the hands of the Mayor and military officials in the Panama City station (neither the Mayor nor the officers would wash their hands for the rest of the day). He followed him while he walked through the recently swept and cleaned streets, under French flags sewn ad hoc by the wives of the most distinguished politicians (just as years later another flag would be sewn, the first one of a country that perhaps began to exist the very afternoon when de Lesseps visited the city, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves or jump to conclusions), and he accompanied him to the Grand Hotel, a colonial cloister recently opened with every luxury along one of the longest flanks of the cathedral plaza, whose paving stones — those of the plaza, of course, not the hotel — were normally occupied by carriages pulled by old horses, the noise of their hooves on the stones, and this time by baby-faced soldiers dressed in white and as silent as nervous children about to take their first communion. In the Grand Hotel, before my father’s fascinated gaze, the welcome banquet was held with French food and a pianist brought from Bogotá—“From where?” asked de Lesseps. “From Bogotá,” he was told — to play a barcarole or some gentle polonaise while the local leaders of the Liberal Party told de Lesseps what Victor Hugo had said, that the constitution of the United States of Colombia was made for a country of angels, not human beings, or something along those lines. For those Colombian politicians, who barely sixty years before were inhabitants of a colony, the mere attention of that prophet, author of The Last Day of a Condemned Man and of Les Misérables, the defense counsel of humanity, was the greatest praise in the world, and they wanted de Lesseps to know it: because the attention of de Lesseps was also the greatest praise in the world. De Lesseps asked a banal question, his eyes widened slightly at an anecdote, and the colonized suddenly felt that their entire existence would take on new meaning. If Ferdinand de Lesseps had wished, they would have danced a mapalé or a cumbia right there for him, or better yet a cancan, so he wouldn’t go away thinking we were all Indians here. For there, in the Isthmus of Panama, the colonial spirit floated in the air, like tuberculosis. Or maybe, it occurred to me at some point, Colombia had never stopped being a colony, and time and politics simply swapped one colonizer for another. For the colony, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
When the banquet was over, my father, who had already reserved a room with a view of the interior patio and its fountain where brightly colored fish swam, followed de Lesseps until he saw him retire at last, and was getting ready to retire as well when the door to the billiard room opened and a young man with a waxed mustache and chalk stains on his fingers came out into the corridor and began to speak to him as if he’d known him his whole life. He was part of the Lafayette delegation, had arrived with Monsieur de Lesseps, and would be part of the press office of the Compagnie back in Paris. People had spoken to him very highly of my father’s journalistic work, he said, and even Monsieur de Lesseps had a very good impression from meeting him. He had read some of his articles about the Railroad, his columns in the Star & Herald, and now he would like to propose a permanent connection to the Magnificent Canal Venture. “A pen like yours would be a great help to us in the struggle against Skepticism, which is, as you know so well, the worst enemy of Progress.” And before the night was over, my father found himself playing a three-cushion frame with a group of Frenchmen (and, by the way, losing by several caroms and tearing the imported baize), and he would forever associate the resplendent green of that baize and the clinking of the immaculate ivory balls with the moment when he said yes, that he accepted and felt it an honor to do so, that starting tomorrow he would be the Panama correspondent of the Bulletin du Canal Interocéanique. The Bulletin, to its friends.