VI. In the Belly of the Elephant
My country would sink metaphorically, of course, just as the sinking of the Canal Company (of which more later) would be metaphorical. But there were other much more literal sinkings in those days; the qualities of each, of course, depended on the object sinking. On the other side of the Atlantic, for example, the sailing ship Annie Frost sank, which wouldn’t have had any significance if you, dear Korzeniowski, had not shamelessly invented for yourself a role in the shipwreck. Yes, I know: you needed money, and Uncle Tadeusz was the nearest bank and the one that requested the fewest guarantees; so you wrote an urgent telegram: SHIPWRECKED STOP ALL LOST STOP NEED HELP. . And since the correspondences that overwhelm me have not ceased, even though I’ve left the space of a few pages to put them on the record, allow me to note one of them now. For while Korzeniowski was pretending to have been on board a sinking ship, another sinking of perhaps more modest proportions was taking place but with much more immediate consequences.
One early morning in the dry season, Charlotte Madinier rented a dugout — undoubtedly similar to the one that had once carried her husband and my father — and, without anyone seeing, paddled herself along the Chagres River. She was wearing a coat that had belonged to her husband and that she’d saved from the famous postmortem burn; she had the pockets stuffed full with a collection of rocks her husband had accumulated over the early days of the explorations. I sneak into her head and I find, in the midst of fears and nostalgia and disorderly thoughts, the words Je m’en vais repeated like a mantra and piling up on top of one another; in her pockets I find chunks of basalt and slabs of limestone. Then Charlotte puts her hands in her pockets, with the left she clutches a large piece of granite and with the right a ball of blue clay the size of an apple. She drops into the water, backward, as if lying down, and the Panamanian ground, the oldest geological formation of the American continent, drags her to the bottom in a matter of seconds.
Let’s imagine: as she sinks, Charlotte loses her shoes, so when she gets to the riverbed, the bare skin of her feet touches the sand. . Imagine: the pressure of the water in her ears and on her closed eyes, or maybe they’re not closed but wide open, and maybe they see trout swim by and water snakes, weeds, sticks, or branches broken off trees by the humidity. Imagine the weight that rushes against Charlotte’s airless chest, against her small breasts and shrunken nipples, oppressed by the cold water. Imagine that all the pores of her skin close like stubborn little mouths, tired of swallowing water and aware that very soon they’ll be able to resist no longer, that death by drowning is right around the corner. Let’s imagine what Charlotte is imagining: the life she managed to have — a husband, a son who learned to talk before he died, a few sexual, social, or economic satisfactions — and most of all the life she won’t have, that which is never easy to imagine, because imagination (let’s be honest) doesn’t really get us that far. Charlotte starts to wonder what it feels like to drown, which of her senses will disappear first, if there’s pain in this death and where this pain will be located. She already lacks air: the weight against her chest has increased; her cheeks have contracted: the air that had been in them has been consumed by the involuntary voracity — no, by the gluttony — of her lungs. Charlotte feels that her brain is turning off.
And then something goes through her head.
Or: something goes on in her head.
What is it? It is a memory, an idea, an emotion. It is something (unique) to which I, despite my prerogatives as narrator of this tale, do not have access. With a shrug of her narrow shoulders, of her elegant arms, Charlotte shakes off her husband’s coat. Lumps of lignite, slabs of schist fall to the bottom. Immediately, with the swiftness of a freed buoy, Charlotte’s body lifts off the riverbed of the Chagres.
Her body begins to emerge.
Her ears hurt. Saliva returns to her throat.
I anticipate all my curious readers’ doubts and questions: no, Charlotte would never speak of what she thought (or imagined, or felt, or simply saw) a few seconds before what would have been a terrible death in the depths of the Chagres River. I, who am so given to speculation, in this case have been unable to speculate, and as the years have gone by this incapacity has become more firmly ingrained. . Any hypothesis on what happened pales in the face of that reality: Charlotte decided to go on living, and when she came out on the cloudy green surface of the Chagres, she was already a new woman (and had probably already decided she’d take the secret with her to her grave). This process of radical renovation cannot be emphasized too much, the reinvention with a capital R of herself that the Widow of the Canal undertook after her head — puffing and panting, her mouth gulping for air with the desperation of a landed salmon — appeared again in the superficial world of the Isthmus, that world she had come to despise and which she now forgave. I’m not afraid to record the physical manifestations of that transformation: the color of her eyes became lighter, her voice took on a graver tone, and her chestnut-colored hair grew down to her waist, as if the water of the Chagres River had formed a perpetual cascade down her back. Charlotte Madinier, who, as she sank into the Chagres River with her pockets bulging with Panamanian geology, had been a beautiful but wasted woman, when revived — because that’s what it was, a resurrection, that occurred that day — seemed to return to the disturbing beauty of a not too distant adolescence. It was an almost mythic event. Charlotte Madinier as a Siren of the Chagres River. Charlotte Madinier as a Panamanian Faust. Readers of the Jury, did you want to witness another Metamorphosis? This one is unpredictable and also without precedents; this is the most powerful I’ve ever seen, because it eventually involved me. For the new woman did not just rise from the bottom of the Chagres, which was a portent in itself, but carried out a deed even more portentous: she entered my life.
And she was transformed, of course she was. There is no doubt: at the end of the convulsive decade of the 1880s, Metamorphosis was in the spirit of the times. On the other side of the world, in Calcutta, Korzeniowski was suffering a series of subtle identity shifts and was beginning — just like that — to sign his contracts as Conrad; the Widow of the Canal did not change her name, for we had a tacit agreement according to which she would keep her married name and I would understand her reasons without her having to explain them to me, but she would change her attire. She opened the doors of her house in Christophe Colomb, took the skirts and capes down from the windows, and I accompanied her to the Liberian neighborhood and helped her exchange her heavy, stubbornly dark Parisian clothes for green and blue and yellow cotton shifts, which gave her pale skin the tone of unripe fruit. Another bonfire in the middle of the street: but this time the bonfire was one of exorcism and not purification, the attempt to cast out the demons of past lives. There, in the port of Colón, during the final days of 1885, Charlotte began a reincarnation in which I participated. The initiation ceremony (the details of which, out of chivalry, I must keep to myself) took place one Saturday night, and was fed by certain shared solitudes, by nostalgias that remained unshared and by the guaranteed fuel of French brandy. In my private dictionary, which might not correspond with those of all my readers, reincarnation means “returning to the carnal.” I returned every Saturday; every Saturday Charlotte Madinier’s generous flesh awaited me ravenously, with the desperate abandon of one with nothing to lose. But never, not in those days of initiation or later, did I manage to find out what happened at the bottom of the Chagres River.