I spent the night of New Year’s Eve in Charlotte’s house, not in my father’s, and the first sentence I heard in 1886 was a plea inside of which lurked an order: “Don’t ever leave again.” I obeyed (willingly, I should add); at the age of thirty-one I found myself, suddenly and unexpectedly, cohabiting with a widow who barely spoke a couple of words of Spanish, colonizing her youthful body like an explorer who doesn’t know he’s not the first and feeling myself to be brazenly, convincingly, dangerously happy. Our place of residence and Charlotte’s nationality, those two items of census data, constituted a sort of moral safe conduct, carte blanche to move through the rigid system of the Panamanian bourgeoisie to which, much to our dismay, we still belonged. Dear readers: I’m not talking, however, about impunity. On one occasion, the Jesuit priest, Father Federico Ladrón de Guevara, called Charlotte a “woman of sullied reputation” and stressed that France was historically a “lair of Liberals and nurturer of anti-Christian revolutions.” I remember it well because it was then, as if trying to respond to those accusations, that Charlotte summoned me one night to the veranda. The first April downpour had just fallen, and the air was still thick with the earth’s dampness, with the smell of dead worms and stagnant ditch water, with clouds of mosquitoes like floating nets. The most redundant phrase tends to be the one that announces humanity’s defining moments: “I have something to tell you,” says the person who — obviously — has something to say. Charlotte was faithful to this tradition of superfluity. “I have something to tell you,” she said. I thought she was going to confess once and for all what had happened at the bottom of the Chagres River, that stubborn incorruptible mystery; but she, lying in the hammock and wearing an orange shift and a red scarf wrapped around her head, turned her back to me but held my hand and, as the heavens opened and unleashed another downpour, told me she was pregnant.
Our private history is sometimes capable of the most remarkable symmetries. In Charlotte’s belly, a new Altamirano announced its presence with the will to continue the isthmian branch of the lineage; at the same time my father, Altamirano Senior, began to back away, to leave the world like a mortally wounded boar. Like a hibernating bear. Like whichever animal you’d prefer to use for the simile.
He began to distance himself from me. Charlotte, the new Charlotte, retained (in spite of her reincarnation) enormous contempt for my father. Do I need to spell it out? Something inside her blamed Miguel Altamirano for the deaths of her son and her husband. He, for his part, did not manage to grasp it. The idea that there was a direct link between his Selective Blindness and the deaths of the Madiniers would have struck him as absurd and indemonstrable. If someone had told him that the two Madiniers had been murdered, and that the weapon (in one of the murders, at least) was a certain open letter that appeared on a certain day in a certain newspaper, my father, I swear, would not have understood the reference. Miguel Altamirano shed a couple of tears for the extinction, at the hands of Panama, of a whole family; but they were innocent tears, since they weren’t guilty, and also innocent, since they were not wise. Miguel Altamirano elevated predictable defense mechanisms — denial and rejection — to the level of an art form. And the process extended to other parts of his life. For the news from the European press had begun to reach us, and to my indignant father, enraged and frustrated, the only way to preserve his sanity was to pretend that certain things were not certain.
Now, for the space of a few pages, my tale transforms into a very personalized collection of press cuttings, something you, Readers of the Jury, will appreciate, I think, in particular. Imagine the gray pages of these newspapers, the cramped columns, the tiny and sometimes incomplete letters. . What excessive power those dead characters have! How much can they affect a man’s life! The twenty-six letters of the alphabet had traditionally been on my father’s side; now, suddenly, a few seditious and subversive words were agitating the political panorama of the Republic of Journalism.
Round about the same time that Pedro Prestán’s neck snapped, The Economist of London warned the entire world, but in particular the shareholders, that the Canal Company had become a suicidal venture. At the same time as Liberal and rebel forces were capitulating in Los Guamos, and bringing the civil war to an end, a long report in The Economist said that de Lesseps had deliberately duped the French, and finished by saying: “The Canal will never be finished, among other reasons because finishing it was never the intention of the speculators.” France, Ferdinand de Lesseps’s beloved hexagone, began little by little to turn its hexagonal back on the Canal Company. My father received this news in the streets of Colón (in the Company offices, at the port where some newspapers came in) openmouthed and slavering like a tired bull, each article another banderilla. But I don’t believe — I can’t believe — that he was prepared for the final sword thrust, the pitiless stab in the neck that fate had in store. I understood that the world had stopped being my father’s, or that my father had stopped belonging to this world, when in the space of a few days two decisive things happened: in Bogotá they reformed the Constitution; in The Economist they published the famous denunciation of the press. In Bogotá, President Rafael Núñez, a strange turncoat who’d gone from the most radical Liberalism to the staunchest Conservatism, put the name of God, “the source of all authority,” back into the Constitution. In London, The Economist made this absurd accusation: “If the Canal does not advance, and if the French had not noticed the monstrous swindle they have been the victims of before, it is because Monsieur de Lesseps and the Canal Company have invested more money in buying journalists than excavators, spent more on bribes than on engineers.”
Dear readers of the gutter press, dear lovers of cheap scandal, dear spectators fascinated by the misfortunes of others: the denunciation in The Economist was like a bag of shit that someone threw as hard as they could against a fan. The room — let’s think, for example, of the offices on rue Caumartin — was soiled from floor to ceiling. Heads rolled at every newspaper: publishers, editors, reporters, whom the pertinent investigations revealed all to have been on the Canal’s payroll. And the shit, whose volatile properties are very little recognized, crossed the ocean and reached Colón, also splattering the walls of the Correo del Istmo (three reporters on salary) and those of El Panameño (two reporters and two editors), and most of all ending up on the face of one poor innocent man who suffered from Refraction Syndrome. The Star & Herald was the newspaper in charge of translating The Economist’s denunciation and did so with unusual alacrity. My father experienced the event as a betrayal in every sense of the word. And one day, while in Bogotá, Núñez, the metamorphosed President, declared that education in Colombia would either be Catholic or would not be, in Colón Miguel Altamirano feels like he’s been the victim of an accident, a stray bullet from a skirmish in the street, a lightning bolt that splits a tree and drops it on the head of a passerby. It is incomprehensible to him that the Star & Herald could accuse all those journalists who’d written about the Canal (who’d only described what they’d seen) of venality, and in a mere thirty lines go from that accusation to a more direct one of fraud (against those whose only interest had been to collaborate in the cause of Progress). It’s incomprehensible.