FRANCE BEGINS TO EMERGE FROM UNDER DE LESSEPS’S SPELL read the headline in Le Figaro. And that was the general feeling: de Lesseps was a cheap conjurer, a circus magician and, at best, a high-quality hypnotist. But whatever the designation conferred, beneath it — sleeping a long siesta like a hibernating bear — persisted the idea that the terms of construction of the Canal, from cost to duration, by way of engineering, had been a monstrous lie. “It would not have been possible,” said the journalist, “had it not been for the solicitous collaboration of the print media and its unscrupulous writers.” But my father defended himself: “In an endeavor of this magnitude,” he wrote in the Bulletin, “contretemps are part of day-to-day life. The virtue of our workers does not lie in an absence of obstacles, but in the heroism with which they’ve overcome them and will continue to overcome them.” My idealistic father, who at times seemed to recover the vigor he’d had at twenty, wrote: “The Canal is a work of the Human Spirit; it needs humanity’s support in order to reach a successful conclusion.” My comparativist father looked to other great human undertakings — the argument of the Suez Canal now seemed stale — and wrote: “Did the Brooklyn Bridge not cost eight times as much as expected? Did the Thames Tunnel not cost triple its original budget? The Canal’s story is humanity’s story, and humanity cannot dwell on debates about centimes.” My optimistic father, the same man who years before had left the comforts of his native city to put his shoulder to the wheel where it was most needed, kept writing: “Give us time and give us francs.” Around then one of our daily downpours fell on the Isthmus, no worse or any friendlier than those that fell every year; but this time the excavated earth absorbed the rainwater, got swept by the current, and returned to its place, wet and stubborn and impossible like a gigantic clay balcony ripped off the side of a hilltop cottage. In one afternoon of intense Panamanian rain, three months of work were lost. “Give us time,” wrote my idealist-optimist father, “give us francs.”
The last item in my press anthology (in my files, clippings fight for me to quote them, elbow each other out of the way, stick fingers in each other’s eyes) appeared in La Nación, the newspaper of the ruling party. For all practical purposes — known and future ones — that text was a threat. Yes, of course we all knew of the badly disguised hostility the central government harbored against the French in general and de Lesseps in particular; we knew the government, after months and more months of meticulously bleeding the Public Treasury dry, had asked the Canal Company for a loan, and the Company had refused to lend them any money. Telegrams came and went, telegrams so dry the ink absorbed into the paper once they were read, and this was known. It was also known that the fact had generated resentment, and in the Presidential Palace this phrase was heard: “We should have given this to the Gringos, who really are our friends.” But we could not predict the profound satisfaction that seemed to emanate from that page.
CANAL COMPANY ON THE BRINK OF BANKRUPTCY read the headline. The body of the article explained that many Panamanian families had mortgaged properties, sold family jewels, and plundered savings accounts to invest everything in Canal stocks. And the last sentence was this one: “In the case of collapse, it will be obvious who is responsible for the absolute ruin of hundreds of our fellow countrymen.” And then it transcribed an extensive list of writers and journalists who had “lied, deceived, and defrauded” the public with their reports.
The list was alphabetical.
There was just one name under the letter A.
For Miguel Altamirano, it was the beginning of the end.
Now my memory and my pen, irremediable addicts to the vicissitudes of politics (fascinated by the stone horrors left in the Gorgon’s wake), must address without distractions those terrible years that begin with the strange lines from a national anthem and end with a thousand one hundred and twenty-eight days of a war. But an almost supernatural event paralyzed the political evolution of the country, or paralyzes it in my memory. On September 23, 1886, after six and a half months of pregnancy, Eloísa Altamirano was born, a baby girl so small that my two hands could cover her completely, so scrawny that her legs still showed the curve of her bones and the only thing visible of her genitals was the tiny point of her clitoris. Eloísa was born so weak that her mouth was unable to wrestle with her mother’s nipples, and she had to be fed with spoonfuls of twice-boiled milk for the first six weeks. Readers of the Jury, common readers of breeding age, fathers and mothers everywhere: the arrival of Eloísa paralyzed the entire world, or rather annulled it, erased it pitilessly the way color is erased from the world of a blind man. . Out there, the Canal Company made desperate attempts to stay afloat, issuing new bonds and even organizing peripatetic lotteries to recapitalize the business, but none of that mattered to me: my task consisted in boiling Eloísa’s spoon, holding her cheeks with two fingers to make sure the milk didn’t spill, massaging her throat with the tip of my index finger to help her swallow; I am indifferent to the knowledge that Conrad was writing his first story, “The Black Mate,” at the time. Shortly before he turned twenty-nine, Conrad passed his captaincy exam in London, and was transformed for us into Captain Joseph K.; but that seems banal to me compared with the moment when Eloísa first put a bumpy nipple in her mouth and, after weeks and weeks of slow learning and gradual strengthening of her jaw, sucked so strongly that she cut it with her gums and made it bleed.
And nevertheless, there is an event that escapes my comprehension: in spite of Eloísa’s birth, in spite of the great care that determined her slow and laborious survival, the annulled world kept spinning, the country kept moving with insolent independence, in the Isthmus of Panama life went on with complete indifference to what was happening to its most loyal subjects. How to talk about politics thinking at the same time of those years, evoking moments that in my memory belong exclusively to my daughter? How to get down to work recuperating events of a national character, when the only thing that interested me at the time was seeing Eloísa gain one more gram and then another? Every day, Charlotte and I took her, all wrapped up in freshly boiled linens, to Tang’s butcher shop and unwrapped her to place her like a fillet steak or a piece of liver in the big bowl of his scales. On the other side of the high wooden counter Tang put the weights on, those solid rust-colored discs, and for us parents there was no greater pleasure than seeing the Chinese butcher look through his shiny lacquered box for a bigger weight, because the previous one hadn’t been heavy enough. . I bring this memory into my tale and immediately wonder: How do I search out, in the midst of my warm personal memories, the aridity of public memories?
Self-sacrificing man that I am, I’ll try, dear readers, I’ll try.
Because in my country things were about to happen of the sort that historians always end up recording in their books, asking with sonorous question marks how on earth we could have come to this and then answering I know, I have the answer. Which, of course, isn’t all that clever, for even the most muddle-headed person would have sensed something odd in the air during those years. There were prophecies everywhere: one had only to interpret them. I don’t know what my father might have thought, but I should have recognized the imminent tragedy the day when my nation of poets was no longer able to write poetry. When the Republic of Colombia lost its ear, mistook literary taste, and rejected the most basic lyric rules, I should have sounded the alarm, shouted man overboard, stop the ship. I should have stolen a lifeboat and descended immediately, though I might have run the risk of not finding terra firma, the day I first heard the verses of the National Anthem.