DECEMBER. On the fourth, after a grueling six-week journey — the long duration the result of his terrible state of health — Conrad has returned to Matadi. He had to be carried in a hammock on the shoulders of younger, stronger men, and the humiliation adds to the exhaustion. On his way back to London, Captain Joseph K. stops again in Brussels. But Brussels has changed in those months: it is no longer the white-walled, lethally boring city Conrad had known before; now it is the center of a slave-holding, exploitative, murderous empire; now it is a place that turns men into ghosts, a real industry of degradation. Conrad has seen the degradation of the colony, and in his head those Congolese images begin to mix, as if he were drunk, with the death of his mother in exile, the failure of his insurrectionist father, the imperialist despotism of Tsarist Russia, the betrayal of Poland by the European powers. Just as the Europeans had divided up the Polish cake, thinks Conrad, now they will divide up the Congo, and then no doubt the rest of the world. As if replying to those images that torment him, those fears that he has undoubtedly inherited from his father, his health deteriorates: Captain Joseph K. goes from rheumatism in his left arm to cardiac palpitations, from Congolese dysentery to Panamanian malaria. His uncle Tadeusz writes: “I’ve found your writing so changed — which I attribute to the fever and dysentery — that since then there is no happiness in my thoughts.”
The day of his pilgrimage to Culebra, several American passengers saw my father take the eight o’clock train on his own, and heard him making comments to nobody each time one of the work stations passed by the windows, from Gatún to Emperador. As they passed near Matachín they heard him explain that the name of the place came from the Chinamen who’d died and were buried around there, and as they passed Bohío Soldado they heard him translate both words into English—Hut, Soldier—without offering the slightest explanation. At midday, while the train filled with the smells of the meals the passengers had improvised for the journey, they saw him alight in Culebra, slip down the railway embankment, and disappear into the jungle. A Cuna Indian who was collecting plants with his son caught sight of him then, and his way of walking struck him as so odd — the careless way he kicked a piece of rotten wood that could have been the refuge of a poisonous snake, the worn-out way he bent down to look for a stone to throw at the monkeys — that he followed him to where the Frenchmen’s machines were. Miguel Altamirano arrived at the excavation, the gigantic gray and muddy trench that looked like a meteor’s point of impact, and contemplated it from the edge the way a general studies a battlefield. Then, as if someone had defied the Isthmus’s rules, it began to rain.
Instead of sheltering under the closest tree, whose impenetrable foliage would have provided a perfect umbrella, Miguel Altamirano began to walk in the rain, along the edge of the trench, until arriving at an enormous creature covered in creepers that towered ten meters above the ground. It was a steam-powered excavator. The downpours of the last eighteen months had covered it in a patina of rust, as thick and hard as coral, but that was only visible after pulling away the three handbreadths of tropical vegetation that covered it all over, the vines and leaves with which the jungle was pulling it down into the earth. Miguel Altamirano approached the shovel and caressed it as if it were an old elephant’s trunk. He walked around the machine slowly, stopping beside each leg, pulling the leaves away with his hands and touching each of the buckets that his arms could reach: the old elephant was ill, and my father circled it in search of symptoms. He soon found the elephant’s belly, a little shed that served as the monstrous tank of the excavator’s engine room, and there he took shelter. He did not come out again. When, after a fruitless two-day search of Colón and the surrounding area, I managed to discover his whereabouts, I found him lying on the damp floor of the excavator. Fate decreed it would rain that day as well, so I lay down beside my dead father and closed my eyes to feel what he would have felt during his last moments: the murderous clatter of the rain on the hollow metal of the buckets, the smell of the hibiscus, the shirt soaked through with the cold of the wet rust, and the exhaustion, the pitiless exhaustion.
PART THREE
The birth of another South American Republic. One more or less, what does it matter?
VII. A Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-eight Days, or The Brief Life of a Certain Anatolio Calderón
The saddest thing about my father’s death, it sometimes occurs to me (I still think of it often), was the fact that he wasn’t survived by anyone prepared to observe a decent mourning. In our house in Christophe Colomb there was no black clothing or any desire to wear any, and Charlotte and I had a tacit agreement to spare Eloísa contact with that death. I don’t think it was a protective impulse but rather the notion that Miguel Altamirano hadn’t been very present in our lives during those last years and it was futile to give the little girl a grandfather after that grandfather had died. So my father began to sink into oblivion as soon as his funeral was over, and I did absolutely nothing to prevent it.
By stipulation of the Bishop of Panama, my Masonic father was denied an ecclesiastical burial. He was buried in unconsecrated ground, beneath a gravelly headstone, among the Chinese and the atheists, unbaptized Africans, and all sorts of excommunicated people. He was buried, scandalizing those who knew, with a certain hand amputated a long time before from a certain Asian cadaver. The Colón gravedigger, a man who had already seen it all in this life, received the death certificate from the judicial authorities and handed it to me the way a bellhop gives you a message in a hotel. It was written on Canal Company stationery, which seemed anachronistic and somewhat disdainful; but the gravedigger explained that the stationery was already printed and paid for, and he preferred to keep using it than to let hundreds of perfectly usable sheets of paper rot away in an attic. So my father’s particulars appeared above dotted lines, beside the words Noms, Prénoms, Nationalité. Beside Profession ou emploi, someone had written: Journalist. Beside Cause du décès, it read: Natural causes. I thought of going to the authorities to make it a matter of public record that Miguel Altamirano had died of disillusionment, though I was prepared to accept melancholy, but Charlotte persuaded me that I would be wasting my time.