When nine months of mourning had passed, Charlotte and I realized we hadn’t visited Miguel Altamirano’s grave even once. The first anniversary of his death arrived without our noticing, and we mentioned it with faces contorted by guilty expressions, hands full of remorse fluttering in the air. The second anniversary went by unnoticed by either of us, and it took the arrival of the news of the trials in Paris for my father’s memory to make a brief, momentary appearance in the organized well-being of our household. Let’s see how I can explain this: by way of some sort of cosmic result of my father’s death, the house in Christophe Colomb and its three residents had become detached from the land of Panama and was now located outside the territories of Political Life. In Paris, Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles were mercilessly interrogated by the hungry pack of swindled shareholders, thousands of families who had mortgaged their houses and sold their jewels to rescue the Canal in which they’d invested all their money; but that news reached me through a thick wall of glass, or from the virtual reality of a silent film: I see the actors’ faces, I see their lips moving, but I can’t understand what they’re saying, or perhaps I don’t care. . The French President, Sadi Carnot, shaken by the financial scandal of the Company and its various economic debacles, had found himself obliged to form a new government, and the ripples of the waves of such an event must have reached the beaches of Colón; but the Altamirano-Madinier household, apolitical and to some apathetic, remained on the margins. My two women and I lived in a parallel reality where uppercase letters did not exist: there were no Great Events, there were no Wars or Nations or Historic Moments. Our most important events, the humble peaks of our life, were very different during that time. Two examples: Eloísa learns to count to twenty in three languages; Charlotte, one night, is able to talk of Julien without collapsing.
Meanwhile, time passed (as they say in novels) and Political Life was up to its usual tricks in Bogotá. The President Poet, Author of the Glorious Anthem, had stretched out his finger and designated his successor: Don Miguel Antonio Caro, illustrious exemplar of the South American Athens who drafted Homeric translations with one hand and draconian laws with the other. Don Miguel Antonio’s favorite pastimes were opening Greek classics and closing Liberal newspapers. . and banishing, banishing, banishing. “We are not short of disoriented individualities,” he said in one of his first speeches. “But the vehement perorations of the revolutionary school have no echo in the country.” His own finger pointed dozens of disoriented individualities, hundreds of revolutionaries, down the road to forced exile. But in the apolitical, apathetic, and historical house in Christophe Colomb, Caro’s name was never heard, despite the fact that many he banished were Panamanian Liberals. The unbearable pressure of the censorship measures was not complained of, despite the fact that several newspapers in the Isthmus suffered under them. One of those days was the hundredth anniversary of the famous day when the famous Robespierre made his famous remark: “History is fiction.” But we, who lived in the fiction that there was no history, paid scant attention to that anniversary so important to others. . Charlotte and I took it upon ourselves to complete Eloísa’s education, which basically took the form of reading together (and sometimes in costume) from all the fables we could find, from Rafael Pombo to good old La Fontaine. On the floorboards of our house, I was the grasshopper and Eloísa was the ant, and between the two of us we forced Charlotte to put on a bow tie and play the Outgoing Tadpole. At the same time, I made myself, dear Eloísa, this solemn promise: never again would I allow Politics to have free access to my life. Before the onslaught of Politics that had destroyed my father’s life and so often disrupted my country, I would defend as best I could my new family’s integrity. On any of the issues that would define the immediate future of my country, the Arosemenas or the Arangos or the Menocals (or the Jamaican with his blunderbuss, the Gringo with his railroad, or the lost bogotáno from the tailor’s shop) asked me: “And what do you think?” And I would answer with an oft-repeated, mechanical phrase: “I’m not interested in politics.”
“Will you vote Liberal?”
“I’m not interested in politics.”
“Will you vote Conservative?”
“I’m not interested in politics.”
“Who are you? Where are you from? Who do you love? Who do you hate?”
“I’m not interested in politics.”
Readers of the Jury: how naïve I was. Did I truly think I would manage to avoid the influences of that ubiquitous and omnipotent monster? I wondered how to live in peace, how to perpetuate the happiness I’d been granted, without noticing that in my country these are political questions. Reality soon disabused me, for in those days a group of conspirators met in Bogotá, prepared to capture President Caro, depose him as if he were an old monarch, and set off the Liberal revolution. . But they did so with such enthusiasm that they were discovered and detained by the police before they had time to say a word. The government continued its repressive measures; uprisings, in answer to these measures, continued in various parts of the country. I kept Charlotte and Eloísa shut up at home in Christophe Colomb; I stocked up on provisions and drinking water and boarded up all the doors and windows with planks stolen from the ownerless houses. And that’s what I was doing when I got the news that another war had broken out.
I hasten to say: it was a tiny war, a sort of prototype of a war or an amateur war. Government forces took less than sixty days to subdue the revolutionaries; the echo of the Battle of Bocas del Toro, the only clash of any importance the Isthmus saw, ricocheted off our boarded-up windows. The memory of Pedro Prestán and his broken-necked hanging body was fresh in Panamanian minds; when the echo reached us from Bocas of those Liberal gunshots so timid they turned back in midair, many of us began to think of more executions, of more bodies hanged over the railway lines.
But none of that happened.
However. . in this story there’s always a however, and here it is. The war barely touched the isthmian coasts, but it touched them; the war stayed with us for just a few hours, but there it was. And most important: that amateur war opened the appetites of Colombians; it was like the carrot before the horse, and from that moment on I knew something more serious was waiting for us round the corner. . Feeling in the air the appetite for warmongering, I wondered if staying holed up in my apolitical house would be enough, and immediately answered that it would, that it couldn’t be otherwise. Watching the sleeping Eloísa — whose legs lengthened desperately under my scrutiny, whose bones mysteriously changed coordinates — and watching Charlotte’s naked body when she went out into the yard under the palm tree to shower with that watering can that looked like it had just been brought from l’Orangerie, I thought: Yes, yes, yes, we’re safe, no one can touch us, we have stationed ourselves outside of history and we are invulnerable in our apolitical house. But it is time for a confession: at the same time I thought of our invulnerability, I felt in my stomach an intestinal upset that resembled hunger pangs. The emptiness began to recur at night when we turned out the lamps. It came to me in dreams or when I thought of my father’s death. It took me a week to identify the sensation and admit, with some surprise, that I was afraid.
Did I speak of my fear to Charlotte? Did I tell Eloísa? Of course not: fear, like phantoms, does more damage when invoked. For years I kept it by my side like a forbidden pet, feeding it in spite of myself (or was it the fear itself, tropical parasite, that fed off me like a pitiless orchid?) but without admitting its presence. In London, Captain Joseph K. also faced small personal and unprecedented terrors. “My uncle died on the 11th of this month,” he wrote to Marguerite Poradowska, “and it seems everything has died in me, as though he carried off my soul with him.” The months that followed were an attempt to recover his lost soul; it was around that time that Conrad met Jessie George, an English typist who had two very obvious qualities for the Polish writer: she was a typist and she was English. A few months later, Conrad proposed to her with this invincible argument: “After all, my dear, I’ll not live long.” Yes, Conrad had seen it, he’d seen the chasm that opened at his feet, he’d felt that strange form of hunger and had run for shelter like a dog in a thunderstorm. That’s what I should have done: run, cleared off, packed up my things and my family, taken them by the hand and evacuated without a backward glance. After writing Heart of Darkness, Conrad had been plunged into new depths of depression and bad health; but I didn’t know it, I didn’t realize other abysses were opening at my feet. On Good Friday in 1899, Conrad wrote: “My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me.” If I had been able to pick up the prophetic-telepathic waves those words were sending, maybe I would have tried to decipher them, figure out what the monster was (but now I can imagine, and so can the reader) and what to do to keep it from devouring us. But I didn’t know how to interpret the thousand portents that filled the air during those years, I didn’t know how to read the warnings in the text of events, and the warnings that Conrad, my kindred spirit, sent telepathically from so far away, did not reach me.