“Man is an evil animal,” he wrote to Cunninghame Graham around that time. “His perversity must be organized.” And then: “Crime is a necessary condition of organized existence. Society is essentially criminal — or it wouldn’t exist.” Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, why didn’t your words reach me? Dear Conrad, why didn’t you give me a chance to protect myself from the evil men and their organized perversity? “I am like a man who has lost his gods,” you said at the time. And I didn’t know how, dear Joseph K.: I didn’t know how to see in your words the loss of mine.
On October 17, 1899, shortly after my daughter Eloísa menstruated for the first time, the department of Santander saw the longest and bloodiest civil war in the history of Colombia.
The Angel of History’s modus operandi was basically the same as usual. The Angel is a brilliant serial killer: once he has found a good way to get men to kill each other he never gives it up, he clings to it with the faith and obstinacy of a St. Bernard. . For the war of 1899, the Angel spent about four months humiliating the Liberals. First he used the Conservative President Don Miguel Antonio Caro. Until his arrival in power, the national army had been composed of some six thousand troops; Caro increased the manpower to the legal maximum, ten thousand men, and in the space of two years quadrupled military expenditure. “The government has a duty to assure the peace,” he said, while he filled his little ant’s cave with nine thousand five hundred and fifty machetes with scabbards, five thousand and ninety Winchester 44 carbines, three thousand eight hundred and forty-one Gras 60 rifles, with well-polished bayonets. He was an ambidextrous and able man: with one hand he translated a bit of Montesquieu — for example: “Peace and moderation are the spirit of a republic”—and with the other signed recruitment decrees. In the streets of Bogotá he mobilized farm workers and hungry peasants in exchange for two reales a day, while their wives sat against the wall and waited for the money to go and buy potatoes for lunch; priests walked around the city promising adolescent boys eternal blessings in exchange for their service to the nation.
Soon the Angel, already bored by this Conservative President, decided to change him for another; to better affront the Liberals, he put Don Manuel Antonio Sanclemente in charge, an old man of eighty-four, who shortly after being sworn in received an order not open to appeal from his personal doctor to leave the city. “It gets so cold here, this playing-President lark could cost you a hefty price,” he told him. “Go on down to the tropical lowlands and leave this business to the young folk.” And the President obeyed: he moved to Anapoima, a little village with a tropical climate where his octogenarian lungs caused him fewer problems and his octogenarian blood pressure went down. Of course the country was then left without a government, but that little detail wasn’t going to intimidate the Conservatives. . In a matter of days, the Minister of State in Bogotá invented a rubber stamp with a facsimile of the President’s signature, and distributed copies to all interested parties, so that Sanclemente’s presence in the capital was no longer necessary: every senator signed his own proposed laws, every minister validated any decrees he felt like validating, for it took only a blow from the magic stamp to bring them to life. And thus, amid the Angel’s resounding guffaws, the new government evolved, to the indignation and dishonor of the Liberals. Then, one October morning, patience went astray in the department of Santander, and a general with many wars behind him fired the first shots of the revolution.
From the beginning we realized this war was different. In Panama the memory of the war of ’85 was still vivid, and Panamanians were determined to take their destiny into their own hands this time. So Panama, the Isthmus detached from Colombian reality, the Caribbean Switzerland, joined in the hostilities as soon as it could. Several towns of the isthmian interior rose up in arms two days after the first shots; before a week was out, the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo had armed a force of three hundred men and started his own guerrilla war in the mountains of Cocle. When the news reached Colón, I was having lunch in the same mirrored restaurant from which I’d seen my father emerge a quarter of a century earlier. I was with Charlotte and Eloísa, who was gradually turning into an adolescent of dark and perturbing beauty, and the three of us heard a Jamaican waiter say, “Well, what difference is one more war going to make? The world’s coming to an end anyway.”
It was a commonly held conviction among Panamanians that on December 31 the Final Judgment would begin, that the world wasn’t designed to see the twentieth century. (Every comet, every shooting star seen from Colón, seemed to confirm these prophecies.) And for several months the prophecies gained strength: the last days of the century witnessed battles bloodier than any seen since independence. The coordinates of the country were flooded with blood, and that blood was all Liberaclass="underline" in every military clash, the revolution was destroyed by the numerical superiority of the government armies. In Bucaramanga, General Rafael Uribe Uribe, at the head of a mixed army of fed-up peasants and rebellious university students, was received with shots fired from the tower of the church of San Laureano. “Long live the Immaculate Conception!” shouted the snipers after each young Liberal death. In Pasto, Father Ezequiel Moreno fired up the Conservative soldiers: “Be like the Maccabees! Defend the rights of Jesus Christ! Kill the Masonic beasts without mercy!” Scenes were also staged on the Muddy Magdalene: in front of the port of Gamarra, Liberal ships were sunk by government cannons, and four hundred and ninety-nine revolutionary soldiers burned to death amid the flaming wood of the hulls, and those who didn’t burn to death drowned in the river, and those who made it to the shore before they drowned were shot without any sort of trial and their bodies left to rot beside the morning’s catfish. And gathered in the telegraph office, the people of Colón awaited the definitive telegram: PROPHECY TRUE STOP COMETS AND ECLIPSES WERE RIGHT STOP ENTIRE WORLD NEARS END. In the Republic of Colombia, the new century was greeted without any celebrations whatsoever. But the telegram never arrived.