Others arrived, however. (As you’ll soon realize, my dear readers, a good part of the war of ’99 was waged in Morse code.) DISASTER FOR REVOLUTIONARIES IN TUNJA. REVOLUTIONARY DISASTER IN CÚCUTA. REVOLUTIONARY DISASTER IN TUMACO. . In the midst of this disastrous telegraphic landscape, no one believed the news of the Liberal victory in Peralonso. No one believed that a Liberal army of three thousand poorly armed men — one thousand Remington rifles, five hundred machetes, and an artillery corps that had made its own cannons out of aqueduct pipes — could have stood up on an equal footing to twelve thousand government soldiers who had allowed themselves the luxury of wearing brand-new uniforms intended for the day the revolution was defeated. GOVERNMENT ROUT IN PERALONSO STOP URIBE DURÁN HERRERA MARCH TRIUMPHANT TOWARD PAMPLONA said the telegram, and nobody believed it could be true. General Benjamín Herrera took a bullet in the thigh and won the battle from a stretcher; he was four years my senior but could already call himself a war hero. That was at Christmas; and on January 1, Colón awoke to find the world still in its place. The French Curse had expired. And I, Eloísa dear, felt that my apolitical house was an invincible fortress.
I felt it with total conviction. The simple force of my will, I thought, had managed to keep the Angel of History far away and marginalized. The war, in this country of windbags, was something that happened in telegrams, in letters exchanged by generals, in the capitulations that were being signed from one end of the Republic to the other. After Peralonso, the revolutionary General Vargas Santos was proclaimed “Provisional President of the Republic.” Mere words (and excessively optimistic ones). From the Panamanian city of David, the revolutionary General Belisario Porras protested before the Conservative government for the “acts of banditry” committed by government soldiers. Mere words. The Liberal command complained of the “flagellations” and “tortures” inflicted on prisoners captured “in their houses” and without “weapons in their hands.”
Mere words, mere words, mere words.
I concede, however, that the words made their sounds from closer and closer. (Words pursue, they can wound, they’re dangerous; words, in spite of being the empty kind of words that Colombians tend to pronounce, can sometimes explode in our mouths, and we mustn’t underestimate them.) The war had now landed in Panama, and in Colón the sound of nearby gunshots reached us and also news of them, the agitation of the prisons crammed with political prisoners and rumors of mistreatment, the smell of the dead that began to be left scattered over the Isthmus, from Chiriquí to Aguadulce. But in my Schizophrenic City, the neighborhood of Christophe Colomb remained firmly installed in a parallel world. Christophe Colomb was a ghost town, and was, to be specific, a French ghost town: What good could a place like that be to a Colombian civil war? As long as we didn’t leave it — I remember having thought — my two women and I would be safe. . But maybe (as I’ve implied elsewhere using other words but finding the exact formula is the writer’s task) my enthusiasm was premature. For at the same time, in the distance, the ill-fated department of Santander, cradle of the war, was flooded with blood, and that battle mysteriously set in motion the hypocritical and backstabbing mechanisms of politics. In other words, a conspiracy was set in motion by which the Gorgon and the Angel of History prepared to invade, in collaboration and without any consideration whatsoever, the paradise of the Altamirano-Madinier household.
It happened in a place called Palonegro. Barely recovered from the bullet wound to his thigh, General Herrera had advanced northward as part of the revolutionary vanguard. In Bucaramanga he took the opportunity to toss out a new crop of words: “Injustice is an everlasting seed of rebellion,” and things like that. But there was no rhetoric worthy of May 11, when eight thousand revolutionaries found themselves up against twenty thousand government troops, and what followed. . How to explain what followed? No, the numbers are of no use to me (those old standbys so beloved of journalists like my father), and statistics, though they travel so well by telegraph, are of no use either. I can say that the combat lasted fourteen hours; I can talk of the seven thousand dead. But numbers don’t decompose, nor are statistics a breeding ground for pestilence. For fourteen days the air of Palonegro filled with the fetid stench of rotting eyes, and the vultures had time to peck open the cloth of the uniforms, and the field became covered in pale naked corpses, with broken bellies and spilled entrails staining the green of the meadow. For fourteen days the smell of death penetrated the nostrils of men too young to recognize it or to know why their mucous membranes were stinging or why it wouldn’t go away even when they rubbed gunpowder into their mustaches. Wounded revolutionaries fled down the Torcoroma trail and collapsed like milestones along the escape route, so one could have kept track of their fate simply by observing the flight paths of the vultures.
The fate of the escaped generals was immediate exile: Vargas Santos and Uribe Uribe left Riohacha for Caracas; General Herrera fled by way of Ecuador, managing to escape the government troops but not the willful, stubborn words. In a message that pursued him until it caught up with him, Vargas Santos entrusted him with directing the war in the departments of Cauca and Panama.
From Panama it was possible to win the war.
In Panama the liberation of the country would begin.
General Herrera agreed, as was to be expected. In a matter of weeks he had put together an expeditionary army — three hundred Liberals who’d been defeated in the battles of the south and of the Pacific coast anxious for an opportunity to avenge themselves and avenge their dead — but they lacked a ship to get them to the Isthmus. At that moment the deus ex machina (so at home in the theater of history) brought him good news: idly anchored in the port of Guayaquil was a ship called the Iris, full of cattle and destined for El Salvador. Herrera inspected the vessel and discovered the most important technical attribute: the owner, the firm of Benjamin Bloom & Co., had put it up for sale. Without delay, the General gave his word, signed promissory contracts of sale, toasted the business with a glass of agua de panela with lemon while the Salvadoran Captain and his first mate raised recurrent glasses of aguardiente de caña. At the beginning of October, filled with as many young revolutionary soldiers as cows, each of whose four stomachs seemed to come to an agreement to suffer simultaneously from diarrhea, the Iris set sail from Guayaquil.
One of the soldiers interests us in particular: the camera approaches, laboriously avoiding one or two cows’ backs, passes under a soft, freckled udder, and avoids the whip of a treacherous tail, and its gray image shows us the immaculate, frightened (and hidden among the cow pies) face of a certain Anatolio Calderón. Anatolio would have his nineteenth birthday flanked by the cows of the Iris, as the ship passed the coast of Tumaco, but his shyness wouldn’t allow anyone to find out. He’d been born on a hacienda in Zipaquirá, son of an Indian servant who died giving birth to him and the owner of the property, Don Felipe de Roux, rebellious bourgeois and socialist dilettante. Don Felipe had sold the family estates and set sail for Paris before his illegitimate son reached puberty, but not without leaving him enough money to study whatever he wanted in any university in the country. Anatolio enrolled in the Externado University to study law, although deep down he would rather have read literature at the University of Rosario and followed in the footsteps of Julio Flórez, the Divine Poet. When General Herrera went through Bogotá, after the Battle of Peralonso, and was received as a hero by the young Liberals, Anatolio was among those, blazing with patriotic fervor, who leaned out of the windows of the university. He saluted the General, and the General singled him out from among all the students to return his salute (or at least so it seemed to him). When the parade had finished, Anatolio went down to the street and found, among the paving stones, a lost Liberal horseshoe. The find struck him as a sign of good luck. Anatolio cleaned the mud and dried shit off the horseshoe and put it in his pocket.