But war is not always as orderly as it seems when narrated, and young Anatolio did not join up with General Herrera’s revolutionary army at that moment. He carried on with his studies, determined to change the country by way of the very laws the Conservative governments had trampled on. But on July 31, 1900, one of those same Conservatives visited the quasi-nonagenarian Don Manuel Sanclemente’s tropical retreat, and in less decent words than mine told him that a useless old man mustn’t hold the reins of the nation, and then and there declared him removed from Bolívar’s throne. The coup d’état was perpetrated in a matter of hours; and before the week was out, six law students had left the university, packed their things, and gone in search of the first Liberal battalion prepared to enlist them. Of the six students, three died in the Battle of Popayán, one was taken prisoner and transferred back to the Panóptico Prison in Bogotá, and two escaped to the south, went round the Galeras volcano to avoid the Conservative troops, and made it to Ecuador. One of those was Anatolio. After wandering the battlefields for so many months, Anatolio had nothing but one rusty horseshoe, a leather canteen, and a Julio Flórez book whose brown covers had become impregnated with sweat. The day the commanding officer of the Cauca battalion, Colonel Clodomiro Arias, notified him that the battalion would be incorporated into General Benjamín Herrera’s army, Anatolio was reading and rereading the lines of “Everything Comes to Us Late.”
And glory, that nymph of fate,
dances only on sepulchers.
Everything comes to us late
. . even death!
Suddenly, he began to feel an itching in his eyes. He read the lines, realized he felt like crying, and wondered if the most terrible thing had happened, if war had turned him into a coward. Days later, hiding among the cows of the Iris for fear that someone — Sergeant Major Latorre, for example — might look him in the eye and notice the cowardice that had settled in there, Anatolio thought of the mother he never knew, cursed the day he’d considered joining the revolutionary army, and felt a violent urge to go home and eat a hot meal. And instead here he was, smelling the vapors of cow dung, breathing the saline humidity of the Pacific, but most of all scared to death of what awaited him in Panama.
The Iris arrived in El Salvador on October 20. General Herrera met the ship’s owners in Acajutla and signed a sales agreement that was more like a bond: if the revolution was successful, the Liberal government would pay the gentlemen of Bloom & Co. the sum of sixteen thousand pounds sterling; if they lost, the ship would form part of the “contingencies of war.” There, in the Salvadoran port, General Herrera had them disembark in a strict order — cattle, soldiers, crew — and climbed up on a wooden crate so everyone could hear as he ceremoniously rechristened the ship. The Iris would henceforth be called the Almirante Padilla. Anatolio took note of the change but also noted that he was still scared. He thought of José Prudencio Padilla, Guajiran martyr of Colombian independence, and said to himself that he didn’t want to be a martyr to absolutely anything, that he wasn’t interested in dying in order to be honored by decree, and much less so for some half-mad military man who would name a ship after him. In December, after putting into port at Tumaco to pick up a contingent of fifteen hundred soldiers, a hundred and fifteen cases of ammunition, and nine hundred and ninety-seven projectiles for the cannon mounted on the prow, the Almirante Padilla put into port in Panama. It was Christmas Eve and the heat was dry and pleasant. The soldiers had not even disembarked when the news reached them: the Liberal forces had been destroyed across the entire Isthmus. While up on deck they recited the novena; Anatolio stayed hidden in the bowels of the ship and wept with fear.
With the arrival of Herrera’s troops in the Isthmus, the war began to take on a different aspect. Under the orders of Colonel Clodomiro Arias, Anatolio participated in the taking of Tonosí, disembarked in Anton, and liberated the forces of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo from the siege of La Negrita, but in none of those places did he stop considering desertion. Anatolio took part in the Battle of Aguadulce; one night when the moon was full, while General Belisario Porras’s revolutionary forces took the Vigia hill and advanced toward Pocri, those of the Indian Victoriano Lorenzo destroyed the government battalions guarding the city, the Sanchez and the Farias. At noon the next day, the enemy started to send emissaries to request ceasefires in order to bury their dead, to negotiate more or less honorable capitulations. Anatolio was part of this historical date in which the balance appeared to shift to the revolutionary side, during which for a few hours the revolutionaries believed in that pipe dream: definitive triumph. The Cauca battalion buried eighty-nine of their men, and Anatolio took personal charge of several bodies; but what he would remember forever did not come from his side but from the government side: the smell of roasting flesh that invaded the air when the medic of the Farias battalion began to incinerate, one at a time, the hundred and sixty-seven Conservative corpses he preferred not to bury.
The smell stayed with him all the way to Panama City, Herrera’s army’s next objective. It soon seemed to him that even the pages of Julio Flórez’s book were impregnated with the stench of Conservatives reduced to ashes, and if he read a line like “Why do you fill the air I breathe?” the air would immediately fill with incinerated nerves, muscles, and fat. But the battalion kept advancing, indifferent; no one sensed the hell that was overwhelming Anatolio, no one looked him in the eye and discovered the cowardice lurking there. Less than fifty kilometers from Panama City, Colonel Clodomiro Arias divided his battalion: some carried on with him toward the capital, planning to camp at a prudent distance and wait for the arrival of the reinforcements the Almirante Padilla would deposit east of Chame; the others, including Anatolio, would carry on northward under the orders of Sergeant Major Latorre. Their mission was to get to the railway at Las Cascadas and guard the line against any attempt to obstruct the free circulation of trains. General Herrera wanted to send a clear message to the marines waiting in the North American steamships — the Iowa off the coast of Panama City, the Marietta off Colón — like a ghostly presence: there was no need for them to disembark, because the Liberal army would ensure that neither the railway nor the Canal works were in any danger. Anatolio, part of this placation strategy, pitched his tent in the place chosen by Sergeant Major Latorre. That night, he was awakened by three shots. The sentinel had mistaken the frenetic movements of a wildcat for a governmental counterattack and had fired three times in the air. It was a false alarm; but Anatolio, sitting on top of his only blanket, felt a new warmth between his thighs and realized he’d wet himself. By the time the camp had calmed down and his tent mates had gone back to sleep, Anatolio had already wrapped the horseshoe and the Julio Flórez book in a dirty shirt, and begun to do — under the protection of the shadows — what he should have done a long time earlier. Before the birds started to wake up in the dense treetops, Anatolio had already become a deserter.