When I arrived at the offices, in that stone building resembling a colonial prison, I found them deserted. This, moreover, was logicaclass="underline" if there were no trains in the terminus station, why should there be any engine drivers, mechanics or ticket collectors, or any passengers? But I didn’t leave, I didn’t go looking for anyone, because in some obscure way I had guessed something would happen in this place. I was still formulating these absurd deliberations when three figures came in through the stone arches: Generals Tovar and Amaya were walking together, their pace almost synchronized, and the uniforms they wore seemed about to succumb to the bristling weight of belts, epaulettes, medals, and swords. The third man was Colonel James Shaler, superintendent of the Railroad Company, one of the most popular and respected Gringos in the whole Isthmus and an old acquaintance of my father’s. It was obvious from his greeting, halfway between affectionate and concerned, that Colonel Shaler wasn’t expecting to see me there. But I wasn’t prepared to move: I ignored the hints and brush-offs, and went as far as to raise one hand to my forehead to salute the governmental generals. Just then, on the other side of the building, the tapping of the telegraph began. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but the Railroad Company had the only means of communication between Colón and Panama City. Colonel Shaler found himself obliged to answer the incoming message. Reluctantly, he left me alone with the generals. We were in the entrance hall of the building, barely protected from the killing heat that by then, just after eight in the morning, was beginning to come in through the wide door. None of us spoke: we all feared revealing too much. The generals arched their eyebrows the way children do when they suspect a salesman is trying to trick them. And at that moment I understood.
I understood that Colonel James Shaler and assistant superintendent Herbert Prescott were party to the conspiracy; I understood that Dr. Manuel Amador was one of its leaders. I understood that the conspirators had received news of the imminent arrival of government troops on board the Cartagena and the Alexander Bixio, and I understood that they’d requested help (I didn’t know who from), and the unexpected arrival of the gunboat Nashville was that help or part of that help. I understood that the success or failure of the revolution that was just then beginning in Panama City depended on the five hundred soldiers of the Tiradores battalion, under the command of Generals Tovar and Amaya, being able to board a train and cross the Isthmus to put it down before it was too late, and I understood that the Panama City conspirators had understood that, too. I understood that Herbert Prescott had moved the empty trains out of Colón for the same reason that now, after receiving a telegram the contents of which were not difficult to imagine, Colonel Shaler was trying to convince Tovar and Amaya to board on their own, without their troops, the only available train, a single coach and locomotive, and calmly proceed to Panama City. “Your troops will catch up with you as soon as I can get a train, I promise,” Colonel Shaler was saying to General Tovar, “but meanwhile, with this heat, there’s no reason for you gentlemen to stay here.” Yes, that’s what he said, and I understood why he said it. And at exactly half past nine in the morning, when Generals Tovar and Amaya fell into the trap and climbed aboard the superintendent’s private coach, along with fifteen of their adjutants, subordinates, and messengers, I understood that there, in the railway station, history was about to perpetrate the separation of the Isthmus of Panama and at the same time the disgrace, the profound and irreparable disgrace, of the Republic of Colombia. Readers of the Jury, Eloísa dear, the time for my proud and guilty confession has arrived: I understood all that, I understood that a word of mine could have given the conspirators away and avoided the revolution, and nevertheless I remained silent, I kept quiet with the most silent of silences that had ever been, the most damaging and most malicious. Because Colombia had ruined my life, because I wanted revenge on my country and its meddling, despotic, murderous history.
I had more than one chance to speak. Today I have to ask myself: Would General Tovar have believed me if I, a complete stranger, had told him that the shortage of trains was a revolutionary strategy, that the promise to send the battalion in the first available trains was false, and that by separating from their five hundred men the generals were submitting to the revolution and losing the Isthmus out of pure naïveté? Would he have believed me? Well, the question is merely rhetorical, for this was never my intention. And I remember the moment when I saw them all (General Tovar, General Amaya, and their men) sitting in Colonel Shaler’s luxurious carriage, basking in the privileged treatment, receiving complimentary glasses of juice and plates of bitesized pieces of papaya while waiting for departure time, satisfied at finally having earned the Americans’ respect. Dear readers, it was not out of cynicism or sadism or simple egotism that I climbed aboard the coach and insisted on shaking hands with the two government generals. I was moved by something less comprehensible and decidedly less explicable: the proximity to the Great Event and, of course, my participation in it, my silent role in Panama’s independence or, to be more precise and also more honest, in Colombia’s disgrace. To have the chance to speak again, even the horrible temptation to speak, and not to do so: my historical and political destiny was then reduced, and would be forever reduced, to that delicate, catastrophic, and vengeful silence.
Colonel James Shaler’s private train began to spit out steam seconds later. The whistle blew a couple of hoarse notes; I was still on board, amazed at the cosmic ironies of which I was the victim, when the landscape outside the window began to move backward. I said a hurried farewell, wished the generals luck, and leapt down onto Front Street. The carriage began to take the generals away; behind, waving the most hypocritical handkerchief in the history of humanity, was Colonel Shaler. I stood beside him as we both engaged in that strange revolutionary task: seeing off a train. The back door of the carriage grew smaller and smaller until there was just a black dot above the rails, then a cloud of gray smoke, and finally not even that: the lines of iron converging, stubborn and determined on the green horizon. Without looking at me, as if not speaking to me, Colonel Shaler said, “I’ve heard a lot about your father, Altamirano.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“It’s a shame what happened to him, because the man was on the right side. We’re living in complicated times. Besides, I don’t know much about journalism.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“He wanted what we all want. He wanted progress.”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“If he had lived to see independence, his sympathies would have been with it.”
I was grateful that he wasn’t attempting fictions, or half-truths, or concealment strategies. I was grateful he respected my talents (my talents as a reader of the real, as an interpreter of immediate reality).
I said, “His sympathies would have been with those who made the Canal, Colonel.”