The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page A

of Colombia. A passenger descends from the ship carrying all his worldly goods: a small trunk of clothes and personal items, more fitting to someone who plans to spend a couple of weeks away from home than to someone who’ll never return to his homeland. Let’s say that it is not the trunk of an émigré but of a traveler, and not just from its humble size but because its owner does not yet know that he has arrived to stay. . . . Of that first evening in London I remember details: the advertising flyer, received from a dark hand on the dock itself, on which were listed the services and virtues of Trenton’s Hotel, Bridgewater Square, Barbican; the supplements that had to be paid, one for the use of electricity, another for cleaning my boots; the fruitful negotiation with the night porter, from whom I demanded a special rate, with breakfast included, in spite of the fact that my identity documents were neither North American nor colonial. The next morning, more memories: a pocket map I bought for tuppence, a folded map with covers the color of bile; bread with marmalade and two cups of cocoa that I had in the dining room of the hotel while searching through those white streets and yellow streets for the address I had written down in my journalist’s notebook. A bus left me in Baker Street; I crossed Regent’s Park instead of going around it, and through already bare trees and slushy paths I arrived at the street I was looking for. It was not difficult to find the number.
    I still have the map I used that morning: its thin spine has been devoured by moths, its streaked pages resemble a crop of fungi for scientific use. But objects speak to me, dictate things to me; they call me to account when I lie, and in the opposite case they offer willingly to serve as proof. Well then, the first thing this old, unusable, out-ofdate (London changes every year) map announces is the encounter with the aforementioned intermediary. But who was Santiago Pérez Triana, the famous Colombian negotiator who in time would become plenipotentiary ambassador to the courts of Madrid and London? Who was that man, one of so many who in Colombia inherit that undesirable and dangerous monster: a Political Life? The answer, which will strike some of you as strange, is: I don’t care. The important thing is not who that man was but rather what version I am prepared to give of his life, what role I want him to play in this tale of mine. So right now I make use of my narrator’s prerogatives, I take the magic potion of omniscience and enter, not for the first time, the head—and the biography—of another person.
    In those years, a Colombian arriving in London necessarily called on Santiago Pérez Triana, at 45 Avenue Road. Pérez Triana, son of a former president and secret writer of children’s stories, political target and amateur tenor, had arrived in the city a few years before and presided with his toad face and anecdotes in four languages over a table designed for an audience: his dinners, his soirees in the Victorian drawing room, were small tributes in his own honor, masterful speeches destined to exhibit his talents as Athenian orator long before the addresses that distinguished him at the courts of The Hague. The evenings in that dining room, or in the special room where coffee was taken, were always the same: Pérez Triana took off his round-framed spectacles to light a cigar, straightened his bow tie while the cups of his private audience were filled to the brim, and began to speak. He spoke of his life in Heidelberg or of the opera in Madrid, of his readings of Henry James, of his friendship with Rubén Dario and Miguel de Unamuno. He recited his own poems: “Sepulchers Safeguard My Secrets” could burst out all of a sudden, or “I Have Heard the Crowds Moan.” And his guests, Liberal politicians or erudite businessmen of the Bogotá bourgeoisie, applauded like trained seals. Pérez Triana nodded with modesty, closed his eyes already