The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page B
Authors: Juan Gabriel Vásquez
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worn out like the slots in a piggy bank, calmed spirits with a gesture of his pudgy hand as if tossing a couple of sardines to the seals. And he would go on without wasting time to the next anecdote, to the next poem.
But at night, when everyone had gone, Pérez Triana would be enveloped by a distant and almost affectionate dread, a sort of tame but fearsome animal that still stayed with him even after all these years. It was a well-defined physical sensation: an intestinal discomfort similar to the moments preceding hunger. When he felt it coming on, the first thing the man would do was to make sure Gertrud, his wife, was asleep; he would immediately leave the dark bedroom and go down to his library, in his green dressing gown and leather slippers, and light all the lamps in the place. From his drawing room he could see the black stain that in the morning would be Regent’s Park, but Pérez Triana didn’t much like to look out at the street, except to confirm the rectangle of light that his window projected onto the dark pavement or the comforting presence of his own disheveled silhouette. He settled down at his desk, opened a wooden box with adjustable compartments, took out a few blank sheets of paper and a few Perfection-brand envelopes, and wrote long and always solemn letters in which he asked how things were in Colombia, who else had died in the most recent civil war, what was really happening in Panama. And the news came back to him in North American envelopes: from New York, from Boston, even from San Francisco. This was, as everyone knew, the only way to evade the censors. Pérez Triana knew as well as his correspondents did that a letter addressed to him would be opened and its contents read by governmental authorities and no one could do anything about it; if the authority considered it necessary, the letter would be lost before arriving at its destination, and could still provoke more or less unpleasant questioning for the sender. So his accomplices in Bogotá soon grew accustomed to the routine of transcribing the news by hand; they also grew accustomed to receiving envelopes bearing U.S. stamps, inside of which appeared, as if playing hide-and-seek, the handwriting of their banished friend. And one of the questions most often repeated in the clandestine letters from London was this: Do you think that I can come back now? No, Santiago, his friends replied. You shouldn’t come back yet.
Readers of the Jury: allow me to give you a very brief lesson in Colombian politics, to synthesize the pages turned up till now and prepare you for those to come. The most important event in the history of my country, as you’ll perhaps have noticed, was not the birth of its Liberator, or its independence, or any of those fabrications for high school textbooks. Nor was it a catastrophe on an individual level like those that frequently mark the destinies of other lands either: no Henry wanted to marry some Boleyn, no Booth killed any Lincoln. No, the moment that would define the fate of Colombia for all history, as always happens in this land of philologists and grammarians and bloodthirsty dictators who translate The Iliad , was a moment made of words. More precisely, of names. A double baptism took place at some imprecise moment of the nineteenth century. The gathered parents of the two chubby-cheeked and already spoiled infants, those two little boys smelling since birth of vomit and liquid shit, agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal. Those children grew up and multiplied in constant rivalry; the rival generations have succeeded each other with the energy of rabbits and the obstinacy of cockroaches . . . and in August of 1893, as part of that indisputable inheritance, former—Liberal—President Santiago Pérez Manosalva, a man who in other times had won the respect of General Ulysses S. Grant, was banished with a total lack of
But at night, when everyone had gone, Pérez Triana would be enveloped by a distant and almost affectionate dread, a sort of tame but fearsome animal that still stayed with him even after all these years. It was a well-defined physical sensation: an intestinal discomfort similar to the moments preceding hunger. When he felt it coming on, the first thing the man would do was to make sure Gertrud, his wife, was asleep; he would immediately leave the dark bedroom and go down to his library, in his green dressing gown and leather slippers, and light all the lamps in the place. From his drawing room he could see the black stain that in the morning would be Regent’s Park, but Pérez Triana didn’t much like to look out at the street, except to confirm the rectangle of light that his window projected onto the dark pavement or the comforting presence of his own disheveled silhouette. He settled down at his desk, opened a wooden box with adjustable compartments, took out a few blank sheets of paper and a few Perfection-brand envelopes, and wrote long and always solemn letters in which he asked how things were in Colombia, who else had died in the most recent civil war, what was really happening in Panama. And the news came back to him in North American envelopes: from New York, from Boston, even from San Francisco. This was, as everyone knew, the only way to evade the censors. Pérez Triana knew as well as his correspondents did that a letter addressed to him would be opened and its contents read by governmental authorities and no one could do anything about it; if the authority considered it necessary, the letter would be lost before arriving at its destination, and could still provoke more or less unpleasant questioning for the sender. So his accomplices in Bogotá soon grew accustomed to the routine of transcribing the news by hand; they also grew accustomed to receiving envelopes bearing U.S. stamps, inside of which appeared, as if playing hide-and-seek, the handwriting of their banished friend. And one of the questions most often repeated in the clandestine letters from London was this: Do you think that I can come back now? No, Santiago, his friends replied. You shouldn’t come back yet.
Readers of the Jury: allow me to give you a very brief lesson in Colombian politics, to synthesize the pages turned up till now and prepare you for those to come. The most important event in the history of my country, as you’ll perhaps have noticed, was not the birth of its Liberator, or its independence, or any of those fabrications for high school textbooks. Nor was it a catastrophe on an individual level like those that frequently mark the destinies of other lands either: no Henry wanted to marry some Boleyn, no Booth killed any Lincoln. No, the moment that would define the fate of Colombia for all history, as always happens in this land of philologists and grammarians and bloodthirsty dictators who translate The Iliad , was a moment made of words. More precisely, of names. A double baptism took place at some imprecise moment of the nineteenth century. The gathered parents of the two chubby-cheeked and already spoiled infants, those two little boys smelling since birth of vomit and liquid shit, agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal. Those children grew up and multiplied in constant rivalry; the rival generations have succeeded each other with the energy of rabbits and the obstinacy of cockroaches . . . and in August of 1893, as part of that indisputable inheritance, former—Liberal—President Santiago Pérez Manosalva, a man who in other times had won the respect of General Ulysses S. Grant, was banished with a total lack of
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