Juan Gabriel Vásquez
$26.95, 283 pages
Panama broke away from Colombia in a 1903 revolution engineered by the U.S. for the purpose of building the Panama Canal. Before that, 50 years of French canal-building efforts had failed dismally amid chronic Colombian warfare and volumes of rain unimaginable in France. A year later, Joseph Conrad published "Nostromo," a novel about a fictional South American country he called Costaguana. In "Nostromo," a silver mine stands in for the canal as the focus of grandiose delusions, violence and corruption.
In "The Secret History of Costaguana," Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez invents a new fiction on top of the old: a Colombian narrator whose personal story Conrad "stole" and then betrayed by omitting it from his novel. The new story is set in a Colombia as feverishly and chaotically real as fiction can make it, but with a darkly comic tone that spares readers the full impact of the horrors it reveals.
José Altamirano is the illegitimate son of a liberal journalist. In the 1850s, his father-to-be campaigns against a prohibition on medical students dissecting human cadavers. "If Christian dead are forbidden," Miguel Altamirano declares, "we'll have to avail ourselves of others." With a U.S. entrepreneur then building a railroad through the isthmus, Miguel arranges for the delivery of 15 barrels full of ice. In each is a Chinese laborer "doubled over and recently deceased from dysentery or malaria, or even cholera, which in Bogotá was now a thing of the past."
"All events," José tells his jury of readers, "are connected: everything is a consequence of everything else." The barrels of Chinese men lead, by various direct or convoluted routes, to a cholera epidemic, José Altamirano's conception and Miguel Altamirano's passionate championship of the French effort "to part the land as Moses parted the sea." Parting the land proves the more difficult endeavor. In Colombia's downpours, "the excavated earth absorbed the rainwater, got swept by the current, and returned to its place, wet and stubborn and impossible like a gigantic clay balcony ripped off the side of a hilltop cottage."
Throughout, revolutions erupt, simmer and erupt again. José offers a cynical parable: "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 ... agreed that the calmer of the two would be given the name Conservative. The other (who cried a little more) was called Liberal." The results are far from abstract: "I can talk of the seven thousand dead. But numbers don't decompose, nor are statistics a breeding ground for pestilence."
Meanwhile, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, the future British author Joseph Conrad, is growing up in Poland, a "doppelgänger" whose betrayal of José is foreshadowed from the novel's opening line. José, too, is a betrayer. "Colombia had taken everything from me," so he "wanted revenge on my country and its meddling, despotic, murderous history" even as, despising himself, he becomes the "evangelist of the crucifixion of Colombia." Conrad is the scapegoat upon whom he yearns to unload his guilt.