The Secret History of Costaguana Read Free Page A

BUT THREE CUPS LEAD TO FAITH. And thus the matter progressed (or rather did not).
    The city watched the vultures squabble. The corpses of cholera victims, which had been leaving the San Juan de Dios Hospital, sporadically, for the last year, were viewed with the avarice of merchants by the radical students, but also by Father Valenzuela’s crusading followers. When one of the patients admitted with fever and vomiting became too thirsty or too cold, word began to circulate and the political forces to prepare themselves: Father Valenzuela came to perform the last rites, and in the midst of them obliged the patient (with bluish skin, eyes sunk deep into the head) to sign a testament containing the unambiguous clause “I die in Christ; I deny my body to science.” My father published an article accusing the priests of denying the patients divine absolution unless they signed those prefabricated testaments; and the priests replied accusing the Materialists of denying those same patients not absolution but tartar emetic. And in the midst of those foul debates, no one stopped to wonder how the illness had managed to climb to 2,600 meters above sea level or whence it had arrived.
    Then fate intervened, as tends to happen in history and will happen often in mine, and did so disguised as a foreigner, as a man-fromelsewhere. (Which increased the fears of the Spiritualists. Enclosed as they were on an inaccessible plateau, ten days’ travel away from the Caribbean coast—which in winter could be double—Father Valenzuela’s followers had ensconced themselves in the condition of blinkered horses, and all that came from outside seemed to them worthy of meticulous suspicion.) During those days my father was seen meeting a man who was not from the city. They were seen coming out of the Observatory, or going together to the Commission for Cleanliness and Sanitation, or even entering my grandparents’ house to hold secret conversations among the nettles of the patio, far from the servants. But the servants, two widowed freedwomen and their adolescent children, had arts my father could not have anticipated, and so the street, and then the block, and then the neighborhood, began to find out that the man was tongue-tied when he spoke (by Beelzebub, said Valenzuela), that he was the owner of a train, and that he had come to sell to the University of Bogotá as many dead Chinamen as it wanted to buy.
    “If the local dead are forbidden,” my father was heard to say, “then foreign dead will have to be used. If Christian dead are forbidden, we’ll have to avail ourselves of others.”
    And that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the Old Spiritualism.
    Among the suspicious was Presbyter Echavarría, of the Santo Tomás Church, a younger man than Valenzuela and more, yes, much more energetic.
     
    A nd the foreigner?
    The man from elsewhere?
    Some words on that character or, rather, some clarifications. He was not actually tongue-tied but spoke Spanish with a Boston accent; he was not the owner of a train but the representative of the Panama Railroad Company, and he did not come to sell dead Chinamen to the university but rather . . . Well, all right: he did come to sell dead Chinamen to the university, or at least that was one of his various missions as ambassador in the capital. Need I state the obvious? His mission was a success. My father and the Materialists had found themselves with their backs against the wall, or rather the opposing side had pushed them there; they were desperate, of course, because this was more than a debate in the press: it was a fundamental battle in the long struggle of Light against Darkness. The appearance of the man from the Company—Clarence was his name, and he was the son of Protestants—was providential. The arrangement did not come about immediately: a number of letters, a number of authorizations, a number of incentives (Valenzuela said bribes) were needed, but in July, there arrived from