The Secret History of Costaguana Read Free Page B

Honda, and before that from Barranquilla, and before that from the brand-new city of Colón, founded only a few months earlier, fifteen barrels full of ice. In each one came a Chinese coolie doubled over and recently deceased from dysentery or malaria, or even cholera, which in Bogotá was now a thing of the past. Many other nameless cadavers were leaving Panama for many other destinations, and this would continue to happen until the railway works came out the other side of the swamp they were in at the time, until they reached some land where it would be possible to build a cemetery able to withstand the ravages of the climate until Judgment Day.
    And the dead Chinamen had a story to tell. Calm yourself, Eloísa dear: this is not one of those books where the dead speak, or where beautiful women ascend to the sky, or priests rise above the ground after drinking a steaming potion. But I hope I’ll be granted some license, and I hope it’ll not be just this once. The university paid an undisclosed sum for the dead Chinamen, but according to some it was not more than three pesos per corpse; in other words, a seamstress could buy herself a cadaver with three months’ work. Soon young surgeons were able to sink their scalpels into the yellow skin; and lying there, cold and pale, launched on a race against their own rate of decomposition, the Chinese workers began to speak of the Panama railroad. They said things that everyone now knows, but which in those days were fresh pieces of news for the great majority of the thirty thousand inhabitants of the capital. The scene now begins to move northward (in space) and recede a few years (in time). And thus, without any other tricks than my own sovereignty over this tale, we arrive at Coloma, California. The year is 1848. More precisely, it is January 24. The carpenter James Marshall has traveled the long and winding trail from New Jersey to conquer the world’s frontier and build a saw mill there. While excavating, he notices that something sparkles in the earth.
    And the world goes mad. All of a sudden, the east coast of the United States realizes that the Route to the Gold goes through that obscure isthmus, province of that obscure country that is always changing its name, that mass of murderous jungle whose particular blessing is being the narrowest point of Central America. A year has not yet passed and the Falcon steamship is approaching the Panamanian Limón Bay, solemnly entering the mouth of the Panamanian Chagres River, carrying hundreds of Gringos who clatter pans and rifles and pickaxes every time they move like mobile orchestras and ask loudly where the hell the Pacific is. Some guess; of these, there are those who arrive at their destination. But others fall by the wayside, killed by fever—not gold fever, but the other one—beside the dead mules, dead men and mules back to back in the green river mud, defeated by the heat of those swamps where the trees do not permit the light to pass through. This is how it is: this corrected version of El Dorado, this Gold Trail in the process of being opened, is a place where the sun does not exist, where the heat wilts bodies, where one waves a finger through the air and the finger ends up soaking wet as if it had just come out of the river. This place is hell, but it is a watery hell. And meanwhile the gold calls, and some way must be found to cross hell. I take in the whole country in a single glance: at the same time as my father is calling for the expulsion of the Jesuits in Bogotá, in the Panamanian jungle step by step, sleeper by sleeper, dead worker by dead worker, the miracle of the railroad begins to make its way.
    And the fifteen Chinese coolies who later rest on the long dissection tables at the University of Bogotá, after having taught a distracted trainee the location of the liver and the length of the large intestine, those fifteen Chinamen who now begin to develop black stains on their backs (if they are faceup) or