Free The Secret History of Costaguana by Juan Gabriel Vásquez Page B

in several places? Don’t you know our relationship already forms part of history, and history is renowned for never bowing to the irksome obligation of plausibility?
    But now I must go back in time. I warn you now that further on I’ll move ahead again, and then back again, and so on alternately, successively, and stubbornly. (I’ll get fed up with this temporal navigation, but I don’t have too many options. How to remember without getting worn down by the past? To put it another way: How does a body manage to endure the weight of his memory?) Anyway, I’m going back.
     
    S hortly befo0re docking, young Korzeniowski avails himself of a moment of calm, he leans on the rail of the Saint-Antoine and allows his gaze to wander at random over the landscape. It is his third voyage to the Caribbean, but never before has he passed by the Gulf of Urabá, never has he seen the coastlines of the Isthmus. After passing the gulf, approaching Limón Bay, Korzeniowski distinguishes three uninhabited islands, three caymans half submerged in the water, enjoying the sun and pursuing any ray that pierces the veil of clouds at this time of year. Later he’ll ask and will be told: yes, the three islands, yes, they have names. They’ll tell him: the archipelago of the Mulatas. They’ll tell him: Great Mulata, Little Mulata, and Isla Hermosa. Or that, at least, is what he will remember years later, in London, when he tries to revive the details of that voyage. . . . And then he’ll wonder if his own memory has been faithful to him, if it hasn’t failed him, whether he really saw a ragged old palm tree on Little Mulata, whether someone actually told him there was a freshwater spring on Great Mulata issuing from the side of a ravine. The Saint-Antoine continues its approach to Limón Bay; night falls, and Korzeniowski senses that the play of light on the sea is starting to deceive his eyes, for Isla Hermosa appears to be little more than a flat, gray rock, smoking (or is it a mirage?) from the heat accumulated during the day. Then night swallows the earth, and eyes have appeared on the coast: the bonfires of the Cuna Indians are the only things visible from the ship, beacons that do not guide or help but confuse and frighten.
    I, too, saw the Cunas’ fires lighting up the night, of course, but let me say in a good loud voice: I saw nothing else. No islands, no palm trees, much less any steaming rocks. Because that night, the night of my arrival in Colón hours after young Korzeniowski arrived, a dense fog had fallen over the bay that only abated to give way to the most extraordinary downpour I had ever chanced to see up to that moment. The deck of the ship was lashed with harsh gusts of rain, and I swear I feared at some point, in my ignorance, that it would extinguish the boilers. As if that weren’t enough, there were so many ships taking up the few moorings in Colón, that the Selfridge could not dock, and we spent that night on board. Let us begin, readers, to put to rest a few tropical myths: it is not true that there are no mosquitoes far from land. Those of the Panama coast are able, to judge by what I saw that night, to cross entire bays to force incautious passengers to take shelter under their nets. In five words: it was an unbearable night.
    Dawn broke at last, at last the clouds of mosquitoes and the real clouds scattered, and the passengers and crew of the Selfridge spent the day on deck, taking the sun just like caimans or the Mulatas, waiting for the good news that they could dock. But night fell again, and the clouds returned, the real ones and the others; and the docks of Colón remained as full as a sailors’ brothel. The resurrection occurred on the third day. The sky had cleared miraculously, and in the cool night air (that luxury article) the Selfridge managed to find a bed in the brothel. Passengers and crew burst ashore like a downpour, and I set foot for the first time on the land of my maledictions.
    I came to