The Secret History of Costaguana Read Online Free PDF Page B

him a good dressing-down, the Corporal forgets himself and responds with insolence, and General Melo sees no better punishment than drawing his sword then and there and cutting his throat in one slash. Great scandal in Bogotá society; great condemnations of militarism and violence. The public prosecutor accuses; the judge is on the point of issuing an arrest warrant against the accused. Melo thinks, with impeccable reasoning: the best defense is not just a good offense, it’s dictatorship. He had the army of war veterans under his command, and he put it to use in his service. Who could blame him?
    Well now, I admit, this is no more than a cheap joke, typical gossip—our national sport—but caveat emptor, and I tell it anyway. It is true that in some versions Corporal Quirós arrives late back to the barracks after finding himself involved in a street brawl and is already injured when he runs into Melo; in others, Quirós finds out about the accusations against the General and from his death bed absolves him of all responsibility. (Isn’t that version pretty? It has all that master-and-disciple, mentor-and-protégé mystery. It is gentlemanly, and my father was no doubt fond of it.) But beyond these various explanations, one single thing is irrefutable: General Melo, with his cowlick and double-chinned Mona Lisa face, was the instrument that history used to split its sides laughing at the fate of our young republics, those badly finished inventions for which no patent could be taken out. My father had killed someone, but that fact would pass into nonexistence when another man, to avoid his own indictment as a common criminal, decided to take by force those things of which every Colombian speaks with pride: Liberty, Democracy, and the Institutions. And the Angel of History, sitting in the stalls in his Phrygian cap, burst out laughing so hard he fell off his seat.
    Readers of the Jury: I do not know who first compared history to the theater (that distinction does not belong to me), but one thing is sure: that lucid soul was not aware of the tragicomic nature of our Colombian scenario, created by mediocre dramatists, fabricated by sloppy set designers, produced by unscrupulous impresarios. Colombia is a play in five acts that someone tried to write in classical verse but that came out composed of the most vulgar prose, performed by actors with exaggerated gestures and terrible diction. . . . Well, I return now to that small theater (I shall do so often) and return to my scene: doors and balconies barred, the streets near the Palace of Government transformed into a ghost town. No one heard the shot that thundered between the cold stone walls, no one saw my father leave Santo Tomás Church, no one saw him slip like a shadow through the streets to his home, no one saw him arrive so late that night with a still-warm pistol in his pocket. The small incident had been obliterated by the Big Event: the minuscule death of some anonymous resident of the Egipto neighborhood, by the Superlative Deaths that are the patrimony of Our Lady War. But I have said before that my father did nothing but change enemies, and that’s how it was: once his ecclesiastic pursuer was eliminated, my father found himself pursued by the military. In the new Bogotá of Melo and his allies, radicals like my father were feared for their formidable capacity for disorder—they had not specialized in revolutions and political riots in vain—and twenty-four hours hadn’t yet passed since the man in the poncho, or rather his corpse, had collapsed in Santo Tomás Church, when arrests began all over the city. The radicals, university students or members of Congress, received armed and not particularly pleasant visits from Melo’s men; the cells filled up; several leaders were already fearing for their lives.
    My father did not hear this news from his comrades. A lieutenant of the seditious army arrived at his house in the middle of the night and woke him up by