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was still lost to him. He would never return to live in it, he’d tell them, for his life there seemed finished, as if it belonged to another man. In Bogotá he had killed, in Bogotá he had hidden, nothing remained for him in Bogotá. But they wouldn’t understand, of course, and those who did understand would refuse to believe him or try to convince him otherwise with phrases like the city of your forefathers or of your struggles or the city where you were born , and he would have to show them, as irrefutable and incontrovertible proof of his new destiny, the hand of the dead Chinaman, the index finger that always points, as if by magic, toward the province of Panama.

II
    The Revelations of Antonia de Narváez
    At nine in the morning on December 17, while in Bogotá General Melo’s life was spared, in the river port of Honda my father boarded an English steamer called the Isabel , belonging to the John Dixon Powles Company, which plied the route from the interior to the Caribbean on a regular basis. Eight days later, having spent Christmas Eve on board, he arrived in Colón, the Panamanian port not yet three years old but already a member of the Schizophrenic Places Club. The founders had elected to baptize the city with the Spanish surname of Don Christopher Columbus, the disoriented Genoese sailor who by pure chance bumped into a Caribbean island and nevertheless passed into history as the discoverer of the continent; but the Gringos who were constructing the railroad did not read the ordinance, or perhaps they read it but didn’t understand it—their Spanish, surely, was not as good as they thought—and ended up conferring their own name upon the city: Aspinwall. Whereupon Colón became Colón for Colombians and Aspinwall for the Gringos, and Colón-Aspinwall for the rest of the world (the spirit of conciliation has never been lacking in Latin America). And it was in this embryonic, ambiguous city, this city with no past, that Miguel Altamirano arrived.
    But before telling of his arrival and all that happened in consequence, I should like and must speak of a couple without whose assistance, I can assure you, I would not be what I am. And I say this, as you’ll see, literally.
    Sometime around 1835, the engineer William Beckman (New Orleans, 1801–Honda, 1855) had gone up the Magdalena River on a private, profit-seeking mission, and months later founded a company of boats and barges for the commercial exploitation of the region. He soon became a daily spectacle for the ports’ inhabitants: blond, almost albino, Beckman filled a big dugout with ten tons of merchandise, covered the wooden cases with ox hides and slept on top of them, beneath a little canopy of palm leaves on which his skin and therefore his life depended, and went up and down the river like that, from Honda to Buenavista, from Nare to Puerto Berrio. After five years of considerable success, during which he had come to dominate the coffee and cacao trade between the provinces along the river, Beckman (true to his adventurer’s nature, after all) decided to invest his not terribly abundant riches in the risky venture of Don Francisco Montoya, who was then in England commissioning a steamer adapted to the Magdalena River. The Union , built in the Royal Shipyards, came up the river in January 1842 as far as La Dorada, six leagues from Honda, and was received by mayors and military officers with honors a minister would envy. She was filled with cases of tobacco—“Enough to get all of the United Kingdom addicted,” Beckman would comment recalling those years—and sailed without incident to the mouth of the Miel River . . . where that English steamer, just like all the rest of the characters in this book, had her encounter with the ever impertinent (tedious, meddlesome) Angel of History. Beckman wasn’t even aware that the civil war of the day (“Is it another or the same one?” he asked) had come that far; but he had to bow to the evidence, for