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in a matter of hours the Union had become embroiled in combat with boats of vague political allegiances, a cannonball had broken the boilers, and dozens of tons of tobacco, as well as all the engineer’s capital, sank without ever knowing the reasons for the attack.
    I said they sank. Not exactly: the Union almost reached the riverbank after the cannon blast, and did not sink entirely. For years, her two chimneys were visible to passengers on the river, breaking the yellow waters like lost Easter Island statues, like sophisticated wooden menhirs. My father definitely saw them; I saw them when my turn came . . . and Engineer Beckman saw them and would continue to see them with some frequency, for he never returned to New Orleans. By the time of the semi-sinking, he had already fallen in love, had already asked for that hand—which for him did not indicate travels, but stillness—and would marry in the days immediately following his bankruptcy, offering his bride a cheap honeymoon on the opposite bank of the river. Great disappointment on the part of the young lady’s (good) family, bogotános of limited means and boundless aspirations, social climbers who would have put any Rastignac to shame, who customarily spent long periods in their hacienda in Honda and had thought themselves so fortunate when that rich Gringo had laid those pale-browed blue eyes on the rebellious daughter of the house. And who was the lucky girl? A twenty-year-old called Antonia de Narváez, amateur toreador in the Santo Patrón running of the bulls, occasional gambler, and steadfast cynic.
    What do we know of Antonia de Narváez? That she had wanted to travel to Paris, but not to meet Flora Tristán, which she thought would be a waste of time, but to read de Sade in the original. That she had made herself briefly famous in the salons of the capital for publicly disparaging the memory of Policarpa Salavarrieta (“Dying for the country is for people with nothing better to do,” she’d said). That she had used what little influence her family had to get inside the Palace of Government, which conceded her a permit and threw her out after ten minutes, when she asked the Bishop where the famous bed was, the one where Manuela Sáenz, the most celebrated mistress in Colombian history, had screwed the Liberator.
    Readers of the Jury: I can hear your perplexity from here, and am prepared to alleviate it. Would you tolerate a brief review of that fundamental historic moment? Doña Manuela Sáenz, from Quito originally, had left her legitimate (and oh-so-boring) husband, a certain James or Jaime Thorne; in 1822, the Liberator Simón Bolívar makes his triumphant entrance into Quito; shortly thereafter, ditto with Manuela. We are dealing with an extraordinary woman: she is skillful on horseback and handles weapons magnificently; as Bolívar is able to see for himself during the exploits of independence, Manuela rides as well as she shoots. Pessimistic in view of social condemnation, Bolívar writes to her: “Nothing in the world can unite us under the auspices of innocence and honor.” Manuela responds by arriving unannounced at his house and showing him, with a few thrusts of her hips, just what she thinks of those auspices. And on September 25, 1828, while the Liberator and his Libertadora take multiple mutual liberties in the presidential bed of that incipient Colombia, a group of envious conspirators—generals no longer young whose wives neither ride nor shoot—decide that this coitus shall be interruptus: they attempt to assassinate Bolívar. With Manuela’s help, Simón leaps out of the window and escapes to hide under a bridge. So then, that was the notorious bed Antonia de Narváez wanted to see as if it were a relic, which, to be honest, perhaps it was.
    And in December 1854, the night my father celebrates with trout and brandy the victory of the democratic armies over the dictatorship of Melo, Antonia de Narváez tells this anecdote. As simple