She rooted through the change bowl on top of the refrigerator and handed me a few balboas. She held my shoulders with her hands and leaned to kiss me on the cheek.
“Stop,” I told her, squirming away.
“You think you’re such a man,” she said, shaking her head. “Okay. You’ll go to the Supermarket Rey and then come straight back.”
I promised her I would.
The dogs next door barked from behind their fence as I walked by. “What do you know?” I asked them, and growled in return. I walked up our street—rows of houses with laundry strung out between them, pink paint peeling from the walls, red scalloped roofs—and stuffed the coins into my sneakers. We didn’t live in a poor area, but we weren’t exactly middle class, either. A few kilometers from here lived people who owned Mercedes with tinted windows and their own swimming pools. I had seen those houses, looked longingly through the gates at the ends of their driveways at the children jumping on big trampolines and playing T-ball on their sprawling lawns, but it was like watching a movie—something unreal and remote, some sort of fantasy I would never know.
We lived in the house that everyone in my father’s family back to my great-grandparents had occupied. Strangely, not one of us had ever legitimately owned it. We had always rented it. The owners had changed over the years, but we—the Velasco family—had remained constant. It wasn’t anything grand. There was only one room upstairs—an office filled with dusty suitcases and stacks of papers—and three bedrooms total: one for my parents, one for Reina and Tito, and one for me. The arched front door opened onto the living room, where a couch and matching loveseat were pushed against the walls and a small television rested atop an old metal vanity table. The kitchen was small, lined with wooden cabinets painted turquoise and crowded by a plastic-topped metal table in the center of it all. The only other space was a small laundry room—it used to be a maid’s room but we used it for laundry—tucked off to the side of the hallway. Besides a washing machine, it housed a minirefrigerator where my mother kept bowls of Jell-0 she ate when she wanted a snack, and a full-size ironing board that cut through the middle of the room. My mother’s main effort at decorating had been to hang a cross, with palms from Palm Sunday tucked behind, in every room. Once, when I was in grade school and all my friends and I had decided that religion was stupid, I took the cross off my wall and threw it in the bottom of my hamper. When I came home from school that day, there was a band of crosses hung all at the same height around my room. My mother never said a word, but I knew it had been her. It was her way.
I wasn’t wearing any socks and the coins were sticking to my feet. It was hot, though not more so than usual. The air was soupy and it smelled alternately of salt water and garbage. People sat on their patios and watched me walk past. A rooster pecked at a piece of concrete at the base of a bent section of fence that used to encircle a park here. Everything seemed fairly calm. I squinted against the sun as I made my way up the gravely road to where I would have to cross for the supermarket, about half a kilometer away.
Then I saw them: two lime trees in a neighbor’s yard. They weren’t more than ten meters from me. I snuck into the yard and over to the trees, though only a few of the limes on either one were ripe. I plucked the first four good ones I saw, waxy and dimpled, holding up the hem of my shirt to make a pouch to hold them. I had turned to leave when I heard a voice. I froze. I thought it was the owner of the house. But the voice was faint and it was clearly not directed at me. I took a step back and looked around. Across the street from the house was a laundromat, one my mother always said was too expensive, and behind that, an alley. There I could see, if I craned my neck, two men—about twenty years old, I guessed—standing beside a card table, arguing. It was difficult to hear what they said. I stood still and watched. One of the men—he had a rag slung over his shoulder—opened a trunk under the table and pulled out a handgun. He aimed it first at the other man and then turned and aimed it at various points along an imaginary arc. When he came to an angle where I thought he could see me, I ran. I dropped one lime, and the coins were pressing into my foot, but I ran all the way home, the fruit bouncing in my shirt.
This is what was going on: a certain lawlessness to everything. General Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno, as I had seen him referred to in textbooks over the years, came to power in 1983 as commander of our armed forces. His popular nickname, because of his horrible, acne-scarred face, was Cara de Piña. My father said it was rude to call someone pineapple face, but I thought it was funny. No one really knew what to make of Noriega. Since the beginning of his rise to power there had been rumors about him: I’d heard that he’d planted the bomb that killed our former military leader, Omar Torrijos, causing his airplane to crash; that he was being paid off by the CIA in the United States to do their bidding; that he slept on a bed made from sacks of cocaine; that he smoked cigars with Fidel Castro; that he played cards with the shah of Iran. Last year, supposedly, he was fired by President Delvalle, but instead of leaving, Noriega had the National Assembly oust Delvalle. Then things started getting out of control. In March last year, the banks in Panama closed and the U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, forced all kinds of economic sanctions on our country. No money was moving in or out. Earlier this year, the U.S. troops started occupying the city in force, more and more of them all the time. People here went crazy. We all knew an invasion was coming. It seemed like an excuse to act up. Kids assembled homemade bombs and Molotov cocktails and tossed them at parked cars. People drove through the streets at night, hanging out their windows and honking at the U.S. tanks. Noriega was essentially handing out guns for free by this point, too, trying to build up a civilian army since everyone knew, if the United States really did invade, our own Panamanian Defense Force would have no fighting chance. I would have bet my life on the fact that those guys in the alley got their gun because of Noriega’s directive.
I was panting by the time I got home. I waited for a few minutes on the patio, catching my breath before I went inside. I couldn’t believe I had run. You would have thought I’d be used to the state of things by now. Not everyone was participating in the mayhem, though, not even most people. Just enough so that the city felt like it was skidding out of control. And just enough so that it was still surprising to see it actually happening before your eyes.
After a few more minutes of collecting myself—wiping the sweat from my brow, smoothing out the area where my shirt had been stretched from the weight of the limes—I finally walked inside.
“Ramón!” my father said. He clapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth and shrugged at me, his hands in the air.
“Your father can hardly speak because he hasn’t been able to drink anything without his limes and his mouth is too dry,” my mother explained.
“Very funny, Papi,” I said. I placed the limes in a row on the table in front of him.
My mother cut one and poured him some water.
Then she said, almost in passing, “These aren’t from the supermarket, Ramón.”
“A vendor on the street,” I told her. It was the first thing I could think of
“Where?” she asked, and I knew it was a bad idea to keep up the lie because my mother’s next move would be to drag me out to the street with her and have me show her the vendor.
But I said, “He was a traveling vendor. He had his limes in a wheelbarrow.”
“And which direction was he headed?” my mother asked.
My father chuckled from his chair and I knew I might as well give up. I was about to apologize when my mother said, “This Sunday. You’ll go to church with me.”
I hated church. At the one my mother attended, they still said Mass in Latin, so I always sat there for an hour, not understanding anything. I hated the smell of the old wood and incense as soon as I walked in. I hated the women with their paper fans, fluttering them constantly. I hated seeing everyone afterward, standing around, talking, and no one ever talking to my mother, who didn’t have a sin
gle friend that I knew of She would smile at everyone and they would smile back and occasionally the priest would shake her hand, touch her elbow, and gaze warmly at her as priests do, and then she would shuffle me out and we would walk back home.
“But Papi doesn’t go,” I protested.
She looked at me with an unwavering gaze, though the corners of her mouth betrayed a tiny grin. “Papi doesn’t steal limes, either,” she said.
NOVEMBER 15, 1989
It was Tito’s birthday. My father was buying a cake. Tito and Reina were both at work—Tito on the streets, holding bright orange flags to wave the cars around construction zones and Reina typing classifieds at a newspaper office. My father, a medical technician, had taken the afternoon off My mother and I were in the kitchen. The radio was on, the light rumble of music fighting through the static. When my father walked in the house, he was balancing a huge white box with a cellophane top in his arms. I was sitting at the table, pulling the rinds off a pile of oranges.
“What kind did you get?” my mother wanted to know, without turning to face him. She was peeling potatoes over the sink, thin ribbons of brown skin flying off and sticking to the sides of the basin.
“Tres leches,” he said, smiling proudly, as if he had made it himself He put the cake down on the table in front of me. Happy Birthday Tito was scripted in bright blue gel.
“Things seem quiet today,” he said, walking toward my mother. She didn’t react. He slid his arms around her waist from behind her. “Turn on the TV. You’ll see. They’re talking about road construction.”
“I would rather just listen,” my mother said, turning a potato in her hand, stripping it clean. “It’s less of a show.”
Ever since talk of the invasion started, my mother had sworn off the television. Even her telenovelas. She didn’t want the news breaking in, showing more images that would terrify her. It had taken her a whole week to even look at my aunt again after the bomb incident. She had vigorously resisted going anywhere near the hospital. When Reina was discharged and sent back to the house, she was under instructions from the doctor to stay in bed for at least another week. My mother brought her chicken broth with rice for lunch and told her what the lottery numbers were that day but aside from that, she did her best to occupy herself in other rooms of the house. Like a dog, Reina could sense my mother’s fear. On more than a few occasions, I heard her asking my mother to change the gauze wraps because, she claimed, it was so exhausting to do it herself Or, I heard her taunting, “Mariella, I’ll just give you a peek.” I conjured images of my aunt pulling back the sheet and raising the hem of her nightgown little by little as she said this. Often during that week my mother would emerge from Reina’s room visibly flustered and hurry down the long hallway to another area of the house. There was something about actually seeing evidence of the destruction occurring throughout the city that was too painful for her to bear.
“How about you, Ramón?” my father said, ruffling my hair as I ducked out from under his hand. “You could probably go outside today.”
I had already been outside with Ubi. We had poked at frogs all morning among the plants along the side of my house. Ubi had informed me that the Panama golden frog didn’t have eardrums. He learned that in his encyclopedia.
“I don’t feel like it,” I told my father.
“Since when? It’s a beautiful day for once. Go out. Enjoy. The party won’t start for another two hours.”
I shrugged. My nail punctured the fruit and sent a squirt of orange juice into the air. I looked at it angrily, as though it had embarrassed me when I was trying to appear cool. My father smiled and turned to pull a tin of soda crackers from the cabinet.
“I heard today that they shut down Café Esme,” I announced. I saw my mother wince. “Not because of violence,” I added quickly. She smiled at me gratefully.
“Why?” my father asked.
“To make room for something else, I guess.”
“It’s crazy,” my mother said, leaning into the tile counter with her hip, “thinking of construction at a time like this.”
“I appreciate it,” my father said as he sat down at the table. “It’s forward-thinking. Optimistic. This will be a better country soon. You wait.”
No one said anything after that. It was as if we were waiting for it to change right then, before our eyes.
For the birthday dinner my mother prepared tamales, potato salad, a tray of empanaditas, and slices of pink pork garnished with orange wedges. My father’s half sister, Flor, took a taxi from her apartment to join us, and some guys from Tito’s construction crew came over as well. Everyone sat heavily on the couches and on the kitchen chairs placed around the living room. Two fans whirred from the corners but the heat that night was vicious. The fans were in a losing battle. The heat was like something you had to struggle through in order to move. It was easier to surrender and remain as still as possible. The front door and windows were open and what little breeze blew through, rustling the curtains, smelled of salt water from the bay. Far off, there were vague sounds—rocks tumbling, a car backfiring—the sounds of a city.
Everyone had a drink in his or her hand, the glasses wrapped in napkins to soak up the perspiration. My job was to walk through the living room and offer food to people. I made a few rounds, my mother handing me something new each time I re-entered the kitchen, but no one was really taking anything. Finally she told me just to wait for a while. She looked mildly dejected when she said it.
“It’s just too hot,” I told her, plopping myself down at the table.
“I guess so,” she said, wiping a hand across her forehead and examining it. “I’m sweating a little.”
In the living room, my father put on a cassette tape. It was his favorite musician, Cachao. Tito started telling a story—who knew what about—and suddenly they were all laughing. My father, whenever he laughed especially hard, made a flicking motion with his wrist that snapped his fingers against one another and created a loud pop. His face bloomed pink under his olive skin and he squeezed his eyes shut. I always loved seeing him like that. It seemed like something close to pure happiness.
My father called out to my mother and told her to join them.
Her gaze lingered on the food spread out on the table. “Try again with these in another minute,” she told me before she walked to the other room.
It was the middle of November. In a month, I would be out of school for the summer break. Since the coup attempts had started back in October, I hadn’t been to school much anyway. The schools weren’t officially closed, but with everything that was going on my mother would rather me not make the trek there. The teachers and administrators seemed to understand. For a time, Ubi kept going every day but eventually he reported that they weren’t really doing schoolwork anymore. Everyone was too distracted. Geometry and History had turned into opportunities for the teachers to open the class up to discussion about what was going on. The teachers liked to say that even though it hadn’t been labeled as such, we were a country at war. They were trying, I suppose, to impress some gravity upon the students who still showed up. That so many desks were empty each day, though, seemed to me a more powerful indication of the seriousness of the situation.
Finally, Ubi stopped going to school, too, when there was no longer any point. We wandered to the outskirts of the city during the day because it seemed safer than downtown. Once, we took a bus out to where the indios lived and sat all day watching them piece together their molas. It was Ubi’s idea. For research, he said. He had an intellectual curiosity that I have never, to this day, seen in anyone else. By the end of the day, two of the indio women invited Ubi back so that he could try making a small mola himself We never returned, though, because both of our mothers—angry and worried—were waiting at my house when we got back to the city. It was close to dusk by then and they had been going out of their heads all day wondering where we could be, what could have happened to us. We tried to explain, but it didn’t matter. I
t wasn’t the time to be taking buses outside of the city. It wasn’t the time to be doing much of anything, it seemed, except waiting to see what would happen next.
After a few minutes, I grabbed the tray of pork along with a box of toothpicks and walked around the room again. People took the food this time, piercing individual slices with a toothpick and sliding them onto a napkin. They thanked me as I moved to the next person. My Tía Flor pushed a dollar bill into my shirt pocket.
“Make it last,” she whispered, and I nodded. I was used to this. Flor had never felt like part of the family so she was always the one complimenting my mother, giving me money, trying too hard. Years later, my mother would tell me that Flor was the result of an affair my father’s father had with the wife of an American army officer stationed at the canal. It was a mess when the story surfaced. The army wife denied it until it was clear, from the appearance of the baby, that what her husband had accused her of was true. She handed Flor over almost immediately, telling my grandfather he was responsible for her. My grandfather, who didn’t want to have to tell my grandmother about the affair, sent Flor to an orphanage. Over the following years, though, his conscience ate at him enough that he finally confessed everything. My grandmother, while not known as a forgiving person nor one to condone betrayal in any way, nonetheless insisted they raise Flor themselves. At least she was compassionate. And although they loved her the best they could, my mother told me, Flor never forgot the rejection in the beginning. Perhaps, my mother speculated, she was afraid of suffering that kind of rejection again.
I went back into the kitchen to start with the tamales. When I came out, my parents were dancing. It wasn’t often that my father could convince my mother to dance but they were locked together, the hem of my mother’s pale green dress swaying softly below her knees as she moved. My father had one hand pressed to the small of her back and the other held high in the air, clasping hers. They traveled the circles of the mambo with ease. One of the construction guys clapped in rhythm and everybody smiled.
Come Together, Fall Apart Page 15