Little Caesar

by Tommy Wieringa

  Darkness still. A sliver of moon, light clouds. I’m much too early, no buses leave before nine. I eat breakfast at the terminal. Mr. Chen fries banana-and-honey pancakes for me, he says, ‘El Real is just like Macondo. Why do you want to go there? Nothing but wilderness. I was born there, but I haven’t been back in twenty years. Not my kind of place.’

  A black woman slides up to the counter, moaning and sputtering. Shopping bags everywhere, her broad lap is covered with them.

  ‘You’re going to Darién? Oh my God! Are you sure? The Indians there eat people! I’ll keep you in my prayers. But right now I could use a soda.’

  The bus stops at a filling station, men are rocking their cars back and forth to get more gas into the tanks. As the day wears on, the thinking stops. You become a sack of flour, a bale of cloth, you wait for them to come and unload you. Trees are dropping big, brown leaves.

  The Policía Nacional at Caňazas, all two of them, make me get off the bus. In their little office they jot down the information from my passport. Flipping the pages, turning it sideways, peering at stamps. I know just enough Spanish to get by.’

  ‘What is your destination?’

  ‘Yaviza.’

  ‘That’s off limits. You cannot go to Yaviza without permission from the ministry.’

  ‘So I’m going to Metetí.’

  ‘Okay, that’s fine.’

  Trucks laden with red logs for the civilized world behind us. Huge trunks stripped of their bark. A routed army, humiliated and sent on transport – a cloud of dust in its wake.

  At Agua Fria the asphalt stopped. People climbed off the bus. People vanished. The driver pointed at a waiting Toyota Hilux pickup with men sitting in the back. The truck pulled away. I ran after it, shouting, ‘Yaviza? Yaviza?’

  ‘Yaviza, si! ’ the men shouted back.

  They grabbed my suitcase and pulled me up onto the bed. Nodding, laughing: that was a close one, gringo. In the cab, the driver ties a bandana around his face to keep out the dust. We hold on tight, the truck jolts, slams into potholes and rolls up out of them again. Children with slingshots are walking along the road. Their fathers are carrying rifles. Indians with machetes, their hair stiff with dust. The end of another day. I wrap a T-shirt around my head. The men toss me an occasional, worried look, a stranger in their country. Nothing they are wearing or carrying is new. Around here, adapting means fading, becoming drab, wearing thin. It goes automatically, the heat and the humidity eat away at everything. It happens before you know it.

  The village at the end of the road. Yaviza. The last stretch driven by starlight. The moon wasn’t showing its face yet. Only one hotel, and I keep my suitcase closed to shut out the vermin. From now on, I vow, I will shake out my shoes every morning. (National Geographic Channel wisdom.)

  Across the dark river, the Chucunaque, the shadow deepens, a sheer wall of plant life; somewhere there, in that, is where he is. I stand on the wooden dock above the river, where the boats moor at high water. The water is low now, the pirogues are bobbing around at the bottom of the pilings. I hear the Indians mumbling down there. The feeling that the darkness is slowly inhaling, expanding. Its voice of countless insects singing clearly. The Indians are sitting in the dark, murmuring, in their long canoes along the bank. Voices kept small, like those of refugees. What are they talking about? The river races by without a sound, carrying the gleam of onyx. The light of the stars refracted in its ripples.

  Beneath a pair of glaring lights, dozens of men have gathered for the cockfight. An impromptu arena around a circle of sand, lined with wooden benches. They’re waiting for the second rooster. The first one is already in the ring, picking at the sand, nervous, worked up. His opponent is having the spurs tied on. It’s not a fair fight; the first cock is angrier, he leaps in the air aggressively and chops at the second one. His opponent gets slaughtered. After a few attacks he lies bleeding on his side, his head raised, watching fate descend on him.

  *

  A canoe is taking me to El Real. I sit on a crosspiece in the middle, the boat isn’t much more than two feet wide. Tito is at the helm, his wife and child with him. An old woman is sitting in the bow. Downstream goes easily enough, we barely need the motor. Close to the bank, a man in a little pirogue tosses out his net. Early-morning mist is hanging between the trees. In front of us, a dusky mountain ridge rises up above the jungle. He is beginning to make himself known. He was here. The trees remember him, the river’s memories float to the surface. Along the dark banks you can see how high the water reaches at times. The sun leaps up above the trees, is catapulted into the heavens. The old woman covers her head with a towel on which a map of Panama is printed, Darién covered by a giant toucan. The family behind me disappears beneath umbrellas. The occasional hut with palm-frond roof along the high banks. Astride the serpent’s back we go deeper, for that is how it is, we don’t go further, we go deeper and deeper. The Indians pay no attention to me. I fill the emptiness with thoughts. I ready the emptiness for his arrival. In which of his guises should I expect him? The father? The god-slayer? Will we recognize each other, sniff at each other, fangs bared like predators? Has he been waiting for me, will he welcome me as though it weren’t him, but me, who was lost?

  Ripples patter against the hull, my hand cuts through the water like a keel. The canoe turns, crossing the current for a moment, then moves up a narrow tributary. The water soon grows shallower, the old woman calls back to Tito to warn of obstacles. This is how El Real died; the river silted up, goods and people could no longer reach the town. Transport is possible only during the rainy season, when the water is high. A pallet across a brace of pirogues, the platform on which a car, a truck or a generator can be conveyed.

  The river grows ever shallower. The muddy bank is covered in a layer of algae, of a greenish hue I’ve never seen before. The old woman sounds the channel with a stick, the canoe scrapes bottom. Big white herons fly off, croaking. The woman spits into the rusty brown water. Sticking up out of the mud, close together, are straight stalks topped with a heart-shaped leaf. The sun blasts its flames in your face, my shirt is soaked, it’s like inhaling burning air. Stumps, amputated and deathly, block the way. The steaming forest on both sides, a tangle, a knot. Prismatic dragonflies chase each other above the mire. Now the women are pushing the canoe through the mud with long poles, Tito guns the motor. That is how it goes, meter by meter through the muck that belches forth its rotten breath. The jungle summons up abhorrence and enchantment, a greenhouse full of increase run amok. Ibises step calmly through the mud. The young woman climbs into the water to push. I take over her punting-pole, but soon we all have to leave the boat, all except for the child. They go barefooted, I keep my socks on. I sink deep into the mud. The Indians think that’s funny, they laugh. I’m afraid of the hard things I feel beneath my feet. Guerrilleros swallowed up by the mud? The bones of conquistadors? We push the canoe upstream in silence, slaves of the infant king. Huts on poles rise up along the shore, the shadows of human forms inside them. The thin smoke from smoldering fires. The forerunners of El Real. We guide the bow of the canoe towards the bank, where more and more dwellings huddle. Just before we leave the water I step on something sharp with my right foot, it cuts deeply into my heel. I climb onto the shore quickly, pull off my sock and see bright red blood welling up from the gash. Standing around a barrel, the Indians rinse away the mud. I hop over to it and wash my foot. A long, deep wound, I can see the meat beneath the colorless callus. They bring my suitcase ashore, I put on clean socks. Between houses on stilts and the walls of corrals I hobble into town.

  A few paved pathways lined with houses, here and there a shop, an open, horizontal shutter to provide shade, on display a smattering of toilet paper, insecticide, soft soap, sweets and canned food. When evening comes the shutters are lowered and locked. People point out to me El Nazareno, a wooden hotel on the main street with rooms on the top floor. The key is with the boy in the shop next door. I have the room facing the street. B
efore the window hangs a little red rag.

  At the edge of El Real I find a Red Cross post. A nurse looks at my foot but can’t do anything to help, it will have to heal by itself. She gives me a bottle of iodine, a roll of gauze and adhesive bandages. The prospect of delay depresses me; for the time being there is no way I can hike on through the jungle as planned. And so I go limping back to El Nazareno.

  In the days that followed I tried to find out about Schultz, about where he might be holed up. It had to be somewhere in the jungle around El Real, the research I’d done back in Europe had shown me that much. It was there, after the completion of Abgrund (completion – a strange word for something that had been actually made to disappear), that he had started on Titan; he had been able to summon up enough vital hatred for yet another act of destruction. To get there, though, I needed a guide. From the travelers’ handbook to Panama I had drawn the name of one man, Edmond Solano, who was apparently the best guide around. But when I asked the rangers at the Agencia Ambiental about him, the man talking to me mimed a pistol with thumb and forefinger, held it against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  I lay on my bed, tangled up in the rotations of the ceiling fan. It was dark outside, a powerful chirping rolled in over El Real from the surrounding forest. What I knew: five hundred years ago conquistadors had built an outpost here, along the banks of the Río Tuiro, to ward off the bandits who preyed on the gold kept upstream at Santa María. Even deeper into Darién, to the south, lay the Cana Valley, where the gold mines were. In Santa María the gold piled up until there was enough to warrant putting together an armada and taking it to Panama City.

  The bed sagged like a hammock, a drab, membrane-thin blanket was all I had over me. The temperature had barely dropped at all.

  Past the army post, a canopy under which drowsy soldiers lay on cots, was the office of the Agencia Ambiental. There I was given the cold shoulder. The rangers’ faces froze when Schultz’s name was mentioned. I limped back and forth, back and forth between the hotel and the settlement. The wooden houses stood on pilings of wood or cement, underneath them chickens pecked amid the garbage. In the shade of the palm and mango trees, men were training their roosters for the cockfights. With a rapid movement they would toss the bird to one side, to teach it to regain its footing quickly. They would lay their rooster on its back, to see how quickly it was back on its feet, again and again, dozens of times in a row. Then they staked the bird by one leg in the shade, a tin can of fresh water beside it. Sphinx-like old folks watched from porches. Screens at the windows, fans slicing the thick, hot air. I had taken the laces out of my shoe to give my foot more room. The blood pounded in my heel, I hopped along on the ball of my foot. The walking wounded.

  After a few days my hands began to swell and go numb, I was worried about infection. I spent the hottest part of the afternoons lying in my room; I could see it, I would have to be airlifted out to Panama City, delirious. My right hand amputated, the left one saved only in the nick of time. The foot would have to be treated for gangrene. In the water stains on the ceiling I saw deformed babies. My eyes slid lethargically over the details, a nail in a plank, little mounds of sawdust on the floor. The beams were eaten hollow, you could see the round entrance and exit holes. Some of the beams were nothing but a tube filled with crumbly sawdust, held together by the paint. If all the other noises were to stop, the vibrating zoom of insects, the crowing of roosters, all you would hear would be a close-set, uninterrupted gnawing. One day this room, this hotel, would be devoured whole.

  I dream of her, my living, sorrowful mother, she says, ‘You’re starting to look less like me all the time! Look at that . . .’

  ‘No! No! I look like you, here, see!’

  Like waking up bleeding. No mercy, godforsaken. My hands feel like they’re going to burst, they bob on the strings of my arms like Disney balloons. I miss her the way I used to miss her, at moments when I had hurt myself badly and all my childish soul became a scream of desolation, a scream for my mother who wasn’t there.

  I started asking passers-by whether they had heard of Schultz. An old man nodded earnestly and walked on. A woman began rattling away in Spanish. I tried to calm her; I had noticed that I could understand some things when people spoke slowly.

  ‘She says he was here,’ I heard a voice say in crystal-clear English.

  As though, after swinging the dial back and forth for a long time, you suddenly hit upon a radio channel with good reception.

  ‘You speak English!’ I said to the young man who had entered the conversation a bit aloofly, but not unwillingly. ‘Could you ask her what he was doing here? When he was here? Does he come here often?’

  The woman had seen him, she had heard stories, she couldn’t understand why the men of El Real hadn’t rushed out and chopped him to pieces with their machetes. Seňor Schultz had been drinking in the bar, he had turned the whole place upside down, everyone was drinking on his tab. They had started fighting, ever since then Jorge Valdez’s nose had pointed in a different direction from where he was headed. They had broken in to Pilar’s store to get more alcohol.

  ‘What was he doing here?’ I asked the young man.

  He interpreted for me patiently. The woman didn’t know why Schultz had come. She picked up her basket as though to move on.

  ‘One more question,’ I said excitedly. ‘When was he here? Did he come here often?’

  He had been here two or three times, the last time was long ago now. I was delighted, her eyes had seen him, it suddenly brought him closer than he had ever been before.

  The young man’s name was Aldair Macmillan, he was the first person I’d talked to in a long time.

  ‘Did you come to El Real to find that man?’ he asked.

  ‘That man. Yes. It’s not exactly easy.’

  ‘Almost nothing is, here.’

  ‘Shall we move over to the shade?’

  Beneath the luxuriant foliage of a mango tree I talked to Aldair Macmillan, who studied tropical forestry at Punta Culebra. Aldair was in El Real at the moment to visit his mother. I poured my relief out over him like cool water. Nothing in his replies made it seem as though he found anything strange about my dashing off to El Real in search of a man in the jungle.

  ‘I have three problems,’ I said. ‘I barely speak the language. I don’t know where he is exactly. And if I did know, I wouldn’t know how to get there. These are the things that are blocking my way, you understand?’

  I saw him squint, and hoped it wasn’t skepticism.

  ‘Problems, problems,’ he said.

  ‘Problems, that’s right.’

  ‘I could ask around for you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘To see if there’s someone . . .’

  ‘Someone?’

  ‘Who could help. I could . . .’

  ‘Oh, that would be fantastic!’

  A few minutes later he had disappeared among the houses. I had forgotten to say where he could find me.

  The day began with a thousand cock crows. I dripped iodine into the wound, which was closing up quickly now. A pretty black girl carrying an umbrella drifted through the streets, holding a sheet of stationery on which one could enter one’s name for the local lottery. The prize was a Geneva wristwatch. I put my name down; I wanted this to be a lucky day.

  The jungle began directly behind the last row of houses. Protruding from the greenery were the blunt noses of three Dodge trucks, overrun by vines, their windows misted over with moss. Before long they would be completely swallowed up by the undergrowth. At the little store I bought a roll of toilet paper, batteries and a bar of soap. The old man groaned as he counted out my change. Aldair Macmillan and I didn’t cross paths again till late in the afternoon. I was eating chicken and rice at a makeshift restaurant, three plastic tables outside, beneath a pergola of flowers. My table was beside the brown creek, where a little Emberá boy was moaning as he emptied his bowels. Along the banks lay the dark trunks from which pirogues were
carved. The stilt-houses were closed off only by one or two walls, I wondered whether Indians said things like have you ever seen a mess like the neighbors’ place? Then, suddenly he was standing beside my table: Aldair Macmillan.

  ‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to find you.’

  He nodded towards the black woman behind the low door to the charred kitchen.

  ‘She’s my mother. Are you enjoying your food?’

  ‘It’s very good. Your mother’s a good cook.’

  Aldair nodded contentedly.

  ‘I grew up without a father,’ he said, ‘but my mother’s cooking brought a lot of fathers to this table.’

  The backdrop to our conversation consisted of a black woman pounding grain on the muddy riverbank. The pestle pounded dully against the hollowed log. Africa, carried forward in a dying settlement in the jungles of Panama.

  ‘I found someone who can solve two of those problems for you,’ Aldair said. ‘There’s a man, his name is Ché Ibarra, who knows how to find the man you’re looking for. He knows the way through the jungle. Unfortunately, he only speaks Spanish and a few lines of German. He’s a communist. He listens to Mozart all day long. Do you like Mozart?’

  ‘Sometimes he moves me, sometimes I think he’s an overrated Alpine composer.’

  ‘Then it’s even more of a pity that you won’t be able to talk to Ché Ibarra.’

  ‘So he really knows where Schultz is?’

  ‘He says he’s guided shipments of material there.’

  The woman on the bank shoveled the grain into a wooden bowl, raised her arm and let the grain run back into the mortar, the chaff blew away. I put a few dollars on the table and we were off, in search of the man who could say the magic words and untangle the jungle’s web.