The Panama Portrait

by Stanley Ellin

  “I thought you were nominated for office by the Radical Party,” Ben said.

  “That happens to be its name. We’re not radical politically or socially. We just want the presidential palace to admit that the twentieth century has finally arrived.”

  “Dear friends and qualified voters,” said Santa Cruz, “Mr. Gil Alden-Aragone will now deliver a brief lecture on the value of an expanding middle class to the economy of the republic.”

  “There’s someone else who’d like to see an end to the festival, too,” said Salazar abruptly. “A visitor, no less.”

  “There is no need to discuss that,” said Blas. “We happen to have a visitor with us.”

  “I know it. And I can’t think of a more sincere compliment than to say he’s nothing like his countryman, thank God.”

  “Manners, Julio, manners,” said Taliaferro lightly.

  “My countryman?” said Ben. “Who?”

  “That painter,” said Blas. “The one we saw when we were at the gallery.”

  “David Chapin? What’s he got to do with the festival?”

  “Nothing at all, fortunately,” said Salazar. “But he seems to think that his opinions of it are terribly important. He wasn’t here a week when he had given them in detail to the papers.”

  “He was baited into it, Julio,” said Alden-Aragone. “You know the Port Buchanan Transcript as well as I do. And what the Transcript prints Monday, El Diario is going to print Tuesday.”

  “The trouble is,” Santa Cruz said apologetically to Ben, “we’re as provincial here as any Arkansas hillbilly. We’re not used to visiting celebrities. When one comes along, the first thing we do is try to whittle him down to size. I’m sure that if Chapin knew he was stepping on the national toes with his remarks about the festival he wouldn’t have opened his mouth.”

  “What did he say?”

  Santa Cruz shrugged. “Oh, he handed out the usual anti-vivisection line which is just what the Transcript wanted from him. For devious reasons of their own they’re violently anti-Yankee. So the next day they published his interview in one long column, and then in the column next to it they just printed the heading More To The Yankee Taste and under that some pictures of Hiroshima after the bomb and a couple of those Japanese girls who came to the States to have their faces repaired. It was the most obvious kind of provocation. You can imagine the public opinion of Chapin afterward.”

  “But why is the paper so anti-Yankee?” Ben said. “It seems to me that we have no influence here at all. And I’ve got reason to know.”

  “That’s the answer,” replied Alden-Aragone. “Outside of getting our vote at the U.N. you have no influence here, and the Party of the Republic intends to keep it that way. The Transcript happens to be their mouthpiece.”

  “And El Diario is the Spanish echo of the Transcript,” said Santa Cruz. “The only difference is that they like pictures of pretty girls. They printed that interview with Chapin, too, but all they had with it were pictures of his wife.”

  “Delectable woman,” said Taliaferro dreamily.

  “Delectable or not,” Ben said, “what are the chances of a different policy in the near future?”

  Alden-Aragone slowly shook his head. “Very small. If my party holds its own in the elections, it’ll still be a minority in the Chamber and Senate. And it may not even hold its own. The Fidelistas are working overtime to persuade people not to vote at all as some sort of protest, and that’s going to hurt us.”

  “Communists?”

  “Well, the party is outlawed here, but this bunch is Moscow-directed all right. And some socialists and Axoyac rabble-rousers and assorted nuisances. I know the spot you’re in, Ben. I wish I could be encouraging, but I can’t. And Chapin in his innocence hasn’t helped you any.”

  Ben silently cursed David Chapin, his innocence, and all his works. “What’s he doing here anyhow? What made him come to Santo Stefano in the first place?”

  “God knows,” said Taliaferro.

  “I doubt if Chapin does,” said Santa Cruz. “The story went around for awhile that he was running away from the police in the United States for some reason, but that was checked out with Hintze, your consular aide here, and it turned out to be a fairy tale. All we know is that he and his team suddenly appeared at the airport one day, lived at the Buchanan a while, and finally settled down in a place on one of those alleys off the Calle Contenta near the waterfront. Very mysterious, the whole thing. Maybe he’s seeking la vie bohème, Port Buchanan style.”

  “Is that where he’d find it?” Ben said. “Down there?”

  “What there is of it here,” said Santa Cruz. “Aside from the general run of paupers and Indians, that’s where you’ll find our local free spirits. They’ve got some coffee shops along the Calle Contenta where the nadaistas hang out.”

  “The night life of our city,” said Alden-Aragone. “You may as well know the truth,” he said to Ben. “Port Buchanan is a veritable hotbed of morality.”

  Salazar said, “Maybe that’s why the painter is here; he’s so highly moral. By the way, he’s supposed to give a talk at The Sun and Moon tonight, that café on the Plaza República. How about going down and asking him why he’s here?”

  “Not me,” said Taliaferro. “I’m a married man now. I’ve already had my six nights off this week.”

  “So am I and so did I,” said Santa Cruz, “but you can count me in. How about it, Gil?” he asked Alden-Aragone. “Want to make it a party and show Blas and our Yankee imperialist here the seamy side of life?”

  “Sure,” said Alden-Aragone. “I’ll even buy a round of coffee for the house and do some electioneering.”

  “I would rather not,” said Blas stiffly.

  “Oh, come on,” said Santa Cruz. “This isn’t Madame Sophie’s.”

  “I would rather not,” Blas said a little more loudly.

  “Then how about you?” Santa Cruz asked Ben. “After Gil gets finished electioneering, you can make a public plea for better international understanding.”

  “I’m willing to try,” said Ben.

  4

  When he got back to the hotel he found a message waiting. Mr. Victor Bambas-Quincy had called from Huanu Blanco, and would Mr. Smith call back as soon as possible? Sitting on the edge of his bed, a hand on the phone, Ben felt as he had that dire moment when O’Harragh had called him. It was quite possible that Bambas-Quincy would announce that he had been considering the matter of the contract and had decided to reject it. He stood to gain a comfortable profit, true, but the arrangements would jeopardize the Santo Stefano way of life, and he could not sacrifice the republic to his own selfish interests. Goodbye, Mr. Smith, and bon voyage.

  Fancies, as ever, proved to be more alarming than facts. On the phone Bambas-Quincy was the soul of graciousness in apologizing for his absence and explaining the reasons for it. He also hoped that Mr. Smith had not been bored these past days. Mr. Blas Miralanda had been instructed to see that he was properly entertained. Had he been?

  “Yes,” said Ben, “and I’m very grateful to him. And to you.”

  “No, no, it’s the least that could be done. However, I have now placed Mr. Adams, my manager, in charge of my business affairs, and tomorrow I return to Port Buchanan to be a proper host myself. You must come to dinner and meet my little family and some old friends. I will have my car pick you up at eight.”

  “No need to. I can get a cab here very easily.”

  “No, the car will be there at eight. Good-bye, Mr. Smith. Oh, yes, a dinner jacket, please. My mother will be present, and she appreciates these little formalities.”

  Ben put down the phone and considered what had just been said, word by word. The nuances of a business dealing may be so subtle as to be overlooked, yet may bear large significance. Take that reference to the dinner jacket. He had not brought one because Fred Burleson’s report had not suggested the need for one. Which could mean that Burleson, a man scrupulous about details, had not found an occasion fo
r one himself. Which could mean, in turn, that Ben Smith was being shown some special consideration that Fred Burleson had not been shown—certainly an encouraging sign. Or it could mean nothing at all. In the final analysis, the one thing sure beyond a doubt was that sometime before tomorrow afternoon a dinner jacket would have to be rented, and there is nothing to make a man more ill at ease in company than the knowledge that he is wearing a rented suit of uncertain fit.

  It was Santa Cruz who solved that problem. He and Salazar met Ben in front of the hotel late that evening and led him to a spectacular white Cadillac convertible with Alden-Aragone at the wheel. While they were weaving through the traffic of the Avenida Hermanos, Ben mentioned his invitation and its requirements.

  “Rent a suit?” said Santa Cruz. “You couldn’t do that now for love or money with festival time just starting. The undersecretaries and dishwashers at the embassies have picked the racks clean a week ago.”

  “Oh, fine,” said Ben. He measured Alden-Aragone with an appraising eye. “Gil, you’re about my size. Would you consider—”

  “Sorry,” said Alden-Aragone. “I couldn’t dream of a Radical dinner jacket being shown at a Party of the Republic dinner. Also, I don’t know why I should encourage you to be in that company yourself.”

  Santa Cruz laughed. “Stop tormenting the man, Gil. Tomorrow morning,” he told Ben, “you show up at my store on Paseo de James Monroe, and you’ll be fitted with the finest suit we have. It will be a gift to our good friend from the north.”

  “Oh, no, it won’t,” said Ben. “After all, my company’ll be glad to take care of the bill.”

  “In that case,” said Santa Cruz promptly, “the price will be ten percent higher than usual.”

  “And so much for our good friend from the north,” said Salazar.

  “Are all these family dinners so formal?” Ben asked. “I wasn’t warned about them in New York.”

  “Not all of them,” said Salazar. “At Victor’s it usually means that the old lady will condescend to show herself. That’s not too often nowadays. She’s usually up in the mountains.”

  “Yes, I know. Blas told me about her.”

  “Good or bad?” asked Santa Cruz.

  Ben considered this. “It’s hard to say. I did get the impression that he was a little bit afraid of her.”

  “La reina,” said Salazar. “She’s the queen and lets you know it. Remember when we were kids, Cris?”

  “Who could forget?” said Santa Cruz.

  “We used to spend a lot of time at the place there,” Salazar explained to Ben. “Jerome and his sisters had a magnificent play house in back of the estate, and we made up a club and used that as our headquarters. Out there we never saw the old lady, but on rainy days when we were in the big house she would suddenly show up and freeze us in our tracks. We’d be yelling our heads off over some game, then there she was standing in the doorway. Next second you could hear a pin drop. We were terrified of her.”

  “Not the girls,” said Santa Cruz.

  “Even the girls.”

  Alden-Aragone looked into the rear-view mirror and shook his head. “Gil’s right, Julio. The girls knew she adored them. They never minded her. It was the boys she despised.”

  “Did she make it that obvious?” said Ben.

  “She did,” said Alden-Aragone. “She’d look us up and down with her lip curling, and then she’d say to Luz and Elissa, ‘Must you spend your time with them?’ If that didn’t work, she’d sometimes try to bribe them away.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Santa Cruz, and raised his voice to a falsetto. “‘Come with me, my little girls. I have something pretty for you.’”

  “And Jerome?” said Ben.

  “He was lumped along with us,” Alden-Aragone said. “Just another dirty little boy.”

  “That’s surprising. I thought grandmothers doted on their grandsons. And with Jerome the only boy in the family—”

  “Oh, this one is more queen than grandmother,” said Salazar. “She’s like something left over from the Victorian age, the frostbitten embodiment of man-hating virtue.”

  “Beautiful,” said Santa Cruz. “What phrasing! What imagery!”

  “Well, it’s true,” said Salazar. “She still gives me the feeling that she finds the male animal too disgusting for words. I can’t imagine how her husband ever lured her into bed with him.”

  “All the same,” said Alden-Aragone, “she’s been the moving spirit of that family from the day she married Roberto. It was her money and her brains that earned them the biggest fortune in the country. You know Roberto never had any head for business. That doesn’t make her any less narrow-minded or prudish, but she deserves the respect she gets. And don’t think Victor still doesn’t ask her advice regularly.”

  “You mean,” said Ben, “that she may be the one to decide about Seaways moving in here.”

  “That’s hard to say. But from the evidence, I’m sure she’s been called into conference about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if that dinner tomorrow was arranged so that she could get a look at you. She’s over ninety. She’d hardly come all the way to the city in this weather just for fun.”

  Santa Cruz said to Ben, “Don’t worry about making the right impression on her. All you have to do is stand there and let her get a good look at my suit. I guarantee she’ll be completely dazzled.”

  “Maybe I should just send the suit,” said Ben.

  “It seems to me,” remarked Alden-Aragone, “that I once heard of a case like that. A suit that occupied a fraternity brother’s armchair for two days, studying a book propped up before it, while the brother was away on urgent business.”

  “Don’t hold it against me, Gil,” said Santa Cruz. “I was a badly disturbed boy at that age.”

  “And she was a badly disturbed girl.”

  “Woman. She was forty if she was a day. But young in heart, bless her.”

  “Here we go again,” said Salazar. “Back to Berkeley, the Babylon of the north.”

  Santa Cruz said to Ben, “You have no idea what it’s like to be a rich and handsome South American up your way, dear friend. It’s heaven. The only trouble is remembering to speak a slightly broken English flavored with tabasco. It’s the Latin dialect that gets them.”

  “And all that money papa sends for educational purposes,” said Alden-Aragone.

  “Not my papa,” said Salazar. “My whole four years in college he had the impression that a Santo Stefano dollar had the same value as a United States dollar. I was probably the poorest college student west of the Rockies.”

  “What I don’t understand,” said Ben, “is why he sent you there at all. I don’t mean college; I mean a college in the United States. If there’s so much feeling against the Yankees here—especially among the older generation—why not some good college on the continent? Or in Europe, for that matter?”

  “Obvious,” said Alden-Aragone. “A college in the United States is the safest place in the world for any growing boy.”

  “When college boys up north start a riot,” said Santa Cruz, “it’s a panty raid. They don’t even steal the girls, mind you, just the panties. Elsewhere it’s different. A college riot means that they’re trying to pull down the government. My father mightn’t have been too happy about sending me away to learn how to steal girls’ panties, but he would have been a lot unhappier to have me come home with some wild ideas about politics.”

  “You went to college up there,” Salazar said to Ben. “How much were you involved in politics?”

  “That doesn’t mean I didn’t have the opportunity. I just wasn’t interested.”

  “Sure not,” said Salazar. “But if you went to school down here, you’d be interested.”

  “This is it,” said Alden-Aragone, “and now where the devil do we park?”

  The Avenida Hermanos, narrowing like the neck of a funnel as it crawled through the slums around the Plaza República, was solid with cars, large and small, with bicycles and motorcycles, an
d with donkey carts, the donkeys seemingly asleep on their feet. In the thick of the traffic up ahead was a policeman furiously shouting instructions, but no one paid attention to the instructions. They honked horns, rang bells, and shouted imprecations at the policeman and each other in English, Spanish, and a strange, harsh dialect which was unfamiliar to Ben but all the more formidable because of it.

  Through this pandemonium ran children, some without shirts, some without pants, some without either, traveling in gangs, pushing their way around and over cars, carrying papier maché skulls, small flags on sticks—the national flag of Santo Stefano with the golden sword, blade upward, on the blue field—and, occasionally, small braided ropes with a noose at one end, which they swung overhead like a lariat or dangled in fierce suggestion like undersized hangmen hunting a victim.

  “There’ll be a couple of these kids dead before the week is up,” Santa Cruz remarked to Ben. “It happens every year. They like to play at being champions of the festival, and, next thing you know, it’s too late to cut them down alive.”

  Alden-Aragone added the sound of his horn to the tumult around them. “The only way they’ll ever settle the traffic problem down here,” he said, and his tone was the tone of the outraged motorist the world over, “is to tear down this neighborhood and rebuild it from the bottom up. I hope my grandchildren live long enough to see that happen.”

  The traffic finally got into motion, inch by inch. By skillful jockeying, the car was pulled clear of it and parked halfway up on the sidewalk. No sooner were they all out of it than a flock of children scrambled aboard and made their way over the seats into the street beyond.

  “Grab that one!” said Alden-Aragone, and Ben got an arm around the waist of the last and smallest of the troop before he could escape. The child howled and struggled until Alden-Aragone addressed him sharply in Spanish, then he subsided sniffling, the tears starting to flow. “Luis de la Horca esta en el sol y la luna,” he wailed, and waved his flag hopelessly at his mates who were already out of sight. “Luis de la Horca!”

  “Oh, let him go,” said Alden-Aragone, and the next instant the boy was across the rear seat of the car and out of sight in his turn.