The Panama Portrait

by Stanley Ellin

  “—paragraph two-eleven,” said the man in charge imperturbably, “I must order your arrest and detention for inciting to riot. For the record, I am Captain Armando Valdez of the Civil Guard, with power to act on behalf of the republic.”

  Chapin’s wife wheeled on the captain. “You were right at that table,” she charged. “You saw the whole thing. And now you can stand there—”

  “Nora,” Chapin said sharply, “stay out of this. You don’t have anything to do with it.”

  “This man is a citizen of the United States, captain,” said Chapin’s agent. “I insist on the right to call our consular aide before any action is taken.”

  “You may call anyone you wish. However, no action will be taken before tomorrow morning at ten when the magistrate appears in court. Tonight the prisoner will be booked at the police station and held without bail. I mention this so that you and Mr. Hintze, your estimable consular aide, will be saved trouble.”

  Everyone was absorbing this little drama with intense interest, but Alden-Aragone, Ben observed, was lighting up with excitement. He suddenly turned to his companions with the air of a conspirator announcing the date of an assassination.

  “Look,” he whispered, “this can be the cause célèbre to end all causes célèbres. That man was defending the festival, do you understand? He was defending the honor of the republic from subversive attack, and he was arrested for it! If I can’t make political capital out of that—if I can’t finally get some headlines—”

  Salazar shook his head. “I’m sorry, Gil, but I work for Bambas-Quincy. You’ll have to count me out.”

  “Well, you can count me in,” said Santa Cruz. “What have you got up your sleeve?”

  “That poor bastard will need a lawyer, and I’m going to be the lawyer. But I want you to get in touch with the Transcript and El Diario right away, Cris, and have them send reporters and photographers to the police station on the double. Don’t give them any details; just tell them Chapin started a riot, and that should do it. Go ahead now.”

  “I might as well be on my way, too,” said Salazar. “No hard feelings, is there, Gil? You understand my position.”

  “Of course. Take Ben along for company. You can share a cab.” Alden-Aragone held out a hand to Ben. “I’m sorry it had to wind up this way, but next time—”

  “That’s all right,” Ben said. “I’m staying anyhow.” He had been watching Nora Chapin who had been shoved into the background of the scene around her husband. She stood there helpless and unwanted while angry voices rose in an argument she had no part of.

  “If that’s what you want,” Alden-Aragone said to Ben, and thrust his way into the center of the argument.

  “Captain,” he said to the man in charge, “I am Gil Alden-Aragone. You may have heard of me, you may know my reputation. I wish to act as legal representative for Mr. Chapin, if he has no objections.”

  By now Chapin had worked himself into an almost incoherent state of rage. In a choked voice from which only the obscenities emerged loud and clear he managed to convey his unfavorable opinion of all lawyers, especially those who wanted to make a case where there was none, so that they could suck his blood.

  Alden-Aragone kept his temper in hand. “Don’t be stupid,” he coolly advised Chapin. “You have no idea how much you need a lawyer, considering the mess you’re in. And I’m not asking one cent for this.”

  “That’s nice of you,” snarled Chapin, “considering that I don’t have one cent to pay.”

  Chapin’s agent regarded Alden-Aragone narrowly. “If you don’t want money, what’s your interest in this? What do you expect to get out of handling this case?”

  “Nothing. I want to see justice done. You may not believe it, sir, but your country does not have a monopoly on justice, much as it may feel that it has.”

  The Civil Guardist captain nodded dourly at Alden-Aragone. “This gentleman,” he told the agent, “has an honorable reputation and comes of good family. The prisoner may benefit from his services.”

  “And what about me?” said the nadaista master of ceremonies who stood pinioned next to Chapin. He raised his eyebrows mockingly at Alden-Aragone. “Do I also benefit from your services without cost?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know your case. My offer is to Mr. Chapin alone.”

  “His case is the same as mine,” Chapin said, but the nadaista only laughed and said, “Don’t waste your anger, David. I’ll get along well enough. The police and I are old friends.”

  Without anyone quite knowing how it came about, the matter was settled. The police formed a cordon around their prisoners, a way was cleared to the door, the cordon with Alden-Aragone and Chapin’s agent following started to move off. When Nora Chapin tried to push through it to join her husband it came to a confused halt.

  “Go home, Nora,” Chapin said. “Go home and wait for me there. I told you I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

  “I can wait just as well in the police station,” she pleaded.

  “Please,” the captain said wearily, “it is not a place for you to be all night.”

  “He’s right,” said the nadaista. “I know what it’s like there. Go home, Nora. Tell Juliana what happened and wait there with her.”

  “I’ll have a man escort her,” said the captain, but Ben standing beside Nora Chapin, his shoulder against hers, surprised himself by saying to her, “I’ll take you there, if you don’t mind.”

  She looked at him and recognized him. Her smile was the same quick, shy smile she had given him at the table. It was as if she vaguely remembered him from the pleasant past, although he was sure that they had never met before.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I want to be with my husband. I wish I could make that clear.”

  “You won’t be able to be with him,” Ben said, “and if you’re not home, he’ll only worry about you.” He took her hand, and with complete and innocent faith she let him. It gave him a sudden sense of assurance that ran through his veins as warmly as chicha. “I know Mr. Alden-Aragone,” he said. “I promise you he’ll take care of everything.”

  “And I can vouch for this gentleman,” Alden-Aragone told the girl. He regarded Ben with frank admiration. “He is Mr. Ben Smith, a countryman of yours. I am sure you will find him a most understanding and helpful friend.”

  The last Ben saw of him as he turned to go through the door was one eyelid drooping in an unmistakable and meaningful wink. In its way it was highly complimentary, but, Ben thought, he gives me too much credit. Trust a man like Alden-Aragone to think that all the world shared his sprightly opportunism.

  5

  Home for the Chapins was a tenement a few blocks away from The Sun and Moon. Nora Chapin led the way to it along the Calle Contenta, a narrow street lined with pushcarts and stands, all doing business even at this late hour, and then along the Calle Indios, an even narrower street, an alley, in fact, where one flattened himself against the wall to make room for anyone passing by, and finally through a dark passageway which separated the two largest rookeries on the Calle Indios.

  The passageway led to a junk-strewn yard behind the buildings. There, a single light, strung high up on a clothespole, revealed a row of jakes whose sewage drained into a noisome channel which ran out of sight beneath the jakes of the next yard. Ben looked at this, and looked at the outside stairway of the ramshackle wooden building before him. Dim figures sprawled on the landings of the stairway. They talked, laughed, suddenly burst into a brief shouting of insults. A voice was raised in a wailing, quavering chant to the accompaniment of a guitar tunelessly plucked, single note by single note. Bottles clinked. An Indian appeared out of the darkness of the building and lurched across the yard to the jakes. He caught sight of Nora and nodded drunken approval of her all the way to the outhouse. He did not close the door while he went about his business there.

  “You mean, this is where you live?” Ben demanded, and Nora answered without resentment, “Look, we’re lucky
to have any place at all to live, the way things are. Did you think David was fooling about not having any money? We don’t. The only reason we’re able to stay here is because Tito and Juliana are so good about it.”

  She had already explained en route that Chapin’s fellow prisoner was Tito Aguilar, a very talented poet, and that Juliana was Tito’s wife and really the practical partner in the marriage. Just the way it was with her and David.

  Ben said, “But I thought he was fooling. After all, he’s David Chapin, isn’t he? He’s one of the most successful artists around. He should be a rich man.”

  “Well, he’s not.” Nora picked her way past the occupants of the first landing and started up the creaking stairs, talking over her shoulder. “We’re dead broke. You can’t make any money unless you paint something, and the last time David painted anything was three years ago. You know the trouble he’s had with his painting for the last three years, don’t you? The Times wrote it up, and Art News—”

  “No, I don’t know about it. I don’t follow painting that closely. I’m just somebody who goes to museums now and then. Even so, from what I read about him he gets fantastic prices for his work. Prices like that don’t fit a neighborhood like this.”

  “The way you talk about it,” Nora said in mild remonstrance, “you’d think people would want to live in a place like this for fun. You make us sound like some kind of slummers who want to see how the Indians get along. You don’t have to move in here for that. You can see it when you pass by.”

  “You sure can.”

  “And if you knew how Max likes his comfort—”

  “Who’s he? That agent?”

  “Yes, he was the Max Klebenau Gallery. He discovered David. And he was very successful until David got his block and we started traveling around. I mean the painting block, so that he hasn’t been able to do any work for the last three years.”

  “Still, between his reputation and Klebenau’s you could borrow enough to live decently. There must be any number of people back home who’d be glad to help out.”

  “There are,” said Nora, “and they already did. We owe everybody money. Even my father, because he sent airline tickets for home. If I told you how much we owed, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s thousands and thousands of dollars. I don’t see how we’ll ever pay it back. I don’t even see how we can keep going this way unless we cash in those airline tickets. Max doesn’t want to do that, but we might have to. And the United States consular office here is no help at all. The consul’s in Washington now, and the only one around is that stupid aide of his who acts as if we’re some kind of Communist spies.”

  This was voiced without any tremor of apprehension, any hint of despair. It led Ben to wonder if she really understood her plight—penniless, walking these broken stairs to a slum room in a strange city, her husband in jail—or if she simply had a blind faith in happy endings. She had screamed and fought when Chapin was in danger at the café, so she had a temper, Ben knew, but once self-composure became the order of the day she had become so self-composed that it baffled him. Even more baffling was the way any three seemingly intelligent people like the Chapins and Klebenau could get themselves into such an unlikely trap. Granting that Chapin was as intensely neurotic as he looked and sounded, and that Nora was completely subservient to him, wouldn’t a businessman like Klebenau be able to steer them a saner course?

  He was wondering how to phrase this question, when they reached the top landing of the house and entered the room that opened on to it. It was a combined kitchen and bedroom with barely enough space in it for the kerosene stove, bed, and small table and bench it contained. Its walls were in an even worse state of repair than those of The Sun and Moon.

  A woman rose from the bed when they came in, an Indian woman dressed in shorts and a basque shirt, her hair in a long plait down her back. It struck Ben that she was the first Indian he could recall encountering in Santo Stefano whose face was not an expressionless mask and whose eyes were neither blankly unseeing nor narrowly guarded. There was a quality of revelation in the way that flat, dark face so openly revealed pleasure, and then bewilderment and concern. This must be what the Axoyacs really look like, Ben thought, when they’re among their own, safely hidden away from the intruder.

  Nora recognized the concern, too. She hastily explained what had happened at the café, and Juliana, wife of Tito Aguilar, poet and prisoner, sighed at the workings of fate. “Everybody goes a little crazy during El Niño,” she said. “Especially my poor husband. Now yours has caught it, too. Poor David, that jail is full of bugs. You’ll have to delouse him when he gets home.” She led them through a curtained doorway into the room beyond. “Come in here. It’s not as airy, but you don’t have everyone sticking his head in the window to hear your business.”

  The other room of the flat was filled to capacity by a bed, a canvas cot, a chest of drawers, and a pile of luggage. The walls here were covered with pictures cut from magazines and reproductions of paintings. Beneath the bed Ben saw stacks of magazines and books so high that they partly supported the mattress.

  He sat down on the canvas cot which sagged alarmingly under his weight, and the two women settled themselves side by side on the bed, their backs against the wall. Nora immediately kicked off her shoes and swung her legs around so that her bare feet rested on Juliana’s lap, and Juliana, evidently knowing what was expected of her, massaged the feet slowly, digging her fingers into them. Nora rested her head against the wall, her eyes closed, a rapturous expression on her face. “Oh, God,” she said, “that feels wonderful.”

  “The first time I saw you,” Ben remarked, “you weren’t wearing shoes either. You were walking along the Plaza de Hermanos carrying them. I wondered about it at the time.”

  “You didn’t have to. My feet have been killing me for months, and the only thing you can do when you don’t have any money is walk places, so they just keep getting worse. Women’s shoes are no good for walking anyhow. The only thing they’re good for is sitting.”

  Walking or sitting, Ben saw, her legs were long and shapely and very satisfying to look at, even with the rash of mosquito bites on them. Then he noticed that Juliana was regarding him with a baleful eye, and he hastily shifted his gaze from the pleasant sight of those legs. Juliana stood up suddenly.

  “I’ll make coffee,” she announced, and addressed herself directly to Ben. “Come into the kitchen. The stove is empty, and that oil can is too heavy for me to lift.”

  In the kitchen she confronted him, her face close to his. “Look,” she whispered fiercely, “this is my house, and I don’t want you sitting in it like some pig in a whorehouse looking over the women. If you want that, you can go to Madame Sophie’s. I’ll tell you where it is, if you don’t already know.”

  The virulence of the assault stunned him. “I give you my word—” he said.

  “Don’t give me your word. If I really thought you had no ideas about making love to Nora, I’d wonder if you were a man at all. You can have your ideas, but keep them in your head where nobody can see them. Don’t even let them show through your eyes. You’d be wasting your time anyhow. The only man Nora wants to make love to her is her husband. Remember that.”

  “I’ll try to,” Ben said acidly, “but considering that I might lose control of my passions any minute, maybe it would be better if I left right now.”

  “You won’t lose control of your passions. You’ll drink coffee and talk until Nora’s ready to go to sleep. It’s the best way of having her not worry about David all night. Now put some oil in this tank from that can there. It’s almost full but you can put a little in. I don’t want her to think I’m trying to be her duenna. She wouldn’t like that.”

  Ben performed his duties and went back to the other room. He fully intended then and there to say a curt good-bye and depart, but when he looked at Nora he changed his mind. He gingerly let himself down on the cot, and Nora said, “It took you long enough. What were you two talking about?”
<
br />   “Stoves,” said Ben. “How to fill them. Juliana speaks English fluently, doesn’t she?”

  “She speaks four languages fluently—English, Spanish, French, and Quechua. That’s the Axoyac language. Tito said she graduated with higher honors than anyone who ever went to the women’s college here.”

  “An Indian?” said Ben, and when Nora frowned, he hastily explained, “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I meant I was surprised that any Indian went to college here.”

  “Oh. Well, Juliana was really sort of an experiment, but, of course, it would work out fine. She’s got a wonderful mind. And her people aren’t like most of the Axoyacs around Huanu Blanco. Her father taught himself to read and write, and they made him a foreman. If he was white he would have been a superintendent by now, but even being a foreman is quite something for an Indian. It’s the same with Juliana. She’s the only Axoyac teaching at the Indian children’s school in town here. That is, unless they fire her because Tito keeps getting into trouble. She says she wouldn’t mind, but it would really break her heart. She loves teaching.”

  “She’s much older than Tito, isn’t she? How did she happen to meet him?”

  “She isn’t older at all. It’s just the disgusting way some of these Spanish men have of looking young until all their teeth fall out. I know Tito looks eighteen but he’s about ten years older than that.” Nora raised her voice. “Juliana, how did you and Tito happen to get together?”

  “I wrote him a fan letter,” Juliana called. She appeared from the kitchen with a tray of coffee things, and as they helped themselves she said, “I read these poems by somebody named Tito Aguilar in a little booklet, and they were so exciting that I wrote a letter about them to the author. The next thing I knew, I was married to him. That’s the way it is with a poet. The first woman to write him a fan letter can have him for keeps.”

  “You’re lucky it was Tito,” said Nora. “I’ve met some poets who were decidedly on the wormy side. Anyhow, it’s different with artists. When I first went to work for Max and saw David’s paintings on the wall there, I couldn’t make head or tail of them. I used to worry about it when I was around David, because I was afraid he’d find out I didn’t like them. It was a long time before I realized he didn’t give a damn whether anyone liked them or not, much less me. I think that’s when I fell in love with him.”