Banana Republic

by Rawson, Eric;

  “I don’t care,” said the customs agent. His pen scratched, as relentless as a headache.

  Porter went back onto the wharf and cast his gaze toward the railhead. He saw a new engine shed, a water tank, an oil pump, and one stub of a wye on which the banana cars stood, like gigantic sway-backed cows, but he did not see anything that looked like a depot, which would be the sensible place to locate a telegraph key. Rough poles, leaning at crazy angles, paralleled the rusty tracks as they emerged from the jungle, the green strands of oxidized copper cable looping and sagging from the cross arms. Vines crept up the poles and out along the wires, green on green, threatening to incorporate the whole affair into the mass of tropical jungle. He could make out a wire that angled off behind the hotel, so he went back across the Calle Grande and down the side street, past the cuartel, where a soldier with a Martini-Enfield rifle looked at him incuriously, past a row of hardbitten little stores where beshawled women stared out from crepuscular interiors, until he came to a dry-goods establishment. The word Telegráfico was painted on the window, along with advertisements for Coca-Cola and Flor de Cana, and a gilt streamer of a name: Hilario.

  Neither Hilario nor anybody else was tending the counter, so Porter moseyed through the sparse aisles, noting Meakin crockery, scotch bowls, tin pans, cast-iron skillets, enameled coffee pots, kettles, Barlow knives, Stevens single-shot rifles, Belgian back-action shotguns, Winchester repeaters, a box of dynamite, machetes, harmonicas, two Dietz Victor railroad lanterns, a plain-box coffin, roman candles and bottle rockets, aluminum thimbles, needles, safety pins, silk ribbons, abalone buttons, bone buttons, brass buttons, a pair of used Wellingtons, Boston Waterproof Polish, B.C. French blacking, brooms, brushes, Frazer’s axle grease, mason jars, rubber tubing, seine twine, crutches, ladies’ syringes, castile soap, sulfur soap, tar soap, borax, matches, bolts of silk and percale, a yellowed copy of the Saturday Evening Post, crucifixes, rosaries, tallow candles, and in a case on the wall behind the counter, plug tobacco, stogies, and cheroots. On the counter itself stood a timeless symbol of global commerce, a japanned steel scale with a brass dial, although nothing in the store appeared to be sold by weight.

  After a while a dark drink of water with a waxed mustache stuck his head through an old coffee-sack curtain. “Buenas tardes.”

  “Buenas tardes,” Porter said, the words awkward on his tongue. “Habla inglés?”

  “Claro que no. Qué quiere?”

  “Telegram,” Porter said, miming the business of tapping out Morse code on a key.

  The clerk’s face darkened. He yanked the coffee-sack curtain closed and shouted, “Saca tu trasero aquí, pendejo!” Porter could hear him stamping around in the back room. He recognized the word gringo and telegráfico. There was some scuffling, and in a moment Pierre, his face glowing a fresh shade of grilled red, unperturbed as a man who has just exited the confessional, slouched through the curtain and sidled over to the telegraph window in one corner of the store. He wore a green celluloid visor and black silk sleeves. The keys rattled on the thong around his neck. He peered through the brass bars and said, “He’p you, Mr.—?”

  “Porter. William Porter. We just met.”

  “On’y jest.”

  “We carried my trunk to the hotel,” Porter reminded him.

  Pierre shook his head. “I wanna lug all day, I go backa Port-au-Prince.”

  “I saw you drinking guaro in the hotel bar not more than a half-hour ago!”

  Pierre’s mud-colored eyes widened. “Don’t feel drunk.” He felt his torso with his fingertips. “Nope. Feel pretty sharp.” He tapped out a staccato comment on the telegraph key. “He’p you, Mr.—?”

  Porter felt a rising panic. He turned and sagged on the counter and took stock of the store, making sure that everything was still where it should be: cheroots, stogies, plug tobacco, tallow candles, rosaries, crucifixes, Saturday Evening Post, percales, silks, matches, borax, tar soap, sulfur soap, castile soap, ladies’ syringes, crutches, seine twine, rubber tubing, mason jars, Frazer’s axle grease, brushes, brooms, B.C. French blacking, Boston Waterproof Polish, used Wellingtons, brass buttons, bone buttons, abalone buttons, silk ribbons, safety pins, needles, aluminum thimbles, bottle rockets and roman candles, plain-box coffin, Dietz Victor railroad lanterns, harmonicas, machetes, dynamite, Winchester repeaters, Belgian shotguns, Stevens rifles, Barlow knives, kettles, enameled coffee pots, cast-iron skillets, tin pans, scotch bowls, Meakin crockery.

  He turned back and leaned on the counter. Pierre waited expectantly.

  “Take a telegram. To Mrs. W. Porter, East Fourth Street, Austin, Texas. U.S. of A.” He paused while Pierre penciled the words on the yellow pad. “Arrived Coralio. Stop. Shithole. Stop. Hope you join me soon. Stop.”

  Pierre’s pencil stub hovered over the paper.

  “That’s it. How much?”

  Pierre narrowed his muddy eyes and looked him over. “How ’bout three dollars? ’Less you gonna pay in reales.”

  “I’ll give you two bits.” He remembered Cornelia Anderson’s warning. “You damned Cajun.”

  “Haitian,” the telegrapher corrected and shot his cuffs.

  Porter straightened up and flipped an American quarter over the top of the brass cage. As the coin flashed in a downward arc, Pierre’s hand shot out and snatched it, like a lizard grabbing a bottle fly with its tongue. “Obliged,” he said and rapped the coin on the counter.

  While they were talking, the tall dark drink of water with the fine mustache had reappeared and was dusting the shelves with an ostrich feather-duster. He kept up a steady sotto voce trickle of abuse in Spanish, shooting hostile glares at the telegraph cage, where Pierre leaned on his elbows, a crooked smile on his face.

  While he was there, Porter bought an Essbach concert harmonica, two cheroots, and the Saturday Evening Post (December 23, 1899, with a cover illustration of a man and a woman dashing through the snow on a sleigh and a headline promising that Joel Chandler Harris would explain why the Confederacy had failed), at which point he was flat busted broke.

  

  The most important social event in Coralio was the daily opening of the bar at the Hotel de los Estranjeros. As the first lady of the region, Isabel Eames Whittaker had appointed herself the task of appearing each afternoon at four p.m. For the three years she had been stuck in this cut-rate country she had treated the occasion as seriously as opening night at the Met. She spent a good portion of the day playing cards with her maid, Elinora, in lieu of bathing and dressing, neither of which she cared for. Isabel wore as little clothing as possible, although she had discovered that even here on the margins of civil society there was a limit to the number of layers she could, in public, shed.

  As for bathing, she preferred to pass through the world in a cloud of funk. If Walter insisted, she dabbed her armpits and crotch with a damp washcloth. Otherwise, she felt there was something enervating, even disempowering, about scrubbing the flesh like some Protestant—although when it came to wine and spirits, she wore her heritage like armor; she was as abstemious as a Wichita Methodist. Alcohol made her sick to her stomach. Cornelia Anderson liked to close the hotel bar at midnight with a prayer, but more often than not the only reverend individual in town, Father Michael, was himself indisposed, and she and Isabel were the only two left standing. Cornelia felt unworthy to address the Savior, not out of humility but from a lack of familiarity. Isabel did not understand what the problem was. She chanted some spells she had learned from The Book of Soyga, which she had read in the French translation, and Cornelia turned out the lights on the drunkards who were not in a condition to make it home for the night.

  In the end, dreggy but fashionable in her minimal percale wrapper, she tied an organdy scarf around her hat and sped off down the hill on her red diamond-framed Hendee Indian Single motorcycle, a collection of new-minted hard-wax records in paper sleeves tucked inside the saddlebag. Her Ed
ison gramophone was equipped so that she could record herself directly to the disc, and she delighted in handing out the singular archives of her performances to everyone she encountered. Although nobody who owned a gramophone played them, every expat household in Coralio could boast a pile of Isabel Eames Whitaker recordings.

  Walter had ordered her a cabinet full of commercial recordings from New York and London, but she did not care to listen to Alfred Lord Tennyson reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” or James Scott playing “Frog Legs Rag” on a piano that sounded like hammers on an iron kettle. As for more serious music, if she wanted to hear someone sing a cute little L’ho perduta, she would sing it herself, better. Clara Louise Kellogg was too old to bear and her Mattinata was disagreeable; that wretched Nellie Melba was all French technique; Emma Thursby sucked balls. Their lyric-coloratura roles lacked charisma, unlike her acapella versions, which lacked only an orchestra.

  All in all, Isabel Whitaker could imagine nothing more enjoyable on a hot and hazy tropical morning than watching herself, trained in the Delsarte system of gesture and devitalization, positioned between two standing mirrors so that she could observe her buttocks and breasts as she rendered a musical rhapsody into a three-minute tangible artifact.

  

  Although Isabel had almost nowhere to go, she liked to go in a hurry. When she roared down the hill to town, her cycle sent up a cloud of dust in the dry season and a muculent plume of mud during the rainy months, scattering chickens and clipping the campesinos walking along the road. So regular was her noisy route from hilltop to hotel that the citizens of Coralio who lived on the Calle Grande calibrated their clocks by her daily passage, the way her own New England ancestors had synchronized their lives to the arrival and departure of the trains. Not until Isabel had raced by the schoolhouse on Calle Severo, the five-horsepower Aurora engine coughing like a leopard, were the students dismissed for the day and Señor Gerardo, trembling, reached for the flask in the bottom drawer of his desk, freed for another sixteen hours from the battering ignorance, mischief, and insubordination that tortured his days. The consul, hearing her pass, asked Chanca to begin his supper—don’t spare the butter—and any sailors who were on shore rushed out of the New Century and the Bar Coralio, opera fans all, to watch her whiz along the wharf, beyond their reach but not beyond their catcalls and whistles.

  Once or twice a month, if he had business with the captain of a fruiter, Walter Whitaker, wearing a straw boater and a blazer the color of the night sky, followed his wife to town in a gig drawn by his favorite horse, a bay gelding named Henry. Today Isabel rode alone, and Henry mooned around with the mares in the south pasture. Who knew what Walter was doing. She had just finished recording a truncated performance of “The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” as a gift for the man who had been deposited by the Valhalla that morning. He looked like someone who enjoyed a melody, although the mandolin indicated indiscriminate taste. Perhaps he would recognize her from the playbills of the recent past, when she was a figure on the world stage. Even President Flores had seen her perform, first in New York, then at the National Theater in Mexico City in ’97, before it was torn down. The president was a devoted fan. She had a bundle of inappropriate letters in her lingerie drawer to prove it.

  

  In the States, the Hotel de los Estranjeros, bearing a name like Farmers or The Lamplighter, would be found in the southeast corner of town near the soapworks. In Coralio, it sat on the main plaza and hosted men and women from all walks of life. When Cornelia Anderson had acquired it, the hotel was an adobe shell with a name painted on three planks nailed above the front door. It was run by a Scotsman named Lusk who used it as a front for channeling old English army rifles to revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries scattered across Central America. Lusk rarely hosted paying guests. When he died of stingray venom—despite the known fact that he had never dipped a toe in the ocean—Cornelia Anderson had been working at the front desk. Her job involved a lot of clandestine cash exchange and secret-messaging. With some dollars in the right pockets, she maneuvered herself into possession of the deed and turned the hotel into a going commercial concern, an outpost for exiles. Every reprobate expat suddenly had a bar to call home. Overnight, they abandoned the New Century, the Bar Coralio, and the dockworkers’ dancehall for the hotel, where they did not have to rub elbows with folks who were not their kind, thereby improving the quality of the clientele in all four establishments. Cornelia welcomed anyone who spoke English and was not an anarchist.

  There was a Steinway upright piano in the corner. Isabel slipped the piano player a little money not to play ragtime or vaudeville songs, and everyone else paid him not to play Chopin. He mostly played hymns. Nobody had to pay Cornelia not to play the gramophone stored under the bar. She had no intention of spinning Isabel’s wax discs and driving off her customers.

  The music may have been churchly, but the joint was nonetheless roaring when the consul arrived with Sybil clinging to his shoulder. The air was blue with tobacco smoke.

  He swept off his hat and waded through the crowd to the bar where Cornelia was stirring gum arabic into a pisco punch. “How’s business, Connie?”

  “It sorta materializes.”

  Geddie took a look around. “Indeed it does. Where are the girls?”

  “They’ll be along, soon as mass is finished. It’s the memorial of Mary Magdalene.”

  “As I recall, the day features repentant sinners.”

  “Explains why none a these fellas are down at the church.” She lifted the dipper and tasted the punch.

  “I can never remember their names. The girls, I mean.”

  “Do you need to?”

  “I guess not,” Geddie said. “It seems a human thing.”

  “Agnes, Sylvia, and Belle—she’s the young one.” “Ah,” Geddie said. “I don’t suppose you’d pass a message to the newcomer, Porter.”

  Cornelia poured a measure of sugar and resumed stirring. “You’re a fella can find a fella if he needs to. Why don’t you circle the room and if he ain’t showed up by the time you come back, I’ll take a note.”

  “Fair enough. Give me a glass of that piss. And pour an extra measure for Sybil.” The threadbare little creature on his shoulder was holding onto his ear. He patted her tender hand.

  As he moved off with two glasses of punch, Cornelia said, “You ain’t the first has been looking for Mr. Porter.”

  He turned around. “Is that right. Who?”

  “Isabel Whitaker.” She nodded toward the far end of the bar, where the unwashed diva sat on a high-backed stool, surveying the rogues’ gallery that was the American colony in Coralio. She looked as though she could hardly wait to wriggle out of her dress. Isabel caught his eye, and he flushed and glanced away. “I can smell her from here,” he muttered, angry that he had been caught looking.

  As he moved across the sawdust-covered floor, past the kitchen, he glimpsed Pierre, dressed in a tall white hat and a smock, standing in a cloud of steam at the stove. Pierre turned a muddy insolent stare in his direction. Geddie flipped him the bird.

  

  When he was not upstairs in his room or out on his rounds dispensing arrowroot pills and bottles of coriander water, the quarantine doctor occupied a corner of the hotel bar beneath a gaslight with a rose-tinted shade. All evening he hulked over a little deal table, glowing pinkly, entertaining a stream of scruffy supplicants to whom he dispensed envelopes of folded paper the size of communion wafers. He watched his needy flock through steel-rimmed spectacles and spat tobacco juice into a ceramic cuspidor decorated with a panorama of cloud-banked mountains and roiling jungle.

  As the evening wore on, a pile of coins and paper money accumulated by the doctor’s left hand, but he was not worried about thieves. When he left the room to relieve himself—it was astonishing that his bladder could hold out as long as it did—he did not bother to scoop up t
he evening’s receipts. Perhaps because so many residents of Coralio had robbed or assaulted their fellow citizens back home, they felt honor-bound not to rob or assault one another during their communal exile, even while stuffing their coffers with the proceeds of smuggling, bribery, and price-gouging. Who knew, Dr. Grieg told himself, why anyone did what they did. He was no philosopher.

  The consul dropped onto the chair across from the quarantine doctor and tossed his worn Dunlap hat on the table. “Evening, Herman.”

  “Buck.” Dr. Grieg squinted through his spectacles. “Feel any better?”

  “I do not,” the consul said. “This damned railroad Walter Whitaker is building is going to need an intervention. Vesuvius wants Englebart to negotiate with the minister of commerce, but I don’t see it. I don’t even know who the minister of commerce is this week. And the Germans are up to something. And my abdominal organs are on fire.”

  “Don’t talk to me about Germans.”

  “All right. What’re you drinking?”

  “White-eye.” The doctor drained his glass. “I can’t stomach that pisco.”

  At that moment, Sybil stood up on Geddie’s shoulder, put one hand on the top of his head, and, her eyes rolling back in the sockets so that nothing showed but the whites, fainted dead away. Her body hit the table like a tiny sack of corn.

  “Goddamn, I wish she wouldn’t do that.” Dr. Grieg spat noisily into the ceramic jar.

  The consul pulled out a brown vial and unscrewed the cap. He held the vial near Sybil’s nostrils until her eyelids fluttered, and she tapped her breast, as wan as a Viennese housewife. Geddie scratched her threadbare belly with his forefinger. He kept thinking how much he needed a needle.

  “Did you just chuckle, you quack?”

  Dr. Grieg spat. “If you need a dose, say so, man.”

  “Damn. And give me one of those packets of South American snuff. I have reports to write.”

  Sybil sat up and blinked.