“You almost seem like you live here. If you don’t talk too much, people might believe it.”
“If I don’t talk too much?”
“You don’t talk like a Panamanian.”
I look away so that he won’t see how that stung. He knows, though.
“It’s nothing about your Spanish. Your Spanish is the best I’ve ever heard from an American. But you don’t say things how a Panamanian would.”
“Like what?”
“Like you say ‘¿Qué pasó?’ but that’s textbook. People here say ‘¿Qué xopá?’ ”
“What’s that?”
“ ‘¿Qué pasó?’ backwards. Sort of.”
I scan the smattering of other people on the viewing deck. “I’m pretty sure everyone here is a tourist.”
“Sure. Point if you want. Whatever. I was just trying to help.”
“I mean, do any Panamanians really come here?”
Danilo takes a step back and looks at me. “I pissed you off, huh?”
I cross my arms and press my fingertips against the sides of my ribs. “Maybe.”
“Well, you’re right anyway, I guess. Panamanians only come here if they work here.”
“Or unless they’re showing me around.” I smile. My hair flips loosely in the breeze. I wiggle my toes against the canvas backing inside my sneakers. “So where are the ships?”
Danilo walks to the front corner of the viewing deck and leans his torso over the railing. “Out there. You can see them.”
Under the beating sun, I lean out, too, twisting my body, and am greeted by a mass of bobbing ships, freckling the expanse of water past the end of the concrete lanes.
“They have to wait for clearance to come in,” Danilo explains. “It’s always backed up like this.”
A flock of birds scatters up from the trees in the hills around us, making a sound like applause. I have to stand very near Danilo in order to see. The faint scent of sweat, delicate and salty, lifts off his skin in the hot air. Once, the front of my thigh brushes the side of his and though I’m sure he’ll startle and jolt away, he doesn’t.
“It’s crazy the shit they have on board,” he says. “It’s everything, you know, cars and pianos and fuel and food.”
He turns toward me. I take a few steps back.
“People swim through it, too,” he says.
“Through the canal?”
“Yeah, there’s a famous guy. Richard Halliburton. He swam through just after it opened. He hired a guy to follow him in a rowboat and shoot alligators if they got too close. They charged him thirty-six cents.”
“I know Richard Halliburton. I mean, not personally. Obviously. But I’ve heard of him. He died in a typhoon, I think.”
Danilo picks at some dirt under his thumbnail as if the topic no longer interests him. “Well, are you ready?” he asks. “Vamos, pues.”
I swear we question every single one of the people working at the visitors’ center that day about whether they’ve heard of my father. Every single one of them says no.
“I have another idea,” Danilo says. “What time is it?”
I wheel my watch around my wrist. “Eleven-thirty.”
“Fuck. He won’t be here until one.”
“Who?”
“Señor Jaén.”
“Who’s that?”
Danilo smiles mischievously, flashing his chipped tooth. “So many questions, Miraflores. Well, what do you want to do? Do you want to look at the museum? It’s brand-new, you know.”
“Is it any good?”
“Let’s find out. Come on. If it’s too boring, we’ll find somewhere to sit and wait.”
We walk upstairs, past glass cases filled with taxidermied insects found in the vicinity of the canal and through a life-sized replica of one of the giant culverts that transports water into and out of the locks. There are illuminated maps and charts and timelines. Another case displays a small collection of weathered personal effects—a pair of boots and a pocket watch and a tin flask—that belonged to one of the early laborers. Still another holds the front pages of yellowed newspapers with articles about the construction progress and setbacks. A letter from a young French worker to his parents was translated into English and reprinted in one of the earliest newspapers. The newspaper caption says that the letter was found in the man’s shirt pocket after he died in the hospital of yellow fever.
Dear Mother and Father,
I have been entangled and entwined in the most absurd manner a number of times by the curiously tentaclelike foliage on the ground in Panama. The plants are quite like land octopuses. I have also suffered a number of mosquito bites from insects big as hummingbirds, which pierce one’s skin until they draw beads of blood to the surface. I should say that not all of the country is so wild. Once or twice, I have made my way to the city, where there are still no modern conveniences (quite a lot of people bathe in the ocean!), but at least it can generally be said to offer a space to breathe in what otherwise appears to be a country entirely and suffocatingly blanketed by jungle. We’ve not yet had rain, only scorching sun that’s left me red as raw clay, but I hear the rain is not to be preferred, either. Tomorrow I trek again through the brush, clearing what I can as I make my way with a machete (a very nice one, too). Say hello to Monsieur Théophile.
Until we reach the end,
I am yours in Panama.
Monsieur Théophile, the newspaper says, was the family cat.
And then we come upon a group of black-and-white photographs housed in glass console cases, each photograph affixed with silver straight pins to a drape of black velvet. Inside the first case is a small sign that reads:
THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPHS WERE TAKEN BY ERNEST HALLEN, OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE ISTHMIAN canal commission, HIRED to DOCUMENT THE BUILDING OF THE GREAT ENGINEERING MARVEL OF OUR TIME, THE panama canal.
The photographs are wide-angle shots of the same sites over and over, usually taken a number of weeks apart, so that the effect is that of a very slow flip-book. An entire case is dedicated to photographs of Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft visiting the canal.
“Your presidents, no?” Danilo says from over my shoulder.
“Not while I’ve been alive, but yes.”
“This is the one who got stuck in his bathtub?” Danilo asks, pointing at Taft.
“How did you know that?”
“Maybe I’m smarter than you think. They had to break him out of it, right?”
“And then they had to build a bigger bathtub for the White House.”
Danilo laughs softly behind me. “At least he fit through the canal.”
I smile and stare at Taft, standing on the observation platform of one of the cars, more than three hundred pounds in his blindingly white suit and his pale hat. Mrs. Taft, luminous in white and wearing a dark hat wreathed in flowers, stands next to him. They’re both waving.
The rest of the cases are divided between staged photographs of white Americans, the women wearing long white dresses and white hats with netting hung over the brims like delicate waterfalls, sitting at their desks or assembled on their verandas or lined up outside hospitals and clubhouses, smiling for the camera, and more candid, journalistic shots of immigrant laborers with skin as black and slick as oil toiling in the sun. There are photographs of machines like dinosaurs, huge and clumsy, biting into the earth, and men who appear small as ants crawling on them; photographs of men walking up the nearly vertical slopes of rock wall with boxes of dynamite on their heads, their sleeves rolled to their elbows, their boots caked in mud. And then there is a grainy photograph of an injured man, drenched in blood, being carried by a group of workers who are holding him as if they are pallbearers and the man a coffin. I shudder and turn away.
“He probably died,” Danilo says. “A lot of them died back then. Those guys carrying the dynamite on their heads? Sometimes it was so hot down there that the dynamite exploded and killed them on the spot. It wasn’t just disease, you know. That’s what everyone talks about. But
it was everything. They were suffocated in mudslides and bitten by snakes and shit. It was hell.”
We lounge outside on a set of bleachers until the appointed hour, the aluminum seats scaldingly hot in the sun. We’re by ourselves, everyone else gawking at the passing ships from the observation deck we were on earlier. Danilo takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, pulls one out, and lights it. He holds the cigarette between his lips, his index finger hooked casually over the top while his middle finger supports it from underneath, before drawing it out and exhaling. He turns his head away from me and pushes the smoke out the corner of his mouth.
“You want one?” he asks, tapping the cigarette.
“No, thanks.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Why? I’ve smoked one before.”
“One?”
“A few. But I never liked it.”
“You didn’t give it enough time.” He squints and smiles.
In front of us, a green-and-white ship with “Mitka United” painted along the side slides into the first lock chamber. A group of men on the ground scramble around, tossing long cables up onto the deck of the ship. The cables get secured at one end to the ship and at the other end to one of the yellow trams that run on tracks parallel to the water lanes, the heavy lines sloping down gracefully like cobwebs. Once the ship and the trams are connected, the trams will help steer the ship through the water lane. Even though the lanes are perfectly straight, it’s tricky because the ships these days are so big they have very few inches of wiggle room sometimes between themselves and the chamber walls. He points out streaks of colored paint along the inside of the canal walls left by ships so big they had scraped through.
As soon as the ship is safely inside the lock chamber, the water drains and the ship lowers as if it’s no more than a raft held aloft by floodwaters. When the water level matches that of the next chamber, the gates—two enormous metal double doors that separate the chambers—swing open and fold back into recesses carved out in the canal walls. The ship advances out of the first chamber and into the next. The process repeats once more until at last the ship makes it through the series of water steps and sails out into the Pacific Ocean.
“Beautiful thing, isn’t it?” Danilo says.
I nod, wondering whether this is what my father saw every day when he worked here. Under the sun, the surface of the oily water glows an iridescent blue like the wings of a dragonfly.
“Tell me something, Miraflores.”
“Like what?”
“Something about you. What do you want to be? What do you like to do? That kind of thing.”
“I want to be a geophysicist.” I say “geophysicist” in English.
Danilo cocks an eyebrow. “A what?”
“I want to study the earth.”
He takes another drag of his cigarette.
“I like to read and draw maps and walk around outside by myself. And I study.”
“You’re a thinker.”
“I hang out with my friends, too.”
“Okay. And what else?”
I cross my ankles in front of me and stare at my shoes. The plastic tip at the end of one lace has split and frayed. “I lied to my mother,” I say.
“Oh yeah?”
“She doesn’t know I’m here. I told her I was going on a trip for school—I go to the University of Chicago—instead of telling her I was coming to Panamá.”
“Why? She doesn’t like Panamá?”
“She loves it.”
“Then?”
I shrug.
“Does anyone know you’re here?”
“My friends do.”
Danilo ashes his cigarette over the front edge of the bleacher. “So you go to university?”
“Yes.”
He gives me a sidelong glace. “Fucking nerd.”
“Hey!”
“Eh, I’m just kidding.”
“Aren’t you in school?”
“Does it look like I’m in school? Nah. It’s not for me.” He takes one last drag of his cigarette, stubs it out, then flicks it off the side of the bleachers.
“Why not?”
He spreads his fingers like a starfish, examining his hands for a second, before contracting them into fists. “Did you know that Panamá is the only place in the world where you can see the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean and set over the Atlantic Ocean?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“You knew that?”
“I’m studying geology. I know things like that.”
“Okay. What’s the highest mountain in the world?”
“That’s too easy. Mount Everest.”
“The shortest river?”
“The D River in Oregon.”
“Where?”
“In Oregon. It’s in the United States.”
“The diameter of the earth in kilometers.”
“Twelve thousand seven hundred fifty-six.”
“So this is what you do with your friends? You sit around and talk about geology?”
“Not really. I mean, I don’t know.” I couldn’t think of the word for trivia. “We have conversations.”
“About what?”
“About whatever. Movies, or school, or books.”
“You talk about movies? What’s your favorite movie?”
“Have you heard of Touching the Void? It’s about two mountain climbers. I just saw it. It was incredible.”
Danilo shakes his head. “I saw Terminator 3 last week, though. Do you know that one? It just came out here.”
It’s been out for ages in the United States and it isn’t a movie I would see anyway, but I just say no.
We both fall quiet for a time. All around us a discordant sort of symphony hums faintly—the squawk of birds from the jungle, the strain of machinery. I scratch my nail over the ridges in the bleacher seat. There’s still twenty minutes until one o’clock. As soon as we get back to the hotel, I need to call my mother. I didn’t call her yesterday.
The minutes stretch out and dissolve until finally I ask, “Do you ever miss being home?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean do you miss where you grew up? When you were with your parents.”
Danilo rubs his chin. “Nah,” he says. “I don’t even think of that as home. That’s only birthplace or something.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Home is something else. I don’t know. Fuck. How can I explain it? It’s where you feel most like you belong, I guess.”
The sun is high and almost quivering in the sky. The backs of my knees are sweaty.
“I don’t know where that is for me,” I say.
Danilo appears to think about that for a minute. “It doesn’t have to be a place,” he says. “Remember, when we were talking in Panamá Viejo? That idea, that geography is an illusion? I think it’s true. People live—I mean, really live—in spaces that aren’t on a map.” He rubs his palm against the back of his neck self-consciously, as though he’s worried he just said something sappy. “Anyway, you’ll know eventually. You’ll just fall into it and suddenly realize that you’re there.”
This whole time, I’ve been leaning back, the bleacher behind me digging a line under my shoulder blades. I’ve been looking at Danilo from an angle. Now I sit up even with him.
“My mother is sick,” I say.
“Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
“You might lose her?”
I can’t bring myself to say yes, but I don’t need to.
“Then what are you doing here?” he asks.
How can I explain? There’s nothing to say that doesn’t make me sound selfish or desperate. I tell him about the letters and everything I once believed and everything as it seems to me now. I give him a quick summary of my life growing up with my mother, without my fath
er, all in a more or less factual way. My mother worked hard to support us. My father, and the absence of my father, was not something that consumed me. I had written him off. I defend myself, saying that had been a reasonable thing to do. I recount the story of the three doctors and the diagnosis. I explain that the idea to come here seized me in its impulsive and obdurate grip. And though he doesn’t say so explicitly, though all he does is listen patiently without offering any remonstrations or condolences or advice, I think he understands, because at exactly one, he stands up, cups his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn, and shouts in the direction of the control tower across the water lanes, “Hector! ¡Oye! Hector!”
“Hector!” he screams again when he receives no answer. “Hector Jaén!”
Before long, an older man, looking extraordinarily annoyed, thrusts his head through the tower window and shouts in response, “What the hell do you want?”
“Can you let me up?” Danilo asks.
“Danilo?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Who is with you?”
“This is Miraflores.”
“I don’t have time for games, okay?”
“That’s really her name. We need your help. Can you let us across?”
He glares at us uncertainly before ducking his head back through the window.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Come on,” Danilo says.
We start across the top of one set of closed gates. It’s like being on a concrete balance beam three stories high. A few steps in, with my hand gripping the metal yellow railing that spans the length, I stop. Danilo is sauntering on ahead of me as if he’s just taking a walk through the park.
“Danilo!” I call.
He turns around. “Holy shit, Miraflores. Don’t stop now. They’re going to need this gate in a minute. You can’t stop.”
“I can’t go.”
He looks at me like he doesn’t know what to say.
“Danilo!”
He starts back toward me. And suddenly all I want is for him not to get to me. All I want is for him not to have to pry my hand off the railing and escort me, like a child, across the gates. I want to be able to do this by myself.
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