“No, I think I’m tired.” Then he gazes at me, as if something in my face is causing him immeasurable grief, before grimacing and padding out of the room, back down the hall, to his bed.
All of a sudden, I just want to go home. I’m sitting here cross-legged in an armchair, in someone else’s house, in someone else’s country. Belonging halfway doesn’t make it mine. Belonging to someone who belongs to it all the way doesn’t make it mine. I feel like a fraud. And like a failure. And like I’m in everybody’s way.
The front door clicks. Danilo walks in and, when he sees me, grins, evidently unfazed that I’m awake in the middle of the night, fully dressed, watching television. He heads for the kitchen, grabs the bucket of chicken, kicks off his sneakers, and comes out to join me, plopping himself on the couch.
“What are we watching?” he asks, pointing a drumstick at the television.
“I think it’s an old movie. I don’t know what it’s called.”
He blinks heavily. He’s drunk.
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out today, in Taboga,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look good.”
“Thanks.”
“Something happened?”
I don’t respond. I don’t know the answer. Or maybe I do. No, nothing really happened, but I feel misplaced, unwelcome, homesick, hopeless.
“Hey, Miraflores, tell me something about him. Something good.”
He’s trying to pep me up. “About my father?”
“No, about Michael Jordan. Yes, about your father!”
I’ve already told him everything I know. What else is left to say? “He loved my mother.”
“Of course he did.”
“I mean he really, really loved her. I don’t know if many people get love like that.”
Danilo chomps on a thigh. Then he rubs his eyes and says, “Miraflores, can I tell you something?”
I tense. “Sure.”
“It bites ass that we don’t have a maid. Everyone else in this fucking country has a maid in their house, but Hernán insists—insists—we don’t need one. And frankly, that’s bull-shit. I’m eating chicken out of a bucket because we don’t have a maid. I want, you know, like homemade arroz con pollo for dinner. I want fucking corvina cooked up the way I like it. Is that too much to ask?”
“I guess not.”
“You guess not? I’ll tell you. It’s not.”
“You could make those things, couldn’t you?”
He shakes his head. He has one whole arm around the bucket as if he’s holding a child. “I do breakfast, but that is all that I do.” He closes his eyes. I have an urge to climb on top of him. When he opens them again he says, “Why are you all the way over there?”
“I’m like four feet from you.”
“You should come over here. Come on, we’ll watch television together.”
Something’s going to happen, I think. How could it not? Not too quickly, but not too slowly, I move over to the couch, narrowing the distance between us from four feet to about four inches. I can feel every atom in between.
“Did you eat?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“You ate this?”
“I ate two legs and one and a half wings.”
“Impressive. Listen, though, maybe you don’t know because you’ve never had it . . . Have you had it? But I am telling you that real fucking Panamanian arroz con pollo like everyone else gets in their house would have been better than this shit.”
He’s so drunk and so energetically angered by it that I just smile. The lights from the screen flicker in the dark and the sounds from the television, distant voices and riotous laughter, seem to float weightlessly somewhere miles from us. I try to look as casual as possible. I tuck my hair behind my ears and skirt my bangs across my forehead lightly with my fingertips. Danilo sits slumped into the cushions. He laughs after a few minutes, wheeling his upper body around like a wobbly bowling pin and, at one point in the rotation, casting himself toward me. I think, This is it. He’s going to kiss me. But instead he tilts his head and puts his mouth to my ear. His hair smells sweaty.
“Don’t tell Hernán, but this show kind of sucks,” he whispers. Then he reels back. “Hey, where is the old man, anyway?”
“He’s in bed.”
“What did you do to him?”
“What do you mean, what did I do to him? I didn’t do anything. I was eating in the kitchen and he came out, so I offered him some chicken but he said he was going to watch TV, and then I asked if I could watch TV with him. That’s all.”
“You’re sure?”
“Why?”
“I just think it’s weird that he’s in bed. He’s usually up watching his shows now.”
“He usually watches TV in the middle of the night?”
“Just since you’ve been here. He made me go with him to buy those headphones so the sound wouldn’t wake you up.”
“Why doesn’t he just watch TV during the day, when I’m awake?”
“What?”
“Is he trying to avoid me?”
“Did I show you my bruise?”
I wrap my hands around my ankles. “Hmmm?”
Danilo rolls the sleeve of his T-shirt up over his shoulder. “Motherfucker Nardo hit me with his baseball bat.”
There’s a spot the size of a plum on his arm. It’s pink, giving way to brown.
I touch it gingerly with my fingers. “Did he do it on purpose?”
“Yeah, that’s a good question. You ask him that.”
My nails are short and unpolished. They look so strange to me, running over his skin. I just keep staring at them, afraid to look up at his face. I’m waiting, waiting. I circle my fingers around the perimeter of the bruise. I drag them up to the peak of his shoulder, just under the edge of his cotton T-shirt.
All at once, Danilo drops his sleeve and hands me the bucket of chicken. “Anyway,” he says, and flips open his phone even though I didn’t hear it ring. “Aló.” He smiles. “Emelinda. ¿Quiúbo?” He pads away with the phone to his ear.
The cardboard tub is on my lap. I squeeze the rounded rim in my fingers and listen for a time to the sound of his voice, of him making plans to meet up with yet another girl, as it drifts softly through the air.
Eight
Friction
My mother wants to know where the hell the Judean Plateau is. She’s been cursing more lately.
“How many letters?” I ask. I’ve embargoed myself in my room, afraid to come out and face Danilo after the embarrassment of last night. Maybe, I think, he’s even repulsed by me, the way I was acting like an obsequious little hanger-on when all he had tried to do was be nice to me. He’s probably already complained to Nardo about the fact that I somehow got the wrong idea.
“Six. Is it Judean like Jewish?”
“Exactly. So where do you think it might be?”
“New York.”
“ ‘New York’ is seven letters.”
“Did I tell you that Lucy made homemade strawberry jam yesterday?”
Earlier, she said it was blueberry.
“Save some for me. I’m going to be home soon, you know.”
“I know. I have it on my calendar.” She hums absently for a moment. I hold the phone away from my ear, straining to discern any evidence that either Danilo or Hernán is awake yet, but there’s nothing. Why do I want to see him? I want to explain myself. No, not really. I don’t want to revisit last night. Well, then, I just want to make sure everything’s okay between us, that I didn’t ruin a friendship or whatever other sort of “-ship” we have going on.
“Israel?” my mother asks.
“Yep. To the east is the Transjordan Plateau, which has almost the same topography in reverse.”
“More than I need to know, Mira.”
“Sorry.”
“So everything’s good? What are you doing today?”
“Just more research. About volcanoes.”
“Tell me
where you are again?”
“I’m in Vancouver, Washington.”
“Those are two different places.”
“Well, there’s a place in Canada called Vancouver. And there’s a place in the United States called Washington. Actually, there are a lot of places in the U.S. called Washington. Okay, but that doesn’t matter. I’m in Washington state, and there’s a city here called Vancouver.”
My mother gasps. “There’s a bug on the window.”
“Mom?”
“It’s a really big bug.”
The front door clicks. Someone going out or coming in? Or did I imagine it? The air folds into silence again. I wish it were him, knocking on my door like he did that first morning, standing there with his arms crossed, inviting me to go somewhere even if both of us had no idea of the destination.
“Mom, I think I need to go.”
“Time to get on with the day!”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
Danilo isn’t at the hotel. I haven’t been back to it since Hernán offered me a place to stay, and as it comes into view now, it’s like glimpsing a structure I haven’t seen in decades. It’s part of another lifetime, one in which I didn’t know anyone in Panama and believed that finding my father would be much, much easier than it has turned out to be.
Dressed in his uniform, Hernán is standing stiffly at the foot of the front steps, his hands clasped behind him, his hat pulled low on his forehead. He seems lost in thought, and when I first wave as I approach him, he appears not to recognize me.
“Hernán,” I call.
He swings his head in confusion, like someone awoken from a dream, and when he spots me, forces a smile. I wonder if he’s still upset that I intruded on his television viewing the night before.
“You’re at work early,” I say.
He unclasps his hands and gives a firm tug to each of his shirtsleeve cuffs. “Not really.”
“I’m looking for Danilo.”
Hernán rolls his eyes. “You are always looking for him. I do not know where he is.”
“He’s not here at the hotel?”
“No.”
“Have you seen him today at all?”
“I saw him last night, but he wasn’t there when I woke up this morning.”
“What time did you wake up?”
“Seven.”
“And he wasn’t in the house?”
Hernán shakes his head. “Your mother, at home. Doesn’t she miss you?”
The question catches me off guard. “What?”
“Your mother. Doesn’t she want you to come home?”
“How do you know about my mother?”
“What do you mean? I was only asking. I was wondering how much longer you’re planning to be in Panamá.”
His tone is innocent enough. I don’t think he knows about my mother’s illness or that I left her behind like I did. Nonetheless, I can tell—I can see it in the uncomfortable expression on his face—that he hopes I’ll leave soon. I doubt he’s mad at me, but maybe I’ve stayed too long, or maybe I’m just in his way, or maybe he regrets ever inviting me in the first place.
Danilo isn’t at Mi Pueblito, where we went once even though he deemed it a huge swamp of quicksand for tourists. It took us a long time to struggle through the language of that one. But eventually I got his meaning: It was a tourist trap. “Even so,” he said, “there’s something cool about the fact that people are trying, you know, to hold on to something.” He told me he liked going there sometimes when he needed to take a step back from his life.
Mi Pueblito is the Panama City version of Colonial Williamsburg, an assortment of replica buildings—an old town store, a gazebo, a church, residential huts where life-sized clay people are hunched forever over a fake fire—made to reflect what life in Panama was like in earlier days. When we went, Danilo shepherded us past all of it and led us up Ancon Hill, through the dense and overgrown grass and foliage, until we reached a reasonable plateau where we could sit in the heat.
“There’s a Kuna Village down there,” he said.
I didn’t want to tell him that I had read about it in my guidebook. He made fun of me anytime I said that.
“I know. You already know. But what you didn’t read”—he smiled—“is that they build the floors of their huts so that they’re creaky. It’s kind of like a tradition, you know. When a man wants to be with a woman in their tribe, he’s supposed to sneak into the hut in the middle of the night when the woman and her whole family are sleeping. If he makes it all the way across the floor without waking anyone up, he gets the woman. If he doesn’t . . .” Danilo made a slicing motion across his throat with his hand.
“They kill him?”
“They kill him.”
“Shit,” I said, and Danilo sprang up.
“Miraflores! Such language!” He looked positively gleeful, amused by my transgression.
“What?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I’m not always good,” I said.
“Yes you are.”
“Well maybe I’m not anymore, then,” I said.
We spent nearly four hours that day at Mi Pueblito, and of course, we asked everyone we laid eyes on about my father, and of course, no one even recognized his name. Now, when I don’t see Danilo anywhere on the premises, I ask some of the employees if they remember him, but they offer no recognition of him, either.
He isn’t at El Dorado, the mall where he took me the one day it rained since I’ve been here. It wasn’t supposed to rain. I had learned that during the dry season in Panama, no matter how threatening the sky looked, no matter how low and full and dark the clouds, rain would not actually tumble from the sky. I knew that because of the myriad times I, glimpsing a purplish-gray sky, remarked to Danilo, We should bring an umbrella with us, and Danilo, with a lifetime of experience to back him up, would tell me not to worry because there was absolutely no way it was going to rain. Not until April. I would eye him skeptically and he would say, “Trust me. It’s not going to happen.”
But it did. One morning I woke to a minor cacophony composed of the sound of rain spitting against the windows and Danilo banging on the bedroom door.
“Miraflores! Are you awake? It’s raining.”
I was groggy in bed.
“Get dressed,” he ordered. “We’re going out.”
I should have known he wouldn’t bring an umbrella.
“I swear to you,” he said, “this is the only time it will rain for you in Panamá. You could stay here for the rest of your life and it would never again rain during January for you.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it’s fucking raining now!” He was giddy about it. “So there’s no way you’re going to stand under an umbrella for it. This is a historic event, Miraflores. You need to experience it.”
The sky outside was perfectly blue and clear, slender needles of rain lit by the sun.
“So that means getting wet?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
I wiped my soaked bangs off my face and twisted my hair into a rope that uncoiled almost as soon as I let go.
“Look, you can always dry off later and you’ll be good as new. Humans are well designed that way. We have this thing called skin, and it’s fairly waterproof. Not waterproof like a fish, because you know when you stay in the bath for too long, your skin starts to wrinkle. That shit is crazy. But waterproof enough, you know, so that when you dry off your skin just goes back to how it was before. So there’s no harm in getting wet, okay? I wouldn’t do this to you if it were dangerous.”
I smiled sarcastically. “Thanks.”
We walked four blocks, the rain pattering down on us. We looked ridiculous, strolling as if immune to the fact that long dashes of water were falling from the sky. Other people walking by with their umbrellas hoisted in the air or plastic grocery bags tied over their heads looked at us with puzzlement or derision. But Danilo didn’t seem to care or notice, and after a time, neither did I
. Maybe he was right. Maybe this was the only time in my life I would get to experience Panamanian rain soaking into my skin and drenching my hair and the fibers of my clothes. Maybe that was something.
“So this is what we’re doing?” I asked, after we had passed several more street corners. “Walking in the rain?”
“This is what we’re doing first. But we’re also going to the mall.”
We ended up at El Dorado, a fairly typical-looking mall, not terribly unlike one in any town in the United States. As we cut across the parking lot, I saw a McDonald’s and a sporting goods store and something called Collins that looked like a department store. The hallways were covered, but there were no doors, blurring the division between inside and out. At the mouth of each corridor opening, elderly people sat behind wooden folding tables lined with small square papers that, I later learned, were lottery tickets. The papers were in rows, secured by long rubber bands that had been snapped around the tabletop. Each time a breeze swept through, the bottom edges of the tickets fluttered up like a swarm of butterfly wings.
Danilo and I walked inside and sat on the ledge of a fountain in the middle of the mall. Surrounding us were shoe stores and clothing stores and a store that sold embroidered linens being billed as authentic handicrafts, a fluorescent-orange piece of posterboard in the window advertising a sale, “Venta.” I looked at Danilo. He was sitting with his hands folded in his lap, an expression of contentment on his face. His soaked T-shirt clung to the slender contours of his chest. His wet hair was sideswept over his forehead. I remember I wanted to lean forward there, in the middle of the mall, and nuzzle my face against his slippery neck, but I turned away instead and stared, through a passing group of girls in flimsy dresses, at the neon Gran Morrison sign down the way, the rose icon blinking every few seconds. Then I noticed it: how loud it was in there. The longer I sat, neither Danilo nor I speaking, the louder it seemed to get. I looked back at him and pointed toward the ceiling. He nodded. I understood why he had brought me there. Without his having to say anything, I understood. Covering the mall was a zinc roof, which was high and spread over an area as large as a cavern. When the rain pounded down on it, the inside of the building thundered so deeply that I swore a herd of horses was stampeding over the roof. The sound swelled and boomed and echoed and reverberated in my chest, and unless it had rained and unless Danilo had brought me there, it was something I wouldn’t have experienced.
The World in Half Page 15