The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

  On one of these outings, I can’t remember which, Danilo had, out of nowhere, claimed that there were eight continents spread over the earth.

  “Are you trying to sound stupid?” I asked. We’d fallen by then into a sort of teasing camaraderie.

  “I usually don’t have to try.”

  “Come on. There are seven continents,” I told him. “You know that.”

  “List them.”

  “Asia, Australia, Antarctica, Africa, Europe, North America, and South America.”

  “And what about Central America?”

  “What about it?”

  “Central America is the eighth.”

  “Central America is part of South America,” I said.

  He balked. “What? Here we learn in school that Central America is its own continent. Everyone here thinks that. And if we all think it and we live here, then it’s true.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  “People here believe it in their hearts, Miraflores, and the heart is a fucking stubborn thing. It makes true what it wants.”

  “I’m pretty sure there are only seven continents,” I said again, and he let it drop after telling me that I was being narrow-minded.

  But the heart is a stubborn thing, I think now. It must be or else I should have given up by now. I should go back to the apartment and start packing my things. I should call the airline and book a return ticket back to Chicago. Because I’m tired of looking for people—of looking for Danilo, and for my father, and for my mother underneath everything, and for myself. But something won’t let me stop.

  The only other place I can think to check is Panamá La Vieja.

  I wait at the bus stop for half an hour. Everyone—nearly twenty people have gathered by the time the bus arrives—grumbles in the heat about the wait. I sit toward the front, next to a bald man with a gold lightning-bolt earring in his left ear. He glances at me, then turns away. As the bus growls away from the stop, he swivels his head back around. I’m staring straight ahead, but I can feel his eyes on me.

  “Buenas,” he says.

  “Buenas.”

  The bus is crowded, packed with people of all ages, and steaming hot despite the fact that nearly every window is open. A woman standing at the front flicks a paper fan in front of her face while she gazes impassively at the city as it slips by.

  “You ride this bus a lot?” the man asks.

  My neck tenses and I clench my toes in my sneakers. “Not usually.”

  “I’m trying to get to a restaurant called Firenze. Do you know it?”

  And all at once, I think I might laugh. He wants directions? And he looked at me and thought I could provide them?

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know it.”

  He squints. “You’re Panamanian?”

  “Yes.”

  The man rolls his eyes. “Even Panamanians don’t know what’s happening in our own country anymore. There’s so much that’s new!”

  And then, as if to prove his point, the bus drives by a construction crane hovering over a new high-rise, like a colossal metal flamingo.

  “I know,” I say, playing along and smiling. “It’s crazy.”

  “It’s a madhouse!”

  I’m the only passenger who gets off at Panamá La Vieja. At first sight, no one besides me is on the grounds. If Danilo was here, he would be in one of two places. Except that he isn’t in the hollow cathedral when I check. In the small square space made of molded stones, there’s nothing but a gray bird pecking at something in the corner. Which leaves only one other spot I can think of.

  I see him before he sees me. He’s sitting with his legs dangling over the side of the bridge, fiddling with a blade of grass between his fingers. My throat tightens. He looks so serene. Something about the way his shoulders are rounded and the way his fingers fumble with the grass makes him seem inexpressibly forlorn. I feel an aching tenderness toward him that I’ve never felt for anyone, not even my mother, who at various moments invokes her own sort of tenderness and ache from me. But standing there watching Danilo is different. He doesn’t seem small or pitiable or lost, as my mother does more and more. He seems entirely himself, only sunken in an odd sort of gloom.

  He peels the blade of grass into two thin strips and then peels those strips into even finer ribbons until the ribbons turn into little more than threads, and gathering them all in his hand, he tosses them out over the edge of the bridge. The strands float down to the water like feathers lit in the breeze. He’s rubbing his palms along the thighs of his pants when he turns his head enough that he sees me. He furrows his brow, then scrambles to his feet, brushing his hands hastily against the front of his pants again.

  “Were you looking for me?” he asks when I reach him.

  I don’t know what to say. Yes, I’ve been looking for you makes it sound like I won’t leave him alone. No, I haven’t been looking for you sounds like a lie, because what? I just happen to be stopping by Panamá La Vieja on my own for no good reason?

  “I hadn’t seen you all day,” I say.

  There’s no one else around. From the bay, I can hear the rush and swell of the water as it brushes up onto the shore and crashes against the rocks behind the seawall. A sewage smell lances sharply through the air. Danilo pushes his hands into his pockets and starts walking past me, up the slight hill I just came down, his strides long and assured. “Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

  The bus rumbles down Avenida Balboa under a cloudless sky. A woman sitting in front of us is wearing over her head a scarf with a purple diamond print, and she hums as we lumber along. Not ten minutes later, as the bus slows, Danilo stands and announces, “This is it. On your feet, Miraflores.”

  We step off onto a street teeming with traffic. There are a handful of businesses—an auto body shop, a travel agency, a nail salon—but we pass them all and turn onto a side street, into an area that very quickly becomes residential, the houses small and squat, well kept.

  Danilo stuffs his hands back into his pockets, keeping them there for the half-mile or so that we walk until we come to the lip of the land hanging over the bay.

  The water is brown and foamy, riddled with tiny pieces of debris where it laps at the shore. Farther out, though, toward the horizon, it appears placid, glittering in the fiery late afternoon sun. There are several sailboats with their masts raised bobbing not far off and, in the very far distance, the shadowy smudge of larger vessels lined up in anchorage to pass through the Panama Canal. It’s the way all of Panama City seems: a place where the sidewalks are cracked and broken, where people live in buildings that look as structurally sound as if they were built with toothpicks, where the storefronts are soiled from polluted air, where abandoned cars sit on the side of the road and sometimes in the middle of it, where armed guards perform random street checks and stand menacingly in front of even the drugstore, where mangy dogs roam free, and where bits of garbage are caught in every patch of overgrown grass throughout the city, and yet, for all the grit, there’s a sublime sort of beauty, too, the way the whole of the city shines in the gracious, broad rays of the sun, the smile—welcoming and sincere and full of life—on people’s faces as they walk down the streets, the brilliant flowers blooming in even the most unsuspecting nooks and crannies, the ebb and flow of the bay against the land, the black iron sand swirled into the shore, the songs of birds—like birds I’ve never heard before—coursing through the morning hours of every single day. It’s the kind of discord that exists everywhere, or at least in any place that’s large enough to be more than one thing. But it’s different here. The beauty and the disarray are everything. They are the edges of Panama, the borders that define it, and there is nothing else in between.

  “This is where I used to live,” Danilo says.

  “Where?”

  “Right here.”

  The nearest house is half a block behind us. We’re standing on nothing but dirt studded with pebbles.

  “Th
ere used to be a house here,” he says. “Hernán sold it when he was sure my parents weren’t coming back.” I’m surprised to hear him bring up his parents. “He thought he’d made us a lot of money from it that he could use to help take care of me. But we burned through it in about two years.”

  “So what happened to the house?”

  “Hernán sold it to a contractor. Guy tore it down after a few months to make way for some condo project, but then the condo project fell through. Anyway, this is where I used to live when my parents were around.” He says all of this while keeping his eyes fixed on the water in the distance.

  “What was it like?”

  “What?”

  “The house.”

  “Nothing special. It was just one floor. My bedroom was in the back. When I was a kid, I used to kneel on my bed and watch my mom through the back window, hanging clothes out on the line. We had some roosters that used to come up and try to eat her ankles, and she had to kick them away. My father killed one of them, once, for being such a pest. He took me out there with him and showed me how to chop the machete through its neck. He told me you had to do it quick. And you had to believe it would die, you had to do it without pity, or else it wouldn’t die right away. It would only suffer.” He crosses his arms. “My parents’ room had air-conditioning. Just a shitty window unit. It fogged up my mom’s mirror all the time, and she would hit it with her slipper like she thought she could get it to behave better. I don’t know. It was just a regular house.”

  “It sounds nice.”

  He turns to me, and if I have ever seen wistfulness etched in another person’s face, it’s then. “What’s your house like?”

  “It’s just a regular house,” I say, smiling.

  “Come on. Tell me.”

  “It’s one story, with two bedrooms. One for my mother and one for me. They’re right next to each other, so I can hear her sometimes on the other side of the wall. We share a bathroom. The toilet seat is padded.”

  Danilo turns up his palms and shakes his head.

  “Um, it’s like . . . it’s not hard like a normal toilet seat. It has this padding on it, so it’s comfortable when you sit down.”

  “Most houses in the United States have that? It’s popular?”

  “Ours is the only one I’ve ever seen.”

  “So you and your mother are just weird?”

  “A little bit.”

  Danilo smiles. “Yeah, a little bit.”

  “There’s a small kitchen. And a basement, too. So I guess that makes it a two-story. I’m not sure how that works. But it’s nice. It’s the only place I’ve ever lived.”

  “That’s what makes it nice,” he says.

  The day is darkening, the cover of dusk descending like a veil.

  Danilo says, “I think about them sometimes. I don’t know whether they ever think about me.” He kicks his heel against the ground.

  “They do, Danilo.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You’re right. I don’t know that. But that’s what you would say to me in the same situation. And besides, I believe it. I don’t think any parent gets through life without thinking about their child, at least sometimes.”

  “You believed your father didn’t think about you.”

  I shake my head. “No. I believed he didn’t care about me. But I always thought that every once in a while he remembered I was out there and wondered about me.”

  “Hernán used to pester me to call them. Every day he would say, Call your parents, they miss you.”

  “And did you?”

  “I thought that was up to them. The one who gets left behind is the one who deserves to be found. That sort of thing.”

  I tuck my hair behind my ears, trying to think of what to say.

  After several more seconds, Danilo says, “Tell me something else. Tell me about the music in the United States.”

  “What do you want to know about it?”

  “What’s popular?”

  “I don’t really know. I don’t listen to what’s popular.”

  “Do people listen to reggaetón?”

  “Some people probably do.”

  “They listen to it at the clubs?”

  “I never go to clubs.”

  “But other people go to clubs?”

  “Sure, some do.”

  “But you don’t.” He smiles kindly, then peers out again across the water. “Do you see those ships out there?” he asks, gesturing toward the queue of vessels barely visible in the dimming light.

  “The ones getting ready to go through the canal?”

  “They’ll cross from one side of the world to the other. Just like that. That’s fucking insane, isn’t it?”

  I don’t say anything at first. “You could go to Brazil. You could visit them.”

  “I know.”

  “You should. You could have them back. At least in some way. God, I would take any way at this point, to have my father. I know I have those letters. And what he said in them . . . well, knowing all of that is a lot more than I had before. But if I could just talk to him, even once, my whole life would be different. Come on, Danilo. You could go to them. They’re out there. You know how to find them at least.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wouldn’t be that hard.”

  “Was it hard for you when you came here?”

  “Sure. At first it was. But then it wasn’t. After I met you, it got easier.”

  Danilo is quiet. I want to tell him more: how much he matters to me, how he makes me feel boundless and switched on, how I’m afraid that I’ll go home and go on and never again meet someone like him.

  He says, “But if I went to Brazil, you wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t have anyone to make it easy for me.”

  “You might meet someone else.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  From the house half a block away, a dog yelps into the muggy air and a woman runs out onto the patio to scream at it.

  “Lovely country, isn’t it?” Danilo says.

  “I like it.”

  “Every year they say we’re going to be discovered. We’ve got cranes up everybody’s ass, building condominiums for all the people who are supposedly going to invest here. But I don’t know. I don’t see it.”

  “My mother liked it, too. I think it was probably the best time of her life, being here.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “I already told you that?”

  “Well, you told me she loved it. She should come back.”

  “I don’t think she can now.”

  “Because of the Alzheimer’s?”

  I nod. “I mean, I guess she could, but it would be so complicated”—I rub my forehead in my palm—“just all the traveling and everything. I don’t know. Plus, I don’t know if it would mean anything to her anymore.”

  Danilo draws a cigarette out of a pack in his pocket and lights it. The two of us are side by side, not meeting each other’s eyes, just watching the surface of the water bob and sway, occasionally building up into an undersized wave.

  “And what about you?” he asks. “Are you ever coming back here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He kicks his heel again, tamping the dirt. “That’s a shitty answer. I mean, if you like it so much, you should just decide now that you’re going to come back sometime.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t.”

  “You didn’t say you would, either.”

  I don’t want to argue with him.

  He takes a few quick drags of his cigarette, the singed odor melting into the air. “You know, Miraflores, if you don’t come back, you’ll be just like your mother.”

  I know he says it because he’s going to miss me when I leave and he can’t bring himself to tell me directly, but it’s impossible not to feel upset with him for playing on what he knows is one of my deepest fears.

  “I can’t believe you said that,” I tell him.

  “Why?”
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  “I’m not going to end up like her. I’m not going to be her.”

  “She came here, right? She met someone. And then she went back to her life and she forgot all about him. She acted like she had never even known him.”

  I set my jaw. “You don’t know what she did.”

  “You told me all of that! And now you’re going to do the same thing, aren’t you?”

  “It was different for her, Danilo. You know that.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not, like, more pissed at her.”

  “I am pissed at her.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  “What do you want me to do? I mean, yeah, I’m pissed. I’m fucking mad as all . . . Jesus! She kept everything from me. She took everything! But she’s sick now, Danilo, and she did what she did, and I’m not going to yell at someone whose mind is slipping away for letting her whole goddamn life slip away!”

  “And yours,” Danilo adds.

  I take a deep breath and lower my voice. “It’s not the same.”

  “But she did take a part of your life from you. A really big part.”

  “I know.”

  Danilo throws his cigarette, like a shooting star, ahead of him over the edge of the rocks. “Well, that’s very magnanimous of you.”

  I sigh.

  “Look, I only said what I did before, about you becoming like your mother, so you can make sure it doesn’t happen. You can make sure, you know. You can decide to make it different for yourself. You can be a different sort of person from her.”

  There’s a quivering tension, taut and persistent, skimming somewhere under my skin.

  “So are you going to come back?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just decide.”

  “Danilo, I don’t know. My life, in case you haven’t noticed, is all up in the air right now. I have no idea what’s going to happen to me after I get home. I don’t even know what’s going to happen to me in the next hour.”