The World in Half

by Cristina Henriquez

  First, there are the photographs. Polaroids mostly, ten in all, some of them caked and cracked like plaster, whole chunks of the images missing or dissolved into dust that has settled into the bottom of the frame. They are pictures of my mother, and of my mother with him, and one wallet-sized portrait with rounded corners of me as a baby, lying on my back on our green shag carpet, wearing a lemon-yellow bunting, my mouth in the shape of an O. On the back of that one, in my mother’s handwriting, is written: “Miraflores Catherine Reid, 5 months, 1 week.” And underneath that, in my father’s, only my name—“Miraflores.”

  I sift slowly through the rest of the photographs. Even though I am seeing my father as he was more than twenty years earlier, it’s the first time I’ve laid eyes on him, the first time I have anything more tangible than my own invention to fill out what he looks like. I want to see myself in him, the resemblance of our features or expressions, but it’s hard to tell whether those connective threads are there. In the two photos where he appears, he is slender to the point of looking lanky, the flared bottoms of his dark brown pants emphasizing the narrowness of his knees and thighs. In both photographs he is wearing a printed button-down shirt tucked into his pants, which are held up by a wide leather belt. He is smiling wide, an irrepressible joy bursting through the seams of his features. His teeth are white and straight. He has a neatly trimmed mustache. His hair is wavy, pure black, parted deeply on one side, and giving way to sideburns. In one photograph he has aviator sunglasses; in the other I can see his eyes, shining with the same sort of ebullience that defines the rest of him. He looks, I think to myself, like a man in love. With my mother, I assume, but also with the world, with the whole crazy tangle of life. In one photograph he is standing next to my mother with his arm slung over her shoulder, and in the other he is demurely holding her hand. Both were clearly posed. I imagine them asking a passerby on the street to take a photo of them, and then the two of them huddling together eagerly over the glossy Polaroid paper, waiting for the result to crystallize into being.

  The images of my mother, in photograph after photograph—my mother’s back as she walks down a street in Panama City; my mother sitting on a step outside a small shop, her legs crossed; my mother posing sidesaddle in a hammock with her arms thrown up in the air and a triumphant grin on her face; a blurry close-up of my mother’s smile and imperfect teeth; my mother in a navy blue bathing suit, displaying in her cupped hands an assortment of seashells she must have collected from the beach; my mother waving at the camera; my mother curled up and sleeping in her dress on a couch as the sunlight drapes in through the windows—are in a way more astonishing to witness. She looks familiar enough; I have seen other photographs of her from the early eighties, the mid-eighties. Her hair was darker then, parted in the middle, falling straight down past her shoulders. She wore polyester dresses with exaggerated collars and platform sandals that crossed in an X over her toes and buckled at her ankles. But in another way, looking at her in these new pictures throws me off kilter even more than seeing my father for the first time. Because in all the photographs I’ve seen—not only from that time, but ever—she has never looked so carefree, so utterly and unabashedly happy, so perfectly radiant as she does in these. In all my life, I have never seen her look like this.

  Then the letters. The ones from my mother are on top, the airmail envelopes stapled to the upper left corner of each.

  Gatún,

  I’m so sorry—really I am—that I didn’t say good-bye to you before I left and that I didn’t tell you where I was going or anything of the sort—I was just so confused—and so much has happened—and I didn’t know how to tell you about it. I needed to figure some things out on my own first. I hope you’ll forgive me. But here is the news—I hate having to give it to you in a letter like this, but I don’t think I could bear to call you and hear your voice and hear your reaction—I’m so afraid for what it might be—and you’ll have questions I don’t know how to answer yet. But here it is: I’m pregnant. I’m going to have a baby—and it’s yours—I’m sure—it’s not Brant’s—there’s no way it could be—it has been too long between he and I—but you don’t need to know that, I suppose. I’m having your baby. Maybe you can understand now how my head got all turned around. I’ve come back to my parents. I haven’t told them about you yet—but I will—I swear it—and together we’ll figure everything out—but for now I just wanted you to know. Part of you is inside me. Part of you will always be with me.

  Your little bird,

  Catherine

  Gatún,

  So much has happened—and I’ve been thinking it over—and perhaps it would be best for me to stay here and have the baby here and live here with the baby on my own. I know you said you were excited—but I also know that a child right now was not exactly in your plans—and I don’t want it to become a burden for you—you shouldn’t feel any responsibility. Besides that, it’s just not a good time here—you don’t understand how people here can be—their attitudes, their judgment, that sort of thing. I’m going to stay here for now—and you should stay there for now. Maybe in the future something can change.

  Catherine

  Gatún,

  We have a baby girl—you have a new little bird. She’s a week old now—with the most perfect feet and elbows and nose—the most perfect everything. We are staying with my parents—they’ve insisted—no visitors. I’ll write again soon.

  Catherine

  Gatún,

  It’s the hardest thing—you can’t imagine—I can’t believe—but you have to stay where you are—it will just be better for everyone—and you should try to forget about me—about the baby—it’s no use—it wouldn’t be good here for you—I can’t think straight but I know that—and it would make her life more difficult—and yours—and mine—so you should just go on—and we’ll go on—and you shouldn’t worry—there are lots of single mothers—and I’ll just be one more—but whatever you do you should pretend that I never happened—and I’ll do the same about you—and life can continue without all the complications—we’ll just release each other—just like that—we’ll let each other slip away—and it will all just be like a dream that we’ve woken up from now—that we walk out of without looking back. It’s best that way.

  Catherine

  Gatún,

  I’m sorry.

  Catherine

  The rest are stacked loosely, unencumbered by envelopes or paper clips or staples. Page after page on onionskin paper, written in the same handwriting that graced the letters I found in my mother’s room more than a month earlier. All of them undated, all of them unsigned, and all of them for some reason unsent.

  Dear Catarina,

  I wonder sometimes whether you really know how I feel about you. I have trouble putting it into words, so I probably didn’t tell you as often as I should have or as well as I wanted to. I’m not a poet. I’m only me. But I do want you to know, if you didn’t know it before, that you changed my life. When I met you, you were a spirited, funny young girl who couldn’t stop talking. You ordered seco in the bar and smoked cigarettes on the street. You drank Coca-Cola straight from the bottle and I remember you always wanted to keep the bottle when you were finished. You would slip it into your pocketbook to take home with you. Why? What did you ever do with all those bottles? I always wondered. And do you remember our first kiss? In my kitchen? I was cooking plátano and you were humming at the table and then you walked up behind me and laid your hands, like two soft paws, on my back. Catarina? I said. Gatún? you said. And I laid the fork down and turned to face you, the palms of your hands skimming around my body until they stopped on my chest. You started humming again, and then you smiled and rose up on your toes and kissed me. I never knew the name of that song.

  I remember how you kept your shoes on the first time we went to the bed together. You giggled when I unbuttoned your blouse. You breathed against my neck in the dark. And that one night, you fell asleep afterward with your hand resting
so gently on my thigh.

  I was in love with you. I’m still so in love with you. It seems like it should be fading by now, but it only gets stronger. I can’t stop thinking about you and remembering you. On the street, I don’t see anyone else. No one else registers. I could live a hundred more lives and a hundred years in all of them and never again find another person besides you.

  I don’t know what to do now without you. I feel like I’m on a carnival ride, spinning around and around, dizzy, unable to see anything clearly. My life now depends on being with you. My life! You’ll think I’m exaggerating, or that I sound too desperate to be taken seriously, or you’ll be frightened because I never told you all of this, even though I should have.

  Please write to me. I don’t have a phone number for you in the United States, even though I tried to find one though the administration offices on your base. They produced one that rang in a small town in New York, but the woman who answered told me it was the wrong number. I only have these letters. I’ll wait for your handwriting. I’ll wait for you, mi pajarita, however long it will take. I’ll be loving you exactly like this every day for the rest of my life.

  Yours

  Dear Catarina,

  Thank you for the photograph. I can hardly stand to look at it, although it’s all I want to look at. She looks so . . . No word, in either English or Spanish. It is cold there? Please send more. Take one every day so I can see how she’s growing.

  Dear Catarina,

  I don’t know why I write to you anymore, except that I can’t help myself. I feel compelled to share my life with you, even if you don’t want to receive it. I haven’t heard from you in months. The girl is nearly a year old now. I still think of her as “the girl.” It’s too painful, her name, what meaning it has. I wonder all the time what she looks like now. I see children on the street and have to duck into shops sometimes to weep.

  I’m still working at the canal, although I’m on the maintenance crew now. Today we started cleaning and repairing one of the gate leaves. It was quite an operation, watching the crane barge lift the gate from its slot and take it to the dry dock at Mount Hope so that it could be laid down for us to work on it. One of the men on my crew told me that each gate weighs twelve tons. It’s all new to me.

  I was moved from my previous post at the Miraflores control tower because of a stupid mistake. In all of canal history—forty ships passing through every day!—there’s never been a single collision, but I almost caused precisely that because of my carelessness. I was managing the log and somehow, because I was not paying close enough attention, I radioed to two separate vessels that they could enter the locks at the same time. I didn’t know what I’d done until the operator on the ground starting blowing his whistle frantically. Hector Jaén (do you remember him?) and I both ran to the window of the control tower to see what was going on. The operator was pointing toward the two oncoming ships and doing what, to be truthful, looked like a vigorous jumping-jack routine. When I looked, I saw one container ship and one coaster ship both headed toward the entrance of the locks from opposing angles. Hector Jaén grabbed the nearest radio receiver from the wall and called the captain of the coaster ship (it was smaller, so it could stop more quickly). The captain asked what the hell was going on. Hector Jaén implored the captain please to stop his boat. There were a few prolonged minutes of arguing, in which the captain tried all manner of threats and reasonings ranging from that he didn’t see why he should be expected to stop, to that he had been traveling for a week already, to that he knew the governor of California, and finally, to that his ship was carrying human hearts for people awaiting transplants in Africa, a falsehood which Hector Jaén didn’t even dignify with a response since both of us could see from the log that the ship was clearly headed to Asia and that it held 75,000 pounds of onions. When Hector Jaén told the captain of the coaster ship to stop, or else he would risk imperiling the crew’s life, the captain finally agreed. The container ship went through the locks and, an hour later, the coaster ship passed as well. I don’t think I exhaled once during the whole ordeal.

  The Panama Canal Spillway ran a front-page story about it. Hector Jaén asked me what I could have been thinking. I didn’t tell him that I was distracted because I’m depressed. I think only of you. He wanted to fire me. I begged him to let me stay. I told him my job was all I had. It’s true. After you left, it became the last thing that mattered to me. I told him I would do anything. He took pity on me and recommended me for a job in the maintenance division.

  Still yours

  Dear Catarina,

  All day at work I hear the shrieks of the howler monkeys echo throughout the rain forest. When I first started working at the canal, I hated that sound—I heard the shrill bursts in my dreams—but now I find that if I go too long without hearing it, I almost miss it.

  Yours

  Dear Catarina,

  It’s the rainy season. You remember it well, no? The way the sky is given to fits of rain that pound down for a few minutes and shut off again. I walked you to the bus stop that night from the bar when it was raining and neither of us had an umbrella and your blouse clung to your skin.

  The streets in the city flooded today.

  Maybe you’re sitting on the other side of the ocean, writing letters to me, too, that you’ll never send. Maybe you still think of me. Is there a chance for us?

  Dear Catarina,

  This morning for breakfast I ate an overripe mango smothered in honey. I had a cup of coffee and then I went to work. Sometimes I go even on Sunday when I’m off. I stand around and watch the lumbering ships pass by in front of me. I stay until dusk and watch the sun set, the orange glow spreading out against the sky. After the lights in the water lanes and control towers flicker on, I return home. I wash my clothes. I have a drink. I sit in the dark and remember you.

  Dear Catarina,

  It’s been another year, and still I’ve heard nothing from you. I feel crazy still expecting to.

  I’ve been transferred to the canal’s dredging division since I last wrote. We scan for abnormal deposits of silt and mud on the floor of Gatún Lake—conditions that could lead to a mudslide. Every day, I ride in a little tugboat with four other men and drag a tool through the water that beeps when the floor levels are off. There are fish gliding through the water, too, and we place bets on whether one of us can catch a fish with his bare hands. Every time I try, I pull my hands up with nothing but water streaming through my fingers. Last week one of the men (Mario) did nab one (a big one!) and we took it to the cafeteria and had the cooks fry it for lunch.

  Also last week I learned that one of my crew had made an arrangement to receive some baseballs from one of the ship captains who come through the canal often. Did you know that the New York Yankees visited Panamá once? I’ve never seen it, but at Balboa High School, in the Zone, there is a shattered window from when Joe DiMaggio hit a home run through it. That probably doesn’t impress you. In the United States, I imagine you see baseball stars all the time. But here, for us, well, you know how important baseball is. When the captain of the ship was lined up in anchorage, we steered our tugboat alongside and a young sailor came out onto the deck and tossed baseballs—one for each of us—overboard as we caught them. I put mine in my kitchen cabinet for safekeeping.

  I hope you’re well.

  Yours

  Dear Catarina,

  I was walking down Avenida Central this afternoon, looking for a new brown belt, when the rain roiled up out of nowhere. I stepped into a fabric shop to keep dry until it passed. In the front of the shop was a young woman, she couldn’t have been much older than you, sewing on a machine. I watched her as she pulled pins out of what had just been sewn, as she made folds and measurements in what still needed work, as she held the needle between her lips. I thought of your lips. And then, feeling like a creep, I moved to the back of the store. Bolts of fabric were propped up and leaning against the walls, one in front of the other. Where the fabric ran
off the end of the roll, it hung down over the bolt behind it, as if in an embrace. I thought of you again. It seems there’s nothing in this world that doesn’t remind me of you.

  Yours

  Dear Catarina,

  I went to a quinceañera for a friend’s daughter. Actually, I don’t know him so well. He’s the bartender at El Cuarto Paitilla, but he’s fond of me (probably for the money I spend there) and invited me to the celebration.

  It was quite an event. When I arrived, the boys were in the driveway playing jacks, but they were all dressed in montunos with striped chácara bags slung over their shoulders and fine ocueño hats on their heads. Do you remember when we saw the men in the parade dressed like that? The girls wore polleras, and the bartender’s daughter wore a pollera de gala that he told me cost fifteen hundred dollars to have made. She wore another three hundred dollars’ worth of gold jewelry on top of that.

  Nearly a hundred people were in the backyard, walking around in their finest clothes and perfumes. I wore starched pants and my best guayabera. And of course my hat. They must have spent a lot on decorating, too. Strands of colored bulbs were strung from beam to beam all the way around the perimeter of the yard, like walls of light. Round tables draped in pink tablecloths had been set up, with enough space left over for a dance floor. At the front was a head table with flower petals sprinkled over the length and an arrangement made from birds of paradise in the center. As soon as enough people were settled, waiters charged like bees from a nest with flutes of champagne for everyone. I didn’t know anyone there, so I sat at a half-occupied table with a few people who clearly didn’t know anyone, either.