The girl’s grandfather made a toast, telling us that he paid a lot of money for the party, enough that he could have bought a new car. He asked the crowd if we’d seen the new Alfa Romeo Quadrifoglio Verde. When no one answered, he said, “It’s very nice. Of course, not as nice as being able to celebrate my granddaughter in grand fashion. Of course! There is no comparison. Of course. But I paid a lot of money nonetheless, so I hope you enjoy yourselves. ¡Salud!” Then he thrust his glass high above his head and finished his champagne, licking his lips when he was done.
When the girl made her entrance, she strutted slowly, holding the corners of her long pollera skirt up like a crescent, showing off the intricate appliqué. She turned on the dance floor while people took photographs. The boys poked one another when they saw her. I clapped politely.
Later, after he had drunk too much champagne, the girl’s grandfather tipped backward in his chair and fell into the wall of lights behind him, pulling the whole thing to the ground like a bedsheet from a laundry line. After the initial shock, everyone broke out in laughter, but I didn’t have the heart. By then, I was lost in my own champagne and my own head, quiet and alone at the table.
Do I have to tell you that I missed our daughter? Is it possible to miss someone you’ve never met? And I wondered, as I often wonder, what she must be like. I believe she must be prettier and, I hope, far humbler than this girl was. I know it will be the great regret of my life that I’ll never meet her. I feel delirious with anger at you sometimes because of it.
Dear Catarina,
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. But today I had the idea that I could jump aboard one of these ships passing through and ride it to the United States, to see you. I looked at a map and Chicago’s in the middle, no? I could take a ship that docks on the eastern coast and then take a train from there. Is that possible? Will you want me to? I know you told me not to, but can that still be true? If I were to arrive, and there was nothing you could do about it, I think once you saw me again
I stopped this letter in the middle of writing it, because I scared myself. All of a sudden, anything seemed possible. What if I did it?
I got Hector Jaén to let me back up in the control tower to look at the log. There’s a ship sailing through to Savannah, Georgia, that leaves tomorrow. Tomorrow! I might see your face again! I want to lie next to you and hold your face in my hands. Listen to this! Me, getting so carried away. All is forgiven for never writing me back. I know your energy has been spent on other matters, like raising our daughter. Look for me soon.
Until then and always
Dear Catarina,
God must be watching over me. I didn’t board the ship. What a fool I would’ve made of myself! I promised I would stay away and I will.
I am yours.
Dear Catarina,
The comet Halley is supposed to pass tonight. People are gathering on the sandbank of the bay to watch the sky catch on fire. The newspaper ran an interview with a woman who was alive the last time it passed, in 1910. She said that back then there had been paranoia because everyone thought that the gas in the tail of the comet was a poison that would shower down. Of course, that did not happen. She said it was like an electric peacock flashing across the black sky. I can hardly imagine. Everyone is so excited. Everyone keeps talking about how spectacular it will be.
Yours
Dear Catarina,
I learned today that I’m sick. My lungs and liver are damaged and failing. I knew it was something, although I would’ve guessed it was my heart. The doctor said it was too much drinking and too many cigarettes. But then he looked at me and said, “Depression has taken its toll, hasn’t it?” He knew. I’ve been drinking and smoking for a reason. Not that it matters. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether it’s my liver or my lungs or my withered heart. God has a stubborn will; He takes each of us when He wants.
Off and on for five years now I’ve been writing you these letters. I woke each day with the dim hope that I would somehow hear from you. I’ve thought about you all this time. Are you still in Chicago? Are you in New York? The fact that I don’t know breaks my heart. I always thought that, after enough time had passed, I would find you again. I always thought that you would finally allow yourself to be found. I wonder sometimes what I meant to you, and whether I was only one in a parade of men, a lover easily eclipsed by others. I try not to think about it too much.
The doctor says that if I start to take care of myself, I could go another few years still. He says if I toss out the alcohol and cigarettes (and cigars!) and if I start exercising, I’ll improve for a time. I don’t know whether he’s telling the truth or just trying to make me feel better. No matter how long I can extend it, though, my time is limited.
Either way, with the news has come the urge to collect the pieces of my life, remember them, and soothe myself with them, like a baby with his blanket. Only I’ve found that there aren’t many pieces to gather—in my life there were my parents, there was the canal, and there was you. It seems pathetic to admit. Then again, I had real happiness once. A blinding, burning happiness. It was because of you.
I still love you, Catarina. I wanted to at least write those words down on paper one last time, to have a record of them in the world.
There’s nothing else to say.
I lay the last letter down slowly and straighten the edges of the pile with my fingertips. I stack the photographs on top. There is nothing else in the box. Danilo stares at me with a blank face. From the floor, I peer up at Ilsa, who has perched herself on the arm of her sofa and is moving her mouth in tiny motions, as if she were eating birdseed.
“Can I keep them?” I ask. I don’t know whether it’s appropriate. It feels a little like walking into someone’s house and seeing a teapot you like, or a television, or a rug—an item that’s patently not yours—and asking if you can just take it. But I feel desperate to own the letters, to take them with me, and be able to look at them again and again.
“They’re more yours than mine,” she says.
Even though the box is bigger than it needs to be for a handful of photographs and sheets of paper, I don’t know whether I should leave it behind, so I drop everything back in and pick it up, light as a hat, as I rise to my feet.
“I remember when he met her,” Ilsa says. “He didn’t say anything, but I could tell something was going on with him. And eventually I got it out of him. He had been waiting to get his shoes shined and he saw her walk by with a roast pig in her arms. She had come from the butcher. She dropped it and he went to help her pick it up. He was never the same again.”
“He used to get his shoes shined?” My voice sounds weak.
“Every week. Until he couldn’t afford to any longer. Then he did it himself. He was a bit of a dandy, your father.”
I nod.
“I could tell you more,” Ilsa says, “if you want to stay. And if you want to know.”
I want to know everything.
“Come on,” she says. “Sit back on the couch.”
Danilo is still there, and I drop myself beside him, resting the box on my lap.
“What can I tell you?” Ilsa asks. She crosses her legs and stacks her hands atop her knee. The skirt of her dress hangs like a gaping mouth.
“What did he like?”
“What do you mean?”
“What were some of his favorite things? His favorite food or music or something?”
“He very much liked strawberry ice cream. Since he was a boy. And there’s something here called a carimañola. Do you know it? It’s a fried yuca roll stuffed with meat. He would have eaten that every day if he could. For music, I don’t know. He liked Tito Puente. Do you know him?”
“I’ve heard of him.”
“And that North American singer with a Mexican name—Joan Baez. He had cassette tapes that he recorded from friends’ albums because he could never afford to buy the originals at the store. But he didn’t listen to them that much that I r
emember. He would rather have been walking through the neighborhood, stopping to chat with people outside.”
“What neighborhood?”
“He grew up in Río Abajo. I only saw him when I was sent over to his house to visit my father. Their house always smelled of menthol ointment.” Ilsa makes a face.
“Did you ever meet my mother?” I ask. “When she was here?”
“No, I never met her. I saw her once. She had long hair and a blue dress. Very pretty. I was at his house, dropping off some pants I had hemmed for him, and she arrived, fresh off the bus. He was waiting for her at the window. I remember because he had told me that when she came, he was going to go outside to meet her and that he would take her for a walk. He wanted me to slip out before they returned.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Gatún was so self-conscious. Not because of her. But because he was so much older, I suppose, and because he was un panameño and she was una gringa. He didn’t care, of course. But he was always afraid of other people’s judgment. He knew how cruel people could be and the kinds of things they might say.”
“You wouldn’t have been like that, would you?”
“No. And he knew that. But he was just so protective of her by then. He was always nervous about upsetting the equilibrium of her life and about making her life difficult for her.”
“She did that for herself.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing.” I change course a bit. “Did you know she was married?”
Ilsa’s eyes widen. “Later, you mean? She married?”
“No, while she was here. That’s why she came here.”
“She was married? When she was with Gatún? To whom?”
“A Marine. He was stationed in the Canal Zone.”
I’m twisting my fingers together. What must Ilsa think of my mother now?
“She was married to the Marine?”
“Did you know him?”
“The one . . .” Ilsa shakes her head. “But no. She was married to him?”
“His name was Brant.”
Ilsa appears confused now, squinting and holding the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she focuses on something on the wall behind me. “I think . . .” she finally says. “Maybe I have the story wrong. But I thought the Marine was a homosexual. Only a friend.”
My eyes widen involuntarily. “Brant Strickland?” I whisper.
“Strickland. Yes, that was his name. Gatún told me he was only a friend to your mother. Maybe he meant . . .”
“But they were married.”
“Maybe he meant it was only possible for him to be a friend to her since he was . . .” Ilsa gazes at her lap and murmurs, “I’m sorry. . . . I probably have it wrong.”
I fix my eyes again on the gas knob and try to sort out the thoughts in my mind, but everything is crowded and knotted like a bramble of thorns. He was gay? Surely my mother didn’t know that when she married him. Although maybe she suspected it. What was it she’d told me once, “It wasn’t right from the beginning or the middle or the end”? And it made sense, then, how she had allowed herself to have an affair, how she would even have been receptive to the possibility. My head is pounding. The box of letters is at my feet, my bag slumped on top of it. My bangs are getting too long, hitting my eyelashes each time I blink. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Danilo’s knee, cloaked in olive cargo pants.
Ilsa says again, “Maybe I’m wrong.”
I shake my head. She’s right. It all fits.
She realizes it, too, because she goes on. “It’s probably why . . .” She turns the bangles on her wrist, then lets them hang. “I doubt he cared very much that your mother was with Gatún, then. Assuming he knew. It would have been ridiculous to stop her. He couldn’t have expected loyalty from her in that circumstance.”
Danilo sighs and falls back against the couch in apparent disbelief at this twist to the story.
“It probably made things worse when she got pregnant,” I mumble.
“Why?”
“It was one thing for her to carry on an affair. He probably thought no one would find out about it, anyway. No one from home, I mean. But there was no way to hide having a baby that wasn’t his. I mean, there was no way it was going to look like him. It was like a very public fissure”—I say the word in English—“in their relationship. Everyone would know that they weren’t working. And then people might start to wonder why. They might have started asking questions.” I’m un-spooling everything almost as if I’m just talking to myself.
“Maybe I should have known they were married,” Ilsa says, regaining her voice. “Why else would your mother have been here, in Panamá? I just didn’t think about it. Gatún never made it clear.”
I take a deep breath. I’m going to need some fresh air soon. “Did he find someone again, after my mother?” I ask.
“No.”
“No one?”
“There were women. They came and went. But no one who meant anything to him. Your mother was the only one for him, I think. He never recovered from her.”
“I don’t think my mother ever recovered from him, either.” Ilsa frowns. “It would have been nice if he could have known that. You can’t imagine the sadness that lived in him after she left. It dislodged part of his soul. He carried that around with him every day. It was always there. If he had known, if she could have at least told him, that she still cared about him, what a difference it would have made.”
“She couldn’t.”
“What?”
“She couldn’t tell him. I mean, she wouldn’t let herself.” I sigh. “I didn’t know her then, obviously. And I’m just putting everything together now, but that same sadness that you say my father had, for my mother I think it turned into anger.”
Ilsa makes a fist and holds it in the air. “Like this? She grew hard?”
“Yes. She grew hard.”
She opens her hand and sinks her other thumb into her palm. “What’s inside?”
“The sadness is still there, too.”
She adjusts the hem of her dress and straightens in the chair. Next to me, Danilo straightens, too.
“Your father wasn’t alone, though,” Ilsa assures me. “He had me. And people liked him. Everyone liked him.”
“Did he talk about me?”
Ilsa shakes her head. “Not often. I knew about you, of course. But I think it was too painful for him to talk about you openly. And what did he know? What was there to talk about? He could only wonder what you must be like. To see you now! Here! In his country! He would have been overjoyed. Very astonished and very pleased. You look like him. The roundness of your nose. The way your mouth curves.”
“I do?”
“He would have been very happy to see that.”
“I thought he abandoned us,” I say. “I didn’t know . . .”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
I know what she’s insinuating. “My mother did love him,” I say.
“Maybe.”
“She did. You don’t know her.”
“I know enough. I read her letters. I know how she broke him.”
But Ilsa is wrong. I know, like my father knew, that my mother didn’t want to write the things she had. She hadn’t meant them. The words on those sheets of paper weren’t her. They were the words of someone who had become hardened, her emotional self calcified, by the kind of heartbreak that happens when someone—not you or the person you love—forces your heart to break. It was her parents. They got to her. And my mother, no matter how strong she liked to seem, was like anyone else—weak and scared and pliable. I recognized that when I read the first batch of letters, but there’s a new force behind knowing it now. It rolls up like a wave and crashes over me. Out of nowhere, I realize it: I came here for her. I thought I came here for me, to find my father. I thought I came here because I wanted to meet him, and because for so long my mother has been all I’ve had and now there was this possibility that there could be someone else. And I did co
me here for those things, but—and I see it so, so clearly now—I came here for her, too. Because even though I’ve been walking around feeling angry and confounded and cheated and resentful, underneath that mess is still the simple bit of knowledge that she loved him. Guilelessly and hopelessly, she loved him. She still loves him, I’m sure, even if she’ll never say it. When everything else flees, every other memory and experience that made up her days, I think my father is the last thing she still wants to have. She pretended to let go of him because it was the only way to hold on. In a heartbeat, it all becomes clear to me. I came here because I wanted to deliver him back to her. I wanted to give her back the best part of her life before she forgot she ever had it in the first place. I was trying to reclaim a past I never knew until recently that I had, and I was trying to reclaim for my mother a past that too soon she would never be able to find her way back to again.
I stand up with the box pressed against my abdomen. Danilo stands, too. I feel dizzy.
“I’m sorry,” Ilsa says. “I didn’t mean to offend. I try to believe that she was doing what she thought was best, or at least what she thought was easiest. The two often masquerade as the same thing.”
“I need some air,” I say, making my way to the door.
Ilsa follows behind saying something about how I can call her if I have more questions and something about bus fare and again how she’s sorry, but I can only concentrate on getting outside to clear my head.
For the next three hours, I walk without breaking my stride. I can’t stop. I can hardly feel my legs, and yet they keep making the motions they’re supposed to make, one foot in front of the other, leading me forward. Each time I near a dead end, I make a quick right or left turn and keep going. Danilo follows behind me at a distance, kicking through the gravel.
The day is pallid and humid, as if it’s sick. It takes a while, but eventually I make it out of Ilsa’s neighborhood and back into the heart of the city. My arms are wrapped tightly around the box, the cardboard corners digging into my biceps. I walk past storefronts, some sealed off with corrugated aluminum gates covered with graffiti, and past a row of residences with openwork concrete-block fences at the edges of their yards. On one corner, a young boy ties a rope around a bundle of newspapers in preparation to walk through busy intersections with the papers in his arms, trying to sell them to motorists stalled at red lights. And the entire time, I feel so extremely aware of myself slicing through the world, of the largeness of everything around me, and of myself, charged like a lightning rod in the middle of it all. I feel electrified and peculiar and crushed by sorrow.
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