Panama (11 page)

"What do you think?" A quaver in his voice.

I shake my head, amazed, still breathless from running and the exhilaration of what I've seen. I smile, go serious, smile again, and shake my head in confusion. I don't know what he wants from me. "It's incredible," I say.

He looks out over the scattered glowing embers and says, "I love it."

"Why?"

"It reminds me of home."

I go quiet again and look at the blackened landscape. Can't quite imagine what he means. There's an occasional pop or breaking sound. The workers move along the periphery, black silhouettes striking at flaring spots along the edges and speaking to one another as workers do during the most common workday.

Federico stands.

He holds his hand out to me, not like a parent this time.

I reach for him. His grip is soft and he keeps his eyes on my face.

We start walking but not in a rush. He holds my hand gently. It makes me forget what we've just seen. I'm seventeen. Still in school. I'm on another planet.

We pass other couples and workers along the way. When we're at the meadow in front of the Tivoli, he stops and we look back at the glow of diminishing fires.

"It's beautiful," I say.

He moves me against him and holds me. I feel him, his sex, between us and I don't pull away. He holds me a long while—it seems very long—and I embrace him, embarrassed at the pounding of my heart that he must feel, embarrassed at not being more sophisticated.

To the side is the gazebo belonging to the Tivoli but overgrown in disuse. The sagging structure stands a few yards off the path, almost hidden by weeds and completely abandoned. He leads us inside, pulls me to him again, and presses us together.

He begins to reach in my clothes and I help, unbutton and unhook and he pulls me against him over and over. His breathing gets heavy and he lays me down and caresses me and makes love to me, trying to be gentle but needing it so much that toward the end he pleads softly, "Hold me ... hold me."

I'm overwhelmed and my emotion is so powerful, I don't feel any discomfort of my own—there must be some. I'm only holding him and feeling how much he needs me.
He needs me.
Then I lie quiet in his arms and he shudders a last time, still holding me against him.

I can't think of anything to say until I'm aware of the warm streak between us and think there might be some correct behavior about that.

Finally he lifts himself and says, "Are you all right?"

"Yes..." I take a stab at the right thing: "Are you?"

A soft laugh comes out of him. "Yes." He wipes his shirt across my belly.

"I know ... I know what to do," I say. A desperate attempt at sexual savvy.

"You do?" He doesn't believe me.

"Yes, don't worry." But I don't know what to do or how to behave—I don't know anything.

We put our clothes back on and pull the weeds and grass from each other's hair and clothing—sexual camaraderie, like old friends. We stand and he runs his hands down my arms.

"I'm all right," I say.

We make our way through the vines that cover the gazebo and walk slowly along the track until we're at the steps to my house. He seems disturbed and says, "You have to be careful."

"I will be."

He leans in and gives me a kiss on the cheek and embraces me again. He needs to say something—I see him searching.

"Bring me books tomorrow?" is what he finally says.

Books.
"Of course," I say, trying to sound like nothing is different and I don't come from a sheltered life and I'm not naive or in an outrageously heightened state.

I go up the steps, affect a business-as-usual manner, and from inside the porch look down at him through the screen door. I raise my hand and he gives me a little nod, then turns and walks away.

I sit with Mamie Lee Kelly, the best known of all Americans on the Isthmus. The local madam. And I've done my homework. My diary is full of thoughtful entries on my new life—what I have to do, have to learn, how to proceed.

Miss Kelly comes from New Orleans and runs the Navajo, a brothel on I Street in Panama City. She's lusty, large, and voluptuous, and she appears to be very capable. This makes me confident.

"Hell yes, honey, I can tell you a whole shitload of things to do," she says. She leans back on her red velvet settee and draws hard on a cigarette. She cocks her head to one side, grins, and looks me over. "Got yourself a young man?"

"Yes. And there's no talking to my mother..."

"Course not. Not her business." Mamie grins widely again. "Mothers don't know everything and they usually know the least about what they should know the most." I'm not exactly sure what she means. "Sex!" she says and laughs.

Sex can be dangerous—I know that. A foolish mistake will always be with me, can shame and destroy Mother and Father. There's no need for that. Mamie can get it all under control. She goes dead serious.

"How old are you, again?" she says.

"Seventeen."

"Mmm." She looks me over carefully. "You've done it with him?"

"Yes. Once. I'm not pregnant."

"Good, you're lucky. And smart—you're here. Good girl. Sorry you can't work for me." Another big laugh. I take the suggestion as a compliment. A couple of her "girls" sidle by in tatty chenille dressing gowns, pasty faces, and stringy hair, but it's early for them at eleven in the morning. They're just getting up. Others walk by in the hall with cups of coffee and what look like corn-bread muffins. They glance in and dismiss me with surly looks.

The place is strange and I lied an hour earlier to get here. Told Mrs. Ewing I felt sick and she sent me home. I'll need another lie tomorrow to get back in class, but it will be only a half lie—my time of the month and discomfort, et cetera. Perfect. A love affair is no simple matter and it isn't all romance.

"I'll tell you something, sweetheart," Mamie says. "There's an old method just right for you. Dates, acacia, a little honey—grind them together, dip it in cotton wool, and put it right in there. Acacia ferments, becomes lactic acid—that's a worldwide spermicide." The laugh again. "Just right for a worldwide young man ... where's he from?"

"Spain," I say, and I don't smile. "I suspect sperm are the same everywhere."

Her face goes straight and she says, "I really am sorry you can't work for me."

There is everything in Panama among the locals. Making my way through the vendors outside the Navajo, I find acacia quick enough. I know I won't find it at the commissary. Honey and dates Mother has at home—she makes wonderful date bread. The acacia is cheap and there's plenty.

Later in the evening, alone in the kitchen with Mother's mortar and pestle, I blend my little concoction and wonder how long it will be good. If fermentation is so important, maybe age is a good thing, and I regret not asking Mamie about that. But I conclude that if it's such a crucial matter she would have told me. I can make small amounts as needed. I'm ready.

But I don't hear from Federico for several days.

Up to now that hasn't been unusual, but after what happened in the gazebo, I don't know what to think. He isn't there after the art class either. I wait in the darkness outside a long time, then go back inside and chat.
(What era was Poussin? And what were the politics? I love the way you're doing your hair.)
I have to escape.

He isn't at the Tivoli when I pass there on Sunday with Mother and Father.

He isn't at any of our regular meeting places, which baffles me, and I toughen myself for the worst. I resolve not to be a whimpering sissy. I can barely make myself imagine what this could mean.

More days go by.

He's dropped out of sight. I can't sleep. At school I can't concentrate or work. I have to do something.

It's one more time along the track at night after another "sketching on the steps" excuse for Mother—slouched hat and jodhpurs.

I climb the stairs to his cabin. I feel nervous and out of place, much worse than the first time I went there. Everything seems so complicated. I never imagined how sex could complicate things. At the door I can see his cot. It's empty—only Augusto is there.

"Augusto..." He looks up, surprised.
"Federico no está...?"

"Al hospital,"
he says and lets me in.

"Hospital?"

He explains. Ancon Hospital, ward 30. It's serious. I sink onto a chair.

Frederico got feverish while he was working, Augusto tells me, and couldn't swing his pick. The doctor came, examined him, and wanted to know if he believed in God, because he was going to die.

"Why would a doctor say a thing like that?"

Augusto doesn't know, but the doc wrote up the papers and put him on the train to the hospital. In the ward he was so weak with fever, the nurses had to hold him up. They gave him an ice bath and he told Augusto he thought he really would die.

"You've seen him?" I say.

"The next day. They were making him drink quinine every two hours." A vile, bitter liquid—I shudder for him.

"Could I see him, do you think?"

Augusto doesn't think so.

"No, no visitors."

"I'm a relative."

"No. No one goes in the typhoid ward." That's where he's been moved.

The nurses' station is busy, and the women in white are moving fast. There's very little casual conversation—everybody's courteous but preoccupied.

"Isn't there anything I can do?" I'm pleading with the nurse, hoping she'll see something in my eyes—fear for his life, desperation, something.

She's sympathetic and says for me to leave a note and she'll make sure he gets it. I'm grateful for that and she gives me paper. "Thank you, thank you."

I crush the first note and write another. I crumple it, too, remembering a nurse will have to read it to him, can't be too personal. The next note says something about finding out from Augusto the night before, he shouldn't give up hope and it begins to sound like I'm saying he's at death's door.

I tear that one up and write another. I take my time. I'm more positive, talk about getting well, efficient nurses, skilled doctors, advanced medicines, he'll be out in no time. It sounds good.

"I'll take it to him right away," says the nurse, and she puts it in her pocket and moves on with her tray. This is a busy place. Federico might die.

"I was so delirious with fever and weak from not eating that it wasn't read to me for days," Federico says. We're walking in the hills, only a few people wandering by. "I was dying and I wasn't afraid."

His first day out of the hospital and he's with me. Who else does he have? Augusto working, Miguel dead, I'm the one. His near-death sickness is over, he's getting well, and we're a couple. It's been a nightmare for me. Worse for him.

I'm in my best white dress with a parasol because I know he likes it. It's clear to anyone who sees us that I'm his woman, because we're walking together, a form of courting in the Zone.

But we're not consciously courting—at least, he's not. He needs to talk about what's happened—the weeks of awful illness, the hospital treatments, how he felt the whole time—and I'm the one to hear it. I've never been so elated. Peaceful, too, though I've lied to Mother. She thinks I'm helping Mrs. Ewing.

"It's not a bad thing to know about yourself—that you're not afraid of dying," he says. "I had terrible dreams. Black ugly shapes and voices—I don't know what they were saying, but talking loud and swarming at me, and all I wanted was to go to sleep. I wanted death, back to before I was born, just to get out of the nightmare."

We walk slowly, the backs of our hands brushing from time to time, no other contact. "Then, after days of that—I don't know how long—I heard the night nurse talking to me, could barely hear her voice. And I came out of it a little, and she helped me drink some milk, the first thing I'd had in days, then I went back to sleep. But there were no dreams anymore, and I began to drink milk every day and I started wanting to live because the nurse kept talking to me and her voice was kind. She made it sound like it mattered to her—my living..."

"It matters to me," I say.

"I know." He smiles. "That's when the nurse asked if I wanted to hear the note you dropped off. She asked if it was from my girl."

"And you said..."

"Yes." He doesn't look me in the eye, just smiles.

We pass a tourist couple in colorful clothes. They look German. Probably weekly arrivals, in on the Hamburg-American Line.

They watch us pass, and I know we are a handsome couple. Federico doesn't notice, though. "Everything smells good again," he says and breathes deep.

It's dry season, hot but not insufferable. The air is heavy with the scent of exotic flowers and local food.

The women we pass glance at Federico, a handsome man who looks better than the others in spite of being pale and thin from his ordeal. Or maybe because of it.

I puff with pride. I wish we could hold hands, but it would be too daring, a worker and an American girl, though no one would guess he's on the labor force. Instinctively we observe the rules of our dangerous liaison.

"Then what?" I say.

"They put me on a regular diet and gave me pajamas."

"You had no pajamas?"

"Only a hospital gown. Pajamas meant I could get out of bed and move around. But I could barely walk. I needed a nurse on each side to hold me up. I walked every day and ate. I ate a lot—porridge, eggs, bread, melon. I was getting well..." I nod and smile, completely content.

He's wearing a beautifully tailored white suit.

"Where did it come from?" I ask.

"A doctor. A reader like you. I promised to loan him several books, some from you. We have the same favorite philosophers, and this doctor, American, said it was rare to find really informed readers among the Zoners. Of course he was surprised to talk with me, a worker. We had long conversations. It made the time pass."

"Books, huh?"