Panama (13 page)

I make every day a party: ice cream and frozen puddings and the local juices in bottles still so cold they have a jacket of fog in the sultry heat. French delicacies from the bakery, millefeuilles and buttery croissants, and elegant tarts and cakes with extravagant decorations, and sometimes little meat pies and chef's concoctions that bewilder us as to their content but are always delicious. And every time I remember to bring something for Augusto.

"Para Usted, "
I say to him.

"Gracias, "
he says, and has to smile.

One time, Federico and I lie naked together when Augusto comes back from work. This is after nearly two weeks, and we don't move as we hear him coming up the steps. He's dripping with sweat after twelve hours in punishing heat, and when he walks in he jerks to a stop. Federico has flung the edge of a sheet across me but not himself—we're lovers in bed in the late afternoon. (It's about four thirty. Mother's cooking supper, thinks I'm building a diorama at school. Father's just finished redirecting tons of volcanic rock onto flatcars.)

"Flagrante delicto,"
Federico says to Augusto, laughing, and waves an arm at a plate on the table.
"Tu piñea helado."

"Lazy brute," Augusto says. He takes the melting ice cream, grins, and goes out to the front step to eat.

We go to the makeshift shower—our ritual—and soap and rinse and dry each other. I put on my school clothes and hang my canvas bookbag over my shoulder.

Flagrante delicto
rings in my head and I wonder. "You studied law?"

"Something like that." His soft smile means "enough."

I don't press it.

My senses are so electrified by these afternoons, it's hard to stop touching him. We kiss, kiss again, and finally I go out the front door. When I pass Augusto—he's finished the last of the
helado
—he thanks me in English.

"De nada,"
I say, but I don't like the sound of the word
nada.
It's true bringing him ice cream is nothing at all, but the afternoons are far from nothing and they're about to end. They are the biggest thing in my life, but Federico is getting stronger and nearly ready for work and this interlude is almost over.
"De nada"
won't pass my lips again.

A few days later Federico says it: "I'm fit for labor." He uses the sardonic tone he saves for comments about the Spanish king. "My weight is normal, muscles strong—the doctor says I can go back to work."

To this "good" news, neither of us smiles.

The last afternoon together we're in the hills above the Cut where long grass billows in the breeze. Father and Mother won't be anywhere near. We're safe.

Federico is troubled and I know why. His self-esteem is back after being away from the Cut and not subjected to humiliating remarks from American workers because he's a digger. Now he has to return to sneers from shovel engineers and numbing labor in the infernal heat. It's got to be hard for him. I have to think he's lectured himself that it's right to endure what the peasants endure so he can serve them better, some magnanimous thing like that, which doesn't help when you feel worthless. And he won't indulge his feelings and complain to me—that would negate the whole thing.

He could talk to Harry about this. He'd understand completely and agree. They could be great friends, these two men in my life—common ideals, common values.

Then Federico speaks and it's as though he's heard my thoughts. "They put themselves at a great height, you know, feeling superior because they earn more."

"Exactly," I say.

"I suppose they need to feel better about themselves."

"Crane man Ned, Harry's old roommate, thinks he's quite a card and very superior, and he's a drunk. I know it for a fact."

"Yes?"

"Hangs out with the Panamanians at their jungle stills. Harry says he's a bully, too. Harry roomed with him till he couldn't stand it anymore."

"Harry's a good man."

"Yes." I can't resist. "Once Harry was talking about enumerating and he said, 'Do you remember that fellow Federico? The one we came across who has books and a neat cabin?'"

A rare grin breaks on Federico's face. "And you said?"

"I said yes."

"That's all?"

"What else could I say? He was talking about the various interesting people he meets, that kind of thing..."

Frederico pulls me to him and hugs me to his side as we walk. At that moment I am his closest friend.

The hills are burnished yellow by the sun, and people are walking all around us, sightseeing. He begins talking about his friends in Spain and how much he misses them. Hugged against him I know we are close, but I feel him begin to slip away as always, off to the place he'd rather be.

"We walk along the Paseo de Recoletas in Madrid every evening," he says. "Everyone comes out. We eat later there, not before eight, then we go out walking and meet and talk." Nothing Dayton-like about that. "They take away the public benches by nine so you pay a little something to sit in a chair—they're stacked away during the day. And there's a band that comes in later and plays—local musicians, a couple of blind violinists are usually with them. And we buy a paper and talk about politics.
El País, El Heraldo, La Correspondencia
—they all have different points of view. Everybody has an opinion..." I hear the pleasure in his voice. His eyes are lit. I'm nowhere in this memory, pressed against his side but distant. "And the music doesn't end until three, sometimes later, and even then it might still be too hot to sleep..."

I try to picture it, a world millions of miles from anything I know and Federico with his friends, not with me. It pains me and, trying to enter that world, I say, "Tell me about the Prado. I've never been there or any museum with paintings of the masters."

"Ah, too crowded," he says, still only faintly aware of me. I've relocated his memory only a few Madrid blocks, not back to us. "I went there as a boy and sketched everything—Pre-Raphaelites to Goya. I'd spend whole days there. I brought food in a little bag and sketched and copied. I was as serious as a master, imagined myself apprentice to the greats..." His smile fades. "But ... other things took over and..."

I did sketching like that with Michelangelo's drawings, but not in a museum. From a book. I don't mention this puny artistic effort of mine.

He finally looks at me seriously, as though I might be going to the Prado tomorrow, and says, "The paintings are hung too close—you can't see one for the other."

"I'll remember that."

He misses my irony and goes on seriously. "You'll see great works someday," he says. "In New York maybe, when you go home."

And that takes my breath away.

At that first mention of separation we crest a grassy hill and come on a guided tour of mostly Europeans; they're coming now by the thousands. I put my mind on them, try to escape the thought of leaving. I imagine the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this afternoon is for them. Photos taken that day will be handed down for generations with stories to tell the children and grandchildren: "We saw the oceans being connected." History in family snapshots.

The men wear white shoes and straw hats; the ladies are in white ankle-length dresses with parasols. I wonder if styles will really change much in the future and how and if they will be better, more functional. I doubt it. The tourists wear the uniform of the Zone—colonialists in white—and they look out over the Cut, awed as the guide pitches his voice for them to hear:

"You are now overlooking the special wonder of the canal, the world-famous Culebra Cut, nine miles between Bas Obispo and Pedro Miguel. Nothing else matters if the stretch you see here cannot be accomplished." Federico listens with a stern look.

"It is the first man-made canyon in history, and that swarming mass of laborers you see down there and the trains and shovels are breaking the spine of the Cordilleras, the Continental Divide." The people gaze below, enthralled. "There is more tonnage per mile moving on those tracks than on any railroad in the world, and I assure you, folks, the noise and heat are merciless." The guide lets that sink in, then says, "Enjoy the breeze!" And the group laughs and moves on.

We stand still. "I'll be there tomorrow," Federico says.

Spain and his friends and the Madrid evening are gone. I am all that's left.

He's still elegant in his white suit—very European, every inch an aristocrat and himself again after weeks of recovering, making love, talking about politics and life. But I'm not really a part of it. I'm still outside looking in.

He looks down at the famous inferno below us.

"Tomorrow..." he says, and he's not happy.

We go back to his cabin, both aware of the finality of our
honeymoon
but not mentioning it. We lie on his cot fully clothed and don't make love. We listen to the parrots, the rumble of work in the Cut, a conversation in Portuguese down the hill, a couple of people arguing. I know Federico has drifted away. He is thoughtful, probably still in Madrid with Spanish friends, certainly not with me.

When I have to leave, he walks with me back toward our house, holding my hand, absent. I don't try to talk to him. Better leave him alone when he's like this. I'm the good, obedient girl.

When it is no longer safe for us to be seen together, he says goodbye. We don't make plans to meet again and he goes back along the track toward his cabin, hardly noticing anything around him. I continue on alone.

An unsettling afternoon. I don't know what comes next.

Catastrophe, that's what.

I'm not a catastrophist and I'm not exaggerating. It's the biggest slide of the entire dig. A massive movement of earth in a section of canal called Cucaracha, a problem spot for years. It breaks loose again that night.

Next morning when Federico shows up with the other workers, they find some steam shovels buried in mud to the tips of their cranes, others entirely covered. It's not a complete surprise.

"It's been threatening for weeks," Father said, mentioning the danger one evening over pork roast and fried apples. "A lot of instability in Cucaracha."

And when it happens, it takes down nearly fifty acres from the canal's edge, a tropical glacier. Five hundred thousand cubic yards of mud straight into the Cut, across the floor, and to the other side. Hundreds of miles of track disappeared or twisted into crazed patterns. One shovel and a stretch of track picked up and deposited unharmed halfway across the floor. No other slide has done anything like it.

I see the disaster from the train on my way to school and wonder where Federico is in this mess. I know he's safe—the slide was at night—but he has to be shoveling the sucking sludge with hundreds of others and no longer in his white suit. It's all wrong. And it's all I can see while we talk about the slide in class—him working like a peasant in the Cut and of course flashes of sex, the two of us on the hammock or on the cot or against the cabin wall.

"Such slides are inevitable," says Mrs. Ewing. "The engineers are ready with dredges and there will be more slides, no doubt about it, but the canal will be built anyway. Don't worry about that."

I don't.

When I get home I expect to hear about a delay or even a complete rethinking of the work—months of digging have been deposited back into the canal and it seems to me like a defiant stroke of nature, something for them to consider in future work. I wonder what Father will say about it.

"Hell, we'll dig it out again." He isn't bothered. He's home at the regular time and is especially buoyed, taking a second helping of glazed carrots, quoting Colonel Goethals: "Go back to work, boys."

Mother frowns at the use of "hell" at the table. Father doesn't notice—he admires Goethals's confidence too much to let her dampen his spirits.

"...he went off in that yellow railcar and everybody started digging again—those strong boys just went right back to work. We saved what we could of the rails and dug out an engine. Thank heaven it happened at night—nobody injured. Pass the gravy, please. We're rebuilding the tracks and digging up the twisted rails—got to haul those away..."

"What if the slides continue," I say, "get so frequent the canal's never completed and letting in ocean water would only make a muddy gully?" Father looks at me, amazed, a silent half smile, half frown at my crazy notion.

I pursue it. "It looks like that's the direction it's going and nature's choosing it. Couldn't that happen?"

"No, no, no, could never happen..." he says, that unstoppable attitude again. "Mr. Roosevelt has been here," he reminds me, as though that's the answer. And he says no more.

Mr. Roosevelt is not God. He is not even in office now. He certainly cannot shore up the canal walls. But he was here, all right, all eyeglasses and flashing teeth. Struck a nice pose sitting in a white suit and hat at the controls of a giant Bucyrus shovel in rain that dogged his entire visit, and the photographs filled local papers and newspapers in the States for weeks with descriptions of the president's can-do attitude in spite of the downpour.

I won't argue Roosevelt and confidence with Father. His attitude is admirable and not unlike the Wrights, who just went on and on to success. They did fly. A month before they flew, the
New York Times
said it would take a million years for man to fly—the boys pointed it out to me, amused. Then a few weeks later, on my birthday, they flew, fifty-nine seconds of heavier-than-air flight a million years too early. So much for projections. I don't want to be the
New York Times
in this situation. Too many deaths so far, too much effort, too much genuine travail for my naysaying ideas. I'll keep quiet, but I want those afternoons with Federico to go on for a long time. Of course, digging in the Cut is not great for Federico, so my idea of prolonging the whole thing serves only me.

"Nature will have to give in to us," Father says, and I come out of my reverie.

"I guess it will."