Panama (5 page)

All this is material for essays, observations on the canal's working class larded with Harry's fire about the laborers' burden. Mrs. Ewing will love it. Still, I feel the uncertainty. It's not fear. It's an unsettledness—is that a word?

We move on, saying very little to each other. My notes keep me occupied.

We come to a cabin that's not like the others. There is no debris outside, not a scrap of paper or a tin can. It's so clean, it seems uninhabited. This is it. The totally unpredicted. The unpredictable, imminent thing.

Here's where my life is about to change.

"Maybe no one's living here," Harry says.

I look closely. "But there's a light."

A glow comes from the window. We go to the screened door and knock. In well-articulated Castilian, a voice tells us to enter.

There must be some mistake. No worker talks like that.

We step into a freshly scrubbed, well-ordered cabin with clean cots, a small table, and a hammock. A Spaniard is sitting alone reading, one foot propped on the only other chair.

He looks at us, undisturbed and calm, no trace of alarm. He wears newly washed work clothes. He's holding a thick book with worn pages. This cabin is so orderly and clean, it could be a vacation hideaway in the Adirondacks, but a worker sits there, a man Harry's age. I can't take my eyes off him.

"You live here alone?" Harry says in smooth Castilian.

"No. My roommate is next door—a card game."

Harry nods.

I've never heard elegant Castilian before. They sound like two diplomats, not worker and census taker.

Harry takes a seat on an empty cot and I sit beside him. I look around the room, intimidated. On the wall is an unpainted shelf made of dynamite boxes. It's filled with books, and there are more books on the table.

Harry begins to reel off questions.

"Name?"

"Federico Malero."

"Metal-check number?"

He answers without moving, book in hand. I'm glued to his elegant speech and his impressive calm.

He just doesn't move, doesn't even close the book. His answers are quick and precise. Harry finally comes to the last question and I'm still transfixed.

"Can you read?"

Harry reads off the question as he does all the others—looking at the form, pencil poised. Malero answers with a faint smile and a slightly condescending tone.

"A little," he says in perfect British-educated English.

Harry's head jerks up. The Spaniard nods toward the shelf.

"My library."

An intrigued smile comes over Harry's face. He gets up, goes to the shelf, and studies the titles: Barcelona paper editions of Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and others, all of them dog-eared from reading.

"Mine and my roommate's," says Malero.

Harry turns to him and frowns, confused. "You're a foreman and living here?"

"Pico y pala."

"Pick and shovel? Dirt gang, and you read those?" Harry is baffled. So am I, with my other loopy feelings.

"It doesn't matter," Malero says.

He's still unperturbed and offers no explanation. His smile is distant, mysterious. Dark, wavy hair, fair complexion but tanned from work in the sun. Long fingers, one slipped behind a page ready to turn it. He's handsome, self-assured, impeccable, and a pick-and-shovel worker in the Cut. It's impossible.

Since we came in, he's only raised his head. We haven't troubled him—we certainly haven't scared him.

"Well then..." Harry says.

He wants a conversation with this Malero, I see it. This educated European working in the Cut—just the kind of fellow Harry would like to know, talk politics with, be personal with. But disciplined Harry does as he's hired to do. He makes out a red completion tag for the side of the cabin.

Federico glances at me for the first time. I'm suddenly self-conscious and close my mouth, flick my eyes around, heart thumping.

"Where's your roommate, again?" Harry says, tag finished. "Next cabin playing cards."

"That's right. I'll catch him there."

Hesitation. Harry wants badly to talk. But he doesn't. He says, "All right then," and reaches out to shake Malero's hand, something he never does with other laborers.

Still Federico does not get up or move, only shakes Harry's hand and says goodbye. He will not be disturbed.

Federico goes back to his book and Harry and I go to the door.

I glance back at Federico, who raises his eyes to me. I turn away in confusion and go out.

I'm shaken.

"Maybe I should have joined the pick-and-shovel gang," Harry says, tacking the red tag on Federico's cabin. "I may have missed something. Look who's working there. Pick and shovel with a mind like that?"

"You could ask him about it." I'm rattled, my heart booming, but I'm ready to walk back in.

"No, no socializing. Maybe it's more money than he can earn in Spain."

"Maybe."

"Or he's running away from something..."

"Yeah."

Harry goes on guessing. I'm not hearing. Federico fills my mind—no space for anything else. His face and hands, the way he sits, how comfortable he is with himself, in some other world, one I want to know.

Gradually Harry's voice comes back. "...more educated than his bosses and swinging pick and shovel. Bet the steam shovelers condescend to him, call him 'spig,' and he's European and better read than any of them..." He mutters on. Of course, he's right.

No doubt the shovelers patronize Federico the way they do all the diggers, treat him like an animal because he's beneath them. Call him "spig" because all the immigrants say "spigadaEnglish." Degrading.

But Malero is no pig-English laborer. He's got a story—it's obvious. And more than that, he's beautiful. And that is what I'm visualizing: Federico sitting at his desk with a book, perfect, like a photograph. In my brain his image comes into focus with the one that's been floating there for years—a spiky urging in me since Father first spoke the word Panama. A smoky, intuited vagueness that formed slowly and became a shape that represents all I don't know. Outside the cabin I realize Federico Malero is that shape. At least, I think he is.

I'm fully awake for the first time. Fully conscious, the fog blown away. Everything is sharp.

Calm, intelligent Federico, a few yards away, is now that image, my center of gravity. I no longer feel I have to get somewhere else or escape. I'm present, in the moment. In the middle of the worst stubble and grunge of Panama, everything has stopped.

I may be exaggerating, but it is a dramatic moment.

Obsession.

I think about him day and night, during classes, on the train, trying to figure out a way to see him again. Write about him at length in my diary.
No one like him in Dayton, no one who looks like him or talks like him
... I go on for pages about his face and manner:
his quiet calm and deadly serenity—a good deadly, exciting deadly.

Of course I'm no longer sullen or morose. I'm thoughtful and conniving.

I've definitely entered the world of misdemeanors, because seeing him will have to be secret and that heightens my fever of stealth.

Grinding away at it constantly, I try to come up with an idea that will take me back to that cabin (or wherever he is), but days go by and I come up with nothing. He's slaving away in the Cut six days a week and I don't know where he is on Sundays. That's the day I'm with my family. My brain sizzles.

Nobody knows this is churning in me. I cover it well. School work continues—turned in on time, high marks. I know the trust and freedom that buys me.

I can't go to Father for help on this one. I'll have to get to Federico on my own.

I won't give up, of course. I'm obsessed.

Sunday. A huge group of laborers is coming along the track toward our house. Mother and I are sitting on the porch and she watches them a minute. "Spanish, aren't they?" she says. We know the dress of different nationalities by now.

I'm suddenly alert. "Looks like it," I say. I don't see Federico among them. We watch them approach.

I've been hearing Father praise the Spanish all along, saying they're the real thing, genuine workers, stocky with strong shoulders. "Good boys. They can take directions and they're well liked, dependable. Heat doesn't bother them a bit and they're strong. I saw a Spanish fella put an iron cookstove on his shoulder and walk up a hill with it. Quartermaster's using them now, too. Every department wants them."

And there they are, these stocky Spanish workers, but no Federico. These are only desperate Spaniards from Cuba and Spain, rough peasants who found work on the canal when they couldn't get it at home. I can see there are several hundred of them, and they've come along the track from the north toward our house. They wear rope-soled cloth
alparagatos.
Some wear velvet berets and colorful sashes, their Sunday best.

"It looks like the entire Spanish work force," Mother says.

But still I don't see Federico, and when they're close, we see something strange. Every man is carrying a plate.

Mother says, "What do you suppose...?"

They climb our hill and two of the men come to the door.

"El jefe,"
they say. They want the boss.

Father's wearing a robe, reading his paper in the living room. The fellows wait politely outside, berets in hand, while Father pulls on some clothes. He goes out and they exchange a few words. He takes a plate and examines it. He sniffs at it, frowns. He starts down the hill and the whole group follows.

They cross the track, go up the opposite hill to the dispensary, and gather around the steps while Father goes inside. After a few minutes Father comes out and speaks to the men. Mother and I can't hear what he says. The men nod and seem satisfied. We can hear
"gracias,"
and then they start down the track toward their barracks, all several hundred of them.

When Father comes back up the hill, he's disturbed. "Trying to feed them rotten meat."

He doesn't get agitated very often. But something has gone wrong. He respects his workers and won't tolerate careless abuse, and that is what has happened. "I won't get the smell of those plates out of my head for weeks."

He gives us the plate he's still carrying and Mother and I both take a whiff.

A rank smell, and Mother says, "Dear Lord," and sets it at a distance on the porch floor. Father has just become the Spaniards' protector and spokesman. They've been given bad meat and he's set things straight. Their American
jefe
goes back in to his Sunday paper, glad to be of help because abuse of power disturbs him.

But where's Federico? I'm disturbed because masses of Spanish men came to our door and he was not with them.

Then they come back the next week and again Federico isn't with them. But this time there is a payoff.

It's the following Sunday and another large delegation arrives—no Federico.

Up our hill they come again, several weeping women among them this time. Father goes out to hear their problem, which they explain in simple Spanish:

"Some of our boys went swimming in a water hole in the Cut. One of them crushed his head diving into a rock." The mother of the boy moans. The other women hold her close. "Now we're unable to bury the dead boy,
Jefe,
because there's no priest to officiate. What can we do?"

"But I'm no priest. How can I help?"

"We just need someone to read the words." None of them can read Latin.

There's silence and Father thinks it over. From my angle through the living-room window I see him pondering the propriety of reading the words of a priest. He's not a priest or even Catholic and doesn't know Latin. He looks down at the porch floor a long time, then says, "Leave the book,
deja el libro."
It's a prayer book of some kind. "I'll study it. We'll do it first thing in the morning."

I don't like this religious mumbo jumbo. There's no foreign language in our Methodist church. Just straightforward hell and damnation if you don't watch your step, and it's in plain English.

I go upstairs to my room, get back to work thinking how to corral Federico, and realize what an amateur I am at this boy/girl thing. I regret it for the first time.

The next morning, after an evening of coaching by Mother, Father slowly reads the Latin text; the Spaniards cross themselves, weep, and sometimes murmur, "Amen." And that's when it comes to me—at the moment of all the amens. I have the perfect plan.

How could I have missed thinking of it before? It's simple, uncomplicated, and almost on the up and up. I'm hugely relieved.

The solemn service is almost over and the women are weeping in grief, but my torment is at an end. I'm smiling.

From below come Father's last plaintive words: "...
in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.
Amen."

Amen
means "so be it," doesn't it?

Two days later, after dinner, I put on jodhpurs and my regular jungle gear. I make a breezy announcement to Mother:

"I'm meeting Harry at the bottom of the hill. Going to Empire this time—he's enumerating over there now." A detail I add to make my story more believable. I'm lying, of course. I won't be meeting Harry this week at all—he's tending to other business, but Mother doesn't know that and I start toward the door.

She stops putting dishes in the cupboard and turns. She looks at me hard. "When is a nice young man from your school going to come here and call for you and take you out for the evening?"

I stop in my lying tracks. I don't have an answer and this isn't a rhetorical question; she wants a response. It's been bothering her. She wants to know why, at seventeen (I've just had a birthday), this nice-young-man thing isn't happening. Why am I still a tomboy in jodhpurs counting workers for the past half a year with the census taker and still enjoying it?

I look her in the eye and words come out of me I didn't know I had. I even have a slightly weary tone, as though explaining it again is just too much. I roll my eyes. (Where did that come from?)