Panama (8 page)

"Yes."

"I'm sorry to bother you. I noticed what you're reading ... Did you get the book here?" My plan is working! Weeks of thinking about him, conniving to meet him, dreaming of him day and night, giving up hope, and now he's standing in front of me and wants to know where the book came from. The book!

"It's from the American library. Here, take it." I hold it out to him. I'm calm and bold.

"No, no, no, no ... I only wanted to know where you got it."

"The library. Go on, take it. You'll be doing me a favor."

"I only want—"

"Take it. Really." I hold the book toward him again and he sees I mean it. "It's a little over my head. Read it and tell me what you think." I lightly touch his hand with the edge of the book. "Please." (I amaze myself.)

Federico takes the book. He opens it, scans the pages, and eases onto the bench beside me, totally absorbed. I feel the warmth of his body next to me and then there's his scent—the soap used in Panama. He's been in the shower. The shower. Concentrate.

"I have a Tolstoy at home," I say.
"The Death of Ivan Ilych."

He looks up quickly.

"A beautiful story."

"Do you want it?"

"Well..." Hard for him to resist.

"I can get almost anything. I put in a request and it comes on the next boat. Just tell me what you want." I shrug at the simplicity of it and don't care at all if he knows what I'm doing, that I'm making myself available and attractive to him. But really it's the books that interest him. I know that.

He smiles. He's got to be astonished at this piece of luck—an evening like the others, when he's walking along, and what comes into his view but Dr. Freud's book, which he must know about and want but doesn't have a prayer of getting. "You're too generous," he says.

"Not at all. I'm always at the library..." I smell the wool of his beret. (Wool in Panama!)

"Yes. Then, yes," he says. I've changed his life in half a minute. "I won't keep it long."

"Keep it as long as you want."

I've got to revel in this—it's too good to be true. And I'm so calm; where did that come from?

He starts talking about what books he wants, but I'm drifting and hear only the clipped English accent, and I relax in the closeness of him. I am myself. I don't think I've ever been myself before, not like this. He's talking about books, of course, and he's enthusiastic and at ease, not like he was when Harry and I first saw him so cool and aloof in his cabin. I picture him in his makeshift shower, enjoy visualizing that awhile, then his voice comes back.

"...Melville ... I haven't read all of him. And Rousseau and the French classics, of course..." He's holding the Freud, gesturing with it, and suddenly he stops. "I'm sorry, I'm running on."

"No, you're not. I don't have anybody to talk to about books—I love it."

Another smile and then it turns awkward. Our little exchange is suddenly finished—no place to go with it unless he wants me to rattle on about Dayton.

"Well..." he says. He stands, a gentleman ready to take his leave, formal again and proper.

The Freud is folded in his arm against his chest. He stands there like a character from an English novel, ready to bid me adieu. Then (I don't know why I do it) I break the spell.

"This'll be fun," I say, light and easy. Wait, yes, I do know why. I'm creating an ongoing relationship and it
will
be fun.

He has to laugh a little. "Yes, it will."

He doesn't know what else to say and neither do I.

I think he's as happy as I am.

"Our book exchange," I say, giving it a name, lest he forget what we're establishing here.

He looks at me with curiosity for a few seconds, and I hope he's seeing something more than the seventeen-year-old daughter of an engineer, who he must suppose is a spoiled American, part of the mob.

Trusting he's seeing more than that, I say, "They'll think I'm a genius at the library, such a prolific reader." Another chuckle between us. (Cripes, I'm good at this.) "Promise to tell me what you think." I nod toward the Freud.

"Of course."

He gives the book a wiggle in the air, then a little bow from the waist and he turns away.

He walks into the crowd hugging the Freud close like a professor. I watch until he's disappeared.

I breathe deep and look around.

The hotel must have installed extra lights, because everything looks brighter and the people are better looking than I remember, or maybe I'm just noticing things. Maybe the hotel lights are stronger—that could be it. But everything really is light and bright, the whole world, everything, everybody. The white clothes everyone wears makes them glow, and the kids running around seem exceptionally smart all of a sudden—bright, intelligent kids these Zoners have. Everything shimmers.

It's peaceful, too. And so am I. (They must have put in more lights.)

***

That night I picture Federico at his desk reading the Freud. I see him talking to his roommate about how he got the book, the coincidental meeting, the girl who was with the enumerator dropping into his life again from the sky.

I picture him at his desk taking notes, reading with one foot propped on the other chair and later reading on his cot and falling asleep, the book open on his chest—I can't close my eyes thinking about it. My diary entry is brief:
Met him at Tivoli.
I'll add to that later. Maybe not. That says it all. I feel so alive, I never want to drift off. Our meeting runs through my mind over and over.

I try to imagine how we look to others, how we sound when we talk. Endless scenarios. Brief encounters, long ones, all of them easy and comfortable, like the meeting in front of the hotel. We're kindred souls. I'm convinced of it.

The next morning I get up without a minute of sleep feeling refreshed and full of energy. My life has direction and I'm not alone; Federico is in it.

Surely there's nothing I can't accomplish.

Simply put: there's nothing I can't do.

Harry and I take the 10:10 train to Gatun, the town by the dam site. He has to do his enumerating there because much of the territory is going to be covered by water. Mother says I should go with him and see what's about to disappear forever—part of the learning experience, she harps on. I'm happy to do it but I have my own agenda.

We sit in a half-empty passenger car. The wooden seats are polished and lacquered, silver metal fittings everywhere, the glass windows sparkling clean. The Panama Railroad is a model of efficiency, no doubt about it, and it's always on schedule. Our train slips out of the station at ten past, exactly.

Harry is my tutor in politics, geography, and language, whether he knows it or not. He points out the villages on the way.

"Matachin, named for a Chinese man who killed himself. That's what they tell the tourists."

"Sounds like a play on words to me," I say.
"Mata,
'kill';
chin
for 'Chinese.' Probably Indian, don't you think? Some ancient glyph on a rock somewhere?"

"Probably." He gives me a sidelong look. "You're good with language, you know that?" I look away, embarrassed. That's a big compliment coming from Harry. Federico wafts through my brain.

Bas Obispo rolls by.

Jungle after that.

We go through Gorgona, the Pittsburgh of the Zone, acres of machine shops working on some of Father's tracks and engines, Federico's face and words doing a lot of wafting at this point. Then we go through stations that are small and wasting away: Bailamonos and San Pablo and Orca L'garto. Harry knows them all and points them out. I take notes and sketch.

"Tabernilla—look," he says. What used to be a village is now stacks of lumber being loaded on flatcars. "Moving it toward the Pacific, they'll build it again."

The same thing is happening in Frijoles when we pass it—dismantling, loading, moving the entire town with everything from police station to homes, five years after founding it. Creating, destroying, re-creating on higher ground, whatever it takes to build the canal. Make way for the encroaching waters of man-made Lake Gatun. Already the jungle vines and foliage are crawling in, taking over the one-time towns, and soon man's visit will be sunk deep by progress. At least, that's the plan, and it's not likely to go wrong.

I write this in my notes, not to please Mother but for my new self: the injustice and inevitability and helplessness of the locals being warned and moved and warned again, stripped of planting grounds, of dwellings, village communities split and scattered to make way for progress. Harry teaches me well.

It is beginning to get to me, even while I concentrate on Federico and my new world with him.

"It'll all be flooded," Harry says. "They're closing the Gatun spillway in February."

"Will these tracks be under water?"

"Tracks, railway, all of it on the bottom of the lake. Steamers will be gliding over those palm trees and mangoes and big ferns. They'll all still be standing in the water, ships steaming back and forth over them until they die."

"That's eerie."

"Yeah."

***

An hour and we don't see the canal, only jungle and the occasional group of huts, then we burst out of the growth and onto the lake. The water is licking at the rails under us. The Zone city of Gatun is on the hillside, to my left the locks and the dam. I don't bother sketching—it'll be there for a long time. So will the station we're sliding into; it's stone, not meant to be moved. It's permanent and out of reach of the flood, built to stay. We get out, look around.

"You know when your train leaves?" he asks. (Always the good uncle.)

"Yes, I'm fine."

This is where Harry and I split up. I plan to go back without him.

"Be careful."

"I will."

His questionnaire ready, he goes to the laborers lined up at a station window for their paychecks—yet another way of reaching them for enumerating. I go to see the locks as Mother has instructed.

She doesn't know my real plan.

I was there the year before with Father but the change is enormous.
Gigantic
is a better word.

It's nearing the end of construction, and the size is so monstrous, it looks like aliens landed and tried to dwarf their machines to fit planet Earth but didn't manage to shrink them enough.

There's a giant aerial tramway swinging buckets of concrete to sky-high steel forms. These are for uprights that stand hundreds of feet in the air. And inside the unfinished walls I can see an enormous bull wheel lying on its side. I've read about that, and Mrs. Ewing has talked about it. That bruiser will open and shut the lock gates—Tinkertoys for God's children.

The gates themselves are half completed and look out of proportion, they're already so big, thousands of cubic feet of poured concrete soaring into the sky. Dazzling.

It comes together for the first time how the whole thing will work—the course of the Chagres River altered and hundreds of acres of land inundated because it's easier to float over the lavarock than blast through it. Blasting is necessary only in Culebra where Father's working and the mountains are so high, no lake can rise above them. It all makes sense. It's a perfect plan.

The colossal scale of it moves me. My eyes tear; my chest swells. I've been pretty disinterested up to now, but spread out before me like that, seeing what puny humans with their invented machines have done, I'm overwhelmed.

This is relentless will and endurance, the stuff of Goethals and Stevens before him. The tough, commanding majesty of it gets to me and, any injustice to locals aside, I'm staggered. It's a match for continental drift, and man didn't take centuries to do it.

I take notes, do sketches, see everything I can, then get back to business. My business. Federico.

I hurry to the station and catch an early train. I have to be back in Culebra by midafternoon to carry out my newest scheme.

On the train I sit alone at a window looking out, antsy. Everything moves too slowly for me now in this new life with Federico.

I want to be where I'm going, do what I mean to do, with no waiting or delays. A long train trip, days at school, endless social gatherings, are tedious. Life is tedious unless it's oriented toward Federico, and here I am stuck on a slow train. It isn't really slow, of course. There are stops, which makes the trip feel long.

I take out a letter from Dayton. Mother says it has news from Katharine that will interest me.

I read: The boys are occupied with patents, no longer solving problems of aerodynamics. (This seems remote, like some other lifetime.) Nine years since that first flight and they're dealing with patents and inaccurate statements and tangled misinformation about their work. There are more issues of a mechanical nature, dates and misconstrued facts, all business and law, no more inventing. Poor Wil. Poor Orville. Glad I'm gone—the fun's over.

"The flying machine is challenged everywhere," Katharine writes, "copied with reckless impunity." She says their discoveries are not completely protected and "they've given up on the president and the secretary of war. They can't be convinced a flying machine is practical for defense and the government doesn't want to invest in it." I want to care about this but I can't. "The boys have to keep the Army rejection under covers since it will make negotiations with other governments difficult." I can see that problem but I can't see them dealing with it. No tinkering? No experiments? No adventure? All is not smooth in Dayton. It may be as complicated and slow there as my life in Panama.

Through Tabernilla again. Flatcars with lumber move in the opposite direction, the town being carried away.

Katharine says Wil wrote from Paris: "Been to the Louvre. Liked da Vinci's
John the Baptist
better than his
Mona Lisa."
Just like Wil to see a painting through his own eyes and not accept some critic's impression. No matter where he goes, he's his own man, has his own thoughts. That much hasn't changed. "A sign of character," Mother says. "Not going along with the herd."