Chapter 27

27

RENATA, VALENTINA, AND JOAQUíN SAT CROSS-LEGGED, ALL IN A ROW, IN FRONT OF the house, facing the pitifully denuded riverbank. Valentina, wearing her pollera, held up a small Panamanian flag that she had sewn herself. She had also braided her hair and wound it up like a crown in an attempt to portray a certain stately air.

It was 10:00 a.m. and the three of them had been sitting for maybe fifteen minutes, staring out at the mighty river, waiting for other people to arrive.

“Where is everyone?” Valentina asked. Not a soul was walking toward them along the riverbank. Not a soul was walking anywhere, from what she could see. Even the town center, visible in the distance, was disconcertingly empty.

Joaquín said, “They are running on Panamanian time.”

Ignoring him, Valentina asked Renata, “Did you remind people?”

Renata nodded. “I knocked on thirty doors yesterday.”

“And you?” Valentina asked Joaquín.

“Me? I must have knocked on a hundred.”

“There are only ninety houses in town.”

“Is that so? Then I must have knocked on thirty as well, just like both of you.”

Two weeks of living in Gatún had changed Joaquín’s feelings toward the town. He found life out here to be pleasant, carried along by a hum that was softer, less jagged than that of the city. People waved to him on the street as he passed. There was a particular pig on the property of Chucho Martínez, a pig with a large patch of brown on its back that Joaquín swore recognized him now, for every time Joaquín neared the fence, it ran up, pushed its snout through, and snorted at him. Justo de Andrade, who had a fruit stand by the train station, had twice tossed Joaquín a free orange in the morning and, like a parent, exhorted Joaquín to eat. When Joaquín had gone door to door yesterday, so many people stood outside and had conversations with him that he felt like one of their actual neighbors. Even Renata had become somewhat tolerable to him. He found her no more attractive and no less dull, but at least she was an excellent cook.

Valentina looked at Joaquín. “Did you tell your clients? Everyone at the market?”

“Of course, my love. I told them, ‘The future of Panamá hangs in the balance!’”

“Well, why aren’t they here?”

“Perhaps they are on their way.”

Valentina expelled a vigorous sigh. She snapped the flag that she was holding up over her head and shouted once, “We will not be moved!”

But there was no one to hear them, just the rushing river and the birds in the sky.

Valentina lowered the flag and looked at Joaquín again. “We should think of a better chant than that.”

“I agree.”

“Well, what do you suggest?”

Joaquín squirmed. The mud had made his rear end wet, and he was loath to admit that he had no suggestion. He said, “But it is not just up to me.” Joaquín leaned forward. “Ideas, Renata?”

“What?”

“Do you have ideas for a chant?”

“A chant? I thought we were sitting to show that we are willing to do what it takes to save this town.” With her customary blankness she looked at Joaquín. “Isn’t that why we are here?”

Valentina nodded. “That’s not bad.”

Joaquín said, “What’s not bad? ‘We are willing to do what it takes to save this town’? That is not a good chant. No offense, Renata. But we might as well stick with ‘We will not be moved.’”

“No, the other part,” Valentina said. “‘We are here.’” She raised a fist and tried it. “We are here!” She looked at Joaquín and smiled. “You see?”

“Ah, yes,” Joaquín said.

Valentina raised the flag again and together the three of them shouted in unison, “We are here! We are here!”

***

FINALLY, AT A quarter past ten, a few people arrived. First, Salvador and then Xiomara and Josefina together. Enthusiastically, Valentina waved them over, and as Joaquín had come to expect each time people saw one another here, whether it had been a year or a day, the greetings were joyous—much turning of faces, much patting of cheeks, much chitchat—and it would have been no use reminding anyone that this was not a party but a protest, for they were who they were, demonstrations of love being more important than demonstrations of pain.

By the time the three of them took a seat, one after the other to the left of Joaquín, more residents had arrived. Esmeralda, Irina, Máximo. Justo hobbled over carrying a wooden crate on which he sat, explaining that he was too old anymore for sitting on the ground. “Even if I make it down, I will never make it back up.”

Irina, who was older than Justo and already on the ground, laughed and said, “Thank you, Justo, for making me feel so young!”

Reina Moscoso showed up with food, as she had promised she would. “I am sorry I wasn’t here earlier,” she said, lugging an enormous basket at her side. “It took a long time to make sixty loaves of bread!”

“But they smell delicious,” Máximo said.

Reina put the basket down. “Here,” she said, handing Máximo the first small loaf. “Que Dios te bendiga.”

“Muchas gracias,” he said, and Reina handed a loaf to everyone.

Hilda Saéz showed up with a basket of her own, and from it she took out crosses she had fashioned from long blades of grass, placing one cross in front of everyone who was already there.

Raúl came with castanets and a dried goat bladder that he was going to use as a drum. “I also brought firecrackers loud enough to shake heaven,” he said.

Hilda frowned.

Elbert Clabber and Solomon Whyte, both of whom lived in Gatún by way of Jamaica, walked over to the growing crowd, and Valentina, who knew them as hardworking farmers who had tilled the earth here for decades, smiled and said, “Sit down, both of you. Have some bread.”

By the time the church bell rang at eleven, neighbors from all over Gatún were sitting side by side in the mud. Carolina and Alonso Rey arrived with their four children, and Alonso unfurled a kite into the air and let each of the children hold it at times. With delight, everyone watched it dip and soar overhead. For a few minutes, people sang the lyrics to a popular song. Raúl shot a firecracker into the air.

All this time Valentina had been periodically glancing in the direction of the train station to see if a reporter might arrive, but she had not seen one yet.

“Remind me what the man at the newspaper told you,” she said to Joaquín.

“You already know.”

“But tell me again.”

Joaquín frowned. After Valentina had divulged her efforts at The Canal Record , he had suggested that perhaps La Estrella , being a Panamanian newspaper, might be more sympathetic to their cause. But when he had gone to their offices, the reporter with whom Joaquín had spoken had been dismissive, saying that it was hardly news that some Panamanians were upset, some Panamanians were always upset, and suggesting that Joaquín come back if something actually happened that was worthy to report. Joaquín had told him, “But we are trying to prevent something from happening.” To which the reporter had replied, “I understand. But the problem for you is that ‘something happening’ is what constitutes news.”

With reluctance, Joaquín cleared his throat. “He said that something has to happen before they will write a story about it.”

Valentina narrowed her eyes. Joaquín did not particularly want to get into it again, so he was relieved when at that moment he heard a noise and looked back over his shoulder to see a man emerging from the house two doors down. Joaquín elbowed both Valentina and Renata. “Is that...?” he asked.

“Eliberto,” Valentina murmured.

The man who had emerged, far from appearing villainous, as Joaquín would have expected, was merely someone with a gray mustache and moppish gray hair and his shirtsleeves rolled up. Valentina, Joaquín knew, had been avoiding Eliberto these weeks, but neither she nor Renata nor Joaquín could keep their eyes off him now as he took a few steps forward and stopped. He put his hands on his hips, surveying the crowd. Raúl was thumping his drum, and the Rey children were fighting over who got to hold the string of the kite, and Reina was guarding her basket of bread from the flies, and most of the others—about twenty-five people in all—were sitting down chatting with whoever was nearby. There was every possibility, Joaquín thought, that Eliberto would say that they were making too much noise, or complain that people were sitting too near his house, or otherwise voice his opposition in some way. But after a minute, Eliberto took a few more steps forward and squeezed himself in between Irina and Máximo, who looked at him with a mixture of irritation and surprise, and sat.

“A miracle of God,” Valentina whispered.

She needed a miracle of a different order, however, and as it was coming up on the time when the next passenger train was due to arrive, she peered at the station again. She watched for several minutes when, down the bank to her right, a man wearing ivory pants strode up.

“Who is that?” She pointed.

Joaquín looked up and saw Li Jie walking toward them. Of all people. When Joaquín had informed his customers at the market that he would not be there today, encouraging them to take part in the demonstration with him, he had done so with the fear that each of those customers would flock to Li Jie’s stall in his absence, and that some of them might never come back. But what could he do? Some things were bigger than fish, which was the very argument Horacio, of course, had made to him once. Perhaps the boy had some brains in his head after all. But Joaquín had not told Li Jie about the demonstration, which meant he must have gotten wind of it somehow. And what’s more, Joaquín realized, Li Jie must have closed his stall for the day to be here as well.

Joaquín jumped up and waved. As soon as Li Jie got to him, Joaquín gave him a hug. The two stood goofily smiling at each other, exchanging greetings, until Valentina tugged on Joaquín’s pant leg and told him to sit back down. He did, and Li Jie nodded slightly before he walked to the end of the line and sat, too.

“Who was that?” Valentina asked.

Someone I believed was my enemy , Joaquín wanted to say. Instead he simply answered, “A friend.”

After a time people started arriving whom they did not recognize, people from outside of Gatún. A man poled downriver from the town of Chagres, saying he had seen the kite in the sky, and he tied up his bungo and sat down with them, too. Another man, shirtless, galloped up on horseback holding a flag of the republic as he rode. He dismounted with a flourish and then planted himself in front of the crowd and swished the flag back and forth in great arcs a few times like a conquistador until someone shouted at him to stop showing off and sit down, for God’s sake. A couple even came from Limón, saying that they feared a similar threat in their town, not from the dam but from the lake that the dam would create, which would flood the place where they lived. They had come to see a model of how they, too, might resist.

“But how did you hear about it?” Valentina asked.

“People are talking,” they answered.

Valentina grinned at Renata and Joaquín. “It is working,” she said.