Chapter 30

30

OMAR STOOD ON THE TRAIN PLATFORM HIGH ABOVE THE CUT. HIS MOUTH TASTED OF blood, and he was still shaking, the same feeling of disgust charging up through him even now—what had happened to Berisford, the things Miller had said.

He clenched his hands in his pockets and licked his split, swollen lip. There was a roiling in his belly, as if something inside him were punching, trying to get out. Restlessly, he walked to the edge of the platform, peered down the tracks, walked back again. Once he got home, he could clean himself up, wash the taste of blood from his mouth.

From the platform, if he had wanted to, he could have seen the Cut, but he kept his eyes elsewhere and continued to pace as more and more people congregated on the platform, waiting for the southbound train. It was not until two Panamanian men walked onto the platform that Omar stopped—and what caught his attention was not only hearing them speak Spanish but hearing them say something about a protest.

“The residents in Gatún have decided to give the North Americans a piece of their mind,” one man said.

“Haven’t we given the North Americans too much already?” the other man asked, laughing.

“Exactly the point!”

Omar stared at them and had the sudden irrational thought that he should go to Gatún. He had no idea what was happening there beyond what the men had said, but the events of that morning had unlocked something in him, something fitful and pulsing, and things he would not have dreamed of doing only the day before suddenly struck him as exactly the things he had to do now.

***

VALENTINA HAD HER concerns. By noon, she counted at least fifty people who had gathered along the riverbank, and while it was wonderful, even miraculous, to have more than fifty people, all of whom had converged in this one spot for, presumably, this one purpose, the problem was that not one of them, from what she could tell, was a government official or a newspaper reporter or anyone from the Land Commission who could actually get anything done. Not to mention that after two hours, many people were not even sitting anymore. Reina kept walking around making sure everyone had sufficient quantities of bread and water. The young daughter of Isabel Velásquez, a girl Valentina had not seen since she was an infant, was playing the flute as she stalked down the line, pointing her toe with each step. Alonso and Carolina’s children were continuously up and back down, reeling in the kite and spooling it out again. And the man who had arrived with a flag and a horse regularly got back up, mostly to check on his horse, it seemed, who was tied to a boulder along the river’s edge.

“What should we do?” Valentina finally asked Joaquín.

“What do you mean? We are sitting. That was the plan.”

Valentina glanced at Renata, who simply nodded.

“And we are chanting,” Joaquín went on. “Remember the chant?”

“Yes, of course I remember the chant,” Valentina said. “But who is listening to us?”

“Why, all of these people here.” Joaquín gestured down the line.

Valentina sighed. Her husband was such a good man, but he could be so naive.

“These people here are already on our side, but who else—who else anywhere out there —will actually hear us, my love?”

***

MOLLY FIDDLED WITH her camera on the train to Gatún. The camera had come as a premium with her subscription to The Youth’s Com panion , a magazine she used to receive, and she cleaned the brass lens with a small chamois cloth, wiped the dust from the bellows and the mahogany frame.

Before coming here, Molly had seen photographs of Panama, but all the photographs showed one of two things: either the canal or the jungle. Not once had she seen an image of an actual town. Which struck her as curious. So when a woman had come into the newspaper office saying that her town was going to disappear before long, Molly had the thought that she should take a photograph of it before it did. A photograph, she believed, was its own sort of preservation, a way to ensure that any particular moment or scene or person or town would, at least in one manner, continue to exist.

***

OMAR SAT ON the ground amid a group of people who were all, more or less, facing the riverbank in Gatún. A row of houses was behind them. Overhead, the clouds had rolled back to let the sunlight pour through. He had been sitting there for long enough that he had been able to piece together what the protest was about. The entire town was being forced to move. That in itself was heartbreaking enough, but what made it worse to Omar was the realization that he was partly to blame for their pain. He had worked on the canal all these months. He had been digging the dirt that would be transported here to make the huge Gatún Dam. Perhaps it was not the same exact dirt, but the fact that it could be, that he could have had a hand in their misery, was enough to make him feel responsible. And it was one more reason he wanted to help them now if he could.

***

VALENTINA LOOKED DOWN the line of people who had assembled with them, thinking again about what the reporter at La Estrella had told Joaquín—something had to happen before they would write a story about it. Well, something was assuredly happening, was it not? And yet no one from any newspaper was here.

“Bueno,” Valentina muttered. “We will write our own story, then.”

Both Joaquín and Renata turned to look at her. “What?” her sister asked.

Valentina fingered the flag in her lap. Sitting like this had been Joaquín’s idea, and though it had been perfectly logical, it seemed to her now that they could not just sit.

“We need to get up,” Valentina said.

“Did I miss something?” Joaquín asked.

“If they will not come to us, then we need to go to them.”

“What are you talking about?” Joaquín said.

“We should take the train to the city.”

“Who?”

“All of us. And then we should march to the Presidential Palace and carry on our protest.” Joaquín and Renata looked at her as if she were crazy. “Trust me,” she said.

Valentina stood up. To her right was Renata, and to her left was Joaquín as well as fifty or so other people, at whom she shouted, “?Oye!” Salvador and Xiomara and Josefina, who were nearest, glanced up, but Isabel’s daughter was still playing her flute and the horse tied to the boulder was snorting and people were talking, of course, and most people farther down could not hear her over all that noise. Valentina cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted again, and that time more people glanced up—Máximo waved as if she were simply saying hello—but it was not until the sound of a whistle tore through the air that everyone, every person sitting and every person who was supposed to be sitting, suddenly stopped what they were doing and looked up.

Valentina turned toward the sound and saw that the police had arrived.

“Shit,” she heard Joaquín say.

“Good,” Valentina murmured, and, still standing, calmly raised her small hand-stitched flag and held it up over her head.

Joaquín yanked on her skirt. “Do you want to be arrested?”

“I want to be noticed,” she said.

In fact, only one police officer had arrived, and Valentina was disappointed not to see an entire army marching toward them in that moment—one lone police officer, a white man wearing a khaki uniform and a peaked hat, advancing, blowing his whistle, holding up his left hand with his fingers spread wide. Where he had come from, Valentina did not know, but even if he was only one person, at least someone was paying attention to them.

The officer strode down the line, along the edge of the riverbank, inspecting the crowd. Somewhere near the midway point, he stopped and shouted something that Valentina did not understand.

Joaquín tugged on her dress again and hissed, “I really think you should sit down.”

“No.”

Besides Valentina, anyone who had been standing when the whistle first pierced the air had promptly dropped back onto the ground. Now, all along the line, everyone waited to see what would happen next. For a few seconds, the rushing river was the only sound to be heard.

Then Valentina shouted, “We are here!”

The officer snapped his head and fixed his gaze on her.

“Oh my God,” Joaquín said.

“We are here and we will not be moved!” she yelled.

The officer sharply blew his whistle and from where he stood yelled something back, but he was speaking in English and Valentina had no earthly idea what he had said.

“Please,” Joaquín begged her.

But Valentina kept shouting, and the police officer shouted back, and it occurred to Valentina that just as she could not understand him, he could not understand her. The two of them were shouting things to the other in languages that neither of them could understand. The absurdity of it made her laugh. Out of nowhere, a laugh as big and round as the moon swelled in her and burst forth.

“What are you laughing at?” Joaquín asked from the ground.

It wasn’t funny, of course. It wasn’t funny at all, but Valentina could not get herself to stop laughing, which only infuriated the police officer, it seemed, since he no doubt believed she was laughing at him. He blasted his whistle several times in a row while Valentina tried without success to compose herself. He walked toward her, but the nearer he came, still shouting out things she could not comprehend, the harder she laughed. For what else was there to do in the face of imminent doom but fight, cry, or laugh? And she had already tried the first two.

***

“STOP!” OMAR SHOUTED from where he sat.

The officer, however, seemed not to have heard him. He was still moving toward the woman in the pollera who, for reasons Omar could not comprehend, was laughing.

Quickly, Omar stood up. He could feel the stares of the people to either side of him. In the distance, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a girl crouched down, taking photographs, her blond hair almost white in the sun.

“Stop!” Omar shouted again when he was up on his feet.

The officer whipped around. He set his hand on the end of the baton that hung from his waist.

Omar swallowed hard. “Please,” he called out in English. “No one here is doing anything wrong. This is their home. They are trying to save it, that is all.”

The officer paused, and for a second Omar believed it might be possible to reason with him. But then, at the other end of the line, the woman shouted in Spanish again, “We are here!” and the officer pulled out his baton and started making his way toward her again.

The officer, whose name was Thomas Rowland, had wandered into Gatún that day not because of any reported disturbance but as a matter of course on his usual rounds. His job, more than anything, was to be a presence, and in his few months on the isthmus, he had done little more than walk about in his uniform, projecting authority. Even when he did not feel particularly authoritative, the uniform alone, he’d found, made folks straighten up and act right. He was unaccustomed to people reacting otherwise, and he was certainly unaccustomed to being laughed at. He would feel better, he told himself, if he could just get the woman to sit down at least. As Thomas walked closer, however, the people directly to either side of the woman stood and began shouting, too. Then, as if someone had given a signal that he missed, suddenly every single person who was still sitting down rose up to their feet, and Thomas found himself face-to-face with a mob chanting something he did not understand.

“We are here!” Omar shouted with everyone else. Their voices were not quite in unison. By the time the chant started at one end of the line and the sound carried down to the other end, the first part of the line had begun chanting again and the words overlapped in the air, but even so, they kept on. The officer, who had been walking toward them at first, reversed course and stepped back. He was holding his baton out in front of himself, as if warding them off, and even though no one did anything other than stand still and chant, the officer kept inching back. He was going to leave, Omar thought with some astonishment. What they were doing was going to work. Then, on the muddy riverbank, the officer slipped and tumbled into the rushing water below.

Immediately, the chanting stopped. People froze in confusion. A split second passed before everyone started running to the edge of the river. By the time Omar got there, so many voices were yelling and so much mayhem abounded that he did not know what was happening until he saw the officer some feet downriver, clinging to an old, protruding tree root to prevent being swept away by the current.

Joaquín ran down even with the officer, squared his feet in the mud, and reached out his hand. The officer, holding fast to the tree root, merely looked up at him. Joaquín stretched his hand farther, wiggling his fingers for emphasis. “?Ven, hombre!” Then he slipped and went down on one knee, coming perilously close to the water himself. As he recovered, the man with the bungo darted up and held out his pole to the officer, telling him to grab on. By then, everyone was crowded at the edge of the riverbank, shouting instructions to everyone else. On the other side of Joaquín, Valentina knelt down and screamed at the officer to take hold of the pole or her husband’s hand, for God’s sake! When—finally—the officer made a grab for the pole, the man with the bungo along with three other people tugged as hard as they could. Joaquín reached down to seize the officer’s elbow and yanked him up onto land.

Everyone watched as, on his hands and knees, the officer panted. He had lost his hat in the river and he was dripping wet, but otherwise he seemed fine. Everyone waited to see whether he would thank them or arrest them or something else. After a moment, however, the officer merely scrambled up to his feet and, without so much as a word, ran off.

On the riverbank, people patted one another’s arms and shook hands and embraced. Salvador and Máximo congratulated the man with the bungo pole. The man with the flag stood on the boulder where his horse was still tied and whipped the flag back and forth through the air, shouting, “?Viva el Istmo!” and a few people shouted back, “?Viva Gatún!”

Joaquín sat back on his heels in shock. They had done something, yes? Arguably, they had turned back only one man, and whether they had accomplished that feat or whether it had been accomplished with assistance from Mother Nature was debatable, yes—but still, it was a start. He turned toward Valentina, who was kneeling beside him, and met her eyes. She seemed to know just what he was thinking, his beautiful wife, for she smiled. Joaquín laughed and enveloped her in an embrace, and then, carried away by his jubilation, he stood up and hugged Renata, too.

Valentina listened as everyone around her rejoiced. They had not achieved what she had hoped. Speaking up only mattered if there was someone to hear it, and in the future they would have to find a way to actually get a government official of some sort somewhere to listen to them. But for now, for this afternoon, she would content herself with the knowledge that they had taken a first step. There would still be time, she thought, to save themselves.

***

MOLLY TOOK FIVE photographs that day. After the images had been developed, she slid them into a brown paper envelope and took them to Mr. Atchison in the hopes that he might run them in the newspaper. Mr. Atchison shuffled quickly through the photographs and handed them back. “Not right for the Record ,” he said. When Molly tried to object, to point out that they had the opportunity to break the story—no other newspaper she knew of was reporting on the unrest in Gatún—Mr. Atchison shook his head. “We don’t cover local disputes.” He suggested she return to her desk and stick to the work she had been hired to do.