Chapter 8

8

WITH HIS EYES CLOSED, OMAR LAY ON HIS BACK, SHIVERING. HIS HEAD THROBBED. When he clenched his fingers he could feel the smoothness of a bedsheet under him, and he knew that he was still in the hospital, though as hard as he tried he could not recall how he had gotten here.

Among the last things he remembered, he had gone for a walk after lunch, which was something he did every day while the other men in his gang dozed in the shade. He could have rested, too, he supposed, but since he was young, he had been in the habit of taking walks by himself, and he liked seeing places and people that took him outside of his otherwise insular life. Once, when he was eight years old, walking down the road that led away from his house, Do?a Ruiz had called to him and said, “Why are you always out here, boy?”

Omar’s father had warned him to avoid Do?a Ruiz. “She can make people do very strange things,” his father had claimed. “Like what?” Omar had asked. But his father had declined to elaborate and had merely said, “Keep your distance from her.”

So when she called out to him that day, Omar did not immediately answer.

“Don’t you speak?” Do?a Ruiz asked. She was sitting on her front patio, wearing a long skirt that hung low in the space between her spread knees. “Come closer.”

Omar did not move.

“I see,” Do?a Ruiz said. “Your father has filled your head with lies, is that it? Well, I have known your father for a long time, and few men more stubborn have ever walked on this earth.” She smiled as if they were on the same side, and the smile made Omar feel less afraid. “Come, joven,” she said.

It would be the first time in his life that Omar defied his father. Omar walked toward the house, through the yard that was scabbed with dirt and weeds.

“You are always out here by yourself,” Do?a Ruiz said when he was all the way up at the patio. “You don’t go to school?”

Omar shook his head.

“I did not think so.” She turned her head so that she was peering at him sideways, as though she were studying him, then she held up a finger and said, “Wait here.” She got up slowly and waddled into the house, and when she returned she had a book in her hand. She came out to the edge of the patio. “Do you know how to read?”

Again Omar shook his head.

“I did not think so about that, either. Well, then, sit down, joven, sit.”

Omar sat in the dirt, and Do?a Ruiz shuffled back to her chair. She spread her knees wide again and opened the book on her lap. Then she started to read.

Omar did not know what she was reading, but he liked the sound of her voice. The rhythms of what she read were almost like a song. It was poetry, she told him, written by a Panamanian named Anselmo López, who was from the highlands of Chiriquí. López was known for writing about the splendor of nature, about the sun and the trees. One poem Do?a Ruiz read was about a grasshopper, its nimble grace captured so perfectly in words that Omar was spellbound.

Every day for a week Omar went back and Do?a Ruiz read a little bit more. He sat on the ground and she sat in her chair, and one day when it was so windy that the pages of the book flapped no matter how much Do?a Ruiz held them down, she stopped in frustration and said, “What if you did it yourself?”

“What?”

“I could teach you to read.”

“But I like listening to you.”

“Ah, no. You will like this better. Look.”

Do?a Ruiz turned the book face out and ran her crooked finger beneath the words as she said them aloud. “You see, all the letters make their own sounds.” Little by little, she taught him each letter’s particular shape. She showed him how to connect those shapes to their sounds. Then how to set the sounds next to each other, like a string of pebbles, and let them clink together to make new sounds, sounds that filled up a word, and words that filled up a sentence, and sentences that filled up a page, and pages upon pages that filled up his mind.

And after he could do that, Do?a Ruiz brought out a new book.

“The Bible,” she announced. She explained how in this edition, for every page written in Spanish, there was a facing page in English. “Do not concern yourself with the English yet. For now, take it with you and read the Spanish when you can.”

Omar hesitated.

Do?a Ruiz said, “It will save you from feeling so lonely.”

Still Omar did not take the book.

“I won’t tell your father,” Do?a Ruiz said.

“No one has given me a gift before,” Omar said.

Do?a Ruiz smiled knowingly. “Take it. And once you have read every word, come and find me again.”

Omar kept the book close. During the day, he sat on the rocks warmed by the sun and read. The book had a pebbled black leather cover and pages as thin as the membrane beneath the shell of a hard-boiled egg. He turned them one by one and used a blade of grass to mark his place. He did not understand everything that he read, nor did he always believe even what he did understand. But he kept going. Sometimes he compared the facing pages, one word at a time, to see which of the Spanish words he had come to recognize matched the English words on the other side. Certain words repeated often enough that he was able to learn the English for them this way. Eventually, he tried speaking the words in English out loud, but there was no way to know if he was pronouncing them right.

Months later, when he had read every word at least once through, Omar walked back up the road with the book under his arm. Do?a Ruiz was there on her patio as though she were waiting for him.

“I finished,” he said.

Do?a Ruiz crossed herself and whispered, “En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo.”

Less fearful now, he walked up to the patio and gave her the book.

She smiled at him. “You need something else now, yes?”

“Yes.”

He thought she meant he needed another book, but instead she said, “Bueno. I am getting older, you see. The things that were easy for me in my youth are not so anymore. I have items to pick up in the city sometimes. I used to walk to get them, but it takes me far too long now. Perhaps you could run into the city from time to time and bring my items to me.”

That was how Omar, every so often, started making trips into the city on his own. It took him an hour and a half to walk there and back. Do?a Ruiz would send him with slips of paper that he was to hand the person she had told him to find. She taught him a few phrases in English in case anything went awry. Things went awry more often than he expected—he lost the paper, or the person reading it could not decipher Do?a Ruiz’s handwriting, or he took a wrong turn—and when he had to speak English, the white men he was speaking to always looked shocked. Eventually Omar was walking to the city even when Do?a Ruiz did not ask. He did not go to the market or to the bullfights. He went to the areas where the American immigrants gathered—the train station and the hotels—and he listened to them speak and wrote down what they said. He learned English this way, bit by bit. At home he practiced pronouncing the words out loud, saying them to the frogs and the butterflies, and even at night, he whispered sentences to himself, quiet enough that his father, who he knew would not approve, could not hear. Then he went back and learned more. When the Americans saw him, they often gave him odd, scornful looks, but Omar found that if he was quiet and kept his hands in his pockets, no one bothered him much.

That was the way he had walked ever since. Quietly, with his hands in his pockets. It was the way he had been walking after lunch through Empire, where not only Americans but people from every nation on earth, it seemed to Omar, were walking, too. Here no one looked at him with scorn, for in his work clothes and boots, he was one of them. His father had reservations about all of these people who had descended upon Panamá, but Omar felt proud to share his country with them, and every once in a while, when he gathered the nerve, he smiled at them or lifted his hat, hoping to make them feel welcome in this place that he called his home.

Lying in the hospital now, he remembered that he had been walking and then had passed a small bakery, and while usually he would have gazed longingly at the sugared desserts in the window, his lunch had not been sitting well in his stomach, and he had felt too nauseous for that. Suddenly he had felt dizzy, too. Across the street, he had seen an old woman sitting in a rocking chair, sewing with a needle and thread, and then the woman and her chair had both tilted sideways.

After that the only thing Omar could recall was something so peculiar that he wondered if he had imagined it. He remembered the voice of a girl singing to him.

***

THE DOCTOR ON rotation, Dr. Pierre Renaud, who had come from France to Panama against the advice of nearly everyone he knew, made his rounds. He had a smooth amethyst-colored stone that he kept in his right trouser pocket, and he rubbed it as he walked. He had found the stone once during a stroll along the Indrois River and had believed ever since that it was good luck. In all the years he had practiced medicine and carried it, the stone had not once let him down.

Pierre had been in Panama for just over a year, attending to patients in Ancón Hospital. There was another hospital at the Atlantic terminus in Colón, but the hospital at Ancón was the primary one. It was a sprawling campus of wards, kitchens, lavatories, nurse dormitories, and physicians’ cottages, all connected by walkways. The wards themselves were designated by some combination of ailment, gender, and race, or by all three. Somewhat inexplicably, Pierre felt, he had been stationed in the colored men’s ward.

Countless Frenchmen before him had been to Panama, of course. Some twenty-seven years earlier, they had come here to build their own canal. Pierre, who had been an adolescent at the time, had scarcely paid attention to the details, but he knew—as everyone did—that the effort had ended in spectacular collapse. The failure of the French. That was the sum of the story as it had been told. Pierre wanted, in his own small way, to rectify that, to prove that a Frenchman in Panama—and certainly a gifted Frenchman like himself—could succeed. But since the day he arrived, he had been stuck in the colored ward, and he was still puzzling over why that should be. Of course, a life was a life, a patient was a patient, of course of course, and he would do what was right, but still, it was a demoralizing assignment, and it bruised Pierre’s pride.

In the American wards, which were situated in the finest locations, one could walk out onto large, screened verandas encircled by bright bougainvillea and fragrant rosebushes and take in a view that reached to Panama City. Or so he had heard. According to his colleagues, it was breathtaking. The best vista in all the tropics, they said.

In the ward where Pierre worked, Ward 13, there was neither a screened veranda nor a view. The space inside was long and narrow with metal beds lining the walls, every bed occupied by a man. Miserable men. One after the next. Men curled on their sides, men panting with thirst, men coughing up blood.

A year ago, when Pierre had first arrived, yellow fever was the chief concern. Every person with even the slightest chill feared that they had contracted it and would certainly die. Thousands did. Thankfully, yellow fever in Panama was now a thing of the past, due in large measure to Colonel William Crawford Gorgas, the white-haired Army doctor whom everyone, it seemed—even Pierre—liked.

Pierre had dined with Gorgas once, among a group of twenty or so other men and their wives. They had been served a wonderful rack of lamb, Pierre recalled, though the accompanying wine had left much to be desired. Pierre had been disappointed at that dinner not to have had the chance to speak with Gorgas himself, but even from afar he found Gorgas genial and charming.

Years earlier, as everyone knew, Gorgas had managed to rout yellow fever in disease-ridden Havana, and he had arrived at the start of the Panama project determined to do the same thing. His first directive had been that every open container with water be emptied at once, open containers being the places where Stegomyia fasciata , the species of mosquito that transmitted yellow fever, preferred to lay her eggs. Throughout the zone every saucer, barrel, can, and cistern was drained. In churches, the holy water in the fingerbowls was replaced each day. Any water that could not be poured out—puddles or rainwater held in the fold of leaves—was doused on the surface with oil to smother the larvae that might be wriggling below. Before long it was common to see fumigation brigades roaming about, gluing strips of newspaper over windows and doors, placing pans of sulfur inside houses and shops, setting them aflame, letting the resulting smoke suffocate every mosquito it touched. Other brigade men spent their days tacking up screens in every American building, which itself, from what Pierre understood, was a bureaucratic battle. But Gorgas succeeded. By the end of 1906, yellow fever was effectively gone.

The challenge before Gorgas now was malaria, and it was proving harder to tame.

Malaria was spread by a different mosquito species, the Anopheles , whose habits were harder to predict. Instead of congregating near dwellings, it liked to fly—and breed—farther afield. Its bite caused such minimal swelling and itch that often people did not know they had been pierced—and therefore could not report it—until they were already ill, making outbreaks harder to track. And its larvae could survive for hours, even under a layer of oil, which meant that no matter how diligently the fumigation brigades roved, malaria carried on.

The great hope for solving the malaria problem was a man named John Oswald, whom, rumor had it, Gorgas himself had asked to come down. Pierre knew little about Oswald except that apparently no one on earth understood Anopheles like he did. He was here, it was said, to enact new initiatives that would lead to eradication at last. If he could do it, Pierre knew, if he was as good as everyone said he was, then his name would forever appear alongside Gorgas’s in the history books.

As a physician, Pierre sincerely hoped it could be done. What he had seen up close of malaria was truly appalling. Fever and chills so violent that at times the legs of patients’ beds vibrated audibly against the hospital floor. The only known remedy for malaria was quinine, a liquid so bitter that the nurses mixed it with whiskey to mask the taste, but the cover of alcohol made it only slightly more palatable. And for many, the quinine had little effect. Death came for them in the end.

It was part of the profession, of course, to be acquainted with death and disease, but before coming to Panama, Pierre had never seen quite so much. Men crushed by rocks; men maimed by the swinging arms of steam shovels; men whose legs had been severed from their torsos by barreling trains; men burned by a live wire; men who had fallen off cliffs; men who had fallen off bridges; men who had fallen off cranes. Once, a man had walked into the ward with his ankle swollen to the size of a coconut, claiming that a ten-foot-long snake had clamped its jaws around him as he tramped through the brush. Pierre had been the only doctor in the room, and as he stood weighing what to do, a nurse hurried forward and tied a tourniquet around the man’s calf. C’est dommage. Two hours later, the man was dead.

Pierre’s responsibility was to treat every man who arrived, to get them back on the job as soon as possible. Of course, despite his best efforts, not every man could be saved. For those cases, the hospital kept a stack of coffins at the ready out back. Sixty years earlier, Pierre knew, when the Americans built a railroad across Panama, there were so many deaths among the laborers—men from China and the Indies—that the railroad company, without space to bury them all, pickled the bodies and shipped the cadavers to medical schools to use for research. These days, however, the bodies were placed in plain pine coffins and loaded on trains. If the bodies inside the coffins were white, the trains took them to the grassy cemetery at Ancón. If they were colored, they were taken instead to a place called Monkey Hill.

Now Dr. Pierre Renaud peered down at the young boy who lay before him—a native Panamanian, he noted with surprise—who had arrived that morning via passenger train. The boy was sick with malaria. Pierre rubbed his stone.