Chapter 9

9

JOAQUíN HAD MADE TWO DOLLARS THAT DAY BUYING FISH AND TURNING AROUND and selling them off again. Two dollars was not very much, and he considered for the hundredth time whether he should pay less for the fish or whether perhaps he should sell them off again for more, but as he had concluded all the ninety-nine times before, neither option held much appeal. If he paid the fishermen less for their catch, they would stop doing business with him. And if he sold the fish for more, customers would stop buying. No, he had established his prices and now he was stuck. It was entirely possible, he also thought for the hundredth time, that he was a lousy businessman.

Lately, he had been losing customers to a vendor named Li Jie who had opened a stall next to him in the market. From what Joaquín could discern, Li Jie was courteous and he spoke perfect Spanish, but it was hard not to begrudge someone who was taking your customers. Finally, he had worked up the balls to ask one of his former customers, a woman with an unfortunate shadow of a mustache above her lip, what the hell was going on. The woman told him that Li Jie was said to know at least fifty different preparations of fish, and that each time you bought from him, he would tell you a new one. She had already gotten six new recipes, she gushed, each one better than the last, and if the rumor was true she would get forty-four more! Joaquín, who had assumed himself victim of a more devious price-fixing scheme, had been dumbfounded. Recipes! He could not compete with that. Yes, yes, he had lively banter to share, and he had quality fish, but who knew that everyone was so desperate for innovative ways by which to cook them? He comforted himself with the thought that at some point Li Jie’s recipe inventory would have to run out, and when it did hopefully his customers would come back.

On top of such ruminations about work, Joaquín walked home through the streets of Panama City with a certain amount of dread. Ever since the rumors had surfaced about a dam being built in Gatún, Valentina’s moods had been all over the place. The fear was not only that she and her sister would have to abandon their family home, but that everyone would. That because of the dam, the entire town as they knew it would cease to exist.

Every day as soon as Joaquín stepped into his apartment, he braced himself for the possibility that Valentina had heard something new, some fresh horror over which she was incensed or saddened or both. And not without reason. These were incensing and saddening times. He understood that, he did. But at the end of the workday Joaquín wanted a break, a chance to sit down in silence, soak his feet in a bucket of cool water, close his eyes, and just breathe. He wanted peace. Just for ten minutes, and then he would be ready to listen to all that his wife had to say.

Their apartment was outside the wall of the city, on the second floor, and when Joaquín walked up the stairwell and opened the door, he found Valentina sitting by the window with a tear-streaked face. Gingerly, trying not to further upset her with any sound, Joaquín closed the door.

With her face still toward the window, Valentina said, “It has gotten worse.”

Just ten minutes. Was that too much to ask? Apparently yes.

“What is it now?” Joaquín asked instead, kicking off his shoes.

“It’s Eliberto el Cid.”

“What?”

“Eliberto el Cid.”

Joaquín stood still, trying to strategize the next thing out of his mouth. He had no idea what his wife was talking about, but to admit this was to invite a look of disappointment that Valentina reserved, it seemed, only for him. Not even Horacio was a recipient of a look like that. Only him. And he tried in every circumstance to avoid it if he could.

The apartment where they had lived since the day they married was comfortable and cool. The open shutters let in street noise, yes, but also a breeze. There were two bedrooms as well as a front room with slightly uneven wood floors and high ceilings in which twenty years’ worth of accumulated things, baskets and books, newspapers and knives, pots and pans, were piled along the walls up to the height of the windowsills. Through the bottom left corner of the window, if one crouched, it was possible to see between a space in the buildings across the street all the way to the square. An apartment with a view, they had laughed when they first rented it. Now, unfortunately, no one was laughing.

Slowly, Joaquín said, “Ah, yes, Eliberto el Cid.”

He had taken care to repeat it in exactly the way Valentina had said it, but when she turned from the window, she frowned. Even teary-eyed, she looked beautiful to him. Her black hair, lately threaded with a few strands of gray, was held back with hair pins. She had deep-set dark eyes, and though her frame was diminutive—she was hardly five feet tall—the force of her personality most certainly was not. Which he appreciated. His wife’s considerable passion was one of the things he loved most about her.

“Do you even know who that is?” Valentina said.

“Of course I do. It is Eliberto el Cid.”

The frown deepened. “But who is that?”

All day long at the fish market people treated him as an authority, and it was fascinating to Joaquín how Valentina, the love of his life, could make him squirm. “Why, you know who he is.”

“ I do.”

“An interesting man,” Joaquín went on. That seemed safe. The same could be said for most anyone, no?

Fortunately, Valentina nodded. “Apparently, he has had enough,” she said.

“Well, yes, everyone has.” Joaquín still did not know exactly what they were talking about, but, confident that he was on surer ground, he walked across the room to the table, peeked beneath the cloth that lay covering a bowl, and found, to his delight, flaky empanadas inside. He took one out and bit into it. Seasoned beef. As he had hoped. He stuffed the rest into his mouth.

As Valentina watched him, the frown returned. “Not everyone,” she said.

Joaquín hurried to swallow his food. “No, no, not everyone certainly. When I said everyone, I did not mean everyone .”

“Not my sister, I hope.”

That was a foothold. That was something he could grab on to. The shape of the conversation took on more clarity then.

“Your sister! Of course she has not had enough.”

“I received a letter from her today.”

“Did you?” A letter was not good. A letter was surely the source of new news.

“She said that someone came to the house with a paper for her to sign. And Eliberto, who apparently has had enough of the whole situation already, advised her that she should!”

Joaquín remembered now. It was difficult to keep track of Valentina’s childhood acquaintances, but he had heard her mention Eliberto before. He lived a few houses down from Valentina’s childhood home, if recollection served.

Joaquín popped another empanada into his mouth and, as he chewed it, asked, “Well, what does the paper even say?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would be good to know, wouldn’t it?” He swallowed. “After all, it could be that Eliberto is right.”

And then, there it was: the disappointed look. As if she questioned how on earth she could have married such a man. Joaquín winced. Now he had to redeem himself.

“Or naturally he could be wrong,” he tried.

“I think we should go to Gatún,” Valentina said.

“What?”

“We should go to Gatún to see for ourselves. As you pointed out, we do not even know what the paper says, and it would be good to know, right?”

In all the years of their marriage, Joaquín had been to Gatún on only a handful of occasions, and each time grudgingly. He had gone back when Valentina had her heart set on spending Christmas there one year; and he had certainly gone for the funerals of both of her parents, who were buried in the local cemetery. He had even gone when the home of the priest, Father Suárez, was destroyed in a storm and Valentina enlisted him to help in the rebuilding effort. But every time Joaquín went, he found himself counting the hours until he could leave. Valentina visited every year without fail, but he frequently managed to wriggle out of the trip for one reason or another, usually having to do with work. There was nothing wrong with the town per se. It was a perfectly fine place with all the usual establishments—a church and a schoolhouse and restaurants and shophouses and so forth—but it was not the city, which was where Joaquín felt he belonged. Not to mention that going to Gatún meant having to see his sister-in-law, Renata, whom, truth be told, he did not care for, not only for the matter of her appearance but for her dull personality, too. This, however, was clearly an important visit, and the disappointed look, it distressed Joaquín to see, was still etched on Valentina’s face.

He said, “Of course, my love.”

***

VALENTINA COULD HEAR Joaquín in the bedroom, changing out of his work clothes. She sat at the window and sighed at the fact that he had not remembered the name of an old neighbor she must have mentioned before. She could never decide whether the problem was that her husband was simply forgetful or whether the problem was that he did not listen to her. Lately, in order to address the latter, if she was speaking and he seemed distracted—sharpening his knife while she spoke, filing his fingernails, snapping open the newspaper as if he thought he might read while she was talking to him—she stopped, looked directly at him, and said, “I would like your undivided attention, my love. I deserve nothing less.” The first time she said it, he had looked at her with bemusement, and she kept her expression deadly serious until Joaquín dropped the half smile from his face, crossed his arms over his broad chest, and said, “Go on.” Since then, she had needed to say it only a few more times. He was getting the idea. If, on the other hand, the problem was truly forgetfulness, there was nothing she could do about that.

Twenty-four years ago they had met through a mutual friend, and Valentina at first had not been overly impressed. She did, however, like how he looked—he was burly and strong with a perpetual grin—and immediately, without the slightest blush, she had a vision of how deftly he might handle her in bed. Which turned out, by the time she came around to the rest of him, to be true. He was thrilling in that regard, and together their performances were so energetic as to be almost acrobatic. Such vigorous lovemaking was part of what had kept their marriage afloat.

It was also, thanks to God, what had blessed them with a child.

Valentina was forty-four years old. She had spent the last twenty years of her life in service to her son, Horacio. Twenty years spent rising early every morning to cook eggs and dice fruit, buttoning his shirts, smoothing the hairs that curled behind his ears, wiping his chin, teaching him manners, clutching his hand as they walked through the streets, keeping him safe, standing at the stove cooking lunches and dinners and lunches and dinners, marveling at how much he could eat, feeling his forehead for fever, cradling him until he refused to be cradled anymore, scrubbing his clothes, listening to him laugh, watching him change, watching hair grow in places where hair had not sprouted before, worrying about him, asking too many questions, reminding him over and over to clear his plate from the table and to pick up his things and to get a good night’s sleep, telling him that she loved him even though he made faces and squirmed out from under those words. For twenty years she had given Horacio everything—and now what? He had gone off and married. He did not need her anymore. Which was the point of parenthood, Valentina told herself. To raise children who were capable of going off on their own. Although it was a perverse point, as she saw it, since raising children to go off on their own meant that the children inevitably... went off on their own.

Without Horacio, there was a discomfiting aimlessness to her days. It was not the same cooking meals for only Joaquín and her to eat. It was not the same strolling through the city by herself. There were other women she knew in the same predicament, and with those women she sometimes had a cafecito and shared a good laugh, but none of it was the same. She had given everything to her son, and he had taken it, and now what did she have left?

Valentina stood up from her seat by the window and smoothed out her skirt. Basta. She had cried enough today. She was not going to start contemplating the emptiness of her life without Horacio and feel sad about that now on top of everything else. Now was not the time for wallowing about such things. And perhaps, she consoled herself, everything happened for a reason. Perhaps no longer being in service to her son gave her time to be in service to something else. For while Horacio may not have needed her anymore, it seemed her town did.

***

BY THE TIME the train pulled into the station at Gatún that Saturday afternoon, Valentina had steeled herself for what they might see once they arrived. She had reread all of her sister’s letters from the last year, and even though Renata could be laconic and the letters were short on details, Valentina nonetheless used them to piece together an image in her mind of what had happened since the last time she was there.

The town had undergone transformations before. Valentina was old enough to remember when Frenchmen had arrived and built blocky machine shops across the river from the town. The machine shops spewed smoke all day long, and for years everyone in Gatún said that the food they grew tasted different because of it. Anytime her father, who was a banana farmer, picked a brown-spotted banana, he blamed the spots on the smoke.

She was not old enough to remember the period before that when the railroad had arrived, although she had heard stories about it. That was when men hoping to find gold came rushing through Panamá in a wild stampede, trying to get to Upper California as fast as they could. There were apparently three main ways to get from the east coast of the United States to the west. One way was for a person to hitch a horse to a wagon and travel three thousand miles over rugged land, trying to locate trails as they went. The second way was to take a ship from a port in the east, sail down along the side of the Americas, hugging its coast, hook around Cape Horn at the southernmost tip, and then sail back up and westward, to the port at San Francisco. That route was safer, but it took three months, which, for people in an urgent mood, was impossibly long. The third way was through Panamá. A person could depart from New York or New Orleans and sail due south until they ran into the isthmus. From there they would continue on foot and canoes, trekking fifty miles across rivers and jungle and land, and once they reached the other side, they would board a second ship that would take them across the Pacific to California, to the glittering promise of gold. The Panamá route took a mere forty days.

“Complete pandemonium” was how Valentina’s father remembered that time. According to him, boats arrived every day, and men too desperate to wait to be brought to the shore jumped overboard and splashed through the water like strange sea creatures, holding their rucksacks up over their heads. On land, they brandished pistols, demanding to be fed. To escape the heat or the rain, they rudely let themselves into people’s homes and took naps on the floor. They stole mules from people’s farms and used them as transport. They walked into the church and lit their cigars using candles that were meant as offerings to the saints. They spit tobacco juice in the dirt. “They had the madness of men who were starving,” her father said. “We had never seen behavior like that before.”

By the time Valentina was born, men hungry for gold were still traveling through, though the chaos was not so consuming as it had been at the start. Eventually, the North Americans completed a railroad across their own broad land. With it, people could travel safely across the whole of the United States in only a week. Traffic through the isthmus naturally slowed. For the time being, the North Americans did not need Panamá as the way through.

On the train ride out to Gatún that day, Valentina repeatedly assured herself that a town that had survived all of that could survive anything that was to come, but when she and Joaquín actually stepped foot in Gatún, she was horror-struck by what she saw. It was not the sight of the town itself, which, situated on the western bank of the river, looked largely untouched—the church with its steeple, the rectory next to it, the dentist’s office and the post office and the various shops, the houses, the laundry hanging on rope—or even, on the eastern bank, the sight of the six steel-bodied machine shovels and the many tall stacks of wood boards and the encampment of tents and the numerous buildings that had not been there before—none of that did her in. It was the sight of the trees—hundreds of what had once been leafy banana trees on the eastern side of the river where her father and others had collectively farmed. All of those trees had been burned until they were nothing but charred sticks poking up out of the ground.

***

RENATA OPENED THE door when they knocked. By day she picked fruit on a nearby farm, but as it was Saturday evening when they arrived, she was home.

“?Hermana!” Valentina said, and fell upon her sister in an ardent embrace. Renata had barely managed to stammer, “What are you—?” before Valentina said, “We came for a visit,” and pushed her way into the house. Reluctantly, Joaquín kissed his stunned sister-in-law on both of her cheeks and followed Valentina in.

The house, one of a dozen or so along the river, looked the same as Joaquín remembered with bamboo-and-clay walls and a pitched thatched roof. Inside, with its packed dirt floor, he was always surprised by how spacious it actually felt. An open room in the center was flanked on each side by a bedroom—one that Valentina and Renata used to share, and the other where their parents had once slept. In fact, the first time Joaquín had been to this house was to meet Valentina’s parents. Her father had sat Joaquín down at the table that was still here in this middle room and asked him what his intentions were. Joaquín had responded with the only sensible answer to a question like that: “To marry your daughter, Se?or,” and Valentina’s father, who had been an affable man, smiled and sent Joaquín home that day with his blessing as well as an armful of ripe yellow bananas.

Lamentably, Renata also looked the same as Joaquín remembered, with her broad forehead and downturned eyes and a hairline that was either too far forward or too far back, he could never decide, but it was definitely not where it should be. Truly, how she and Valentina were related was one of the great mysteries of the world.

Renata, still flummoxed by their unexpected arrival, managed to prepare coffee, and the three of them sat. Joaquín presumed that Valentina would right away say why they had come, but instead she started reminiscing about her time in the house.

“Do you remember, hermana, the time we had a leak in this roof?”

“Yes. You can still tell where it was patched.” Renata pointed.

“Papá could fix anything,” Valentina said, gazing up with reverence.

The coffee was so hot that Joaquín burned his tongue, but he kept sipping it, thinking that if he did, it might spur Valentina to sip hers, too, and the sooner they both finished their coffees, the sooner they could turn to the business at hand—reading the letter, offering their advice—and thus the sooner they could return to the train station and head home. Valentina, however, was so engrossed in her recollections that she hardly sipped the coffee at all.

“Do you remember the smell on Christmas morning when Mamá made her tamales? And the ron ponche that I always tried to sip? Mamá would get so drunk. She would kiss everything in sight! The pots and the pans, the firewood. One time she kissed the goat on the tip of his nose!”

Valentina went on—and after a time Joaquín covertly slid the cup of coffee closer to his wife as a small reminder, a suggestion, that’s all.

She did not seem to notice it, though. Joaquín cleared his throat. Nothing. Under the table, he nudged her knee with his, but that only startled her and she knocked the cup of coffee such that it spilled. Valentina jumped up, embarrassed, and Renata rushed to clean what she could. When she said that she would pour a new cup of coffee for Valentina—in effect starting over —Joaquín, who could take it no more, spoke up.

“Where is the paper they asked you to sign?”

Renata looked at him as though she had forgotten he was there.

“The paper,” Joaquín prodded. “We would like to read it for ourselves.”

“The paper about the house?” Renata asked.

The mind of his sister-in-law, Joaquín had long observed, had all the sharpness of a spoon. It could take a few times before something got through to her. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the one.”

Renata walked into the bedroom and returned a few seconds later with a piece of paper, which she handed to him. Valentina peered over his shoulder.

The language was straightforward enough, but what the letter actually said was extreme. In six months’ time, the entire town of Gatún would be moved. Every man, woman, and child, every storefront, every farm would have to relocate to the opposite side of the river. Buildings and houses would need to be dismantled by their owners or else they would be destroyed. The Isthmian Canal Commission would cover the costs of transport for those who signed.

Joaquín set the paper down. While they were reading, Renata had poured a second cup of coffee for Valentina and, he noticed, refilled his own. Well, at least they understood the situation now. That was progress. Although what the paper said was not good, not good at all.

“You cannot sign this,” Valentina said.

“I didn’t.”

“But Eliberto told you to?”

“Yes.”

“So he did?”

“I assume so.” Renata was looking at them wide-eyed and anxious.

Valentina shook her head. “Unbelievable. Gatún has been in this very spot for centuries. Do they know that? And now what? It will be erased? Now, in only six months, they expect us to move everything we have built?”

“Well, not us ,” Joaquín said.

Valentina glared at him.

As gently as he could, he said, “Your sister, yes. But not us. We live in the city, my love.”

Joaquín thought that, as usual, he had probably said the wrong thing, so he was somewhat shocked when he saw Valentina’s face brighten.

“That’s it,” she said.

“What’s it?”

“We should stay here and fight.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you said we’re not here.”

“True—”

“So perhaps we should be.”

Joaquín saw where this was going. “But what does that even mean—fight?”

“I don’t know. We will figure it out.”

“Well, can’t we figure it out in the city?”

“And then what? Come back again? That does not seem very efficient.”

“My love,” Joaquín said, working a bit more firmness into his voice, “whatever shape this so-called fight takes, I do think we can wage it from the city. In a battle, you have to disperse your troops.”

“No, in a battle you have to position your troops where they will have the greatest impact. If we fight from the city, it will not be the same.”

“But where will we stay?”

“Here.” Valentina circled her arm in the air.

Here? Joaquín thought. In this house? The three of them together? He glanced at Renata, whose mouth had dropped open wide enough that an entire hard-boiled egg could have fit perfectly in the gap.

“Valentina,” Joaquín said in an imploring tone.

But Valentina ignored him and looked at her sister and said, “We will stay in Mamá and Papá’s bedroom, yes? You will hardly know that we’re here.”

Joaquín looked at Renata again, hoping she would have the good sense to object, but she was still standing dumbstruck.

Frustrated, Joaquín said, “What about my work?”

“You can take the train there,” Valentina replied.

“My love—” Joaquín began.

“It will only be temporary,” Valentina said.

“How temporary?”

“Just until we can do something about this.”

“But what can we even do?”

“I told you I don’t know yet.”

Valentina watched her husband drag the palm of his hand down over his face, then again down the back of his neck. She knew he was struggling to keep himself composed. But to her it was easy. Twenty-four years ago, she had chosen him. Now, she needed him to choose her. She needed him to understand that Gatún was her. That although she lived in the city, Gatún was the place whose air she had breathed, whose dirt she had walked barefoot upon, whose streets she could follow blindfolded, the place where she had learned how to cook and how to climb and how to argue and how to love, the place that had made her. Without having to say all of that, she hoped he understood.

Finally Joaquín looked at her and said, “All right. Temporarily. ”

Valentina smiled. “Of course.”