The Great Divide

by Cristina Henríquez

Perhaps the problem, he thought, was that a person needed faith to be able to see things that did not exist, to imagine a world not yet made. In addition to so many other things, Francisco had lost his faith a long time ago.

Every day out here by himself, he tried to see through it, down to the bottom, to the things that were lost. But he never saw what he wanted to see.

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.

She had given everything to her son, and he had taken it, and now what did she have left?

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.

It was not until later that Joaquín and Francisco understood just what the United States had done. They had not simply stood up to the government in Bogotá; they had tacitly offered military support to the separatists in Panamá. For if the separation occurred, then the United States could try anew to negotiate a treaty for the canal—only this time with a country that wanted it anyway.