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.

For as long as people had inhabited this land, they had fished from its waters, its rivers and seas. The very name Panamá meant “abundance of fish.”

A woman should have no need for a man. Millicent could sit by the sea and hold her own hand, she supposed. It was why she had two.

To be independent and to be sovereign were two different things. Panamá, detaching itself from Colombia, had merely done an about-face and attached itself to the United States instead.

Down its sides, the earth had been stripped and carved bare. There were layers of dirt and clay and rock in shades of every color, it seemed: black, yellow, blue, brown, orange, pink, and red. They flamed in the sun like a vast open wound, one that was not meant to heal. But even more bewildering than what had been done to the land—what had been done to his country—was how many hundreds of men were participating in it.

What he saw as he stared across that vast chasm was not simply a canal, but a great divide that would sever Panamá in two.

He looked up once to make sure that the mountains had not closed in around him and that he could still see the sky, but looking up only made him feel even more overwhelmed. It was an experience similar to how he felt out on the ocean sometimes, but the feeling on the ocean was a kind of surrender to the grandeur of the world. Here it was different. Here, he kept thinking, instead of surrendering to nature, they were foolishly attempting to make nature surrender to them.

I know you have always been rootless, not a Tree but a Leaf, taken up by the wind.