The Great Divide

by Cristina Henríquez

Everything in the Canal Zone—the commissaries, the train cars, the dining halls, the housing, the hospitals, the post offices, and the pay—was divided on the basis of silver and gold. Gold meant the Americans, and silver meant them.

John had begun work at a small laboratory, researching the theory that mosquitoes were responsible for spreading disease. It was a discovery that had been made seventeen years earlier by a Cuban doctor named Carlos Juan Finlay and then put to the test by an American doctor named Walter Reed.

John had turned and looked at her with such gratitude that for an instant she mistook it for love.

The town of Empire was at the highest point of the canal route, roughly midway between the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. It was perched on a ledge that overlooked the immense Culebra Cut, the nine-mile-long segment of the canal impeded by the mountains, which had to be dug through.

Three million years earlier, Marian had read, underwater volcanoes had erupted and sent great reservoirs of sediment up through the surface, connecting two continents and forming the bridge of land upon which they all stood. Now, evidently, the task was to divide it again, to open the land from sea to sea. What nature had accomplished, men wanted to undo.

A few years back, her husband, whom she had loved for twenty-three years, had gone and plucked some young flower that was half his age. She had not suspected him capable of such a thing, but he had done it, and the reason, Antoinette assumed, was because a flower newly in bloom smelled sweeter than one fading fast.

“Seems people always look for meaning in things that don’t mean much at all.”

They lived their life there because to them that was simply where life was lived.

“Officially unchained,” her mother said at the end of the story, “but tethered just the same.”

It was as his hero, the great Belisario Porras, had said: Panamá was being swallowed up by the United States. Francisco refused to be swallowed, too. He refused to wade into enemy territory among that army of invaders. That his son decided to do it day after day was a grave disappointment, a humiliation that he found nearly intolerable.

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.”

No one else made him feel like she did—more aware of everything, infinitely more alive. He experienced with her the kind of happiness that felt so out of proportion to everything he knew that he had to stop and ask himself sometimes, Is this happiness? Is this what it feels like?, just to be sure.

Francisco had not thought that a woman like Esme could exist, but even after he accepted that she was in fact very real, it diminished none of her mystery. She was always to him, from the first moment back in the square, the most magical being ever to walk the earth.

She walked down to the water where the sea stretched like a blue velvet field to the edges of the world in three directions and plopped down in the sand, listening to the faint sigh of the water as it skidded up and dragged back out. It came again and again, and as long as she listened, she could never decide whether the sigh was from sadness or surrender, or whether they were one and the same.

every human being only gets a certain allotment of joy and theirs had come in a windfall, the entirety of it used up across those nine glorious months. For

she should keep her thoughts to herself. He did not care for an outspoken woman. A woman might be moved to share her opinions with a diary, but she should not share them with the rest of the world.

Francisco believed he understood something that they did not. 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.

It was a terrible fate to know that nothing in one’s actual life would equal the world of one’s dreams.

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

He could show her places he had only heard about, could see them for the first time with her, the old cannons at Portobelo and the crashing waves at Pedasí, the highlands and the lowlands, the lush green mountains of Boquete and the beautiful dark jungle of Darién. He could show her the mangrove swamps whose roots had spread through the silt for thousands of years, the toucans and shimmering quetzals in the trees, the howler monkeys who moaned every morning at dawn, the glass frogs whose heart and tiny bones you could see through its skin, the silk moths and butterflies that alit on the leaves. He could buy her a bowl of sancocho or an empanada or a boiled tamale. They could sit outside listening to a tamborito in the indigo-orange light at dusk. It did not matter to him what they did. He just wanted to keep being around her, and for the simplest reason: All his life he had been lonely, but when he was with her he felt less alone.