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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.
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 turned and looked at her with such gratitude that for an instant she mistook it for love.
“Officially unchained,” her mother said at the end of the story, “but tethered just the same.”
THAT MORNING THERE had been a storm setting up to the south, and the smell of rain had roused her. Not rain falling, but rain coming. The air was fuzzy with that particular smell. Lucille had lain still in bed for a few minutes upon waking, breathing it in and listening for thunder, but all she heard was the sound of the birds, who seemed so blithely unconcerned by any change in the weather that it made her wonder whether she was wrong. Maybe there was no gathering storm. Maybe she only wanted there to be. She was not the only one who would have welcomed rain. The drought had been going on for
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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.”
It was easier, Francisco had learned, to live in a world of delusion, which was after all not so different from hope, than to stand face-to-face with the truth.
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.
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.
