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.

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.

Everything everywhere was dazzlingly green. Olive green, jade green, emerald green, lime green, green lost in shadows, green lit by the sun. She walked through green curtains and over green carpets, hoping to find something she recognized—jackfruit or sea grape or pawpaw—and knew she could eat.

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.

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.

Omar had never known her, although at times he told himself that he had. He had swum between her bones, after all. He had known her from the inside out. It was true he did not remember her, though.

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

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.”

And when she was not asking questions, she was saying superfluous things. She hasn’t eaten today, but I did ask Antoinette to prepare some broth. She used the washroom twice during the night. Useless information. Unless she could tell him the thickness of the pleural lining or the chance of cardiac thrombosis or any other actual medical fact, 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.

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.

No. 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.

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow whatever she was waiting for would come, but every next tomorrow brought the same nothing as the yesterday before.

On the eve of their wedding, he had given her a leather-bound edition of On the Origin of Species meant to communicate things he did not know how to say—that he valued her mind, that he was astonished to have found her, that he would be eternally grateful he had. There was not a woman on earth with whom he had dreamed he would ever be able to talk about his work. With ease, she grasped the essence of it, the complexity of the problems, the challenges ahead.