The Great Divide

by Cristina Henríquez

His eyesight unfortunately was not what it used to be. Francisco squinted out at the horizon to the place where, supposedly, ships one hundred times bigger than his little boat would someday line up, waiting their turn to sail across Panamá.

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 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.

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

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.