I am now someone without you. That knowledge. .
Better to play something for you. I’ve chosen Beethoven’s Marcia Funebre Sulla Morte d’un Eroe, especially for you. I’ll play it for you as though I were in the Royal Festival Hall. And if you sort of close your eyes and peek through your lashes, then that’s where we’ll be. I’m waving to you. You’re moving further away, you’re all the way at the back of that dark concert hall now, I can barely see you. Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye.
After laying a hand on the coffin and mumbling things, we left the auditorium — the dispatch would take place in our absence. We stood together in the reception room, a bit bedraggled. The unknown man came up to offer his condolences, his eyes averted,
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Nice of you to come.’
And then, to his back, while he was already walking away, I asked, ‘Excuse me, sir, but could I ask your name?’
He turned around, took a few steps towards us.
‘Boender,’ he said.
The Rolodex, and fast! Boender?! Boender!
‘The musician!’ I said. ‘You went with my mother to Los Angeles. .’
He nodded.
‘A long time ago, yeah.’
The local dialect. Aunt Edith and Uncle Gerard stood there, staring blankly at this encounter that moved me for reasons I didn’t quite understand.
‘Guitar player, right? Route 66?’
‘Yup,’ he said.
A farmer’s hands, ashamed of themselves. Dark, callused lines on the fingers.
‘Do you still play?’
‘Oh, a little rockin’ in the city. Bars and cafés. Nothing special.’
I wanted to talk to him about her, about how she had been, that mother of mine, before I was there, when she was still young, not quite a girl anymore, but I could feel the situation slipping away from me. He took a step back, with his eyes fixed on the carpet, and said, ‘Well, take care then.’
And disappeared. The ghost who had accompanied her to the City of Angels, tossed aside once the light focused on her. I suddenly realized why he touched me: the convoluted thought that he could have been my father.
MEDIOHOMBRE
Why the hell isn’t there a flight to El Real? The man from Aeroperlas raises his hands in surrender: next week, if I understand correctly. It’s nothing but a ribbon of asphalt in the jungle, that airfield at El Real, where I have to go to find him. Aeroperlas runs a sporadic service there with little prop planes. I feel like kicking something to bits. I walk away, then back to the ticket counter. Is there any other way to get there? He consults with a colleague. I would have to travel to Yaviza, I hear. From there downriver to El Real.
I go back to my hotel in Panama City. The thought of staying here for a week is a burden. I have no sightseeing plans, and I can’t motivate myself to come up with any, either. What had quietly waited in the wings all those years has suddenly become urgent.
Very early the next morning, I deposit my bags in the trunk of the taxi. The new bus terminaclass="underline" from there, they’ve assured me, buses leave for Darién, the eastern province that borders on Colombia. There’s no road between the two countries, the Pan-American Highway is chopped in two by rivers, mountains and virgin rainforest. With all the horrors that go along with that. In any case, I can almost certainly catch a bus as far as Metetí.
Darkness still. A sliver of moon, light clouds. I’m much too early, no buses leave before nine. I eat breakfast at the terminal. Mr. Chen fries banana-and-honey pancakes for me, he says, ‘El Real is just like Macondo. Why do you want to go there? Nothing but wilderness. I was born there, but I haven’t been back in twenty years. Not my kind of place.’
A black woman slides up to the counter, moaning and sputtering. Shopping bags everywhere, her broad lap is covered with them.
‘You’re going to Darién? Oh my God! Are you sure? The Indians there eat people! I’ll keep you in my prayers. But right now I could use a soda.’
The bus stops at a filling station, men are rocking their cars back and forth to get more gas into the tanks. As the day wears on, the thinking stops. You become a sack of flour, a bale of cloth, you wait for them to come and unload you. Trees are dropping big, brown leaves.
The Policía Nacional at Caňazas, all two of them, make me get off the bus. In their little office they jot down the information from my passport. Flipping the pages, turning it sideways, peering at stamps. I know just enough Spanish to get by.’
‘What is your destination?’
‘Yaviza.’
‘That’s off limits. You cannot go to Yaviza without permission from the ministry.’
‘So I’m going to Metetí.’
‘Okay, that’s fine.’
Trucks laden with red logs for the civilized world behind us. Huge trunks stripped of their bark. A routed army, humiliated and sent on transport — a cloud of dust in its wake.
At Agua Fria the asphalt stopped. People climbed off the bus. People vanished. The driver pointed at a waiting Toyota Hilux pickup with men sitting in the back. The truck pulled away. I ran after it, shouting, ‘Yaviza? Yaviza?’
‘Yaviza, si! ’ the men shouted back.
They grabbed my suitcase and pulled me up onto the bed. Nodding, laughing: that was a close one, gringo. In the cab, the driver ties a bandana around his face to keep out the dust. We hold on tight, the truck jolts, slams into potholes and rolls up out of them again. Children with slingshots are walking along the road. Their fathers are carrying rifles. Indians with machetes, their hair stiff with dust. The end of another day. I wrap a T-shirt around my head. The men toss me an occasional, worried look, a stranger in their country. Nothing they are wearing or carrying is new. Around here, adapting means fading, becoming drab, wearing thin. It goes automatically, the heat and the humidity eat away at everything. It happens before you know it.
The village at the end of the road. Yaviza. The last stretch driven by starlight. The moon wasn’t showing its face yet. Only one hotel, and I keep my suitcase closed to shut out the vermin. From now on, I vow, I will shake out my shoes every morning. (National Geographic Channel wisdom.)
Across the dark river, the Chucunaque, the shadow deepens, a sheer wall of plant life; somewhere there, in that, is where he is. I stand on the wooden dock above the river, where the boats moor at high water. The water is low now, the pirogues are bobbing around at the bottom of the pilings. I hear the Indians mumbling down there. The feeling that the darkness is slowly inhaling, expanding. Its voice of countless insects singing clearly. The Indians are sitting in the dark, murmuring, in their long canoes along the bank. Voices kept small, like those of refugees. What are they talking about? The river races by without a sound, carrying the gleam of onyx. The light of the stars refracted in its ripples.
Beneath a pair of glaring lights, dozens of men have gathered for the cockfight. An impromptu arena around a circle of sand, lined with wooden benches. They’re waiting for the second rooster. The first one is already in the ring, picking at the sand, nervous, worked up. His opponent is having the spurs tied on. It’s not a fair fight; the first cock is angrier, he leaps in the air aggressively and chops at the second one. His opponent gets slaughtered. After a few attacks he lies bleeding on his side, his head raised, watching fate descend on him.
*
A canoe is taking me to El Real. I sit on a crosspiece in the middle, the boat isn’t much more than two feet wide. Tito is at the helm, his wife and child with him. An old woman is sitting in the bow. Downstream goes easily enough, we barely need the motor. Close to the bank, a man in a little pirogue tosses out his net. Early-morning mist is hanging between the trees. In front of us, a dusky mountain ridge rises up above the jungle. He is beginning to make himself known. He was here. The trees remember him, the river’s memories float to the surface. Along the dark banks you can see how high the water reaches at times. The sun leaps up above the trees, is catapulted into the heavens. The old woman covers her head with a towel on which a map of Panama is printed, Darién covered by a giant toucan. The family behind me disappears beneath umbrellas. The occasional hut with palm-frond roof along the high banks. Astride the serpent’s back we go deeper, for that is how it is, we don’t go further, we go deeper and deeper. The Indians pay no attention to me. I fill the emptiness with thoughts. I ready the emptiness for his arrival. In which of his guises should I expect him? The father? The god-slayer? Will we recognize each other, sniff at each other, fangs bared like predators? Has he been waiting for me, will he welcome me as though it weren’t him, but me, who was lost?