It was during those days that Sarah Bernhardt arrived. Readers’ eyes widen, skeptical comments are uttered, but it’s true: Sarah Bernhardt was there. The actress’s visit was another symptom of the navelization of Panama, the sudden displacement of the Isthmus to the very center of the world. . La Bernhardt arrived, for a change, in that dispenser of French figures that was the Lafayette, and stayed in Colón only long enough to catch the train to Panama City (and earn her brief inclusion in this book). In a tiny and sweltering theater, set up in haste in one of the lateral salons of the Grand Hotel, before an audience made up entirely, with one exception, of French people, Sarah Bernhardt appeared on a stage with two chairs and, with the help of a young amateur actor she’d brought with her from Paris, recited, from memory and without a slip, all the speeches of Racine’s Phèdre. A week later she’d taken the train again, but in the opposite direction, and returned to Europe without having spoken to a single Panamanian. . but securing, nevertheless, a place in my tale. For that night, the night of Phèdre, two people applauded more than the rest. One was Charlotte Madinier, for whom the presence of Sarah Bernhardt had been like a balsam against the unbearable tedium of life in the Isthmus. The other was the man in charge of registering every beneficial or worthwhile experience that occurred as a consequence (directly or indirectly) of the construction of the Canaclass="underline" Miguel Altamirano.
I’ll tell it plainly: Charlotte Madinier and Miguel Altamirano met that night, exchanged names and pleasantries and even classical alexandrines, but it was quite some time before they would see each other again. Something, in any case, quite normaclass="underline" she was a married woman, and all her time was taken up in being respectably bored; he, for his part, was never still, because at that time there was never an instant when there wasn’t something happening in Panama worthy of review in the Bulletin. Charlotte met my father, forgot him straightaway, and carried on with her own routine, and from the vantage point of that routine watched the dry February air grow denser as the weeks passed, and one night in May she awoke in a fright, because she thought the city was being bombed. She looked out the window: it was raining. Her husband looked out with her, and in a glance calculated that in the forty-five minutes the downpour lasted more water had fallen than fell on France in a whole year. Charlotte saw the flooded streets, the banana peels and palm leaves that passed floating in the current, and every once in a while caught sight of more intimidating objects: a dead rat, for example, or a human turd. Identical downpours occurred eleven more times over the course of the month, and Charlotte, who watched from her seclusion as Colón turned into a swamp over which flew insects of all sizes, began to wonder if the trip hadn’t been a mistake.
And then one day in July, her son woke up with chills. Julien was shaking violently, as if his bed had a life of its own, and the chattering of his teeth was perfectly audible in spite of the downpour lashing the terrace. Gustave was at the Canal construction site, evaluating the damage caused by the rains; Charlotte, dressed in the still-damp clothes she’d had laundered the previous day, carried the child in her arms and arrived at the hospital in a dilapidated buggy. The chills had ceased, but as she laid Julien down in the bed he’d been assigned, Charlotte put the back of her hand against his forehead more out of instinct than anything else, and in the same instant realized the boy was burning up with fever and that his eyes had rolled back in his head. Julien moved his mouth like a grazing cow; he stuck out his dry tongue and there was no saliva in his mouth. But Charlotte could not find enough water to quench his thirst (which, in the middle of a downpour, was nothing if not ironic). Gustave arrived mid-afternoon, having run all over the city asking in French if anyone had seen his wife, and had finally decided, in order to exhaust all possibilities, to go to the hospital. Sitting in hard wooden chairs with backs that fell off if you leaned on them, Gustave and Charlotte spent the night, sleeping upright when exhaustion overcame them, taking turns in a sort of private superstition to take Julien’s temperature. At dawn, Charlotte was awakened by silence. It had stopped raining and her husband was doubled over asleep, his head between his knees, his arms hanging down to the floor. She reached out her hand and felt a wave of relief at finding the fever had gone down. And then she tried, without success, to wake Julien up.
And once again I write this phrase I’ve written so often: enter Miguel Altamirano.
My father insisted on being the one to accompany the Madiniers through those diabolical proceedings: take the child out of the hospital, put him in a coffin, put the coffin in the ground. “It was Sarah Bernhardt’s ghost’s fault,” my father would tell me much later, trying to explain the reasons (which remained unexplained) he’d dived headfirst into the suffering of a couple he barely knew. The Madiniers felt a gratitude I should call eternaclass="underline" in the midst of their loss and the disorientation of loss, my father had served them as interpreter, undertaker, lawyer, and messenger. There were days when the presence of mourning overwhelmed him; he would think at those moments that his task was complete, that he was intruding; but Charlotte asked him not to go, not to leave them, to keep helping them with the simple help of his company, and Gustave put a hand on his shoulder with the gesture of a brother-in-arms: “You’re all we have,” he said. . and then Sarah Bernhardt went past, dropped a line from Phèdre and continued on her way. And my father was unable to leave: the Madiniers were like puppies, and they depended on him to confront that inhospitable and incomprehensible isthmian world in which Julien no longer was.
Maybe it was around then that people in Colón began to speak of the French Curse. Between May and September, as well as the Madiniers’ son, twenty-two Canal workers, nine engineers, and three engineers’ wives fell victim to the killer fevers of the Isthmus. It carried on raining — the sky turned black at two in the afternoon, and the downpour began almost immediately, not falling in drops but solid and dense, like a heavy wool poncho coming down through the air — but the work carried on, in spite of the earth excavated one day being found back in the trench the next morning due to the weight of the rain. The Chagres River rose so much in one weekend that the railway had to stop running, because the line was under thirty centimeters of water and weeds; and with the railway paralyzed, the Canal was paralyzed, too. The engineers met in the mediocre restaurant of the Jefferson House Hotel or in the 4th of July, a saloon with tables wide enough for them to spread out their topographical maps and architectonic plans — and perhaps play a quick hand of poker on top of the maps and plans — and there they spent hours arguing about where they’d carry on the works when it finally cleared up. It would frequently happen that the engineers would say adieu at the end of an afternoon, arranging to meet the next morning at the excavations, only to discover the next morning that one of them had been admitted to the hospital with an attack of chills, or was at the hospital watching over his wife’s fever, or was with his wife at the hospital attending to their child and regretting ever having come to Panama. Few survived.