I couldn’t sleep a wink. I was talking to Charlotte’s memory, asking her what I should do, but I got no answer: Charlotte’s memory had turned inscrutable and unfriendly, looked away when she heard my voice, refused to advise me. Panama, meanwhile, shifted beneath my feet. Panama had once been said to be “flesh of Colombian flesh, blood of Colombian blood,” and for me it was impossible not to think of my Eloísa, who slept at my side now unafraid (falsely convinced that I could protect her from anything), when remembering the flesh of the Isthmus that was about to be amputated a few kilometers from our shared bed. You were flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, Eloísa; that’s what I was thinking as I lay beside you, head resting on my elbow, and looked closely at you, closer than we’d been since you were a babe in arms, recently recovered from the risks of your extreme prematurity. . And I think that’s when I realized.
I realized that you were also flesh of the flesh of your land, I realized that you belonged to this country the way an animal belongs to its particular landscape (made for certain colors, certain temperatures, certain fruit or prey). You were Colónian as I never was, Eloísa dear: your mannerisms, your accent, your different appetites reminded me with the insistence and fanaticism of a nun. Each of your movements said to me: I am from here. And seeing you up close, seeing your eyelids vibrating like the wings of a dragonfly, at first I thought I envied you, that I envied your instinctive rootedness — because it hadn’t been a decision, because you’d been born with it the way one is born with a mole or one eye a different color from the other — then, seeing how placidly you slept in this land of Colón that seemed to blend with your body, I thought I would have liked to ask you about your dreams, and finally thought again of Charlotte, who never belonged to Colón or to the province of Panama or much less to the convulsive Republic of Colombia, the country that had exterminated her family. . And I thought of what had happened at the bottom of the Chagres River that afternoon when she decided it was worthwhile to go on living. Charlotte had taken that secret to the grave, or the grave had come looking for her before she’d had time to reveal it to me, but it had always made me happy (briefly, secretly happy) to think that I had something to do with that deep decision in the depths. Thinking of that I laid my head on your chest, Eloísa, and the scent of your naked underarm reached me, and I felt so calm for a moment, so deceitfully and artificially calm, that I ended up falling asleep.
The martial maneuvers that, according to Eloísa, the Tiradores battalion carried out in front of our house did not wake me up. I slept dreamlessly, without any notion of time; and then Panamanian reality came flooding in. At about noon, Colonel Shaler was standing on my front porch, beside the hammock that had belonged to my father, pounding on the screen door so hard he might have knocked it off its hinges. Before starting to wonder where Eloísa had gone on this exceptional day when all the schools were closed, the smell of the fish stew she was cooking in the kitchen reached my nose. I barely had time to pull on a pair of boots and a decent shirt and answer the door. Behind Shaler, far enough back not to be able to hear his words, was Colonel Eliseo Torres, duly accompanied by his bugler.
Shaler said: “Lend us your table, Altamirano, and serve us some coffee, for the love of God. You won’t regret it, I swear. At this table history is going to be made.”
It was a heavy oak table, with round legs and a drawer with iron rings on each of the longest edges. Shaler and Torres sat on opposite sides, each in front of a drawer, and I sat at the head of the table where I always sat; the bugler stood out on the porch looking at the street occupied by the Tiradores soldiers, as if the battalion still expected a treacherous attack from the revolutionaries or the marines. So we were sitting, and were still settling into the heavy chairs, when Colonel Shaler put both hands, like gigantic water spiders, on the table and began to speak with his tongue tangled by the stubbornness of his accent but with the persuasive powers of a hypnotist.
“Honorable Colonel Torres, allow me to speak frankly: yours is a lost cause.”
“What?”
“The independence of Panama is a fait accompli.”
Torres leapt to his feet, his eyebrows arched indignantly, and attempted an unconvincing protest: “I haven’t come here to—” But Shaler cut him off.
“Sit down, man, don’t be foolish,” he said. “You have come here to listen to offers. And I have a very good one, Colonel.”
Colonel Torres tried to interrupt him — his hand went up, his throat emitted a snarl — but Shaler, consummate hypnotist, shut him up with his gaze. Before the day was out, he explained, the battleships Dixie and Maryland would appear in Limón Bay, full to the gunnels with U.S. Marines. The Cartagena had fled at the slightest sign of confrontation, and that should give him an idea of the central government’s position. On the other hand, nobody could shout about independence as long as the Tiradores remained physically present on the Isthmus, and the Cartagena was the battalion’s only means of transport. “But this morning things have changed, Colonel Torres,” said Shaler. “If you look out toward the port, you’ll see anchored in the distance a steamship with a Colombian flag. It’s the Orinoco, a passenger ship.” Colonel Shaler steadied his spider-like hands on the dark wood of the oak table, on each side of a coffee served in French porcelain, and said that the Orinoco would be sailing for Barranquilla at half past seven that evening. “Colonel Torres: I’ve been authorized to offer you the sum of eight thousand U.S. dollars if you and your men can be on board by then.”
“But this is a bribe,” said Torres.
“Certainly not,” said Shaler. “That money is for rations for your troops, who well deserve it.”
And at that moment, like a punctual extra in a theater play — and we already know, Readers of the Jury, who was angelically directing ours — the revolutionaries’ agent in Colón, Porfirio Meléndez, appeared on my front porch. He was accompanied by a cargador from the Freight House carrying a chest on his shoulders, like he would a small child (as if the cargador was a proud father and the leather chest his son who wanted to see the parade).
“Is this it?” asked Shaler.
“This is it,” said Meléndez.
“Lunch is almost ready,” said Eloísa.
“I’ll let you know,” I told her.
The cargador dropped the chest on the table and the cups jumped in their saucers, splashing the coffee left in them and coming perilously close to getting chipped. Colonel Shaler explained that inside were eight thousand dollars removed from the coffers of the Panama Railroad Company under the guarantee of the Brandon Bank of Panama City. Colonel Torres stood up, walked to the porch, and said something to his bugler, who immediately disappeared. Then he returned to the negotiating table (to my dining-room table, awaiting a fish stew and finding itself involuntarily transformed into a negotiating table). He did not say a single word, but Shaler the hypnotist didn’t need words at that moment. He understood. He understood perfectly.