A Shade of Difference (36 page)

Two: Felix Labaiya’s Book

1

This week’s principal contributor to “The Talk of the Town” inserted a piece of paper in his typewriter and wrote with a glowing satisfaction (for it had been a truly thrilling interview):

“Terry

“We had a talk a couple of days ago [he informed
The New Yorker
’s
readers with a cozy warmth] with the M’Bulu of Mbuele, the vigorous young African leader who has thrown the United Nations and the United States into one of the biggest uproars they have known in years. We found him at the St. Regis, a charming and attractive six-feet-seven known to friends as Terry, not at all abashed by the fuss he had caused from Charleston to China (Red, that is).

“We thought of a panther as we watched him pace up and down the room, for that is the impression he gives: overwhelming virility, powerful masculine force, sleek and trigger-quick control. We found him, like ourselves, more amused than bothered by events of recent days in which he has played so heroic a part. He was also not at all averse to giving us a candid picture of how an intelligent, freedom-loving African has come to achieve leadership in his continent’s struggle to achieve full status in the world.

“‘From my earliest days, I think,’ he said with a faraway look in his eyes, pausing in his pacing long enough to sit beside us on the couch for a moment before leaping up to pace again, ‘I have been dedicated to the fight for freedom. Britain encouraged forces of oppression in my country, which had to be beaten before Gorotoland could be free. Some of these were very close to the throne. I enlisted in that battle at an early age.’

“We told him we had heard that there had been some dynastic difficulties for a time in his progressive and prosperous land. He smiled, though a little somberly, we thought, and made a charming gesture with his hands.

“‘The fight for freedom is never easy,’ he told us. ‘Sometimes it requires heroic measures of us all. Do you not think so?’

“We said we did, and asked him if he thought Gorotoland was now well on its way to a deserved freedom at last. At once a happy gleam came into his eyes.

“‘It is almost literally a matter of days, now,’ he said confidently. ‘I think the world’s freedom-loving peoples will join us in our battle. The outcome is inevitable.’

“He broke off abruptly to go to the window and greet a couple of pigeons which had alighted there to eat the crumbs he had put out. We liked the way he talked to the pigeons: at once tender, encouraging and manly. The pigeons cooed, and flew away.

“‘Of course you understand,’ he went on, coming back to sit beside us again, ‘that Britain is now resorting to almost hysterical measures to block our independence. Every charge is being used against us—slavery, human sacrifice, cannibalism, Communism’—he grinned, so infectiously that we could not help grinning back—‘there is nothing too inflammatory. But it won’t work. It is old hat, and it won’t work.’

“We asked him how it had felt to defy a hate-filled mob when he used his great prestige to help a frightened little Negro girl start integration at a white school in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. He gave an answer that, we thought, was typical of him, touching in its modesty, noble in its innate and instinctive dignity.

“‘Something like that is not easy, of course,’ he told us earnestly, ‘but when the imperatives of history speak, one answers, even in your great country. One cannot blame the past for being the past, but one must have the courage to march unfrightened into the future. If one’s cause is just, one must inevitably triumph.’ He smiled, and shook his head reflectively. ‘Still,’ he confessed with a touching candor, ‘I cannot say it was easy.’

“We told him we thought a great many Americans admired his courage and supported him fully in what he had done.

“‘That moves me deeply,’ he assured us, ‘because there are certain hysterical people in your country, too. Even here they see Communism under every bed, and circulate stories around the United Nations that it was all a—your expression is “a put-up job,” I think.’

“We assured him
we
did not believe it, and he smiled gratefully.

“‘After all,’ he said, ‘I really did risk my own life. It is foolish to think I would do a thing like that unless I really believed in it, is it not?’

“We told him we couldn’t agree more.”

This week’s principal contributor ripped the sheet from his typewriter and sent it along to be edited with a pleased little sigh. It had been a thrilling interview, the M’Bulu so big and black and handsome, his knee scarcely an inch from the principal contributor’s, his long, prehensile fingers occasionally exerting a gentle pressure upon that intimate appendage by way of emphasis. The whole thing had been so—so
democratic,
somehow.

This week’s principal contributor, who mercifully had not seen the sardonic smile with which the M’Bulu studied his departure, told himself that he had rarely met so magnificent a personality, felt so immediate and electric a sense of understanding intimacy with another human being. He only hoped he could make
The New Yorker
’s
readers feel it. God knew
he
had.

For Felix Labaiya, as his chauffeured limousine drove up and deposited him at the Delegates’ Entrance on First Avenue, there was no such mood of fun-and-games. His interests lay elsewhere, for one thing, and for another he was far too self-contained and practical a soul to waste his time in unnecessary fawning on an adventurer whom he assessed accurately, and dismissed, for what he was. An intensive three days lay ahead for the Ambassador of Panama, a prospect which neither displeased nor intimidated him. Felix was used to hard work and, in a diplomatic context, thoroughly enjoyed both its challenges and its demands.

The task was made easier by a secret excitement, a glow of triumph every bit as great as any felt by Terrible Terry in his brightest moments of glory. Felix had the Colossus of the North fairly hooked, and he did not see at the moment how the Colossus proposed to escape.

So enormous were the implications of this fact, so astounding its ultimate possibilities in the world, that he had to stop and remind himself every few moments that he had actually brought it off: brought it off, or helped to bring it off. He was not sure at exactly what moment the idea of the M’Bulu’s dramatic assault upon the citadels of Charleston had coalesced, or whether he or Terry could take the ultimate credit. Somewhere in the course of their private talks at “Harmony” there had been mention of Justice Davis’ ruling on the Middleton School appeal; there had been a reference to occasions in the past when African diplomats traveling in the South had been insulted; and then a sudden, apparently simultaneous moment of illumination in which Felix had said with a quick excitement, “Perhaps you could—” only to be interrupted by the M’Bulu’s suddenly eager, “Possibly I could—” And then, in great secrecy and mounting excitement, encouraged by LeGage Shelby, whom they had taken immediately into their confidence, they had become committed. LeGage had slipped away as soon as the Jason Foundation luncheon ended to find the necessary child and arrange with her parents to have her ready at the proper time; Felix had suggested casually to his in-laws that it might be well for them to leave the house to the M’Bulu and be far away as soon as possible; and they had known him well enough to take his advice and, without haste but with tasteful dispatch, depart. Terry had been left to plan his moment, hampered only by the unexpected self-invited presence of Cullee Hamilton. But that, as it turned out, had been no handicap. Perhaps, in the sense of ultimate pressures which could be brought to bear upon the Congressman when his fellow Negroes began really to understand that he had left it to a foreigner to make one of the most dramatic gestures ever made in the South against segregation, it would turn out to be a very useful weapon indeed.

And so it had come about, just as they had discussed it in the cool high-ceilinged rooms where the proud planters of the past had sown with graceful self-righteousness a harvest more terrible than they knew. It lent an extra spice to the game—for him and, he knew, for both LeGage and Terry—that the idea should have come to them at “Harmony.” It was somehow fitting that it should be so, and that there, where so many proud people had lived their carefree, unthinking lives, preparation should be made to humble pride.

Pride: how he hated their pride, the arrogant ones, the bland ones, the crude, the powerful, the mightily supreme ones, the creators and oppressors of his country who used weapons of money and influence and thoughtless superiority more cruel than any weapon of shot or steel. He turned now and stared at their flag, snapping in a freshening breeze as an early hint of the winter to come gusted up First Avenue; it flew among more than a hundred others, yet for him it blotted out all else. To lower it figuratively here, he was attempting; to lower it literally where it still flew in his own land, he must. For Felix Labaiya-Sofra, born to be an oligarch of Panama but somehow diverted to purposes he deemed more noble and worthy than that, nothing in the world was more important than this fierce desire, which had been a part of him as long as he could remember.

That it had been so deep an aspect of his being for so long could probably, he supposed, be traced to his grandfather, since it had effectively skipped his father; or perhaps, for that very reason, it could be traced to his father. His father he thought of now with a customary contempt as he passed between the blue canvas windbreaks that shelter the walk to the Delegates’ Entrance, nodded absently to the guard on duty, and passed within the tall glass doors. Luis Labaiya was a dutiful servant of the Yanquis; no one had ever been able successfully to accuse him of not being that. Any independence he might once have felt had disappeared long ago in the necessity to do well in business, to hold and increase the vast salt and mineral deposits left him by Don Jorge, to double his patrimony ten times over by a shrewd policy of co-operating with the owners of the Canal, running their errands, flattering their egos, supplementing and easing the exercise of their power with the ubiquitous contribution of his own. Old-timers in the Canal Zone looked back to his occupancy of La Presidencia with a nostalgia they did not feel for some who had resided there. “We never had this trouble when Louie Labaiya was in,” they sometimes told one another in tones of exasperated reminiscence. Times have changed since Louie, and nowhere was it more evident than in the person of his son.

That this surprised and disappointed Louie, he had made quite clear before he had died eight years ago. That it would not have disappointed his fierce old grandfather, Felix was certain. The ghostly presence of Don Jorge was with him still, aided, it is true, by the actual presence of Donna Anna, now in her ninety-seventh year and still commanding the family with a wraithlike vigor that no one dared challenge, at least to her face; but more alive and vigorous by far was the spirit of the indomitable man who had seized a fortune for himself in gold near El Real and salt at Gulfo de Parita; who had led revolutions against Colombia, conspired with the agent of the hero of San Juan Hill to bring Panama to birth in the jungles of the Isthmus—and then lived to see the victory turn bitter as his erstwhile allies proved to be as firmly insistent on complete control of the Canal as he himself would have been in their place. This was not an irony he could appreciate, however. There had been in his proud and rigid mind the dream that, having used the Yanquis, he could throw them out. It did not work that way; nor could it possibly have done so in the face of the national imperatives that had prompted the United States to build the Canal in the first place. Don Jorge had served in a government or two, then been quietly forced out at the insistence of the American military governor of the Canal, who regarded him, accurately, as a troublemaker. Angry and embittered, he had retired to Boquete near the foot of the volcano Chiriqui, built himself an enormous home overlooking the valley, and proceeded to brood in an arrogant and ominous loneliness symbolized in the name he gave his house: La Suerte, which stood for
La suerte esta echada,
or, The die is cast.

But, like many such gestures in the annals of man, this one, too, proved to be more defiant than prophetic—at least, in the days of Don Jorge. Yanqui presence brought Yanqui money and Yanqui trade, a commerce that rapidly and inevitably tied the oligarchic families of Panama to the lead-strings of the United States. Like most Latin American nations, the new republic consisted of a thin layer of wealth on top and a great drop down to the illiterate, impoverished mestizos below. Inevitably, in the immemorial fashion in which wealth adheres to wealth, an economic cohesion of interest took place among the leading families. Inevitably, Don Jorge’s son, coming to maturity in the years of growing prosperity and stability at the top, found himself increasingly unmoved by his father’s grim attempts to keep alive the fanatic flames of the past. By the time the world turned toward its second great convulsion and it became necessary to greater states than Panama that it should be absolutely reliable with no chance of waverings or uncertainties, Luis Labaiya was of an age and temperament to accept without hesitations or qualms of conscience the obvious intention in several powerful cities far away that he should be one of those chosen to do the job of holding the Caribbean that had to be done.

Shortly before his election to the Presidency, however, there had been one sharp, embittered interview at La Suerte whose impact had never faded from the mind of Don Jorge’s youthful grandson, then just coming to an age in which the defiances of the past are easier to understand than the compliances of the present. The old man had commanded them to come together to his lair at the foot of Chiriqui—for lair it seemed, then, with its stone ramblings, brooding vistas, heavily-furnished, darkly-shuttered rooms, and general air of somber retreat—and there had given his son the harsh ultimatum that he was not to accept the Chief Magistracy on the conditions of good behavior implicit in every official and unofficial American approach on the subject. Luis Labaiya, by then sufficiently self-assured in his own personality to be no longer overawed by his father, and already committed to the certainty of coming power, had ventured to reply, not with the equivocal politeness he should perhaps have used, but with a bluntness that had astounded and aroused his father.