A Shade of Difference (37 page)

Even now, as he walked across the marbled floor of the Delegates’ Lobby and prepared to take the escalator down to Conference Room 9 in the basement where he had been invited to speak to the African states, Don Jorge’s grandson could see as vividly as though the old man were before him this moment the expression of utter disbelief and anger that had rushed across his grandfather’s face. For a moment he had thought Don Jorge would literally have a stroke, as he alternately flushed and paled, flushed and paled, while his breath came in hurtful gasps, harshly and almost out of control. When he had finally mastered himself to the point of coherent speech, he did not address his son at all. Instead, he ignored him as though he were not there and, turning to his grandson, in a whisper whose intensity rang in Felix’ ears to this day, repeated two words:
“Remember me! Remember me!”

And so he had, the Ambassador of Panama thought grimly as he bowed with his polite, self-contained, closed-off smile to a member of the Polish delegation, passing him alongside on the up-escalator. He was convinced that he knew the sense in which Don Jorge had meant it: Remember me—remember Panama—remember the revolutions and all the bright banners flying—remember to hate the Yanquis—remember the dream of “the Canal to us!”—remember there is still tomorrow—remember not to forget! All these things were symbolized for him by his grandfather, and it was with a bitter anger and contempt for his father that he had followed him, shaken, white-faced, silent but still unyielding, out of the gloomy doors of La Suerte, down the rutted, winding hill road through the crowding jungle, and so presently back across the Isthmus to Panama City and Luis Labaiya’s destiny.

And now they were both dead, the bitter old man and the defiant younger, and he, Felix, was male head of the family and embarked upon purposes that one of them, at least, would have approved, even though the other would not. He too had had his interview with his father, then on his deathbed with cancer, and it too had been a bitter one. In his own eyes Luis Labaiya had served the cause of freedom and justice well in the Second World War, conducted the Presidency with a decent regard for his countrymen, shown an enlightened attitude toward education and social reform, moved surprisingly far from the selfish pattern of the Latin
patron.
But these things were not sufficient for his son, as they were not sufficient for an increasing number of Panamanians, swiftly becoming sick with what the Americans, looking across the street from the Zone, were coming to refer to scathingly as “the Canal disease.”

“Whatever Louie’s faults,” they told one another, and they thought he had some, “at least he didn’t have the Canal disease.”

But Louie’s son, and more and more of his countrymen every day, certainly did.

The truth of the matter—that the Americans had dreamed, planned, financed, built, and maintained the world waterway with a justice much fairer to Panama than many of her citizens would ever admit; that they genuinely did regard the Canal as an international trust that they must administer honorably and well, and that they had done so beyond challenge by impartial judgment—these were as nothing in the face of the emotional obsession that settled upon the surrounding republic. To this obsession it was easy for Felix, prepared by his grandfather’s whispered admonition, which he knew he would carry for life, to succumb. He had followed the traditional pattern of wealth in Latin America, it is true, and gone north to get his education in the United States; but in a very real sense this was done in much the same spirit in which Terence Ajkaje had done it—to scout the enemy’s defenses. He had returned to break the traditional pattern by taking postgraduate studies at the University of Panama, just beginning to open to underprivileged Panamanians of his own generation the promise that they, too, could acquire the knowledge that might, in time, give them the strength to move the world.

In time—but there was no time. The world was spinning ever faster, and those who would move it must seize the fleeting chance and tip it while they could. Companions and projects his father only dimly suspected began to concern Felix Labaiya; not until Felix, by then a two-term Deputy in the National Assembly, joined Aquilino Boyd to help lead the march on the Canal Zone on Independence Day, November 3, 1959, did his father realize that Don Jorge and not himself had won the battle for his son. And by then it was too late for Luis Labaiya to win him back, though he tried.

Again there was the call to come to La Suerte, by now remodeled, modernized, made bright with Yanqui paints and Yanqui prints, only Donna Anna’s quarters far in the left wing preserved, as they had always been, in dingy splendor. There was even a swimming pool, now, and on long weekends lively groups of friends, quite often including members of the Canal Zone staff, the military governor and his lady, and other American residents as well as wealthy Panamanians, would travel the still-difficult two hundred miles out to frolic and disport. Near the end of his father’s life, Felix began to introduce a new element to these parties, one that increasingly embarrassed Luis Labaiya: angry students from the University, young scholars and professors, youthful journalists, occasionally a stranger or two from overseas, visitors full of positive opinions and instantaneous contention who rapidly disrupted the easygoing air of the
estancia
and turned previously relaxed gatherings into battlegrounds of argumentative tension. It was not long before Luis’ friends, particularly his American friends, began to find other things to do upon receipt of invitations to come to La Suerte. Urged on by increasing anxiety for his son and unexpected word from his doctors that he was engaged in a physical battle he could not win, the ex-President made one last attempt to persuade a moderation that Felix was no longer prepared to accept save as a deliberate means to an end. In his heart he had already left moderation far behind.

The Ambassador sighed deeply now, an unconscious commentary on the gap between generations that he was not even aware of, as he thought of that second confrontation between father and son at La Suerte. As he had entered the high-ceilinged bedroom with its view down the valley, glanced at the wasted hands lying on the coverlet, and looked into the desperate eyes with a feeling of pain that he could not conceal, he had known a sudden resurgence of the love for his father that he had felt long ago as a child and had almost forgotten since in their increasingly bitter political arguments. A sudden vivid memory of a young and handsome Luis Labaiya riding a horse down jungle roads with a self-assured and self-confident swagger flashed into his mind; it was all he could do to suppress a sob. But his father’s opening words had ended the moment at once and instantly reestablished the insurmountable barrier between them.

‘The principal reason I do not wish to die,” he had said in the husky whisper that was all the cancer still permitted him, “is that I fear for my son.”

With a great effort Felix retained his self-control and replied with a calmness he did not feel.

“I am sorry for that,” he said gravely. “Sorry that I have disappointed you and sorry that you are worried for me. Neither has been necessary.”

“You have made it necessary. It has not been my doing.”

Felix realized that his nails were biting into his palms; the sensation was sharp enough to conquer his impulse to cry out in anger. Instead he retreated to the cold precision to which he always retreated when his purposes, his ideas, or his emotions were under attack from any source.

“It has been the doing of the times. The world has moved from what it was. It is simply that I have moved with it. As,” he continued when his father’s ravaged hands made a movement of protest, “Panama too is moving with it. And will continue to move.”

“It is not impossible,” Luis said, “that another Labaiya may someday sit in
La Presidencia.
I should like to feel before I go that you would govern with honor.”

“What is honor?” Felix asked bitterly. “To bow to the Yanquis? To be their colony? To let them operate our Canal and rake off its profits into their own fat pockets? There are some who have considered that honor. Not I.”

“My son, you talk in slogans, not in facts,” Luis said with a painful slowness. “They built the Canal. They do not run it at a profit. They do not keep from us anything which is rightfully ours.”

“Is La Suerte’s land ours?” Felix demanded harshly. “Do we love La Suerte? So is Panama’s land ours, and so do I love Panama.”

“And I do not?” Luis demanded with a ghostly but equal harshness. “La Suerte is nothing to me, Panama is nothing to me? You talk like a child and a fool.”

“And yet I am neither,” Felix said coldly. “And many grown men who are neither agree with me. And the day is coming when all Panama and all the world will agree with me. And then the enemy will be gone, and we will be left in peace to prosper as God intended.”

“The enemy! You are beyond intelligence to use such terms. My friends are not ‘the enemy’!”

“Your friends are not my friends,” Felix snapped.

“My son is not my son,” his father said, and turned on his side with an infinite weariness.

“Father—” Felix began, but there was no sign of relaxation in the rigid back beneath the coverlet. Automatically he satisfied himself that the cloth still moved, faintly but regularly, with breathing, and then turned away and walked out on the terrace of La Suerte and stood for a long time, his eyes blinded by tears that shut off the valley of his childhood and growing-up, the jungle and mountains and tropical vistas of his dearly beloved home. But his back was rigid too, and no more than his father’s did it give sign of yielding. It was the last time he cried for anyone, and he would have died himself rather than have his father know that it had been for him.

Two weeks later Luis Labaiya was dead, the funeral was over, the business of readjusting was done, Felix was head of the family, now dwindled to himself, and his mother, and Donna Anna, huddling together in the old wing of the house in a protest, silent but inescapable, as strong as his father’s. So be it, then. He was alone; he had always been alone; he would
be
alone. And when he was through, the world would know that in Felix Labaiya-Sofra it had a man who achieved what he set out to do.

Perhaps it was this quality more than any other that had really brought about his marriage to Patsy Jason. Some spark, not of fire but of the cold blue light that burns in certain people, had leaped between them when they met in Washington. He had been there as counselor of embassy first, a tentative and cautious offering from the current government in Panama—an offering that said, in effect, Here is your chance. We shall see if you will continue down the road you are going or be Louie Labaiya’s son. It had occurred to him in the bitter days following his father’s death that obviously his best advantage lay in appearing to be the latter and giving them to understand that he was not bidding them farewell forever. He had gracefully eased himself away from the more publicly obstreperous companions of his radical days and begun to assume, not too slowly, not too fast, the necessary mantle of conformity.

“I knew that when Louie died and he understood the full responsibilities of his position, Felix would be all right,” they told one another comfortably in the Zone. The enemy had even been invited back to La Suerte, and presently it seemed as though nothing at all had changed and that the House of Labaiya was again what it had been under his father, a pillar of Panama, one of the principal rocks upon which to rest the curious relationship between the Giant of the North and its tiny brother of the Isthmus.

There had come in due course the invitation to go to Washington, and he had accepted it eagerly, for there was still much that he wanted to know about the Americans on their home ground. In the gleaming white capital, which he reached in an autumn season much like the present with the leaves turning and the air soft and a gentle wistfulness in the busy atmosphere, he had moved at once into a position of prominence in the diplomatic corps. “Panama Sends an Eligible Young Bachelor,” the
Evening Star
reported in a personality sketch in its society pages shortly after his arrival. “Pat and Perle and Dolly and Polly are all going to be after the new counselor of the Embassy of Panama,” the article had begun, “for he is everything a hostess’ heart could desire. Young, handsome, and dashing, he reportedly has a reputation in his homeland for being a great one with the ladies. So, watch out girls!” And the girls, of course, instead of watching out, had flung themselves at his head with a gay abandon that amused, if it did not particularly impress, the eligible young bachelor from Panama.

Like most Latins—indeed, like most foreigners of whatever nature—Felix was somewhat baffled by the American attitude toward sex, a practical function in his country that few people thought about twice. Either you got it or you didn’t; if you did, fine, and if you didn’t, well,
mañana
was another day and more than one fish swam in the boundless sea. Bafflement soon yielded to amusement, and a calm decision to make the most of it; before very long he was living up to his reputation in a way that caused some deliriously excited gossip in Georgetown and other purlieus of the capital’s knowledgeable. This had been going on for six months when he met Patsy Jason at a party at Dolly’s. He was given to understand at once that this was not to be a conquest as simple as the rest.

Why it shouldn’t have been he was for a time puzzled to understand, which was exactly the result intended, as he soon came to realize. His first impulse was to dismiss it, but something about Patsy, with her striking dark good looks, her outwardly vacuous chatter, and her inner certainties, seemed to appeal directly to something in him.

“I think you’re very cold-blooded,” she had told him when she finally consented to being escorted to a ball at the beautiful main building of the Pan-American Union at Seventeenth Street and Constitution Avenue.

“I have company in that,” he responded with a rarely flashing smile.

“I know,” she said with a giggle. “Aren’t we WORTHLESS?”