Little Caesar (34 page)

‘You speak English!’ I said to the young man who had entered the conversation a bit aloofly, but not unwillingly. ‘Could you ask her what he was doing here? When he was here? Does he come here often?’

The woman had seen him, she had heard stories, she couldn’t understand why the men of El Real hadn’t rushed out and chopped him to pieces with their machetes. Seňor Schultz had been drinking in the bar, he had turned the whole place upside down, everyone was drinking on his tab. They had started fighting, ever since then Jorge Valdez’s nose had pointed in a different direction from where he was headed. They had broken in to Pilar’s store to get more alcohol.

‘What was he doing here?’ I asked the young man.

He interpreted for me patiently. The woman didn’t know why Schultz had come. She picked up her basket as though to move on.

‘One more question,’ I said excitedly. ‘When was he here? Did he come here often?’

He had been here two or three times, the last time was long ago now. I was delighted, her eyes had seen him, it suddenly brought him closer than he had ever been before.

The young man’s name was Aldair Macmillan, he was the first person I’d talked to in a long time.

‘Did you come to El Real to find that man?’ he asked.

‘That man. Yes. It’s not exactly easy.’

‘Almost nothing is, here.’

‘Shall we move over to the shade?’

Beneath the luxuriant foliage of a mango tree I talked to Aldair Macmillan, who studied tropical forestry at Punta Culebra. Aldair was in El Real at the moment to visit his mother. I poured my relief out over him like cool water. Nothing in his replies made it seem as though he found anything strange about my dashing off to El Real in search of a man in the jungle.

‘I have three problems,’ I said. ‘I barely speak the language. I don’t know where he is exactly. And if I did know, I wouldn’t know how to get there. These are the things that are blocking my way, you understand?’

I saw him squint, and hoped it wasn’t skepticism.

‘Problems, problems,’ he said.

‘Problems, that’s right.’

‘I could ask around for you.’

‘Really?’

‘To see if there’s someone . . .’

‘Someone?’

‘Who could help. I could . . .’

‘Oh, that would be fantastic!’

A few minutes later he had disappeared among the houses. I had forgotten to say where he could find me.

The day began with a thousand cock crows. I dripped iodine into the wound, which was closing up quickly now. A pretty black girl carrying an umbrella drifted through the streets, holding a sheet of stationery on which one could enter one’s name for the local lottery. The prize was a Geneva wristwatch. I put my name down; I wanted this to be a lucky day.

The jungle began directly behind the last row of houses. Protruding from the greenery were the blunt noses of three Dodge trucks, overrun by vines, their windows misted over with moss. Before long they would be completely swallowed up by the undergrowth. At the little store I bought a roll of toilet paper, batteries and a bar of soap. The old man groaned as he counted out my change. Aldair Macmillan and I didn’t cross paths again till late in the afternoon. I was eating chicken and rice at a makeshift restaurant, three plastic tables outside, beneath a pergola of flowers. My table was beside the brown creek, where a little Emberá boy was moaning as he emptied his bowels. Along the banks lay the dark trunks from which pirogues were carved. The stilt-houses were closed off only by one or two walls, I wondered whether Indians said things like
have you ever seen a mess like the neighbors’ place?
Then, suddenly he was standing beside my table: Aldair Macmillan.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

‘I wasn’t trying to find you.’

He nodded towards the black woman behind the low door to the charred kitchen.

‘She’s my mother. Are you enjoying your food?’

‘It’s very good. Your mother’s a good cook.’

Aldair nodded contentedly.

‘I grew up without a father,’ he said, ‘but my mother’s cooking brought a lot of fathers to this table.’

The backdrop to our conversation consisted of a black woman pounding grain on the muddy riverbank. The pestle pounded dully against the hollowed log. Africa, carried forward in a dying settlement in the jungles of Panama.

‘I found someone who can solve two of those problems for you,’ Aldair said. ‘There’s a man, his name is Ché Ibarra, who knows how to find the man you’re looking for. He knows the way through the jungle. Unfortunately, he only speaks Spanish and a few lines of German. He’s a communist. He listens to Mozart all day long. Do you like Mozart?’

‘Sometimes he moves me, sometimes I think he’s an overrated Alpine composer.’

‘Then it’s even more of a pity that you won’t be able to talk to Ché Ibarra.’

‘So he really knows where Schultz is?’

‘He says he’s guided shipments of material there.’

The woman on the bank shoveled the grain into a wooden bowl, raised her arm and let the grain run back into the mortar, the chaff blew away. I put a few dollars on the table and we were off, in search of the man who could say the magic words and untangle the jungle’s web.

Chickens were scratching about on the thatched roofs. In a few minutes the gas lanterns would go on and here and there little generators would begin thrumming.

Anyone seeing Ché Ibarra for the first time would think he had met his own murderer. But, apparently, inside that exterior of riffraff from a Mariachi film was housed the soul of a poet. His lips knew the shape of the libretto to
Le nozze di Figaro
. Aldair Macmillan acted as our interpreter. Ibarra glanced at me only briefly, dead eyes in a craggy face shiny with salt and grease. He had the moustache of a Chinaman, its hairs implanted sparsely across his lip. The fireflies gleamed in the bushes behind his house. He nodded in reply to my questions. He knew the way. He had seen Schultz in real life. He was still there. A day’s walk if you left before sunup, otherwise two. He didn’t seem to care at all whether we went or not. When asked what it would cost to lead me there, he shrugged, then said, ‘
Doscientos dólares
.’

The prospect of being alone with this man in the jungle frightened me. I could see myself dead, buried carelessly beneath a layer of leaves. That someone like this could love Mozart seemed a comic misunderstanding.

‘Two hundred is okay,’ I said. ‘When can we go?’

Again, indifference. I said I’d like to leave the day after tomorrow, before sunup. His hands lay motionless on the table in front of him. Did I need to bring things, food, water? Ché Ibarra shook his tired head – that would not be necessary.

Thirty-six hours later, almost empty-handed, I found myself at his door. A backpack containing a few odds and ends. The house was dark. A lemon-yellow moon was lingering over the trees. The chirping of geckos, and the impression that the buzzing and shrilling of insects must be loudest just before dawn. You could lose yourself in that noise, an electrifying tapestry. Just as I started climbing the steps to the veranda, I heard footsteps on the road. Ibarra had already left his house, perhaps he had been picking up a few necessities for the trip. He was wearing a half-filled backpack, he looked like nothing so much as a soldier.

‘
Venga, vamos
.’

Then he gave me my first view of the prospect that would lie before me all day long, the army-green backside of a man who seemed to consist entirely of sinew and stolid willpower. I felt lucky, and I was on my way, it was going to work out. We plunged into the head-high elephant grass. The last stars in the sky were growing pale, we were rotating again into a new day. The pain in my foot was bearable, the skin had healed over. I picked up the pace, but he was far out in front of me. We crossed a path lined by a dyke that seemed built for irrigation and disappeared into the blue embrace of the forest. Ibarra put in the earbuds of his Walkman. Every once in a while he looked back. The final shadows of the night had tucked themselves away amid the trees, they would quickly be chased away by bundles of sunlight falling through the high crowns. I barely realized that I was on my way to my father. The effort it had taken to get there had relegated my goal to the background. But now every step was taking me closer to him, every meter counted; the less I thought, the better off I was, that would help me to ignore the pain in my foot that was acting up now, the shortness of breath and the sweat seeping through my shirt – I counted my steps, up to one hundred and then back down again. The fanatical hiss of insects had subsided, as it grew hotter that sound was replaced by a low, constant drone. We arrived at a brook that could easily have flowed in England, silver water rolling over a copper-colored bed, to cross it was an act of blasphemy; clouding the holy water, muddy feet on the gold brocade of the temple garment.

We clambered across the mossy, moist roots of trees, climbed hills of mud, stones shot out from under the soles of my shoes. We still had not stopped for a rest. My mouth was dry. Ibarra warned me not to step on a coral snake that was almost completely hidden beneath leaves and humus. My hands began swelling again and itched. I did my best to keep up with him, while he listened composedly to piano concertos or the requiem
Dies irae
– baroque absurdities of this continent. I was no longer worried about him gutting me with his knife, I was too exhausted to be afraid. We stopped beside a dark pool amid the trees, a place where elves and sorcerers wrote the course of lifetimes on the black mirror of the surface. Ibarra handed me a bottle of water. He put the earbuds back in and stared into space. Later he gave me a banana. Then a piece of bread and a can of sardines. I dunked the bread in the leftover oil. Ibarra stood up. Apparently he was not planning to take the rubbish with him. Conscientious European that I was, I put it in my backpack.

The forest showed itself to me as an entity, an organism specialized in brief, flagrant blossoming and sudden death. Minor revelations flared up between the trees, birds like hellish-red flames. I was startled by the fleshy wings of a butterfly that fluttered in my face. I slapped at them. There were animals – insects? – that sounded like a plane flying over, there were others that made the sound of a chainsaw, a dying lamb, marbles knocked together. This was how the forest sounded at a noon hour giddy with heat. My thoughts took on the form of hallucinations. Flowers fell from the sky, in front of me walked a man who, I was suddenly certain, had served with the
FARC
, a runaway
guerrillero
– so light-footed and purposefully did he move through the trees. A new storey was built onto my fear: what if he were taking me to a rebel camp where I would be held hostage? Did the
FARC
operate this deep within Panama? What time was it? Was this the day that I was going to meet him, the man of whom I had no other memory but the rustling of his trouser legs? And what day was that then?

Ibarra was waiting for me beside a little waterfall. Kneeling, he drank from the stream and gestured to me to do the same. He sat down on the stones and unlaced his army boots. Then he undressed and dove into the pool under the cascade. He swam like a little dog. My sock was red with blood. The sole was soaked. From the rocks along the bank I slid into the water. Little fishy mouths nibbled at my flesh. I went under and drifted over the smooth stones at the bottom. When I resurfaced, we were no longer alone. A man was looking at us. Soiled T-shirt and fatigue trousers, a machete hanging from his belt. They were talking, Ibarra and he. Ibarra was standing naked on the bank, solid as the trunks along the banks of the creek at El Real, seeming completely at ease. They tossed the occasional glance in my direction. While Ibarra was getting dressed, the other man shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack. I climbed onto the bank and caught a whiff of sulfur. An unpleasant kind of watchfulness had settled on the things that happened.

‘
Hombre
,’ the unknown man said to me.

He shook his head and said things I didn’t understand. A gate was being closed, I understood that much. I breathed deeply in and out to ward off a panic attack. I understood the word
prohibido
. An obstacle, no more than that. An obstacle.

‘No,’ I stammered. ‘
No es imposible
.’

He raised his chin.

‘
Vamos a señor Schultz
,’ I said.

The thin valor of those words, spoken to two men who had only to walk away in order to ensure my certain death. I began speaking in English. That I sure as hell had not come to Darién just to let myself be turned away by the first hillbilly I ran into. That I was his son, that he was expecting me, that he had been waiting for me all his life, that’s right, sir! Waiting for me, his son, the
hijo
of
señor Schultz
, and now you – my hand cast lightning bolts in his direction – are not going to try to tell me that I’ve come to the end of the road here, oh no, you are going to let us through, what’s more, you’re going to take us there, me,
hijo de señor Schultz
, and my man Friday here.

His head moved slightly, doubtfully, he asked, ‘
Usted es el hijo de señor Schultz?’

I tapped my finger against my chest.

‘
Hijo
.’

I pointed to the countryside behind him.

‘
Padre
.’

He took a drag of his cigarette, then squished the glowing cone between thumb and forefinger. It was impossible to tell whether he was thinking about a great many things at the same time, or thinking very slowly about one little thing, stuck between his teeth like a bothersome piece of gristle. The smoke from his cigarette hung between us. When it had drifted away the man shrugged and said something to Ibarra, but against the rocky surface of my guide’s expression all announcements dashed themselves to pieces. We started moving. First the unknown man, then Ibarra, then me. That was how we moved through the forest, like the ants at our feet, who carved out narrow roads with snippets of bright green leaves on their backs, heading home to their republics. A shiny blue butterfly flew out in front of me, amid the treetops the embers of the day died out. Dull pain wedged itself between my temples, every single footstep resounded in my head.