The World in Half (17 page)

“Is that even legal?”

“Yeah. People set up fights in the streets. No one stops them.”

“Have you been to one before?”

“Once. I had a bet on one of the birds. I lost, so I figured it wasn’t my thing. I have better luck with cards, but I could go again if you want me to take you.”

I scrunch up my nose.

“I’m not saying you’ll like it. I can almost guarantee you won’t like it. But it’s something you’d never do at home, right?”

“Definitely not.”

“Okay,” he says, as if I just agreed to something, and the next thing I know he’s pulling his phone off the counter and calling Nardo to find out whether there’s a fight today and what time it starts.

When we arrive at the one-story concrete building, people, mostly men in hats and blue jeans, are filing in the door. Inside, the air feels superheated and stagnant. A concentrated bubble of noise—people talking and shouting and catcalling—echoes off the walls. There’s a small dirt-floor ring surrounded by five circles of stadium seating that incline out toward the back row. By the door are tables crammed with plastic cups of beer for sale for fifty cents, and another table swarmed by men handing off thin slips of paper and placing bets.

Danilo leads me to the back row, to wooden folding chairs numbered 131 and 132. When it’s time to begin, two birds—one brown-feathered and one white-feathered—are placed in the ring and someone in the front row rings a bell. Everyone rises to his feet and starts waving his arms and shouting at the birds. I keep hearing one man’s voice in particular screaming,
“¡Dale! ¡Dale!”
The only other woman I see in the place, a woman wearing a striped shirt so tight it shows off her fat rolls, stands in the second row clapping.

The birds alight sporadically, beating their wings once or twice, and then come down on each other, darting their beaks at each other’s neck and head and chest. They have razor blades tied to their feet, and if they jump high enough, they slice the other bird upon landing. When the birds were first dropped into the ring, Danilo lowered his head and kept his gaze down between his knees. But now, even though he, like me, is one of the few not standing, he’s craning his neck to glimpse the action. It doesn’t take long before the blood blooms on the feathers of the white bird. I cringe. His head is covered in the dark red stickiness.

“How much longer?” I ask Danilo.

“You’re ready to go?”

The white bird crumples to the ground and then, shakily, tries to stand again. I feel like I might throw up. “Yes,” I tell him.

“Good,” he says. “I was right the first time. This shit isn’t my thing.”

We fight through the cheering crowd to make our way outside, where the city, which I usually associate with so much noise, suddenly sounds almost quiet by contrast, and where the sun, even though it’s still pulsing its heat at us, feels like a welcome relief from the thick air inside the stadium.

“You okay?” Danilo asks, pulling out a cigarette as we walk.

“That was horrible,” I say, as he stops and cups his hand around the cigarette to light it.

“You’re right. I’m never doing that again. The whole scene was fucking sick.”

I don’t know where we’re going now, although I don’t ask, either. I assume back to the apartment, or for something to eat.

“The bullfights aren’t as bad,” Danilo goes on. “You know, earlier when I asked you, What’s the difference? I really think they’re not as bad. Still sick. But at least there’s some majesty about it.”

A soft breeze scampers up my back, under my shirt, and I start to feel a little bit better. We amble on, toward a bus stop, and when we get there, I ask, “Would you ever be a bullfighter?”

“You want me to?” Danilo says. He’s smoking his second cigarette in a row now, something I’ve never seen him do. I take it as a sign that the cockfight unsettled him as much as it did me.

“I’m just asking if you would do it.”

“If you wanted me to be a bullfighter, Miraflores, I would do it.”

“I don’t want you to be.”

“What
do
you want me to be?” He tilts his head back and exhales.

A block away, the bus stops with a squeal. Plumes of diesel exhaust filter up into the air.

The world seems wide open at that moment. I could say almost anything. I want you to be a salesman. I want you to be an artist. I want you to be my tour guide. I want you to be my confidant. I want you to be my friend. I want you to be in love with me. The way he asked makes me think he’s angling for one answer above all others, or at least that he’s testing the waters to gauge the depth of my interest in him. It’s too much pressure, though. The bus trundles up.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just how you are is fine.”

 

 

 

The night after the cockfight,
I call Beth, Asha, and Juliette, in that order, but not one of them answers. It’s Sunday. Nine p.m. I imagine them all out together, probably at Doc, watching a movie, as we usually do on Sunday nights. They’re probably in their seats already, their winter coats crunched up behind their backs, their boots dripping snow onto the floor. Asha is probably pinching the skin around Juliette’s wrist to signal that she really, really needs to stop talking now that the previews are over. Beth is probably sneaking Raisinets out of her bag and slipping them into her mouth one by one.

I run my fingers through my hair and shake my head. Then I pull out the postcards I bought earlier that week and start writing.

A week later,
Danilo and I are no closer to finding my father. We keep trying new places and asking new people, but we don’t have any real leads. In an act of desperation, Danilo draws flyers that say, in stylized block letters in the middle of the page, Do YOU KNOW gatÚn GALLARDO? In smaller letters underneath, he writes, “If so, call 227-0497,” and sketches a mazelike border around the edges. He makes dozens of photocopies and takes them everywhere he goes with his flowers. He claims it actually helps business. “People are kind of over the flower thing. They’ve seen it before. They think they’ve seen it all. They’re waiting in their cars and they can buy flowers or dish towels or fruit or watches or newspapers or cassette tapes. But to see someone walking around waving a piece of paper that I’m going to give them for free? They don’t know what’s up with that. Curiosity gets the better of them. So they roll down their windows and I give them the paper about your father and sometimes I manage to tack on a flower sale, too.”

But no one ever calls.

I press Hernán for anything he might remember about my father, even the smallest misplaced detail, but over and over he reiterates that all he knows is what he told me the first time my father’s name came up. Anytime I try to ask, Hernán steers the conversation to general recollections and reminiscences about his time on the canal and, beyond that, the history of the canal itself. He likes to sit with me at the breakfast table and regale me with tales about what the whole adventure was like. Danilo typically leaves the room when Hernán starts, and I have the distinct impression that he already tried out this same material on Danilo over the years, but now, in me, he has found somebody willing to listen.

He tells me about the first successful passage through the canal and about the hundreds of frogs that gushed in with the water the first time the lock chambers were filled. He tells me about how the men who built it were imported by the boatload mostly from the West Indies and how, as soon as they stepped off the ships upon arriving, they were pulled aside one by one and measured for their coffins. “That’s how probable death was,” he says.

“You know,” he goes on, “they were cutting the world in half. But the land was not happy about it. All the landslides! When I worked there, it was always a threat. You don’t know because you haven’t seen it rain in Panamá. But when it rains here”—he grimaces—“it is as if God himself has torn the sky in two. And working in it? It is like being trampled by elephants.

“Even so, the whole thing is very beautiful. The ships sliding from ocean to ocean, over and over again, like someone working a sewing needle back and forth through a piece of fabric—the precision, the rhythm. And there are mountains under the water because the engineers flooded the land to make the canal. If you take a boat out onto Gatún Lake and look down, you can see them. You can see fish swimming around the tops of mountains.”

Hernán looks entranced by his own account, as if he just came up with a particularly fantastic fairy tale to tell a child, except that it isn’t fantastic at all. “It’s true,” he assures me. I have no reason not to believe him.

T
here’s a famous story about Archimedes, bearded and gaunt, stepping into his tub to take a bath one day and noticing that the water level rose as he settled in. It was simple enough, but we only notice things sometimes when we need to. Archimedes had recently been charged with the task of figuring out whether a new laurel-wreath crown commissioned by Hiero II, the king of Syracuse, was made of pure gold or whether, as Hiero suspected, a devious goldsmith had used an equivalent weight of silver to forge it instead.

This is what Archimedes knew: Silver weighs less than gold. The crown weighed the same as the amount of gold Hiero had given the goldsmith. Therefore, it seemed clear that the crown was indeed made from pure gold. If it had been made from silver, it would have weighed less. Except that Archimedes realized something else: The goldsmith might simply have used much
more
of the silver to bulk the crown up to the same weight, to make it
seem
as though it were gold. Weighing the crown was not proof enough. What Archimedes needed to figure out was the crown’s volume.

When he stepped into his bath that day and saw the water rise and overflow, he had a moment of clarity. He realized that the amount of water displaced was equal in volume to what had been submerged. He could dunk the crown in water to determine its volume. And if the volume was greater than the volume of the gold Hiero had supplied, he would know the goldsmith had cheated the king. Archimedes’ mind reeled. He was so overcome with the thrill of discovery that he jumped out of the bath and ran into the streets naked and shouting.

There’s a similar idea in geology, known as isostasy. It explains how the layers of the earth stay balanced and how different topographic elevations and depressions exist. The earth’s crust is a seesaw. If one part of the land gets heavier, it pushes down the crust beneath it, and other areas of the land rebound. When part of the world is sinking, another part bobs up.