Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

After a few days my hands began to swell and go numb, I was worried about infection. I spent the hottest part of the afternoons lying in my room; I could see it, I would have to be airlifted out to Panama City, delirious. My right hand amputated, the left one saved only in the nick of time. The foot would have to be treated for gangrene. In the water stains on the ceiling I saw deformed babies. My eyes slid lethargically over the details, a nail in a plank, little mounds of sawdust on the floor. The beams were eaten hollow, you could see the round entrance and exit holes. Some of the beams were nothing but a tube filled with crumbly sawdust, held together by the paint. If all the other noises were to stop, the vibrating zoom of insects, the crowing of roosters, all you would hear would be a close-set, uninterrupted gnawing. One day this room, this hotel, would be devoured whole.

I dream of her, my living, sorrowful mother, she says, ‘You’re starting to look less like me all the time! Look at that. .’

‘No! No! I look like you, here, see!’

Like waking up bleeding. No mercy, godforsaken. My hands feel like they’re going to burst, they bob on the strings of my arms like Disney balloons. I miss her the way I used to miss her, at moments when I had hurt myself badly and all my childish soul became a scream of desolation, a scream for my mother who wasn’t there.

I started asking passers-by whether they had heard of Schultz. An old man nodded earnestly and walked on. A woman began rattling away in Spanish. I tried to calm her; I had noticed that I could understand some things when people spoke slowly.

‘She says he was here,’ I heard a voice say in crystal-clear English.

As though, after swinging the dial back and forth for a long time, you suddenly hit upon a radio channel with good reception.

‘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 .’