Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

Hotel Washington, Colón, Panama

19th July, 189 –

My dearest Wilson,

I do not know whether this letter will ever reach you. I have to believe that it will. Still, writing gives me a disturbing feeling, as if I were speaking to an empty room –

She paused, looked up. Imagined him.

His flat-crowned hat, its curling brim. His shocked blue eyes beneath. Eyes that looked as if they had witnessed atrocities, or miracles. At times they had seemed to distance him, to place him at one remove from reality. Then she could see why some might think of him as a simpleton, a dreamer — a laughing-stock …

Yet he had saved her life.

The thought opened a space inside her head. A landscape that was featureless, where nothing could find purchase.

She tried to imagine thanking him and saw his boots begin to shuffle in the dust. She watched one hand wander from his pocket, touch his hat.

She lifted her eyes to the window. Beyond the palm trees, on the horizon, black clouds heaped above a narrow blade of land. That would be the coastline, stretching north. Bahía de las Minas. Cristóbal.

The sky had darkened. Green light seeped through one last gap.

We arrived in Panama after nine days. I did not see much of the city, though we did take a drive along the Avenue Balboa and spend a few moments on the seafront, looking out towards Taboga and the islands beyond. There were many white pelicans floating on the water. To the south the mountains were covered in a light cloud. It was very beautiful. And it seemed quite natural to be sitting there, just looking, saying nothing, perhaps because it was the kind of thing we used to do –

A knocking at the door interrupted her. She looked round.

‘Yes?’

When there was no response, she laid down her pen and rose to her feet. She opened the door. Two hurricane lamps, already lit, stood at her feet.

She peered down the corridor. It was tall and narrow; the walls, panelled in cheap wood, had been treated with a dark varnish. She caught a glimpse of a boy in a white shirt, close to the top of the stairs.

‘Thank you,’ she called out. ‘ Gracias .’

Back in her room, she placed one of the lamps beside her on the writing desk and then sat down again.

Wilson, it was so strange for me to find myself in a country where there are trees and flowers, where there is life. In fact, it has been a strange journey altogether, undertaken in a kind of trance. I am suffering from headaches; it is possible that I am still feeling the effects of our ordeal in the desert, though it could be a change of climate, I suppose, since Théo has been ill as well –

A kind of trance.

She had woken in a small white room, not knowing where she was. Her bones lay buried deep below her skin; they felt as if they had been down there for centuries. Her mouth hurt when she tried to speak.

There was a constant humming in her ears which she found comforting somehow. She did not need to have the sound identified. It was days before she learned that it was engines. That she was on a ship.

As her strength returned she left the cabin, but the voyage south made almost no impression on her. She slept much of the time, in a striped canvas chair. When she was not asleep, she watched blocks of shadow edge across the bleached boards of the deck. The second officer would bring her iced water in a jug.

In Panama City Théo heard that a steamer was sailing from the port of Colón on the east coast the following afternoon. Hoping to escape the heat, they took the night train. A journey of fifty kilometres lasted almost seven hours. She remembered the day breaking, darkness lifting from the jungle. Light that was pale and tropical, like oysters or muslin. Massed trees, sticky with mist. A river sliding past huge knotted roots, its surface solid, seamless; it could have been a length of polished wood. She saw a bush adorned with white flowers of such a size that she could only stare. One blast from the train’s whistle and the flowers rose into the sky.

Herons.

As the mist began to burn off, Théo woke from a nap and looked at her, his eyes dark in his exhausted face.

‘I’ve been dreaming.’

But he did not elaborate.

Instead he turned to face the window where broad trenches were now visible, gouged through the terrain. The soil was the colour of tea.

‘The canal,’ he murmured.

Suzanne gazed out.

This was all that now remained of de Lesseps’ attempt to build a waterway through Panama. It had taken him eight years to admit his mistake; by then the scandal had muddied even Monsieur Eiffel’s name. Yet the cleared areas were already growing back; banana leaves and lilies draped pieces of abandoned machinery. The shame of the French was being covered over, as if the land itself were embarrassed on their behalf.

Théo contemplated the scene with a kind of morbid relish.

‘They say that twenty thousand men died out here.’

The landscape offered him no solace, no evidence of mercy or redemption. He could see only disaster, and it was everywhere he looked. It was as if his failure had taken its rightful place in a whole hierarchy of failures.

And one failure, it seemed, could breed another. In the shipping office in Colón, they were told that there was no boat. Not for another week. When Théo tried to argue, the man just shrugged his shoulders, a slow, watery gesture that seemed to render them powerless, that was like being drowned. They had no choice but to book into the Hotel Washington, and wait.

On their first evening, Suzanne took a seat on the veranda. As the sun began to set over the Caribbean, Théo joined her. A march by Sousa blared and crackled from the graphophone in the dining-room. She wondered whether she ought not to be talking to Théo. Instead she listened to a French anthropologist tell a story about some trees that he had discovered in the province of Chiriqui. ‘They were extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Quite square.’ She presumed he meant the trunks. When he had finished his story about the trees, he launched into another. This time it was frogs. Golden frogs. He was a thin man, tubercular, with earnest lines between his eyebrows and the distinctly irritating habit of constantly swirling his drink around inside his glass. She found that his stories did not surprise her. In fact, she was not sure that she was capable of feeling anything as abrupt as surprise. Certainly it would take more than a few square trees.

When she retired to bed that night she glanced across at Théo. They had scarcely exchanged a word all day. She wondered if the anthropologist had noticed. Weren’t anthropologists in the business of noticing such things?

The lamp at her elbow began to smoke; she had to adjust the flame. Then she dipped her pen into the inkwell and continued.

From Panama we took the railroad (built by Americans, apparently!) to Colón on the Atlantic coast, which is where we are now. There is little to do here but rest; the good doctor would approve, no doubt. We leave tomorrow, on a steamship bound for New York — an eight-day voyage, if everything goes well –

The door opened and Théo entered. He hung up his hat, leaned his cane against a chair, then glanced across the room at her.

‘A letter?’

She nodded.

‘Who are you writing to?’

‘Monsieur Pharaoh.’

Standing in front of the mirror, Théo adjusted the lapels on his frock-coat. ‘Make sure you post it in the morning,’ he said. ‘There won’t be another chance for a while.’

She watched him settle in the armchair with a newspaper. The walls behind him were papered in green-and-gilt, mould blossoming above the picture-rail. Dictionaries filled the shelves. Works by Cervantes too. The size of the books wearied her; she had to look away.