The Panama Portrait

by Stanley Ellin

  Ben said, “I gather he was telling us that Luis Something-or-other is at The Sun and Moon. Would that be the champion Blas admires so much? The only one who ever took the festival prize twice?”

  “That’s the one,” said Salazar. “And what the kid was calling him was Luis of the Rope. The gallows champion. About once in a lifetime a man does something so fantastic at the festival that he earns the right to be called that. Luis is this generation’s wonder man.”

  “But what’s he doing at The Sun and Moon?” said Santa Cruz. “He’s usually up on the Victorica this time of the year, at Chicamayo village. And when he is in town it’s always at one of those Indian cantinas where they’ll buy him all the drinks he can hold. Don’t tell me he’s here just to listen to Chapin talk. Next thing you know, Gil, Chapin’ll be running for office.”

  “And,” said Salazar, “with Luis on his side, he might get elected.”

  Ben saw the point of this when they approached The Sun and Moon. The street before it was solidly packed with avid spectators, not only children, but men as well, and a sizable number of women, all straining and pushing to get a glimpse of their hero through the open doorway. It took some ruthless shouldering to get through the mob, and then there was another crush at the doorway impossible to move past. The Sun and Moon was not large, every table was occupied, and standees lined the walls. It was then that Ben learned the advantages of a hyphenated name.

  “I want a table for four,” said his host to the sweating, bad-tempered guard at the door. “I am Mr. Alden-Aragone.”

  Gone was the bad temper; even the sweat on the guard’s ugly face seemed magically to evaporate. A way was cleared, a table was carried on the head of a waiter to the front of the room, chairs were placed around the table, the waiter snapped his napkin at the seats of the chairs to assure cleanliness. As soon as all were seated, he stood at attention to take their orders.

  “Chicha and sauce,” Alden-Aragone told him. “And beer. A lot of beer, very cold.”

  “What’s chicha?” asked Ben.

  “Wine of the country,” said Santa Cruz. “Corn liquor two days old. The Indian delight.”

  “You have to be careful with it,” said Salazar; “it’s all fusel oil. Maybe someone ought to tell that to the guests of honor.”

  He was looking over Ben’s shoulder, and by turning sideways in his seat, Ben managed to get a view of the table behind him on which stood a cluster of bottles. The table was occupied by Chapin, his wife, the stout, bald-headed agent, and a small, swarthy Indian. At the moment Ben’s eyes met hers, Chapin’s wife smiled at him, a friendly smile so confiding and revealing, so unexpected, that he could only gape at her as she looked away and went back to her conversation with the agent. It was not so easy for him to look away. She was a tall, handsome girl, but while that mop of pale blonde hair, those full lips, those heavy breasts were wholly and invitingly sensual, there was a sort of youthful, wide-eyed innocence about her. Ben estimated that she was in her middle twenties which would make her at least fifteen years younger than Chapin. Very likely, he decided, it was the case of a girl yearning for a father image, and a blasé painter taking advantage of that. Lucky painter.

  Salazar nudged Ben. “Take a look at Luis’ neck,” he whispered. “You can see the mark there.”

  It was a chilling sight to consider. Luis was collarless; clearly visible around his brown throat was a pale outline stamped into the flesh. The mark of the rope on which he had twice swung, from which he had twice watched death thundering down on him while he clutched a small blade in a failing hand as his only weapon against it.

  Yet the man himself did not look heroic, did not look like anything at all. He was slight and wizened, he sat listening in a half-stupor as Chapin talked to him, and when Chapin drank he raised his own glass as well, pouring off the drink thirstily with a quick flip of the wrist. From the look of him he could have been any shabby Indian in Port Buchanan, any Axoyac derelict invited into this café for a drink by the whim of his masters.

  But he had done something no one else there had done. Not once, but twice, he had deliberately climbed that towering height which divides life from death, he had ascended to its very peak, had looked beyond it into the unknown, and had come back to tell about it. Blas had once said that the Axoyacs firmly believed that the champion of the festival did not merely hang himself longer than any rival, but that he literally died and returned to life. And looking at the crowd which craned its heads, stood on chairs to catch a glimpse of Luis of the Rope, Ben found it impossible not to share its feeling of awe in the presence of this small, mahogany-colored Lazarus.

  Alden-Aragone must have been reading his thoughts. “Doesn’t look like much, does he?” he said, smiling. “A scrawny featherweight, that’s all. But if you ever got your hands around that neck you’d find it was like an iron bar.”

  “That’s not the only thing on him like an iron bar,” said Santa Cruz. “Did Blas ever tell you about the time he got himself confused with Ajaxa?”

  “No.”

  “Well, one day he got himself drunk and waited around by that statue until an Axoyac woman showed up to pay homage to it. Those women have some pretty shameless ideas about Ajaxa. If they think no one is looking, they hoist their skirts—”

  “The god Priapus,” said Alden-Aragone, “has many names.”

  “So he has,” said Santa Cruz. “Anyhow, the god Priapus under the name of Luis de la Horca caught this little lady with her skirts up and assaulted her. It made quite a sensation, because the woman yelled her head off, and poor Luis was caught with his weapon in his hand.”

  “That’s what you call identifying with a god,” said Alden-Aragone.

  “What happened to him?” Ben asked. “Isn’t rape a serious offense here?”

  “It is,” said Santa Cruz. “But for one thing, there wasn’t a white woman involved, and for another thing, neither the victim nor her husband would testify against Luis in court.”

  “I had the impression,” said Alden-Aragone, “that once the smoke cleared away, they both realized that they had been highly honored by the assault. The upshot was that Luis got a week in jail for public drunkenness where any other Indian would have gotten ten years at hard labor. Or, possibly, a knife in the back from the outraged husband. You might say that our Luis leads a charmed life. Here,” he ordered the waiter who was balancing a large tray overhead, “you can put that down. We’ll do the mixing ourselves.”

  The bottle of chicha was placed on the table along with a dozen bottles of beer and a bowl of bright red paste, the tomato and pepper sauce which, Alden-Aragone explained, was an indispensable part of the concoction. He mixed a drink for Ben: two fingers of colorless liquor and a spoonful of the sauce which were stirred together vigorously and to be downed at a gulp. The result, Ben discovered, was a train of fire racing through the gullet and exploding in the diaphragm. The function of the beer was now evident. It was there to extinguish the fire, or, at least, dim its blaze, and after that one experiment Ben applied himself only to the beer.

  He observed that The Sun and Moon might have been designed to make its customers thirsty. It was badly ventilated by its one open door and a ceiling fan which labored futilely against the fog of tobacco smoke swirling about it. At one time the walls had been decorated by murals which showed a flaming sun and a crescent moon, miraculously side by side, illuminating an arid landscape peopled by surrealist monsters, but now this work of art had partially disintegrated; the walls were scabrous with flaking paint; here and there the plaster was gone, showing the laths beneath. And all this was garishly revealed by naked electric bulbs overhead which cast the kind of inhuman light that one might expect to find on the floor of the moon.

  When Ben commented on this, Alden-Aragone said, “Sure it would be a lot better with that dark, San Francisco, coffee house atmosphere, but there’s not a chance of it in any café around this district. Police regulations say they have to keep lit up this way until closing
time. There’s always a couple of plainclothesmen sitting around, and they like to know what’s going on. You see that motorcycle corps at those tables in the middle there?”

  Ben looked and saw the black leather jackets, the black motorcycling caps shadowing hard faces and long sideburns. The girls in the company looked as hard as the men.

  “They call themselves Young Nationalists,” said Alden-Aragone, “and when they’re not racing up and down the coast driving the villages crazy, they hang around places like this looking for trouble. They get away with it because the police cultivate them. They’re regarded as the kind of vermin you breed to keep more troublesome vermin under control. They hate the nadaistas like poison.”

  “Do you go along with that policy?” Ben asked.

  “No, because I don’t think the nadaistas are dangerous. Some do.”

  “Dangerous or not,” said Salazar, “they ask for trouble. Their idea of a good time is to parade around the churches yelling anticlerical slogans, or to write scurrilous leaflets about anybody in the government who doesn’t suit their fancy. But you notice they’re very tame when the Young Nationalists are around.”

  “Sometimes,” said Santa Cruz. “Oh, dear God, this may turn out to be a lovely night.”

  A tall boy in the nadaista uniform of black sweater and blue dungarees, his hair, like that of his fellows, cut in a straight bang across his forehead, had led Chapin to the musicians’ platform in front of the room, was trying to introduce him, and was not being allowed to. He thumped his fist angrily on top of the battered piano there, but even that could not be heard over the wave of sound that engulfed the room, a din compounded of yells, catcalls, and shrill whistling, of the pounding of fists on tables and shoes on the rickety wooden floor. The pounding settled into a steady rhythm. The boy’s mouth opened and closed in a soundless plea, he waved commandingly at his audience, but the pounding only grew louder, the floor shuddering under it.

  The boy gave up trying to speak. He pointed at Chaplin’s table, he gestured at Luis, and slowly Luis arose. He faced the crowd impassively, and the noise started to die away. There was unquestionably a magnetism about this little man. Standing there motionless, he commanded silence by his mere presence, and in the silence he spoke.

  “My friend has words for us,” he said in a curiously guttural Spanish. “We will hear him.”

  He had said all he had to say. He looked around at the crowd with great deliberation and sat down as slowly as he had arisen. The master of ceremonies was wise. He made no attempt to repeat his introduction, but motioned to Chapin and left the platform. For the time being, he knew, Chapin was protected by the spell cast by Luis of the Rope. It was not a spell guaranteed to protect anyone else.

  Chapin stood there squinting out at the crowd as if in a trance himself. His face, Ben now saw clearly, was deeply lined, and a stubble of beard showed on it; his dark hair was unkempt, and white threads in it glittered in the brilliant light. He was in shirtsleeves as he had been that day outside the museum; he fumbled in a shirt pocket, then in his trouser pockets, and finally came up with a crumpled sheet of paper. The crowd waited through this quietly enough, but it murmured a little and shifted in its seats, and Ben had the feeling that the spell was a thin and precarious one. When he glanced at Chapin’s wife he saw that she was staring fixedly at her husband, her face taut with concern, a hand pressed to her lips.

  “My friends,” Chapin said, and seemed startled at the sound of his own voice. He cleared his throat. “My friends, I am not much of a speaker, but I am here to make an apology to you.” He held up the sheet of paper. “This is a copy of that apology which I wrote to the newspapers, but they won’t print it. I don’t know why, but they won’t. So I am here tonight to tell you what this letter says. In order that everyone will understand—especially those people of the Axoyacs in back there—I will try to translate it as I go.”

  He rattled off a translation of his introduction in surprisingly fluent Spanish, and there was a patter of applause from some of the tables. “So far so good,” observed Alden-Aragone, and Salazar said, “If you like the way they speak the language in Mexico City.”

  “My apology,” said Chapin, “is for what I said in public about your festival of the rope when I was still ignorant of its meaning.”

  There was an uneasy stirring among the nadaistas at this. They looked at each other, frowned, shook their heads in bewilderment. Someone from among the Young Nationalists cried, “Arriba la horca! Arriba Santo Stefano!” and a few of the nadaistas rose in their seats to see where the cry had come from.

  “A lovely, lovely night,” breathed Santa Cruz rapturously.

  “Now that I understand the meaning of this festival,” said Chapin, “I must retract everything I said about it.”

  This brought more of the nadaistas to their feet. “Traitor!” shouted one of them, but he was immediately pulled back into his chair by some of his companions. From the buzzing among them, the growing heat of their whispered colloquy as heads were put together, Ben could see that Chapin had not alienated the entire fraternity, but had only caused a schism in it. It would all depend, he thought, on whether you worshipped the man or his beliefs.

  Chapin paid no attention to the disturbance. His eyes were fixed on the far distance, he was groping for the words he wanted.

  “I am an artist,” he said. “All my life has been spent trying to find the true form of things beneath their outward form. Maybe I’m looking for God, if God is the name for it. But names don’t matter—nothing matters but one thing: that there is a significant form to all existence, to the whole universe, and as an artist I must discover it and make it known. The clues to it are all around us. They are manifest in the most common objects, which have meanings far deeper than the ones we so readily attribute to them. The eye sees only the face of nature. The heart—” he struck his fist against his chest “—the artist’s heart tells him that there is something powerful and meaningful behind that face which he must understand.”

  He stopped the rush of words to translate them, and now the scattered applause was longer and louder than before, but mixed with it were challenging hoots and catcalls. Neither the applause nor the voices had any perceptible effect on Chapin. He was like a man moving step by step through a thorny wilderness in pursuit of a vision, with eyes only for the vision.

  “This is the truth about any artist,” he said: “this need in him to discover the great reality which is the single principle that gives meaning to all the little realities. This is what makes him an artist. And now I know that it is also what makes a man put his rope on the gallows, what drives him to become part of your festival and offer his life to it.”

  The schism among the nadaistas suddenly erupted with a roar. Some stood and shouted challengingly at Chapin, others tried to wrestle them back into their seats, there was scuffling at half the tables in the place. The audience behind those tables cried, “Down in front! Let’s hear this!” and then gave up and stood en masse. At Chapin’s table the bald man came to his feet bellowing at the painter to come down from that platform, for God’s sake, and at the same time kept a hand on the blonde girl’s shoulder, restraining her. Luis alone sat as if he were carved out of stone.

  For a moment Chapin recoiled at the scene before him, then swung his fist at the crowd as if he were trying to punch it in its collective face. “The man of the rope is an artist,” he shouted. “Do you hear me? He is an artist! He is not on the gallows to prove his skill, any more than a true artist will paint a pretty picture to satisfy fools! He is there to search for the meaning of the rope, for the meaning of life itself!”

  Salazar snorted. “I could tell him the meaning of the rope in one line,” he said.

  “Some other time,” said Santa Cruz. “Right now let’s get out of this madhouse.”

  He was too late. In the middle of the room a table overturned with a crash. A beer bottle flew over Chapin’s head and shattered against the wall behind him. His wife
screamed and dashed toward him as other bottles bounced on the platform and among the occupants of the front tables. The front tables returned the fire. The Indian standees in back of the room stampeded for the door behind them, the Young Nationalists attacked in person, and Ben found himself in the middle of a wildly swinging mob of nadaistas, Young Nationalists, and various strangers in beards and berets who also seemed to have some political and artistic scores to settle. Pinned down this way, he discovered that the shrill blasts of a police whistle echoing around him could be music to the ears.

  The melee lasted three minutes. When it was over, the room was a shambles occupied not only by nearly all the hard-breathing combatants and innocent bystanders—few had been able to escape through the one available exit—but also by a host of police officers, truncheons in hand, and a squad of soldiers in white helmets, wielding bamboo canes. The man in charge of this detachment wore no uniform or any identification of rank or position. Dressed in shirt, slacks, and sandals, he might have been any anonymous patron of The Sun and Moon, and Ben recognized him as one of a party that had occupied a nearby table throughout the proceedings. He was a tall, thin man with the sad face of someone who always expects the worst and is rarely disappointed.

  There was no doubt that he had already marked the instigators of the riot to his own satisfaction. He pushed his way to the foot of the platform where Chapin, shirt torn and a trickle of blood oozing from the corner of his mouth, stood being comforted by his wife. He gave a command, and a husky policeman seized Chapin. Another already had hold of the nadaista master of ceremonies and hustled him over to stand by Chapin.

  “I am sorry,” said the man in charge, “but under the Civil Code, article eleven, section six—”

  “The hell with your civil code,” Chapin said furiously. He tried without success to pull himself free of his captor. “You know damn well it was those hoodlums who started this. Why don’t you read your civil code to them?”