Drums of Darkness

Chapter One

No one who has ever known Panama can think of it without remembering the rain. Panama's rain is God's own temper tantrum, a pelting, passionate outburst of nature. Like a fit of melancholy, it sweeps down from the clouds in torrents, covering the corrugated tin roofs in the slums of Colón and Panama City with sheets of running water, turning the old cobblestone streets to rivers and the rivers to boiling brown cauldrons. The wind whips about the iron cock that keeps its vigil atop an ancient obelisk above the seawall at Las Bovedas, and whispers in the ears of the heroic bronze statue of Balboa that gazes out over Panama Bay toward the Pacific. It whistles through the windows of the empty bell tower in the ruins of Old Panama, sighing songs of long-dead conquistadors and pirates, of gold, galleons, and glory. Out in the bay, the shrimp trawlers huddle in clusters, awaiting the end of the downpour. The gulls and pelicans crouch on the beaches or stoically ride the waves, eyes closed against the stinging drops.

The rain mists the dense green of the jungle and runs down the slopes into the swollen Chagres River that empties now into man-made Gatun Lake. It hammers the steel tracks of the Panama Railroad where it parallels the canal all the way from Panama City on the Pacific side of the Isthmus, to its Atlantic terminus at Colón.

Running south from Colón, a narrow stretch of water threads its lonely way through the mangroves to lose itself just short of the massive Gatun Dam. Almost abandoned, except by the rain and the birds, this silent passage is all that visibly remains of the French Canal.

A disaster, people called it; a failure, this abortive effort that cost billions of francs and more than twenty thousand human lives. Yet, did the French truly fail? Or did they merely begin too soon--when man's technology was too feeble to conquer the fearsome obstacles of disease, floods, landslides, political turmoil, and discouragement that lay like hidden serpents across the deceptively narrow fifty-mile Isthmus of Panama? Did they fail, or did they only succeed in beginning the titanic project that the Americans were to finish almost thirty years later?

The rain does not know or care. It only washes down on the hills and jungles, on the docks, the cantinas, the stores and tenements of Colón, on the dark, rubble-strewn beaches and the glistening sea beyond.

Even today, there are secluded corners beyond the towns, silent, green places where hundreds of lichen-covered stone crosses inscribed with French names--or simple iron markers stamped with numbers--still stand. Each grave has its own story, its own buried dreams and hopes. These are places of memory, and here even the rain seems to walk softly.
* * * *

It was raining on the afternoon of that January day in 1885 when Claire sat in a straight-backed cane chair beside her husband's hospital bed and watched him die. His face was gaunt and yellowish; his lips crusted with blood. He'd been retching all that morning, ghastly black stuff that gave the disease its Spanish name: el vómito negro. Yellow fever.

She smoothed the stringy, brown hair away from his forehead and bit back the pain of remembering the robust young man who'd kissed her good-bye in Paris less than ten months earlier. They'd clung together on the stoop that morning, touching each other's faces, wanting to remember. It had been less than a week since they'd been married by a magistrate in the registry building.

On the other side of the door, Claire's sister-in-law, Denise petulantly pregnant and impatient for Claire to come in and help, had rattled the breakfast dishes insistently. Claire had made her wait while Paul held her in his arms for the last time.

"I'll send for you as soon as I can save up the money," he'd whispered before the carriage took him down to the Seine where he would take the boat to Le Havre and from there catch a steamer for Panama. And he had been true to his word, as she'd known he would. Still it had taken months--months that had limped past like crippled beggars--before the envelope with her steamship ticket for Panama had finally arrived.

And so she had made the long sea voyage alone. She had come to Panama at last--just in time to see him die. Yellow, stinking, hardly aware that she'd come. Paul lay on the narrow bed. The fat little nun, wearing the white habit of the order of St. Vincent de Paul, squeezed past Claire and leaned over to sponge his face with something from an enamel bowl. It was the nun who had met her at the foot of the gangplank on the docks of the Panamanian town that the world knew as Aspinwall, but which the ruling Colombian government doggedly called Colón, the Spanish name for Columbus.

Fluttering up and down the pier like a white moth, she'd waited while the Negro porters had carried Claire's baggage off the steamer and deposited it on the dock. Only then had she broken the news. "Your husband is down with fever, Madame.... You're to come with me at once." And she'd driven Claire to Colón hospital herself in one of the buggies that served as an ambulance.

Claire leaned over and rested her head against his thin, bare shoulder. She was numb. This sticky, steamy world where everything seemed to move slowly was still so new to her that it hardly seemed real. And this human wreck laid out on the bed before her. Was this really Paul? Laughing Paul with a brand new engineering degree and his breathless talk of Ferdinand de Lesseps and the plan to dig a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama?

She remembered his letters, so full of enthusiasm in the beginning. Then the disillusionment had crept in, subtly at first. He'd begun to agree with the other engineers on the project who felt that a sea-level canal like the one de Lesseps had pushed through at Suez in 1869 was impractical in Panama. Later on, the word "impractical" had changed to "impossible." De Lesseps had moved sand at Suez. French engineers and laborers were chopping away at jungle, earth, and rock in Panama. The proposed route of the canal would cut through a range of hills--part of the continental divide--that approached six hundred feet in height. It would intersect twenty-three times with an irascible devil of a river, the Chagres, that could rise forty feet in a storm.

"The only way we'll ever get ships across this cursed fifty miles of hell is with locks!" he'd declared in one of his last letters. "De Lesseps is a dreamer!" Then, in his very last letter, "De Lesseps is a fool! Many's the time I've wanted to pack my bags and take the next boat back to France, but I'm committed to staying. Somebody's got to do this! Heaven knows, Claire, this is no place for a woman, but I gave you my word. Having you with me will make life bearable again."

The nun laid a hand on Claire's shoulder. With her round, white face, she resembled a flour-dusted yeast bun, risen to plumpness and ready to pop into the oven. "I can get the priest for you, Madame," she said.

Claire shook her head. Paul had not believed in anything he could not see, hear, or touch.

His hand lay limp in hers. His eyes were closed. Only the slightest flutter of his nostrils told her he was still breathing. There was no hope. The nun had made that clear as gently as she could. So Claire waited helplessly, her heart a lump of lead. The numbness, the sense that all this was a bad dream and that she would soon wake up again to find herself back in Paris was, she supposed, a mercy. Claire had always known that her own emotional equilibrium was delicate, and over the years she had learned to cushion her feelings, to avoid extremes of shock, anger, fear, or sadness. Paul had understood her completely, and in this he was more than just the man she loved. He was her dearest friend, her brother, her harbor against the storms of life.

Closing her eyes momentarily, she forced herself to think of what her life had been before Paul. It was never easy to remember those buried years at the Bicêtre Asylum in Paris. It was only in dreams that they came back to haunt her--the barred windows, the whitewashed walls, eternally long, maddeningly blank, and the old woman screaming, her gray hair standing out in all directions like the ends of an unraveled rope, her eyes rolling white in her head, and her mouth drizzling saliva.

Claire had been a child then, the only child in a ward of fifty female patients. When the old woman screamed, she would watch from her corner, huddled like a rat, her thin arms wrapped around her body under the yellowed shift. She did not wonder why the old woman was screaming, for those screams had been part of her world for as long as she could remember. She only watched, as she always did. Her huge, gray eyes did not blink. She did not speak. She never spoke.

On her better days, the old woman could be gentle. She would smile then, and sing to the gray-eyed child. Sometimes she would even take the young girl in her arms and rock her, squatting on the tiles and crooning senselessly, her eyes closed. Claire would wriggle like a captive kitten, torn between the need to be cuddled and the desire to free herself from that stifling embrace, for the old woman was not bathed often and she reeked of sweat and urine.

One day the old woman had begun to scream again, had thrown herself on the floor, jerked for a time, shuddered, and lay still. The other patients, long accustomed to such scenes, had ignored her, but Claire had crept out of her corner to the old woman's side where she lay, unmoving, face-down on the cold tiles. She had run her frail finger along the crepelike skin of one extended forearm. The flesh had felt cool, devoid of response. She had fingered the wild, gray hair, pressed a cheek, opened and closed one of the eyelids. Even when Claire had bitten the weathered hand in a fury of frustration, the old woman did not flinch.

Several of the other patients, women ranging in age from the teens to the eighties, had gathered in a circle, whispering.

"She's dead," announced one of them, a pretty girl with a tangled mat of red hair and razor scars running up the insides of her arms. Another woman had begun to cackle hysterically. "She's dead, I tell you," the red-haired girl had said again. "Come away, child."

But Claire would not be moved. She had only locked her fingers into the old woman's ragged shift and clung there until the doctors made their evening rounds.

Even when they stood around her, a ring of dark trouser legs, spats, and white coats, she had not raised her eyes. One of them, a young one with a short-clipped beard, had knelt to feel for the old woman's pulse. "Gone," he'd said in a flat voice. "We'd best call for the cart and a couple of attendants. She'll be heavy."

"What's the matter with the child?" The voice was one Claire did not recognize. Someone new.

"They found her four years ago in an alley in Montmartre. Mother had been stabbed. The little girl was sitting beside the corpse, almost the way she is now." It was Dr. Jean-Batiste Sagan, one of the senior physicians, who spoke. "Must have seen it happen, the poor mite, and she'd been there for days. It was summer and the body was beginning to decompose. The child was in shock, of course, and half-dead from thirst and hunger..."

"But here! Lord, couldn't she have been put in some foundling home?"

"They wouldn't have her," answered Dr. Sagan. "She wouldn't talk, you see. And they claimed she frightened the other children, the way she stared. In the meantime, the police had done some tracing. They'd found she had an older brother who was living with an aunt. But the aunt wouldn't take her either."

"So they brought her here?"

"Yes. We'll take anyone, you know." The doctor sighed. "She was about six years old when she came to us. She's ten now, though she doesn't look it. Once I had real hopes of a cure for this one, but she's never spoken. Not a word. She never smiles, never laughs, never even cries..."

"Never cries ...?" It was the young doctor, still kneeling on the floor beside the old woman's body. "But Doctor Sagan, look at her face! She's crying now--there are tears--"

Claire smoothed the sheet that covered Paul's bed. Even now tears did not come easily to her, but she respected them, for she knew their value. It was with those tears, shed for a nameless old woman, that her new life had begun.

It was her good fortune to have been housed at Bicêtre. Even in France there were other asylums where the inmates were chained to the walls and left to die in their own filth. And less than twenty years earlier, places such as the infamous Bedlam in London and the Lunatics' Tower in Vienna had still been putting their patients on public display in cages, like zoo animals. Bicêtre, however, had been blessed with the pioneering efforts of Dr. Philippe Pinel who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been the first to advocate and practice humane treatment for the insane.

A frail child like Claire would have perished within weeks under the old conditions. Thus, in a very real sense, she owed her life to Dr. Pinel. The good man had died before she was born, but his student and disciple, Dr. Jean-Batiste Sagan, had kept his work alive. Bicêtre was, for its time, a model of cleanliness and innovative methods of treatment.

Dr. Sagan, a portly man with flowing, gray-flecked whiskers, beetling eyebrows, and amber eyes that burned with zeal and kindliness, took the little waif into his heart and his home. In the weeks following her tears he worked with her, talking to her, reading her stories, playing simple games that a normal child of three or four could have mastered, praising her every effort to learn. One day he decided that she was ready to exchange her dismal surroundings for a brighter, more loving world. He led her to his carriage and drove through the teeming streets of Paris to his own house.

She had clung to his arm as the traffic rattled past--cabs and vegetable carts, elegant buggies where ladies sat with perfumed silk handkerchiefs pressed to their noses to hide the stench of the streets, their little beribboned hats perched atop heaps of false curls; begrimed junk wagons, their drivers cursing volubly; pushcart vendors, shrieking the merits of their cheeses, their eels and lobsters, their apples, their crepes, their cabbages.

When the narrow avenue had opened up into the Place de l'Étoile where a great river of horses and carriages clattered around and around the colossal Arc de Triomphe, she had pressed her face into his coat-sleeve and begun to whimper. The doctor had not yet coaxed her to speak, but she was capable of making tiny mews of fear.

He'd patted her, encouraging her to look, but she had burrowed her head into his coat, refusing to open her eyes until the carriage had at last come to a stop in the courtyard of the doctor's modest but comfortable home.

He had lifted her from the carriage then, her face still pushed into his coat, and carried her into the garden. "Open your eyes, Claire," he'd commanded gently.

Claire had blinked in the bright sunlight and rubbed her eyes, totally stupefied. She was surrounded by flowers--lilacs descending in fragrant lavender clouds, tulips and daffodils, golden sprays of forsythia. After four years in the gray and white world of Bicêtre, she found herself drowning in a sea of colors whose existence she had all but forgotten. Awestruck, she had buried her face against Dr. Sagan's lapels once more.

The doctor had carried her to a wooden bench and sat down with her on his knee. When she found the courage to open her eyes again she saw that a young boy with light brown hair and golden eyes like the doctor's was sitting beside them, holding a black and white kitten in his arms. Smiling, he held the kitten toward her, but she drew back. She had no memory of animals, and the little creature was strange. The boy, however, had fascinated her at once--another human being who was almost as small as herself!

Dr. Sagan had put a plump, manicured hand on the boy's shoulder. "Claire," he'd said softly, for she was still trembling, "this is your new brother. My son, Paul."

Claire took Paul's hand and pressed it hard against her lips, feeling the bones through the thin, blue-veined skin that tasted of rubbing alcohol. The room reeked of antiseptic. On entering the two-story Colón hospital, she'd glanced down hallways into wards of perhaps thirty or forty beds, all of them full and placed so close together that there was barely room to stand between them. Paul, as an engineer, and therefore a person of some importance, had rated a private room. It was clean at least. The sheets were bleached white, if somewhat threadbare from scrubbing. The door too had been scoured until the grain of wood stood out. The walls were freshly painted in a bilious shade of green. The legs of the bed rested in four shallow pans of water to discourage the ever-present ants from climbing up them and into the bedding. Years later. Claire would shudder to think of it. No one suspected at the time that these very pans provided breeding places for the mosquitoes that hosted and spread malaria and yellow fever.

"I'm sorry, Madame. He's dead."

A little sob cut its way up through her throat. It was the doctor who'd spoken the words. He was standing on the other side of the bed, still holding Paul's flaccid left wrist at pulse point between his thumb and forefinger. "I'm sorry," he said again. His face was darkly dispassionate. Was this the hundredth such death he'd seen over the past month? The thousandth? In all likelihood, Claire reflected numbly, he'd lost count. He let go of Paul's wrist and the hand fell soundlessly to the coverlet like the body of a bird. The nun, smelling of sweat and talcum, leaned past Claire to draw the sheet up over Paul's face.

"No!" She clung to the limp, cooling fingers, willing her own life to flow through them and into Paul's body.

The doctor's hand nudged her elbow, gently but insistently. "You can't stay here. It's cooler on the porch."

Still grasping Paul's lifeless hand, she remembered how she had sat beside her mother's body for days without moving, watching the flesh swell and crack in the summer heat. She remembered how she had squatted all afternoon on the cold gray tiles at Bicêtre, refusing to leave the old woman's side until the attendants came to take her away.

Through the blur of her pain, she fought for the strength to let go of Paul's hand, to stand up, to leave him there and walk out of the room. She was no longer insane, she told herself firmly. And Paul was gone. The hand she held was no longer truly his. She could not help him; he could not help her.

Finger by finger she withdrew her hand from his. Then, like a sleepwalker, she let the doctor guide her through the doorway and down the hall. They passed a long, narrow cart on wheels that clacked along under the power of a lethargic little Panamanian in a white jacket. He had such a hunched-over, vulturine look that Claire had to avert her face from him. Behind them, the cart turned into Paul's room. How mechanical it all seemed. How routine in this place. There was probably a waiting list for Paul's bed, she thought bitterly.