voice echoed in the jungle. A troop of white-faced monkeys cried in response.
Ernesto threw his painter on deck and Sybil tied him to Juliet. I offered my hand, but the old man had already stepped out of his boat and onto the transom. Sybil tugged on his shirt.
Guess what, she said. I speak Guna.
He laughed. The merki children know more about Guna Yala than the Guna.
By the time the transaction shook out, it cost a little more than I estimated. OK, a lot. OK, I was dead wrong about most of it. I didn’t factor in the costs of the surveys, the repairs, the permits, the upfront money for the slip in Bocas, everything else but the boat. I’m never that guy. Head-in-the-sand guy. The one who rents a slip for his 40-footer only to be told the boat is 44 feet in overall length, at which point he has to admit to his wife that he simply had not understood the acronyms on the listing sheet. I work in insurance. We are detail people. I guess I just fell in love. It doesn’t help how we gender the boats she. In love, I behaved toward the boat just as I’d behaved when I met Juliet. I knew she was smarter than me, and I also knew she was half-crazy. I knew I couldn’t “afford” her. Meaning, I suspected on some level that I would never be a satisfying husband to her, but I did it anyway.
Have I lied to her? Sure. I lied to her the moment I represented myself as someone she could count on for a lifetime. How would I know?
She told the same lie.
How could she know she would stop loving me?
I don’t know. It’s too much to ask. We come from nothing & return to nothing, but in between we’re supposed to lead lives of grace and courage?
* * *
—
Read those trees, Ernesto said to me, pointing. Those two leaning over the water.
I laughed. Is this a test?
Yes, he said.
The evening was quiet, some birds mewling in the trees. Georgie was asleep in his berth, and Sybil drowsed in my lap. The old man and I sat in the cockpit, drinking warm after-dinner whiskey from Michael’s “medicinal” flask.
That’s a palm tree and—I tried to remember—a fig.
The palm and the fig, he said. Very good. In the jungle, as you know, my queen, everything fights for light. Do you see how the fig is climbing up the palm? Using the palm to get closer to the light? As soon as the fig succeeds, the palm will fall into the water, killing both the palm and the fig.
It made me sad. The parable of the fig and the palm.
Were you ever married? I asked him.
Was I, Ernesto, married?
Yeah.
Of course! What do you think? I had a queen of my own! Do you know that in Guna Yala, when two people marry, the man must move to the island of the woman? And so I did. Years later, when my poor wife left this earth and went to our Father Bab Dummad, I returned here to Gaigar.
Did you get along well, the two of you? I mean, what did you fight about?
Fight? Ernesto looked at the sky. I didn’t trust her people, he said. Her people were sick with money. They sold anything they found. Sacred things. They taught their children Spanish. They are Western, her people. We fought about that.
Ernesto sighed heavily. In Guna Yala, we do not study our own language anymore. That is considered “dialect.” We force our children to study Spanish. The mother tongue is replaced with Spanish. To help the little Indian become less Indian. Why should the Gungidule study Dule, they say, if he already speaks it? Well, I say, why do the great universities of Spain have Spanish departments? Look at me. I must teach merki, because my own people think I am crazy. I am not crazy. I am Ernesto, sahila of Gaigar. I am no cholo.