Copyright © 1995 Eric Zencey.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-22943-0
Chapter One
Night falls suddenly in the tropics. The sun dives straight for the horizon, with none of the oblique angling of temperate climates. In the brief tropical twilight, darkness seems to materialize out of the very air, as if it leaked from the transparent nothingness between things; as if, Henry Adams thought, it were a colorless, coagulant fluid, undetectable by any sense but sight, kept at bay somehow by the oppressive force of the sun.
In the darkness he could no longer see much of anything. He had lingered too long at the window, watching the shadows lengthen by visible degrees, watching the cobbled relief of the jungle canopy below grow deeper and deeper and then disappear completely. No stars; no moon.
He turned from the window and walked carefully to his right, advancing tentatively, hands extended to catch the wall. He hurried, thinking one of Hay's stewards would be along soon to light the lamps. When he found the wall he floated his hands on its smooth, even surface: native mahogany, he had urged it that afternoon. The photograph he wanted had been at eye level for a man of normal height. Adams reached up, running his hands across the wall in slow, wide arcs.
When he located the wooden frame he lifted it quickly off its hook. Even when he brought the picture close to his face he could make out nothing. He should have thought to bring a lamp, should have planned ahead. But no: to have done so would have been to premeditate theft, and he found it easier to tell himself he acted on impulse. Besides, the night shielded him from discovery.
Slowly, taking small steps in the darkness, Adams made his way toward the door. Out of sight beneath his coat he held the photograph of Jules Dingler, Chief Engineer of the French Interoceanic Canal Company.
Adams had arrived in Colombia two weeks before. From the deck of the steamer that had brought him to the port of Colon, the province of Panama seemed all space and primary color. Far above the bay cumulus glided in long trains, a trail extruded from each of the highest peaks in the distance; they unfurled downwind like badly blotted script. White clouds; blue sky; green land; and everywhere the blazing orange of abandoned French machinery. His steamer passed a huge rusting dredge contraption that poked its pilothouse and a canted derrick of chain-ganged buckets out of the harbor. On the docks commerce threaded between piles of rusting railroad trucks and the twisted latticework of a derelict crane. Here and there in the village, buildings had been patched, or maybe decorated, with salvage: identical flat sheets of iron. The brightness of color, the jarring size of the decrepit French machinery, and most of all the heat, the intimate, stealthy heat that pressed on every inch of him, made Panama seem an absolute extremity of the earth, a place where temperature and color and feeling were somehow more elemental, more penetrating, capable perhaps (who could say for certain?) of reaching through the organs of sense to leave their direct and permanent impress on the soul.
On the train ride from Colon to Ancon Station, where Hay was to meet him, he'd caught glimpses of tangled clearings that opened from the rail bed like niches in the wall of a cathedral. They held not statues of saints but broken, rusted machines, each a brilliant flash of orange in the enfolding green. In Tahiti he had seen how rust feeds on tropical heat and devours its host - oxidizes it, really - with a florid appetite. By that slow fire nature was absorbing these machines, pulling them back to the soil from which men had wooed them, as if the jungle itself were jealous of the achievement they represented, as if it sought to demonstrate that what it abhors is not a vacuum, not just a vacuum but something more general: distinction, any distinction at all. Adams, sitting uncomfortably erect on the slatted wooden seats of the train, tipping his toes down to rest them on the floor so his legs wouldn't sway annoyingly, had smiled to think that nature might approve of him, grandson of one President and great-grandson of another, for failing to achieve the place in politics that seemed an Adams birthright.
At Ancon Station the train pulled past the French railway building, sagging but not yet fallen down. In size it clearly exceeded any current purpose. Adams wondered whether the Panamanians of Ancon had a sense of being overshadowed by their past, whether they had an Egyptian or Roman or Athenian sense that daily life was pressed into mundane sameness by the weight of the monuments that stood above them. And what if one's fall from glory were measured not by something as permanent as stone but by wood, mere impermanent wood? Wouldn't this emphasize the suddenness of the fall? Then, on the platform, he saw John Hay, bearded, gone tropical in government-issue khaki damp with sweat at the arms and neck. Hay was scanning the windows of the train as it slowed, looking for him.
Adams rose and moved away from the window. He would catch Hay. unawares. With his leather necessaries bag in one hand and his boater in the other, he made his way down the aisle, taking pleasure in the inertial charge of acceleration as the train stopped beneath him.
Panama, at least at Ancon Station, was a furnace. Beneath his clothing Adams was moist all over his body. From the step of the car he watched Hay for a moment before calling to him. Smooth of skin, tanned, darkeyed, his friend struck him as being in some essential quality similar to an aquatic mammal - looking this way and that, pausing with head held high, as if to sniff the air. An otter. A mink. Minkish. Like an old, white-muzzled mink. Hay was graying at chin and temple, and had gone fully white in his long mustaches; these he kept long, while the dark hair on is cheek and jaw was trimmed close to the skin.
Hay had been in Panama for a month, on a mission for the State Department about which he had been uncharacteristically vague. To Adams this hardly signified: it didn't take special cleverness to deduce that Hay's purpose involved the French canal concession, soon to expire, and the work and works the French had abandoned there years before. Likewise, one needn't be clairvoyant to see that the United States must be the nation most interested in advancing the French project by fresh means; a glance at any world map showed that America's future as a continental power depended on it. Secret or not, Hay's mission was transparent.
Adams called to Hay and soon the two were embracing on the platform. They were built to the same scale; Adams was the shorter of the two, but Hay also knew the dally experience of looking up to the people with whom he conversed. At the new house in Washington, on Lafayette Square, across from the White House, Adams had directed that all the chair legs be shortened, so that his feet might rest comfortably on the floor. Hay, whose home was next to Adams's, had not yet duplicated the gesture, but meant to. In each other's company they could be reassured that it was the rest of the world that was out of proportion.
"Are you hot? Hungry?" Hay asked.
"Yes to both."
"Can't do a thing about the heat. I'll feed you when we get you settled in. You don't want to eat here." The sweep of his gaze took in the abandoned stationhouse and the shacks of the village beyond. Adams smelled the acrid scent of sewage. Whatever the French had gotten with their famous expenditures, it hadn't been housing or sanitation - not here, at least.
Hay took his arm to steer him to the baggage office. Walking brought new perspiration into Adams's beard, and he could feel it rolling from under his hat and gathering toward his chin; the boater protected his bald head from the sun but seemed to work as a species of oven. At the railway freight office they discovered that the portage was not up to domestic standards - and if walking was work, then lifting his own trunks, even with Hay's help, was an unimaginable effort. He was annoyed and then too drained to be annoyed.
On the badly sprung seat of Hay's native wagon they jounced behind a small swaybacked horse. Adams tried to hold himself exertionless in the heat as he listened to Hay explain the arrangements, but the movement of the wagon defeated him. The French administrator was being very helpful, was even allowing them to stay in la folie Dingler, the house built atop Ancon Hill for Jules Dingler. Hay proposed Dingler as an interesting case: for a time he had been the chief engineer of the effort in Panama, a man whose faith in the power of moral rectitude against disease had not been enough to save his family from malaria. His wife and daughter succumbed within a year of joining him. He was remembered for that tragedy, and for the hubris with which he had once announced, from his pre-Panamanian safety in Paris, that the climate was not deadly for those who lived pure lives. It would have been unkind to castigate him for his pride; wifeless, childless, every day he must have been reminded of the error of his faith. And yet his responsibility for their deaths could not go unremarked. And so his house, opulent by local standards but not out of character for the architect of what was to have been the eighth wonder of the world, was known, through an act of transference, as la folie Dingler.
As Hay spoke, the wagon lurched on a rutted road out of town and into an enveloping fogbank of flora, its shapes strange and seemingly animate, each leaf-like thing an alien hand or blade or tendril, outstretched, gesturing, ready to grasp, to press upon, to engulf. Adams shrank from contact with it. "How old was Dingler?" he asked.
Hay glanced sideways. "I don't know. Why?"
"No reason." Adams was willing to bet that Dingler had been young - in his thirties, maybe. Young enough to belong to that generation to whom steam was not a novelty; young enough to have known no other world, to have accepted the power of coal and steel as a given, as part of the necessary furnishing of life. Young enough to have believed that all there was to know about the corrosive effect of power on the self could be read in the mirror of its smooth, well-oiled surface. Well, maybe the flamboyant rust of the tropics had taught him differently.
Adams was about to speak, to offer a jest in a familiar theme - they were old and virtually useless in this world, Hay's continued employment at the State Department notwithstanding - but Hay spoke first. "Any word from Lizzie? How is she?"
"Fine, so far as I know," Adams answered evenly.
"She'll be coming to Paris?"
"So she says." For a moment Adams imagined not telling Hay what else he knew. "Le Havre, too. She'll meet us. Then on to Pontorson." He'd have a week in Normandy with her. "She says her only thought in going to Europe was to see me the sooner."
Hay was silent for a moment. "That sounds ... comforting."
"Mmmm." Was comfort what he wanted? What did he want?
"She's very good for you. Anyone can see that."
"Friends are important." Adams allowed.
"That's not what I meant."
Adams knew that wasn't what he meant, but said nothing.
"She isn't happy," Hay continued. Then, more pointedly: "She certainly isn't appreciated."
Adams looked at his shoe. thinking for the first time that the smooth black leather and seams and stitching bore no resemblance to the foot within. He rotated his foot to see it from different angles. This is my posthumous existence, Hay." he said finally. "I have grown comfortable in it.
"Too comfortable," Hay, muttered, but when Adams looked at him, expecting an explanation. Hay merely widened his eyes, returning the query.
Adams smiled and shook his head, and for a time they rode in friendly silence.
In Adams's judgment Dingler's Folly, achieved after a horse-lathering climb up Ancon Hill, did not live up to its name; plain in design, square, a two-story box with a mansard roof, it was neither lavish nor large nor obviously foolish. Its one striking feature was the encircling veranda, from which was flung, north and south into the jungle, a mirror-image pair of covered walkways: scouts, architecturally speaking, symbolizing the French mission in Panama - to carry order and civilization into the jungle - while serving the practical purpose of connecting two mansard-roofed pavilions to the house.
Hay gave him a quick tour while a pair of Navy ensigns hauled his baggage up to a bedroom. "Dingler didn't stay in Panama long, just a few years," Hay explained, leading Adams out of the parlor. "Long enough to lose his family. A month after his wife died he was sent back. He built this house for her, but she never lived in it." A glance told him that Hay's thought was his own: Like the house on Lafayette Square. Hay showed him the study, where Adams lingered in the doorway as Hay moved on toward the kitchen, talking brightly about food and some menu mix-up of the day before. Adams followed but hardly listened: his thoughts were in the paneled room with its wooden desk, oak chair, bank of dark file cabinets, and view of the jungle below. To one side of the room had been a wardrobe-sized cabinet with a regimented grid of pigeonholes, each with a roll of paper - plat maps of the canal route, he guessed, ready to be rolled out on the desk and studied. Incredibly the room still held the Chief Engineer's personal belongings - his inkstand, blotter, hand blotter, pens, framed photographs on the wall, a handful of leather-bound books on one corner of the desk.
The tour ended outside, in a pavilion, with a view of the Caribbean far to the north. Hay picked out the larger peaks to the south for him, and as he spoke about the total cube of the French excavation, the difficulties Dingler faced, the chronic undercapitalization, the unending need for money, the rains and the deaths and the disease that crippled the work, Adams tried to imagine how the view would have looked to the man who had once figured to behold it regularly. Far off to the southeast the horizon would have carried smudges of smoke from the shovels at Culebra, there in the notch between Gold and Contractor's Hills. According to Hay the Culebra Cut was the most difficult work on the canal; of course the Chief Engineer would have stood in this exact spot, contemplating it, measuring his fate from this distance; like a tribal chieftain reading blood omens, he would have searched the wisps that rose from the shallow cut, finding in these vapors from the entrails of the planet some intimation of the future, some clue to what was to be. Here, at home, Dingler would have been well beyond hearing the gang bosses who, paid by the cubic yard, sometimes worked their men to death from exhaustion or killed them with a too hasty ignition of dynamite. He would not have heard the screech of metal on rock as the shovels ground into the flaky, schist beneath rain-softened clay; he would not have seen men weak from yellow fever collapse in the thigh-deep muck that oozed from the hills during the rainy season, wouldn't have had to face the irony that Hay spoke of, how the particular slope of bedrock and a deep. rain-lubricated layer of clay meant that here, in the Cut, every shovel of earth extracted caused two shovels of earth to slump into the hole. He would have known all this, Adams thought, but would have been expected to persevere despite the difficulty, to transcend the cloying burden of detail. Perhaps from the vantage of this pavilion he'd been able to consider the Culebra as a clean and lifeless abstraction, a mathematical equation whose only corporal effect was the heat generated by large ideas rubbing against each other: cubic yards moved versus time to move them, work to do versus money to spend. Or perhaps it was no more than a distant panorama - an epic struggle orchestrated by his will, a product of his authority, the greatest challenge he would ever face, all of these, yes, but above all an arena he could enter and leave as he chose: not a world he ever thought would intrude upon his own, stealing into his home and seizing from him his family, his happiness.
A man could be judged by the tasks that defeat him, Adams thought. Dingler's defeat was spread out in this jungle for all to see. His own had been less obvious, less a matter of public record. It was his own failure, no mistake, but packed around its root were Dingler and those like him: engineers, lacking breadth and vision, with no clear idea of whom they served or what moved them, even as they moved and served. The industrial age had made man over in its own image; new men required a new sort of leader. And here, in Dingler, they had found one. Within his class he was, in all particulars, indistinguishable from any of the others; a product of the coal and steel and steam that made him, he bore its impress and was on that account as indifferently interchangeable as any of the machine-stamped revolver parts with which Colonel Colt had revolutionized manufactures. And what of individuals, the ones who didn't fit? What of those who saw politics being transformed from moral statecraft to a mere resolution of forces, and who understood that in such transformation lay a loss, a profound loss?
The new world didn't offer paid employment as moral witness. No, he was irrelevant, displaced by Dingler, by the optimism of coal and steam.
And here, Adams thought, looking at the grand sweep of the jungle below, here that optimism had met a force larger than itself. Here, in Panama, coal and steam had been defeated.
Had Hay seen it, he might have mistaken Adams's smile for contentment.
Immediately after dinner he excused himself, pleading tiredness, but on his way upstairs took a detour into Dingler's study. He sat at the man's desk for a moment before his eye was caught by a pair of framed photographs on the wall to his right, which he got up to examine more closely. In the first, a dozen men stood on a wide set of steps, ten in front and two in back. Across the bottom of the photo, in a steady, backward-slanting hand, a caption had been lettered in white ink: Directorate, 25 Janvier 1883, Paris. Behind the two men he could just make out a legend painted on a glass door: COMPAGN curved upward and disappeared behind a gray-suited shoulder, while CANAL INT was printed below, straight across, ending abruptly at the same man's elbow. Compagnie something de Canal Inter, Inter, Inter-oceanique. That was it. Compagnie Universelle. Yes. That had been the name of the company that went bankrupt, what, five, six years ago.
He was surprised that he could remember; he hadn't exactly been paying attention to events in the world back then.
Hay was at his elbow. "This one," he said, tapping the white-haired figure in the back, who stood at attention, utterly solemn, "is Ferdinand de Lesseps. The consummate entrepreneur. He built the canal at Suez, hadn't a lick of training, not an engineer, just an organizer. Le Grand Francais, they called him. Lucky in Suez, unlucky here. Well, call it bad luck - or criminal stupidity. He's the one I told you about - the one who just put his finger on the map and said, `There, dig it there.' No route surveys for him! Next to him is his son, Charles."
The son was balding where the father had a loose mane; he looked to be trying and not quite succeeding to match his father in dignity and gravitas. Not dignity but wary vigilance seemed to be the mark of the man. "He was a director of the company. The others I don't know."
"That one must be Dingler."
Adams pointed to another balding man, short with a round face and a long, downswept mustache, who stood in the middle in front, shaking hands with the man immediately to his left. Something about his corner-lidded eyes made him seem sad, despite the smile on his face. "He's in the other picture, here." The same man squinted at the camera from atop a horse, which stood before the gate of an unfinished house, a two-story structure whose spindly ribs poked up into a broad, cloudless sky. Though the shape of the house was barely outlined in wood, it was instantly recognizable: the frame for the surrounding veranda was in place, anchored at each end by the distinctive skeleton of a mansard-capped pavilion. Next to the man and also mounted were a woman and two children, a boy and a girl, aged about eighteen or nineteen, each looking very comfortable on their fine, strong horses. The woman and girl rode sidesaddle: old-fashioned. Behind the woman he could see a wicker hamper, such as one might take on a picnic. Jules Dingler and his family in happier days.
"So he is," Hay murmured.
Adams drew closer to look at Dingler, to see if he could find in the man's face any clue to his future. He glanced back and forth from one picture to the other, comparing the thumbnail-sized faces. He imagined that in the first photograph, in front of the company offices, Dingler looked younger, less careworn, but Adams knew he might be generating difference where he expected to find it. Did he read history through its result to find, even in the earlier picture, a sad wisdom in Dingler's eyes, a clear dissent from the brightness on the faces of the men flanking him? In the second photograph he saw the same intelligence on the man's face. His right hand, free from the reins, reached toward his daughter, seeking to hold her hand, a gesture that made him seem dynamic in some way that subverted the formal rigidity with which he, like his wife and children, awaited the shutter's long blink.
Having seen the image of the man, having put a face to the title of Chief Engineer, Adams understood: he and Dingler were victims of the same thing, the same ineluctable force. True, Dingler had served that force, and had served in the van, where he had been crushed by its too-ambitious expectations, by thee hubris of its attempt to manufacture a path between the seas; and he, Adams, in no sense a soldier in this cause, had been left in a backwater, outpaced by a world that seemed no longer to need his kind. But for all their apparent dissimilarity they, were united, two halves of one whole, front and back, obverse and occiput, pressed to the edges of cultural life by the swelling mass of middling sort of men, the sort who every day came to greater prominence, the sort who were more and more becoming creatures of force, constrained from without by a logic that was necessary and irrefutable, at least on the ground on which they encountered it. Such a man was incapable of positive assertion, incapable of true autonomous action. Yes, he and this poor engineer were paired; the coincidence of their losses, and of their new, empty widower's houses, merely confirmed it.
Hay pointed to the second picture. "These must be the horses he shot."
"What?"
"It was the morning after he buried his wife. He was passing the stables and saw her horse, her favorite horse. Something happened to him - went into a rage, I suppose. He took all the horses out to a ravine and shot them. Two weeks later, he was on a boat for France."
Adams's own wife, Clover, had never had a favorite horse.
"Adams?" Hay asked. "Are you all right?"
Not rage, no, not that, but something else: call it a compulsive attention to the necessary means of continuing. Negation to match negation. That's what it would have been. He himself had burned diaries, his own and Clover's, page after page, on the hearth of the new house.
"Do you think anyone would mind if I took that picture with me? As a memento?"
Hay looked at him quizzically. "The French have been very kind, letting us stay here." He frowned. "That's no way to repay their hospitality."