Carmen Elcira: A (Love) Life

For five months, Carmen Elcira traveled throughout Panama with Diego. Los Santos, Chitré, Santiago, David, Cerro Punta, El Valle, Portobelo. She took a semester off from school to pile into a white Toyota minibus with Diego and four of his friends and careen over dusty streets and sweat against vinyl seats and eat grilled chicken at roadside stands. She never joined the protests. She did not hand out leaflets door to door like the rest of the group. She did not stand on church steps in town squares and urge people to pray for Héctor Gallego. She was merely along for support and, when the group raised enough of a ruckus or prompted enough of an assembly, she was the designated spokesperson as the media swarmed in, posing and flashing her toothy smile. Once, when Carmen Elcira called her father from the road, he told her that when he had been running newsprint through the reel, he had seen her photograph. He said, “It was good to see your face again, hija.”

In the evenings, while the rest of the group was camping or sleeping in the minibus, Carmen Elcira and Diego would find a place to lie together. Often, they would talk, murmuring against each other’s ears and faces, whispering into the dark, until the sun rose in the morning. Her favorite of the things he said was that he would never forget her, that no matter what happened to him or to her in this world—because a lot of things could happen—he would always find his way back to her.

They made love out in the open air, too. Carmen Elcira let Diego draw his fingers through her hair and trip them lightly down her neck and smooth his hands over the soft curve of her waist, under her blouse, and straddle his knees on either side of her hips and brush his nose against her cheek and stroke her thighs under her skirt and nuzzle his face into the shallow reef at her clavicle and kiss her chin and kiss her neck and kiss the palm of her hand and suck her fingertips and kiss her stomach and kiss her navel and drag the tip of his tongue along the length of her arm and kiss her round shoulder and grip the back of her head and kiss her mouth and kiss her mouth and kiss her open mouth and unbutton her blouse and unhook her brassiere and cup her breasts and lick her nipples and pull down her skirt and slide off her panties and run his finger along the wetness in between her legs and put himself inside her and hold his hand against the arch at the small of her back and raise her up and raise her up again and again and again and again.

Months ago, on the night she jumped off the seawall and into his arms, Carmen Elcira had let Diego kiss her, but she had stopped him after that. When he had asked why, she said, “I’m waiting for the right man.” He had said, “Maybe I’m it.” Back then, she had told him, “I only learned your name a few hours ago. How could I have possibly learned by now whether you are it? We will have to wait and see.”

At 2:12 a.m. on June 14, 1975, Diego Arosomena and a group of unidentified men planted a bomb at General Omar Torrijos’s living quarters.

This was the line, more or less, that Carmen Elcira read in the newspaper one day after the group arrived back in Panama City and she had returned home. This was the line, more or less, that she kept repeating in her head. She had known nothing of the plan. Diego had never let on.

Carmen Elcira must have read the article 10 times. The words blurred together on the paper. She could make sense only of his name, which seemed to flash at her whenever it appeared, and this: Diego was being exiled to Costa Rica. At the top of the article, she saw a peppery black-and-white image of him, which Carmen Elcira tore out and put in her green satin change purse. At home, she covered both sides of the photo with strips of transparent tape to keep it safe.

She tried calling him, but of course got no answer, so as soon as she had enough money (forgoing her usual salon treatments to save up), Carmen Elcira bought a plane ticket to Costa Rica. She had never been on a plane. She had never been outside Panama. All she knew was that she had to find Diego. It seemed as though her life depended on it.

Her father dropped her at the airport, believing, as she had told him, that the trip was for all the secretarial candidates in her class at university. The plane smelled odd, of dust and fuel and lemon. But when it lifted into the air, Carmen Elcira got the most wonderful feeling in her belly—like a huge quavering bubble blown through a plastic bubble ring, swelling inside her. Her ears plugged up and popped, and her eyes watered and then turned paper-dry. She kept her face centered in the frame of the oval window and, holding her breath in delight, watched as everything she had known receded beneath her.

One hour and 15 minutes later, the plane landed at Juan Santamaría Airport. Carmen Elcira grabbed her colorful plastic woven shopping bag filled with accessories and cosmetics from under the seat in front of her, and a matching bag with all her clothes from the overhead compartment, and walked off the plane, expecting to find a whole new world.

What she found, as she stepped off the giant staircase that had been brought onto the tarmac to meet the plane, was a world that looked remarkably like Panama.

“Excuse me,” she said to a man at the bottom of the staircase, “but where have we landed?”

“Mars,” he said, then laughed. “Where do you think? This is Costa Rica!”

Carmen Elcira nodded and then started to walk away, following the line of other passengers. Before she got too far, she had an idea and doubled back.

“Can you tell me where I might find Diego Arosomena?” she asked the same man.

“Who?”

“Diego Arosomena. He’s Panamanian, about so tall, greased dark hair, parted on the side, thin build, a dimple in his chin.” Carmen Elcira waited for a response. “I believe he’s on a farm somewhere.” She was hesitant to mention the part about Diego being exiled here.

“No idea. You can ask inside. Maybe they can help you.”

But inside was no help either. In the entire country of Panama, most people lived in one city, and most of them had lived there all their lives. Finding someone was reasonably easy. In Costa Rica, though, that was proving not to be the case. Carmen Elcira showed the woman at the information desk Diego’s photo from the newspaper. Nothing. She told the woman everything she could remember from the newspaper article. Nothing. And as the two of them exchanged a long, silent look across the information desk, Carmen Elcira realized she had come to Costa Rica completely ill-prepared for her mission to find Diego. Finally, with the handles of both her bags cutting into her hands, she said to the woman, “When is the next flight back to Panama?”

For the next few weeks, she tried to get in touch with Diego. She contacted all of his friends. She consulted judges in Panama City who she thought might know how to reach exiled citizens. She called the Costa Rican Embassy. She called the police. She spoke with one official who made clear that even if she were to find Diego, she would certainly not be allowed to talk to him (he also suggested that it would be in her best interest, legally speaking, to keep her distance from him and avoid implicating herself in the bombing). Then she took to her bed.

She languished there for days, the wobbly ceiling fan swishing overhead, silent geckos darting along the walls. Then one day her father came in and laid his hand on her ankle. Since going on the road with Diego, she hadn’t seen him much. Even after she returned, she found that he spent almost all of his time at work and at the bars, having grown accustomed to a life without her there. When he did come home—sometimes not until two in the morning—he spent a long time in the bath, the water darkening as the layers of newspaper ink from his job lifted off him, his fingertips and toes wrinkled to raisins by the time he stepped out.

“The trip was bad?” he asked.

Carmen Elcira sniffled.

“Didn’t you like anything about it?”

Carmen Elcira considered this and said, “The plane ride was nice.”

Two days later, after getting lucky on a lottery ticket, Carmen Elcira’s father used his winnings to buy her a plane ticket. “To make you happy again,” he said as he handed her the paper sleeve. It was a Pan Am flight round-trip to Miami, Florida. “You’ll have to stay over one night. But you’ll get to take two more plane rides, see? There and back.”

What was supposed to have been one night in Miami turned into nearly one year, on account of Joseph Grindigger. Joseph played the drums, and sometimes the tambourine, in a band called Fields of Grass. In the late midsummer evening, Carmen Elcira was trying to sleep in the motel room where she was spending her one night in Miami. She was having a terrible time of it, though, because of a very discordant—and very loud—ruckus outside her window. She was used to the noises of a city, of course, but an amateur band hacking away at their instruments was another matter entirely. In a huff, Carmen Elcira slid the rollers out of her hair, pulled on some respectable clothes, and marched across the street with every intention of telling the noisemakers that, for the sake of everyone with ears, they should stop playing, sell their instruments, and find another line of work. Then Carmen Elcira saw Joseph. He was slapping his tambourine against his maroon wide-wale corduroys, a flap of shaggy brown hair lapping at his face, his eyes closed. Four other people were in the band, but under the streetlamps she saw only him. She stood biting her lip, watching, for nearly an hour, until Joseph put his tambourine down and opened his eyes. Green eyes that seemed to burn straight through her.

Carmen Elcira introduced herself to him that night, fumbling with her English, and he, smiling curiously at her, invited her to come out with the band to get a drink.

“We’ve never had a fan before,” he told her, though Carmen Elcira didn’t understand until later that he wasn’t talking about an appliance but about her.

Between the miscommunications, though, something unexpected happened: Carmen Elcira fell for Joseph Grindigger. He bought her a drink—coconut rum and pineapple with a maraschino-cherry garnish—and walked her back to her motel room well after midnight. She invited him in and he slouched in the wooden chair beside the low dresser and talked to her while she sat cross-legged on the bed. The entire evening, Carmen Elcira fought the urge to crawl on top of him. She shivered each time he took his hair between his first and second fingers and flipped it out of his eyes.

Joseph paid for the motel room for another week because he claimed that no one should come to Miami and not see all that the city had to offer. In his green Volvo, he picked Carmen Elcira up from her room after breakfast and took her to the Freedom Tower and to a regatta at Marine Stadium and to Parrot Jungle (“We have parrots like this in Panama!”) and to the estate at Vizcaya and to a Cuban restaurant called Versailles, where the waiters all knew him by name and asked after his father. At home, she had felt in charge of the world, but she found something nice about being here and feeling smaller, receding to the back and having someone else take charge.

Near the end of the week, Joseph drove Carmen Elcira to Coral Gables, down streets lined with the most-opulent homes she had ever seen or even imagined. He asked, “Which house do you like?” and Carmen Elcira, her heart in her throat, stayed quiet, gazing out the window, until she saw one, with stately white columns and a brick-laid driveway and a stone archway at the front, that suited her taste. Joseph idled the car at the curb. “That’s the one?” he asked, squinting at it.

“I like it,” said Carmen Elcira.

Joseph turned to her and took her hands. The radio was humming and the leaves of the banyan trees in the massive front yards swayed in the sun. “We can live in it if you want,” he said. “I’ll buy it and we can get married and we can live in it if you want.”

She looked him straight in his green eyes, his brown hair falling lazily into them. “OK,” she said.

Only two months later, a month after they were married, Carmen Elcira learned she was pregnant. How this could have happened, Carmen Elcira did not know. It wasn’t the mechanics of conception that baffled her, of course, but the fact that one passionless night, when they were both dizzy drunk on champagne from the wedding, had resulted, sure enough, in a baby. The only thing Carmen Elcira could presume was that Joseph’s father—whose primary concern in life, he had made clear, was that his son become a respectable, functioning member of society with a proper wife and house and family and job so that his golf companions would stop snickering about Joseph at the club—had prayed very hard indeed for the family part to start as soon as possible. For though Carmen Elcira found Joseph on the drums, or Joseph rattling a tambourine, or Joseph walking down the street, enough of a turn-on, Joseph in bed was not.

On their wedding night he had taken off his own clothes and, shyly, took off hers as well. He slid his string-bean body under a sheet and waited for her. She climbed in and, turning onto her side, rubbed her knee along his bare thigh, typed her fingertips atop his shoulder, let her dark hair fall across her breast, giggling all the while. When Joseph took her upper arms in his hands and pressed her down on her back, the pleasure of anticipation unfurled the length of her body. But then he got on top of her and, keeping his legs almost straight, his head up somewhere beyond her face, he guided himself, dry as bark, inside her and, as if he were doing a quick set of vigorous push-ups, his arms bent on either side of her, gave a few brief thrusts before he moaned and rolled himself back onto his side of the bed.

“What was that?” Carmen Elcira asked.

Joseph was quiet.

“Joseph?”

When he turned his face to her, she could see the fear in his eyes. “Was it bad?” he asked quietly. “I’m sorry, Carmen Elcira. I’ve never done it before. A buddy of mine gave me a movie of what it was supposed to look like. I was just trying to do that. Was it bad?” he asked again.

Carmen Elcira swallowed hard to keep herself from crying or from laughing, as both reactions were rising in her and she wasn’t sure which would surface first. Clearly, she would have to teach him a thing or two.

“We’ll try again soon,” she said.

In the hospital, after their baby boy was born, the nurse asked Joseph and Carmen Elcira if they had decided on a name.

“José Carlos,” Joseph said, speaking for them both. “My wife is Panamanian. José is ‘Joseph’—that’s my name—in Spanish. José Carlos Grindigger.” He smiled wide, and Carmen Elcira patted his hand approvingly. He had been so proud of the idea when he came up with it.

But when Joseph’s father arrived and Carmen Elcira, dozing in bed, listened to Joseph tell him the same thing, his father said, “You can’t name him that.”

“Why?”

“He’ll never be president of the United States with a name like that.”

Carmen Elcira raised her hand to protest, but before she could say anything, Joseph’s father urged him into the hall.

By the time they came back, the nurse had returned with the birth certificate to record the name. Joseph pulled the nurse into a corner and muttered something to her.

“But I thought—” the nurse started.

“What’s going on?” Carmen Elcira asked weakly.

“We’re just doing the paperwork,” Joseph said.

It turned out that by “paperwork,” Joseph actually meant he was assigning the baby an entirely different name: Woodrow Wilson Grindigger. When Carmen Elcira found out about it and confronted her husband, Joseph said, “Woodrow Wilson was a great president. Sure, he was a Democrat, but he grew up in Augusta, where my daddy is from.” When Carmen Elcira just stared at him, disbelieving, he went on. “I know what you’re thinking. And yes, it would have made more sense to name him Jimmy, I mean, since President Carter’s got his own Georgia ties.” He shook his head. “But my daddy hates Jimmy Carter.”

That was the moment Carmen Elcira decided she would have to leave. A man who could not get out from under his father’s thumb was no man for her, and he was surely no father for her son.

Two weeks later, Carmen Elcira told Joseph she wanted to take Woodrow to Panama to meet his abuelo. She asked politely if he would pay for a plane ticket. Joseph said he wanted to go, too, but Carmen Elcira insisted it was something she needed to do on her own. In his green Volvo, Joseph dropped Woodrow and her at the airport and wished them both safe travels, cupping his hand gently over the baby’s downy head. “I’m gonna paint the baby’s room while you’re gone,” he said.

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