After that Pendel must have dozed for a time and probably he took a wrong turning as well, because when he looked again he was on family holiday in Parita two years ago, picnicking with Louisa and the children on a grass square surrounded by one-storey houses with raised verandahs and stone mounting blocks for getting on and off your horse without spoiling your nice dean shoes. In Parita an old witch in a black hood had told Hannah that the people of the town put young boa constrictors under their roof tiles to catch mice, at which Hannah refused to enter any house in town, not for an ice cream, not for a pee. She was so scared that instead of attending Mass as they had planned they had to stand outside the church and wave at an old man in the white belltower who tolled the big bell with one hand while he waved back at them with the other, which they all afterwards agreed was better than going to Mass. And when he had finished with his bell he gave them an amazing slow-motion performance of an orang-utan, first swinging from an iron crossbar, then fleaing himself, armpits, head and crotch and eating the fleas between searches.
Passing Chitré Pendel remembered the shrimp farm where shrimps laid their eggs in the trunks of mangrove trees and Hannah had asked whether they got pregnant first. And after the shrimps he remembered a kind Swedish horticulturist lady who told them about the orchid called Little Prostitute of the Night, because by day it smelt of nothing but at night no decent person would let it into the house.
‘Harry, it will not be necessary for you to explain this to our children. They are exposed to quite enough explicit material as it is,’
But Louisa’s strictures made no difference because all week long Mark had called Hannah his putita de noche till Pendel told him to shut up.
And after Chitré came the battle zone: first the approaching red sky, then the rumble of ordnance, then the glow of flares as he was waved through one police checkpoint after another on his road to Guararé.
Pendel was walking, and people in white were walking beside him, leading him to the gallows. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself so reconciled to death. If he ever lived his life again, he decided, he would insist on a brand new actor in the leading role. He was walking to the gallows and there were angels at his side, and they were Marta’s angels, he recognised them at once, the true heart of Panama, the people who lived the other side of the bridge, didn’t take bribes or give them, made love to the people they loved, got pregnant and didn’t have abortions, and come to think of it Louisa would admire them too, if only she could jump over the fences that confined her – but who can? We’re born into prison, every one of us, sentenced to life from the moment we open our eyes, which was what made him so sad when he looked at his own children. But these children were different and they were angels and he was very glad to be meeting them in the last hours of his life. He had never doubted that Panama had more angels per acre, more white crinolines and flowered head-dresses, perfect shoulders, cooking-smells, music, dancing, laughter, more drunks, malign policemen and lethal fireworks than any comparable Paradise twenty times its size, and here they were assembled to escort him. And he was very gratified to discover bands playing, and competing folkdance teams with gangly romantic-eyed black men in cricket blazers and white shoes and flat hands that lovingly moulded the air round their partners’ gyrating haunches. And to see that the double doors of the church were pulled open to give the Holy Virgin a grandstand view of the Bacchanalia outside, whether She wanted it or not. The angels were evidently determined She should not lose touch with ordinary life, warts and all.
He was walking slowly, as condemned men will, keeping to the centre of the street and smiling. He was smiling because everybody else was smiling, and because one discourteous gringo who refuses to smile amid a crowd of ridiculously beautiful Spanish-Indian mestizo revellers is an endangered species. And Marta was right, these were the most beautiful and virtuous and unsullied people on earth, as Pendel had already observed. To die among them would be a privilege. He would ask to be buried the other side of the bridge.