Brian Steidinger: June 2010

I hope I write with due respect
Arturo is a kuna Indian, which means nothing. This is confusing for people when they first meet him. They wait for him to do something kuna—they don’t know what it means but they’ll know it when they see it. But he drinks Abuelo rum, loves music from the 1980s, and would like to get away to Panama City to see a concert performance of Chicago, if only he could get away from the job. He knows some of the medicinal properties of plants, but when I’m feeling green he tells me to have some rum with lemon and raw garlic. It doesn’t help anything. Try it if you revel in a world of pure sensation.

Arturo is a plant taxonomist, which makes him very useful to someone studying species turnover. He walks along the trails spryly and when he sees something he’d like a photograph of he excitedly removes his digital camera from a plastic case and baggie and takes a few shots. He speaks English in a strange way. His memory is photographic—appropriate for a tropical plant taxonomist—and he can translate the nouns for just about anything. But he doesn’t speak fluently and he mispronounces awfully.

If, for instance, he saw a snake that day, he will excitedly tell me

“Brian, today I see a big snatch.”

A big snatch? Good for you.

“I have pictures!”

Bravo.

The truck has a bench seat, where the passenger and driver seat are connected, and when Arturo drives he crushes you like a can against the dashboard. This is because he’s about five feet nothing. You can’t tell how hold he is. He could be anywhere from 30 to 60. If you use the truck before him his feet don’t even reach the pedals.

Arturo was there for the US invasion of Panama in the 80s, and he saw soldiers marching through the streets, and tanks, and heard machine gun fire, and smoke grenades. It was all a big show and it didn’t affect him in any profound way. He wants to visit the United States, particularly the city of Chicago, because he thinks this is the city of Jim Dalling (my adviser, his boss), who is English and lives in Champaign. But never mind. We talk about how one day he will visit Jim in Chicago, where that isn’t the ocean but a very big lake, and it is freezing in winter and stifling in summer. The city that Sinatra sung of. No, the other city. The second city. The windy city. Perhaps they’ll ride together on the big Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, and Jim will point his house out in the distance.

Sometimes I tell Arturo about America as if I were an emissary, shipwrecked in Central America without a map. That is, with some artistic liberty. He asks me interesting questions. How do American’s feel about President Carter signing over control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians.

Oh, Arturo. That is a very hot issue. I don’t bring that up in mixed company.

Do we like the current president of Panama.

We are not sure of him yet. We want to see more action.

“More action?”

But what can I say. The truth? That we don’t care about Panama, by and large? So I lie.

We want to know what he is doing for the people of Panama, I say. We want to see him deliver to you on some of his campaign promises.

Would you believe it? That is exactly the sentiment of the Panamanians. Lucky guess. But I flatter myself on a presence of mind for the great averaging impulses.

Arturo has a girlfriend in David who thinks he should spend more time in the City, away from Fortuna. She has a picture on her wall of an Indian washing her clothes with a sailboat in the harbor in the background. The sails have swastikas on them, and when I point them out to Arturo he laughs a little and says “Like Hitler?” Not exactly, I say. That’s likely a Buddhist symbol. The painting is Indian. “Indian?” says Arutro. “Like kuna?” No, I say. Not like the kuna. Arturo is relieved--the Kuna are not Nazis. Unlike the Indians. And the Buddha.

Arturo’s girlfriend’s name is Kenya. She’s very nice and sensible, but Arturo can only bend so far. He visits when he can. But he’s sentimental about Fortuna. About Jim, about the forest, about the 1 hectare plots he sets up and samples and re-samples. About his position as the largely unsupervised manager of all Jim’s students and assistants. About the music, clothing, and movies of the 1980s. About Lionel Richie, who he prefers even to Michael Jackson, and whose music videos he’s collected in anthology on compact discs with movie files. More to the heart of it, perhaps mostly about another woman.

The love of his life was a Cuban refugee, who had somehow, in a confusing episode of Caribbean-American geopolitics, ended up in Panama City. She was there for about one year of their six-year relationship before she left to join the rest of her family in Miami. They stayed together through letters and phone calls, until, abruptly, Arturo stopped hearing back from her. Weeks went by before he learned from her family that she’d died in a car accident. He was unable to attend the funeral.

He took it hard and didn’t concern himself with romance again for about another ten years. If you think I write too freely about his depths and torments, he speaks quite freely, if still feelingly, of those events. An entire decade of abstinence, spent in large-part in the jungles of Barro Colorado Island and Fortuna, but without the associated eccentricities one might expect. He never became withdrawn, antisocial, or overly-spiritual, even in his mourning. Yet I imagine there was something special in it that life together and marriage didn’t offer him, a sort of sustained notion of an ideal that experience could never repudiate. But that’s all my analysis. It is his life. I digress.

Perhaps it is wrong to say it means nothing for Arturo to be Kuna. He can speak kuna. His family came from a kuna village. He grew up kuna. I remember talking to someone at a hostel about working with a kuna Indian.

“Does he wear traditional clothes?” he asked.

And I imagined Arturo in Amerindian garb. With face paint and all that. And I said no.

No, he’s probably the most normal guy you’ll ever meet.

But of course he isn’t. And no one is.