Hands of Stone - Christian Giudice [4]
With one exception, all of her men were strong Latin types who took her to bed then hit the road. First, she had a son to a Puerto Rican and named him Domingo, though everyone called him “Toti.” His father did not stick around. “He abandoned me in 1950 because my mother had some problems with him,” said Toti. “He wanted to take me but my mother did not agree to this, so I did not see him again.” After her Puerto Rican lover left, Clara had a brief fling with a Filipino and bore him a daughter, Marina.
In Panama, marriage was no big deal. Many unions, especially among the poor, were consensual rather than contractual; indeed, a marriage ceremony often marked the culmination of a life together rather than the start of one, and served as a mark of economic success. Sometimes a priest might encourage it for an elderly invalid, as a prerequisite for receiving the rite of the anointing of the sick. In rural areas, where the campesinos’ livelihood was reasonably secure and the population stable, children suffered little social stigma if their parents were not legally married. If parents split up, the paternal grandparents sometimes took in both mother and children, or a woman might return to her mother’s or her parents’ household, leaving behind her children so that she could work. There were many female-headed families, particularly in cities and among the poor. Legal marriage tended to be the rule only among the more prosperous farmers, cattle ranchers, the urban middle class and the elite.
The southernmost state of Central America, Panama was for 300 years a part of the Spanish Empire. A land bridge between the continents of North and South America, its status as a vital crossroads would eventually be underscored by two massive transport projects: the Panama Railroad and the Panama Canal. The railroad, linking north with south, was forged through a purgatory of disease and death; legend has it that one man died for every railroad tie on the track. Then, in 1903, the state declared independence from neighboring Colombia and granted rights to the United States to build and administer indefinitely a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Canal opened in 1914.
A treaty provided the Americans, or Zonians, with rights to both sides of the Canal, a one-sided deal that would cause tension between both parties for much of the twentieth century. Locals living or working in the Zone could be prosecuted under American law and faced the possibility of extradition to the States for trial. From the outset, the Americans turned the area into their own private quarters in which Panamanians, whose Caribbean-black contingent composed most of the Zone workers, were mere houseguests. The Americans created their own country club atmosphere in the Zone with perfectly coiffed lawns, golf courses, comfortable housing, and bowling alleys.
Margarito Duran Sanchez was a US Army cook, born in Arizona, the second son of Mexican parents, Diego and Esther. At nineteen, he was stationed in the Canal Zone and worked in Mi Pueblito, an area of small villages just north of Chorrillo that housed Zone workers. There he befriended Clara’s brother Moises. “On my way to work I used to walk past that area,” Clara remembered, “and that is where I met Roberto’s father. He used to cook in the villages.” Moises thought highly of the Mexican and would often give him a lift over unpaved roads to Guarare to see Clara. According to Garcia, Clara escaped from her Filipino boyfriend late one night with Margarito and they became lovers. “She left with him in the middle of the night,” said Moises Samaniego. “He came to get her and she was never allowed to see the Filipino man again.”
Margarito was a large man who could look after himself if pushed, though it wasn’t his nature to look for trouble. “I don’t remember him getting in many fights but he could handle himself,” said Moises. “He hit down two guys at once in a fight. He was