Ana Spoke and I Listened

Ana had a serious smoker’s cough.
Image thanks to Wendy.

One day, as the evening lingered on, the walking and stopping at yet another business made this canvassing trip seem never ending. Ana spoke and I listened.

“Where is Aminta now?” she asked me as if it were one of her own relatives she was asking about. “She ran away to live with my mother in Colon,” I answered nonchalantly. “And when was the last time you saw her?” she asked with concern in her voice for my response. I was about to answer her when I decided to lean against the wall of a building where we’d suddenly stopped on Avenida B.

I hesitated in replying to Ana’s last question fearing my words would reveal something of my family’s dirty laundry that I didn’t want washed in public. All kinds of thoughts flooded into my head about my aunts and my grandmother and how I felt about living with them. I became reflective for a moment, forgetting she was there. I was thinking that, as a person, I hardly received any recognition at home as the firstborn of the generation that would follow them all, a descendent of the fair skinned man, my grandfather, I only knew from the large photo above the inner door that separated the rooms I had come to know so well in Magnolia Building.

I remembered distinctly overhearing my aunts and grandmother in the darkened night as they exchanged notes between them on the happenings in the community they were part of. My thoughts then ran like a river as I suddenly remembered how they viewed me as one of their enemies, someone left in their camp “to spy on them.” Those thoughts depressed me as they would throughout my life, at times becoming angry thoughts or even rage.

Then, I snapped back to the day’s activities with my neighbor and teacher Ana Sanchez. I figured it had been instructive, to say the least, as I replayed the scenes of my first fund-raising experience, awaiting just this moment in which I would be able to chat with Ana about my feelings.

She tried to continue conversing but was interrupted by another bout of the horrible smoker’s cough. The spasms took hold of my dear teacher, violently unsettling her body for several minutes. I leaned against the wall patiently waiting for her to recover and while I kept my respectful silence a car suddenly sped by and slowed down a bit as he approached the spot where we were standing. The driver suddenly shouted in English, “Hey Ana what you up to now?” To my surprise Ana angrily said, “Yes, you son of a bitch, nothing your mother wouldn’t be doing, you bastard!” The man sped off laughing out loud leaving Ana fuming after him.

Having quickly recovered her normal, ladylike composure she then turned to me and said, “Look you, I want you to go to your father!” She didn’t wait for me to respond to this sudden pronouncement before she continued. “Your father spoke to me about you long before he went away. He reassured me that he was going to send for you to go to him up there in the States. I want you to go…you hear me!? You go up there and study and then I want you to come back here to Panama and become a very important man. Are you listening to me?”

Stunned and a bit taken aback by her revelations of what she knew my father was planning all I could do was answer this woman in the affirmative. Yet, all that time I couldn’t help but think that she seemed temporarily out of her head.

Suddenly she said, “Let’s go!” and she proceeded to walk away from me prompting me to follow her.

This story continues.