  Praying to Lord Jesus for a safe return home, in the morning in Panama City, still within the territory of the Republic, I asked why I had come to Panama and returned in my mind to the Big Bend ten years earlier, to the wilderness and to visions of the Mexican border. Panama is beautiful and it is drab, all at the same time, a blending of jungle, Bank Boston and the Banco do Brasil, colonial neighborhoods, slums that supported Noriega, mulatto girls and the Canal. I was ready to leave and I left. My transformation began in the sky, over the Caribbean. Upon landing, again Panama the country had been replaced by Panama the myth, imaginary like Veracruz or Havana. Fecund Panama, with its malaria and its yellow fever, a French graveyard: the customs agent was surprised that I had gone there alone.
He asked me what I was doing there and how I got the money. ("What do I do for a living? ") But I actually wanted him to search my bags this time, and to see the new guayabera, and the molas and the maps of the Canal, evidence of another land that does not exist, in a very real sense, on this earth. You know I created Panama in my mind. "Verdes mares bravias de minha terra natal, onde canta a jandaia nas frondes da carnaúba," writes the Brazilian poet Alencar. "Verdes mares, que brilhais como líquida esmeralda aos raios do sol nascente, perlongando as alvas praias ensombradas de coqueiros. " I wanted the customs agent to search everything. Latin America is vast. I have not found its heart, although I am now convinced that it is hidden in Bolivia, in the most remote hamlet of the most indigenous, secessionist province.
(After all, remember that Balboa was the explorer who first thought of El Dorado. Later came Voltaire and then Vicente Huidobro, who knew that the key to entry is the airplane. ) I have entered and returned through one of the mysterious doors of the international terminal of our airport, such as are delineated "Port of Spain" or "San Salvador", and through which entire worlds open (like the hallucinations of a Mayan noble, induced by bloodletting of the tongue) after a matter of hours in the blue sky, in the mere difference between morning over the Gulf of Mexico and the Central American afternoon.
Panama is not different from its point of origin; it, too, is an international zone like Terminal E at George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH). When you're there in the netherworld, you know it. At Miraflores Locks one afternoon, I perceived it -- the yield of the conquest of the Chagres and Finlay's taming of malaria -- in the modern specter of unknown mariners, loafing on the deck of a Swiss container ship while their captain waved at us.
The Swiss were followed by a freighter with Taiwanese markings. Each was descending to the Pacific and to Asia, in the direction opposite that of Spanish galleons leaving for Spain from Nombre de Dios, yet to the real land of Columbus, the entrance to which is marked with fanfare and melodrama by a final gate, not a lock, the Bridge of the Americas. 
