Snakes, Machetes, And Unfriendly Locals

It was my third machete.

My first was in Santiago where I watched a man use one to shave his chest.

He sat in a wooden rocking chair on his front porch at about 10:00 o’clock in the morning, his red checkered shirt unbuttoned and open as he scraped the blade across his belly.

My second machete was at Panama Jack’s, the tiki bar on our property at Los Islotes. My husband, Lief, used one to cut the head off a snake.

It was late and most of the staff of our publishing business we’d invited to enjoy themselves at our beach were good and drunk.

We were sunburned and tired and the evening was winding down when Valentine, our marketing director, pulled a cooler over to a table to sit on. Underneath was a long black snake coiled around itself. Exposed, it stretched out and darted across the floor.

Everyone screamed.

We were all in swimsuits and barefoot. We jumped up on chairs, onto the bar. Lief ran to the Prado and returned with the machete he keeps in the back. In a stroke, he decapitated the intruder.

He picked up the severed head with his blade and flung it as far as he could into the darkness. He knew better than to leave it where it lay. Even separated from its body, the head can still bite.

Now our neighbor Roberta was swinging machete number three above her head while shouting in Spanish I couldn’t follow.

From the cab of our project manager Dalys’ pick-up truck, Lief, Dalys, and I watched as five guys from our construction crew huddled together a meter away.

They stood rigid and straight, whispering to each other but never taking their eyes off Roberta. Every one of them had a good three inches and fifty pounds on the woman losing her mind in the middle of our dirt road, but they were clearly afraid.

“What is she saying?” I asked Dalys.

I’ve been spending time in Latin America for four decades and have lived in Panama for fifteen years. I should speak better Spanish than I do. Dalys is a local. I’ve let her become a crutch.

“She’s yelling at them to get off her land, Señora Kathleen. She’s saying that if they don’t stop work on this fence, they will regret it.”

We’ve been feuding with Roberta over this fence for two years. We believe it’s our right to build it on land we own. She disagrees. I knew the situation was coming to a head, but I never imagined it would escalate to physical violence.

What could the woman be thinking?

Roberta moved toward our men, holding her machete straight out in front of her.

Roberta is a small woman but strong. I’ve seen her carry stacks of concrete blocks and big tree trunks. Behind her was the two-room concrete structure that is both her house and her restaurant. A few yards behind it stood her wooden outhouse with its rusty tin roof. Roberta and her husband, Mateo, sleep in hammocks strung from trees in between.

The contrast between Roberta’s homestead and our five-star community next door is jarring. Just outside our property line, chickens scratch in the dirt and feral dogs dart among piles of sand, broken car parts, and garbage. It doesn’t say Welcome to Paradise.

Passing by every day, I feel a twinge of shame although I shouldn’t. The gap between the haves and the have-nots on display is undeniable. Roberta and Mateo resent us for being the big, bad, rich foreigners but we’ve tried every way we can think of to help them see that we respect them and their world and intend only good. Our project provides jobs and pumps money into the local economy. We hope they’ll benefit along with everyone else.

Roberta stopped two inches from one of our guys, leaned back, looked up, and brought the tip of her blade within inches of his face. She stared at him a long second. Then she stepped to the next man. She assumed the same bent-backward posture with her arm straight out so her machete nearly touched the second man’s cheek.

She’d stopped shouting.

All her energy was going into that stare. She moved to the third man in line and placed the tip of her blade a hair away from his throat.

“Lief, we need to do something. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“We’re building this fence,” Lief said flatly. My husband is stubborn, and he can be contentious. But I’m too agreeable. I want everyone to be happy all the time and will twist myself into knots to try to make it so. Lief was right. Roberta had pushed us around long enough. Still, I didn’t want bloodshed.

“I agree,” I said, “but this is getting out of hand. I think we need to tell the men to come back inside the gate. Dalys can give them other work for today.”

We’ll come out the other side of this wiser and stronger, like we’ve done so many times before, I told myself, as I have about so many other things on so many

sleepless nights since we embarked on this adventure fourteen years ago. But I’m finding it harder and harder to believe myself.

We’ve tried diplomacy. We’ve enlisted help from the authorities. We’ve hired two sets of attorneys, one in Santiago and another in Panama City. Yet here we are. No one has been able to help.

Our surveyor maps the area. Roberta’s sons remove the boundary points. Our crew digs post holes. Roberta’s sons fill them in overnight. Some of our men have quit rather than face Mateo’s ceaseless taunts. Who needs the aggravation when you’re breaking your back under the tropical sun for eight hours a day.

I’ve never felt more frustrated or more vulnerable.

“If we back down again now, it’ll only be harder to start up again later,” Lief said. “I’m done backing down. I don’t care what Roberta wants. I want a fence.”

I glanced over at Dalys. She was sitting calmly, with her head lowered slightly, listening to our debate. Dalys recognizes the role she’s grown into. She is often the voice of compromise between Lief ’s position and mine. I wanted to know what she was thinking.

“I understand, Señor Lief,” Dalys said in answer to my unspoken question. “But this woman is crazy.”

Thank you, Dalys. She’d said what needed saying, and I knew it was better for Lief to hear it from her than from me. My contrarian husband can be counted on to take the opposing view to mine. I sometimes adopt positions I don’t believe so he’ll respond conversely. This situation was too serious for those games.

Roberta’s machete was in the face of the final man in the huddle. Her screaming had resumed, now incoherent in any language.

Then, suddenly, she stopped, dropped her machete to her side, and turned in our direction.

She stood still and silent for a moment then raised her weapon again. She was pointing her machete at us.

We’d turned off the engine in Dalys’ truck when we’d parked. With no air conditioning, it was better than ninety degrees inside the cab, but as Roberta stared at the wall separating us from her, I shivered…

Until next time,