We received a call from Nadja, who had gotten a call from Tavo, who had talked to Domingo, (an old-timer who seems to live on the sidewalk near our apartment in San Felipe) who had talked to a night-watchman who said he saw someone coming out of the front gate of Raul’s building at five in the morning, carrying a black bag. Nadja and Aunt Rosa drove over to the building to see if it looked like it had been broken into, but it looked normal to them. They advised that we return to Panamá city to go into the building and verify if there was a break-in during our eight day stay in Colón.
I immediately thought of the keys to the building. Maybe someone had gotten a copy of one or more of them, perhaps from the former owners. Sudarshani did not know if Raul had re-keyed the locks after he took possession of the building; and from the look of the keys, I didn’t think they looked new at all. What a plan, I thought: Don’t go through the trouble to break in, just buy the old keys and waltz in and out at your leisure. After all, there are four units in this building and people might think that a new tenant had moved in, only he is taking empty boxes in and full boxes out. We had just loaded all of our belongings into the building and took off the next day for who knows how long.
We decided to take a bus to Panamá right away and began packing what we needed in a knap-sack and a canvas bag (I now wish that I had taken a bag of my favorite foods as well). It was a quiet trip and I was in a depressed mood, thanks to my ingenious theorizing. The movie was lost on me; it wasn’t that good anyway. Thoughts of my karma drifted through my mind, sometimes re-assuring and other times depressing me; but paramount to all of the rationalizing was the idea that we all deserve what we get and that whatever happens will be the result of the sum-total of our collective decisions in the past and there is no value in whining about it.
After the bus pulled into Calidonia we flagged a taxi to San Felipe. I was steeled to take whatever was dealt to me and I tried to feel neutral about what I suspected I might see. The city looked especially ominous today and Sudarshani commented on the bleakness of barrio Santa Ana as we passed through it and into our barrio. As Nadja had said, all looked normal from the street as we pulled up to our front gate; but I wasn’t assured. The gate was locked, the upstairs security gate was also locked and the front door was locked. Now, I wouldn’t think that thieves would lock up all the doors as they came and went, just the front gate; so I felt a little better.
We walked into the front room and saw that the balcony door was shut and locked and there was nothing strewn about the room, OK so far. Upon unlocking our bedroom door we saw that everything was lying about as we had left it. We proceeded to the rear of the apartment, to the storage room where all of our unopened boxes of good stuff were. It was all there just as we left it and I heaved a sigh of relief. We were spared; especially when we did not deserve to be–considering the neighborhood, the general knowledge that the rich Americans had just stashed their stuff there and our hasty departure without securing the balcony doors, the weakest link.
