UNITED STATES—You leave the house bright and early, with a spring in your step and a tune on your lips, you turn on St. Charles Street and run bang into your own superannuated, stooped self, reflected back on a freckled wall-size mirror. Sam Delaney, who had an unusually good run over seven decades in the banana business, it seemed like his clout and vitality wore out the big man, who always commanded the room, had grown pitifully old, the jowls sagged around his jawline. His joints were creaky.
His gut, once Adonic, prone to sharp stitches of pain that augured the worst. There were rumors that he was taking anabolic steroids to keep up the impression of raw power and toughness. It was so vital to rule among the banana cowboys. Sam started barking orders that contradicted each other.
“Sell Chamelecón Valley…Let San Pedro Sula go fallow.”
Sam had gradually given up standing on his head sometime after seventy and was more often than not looking for a place to sit, and he was still looking for the best diet to stave off old age, that he had held at bay so well for so long.
Sam Delaney at last called it quits from the Allied Fruit Co. This was it for keeps. He left Boston and Bogota, His imposing figure no more to be seen in New York, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Cuba and Nicaragua. Or rotating around the Carrousel bar or the bar where he held court with a few old friends and they had beignets.
“Sam, I’m worried about you!” said Jaime Barker said, one of the old timers.
“Don’t worry about me,” he gaped but there was a strength to the words, still. “I’m halfway home. Now and then I get a telegram from G-d.”
“What does the Almighty say?”
“Regalar más.”
“I’m sorry, we don’t all understand Mexican like you do Sam.”
He gaped, “The Parkinson’s disease is getting to me.”
Barker retorted, “Give the disease back to Parkinson.”
The facial muscles no longer operated in Sam, but Barker imagined he detected a wan smile.
“Easy for you to say,” said Sam.
Sam had a seemingly endless career that spanned centuries and eras. It went in one era and out three others. In the beginning. it was the Wild West of banana cowboys and mercenaries raising hell on the isthmus. You gotta be able to go somewhere to raise hell.
“Where’s it gonna be now?”
“The moon. . . and after that Mars and then. . .”
It was the America of Mark Twain and Bret Harte and Zane Gray, the dentist turned author whose romances celebrated the legend of the frontier. In the end, it was the freaking intelligence agency and the triumph of the corporation, which has a bloodless life of its own, and air conditioning. Sam Delaney did not just live through this change parteaguas, which is the rise of Americaland told another way—he helped make it happened.
A flock of life sucking corporations that cleared the jungle and leeched the soil’s fertility. Perhaps I am best understood as the last player in the drama of Manifest Destiny, a man who lived gusto as if the wild places of the hemisphere were mine for the taking. It was in this spirit that he built his company into a colossus.
You know it was an accident. You stupid author. You think you know something—you should have been there.
The Company got to be so big and unwieldy, it became the most important fact of life on the isthmus. Allied Fruit’s predominance made it a mockery of regional rule and was humiliating and infantilizing in ways that were barely understood at the time. Look, I was only looking at dividends. It was a pattern often repeated, once he noticed this repeated switch and bait of the moneyist society it was a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon all over again. A bias in which you, after noticing a word, concept or product become suddenly, intensely aware of its repetitions.
It was worse than the European colonials. They at least came with a sense of obligation. Those who lived in the banana lands were ruled not by foreign nationals bringing “civilization” and the word of God, but by absentee businessmen who looked on their fields with cold moneymaking precision.
Sam did not see himself in this way of course. (The hell I didn’t. Again curse you author for not looking at all the schools I gave, and the hospitals that vanquished malaria and all the Nobel Laureates my monster spawned along the way. But I’ll let you talk: He considered himself a bearer of modern industry, creating jobs and wealth in a place deprived of both.) Can’t you see: wealth=poverty. But there is the world as you see it and the world that is, which quarantines high ideals. It was not all my fault: I inherited a well-oiled machine built by my Anglo-Saxon predecessors.
If he had been a great man, he would have questioned the workings of the machine, but he was not a great man, Sam was a complicated man blessed with great energy and ideas.
“You would say I did pretty good under the circumstances. OK, I came up short on the yardstick of ethics, which are a luxury in the life of somebody like me.”
Sam did not question the machine because he did not understand what it was doing to the people, catching them up in the cogs and gears like Charlie Chaplin in “Modern Times.”
When things got so hot the truth could not be missed, he saw himself, for one terrible moment as he was seen in Bananaland. “This is what I know about authors, they must dramatize. I like to get my facts out of the paper, take it all with a grain of salt, but I’m gonna let you talk, you S.O.B. fabulator.”
A debauched pirate, a puppet master, a banana king, an unelected potentate. In a flash, the work of your life reveals itself to be the opposite of what you always had considered it. He tried to change the legacy at the end of the game, when the jig was up, and build roads and hospitals and train stations and water systems—but it was too late. The history of Allied Fruit was, as the Arabs say when something inconceivable has happened, it is written.
