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"Here's to Pancho Piquet."
"Who is Pancho Piquet?" she asked.
"The carpentero de ribera. He was an old Cuban. He spoke Spanish so fast even the Mexicans had trouble understanding him. Looked like Boris Karloff. Didn't look Cuban or Mexican at all.
"But he was the fastest carpenter I've ever seen," the Captain said. "And careful too. He never slowed down, even in that jungle heat. We didn't have any electricity but he could work faster with hand tools than most people do with power tools. He was in his fifties or sixties and I was twenty-something. He used to smile that Boris Karloff smile watching me try to keep up with him."
"So why are we drinking to him?" Lila asked.
"Well, they warned me, 'El tome!' He drinks! And so he did," the Captain said.
"One night a big Norte, a norther, blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and it blew so hard... Oh, it was a big wind! Almost bent the palm trees to the ground. And it took the roof off his house and carried it away.
"But instead of fixing it he got drunk and stayed drunk for more than a month. After a couple weeks his wife had to come begging for money for food. That was so sad. I think partly he got drunk because he knew everything was going wrong and the boat would never get built. And that was true. I ran out of money and had to quit."
"So that's why we're drinking to him?" Lila said.
"Yeah, he was sort of a warning," the Captain said, "Also, he just opened my eyes a little to something. A feeling, for what the tropics is really like. All this talk about going to Florida and Mexico brought him back to mind."
"What do you want to go back there for?" she said.
"I don't know. There's always that feeling of despair from there. I can feel it now just thinking about it. 'Tristes tropiques,' the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, called it. It keeps pulling you back, somehow. Mexicans know what I mean. There's always this feeling that this sadness is the real truth about things and it's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up north."
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While you are at it, you might be interested in this comment posted to some discussion site, commenting on the very same passage.
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