By Vanessa Londoño

One
You arrive at Camino de Cruces amidst the suffocating air that moves between the treetops and the sound of bamboo swaying in the wind: the dense tropical air dispensed by the jungle suddenly reaching us through the car window from the dip in the road. I set out in search of it on behalf of the Centroamérica Cuenta Festival, at eight in the morning from a hotel in the heart of Casco Viejo, leaning toward the imposing Canal Museum, taking the Centenario route toward the suburbs and then toward the skyscrapers of a modern Panama. As we move farther away, the towering green of the jungle begins to appear. Among the various national parks in the area, this is where the remnants of the colonial road that connected the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in the 16th century can best be seen, using a multimodal river system to link navigation from one end of the isthmus to the other. However, today, the road is overtaken by highways, buildings, and tunnels, making it necessary to perform a mental trick, like making a coin appear and disappear: to mentally connect the discontinuity of its route throughout a city that has grown over it, to grasp the scale of its ambition and technology—to link two oceans separated by a narrow strip of land that, since the Precambrian era, connected the vast American continent.
Two
At first glance, the road is invisible, hidden under brush and decomposing leaves that enrich the soil. It needs to be swept clean, just like the jungle reveals hidden beaches when rivers recede in the summer. While brushing the path carefully with a broom he carries in his backpack, Puleio explains that in the 16th century, goods from Spain arrived via the Atlantic to Chagres, and from there they were transported by river, following the path from Gatún, La Bruja, Ahorca Lagarto, and Palenquillo to Gorgona, where they would walk the stone path toward Panama City.
In the opposite direction, this path carried the plunder from South America back to the Spanish Crown.

Three
Puleio is a retired military man. He discovered the road as a child in 1958, while exploring the jungle that began in his backyard.
Perhaps it was this same adventurous spirit, still alive in him like a child, rather than that of an ex-soldier, that led to his second discovery. For over four decades, he pursued a map drawn by Nicolás Rodríguez in 1735, which documented a second path built by pirates under Morgan’s command in 1671, after the 1670 sacking of Panama. The Pirate Path of Gorgona stretched from west to east, reaching the old city center of San Felipe de Neri, reconfiguring its route to suit new economic interests. Many archaeologists claimed that Rodríguez’s map was a fantasy, that the Gorgona path didn’t exist and didn’t intersect with the original, and that Puleio was simply mad. But in 2004, after more than four decades with compass in hand, he was proven right: Puleio traversed the jungle, striking the ground centimeter by centimeter with a metal rod until, one day, beneath the grass, it struck rock. Clearing it revealed another road, nearly consumed by the undergrowth, confirming that he had found the exact point where these paths intersected, one above the other. This intersection spoke of more than just physical paths; it revealed historical revolts and clashes: indigenous people and runaway slaves, allied militarily with pirates and corsairs, had faced off against the Spanish Empire in this isthmus of Panama and the Darién, walking the upper path, no longer the one beneath.
Indeed, what Puleio avoids mentioning when he excitedly talks about this is that the path was built at the cost of the extermination of indigenous people and runaway slaves.

Four
At a railway crossing in Kenya, a sign warns passengers that one train can hide another, cautioning them not to cross the tracks too soon, as they could be hit by a second train concealed by the first. Inspired by this sign, Kenneth Koch wrote a poem about things hidden behind what they appear to be—like a reproach that actually hides a complaint, a dog that conceals a whole pack around the corner, or a tomb on the Appia Antica that hides beneath it countless more graves.
A memory can hide another memory, says Koch, because memory is just that: the eternal reverberation of entities contemplating one another.
Five
«Panama is actually a geological bridge,» Daniel Domínguez tells me one afternoon as we talk in the old city, wrapped in that suffocating gray air blowing in from the Pacific. It emerged from the sea to connect the Americas as part of a chain of volcanic islands that laid a bed of land connecting the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico to the Atrato Valley in Colombia. Four million years ago, it solidified as a kind of stone bridge linking South America with Central America, separating the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic for good. In the act of linking the Americas, Panama inevitably divided the oceans.

Six
Puleio talks while cutting through the brush with a machete to make the path passable, preventing it from being swallowed by the jungle that eventually becomes the Darién Gap. From his backpack, he pulls out bottles of glass so thick that light gets trapped inside them, marked with the name of a company in New Jersey. He has been collecting them along the path, as they testify to a third wave of travelers who passed through these crossings: the wanderers chasing gold fever between the coasts of the United States.
By 1855, the gold economy was so powerful that the Interoceanic Railway had already been built in Panama, sparing Californian travelers from crossing the United States in horse-drawn wagons, rounding Cape Horn’s 18,000 miles, or trekking through all of Central America to cross the isthmus at its narrowest point—this cobblestone road. The goal was singular: to reach the West Coast in search of gold, for the Americans were trapped in a country they feared for being too distant from itself within its own borders. Then came the canal. And later, Tocumen Airport, which follows the same principle: to connect the Americas with the Americas and the world.

Puleio moves ahead into the forest, and I watch him disappear under the filtered light between the trees as he talks, already lost in his own reveries, just as I am lost in mine: writing. It seems inevitable to think of the layering of old manuscripts, where the first books were written repeatedly on the same animal skin, washed clean to endlessly inscribe a new text over the old. I think of the overlap between the hidden line and the one being written, suspecting that we are always rewriting the same book, which fights to resurface from the depths. I think of the train hidden behind another, ready to hit us if we don’t wait for the first to pass, when we still don’t know its meaning. I think that the Interoceanic Canal is just that: the eternal reverberation of a technology always reflected in the first—the Camino de Cruces—or the overlap between it and the stone, driven by the geological ambition to unite the oceans. Its technologies have simply evolved, culminating in the most precise of all at this Festival: the word (when it’s free).

Credits
Text: Vanessa Londoño
Photographs: Gabriel Rodríguez
Curation and Editing: Emiliano Monge
Centroamérica Cuenta | Panama City, May 2024