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  In Panama, marriage was no big deal. Many unions, especially among the poor, were consensual rather than contractual; indeed, a marriage ceremony often marked the culmination of a life together rather than the start of one, and served as a mark of economic success. Sometimes a priest might encourage it for an elderly invalid, as a prerequisite for receiving the rite of the anointing of the sick. In rural areas, where the campesinos’ livelihood was reasonably secure and the population stable, children suffered little social stigma if their parents were not legally married. If parents split up, the paternal grandparents sometimes took in both mother and children, or a woman might return to her mother’s or her parents’ household, leaving behind her children so that she could work. There were many female-headed families, particularly in cities and among the poor. Legal marriage tended to be the rule only among the more prosperous farmers, cattle ranchers, the urban middle class and the elite.

  The southernmost state of Central America, Panama was for 300 years a part of the Spanish Empire. A land bridge between the continents of North and South America, its status as a vital crossroads would eventually be underscored by two massive transport projects: the Panama Railroad and the Panama Canal. The railroad, linking north with south, was forged through a purgatory of disease and death; legend has it that one man died for every railroad tie on the track. Then, in 1903, the state declared independence from neighboring Colombia and granted rights to the United States to build and administer indefinitely a canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The Canal opened in 1914.

  A treaty provided the Americans, or Zonians, with rights to both sides of the Canal, a one-sided deal that would cause tension between both parties for much of the twentieth century. Locals living or working in the Zone could be prosecuted under American law and faced the possibility of extradition to the States for trial. From the outset, the Americans turned the area into their own private quarters in which Panamanians, whose Caribbean-black contingent composed most of the Zone workers, were mere houseguests. The Americans created their own country club atmosphere in the Zone with perfectly coiffed lawns, golf courses, comfortable housing, and bowling alleys.

  Margarito Duran Sanchez was a US Army cook, born in Arizona, the second son of Mexican parents, Diego and Esther. At nineteen, he was stationed in the Canal Zone and worked in Mi Pueblito, an area of small villages just north of Chorrillo that housed Zone workers. There he befriended Clara’s brother Moises. “On my way to work I used to walk past that area,” Clara remembered, “and that is where I met Roberto’s father. He used to cook in the villages.” Moises thought highly of the Mexican and would often give him a lift over unpaved roads to Guarare to see Clara. According to Garcia, Clara escaped from her Filipino boyfriend late one night with Margarito and they became lovers. “She left with him in the middle of the night,” said Moises Samaniego. “He came to get her and she was never allowed to see the Filipino man again.”

  Margarito was a large man who could look after himself if pushed, though it wasn’t his nature to look for trouble. “I don’t remember him getting in many fights but he could handle himself,” said Moises. “He hit down two guys at once in a fight. He was a very big man.”

  The lovers soon had a son, Alcibiades. He died at two years old from what was reported as an apparent heart attack, though Clara claims it was due to medical negligence. “My older son died when [doctors] let him fall from the cradle,” said Clara. “He was seriously hurt and when I picked him up he was already dead.” According to Roberto, the brother he never knew died after an operation went wrong. “He was born sick,” said Duran. “My mother took care of him because he was born with a heart condition. That was the child my mom loved the most, because his heart was damaged. He slept on the bed and I slept on the floor because my mother loved him the most. My mother took him to the hospital. If it had been now, they would have paid my mom millions because the doctors performed the operation wrongly and killed my little brother, the other Duran. My brother had to undergo a heart examination but he was operated on at the Children’s Hospital and the operation was not done properly. My brother died there. If it had not happened so many years ago, but now, my mother would have been able to start a claim.”

  Before Alcibiades died, the union of Clara and Margarito also produced little Roberto, and at first the family lived in their small apartment in Chorrillo, a low-income fishing town west of Panama City, bordering the Canal Zone, and one of the country’s poorest slums. Almost all of the homes were made of wood. Chorrillo was a place to pass through and not look back.

  Like the others, Margarito would not stay to see his surviving son grow. He cut out without a word when his tour of duty in Panama ended. Some say the only thing he left his son was his punch. “His father left us and went to live with another woman,” said Clara. “Roberto was a year and five months old. His father was not interested in learning about Roberto. So I worked while Duran grew up. Until he was twelve years old we used to go to work together.”

  Duran Senior shipped out to California and then Germany and would go on to serve with an infantry battalion in Vietnam. He married a woman from Guatemala and later settled in Flagstaff, Arizona. There was no apology and little regret, just a man trying to make peace with the decisions he’d made in his immature youth. While some ageing fathers use the remaining years of their life to reconstruct all the missed birthdays and graduations, Margarito didn’t want to rewind anymore. It just so happened that the kid he left abandoned turned out to be one of the greatest boxers ever.

  “I didn’t know what he was going to be,” said Margarito from his Flagstaff home years later. “I supported him as well as I could. Clara was fifteen at the time, and when we separated … she went on to have ten or twelve kids, something like that. I just couldn’t do it. I don’t have any regrets. When you are in the Army, you just have to go. No ifs, ands or buts, I just couldn’t come back. My family couldn’t go but I could. I could only bring Roberto with me if I got his rights and adopted him. She didn’t want to give him to me. What could I do? We weren’t married. The thing was, I wanted to take him back to the States, but she wouldn’t give him to me. In Germany, I adopted my daughter … I adopted all my children. If I had gotten Roberto’s permission, it would have been okay.

  “Was the life in the States better than the one he had? Better, well, no. Maybe he wouldn’t have become a fighter … He looked exactly like my younger brother Roberto. That’s who I named him after. I baptized him and recognized him. I gave him everything I could. I recognized him in the hospital. That’s what a father is supposed to do.” The words came out as if Margarito needed to absolve himself of guilt.

  Clara was left to bring up her children with no money and no prospects. She would rely on her own extended family, in particular Ceferina, her mother and her rock. Mireya recalled entering the apartment to the sight of her mother breast feeding Clara’s children. She took care of the family until she passed years later. “Do you know what she used to do?” a smiling Mireya said. “Like after having Toti, after giving birth she would leave them in my mother’s care in the house of stone. Since there was no milk, my mother would put one to one of her nipples, and the other one on the other, so that they would suckle. Because my mother had also just had a baby, my brother Joaquin.”

  An individual without kin was adrift in Panama. Family ties were the surest defense against a hostile and uncertain world and blood loyalty was ingrained. This loyalty often outweighed that given to a spouse; indeed, a man frequently gave priority to his parents or siblings over his wife. Relatives relied on each other for help throughout life. Grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins faithfully gathered to mark birthdays and holidays together. Married children visited their parents frequently, even daily. In some small remote villages and in some classes, such as the elite, generations of intermarriage meant almost everyone was related in some way. Co-residence was the basis for the most enduring ties an individual formed.

  Clara r
emained bitter about her abandonment. “When I met him in Las Vegas [years later] he said he used to send letters with someone, but I was never given any of his letters,” she said, “and he never helped me with Roberto. Never.” Her sister Mireya added, “He left and never came back again. That is the reason why Roberto never wanted to learn anything about his papa. He resented that he had left him.”

  Roberto would grow up knowing only what relatives told him, of how his parents met at Mi Pueblito. “My father was a soldier and all the soldiers slept in a church,” he said. “There was a private military club and my father worked there as a cook and when they had a day off, he would go to the bar. When I was about two or three, my mom took me there. That was when she told me about him. She was strange … after that she didn’t know about him anymore. He left and we wouldn’t see him again. My mom later told me that he wanted to take me but she refused.”

  The father did leave his son at least one thing: his Mexican complexion, the light skin tone contrasting with the jet-black hair of a mixed-breed cholo. Indeed “Cholo” or “Cholito” would become young Roberto’s nickname. The fierce, kill-or-be-killed boxing style of most Mexican fighters was one Duran would also adopt, unlike the more cultured style of most Panamanian boxers.

  The young family suffered. Clara could often be seen with her beloved and barefoot Roberto by her side, whether in her hometown of Guarare or on North 27th and 29th streets in Chorrillo. She worked odd jobs and found various apartments when she wasn’t staying with her relatives. When available, rice, beans and meat made a typical meal. “Clara and Roberto would come here on weekends all the time,” said an old friend, Lesbia Diaz, from Guarare. “Clara even lived here for a couple years. Roberto was always running without shoes, even riding horses around town.”

  Three years after Margarito left, Clara hooked up with a young man from Guarare named Victorino Vargas. The seventeen-year-old Vargas played guitar for a band and they met at a ball. All of the passion lost on the man that broke her heart now returned. The union was not without problems and Vargas failed to hold down a steady job, but he would father five children with Clara: girls Anabelle, Isabelle and Justiniano and boys Victor and Armando, or “Pototo.” In all she would have nine children but only Roberto would carry the Duran surname.

  Whenever Vargas returned home, Roberto would be there waiting for him with a big grin and a cry of “Victorino!” Like other children his age, he thrilled to King Kong, Mexican adventure movies and cartoons. He and Toti loved Cantinflas movies, cowboys like Roy Rogers and acted out moves they learned from the popular television luchadores, or Mexican masked wrestlers, like the famous El Santo (The Saint), El Vampiro and the Blue Demon, who became icons not just for their ring exploits but for their appearances in schlocky but popular movies and comic books. The boys also aped the style of popular American singers like Elvis Presley and Frankie Lymon. On Sundays, they could be seen at the Iglesia de Don Bosco or the Iglesia de las Mercadas, where young Roberto lit candles to Jesus de Nazareth and the Virgen de Carmen. “We always were in the streets, in an area which was filled with sailors,” said Toti, “and they used to listen to Elvis Presley and other singers like him. So Roberto would start to dance, hearing these songs.”

  Childhood was short for little Roberto.Vargas may have been the man of the house, but almost from the time he could work Roberto needed no one to look after him. Often a regular at El Parque Santa Ana, Duran also danced for coins in the streets and shined shoes for pennies in a neighborhood bar. “When Duran was five years old, he used to be in the street a lot and all the money he would make he would take to his mother,” said Vargas. “He was good with his mother. They were living there with his mother, him and his brother, and at the age of eight he started to box.

  “I never mistreated Roberto, as a stepfather I never hit him. I do not like to abuse children who are not mine. He never even misbehaved with me in a way he would deserve to be mistreated. I used to advise him not to do the wrong things, but he always used to be out there with Chaflan. We had a very humble room, but we lived there. He would leave the house and be away for a couple of days, and then he would return with food for his mother.”

  Though Toti was older, Roberto often acted like a guardian to his younger siblings. “When Isabelle was born, Roberto asked me whether the baby had any clothes,” said Clara. “So he went to see a woman who sang, Ana Maria de Panama was her name, and she gave him a tub filled with clothes for Isabelle. He was a very curious child and he went over all these things and chose a couple, including a hat, which he brought to the hospital so that we could come out with the baby nicely dressed. After I had my daughters, Roberto was a father for them and for us all.”

  At the age of seven, he told his mother, “Don’t worry mamma. You’ll see. When I am older, I will help you.” He remembered, “At the time there were three children in my family and I didn’t have anything to eat. I had to go out and clean shoes. Me and my other brother had to go out and sell newspapers while my sister Marina stayed home. That’s what we had to do to survive.” Christmas and New Year were the worst; the children would go to bed early because there was not even enough money to buy candy.

  From selling the newspaper La Estrella de Panama to cleaning shoes, to cleaning dishes in restaurants, to painting jobs, to dancing and singing in night clubs, Duran skipped childhood: he had no choice. The hunger would never leave him. “He grew up fast,” said Toti. “I would stand up for him when he was younger, but soon he could do it on his own.”

  THE MOST important man in Robertito’s life, at least until his late teens, was neither his father nor his stepfather but a smiling urban gypsy in colorful, ragged clothes called Candido Natalio Diaz. Known throughout Panama City as “Chaflan,” which loosely translates as “punchy,” he was an eccentric, a short, well-built, wide-eyed negrito in a sailor’s cap, exactly the type of poor, shiftless Panamanian that the snooty rabiblancos, the light-skinned social elite, despised.

  “I used to live in Chorrillo in a house made of stone, near a bar called La Almenecer,” said Duran. “I used to polish shoes and a person came in and started to dance. There were dozens of people peeking through the spaces from the wooden walls in the cantina. He would make all of these funny faces. When he was finished dancing, he would collect money.”

  Chaflan was a kind of Fagin to the children of the slums, finding them work, teaching them to survive. He watched out for them, though many adults questioned his motives and some even hinted that his interest in young boys was suspicious. He took a special liking to Roberto, taking him to dance on street corners or in nightclubs for money. He often arranged fights or wrestling matches between the youngsters, setting up a makeshift ring in some backyards to draw pennies from onlookers – then bought them lunch.

  Duran hooked up with Chaflan. He was already a restless child, always on the move. “He hardly had any friends,” said Clara. “Only Chaflan was his friend. He put him to sell the newspaper and to clean shoes. Chaflan used to tell him, ‘Roberto, from the money you make working you have to give some to your mother.’” He always did.

  Roberto was something of a prankster and liked to play jokes. When he was ten years old, he was watching a TV that his grandmother had won in a raffle. Trying to grab the seat from her grandson, she offered young Roberto five cents to chop some wood. “I knew her trick to get the seat,” said Duran to a reporter. “So I said to her, ‘The program is very good, here is ten cents, you chop the wood!’”

  His warmth could quickly turn to fire, however. Anyone who disrespected Chaflan or any of Duran’s friends would take a punch, thrown with such venom that they would be left gasping. And wherever Chaflan went, the children followed, with Duran leading the pack. To Duran, the man without a home was heroic. He refused to abandon them when others had. Chaflan couldn’t replace Duran’s father, but he showed him he could accomplish anything he put his mind to.

  On first sight, Chaflan resembled the many other throwaways roaming Pa
nama City trying to get by without taking the same risks that everyone else had. Nobody had ever seen him with a job or any stability. But nobody ever saw him dealing with drugs or alcohol. He wasn’t a bum. Despite his lifestyle, he was not necessarily a bad influence. Nobody recalled seeing him drunk and many people knew him by name. He had no home but a ready grin, and would share whatever food he had with his posse of children. To people who had made it without having to stick out their hand for a nickel, Chaflan was a hopeless, lazy figure whose charming nature belied inner weaknesses. To Duran, the man making funny faces was more than a street clown; he was the one man who wouldn’t abandon him. “If Duran was selling shoes today, his only friend would be Chaflan,” read a newspaper headline at the height of the boxer’s fame.

  Like all clowns, there was a sad side to Chaflan. Panamanian journalist Emilio Sinclair called him “the man whose heart was broken by deception,” and said he “cried in silence in the dark and stink alleys of the poor neighborhood.” He could often be found sleeping in dumpsters or parks. He and young Roberto would be seen together before dawn, waiting as the sun lifted to get a heap of the morning papers to sell. Yet both were always smiling and they worked as a team.

  “I remember getting up at five a.m., or sleeping under a tree in the park to get the papers,” said Duran. “We would leave with Chaflan and would wake up in a newspaper factory. We were seven or eight kids who wouldn’t go back home and would stay with Chaflan. There was a little window, they would give us a ticket, the first one would get the papers and would sell the papers fast. But most of the time the older kids got them first. Since we were so young, we couldn’t keep up with the bigger kids and we couldn’t sell the papers fast enough.

  “There was a kid who could not talk and was very hunched over. Chaflan would put him to sell papers. Chaflan would stand in a busy street. I would stand where few people came and the hunched boy would be put in the street with no pedestrians by a building where lots of people lived,” said Duran.