by Paul Theroux
... we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
I shut my book. At length, the train started and continued the last half-mile into Puntarenas. Puntarenas was very hot, and even in the breeze very humid. I walked the streets. There were boarding houses and cheap hotels, bars, restaurants, curio stalls, people selling plastic water-wings and back-scratchers and sunhats. It was a run-down but busy resort. There was not much to do here but swim, and I did not care for the water which was littered with seaport detritus, frayed rope and old bottles, oil-slick and seaweed which had become like greasy rags. I had a glass of lemonade; I wondered if I should stay here, on the Gulf of Nicoya.
‘You should go over to the other side,’ said the stallholder who had sold me the lemonade. ‘That is where all the Americans live. Is is very beautiful.’
I saw some of them, shuffling through the streets of Puntarenas, the people who had come down here to die in this sunny youthful place. I was almost tempted to board a bus and look at their houses, but I had a feeling I knew what I would find. A suburb in the tropics might be worth seeing, but I doubted that it was worth examining in much detail; and I did not relish that sense of exclusion that I would feel, faced by people mowing the lawn and pushing vacuum cleaners. Nor, after all my travelling, did I wish to find myself describing Sarasota, down to its last funeral parlour and miniature golf course. Travellers do not belong in the suburbs, and the most civilized places tire the eye quickest; in such places, the traveller is an intruder, as he is in Sarasota. I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness; these friendly Americans only made me homesick.
12 The Balboa Bullet to Colón
It was ‘Save Our Canal Day’. Two United States congressmen had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, ‘Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!’). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75 per cent of the United States was against the Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise – there was a demonstration, too – little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn’t care. She had enjoyed the rally: ‘We’ve been feeling left out, as if everyone was against us.’
The Zonians, 3,000 workers for the Panama Canal Company, and their families, saw the treaty as a sell-out; why should the Canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell, It’s our canal!
‘Want to know the trouble with these people?’ said an American political officer at the embassy. ‘They can’t decide whether the Canal is a government department, or a company, or an independent state.’
Whatever it was, it was certainly a lost cause; but it was not the less interesting for that. Few places in the world can match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status or in the cloudiness of its future. The Canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate – they want the Canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the Canal was dug. If justice were to be done the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubbdubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however – when they become especially frenzied – often burn their Stars and Stripes and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. What a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.
It is, by common consent, a Company town. There is little in the way of personal freedom in the Zone. I am not talking about the liberal guarantees of freedom of speech or assembly, which are soothing abstractions but seldom used; I mean, the Zonian has to ask permission before he may paint his house another colour, or even shellac the baseboard in his bathroom. If he wishes to asphalt his driveway he must apply in writing to the Company; but he will be turned down: only pebbles are permitted. The Zonian is living in a Company house; he drives on Company roads, sends his children to Company schools, banks at the Company bank, borrows money from the Company Credit Union, shops at the Company store, (where the low prices are pegged to those in New Orleans), sails at the Company club, sees movies at the Company theatre, and if he eats out will take his family to the Company cafeteria in the middle of Balboa and eat Company steaks and Company ice-cream. If a plumber or an electrician is needed the Company will supply one. The system is maddening, but if the Zonian is driven crazy there is a Company psychiatrist. The community is entirely self-contained. Children are born in the Company hospital; people are married in Company churches – there are many denominations, but Baptists predominate; and when the Zonian dies he is embalmed in the Company mortuary – a free casket and burial are part of every Company contract.
Society is haunted by two contending ghosts, that of Lenin and that of General Bullmoose. There are no Company signs, no billboards or advertising at all; only a military starkness in the appearance of the Company buildings. The Zone seems like an enormous army base – the tawny houses, all right-angles and tiled roofs, the severe landscaping, the stencilled warnings on chain-link fences, the sentry posts, the dispirited wives and stern fattish men. There are military bases in the Zone, but these are indistinguishable from the suburbs. This surprised me. Much of the Canal hysteria in the States was whipped up by the news that the Zonians were living the life of Riley, with servants and princely salaries and subsidized pleasures. It would have been more accurate if the Zonian was depicted as an army man, soldiering obediently in the tropics. His restrictions and rules have killed his imagination and deafened him to any subtleties of political speech; he is a Christian; he is proud of the Canal and has a dim unphrased distrust of the Company; his salary is about the same as that of his counterpart in the United States – after all, the fellow is a mechanic or welder: why shouldn’t he get sixteen dollars an hour? He knows welders who get much more in Oklahoma. And yet the majority of the Zonians live modestly: the bungalow, the single car, the outings to the cafeteria and cinema. The high Company officials live like viceroys, but they are the exception. There is a pecking order, as in all colonies; it is in miniature like the East India Company and even reflects the social organization of that colonial enterprise: the Zonian suffers a notoriously out-dated lack of social mobility. He is known by his salary, his club and the nature of his job. The Company mechanic does not rub shoulders with the Company administrators who work in what is known all over the Zone as The Building – the seat of power in Balboa Heights. The Company is uncompromising in its notion of class; consequently, the Zonian – in spite of his pride in the Canal – often feels burdened by the degree of regimentation.<
br />
‘Now I know what socialism is,’ said a Zonian to me at Miraflores.
I tried to explain that this was not socialism but rather the highest stage of capitalism, the imperial company; profit and idealism; high-minded exploitation. It was colonialism in its purest form. And by its nature colonialism is selective. Where are the victims, then, the poor, the exploited? The Zone is immaculate, but it only appears to be a haven of peace. About four years ago the schools in the Zone were reclassified – it meant they did not have to be integrated. Blacks, who had been brought years ago to work in the Zone, were regarded as Panamanians. So the integration issue was simplified: the blacks were encouraged to move out of the Zone. They did not move far – they couldn’t, they still had jobs in the Zone. The fringes of the Zone are occupied by these rejects, and the far side of the Fourth of July Highway is a slum. They cross the highway to go to work, and in the evening they return to their hovels. And what is interesting is that the Zonian, when particularly worked up about the civilization he has brought to the Isthmus, points to the dividing line and says, ‘Look at the contrast!’ But it was the Zonian who decreed that those people should live there and that all Panama should stand aside and let him get on with the job.
It is hard to exaggerate the tenacious attitude of the Zonians. Their mirror-images are less the time-servers in Suez than the toilers in India during the last years of the British Raj. The Zonian is not noted for his command of Spanish, but on his own turf he is efficient and hardworking. A week before I arrived, the Zonian workers tried to organize a strike, to prove they had some bargaining power. But they failed, as strikers in Poland and Czechoslovakia always fail, and perhaps for the same reason: they were sat on and, when it came to it, the shutdown could not last – they did not have the heart to close down the Canal. In sympathy their children cut classes at Balboa High School, played hooky for their parents’ sake – and for their own reasons. Zonians are aware that the world they inhabit is special, and they know it is threatened with extinction. But, because they keep to themselves, the menacing world is closer than the demon countries they whisper about – Russia, China, Cuba, ‘the Arabs’, ‘the Communists’. The big stupid clumsy world of squinting cannibals begins where the Zone ends – it is right there, across the Fourth of July Highway, the predatory world of hungry unwashed people gibbering in Spanish. Even the sweetest Zonians haven’t got a clue. A testimonial dinner was given for a librarian in the Zone. She was retiring after forty years in the Company library – forty years of residence in the Zone, supervising the local staff, ordering books, hovering in the stacks, attending functions, initialling memos, issuing directives, coping with the Dewey Decimal System. Everyone she had known came to her testimonial, and most – to her credit – were Panamanians. Speeches were made; there was praise, and a presentation. At the end of it, the librarian got to her feet and attempted to thank them in Spanish. She faltered and finally fell silent. In forty years she had not learned enough Spanish to utter a complete sentence of gratitude to the Spanish workers who organized the dinner.
‘I don’t care what you say,’ the Zonian at Miraflores was saying to me, ‘but it sure feels like socialism.’
We were watching the Chilean freighter Palma pass through the lock. There were no pumps in the Canal. The freighter enters the lock; the gates shut; and within a few minutes the huge ship is dropping to the level of the Pacific on this last liquid stair in its descent. The upper gates are closed, too, and 50,000 gallons of water flow from Lake Madden to replace the water the Palma used for its journey through the Canal. The freighter is towed by small engines on canal-side tracks – this is the single improvement that has been necessary in sixty years. Once, the ships were drawn by mules; the engines are still called ‘mules’. One cannot fail to be impressed by the running of the Canal; there are few works of man on earth that can compare with it.
‘Who are those people?’ I asked.
There were five men in clean white Panama-style shirts, vaulting coils of cable and occasionally tripping as they made their way towards the steel front of the lock which was the shape of a battleship’s bow. They were hurrying, puffing and blowing in the ninety-degree heat; their fancy shoes were not made for these slippery surfaces. I had asked whether I could roam around the lock, but I was told it was forbidden.
‘Them are congressmen,’ said the guide. ‘That’s all we get around here these days. Congressmen.’
The guide was black, a Panamanian, from Chiriqui Province. He had written his thesis at the University of Panama on the history of the Canal. He was completely bi-lingual. I wondered whether he was in favour of the Canal being handed over.
He said, ‘If this Canal Treaty is ratified that’s going to be the end of this place.’
‘You want to see the Americans run it forever?’
He said, ‘I sure do.’
It was not a Panamanian view, but he was untypical. After that, every Panamanian I met said the Canal belonged to them; though the terms on which it should be given back varied from person to person. And yet the Zonians are probably right when they say that the Canal will be mismanaged when it is in Panamanian hands. It does not take much to upset its balance sheet; in fact, some years it loses money, and to show a profit the Panama Canal Company must tow an average of thirty-five or forty ships a day through the three locks, repeating this complicated procedure every day of the year. Was it outmoded? No, said the guide; apart from a few super-tankers it could handle all the ships in the world. Wouldn’t a sea-level canal be simpler? No, said the guide; the Atlantic tides were different from the Pacific ones, and did I know that there was a poisonous variety of sea-snake in the Pacific? A sea-level canal would allow this creature into the Caribbean, ‘and God knows what would happen then.’
‘I’m glad you’re on our side,’ said the Zonian to the guide.
‘Send anyone you want down here,’ said the guide. ‘I’ll tell them the truth.’
I suggested to him that the truth of it was that, like the arguments for the British staying in India or the U.S. Marines patrolling Veracruz or Colonel Vanderbilt in Nicaragua, the adventure could not last. For better or worse (‘Worse!’ he said quickly), the Canal would have to become the property of the Republic of Panama. Surely, it was plain to him that the Treaty would be ratified and that this would happen.
‘Maybe it will happen and maybe it won’t,’ he said. I can’t say. But it if does happen it’s going to be bad.’
‘Good for you!’ said the Zonian, then turned to me. ‘We’re going to give the Canal away, just like we gave Vietnam away. It’s terrible. We should stay. We should have kept Taiwan –’
‘Taiwan?’ I said.
‘We gave it to the Chinese. That’s why we have to keep this Canal. This is our last chance. Look at what happened to Vietnam after we gave it away.’
I said, ‘We didn’t give Vietnam away.’
‘Yes, we did.’
‘Madam,’ I said, ‘we lost the war.’
‘We should have won it,’ she said. ‘Now you’re talking like the reporters. They come here and say all the Zonians are red-necks, living in beautiful homes. Goodness, we’re ordinary people!’
‘That I can vouch for,’ I said.
But when people said We in Panama I had to think hard to know who they meant. The Zonian lady’s we referred to all Zonians, Ambassador Jorden said we and he meant the United States of America, the Ratifier’s we ignored the Zonian: there was always exclusion in the pronoun. The American soldiers in the Zone were officially neutral, but when a military man said we he implied that he was against the treaty. The third or fourth generation West Indians, mainly from Barbados, said we in English and feared for their jobs, other Panamanians said we in Spanish and spoke of their long tradition and subtle culture; of the three tribes of Indians, the Cuñas, the Guaymíes and the Chocόes, only 3 per cent speak Spanish, and their we – spoken in their own tongues – is in opposition to the treaty. Alluding to the Canal (and in
Panama people alluded to nothing else) no one I heard ever said I. People held the identity and opinions of their particular group, and they did not venture far from their tribal areas. Like Gulliver, I was in transit; I went from group to group, noting down complaints in handwriting which grew ever more bewildered and uncertain.
Not everyone complained. A girl I met in Panama City said, ‘In most places you go, people say, “You should have been here last year.” They said that to me when I went to Brazil, then Peru, then Colombia. But no one says it in Panama. This is the time to be here.’
The Canal, and the Miraflores Locks, had been my first stop. But I wanted to know a bit more about the place. I spent an evening at the casino in the Holiday Inn, watching people lose money by the armful. Winning made them grimmer, since the gambler’s felt wish is to lose. They were pale, unsmiling, actually throwing their money down – and, say, those men at the blackjack table, hunched over diminishing towers of chips and gloomily flicking at playing cards: the congressmen! There were men in cowboy boots and ladies pulling hundred-dollar bills out of their cleavage and uproarious Americans being reprimanded by squinting croupiers in dainty suits because the Americans were spitting on the dice (‘Do me a favour!’ screamed one crap-shooter, and threw a pair of dice at the croupier). Gambling looked such a joyless addiction, and I had to leave –another minute would have turned me into a Marxist. The next day I took a closer look at the black tenements of Panama City; although their condition was dismal – broken windows, slumping balconies, blistered peeling paint on the wooden walls –they dated from the French occupation of Panama and retained some of the elegance of the original design. But it was not enough to hold my interest and the conversations I had with the aggrieved tenants told me only that this was yet another tribal area at odds with its neighbours.