by Paul Theroux
One morning I gave a lecture at Canal Zone College. The subject was travel, and how strange it was to speak of the world and the romance of distance to people who could not conquer their timidity long enough to endure the short drive to Panama City, and who regarded the town of Colón just up the road as more savage and dangerous than a whole jungle of Amazonian head-hunters.
After the lecture I fell into conversation with a Zonian lady who said, ‘I don’t know what you expected to find here in the Zone, but I can tell you we live a very quiet life.’
That we again; and yet it was not the mob pronoun I had been hearing, but a more intimate word, spoken with a kind of marital tenderness and defiance. She was talking about her family. They had come down from Pennsylvania, initially for two years, but they had liked the Zone and decided to stay. After eleven years the place still had an attraction, though the Company was often oppressive in the way it managed their lives.
‘And what do you do?’ I asked.
‘It’s not me – it’s my husband. He’s the head of the Gorgas Mortuary. Don’t laugh.’
‘I’m not laughing,’ I said. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘You think it’s interesting?’ She had started to laugh. I could not contain my curiosity, my enthusiasm for visiting the mortuary; and when I thought I had convinced her that I really did want a tour, and as we were driving to the old grey building, she kept saying, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
John Reiss was a tall stout mortician with a pink complexion and a friendly manner. His wife had said, ‘He’s wonderful with bereaved relatives – he just calms them down, I don’t know how he does it.’ He was soft-spoken and precise, interested in his work – interested particularly in embalming – and proud of the fact that corpses were sent to him from all over Central and South America. Like many other Zonians he was a member of the Elks’ Club, the V.F.W., the Rotary, but his mortician’s interest perhaps made him more of a joiner than most: a mortician is a public figure in America, like a mayor or a fire chief, and the Zone was a version of America. But Mr Reiss was also a member of the local barber shop quartet, and there was in his voice a kind of melodious croon, a singer’s modulation, a mortician’s concerned coo.
‘To start off with,’ said Mr Reiss in the Coffin Room, an instructional whisper in his voice, ‘here we have the coffins themselves. If you were a local employee you got this coffin.’
It was a plain silvery steel coffin, with unornamented handles, a buffed metal box the length of a man and the depth of a horse trough. It was shut, the lid fastened. It was difficult for me to see this closed coffin and not to feel a distinct uneasiness about what it might contain.
‘And if you were an American you got this one.’
This one was bigger and a bit fancier. There were rosettes on the side and simulated carving on the corners of the lid, some romanesque scrollwork, leaf clusters and the sort of handles you see on doors in Louisburg Square in Boston. Apart from the foliage, and the size, I wondered whether there was any other difference between this coffin and the silver one.
‘This is much more expensive,’ said Mr Reiss. ‘It’s hermetically sealed, and look at the difference in the colours.’
Of course, this one was goldy bronze, the other was silver. They matched the status of the deceased. It was a racial distinction. From about the turn of the century until very recently, race was expressed by the Panama Canal Company not in terms of black and white but by the designations gold and silver. The euphemism was derived from the way workers were paid: the unskilled workers, most of them black, were paid in silver; the skilled workers, nearly all white Americans, were paid in gold. The terms applied to all spheres of life in the Zone; there were gold schools, and silver schools, gold houses and silver houses, and so on, to gold coffins and silver coffins, the former hermetically sealed, the latter – like the silver house – leaky. So, even in his casket, the canal employee could be identified, and long after he had turned to dust, the evidence of his race lost in decay, his remains could be disinterred and you would know from the hue of that box whether the grit in that winding sheet had once been a white man or a black man. It must have been some satisfaction for the Company to know that, however evenly the grass covered these graves, the colour line that had been the rule in schools and housing (and even water fountains and toilets, the post office and cafeterias), was still observed beneath the ground.
‘Nowadays,’ said Mr Reiss, ‘everyone gets this good coffin. That’s why the mortuary loses money. These things cost an awful lot.’
Upstairs was the Receiving Room. There were refrigerators here, and on the wall of the bare flint-grey room the large steel drawers that most people know from the morgue scenes in movies, the floor-to-ceiling arrangement that resembles nothing so much as stacks of over-sized filing cabinets.
Mr Reiss’s hand went to one drawer. He balanced himself by gripping the handle; underneath it was a label: a name, a date.
‘I have a man in here,’ he said, tugging as he spoke. ‘Died a month ago. We don’t know what to do with him. From California. No family, no friends.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t open that drawer,’ I said.
He pushed it gently and released it. ‘No one wants to claim him.’
It was cold in the room; I shivered and noticed my skin was prickling with gooseflesh. This was the coldest I had been since leaving the sleet storm in Chicago.
‘Shall we move on?’ I said.
But Mr Reiss was reading a new label. ‘Yes,’ he said, tapping another drawer. ‘This is a little boy. Only six years old.’ His fingers were under the handle. ‘He’s been there since last June – anything wrong?’
‘I feel chilly.’
‘We’ve got to keep the temperature down in here. What was I saying? Oh, yes.’ he said, glancing at his hand, at the label, ‘he’s going to be here until next June. But he’ll be all right.’
‘All right? In what sense?’
Mr Reiss smiled gently; it was professional pride. ‘I embalmed him myself – he’s all ready to go. Well,’ he went on – and now he was speaking to the drawer, ‘just to make sure, I look at him about once a month. I open him up. Check him over.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Dehydration.’
On our way to the Cremation Room, I said, ‘For a minute, I thought you were going to open one of those drawers back there.’
‘I was,’ said Mr Reiss. ‘But you didn’t want me to.’
‘I think I would have keeled over.’
‘That’s what everyone says. But it’s something you should see. A dead person is just a dead person. It happens to everybody. Death is one of the things you have to accept. It’s nothing to be frightened of.’ This was obviously the tone he adopted with the bereaved; and he was convincing. I felt ignorant and super-stitutious. But what if it had frightened me? How to erase the image of a death-shrunken six-year-old from my mind? I was afraid that, seeing it, I would be scared for the rest of my life.
The Cremation Room was hot: the air was stale and dusty and I could feel the heat across the room from the furnaces, which were larger versions of the old coal burners of my childhood. The heat had reddened the iron doors and they were coated with fine powder. Shafts of sunlight at the windows lighted tiny particles of dust which the hot air kept in turbulent motion.
‘The reason it’s so hot in here,’ said Mr Reiss, ‘is because we had a cremation just this morning.’ He went to the side of one of the furnaces and jerked open the iron door. ‘Local fellow,' he said, peering in. He pushed at some white smouldering flakes with a poker. ‘Just ashes and a little bone.’
There were two aluminium barrels near the furnaces. Mr Reiss lifted the lid of one – an ash barrel. He reached in, groping in the ashes and took out a fragment of bone. It was a dry chalky hunk of splinters, bleached to sea-shell whiteness by the heat and dusted with grey biscuit-flakes of ash; and it had a knob on the end, like a prehistoric half of a ball-peen
hammer.
‘These are just odds and ends mostly.’
‘That looks like a femur.’
‘Good for you,’ said Mr Reiss. ‘That’s what it is. How’d you know that?’
‘I’m a failed medical student.’
‘You shouldn’t have failed – you certainly know your bones!’ Mr Reiss closed his hand on the bone and squashed it like a cookie, reducing it to crumbs: I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ‘We get a lot of amputations. This was a whole leg.’
He dropped the dust back into the barrel and clapped crumbs from his hands. I looked into the barrel and saw scorched safety pins and scraps of mummified cloth.
‘There’s a teaching hospital next door. They send us things to cremate. After the lessons are over. They’re in terrible shape – brains removed, all cut open and dissected. Hardly recognize some of them.’
There were no other people in these mortuary rooms, no live ones. The emptiness, the absence of voices and furniture, made it seem like a mausoleum, and I had the feeling I had been locked in, sealed up with this soft-spoken guide who treated coffins and dehydrating corpses and friable thigh bones with an ordinariness that chastened me and made me wonder if perhaps in his casual way he was successfully concealing some horror from me. But Mr Reiss was saying, ‘We’re losing money hand over fist – because of the pay-grades. The hardware and coffins are so expensive we can’t even cover our costs. The local workers are getting those real nice – ah, here we are,’ he said, interrupting himself at the threshold of another empty room, ‘the Embalming Room.’
There were four sloping sinks in the centre of the room, and beneath them rubber hoses draining into the floor. There were grey marble slabs as well, arranged as tables, and two ceiling fans and a strong odour of disinfectant.
‘We’ve been asking for air-conditioning for years,’ said Mr Reiss.
‘I can’t imagine why,’ I said. ‘It’s quite cool in here.’
He laughed. ‘It’s about eighty degrees!’
Strange: I was shivering again.
‘But they won’t give it to us,’ he said. ‘Those fans aren’t enough. It can get pretty smelly in here when we’re working.’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you what you call the corpses,’ I said. ‘Do you ever refer to it as “the loved one”? Or the body, the victim, the corpse, or what?’
‘ “The loved one” is what they say in books,’ said Mr Reiss. ‘But they’re just exaggerating. People have a lot of funny ideas about morticians. Jessica Mitford – that book. She didn’t go many places. We’re not really like that. “The remains” – that’s what we usually call it.’
He stepped to one of the deep sinks and went on, ‘We put the remains on the table here and slide it into the sink. Then we raise an artery. The carotid’s a good one – I like the carotid myself. Drain it completely. Blood goes all down there, through the pipe’ – he was speaking to the sink and using his hand to indicate the flow of the blood – ‘into the floor. Then – see that hose? – we fill it with embalming fluid. It takes time and you have to be careful. It’s harder than it looks.’
I was mumbling, making notes with frozen fingers. I said I thought it was interesting. Mr Reiss seized on this.
‘It is interesting! We get every type in here. Why, just recently,’ he said, beating his palm on the embalming sink in emphatic excitement, ‘a bus went off the bridge – you know the big bridge across the Canal? Thirty-eight people died and we had them all, right in here. Boy, that was something. Planes, car crashes, drownings, murders on ships, people who get mugged in Colón. Take a murder on a ship passing through the Canal – that’s real tricky, but we handle it. And Indians? They drink and then they try to paddle their canoes and they drown. We get every type you can mention. Interesting is the word for it.’
I had gone silent. But Mr Reiss remained by the sink.
‘I’ve been down here in the Zone for eleven years,’ he said, ‘a mortician the whole time.’ Now he spoke slowly and wonderingly, ‘And you know what? I’ve had something different every single day. Want to see the Autopsy Room?’
I looked at my watch.
‘Golly,’ he said, looking at his own. ‘It’s past one o’clock. I don’t know about you, but I’m real hungry.’
The Elks kitchen was shut. We went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2537 and, ordering chop suey and iced tea, Mr Reiss said, ‘But there’s no comparison with the States service-wise. You don’t get the attention here that they offer there. In the States you get a real nice service and big cars and a little ceremony. Here, all we give you is a hearse.’
‘And an embalming.’ I said.
‘I’ve always been interested in embalming,’ he said.
The chop suey came, a large helping of wet vegetables, a dish of noodles. There were very few other diners in the V.F.W. cafeteria, but, clean and dark and air-conditioned, it was like any post in America. I asked Mr Reiss how he had become a mortician.
‘Usually, it’s a family-type business. Your father’s a mortician, so you become one, too. So I’m very unusual in a way – my family wasn’t in the business.’
‘Then you just decided, like that, to be a mortician?’
Mr Reiss swallowed a mouthful of chop suey and patting his lips with his napkin said, ‘I always wanted to be a funeral director – as far back as I can remember. Know something? It’s the earliest memory I have. I must have been about six years old when my old granny died. They put me upstairs and gave me a candy to keep me quiet. They were liquorice things in the shape of hats – derby hats and Stetsons. Well, I was upstairs – this was in Pennsylvania – and I started yelling and I said, “I want to see Granny!” “No,” they said, “keep him upstairs, give him some more candy.” But I kept yelling and they finally gave in and let me come down. My cousin took me by the hand and we went over to Granny in her casket. See, they had the funerals in houses then. When I saw her I asked all sorts of questions, like “How to they do it?” and “Who did this?” and so forth. I was real interested. And I decided then what I wanted to be – a funeral director. When I was nine or so I was sure that’s what I wanted to be.’
I could not help imagining a classroom in Pennsylvania, and a curious teacher leaning over a quiet pink-faced boy, and asking, ‘Tell me, Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?’
Inevitably, our talk turned to the Canal Treaty. I asked what would happen to him and the Gorgas Mortuary if the Treaty was ratified.
‘I think we’ll be all right, whatever happens. I don’t know what’s going to happen about the Treaty, but if they take us over I hope they keep us on. Most of us love this Canal, and we do a good job at the mortuary. I think they’ll just rehire us. Everyone’s worried, but why? They can’t run the Canal without us. And I’m real interested in staying here.’
That night I was invited to a dinner. ‘You’re going to have to sing for your supper,’ the host said. I asked him what I should talk about. He said it didn’t matter very much – perhaps something about writing? ‘No matter what you say,’ he said, ‘the only thing they’re really interested in is what you think about the treaty.’ I said it was my favourite subject.
I talked to the assembly of Panamanian writers and artists about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. No one had read it and so it was like speaking about a book which had just appeared, a candidate for the best-seller list, as fresh and full of news as a spring morning in Boston. They listened with rapt attention to the plot, the sequence of atrocities, the muffled music of the thrilling ending; and they looked at me with the near-sighted commiserating expressions I had seen on the faces of my students in faraway lecture halls, as I attempted to explain how, with such clever knots and loops, Poe had made of such stray pieces of string such a convincing hangman’s noose.
‘I am interested to know,’ said a fellow afterwards, at question-time, ‘what your position is with regard to the Panama Canal Treaty. Would you mind telling us?’
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�Not at all,’ I said. I said they were welcome to their opinion of the Zonians, but that they could easily underestimate the sentiment Zonians had for the Canal. It was not an age when people were very attached to their jobs, but the Zonians were proud of the work they had done and were dedicated to the running of the Canal. No amount of Panamanian nationalism or flag waving could compare with the technical skill it took to get forty ships a day through the Canal safely. I admitted that Zonians were fairly ignorant of Panama, but that Panamanians had little idea of the complexities of life in the Zone and the sort of fervour Zonians had.
This view brought smiles of disagreement from the audience, but, as no one challenged me, I went on to say that in essence the Canal Zone was colonial territory, and that one could not really understand any colony unless he had read Frankenstein and Prometheus Bound.
Over dinner, I talked with an elderly architect. He also wrote stories, he said, and most of his stories were satires about the Chief of Government and Commander of the National Guard, General Omar Torrijos. What did Torrijos think of his stories? He had wanted to ban them, said the architect, but this was impossible because the stories had won a literary prize.
I said, ‘There are people who think that Torrijos is a mystic.’
‘He is a demagogue, not a mystic,’ said the architect. ‘A showman – very astute, but full of tricks.’
‘So you think the Americans should keep the Canal?’
‘No. I will tell you. The Canal is every Panamanian’s dream. Just as you have your American dream, this is ours. But it is all we have. The real tragedy is that it will come to us while Torrijos is in power. He will take credit for it, you see. He will say, “Look what I have done! I have gotten our Canal back!” ’
That was probably true. The American government, through an aid programme, had built a number of apartment houses just outside Panama City. It was public housing, a sop to the thousands of homeless Panamanians. Officially, the apartments were known as ‘Torrijos Houses’. It would have been far more just to give them the name of their real benefactor, the American tax-payer. I explained this to the architect and said I had more right than Torrijos to have my name on the apartment houses, since I paid American taxes and the General did not.