The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  ‘But you put him in power.’

  ‘I did not put General Torrijos in power,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, the United States government put him in power. They wanted him there so that they could negotiate with him. They would have had a much harder time dealing with a democratically elected government. It is well-known that Torrijos has made concessions that a democratically elected leader would never have made.’

  ‘Didn’t Torrijos hold a referendum on the treaty?’

  ‘That was a bluff. No one knew what it was about. It proved nothing. The people have had no say whatsoever in this treaty. And, look, the United States is giving Torrijos fifty million dollars for his army alone! Why? Because he demanded it. They have given much less to Somoza in Nicaragua and he has stayed in power.’

  ‘So you’re stuck with Torrijos?’

  ‘No,’ said the architect. ‘I think that when the United States gets what it wants from him they will throw him away – like trash.’

  The architect was becoming quite heated. He had forgotten his food; he was gesturing with one hand and mopping his face with the handkerchief in his other hand.

  ‘Do you want to know what Torrijos is really like?’ he said. ‘He is like a boy who has crashed his first car. That car is our republic. Now he is waiting for a second car to crash. The second car is the treaty. What I say to Torrijos is, “Forget about the car – learn how to drive!” ’

  ‘You should eat something,’ I said.

  ‘We are not used to him,’ he said, glancing at his plate. ‘This dictatorship is strange to us. Since we got our independence in 1903 he is the first dictator we’ve had. I have never known anyone like him before. Mr Theroux, we are not used to dictators.’

  I was so interested in what the architect had said that I made a point, a few days later, of speaking with a Panamanian lawyer who had helped to draft the legal aspects of the treaty. I concealed the architect’s name: the lawyer was a close friend of Torrijos and I did not want the man thrown into jail for uttering seditious opinions. The lawyer listened to the arguments and then said in Spanish, ‘Rubbish!’

  He continued in English, saying, ‘Omar wasn’t put there by the gringos.’

  I found his phraseology objectionable. But the American Ambassador was present. I could not say, ‘Don’t call me a gringo and I won’t call you a spic,’ to this swarthy citizen of Panama.

  ‘In 1967 none of the elected people could agree on a draft treaty,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘Is that why General Torrijos overthrew the government in 1968?’ I said, averting my eyes from the Ambassador.

  The lawyer was snorting. ‘Some people,’ he said slowly, ‘think the attempted coup against Torrijos in 1969 was instigated by the CIA. What would your friend say to this?’

  I said, ‘If the coup was unsuccessful the CIA was probably not behind it. Ha-ha.’

  ‘We make mistakes occasionally,’ said the Ambassador, but I was not very sure what he meant by that.

  ‘Torrijos showed great courage in signing the treaty,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘What courage?’ I said. ‘He signs and he gets the Canal. That’s not courage, it’s opportunism.’

  ‘Now you’re talking like your friend,’ said the lawyer. ‘He is obviously of the extreme Left.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, he’s rather conservative.’

  ‘Same thing,’ said the lawyer, and walked away.

  My last task, before I took the train to Colón, was to give a lecture at Balboa High School. Mr Dachi, the Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy, thought this might be a good idea: the Embassy had never sent a speaker to Balboa High. But I was not an official visitor; the State Department wasn’t paying my way, and there was no reason why the traditional hostility the Zonians felt for the Embassy should be directed towards me. Out of friendship for Mr Dachi (whom I had met in Budapest) I agreed to give the lecture. The American Embassy man who accompanied me said that he preferred to remain anonymous: it was a rowdy place.

  Everyone who went to an American high school in the 1950s has been to Balboa High. With its atmosphere of simmering anarchy – the sort of anarchy that takes the form of debagging first-year students in the john or running a Mickey Mouse pennant up the flagpole – and a devotion to spit-balls, sneakers, crew-cuts, horsing around in the gym, questing after intellectual mediocrity in the pages of literary anthologies (‘Thornton Wilder has been called the American Shakespeare’) and yet distrusting excellence because anything unusual must be a flaw (if you wear glasses you’re a brain and known throughout the school as ‘Einstein’), taking ‘science’ because that is what the Russians do and using it as an opportunity for leering at anatomical drawings in the biology book, regarding education as mainly social, coming to terms with sweaty palms and pimples, praising the quarterback, mocking the water-boy – yes, Balboa High was familiar to me. The current craze for rock-and-roll made it seem even more of a throw-back: Elvis read the motto on one tee-shirt, and on another Buddy Holly.

  To confirm my impression I went into Boys and looked around. It was empty but the air was whiffy with illicit cigarette smoke, and on the walls: Balboa is Number One, America’s Great and, repeatedly, Panama Sucks.

  I had not been inside an American high school for twenty years; how strange it was that the monkey house from which I had graduated had been reassembled, down to its last brick and home-room bell and swatch of ivy, here in Central America. And I knew in my bones what my reaction would have been at Medford High if it had been announced that, instead of Latin at ten o’clock, there would be an assembly: a chance to fart around!

  It was probably good-natured unruliness, the buzz, the yakking, the laughing, the poking and paper-rattling. Half the student body of 1,285 was there in the memorial auditorium. The microphone – of course! – gave off a locust-like whine and now and then cut out entirely, making my voice a whisper. I watched the mob of tubby and skinny students and saw a teacher hurry across an aisle, shove her way along a row of seats and, rolling the magazine she held into a truncheon, smack a giggling boy on the head.

  The principal introduced me. He was booed the moment he approached the lectern. I took my place and was applauded, but as the applause died away the booing increased. My subject was travel. ‘I don’t think they can take more than about twenty minutes,’ the principal had told me; but after ten minutes the murmuring in the audience had nearly drowned my words. I continued to speak, glancing at my watch and then brought the proceedings to an end. Any questions?

  ‘How much money do you make?’ asked a boy in the front row.

  ‘What’s it like in Africa?’ asked a girl.

  ‘Why bother to take a train all that way?’ was the last question. ‘I mean, if it takes so wicked long?’

  I said, ‘Because you can take a six-pack of beer in your compartment and guzzle it and by the time you’ve sobered up you’ve arrived.’

  This seemed to satisfy them. They howled and stamped and then booed me loudly.

  ‘Your, um, students,’ I said to the principal afterwards, ‘are rather, um –’

  ‘They’re real nice kids,’ he said, thwarting my attempt to be critical. ‘But I thought when I came down here that I’d find some real sophisticated kids. This is a foreign country – maybe they’d be cosmopolitan, I figured. The funny thing is, they’re less sophisticated than the kids back home.’

  ‘Ah, yes, unsophisticated,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help noticing that they’ve dumped red paint on the bust of Balboa in front of your school.’

  ‘That’s the school colour,’ he said.

  ‘Do they study Panama’s history?’

  This gave him a pause. He thought a moment and then said uncertainly, ‘No, but when they’re in the sixth grade they have a few classes in social studies.’

  ‘Good old social studies!’

  ‘But Panama history – it’s not what you’d call a subject or anything like that.’

  I said, ‘How long have
you been here?’

  ‘Sixteen years,’ he said. ‘I consider this my home. Some people here have houses in the States. They go home every summer. I don’t do that. I plan to stay here. Back in 1964 a teacher of ours ran away – he thought it was the end. Remember the flag-burning? If he had stayed he would have had nearly thirty years service and a good pension. But he didn’t. I’m going to see what happens here. You never know – this treaty business is far from settled.’

  Another teacher, a young woman, had wandered over to hear what the principal was saying. When he finished, she said, ‘This isn’t home for me. I’ve been here ten years and I’ve always felt, well, temporary. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and open the curtains and see those palm trees and I think, “Oh, heavens!” ’

  ‘What’d you think of the students?’ asked a male teacher, smiling, as he accompanied me out of the building.

  ‘Pretty noisy,’ I said.

  ‘They were behaving themselves,’ he said. ‘I was surprised – I expected trouble. They’ve been raising hell recently.’

  Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of glass breaking, and youthful laughter, and a teacher’s exasperated yell.

  It was the high school students who nick-named this train ‘The Balboa Bullet’. Like the canal, it is American in character, of solid appearance, efficiently-run and well-maintained. Boarding at Balboa Heights you could not be blamed for thinking that this was the old train to Worcester. In the way tickets are sold and conductors in pill-box hats punch them and hand you a seat-stub (Keep This Check in Sight) it is slightly old-fangled and very dependable. But that too is like the Canal: both Canal and railway have worn well, lasting through the modern age without having to be modernized. It travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific in under an hour and a half, and it is nearly always on time.

  I had been in Panama long enough to be able to recognize some of the landmarks – ‘The Building’ overlooking Stevens Circle, the mansion houses on Balboa Heights, and Fort Clayton which has the look of a maximum security prison. Most of the houses had a monotonous sameness – the two trees, the flower-bed, the boat in the breezeway. There are no pedestrians on the side-walks – in most places there are no pavements. Only the servants lounging at kitchen doors break the monotony and hint at life being lived.

  The first stop was Miraflores: ‘Mirror-floors,’ in the corrupt Zonian pronunciation. And then the Canal drops behind a hill and does not reappear until Pedro Miguel where, at that set of locks, there are dredgers whose shape and smoke-stacks gave them the look of old Mississippi riverboats.

  The train, unlike any other train in Latin America, contains a cross-section of the country’s society. In the air-conditioned cars are the American army officers, the better-paid Zonians, tourists, and the businessmen from France and Japan who, at this crucial time, have come down to make a killing in real estate or imports. I was in the non-air-conditioned car by preference, with an ill-assorted group of Panamanians and Zonians, enlisted men, canal workers on the afternoon shift, blacks in velvet caps and some with Rastafarian dreadlocks and octoroons in pig-tails and whole families – black, white and all the intermediate racial hues.

  In the air-conditioned car the passengers were looking out of the windows, marvelling at the Canal; but here in the cheaper seats many of the passengers were asleep and no one seemed to notice that we were passing through woods which thickened and, shadier and with hanging vines, turned into half-tame rainforest. It became jungle, but it remained to the east; on the west, next to the Canal, there was a golf course, with brown tussocky fairways and forlorn golfers marching towards the rough – snakes and scorpions plague the duffers on this course. There are no billboards, no signs at all on the roads, no litter, no hamburger stands or petrol stations: this is an American suburb in apotheosis, the triumph of banality, a permanent encampment of no-nonsense houses and no-nonsense railway stations and no-nonsense churches, and even no-nonsense prisons, for here, in Gamboa, is the Canal Zone Penitentiary and it looks no better or worse than the barracks at Fort Clayton or the Zonian houses at Balboa. The severity is given emphasis by a policeman in a state trooper’s Stetson leaning against the fender of his squad car, filing his nails.

  Only in the tunnels was I reminded that I was in Central America: people screamed.

  Out of the tunnel deeper jungle began, tree jammed next to tree, vine creeping on vine, pathless and dark. It bears no relation to the Canal; it is primeval jungle, teeming with birds. That is the margin of the Zonian’s world, where Panama resumes after the interrupting ribbon of the Zone. And it is in its wildness as unreal as the military manicure of the Zone. It does not matter that there are alligators and Indians there, because there are puppy-dogs and policemen here, and everything you need to ignore the jungle that does not stop until the Andes begin.

  At Culebra we crossed the continental divide, and two ships were passing in the Cut. For these two ships to be sliding sleepily along, seven years of digging were necessary; it was, said Lord Bryce, ‘the greatest liberty ever taken with nature’. The details are in David McCullough’s canal history, The Path Between The Seas: to dig nine miles and remove 96 million cubic yards of earth it cost $90 million; 61 million pounds of dynamite were used to blast open the canal, and much of it was used right here at Culebra. But it was a hot sunny afternoon; the birds were singing; Culebra seemed little more than a natural river in the tropics. The Canal’s history is unimaginable from what it is possible to see in the Zone; most of it is underwater, in any case. Bunau-Varilla’s remark that ‘the cradle of the Panama Republic’ was Room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City is true, but seems, like all the other historical details connected with the Canal, monstrous and fanciful.

  And what could be odder than the sight of a great sea-going ship in the jungle? Inland, swamps and lagoons were more frequent, and then the lake began. Gatun Lake was formed by the Canal; until the sluice gates opened in 1914 there was only a narrow river, the Chagres. Now there is a vast lake, bigger than Moosehead Lake in Maine. Near Frijoles, a cool breeze blew across it and whitened the water and made it choppy. I could see Barro Colorado Island. As water filled the valley to create the lake the animals made for Barro Colorado, the birds flew to its trees, and so this hill was turned into an ark. It remains a wild-life sanctuary.

  All the transistor radios – there were five – in my car were playing a current hit, Stayin’ Alive, as the train crossed the causeway from Monte Liro to the Gatun side. It was like being in Louisiana, not merely because of the blacks and their radios and that music; but most Zonians had been recruited out of New Orleans, and this passage was practically identical to crossing the long lacustrine bridge on Lake Pontchartrain on the Chicago train called, not entirely by coincidence, ‘The Panama Limited’. The islands in Gatun Lake are so young they still look like hilltops in flood-time, but there is no time to examine them. Here, the train does sixty, going clickety-click across the causeway. I regretted that it was not going farther, that I could not simply sit where I was, puffing my pipe, and be taken to Colombia and Ecuador. But no good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough.

  The last set of locks at Gatun, and the surrounding buildings, the camp, the houses, the military signs – all this jogged a memory in me I thought I had lost. It put my Panama experience into perspective. I had felt at Balboa High a familiar melancholy. It had been like my high school. But one American high school is much like another; they all have a timeless gamesmanship, a pretence of study and a rather comic look of skirmish between student and teacher. And the atmosphere is always the same, the smell of textbook glue and paper, corridor wax, chalk dust and sneaker rubber; the distant strongbox clang of locker-doors, the shouts and giggles. It was no aid to perception to be in Balboa High.

  But Gatun moved me. Gatun was a piece of my past I thought I had lost; I had forgotten it, and it was not until we passed through that I realized how special it was. Excep
t for this trip, the memory might have been irrecoverable. Round about 1953, when I was twelve and skinny and too near-sighted to catch a baseball, my uncle – an army surgeon – did me the favour of inviting me to spend the summer with him and my aunt and cousins at Fort Lee in Virginia. He was an officer. Punished-looking privates picking up gum-wrappers at the roadside used to salute his car, even when my aunt was driving it – saluting the insignia, I suppose. We were always going to the pool when this happened, to the Fort Lee Officers Open Mess. We usually went to the pool. There was a boy my age there, named Miller. He had a yellow stain on his swimming trunks. ‘That’s pickle juice,’ he said. ‘I spilled it in Germany.’ It seemed an amazing explanation, but I believed him: he owned a German bayonet. Miller had been in Virginia long enough to ignore the heat. I had never known such temperatures. I volunteered to caddy for my uncle, but after six holes I had to sit in the shade and wait for him to return for the thirteenth, which was nearby. I tried to acclimatize myself like Miller, but invariably I ended up in the shade of a tree. My uncle said I probably had dropsy. ‘This is my nephew,’ he would say to his golf partner. ‘He’s got dropsy.’ The nickname ‘Dropsy’ dogged me throughout the summer. Fort Lee was an army camp, but it did not match the stereotype I had seen in war movies; it looked like a state prison that was being used as a country club. Apart from the soldiers – saluting, saluting – there were blacks, lurking everywhere, gardening, idling at the Tastee-Freez ice-cream parlour, walking down the unshaded roads, driving the DDT spraying truck which tore through the back yards leaving a cloud of poison as pretty as fog and, afterwards, piles of dead grass-hoppers. The woods were thin and piney, the earth redder than any I had ever seen, the houses cool (my aunt had ‘coffee mornings’). At the restaurants near the camp there were small rectangular signs near the doors, like the tin name-plates in Boston that said DUFFY or JONES; but here, the name –I innocently believed it was a name – was always WHITE. A train ran nearby, to Hopewell and Petersburg; the insects were as loud in the daytime as at night, the buildings pale yellow, with red-tile roofs, and fences, and stencilled signs – like this.