by Paul Theroux
As the train approached Gatun, and stopped, I was back in Fort Lee, returned to a moment twenty-five years before, when I had watched with the same sense of fear and excitement the military buildings and the stunted trees in the red soil, the unaccountably bright flowers, the WACs, the yellow school bus, the row of olive-drab Fords, the baseball diamond and the black people, the Little League field, the cemetery, the young soldiers who looked aimless whenever they were not marching, the dust settling in the heat. The two worlds met; here it was rural Virginia, and still the Fifties, and the smell was the same and the memory so clear, I thought: The next stop must be Petersburg.
It was Mount Hope, but Mount Hope was a continuation of the same memory. It is not often that I have travelled so far and been able, so easily, to uncover a fragment of the past that had remained lost to me. And as in all recollection there is something that looks inexact, like the memory of the name-plate WHITE. The perspective of years allowed me to see how old and small that other world was, and how I had been fooled.
The spell was broken at Colón. Colón had a divided look I could never grow used to. It was colonial in such a naked way: the tenements of the poor on one side of the tracks – what passed for the native quarter; and the military symmetries of the imperial buildings on the other side, the yacht club, the offices, the houses set in gardens. Here the governors, there the governed. It is the old form of colonialism because, unlike the equally grasping multi-national corporations which are so often invisible, you can see at a glance from the appearance of things that you are in a colony, and the make of every car tells you that it is an American colony.
The tenements were like those I had seen in Panama City, decaying antiques. With a coat of paint and a dose of rust-remover they would have looked like the houses in New Orlean’s French Quarter or those in the older parts of Singapore. If Gatun and so much else in the Zone looked like Fort Lee, Virginia, circa 1953, what lay just outside it seemed like the hectic and faintly reeking commercial districts of pre-war Singapore – the sour tangs of the bazaar, the cloth and curio emporiums, the provisioners, the ships’ chandlers who, in Colón as in Singapore, were Indians and Chinese.
I had been told that the Indians in the Zone had come from India to work on the railway. It is not an easy fact to authenticate – workers are workers: they are the silent men in history books – but the labour supply in the building of the Canal was drawn from ninety-seven countries; India must have been one of them. I could not find any Indian in Colón who had come for this reason. Mr Gulchand seemed to be typical. He was a Sindhi, and a Hindu – he had a coloured portrait of the Mahatma in his shop. After the partition of India, the province of Sindh became part of Pakistan, and fearing Muslim rule, Mr Gulchand went to Bombay. It wasn’t home, but at least it was Hindu. He started an import-export business and, in the course of this enterprise, had occasion to deal with Filipinos. He visited the Philippines. He liked it well enough to move his business there in the Sixties. The Vietnam war created a brief boom in the Philip-pines. Mr Gulchand’s business prospered. His move accomplished several things: it estranged him from the Anglo-Indian sphere of influence and put him in close touch with Americans. And he learned to speak Spanish. He was now halfway across the world. Only the Pacific Ocean separated him from the emporium of Colón and the promise of greater wealth in Panama, more import-export, Central American connections and the city all Latin Americans regard as their metropolis: Miami. He had been in Colón for five years. He hated it. He longed for the more comprehensible disorder of Bombay, the more familiar anarchy.
‘Business is slack,’ said Mr Gulchand. He blamed the Canal Treaty. It was an old story: the colony about to collapse around the shopkeepers’ ears; recessional; bolting whites; prices down. I can’t give this stuff away.
What did he think of Colón?
‘Wiolent,’ said Mr Gulchand. ‘And darty.’
He told me to take my watch off. I said I would. Then, trying to find the post office, I asked a black man the way. ‘I will show you the way,’ he said. ‘But that,’ he went on, tapping my watch crystal, ‘you must remove it or you will lose it.’ So I took it off.
The shop-signs were variations on the same theme: Liquidation Sale, Everything Must Go!, Total Liquidation, Close-Down Sale Today. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ Mr Reiss had said in the Gorgas Mortuary, speaking of the treaty. But it was clear from these shop-signs in Colón that it would be ratified and these shops soon empty.
I asked another Indian what he would do if the treaty was ratified.
‘Find new premises,’ he said. ‘Other country.’
The Indians said the blacks were violent; the blacks said the Indians were thieves. But the blacks did not deny that some blacks were thieves. They blamed the young, the Rastas, the unemployed. Everyone in Colón looks unemployed, even the shopkeepers: not a customer in sight. But if business is slack – and it certainly seemed slack to me – it might be understandable. Look at the merchandise: Japanese pipes that look as if they’re for blowing soap-bubbles; computerized radios and ridiculously complicated cameras; dinner services for twenty-four and purple sofas; leather neckties, plastic kimonos, switchblades and bowie knives; and stuffed alligators in eight sizes, the smallest for $2, the largest – four feet long – for $65; stuffed armadilloes for $35, and even a stuffed toad, like a cricket ball with legs, for a dollar. And junk: letter-openers, onyx eggs, flimsy baskets, and pokerwork mats turned out by the thousand by the derelict Cuña Indians. Who needs this stuff?
‘It is not quality of merchandise,’ said another Hindu shopkeeper. ‘It is absence of customer. They are not coming.’
I was thirsty. I went into a bar and ordered a beer. A Panamanian policeman was standing near the juke-box. He pressed buttons. Stayin’ Alive soon filled the bar. He turned to me and said, ‘This is not a safe place.’
I went into the French Wax Museum. The bleeding head of Christ led me to think it might be devotional; and there was also a martyr in the window. Inside, it became more anatomical, with two hundred corpses and exhibits. There were fetuses in wax, and sex organs, Siamese twins, lepers, syphilitics and an entire Caesarean section. Know the truth about the transformation from a man to a woman! said the brochure. The exhibit was androgynous and yellow. See Cancer of the Liver, the Heart and Other Organs! See the Miracle of Birth! A note in the brochure said that this Wax Museum was operated to benefit the Panama Red Cross.
If I was to stay in Colón I would have to choose between the chaos and violence of the native quarter or the colonial antisepsis of the Zone. I took the easy way out, bought a ticket back to Panama City and boarded the 5:15. As soon as we pulled out of the station, the skies darkened and it began to rain. This was the Caribbean: it might rain anytime here. Fifty miles away, on the Pacific, it was the Dry Season; it was not due to rain for six weeks. The Isthmus may be narrow, but the coasts are as distinct as if a great continent lay between them. The rain came down hard and swept across the fields; it blackened the canal and wrinkled it with wind; and it splashed the sides of the coach and ran down the windows. With the first drops the passengers had shut the windows and now we sat perspiring, as if soaked by the downpour.
‘I said, “Where’s your ticket?” ’
It was the conductor, fussing down the aisle, using his Louisiana drawl on a black.
‘You cooperate with me, buddy – you’re on my train!’
He spoke in English. This, after all, was the Zone. But these were not Zonians – they were canal workers, most of them the blacks who had been reclassified as ‘Panamanian’. So it seemed especially incongruous for this American conductor, irritably tugging his peaked railway cap and busy with his ticket-punching, coming to rest before a Spanish-speaker with a ticket stub and saying, ‘That’ll be five cents more – fares went up a year ago.’
He moved along: another ticket problem. ‘Don’t give me that crap!’
At the height of the empire in the Dutch East Indies, men
just like this one – but Dutchmen – wore blue uniforms and ran the trams and trains through Medan. This was in North Sumatra, a world away from Amsterdam. But they had learned their trade in Amsterdam. They wore leather pouches and sold tickets and punched them and rang the tram-bells. Then the archipelago became Indonesia and most of the trains and all of the trams stopped running, because the Sumatrans and the Javanese had never run them.
You’re on my train: it was a colonial cry. But I would be doing this conductor a disservice if I did not say that after he had dealt with all the passengers he relaxed; he joked with a cackling black girl and he chatted with a family which filled three long seats. And for the amusement of the passengers hanging out of the window – they were now open: it had stopped raining three miles out of Colón – he chased five small boys who were playing on the platform at Frijoles. He stamped his feet and shouted, ‘Git! Git! Git! Git! Git! Git!’ Then he talked to the men who stood near the train holding bunches of fish they had caught in the lake, which was twenty feet from the railway line.
In Balboa and Panama City, the early evening baseball games had started in the parks; we passed three in a row, then another pair. And the American tourists, who had occupied every seat of the air-conditioned coach, tottered out of the train and walked across the platform to their air-conditioned bus. It struck me that we must have the most geriatric tourists in the world; and, even though they were treated like kindergarteners, they were curious about the world. For them, bless their yellow pants and blue shoes, travel was part of growing old.
All over the Zone it was Club-going Hour. At the officer’s mess and the VFW, the American Legion and the Elks, at the Church of God Servicemen’s Center, the Shriners Club, the Masons, the golf clubs, the Star of Eden Lodge No. 9, of the Ancient and Illustrious Star of Bethlehem, the Buffaloes, and the Moose, and at the Lord Kitchener Lodge No. 25, and the Company cafeteria in Balboa the day’s work was done and clubby colonials of the Zone were talking. There was only one subject, the treaty. It was seven o’clock in the Zone, but the year – who could tell? It was not the present. It was the past that mattered to the Zonian; the present was what most Zonians objected to, and they had succeeded so far in stopping the clock, even as they kept the canal running.
At Balboa High some students were waiting for it to grow dark enough so that in stealth they could drive nails again into the locks, and jam them, and prevent school from opening. At midnight the arts teacher suddenly remembered that she had left a kiln on and was afraid the school would burn down. She phoned the principal and he changed out of his pyjamas and checked. But there was no danger: the kiln had been left unplugged. Nor were the locks successfully jammed. The next day, school opened as usual, and all was well in the Zone. I was asked to stay longer, to go to a party, to discuss the treaty, to see the Indians. But my time was getting short; already it was March, and I had not yet set foot in South America. In a few days, there was a national election in Colombia, ‘and they’re expecting trouble,’ said Miss McKinven at the Embassy. These considerations, as Gulliver wrote, moved me to hasten my departure sooner than I intended.
13 The Expreso de Sol to Bogotá
When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, ‘Nowhere.’ Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness. For example, I could not remember why I had come to Barranquilla.
True, I had to fly somewhere from Panama – there is no road or rail link through the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia; but why I chose Barranquilla I did not know. Perhaps the name was printed in large type on the map; perhaps it had seemed important; perhaps someone had told me that it was the right place to go in order to catch the train to Bogotá. But none of these suppositions had much basis in fact. Barranquilla was inconvenient and filthy, and I was at an additional disadvantage in arriving in this rat-hole the day before the national senatorial elections. There would be riots, I was assured; mob violence was expected; farmers were being bussed in from the mountains – they had sold their votes for 200 pesos (about £2.50) and for this they got a free ride to the polling stations. The man I was talking to had no teeth. If one learns a foreign language one never quite reckons on speech defects; it was difficult for me to understand this man’s Spanish through his champings. But I got the message. For two days, no liquor would be sold; all the bars would be shut and, once polling had begun, no taxis or buses would be allowed to leave the city, which was near the mouth of the Magdalena River, on the Caribbean. You will have to wait, the man said. And while I waited I tried to think why I had come to Barranquilla. I drank soda water and five-cent cups of coffee. I started Boswell’s Life of Johnson under a palm tree in the hotel garden. I listened to the honking cars. Several times I walked through town and saw truckloads of supporters with the names of their candidates on their banners and tee-shirts, or much fuller trucks carrying armed soldiers. It looked as though armies were massing for battle. I retreated to sit under the palm tree with Boswell and tried to remember why I had not gone straight to Santa Marta, where the train leaves for Bogotá.
In my meanderings around Barranquilla I had met an American foreign service official. He felt that he had been marooned in the place; he ran the cultural centre; his name was Dudley Symes. On election day, he telephoned me at my hotel and asked whether I wanted to see the people voting. Was it safe? I asked.
‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I figure if we keep a very low profile, no one will bother us.’
I trimmed my moustache and put on a wrinkled short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers and my leakproof shoes: I would blend perfectly, I thought. But it was pointless. Dudley wore sandals and bright plaid Bermuda shorts, and his car, a great lumbering Chevrolet, was unlike any other I saw in Barranquilla. A low profile, he had said, but people stared at us wherever we went, and the car was nearly unmanageable on the narrow broken roads in the middle of town. Almost immediately we were in a traffic jam. And the people who had sold their votes, whose homeward-bound buses could not leave for another day, milled around wearing the paper hats of their particular candidate; they looked curiously into our car. There was shouting, and singing, and at various campaign headquarters – store-fronts draped in bunting – hundreds of supporters (tee-shirt, paper hat) chanted candidates’ names and awaited the results. (In the event, the votes were not correctly counted for two weeks.) The voters were clearly identified as supporting this party or that party; it would not have been hard for any of the opposing parties to pick a fight. But the soldiers were numerous, and the only blood-curdling sounds I heard were those of the twanging tin-drum music and braying voices – one party headquarters trying to drown out another.
Dudley manoeuvred his car down a back street, cursing the pot-holes and blowing his horn at the crowds. It was hot and humid; the faces of these people were shining with perspiration.
‘See any violence?’ said Dudley.
I said no.
‘These people,’ he said – and he might have been speaking about the boys who were now thumping the rear fenders of his car with their fists – ‘are known as “the happy people of Colombia”.’
Happy was not precisely the word I would have used. They looked hysterical; their voices were shrill; they wiped their faces on their campaign tee-shirts, darkening the face of the man already printed there; they cat-called from cars, and we saw one new car run smack into the rear of a jeep and drive it into a tree. The new car’s radiator burst and water dribbled into the street.
‘His daddy will buy him a new one,’ said Dudley.
‘Who calls them the happy people of Colombia?’ I asked.
‘Everyone,’ said Dudley. ‘That’s why nothing ever happens here. The government doesn’t do anything here. They don’t have to. They know the people are happy, so they don’t give them anything.’
Some of the cars, and all the buses and trucks, had thick bunches of palm fronds tied to the bumpers just ahead of the tyres. They looked like tropical decorations. They were no such thing. In elect
ion time, playful Colombians sprinkled broken glass and nails on the roads; a vehicle without the palm fronds would have its tyres punctured, and then the occupants could easily be robbed or intimidated. But if the palm fronds were tied correctly they swept the glass and nails aside.
‘Now if I was a little smarter,’ said Dudley, ‘I would have put some of those things on my car. I will, next time, if I live that long.’
Dudley was black. He had worked for a number of years in Nigeria and Mexico. He spoke Spanish with a drawl. He said Barranquilla was the worst place he had ever been, and he wondered sometimes if he would not be better off back home in Georgia.
‘You seen enough of this election?’
I said I had. And I had seen enough of Barranquilla. The city had no centre. It was no more than hundreds of dusty roads running at right angles; a traffic jam at every corner, a rally on every street; soldiers positioned at polling stations, policemen aimlessly tweeting their whistles. Music, and mobs. The editorial in the morning Chronicle had said, ‘Living in a democracy often makes one take its liberties for granted.’ This might have been a democracy – it certainly looked chaotic enough to be one. The voting was unreadably busy and the crowds in the streets looked as if they expected something momentous to happen.
But nothing happened. The next morning, all the parties claimed a victory of some sort. Perhaps that was the answer. In a dictatorship only one party wins; in a Latin American democracy all the parties win; and such victories can only end in squabbles. It was like a Latin American football game. The score, the playing, the strategy mattered very little; the mob satisfaction mattered most. And it had to be a free-for-all because, no matter what happened, Barranquilla would remain Barranquilla. ‘I once went to Buenaventura,’ an American said to me. ‘Some-one told me that Buenaventura was the worst place in Colombia, and I couldn’t believe that anything could be worse than Barranquilla. It was pretty bad, but it wasn’t anything like this.’