'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 are 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 if it 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 Guaymies and the Chocóes, only 3% 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 /. 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.
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 wholejungle 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?'