'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.
'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 spie,' 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 1950's 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.'