'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 trans formation 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 ofBirthl 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 officers 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 once 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 BOGOTA
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 Barran-quilla.
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.