To the Ends of the Earth (18 page)

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “All you did was go on honeymoon, right?”

“Ten days,” said Mr. Thornberry. “It was supposed to be two weeks, but she couldn’t take the silence. Too quiet for her.”

“And then she wanted alimony?”

“She knew my sister had left me a lot of money. So she went ahead and sued me.”

“What did you do?”

Mr. Thornberry grinned. It was the first real smile I had seen on his face the whole afternoon. He said, “What did I do? I countersued her. For fraud. She, she had a friend—a man. He had called her up when we were in Hawaii. She told me it was her brother. Sure.”

He was still looking out the window, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was chuckling. “I didn’t have to do a
thing after that. She gets on the witness stand. The judge asks her, ‘Why did you marry this man?’ She says, ‘He told me he had a lot of money!’ He told me he had a lot of money! Incriminated herself, see? She was laughed out of court. I gave her five grand and was glad to get rid of her.” Almost without pausing he said: “Palm trees,” then, “Pig,” “Fence,” “Lumber,” “More morning glories—Capri’s full of them.” “Black as the ace of spades,” “American car.”

The hours passed; Mr. Thornberry spoke without letup. “Pool table,” “Must be on welfare,” “Bicycle,” “Pretty girl,” “Lanterns.”

I had wanted to push him off the train, but after what he had told me I pitied him. Maybe the nurse had sat beside him like this; maybe she had thought,
If he says that one more time I’ll scream
.

I said, “When was this abortive honeymoon?”

“Last year.”

I saw a three-story house, with a veranda on each story. It was gray and wooden and toppling, and it reminded me of the Railway Hotel I had seen in Zacapa. But this one looked haunted. Every window was broken and an old steam locomotive was rusting in the weedy front yard. It might have been the house of a plantation owner—there were masses of banana trees nearby. The house was rotting and uninhabited, but from the remainder of the broken fence and the yard, the verandas and the barn, which could have been a coach house, it was possible to see that long ago it had been a great place, the sort of dwelling lived in by tyrannical banana tycoons in the novels of Asturias. In the darkening jungle and the heat, the decayed house looked fantastic, like an old ragged spider’s web, with some of its symmetry still apparent.

Mr. Thornberry said, “That house. Costa Rican gothic.”

I thought:
I saw it first
.

“Brahma bull,” said Mr. Thornberry. “Ducks.” “Greek.” “Kids playing.” Finally, “Breakers.”

I
T WAS
S
AVE
O
UR
C
ANAL
D
AY
. T
WO
U
NITED
S
TATES
C
ONGRESSMEN
had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, “Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!”). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75 percent of the United States was against the Panama Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise—there was a demonstration, too—little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn’t care. She had enjoyed the rally: “We’ve been feeling left out, as if everyone were against us.”

The Zonians, three thousand workers for the Panama Canal Company and their families, saw the treaty as a sellout; why should the canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell,
It’s our canal!

“Want to know the trouble with these people?” said an American political officer at the embassy. “They can’t decide whether the canal is a government department or a company or an independent state.”

Whatever it was it was certainly a lost cause; but it was no less interesting for that. Few places in the world can
match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status, or in the cloudiness of its future. The canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius, and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate—they want the canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the canal was dug. If justice were to be done, the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubdubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however—when they become especially frenzied—often burn their Stars and Stripes, and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. When a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.

It is, by common consent, a company town. There is little in the way of personal freedom in the Zone. I am not talking about the liberal guarantees of freedom of speech or assembly, which are soothing abstractions but seldom used; I mean, the Zonian has to ask permission before he may paint his house another color or even shellac the baseboard in his bathroom. If he wishes to asphalt his driveway he must apply in writing to the Company; but he will be turned down: only pebbles are permitted. The Zonian is living in a Company house; he drives on Company roads, sends his children to Company schools, banks at the Company bank, borrows money from the Company credit union, shops at the Company store (where the low prices are
pegged to those in New Orleans), sails at the Company club, sees movies at the Company theater, and if he eats out, takes his family to the Company cafeteria in the middle of Balboa and eats Company steaks and Company ice cream. If a plumber or an electrician is needed, the Company will supply one. The system is maddening, but if the Zonian is driven crazy, there is a Company psychiatrist. The community is entirely self-contained. Children are born in the Company hospital; people are married in Company churches—there are many denominations, but Baptists predominate. And when the Zonian dies he is embalmed in the Company mortuary—a free casket and burial are part of every Company contract.

The society is haunted by two contending ghosts, that of Lenin and that of General Bullmoose. There are no Company signs, no billboards or advertising at all; only a military starkness in the appearance of the Company buildings. The Zone seems like an enormous army base—the tawny houses, all right angles and tiled roofs, the severe landscaping, the stenciled warnings on chain-link fences, the sentry posts, the dispirited wives and stern fattish men. There are military bases in the Zone, but these are indistinguishable from the suburbs. This surprised me. Much of the canal hysteria in the States was whipped up by the news that the Zonians were living the life of Riley, with servants and princely salaries and subsidized pleasures. It would have been more accurate if the Zonian were depicted as an army man, soldiering obediently in the tropics. His restrictions and rules have killed his imagination and deafened him to any subtleties of political speech; he is a Christian; he is proud of the canal and has a dim, unphrased distrust of the Company; his salary is about the same as that of his counterpart in the United States—after all, the fellow is a mechanic or welder: why shouldn’t he get sixteen dollars an hour? He knows some welders who get much more in Oklahoma. And yet the majority of the Zonians live modestly: the bungalow, the single car, the outings to the cafeteria and movie house. The high Company officials live like viceroys, but they are the exception. There is a pecking order, as in all colonies; it is in miniature like the East India Comparry
and even reflects the social organization of that colonial enterprise: the Zonian suffers a notoriously outdated lack of social mobility. He is known by his salary, his club, and the nature of his job. The Company mechanic does not rub shoulders with the Company administrators who work in what is known all over the Zone as The Building—the seat of power in Balboa Heights. The Company is uncompromising in its notion of class; consequently, the Zonian—in spite of his pride in the canal—often feels burdened by the degree of regimentation.

“Now I know what socialism is,” said a Zonian to me at Miraflores.

W
ITH THE SIGHT OF MY FIRST
I
NDIAN IN BOGOTÁ, MY
S
PANISH
images quickly faded from mind. There are 365 Indian tribes in Colombia; some climb to Bogotá, seeking work; some were there to meet the Spanish and never left. I saw an Indian woman and decided to follow her. She wore a felt hat, the sort detectives and newspapermen wear in Hollywood movies. She had a black shawl, a full skirt, and sandals, and, at the end of her rope, two donkeys. The donkeys were heavily laden with metal containers and bales of rags. But that was not the most unusual feature of this Indian woman with her two donkeys in Bogotá. Because the traffic was so bad they were traveling down the pavement, past the smartly dressed ladies and the beggars, past the art galleries displaying rubbishy graphics (South America must lead the world in the production of third-rate abstract art, undoubtedly the result of having a vulgar moneyed class and the rise of the interior decorator—you can go to an opening nearly every night even in a dump like
Barranquilla); the Indian woman did not spare a glance for the paintings, but continued past the Bank of Bogotá, the plaza (Bolívar, his sword implanted at his feet), past the curio shops with leather goods and junk carvings, and jewelers showing trays of emeralds to tourists. She starts across the street, the donkeys plodding under their loads, and the cars honk and swerve and the people make way for her. This could be a wonderful documentary film, the poor woman and her animals in the stern city of four million; she is a reproach to everything in view, though few people see her and no one turns. If this was filmed, with no more elaborate scenario than she was walking from one side of Bogotá to the other, it would win a prize; if she was a detail in a painting it would be a masterpiece (but no one in South America paints the human figure with any conviction). It is as if 450 years have not happened. The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.

She walked, without looking up, past a man selling posters, past the beggars near an old church. And, glancing at the posters, examining the beggars, I lost her. I paused, looked aside, and then she was gone.

N
EARER
V
ILLAZÓN THE TRAIN HAD SPEEDED UP AND SENT
grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given—we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border.
I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.

“We will be here a long time,” he said. He made it sound like years.

The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square homemade umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast—at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. “Are you in that sleeping car?” asked a man hurrying toward me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.

I told him I was.

“What time is it leaving?”

I said, “I wish I knew.”

He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, “Go away!”

The man came out of the station. He said, “These people are all whores.” He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.

The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazón. The sleeping car looked very silly stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.

A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazón, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its
horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.