III
I stopped at the leading hotel, operated—like most hotels on this coast—by a Chinaman.
It was the usual type of seaport hostelry, less comfortable and more expensive than those of the interior cities, but well stocked with fleas, bugs, liquor, and flirtatious servant maids.
“What does one do in this town for amusement?” I asked a native.
“Amusement?” He seemed a little surprised. “Why, señor, there are plenty of women.”
For occupation, the male population carried the baggage of passing travelers. The female population took in washing. Rather dark, and not distinguished for beauty, the younger ones called at the hotel for the laundry; the older ones did the work. They took the clothes to the waterfront, laid the garments on flat rocks, and pounded the buttons off with a stout club. Then they left them to bleach, spreading them out on scrubby little bushes whose berries stained them with yellow spots, while they themselves—already stripped to the waist for comfort—retired to the shallow water to immerse themselves through the hot mid-day. In the evening they collected the garments, carried them home, and ripped them into shreds with rusty irons. Finally, having wrapped them into a neat bundle with the least-ruined articles on top, the younger girls brought them back with smiling countenances, and the inquiry:
“Is that all, señor?”
As a town, Amapala was not unpicturesque. Its whitewashed houses, beneath red-tiled roofs, were set amid palms and bougainvillea. If at noon it seemed to wither under the dry white heat of a tropic sun, there was usually a breeze in the evening, with a tang of salt from the ocean. Across the Gulf of Fonseca, if one looked beyond the fleet of scows and lighters in the foreground, one could see myriad islands and the cones of several Salvadorean volcanoes. There was a play of red and gold at sunset, then the purple and silver of twilight, and finally a glorious night with stars twinkling above and fireflies below, and the glare of the volcanoes tracing a crimson path through the waters of the bay.
Its only point of interest, however, was the cliff where occurred a bloody incident in a long-past war between Nicaragua and Honduras. Some many years ago Nicaragua, having confiscated a smuggling schooner, had armed it with a cannon, and feeling rather cocky in its possession of a navy, had dispatched it to fight Honduras. It came up to Amapala and fired one shot. The bloody incident occurred when a Honduranean, standing on the cliff, craned his neck to see where the shot landed, and fell into the Gulf of Fonseca.
From the cone of the extinct volcano that rose above Amapala, one could see Honduras, Salvador, and Nicaragua. Each was but a few hours’ distance from the other, yet the traveler might wait indefinitely for a boat. Shields, my companion on the auto trip from Guatemala to Santa Ana, was now in Amapala, also bound for Nicaragua, and had already been waiting over a week.
He spent most of his time on the hotel veranda, scanning the horizon with a telescope. This operation afforded much entertainment for the village idiot. Each Central-American port seems to contain one weak-minded or defective youth, who sits all day at the hotel to watch the every movement of a visiting foreigner. In Amapala it was “The Dummy.”
He was a harmless, pleasant little brown fellow in ragged breeches and an undershirt salvaged from the rubbish pile. How he lived, no one seemed able to explain. Some one apparently fed him. No one apparently washed him. Occasionally he earned a few pennies by performing tricks for tourists. His chief accomplishment was that of resting his bare toe upon a lighted cigarette. He was always cheerful, and affable, and he would chat with us by the hour in parrot-like squawks made intelligible by a marvelous art of mimicry. He could describe any one in Amapala by a single gesture. For the Commandante he twisted an imaginary mustache. For the Chinaman, he pulled down his cheeks to give his eyes an oblique slant. He became our constant associate and entertainer, guide, counselor and friend.
From time to time, as an alternative amusement, Shields wrote passionate love letters to the daughters of the Commandante—the only two white girls in town—to which missives, I later learned, he usually signed my name. The Dummy would serve as emissary, and upon his return would enact the giggling of the señoritas, and the wrathful explosions of their parents.
Toward evening, the two girls sometimes made their appearance to stroll in the plaza, accompanied by a male relative with a rifle. Occasionally they would stop at the hotel for a glass of lemonade, and would subject Shields and myself to the careful scrutiny to which señoritas invariably subject a strange youth, while their companion sat beside them with the rifle over his knees. Still later the Commandante himself would join them, favoring us with a stern military glance of warning.
The Dummy always sidled away at his approach, for the Commandante had arrested him not long ago. He often told us the story in his own crude language. The trouble had been about a woman. From his ecstatic expression, she must have been beautiful. He would point at his face, then at his black trousers, to suggest her complexion, and a twist of his fingers would indicate kinky hair. He showed us in pantomime the evil intentions of a rival. He seized a rock and planted it with much zest against the villain’s imaginary skull. He whistled shrilly. That was a policeman! He slumped into a heap as the imaginary club descended upon his head. He placed his wrists together. Handcuffed! He held up ten fingers. The Commandante had sentenced him to ten days! Then he gave a series of unintelligible parrot-squawks, and pointed toward La Unión. During his imprisonment, the girl had fled with the rival! He shook his head sadly, and ran a hand across his throat. Was he meditating suicide? Or was he planning revenge? His story always ended in the harsh, mirthless laughter of an imbecile, and he sidled away, for the Commandante, having partaken of his cocktail, was leading his family home.
In the evening the Consular Agent, fat and jovial, would drop in for a glass of beer. His only official duty at present was looking after a Panamanian sailor who had fallen down the hold of the last vessel in port and broken a shoulder bone.
“It might have killed a white man, but you can’t hurt these natives. Down in Nicaragua, I saw one fellow sink a pen-knife two inches into another fellow’s skull. We just pulled it out, and the man went on working.”
And many other yarns would follow, the locale varying from Chile, where they use those little curved blades with an upward thrust, to the Philippines, where the Moros take your head off with one deft swing of a bolo. We would all collaborate, the stories growing more and more astounding until we reached the incident of the Mexican who swam two miles after a shark had bitten off his stomach.
“I believe it,” the Consular Agent would nod. “Down in Costa Rica a shark bit one of my pearl-divers, and took out a chunk as big as a watermelon. We clapped it back on, plastered the edges with a little mud—”
Then we would have another beer, and the Consular Agent would stroll homeward. The street lamps flickered. Five ragged soldiers—the night patrol—glided past us like phantoms through the dark street. A peon girl hurried along the sidewalk, and the Dummy, bidding us good-night, ran after her with shrill parrot-like squawks. Within the hotel the Chinaman sat imperturbable as a Buddha, waiting to close up his establishment, while the town’s three German merchants drowsed at a table.
Shields and I would rise and yawn.
“To-morrow there may be a boat.”