To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

CHAPTER X

About Town

Early Breakfast—The “Gentleman of the Eggs” Again—How to Eat the Juice of an Orange—Panama Shops—Chinese Silks and Curios—Purchases—Trying to Beat Down a Chinaman’s Price—The Market—Chinatown—Assortment of Smells—Chinese Style—A Large Stock—The Doctor’s Extravagance—Idleness the Cause of Injudicious Buying—Another Lesson in Siestas—The dolce far niente of It—Another Interruption--Nada, Nada!—New Year’s Resolutions—The Usual Visit to the Cable Office—Las Lonely Bovedas—Extension of Sewers to Low Water Line—The Odor Worse than the Poison—The Remedy—The Prison—The Barracks—Goats Versus Cows—Narrow Streets and Ruins—Chicago Again in the Lead—Unserviceable Sidewalks—Rich Food Eaten in the Tropics—The Promenade Concert—Costumes and Customs.

At coffee I found the portly old “Gentleman of the Eggs” in his place at the head of the table, as confident and contented as a successful South American revolutionist. Things were going his way—beefsteak, fried potatoes, camareros and congestion.

Doctor Echeverría came in and showed me how to peel and eat an orange. He thrust a sharp-pronged fork into one end, peeled it with a sharp table knife the same as one pares an apple and began biting into it. After finishing it, all of the fibrous portion remained on the fork and the juice only had been eaten. This is the way a fluid can be eaten. The old gentleman looked askance at the performance as if he considered it a foreign fraud, but did not alarm those who were not looking at him; and everything went well.

After coffee we sent a cablegram to the doctor’s wife, and proceeded to hunt up a Chinese store. All stores in Panama are, in point of size, shops, for although some of them have a frontage of twenty-five feet, in a few instances of fifty feet, they are shallow, the great majority being not more than twenty-five feet deep. Thus the stores as well as the streets are mere bumping places.

The duties on silk and, I believe, on nearly all goods are low. Hence, although scarcely anything is manufactured or made in Panama, the prices are usually moderate. But so many things are imported from the United States that I had to be careful not to buy goods that had been brought from the United States. In such cases I would pay the increased prices resulting from the moderate Panama duties, and then pay the immoderate American duties upon bringing them back. The Chinese silk and curio stores had the usual things that they have in the United States. In addition to this the Chinese kept provision stores of all sizes and grades where they sold groceries, liquors, fruits, dried and canned goods, and other delicacies demanded by their numerous countrymen and native customers.

By way of introduction I bought some feather fans and bronze sea cows. I then called for a skeleton coat. The Chinaman looked at my arms and legs and said that he did not keep skeleton clothes, but had some about my size, and brought out a white shiny silk sack coat for twelve dollars. As I only wanted it for a week’s wear in Panama and a couple of days on the Caribbean Sea, the coat would cost me more than a dollar for each day’s wear. Had I been younger and more enterprising I should have embraced the opportunity of wearing an imported coat that cost a dollar a day while worn, and would have discarded it at the end of ten days in order not to spoil its record; but I allowed the opportunity to pass and called for something cheaper. The Chinaman showed me a similar coat for ten dollars and said:

“Vely cheapee.”

“More cheapee,” I said.

He showed me one for eight dollars.

“Still more cheapee, much more cheapee.”

He then brought out one for three dollars that looked the same to me, and would catch the Panama dust and filter the Caribbean showers just as faithfully as if I paid twelve dollars for it. I gave him a five-dollar bill and received seven dollars back. I then spied a beautiful piece of silk embroidery and drawn-work about as wide as a door mat and a little longer. I guessed it to be a bureau cover but called it a door mat, for short.

“How muchee?” I asked.

“Eight dollah.”

“What? Eight dollah for door mat? No go. It looks well but it wouldn’t last an hour in Chicago. It is full of holes. I never pay for holes. Deduct for the holes and I’ll buy it.”

“No put him out doah. Keep him in house.”

“Oh, I see, he is a towel. But when we wash in Chicago we use muchee water. It would take three of him for one wiping, and then there would be no opportunity for friction. Such a towel——”

“No towel. Put him on table,” interrupted the Chinaman, with a trace of alteration in the tone of his voice.

“Oh, a napkin? Why, every time I’d wipe my mouthee the soupee would come through these confounded holes on my hands. You must obliterate them if you wish to sell him. He’s a regular skeleton.”

“Not for eatee—for pollah table, for buleau—lookee pletty.”

“Oh, a sort of tidy for the bureau. But these holes spoil him, I say. The dirt would show right through him. Here, I’ll give you six dollah for him. Quickee—comee—bargain—cashee—hoop lah!” I tried to carry the bargain by storm.

The Chinaman could not deny that dirt would show through the drawn-work. He looked perplexed and human, but his speech had the sound of a talking machine.

“Sem dollah ninety-fye cent.”

“Sew up the holes,” I said, “and I’ll give it. Nobody’ll ever buy him full of holes. Why he couldn’t hold water, he wouldn’t even hold molasses. Here’s your six dollah, last chancee.”

“Bully hole! Vela fine hole! Sem dollah ninety-fye cent. Allee hole flee in bahgain.” As he said this his words became animated, but his face was like yellow wax.

“No fleas or flea holes in mine. You’ll never sell him to a Yankee with those flea holes in him. Goodbye!”

He eyed me with patient disgust and put away his finery. As I went out he said, “Bettee fye dollah sell him to-mollah.”

I knew that the piece was worth eight dollars in Colombian money, but I didn’t like to give in, and thought it quite as well to return another time and buy it. But when I did return three days later the Chinaman pretended that the bureau cover was gone, thinking probably that I wanted to claim the five dollars that he had offered to bet. He did not seem anxious to sell me anything. But I had taken a fancy to the cover and wanted it. I offered him eight dollah and fye cent, but he said:

“Allee gone.”

I offered him nine dollah.

“Allee gone.”

I offered him ten dollah.

“Allee gone.”

So I also went, cured of my conceit as a shopper and business man. I had the best of the bargain, however, for the cover didn’t cost me anything. In my subsequent shopping I soon learned that the amount a Chinaman would throw off was so insignificant that it was not worth while to ask it. In fact, it is a good thing to offer him five cents more than he asks to make him jump about and show his goods with more zeal. As we passed out I noticed that the doctor had bought several things of considerable value for his wife.

We then sauntered leisurely down to the street that skirted the seashore, passing the market on our way. The market was a large fenced, rectangular area with a galvanized iron roof. It projected over the sea wall, giving opportunity for the disposal of all dirt by merely throwing it out, supposing, of course, that it were possible to get rid of all of the dirt in the place. It was much better constructed and arranged than the market at Colón, and was well supplied with dirty counters and dirty booths where dirty Chinamen, dirty negroes and dirty mestizos sold dirty fruit, dirty fish, dirty vegetables, etc., all of which should have gone over the sea wall instead of over the palate.

Arriving at the end of the street where it was cut off by an inward curve of the shore line, we turned at right angles to the left into a street about a quarter of a mile long and were, commercially speaking, in Chinatown. The ground-floor front of many of the houses were little Chinese stores, and most of the inhabitants that we saw were Chinese. And before we had finished our walk along the shore, through the market and up this street, we were prepared to endorse the saying that Panama had a separate smell for every turn of the head. A blind man could soon learn to find his way around easily and unerringly.

Up near the main street, where our little street ended, we came to a large, clean-looking Chinese silk and dry-goods store with an imposing entrance. A private carriage was standing in front of it, although upon entering we did not find any one who looked as if he or she had ever possessed or even driven in a carriage. Indeed, on two other occasions I saw a carriage, presumably the same one, in the same place, but never discovered a possible owner shopping there. Hence I inferred that the carriage belonged to the establishment, and was kept there to impress strangers by making them believe that rich customers frequented the place. The store had two front rooms, a main room for all sorts of articles, and a smaller one for silk. We went into the silk room where we found a beautiful display of a costly embroidered silk in the show-cases, and in innumerable pasteboard boxes on shelves reaching almost up to the ceiling.

The proprietor, who waited upon us, was a plump, handsome, courteous, intelligent and exceedingly dignified Chinaman. When Chinamen grow fat they often become good looking; those that remain thin remain ugly, like the rest of us. He showed us all sorts of finery, and Doctor Echeverría let himself out. Whenever the doctor saw silks and embroidery and a Chinaman he thought of his wife, and whenever he thought of his wife he thought of silks and embroidery and Chinamen. In Costa Rica the tariff is very high on silks, and the market is probably not good. We examined many things and made the Chinaman send for more goods from his store-rooms. The doctor wasted no time talking, but bought freely: scarfs, shawls, fans, waists, kimonas, doilies, table covers, etc., for his wife, and handkerchiefs, neckties, etc., for himself.

But this was not all, for we made other visits.

Finally one day he opened his mouth upon the subject and said, “I’m buying too much. I must keep away from these stores.”

I thought so too, and wondered how he would find room enough in his trunks for all of the goods, and what the Costa Rica custom officers would do to him. I have since also been curious to know if his wife, after seeing these things, told him, as my wife told me when I presented my purchases, that she could have bought the same at home just as cheaply, and could have selected things she wanted. My wife would have perhaps obtained more at home for the money, but I would not have gotten the romance out of it. I needed the experience. A little chivalry toward one’s wife is worth more than money.

At home I never enter Chinese shops. Being busy, and therefore in a normal mental state, I act rationally and do not buy Chinese silks and jimcracks. But in Panama I had nothing useful to do, and was therefore apt to do things I should not have done. When the mind is preoccupied with buying stocks one buys them more or less freely and precipitately; when it is preoccupied with buying Chinese silks one is apt to buy more than one’s wife needs or wants.

The shrewd insurance agents, book agents, art venders and irresponsible promoters take advantage of this fact at home where you can not escape them. They take up so much of your time and talk so much about insurance, books, pictures or investments that they communicate to you their own paid-for enthusiasm on the subject. They hammer it into your brain cells by prolonged and repeated nerve impressions until the brain cells are temporarily modified to reproduce the impression involuntarily, so that “insure, insure,” or “buy, buy,” is continually running through your mind. You are hypnotized. The only way to determine whether you want an insurance policy or a book or a picture or a fortune from the agent or promoter, is to get away from him or her for forty-eight hours, and sleep over the problem twice. The impressions of the agent’s sonorous or perhaps insinuating voice will then have become weakened, and you will find that you do not want either an insurance policy, a book, a picture or a gold mine.

After lunch I went up to my room to take another private lesson in siestas. The barricading of the door, the removing of superfluous clothing, the careful tucking in of the mosquito bar under the mattress all around, futile efforts to stop thinking and keep from perspiring, and protracted attempts to read Spanish novels, made of the siesta a not insignificant part of the day’s work. It was not the dolce far niente, the Traeumerei, the dreamy dozing so dear to the imagination of degenerates. My character was unfortunately already formed; I had my limitations, and could not adapt and reconcile myself to the popular siesta hoax. A tropical siesta is not a sleep; it is a broil in which the victim does the turning over and seasoning himself.

Finally, however, at the end of an hour and a half by the cathedral clock, twelve hours by the hour-glass in my brain, I seemed to be well done, and slowly sizzled off into a simulated sunstroke, only to be awakened as on the day before by those knockout blows on my door. I aroused myself and saw the bell boy peeking in.

“The washing, the washing,” he said hastily, and was evidently anxious to anticipate and avoid the expected torrent of dreadful Spanish. But I was too discouraged to compose epithets. Epitaphs were more in keeping with the situation, and one was due him. So I crawled out of bed, made a toga out of a towel, removed the barricade from the door and took the bundle. I then wiped my forehead and looked at him. He stood like a black Pompeian statue with the white of its staring eyes fixed upon me. I began, “Nada, nada!”—and the thing glided out. It was becoming intelligent at last.

But it was still too hot to keep clothes on, and I had to crawl into my mosquito cage and make up my mind to stay there until the three o’clock breeze made itself felt. As the new year was only two days off, I passed the time making New Year’s resolutions. I made about a hundred, but could only remember a dozen or so of them afterward. I resolved:

Never to take a siesta or a dolce far niente in the future, but to be satisfied with a plain nap when I felt the need of it.

Not to return to Panama until a Yankee hotel had reconstructed the country.

Not to personally undertake the reformation of the tropics.

Not to train the servants of aliens.

Not to begin by getting hot when I wanted to keep cool.

Not to be a conqueror.

Not to do in Rome as the Romans did.

Not to take a Turkish bath and call it a siesta.

Not to drink frescoes when I wanted water.

Not to do the tropics, nor let the tropics do me.

Not to have opinions, but try to understand things.

Not to be eloquent when silence would suffice.

Not to care when it couldn’t help.

Not to know everything.

Not to want anything.

Not to make any new resolutions until the old ones were worn out or broken.

Finally at half past three I arose, shut and locked the door, drank a bottle of imported lukewarm water, cooled myself by washing my chest and body with so-called cold water, and felt more or less refreshed.

After I had been down-stairs a few minutes, Doctor Echeverría and, later, Señor Arango appeared, and we started for the cable office to send a message to the doctor’s wife and enquire after the one he had not yet received. If one had come it would have been sent to the hotel, but he went and enquired morning and evening, just for the love of it, or of her, I supposed. At any rate, he couldn’t help it.

We then went for a promenade on the Bóvedas along the seashore. The tide, which rises thirteen feet, was out and the flat rocky bed of the bay lay exposed for more than a hundred yards. Two men of slow and deliberate intentions were digging a trench from the sea wall out to the water’s edge at low tide for the benefit of the sewer pipes. The sewers which emptied just outside of the sea wall were to be extended out to that point. This improvement would do away with some of the bad smells that had followed the daily exposure of the sea bottom by the recession of the water. The bad smells at low tide did not, however, seem to cause much sickness, the regular return of the salt water acting as a disinfectant and douche. The offense to the olfactories was probably the worst feature of the emptying of the sewage near the shore. Individual perfumery would have been cheaper and perhaps more efficacious, but the men had not thought of that, and the ladies had never told them. Whether it was too early in the day for promenading, or whether there was but little promenading done on Las Bóvedas I do not know (probably both), but the only fashionable people we met were Señor McGill and his party, consisting of two ladies and a gentleman besides himself. A few children and two men of the poorer class were the only other persons visible.

OCEAN FRONT AT PANAMA

Tide Out, Showing the Sea Wall and Bottom of the Sea

We arrived in a few minutes at the end of the lovely but lonely promenade where it turned upon itself and led us down to the low ground just inside of the sea wall. Here the soldiers’ barracks, the city jail and a good parade ground of three or four acres were situated. We saw many prisoners and a few soldiers. The prisoners were confined under the vaults that supported the promenade. Hence the name Las Bóvedas, the vaults. They were closed on the outer side by the solid sea wall and on the inner side by iron grating. Light and air entered the cellars thus formed from one side only, through the iron grating, leaving the deeper portions so dark that we could not see into them. The light space near the grating was teeming with prisoners of both sexes, mostly negroes and mixed breeds, who seemed to be uncomfortably crowded in an exceedingly unhealthy place. Just beyond the jail was a plain, rectangular brick building, in which the soldiers were lodged, and beyond this were some dilapidated frame houses, ragged children, dirty goats and drowsy vultures.

Doctor Echeverría wished to buy a herd of goats for his children and take them to San José; but although goats were plenty he could only find one good one. They had subsisted on straw hats and stray shoes so long that most of them were getting bald and leathery on their backs and sides. Cows and fodder are rather scarce in Central American cities and the facilities for keeping the milk fresh are not good, hence the desirability of a herd of goats which can be starved when corn husks are dear, and can be driven from house to house to be milked as milk is wanted for use. This provides sterile, undiluted milk, rich enough for coffee and more digestible and nourishing for children than the best of cows’ milk that has been milked several hours before being used, or that has been artificially sterilized. I should think that Central America, and particularly Panama and the neighborhood of the Canal Zone, would be a profitable place for large goat dairies. The goats could eat all night on the sabanas, manufacturing morning milk from the midnight grass and stubble, and walk the streets of Panama city all day, clearing the town of rubbish and giving certified milk to all. They could take a daily siesta from 1 to 3 P. M. in the Parque de la Catedral and in Parque de la Iglesia de Santa Ana, giving the town rubbish a chance to form fresh milk for afternoon delivery. It would be a blessing to our children in the United States if milch-goats could replace milch-cows, which can not safely be starved and neglected, and it would aid materially in clearing our homes and streets of tuberculosis and waste paper—the two white plagues.

In returning we passed through quaint and narrow streets with their small and old-fashioned houses, and here and there a ruin. Some of the old church ruins are very picturesque and very ruinous, although none of them so ponderous, pretentious and dangerous as was our old Cook County court building at Chicago, the world’s most magnificent specimen of popular and political ruin. “Si caput videas, ferias,” was its motto, and for a long time it threatened to crush the head of the solitary passerby who did not keep his distance, or to lie down suddenly on the crowd that ventured too near. The citizens had to be protected against it. Experts on architectural degeneracy reported that its angle of velocity was accelerated, its angle of repose faulty, and that its lateral parts showed great fatigue. So complete and perfect a ruin was never before matured at so rapid a rate. It made a new record and set a new pace for municipal dissolution, for without the aid of quakes, tornadoes or the help of time, it crumbled so rapidly and steadily that it could not be kept up long enough to get into guide books and attract tourists. Thus Chicago leads in ruin as well as in rush. In its place we have the new county building, which is a ruin of architectural art—a columnated parallelopiped. Its two-story basement is an example of bewindowed weakness. Its high and heavy columns have but little support and support but little; they are too stuck up, too desirous of being looked up to. But Chicago is not yet a great architect; the University of Chicago is a better one. Chicago’s specialty lies in a rampant repetition of rectangular windows without any walls, its variety in a massive superfluity of meaningless stone carved and crusted with architectural trumpery; its exception in an occasional magnificent success.

The Panama sidewalks were too narrow for the enjoyment of a walk. In order to walk side by side, two of us had to walk on the cobblestones, and as the third one was too polite to monopolize the whole sidewalk, we all walked on the cobblestones, and thus took up the whole street. But as we never met a vehicle in these parts it did not matter except to our feet. We might have walked single file on the sidewalk, but as I was the only one not too polite to walk ahead, and both of the others were too polite to take the second place, the cobblestones were the only alternative. An advantage, however, of the use of the street was that we did not have to step off the sidewalk into the depression intended for a ditch every time we passed anyone. This passing of people on the twenty-five inch sidewalks in Panama was almost as difficult as passing people in Chicago on our twenty-five foot sidewalks.

When we reached the hotel it was time for an appetizer, which we dutifully drank in preparation for a tour-de-force dinner. I formerly thought that in the tropics men lived mostly on fruits, rice, light vegetables and, if they worked hard, an occasional egg, taking but little meat or greasy, mixed dishes. But my experiences in Cuba, on the Italian ship and in Panama have taught me that the people eat as heartily, or more so, of greasy food as in northern portions of the United States, where we subsist too much upon our home-made cereals that overfill and underfeed us.

As it was Thursday evening there was to be a concert in the Plaza de la Iglesia de Santa Ana at eight o’clock, and my companions dined with some friends in town preparatory to attending it with them. So I had to go through the paces of dinner alone—and succeeded. I then sat around the hotel corridor until eight o’clock when the air had become cooler, but not cool, and my stomach lighter, but not light, and strolled leisurely to the Plaza de la Iglesia de Santa Ana, about half a mile away. The musicians were playing in one corner of the square and the people promenading in the park which, as in Plaza Centrál, occupied the entire square except the peripheral space taken up by the streets. The men were, as a rule, dressed in evening or afternoon dress, as if for protection against cold, while the ladies were draped in all sorts of flimsiness appropriate to the weather—white, gauzy, fleecy, fluffy and pretty. Their clothes were as appropriate as those of the men were inappropriate, which is quite the reverse of the methods of dress in the North, where the men dress for comfort, and the ladies for the men. Around and around the outer edge of the park they walked, some in one direction, some in the opposite, passing and repassing each other, laughing and talking and apparently unconscious of the increasing monotony of it all. But a large proportion of the promenaders were young, and to youth nothing is monotonous but inactivity.

The main street passed by the plaza constituting the front side; the church occupied the opposite side, forming a fine background with the dense, electrically lighted foliage in the middle, and the illuminated, brilliant throng moving around the edges. Whenever the music started, the crowd became more animated and the whole scene presented something romantic or fairylike to the spectator. The music was of a loud Spanish character, very appropriate in the open air, and the pieces, which varied from popular to classic, were well played.

After becoming somewhat weary from carrying my course dinner around, I stepped into the shadows of the trees and took a seat on a bench to listen with comfort to the music, and watch the young people chatter and enjoy each other as only the young can. I resolved that if providence or a vigorous digestion should ever give me back my youth I would make myself enjoy trifles also. But some men never grow young, and trifles never become important to them.

I concluded that the Panama Physicians must also have overfilled stomachs and an apathy for trifles, for none of them were there promenading and lemonading.