CHAPTER XI
Town Topics
Waiting for the Bull-fight—Daily Newspapers—Death from Yellow Fever—Fate of Mr. Dingler’s Family—Doctor Echeverría Receives the Cablegram at Last—Walks to the Seashore—The National Lottery—The Cathedral—A Titled Doctor of the Past—Ruins—A Ruin within a Ruin—Business Hours—Baths and Economy of Water—Proposed Improvements.
The next two days, Friday and Saturday, were days of waiting for the Sunday bull-fight. Panama is a small city of 20,000 inhabitants and there was nothing doing, as the saying is, excepting the walk to the cable office morning and evening with Doctor Echeverría in quest of the cablegram from San José that had not arrived. For an ignorant person like myself, however, who had gone there knowing nothing about the ways of the people in the tropics, and had only learned a couple of days before to go in out of the sun, there was interest and instruction in everything.
I spent a part of the time sitting about the barber shop, the hotel corridor and the barroom studying local customs, and reading the daily Estrella (Star and Herald) and El Diario (The Daily). The newspapers were printed in both English and Spanish and contained short but very good extracts from the latest authenticated world news. One did not have to read twelve illustrated and illuminated pages to find two doubtful facts that would be contradicted the next day. Much of the talk was about the death, which had just been announced, of the wife of Chief Engineer Wallace’s secretary of yellow fever. The young secretary had gone North to marry her, and had brought her to Panama to become a victim within a few weeks. Her death cast a gloom over the community and was certainly not an encouraging and comforting experience for Mr. and Mrs. Wallace. It reminded us of the fate of Mr. Dingler, one of the chief engineers of the Panama Canal under the French regime, who brought his wife and two sons to Panama and lost all three of yellow fever in one month. His troubles produced melancholia and he had to give up his work.
These were isolated instances of such misfortunes in high stations of life, and were indicative of many equally distressing but generally unknown or quickly forgotten ones in more humble stations. This does not apply to the Jamaica negroes, however, who think that they are suffering from too much hygiene. Instead of yellow fever they are contracting catarrh and pneumonia in their new, well-ventilated sleeping quarters. Health, wealth and prosperity, like everything else, should be enjoyed in moderation.
On Friday evening Doctor Echeverría received the longed-for cablegram from his wife, and again took interest in ordinary mundane trivialities. I missed our walks to the cable office, which was situated at the upper end of the city where it extended out upon a projecting piece of land. I enjoyed going there to gaze at the picturesque shores, the green islands and the dark blue sky and sea, and feel romantic. These walks also took care of considerable superfluous time that would have been spent sitting about the hotel, and they kept us in touch with the common people and cobble pavements. As it was the end of the week, numerous old, half-breed Indian women, and an occasional Chinaman, wandered about the streets peddling tickets for the Panama National Lottery, which had a drawing every Sunday. The tickets were divided into halves and quarters to represent the fraction of the prize one paid for, but did not draw. Thus one could gamble away a few cents or a few dollars weekly, according to one’s pocket and one’s patriotism. The lottery is a devilishly good thing for a country of impoverished people because it lightens taxation. To those who believe in gambling it represents the best and most desirable part of taxation since it takes only the money of those who pay voluntarily and cheerfully. It also collects quite a sum from visiting strangers, and did from us. I bought a large fraction of a ticket, as did most of the other strangers, and we all came near winning something.
In our peregrinations about town, the doctor and I went through the cathedral, but saw nothing cheerful or pretty, although the altar and a representation of the nativity near it were bright with gilt and gaudy coloring. The walls everywhere abounded in mortuary tablets, very cheerful and comforting things to the sick and the dead, but very uncomfortable reminders to those of us who have the Greek enjoyment of living untainted with a fondness for the contemplation of dissolution. The church contains a tablet inscribed to a physician, Dr. Joaquin Morro, which shows him to have been titled, according to the proper forms of law, for public services. This tablet, together with the fact that the present president is a physician, shows that the doctors are better appreciated in Panama than with us. It speaks well for the Panama doctors, or perhaps worse for those of some other countries.
The exteriors of the churches were much more interesting to me, for they were picturesquely old, typically Spanish in style, and most of them located among surroundings that were decidedly medieval and suggestive of strange customs and superstitious beliefs. As a rule, the ruins were roofless, imperfect shells of past glory and gloom, with perhaps a corner or small space or two boarded up for use as a storehouse or humble dwelling place. As we passed the ruins of the old Franciscan Church (a new, smaller one has been erected near by), I saw coming out from a boarded space in the walls an exact counterfeit of the witch of Endor, as we see her in the tragedy “Macbeth,” the final evolution of that species of old women that nourish themselves and their house-plants with tea and coffee. She was a sort of ambulating mummy; her face and head mere skull bones with yellow parchment drawn over them, and her body a concatenation of long bones held in line by some rags loosely drawn around them. As she came shuffling out from between the detached, fragmentary pillars she seemed appropriately housed, a ruin within a ruin. I wondered how much rent she ought to have been paid to live there among the lizards. She added life to the dead pile, and undoubtedly added romance and interest by telling fortunes and frightening children.
RUINS OF THE SANTO DOMINGO CHURCH
Across from these human and divine rooms were little dingy shops that looked like small square masonry cells, relics of the days of the old church. Large double doors constituted almost their entire front, and were kept open for light and air. On account of their smallness, the almost complete emptiness of visible merchandise in most of them, the absence of customers, and the miserable appearance of the inmates, I asked the doctor if they were not disreputable places. He assured me that they were not, but that as it was already nine o’clock, the business of the day had been about all transacted. The owners dealt mostly in perishable provisions which were sold early in the morning, and there was but little left for them to do but lounge about until the next morning. Thus poverty and leisure and content often go together in the tropical zone, just as riches and leisure and discontent so often do in the temperate and intemperate zones.
I noticed that most officials and business agents in Panama had office or business hours in the forenoon and afternoon, which were often marked on the doors or windows. This enabled them to enjoy their siestas and cigarets between business hours without being disturbed, and also made it practicable for them to finish their work early in the day. The comparatively small amount of work done by business men in the afternoon would lead one to suppose that but little was done, yet the best work is done in the early morning, at a time when Northern customers are not astir. In the tropics the early birds catch the worms. In the North the proverb speaks of only one early bird.
I had given up hunting after baths. I could not hear of any tub baths, and had been frightened out of the notion of taking shower baths by a visiting Central American doctor who was waiting to attend the Medical Congress. He told me that next to his seventy-five cigarets a day he enjoyed his daily cold shower bath at the house of a relative who was a druggist. The water that was used in the drug store to wash bottles and things with was run into a reservoir under the floor and used for shower baths in the basement. As the Panama wells were drying up and plain drinking water was bringing a price, it occurred to me that to make shower baths pay, it might be necessary in bathing establishments, where the dishwater and waste water would, of course, be insufficient to supply shower baths for all of the customers, to collect also the waste water from the baths, pump or carry it up into the tank and use it over again. When the water became soapy enough from the multitude of baths, to look dirty, it could be allowed to flow away and a new series of baths be started on the same economical plan. Having a dread of beri-beri, dengue, leprosy, elephantiasis, tropical ulcers, and other prevalent ailments of more or less contagious nature which had their habitat in Panama, I did not allow myself to deviate from my previously formed opinion that cold private sponge baths were not only more cleansing than the public shower baths, but were more available, reliable, convenient, comfortable and manageable.
After wandering about considerably among the streets and studying the business facilities, I came to the conclusion that Plaza Centrál was a good place for a residence district, but that, being at the wrong end of the town from the railroad station, it would soon be an out-of-the-way place for the agencies and business houses at present located in or near it. When the volume of business would become greater, the main thoroughfare would have to be made wider, or the business centered nearer to the station or transferred to the mouth of the canal, for nothing ever stays but dirt and nothing ever lasts but time.
Chief Engineer Wallace had, I believe, spoken of a plan, which carried to its extreme, would mean tearing down entire blocks of houses for long distances and enlarging the city area by building a sea wall out at the edge of the water at low tide, and filling in with the earth excavated from the canal. But Mr. Wallace was too modern and reconstructive. I suppose that a gradual change of the business center will be the most probable solution of the economic problem, leaving the old city as a residence district, for which it would be well located. A Chicago real estate dealer would make a beautiful suburb of it.