Surely the tourist, the poet, the artist, the antiquarian, and lover of the romantic past, need not go to Europe or Asia to find ruin and romance, dirt and dreaminess, the splendor of nature and the destructiveness of man, to find history, hallucination, inspiration and perspiration.
Let him visit the solitary ruined tower at the site of the old city of Panama and tumble into old vaults and ditches; let him study the church ruins in the present city, and buy a few; let him live in the dingy old Spanish houses and go about among the parti-colored inhabitants, instead of traveling in Europe among his own countrymen. Let him study the history, legends, superstitions, customs and language of the people and be satisfied. If not let him go to Yucatan and study the architecture and religion of the Aztecs, which are not modeled after guide books, and let him wander and dream and write and paint and see something new under the sun, that really is under the sun. Europe and Asia are an old story.
Panama has changed hands since the buccaneer period when the buccaneers did all of the fighting. Panamanians now have less money, fewer prayers and more fights. They have not a praying Don Juan for president—Don Juans should not pray. Their chief fault is that they believe in frequent changes of administration. But they have the courage of their convictions, and the army has always been ready to act upon them, pro or con.
President Amador is a philosopher and believes that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, that the greatest preventive of fighting is to do away with the fighters. Hence the large standing army of the republic has been disbanded and their duties given over to the military policemen. Since then there has been a revolutionary stagnation, a slump in the revolutionary market, for which Uncle Sam is said to be responsible. But for Uncle Sam there would have been something doing in Panama before this.
CHAPTER XIII
New Year’s Day and the Sabanas
Cathedral Bells—The Bawl after the Ball—Ringing in the New Year—Unique Chimes—The Musical Score—A Drive to the Sabanas—The Suburban Highway—Natives—Open Prairie—Señor Arango’s Summer Residence—Great Variety of Flowers, Fruits and Foliage—Good Cattle Country—Fire-crackers—The Siesta Hour—A Quiet Funeral—Ho! for the Bull-fight.
New Year’s eve I was awakened at midnight by the ringing of the cathedral bells, which, being directly across the plaza and at about the same altitude as my open window, had a good chance at me. After a long time the noisy tolling ceased and I again dropped off to sleep. But I was hardly asleep when I was awakened by singing, that universal type of popular song that has its source in the saloon where good cheer is manufactured for holidays; where holidays are howling days, and pay days are heydays. It was the bawl after the ball, and commanded attention. As New Year’s day is a sort of Panama Fourth of July, both as to temperament and temperature, the night watchmen considerately allowed the singing to go on, although they probably kept the amateur musicians moving, and thus distributed the noise impartially over the different parts of the town. At any rate, the noise died away in the distance long enough for me to go asleep, when it came back and commanded attention again.
At six-thirty in the morning when I was in the depths of my final heavy tenacious sleep, we had another musical entertainment, an official one this time. At the break of each New Year’s day boys were hired to pound the bells in the cathedral towers, each boy having two or three bells to strike promiscuously and loudly, according to his strength and inclination. The rhythm as nearly as can be reproduced was as follows:
Ting-aling, ting-tong, ting-ting, ating-tong, go-it-boys-aping-pong, right-along, sing-song, ring-wrong, hong-kong, gong-gong!