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.
[Illustration: 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.