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.
[Illustration: 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.