Canal Zone

PAUL MORAND

An air voyage to Panama, Central America's paradox, where a tropic civilization elbows that of the U. S. A.

The entire bay of Panama stretches out before me, dotted with green islands that

look like parrots: Pearl Island, Flamenco, Perico, Naos, Cubeba, then the fortified islands that protect the Canal, then the old Spanish fortifications, hidden beneath the ferns. I am flying a thousand feet above the Canal. From my observation post, well sheltered from the showers, I see the Miraflores Lake, the different levels of water, and the trench in the forest; asphalt roads surround it with a black festoon; the Darien wireless station raises its antennae above the bread-trees and the banana-trees. The cargo boats of Honduras, full of green bananas, the white United Fruit boats, the various Santas from South America, the Presidents of the Dollar Fine, the English liners from Australia, the French steamers from Tahiti, some loaded with mother-of-pearl, others with wheat, and still others with pelts, or Chilean or Argentine minerals, are lined up along this opening made with dynamite in the earth's red flesh.

Suddenly the Atlantic appears before me; 1 can see the two oceans simultaneously;

my glance takes in the entire Isthmus, its slender outline, its wasp waist, its strange framework, its breakable stem. In the artificial lakes, fields inundated by the sea, the salt has killed the trees, upon which cormorants are perched, like the harpies in the Inferno; these black, twisted, dead trees seem, like those of Dante, "not to bear fruit on their poisoned branches." Here is the Gatun Lock; the sky is so full of planes that one-way streets have been established above the Canal. Now we reach Cristobal, Canal Zone.

The frontier between the U. S. A. and the Republic of Panama is indeed that abstract line, that "imaginary line" peculiar to modern frontiers. It is no more visible than that which separates Monaco from France: a white line painted on the asphalt—that is all. In Cristobal, water is the drink, but in Colon, thirty yards further, are the largest bars in the world. I once wrote in a book that the largest bar in the world was that of the Jockey Club, in Buenos Aires. Shanghai immediately protested. I had to bow to the evidence. The bar of the Shanghai Club, one hundred and fifty feet long, with its five hundred drinkers, is the largest on the face of the globe. However, the bars of Colon, by reason of their number, the diversity of their bottles—each containing its own demon and climate—form a sheet of alcohol, a deposit of spirits, which is far from being exhausted. 1 counted sixteen brands of whiskey, thirty-two of brandy, fourteen of rum, and one hundred thirtyeight varieties of cocktails.

Neither Bermuda nor Havana can compete with this array of bottles, alcohols compressed by cold, which dilate to breaking-point in the heat of the body, concentrated happiness, the caress of the tropics. Coolers, cups, creamy egg-nogs, flips without milk, in which only the yoke of the egg is visible, tonic fizzes, late Victorian juleps and cobblers, Brazilian chartreuse mixtures with fresh powdered chocolate, Caribbean mixtures of pineapple juice and white rum—that is what one finds on the other side of the border, facing the land of White Rock. In spite of so many attractions these rare alcoholic symphonies do not draw great cnnvds. Colon is no longer the town of the heroic age, when revolvers went off by themselves, when payments were made with Californian gold dust. Nowadays, fights rarely occur, save in the movies, those repositories of old legends.

In Balboa and Cristobal, despite the typewriters rusted by the humidity, the envelopes which stick to one's fingers, and the notepaper soaking with water, everybody perspires and expedites the mails. The Panamans, in order to show that they, too, are working, have pulled up their sleeves. However, the stifling moisture of the tropics will finally triumph over the activity of man; the horses of the cavalry brigade look without appetite at their oats and sigh for Kentucky; the tourists mop their brows as they loll in coaches, ancient, secular vehicles, worthy of Don Quixote, covered with hoods of dirty white linen. The Canal employees are tired, and so are the officers' children, with dark circles under their eyes and anemic complexions, who are roller-skating on the asphalt in front of the bungalows decorated with hibiscus.

At the Washington Hotel, in a framework of cocoa-trees and pink pepper-plants, languid New York women, with bare legs and supple bodies under their light foulard dresses, watch the admirals' daughters, who all look like Marlene Dietrich, diving into the lukewarm swimming pool, beneath the jaws of the double cannons of Fort Randolph. Americano tourists in pongee and palm beach suits struggle, with the help of huge pieces of ice, against the prevailing dreariness and decomposition. The swimming pool of the Washington Hotel is the world rendezvous of everything that wanders on the earth, of everyone who goes anywhere to buy or sell anything; one of those platforms of the globe, one of the waiting-rooms of the planet: missionaries, unaccompanied ladies, expatriates, sheepfarmers, spies, Russian princesses, tennis champions, pianists and reporters. Nowadays, when all the nations have retired to their own homes, Panama is, with Geneva. Shanghai and Singapore, one of the few places where world conversation still goes on, where interests, pleasures, friendships and intrigues cross each other. Later one dines beneath electric lights surrounded by mosquitoes and moths, and passengers from the big liners, with a night ashore, watch some ball of the Elks or the Rotarians, who sweat fox-trots. One can also dine very well at the establishment of a French convict, who escaped from Guiana, a former murderer who has become a pork-butcher, or in the Chinese cafeterias and chop suey restaurants, where foregather the pilots from Panagra and the health commissioners whose wives have gone to Atlantic City for the summer.

In the streets of Colon, behind the Hindu shops which are to be found at every crossroads of the world, where Manila shawls and Panama hats are sold, lives a largely African population, and also a tropical melting-pot of Italians, Syrians, Arabs, Russians and Chinese laundrymen. They all wear Panama hats, although this headgear is not made on the Isthmus, but at Santa Elena, in Ecuador. Have you ever noticed that when a product is named after a country, it is always manufactured in a different country? Thus, in Siam I have never seen a Siamese cat—they come from Burma; there are no Angora cats in Angora —they come from Persia; there are no Great Danes in Denmark—they come from German Schleswig; and so on. The happiest inhabitants of Colon are, of course, the Negroes, who, in their three-storied houses with wooden balconies, get up about six in the evening, after the siesta. For a long time they titivate themselves and look at themselves in mirrors, preparatory to going out. Having tried to run a comb through their woolly hair, they give up the struggle, stretch themselves, and collapse exhausted in their wooden armchairs, which are attached to the ceiling by chains.

• How it rains in Panama City! The water pours on the tall, regal palm trees, washes the sodden walls. The churches (in the porches the procession statues are lined up, larger than those of Seville, almost as large as those of the Nice Carnival) present their complicated and baroque facades to the severe exterior of the American banks: Mercedes versus the Guaranty Trust. The half-castes, in bell-bottomed trousers and pink shirts, sit in front of the cafes, or stand beneath the pink pepper-plants, waiting for sinecures. In the dark streets of the old quarters of Caledonia, love is cheap . . . Panama and Cristobal are two worlds, two civilizations, two religions, two races. Panama sells crucifixes and Cristobal Frigidaires; Panama smokes black tobacco and Cristobal yellow; Cristobal sleeps on steel mattresses, Panama in feather beds. Panama believes in the Virgen and los Santos. Cristobal takes showers and Panama wears glossy shoes; one is inhabited by gringos, the other by spigoties; Cristobal engages in world politics and Panama in local caciquismo; in Cristobal everyone is shaved, Panama is the town of three days' growth of beard.

I shall never forget that superb spectacle of youth and strength, the France Field at work. The first thing in the morning the entire staff of the great American airport is at work. From a distance I hear the hum of the motors being started. Amidst so many Panatnan cemeteries, so much tropical stagnation and decay, this (dean air, this spectacle of good humor and health, rejoices the heart of the traveller who comes to take a plane for Kingston or Miami. The Navy, its cap set upon its blond, smooth hair, is astride the Panama Canal. These men, proud of their young, luminous skin, are bare to the waist, burned red by the sun. The officers work in bathing suits, as the heat is already oppressive. In one of the hangars there is an inspection of parachutes; their long dresses of white Mlk. from which fine ropes dangle, are being examined. All the motors are singing, and the planes seem to be birds saluting the dawn with their cries. At France Field nothing is terrestrial: everything is naval or aerial scouting monoplanes with orangecolored wings, like Argentine swallows, huge carrying planes, triplace bombing biplanes.

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Amphibians arrive on cradles, or are brought by tractor. Here is the Commodore in which 1 am going to travel, a beautiful flying ship, and in it there are even two sofas beside the radio, for a nap after lunch, as peacefully as if one were in a Panama hut. While waiting to leave I looked at the sign: Safety First, in English, and Seguridad ante Todo, in Spanish, which stood at the entrance to the hangars. "If," I said to myself, "at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in irujillo, that little Estrcmadura hamlet in Spain, there had been a sign. Seguridad ante Todo, in front of the stable where young Pizarro tended his pigs, would he ever have reached Panama?"