To the Ends of the Earth

The society is haunted by two contending ghosts, that of Lenin and that of General Bullmoose. There are no Company signs, no billboards or advertising at all; only a military starkness in the appearance of the Company buildings. The Zone seems like an enormous army base—the tawny houses, all right angles and tiled roofs, the severe landscaping, the stenciled warnings on chain-link fences, the sentry posts, the dispirited wives and stern fattish men. There are military bases in the Zone, but these are indistinguishable from the suburbs. This surprised me. Much of the canal hysteria in the States was whipped up by the news that the Zonians were living the life of Riley, with servants and princely salaries and subsidized pleasures. It would have been more accurate if the Zonian were depicted as an army man, soldiering obediently in the tropics. His restrictions and rules have killed his imagination and deafened him to any subtleties of political speech; he is a Christian; he is proud of the canal and has a dim, unphrased distrust of the Company; his salary is about the same as that of his counterpart in the United States—after all, the fellow is a mechanic or welder: why shouldn’t he get sixteen dollars an hour? He knows some welders who get much more in Oklahoma. And yet the majority of the Zonians live modestly: the bungalow, the single car, the outings to the cafeteria and movie house. The high Company officials live like viceroys, but they are the exception. There is a pecking order, as in all colonies; it is in miniature like the East India Comparry and even reflects the social organization of that colonial enterprise: the Zonian suffers a notoriously outdated lack of social mobility. He is known by his salary, his club, and the nature of his job. The Company mechanic does not rub shoulders with the Company administrators who work in what is known all over the Zone as The Building—the seat of power in Balboa Heights. The Company is uncompromising in its notion of class; consequently, the Zonian—in spite of his pride in the canal—often feels burdened by the degree of regimentation.

“Now I know what socialism is,” said a Zonian to me at Miraflores.

Shadowing an Indian

WITH THE SIGHT OF MY FIRST INDIAN IN BOGOTÁ, MY SPANISH images quickly faded from mind. There are 365 Indian tribes in Colombia; some climb to Bogotá, seeking work; some were there to meet the Spanish and never left. I saw an Indian woman and decided to follow her. She wore a felt hat, the sort detectives and newspapermen wear in Hollywood movies. She had a black shawl, a full skirt, and sandals, and, at the end of her rope, two donkeys. The donkeys were heavily laden with metal containers and bales of rags. But that was not the most unusual feature of this Indian woman with her two donkeys in Bogotá. Because the traffic was so bad they were traveling down the pavement, past the smartly dressed ladies and the beggars, past the art galleries displaying rubbishy graphics (South America must lead the world in the production of third-rate abstract art, undoubtedly the result of having a vulgar moneyed class and the rise of the interior decorator—you can go to an opening nearly every night even in a dump like Barranquilla); the Indian woman did not spare a glance for the paintings, but continued past the Bank of Bogotá, the plaza (Bolívar, his sword implanted at his feet), past the curio shops with leather goods and junk carvings, and jewelers showing trays of emeralds to tourists. She starts across the street, the donkeys plodding under their loads, and the cars honk and swerve and the people make way for her. This could be a wonderful documentary film, the poor woman and her animals in the stern city of four million; she is a reproach to everything in view, though few people see her and no one turns. If this was filmed, with no more elaborate scenario than she was walking from one side of Bogotá to the other, it would win a prize; if she was a detail in a painting it would be a masterpiece (but no one in South America paints the human figure with any conviction). It is as if 450 years have not happened. The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.

She walked, without looking up, past a man selling posters, past the beggars near an old church. And, glancing at the posters, examining the beggars, I lost her. I paused, looked aside, and then she was gone.

High Plains Drifter