The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

12 THE BALBOA BULLET TO COLON

It was 'Save Our Canal Day'. Two United States congressmen had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, 'Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!'). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75 % of the United States was against the Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise — there was a demonstration, too — little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn't care. She had enjoyed the rally: 'We've been feeling left out, as if everyone was against us.'

The Zonians, 3,000 workers for the Panama Canal Company, and their families, saw the treaty as a sell-out; why should the Canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell, It 's our canali

'Want to know the trouble with these people?' said an American political officer at the embassy. 'They can't decide whether the Canal is a government department, or a company, or an independent state.'

Whatever it was, it was certainly a lost cause; but it was not the less interesting for that. Few places in the world can match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status or in the cloudiness of its future. The Canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate — they want the Canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the Canal was dug. If justice were to be done the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubb-dubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however — when they become especially frenzied — often burn their Stars and Stripes and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. What a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.

It is, by common consent, a Company town. There is little in the way of personal freedom in the Zone. I am not talking about the liberal guarantees of freedom of speech or assembly, which are soothing abstractions but seldom used; I mean, the Zonian has to ask permission before he may paint his house another colour, or even shellac the baseboard in his bathroom. If he wishes to asphalt his driveway he must apply in writing to the Company; but he will be turned down: only pebbles are permitted. The Zonian is living in a Company house; he drives on Company roads, sends his children to Company schools, banks at the Company bank, borrows money from the Company Credit Union, shops at the Company store, (where the low prices are pegged to those in New Orleans), sails at the Company club, sees movies at the Company theatre, and if he eats out will take his family to the Company cafeteria in the middle of Balboa and eat Company steaks and Company ice-cream. If a plumber or an electrician is needed the Company will supply one. The system is maddening, but if the Zonian is driven crazy there is a Company psychiatrist. The community is entirely self-contained. Children are born in the Company hospital; people are married in Company churches — there are many denominations, but Baptists predominate; and when the Zonian dies he is embalmed in the Company mortuary — a free casket and burial are part of every Company contract.

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 stencilled 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 was 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 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 cinema. 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 Company and even reflects the social organization ofthat colonial enterprise: the Zonian suffers a notoriously out-dated 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 1 know what socialism is,' said a Zonian to me at Miraflores.

I tried to explain that this was not socialism but rather the highest stage of capitalism, the imperial company; profit and idealism; high-minded exploitation. It was colonialism in its purest form. And by its nature colonialism is selective. Where are the victims, then, the poor, the exploited? The Zone is immaculate, but it only appears to be a haven of peace. About four years ago the schools in the Zone were reclassified — it meant they did not have to be integrated. Blacks, who had been brought years ago to work in the Zone, were regarded as Panamanians. So the integration issue was simplified: the blacks were encouraged to move out of the Zone. They did not move far — they couldn't, they still had jobs in the Zone. The fringes of the Zone are occupied by these rejects, and the far side of the Fourth of July Highway is a slum. They cross the highway to go to work, and in the evening they return to their hovels. And what is interesting is that the Zonian, when particularly worked up about the civilization he has brought to the Isthmus, points to the dividing line and says, 'Look at the contrast!' But it was the Zonian who decreed that those people should live there and that all Panama should stand aside and let him get on with the job.

It is hard to exaggerate the tenacious attitude of the Zonians. Their mirror-images are less the time-servers in Suez than the toilers in India during the last years of the British Raj. The Zonian is not noted for his command of Spanish, but on his own turf he is efficient and hardworking. A week before I arrived, the Zonian workers tried to organize a strike, to prove they had some bargaining power. But they failed, as strikers in Poland and Czechoslovakia always fail, and perhaps for the same reason: they were sat on and, when it came to it, the shutdown could not last — they did not have the heart to close down the Canal. In sympathy their children cut classes at Balboa High School, played hooky for their parents' sake — and for their own reasons. Zon-ians are aware that the world they inhabit is special, and they know it is threatened with extinction. But, because they keep to themselves, the menacing world is closer than the demon countries they whisper about — Russia, China, Cuba, 'the Arabs', 'the Communists'. The big stupid clumsy world of squinting cannibals begins where the Zone ends — it is right there, across the Fourth of July Highway, the predatory world of hungry unwashed people gibbering in Spanish. Even the sweetest Zonians haven't got a clue. A testimonial dinner was given for a librarian in the Zone. She was retiring after forty years in the Company library — forty years of residence in the Zone, supervising the local staff, ordering books, hovering in the stacks, attending functions, initialling memos, issuing directives, coping with the Dewey Decimal System. Everyone she had known came to her testimonial, and most — to her credit — were Panamanians. Speeches were made; there was praise, and a presentation. At the end of it, the librarian got to her feet and attempted to thank them in Spanish. She faltered and finally fell silent. In forty years she had not learned enough Spanish to utter a complete sentence of gratitude to the Spanish workers who organized the dinner.

'I don't care what you say,' the Zonian at Miraflores was saying to me, 'but it sure feels like socialism.'

We were watching the Chilean freighter Palma pass through the lock. There are no pumps in the Canal. The freighter enters the lock; the gates shut; and within a few minutes the huge ship is dropping to the level of the Pacific on this last liquid stair in its descent. The upper gates are closed, too, and 50,000 gallons of water flow from Lake Madden to replace the water the Palma used for its journey through the Canal. The freighter is towed by small engines on canal-side tracks — this is the single improvement that has been necessary in sixty years. Once, the ships were drawn by mules; the engines are still called 'mules'. One cannot fail to be impressed by the running of the Canal; there are few works of man on earth that can compare with it.

'Who are those people?' I asked.

There were five men in clean white Panama-style shirts, vaulting coils of cable and occasionally tripping as they made their way towards the steel front of the lock which was the shape of a battleship's bow. They were hurrying, puffing and blowing in the ninety-degree heat; their fancy shoes were not made for these slippery surfaces. I had asked whether I could roam around the lock, but I was told it was forbidden.

'Them are congressmen,' said the guide. 'That's all we get around here these days. Congressmen.'

The guide was black, a Panamanian, from Chiriqui Province. He had written his thesis at the University of Panama on the history of the Canal. He was completely bi-lingual. I wondered whether he was in favour of the Canal being handed over.

He said, 'If this Canal Treaty is ratified that's going to be the end of this place.'

'You want to see the Americans run it forever?'

He said,'I sure do.'

It was not a Panamanian view, but he was untypical. After that, every Panamanian I met said the Canal belonged to them; though the terms on which it should be given back varied from person to person. And yet the Zonians are probably right when they say that the Canal will be mismanaged when it is in Panamanian hands. It does not take much to upset its balance sheet; in fact, some years it loses money, and to show a profit the Panama Canal Company must tow an average of thirty-five or forty ships a day through the three locks, repeating this complicated procedure every day of the year. Was it outmoded? No, said the guide; apart from a few super-tankers it could handle all the ships in the world. Wouldn't a sea-level canal be simpler? No, said the guide; the Atlantic tides were different from the Pacific ones, and did I know that there was a poisonous variety of sea-snake in the Pacific? A sea-level canal would allow this creature into the Caribbean, 'and God knows what would happen then.'

'I'm glad you're on our side,' said the Zonian to the guide.

'Send anyone you want down here,' said the guide. 'I'll tell them the truth.'

I suggested to him that the truth of it was that, like the arguments for the British staying in India or the U.S. Marines patrolling Veracruz or Colonel Vanderbilt in Nicaragua, the adventure could not last. For better or worse ('Worse!' he said quickly), the Canal would have to become the property of the Republic of Panama. Surely, it was plain to him that the Treaty would be ratified and that this would happen.

'Maybe it will happen and maybe it won't,' he said. 'I can't say. But if it does happen it's going to be bad.'

'Good for you!' said the Zonian, then turned to me. 'We're going to give the Canal away, just like we gave Vietnam away. It's terrible. We should stay. We should have kept Taiwan — '

'Taiwan?’ I said.

'We gave it to the Chinese. That's why we have to keep this Canal. This is our last chance. Look at what happened to Vietnam after we gave it away.'

I said, 'We didn't give Vietnam away.'

'Yes, we did.'

'Madam,' I said, 'we lost the war.'

'We should have won it,' she said. 'Now you're talking like the reporters. They come here and say all the Zonians are red-necks, living in beautiful homes. Goodness, we're ordinary people!'

'That I can vouch for,' I said.

But when people said We in Panama I had to think hard to know who they meant. The Zonian lady's we referred to all Zonians, Ambassador Jorden said we and he meant the United States of America, the Ratifier's we ignored the Zonian: there was always exclusion in the pronoun. The American soldiers in the Zone were officially neutral, but when a military man said we he implied that he was against the treaty. The third or fourth generation West Indians, mainly from Barbados, said we in English and feared for their jobs, other Panamanians said we in Spanish and spoke of their long tradition and subtle culture; of the three tribes of Indians, the Cuñas, the Guaymies and the Chocóes, only 3 % speak Spanish, and their we — spoken in their own tongues — is in opposition to the treaty. Alluding to the Canal (and in Panama people alluded to nothing else) no one I heard ever said /. People held the identity and opinions of their particular group, and they did not venture far from their tribal areas. Like Gulliver, I was in transit; I went from group to group, noting down complaints in handwriting which grew ever more bewildered and uncertain.

Not everyone complained. A girl I met in Panama City said, 'In most places you go, people say, "You should have been here last year." They said that to me when I went to Brazil, then Peru, then Colombia. But no one says it in Panama. This is the time to be here.'

The Canal, and the Miraflores Locks, had been my first stop. But I wanted to know a bit more about the place. I spent an evening at the casino in the Holiday Inn, watching people lose money by the armful. Winning made them grimmer, since the gambler's felt wish is to lose. They were pale, unsmiling, actually throwing their money down — and, say, those men at the blackjack table, hunched over diminishing towers of chips and gloomily flicking at playing cards: the congressmen! There were men in cowboy boots and ladies pulling hundred-dollar bills out of their cleavage and uproarious Americans being reprimanded by squinting croupiers in dainty suits because the Americans were spitting on the dice ('Do me a favour!' screamed one crap-shooter, and threw a pair of dice at the croupier). Gambling looked such a joyless addiction, and I had to leave — another minute would have turned me into a Marxist. The next day I took a closer look at the black tenements of Panama City; although their condition was dismal — broken windows, slumping balconies, blistered peeling paint on the wooden walls — they dated from the French occupation of Panama and retained some of the elegance of the original design. But it was not enough to hold my interest and the conversations I had with the aggrieved tenants told me only that this was yet another tribal area at odds with its neighbours.

One morning I gave a lecture at Canal Zone College. The subject was travel, and how strange it was to speak of the world and the romance of distance to people who could not conquer their timidity long enough to endure the short drive to Panama City, and who regarded the town of Colón just up the road as more savage and dangerous than a wholejungle of Amazonian head-hunters.

After the lecture I fell into conversation with a Zonian lady who said, 'I don't know what you expected to find here in the Zone, but I can tell you we live a very quiet life.'

That we again; and yet it was not the mob pronoun I had been hearing, but a more intimate word, spoken with a kind of marital tenderness and defiance. She was talking about her family. They had come down from Pennsylvania, initially for two years, but they had liked the Zone and decided to stay. After eleven years the place still had an attraction, though the Company was often oppressive in the way it managed their lives.

'And what do you do?' I asked.

'It's not me — it's my husband. He's the head of the Gorgas Mortuary. Don't laugh.'

'I'm not laughing,' I said. 'That's interesting.'

'You think it's interesting?' She had started to laugh. I could not contain my curiosity, my enthusiasm for visiting the mortuary; and when I thought I had convinced her that I really did want a tour, and as we were driving to the old grey building, she kept saying, 'Are you sure you want to do this?'

John Reiss was a tall stout mortician with a pink complexion and a friendly manner. His wife had said, 'He's wonderful with bereaved relatives — he just calms them down, I don't know how he does it.' He was soft-spoken and precise, interested in his work — interested particularly in embalming — and proud of the fact that corpses were sent to him from all over Central and South America. Like many other Zonians he was a member of the Elks' Club, the V.F.W., the Rotary, but his mortician's interest perhaps made him more of a joiner than most: a mortician is a public figure in America, like a mayor or a fire chief, and the Zone was a version of America. But Mr Reiss was also a member of the local barber shop quartet, and there was in his voice a kind of melodious croon, a singer's modulation, a mortician's concerned coo.

'To start off with,' said Mr Reiss in the Coffin Room, an instructional whisper in his voice, 'here we have the coffins themselves. If you were a local employee you got this coffin.'

It was a plain silvery steel coffin, with unornamented handles, a buffed metal box the length of a man and the depth of a horse trough. It was shut, the lid fastened. It was difficult for me to see this closed coffin and not to feel a distinct uneasiness about what it might contain.

'And if you were an American you got this one.'

This one was bigger and a bit fancier. There were rosettes on the side and simulated carving on the corners of the lid, some romanesque scrollwork, leaf clusters and the sort of handles you see on doors in Louisburg Square in Boston. Apart from the foliage, and the size, I wondered whether there was any other difference between this coffin and the silver one.

This is much more expensive,' said Mr Reiss. 'It's hermetically sealed, and look at the difference in the colours.'

Of course, this one was goldy bronze, the other was silver. They matched the status of the deceased. It was a racial distinction. From about the turn of the century until very recently, race was expressed by the Panama Canal Company not in terms of black and white but by the designations gold and silver. The euphemism was derived from the way workers were paid: the unskilled workers, most of them black, were paid in silver; the skilled workers, nearly all white Americans, were paid in gold. The terms applied to all spheres of life in the Zone; there were gold schools and silver schools, gold houses and silver houses, and so on, to gold coffins and silver coffins, the former hermetically sealed, the latter — like the silver house — leaky. So, even in his casket, the canal employee could be identified, and long after he had turned to dust, the evidence of his race lost in decay, his remains could be disinterred and you would know from the hue ofthat box whether the grit in that winding sheet had once been a white man or a black man. It must have been some satisfaction for the Company to know that, however evenly the grass covered these graves, the colour line that had been the rule in schools and housing (and even water fountains and toilets, the post office and cafeterias), was still observed beneath the ground.

'Nowadays,' said Mr Reiss, 'everyone gets this good coffin. That's ^{why the mortuary loses money. These things cost an awful lot.'}

Upstairs was the Receiving Room. There were refrigerators here, and on the wall of the bare flint-grey room the large steel drawers that most people know from the morgue scenes in movies, the floor-to-ceiling arrangement that resembles nothing so much as stacks of oversized filing cabinets.

Mr Reiss's hand went to one drawer. He balanced himself by gripping the handle; underneath it was a label: a name, a date.

'I have a man in here,' he said, tugging as he spoke. 'Died a month ago. We don't know what to do with him. From California. No family, no friends.'

'I'd rather you didn't open that drawer,' 1 said.

He pushed it gently and released it. 'No one wants to claim him.'

It was cold in the room; I shivered and noticed my skin was prickling with gooseflesh.This was the coldest I had been since leaving the sleet storm in Chicago.

'Shall we move on?' i said.

But Mr Reiss was reading a new label. 'Yes,' he said, tapping another drawer. 'This is a little boy. Only six years old.' His fingers were under the handle. 'He's been there since last June — anything wrong?'

'I feel chilly.'

'We've got to keep the temperature down in here. What was I saying? Oh, yes,' he said, glancing at his hand, at the label, 'he's going to be here until next June. But he'll be all right.'

'All right? In what sense?'

Mr Reiss smiled gently; it was professional pride. 'I embalmed him myself- he's all ready to go. Well,' he went on — and now he was speaking to the drawer, 'just to make sure, I look at him about once a month. I open him up. Check him over.'

'What do you see?'

'Dehydration.'

On our way to the Cremation Room, 1 said, 'For a minute, I thought you were going to open one of those drawers back there.'

'I was,' said Mr Reiss. 'But you didn't want me to.'

'I think I would have keeled over.'

That's what everyone says. But it's something you should see. A dead person is just a dead person. It happens to everybody. Death is one of the things you have to accept. It's nothing to be frightened of.' This was obviously the tone he adopted with the bereaved; and he was convincing. I felt ignorant and superstitious. But what if it had frightened me? How to erase the image of a death-shrunken six-year-old from my mind? I was afraid that, seeing it, I would be scared for the rest of my life.

The Cremation Room was hot: the air was stale and dusty and I could feel the heat across the room from the furnaces, which were larger versions of the old coal burners of my childhood. The heat had reddened the iron doors and they were coated with fine powder. Shafts of sunlight at the windows lighted tiny particles of dust which the hot air kept in turbulent motion.

'The reason it's so hot in here,' said Mr Reiss, 'is because we had a cremation just this morning.' He went to the side of one of the furnaces and jerked open the iron door. 'Local fellow,' he said, peering in. He pushed at some white smouldering flakes with a poker. 'Just ashes and a little bone.'

There were two aluminium barrels near the furnaces. Mr Reiss lifted the lid of one- an ash barrel. He reached in, groping in the ashes and took out a fragment of bone. It was a dry chalky hunk of splinters, bleached to sea-shell whiteness by the heat and dusted with grey biscuit-flakes of ash; and it had a knob on the end, like a prehistoric half of a ball-peen hammer.

'These are just odds and ends mostly.'

'That looks like a femur.'

'Good for you,' said Mr Reiss. 'That's what it is. How'd you know that?'

'I'm a failed medical student.'

'You shouldn't have failed — you certainly know your bones!' Mr Reiss closed his hand on the bone and squashed it like a cookie, reducing it to crumbs: / will show you fear in a handful of dust. 'We get a lot of amputations. This was a whole leg.'

He dropped the dust back into the barrel and clapped crumbs from his hands. I looked into the barrel and saw scorched safety pins and scraps of mummified cloth.

'There's a teaching hospital next door. They send us things to cremate. After the lessons are over. They're in terrible shape — brains removed, all cut open and dissected. Hardly recognize some of them.'

There were no other people in these mortuary rooms, no live ones. The emptiness, the absence of voices and furniture, made it seem like a mausoleum, and I had the feeling I had been locked in, sealed up with this soft-spoken guide who treated coffins and dehydrating corpses and friable thigh bones with an ordinariness that chastened me and made me wonder if perhaps in his casual way he was successfully concealing some horror from me. But Mr Reiss was saying, 'We're losing money hand over fist — because of the pay-grades. The hardware and coffins are so expensive we can't even cover our costs. The local workers are getting those real nice- ah, here we are,' he said, interrupting himself at the threshold of another empty room, 'the Embalming Room.'

There were four sloping sinks in the centre of the room, and beneath them rubber hoses draining into the floor. There were grey marble slabs as well, arranged as tables, and two ceiling fans and a strong odour of disinfectant.

'We've been asking for air-conditioning for years,' said Mr Reiss.

'I can't imagine why,' I said. 'It's quite cool in here.'

He laughed. 'It's about eighty degrees!'

Strange: I was shivering again.

'But they won't give it to us,' he said. Those fans aren't enough. It can get pretty smelly in here when we're working.'

'I've been meaning to ask you what you call the corpses,' I said. 'Do you ever refer to it as "the loved one"? Or the body, the victim, the corpse, or what?'

'"The loved one" is what they say in books,' said Mr Reiss. 'But they're just exaggerating. People have a lot of funny ideas about morticians. Jessica Mitford — that book. She didn't go many places. We're not really like that. "The remains" — that's what we usually call it.'

He stepped to one of the deep sinks and went on, 'We put the remains on the table here and slide it into the sink. Then we raise an artery. The carotid's a good one — I like the carotid myself. Drain it completely. Blood goes all down there, through the pipe' — he was speaking to the sink and using his hand to indicate the flow of the blood — 'into the floor. Then — see that hose? — we fill it with embalming fluid. It takes time and you have to be careful. It's harder than it looks.'

I was mumbling, making notes with frozen fingers. I said I thought it was interesting. Mr Reiss seized on this.

'It is interesting! We get every type in here. Why, just recently,' he said, beating his palm on the embalming sink in emphatic excitement, 'a bus went off the bridge — you know the big bridge across the Canal? Thirty-eight people died and we had them all, right in here. Boy, that was something. Planes, car crashes, drownings, murders on ships, people who get mugged in Colón. Take a murder on a ship passing through the Canal — that's real tricky, but we handle it. And Indians? They drink and then they try to paddle their canoes and they drown. We get every type you can mention. Interesting is the word for it.'

I had gone silent. But Mr Reiss remained by the sink.

'I've been down here in the Zone for eleven years,' he said, 'a mortician the whole time.' Now he spoke slowly and wonderingly, 'And you know what? I've had something different every single day. Want to see the Autopsy Room?'

I looked at my watch.

'Golly,' he said, looking at his own. 'It's past one o'clock. I don't know about you, but I'm real hungry.'

The Elks kitchen was shut. We went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2537 and, ordering chop suey and iced tea, Mr Reiss said, 'But there's no comparison with the States service-wise. You don't get the attention here that they offer there. In the States you get a real nice service and big cars and a little ceremony. Here, all we give you is a hearse.'

'And an embalming,' I said.

'I've always been interested in embalming,' he said.

The chop suey came, a large helping of wet vegetables, a dish of noodles. There were very ifew other diners in the V.F.W. cafeteria, but, clean and dark and air-conditioned, it was like any post in America. I asked Mr Reiss how he had become a mortician.

'Usually, it's a family-type business. Your father's a mortician, so you become one, too. So I'm very unusual in a way — my family wasn't in the business.'

'Then you just decided, like that, to be a mortician?'

Mr Reiss swallowed a mouthful of chop suey and patting his lips with his napkin said, 'I always wanted to be a funeral director — as far back as I can remember. Know something? It's the earliest memory I have. I must have been about six years old when my old granny died. They put me upstairs and gave me candy to keep me quiet. They were liquorice things in the shape of hats — derby hats and Stetsons. Well, I was upstairs — this was in Pennsylvania — and I started yelling and I said, "I want to see Granny!" "No," they said, "keep him upstairs, give him some more candy." But I kept yelling and they finally gave in and let me come down. My cousin took me by the hand and we went over to Granny in her casket. See, they had the funerals in houses then. When I saw her I asked all sorts of questions, like "How do they do it?" and "Who did this?" and so forth. I was real interested. And I decided then what I wanted to be — a funeral director. When I was nine or so I was sure that's what I wanted to be.'

I could not help imagining a classroom in Pennsylvania, and a curious teacher leaning over a quiet pink-faced boy, and asking, 'Tell me, Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?'

Inevitably, our talk turned to the Canal Treaty. I asked what would happen to him and the Gorgas Mortuary if the Treaty was ratified.

'I think we'll be all right, whatever happens. I don't know what's going to happen about the Treaty, but if they take us over I hope they keep us on. Most of us love this Canal, and we do a good job at the mortuary. I think they'll just rehire us. Everyone's worried, but why? They can't run the Canal without us. And I'm real interested in staying here.'

That night I was invited to a dinner. 'You're going to have to sing for your supper,' the host said. I asked him what I should talk about. He said it didn't matter very much — perhaps something about writing?

'No matter what you say,' he said, 'the only thing they're really interested in is what you think about the treaty.' I said it was my favourite subject.

I talked to the assembly of Panamanian writers and artists about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. No one had read it and so it was like speaking about a book which had just appeared, a candidate for the best-seller list, as fresh and full of news as a spring morning in Boston. They listened with rapt attention to the plot, the sequence of atrocities, the muffled music of the thrilling ending; and they looked at me with the near-sighted commiserating expressions I had seen on the faces of my students in faraway lecture halls, as I attempted to explain how, with such clever knots and loops, Poe had made of such stray pieces of string such a convincing hangman's noose.

'I am interested to know,' said a fellow afterwards, at question-time, 'what your position is with regard to the Panama Canal Treaty. Would you mind telling us?'

'Not at all,' I said. I said they were welcome to their opinion of the Zonians, but that they could easily underestimate the sentiment Zon-ians had for the Canal. It was not an age when people were very attached to their jobs, but the Zonians were proud of the work they had done and were dedicated to the running of the Canal. No amount of Panamanian nationalism or flag waving could compare with the technical skill it took to get forty ships a day through the Canal safely. I admitted that Zonians were fairly ignorant of Panama, but that Panamanians had little idea of the complexities of life in the Zone and the sort of fervour Zonians had.

This view brought smiles of disagreement from the audience, but, as no one challenged me, I went on to say that in essence the Canal Zone was colonial territory, and that one could not really understand any colony unless he had read Frankenstein and Prometheus Bound.

Over dinner, Í talked with an elderly architect. He also wrote stories, he said, and most of his stories were satires about the Chief of Government and Commander of the National Guard, General Omar Tor-rijos. What did Torrijos think of his stories? He had wanted to ban them, said the architect, but this was impossible because the stories had won a literary prize.

I said, There are people who think that Torrijos is a mystic.'

'He is a demagogue, not a mystic,' said the architect. 'A showman-very astute, but full of tricks.'

'So you think the Americans should keep the Canal?'

'No. I will tell you. The Canal is every Panamanian's dream. Just as you have your American dream, this is ours. But it is all we have. The real tragedy is that it will come to us while Torrijos is in power. He will take credit for it, you see. He will say, "Look what I have done! I have gotten our Canal back!" '

That was probably true. The American government, through an aid programme, had built a number of apartment houses just outside Panama City. It was public housing, a sop to the thousands of homeless Panamanians. Officially, the apartments were known as 'Torrijos Houses'. It would have been far more just to give them the name of their real benefactor, the American tax-payer. I explained this to the architect and said I had more right than Torrijos to have my name on the apartment houses, since I paid American taxes and the General did not.

'But you put him in power.'

'I did not put General Torrijos in power,' I said.

'I mean, the United States government put him in power. They wanted him there so that they could negotiate with him. They would have had a much harder time dealing with a democratically elected government. It is well-known that Torrijos has made concessions that a democratically elected leader would never have made.'

'Didn't Torrijos hold a referendum on the treaty?'

'That was a bluff. No one knew what it was about. It proved nothing. The people have had no say whatsoever in this treaty. And, look, the United States is giving Torrijos fifty million dollars for his army alone! Why? Because he demanded it. They have given much less to Somoza in Nicaragua and he has stayed in power.'

'So you're stuck with Torrijos?'

'No,' said the architect. 'I think that when the United States gets what it wants from him they will throw him away — like trash. '

The architect was becoming quite heated. He had forgotten his food; he was gesturing with one hand and mopping his face with the handkerchief in his other hand.

'Do you want to know what Torrijos is really like?' he said. 'He is like a boy who has crashed his first car. That car is our republic. Now he is waiting for a second car to crash. The second car is the treaty. What I say to Torrijos is, "Forget about the car- learn how to drive!" '

'You should eat something,' I said.

'We are not used to him,' he said, glancing at his plate. 'This dictatorship is strange to us. Since we got our independence in 1903 he is the first dictator we've had. I have never known anyone like him before. Mr Theroux, we are not used to dictators.'

I was so interested in what the architect had said that I made a point, a few days later, of speaking with a Panamanian lawyer who had helped to draft the legal aspects of the treaty. I concealed the architect's name: the lawyer was a close friend of Torrijos and I did not want the man thrown into jail for uttering seditious opinions. The lawyer listened to the arguments and then said in Spanish, 'Rubbish!'

He continued in English, saying, 'Omar wasn't put there by the gringos.'

I found his phraseology objectionable. But the American Ambassador was present. I could not say, 'Don't call me a gringo and I won't call you a spie,' to this swarthy citizen of Panama.

'In 1967 none of the elected people could agree on a draft treaty,' said the lawyer.

'Is that why General Torrijos overthrew the government in 1968?' I said, averting my eyes from the Ambassador.

The lawyer was snorting. 'Some people,' he said slowly, 'think the attempted coup against Torrijos in 1969 was instigated by the CIA. What would your friend say to this?'

I said, 'If the coup was unsuccessful the CIA was probably not behind it. Ha-ha.'

'We make mistakes occasionally,' said the Ambassador, but I was not very sure what he meant by that.

Torrijos showed great courage in signing the treaty,' said the lawyer.

'What courage?' I said. 'He signs and he gets the Canal. That's not courage, it's opportunism.'

'Now you're talking like your friend,' said the lawyer. 'He is obviously of the extreme Left.'

'As a matter of fact, he's rather conservative.'

'Same thing,' said the lawyer, and walked away.

My last task, before I took the train to Colón, was to give a lecture at Balboa High School. Mr Dachi, the Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy, thought this might be a good idea: the Embassy had never sent a speaker to Balboa High. But I was not an official visitor; the State Department wasn't paying my way, and there was no reason why the traditional hostility the Zonians felt for the Embassy should be directed towards me. Out of friendship for Mr Dachi (whom I had met in Budapest) I agreed to give the lecture. The American Embassy man who accompanied me said that he preferred to remain anonymous: it was a rowdy place.

Everyone who went to an American high school in the 1950's has been to Balboa High. With its atmosphere of simmering anarchy — the sort of anarchy that takes the form of debagging first-year students in the John or running a Mickey Mouse pennant up the flagpole — and a devotion to spit-balls, sneakers, crew-cuts, horsing around in the gym, questing after intellectual mediocrity in the pages of literary anthologies ('Thornton Wilder has been called the American Shakespeare') and yet distrusting excellence because anything unusual must be a flaw (if you wear glasses you're a brain and known throughout the school as 'Einstein'), taking 'science' because that is what the Russians do and using it as an opportunity for leering at anatomical drawings in the biology book, regarding education as mainly social, coming to terms with sweaty palms and pimples, praising the quarterback, mocking the water-boy — yes, Balboa High was familiar to me. The current craze for rock-and-roll made it seem even more of a throw-back: Elvis read the motto on one tee-shirt, and on another Buddy Holly.

To confirm my impression I went into Boys and looked around. It was empty but the air was whiffy with illicit cigarette smoke, and on the walls: Balboa is Number One, America's Great and, repeatedly, Panama Sucks.

I had not been inside an American high school for twenty years; how strange it was that the monkey house from which I had graduated had been reassembled, down to its last brick and home-room bell and swatch of ivy, here in Central America. And I knew in my bones what my reaction would have been at Medford High if it had been announced that, instead of Latin at ten o'clock, there would be an assembly: a chance to fart around!

It was probably good-natured unruliness, the buzz, the yakking, the laughing, the poking and paper-rattling. Half the student body of 1,285 was there in the memorial auditorium. The microphone — of course! — gave off a locust-like whine and now and then cut out entirely, making my voice a whisper. I watched the mob of tubby and skinny students and saw a teacher hurry across an aisle, shove her way along a row of seats and, rolling the magazine she held into a truncheon, smack a giggling boy on the head.

The principal introduced me. He was booed the moment he approached the lectern. I took my place and was applauded, but as the applause died away the booing increased. My subject was travel. 'I don't think they can take more than about twenty minutes,' the principal had told me; but after ten minutes the murmuring in the audience had nearly drowned my words. I continued to speak, glancing at my watch and then brought the proceedings to an end. Any questions?

'How much money do you make?' asked a boy in the front row.

'What's it like in Africa?' asked a girl.

'Why bother to take a train all that way?' was the last question. 'I mean, if it takes so wicked long?'

I said, 'Because you can take a six-pack of beer in your compartment and guzzle it and by the time you've sobered up you've arrived.'

This seemed to satisfy them. They howled and stamped and then booed me loudly.

'Your, um, students,' I said to the principal afterwards, 'are rather, um-'

They're real nice kids,' he said, thwarting my attempt to be critical. 'But I thought when I came down here that I'd find some real sophisticated kids. This is a foreign country — maybe they'd be cosmopolitan, I figured. The funny thing is, they're less sophisticated than the kids back home.'

'Ah, yes, unsophisticated,' I said. 'I couldn't help noticing that they've dumped red paint on the bust of Balboa in front of your school.'

'That's the school colour,' he said.

'Do they study Panama's history?'

This gave him pause. He thought a moment and then said uncertainly, 'No, but when they're in the sixth grade they have a few classes in social studies.'

'Good old social studies!'

'But Panama history — it's not what you'd call a subject or anything like that.'

I said, 'How long have you been here?'

'Sixteen years,' he said. 'I consider this my home. Some people here have houses in the States. They go home every summer. I don't do that. I plan to stay here. Back in 1964 a teacher of ours ran away — he thought it was the end. Remember the flag-burning? If he had stayed he would have had nearly thirty years service and a good pension. But he didn't. I'm going to see what happens here. You never know — this treaty business is far from settled.'

Another teacher, a young woman, had wandered over to hear what the principal was saying. When he finished, she said, 'This isn't home for me. I've been here ten years and I've always felt, well, temporary. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and open the curtains and see those palm trees and I think, "Oh, heavens!" '

'What'd you think of the students?' asked a male teacher, smiling, as he accompanied me out of the building.

'Pretty noisy,' I said.

'They were behaving themselves,' he said. 'I was surprised — I expected trouble. They've been raising hell recently.'

Behind us, I heard the unmistakable sound of glass breaking, and youthful laughter, and a teacher's exasperated yell.

It was the high school students who nick-named this train 'The Balboa Bullet'. Like the canal, it is American in character, of solid appearance, efficiently-run and well-maintained. Boarding at Balboa Heights you could not be blamed for thinking that this was the old train to Worcester. In the way tickets are sold and conductors in pill-box hats punch them and hand you a seat-stub (Keep This Check In Sight) it is slightly old-fangled and very dependable. But that too is like the Canal: both Canal and railway have worn well, lasting through the modern age without having had to be modernized.lt travels from the Atlantic to the Pacific in under an hour and a half, and it is nearly always on time.

I had been in Panama long enough to be able to recognize some of the landmarks — 'The Building' overlooking Stevens Circle, the mansion houses on Balboa Heights, and Fort Clayton which has the look of a maximum security prison. Most of the houses had a monotonous sameness — the two trees, the flower-bed, the boat in the breezeway. There are no pedestrians on the side-walks — in most places there are no pavements. Only the servants lounging at kitchen doors break the monotony and hint at life being lived.

The first stop was Miraflores: 'Mirror-floors,' in the corrupt Zonian pronunciation. And then the Canal drops behind a hill and does not reappear until Pedro Miguel where, at that set of locks, there are dredgers whose shape and smoke-stacks gave them the look of old Mississippi riverboats.

The train, unlike any other train in Latin America, contains a cross-section of the country's society. In the air-conditioned cars are the American army officers, the better-paid Zonians, tourists, and the businessmen from France and Japan who, at this crucial time, have come down to make a killing in real estate or imports. I was in the non-air-conditioned car by preference, with an ill-assorted group of Panamanians and Zonians, enlisted men, canal workers on the afternoon shift, blacks in velvet caps and some with Rastafarian dreadlocks and octoroons in pig-tails and whole families — black, white and all the intermediate racial hues.

In the air-conditioned car the passengers were looking out of the windows, marvelling at the Canal; but here in the cheaper seats many of the passengers were asleep and no one seemed to notice that we were passing through woods which thickened and, shadier and with hanging vines, turned into half-tame rain-forest. It became jungle, but it remained to the east; on the west, next to the Canal, there was a golf course, with brown tussocky fairways and forlorn golfers marching towards the rough — snakes and scorpions plague the duffers on this course. There are no billboards, no signs at all on the roads, no litter, no hamburger stands or petrol stations: this is an American suburb in apotheosis, the triumph of banality, a permanent encampment of no-nonsense houses and no-nonsense railway stations and no-nonsense churches, and even no-nonsense prisons, for here, in Gamboa, is the Canal Zone Penitentiary and it looks no better or worse than the barracks at Fort Clayton or the Zonian houses at Balboa. The severity is given emphasis by a policeman in a state trooper's Stetson leaning against the fender of his squad car, filing his nails.

Only in the tunnels was I reminded that I was in Central America: people screamed.

Out of the tunnel deeper jungle began, tree jammed next to tree, vine creeping on vine, pathless and dark. It bears no relation to the Canal; it is primeval jungle, teeming with birds. That is the margin of the Zonian's world, where Panama resumes after the interrupting ribbon of the Zone. And it is in its wildness as unreal as the military manicure of the Zone. It does not matter that there are alligators and Indians there, because there are puppy-dogs and policemen here, and everything you need to ignore the jungle that does not stop until the Andes begin.

At Culebra we crossed the continental divide, and two ships were passing in the Cut. For these two ships to be sliding sleepily along, seven years of digging were necessary; it was, said Lord Bryce, 'the greatest liberty ever taken with nature'. The details are in David McCullough's canal history, The Path Between The Seas: to dig nine miles and remove 96 million cubic yards of earth it cost $90 million; 61 million pounds of dynamite were used to blast open the canal, and much of it was used right here at Culebra. But it was a hot sunny afternoon; the birds were singing; Culebra seemed little more than a natural river in the tropics. The Canal's history is unimaginable from what it is possible to see in the Zone; most of it is underwater, in any case. Bunau-Varilla's remark that 'the cradle of the Panama Republic' was Room 1162 of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City is true, but seems, like all the other historical details connected with the Canal, monstrous and fanciful.

And what could be odder than the sight of a great sea-going ship in the jungle? Inland, swamps and lagoons were more frequent, and then the lake began. Gatun Lake was formed by the Canal; until the sluice gates opened in 1914 there was only a narrow river, the Chagres. Now there is a vast lake, bigger than Moosehead Lake in Maine. Near Frijoles, a cool breeze blew across it and whitened the water and made it choppy. I could see Barro Colorado Island. As water filled the valley to create the lake the animals made for Barro Colorado, the birds flew to its trees, and so this hill was turned into an ark. It remains a wild-life sanctuary.

All the transistor radios — there were five — in my car were playing a current hit, Stay in' Alive, as the train crossed the causeway from Monte Liro to the Gatun side. It was like being in Louisiana, not merely because of the blacks and their radios and that music; but most Zonians had been recruited out of New Orleans, and this passage was practically identical to crossing the long lacustrine bridge on Lake Pontchartrain on the Chicago train called, not entirely by coincidence, 'The Panama Limited'. The islands in Gatun Lake are so young they still look like hilltops in flood-time, but there is no time to examine them. Here, the train does sixty, going clickety-click across the causeway. I regretted that it was not going farther, that I could not simply sit where I was, puffing my pipe, and be taken to Colombia and Ecuador. But no good train ever goes far enough, just as no bad train ever reaches its destination soon enough.

The last set of locks at Gatun, and the surrounding buildings, the camp, the houses, the military signs — all this jogged a memory in me I thought I had lost. It put my Panama experience into perspective. I had felt at Balboa High a familiar melancholy. It had been like my high school. But one American high school is much like another; they all have a timeless gamesmanship, a pretence of study and a rather comic look of skirmish between student and teacher. And the atmosphere is always the same, the smell of textbook glue and paper, corridor wax, chalk dust and sneaker rubber; the distant strongbox clang of locker-doors, the shouts and giggles. It was no aid to perception to be in Balboa High.

But Gatun moved me. Gatun was a piece of my past I thought I had lost; I had forgotten it, and it was not until we passed through that I realized how special it was. Except for this trip, the memory might have been irrecoverable. Round about 1953, when I was twelve and skinny and too near-sighted to catch a baseball, my uncle — an army surgeon — did me the favour of inviting me to spend the summer with him and my aunt and cousins at Fort Lee in Virginia. He was an officer. Punished-looking privates picking up gum-wrappers at the roadside used to salute his car, even when my aunt was driving it — saluting the insignia, I suppose. We were always going to the pool when this happened, to the Fort Lee Officers Open Mess. We usually went to the pool. There was a boy my age there, named Miller. He had a yellow stain on his swimming trunks. 'That's pickle juice,' he said. 'I spilled it in Germany.' It seemed an amazing explanation, but I believed him: he owned a German bayonet. Miller had been in Virginia long enough to ignore the heat. I had never known such temperatures. I volunteered to caddy for my uncle, but after six holes I had to sit in the shade and wait for him to return for the thirteenth, which was nearby. I tried to acclimatize myself like Miller, but invariably I ended up in the shade of a tree. My uncle said I probably had dropsy. 'This is my nephew,' he would say to his golf partner. 'He's got dropsy.' The nickname 'Dropsy' dogged me throughout the summer. Fort Lee was an army camp, but it did not match the stereotype I had seen in war movies; it looked like a state prison that was being used as a country club. Apart from the soldiers — saluting, saluting — there were blacks, lurking everywhere, gardening, idling at the Tastee-Freez ice-cream parlour, walking down the unshaded roads, driving the DDT spraying truck which tore through the back yards leaving a cloud of poison as pretty as fog and, afterwards, piles of dead grasshoppers. The woods were thin and piney, the earth redder than any I had ever seen, the houses cool (my aunt had 'coffee mornings'). At the restaurants near the camp there were small rectangular signs near the doors, like the tin name-plates in Boston that said DUFFY or JONES; but here, the name-1 innocently believed it was a name — was always WHITE. A train ran nearby, to Hopewell and Petersburg; the insects were as loud in the daytime as at night, the buildings pale yellow, with red-tile roofs, and fences, and stencilled signs — like this.

As the train approached Gatun, and stopped, I was back in Fort Lee, returned to a moment twenty-five years before, when I had watched with the same sense of fear and excitement the military buildings and the stunted trees in the red soil, the unaccountably bright flowers, the WACs, the yellow school bus, the row of olive-drab Fords, the baseball diamond and the black people, the Little League field, the cemetery, the young soldiers who looked aimless whenever they were not marching, the dust settling in the heat.The two worlds met: here it was rural Virginia, and still the Fifties, and the smell was the same and the memory so clear, I thought: The next stop must be Petersburg.

It was Mount Hope, but Mount Hope was a continuation of the same memory. It is not often that I have travelled so far and been able, so easily,to uncover a fragment of the past that had remained lost to me. And as in all recollection there is something that looks inexact, like the memory of the name-plate WHITE. The perspective of years allowed me to see how old and small that other world was, and how I had been fooled.

The spell was broken at Colón. Colón had a divided look I could never grow used to. It was colonial in such a naked way: the tenements of the poor on one side of the tracks — what passed for the native quarter; and the military symmetries of the imperial buildings on the other side, the yacht club, the offices, the houses set in gardens. Here the governors, there the governed. It is the old form of colonialism because, unlike the equally grasping multi-national corporations which are so often invisible, you can see at a glance from the appearance of things that you are in a colony, and the make of every car tells you that it is an American colony.

The tenements were like those I had seen in Panama City, decaying antiques. With a coat of paint and a dose of rust-remover they would have looked like the houses in New Orleans's French Quarter or those in the older parts of Singapore. If Gatun and so much else in the Zone looked like Fort Lee, Virginia, circa 1953, what lay just outside it seemed like the hectic and faintly reeking commercial districts of prewar Singapore — the sour tangs of the bazaar, the cloth and curio emporiums, the provisioners, the ships' chandlers who, in Colón as in Singapore, were Indians and Chinese.

I had been told that the Indians in the Zone had come from India to work on the railway. It is not an easy fact to authenticate — workers are workers: they are the silent men in history books — but the labour supply in the building of the Canal was drawn from ninety-seven countries; India must have been one of them. I could not find any Indian in Colón who had come for this reason. Mr Gulchand seemed to be typical. He was a Sindhi, and a Hindu — he had a coloured portrait of the Mahatma in his shop. After the partition of India, the province of Sindh became part of Pakistan, and fearing Muslim rule, Mr Gulchand went to Bombay. It wasn't home, but at least it was Hindu. He started an import-export business and, in the course of this enterprise, had occasion to deal with Filipinos. He visited the Philippines. He liked it well enough to move his business there in the Sixties. The Vietnam war created a brief boom in the Philippines. Mr Gulchand's business prospered. His move accomplished several things: it estranged him from the Anglo-Indian sphere of influence and put him in close touch with Americans. And he learned to speak Spanish. He was now half-way across the world. Only the Pacific Ocean separated him from the emporium of Colón and the promise of greater wealth in Panama, more import-export, Central American connections and the city all Latin Americans regard as their metropolis: Miami. He had been in Colón for five years. He hated it. He longed for the more comprehensible disorder of Bombay, the more familiar anarchy.

'Business is slack,' said Mr Gulchand. He blamed the Canal Treaty. It was an old story: the colony about to collapse around the shopkeepers' ears; recessional; bolting whites; prices down. I can't give this stuff away.

What did he think of Colón?

'Wiolent,' said Mr Gulchand. 'And darty.'

He told me to take my watch off. I said I would. Then, trying to find the post office, I asked a black man the way. 'I will show you the way,'he said. 'But that,' he went on, tapping my watch crystal, 'you must remove it or you will lose it.' So I took it off.

The shop-signs were variations on the same theme: Liquidation Sale, Everything Must Go! Total Liquidation, Close-Down Sale Today. 'I don't know what's going to happen,' Mr Reiss had said in the Gorgas Mortuary, speaking of the treaty. But it was clear from these shop-signs in Colón that it would be ratified and these shops soon empty.

I asked another Indian what he would do if the treaty was ratified.

'Find new premises,' he said. 'Other country.'

The Indians said the blacks were violent; the blacks said the Indians were thieves. But the blacks did not deny that some blacks were thieves. They blamed the young, the Rastas, the unemployed. Everyone in Colón looks unemployed, even the shopkeepers: not a customer in sight. But if business is slack — and it certainly seemed slack to me — it might be understandable. Look at the merchandise: Japanese pipes that look as if they're for blowing soap-bubbles; computerized radios and ridiculously complicated cameras; dinner services for twenty-four and purple sofas; leather neckties, plastic kimonos, switchblades and bowie knives; and stuffed alligators in eight sizes, the smallest for $2, the largest — four feet long — for $65; stuffed armadilloes for $35, and even a stuffed toad, like a cricket ball with legs, for a dollar. And junk: letter-openers, onyx eggs, flimsy baskets, and pokerwork mats turned out by the thousand by the derelict Cuña Indians. Who needs this stuff?

'It is not quality of merchandise,' said another Hindu shopkeeper. 'It is absence of customer. They are not coming.'

I was thirsty. I went into a bar and ordered a beer. A Panamanian policeman was standing near the juke-box. He pressed buttons. Stayin' Alive soon filled the bar. He turned to me and said, 'This is not a safe place.'

I went into the French Wax Museum. The bleeding head of Christ led me to think it might be devotional; and there was also a martyr in the window. Inside, it became more anatomical, with two hundred corpses and exhibits. There were fetuses in wax, and sex organs, Siamese twins, lepers, syphilitics and an entire Caesarean section. Know the truth about the trans formation from a man to a woman! said the brochure. The exhibit was androgynous and yellow. See Cancer of the Liver, the Heart and Other Organs! See the Miracle ofBirthl A note in the brochure said that this Wax Museum was operated to benefit the Panama Red Cross.

If I was to stay in Colón I would have to choose between the chaos and violence of the native quarter or the colonial antisepsis of the Zone. I took the easy way out, bought a ticket back to Panama City and boarded the 5:15. As soon as we pulled out of the station, the skies darkened and it began to rain. This was the Caribbean: it might rain anytime here. Fifty miles away, on the Pacific, it was the Dry Season; it was not due to rain for six weeks. The Isthmus may be narrow, but the coasts are as distinct as if a great continent lay between them. The rain came down hard and swept across the fields; it blackened the canal and wrinkled it with wind; and it splashed the sides of the coach and ran down the windows. With the first drops the passengers had shut the windows and now we sat perspiring, as if soaked by the downpour.

'I said, " Where's your ticket?" '

It was the conductor, fussing down the aisle, using his Louisiana drawl on a black.

'You cooperate with me, buddy — you're on my train! '

He spoke in English. This, after all, was the Zone. But these were not Zonians — they were canal workers, most of them the blacks who had been reclassified as 'Panamanian'. So it seemed especially incongruous for this American conductor, irritably tugging his peaked railway cap and busy with his ticket-punching, coming to rest before a Spanish-speaker with a ticket stub and saying, That'll be five cents more — fares went up a year ago.'

He moved along: another ticket problem. 'Don't give me that crap!'

At the height of the empire in the Dutch East Indies, men just like this one — but Dutchmen — wore blue uniforms and ran the trams and trains through Medan. This was in North Sumatra, a world away from Amsterdam. But they had learned their trade in Amsterdam. They wore leather pouches-and sold tickets and punched them and rang the tram-bells. Then the archipelago became Indonesia and most of the trains and all of the trams stopped running, because the Sumatrans and the Javanese had never run them.

You're on my train: it was a colonial cry. But I would be doing this conductor a disservice if I did not say that after he had dealt with all the passengers he relaxed; he joked with a cackling black girl and he chatted with a family which filled three long seats. And for the amusement of the passengers hanging out of the window — they were now open: it had stopped raining three miles out of Colón — he chased five small boys who were playing on the platform at Frijoles.He stamped his feet and shouted, 'Git! Git! Git! Git! Git! Git!' Then he talked to the men who stood near the train holding bunches of fish they had caught in the lake, which was twenty feet from the railway line.

In Balboa and Panama City, the early evening baseball games had started in the parks; we passed three in a row, then another pair. And the American tourists, who had occupied every seat of the air-conditioned coach, tottered out of the train and walked across the platform to their air-conditioned bus. It struck me that we must have the most geriatric tourists in the world; and, even though they were treated like kindergarteners, they were curious about the world. For them, bless their yellow pants and blue shoes, travel was part of growing old.

All over the Zone it was Club-going Hour. At the officers mess and the VFW, the American Legion and the Elks, at the Church of God Servicemen's Center, the Shriners Club, the Masons, the golf clubs, the Star of Eden Lodge No. 9, of the Ancient and Illustrious Star of Bethlehem, the Buffaloes, and the Moose, and at the Lord Kitchener Lodge No. 25, and the Company cafeteria in Balboa the day's work was done and clubby colonials of the Zone were talking. There was only one subject, the treaty. It was seven o'clock in the Zone, but the year — who could tell? It was not the present. It was the past that mattered to the Zonian; the present was what most Zonians objected to, and they had succeeded so far in stopping the clock, even as they kept the canal running.

At Balboa High some students were waiting for it to grow dark enough so that in stealth they could drive nails once again into the locks, and jam them, and prevent school from opening. At midnight, the arts teacher suddenly remembered that she had left a kiln on and was afraid the school would burn down. She phoned the principal and he changed out of his pyjamas and checked. But there was no danger: the kiln had been left unplugged. Nor were the locks successfully jammed. The next day, school opened as usual, and all was well in the Zone. I was asked to stay longer, to go to a party, to discuss the treaty, to see the Indians. But my time was getting short; already it was March, and I had not yet set foot in South America. In a few days, there was a national election in Colombia, 'and they're expecting trouble,' said Miss McKinven at the Embassy. These considerations, as Gulliver wrote, moved me to hasten my departure sooner than I intended.