The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HENRY MILLER’S NEPHEW

  The dollar is the imperial currency, not just in international trade but in the smallest víveres outlet as well. No matter how well acquainted you are with a Latin American town and make friends with its people, you still symbolize the gringo dollar. No one hesitates to ask about the United States. Everyone wants to know: What is your income? How much does a watch cost? A television? A car? A house? A hat? A plane ticket between the United States and Ecuador? During that pause suspended between the question and the answer the inquisitive mestizo comes one tiny step closer to that material world. He imagines himself, for a moment, directly in touch with the dollar and all that it represents.

  “What is it like to teach in the United States? Do you think we could get jobs there?” These questions came from students at the Universidad Estatal de Cuenca, whose class in Culture and Civilization of the English-Speaking Countries I visited once more. The previous day classes had again been suspended for a political rally, virtually guaranteeing a day free of disruption. On my way over I had stopped to browse in a bookstore, struck by the wide range of books from Argentina, Mexico, and Spain. The few domestic offerings included The Responsibility of the United States Government in the Territorial Mutilation of Ecuador, published by the University of Guayaquil.

  Most of the students aspired to teach English, the imperial language. They had just finished discussing the relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and they asked about contemporary United States authors. “Do you know Norman Mailer?” My last name was close enough for them. They were especially interested in Saul Bellow. “Do you like John Steinbeck?” They were familiar with The Grapes of Wrath, often compared to their own novel Huasipungo, by Jorge Icaza, about the horrific treatment of Indian chattel in the Ecuadoran highlands. “Are any of our authors well known in America?” I counted on the fingers of one hand the Ecuadoran writers whose works had been translated into English. They felt better when I described the upsurge in interest in Latin American literature brought about, in part, by Gabriel García Márquez winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Imagine, a South American writer—a neighbor, no less, who writes about life along the Pacific Coast!—recognized with the world’s foremost literary honor.

  “Well, we want to know about the decline of American morals. Is it true?” “Is what true?” I replied. “You know, that you have no values left in the States.” Shot. Kaput. Bankrupt. Another grand experiment down the drain. My answer, an awkward and uncustomary defense of the United States, was overrun with further questions. “We have heard of the environmentalist movement. How big is it?” “We’ve been reading about Indians in U.S. history. Are they well treated now, or is it like our Indians here?” “What difference have you noticed between family life in America and in Ecuador?” “Are Eastern religions very influential?” “Why do you have so many vegetarians?” “What happens to the Mexicans and others who get caught coming into the United States illegally? For the ones who don’t get caught, what sort of jobs can they expect?” “Do you think John F. Kennedy’s brother will run for president?” “What do Americans think of our president?” I fudged that one; in truth, of course, only a handful of people north of the Panama Canal can locate Ecuador, much less identify its president.

  They were keenly interested in United States domestic politics. “You have a two-party system in a country of two hundred million. Do you have any minor parties? We never hear about them. Here we have fewer than ten million people but we have seventeen political parties.” “What is the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party? From here they look so similar.” They don’t look a whole lot different close up, I confessed.

  La Fuerza del Cariño (Terms of Endearment) had just opened at a local theater. “Is America really like that?” “Well, parts of it are, yes,” I said, warming to my advisory role. “Actually that’d be a good movie to see. It shows some subtleties of American culture you don’t find in many films here.” “Oh, we know all about American culture,” a student replied. “Yes,” another followed, “we watch Dallas all the time!” “Dynasty too,” another chimed in. “We learn about your culture that way.”

  The next afternoon I was invited to sit in as three professors grilled an English major on her senior thesis—“Thomas Hardy: Harbinger of the Screenplay.” She planned to leave Cuenca the following fall to attend an exclusive New England college to complete her education. Her family threw a graduation party for her that night. Fellow students mingled with faculty, relatives, and family friends. Servants brought out terrific food, and we toasted her success with Chilean wine. The elite of Cuenca gathered once again to celebrate another passage into their ranks.

  “Excuse me,” a man said as he introduced himself. “But are you related to Glenn Miller?” Older Ecuadorans remember the band leader from a visit to Salinas on the coast, where he entertained United States troops during World War II. Not in the slightest disappointed that Glenn and I were not related, he returned five minutes later, smiling. “Ah, I know. You are related to Henry Miller, the author. I just heard it.”

  Since my earlier visit to the university campus, a rumor had circulated that I was Henry Miller’s nephew, in Cuenca to conduct interviews. The few times I was confronted with the story I denied it, which of course gave it more credibility. Now it seemed that half the faculty at one of the country’s most prestigious universities was convinced—nay, honored—that the nephew of the well-known American writer had graced their campus. I was, after all, of the same name and profession, and I was writing about life halfway between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Did they need further evidence? Nothing I could say would dissuade them.

  “Well?”

  Chitchat around my corner of the room suddenly ceased as the guests awaited my reply. Being Henry Miller’s nephew wouldn’t be such a bad gig for a while, I thought to myself. Surely no one here knows anything about his real nephews, if indeed he had any. If I play my cards right, I could probably dine out on Uncle Henry for months. First I’d spend a few weeks in Cuenca perfecting my ruse, then take my show on the road all over the continent—Lima! La Paz! Buenos Aires! Rio! Caracas! Bogotá! I’d stay one step ahead of the U.S. Information Agency, which would put its junior-most officers on my trail. What finally convinced me to forgo my celebrity status—all in the space of five seconds—was not so much conscience as caution. I had only a passing familiarity with Henry Miller and his works. I hated to disappoint them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BIBLIÁN WEAVERS

  The seventy-five minute bus ride to Biblián the next morning was smooth enough to sleep through. By now I knew not to react to sudden stops, frequent swerves, or excess commotion. Biblián, whose Sunday market I had visited, attracted me because it was far enough out in the countryside to avoid the excesses of Cuenca but close enough to reach with no trouble. Its residents, fewer than fifteen thousand, led conventional small-town lives with marginal incomes, substandard health, and limited literacy. Walking all its streets took less than an hour. Friendly faces invited me into their one-room homes for low talk and instant coffee. Often I’d be seated in the one chair, shaky, next to the one table, wobbly. In many houses a burlap curtain draped over a series of interlocking coat hangers separated the kitchen from the bedroom. “You see that house across the street?” one woman asked, pointing up the hill. “The best toquilla hat weaver in town lives there. He’s home now. Why don’t you visit him?”

  César Vicuña sat upstairs in his two-story house whose walls were made of mud mixed with hay. The first floor was alive with cats and piglets playing in the middle. An empty light socket hung from a frayed wire overhead. A series of unstable planks formed the steps that reached a hole in the corner of the second floor. Flush against one wall was a double bed covered with a tattered bedspread. A smaller bed leaned against an adjoining wall. An outdated calendar tacked above it partly covered a faded image
of Jesus. Next to it were two small mirrors and a poster of multiplication tables for the four children who lived there. A cardboard box in the corner served as a clothes closet. A hot-water bottle and a small can of 3-in-One oil rested alone on a shelf. Sunlight streamed in through the two open-air windows surrounding the one piece of furniture, a chair in the middle of the floor on which sat the master weaver of Biblián.

  Señor Vicuña wore a wool poncho over some well-worn pants, a Panama hat, and old sneakers. He sat hunched over. A flat board supporting a wooden hat block rested on his lap. Few people express interest in his hat weaving anymore, he said. “I’ve been doing it all my life. No one else in town makes finos like this anymore.” The hat in his lap, about half finished, looked like creamy-white linen. Hundreds of needle-thin fibers hung from the edge. Vicuña talked as he wove, his eyes sharply focused on the fibers his hands continuously maneuvered over, under, and around each other. “The first six inches of this hat took me fifteen days to complete. That’s the hardest and most important part. The rest of the crown took three weeks. From there it takes three more weeks to finish.” His fingernails were as thin as a knife as he split a thin fiber still thinner to lay into place on his masterpiece. “I made three hats for Velasco Ibarra while he was president.” He took a cornless cob out of a small bowl of water and combed the loose straws with it. “One of them cost three thousand sucres,” more than $750 at the time. The hat he worked on as we spoke, as fine as any to come from Montecristi, would bring him more than $50, he estimated. “I’m seventy-one years old now. I don’t wear glasses. I need them, but I can’t afford them.”

  He paused in his labor and carefully took his work in progress off the block. The strands were so thin that when he held it upright it looked like a blond wig. “Not one drop of water can pass through this hat,” he boasted. He turned the hat upside down, clutching it by its loose hairs, and poured a small bowl of water into it. “See?”

  Before leaving I asked where I might find the excusado. “Bathroom?” Both César and his wife laughed. “We barely have a roof over our heads.” Boards, tile, plastic, and planks lay scattered over decaying crossbeams above us. The sky shone clearly through the roof.

  Back down the hill, on the other side of the Pan American Highway, Isaura Calderón de Ojeda sat in her little grocery store waiting for customers. The store, Mini Mercado El Rocío, caters to neighbors who need an item or two to tide them over until the following Sunday’s market. Whenever three families live near each other anywhere in the country, no matter how desolate the setting, it seems one of them assumes the role of grocer. When more than five families find themselves living close together, a second tienda opens up, competing with the first to see which can charge higher prices. The entire stock in Mini Mercado El Rocío consisted of two dozen different items.

  While she waited, Señora Calderón wove her first hat of the week. Her mother, Catalina, who wove her first Panama hat during Eloy Alfaro’s Liberal Revolution, sat nearby doing likewise. Once she could turn out six or more hats a week, but age had slowed her down to two, and sometimes one. Thirteen-year-old Janet, on the basketball team at the local Colegio Femenino, found time to weave a few every week. Her sister Eulalia, almost twice Janet’s age, hadn’t made a hat in a long while. She worked as a social worker when the government could afford to pay her, going through the countryside informing campesinos about nutrition and birth control. María Elena, three years younger, still made hats when she wasn’t caring for her four-year-old son, Dany (“like Daniel Boone!”). Eighteen-year-old Carlota Beatríz blushed when I asked if she made hats. “She just got back from her honeymoon,” her mom said laughing, as she slapped her daughter on the fanny, “and she doesn’t spend her evenings weaving anymore.”

  Isaura’s husband completed the eight-member household. He drove a small passenger van on a regular route between Azogues and Cuenca every day. A ceramic Jesus stood on its dashboard; a sticker advertising a travel agency in Hyde Park, New York, was plastered to its window. His garage next to the store was empty save for a bicycle hanging upside down. “Almost all of the weavers are women,” María Elena said. “At least around Biblián. The men can make more money doing other things.”

  I was impressed with the intelligence and industry shown by Isaura and her family. I dropped by their place often to chat—something they invariably had time for—and both they and I grew to welcome the visits as they passed the hours weaving their Panamas. On Sundays they brought their finished hats a few blocks away to Adriano González, a comisionista who purchased all the hats produced in the Cantón of Biblián and sold them to the hat factories in Cuenca. Hundreds and hundreds of weavers line up at González’s place Sunday mornings to trade in their artisan labor for money to buy food during the following week. “The real poor people,” Isaura explained, “they sell their hats to Señor González on weekdays so they can buy rice.” Five minutes later an example walked through the door. She paid a few sucres for just enough rice to fill a small crumpled paper bag.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  INCAS AND INDIANS

  Instead of visiting the Ojedas the next day, I went north, where the Cañari and other Indians lived. The Indians of the Andes—does there exist a worse-treated, more downtrodden slice of humanity? Subjected to whimsical rule, living in decrepit huts, horrendously overworked and miserably underpaid, they have been bypassed, for the most part, by recent advances in agriculture, commerce, and civil rights. Over the course of five centuries, the highland Indians have had to contend with Inca masters, Spanish subjugation, Catholic dominance, and, since national independence, exploitative local, provincial, and central governments. From each of these they have benefited only marginally and suffered greatly. The fertile hacienda land they have farmed has enriched its owners; the rocky plots they live on have kept them in poverty. Laws allowing them a measure of independence were barely worth the parchment they were written on. Priestly calls for brotherly love fell on deaf ears, even within the clergy.

  Indians were “reduced to the most abject state of servitude and bondage,” observed the Frenchman Laurent Saint-Criq when he traveled through the Andes in the 1870s. “These unfortunate beings, robbed of their country, are merely allowed to exist in it. . . . [T]he plunderers would only possess a barren waste without their labour.” Saint-Criq’s conclusion about the Indians and the land they work could be drawn in the twentieth century as well. They are, he wrote, “the degraded original proprietors, on whom the curse of conquest has fallen with all its concomitant hardships and penury.”

  Ecuador abolished slavery thirteen years before the United States did, but the act effectively freed only the fewer than twenty-five hundred blacks. For Indians, other forms of enforced labor continued. Contract servitude, called concertaje, was only a small step better than huasipungaje, a system that strangled them in a choke hold of perpetual debt. The practice required peasants to give a fixed amount of labor to a hacienda in exchange for a plot of land on which to farm and to live. The soil on the little plot was often impossible to till, the home too ramshackle to last beyond a few seasons, and the debt to the hacienda owner inherited by the worker’s children after his death. When hacienda land was sold, title to the Indians went with it. With the notable exception of some enlightened landowners over the years, Indians, subjected to the hacienda manager and his underlings, were forced to pay tribute to the parish priest, endure beatings, and maintain a life of unrelenting hardship. They lay at the very bottom of a caste system so pervasive as to be invisible. Throughout its history Ecuador has adhered to this system religiously.

  Efforts to abolish the more notorious forms of servitude have surfaced spasmodically in the national legislature, but not until 1964, under military rule, did change take place. The Law of Agrarian Reform came about mainly because domestic politics dictated it, but also as a result of pressure from the Alliance for Progress, the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s effort to strengthen Latin American countries sympathetic to
the United States. The act abolished the practice of exchanging land for labor and set a minimum wage for male farm workers in the sierra of forty cents daily.

  Land redistribution was slow and haphazard. Peons who had never owned land before lacked the know-how to raise crops and livestock for market. Many were awarded land too poor for cultivation and too far from transportation to succeed. Some landowners avoided losing property by dividing their haciendas into smaller parcels and giving title to each of their children. Tens of thousands of campesinos still await land claims from an inefficient and often unsympathetic government agency. Even a generation past the abolition of servitude, teenage children of formerly indentured peons still carry on the servile traditions of their ancestors, lightly kissing the hand of the landowners who hire them. “Sí, patroncito.” Yes, dear master.

  The plight of Indians in the sierra became more than recent history as I rode an hour north of Biblián to Ingapirca, a series of stone walls dating back to the latter half of the fifteenth century. The closer I got to Tambo, the turnoff for the Inca ruin, the more the mountains spread their folds, out of which trickled streams of water and Indians. Sunlight landed only in the valleys below. A tractor-trailer had recently jackknifed off the side of the road; cars, cattle, and campesinos had to detour through a gully. A crowd of Indians watched as a mammoth tow truck pulled the injured semi from the ditch where it had landed. The Indians, both male and female, wore longer and longer hair the farther into the province of Cañar I traveled. Most walked slowly but steadily on sturdy legs whose feet only occasionally wore shoes.