The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  For more than fifty pages Monsalve followed his own Panama hat trail. He wrote of “the soil which generously produces the fiber, to our cities, mute witnesses of the pain of the people in the painstaking process of their workmanship . . . until arriving in New York to cover millions of human heads.” By the end of his Marxist polemic, Monsalve had used charts, statistics, emotion, taxes, and sales figures to expose the system that sends hats to the marketplace. He analyzed expenses and profits for the weavers, perros, comisionistas, and exporters. The year he published, Ecuador sent 4.3 million sombreros de paja toquilla abroad, earning 5 million dollars for the exporters.

  By 1953, when Monsalve updated and reprinted his tract, fashions had changed, and overseas hat sales had dropped by almost a million annually. This time the exporters responded with a diatribe of their own, denouncing the author for lying with statistics, misrepresenting costs and inventing profits, and spreading “insulting falsehoods.” They buttressed their attack with their own statistics negating Monsalve’s claims. It was a ringing defense of that particular brand of capitalism which thrives upon the Panama hat industry. More than half of the fifteen exporters who signed the rebuttal to Monsalve’s analysis are still in business today.

  Monsalve was not the first of his era to inveigh against the hat industry. On the eve of World War II, in 1939, G. H. Mata wrote a poem of epic proportions titled Juan Cuenca—Biografía del Pueblo Sombrerero (“Juan Cuenca—biography of the hat-making people”). The protagonist in this remarkable saga is an Everyman of Cuenca, born into a family steeped in the poverty of El Chorro, the Cuenca neighborhood whose women weave hats and spin cloth. Thick with invective against those who gain by the handicraft of the hat makers, Juan Cuenca rails relentlessly against working conditions and profiteering in the industry. The poem abounds with bitter stereotypes of perros, comisionistas, factory owners, and gringos—United States and European—who own exporting firms or who import from abroad. First, Juan Cuenca’s parents:

  His father was a hat-maker, poorly paid for piece-work,

  In the house of some gringo toquilla hat companies.

  At all hours, poorly fed, pounding his worker’s mallet,

  As if he were digging his own grave. . . .

  . . . the moans of his mother, weaving and weaving,

  blurred her vision. . . .

  Juan, meanwhile, worked as a hat finisher, tightening and tying the short straw ends that circle the hat’s brim when the weaving is complete.

  Many times the straw, strong and slippery,

  Cut his fingers like a twisting knife.

  Always at the meat of his tired finger,

  Leaving the imprint of fiery, yellow canals . . .

  Mata goes on to portray the abused weaver who spumes spittle and phlegm after years of contorting her torso over her hat board, leading to consumption and lung disease:

  Fiber which the chola weaves,

  weaving tuberculosis and hunger,

  Mixing anemia with the ruin of her body,

  shrinking her thorax . . .

  Twisting her spine, always leaning toward her work . . .

  Carloduvica palmata

  Executioner disguised in white clothing . . .

  Exalted assassin of the Brown Virgin of the Rosary

  Wearing a lovely sombrero woven by the hands of a chola

  Who dies as she lives.

  In the end, Juan Cuenca calls for a syndicate of hat workers, closing with a cry on behalf of “the proletariat of the world.”

  El Chorro, the same community known for its weaving and spinning, is the stage for Los hijos (“The children”), a novel by Alfonso Cuesta y Cuesta. In it a little girl is born whose fate at birth is forecast by her nickname: la tejedorita—the little weaver. “‘Baby girls are born with paja toquilla in their hands,’” observes a neighbor.

  “‘With the hat already begun!’” another notes.

  “‘Certainly,’” the first neighbor says, “‘it would have been better had it been a man. Más gana el hombre silbando que la mujer hilando.’” There’s more profit in a man whistling than a woman spinning.

  Later in Los hijos, during a city-wide competition, each weaver enters her best toquilla hat, hoping it will be chosen for the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. The Church keeps all the contestants’ hats for itself to export, and the women talk about how much money the hats will bring:

  “‘In New York, at least a hundred dollars. And the Fathers need more money.’

  “On hearing this, another commented: ‘Soon we will see the hats in the movies, on celebrities, on the head of a President or an oil baron.’”

  The next day I went to the hospital to learn what was behind all this talk about tuberculosis. Was there really a high correlation between tubercular sickness and Panama hat weaving? Are those spritely straw hats found on models in high-fashion spring and summer advertisements causing pain and suffering among their poorly paid weavers? To find out, I visited the Red Cross on the second story of a downtown building whose first floor was under construction. (South of the equator buildings are constructed from the top down.) To reach the steps to the second floor, the determined visitor had to first circumvent wooden barriers, then tiptoe around wet cement and drying plaster, avoid live electrical wires and nails pointed skyward, and, finally, maneuver up a set of narrow, rubble-strewn stairways that lacked railings and, in some cases, steps. Most of the traffic was headed for the blood bank down the hall. The Red Cross directed me to the tuberculosis hospital. My leisurely look at an innocent hat was turning into a detective story.

  “We have virtually wiped out tuberculosis here,” said the chief doctor, who began working at the clinic in 1957. “It is true that there was a high incidence of tuberculosis in the more rural hat-making communities. So we did a study at Sígsig, where most people at the time had at least one weaver in the family. It turned out that eighty percent of the people who said they had TB had gone to the coast looking for seasonal work between March and October. In another area of high TB occurrence we found no weavers whatsoever. From this we concluded that the somewhat contorted way in which some weavers sit was not responsible for tuberculosis.

  “We found a far higher connection between respiratory illness and people who went through a drastic change of climate twice a year than we did with weavers. It goes back to just after World War II, when the international Panama hat market fell. That brought about new behavioral patterns here in Azuay and Cañar provinces—people from the countryside started moving to Cuenca, and many people began to emigrate to the coast looking for work.”

  The good doctor backed his claim with impressive statistics. I thanked him for his time, and he gave me a ride back to my hotel. It appeared I was out of the detective business.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CUY FOR TWO

  I had again switched lodging—not because of hospitality pompously proffered, but rather because my new hotel didn’t live up to its word. When I checked in I asked the afternoon desk clerk if, like the signs on the door said, the hotel took VISA cards.

  “Sí,” he replied.

  “No,” the morning desk clerk said as I tried to check out a few days later. “We don’t take VISA cards.”

  “Well, the other fellow said you do,” I protested.

  “Sorry, I can’t take a VISA card.” I went through the same conversation with the hastily summoned assistant manager. “No,” he said piously. “There must be some mistake. No aceptamos VISA aquí. We never have.”

  “Mira,” I said, ushering him by the elbow to the front door. “Look. What does this say?” I pointed to a credit-card-shaped decal that read ACEPTAMOS VISA. “And this? And this? And this?” So many ACEPTAMOS VISA stickers covered the glass door that you could barely see through it. “And you have the temerity to tell me you don’t take VISA cards?”

  Cuenca’s hotels, like one Ludwig Bemelmans stayed at in Riobamba, appeared to have come out of a story conference of the Marx Brothers. In fact, had
this been a movie I would have throttled the assistant manager by his puny little throat till his eyes got beady. Instead, I settled for the inner satisfaction at having caught this duplicitous factotum at his own game. Having made my point, I relented, and we retired to his office where we made amicable payment arrangements. When I left, the porter was busy scraping decals from the front door.

  I next moved to the Hotel Crespo, whose rooms overlook the Tomebamba River and whose staff tolerates the whims of foreign travelers. I grew rather fond of the Crespo, and it was from there that an Ecuadoran friend and I went down the street for a dinner of cuy at Tres Estrellas. An Andean delicacy, cuy is a favorite at countryside fiestas.

  Cuy is guinea pig, precious little furry animals raised on corncobs, alfalfa, grass, and lettuce, then slaughtered between six months and one year after birth. Its name comes from the squeaky noise it makes: kwee! kwee! I had to overcome severe cultural bias before finally agreeing to eat one.

  Tres Estrellas adjoins the home of its owner, Victor Toral, who served his first guinea pig in 1953. The restaurant takes up ten rooms of a two-story house, with a small bar near the front door. Each room has one wooden table, large enough for a party of eight or more, and is shut off from the other rooms. Large windows look out from the second-floor dining rooms into the hallway below. Bare light bulbs swing from the ceiling. “People come in for a drink and get rowdy,” explained Sr. Toral, motioning to the upstairs dining areas. “So it’s better to have private rooms.” We chose a downstairs room and ordered cuy for two.

  Sr. Toral allowed me to watch the cook prepare our meal. On the way back to the kitchen I heard an oddly familiar sound followed by a hollow crash of wood. A couple of teenagers were bowling in the back. The alley they bowled on, imported from the United States, diverted diners while they waited the forty-five minutes or so it takes to prepare cuy. Except for occasional sweepings and moppings, the two alleys had not been serviced since their installation in 1962, and the wood was severely warped. Small craters pockmarked the alleys from balls tossed by uninitiated bowlers. Each lane resembled the topography of Ecuador itself, with the volcanic Andes down the middle sloping outward to the jungle and the sea.

  While one boy bowled, the other acted as his pinspotter, yelling out the number of pins down, clearing the deadwood, and sending the ball back to the front. The lanes were in such pitiful shape, though, that a ball on a perfect toss for a strike might be diverted by a jagged splinter, a sudden bump, or a gradual slope toward the gutter. Likewise, a ball headed for the side could just as easily crash through the strike zone. Bowlers chose from four balls, each so used and abused over the years that they wobbled rather than rolled toward the pins. Coming or going, a ball might lurch onto the adjoining alley or over toward a dozen chickens who watched the games from inside some cages on the sidelines.

  Back in the kitchen, the cook, one of Toral’s eleven children, had slit a guinea pig along its guts and cut off its feet. A lengthy pole was stuck through the length of the rodent, mouth first, until it came out the other end, then placed over hot coals for a half hour to forty-five minutes. “It’s best to use a wooden poker,” the Toral lad said as he slowly kept the spit turning three inches above the heat. “Electric rotisseries with their metal spits don’t cook the cuy as well.” A regional cookbook I picked up had these instructions: “The little animal is roasted and skinned one day ahead of time and marinated with garlic, salt, and seasonings. It is later basted with colored hog fat, and slowly roasted over an open fire. Usually accompanied by specially prepared potatoes called ‘ají de cuy.’” This last item was described as “potatoes cooked together with the head of a guinea pig, and browned with colored lard or hog fat. Adorned with slices of hard-boiled egg.”

  Finally Sr. Toral brought in our roasted guinea pig and placed it on the table. As large as a rat, its cousin, our cuy looked like the victim of a forest fire. It had been sliced across the stomach so that each of us could get half. Short, stubby hairs stuck out through its cooked skin. Tiny pointed teeth gave the dead guinea pig’s face a sly grin. I took the rear half.

  The skin had ducklike crispness, crunchy but tasteless. Inside, there were so many small bones and so much fat and gristle that finding meat to chew proved difficult. Despite its size, cuy is definitely a finger food; forks and knives proved irrelevant. The meat, once I found some, tasted spongy, like overcooked rabbit. Juice oozed from all over; guinea pig is a five-napkin food.

  Cuy is a traditional meal at funeral services in some parts of Latin America and plays a role at religious feasts as well. Countryside healers rub a live guinea pig on the afflicted part of an ailing patient so that the malady will be transferred to the animal. In sixteenth-century Quito, the still beating heart of a cuy was customarily removed and offered to the sun and the moon as part of the last rites. My guinea pig was no good for either ceremonial or medical purposes. It just lay there as I picked at it.

  A loud whistle pierced the air, followed by a man clapping noisily. The bartender hurried out to the hallway and craned his head upward. A convivial patron upstairs was leaning precariously out the window of his private dining room, waving an empty bottle of cane liquor. “Sí, señor,” the bartender said with a nod. He went back to the bar for a full bottle and rushed upstairs to replenish the whistler’s stock. Our bill came to $8.40; $7.50 for two plates of roast guinea pig, and $.15 a shot for the booze with which to wash it down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE 10,000 HATS OF ADRIANO GONZÁLEZ

  Adriano González appeared particularly tired when he and his wife arrived to unlock the front door at his place in Biblián at six o’clock Sunday morning. They had returned from a wedding fiesta just three hours earlier, and now, after the predawn drive from Cuenca, Adriano faced his most arduous day of the week. He quickly set up a chair for his wife, the table across which business would be transacted, and, most important, a small stool on which he put his briefcase filled with 650,000 sucres—almost $7,000—in crisp bills fresh from the bank. Within ten minutes the first woman walked in, her arrival announced by the shuffle of her sandals echoing down the hall. The next weaver, less than five feet tall, had her baby strapped to her back in a shawl. She was followed by a woman shorter still. A low hubbub of Spanish and Quechua flowed forth; it was to rise steadily for an hour or so, and then, with occasional lulls, maintain itself until diminishing into the early afternoon. This Sunday, as every Sunday for decades, the economy of Biblián began and ended at the house of Adriano González.

  “How much do you think it’s worth?” González asked a weaver who handed him a hat to appraise a half hour later. The line had already curved around the corner down the hallway. “Eighty sucres?” she replied (about eighty-five cents at the time).

  “Seventy-five,” he stated with finality. He looked over the second of two hats she handed him. “Ah, here’s one worth eighty.” Adriano’s wife handed the weaver 155 sucres as he reached down to take five hats from the next weaver in line.

  “What do you want for these?” he asked the lady.

  “Sixty sucres apiece,” she said with a big smile. He laughed at her preposterous request as he looked each one over. “These get fifty-five each,” he said, putting four Panamas to the side, “but this one—this is what I’m looking for. It is free of the inconsistency of the others.” He held it aloft for the other weavers in line to see, then turned to his wife. “Sixty for one and fifty-five for four.” González tossed the newly purchased 280 sucres worth of hats into the back corner.

  Another woman, short and bony, reached the front of the line to sell her handiwork. “I used to make nine hats a week,” she said, “but now I weave only three. My eyes have grown bad. All of ours do after years of weaving.” She thought her hats, made of coarser straw and with a looser weave, would fetch sixty-five sucres each. She accepted sixty with equanimity. As he did with all the others, González inquired about her family’s health, recalling the names of her husband, sister, and fiv
e children. The lady made a slight curtsy before departing.

  For hours it seemed virtually every woman—and some men—who lived in the Cantón of Biblián approached Sr. González to sell him their newly woven hats. At his mercy for their weekly pittance, they stood in small bunches, some silent, others chattering, a few solemn, and a couple drunk.

  I walked around front to get a weaver’s-eye view. From their side of the table, González’s slender six-foot frame grew another foot. From this vantage point he clearly had the upper hand—in fact, he had the only hand. His eyes, his skin tone, his clothes, his home, his gender, his vocabulary, his height, his wallet—all these gave him every advantage. Many weavers chewed raw sugarcane while waiting in line; their teeth, or what was left of them, were as yellow as the hats. I asked a small cluster of women how long it had taken them to weave their hats—how many hours. “Who knows? We don’t figure time in hours.”

  Early mass had let out, and now the line stretched almost to the door. The two dozen weavers closest to the table crowded around, all waving their hats under González’s nose like frantic floor brokers at the stock exchange. “I can’t use these,” González told a woman in her early twenties. He wore the scowl of a stern father.