The Panama Hat Trail Page 15

  “But señor, you said last week—”

  “If you want to try to sell these in Cuenca next week, go ahead. But to me they’re worth only twenty-five sucres each.”

  “Señor,” she implored, “you said—”

  “You heard me wrong. You must have had too much to drink.” In fact, at nine-thirty on a Sunday morning, she did appear somewhat intoxicated. “Here. Take these back. Don’t bother me anymore.” He flashed annoyance for the first time, then regained his composure.

  “This straw is worthless,” he told one forlorn weaver. “Look at this!” He held up the hat for the other weavers to see. The woman giggled nervously with an embarrassed smile. “On this one the brim isn’t wide enough.” He pulled out his ruler. “Oh, yes—this one is fine.”

  The exchange began again: “How much do you think it’s worth?” Fifty-five, said the weaver; González countered with fifty. His wife had gone off to the second show at church, and Adriano doled out the sucres. In the seconds before his fingers touched the stack of bills, each weaver murmured one last desperate plea for a few extra sucres. When small children accompanied their mothers, González gave them each a sucre. He encouraged young girls just starting out in the hat-weaving trade by paying them a bit more than the same hat would ordinarily fetch.

  A succession of ear-splitting fireworks suddenly erupted down the street, to no one’s concern. Whenever González criticized a weaver in front of her compañeras for shoddy work, she blushed, more so if her children accompanied her. His appraisal of each hat followed a well-defined pattern: He’d grab the hat from a weaver as he finished with the previous one, hold it up to the light, twirl it around once or twice on the index finger of one hand, “bargain” with the weaver, then toss the hat into the corner. One-sided pleasantries were as much a part of the ritual as the final payment. Every five minutes he would stop to neatly stack and restack the growing piles of hats in the corner. Different grades of hats went into different stacks. Two hats here, five over there, another three on the end stack, and six more in the middle. He accomplished this as deftly as a shell game. Sometimes he tossed them into piles from halfway across the room, usually hitting his mark. His cat lurked in the background, hunting for rodents who found the dry, soft paja toquilla an ideal playground.

  “This is terrible. It’s worthless,” he told one weaver. “How about ten sucres,” she replied with a shy grin, acknowledging her sloppy work.

  “Ah, now the brims on these are well done!” he told the next woman as he held them up for others in line to admire. Complimented, the woman blushed as a schoolgirl might at gushing praise from her teacher. As the comisionista pulled 130 sucres from his open briefcase, the weaver counted with him, by color. Each denomination has a different color, so that nonliterates can count their take-home pay.

  Dozens more calmly waited to trade in their creations, talking about each other, their weaving, and the price they hoped to get, God willing, but knew they wouldn’t. At the table González berated a middle-aged woman for not doing a better job as she had promised. “If your hats improve, you’ll get five to ten more sucres for each one. But they must look like this.” He pulled out a sample hat. Just then a young boy ran in, excited at having just taken his first communion. González tugged playfully at the boy’s hair and gave his mother a few extra sucres for the occasion.

  “Oooh, my aching back.” González stretched his muscles after four hours of leaning over to talk with the sellers. “I think I’ll take a break.” He walked over and sat down next to me, leaving the patient women waiting. “When they hand me a hat, I look at the tightness of the weave, the quality of the straw, the consistency of the color, the size of the brim, and the size of the crown. All of these things have to be good by themselves and consistent with each other. A coarse straw shouldn’t be woven too tightly.” Engaging and articulate, González seemed careful not to overstep his role as paymaster of Biblián.

  “I’m paying slightly more for hats now because this year’s corn harvest is so good. These same people can make one hundred fifty sucres a day in the field, plus meals and transportation. That’s more than they can make weaving hats.

  “Tomorrow I make the rounds selling to the hat factories in Cuenca. I have to have all the figures ready for how much I paid out today. On Thursdays I go back to pick up a check from each one. I get the amount I’ve paid out today, plus six percent. That’s my commission. Six percent for each hat. Why, in sucres I’m a multimillionaire!”

  The perros in the field and on the street corners operate similarly, but with more convolutions in the price. These street-corner dandies clad in ties, clean white shirts, and dark suits with rulers in the breast pockets stop practically every woman who is carrying a newly woven hat. In Biblián, Azogues, Cuenca, and throughout the provinces of Cañar and Azuay, the routine follows a ritual established generations ago. First the weaver suggests a price, then the perro makes a face and counters with a price half as big while pointing out some imperfections. They haggle back and forth. Others stand nearby, watching, trying to glean what the perro is offering that week. The weaver pulls out a second hat, suggesting a compromise price. The perro finds more imperfections. She makes her final offer. He says no and starts to hand it back to her. She either accepts the perro’s price or moves on. On market day, dejected weavers slowly walk corner to corner, hats in hand. One perro noticed me watching. “Son mal pagadas, las tejedoras,” he said, shaking his head. The weavers are poorly paid. “They can’t even eat on what we pay them. The straw costs them twenty sucres each, and I buy the hat for fifty. How can they live on that?” The perros themselves receive 5 percent profit from the comisionista on each hat they buy.

  Mariana Arsiaga, the only woman hat buyer I noticed in the streets, looked scornfully at four hats a chola handed her on a street corner in Cuenca. The two dickered, the hopeful campesina asking forty sucres for each hat, the bullying perra offering thirty. “OK, all right. Here. I’ll take two at thirty-five and two at thirty-two.” The weaver nodded and stuffed 134 sucres into a side pocket for her week’s work. “These are bad ones,” Mariana said, not waiting for the chola to walk out of earshot. “I shouldn’t have bought them.”

  A few blocks from the Cuenca hat market an independent perro wearing a crooked tie and a soiled jacket stood in a corner buying hats that had been rejected by all the regular perros. Two city inspectors came by. The perro’s corner was too far from the mercado and he wasn’t part of any established network of perros and comisionistas. They ordered him to pack up and leave. “I’m only trying to make a living,” protested the freelancer.

  “Well, you can’t make it here. Move on.”

  “But I’m not doing anything wrong.” He hastily put his hats in a burlap sack, preparing to go as he argued to stay. “You can’t do this.”

  “You’re blocking the sidewalk with your business. Now get going,” barked the irritated officials.

  “You have no reason to drive me off.” His hats were stuffed in the bag now. “I’m here every week.” He walked backward, away from the officials, insisting he was doing no wrong. “I can stay if I want to.” He made his final getaway, fading into a crowd of pedestrians crossing the street.

  At the Ojeda household in Biblián, Isaura was preparing to take her hats over to González’s place. On the way home, she planned to shop at the weekly market. “Of course I go to González. If you live here there’s no one else to sell to,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s been this way for many years.”

  “He is one of the exploiters of the poor people,” Eulalia offered in a low voice.

  When Señora Calderón de Ojeda finally inched her way to the front of the line, González spent little time with her. They exchanged gracious niceties, he paid full price for her hats, and she left. She had received sixty-five sucres for each of her hats—the going rate for a well-made brisa-style sombrero de paja toquilla. The straw for each one had cost her twenty-two sucres. For weaving a Panama hat, fifty-one-
year-old Isaura Calderón Encalada de Ojeda made forty-three sucres—approximately forty-five cents.

  The untenable situation Panama hat weavers accepted as part of their lives made me think of “Assembly Line,” a short story by B. Traven set in Oaxaca, Mexico. An Indian sat day after day weaving beautiful baskets from local straw, dyed with the colors of nearby insects and plants. Each one took twenty to thirty hours to produce. Although he asked fifty centavos—four cents at the time—for each basket when he peddled them at market and door-to-door, he almost always relented: “The prospective buyer started bargaining, telling the Indian that he ought to be ashamed to ask such a sinful price. ‘Why, the whole dirty thing is nothing but ordinary petate straw which you find in heaps wherever you may look for it. . . . If I paid you, you thief, ten centavitos for it you should be grateful and kiss my hand. Well, it’s your lucky day, I’ll be generous this time, I’ll pay you twenty. . . . Take it or run along.’”

  Traven’s Indian artisan sells his basket. “He had little if any knowledge of the outside world or he would have known that what was happening to him was happening every day to every artist all over the world. That knowledge would perhaps have made him very proud, because he would have realized that he belonged to the little army which is the salt of the earth and which keeps culture, urbanity, and beauty for their own sake from passing away.”

  By midafternoon Adriano González had bought, both over the counter and from his perros in the field, ten thousand hats for the week. Their average cost came to just over 60 sucres each. In all, González paid out about $6,300. A son arrived to help the comisionista load the hats of Biblián into his Travelall for the afternoon drive back to Cuenca.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE LAST JEWS IN CUENCA

  Daniel Kuperman, general manager of the Hotel Crespo, sat stirring his coffee in the first-floor dining room as he talked about the memory of his father and the future of his child. Kuperman’s family history takes off from turn-of-the-century Russia, where his grandfather served in the czar’s army, then winds through World War II with his father’s exploits, and ends in the Shuar Indian country of Ecuador’s Amazon basin, where Daniel leads expeditions for small tour groups. “When the pogroms came my grandfather fled Russia and ended up selling fruits and vegetables in Paris, where my dad was born. My father had wanderlust, and when he turned twenty-one he came to Colombia, where he made yarmulkas in a hat factory in Baranquilla. He was Jewish.

  “When war broke out in Europe he went back to join the French army.” When the German occupation came, he joined the Resistance and went underground. He helped to bomb German convoys. He was a very sentimental man, filled with patriotismo. He fought with his heart.

  “Toward the end of the war he became exhausted, and decided to return to South America. My dad got off in Guayaquil stone broke. The first night he slept on a bench and covered himself with newspapers. The second day he met a rich man in the streets who said, ‘Oh! You are a gringo!’ My father was a handsome French gentleman, and he told the man he’d just come from the war. The Ecuadoran lent him some start-up money to open a small restaurant and bar next to the U.S. Consulate. He served Chateaubriand and French wine. It was called Henry’s Place. He worked like an animal. Once when he visited Salinas he met a woman named Yolanda on the beach. A year later they were married. Her stepfather was a Polish Jew.

  “Eventually my father grew tired of the restaurant and bought a hacienda near Ambato, where he grew potatoes. He was a romantic. ‘The poor Indians have nothing,’ he said. He wanted to give them medicine, books, and clothes. So he spent all his money on the Indians and returned to Guayaquil to open another restaurant, and then a nightclub in Quito called Incas. He hired singers and musicians from all over Latin America. With the money from Incas he opened the Hotel Crillon in Guayquil. Papillon was among his guests—father gave him his bed and food. He also put up Legionnaires who escaped France and helped them get work. He led a crazy life.

  “He opened up some more hotels around the country, including one on the coast at Salinas. When my little brother was three, the Communists came from town and told my dad to get out because he was taking their natural resources. They dynamited the beach and scared my little brother to death. Literally. With this a little bit of my dad died too.”

  A Joan Baez tape came through the hotel’s speaker system. “He started to dream again, and formed a joint partnership to run a hotel with the government under Velasco Ibarra. But there was a coup a month later, and the new regime said that the friends of Velasco Ibarra were his enemies. So they took my dad’s hotel, all his money, and his property. He lost forty-five years of work that day. A few years later, in 1972, he arranged to buy this place. He died in 1979.” Kuperman sipped his coffee for the first time.

  “Once I saw him crying because the Arabs had attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. He said, ‘How could anyone attack Israel on our most sacred day?’ That was the first time I knew I was a Jew.

  “I studied for three years at the Colegio Hebrew Union in Colombia. I had my bar mitzvah in Cali, Colombia, when I was eighteen. Sarita, my wife, is a Jewish Colombian. I became secretary of the South American Youth Zionist Federation.” A waiter interrupted his twenty-six-year-old boss with a telephone call. Daniel took it on a cordless phone.

  “Colombia has a large and active Jewish population. They know about Jewish history there, and about the war with the Arabs. In Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, and Brazil they also know. But here—well, there used to be eight Jewish families in town. Now there are only four. In the past, Kurt Dorfzaun had a seder and we used Haggadahs from Argentina. At another seder my sister, her Catholic husband, and my mom came. I think she’s a Yiddish mama. The last time we had a minyan in Cuenca was at the bar mitzvah of Kurt’s youngest son. I have Spanish, Inca, and Jewish-Russian blood flowing through me. I love my blood.

  “It would have been simple to assimilate here. Many have. But inside I have to be Jewish, so it’s easier to be Jewish on the outside too. Jewish children here have absolutely no reinforcement outside the home. My son is only eighteen months old, but we light the Shabbas candles every Friday night so he’ll grow up with the traditions.”

  At a nearby table, waiters served a small group from Europe their cuy. Rather than slaughter and roast guinea pigs in the hotel kitchen, Kuperman orders carry-out from Tres Estrellas. “I have a lake near here, and we import trout from Idaho. I also own a small plot of land on the coast. When I want to get away from everything, I go visit the Shuar Indians in the jungle. I’ve started a little business guiding tours into the Shuar country. It’s pretty rugged. When the Shuar come to town they stay here. I’m like their consul.

  “I feel a stronger identity with Jews now than I did ten years ago. I love the idea of Zionism. I want to go to Israel and work there and learn Hebrew. I don’t know if I’ll stay, but I want to try it. Here, everyone is into drugs, cars, liquor, motorcycles, and so on. If you know anyone in the States who’d like to buy the Crespo, let me know.”

  The next morning a couple in their fifties sat talking with Kurt Dorfzaun in his office as his staff sorted through the hats left by Adriano González and other middlemen. The couple, a sculptor and his wife, had come to Ecuador two years earlier because of a particular type of rock that lent itself especially well to chiseling. That type of rock was impossible to find in their native Israel. But an Ecuadoran diplomat there had led them to believe that they could set up shop in Ecuador and export works to the United States. Confused, the couple traveled from their rural home near Loja to petition Dorfzaun for aid as if he were the Israeli consul. This was their third visit to his office. The three chatted awhile; had Mr. Dorfzaun found them a studio or a place to live near Cuenca?

  He had not, the tall businessman regretted. He had asked around the Rotary Club and among his other friends; no luck. None of the local Jews could help either. The conversation lost its momentum as the Israelis realized that the one man in town they felt comfortable
asking for help had run out of possibilities. “Hey,” Dorfzaun exclaimed, looking over at me with a smile. “We almost have a minyan here!” The mood lightened up somewhat. I admitted I hadn’t been inside a synagogue since my bar mitzvah twenty-five years earlier. “He’s a goy!” Dorfzaun said with obvious glee. “He’s a goy!” The couple forced a smile, and Dorfzaun ushered them out.

  “What can I do in a situation like that?” he asked when he returned. “I tried. But no one had space available. This happens every once in a while—some Jews new to the country will come to me for help. Some I can, others I can’t.”

  Late in 1938, thirteen-year-old Kurt Dorfzaun traveled with his family from Munich to New York and then to Cali, Colombia. “My father had a wholesale drugstore and cosmetics-supply business. He sold it to a man in 1938 who had helped Hitler fifteen years earlier when he tried to overthrow the government. It was this man who arranged for my family’s passage out of the country. Most of my cousins, my grandparents, uncles, and aunts were sent to concentration camps. In Colombia my father had a cutlery factory. An uncle of mine had escaped to Ecuador and went into the hat trade. I later joined him and I’ve been in the hat business ever since.” Although many of the European Jewish newcomers were shocked at barefoot soldiers and people picking lice out of each other’s hair, an immigrant doctor forged their collective attitude toward their new homeland: “Ich lebe lieber unter verlausten Menschen, als unter vertierten Menschen.” I prefer to live among vermin-infested people than among beastly people.

  The father of Kurt’s wife, Ilse, had been the shamus of a synagogue in Essen. In November 1938, all the synagogues in Germany were burned to the ground and Jewish men were taken to concentration camps, their homes burned and the windows smashed in. “They took my father to the synagogue with machine guns. They made him turn on the lights and pour gasoline all over. He was forced to burn everything there.” The temple’s thirty-six Torahs were burned in the park next door. The family moved from house to house, each time more fearful. Ilse and her parents escaped, joining thousands of others who took refuge from Hitler in Latin America. She met Kurt during Hanukkah in 1952 in Colombia, where he traveled often on business. They were married the following year.