The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  In the mid-1950s Dorfzaun met a German businessman who passed some time in Cuenca visiting a stepson. On a few occasions the businessman joined some of the refugees from his homeland for chitchat at the Cafetería Toledo. “He was looking for Jewish companionship,” said Dorfzaun, who sipped coffee with the stranger a few times. Soon the German moved to Chile, but in 1984 his death made international news. He had been Walter Rauff, the Nazi SS colonel who developed the particularly insidious technique of killing victims by stuffing them into trucks disguised as Red Cross vans and asphyxiating them with exhaust fumes. “He used to have many Jews among his friends. In Ecuador, nobody knew about him.”

  Public-service awards hung on Dorfzaun’s office wall, along with a picture of Moshe Dayan and a letter from Princess Diana’s Lady-in-Waiting: “Dear Sir: The Princess of Wales has asked me to write and thank you for the handsome Panama hat. Her Royal Highness was grateful for your thought in sending this present and asks me to send her sincere thanks.” Dorfzaun chuckles each time he tells about sending the wedding gift to Prince Charles’s wife, and how, thinking it was junk mail, he almost tossed out the reply.

  The Dorfzaun house sits in a fashionable neighborhood where decades earlier cattle grazed and townspeople collected firewood. Dorfzaun’s office, his car, and his home are filled with telephones and other communications gear. From the house he talks with his children in the United States by ham radio. Months earlier he had received Resistol’s purchase order on his office Telex, relayed through his uncle Karl in New York. As we drove up to the house for lunch he honked the horn, and the servant came out to open the driveway gate before returning to the stove.

  “Can you buy matzo in Cuenca?” I was curious because the first course from the kitchen was matzo-ball soup.

  “The law says that you have to pay an import duty to bring bread into the country because we make our own. But we can import matzo duty free.” This dispensation raised another possibility: Perhaps I could stay in the Andes and open up—yes! La Matzoría—The Matzo Hut.

  Kurt interrupted the fantasy. “Did you see the story about you in this morning’s newspaper?” A reporter for El Mercurio, Cuenca’s main daily, had interviewed me a couple of days earlier. WRITER FROM THE UNITED STATES COLLECTS FACTS ABOUT TOURIST ASPECTS read the headline. The article said that I was writing a firsthand report about human conditions in Ecuador, and in Cuenca I was particularly interested in “all the necessary information about this important region of the country.” Dorfzaun invited me to speak to the local Rotary Club, which he helped found. “We meet next Tuesday evening; can you make it?”

  Dorfzaun is a macher con mucha palanca, a well-connected big shot: “I’m on the local utilities board, which oversees the telephone, electricity, and water works. I came to Ecuador as a foreigner, but now I feel at home. For many years I’ve been part of the Chamber of Industries. I even served on the Fé Alegría—a Catholic organization. I was its president! They established a school for the poor and hold an annual raffle. After three years as president of a Catholic group, for a Jew—that’s enough.

  “A while back we built a synagogue on property owned by the Catholic Church. Two days before Rosh Hashanah the Church said we couldn’t use it because people would say they rented it for the money. During the Vietnam War we had about ten Jewish boys here in the Peace Corps and five Jewish girls. We held services here at the house every week. We even used prayer books in English.”

  With a minyan no longer likely in Cuenca, the Dorfzauns now fly to Colombia for the High Holy Days, or to Miami. Cuenca’s two Torahs, however, still live with the family. “I wanted to send them to the Jewish community in Quito, but the other Jew here said no. So now I keep them here”—he led me to a hiding place elsewhere in the house—“so no Gentiles will handle them.” He has also held on to one of the few mementos he carried with him from Germany to the New World: a prayer book given to him for his bar mitzvah inscribed by a family friend, F. Kissinger, uncle of Henry.

  The city gave a small part of its cemetery to the local Jewish community in the late 1950s. “Of the thirty or so Jews who came here, most have moved to Guayaquil, Quito, or to another country, or they have died. Many couldn’t adapt; they had the Holocaust behind them and an uncertain future in front of them. Jews who fled to New York had community, but in Cuenca they had almost nothing. Some committed suicide. In another generation I’m afraid the cemetery will be all that remains of the Jewish community in Cuenca.” Kurt handed me the key to the gate.

  The Jews in Cuenca have buried twenty-five of their own within the small cemetery’s stone-and-brick walls. Epitaphs were inscribed in Hebrew, Spanish, and German. Recently placed flowers rested against a few tombstones. A family visiting the adjoining municipal graveyard looked over the fence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ASSEMBLY LINE

  Cuenca’s profoundly religious society began to shift out of low gear in the mid-1960s. Roads to Guayaquil and Quito—unpaved, but roads nonetheless—were not completed until about 1950. A tire factory opened in 1963, followed by ones making ceramics, kitchen equipment, and household furnishings. Suburbs developed, and the city began a transition from a market center for goods from the countryside to one that could support some industry. Cuenca’s population tripled during that time. The city is still immersed in that change, but vestiges of a far slower, feudal Cuenca are everywhere. It can be seen at the Tomebamba River, in whose waters mothers still gather every day to wash the family laundry and on whose banks the clothes are spread out to dry. An old riverside mill lies almost directly below the Hotel Crespo. Just down the street, sombreros de paja toquilla hang on the walls of a little hole-in-the-wall shop. Similar shops dot Cuenca and smaller towns; I thought that they sold new Panamas.

  They don’t. They are hat restoration shops for cholos and Indians. “People usually own two or three hats,” explained Luis Figueroa, a grizzled seventy-four-year-old hat renovator. “They start wearing them when they’re very, very young, every day, from the moment they get up in the morning until they go to sleep at night, for the rest of their lives. One of the hats is always in the shop being cleaned and, if necessary, reblocked. Usually they bring one in for a cleaning every few weeks.” As he spoke, Figueroa wiped a sticky, glue-like gum over a hat to stiffen the brim. Sunlight sliced through the doorway onto the back wall. A charcoal-heated iron, a wire brush, wooden hat blocks, sulfur, and other tools of the trade lay on his ancient workbench. His customers paid between thirty-five and fifty-five cents for hat restoration, depending on the work required. Some two thousand hats lay about the little shop his father had started decades earlier.

  Across town Adriano González was delivering newly woven hat bodies to the factories of several exporters, who treat the hats before shipping them abroad. By day’s end he had unloaded all 10,000 hats with Ortega, Serrano, and the others, including “el gringo Dorfzaun,” as Kurt Dorfzaun is often called. At each plant, workers started counting the hats right away. The sombrero woven by Sra. Calderón de Ojeda in Biblián from paja toquilla harvested by Domingo on the coast was one of the 2,068 hats Adriano González brought into the assembly line at Kurt Dorfzaun’s factory.

  One of Dorfzaun’s workers took dozens of hats home with him, Isaura’s included, to tighten the straw and trim the edge. When the hats came back the next day, they were put in large vats filled with a bleaching solution. For two or three days the hats soaked in the troughlike vats, after which they were transferred to another vat for further bleaching. When they came out of the second vat, their color was more uniform and they were sundried on the patio in the middle of the plant. Once dry, the hats spent the night in a closet fumigated with sulfur fumes for further bleaching and disinfecting. After that the final half inch of straw was cut from their perimeter.

  The Panamas have taken a beating by this time—stretched, soaked, sunned, and snipped. To make the weave more even and the straw more pliable, they were placed on blocks, where the crowns were poun
ded with mallets and the brims were hand-ironed to ensure a uniform smoothness. After another steaming, each hat got a MADE IN ECUADOR sticker, required by law for exports, attached to the inside crown.

  A hundred workers are involved in this continuous flow of hats through Dorfzaun’s plant, including those who take the hats home to cut off and tighten the straw. Each worker gets seventeen months’ worth of wages yearly; the extra five months include Social Security payments, a bonus month in March, September, and December, and another month spread out over ten payments throughout the year. Additionally, 15 percent of the company’s profits must be divided up among the workers. “The national laws say you can’t fire a worker after three months,” Dorfzaun complained. “If you do you must pay two years’ salary.” A plant the size of Dorfzaun’s must also maintain a small víveres outlet of its own. Ecuador’s minimum wage, adjusted annually, was set in mid-1985 at eighty-five hundred sucres monthly, between eighty and eighty-five dollars. Most of Dorfzaun’s workers earn more.

  An incentive program at Dorfzaun’s plant rewards employees for punctuality. His workers—and Dorfzaun himself—punch in and out on a time clock, an almost unheard-of practice in Cuenca, where work usually gets done mañana, tomorrow. “Mañana means so much here,” Dorfzaun said with a sigh. “It can mean I don’t want to do it, I’ll do it later, I’ll get around to it eventually, or I’ll never do it. Only seldom does it mean tomorrow. When I ask somebody to do something and they say, of course, mañana, I say, look: Am I paying you today for tomorrow? I told them I don’t want to hear that word around here anymore.”

  Adriano González stopped by that Thursday to pick up his check for the 2,068 hats he had brought by at the beginning of the week. The hats had cost him 124,290 sucres, to which Dorfzaun added in a 6 percent commission of just under 7,500 sucres. Adriano González made slightly less than $80 for buying hats in Biblián and delivering them to Kurt Dorfzaun. Altogether, he made about $400 that week from all the Cuenca export factories.

  Once the hats had been grouped by size, style, color, and destination, they were tightly packed twenty dozen to a sack. Although some stayed in the country for sale at boutiques and gift shops, most were to be shipped elsewhere in Latin America, and to North America, Europe, and Japan. The six thousand hats destined for the Resistol Hat company in Texas were to go first to Uncle Karl in New York. Kurt charges thirty-six dollars a dozen for brisa-style hats. After having gone through the rigors of a hat factory, Isaura’s hat now costs three dollars.

  Money from Uncle Karl in New York does not go directly to his nephew’s bank account. Instead, it has to go first to the government’s Banco Central, which must collect from the foreign bank against which the check is written before the exporter gets his money. No interest accumulates during the six weeks and more that it takes for the foreign checks to clear. When Dorfzaun finally collects, he receives payment in sucres at the Banco Central rate, which lags about 20 percent behind the floating rate used in most domestic transactions. If, for example, Dorfzaun’s check from New York came to five thousand dollars, he would instead receive the sucre equivalent of slightly more than four thousand dollars. The hats González brought in from Biblián that week were among the 384,000 Panama hats Kurt Dorfzaun exported that year.

  Before leaving Cuenca I went to see the Ojeda family in Biblián one last time. Surprised at my visit, Isaura offered the ultimate compliment: “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked you a cuy!” Talk at the Ojeda house centered around Isaura’s son-in-law, an agronomist who had gone to the United States. He had written from Brooklyn that he had found work in a supermarket. His wife and son hoped to join him within a year. “But we’ll go with visas,” María Elena said. “I understand for a woman and a child it can be dangerous to go the other way.”

  When hats from Biblián were first exported in the nineteenth century, Manuel Alfaro, father of the Liberal revolutionary, took them by ship to Panama. Until air service from Ecuador became reliable in the late 1950s, Dorfzaun’s hats were always sent by mail from the Cuenca post office and put on a freighter in Guayaquil. A few months later they’d arrive in New York. Now hats going to the States are brought across the street to the bus terminal for shipment to Guayaquil, where they’re put aboard an Ecuatoriana Airlines flight to New York.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  DEAD DRUNK

  The hats weren’t quite ready to take off for the United States and I wasn’t either. I suppose I could have waited around Cuenca, then joined them for the ride to Guayaquil and booked a seat on the same flight north—but the truth is I couldn’t bear to leave South America right away. I might never again get this close to the Incas, the Andes, the Amazon, and the equator. For all its frustrations and exasperating customs, Ecuador had its hold on me. I had time for one final sweep through the country, visiting places I’d missed so far.

  My last swing began at Pujilí (poo-hee-LEE), a town in the central highlands at the base of Cotopaxi, the volcano south of Quito. A few weeks earlier I had met a ceramist from there named José A. Olmos and ordered some custom-made figurines from him. He suggested I pick them up on the day of the Corpus Christi fiesta, a traditional festival born of that curious amalgam of pre-Columbian ritual and post-Columbian colonialism, with a wafer-thin layer of Catholicism on top. It started as the most bizarre celebration I’d ever witnessed and ended as the most tragic.

  A mile-long parade dominated the day, beginning after church services and winding through Pujilí for an hour until it passed the reviewing stands at the main plaza, where dignitaries watched the gala procession. What was once a special day for Indians from the surrounding countryside to move at will through the town had become an established civic event borrowing heavily from Indian customs and symbols. Everyone looked forward to the festivities, including the traffic cop five miles east of town who stopped the bus I rode and demanded twenty sucres from the driver before we could push on.

  Danzantes, dancers, play the most prestigious role in the celebration after the prioste, the organizer who leads the hundred or so entries in the parade. Rare and colorful, brazen and gaudy, danzante costumes are painstakingly pieced together for months before the fiesta. A hodgepodge of trinkets—beer cans and mirrors, ribbons, cigarette packs, and other baubles—are fastened to a rectangular cloth lined with aluminum foil. The cloth, or cola, hangs from the back of an elaborate headdress jingling with coins, cheap jewelry, and beads. As part of his tinseled regalia, one danzante displayed pheasant feathers and a framed picture of a dog clipped from a magazine. Across the back of another lay a rabbit skin with tiny battery-operated light bulbs flashing in its eyes. A third cola sported a noisy wind-up alarm clock and dolls—blond, blue-eyed, and naked. Boys aged eight and up danced in white costumes with pillowcase hoods. These diablillos, little devils, pranced about, set off fireworks, and good-naturedly harassed onlookers. One ran up to a man about to take his picture, covered the camera lens with his hand, and demanded money. The photographer laughed, handed the kid some sucres, and snapped away. An alpaca clad in silk carried a wreath on its head, and on its back, a blond-haired plastic baby Jesus. A military band with indigenous flutes and pipes entertained; their music sounded as if John Philip Sousa had visited the Andes.

  Each entry in the parade represented a school or a club, a neighborhood or a town; participants came from villages throughout the highlands. Sometimes a family or simply an individual would join the procession. The diablillos, some of whom carried whips and used stockings to obscure their features, mimicked onlookers, ordering people around in falsetto. These mischievous devil-spirits zigzagged through and around the parade mocking Spaniards and the white elite. One group staged a play lampooning authority as it marched through the streets shoving campesinos around. A visiting lad wore a gorilla mask and full military uniform; another romped in a Bozo the Clown outfit. Yet another made fun of costeños by carrying big bunches of bananas. He was followed by a man in a Chaplinesque
Hitler-face who led some teenagers prowling about in drag, hairy legs protruding from beneath their dresses. One boy in sunglasses played with his falsies, much to the crowd’s delight, then hiked his silk skirt thigh-high. The next group acted out Little Red Riding Hood, accompanied by a man hoisting a painting of the Big Bad Wolf in Grandma’s bed.

  Civic bands, their musical selections often at odds, raced through their repertoires. The national police from Riobamba sent a thirty-five-piece ensemble. Speakers on cars sandwiched between the bands blared Latin pop from cassette players and radios. Shimi-Aya, folkloric musicians from Ambato, had started drinking early and kept bumping into one another as they walked down the street playing highland instruments and pounding hairy drumskins. What sounds these drunkards coaxed from their wooden flutes! One musician rattled a curious instrument assembled from tin, wires, and springs. It sounded like crickets at dusk. All up and down the route, strangers shared glasses of aguardiente and bowls of chicha, a drink made from masticated and fermented corn.

  A master of ceremonies excitedly welcomed each group as it passed the reviewing stand. A few men paraded by in white pants and shirts, lifting mannequins of saints whose faces were covered with gauze. Giant Indian scarecrows propped up on poles were carried throughout the parade. The marchers passed faded posters from defeated political campaigns peeling from the buildings. One called for UNITY OF ALL THE PEOPLE; another, with a sketch of Che Guevara, urged NATIONAL LIBERATION AND SOCIALISM. The parade offered an opportunity to petition the authorities for improved living conditions. One man solemnly walked alone, carrying a sign asking for water and electricity. He kept his eyes straight ahead through the entire route, not even acknowledging periodic cheers from the crowd. Just before he reached the reviewing stand, the cellophane tape on his placard weakened and his sign hung askew. When he passed the finish line, the announcer enthusiastically read his plea over the public-address system; whistles and applause filled the plaza. “And señor,” the breathless announcer proclaimed, “You shall get these things!” A thousand people cheered his false promise. The man walked on.