The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  That afternoon I visited my last hat exporter for the day. He confirmed Harry A. Franck’s remark that aside from studying the professions, “He who does not deal in ‘panama’ hats has hardly an opening in Cuenca.” Gerardo Serrano first studied economics and business, then found himself dealing in Panama hats. His plant was on Pío Bravo, a cobblestone street so narrow that two cars passing each other would clink side-view mirrors. It is the oldest street in an old town. Serrano looks like a New York garment-district man, with a friendly round face above a rounding body. He wore a dark three-piece suit, customary for Cuenca businessmen, and over it a white smock. He had entered the hat business for himself in the early 1950s after serving as business adviser to one of the other companies. “I wasn’t satisfied with the way they were weaving and finishing the hats here. So I visited the United States and Europe to see how they finish and trim their hats. I learned English and accounting from the LaSalle Extension School. The courses came by mail.” He pointed to recent issues of a Harvard Business School publication. “I brought the industry into the twentieth century,” he boasted in his eighteenth-century office. He showed off a trophy his hats had won in a competition in Buenos Aires. “And soon,” he said, “I’ll be moving into a brand-new factory my son is designing. He’s an engineer.

  “It’s too bad you weren’t here two weeks ago. There was an exhibition about the Panama hat trade at CIDAP” (El Centro Interamericano de Artesanías y Artes Populares—Inter-American Popular Arts and Crafts Center, a branch of the Organization of American States). “The display was put up by students from the state university. Here’s the brochure.” The pamphlet emphasized the role of the weaver in the hat trade. “The students have a tendency toward Marxism, communism, and populism. They are more interested in politics than in their studies. That’s the way it is in underdeveloped countries. They say that the poor weaver makes so little and when the hat is sold at last it costs so much. They don’t take into account all that we do to each hat before we sell it.

  “During vacation time the children in the countryside weave hats. They learn from their mothers. It’s supplementary income for each family while they watch the cattle, cook meals, and take care of the house and the baby. They start as early as six in the morning and weave in stretches of two or three hours until midday. Women are better at weaving toquilla hats because the straw is more supple and pliable and their hands can adjust to it better. Country people—they don’t have clean hands. When we wash the hats we take out the grease. Then they get bleached and dyed, followed by ironing and pressing. Besides the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, I ship to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and England.” He brightened up—“And I even sell a few to France!”

  Serrano’s business day was over, and he offered me a ride back to my hotel. The sun had ceased warming the air, and an early evening chill was coming on. As he left his ancient wooden plant, he secured the door with a ten-pound shackle joining two horseshoe hooks at the bottom. The man in the three-piece suit slowly folded himself over to ground level to latch his weighty colonial padlock. Silhouetted against the dark building on the ancient street at nightfall, Serrano’s black suit blended seamlessly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BUS PLUNGE HIGHWAY

  One of the hatters told me how to reach Victor González, an importer of raw toquilla straw from the coast. When I walked into his house, he started to hand me a fifty-sucre note. (The sucre was worth slightly more than a penny at the time.) I hadn’t yet introduced myself. “No, no,” I protested, “there must be some mistake. I telephoned this morning and spoke with your daughter, Fanny, about—” Fanny, entering the front courtyard, interrupted. “He thinks you’re from the government,” she apologized. “I’ll tell him again what you’re interested in.” As she explained, her father relaxed somewhat, and he led the way to a room filled with large sacks tightly wrapped in light cloth, about three feet by five feet, holding the raw straw.

  “These are called bultos. They come like this from the coast. If you’re going up to the town they come from, take this, will you?” He wrote a note to his suppliers listing the prices he was paying for bultos that week. I was closing in on the beginning of the trail.

  “You’ll be going to Febres Cordero.”

  I stopped and stared. That was the name of the country’s president, elected in 1984. “He’s got nothing to do with it,” Fanny said. “It was named for his grandfather, a military officer.”

  “From Guayaquil,” her father continued, “take a bus to La Libertad, and from there to Febres Cordero. It’s easy. Make sure you give them my price list.”

  To reach the town of Febres Cordero I took a bus to Guayaquil—at 1.6 million, the country’s most populous city. The 150-mile ride started smoothly despite my apprehension. Bus rides through Latin America have always induced fear in me, brought on by years of reading one-paragraph bus-plunge stories used by newspapers in the States as fillers on the foreign-news page. The datelines change, but the headlines always include the words bus plunge, as in 12 DIE IN SRI LANKA BUS PLUNGE, OR CHILEAN BUS PLUNGE KILLS 31.

  “We can count on one every couple of days or so,” an editor at the New York Times once told me. “They’re always ready when we need them.” Never more than two sentences long, a standard bus-plunge piece will usually include the number feared dead, the identity of any group on board—a soccer team, church choir, or school bus—and the distance of the plunge from the capital city. The words ravine and gorge pop up often. Most of the stories come from Third World countries, the victims constituting just a fraction of the faceless brown-skinned masses. “A hundred Pakistanis going off a mountain in a bus make less of a story than three Englishmen drowning in the Thames,” noted foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum in Coups & Earthquakes. Is there a news service that does nothing but supply daily papers with bus-plunge stories? Peru and India seem to generate the most coverage; perhaps the wire services have more stringers in the Andes and Himalayas than anywhere else.

  If an Ecuadoran bus driver survives a plunge fatal to others, according to Moritz Thomsen in Living Poor, “he immediately goes into hiding in some distant part of the country so that the bereaved can’t even up the score. There are rumors of whole villages down in the far reaches of the Amazon basin populated almost entirely by bus drivers. This is probably apocryphal . . .”

  If you anticipate a bus trip in Latin America, go through the following checklist prior to boarding:

  Look at the tires. If three or more of the six tires (most buses include two rear sets of two each) are totally bald, the probability of bus plunge increases. Visible threads on the tires means a blowout is imminent.

  Does the bus have at least one windshield wiper? Good. If it’s on the driver’s side, so much the better. Try to avoid buses whose windshields are so crowded with decals, statues, and pictures that the driver has only a postcard-size hole through which to see the future. Shrines to saints, pious homilies, boastful bumper stickers, and religious trinkets do not reflect the safety of a bus. Jesus Christ and Che Guevara are often worshiped on the same decal. This should give neither high hopes nor nagging suspicion.

  The driver’s sobriety isn’t a factor. The presence of his wife or girlfriend is. If she’s along, she will usually sit immediately behind him, next to him, or on his lap. He will want to impress her with his daring at the wheel, but he will also go to great lengths not to injure her. If he has no girlfriend or wife, the chances of gorge dive increase.

  You can’t check the bus for brakes. Once I asked a driver in Guatemala about the brakes on his bus. “Look,” he said, “the bus is stopped, isn’t it? Then the brakes must work.”

  On intercity buses, seats are often assigned before boarding. Refuse the seat directly behind the driver or in the front right. If your ride takes place during the day, you’ll be subjected to at least one heart-skip a minute as your bus casually passes a truck on an uphill blind curve or goes head-to-head with an oncom
ing bus. At night the constant glare of approaching headlights will shine in your eyes. At any hour, the driver’s makeshift radio speaker will dangle closer to your ears than you’d like.

  Always have your passport ready. Random military inspections take place when you least expect them. I once delayed a bus full of cross-country travelers for ten minutes a couple of miles outside Esmeraldas, on the Pacific Coast south of Colombia, while frantically searching first for my bag atop the bus, then my passport within the bag.

  In defense of Latin-American buses: They go everywhere. Everywhere. No road is so dusty, bumpy, unpopulated, narrow, or obscure that a bus doesn’t rumble down it at least once every twenty-four hours. The fare is very little—Cuenca to Guayaquil cost less than three dollars—and, barring plunges, they almost always reach their destination. If your window opens, you’ll get a view of the countryside unmatched in painting or postcard. Your seatmate may be an aging campesina on her way home or a youthful Indian on his first trip to the big city. Dialects of Spanish and Quechua unknown to linguists float past you. Chickens, piglets, and children crowd the aisles or ride on top.

  At Cuenca’s terminal terrestre, the bus station, I had a choice of taking a regular bus or an aerotaxi to Guayaquil. The former travels slower, hence it is theoretically safer. The latter, a small twenty-four seater, whizzes along far faster, has less leg room, and tends to be more plunge-prone. I resisted the odds and took an aerotaxi.

  The trip, five and a half hours long, begins at 8,400 feet above sea level, climbs somewhat higher, and descends to a sea level straightaway for the final ninety minutes or so. The advantage of the drive toward Guayaquil is that the precipitous ravine usually falls off on the left side of the two-lane road; the disadvantage is that you’re headed downhill most of the way. Guard railings, few and far between, relieved a bit of my fear, except when the downhill section was bent outward or was simply broken off. For the better part of the first hour we followed a cattle truck, which moved only slightly faster than its cargo could have managed on its own.

  The cattle turned off at Azogues, and we pushed on deep into the province of Cañar. The temperature dropped. I looked out the left side onto the clouds surrounding peaks nearby and distant. The thin air above the clouds in the Andes gave the sunlight colors unknown below. Only occasionally did our driver attempt a suicide squeeze—overtaking someone around a blind curve—and we settled into a quiet passage. Crude signs advertised local cheeses. Small piles of toquilla straw lay on the ground near doorless houses where women sat in the entrances weaving Panama hats. Julio, the driver, knew all the potholes and bumps on that road and managed to hit every one. Pepe, his helper—the driver’s assistant is almost always a younger brother, son, or nephew—fidgeted with the radio until he found a distant station whose static muffled a brass band. We passed Cañari Indians heading home; in front the father, directly behind him his wife, behind her a passel of kids, and bringing up the rear a burro and a goat. Each party in the procession was connected to the one behind by a rope tied around the midsection. A dog yipped alongside.

  We descended into the thick of the clouds and Julio downshifted. The white line down the center of the curving two-lane road was his only guide; even the aerotaxi’s hood ornament had disappeared into the clouds. After five minutes he slowed further and then stopped. Pepe walked through the aerotaxi collecting money. I nudged Horacio next to me. “What’s this for?”

  “We’re at the shrine,” he replied. “Each driver stops at this shrine along the way and leaves some money. It’s their way of asking God’s blessings for a safe journey.” Often the saints are next to a police checkpoint so that the driver can make two payoffs at once. Offering insurance money to some saint required a gargantuan leap of faith, but if it would assure us a trip free of bus plunge, I wanted in. I coughed up a few sucres.

  Pepe trotted across the road to leave our money at the shrine when suddenly a half-dozen Indian faces appeared out of the clouds pressing against the windows. “¡Choclos! ¡Choclos! ¡Diez cada uno!” They were selling sweet corn cooked with onion, cheese, and egg for slightly more than ten cents each. Two barefoot Indian women in felt hats and thick mud-stained ponchos slipped onto the bus and walked up and down the aisle. “¡Choclos! ¡Choclos! ¡Nueve cada uno!” The price had gone down some. Another vendor with a glazed look in her eyes and a baby in her arms rapped desperately on a window trying to get a passenger to open it. Her shrill voice seemed as distant as her eyes. Pepe returned, and the Indians withdrew into the Andean mist.

  Bus drivers’ assistants throughout Latin America display keen skills at hopping on and off moving buses, keeping track of which passenger is due how much change for his fare, pumping gas, climbing through a window to the roof to retrieve some freight before the bus stops, and changing blowouts. Pepe performed all these feats in the course of the run to Guayaquil, and excelled at hopping on the bus when it was already in second gear. Trotting apace of the bus, he first took a short skip on the ground to get the spring in his feet, then a short jump at a forty-five-degree angle calculated to land him on the first step while he grasped a metal bar next to the doorway. His motion appeared so fluid and effortless, he seemed to be simply stepping onto a bus in repose.

  The right rear tire blew out on the southern edge of the town of Cañar. Julio pulled into an abandoned service station and Pepe had us back on the road within ten minutes. In more restful moments he sat on a makeshift seat between Julio and the door. The only job forbidden him was highway driving, and even then he was allowed to maneuver the bus around the terminals.

  The ride down the western face of the Andes settled into a relatively peaceful journey once the tire was changed and the saint paid off. We went through long stretches where the only hint of life was an occasional choza, a straw-thatched hut, set back from the road. Valleys with streams and rivers flowing toward the Pacific held small towns. Our descent to sea level was practically complete and we entered a different climate, province, and culture. Bribing the saint had worked; we had passed the bus-plunge zone safely.

  The air hung heavier, more humid, and warmer. Roadside vegetation grew more lush. Thick grass grew right up to roadside. Towns suddenly burst upon the highway—healthy, lively towns, active, jumping, noisy, uncaring. A church was just another building near the plaza, nothing more. Men and boys wore shorts, thongs, and torn T-shirts. Women and girls wore slacks or short, loose cotton dresses. Card tables were surrounded by men who looked like they’d sat there months on end encircled by a floating crowd of onlookers. Shot glasses of puro were constantly drained and refilled. Every structure was made of bamboo—split, dry, and aged. There was loud laughter, backslapping, gold-toothed grins, ass-pinching, life with few worries and less money. We had encountered our first consteños—people who live in the coastal region. Julio raced to Guayaquil on a road studded with potholes bigger than our aerotaxi. The tropics had begun.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE CITY OF MONKEYS

  When you mention Guayaquil, the people of Quito snicker. Monos, monkeys, live there. Uncouth, sacrilegious, lazy, no modesty or commitment to family or God. They lack ambition, culture, and spirituality. Worse, they admit it without shame. Quito and Guayaquil have so little in common they appear as if on different planets. Guayaquil, whose industries produce most of the goods bought and process most of the food consumed in the country, is Ecuador’s breadwinner. Most of the bread, however, winds up in government coffers in the capital city, and Guayaquil sees little benefit from its industrial output. Julio Estrada Ycaza, the executive director of the Province of Guaya Historic Archives, summed up the Guayaquil attitude toward Quiteños: “We live in the tropics; we work. They live in the mountains; they don’t.” Unattractive, hot, crowded, and constantly in motion, Guayaquil’s strengths are abhorred by serranos—that is, mountain people, including Quiteños. On the coast, monos celebrate life with gaiety in the streets till dawn. In the mountains, serranos venerate death with solemnity in church till
heaven. Until the bridge spanning the Guayas River was finally completed in the early 1960s, cars and trucks had to cross into Guayaquil on a ferryboat. Quiteños called the new bridge “the missing link.”

  Julio crossed over the missing link, guided the aerotaxi into the midst of three blocks of confusion, and parked in front of a hand-painted sign advertising regular departures for Cuenca. Instead of a central terminal, Guayaquil’s interprovincial buses simply come and go from a crowded neighborhood near downtown, with aerotaxis and buses parked along every inch of curb, charging out of narrow alleys and filling all available pavement. Bus stations are little more than booths, with a dispatcher selling tickets and announcing departures. Cabs and passenger cars squeeze through the lane between the buses, gleefully honking at each other. At every corner street vendors sell cebiche—chunks of marinated seafood floating in a lightly spiced liquid—and sugar and nail clippers and combs and magazines and cigarettes. A major port for South American ships, Guayaquil throbs as Ecuador’s melting pot. It is a city in heat.

  Rather than defend themselves against serrano accusations, Guayaquileños embrace them with humor. In Vistazo, humorist Tomás del Pelo challenged his readers to find “twenty-five tremendous mistakes” in a large cartoon of Guayaquil. Among the errors: city employees removing outdated political wall posters; a lady actually throwing garbage into a trash can; a taxi driver opening the door for a passenger; a working parking meter; a city inspector barring minors from an X-rated movie; a uniformed food vendor with a clean stand; a tavern shut down for being next to a school; a working pay telephone with its directory intact; students demonstrating for more classes; a hippie not smoking marijuana; a manned information booth with city maps and brochures; a radio serenading the streets with a Beethoven symphony.

  I decided to leave for the fields of toquilla straw the next morning, and spend the rest of the day in Guayaquil hoping it would live up to its image. First I called on Edmundo Ward, at seventy-five a lifelong Guayaquileño and part owner of the city’s main maternity hospital. His last name is an approximation of his family’s original Lebanese name. He had commerce on his mind. “The Lebanese here are all bourgeois, and rabid capitalists,” Ward said. “In Guayaquil, it seems everyone is selling something. Everything is sold here.” We walked through the teeming central market district. Vendors filled the sidewalks for blocks and blocks hawking food, clothing, and furniture, candy, newspapers, and stereos, books, bedding, and themselves. “The Indians from the mountains come down here. They live twenty, sometimes thirty to a room in this area. This city has so little. On my way to work this morning I found an old friend begging on the streets. So I gave him all the money I had with me. Guayaquil is not a pretty city, but it has abundant activity. You can fix things by telephone if you know the right people. There was a time when I used to know everyone here. Now I feel as if I know no one. Here you can give affection, and take it too. If you can live with the chaos, you can make it here.”