The Panama Hat Trail Page 5
Ward gave a beggar a few sucres. “You need servants,” he added. “Of course, there aren’t as many servants as there were before. The women prefer to work in the factories.” We had left the central market district and walked over toward the Malecón, the main street that runs alongside the river. Every block had Chinese and Lebanese restaurants.
“You see this factory? My father helped found it. It went broke a month ago. The manager was a crook. Our last mayor went to jail for the same reason. His fingernails were too long.” The current mayor, a Lebanese, was a bombastic purist, colorful, unpredictable, and just a little maniacal. People called him a little dictator for his actions, unilateral and illegal, on behalf of the city. Once, to protest policies of the central government, he called for a citywide paro, a work stoppage, and enforced it with roving thugs. All transportation in and out of town was shut down (during which time Quiteños called the city “a cage full of monkeys”). “He’s bad,” Ward admitted. “He’s not going to last.” The next day the mayor announced plans to run for president in the next election. Months later, after he was charged with slandering the military and the central government, he surreptitiously left the country.
We walked into an imposing apartment building and took the elevator to the seventh floor. “I have lunch with this family regularly. They’re Lebanese and they are extremely wealthy. They own a major department store downtown. Life can be easy here. You’ll see.” The apartment was close enough to the Malecón so that the Río Guayas was in full view, but far enough so that the river’s odor was not apparent. The spacious living room dripped with opulence. Wall-to-wall kitsch filled the living room. A cocker spaniel tap-danced across the marble floor. Cigarette ashes lay in sterling silver ashtrays. The women in the family talked of their latest shopping sprees in Miami and Europe. (“They spent fifty thousand dollars on a recent trip,” Ward whispered.) No books were evident.
The midday meal, the main meal of the day, was delicious. Servants brought out five courses highlighted by seafood and veal. The coffee wasn’t bad. “Those people don’t understand me,” Ward confided later, “but they give me affection. I have no family, and they think of me as one of them. I’m used to loneliness. I like it. I don’t like domesticity. I would feel too limited. Ecuadoran women are too domesticated; Lebanese women more so. Once you’re in a Lebanese family, it absorbs all of you.”
I asked Ward about the national rivalry between the coast and the sierra. “The Indians from the sierra—the ones who have initiative—they come here for work. They know we won’t call them indios brutos,” beastly Indians, “like they get called in Quito. No, we just ignore them. Of course, the roots of our nationalism are in the sierra.”
As another consteño said of serranos, “The way they talk, it’s like a bird chirping and twittering. They call us monkeys, we call them birds. When they drink, you know, they don’t dance or laugh; they just drink until they fall down. Animals, animals. They don’t bathe, you know.”
“Have you noticed that there are no Guayaquileños in the air force?” Ward went on. “They don’t want anything to do with it. They don’t like uniforms. In Quito, everyone looks like a Christmas tree.”
Women on the coast have a different personality from the serranas also. Taller, more lively and flirtatious, they look directly into men’s eyes, instead of demurely glancing aside. Observed the Frenchman Laurent Saint-Criq in his 1875 book Travels in South America: From the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean: “The female society of Guayaquil exceeds that of any other town in South America that I visited. Their private characters being as free from levity as their public demeanor is from prudery.” I mentioned these perceptions to Ward. “It’s true. No Guayaquileña would ever take a serrano from Quito for a husband. They think all serranos are hypocrites. Everything is different about them—the clothes they wear, the food they eat, the whole ambiente. There, they are closed.”
We reached Ward’s home, an apartment overlooking the Guayas River. It was filled with books of poetry, history, and philosophy. “I started writing poetry twelve years ago. I’ve published four books of poetry privately. This next one I hope to find a publisher for. I’m ready to invite criticism.” He reached for his notebook. Writing poetry, he said, is solitario y arduo, solitary and arduous. “Here. This one is about Sitting Bull and Custer. Custer was a real bastard. Do you know a good translator?”
I left Ward to his poetry and went downtown to see Carlos Elías Barberán Loor at the finest Panama hat shop in the world. At times this obsession with Panama hats seemed to border on the ludicrous. Weren’t there better things to do than chase straw hats through South America? No. Through the Panama I could interpret the economic theories of Adam Smith and B. Traven, decipher Incan history, analyze United States foreign policy, and look at the First World from the outside in. I assured myself of all this on my way over to see Sr. Barberán.
Barberán, born in 1914, is known as the leading authority on Panamas, an opinion he himself is not reluctant to offer. Panamas of all qualities fill his store, from coarse and inexpensive Cuenca weaves to the very best from the province of Manabí. “My father was a comisionista in Manabí. That’s where the most elegant hats have always come from, you know. My father lived in London between 1925 and 1930. Shortly after that we moved here to Guayaquil and opened up shop. I’ve been a one-man promoter of these hats for decades now. I developed the industry that now exists in Manabí.”
Two towns in Manabí, Montecristi and Jipijapa (heepy-hahpa), have earned worldwide reputations over the years as the source of the finest Panamas. “I still get my best ones from Montecristi. Here’s one that costs thirty-six thousand sucres,” about three hundred dollars at the time. “It took eight months to weave.” He held the hat up to the light and showed me the vueltas, the rings, which help determine the hat’s value. “Here. How many do you count?” He handed me a hat weighing no more than an ounce, so smooth and soft you could easily pull it through a napkin ring. It rolled up into a cone, then opened back with nary a crease. So tight was the weave that very little light came through. I counted fourteen vueltas.
“Look again,” Barberán counseled. “There are nineteen. Now for a hat like that, I paid the weaver twenty-six thousand sucres”—approximately two hundred forty dollars.
The payment was made in steps. “I pay twenty-five percent when the button and a little bit further are done; another quarter when the crown is complete, and the balance on completion. It looks very good on you.”
Barberán placed a half-dozen different styles on my head, reeling off their names and the country where they are most popular. “I’ve been all over Central America selling hats, and also to Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, England, France, and Germany. I was in your country last in 1978.” In which country, I asked, do you find the largest heads?” “The United States! You Americans have the biggest heads in the world.” He spoke with awe. “It’s said the bigger the head, the smarter you are. Look at me!” Señor Barberán’s head was small; there was no getting around that. He put his hands to the sides of his face to reinforce its narrow dimensions. “Now, this style looks good on me,” he said, picking up a Panama with a small brim. “If you have a big face, though, get a hat with a wide brim.”
We retreated to his desk, where he deplored the state of fino and superfino Montecristi Panamas. “There are ten families left in the entire Province of Manabí that make the extra-fine hats. They weave for three or four hours in the morning, or late at night. The rest of the day the sweat builds up on their fingers. Direct sunlight isn’t good for the straw either. It gets too brittle to weave a proper fino. Before, there were a hundred families who could do it, and before that a thousand. But weavers don’t get paid what the hats are worth, so now the people go into ranching or work on farms rather than make hats. In twenty years the weaving of the Montecristi finos will be all over.” Barberán’s sad prediction compelled me to add Montecristi to my itinerary before it was too late.
TOQUILLA SUNRISE
La Libertad lies on the coast seventy-five miles west of Guayaquil. The drive was flat, quick, and happily uneventful. We parked near the central market, a one-stop shopping center crowded with vendors selling fresh fruit, meat, vegetables, soft drinks, luggage, and a hundred more items. “The bus for Febres Cordero—where does it leave from?” I asked a lady selling onions. Over there, I was told, next to that ice cream stand. The only vehicles parked at the heladería were small pickup trucks. The bed of each pickup held two wooden benches under a low-slung metal shell with a couple of holes carved out. A boy of fifteen leaned against one of the trucks reading the morning newspaper. “Excuse me, could you tell me where to find the bus to Febres Cordero?” “This is it,” he replied without looking up. “This pickup?” “Sí.” Laborers were loading cases of Coca-Cola on top of the shell. “We leave in forty-five minutes.”
Four others joined me for the ride north. One was going all the way to Febres Cordero; the other three to Colonche. Uncomfortable and hot, the confines of the pickup grew even more so as passengers flagged us down to hop on. We started to overflow; the driver’s helper and two passengers rode standing on the rear bumper. Little ventilation reached the front of the shell. We stopped every five minutes to let someone on or off. After ninety minutes most of the riders had left, and we remaining passengers could finally stretch out. “Which Febres Cordero do you want?” the driver’s helper asked. “Lower or upper?” I guessed lower, hopped out, and paid the driver $1.10.
The note from Victor González in Cuenca had three names on it. I went from house to house asking for the men. The first one couldn’t be found. The second was spending the day in La Libertad. The third was Ramírez, a man who could get me to the fields of the toquilla straw from which Panama hats are made. “Oh sure,” a lady told me. “He’s in upper Febres Cordero. He operates a víveres,” a Third World 7-Eleven. “He should be behind the counter.” The village of Febres Cordero was in one of the areas the U.S. State Department medical bulletin had warned about when I checked on possible diseases and their prevention. “If you’re planning to travel outside the major cities, especially on the coast,” a public-health nurse told me, “we suggest you get a tetanus-diphtheria shot, one for typhoid, and of course gamma globulin. Also, we recommend you take a Fansidar antimalaria pill once a week. Just in case.” Every Thursday I popped my weekly malaria pill. It wouldn’t prevent malaria from setting in, I was later told, but rather it controlled the symptoms.
Febres Cordero lies about twenty miles inland from the coast. The town itself was dry but not arid, hot but not sweltering. A dirt plaza at the center of town was surrounded by about ten houses and a church with a cement floor, cinder-block walls, and wooden benches. Its one light was fluorescent and hung over a cracked plaster Jesus. Kids from four to twenty used the plaza for a soccer field, careful to avoid the piglets who likewise played on it. Other homes lay farther back from the plaza. Most were made of split bamboo, often on wooden stilts, with ladders or stairways leading to the main floor. This prevented unwanted animals from wandering into the houses, gave some ventilation between the floor and the ground, and allowed rainwater to flow beneath the houses during torrential downpours rather than into them. The space between the floor and the ground was a storage area for drying toquilla straw. Piles of the stuff lay beneath one-room houses all over town. Except for the new straw itself, harvested within the previous seven days, everything in Febres Cordero appeared gray: people, hills, rocks, mules, calves, pigs, roads—all gray, gray as far as the eye could see. Year-old weather-beaten houses appeared as gray and old as twenty-year-old homes.
The coast wears a different cloak of poverty from the sierra. Clothing and shelter are cheaper, and fresh food is less expensive and more available. A primitive economy in towns as remote as this allows the richest man to earn perhaps ten or fifteen dollars more a month than the poorest. Febres Cordero had recently been wired into the nation’s rural electrification grid, a fact advertised by the television antennas above some houses. Juan Ramírez, the third man on Victor González’s list, had one on his house. When I called out his name he stuck his head out an open-air window and came down.
A dozen small children gathered as I explained my mission. Juan nodded, thought for a minute, and introduced me to some other men among the twenty or so people who had gathered around to gawk at the foreigner. A blue-shirted man about sixty took command. “In this town we not only harvest the straw,” he intoned, “but we used to weave the hats as well. It was quite an industry here for a long time. We sent hats from here to Havana, Cuba.” He tottered a bit and moved closer. His breath reeked of stale fermented sugarcane. The children laughed at his drunkenness. “Ecuador broke relations with Cuba in the year 1962. After that our market died and we stopped weaving hats. Our town has been poor ever since.”
Two elderly women approached. “We used to make our living weaving the hats here,” one said, “but since Cuba stopped buying we have had no way to support ourselves. We have no family here to care for us. We are alone.”
Ecuador breaking relations with Cuba? Hadn’t the CIA been instrumental in precipitating the split? In Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Philip Agee detailed the Agency’s extensive undercover operations that drove an artificial wedge between Ecuador and Fidel. The divorce was part of a large-scale CIA effort to isolate Havana from hemispheric unity by creating friction between Cuba and all the other Latin American countries. Some of the fallout from that operation had landed here in Febres Cordero. United States foreign policy had unwittingly eliminated straw-hat weaving in a tiny South American village. The town has never recovered.
Juan invited me into his little store on the ground floor of his house. Daylight flooded the room as he opened the door, and a mouse scurried off the counter. One soft drink stood alone in the refrigerator. “The things I sell,” Juan said, “are daily items for the people. It may look like these things stay here forever, but everything gets bought eventually. Everyone goes to La Libertad on market day to buy other things.” On his shelves were the following: batteries, cigarettes, chewing gum, clothespins, oil, zippers, thread, notebooks, crackers, flour, noodles, lard, rice, canned tuna, aspirin, and 250-milligram tetracycline pills.
“You must be hungry. Would you like something to eat?” I bought the store’s one soda and Juan reached for a dusty tuna can and crackers. “Here. You may have this.” He picked up his machete and hacked open the tuna can. He poured its contents on a plate, added some stale crackers, and handed it to me. A crowd of fifty had gathered outside the little store to watch the gringo eat. Frankly, by this time I was getting tired of cute little barefoot kids following me around, but waving them off only heightened their curiosity.
“That man who was telling me about the straw industry here,” I said to Juan. “What’s his name? It came out all slurred when he told me.”
“Who?” Juan answered. “Which one?”
“The drunkard in the blue shirt.”
“Oh, him. That’s my father.”
“Well,” I said, trying to recover, “he sure knows a great deal about straw.”
“Oh, yes. It’s his life. But he does drink a lot, doesn’t he?”
Antonio, at eighteen the eldest of Juan’s six children, drove a pickup between La Libertad and Febres Cordero for a living. He was scratching his head looking under his truck’s hood. “Antonio will drive you out to the straw fields as soon as his truck is fixed,” Juan said. “Domingo will go along too. He is a pajero,” a straw cutter. By the time Antonio repaired his pickup and had poured some gas into the tank, half a dozen men had volunteered to come along. Two of them joined Domingo, Antonio, and me.
We drove off to the northwest, first zigzagging between houses, then onto an open dirt road. The ground was like soft clay. Some pajeros were coming in from the countryside, their day’s work done by early afternoon. Pack mules walked alongside them, carrying bundles of toquilla
straw strapped to their sides. They also carried bananas, mangoes, oranges, and, on each one, a small child. Soft of face, short of stature, and barefoot, the pajeros seemed gentle to an extreme. They called their machetes piedras, rocks, because that’s what they were as hard as, but they treated them as if they were baby chicks. The pajeros waved as we drove by. The toquilla straw came in green shoots about a yard long and a quarter-inch in diameter. Each mule carried a load of forty shoots or so on each side.
We covered about four miles in twenty-five minutes, driving up and down some rolling hills. Pencil-thin cacti appeared near the road for the first few miles, but as we ascended they disappeared. The ground was getting wetter and the hills steeper. The truck had already slid on a short stretch of the road and Antonio feared worse slides ahead. He found a little space in which to turn the truck around, then parked in the middle of the road. Normally, Domingo said, the pajeros walk the entire distance. He, Antonio, and the other two left their shoes in the pickup and together we all walked deeper into the increasingly moist lowland rainforest.