Real connections between people in Panama City
I am writing with a practical question. Our household moved here recently and we would like to spend Sunday mornings outdoors on the bicycles. Traffic at rush hour on weekdays is very heavy, and I do not yet know whether weekends are similar. Do residents usually load the bicycles in a car and drive to the Amador Causeway, or is there a sensible way to ride there from the city?
The bench on the Cinta Costera had been broken for weeks, one leg shorter than the others. One evening at 7pm I sat on it and tilted. A man two meters away sat on the same bench and tilted too. We both stood up. We both looked at the bench. We both blamed the other. It was the best argument I have had in Panama. We sit on the next bench along now, every Thursday, and we do not discuss the old one. It is still broken. We still look at it.
I was on a bench in a Casco Viejo plaza when the sky turned grey. A man sweeping nearby said to a visitor who had just opened a map, "It is only the afternoon rain, it will be gone before your coffee is." It was around three. The visitor looked at the sky and then at the man, and took his coffee inside anyway. The rain stopped before the cup was empty. Back in Brazil we say the forecast is a suggestion, and here the sky seems to keep appointments.
You walked the length of a Casco Viejo street one Friday evening with a cat following a few steps behind you in a perfectly straight line, like a bodyguard. You did not look back once. You went into a doorway. The cat sat down outside, facing the street, on duty. I stood across the road for ten minutes. Nobody came for the cat and nobody tried to pass it. I have never wanted anything more than to be followed by a cat like that.
For a whole dry season I cycled the Amador Causeway on Saturdays at 7am and passed the same three riders at the same bend, first with a nod, then a wave, then a shout. One Saturday they were gone. I have been back a dozen times and seen only tourists on rented bicycles. If you rode in the rain, I owe you the first coffee. If you moved, I owe you the second. I have ordered both. They are on the table.
The sky went black in two minutes on the Cinta Costera on Thursday around 5pm and the rain started sideways. A man jogging past stopped, held his rain jacket open like a roof, and said, come. We ran to the nearest bench roof and stood there dripping, watching the container ships. We talked about nothing, mostly about ships. When it stopped he said, have a good evening, and jogged away. His shoes were completely soaked. So were mine. We had stood very close for eleven minutes and learned nothing. I think about that a lot.
I had an empty card and a line behind me at the Metro gate in Panama City, and I was trying to remember my pin for the top up machine. A woman in front of me turned around, tapped her own card on the reader for me, and walked on without a word. It was the quickest kindness I have had in this city. I have repeated it twice for other people since. Both times they looked at me exactly the way I looked at her. Both times I walked on.
In my first week I walked the Cinta Costera in the late afternoon, because Panama City is hot and humid all year and I assumed that evening was the cool part. The sky went dark in minutes. The rain came down like someone had tipped a bath over the city. Every local I could see was already under a shelter, as if they had received a message I had not. I stood in the open for a while, completely soaked, thinking that it was almost a relief. After that I started looking at the sky around the middle of the afternoon.
I left my raincoat on a bus stop bench in El Cangrejo in the rainy season, which is a mistake you make exactly once. A security guard at the building next door kept it behind his desk for three days and gave it back with a small bow. I did not know there was a lost raincoat system. There is now. It is called him. I take a different route past the building these days so that he does not see me carrying a second one. I bought a second one.
On a Friday morning in a Casco Viejo plaza you stood with a folded paper map and a straw hat, turning slowly like someone looking for a street that had moved. I was on a bench knowing the answer and too shy to say it. A pigeon landed on your hat. You laughed out loud, took the hat off, looked at the pigeon, and then asked me for directions. I gave them. You went left. The pigeon went right. It was a good day. I have the map in my head now. It is mostly pigeons.
