Passage to Panama

Panama, June 2010

The Friday night party ended as usual: the friends staggered away and turned off the lights.
The ice cube, still floating in a finger of rum, said to the cigarette butt: "Did you notice?
All night talking about the same things every Friday!
The same nonsense, the same bad jokes." "Tonight was even worse," replied the cigarette butt, yawning. "Did you forget that Italian bigwig was visiting?
That one, the exuberant one, yes. He came to meet his friend, our president... but... excuse me, haven't you seen all those majorettes in the streets?" The cigarette butt, bored to death, stared at the almost completely melted cube and said: "How about we go for a walk and have some fun too?"

I folded the local newspaper and put it back in the pile, among the international ones, looked toward the entrance, then ordered another coffee.
I'd been wasting most of my time for days waiting for the passport I'd lost the night of my arrival in Panama, which had slipped—I don't know how—into the back seat of the taxi.
For this reason, I was stuck in the hotel for three days, in Lost in Transition mode, which isn't a Sofia Coppola film, but the surreal situation that happened to me: lost, lost in a transition.
Bored, too, from staring, from behind the mirrored glass of my room on the twelfth floor of an awkward, gray parallelepiped, at a piece of futuristic landscape worthy of Metropolis, inhabited by a multitude of Supermans in suits and ties, I couldn't resist for long, and finally plucked up the courage to go for a walk outside, without going too far.
The idea was to go in search of the hat made famous by films and literature.

What can I say? In life and in dreams, time flows only in memory. Personal or universal history, the entire universe exists only to be remembered and sometimes invented.
And the memory of what has been experienced and what has been dreamed is the same. The street photographer therefore goes out early in the morning; it's an urgency, a physiological necessity that leads him into the crowd to record things, events, all the situations he encounters.
I found myself walking in a modern, anonymous neighborhood with the unrequited name of "Bella Vista." Proceeding along the coastal road that runs alongside the "Maleçon," Panama City's waterfront, I began to photograph.
Toward the north, I barely saw a piece of the metal arch of the old Bridge of the Americas peeking through the clouds, the bridge that, since 1962, the year of its construction, remained for a long time the only road bridge to have held the distinction of uniting the two Americas.
Now there is the Centennial Bridge that does the same job, more modern, more efficient, even if less romantic.

Anyone expecting an urban beach will be disappointed.
What I see instead of a beach is a stretch of dark, guano-colored mud stretching for kilometers along the entire coast. A pitch-black, oily, and dense sand that, after being hit by the waves, is full of cracks caused by the retreating surf; similar to depressions, which occasionally sink and collapse like dunes sometimes do in the desert.
Bulldozers and dredgers have flattened everything in this stretch where futuristic new buildings will soon appear, built where the jungle once began. No architectural aesthetic differentiates Panama from Hong Kong, Miami, Dubai, or Las Vegas: they are all the same self-regenerating city imagined by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities. Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to the colonial buildings, the hallmarks of a culture: perhaps dismantled, moved, and reassembled elsewhere, where only tourists go.
Such opulence demonstrates the arrogance of contemporary man, the same man who fails to consider and acknowledge the current era, the Anthropocene, an environment severely compromised and penalized by the consequences of human activities, starting with the Industrial Revolution.

Panama is an entity for making money, to bring it in or to lose it.
It builds endlessly, as far as the land allows: banks, luxury hotels, shopping malls, casinos... A place suited to attracting capital, while the less well-off classes remain in the corners, waiting with their uniforms neatly folded under their arms, and the sad looks of those who feel blackmailed for low-paid work.
Even Panama is not immune to the effects of climate change.
The severe drought, the same one that hit Suez, is creating serious problems for navigation in the Panama Canal, the primary source of revenue for the artificial corridor, which has recently seen its water level drop significantly, even outside the dry season.

Of the thirty-eight vessels a day, only twenty-four currently manage to obtain permission from the canal authorities to transit. These same authorities, to cope with the huge losses resulting from lost revenue, have increased toll fees to such an extent that, in the twelve months since the measure began, revenues have actually increased by 15%, with a profit of $5 billion.

The house always wins.
At mid-morning, feeling drained of energy, I decide to buy some bananas from a street vendor I see standing with his cart in the middle of the road.

As I enjoy the fruit, sitting on a bench, I think of the artist Cattelan's "banana," the one sold at auction for three million euros: so if you eat three bananas, anyone today can have a breakfast worth nine million and feel rich, even without a penthouse in Panama.

Luca Periotto
NPPLUS
NP April 2025