Termite wings in the lampshades.

AuthorMoon, Calista
PositionLife in Panama City

Editor's Note:

The author, whose husband was then serving as the State Department's advisor to the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Southern Command, reminisces about living in, and trying to manage, a house first built for one of the French engineers sent by DeLesseps in his failed effort to build a Panama canal.

Lila worked every day as a domestic in Panama City. She hailed from the West Indies, admitted to seventy odd years, and each morning donned some wildly worded tee shirt and skin tight jeans.

The first time I saw Lila was the early afternoon we arrived at our assigned Quarry Heights quarters: a shabby, genteel, century-old French Colonial frame house. Surrounded by banana trees and flaming ginger plants, it possessed an air of charming decay.

A neighbor's gardener had arranged my meeting with Lila. They had a complicated kinship: she was a cousin of the gardener's brother-in-law's niece.

"Fortunately for you, madam," the gardener said, "she be without a job now. She could be helpin' you with such a big house."

And big house it was, evoking a spirit of bygone canal-building days with its graceful, high ceilings and rugged exposed beams and joists: a grand dame caught in a moment of undress.

It was Panamanian hot and muggy as I climbed a few rickety stairs to the vast porch surrounding the house. A sloth, hanging upside down, lazily watched me from a nearby pecan tree. There on the veranda was Lila, already busily dusting the mildewed lampshades. She was wearing a Crocodile Dundee tee shirt.

"Good evenin', missus. Lila be my name. You must be the new lady. Well, finally you reach. Chuleta! I hopin' to stay here and work some, but I meanin to tell you some things first off. You see, I be a full woman, mum, and I never bend."

Her manner of speech mystified me at first, but I soon learned some of her lingo was a West Indian-Panamanian grammatical stew. A greeting in the afternoon was "good evenin'" and in the evening was "good night". Chuleta was not a "pork chop" as I had learned in school, but rather an expression of enthusiasm or exasperation. And "full woman" in this Caribbean argot meant of an age, mature ... yes, downright old. And bending? That was to be taken literally for Lila avoided basic household tasks like opening windows--shutting them for that matter. Later she was to remind me: "There will be no bed making or sweeping of floors."

But on that first sultry afternoon I knew none of this and when Lila had completed her...

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