Table of Contents
THE OLD
PATAGONIAN
EXPRESS
By Train Through The Americas
1979
PAUL THEROUX
For my Shanghai Lil,
and for Anne, Marcel, and Louis, with love
CONTENTS
1
THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED
2
THE LONE STAR
3
THE AZTEC EAGLE
4
EL JAROCHO TO VERACRUZ
5
THE PASSENGER TRAIN TO TAPACHULA
6
THE 7:30 TO GUATEMALA CITY
7
THE 7:00 TO ZACAPA
8
THE RAILCAR TO SAN SALVADOR
9
THE LOCAL TO CUTUCO
10
THE ATLANTIC RAILWAY: THE 12:00 TO LIMON
11
THE PACIFIC RAILWAY: THE 10:00 TO PUNTARENAS
12
THE BALBOA BULLET TO COLON
13
THE EXPRESO DE SOL TO BOGOTA
14
THE EXPRESO CALIMA
15
THE AUTOFERRO TO GUAYAQUIL
16
THE TREN DE LA SIERRA
17
THE TRAIN TO MACHU PICCHU
18
EL PANAMERICANO
19
LA ESTRELLA DEL NORTE
( 'THE NORTH STAR' )
TO BUENOS AIRES
20
THE BUENOS AIRES SUBTERRANEAN
21
THE 'LAGOS DEL SUR'
(LAKES OF THE SOUTH) EXPRESS
22
THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS
THE OLD
PATAGONIAN
EXPRESS
By Train Through The Americas
1979
PAUL THEROUX
That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes . . . how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the 'bad medicine waggon' charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock-coats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant
'Romance!' the season-tickets mourn,
'He never ran to catch his train,
'But passed with coach and guard and horn -
'And left the local - late again !'
Confound Romance. . . And all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.
- Rudyard Kipling, 'The King'
For my Shanghai Lil,
and for Anne, Marcel, and Louis, with love
CONTENTS
1 The Lake Shore Limited l
2 The Lone Star 23
3 The Aztec Eagle 33
4 El Jarocho to Veracruz 53
5 The Passenger Train to Tapachula 67
6 The 7:30 to Guatemala City 81
7 The 7:OO to Zacapa 97
8 The Railcar to San Salvador 109
9 The Local to Cutuco 122
10 The Atlantic Railway: the 12:00 to Limón 135
11 The Pacific Railway: the 10:00 to Puntarenas 161
12 The Balboa Bullet to Colón 170
13 The Expreso de Sol to Bogotá 195
14 The Expreso Calima 212
15 The Autoferro to Guayaquil 229
16 The Tren de la Sierra 244
17 The Train to Machu Picchu 253
18 El Panamericano 269
19 La Estrella del Norte ('The North Star') to Buenos Aires 291
20 The Buenos Aires Subterranean 305
21 The Lagos del Sur ('Lakes of the South') Express 319
22 The Old Patagonian Express 328
1
THE LAKE SHORE LIMITED
One of us on that sliding subway train was clearly not heading for work. You would have known it immediately by the size of his bag. And you can always tell a fugitive by his vagrant expression of smugness; he seems to have a secret in his mouth - he looks as if he is about to blow a bubble. But why be coy? I had woken in my old bedroom, in the house where I had spent the best part of my life. The snow lay deep around the house, and there were frozen footprints across the yard to the garbage can. A blizzard had just visited, another was expected to blow in soon. I had dressed and tied my shoes with more than usual care, and left the stubble on my upper lip for a moustache I planned to grow. Slapping my pockets to make sure my ballpoint and passport were safe, I went downstairs, past my mother's hiccupping cuckoo clock, and then to Wellington Circle to catch the train. It was a morning of paralyzing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America.
For some, this was the train to Sullivan Square, or Milk Street, or at the very most Orient Heights; for me, it was the train to Patagonia. Two men using a foreign language spoke in low voices; there were others with lunch-boxes and valises and briefcases, and one lady with the sort of wrinkled department store bag that indicated she was going to return or exchange an unwanted item (the original bag lending veracity to the awkward operation). The freezing weather had altered the faces in the multi-racial car: the whites' cheeks looked rubbed with pink chalk, the Chinese were bloodless, the blacks ashen or yellow-grey. At dawn it had been 12° Fahrenheit, by mid-morning it was 9°, and the temperature was still dropping. The cold wind gusted through the car as the doors opened at Haymarket, and it had the effect of silencing the muttering foreigners. They looked Mediterranean; they winced at the draught. Most of the people sat compactly, with their elbows against their sides and their hands in their laps, squinting and conserving their warmth.
They had affairs to attend to in town - work, shopping, banking, the embarrassing moment at the refund desk. Two had hefty textbooks in their laps, and a spine turned towards me read A General Introduction to Sociology. A man solemnly scanned the headlines in the Globe, another thumb-flicked the papers in his briefcase. A lady told her little girl to stop kicking and sit still. Now they were getting out at the windy platforms- after four stations the car was half-full. They would return that evening, having spent the day speaking of the weather. But they were dressed for it, office clothes under eskimo coats, gloves, mittens, woolly hats; resignation was on their faces and, already, a suggestion of fatigue. Not a trace of excitement; all this was usual and ordinary; the train was their daily chore.
No one looked out of the window. They had seen the harbour, and Bunker Hill, and the billboards before. Nor did they look at each other. Their gazes stopped a few inches from their eyes. Though they paid no attention to them, the signs above their heads spoke to these people. These folks were local, they mattered, the advertising men knew who they were addressing. NEED FEDERAL INCOME TAX FORMS? Beneath it, a youth in a pea-jacket grinned at his newspaper and swallowed. CASH YOUR CHECKS ALL OVER MASSACHUSETTS. A lady with that yellow-grey Hottentot colour hugged her shopping bag. BE A SCHOOL VOLUNTEER IN THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Not a bad idea for the sick-of-it-all briefcase examiner in the Russian hat. MORTGAGE MONEY? WE HAVE PLENTY. No one glanced up. ROOFS AND GUTTERS. GET A COLLEGE DEGREE IN YOUR SPARE TIME. A restaurant. A radio station. A plea to stop smoking.
The signs did not speak to me. These were local matters, but I was leaving this morning. And when you are leaving, the promises in advertisements are ineffectual. Money, school, house, radio: I was putting them behind me, and in the duration of this short trip from Wellington Circle to State Street, the words of the ads had become merely an imploring jabber, like the nonsense of an unknown language. I could shrug; I was being pulled away from home. Apart from the cold, and the blinding light on the fallen snow, there was nothing of great significance in my going, nothing momentous except the fact that as we drew into South Station I was now a mile nearer to Patagonia.
Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.
What's become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip?
But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words.
That sort of disappearance is elemental, but few come back silent. And yet the convention is to telescope travel writing, to start - as so many novels do - in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without having first guided him there. 'The white ants had made a meal of my hammock,' the book might begin; or, 'Down there, the Patagonian valley deepened to grey rock, wearing its eons' stripes and split by floods.' Or, to choose actual first sentences at random from three books within arm's reach:
'It was towards noon on March 1, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa.' (The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt Col J.H. Patterson)
' "Welcome!" says the big signboard by the side of the road as the car completes the corkscrew ascent from the heat of the South Indian plains into an almost alarming coolness.' (Duty Preserved, by Mollie Panter-Downes)
'From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra, capital of Ghana.' (Which Tribe Do You Belong To? by Alberto Moravia)
My usual question, unanswered by these - by most - travel books, is: How did y ou get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet, because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what's the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, 'From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra . . .'
Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step (now past the cuckoo clock, now down Fulton to the Fellsway) brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway labourers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as rivetting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.
The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane's tilted fuselage. The joke-opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody. How does it go? 'Below us lay the tropical green, the flooded valley, the patchwork quilt of farms, and as we penetrated the cloud I could see dirt roads threading their way into the hills and cars so small they looked like toys. We circled the airport and, as we came in low for the landing, I saw the stately palms, the harvest, the rooftops of the shabby houses, the square fields stitched together with crude fences, the people like ants, the colourful . . .'
I have never found this sort of guesswork very convincing. When I am landing in a plane my heart is in my mouth; I wonder - doesn't everyone? - if we are going to crash. My life flashes before me, a brief selection of sordid and pathetic trivialities. Then a voice tells me to stay in my seat until the plane comes to a complete stop; and when we land the loudspeakers break into an orchestral version of Moon River. I suppose if I had the nerve to look around I might see a travel writer scribbling, 'Below us lay the tropical green - '
Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? Perhaps there is nothing to say. There is not much to say about most aeroplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the aeroplane passenger is a time-traveller. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time-zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright - from the moment he departs, his mind is focussed on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above it empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, 'What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.'
But apologies are not necessary. An aeroplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston - but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport. If the passenger conceives of this species of transfer as travel and offers the public his book, the first foreigner the reader meets is either a clothes-grubbing customs man or a moustached demon at the immigration desk. Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that aeroplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armour.
This is obvious. What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as the trains run from Medford, Massachusetts; to end my book where travel books begin.
I had nothing better to do. I was at a stage I had grown to recognize in my writing life. I had just finished a novel, two years of indoor activity. Looking for something else to write, I found that instead of hitting nails on the head I was only striking a series of glancing blows. I hated cold weather. I wanted some sunshine. I had no job - what was the problem? I studied maps and there appeared to be a continuous track from my house in Medford to the Great Plateau of Patagonia in southern Argentina. There, in the town of Esquel, one ran out of railways. There was no line to Tierra del Fuego, but between Medford and Esquel rather a lot of them.
In this vagrant mood I boarded that first train, the one people took to work. They got off - their train-trip was already over. I stayed on: mine was just beginning.
And at South Station, my skin crinkling into crepe from the dull cold, some friends appeared. Vapour billowed from beneath the train; they were like people materializing from mist, their breath trailing in clouds. We drank champagne out of paper cups and hopped to keep warm. My family burst into view, pumping hands. In his excitement, my father forgot my name; but my brothers were calm, one ironical, the other squinting at a trim young man on the platform and saying, 'A dash of lavender, Paul - watch out, he's getting on!' I boarded, too, and waved goodbye to my well-wishers. As the Lake Shore Limited pulled out of Platform 151 felt as if I was still in a provisional state, as if everyone was going to get off soon, and that only I was riding the train to the end of the line.
It was a nice conceit, but I kept it to myself. If a stranger asked me where I was going, I said Chicago. It was partly superstition - it seemed unlucky, so early in the trip, to give my precise destination. It was also to avoid startling the questioner with a ridiculous place name
(Tapachula, Managua, Bogotá), or arousing his curiosity and setting off an interrogation. Anyway, this was still home, still familiar: the bent backs of city brownstones, the preposterous solemnity of the Boston University spires, and across the frozen Charles River the white steeples of Harvard, each one in its frailty like a failed attempt at an ivory tower. The air was cold and clear, and it carried the cry of the train whistle through Back Bay. American train whistles have a bitter-sweet change in pitch, and the most insignificant train plays this lonesome note perfectly to the dreamers along the tracks. It is what is known in music as a Diminished Third: Hoo-wee! Hoo-wee!
There was some traffic on the salted roads, but no pedestrians. It was too cold to walk anywhere. The outskirts of Boston looked evacuated: no people, every door and window tightly shut, and the dirt-flecked snow piled beside the empty streets and covering the parked cars. We passed a television station bricked up to look like a country mansion, a solid duck pond, an armoury with grey fake battlements that was about as convincingly military as the kind you see stamped on the back of a cornflakes box to be assembled with scissors and glue. I knew the names of these suburbs, I had been here many times, but because I was headed so far away I saw every point we passed as important. It was as if I was leaving home for the first time, and for good.
Realizing how well I understood these places, I clung to what was familiar and was reluctant to surrender it to the distance. That bridge, that church, that field. There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy.
Here in Framingham, I had eleven cousins. There were bungalows and tame woods and ice-covered porches on hillsides; cleaner snow than I had seen in Boston. And some humanity. On this winter afternoon, children skidded hunched-over on skates on a frozen rink between derelict buildings. A moment later we crossed a class barrier: big pink, green, yellow and white oblongs of houses, some with swimming pools filled with snow. The Lake Shore Limited stopped traffic on Main Street, where a policeman whose puffy face was chilled the colour of salami, held the cars back with gloves like a bear's paws.
I had not come far. I could have hopped off the train and quite easily found my way back to Medford on a bus. I knew these places well, and yet I saw new things: a different texture in the suburban snow, the pally names on storefronts - 'Wally's', 'Dave's', 'Angle's' -and, repeatedly, American flags, the Stars and Stripes flying over petrol stations and supermarkets and in numerous yards. And a church steeple like a pepperpot. I could not remember having seen it before, but I had never rushed headlong from home like this. The length of the trip I intended allowed me to be attentive to detail. But the flags puzzled me - were these the pious boasts of patriots, or a warning to foreigners, or decorations for a national holiday? And why, in the littered yard of that rundown house, was a pretty little flag flapping loyally from a pole? On the evidence here it seemed an American obsession, a kind of image-worship I associated with the most primitive political minds.
The snow was bronzed by the setting sun and now I saw factories flying the flag, and advertising their products on their tall brick chimneys: SNIDER'S DRESSED BEEF, and on another the single word ENVELOPES. And like the armoury earlier, with its fake battlements, a cathedral with fake buttresses and a bell-less bell-tower, and some houses with columns which offered no support to the roof, purely decorative fakery repeated in a gingerbread villa. There was no pretence that it was not bogus, only an insistence on cuteness so common in American buildings, which have promoted fakery as legitimate in styles of architecture.
And between the small factory towns - now farther and farther apart - the dense woods were darkening, and the trunks of oak trees were black and forbidding, the shape of pulpits. As we neared Springfield night was falling on the bare hills, and in the snowy valleys the phosphorescence of the deep snow slipped towards black brooks, their surfaces roughened by the current. Since leaving Boston, water had been constantly in view: frozen lakes and ponds, half-frozen rivers, or streams with conches of ice at their banks and the moving water turned to ink by the twilight. Then the sun sank and the light which had moved down the sky drained into the hole where the sun had gone, and the window specks showing in the woods seemed to brighten. Far down on the road, a man in mittens stood alone by his gas station pumps, watching us pass.
Not long afterward we were in Springfield. I had clear memories of the place, of getting off the train at that very station on a winter night, and crossing the long bridge over the Connecticut River to Route 91, to hitch-hike the rest of the way to Amherst. There were ice-floes on the river tonight, too, and the dark slopes of woods on the far side, and the same knifing wind. Memories of school are always to me like memories of destitution, of inexperience, the joyless impatience I had suffered like poverty. And I had had some sadnesses there. But the movement of travel is merciful: before I could remember much -before this town and river could toss me a particular memory - it whistled and rushed me into the amnesia of night. We travelled west, the rumble of the train muffled by snowbanks, through the forests of Massachusetts. But even in that darkness I recognized it. It was not the opaque night, the uninterrupted dark, of a foreign country's hinterland. It was the darkness that only baffles strangers. It was an average evening for this time of year in this place; and I knew all the ghosts here. It was the darkness of home.
I was still sitting in my compartment. The champagne at South Station had left me groggy, and though I had a copy of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms in my lap, I had done no more than read three pages. On the back cover I had scribbled, policeman's face like salami and inky water and flags. And the rest of the time I had spent with my face turned to the window. I had not seen any other passengers - I hadn't looked. I had no idea who was travelling on this train, and in my listless state thought there would be plenty of time for socializing further on-if not tonight, then tomorrow in Chicago, or the day after in Texas. Or I could leave it all for Spanish America or another climate -just sit here reading until the weather changed, and then go for a stroll. But I found the Faulkner impenetrable; my curiosity overcame my listlessness.
There was a man in the corridor of the sleeping car (it was the only sleeping car on the train; it had a name, 'The Silver Orchid'). His face and forearms were against the window and he was staring, I suppose, at Pittsfield or the Berkshires - a paper-white birch grove smothered by night and snow, a row of fence posts visible because of the drifts in which they lay half-buried, and the shadowy lantern shapes of small cedars, and a frosting of flakes mimicking a contour of wind that streaked the pane of glass in front of his nose.
'This is like the Trans-Siberian,' he said.
'No, it's not,' I said.
He winced and went on staring. I walked to the end of the car, but felt bad for having snapped at him. I looked back and saw him still there, studying the darkness. He was elderly and what he had said to me was a friendly gesture. I pretended to look out of the window myself, and when he stretched and came towards me - he was doing a sort of tango to keep his balance, the way people walk on the decks of ships in storms - I said, 'Actually, there isn't this much snow in Siberia.'
'You don't say.' He kept moving. I could tell from his gruffness that I had lost him.
There would be no food until Albany, when the New York section, with its diner, was hooked to this train. So I went into the Lounge Car and had a beer. I packed my pipe and set it on fire and savoured the trance-like state of lazy reflection that pipe smoke induces in me. I blew myself a cocoon of it, and it hung in clouds around me, so comforting and thick that the girl who entered the car and sat down opposite seemed wraithlike, a child lost in fog. She put three bulging bags on her table, then tucked her legs under her. She folded her hands in her lap and stared stonily down the car. Her intensity made me alert. At the next table a man was engrossed in a Matt Helm story, and near him, two linesmen - they wore their tools - were playing poker. There was a boy with a short-wave radio, but his racket was drowned by the greater racket of the train. A man in a uniform was stirring coffee - a train man: there was an old greasy lantern at his feet. At the train man's table, but not speaking, a fat woman sneaked bites at a candy bar. She did it guiltily, as if she feared that at any moment someone would shout, Put that thing away!
'You mind not smoking?'
It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze.
I looked for a No Smoking sign. There was none. I said, 'Is it bothering you?'
She said, 'It kills my eyes.'
I put my pipe down and took a swig of beer.
She said, 'That stuff is poison.'
Instead of looking at her I looked at her bags. I said, 'They say peanuts cause cancer.'
She grinned vengefully at me and said, 'Pumpkin seeds.'
I turned away.
'And these are almonds.'
I considered relighting my pipe.
'And this is cashews.'
Her name was Wendy. Her face was an oval of innocence, devoid of any expression of inquiry. Her prettiness was as remote from my idea of beauty as homeliness, and consequently was not at all interesting. But I could not blame her for that: it is hard for anyone to be interesting at twenty. She was a student, she said, and on her way to Ohio. She wore an Indian skirt, and lumberjack boots, and the weight of her leather jacket made her appear round-shouldered.
'What do you study, Wendy?'
'Eastern philosophy? I'm into Zen.'
Oh, Christ, I thought. But she was still talking. She had been learning about The Hole, or perhaps The Whole - it still made no sense to me. She hadn't read all that much, she said, and her teachers were lousy. But she thought that once she got to Japan or Burma she would find out a lot more. She would be in Ohio for a few more years. The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life. Like everything you did - it was Buddhism. And everything that happened in the world - that was Buddhism, too.
'Not politics,' I said. 'That's not Buddhism. It's just crooked.'
'That's what everyone says, but they're wrong. I've been reading Marx, Marx is a kind of Buddhist.'
Was she pulling my leg? I said, 'Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can. But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics. It's the opposite of thought - it's selfish, it's narrow, it's dishonest. It's all half truths and short-cuts. Maybe a few Buddhist politicians would change things, but in Burma, where - '
'Take this,' she said, and motioned to her bags of nuts. 'I'm a raw-foodist-non-dairy vegetarian. You're probably right about politics being all wrong. I think people are doing things all wrong - I mean, completely. They eat junk. They consume junk. Look at them!' The fat lady was still eating her candy bar, or possibly another candy bar. They're just destroying themselves and they don't even know it. They're smoking themselves to death. Look at the smoke in this car.'
I said, 'Some of that is my smoke.'
'It kills my eyes.'
' "Non-dairy",' I said. 'That means you don't drink milk.'
'Right.'
'What about cheese? Cheese is nice. And you've got to have calcium.'
'I get my calcium in cashews,' she said. Was this true? 'Anyway, milk gives me mucus. Milk is the biggest mucus-producer there is.'
'I didn't know that.'
'I used to go through a box of Kleenex a day.'
'A box. That's quite a lot.'
'It was the milk. It made mucus,' she said. 'My nose used to run like you wouldn't believe.'
'Is that why people's noses run? Because of the milk?'
'Yes!'she cried.
I wondered if she had a point. Milk-drinkers' noses ran. Children were milk-drinkers. Therefore, children's noses ran. And children's noses did run. But it still struck me as arguable. Everyone's nose ran - except hers, apparently.
'Dairy products give you headaches, too.'
'You mean, they give you headaches.'
'Right. Like the other night. My sister knows I'm a vegetarian. So she gives me some eggplant parmyjan. She doesn't know I'm a non-dairy-raw-foodist. I looked at it. As soon as I saw it was cooked and had cheese on it I knew that I was going to feel awful. But she spent all day making it, so what else could I do? The funny thing is that I liked the taste of it. God, was I sick afterwards! And my nose started to run.'
I told her that, in his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi stated that eating meat made people lustful. And yet at thirteen, an age at which most American children were frolicking with the Little League team or concentrating their minds on making spit-balls, Gandhi had got married - and he was a vegetarian.
'But it wasn't a real marriage,' said Wendy. 'It was a kind of Hindu ceremony.'
The betrothal took place when he was seven years old. The marriage sealed the bargain. They were both thirteen, and he started shagging her - though I'm not sure one should use that term for describing the Mahatma's love-making.'
Wendy pondered this. I decided to try again. Had she, I asked, noticed a falling-off of her sexual appetite since her conversion to raw vegetables?
'I used to get insomnia,' she began. 'And sick - I mean, really sick. And I admit I lost my temper. I think meat does cause people to be hostile.'
'But what about sexual desire? Lechery - cravings - I don't know quite how to put it.'
'You mean sex? It's not supposed to be violent. It should be gentle and beautiful. Kind of a quiet thing.'
Maybe if you're a vegetarian, I thought. She was still droning on in her pedantic college student way.
'I understand my body better now . . . I've gotten to know my body a whole lot better . . . Hey, I can tell when there's just a little difference in my blood sugar level. I can sense it going up and down, my blood sugar level. When I eat certain things.'
I asked her whether she ever got violently ill. She said absolutely not. Did she ever feel a little bit sick?
Her reply was extraordinary: 'I don't believe in germs.'
Amazing. I said, 'You mean, you don't believe that germs exist? They're just an optical illusion under the microscope? Dust, little specks - that sort of thing?'
'I don't think germs cause sickness. Germs are living things - small, living things that don't do any harm.'
'Like cockroaches and fleas,' I said. 'Friendly little critters, right?'
'Germs don't make you sick,' she insisted. 'Food does. If you eat bad food it weakens your organs and you get sick. It's your organs that make you sick. Your heart, your bowels.'
'But what makes your organs sick?'
'Bad food. It makes them weak. If you eat good food - like I do,' she said, gesturing at her pumpkin seeds, 'you don't get sick. Like I never get sick. If I get a runny nose and a sore throat I don't call it a cold.'
'You don't?'
'No, it's because I ate something bad. So I eat something good.'
I decided to shelve my inquiry about sickness being merely a question of a runny nose, and not cancer or the bubonic plague. Let's get down to particulars, I thought. What had she had to eat that day?
'This. Pumpkin seeds, cashews, almonds. A banana. An apple. Some raisins. A slice of wholemeal bread - toasted. If you don't toast it you get mucus.'
'You're sort of declaring war on the gourmets, eh?'
'I know I have fairly radical views,' she said.
'I wouldn't call them radical,' I said. 'They're smug views - self-important ones. Egocentric, you might say. The funny thing about being smug and egocentric and thinking about health and purity all the time, is that it can turn you into a fascist. My diet, my bowels, my self - it's the way right-wing people talk. The next thing you know you'll be raving about the purity of the race.'
'Okay,' she conceded in a somersault, 'I admit some of my views are conservative. But so what?'
'Well, for one thing, apart from your bowels there's a big world out there. The Middle East. The Panama Canal. Political prisoners having their toenails pulled out in Iran. Families starving in India.'
This rant of mine had little effect, though it did get her onto the subject of families - perhaps it was my mention of starving Indians. She hated families, she said. She couldn't help it - she just hated them.
I said, 'What does a family make you think of?'
'A station wagon, a mother, a father. Four or five kids eating hamburgers. They're really awful, and they're everywhere - they're all over the place, driving around.'
'So you think families are a blot on the landscape?'
She said, 'Well, yes.'
She had been at this college in Ohio for three years. She had never in that time taken a literature course. Even more interesting, this was the first time in her life that she had ever been on a train. She liked the train, she said, but didn't elaborate.
I wondered what her ambitions were.
'I think I'd like to get involved in food. Teach people about food. What they should eat. Tell them why they get sick.' It was the voice of a commissar, and yet a moment later she said dreamily, 'Sometimes I look at a piece of cheese. I know it tastes good, I know I'll like it. But I also know that I'm going to feel awful the next day if I eat it.'
I said, 'That's what I think when I see a magnum of champagne, a rabbit pie and a bowl of cream puffs with hot chocolate sauce.'
At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterwards, when I remembered our conversation, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom's love of 'the faint tang of urine' in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi's early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers. Uttering rosy generalities in her sweetly tremulous voice, and tugging her legs back into the lotus position when they slipped free, she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candour of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.
The talk of food must have been inspired by the late hour and my hunger. But now we were at Albany. I excused myself and hurried to the dining car which had just been attached to the train. The miles ahead were historic: trains have been running between Albany and Schenectady for 150 years, starting with the Mohawk and Hudson Railway, the oldest in America. Farther on, the route followed is that of the Erie Canal. It was the railway that put the canals and waterways out of business, although the railway's efficiency was bitterly disputed by the rival companies. But the facts were indisputable: in the 1850s it took 14| days to reach Chicago from New York by water; by rail it was 67 days.
The Amtrak meal was promptly served by a towel-snapping waiter. The steak sandwich, on which I had poured Tabasco sauce, was my revenge on Wendy and her preference for raw alfalfa. While I ate, a sales manager named Horace Chick (he sold equipment for making photographic driving licenses) sat down and had a hamburger. He was a monologuist, too, but a harmless one. Each time he wished to emphasize a point he whistled through the gap in his front teeth. He munched and yapped.
'All the planes were full. Pfweet. So I took the train. Never took this train before. Simple. Pfweet. Three am and we're in Rochester. I'll take a cab home. My wife would go ape-shit if I phoned her from the station at three am. Next time I'm going to take the kids. Just plop them down. Pfweet. Let them run. It's hot in here. I like it cold. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight. My wife hates the cold. I can't sleep. I go over to the window and, pfweet, open it up. She screams at me. Just wakes up and, pfweet, screams. Most women are like that. They like it four degrees warmer than men. Pfweet. I don't know why. Bodies. Different bodies, different thermostat. Is this better than driving? You bet it is! Driving! Eight hours, fourteen cups of coffee. Pfweet. This hamburger, though. I taste filler. Hey, waiter!'
There was snow and ice outside. Each street-light illuminated its own post and, just in front, a round patch of snow - nothing more. At midnight, watching from my compartment, I saw a white house on a hill. In every window of this house there was a lighted lamp, and these bright windows seemed to enlarge the house and at the same time betray its emptiness.
At two the next morning we passed Syracuse. I was asleep or I would have been assailed by memories. But the city's name on the Amtrak timetable at breakfast brought forth Syracuse's relentless rain, a chance meeting at the Orange Bar with the by then derelict poet Del-more Schwartz, the classroom (it was Peace Corps training, I was learning Chinyanja) in which I heard the news of Kennedy's assassination, and the troubling recollection of a lady anthropologist who, unpersuaded by my ardour, had later - though not as a consequence of this - met a violent death when a tree toppled onto her car in a western state and killed her and her lover, a lady gym teacher with whom she had formed a Sapphic attachment.
Buffalo and Erie were behind us, too, which was not a bad thing. I had no idea where we were. I had woken in my compartment, and it had been so hot my lips were cracked and my fingertips felt flayed. But there were curtains of heavy vapour between the cars, where it was very cold, and frost on the windows of the diner. I rubbed the frost away but could see very little except a blue-grey fog that blurred the landscape with a cloudy fluorescence.
The train stopped in this haze. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then, in the fog, a dim tree stump became apparent. It bled a streak of orange and this widened, a splash, increasing and staining the decayed bark like a wound leaking into a grey bandage. And then the whole stump was alight, and the bunches of grass behind it flaming, and sudden trees. Soon the rubious fire of dawn glittered in the fields, and when the landscape was lit - the stump and the trees and the snow - the train moved on.
'Ohio,' said a lady at the next table.
Her husband, looking uncomfortable in a baggy yellow shirt, said, 'It doesn't look like Ohio.'
I knew what he meant.
The waiter said, 'Yep. That's Ohio all right. Be in Cleveland soon. Cleveland, Ohio.'
Just beyond the tracks there was a forest of frozen branches, poplars made out of frost, like ghostly sails and masts in a sea of snow. The elms and beeches had swelled cleanly into icy manifestations of exploded lace. And flat windswept snow, with hair-strands of brown broken grass buried to their tips. So even Ohio, covered in snow, could be dreamland.
The train was sunlit and emptier. I did not see Mr Chick or hear his pfweet; and Wendy, the raw foodist, was gone. It seemed to me here - and I was not very far from home-as if more of the familiar was slipping away. I had not really liked either one of them, but now I missed them. The rest of the people on the train were strangers.
I picked up my book. I had gone to sleep reading it the previous night; it was still The Wild Palms and still opaque. What had put me to sleep? Perhaps this sentence, or rather the tail end of a long straggling sentence: '. . . it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal unsentient demanding ancient meat.'
I was not sure what Faulkner was driving at, and yet it seemed a fair description of the sausage I was eating that early morning in Ohio. The remainder of the breakfast was delicious - scrambled eggs, a slab of ham, grapefruit, coffee. Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey-wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars, I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian train, the borscht and bad manners in the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: 'a morning pick-me-up,' as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning. Amtrak was trying hard. Near my toast there was an Amtrak brochure which said that for the next 133 miles the track was perfectly straight - not a curve in it anywhere. So I copied down that shin-barking Faulkner sentence without any swerve of the train to jog my pen.
By the middle of the morning, the vapour I had seen between the cars had frozen. Each small passageway smoked like a deep freeze, with complicated crusts of frost covering it, and solid bubbles of ice, and new vapour pouring from cracks in the rubber seal. It was pretty, this snow and ice, and no less pretty outside; but it was also a nuisance. It was now past eleven and we had not yet reached Cleveland. Where was Cleveland? And I was not the only one who was perplexed. Up and down the train, passengers were buttonholing conductors and saying, 'Hey, what happened to Cleveland? You said we were supposed to be there by now. What's the story?' And yet Cleveland might have been right outside the window, buried under all that snow.
My conductor was leaning against a frosted window. I wanted to ask him what happened to Cleveland, but before I could speak he said, 'I'm looking for my switchman.'
'Anything wrong?'
'Oh, no. It's just that every time we go by here, he throws a snowball at me.'
'By the way, where's Cleveland?'
'Way off. Didn't you know we're running four hours late? Frozen switch back in Erie held us up.'
'I have to catch a train at four-thirty in Chicago.'
'You'll never make it.'
'Beautiful,' I said, and started away.
'Don't worry. I'll wire ahead in Elkhart. When we get to Chicago we'll just dump the whole thing in Amtrak's lap. They'll put you up at the Holiday Inn. You'll be in good shape.'
'But I won't be in Texas.'
'You leave this to me, sir.' He touched the visor of his cap. 'Ever see snow like this? God, it's terrible.' He looked out of the window again and sighed. 'Can't imagine what happened to that switchman. Probably got frostbite.'
It was hours before we got to Cleveland and, as with most delays, the slowness of our arrival created a sense of anti-climax: I felt I had already given it all the thought it deserved. Now the snow only bored me, and the houses depressed me- they were tiny bungalows not much bigger than the cars parked beside them. The greatest joke was that Cleveland, which had been smothered by the previous week's snowstorm, which had broadcast news items about survival techniques at home (intelligence - welcome, one would have thought, to Arctic explorers - about sleeping bags, body heat, keeping your condominium warm in an emergency, cooking on Sterno stoves and the like) -this city, which was frozen solid under drifts of snow, had to cheer it a long story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about the monstrous inefficiency of the Russians in snow removal. The Russians! Under the headline MOSCOW SNOW DIG-OUT CROWN TARNISHED, with its Moscow dateline, the story began, 'This city's once-renowned snow removal capabilities have been drastically diminished this winter by a combination of bureaucratic blunders and unexpectedly heavy snowfalls.' It continued in the same gloating vein: 'The problem is apparently not a lack of special equipment. . . Residents are complaining bitterly this winter about the sad state of the streets . . . Still, heavy December snows and inadequate parking regulations seem a poor excuse for streets that are still clogged several weeks later.'
It was Mid-West smugness. In order to boast in Ohio you have to mention the Russians. Even better, a mention of Siberia which, as a matter of fact, Ohio in winter greatly resembles. I read that news item in Cleveland. I read the entire Plain Dealer in Cleveland. In Cleveland we were delayed nearly two hours. When I asked the conductor the reason he said it was the snow; and the track had been buckled by ice.
'It's a real bad winter.'
I told him that in Siberia the trains run on time. But it was a cheap crack. I would choose Cleveland over Irkutsk any day, even though - this was obvious - Cleveland was colder.
I went to the Club Car and had a morning pick-me-up and read The Wild Palms. Then I had another pick-me-up, and another. I considered a fourth, ordered it, but decided to nurse it. If I had many more of these pick-me-ups I'd be under the table.
'What are you reading?'
It was a plump freckled-faced fiftyish lady sipping a can of sugar-free tonic.
I showed her the title.
She said, 'I've heard of it. Any good?'
'It has its moments.' Then I laughed. But it wasn't anything to do with Faulkner. Once, on an Amtrak train not far from here, I had had a book which no one had queried; and yet it had aroused considerable interest. It was the biography of the writer of horror tales, H.P. Lovecraft, and the title Lovecraft had led my fellow passengers to believe that throughout a two-day trip I had had my nose in a book about sexual technique.
She was from Flagstaff, she said, and 'Whereabouts you from?'
'Boston.'
'Really?' She was interested. She said, 'Will you say something for me? Say G-o-d.'
'God.'
She clapped her hands delightedly. She was, despite her plumpness, very small, with a broad flat face. Her teeth were crooked, slanting in a uniform way, as if they had been filed. I was baffled by the pleasure I had given her in saying the word.
'Gawd,' she said, mimicking me.
'What do you say?'
'I say gahd.'
'I'm sure He understands.'
'I love to hear you say it. I was on this train a week ago, going east. We were delayed by the snow, but it was fantastic. They put us up at the Holiday Inn!'
'I hope they don't do that to us.'
'Don't say that.'
'I've got nothing against the Holiday Inn,' I said. 'It's just that I have a train to catch.'
'Everybody does. I bet I'm going further than you - Flagstaff, remember?' She took another sip of her tonic and said, 'In the end it took us days - days - to get from Chicago to New York. There was snow everywhere! There was a boy on the train. He was from Boston. He was on the seat beside me.' She smiled - a kind of demure leer: 'We slept together.'
'That was lucky.'
'I know what you're thinking, but it wasn't like that. He was on his side and I was on my side. But' - she went pious - 'we slept together. What a time that was. I don't drink, but he drank enough for the both of us. Did I tell you he was twenty-seven years old? From Boston. And all through the night he said to me, "Gawd, you're beautiful." and he kissed me I don't know how many times, "Gawd, you're beautiful." '
'This was at the Holiday Inn?'
'On the train. One of the nights,' she said. 'The Chair Car. It was very, very important to me.'
I said it sounded like a very sweet experience and tried to imagine it, the drunken youth pawing this plump freckly woman while the Chair Car (smelling, as it always did at night, of old socks and stale sandwiches) snored.
'Not just sweet. It was very important. I needed it just then. That's why I was going East.'
'To meet this fellow?'
'No, no,' she said peevishly. 'My mother died.'
'I'm sorry.'
'I got word of it in Flagstaff and caught the train. Then we got held up in Chicago, if you call the Holiday Inn being held up! I met Jack round about Toledo - right about here, if this is Toledo.' She looked out the window. ' "Gawd, you're beautiful." It really cheered me up. It came between so much.'
'My condolences. It must be very sad to go home for a funeral.'
'Two funerals,' she said.
'Pardon?'
'My father died, too.'
'Recently?'
'Tuesday.'
This was Saturday.
'God,' I said.
She smiled. 'I love to hear you say that.'
'I mean, that's terrible about your father.'
'It was a blow. I thought I was going home for my mother's funeral, but it turned out to be both of them. "You should come home more often, honey," Dad said. I said I would. Flagstaff is pretty far, but I've got my own apartment and I'm making good money. Then he died.'
'A sad trip.'
'And I'll have to go back. They couldn't bury them. I have to go back for the interment.'
'I would have thought that would be done by now.'
She looked at me sharply. 'They cain't bury people in New York City.'
I asked her to repeat this strange sentence. She did, in just the same tones.
'God,' I said.
'You sound like Jack.' She smiled: such odd Eskimo-granny teeth.
'Why can't they bury people in New York?'
'The ground's too hard. It's frozen. They cain't dig - '
In the severe winter of '78, I thought, when the ground was so hard they couldn't bury people, and the mortuaries were stacked to the rafters, I decided to take the train to the sunniest parts of Spanish A merica.
The lady from Flagstaff went away, but over the next eight or nine hours, again and again, in the Club Car and the Chair Car and the Diner, I heard her flat, dry corncrake voice repeating slowly, ' - because they cain't bury people in New York City.'
Twice, when she saw me, she said Gawd! and laughed.
The frozen switch, the buckled track, the snow: we were running very late and my conductor insisted that I did not have a hope of arriving on time or making my connection for Fort Worth. 'You don't have the chance of one of these in Hell,' he said at an Indiana station. He was holding a snowball. And there was a new problem. A wheel was overheating and (I think I have this right) a fuse had blown; there was a frosty stink of gas seeping through the end of the train. To avert an explosion, the speed of the train was brought down to about 15 miles an hour, and we remained at this creeping pace until an opportunity arose to detach the afflicted car from the Lake Shore Limited. At Elkhart we were able to rid ourselves of this damaged car, but the operation took an unconscionably long time.
While we stopped, things were calm in the 'Silver Orchid' sleeping car. Only the conductor fussed. He said the steam was freezing and jamming the brakes. He hurried back and forth importantly with a push-broom and told me that this was much better than his previous job. He had been desk-bound in an electronics firm, 'but I'd rather deal with the public.'
'The trouble with you,' said the ticket collector, who saw the conductor growing anxious, 'is you fret before you stew.'
'Maybe so.' The conductor banged his broom on the ice that had accumulated inside the door.
'Won't be as bad as the last trip, though. That was frozen bananas.'
The conductor said, 'I've got my passengers to think of.'
My passengers. There were three of us in the 'Silver Orchid', the Bunces and me. The first thing Mr Bunce said to me was that his mother's people had been on the Mayflower. Mr Bunce wore a cap with earflaps and was zippered into two sweaters. He wanted to talk about his family and Cape Cod. Mrs Bunce said that Ohio was far uglier than the Cape. Mr Bunce also had a Huguenot pedigree. In one sense, old Bunce was an untypical bore. Characteristically, the American boasts about how desperate and poverty-stricken his immigrant ancestors were; Mr Bunce's were a huge success, right from the start. I listened with as much patience as I could muster. It might, I thought, have been Bunce I had offended that first day ('This is like the Trans-Siberian' 'No, it's not'). After that, I avoided the Bunces.
And still at Elkhart a great panic overtook the Lake Shore Limited. Now, everyone knew he would miss his onward connection in Chicago. A large group of single girls were heading for New Orleans and the Mardi Gras. Some elderly couples had to catch a cruise ship in San Francisco: they were very worried. A young man from Kansas said his wife would think he'd left her for good. A black couple whispered, and I heard the black girl say, 'Oh, shoot.' One of the Mardi Gras girls looked at her watch and said, 'We could be partying by now.'
The lady from Flagstaff, whose parents had just died, caused this mood to become festive and, at last, one of celebration. She explained she had been on the train going east just ten days before. The same thing had happened - delays, snow, missed connections. Amtrak had put everyone up at the Holiday Inn in Chicago and given everyone four dollars for taxi fare, and meal vouchers, and one phone call. Amtrak, she said, would do the same thing this time.
The news spread through the train and, as if proof of Amtrak's good intentions, a free meal was announced in the dining car: soup, fried chicken and vanilla ice cream. This vindicated the no longer bereaved lady from Flagstaff, who said, 'And wait till we get to Chicago!'
Elsewhere, passengers were spending the four dollar taxi fare they had not yet been given.
'Okay, Ralph,' said a greasy-haired boy to the bartender, and put a dollar down, 'let's get drunk.'
'We been setting here eight hours,' said the loudest of three youths, 'we already drunk.'
'I'm working overtime,' said Ralph the bartender, but obediently began cramming ice cubes into plastic cups.
There were other voices.
This: 'Never go home in the spring. It's never the same.'
And this: 'Jesus Christ' (a pause) 'was black. Like a Ethiopian. White features and a colored face.' (pause) 'All them usual descriptions are bullshit.'
And again: ' - because they cain't bury people in New York City.'
They were, all of them, frightfully happy. They were glad about the delay, delighted with the snow (it had begun to fall again) and they rejoiced at the promises made by the lady from Flagstaff about a night - or maybe two - at the Holiday Inn. I did not share their joy or feel very kindly towards any of them, and when I discovered that the car to be detached lay between the 'Silver Orchid' and this mob I told the conductor I was going back to bed: 'Wake me up when we get to Chicago.'
'We may not be there until nine o'clock.'
'Wonderful,' I said. I fell asleep with The Wild Palms over my face.
The conductor woke me at ten to nine. 'Chicago!' I jumped up and grabbed my suitcase. As I hurried down the platform, through the billows of steam from the train's underside, which gave to my arrival that old-movie aura of mystery and glory, ice needles crystalized on the lenses of my glasses and I could hardly see.
The lady from Flagstaff had been dead right. I was given four dollars and a berth in the Holiday Inn and three meal vouchers. Everyone who had missed a connection got exactly the same: the Bunces, the drunken louts from the Club Car, the young man from Kansas, the Mardi Gras girls, the guffawing peckerwoods who had slumbered the trip away on cheap seats in the Chair Car, the elderly people on their way to San Francisco, the lady from Flagstaff. We were met by Amtrak staff and sent on our way.
'See you at the hotel!' cried a lady whose luggage was two shopping bags.
She could not believe her luck.
A lout said, 'This is costing Amtrak a fortune!'
The wild snow, the sudden hotel, Chicago - it seemed unreal. But this unreality was amplified by the other guests at the Holiday Inn. They were blacks in outlandish uniforms, bright green bell-bottoms, white peaked caps and gold braid; or red uniforms, or white with medals, or beige with silver braid looped around the epaulettes. Was it a band, I wondered, or a regiment of pop-art policemen? It was neither. These men (their wives were not in uniform) were members of the Loyal Order of Antlers. Their shoulder badges said so, in small print. The men gave Antler salutes and Antler handshakes and paraded very formally around the lobby in white Antler shoes, looking a trifle annoyed at the class of people the storm had just blown in. There was no confrontation. The Amtrak passengers made for the 'Why Not? Discoteque' and the Bounty Lounge, and the Antlers (some of whom wore swords) stood and saluted each other - stood, I suppose, because sitting would have taken the crease out of their trousers.
The swimming pool was floodlit and filled with snow. Green palm trees were painted on the outside wall. These appeared to be rooted in the snowdrifts. The city was frozen. There were cakes of ice in the river. Last week's snow was piled by the roadsides. There was new snow on the streets. And with this newly falling snow was a sleet storm, tiny pelting grains that made driving treacherous. The Gideon Bible in my room was open at Chronicles (2, 25). Was there a message here for me? 'The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, or the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall die for his own sin.' Amen, I thought. I shut the Bible and unpacked Faulkner.
Coincidentally, Faulkner had a message. 'Now it was winter in Chicago,' I read. '. . . the defunctive days dying in neon upon the fur-framed petal faces of the wives and daughters of cattle and timber millionaires and the paramours of politicians returned from Europe . . . the sons of London brokers and Midland shoe-peg knights . . .' He went on jeering at their status and then described how they all went south and deserted Chicago's snows. They were 'members of that race which without tact for exploration and armed with notebooks and cameras and sponge bags elects to pass the season of Christian holiday in the dark and bitten jungles of savages.'
I was not sure about my tact for exploration, and I had neither a camera nor a sponge bag, but twenty-four hours in the Holiday Inn in wintry Chicago convinced me that the sooner I got to the savage jungle, however dark and bitten, the better.
2
THE LONE STAR
There seemed to me nothing more perfect in travel than boarding a train just at nightfall and shutting the bedroom door on an icy riotous city and knowing that morning would show me a new latitude. I would leave anything behind, I thought, for a sleeper on a southbound express.
And it was impossible to be on the Lone Star out of Chicago, beginning this crossing of six states, and not hear the melodies of all the songs that celebrate the train. Half of jazz is railway music, and the motion and noise of the train itself has the rhythm of jazz. This is not surprising: the Jazz Age was also the Railway Age. Musicians travelled by train or not at all, and the pumping tempo and the clickety-clack and the lonesome whistle crept into the songs. So did the railway towns on the route: how else could Joplin or Kansas City be justified in a lyric? We rolled out of Union Station towards Joliet and this nice combination of privacy and motion- and the bass notes of the wheels on the tracks - brought me a melody and then words. The wheels were saying, 'It ain't nothing like my daddy's big cigar - no, it ain't -'
I hung up my coat and set out my belongings, poured myself a glass of gin and watched the last pinky sunset flecks disappear from the Joliet snow.
Keep your money and your liquor and your fancy car -
It ain't nothing like my daddy's big cigar.
Don't matter if he's broke,
'Cause how that man can smoke . . .
Keep your special table at that downtown bar -
It ain't nothing like my daddy's big cigar.
He offers me a puff
But one just ain't enough . . .
Not a bad start. It seemed to strike the right note, but obviously it needed work. Anyway, here was the ticket-man.
'You've been involuntarily upgraded,' he said, looking at my ticket. He perforated it expertly. 'Anything you need, just holler.'
I said, 'Is there going to be anyone else in this bedroom?'
'Nope. You got the whole place to yourself.'
'What's the weather report like?'
'Terrible,' he said. 'I've been working on this train for fifty years and this is the worst winter I've ever seen. Ten below in Chicago, winds going a hundred miles an hour. It took the signs down in Cleveland. Shee!'
One thing about cold weather: it brings out the statistician in everyone. The temperatures, the wind speeds, the chill factors were always different, but always bad. And yet, even if they were not the exaggerations they seemed, I would be out of this glaciation in a day or so. I had not seen one green tree or one unfrozen body of water since leaving Boston. But there was hope - I was going south, more southerly than anyone on this southbound express would believe. Somewhere below, the wind was in the palm trees. On the other hand, we were only now in Streator, Illinois.
Streator was dark, and my one glimpse of Galesburg was a rectangle of snow and a sign that said PARKING and a little lighted shed and a half-buried car - a scene with the quaint insignificance of a New Yorker cover. This I saw from the dining car, looking up from my halibut and chablis. Propped against the wine bottle was The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett. I had hurried through the Faulkner and left it in Chicago, in the drawer of the vanity table in the Holiday Inn, with the Gideon Bible.
The criminality in The Thin Man was not half so distracting as the drinking. Everyone drank in this book; it was, in the Hammett world, eternally cocktail time. The Faulkner had disturbed me with torrential irrelevance and set my teeth on edge with confederate metaphysics. Hammett's English was more lucid, but the plot was plainly concocted, and the detective-work seemed a poor excuse for boozing sessions.
I turned my attention to the three people at the next table, who were drawling away happily. A middle-aged couple had discovered that the stranger who had seated himself at their table was also a Texan. He was dressed in black and yet looked raffish, like one of those adulterous preachers who occur from time to time in worthy novels set in this neck of the woods - it was nine o'clock, we were in Fort Madison, Iowa, on the west bank of the Mississippi.
'Yep, the mighty Miss,' said the waiter, when I asked him to confirm this. He took my empty plate away and crooned, 'The Mississippi, the Mississippi' to the other diners.
The preacher, like the couple - and this thrilled them - was from San Tone. All three were returning from New York. They took turns telling horror stories - Eastern horror stories of drugs and violence. 'One night we were going back to our hotel and I saw this man -' That sort
of story.
And this sort of rejoinder. 'You think that's bad? A friend of mine was over in Central Park -'
Soon they were reminiscing about Texas. Then boasting. Finally, their boasting took an unexpected turn. They talked about all the people they knew in Texas who carried guns. 'My cousin carried a gun his whole life' and 'Ron knew a politician who never went anywhere without his gun' and 'My grand-daddy had a beautiful gun.'
'Everyone had a gun in those days,' said the preacher.
'He gave it to my Daddy,' said the lady.
'My Daddy had two guns,' said the preacher. 'One here and one here.' He spanked two pockets.
The lady said that one day her Daddy had tried to take a gun into a Dallas department store. He was just a stranger in town, from San Tone. Woke up that morning and strapped on his gun, like he always done. Nothing funny about that. Done the same thing every day of his life. Went in the store, packing this old gun. He was a huge man, way over six feet tall. The department store girls figured it was a hold-up as soon as they seen him. They stomped on the alarm. All Hell busted loose, but Daddy didn't mind one bit. He pulled out his gun and when the police come along Daddy said, 'Okay, boy, let's git 'im !'
The lady's husband said that Daddy had been eighty-four years old at the time.
' "Okay, boy, let's git'im!" '
The preacher had listened to this story with a growing look of defeat. He was silent for a moment, then he spoke up.
He said, 'My Daddy had eight heart attacks.'
The lady squinted at him. Her husband said, 'Wow.'
'Coronary thrombosises,' said the preacher. 'Lived through all eight.'
'He from San Tone, too?' asked the man.
'He surely was,' said the preacher.
'Must have been tough,' said the lady.
'No Easterner could survive that,' said the preacher. 'Only a Westerner could survive eight heart attacks.'
This met with general agreement. I wanted to ask what a Westerner was doing with eight heart attacks. But I kept my peace.
'Back East -' the lady began.
It was time to go. I returned to my bedroom, through a succession of deep freezes, the ice chests that lay between the cars. I yanked the covers over my head and said goodnight to Kansas. I'm staying here, I thought, and if I see snow on the ground tomorrow morning I'm not getting out of bed.
Dawn at Ponça City, Oklahoma, was a wintry shimmer under a sky of grey oatmeal. We were nearly 800 miles south of Chicago and headed towards Perry. The land was flat and barren; but the traces of snow - pelts of it blown into ruts and depressions, like the scattered carcasses of ermine - was not enough to keep me sulking in bed. I did not realize how cold it was out there in Oklahoma until I saw the white ovals of frozen ponds and the narrow ice-paths at the center of stony riverbeds. The rest was brown; a few bare brown trees; a small herd of brown cattle, lost in all that space, nibbling at brown turves. At the topmost portion of the sky's dome, the mournful oatmeal dissolved and slipped, leaving a curvature of aquamarine. The sun was a crimson slit, a red squint in the mass of cereal, a horizontal inch steadied above the horizon.
For twenty minutes or so, and as many miles, the land remained utterly empty: no houses, no people, very little snow, only that changeless brown. It was the unadorned surface of the earth, old humpless grasslands, every lick of weed combed flat by the wind, and no mooching cow anywhere to give it size.
These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name -
The Prairies.
We came to Perry. Perry's bungalow styles were from Massachusetts and Ohio, and some with tarpaper roofs and air-conditioners rusting on the windows were nearly hidden behind the large sun-faded cars parked in their driveways. The cars were as wide as the roads. But one Perry house was tall and white, with three porches and gables and steeply sloping roofs, and newly painted clapboard. It would not have looked unusual on an acre of green lawn in Cape Cod; but in Perry, surrounded by trampled stones, and towering in the prairie like a beacon, it seemed a puzzle. Yet it was a vivid puzzle, so clear in design it required no solution. The assertive clarity of the thing was distinctly American, and I found it as remarkable in its way as the sudden parking lot (the lighted shed, the sign, the buried car) I had seen the previous night in Galesburg, or the snowy swimming pool with the painted palm trees in Chicago. I would not have found it so beautiful if I had not also found it slightly comic. But it was American humour, unambiguous, newly-minted, half cliché, half genius, and visually memorable, like the minute we spent in Norman, Oklahoma: the Sooner Movie House at the corner of Main and Jones, the Stars and Stripes flying over the store-fronts, the five parked cars, the selfconsciously severe row of low buildings, and Main Street a perfectly straight line from here, the train station, to the end of town, that brown smudge of prairie at the end of the street.
'It's cold out there, boy!' the conductor said at Oklahoma City. He advised me to stay in the train. Oklahoma City was really no different from Perry. The sheds, the stores, the warehouses were bigger, but the shapes were the same, and like Perry it had the temporary and unfinished look of a place that had been plunked down in the prairie.
These Western towns had no apparent age. They were settlements of Baptist utility: the citizens worked and prayed, tore down the buildings they ceased to need and put up new square ones and did not bother to decorate them, except with flags. So the towns slipped by, one Main Street scarcely distinguishable from another, church and post office cut to the same pattern, two-story buildings in the centre of town, one-story buildings at its edge. It was not until I saw a certain house, or barn, or a side road with a row of blackened fractured sheds, that I remembered how old these places were or received a whiff of their romance.
'Want to hear something awful?' said a man entering the Dining Car for breakfast. 'Forty-five thousand schoolkids just got on the train.'
He grumbled and picked up the menu which served as a place-mat.
I finished my coffee and, heading back to my car, saw what he meant. There were not quite as many as he had said, perhaps two or three hundred, women and children, each wearing a name-tag: Ricky, Sally, Tracy, Kim, Kathy. Kathy was gorgeous; she was chatting to Marilyn, who was also a knockout. Both stood near their chubby little girls.
'Daddy's got a real bad cold,' said Kathy, glancing down. 'I had to put him right to bed.'
'Our daddy's at the office as usual,' said Marilyn.
Overhearing them, another woman said in the same TV-mummy voice, 'And where's our daddy, honey? Tell them where our daddy is.' Her small girl sucked a finger and looked at the floor. 'Our daddy's on a trip! And when he comes back, we're going to tell him that we took a trip. On a train!'
It was, I was sure, mostly self-parody. Dressed to kill, sprung from their kitchens for a day's outing to Fort Worth, they were lumbered with their kids. It was a taste of freedom, but clearly not enough: tomorrow they would be back home, cursing housework and hating the mummy-daddy stereotype. They had the wise-cracking good looks of the television commercial housewives, who sell soap flakes and anti-Perspirant. If there had been only a dozen or so, I would not have reflected on their condition. But the hundreds of them, turned into governesses and talking with gentle sarcasm about their daddies, was an impressive example of wasted talent. It seemed unfair, to say the least, that in one of the most socially-advanced countries on earth, here was a group behaving no differently from the wariest folk-society. Apart from me - and I was only passing through - there were no grown men in the three cars they occupied. So there was an atmosphere of purdah in these cars, which was not only grim for a feminist, but rather pitiable for the hard-liners there as well. And since at least half of these bright-looking girls had probably majored in sociology, it could not have escaped their notice how closely they resembled the Dinka womenfolk of the southern Sudan.
I went to my compartment and could not help but brood. Seeing a pump in the prairie I recalled that I had been watching them for the past three hours, the up-and-down motion of a black spindle upraised on a tower, see-sawing all over Oklahoma, sometimes in clusters, but more often a solitary arm-swinging contraption in the middle of nowhere.
After Purcell, 900 miles from Chicago, we emerged from the ice-age. The creeks were soggy, no longer knobbed with frost; and the snow was sparse - hardly snow-like, it lay in scraps in the tight grass like waste paper. Here, a town was two streets of bungalows, a lumberyard, a grocery store, an American flag and, a moment later, prairie. I looked for details and after an hour or so of close scrutiny was glad for the occasional tree or see-sawing well to break the monotony. I wondered what it must be like to be born in a place like this, where only the foreground-the porch, the storefront, the main street-mattered. The rest was emptiness, or did it only seem that way to me because I was a stranger, passing through on a train? I had no wish to stop. The Oklahoman or Texan celebrates his freedom and speaks of the confinement of the New Yorker; but these towns struck me as confining to a suffocating degree. There was a pattern of defensiveness in the way they were laid out, as if they had simply sprung out of a common fear. And the pattern? It was that of a circle of wagons. And the small oblong houses even had the look of wagons - wagons without wheels, which had been parked there for no better reason than that there were others already there. The land was vast, but the houses were in huddles, regarding the neighbours and the narrow street, their backs turned to the immense spaces of the prairie.
Ten miles out of Ardmore, on the Oklahoma-Texas border, an old man at the window said, 'Gene Autry.'
But asking him for an explanation I missed the place, which was not the cowboy but another town and a railway station so small the Lone Star bowled through it without slowing down.
'Maybe he was born there,' said the man. 'Or maybe buried.'
Low dry hills giving on to grey-green plains marked the Texas border. No ice, no snow; the weather looked mild. Followed by blackbirds, a farmer ploughed a field in a tractor, screwing six stripes out of the ground as he went. I was relieved to see that he was not wearing mittens. So the season had changed; it was early spring here in the first week of February, and if I kept to the trains it would be summer for me in a few days. The air traveler can be jetted to any climate at short notice, but the railway passenger on the southbound express has the satisfaction of seeing the weather change hour by hour and watching for its minutest alteration. At Gainesville there was planting, and more ploughing, and some inch-high shoots. There were trees around the houses here and less constriction than I had seen in the Oklahoma settlements. These were homesteads, with wells and wind-vanes and what might have been orchards.
Here, where the red man swept the leaves away
To dig for cordial bark or cooling root,
The wayside apple drops its surly fruit.
The direction of the Lone Star - compare it with any history book map - is the direction of the main cattle drive north, the Chisholm Trail. At first, in the 1860's, the cattle were driven through what was known as the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. All the great railroad towns - Dodge City, Wichita (which we had passed at 6am), Cheyenne - flourished because of the cattle that were penned and graded there before being loaded on the Chicago-bound trains. Some of the cattle on the long drive from the Rio Grande were wild, but all were dealt with Mexican-style - the American cowboys had inherited the lariat and the branding iron and most of the lingo, including the word lingo, from Mexican cattlemen. The Chisholm Trail was only one of the routes; the Sedalia took cattle through Arkansas and Missouri, and the Goodnight-Loving Trail ran along the Pecos River. The railways took over these routes - the water supplies along the way, which had determined the course of the Chisholm Trail, were no less important to the steam locomotives' thirst - and only much later did passengers replace cattle as a source of railway income.
I saw herds of cattle, and ducks in flight, and large black circling birds that might have been buzzards, but even here- nearly a thousand miles south of Chicago - the trees were bare. I had not seen one green tree in four days of cross-country travel. I watched for one, but only saw more birds of prey, or windmill pumps, or horses cropping grass. There were houses here, but no towns of any description; what trees I saw were dead but still upright like rather wicked coat-racks along dry creekbeds. Behind the isolated and rusty-roofed farmhouses there was empty space, and nearer the track and usually beside a fence of thorny barbed wire, I saw what I expected to see, the staves of cattle bones, the bleached knuckles and heaps of vertebrae, the cracked and hollow-eyed skulls.
Texas pride, an amiable but tenacious vulgarity, was the grotesquely fat man wearing his ten-gallon hat in the Silver Dollar Saloon in downtown Fort Worth, in February. It might have been a gesture of defiance - the day was overcast and chilly, the bar dungeon-dark (its only light the subaqueous flicker from a fish tank bubbling on a shelf of whisky bottles). I had ducked in here to get warm and quietly read The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Once my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I sat near the fish tank to read. I also had a decision to make: I could spend the night in Fort Worth, or leave in a matter of hours for Laredo. But I had left my suitcase at the railway station. I had not liked the look of Fort Worth.
It had been recommended to me as friendlier and more graspable than Dallas, and yet that February afternoon it looked merely gray and grit-blown, a Texas town of pompous insignificance, the desert wind whirling gory ketchup-soaked sandwich wrappers at men clutching their ridiculous hats. Every public place displayed the same ominous sign (or rather two signs - I'm not counting You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Work Here - But It Helpsl). The warning went as follows:
These premises may be occupied by a policeman armed with a shotgun. If ordered to halt - please comply!
- Fort Worth Police Dept.
It was perhaps a comment on Fort Worth friendliness that the citizens needed to be reminded that a man with a shotgun meant business, and was not the clay-pigeon enthusiast he seemed.
That sign was in all the finance companies, and in the stores selling Western gear - Fort Worth had more than its share of these two enterprises: you could get a mortgage and a gold lamé cowboy suit on every corner. It was also in the Blood Donor Center ($50 a pint, and two scruffy individuals waiting to have their veins opened) and the narrow office of the bail bondsman (24-Hour Service said the sign, which also showed a poor devil in handcuffs) and all the chili parlours. It was in the Silver Dollar, too, but by the time I had taken refuge there I had seen it so often it had lost its power to intimidate me.
In the gurgling light of the fish tank I read the newspaper. The headlines were indignant over local issues. I skipped to the sports page; here, the lead story was an exultant blow-by-blow account of the Southwest Exposition and Fat Stock Show Rodeo. No baseball, no football, no hockey - only the American equivalent of bear-baiting. A rodeo - this was sports? The report covered the entire page, and the next page as well ('Bull Riding', 'Calf Roping'). These people were serious.
'Not too awful long ago,' said the fat man in the ten gallon hat, using a construction that was new to me, and making it sound - by saying it slowly - like a complete sentence, 'folks here would have started a revolution if they couldn't read the rodeo scores. Sure, we're glad to have it.'
But rodeo news was little more than a balance sheet listing the winnings of the cowpoke pictured tormenting a bull. I found it a mystifying triumph, and the amassing of two thousand dollars - there was no mention of technique - an ungainly, if not unworthy, victory. Aside from the barbarity of it, this was the first sports page I had ever seen where there were dollar signs beside every score.
Hoping for a little light relief I turned to the Letters to the Editor. After all, if I was going to spend the night here it would help if I had some clue to the city's character. The first letter began, 'It is generally known that the theory of evolution is being taught in the public schools as a fact. . .' There followed some rather clumsy sarcasm about science eroding 'moral values', and every indication that a Scopes-like Monkey Trial might follow the Fat Stock Show as Fort Worth's next attraction. Letter Two: Hold on to the Panama Canal, for Christ's sake! Letter Three was an extraordinary denunciation of the Texas Democratic Committee for inviting Cesar Chavez to Texas. It implied that Mr Chavez was a troublemaker for wanting to organize farm labourers. This letter ended, 'Unions are doing more to destroy our national economy, promoting unemployment and inflation than any one cause.'
Unions, the Canal, the Bible: they were not getting down to basics in Fort Worth - they had never got away from them in the first place. I really hadn't the strength to grapple with Adam and Eve and the child labour laws, and so I handed my newspaper to Fatty and headed out of the Silver Dollar and past the billboards (Listen to Redneck Radio!) to the railroad station.
There was some delay, but waiting I met a very happy man. He was a newcomer to Fort Worth, he said, but six months in the city had convinced him of the limitless opportunities of the place I had no trouble dismissing in an afternoon.
'Tennis, golf, bowling,' he said. 'Swimming.'
I said, 'You can do those things in Cleveland.'
'Here, you can do anythink.'
Any think?
I said, 'Are you English?'
Yes, indeed, he was a Londoner. He had been a policeman in a wretched precinct of south London, but he had grown sick of the taxes and the general gloom and the British passions for amateurism and failure. He had migrated to Fort Worth: 'More for the kids' sake than anythinkelse.'
In London, as a bobby in a funny helmet, unarmed except for his truncheon and his whistle, he had been jeered at. He had always wanted to play golf. But policemen in London do not play golf. He liked swimming. But one cannot be a serious swimmer at the Public Baths in Tooting. He had been at the bottom of the pay-scale, on the last rung of the social ladder. Here, as a hotel clerk in the city of bull riders, calf ropers, bail-bondsmen, wholesalers of cowboy suits, Fundamentalist drawlers and - it was their own word - rednecks, his whiffling south London accent marked him out as an aristocrat and gave him a Churchillian authority.
'I'm staying,' he said.
'You could be a policeman here,' I said.
'They do all right here,' he said.
I wished him luck, and then, somewhat reassured, and still sticking to this cattle drive in reverse - the Chisholm Trail which the railway had inherited - made tracks for Laredo.
3
THE AZTEC EAGLE
It was a rainy night in Laredo - not late, and yet the place seemed deserted. A respectable frontier-town, sprawling at the very end of the Amtrak line, it lay on a geometric grid of bright black streets on a dirt bluff that had the clawed and bulldozed look of a recent quarry. Below was the Rio Grande, a silent torrent slipping past Laredo in a cut as deep as a sewer; the south bank was Mexico.
The city lights were on, making the city's emptiness emphatic. In that glare I could see its character as more Mexican than Texan. The lights flashed, suggesting life, as lights do. But where were the people? There were stop-lights on every corner, Walk and Wait signs winked on and off; the two-storey shop-fronts were floodlit, lamps burned in the windows of one-story houses; the street lights made the puddles bright holes in slabs of wet road. The effect of this illumination was eerie, that of a plague city brightened against looters. The stores were heavily padlocked; the churches lit up in cannonades of arc-lamps; there were no bars. All that light, instead of giving an impression of, warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.
No traffic waited at the red lights, no pedestrians at the crosswalks. And though the city was silent, in the drizzly air was an unmistakable heart-murmur, the threep-threep of music being played far away. I walked and walked, from my hotel to the river, from the river to a plaza, and into the maze of streets until I was almost certain I was lost. I saw nothing. And it could be frightening, seeing - four blocks away -a blinking sign I took to be a watering hole, a restaurant, an event, a sign of life, and walking to it and arriving soaked and gasping to discover that it was a shoe store or a funeral parlour, shut for the night. So, walking the streets of Laredo, I heard only my own footsteps, the false courage of their click, their faltering at alleyways, their splashes as I briskly returned to the only landmark I knew - the river.
The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine from which every bush and tree had been removed in order to allow the police to patrol it. Three bridges linked the United States to Mexico here. Standing on the bluff I heard the threep-threep louder: it was coming from the Mexican side of the river, a just-discernible annoyance, like a neighbour's radio. Now I could see plainly the twisting river, and it struck me that a river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.
Looking south, across the river, I realized that I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there - music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people did things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer-signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope - the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.
A car drew up behind me. I was alarmed, then reassured when I saw it was a taxi. I gave the driver the name of my hotel and got in, but when I tried to make conversation he responded by grunting. He understood only his own language.
In Spanish I said, 'It is quiet here.'
That was the first time on my trip that I spoke Spanish. After this, nearly every conversation I had was in Spanish. But in the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English. I have no patience with sentences that go, ' "Carramba!" said the campesino, eating his empanada at the estancia . . .'
'Laredo,' said the taxi driver. He shrugged.
'Where are all the people?'
'The other side.'
'Nuevo Laredo?'
'Boys' Town,' he said. The English took me by surprise, the phrase tickled me. He said, now in Spanish again, 'There are one thousand prostitutes in the Zone.'
It was a round number, but I was convinced. And that of course explained what had happened to this city. After dark, Laredo slipped into Nuevo Laredo, leaving the lights on. It was why Laredo looked respectable, even genteel, in a rainswept and mildewed way: the clubs, the bars, the brothels, were across the river. The red-light district was ten minutes away, in another country.
But there was more to this moral spelled out in transpontine geography than met the eye. If the Texans had the best of both worlds in decreeing that the fleshpots should remain on the Mexican side of the International Bridge - the river flowing, like the erratic progress of a tricky argument, between vice and virtue - the Mexicans had the sense of tact to keep Boys' Town camouflaged by decrepitude, on the other side of the tracks, another example of the geography of morality. Divisions everywhere: no one likes to live next-door to a whorehouse. And yet both cities existed because of Boys' Town. Without the whoring and racketeering, Nuevo Laredo would not have had enough municipal funds to plant geraniums around the statue of its madly gesturing patriot in the plaza, much less advertise itself as a bazaar of wicker-work and guitar-twanging folklore - not that anyone ever went to Nuevo Laredo to be sold baskets. And Laredo required the viciousness of its sister-city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had the airport and the churches, Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket-factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically-sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist, David Ricardo (1772-1823).
At first glance, this looked like the typical sort of mushroom-and-dunghill relationship that exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. But the longer I thought about it the more Laredo seemed like all of the United States, and Nuevo Laredo all of Latin America. This frontier was more than an example of cozy hypocrisy; it demonstrated all one needed to know about the morality of the Americas, the relationship between the puritanical efficiency north of the border, and the bumbling and passionate disorder - the anarchy of sex and hunger - south of it. It was not as simple as that, since there was obviously villainy and charity in both, and yet crossing the river (the Mexicans don't call it the Rio Grande; they call it the Rio Bravo de Norte), no more than an idle traveller making his way south with a suitcase of dirty laundry, a sheaf of railway timetables, a map and a pair of leak-proof shoes, I felt as if I was acting out a significant image. Crossing a national boundary and seeing such a difference on the other side had something to do with it: truly, every human feature there had the resonance of metaphor.
It is only two hundred yards, but the smell of Nuevo Laredo rises. It is the smell of lawlessness; it is smokier, scented with chilis and cheap perfume. I had come from the tidy Texas town, and could see, almost as soon as I left it, the crowd of people at the far end of the bridge, the traffic jam, the cat-calling and horn-blowing, some people waiting to enter the United States, but most of them merely gaping across the frontier which is - and they know it - the poverty line.
Mexicans enter the United States because there is work for them there. They do it illegally - it is virtually impossible for a poor Mexican to enter legally, if his intention is to seek work. When they are caught, they are thrown into jail, serve a short sentence and then deported. Within days, they head back for the United States and the farms where they can always find work as low-paid day-labourers. The solution is simple: if we passed a law requiring United States farmers to hire only men with entry visas and work permits, there would be no problem. There is no such law. The farm lobby has made sure of that, for if there were no Mexicans to exploit how would these barrel-assed slavers be able to harvest their crops?
Closer, I could see the chaos particularized. The lounging soldiers and policemen only made it look more lawless, the noise was terrifying and, at once, the national characteristics were evident - the men had no necks, the policemen wore platform shoes and no prostitute was without her natural ally, an old woman or a cripple. It was cold and rainy; there was an atmosphere of impatience in the town; still February - the tourists were not due for months.
Halfway across the bridge, I had passed a rusty mailbox bearing the sign Contraband. This was for drugs. The penalties were posted in two languages - five years for soft drugs, fifteen for hard. I tried to peek inside, but unable to see anything I gave it a whack with my fist. It boomed: it must have been empty. I continued to the barrier, five cents in the turnstile slot, and as simply as boarding a bus I was in Mexico. Although I had been growing a moustache to make myself visibly Latin it was clearly not working. I was waved through the customs gate with four other gringos: we looked innocent.
There was no question that I had arrived, for while the neckless men and the swaggering cops and maimed animals had a certain sullen statelessness, the garlic-seller was the personification of Latin America. He was weedy, and wore a torn shirt and a greasy hat; he was very dirty; he screamed the same three words over and over. These attributes alone were unremarkable - he too had a counterpart in Cleveland. What distinguished him was the way he carried his merchandise. He had a garland of garlic cloves around his neck, and another around his waist, and ropes of them on his arms, and he shook them in his fists. He fought his way in and out of the crowd, the clusters of garlic bouncing on his body. Was there any better example of cultural difference than this man? At the Texas end of the bridge he would have been arrested for contravening some law of sanitation; here, he was ignored. What was so strange about wearing bunches of garlic around your neck? Perhaps nothing, except that he would not have done it if he was not a Mexican, and I would not have noticed it if I hadn't been an American.
Boy's Town - the Zone - is aptly named, since so much of it wickedly reflects the sexual nightmare-paradise of forbidden boyhood fantasy. It is fear and desire, a whole suburb of libido in which one can see the dire consequences in every greedy wish. It is the child who numbly craves the thrill of a lover's hug; but no child enjoys this fantasy without knowing the equal and opposite anxiety of being pursued by the same creature. Months of wintry weather and rain and off-season idleness had turned the prostitutes of the Zone into rather woeful examples of demon lovers. They were the howling, sleeve-tugging, arm-grabbing, jostling embodiment of the punitive part of sexual fantasy. I felt like Leopold Bloom steering his timid way through the limitless brothel of nighttown, for here one could not express an interest without risking humiliation. What made it worse for me was that I was merely curious; intending neither to condemn nor encourage, I was mistaken for that most pathetic of emotionally damaged souls, the near-sighted voyeur, a kind of sexual barnacle fastening my attention upon the meat market. Just looking, I'd say; but prostitutes have no patience with this attitude.
'Mister!'
'Sorry, I have to catch a train.'
'What time is it leaving?'
'About an hour.'
'That's plenty of time - mister!'
The urchins, the old ladies, the cripples, the sellers of lottery tickets, the frantic dirty youths, the men selling trays of switch-blades, the tequila bars and incessant racketing music, the hotels reeking of bedbugs - the frenzy threatened to overwhelm me. I had to admit a certain fascination, and yet I feared that I would have to pay for my curiosity. If you're not interested in this, said a pretty girl hiking up her skirt with a casually lazy gesture, why are you here?
It was a good question and, as I had no answer, I left. I went to the office of Mexican Railways to buy my train ticket. The town was in great disrepair - no building was without a broken window, no street without a wrecked car, no gutter not choked with garbage; and in this clammy season, without any heat to justify its squalor or give it romance, it was cruelly ugly. But it is our bazaar, not Mexico's. It requires visitors.
Some citizens remain pure. Paying for my sleeper on the Aztec Eagle, I mentioned to the friendly manageress that I had just come from the Zone.
She rolled her eyes and then said, 'Shall I tell you something? I do not know where that place is.'
'It's not far. You just-'
'Don't tell me. I have been here two years. I know my home, I know my office, I know my church. That's all I need.'
She said that my time would be better spent looking at the curios than idling in the Zone. On my way to the station, I took her advice. Inevitably there were baskets and postcards and switchblade knives; but there were also plaster dogs and plaster Christs, carvings of women squatting, religious junk of every description, including rosaries the size of a ship's hawser with beads like baseballs, rained-on ironwork rusting on sidewalk stands, and gloomy plaster saints - martyred rather savagely by the people who had painted them, and each bearing the inscription Souvenir of Nuevo Laredo. A curio (the word, practically self-explanatory, is short for 'curiosity') is something that has no purpose other than to prove that you arrived: the coconut carved with an ape's face, the combustible ashtray, the sombrero - they are useless without the Nuevo Laredo inscription, but a good deal more vulgar than anything I saw in the Zone.
Not far from the station there was a man melting tubes of glass and drawing them thin and making model cars. His skill amounted almost to artistry, but the result - always the same car - lacked any imagination. The delicate work, this glass filigree, took hours; he laboured to make what could have been something beautiful, into a ridiculous souvenir. Had he ever made anything else?
'No,' he said. 'Only this car. I saw a picture of it in a magazine.'
I asked him when he had seen the picture.
'No one ever asked me that question before! It was ten years ago. Or more.'
'Where did you learn to do this?'
'In Puebla- not here.' He looked up from his blowtorch. 'Do you think a person could learn anything here in Nuevo Laredo? This is one of the traditional arts of Puebla. I have taught my wife and children to do it. My wife makes little pianos, my son makes animals.'
Over and over again, the same car, piano, animal. It would not have been so disturbing if it was a simple case of mass-producing the objects. But enormous skill and patience went into the making of what was in the end no more than junk. It seemed a great waste, but not very different from the Zone which turned lovely little girls into bad-tempered and rapacious hags.
Earlier that afternoon I had left my suitcase at the station restaurant. I had asked for the baggage department. A Mexican girl at a table on which someone had spewed pushed her tin plate of beans aside and said, 'This is it.' She had given me a scrap of paper and written PAUL in lipstick on the suitcase. I had no lively hope of ever seeing it again.
Now, trying to reclaim it, I gave the scrap of paper to a different girl. This one laughed at the paper and called a cross-eyed man over to examine it. He laughed, too.
I said, 'What's so funny?'
'We can't read her writing,' said the cross-eyed man.
'She writes in Chinese,' said the girl. She scratched her stomach and smiled at the paper. 'What does that say - fifty or five?'
'Let's call it five,' I said. 'Or we can ask the girl. Where is she?'
'Chee' - now the cross-eyed man was speaking in English - 'enee go to the veech!'
They thought this was hysterically funny.
'My suitcase,' I said. 'Where is it?'
The girl said, 'Gone', but before I could react, she giggled and dragged it out of the kitchen.
The sleeping car of The Aztec Eagle was a hundred yards down the track, and 1 was out of breath when I reached it. My English leak-proof shoes, specially bought for this trip, had sprung a leak; my clothes were wet. I had carried the suitcase on my head, coolie-style, but all that served to do was provoke a migraine and funnel rainwater into my collar.
A man in a black uniform stood in the doorway, barring my way. 'You can't get on,' he said. 'You haven't been through Customs.'
This was true, although I wondered how he could possibly have known this.
I said, 'Where is Customs?'
He pointed to the far end of the flooded track, and said disgustedly, 'Over there.'
I heaved the suitcase onto my head again and certain that I could get no wetter splashed back to the station platform. 'Customs?' I asked. A lady peddling bubble-gum and cookies laughed at me. I asked a little boy. He covered his face. I asked a man with a clipboard. He said, 'Wait.'
Rain dribbled through holes in the platform roof and Mexicans carted bales of their belongings and shoved them through the windows of Second Class. And yet, for an express train with a high reputation, there were not many passengers in evidence. The station was dingy and nearly deserted. The bubble-gum seller talked to the fried chicken seller; barefoot children played tag; it continued to rain - and the rain was not a brisk purifying downpour, but a dark tedious drizzle, like flecks of falling soot, which seemed to taint everything it touched.
Then I saw the man in the black uniform who had barred my entry to the sleeping car. He was wet now and looked furious.
'I don't see the Customs,' I said.
He showed me a tube of lipstick and said, 'This is Customs.'
Without inquiring further, he franked my suitcase with a slash of lipstick, then straightened and groaned and said, 'Hurry up, the train is about to leave.'
'Sorry, have I been keeping you waiting?'
The sleeping cars - there were two - were old American ones, from a railway in the States which had gone bankrupt. The compartments had deep armchairs and art-deco angles and three-sided mirrors, and were not only handsome but comfortable and well-carpeted. Everything I had seen in Nuevo Laredo seemed to be in a state of dereliction; nothing maintained, nothing cared-for. Yet this old train with its hand-me-down sleeping cars was in good condition, and in a few years would qualify as an antique in an excellent state of preservation. It had happened by accident: the Mexicans did not have the money to rebuild sleeping cars in chrome and plastic, as Amtrak had done, but by keeping them in trim they had managed to preserve the art-deco originality.
Most of the compartments were empty. Walking through the cars just before the whistle blew, I saw a Mexican family, some children travelling with their mother, a pair of worried-looking American tourists, and a winking middle-aged lady in a fake leopard-skin coat. In the bedroom across the corridor from mine there was an old woman and her pretty companion, a girl of about twenty-five. The old woman was flirtatious with me and sharp with the girl, who I supposed was her daughter. The girl was desperately shy, and her drab clothes (the old woman wore a mink around her neck) and her lovely face with its sallow English sadness, gave her expression a sort of passionate purity. All the way to Mexico City I tried to talk to this girl, but each time the old woman interrupted with cackling questions and never allowed the girl to reply. I decided that the girl's submissiveness was more than daughterly obedience: she was a servant, maintaining an anxious silence. Her eyes were green, and I think that even that aged woman's vanity could not have prevented her from knowing how attractive this girl was, or the true motive for my questions. There was something Russian and old-fashioned and impenetrable about this pair.
I was in my compartment, sipping tequila, and thinking how - so close to the United States (I could see the department stores on eroded bluffs of Laredo from the station) - everything had become so different, such slaphappy Mexican dishevelment. There was a knock at the door.
'Excuse me.' It was the conductor, and as he spoke he bustled into the compartment. He was still bustling, still speaking. 'I'm just going to put this up there.'
He carried a large paper shopping bag in which there were stuffed many smaller bags. He grinned and held it chest-high. He motioned to the luggage rack above the sink.
I said, 'I was going to put my suitcase up there.'
'No problem! You can put your suitcase under the bed. Look, let me do it.'
He got to his knees and pushed the suitcase out of sight, remarking on what a nice fit it was. I had not thought to remind him that this was my compartment.
'What's that?'I asked.
He clutched his bag more tightly and grinned again. 'This?' he said breezily. 'Some things, that's all.' He slid the bag onto the luggage rack - it was too plump to fit under the bed - and said, 'No problem, okay?'
It filled the luggage rack. I said, 'I don't know.'
I tugged at the opening and tried to peek inside the bag. With an insincere laugh, he put his hand on my shoulder and eased me away.
'It's all right!' He was still laughing, now with a kind of shrewd gratitude.
I said, 'Why don't you put it somewhere else?'
'It's much better here,' he said. 'Your suitcase is small. That's a good idea - always travel with a small suitcase. It fits beautifully down there.'
'What is this thing?'
He did not reply. And he had not removed his hand from my shoulder. Now he applied gentle pressure and sat me down. He stepped backwards, looked left and right along the corridor, stepped forward and leaned over and in breathy Spanish said, 'It's fine. You're a tourist. No problem.'
'Very well then.' I smiled at him, I smiled at the bag.
He stopped laughing. I think he became alarmed at my willingness to accept the bag. He half-closed the compartment door and said, 'Don't say anything.'
He put a finger to his lips and sucked air.
'Say anything?' I started to get up. 'To whom?'
He motioned me back to my armchair. 'Don't say anything.'
He shut the door.
I looked at the bag.
A moment later, there was a knock at the door. The same conductor, a new grin: 'Dinner is served!'
He waited, and when I left the compartment he locked the door.
It was in the dining car that I tried to strike up a conversation with the green-eyed girl. The old woman fielded my questions. I had two Bohemian beers and the carcass of a scrawny chicken. I tried again. And I noticed that when the old woman replied she always said, 'I', not 'we' - 'I am going to Mexico City,' 'I have been in Nuevo Laredo.' So the green-eyed girl was almost certainly a servant, part of the old woman's baggage. Concentrating on this problem, I barely noticed that three uniformed men had entered the dining car; I saw them - pistols, moustaches, truncheons, no necks - and then they were gone: Mexico was full of men in ambiguous uniforms - they seemed to be part of the landscape.
'I live in Coyoacan,' said the old woman. Her eating had removed her lipstick; she was putting on more.
'Didn't Trotsky live there?' I said.
A man in a white steward's smock appeared at my elbow.
'Go back to your compartment. They want you.'
'Who wants me?'
'Customs.'
'I've been through Customs.' With an intimation of trouble, I spoke in English.
'You no espick Espanish?'
'No.'
The old woman looked sharply at me but said nothing.
'Da men. Dey wants you,' said the steward.
'I'll just finish this beer.'
He moved my glass out of reach. 'Now.'
The three armed Customs men were waiting for me outside my compartment. The conductor was nowhere in sight, and yet the compartment had been unlocked: obviously he had skipped out and left me to face the music.
'Good evening,' I said - they exchanged grimaces on hearing my English. I took out my passport, rail ticket, health card and waved them to deflect their attention. 'You'll find that I have a Mexican Tourist Card, smallpox vaccination, valid passport - look.' I jerked the concertina of extra pages out of my passport and showed them the Burmese postage stamps glued to my Burma visa, my garish re-entry permit for Laos, the chit that gave me unlimited access to Guatemala.
This distracted them for a moment - they muttered and turned pages- and then the ugliest one of the three stepped into the compartment and whacked his billy club against the luggage rack.
'Is this yours?'
I decided not to understand Spanish. To give a truthful answer would have put the conductor into the soup - probably where he belonged. But earlier in the day I had seen a bullying customs officer tormenting an elderly Mexican with a series of impromptu humiliations. The old man was with a young boy, and their suitcase contained about thirty tennis balls. The customs officer made them empty the suitcase; the tennis balls rolled in all directions, and while the two victims chased them, the customs officer kicked the tennis balls and repeated in Spanish I am not satisfied with your explanation! This gave me an unmerciful hatred for all Mexican customs officials that was far greater than my powerful resentment for the conductor who was the cause of my present problem.
Without saying yes or no, I said very rapidly in English, 'That's been there for some time, about two hours.'
Hearing ours, he said in Spanish, 'It belongs to you, then.'
'I've never seen it before in my life.'
'It's theirs,' he called out in Spanish. The men in the corridor grunted.
I smiled at the man and said, 'I think there's a great misunderstanding here.' I stooped and pulled my suitcase out from under the seat and said, 'Look, I've been through customs already - there's the lipstick smear on the side. I'd be glad to open it for you. I've got some old clothes, some maps -'
In Spanish, he said, 'Don't you speak Spanish?'
In English, I said, 'I've only been in Mexico one day. We can't expect miracles, can we? I'm a tourist.'
'This one's a tourist,' he yelled to the corridor.
As we talked, the train sped along and lurched, throwing us against each other. When he rocked, the customs officer's hands went to his billy club and his pistol for balance.
His eyes were very tiny and his voice full of threat as he said slowly in Spanish, 'So all this is yours, including that parcel up there?'
In English I said, 'What is it exactly you'd like to see?'
He looked again at the bag. He squeezed it. There was a clinking sound inside. He was very suspicious, but he was also sad because, as a tourist, I was entitled to privacy. That conductor knew the ropes.
The customs officer said, 'Have a good trip.'
'Same to you.'
When they left, I went back to the dining car and finished my beer. The waiters were whispering as they collected the plates from the tables. We came to a station, and when we pulled out I was sure the customs officers had left the train.
I hurried to my compartment, dying to see what the bag contained. I felt, after what had happened, that I had every right to look in. The car was empty, my compartment as I had left it. I locked the door behind me and stood on the toilet to get a better look at the luggage rack. The shopping bag was gone.
We had left Nuevo Laredo at twilight. The few stations we stopped at later in the evening were so poorly lighted I could not make out their names on the signboards. I stayed up late reading The Thin Man, which I had put aside in Texas. I had lost the plot entirely, but the drinking still interested me. All the characters drank - they met for cocktails, they conspired in speakeasies, they talked about drinking, and they were often drunk. Nick Charles, Hammett's detective, drank the most. He complained about his hangovers, and then drank to cure his hangover. He drank before breakfast, and all day, and the last thing he did at night was have a drink. One morning he feels especially rotten; he says complainingly, 'I must have gone to bed sober,' and then pours himself a stiff drink. The drinking distracted me from the clues in the way President Banda's facial tic prevented me from ever hearing anything he said. But why so much alcohol in this whodunnit? Because it was set - and written - during Prohibition. Evelyn Waugh once commented that the reason Brideshead Revisited had so many sumptuous meals in it was because it was written during a period of war-time rationing, when the talk was of all the wonderful things you could do with soya beans. By midnight, I had finished The Thin Man and a bottle of tequila.
Two blankets did not keep me warm in my compartment. I woke three or four times shivering, believing - it is so easy to be deluded on a dark train - that I was back home in Medford. In the morning, I was still cold, the shades were drawn and I was not sure which country I was in. I pushed up the shade and saw the sun rising behind a green tree. It was a solitary tree, and the climbing sun gave it an emblematic quality in the stony landscape; it was a pale perpendicular, studded with fruit like hand grenades, but as I watched it, it thickened and grew less tree-like and finally stiffened into a cactus.
There were more cactuses, some like burnt-out torches and others the more familiar candelabras. There were no trees. The sun, so early in the morning, was bright and gave a blueness to the hills which twisted off into the distance, and a glitter to the stiletto spikes on the cacti. The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins. I wondered whether it was cold outside until I saw a man - the only human in that desert - in a donkey cart, rumbling over a road that might well have been a creek-bed. The man was dressed warmly, his sombrero jammed over his ears, a maroon scarf wrapped around his face, and a wadded jacket of brilliantly coloured rags.
It was still early. As the sun moved higher in the sky, the day became warmer and woke the smells, until that curious Mexican mixture of sparkle and decay, blue sky and bedragglement, asserted itself. In the bright air was the dismal town of Bocas. Here were four green trees, and a church on a steep hill, its whitewash reddened by dust, and cactuses so large cows were tethered to their spiky trunks. But most of the town was mimicry: the church was a house, the houses were sheds, most trees were cactuses, and without topsoil the crops - red peppers and corn - were skeletal. Some children in torn clothes skipped over to look at the train, and then, hearing the honk of a horn, ran to the sandy road to see a heavily-laden Coca-Cola truck - up to its axles in sand -straining towards the town's one store.
Mexicans habitually site the town dump along the railway tracks. The detritus of the very poor is unimaginably vile, and though it smoulders it is far too loathsome to catch fire. In the Bocas dump, which was part of Bocas station, two dogs yanked at one heap of garbage, two pigs at another. These animals went on rooting - keeping their distance- and I noticed that both dogs were lame, and one pig's ear was missing. The mutilated animals were appropriate to the mutilated town, the ragged children, the tumbledown sheds. The Coca-Cola truck had parked. Now the children were watching a man dragging a frantic pig across the tracks. The pig's hind legs were roped, and the man yanked the screaming creature backwards.
I do not consider myself an animal-lover, but it is a long way from disliking them to maiming and torturing them. And I came to see a resemblance between the condition of domestic animals and the condition of the people who mistreated them. It was the same contempt, and the whipped dog and the woman carrying wood had the same fearful eyes. And it was these beaten people who beat their animals.
'Bocas,' said the conductor 'it min kish.' He smacked his lips and laughed.
In Spanish I said, 'Why didn't you tell me you are a smuggler?'
'I am not a smuggler.'
'What about the contraband you put in my room?'
'It is not contraband. It is just some things.'
'Why did you put it in my room?'
'It is better in your room than mine.'
'Then why did you take it out of my room?'
He was silent. I was going to let up on him, but I remembered again that he might have been the cause of my being in the Nuevo Laredo jail this morning.
I said, 'You put it in the room because it is contraband.'
'No.'
'And you are a smuggler.'
'No.'
'You are afraid of the police.'
'Yes.'
The ragged man outside the train had dragged his pig across the tracks. Now he was dragging the pig backwards to a pick-up truck parked near the station. The pig howled and scattered stones with its scrabbling trotters; it sounded demented because it was intelligent enough to know it was doomed.
'The police bother us,' said the conductor. 'They don't bother you. Look, this is not the United States - these men want money. Understand?' He made a claw of his brown hand and snatched with it. 'That is what they want - money.'
'What was in the bag? Drugs?'
'Drugs!' He spat out the door to show me how ridiculous the question was.
'What then?'
'Kitchen utensils.'
'You smuggle kitchen utensils?'
'I don't smuggle anything. I buy kitchen utensils in Laredo. I take them home.'
'Don't you have kitchen utensils in Mexico?'
'In Mexico we have shit,' he said. He nodded and then said, 'Of course we have kitchen utensils. But they are expensive. In America they are cheap.'
'The customs man asked if they were mine.'
'What did you tell him?'
'You said, "Don't say anything." I did not say anything.'
'See? No problem!'
'They were very angry.'
'Of course. But what can they do? You're a tourist.'
The train whistle sounded, drowning the pig's cries. We started out ofBocas.
The conductor said, 'It is easy for you tourists.'
'It is easy for you smugglers because of us tourists.'
Back in Texas, with a sweep of his hand, taking in Main Street and the new shopping centre and a score of finance companies, the Texan says, 'All this was nothing but desert a few years ago.' The Mexican pursues a different line. He urges you to ignore the squalor of the present and reflect on the glories of the past. As we entered San Luis Potosí towards noon on the day that had started cold and was now cloudless in a parching heat, I noticed the naked children and the lamed dogs and the settlement in the train-yard, which was fifty boxcars. By curtaining the door with faded laundry, and adding a chicken coop and children, and turning up the volume on his radio, the Mexican makes a bungalow of his boxcar and pretends it is home. It is a frightful slum, and stinks of excrement, but the Mexican man standing at the door of the Aztec Eagle with me was smiling. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'this was a silver mine.'
The boxcars, now closer together, became horrific, and even the geraniums, the women preparing food in the doorways, the roosters crowing from the couplings, did not mask the cruelty of the fact that the boxcars were going nowhere. They were cattle cars, and here in San Luis Potosí they parodied their original function.
The Mexican man was enthusiastic. He was getting off - he lived here. This was a famous place, he said. There were many beautiful churches in San Luis Potosí; very typical, very pretty, very ancient.
'Are there any Catholics?' I asked.
He gave me a nasty little three-beat laugh and an anti-clerical wink. 'Too many!'
'Why are these people living in cattle cars?'
'Over there,' he said, pointing past the tops of the boxcars, 'in the Plaza Hidalgo is a fantastic building. The Government Palace. Benito Juarez was there - you have heard of him. In this very place he ordered the execution of Maximilian.'
He tugged his moustache and smiled with civic pride. But Mexican civic pride, always backward-looking, has its roots in xenophobia. Few countries on earth have greater cause to be xenophobic. And in a sense this hatred of foreigners had its origins here in San Luis Potosí. Like many reformers, Benito Juarez ran into debt: it seems almost to amount to a condition of reforming governments. When he suspended payment on the national debt he was invaded by the combined forces of Spain, Britain and France. Ultimately only France's armies stayed and, seeing that he could not defend Mexico City, Juarez retreated to Potosí. In June, 1863, the French army entered Mexico City and made the Archduke Maximilian of Austria the new Emperor of Mexico. Maximilian's rule was muddled and contradictory, a tyranny of good intentions. But he was weak; he needed the French presence to keep him in power and commanded little popular support (though it has been said that the Indians liked him because he was blond, like Quet-zalcoatl - Cortez enjoyed the same bizarre notoriety for his resemblance to the Plumed Serpent). Much worse, Maximilian was a foreigner. Mexican xenophobia is far stronger than any tendency towards internal bickering, and it was not long before Maximilian was being denounced from the pulpits of Catholic churches as a syphilitic. His wife, the Empress Carlotta, had not borne him any children: that was the proof. Carlotta made a desperate trip to Europe to rally support for her husband, but her appeal was ignored and she lost her mind and died insane. For much of this time, America was engaged in the Civil War as well as urging the French to withdraw from Mexico. After the Civil War, America - which had never recognized Maximilian - began arming Juarez, and in the guerrilla war that followed in Mexico, Maximilian was captured and shot at Querelare. This was in 1867; Juarez had retained San Luis Potosí as his capital.
America's help might have endeared us to the cause of Mexican nationalism. After all, Juarez was a Zapotee Indian, ethnically pure, and was one of the few Mexican rulers who died a natural death. But his successor, the devious and greedy Porfirio Diaz, welcomed - for a price - those whom we now think of as philanthropists and trailblazers, the Hearsts, U.S. Steel, Anaconda Corporation, Standard Oil, and the Guggenheims. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing at the time of Santa Ana's paranoid rule (Santa Ana demanded to be known as 'His Most Serene Highness' - Mexican dictators frequently affected regal titles: the creole butcher Iturbide styled himself 'Agustín I'), his lines are apposite to the Guggenheim adventure:
But who is he that prates
Of the culture of mankind,
Of better arts and life?
Go, blindworm, go,
Behold the famous States
Harrying Mexico
With rifle and with knife!
Mexico under Diaz had never been so peaceful, so industrialized, or so wretched. Spanish America is cursed with the grandiosity of crooked statesmen; the Indians and peasants remain Indians and peasants. In the bloody revolution that Diaz's dictatorship made inevitable - the peasants' revolt of 1910, described so turgidly in B. Traven's The Rebellion of the Hanged and his five other tendentious 'Jungle Novels' - Diaz crept secretly aboard a train he himself had built and fled incognito to Veracruz and his exile in Paris.
'And here' - the Mexican man was still talking - 'in Potosí, our national anthem was written.' The train had come to rest beside a long platform. 'And this is one of the most modern railway stations in the country.'
He was speaking of the building itself, a mausoleum of stupefied travellers, which bore on its upper walls frescoes by Fernando Leal. It was very much a Mexican style of interior decoration for public buildings, the preference for mob scenes and battle pieces instead of wallpaper. In this one, a frenzied crowd seemed to be dismantling two locomotives made of rubber. Pandemonium under a thundery sky; muskets, arrows, pick-axes, and symbolic lightning bolts; probably Benito Juarez leading a charge. If Mexican painters used conventional canvases, I never saw the result. 'Diego Rivera's frescoes in the patio of the Ministry of Education are chiefly remarkable for their quantity,' Aldous Huxley wrote in Beyond the Mexique Bay. 'There must be five or six acres of them.' From the wall art I saw in Mexico I concluded that the painters had drawn much of their inspiration from Gulley Jimson.
I went into the plaza and bought a Mexican newspaper and four bananas. The rest of the passengers bought comic books. Back on the platform, waiting for the train to leave, I noticed that the sallow-faced girl with green eyes was holding a magazine she had just bought. When I saw it was a comic book most of my ardour died: I find it discouraging to see a pretty woman reading a comic book. But the old woman was carrying nothing. Perhaps the green-eyed girl was holding the old woman's comic book? I became interested in the girl once more, and sidled up to her.
'It was cold last night.'
The girl said nothing.
The old woman said, 'There is no heating on this train.'
I said to the girl, 'At least it is warm now.'
The girl made a tube of the comic book and clutched it.
The old woman said, 'You speak English extremely well. I wish you would teach me some English. I suppose I am too old to learn!' She looked at me slyly from beneath the fringes of her shawl and then boarded the train. The girl obediently followed, lifting the old woman's hem from the dusty steps.
The lady in the leopard-skin coat was also on the platform. She too had a comic book in her hand. She smiled at me and said, 'You're an American. I can tell.'
'Yes, from Massachusetts.'
'Very far!'
'I am going even farther.' At this point I had only been travelling for six days; I grew anxious when I remembered how distant Patagonia was.
'In Mexico?'
'Yes, then Guatemala, Panama, Peru -' I stopped there; it seemed unlucky to speak of destinations.
She said, 'I've never been to Central America.'
'What about South America?'
'Never. But Peru - it is in Central America, no? Near Venezuela?'
'I don't think so.'
She shook her head doubtfully. 'How long is your vacation?'
'Two months, maybe more.'
'Shoo! You will have seen enough!'
The whistle blew. We hurried to the stairs.
'Two months vacation!' she said. 'That's the kind of job I'd like to have. What do you do?'
'I'm a teacher.'
'You're a lucky teacher.'
'That's true.'
In my compartment I unfolded El Sol de San Luis and saw, on the front page, a picture of a sinking ship in Boston harbour, and the headline, CHAOS AND DEATH FOLLOW A VIOLENT STORM IN THE US. The story was frightening: two feet of snow in Boston, a number of deaths, and a power-cut that had plunged the city into darkness; one of the worst storms in Boston's history. It made me feel even more like a fugitive, guilty and smug having made a successful escape, as if I had known in advance that I was fleeing chaos and death for this sunny train ride. I put the paper down and looked out the window. In a biscuit-coloured gully in the foreground a large flock of goats champed on tufts of grass, and the herd-boy squatted under a tree. The sun burned in a cloudless sky. Further on, there were the remains of an abandoned silver mine and a wild yellow desert hemmed in by rocky hills, and yucca-like bushes from which tequila is made, and then cactuses in grotesque configurations - great stiff things that looked like swollen trees on which ping-pong paddles are growing, or sword clusters, or bunches of bristling pipe-fittings.
For the next half hour I read about the snow storm, and from time to time - between paragraphs, or turning a page - I would look up to rest my eyes and see a man ploughing dust using two steers and a small plough-blade, or a group of women on their knees, doing their laundry in a shallow stream, or a boy leading a burro loaded with firewood. Then the story: Cars were left stranded . . . Offices closed . . . Some people suffered heart attacks. . . Ice and snow blocked roads . . .
I heard a glockenspiel. It was the steward from the dining car, tapping his bundle of chimes. 'Lunch!' he yelled. 'First call for lunch!'
Lunch and the morning paper in the Aztec Eagle: this was perfect. A heat haze lay over the plains which were green with cultivation; and it was now so hot that we were the only thing moving. There was no one in the fields, and at the streams no women doing laundry, though their suds remained in the shallows. We passed Queretaro, where Maximilian was shot, and here dark tough-looking Mexicans sat glowering from doorways of houses. They were quite unlike the gold-toothed buffoons I had seen in Nuevo Laredo, and watching from the shadowy interiors of houses they seemed sinister and disapproving under the brims of their sombreros. Outside those houses there was little shade, and on this afternoon of withering sunlight nothing stirred. We were soon in semi-desert, travelling fast, and through the heat haze I could see the pencilled outline of the Sierra Madre Oriental. In the middle of this great sun-baked plain a small burro was tethered near a tiny tree; a still creature in a puddle of shade.
Lunch had ended. The three waiters and the cook drowsed at a corner table. I had risen and was walking through the dining car when the couplings crashed, and made me stagger. The train came to a sudden jolting halt, knocking the salt and pepper shakers to the floor.
'A fat little bull,' said a waiter, opening one eye. 'But it's too late to worry about him now.'
The Aztec Eagle climbed through the Cerro Rajón, a region of steep scrub-covered hills. It moved slowly enough on these circular climbs for me to pick the wild-flowers along the track, but when it descended it did so with loud racketing speed and a rhumba from the coupling under the vestibule where I stood for the air. The haze had lifted in this cooler altitude, and I could see for fifty miles or more across a blue-green plain. Because the train kept switching back and forth on the hillside, the view continually altered, from this plain to a range of hills and to fertile valleys with tall feathery trees in columns along the banks of frothing rivers, and occasionally a deep gorge of vertical granite slabs. The trees were eucalyptus, as African as the view, which was an enormity of stone and space.
There was no one at the tidy station at Huichapan: no one boarded, no one got off, and only the signalman with his flag ventured out of the train. In this, as in other places, the laundry washed that morning at the river was set out to dry, Mexican-style: it was spiked upon the cactuses and transformed them into crouching figures in clean rags. The train trembling importantly at the platform at Huichapan gave the place a certain grandeur, but when we left, and I looked back, a hot solitude seemed to descend on the little station, as the dust sifted to the ground and the cactuses in their tatters remained in hunched postures, like a mimicry of ghost passengers left behind.
During that long afternoon, I read The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, a grimly humorous book of self-congratulatory cynicism. I had turned first to Railroad, which Bierce defines as 'the chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off'. Two feet of snow in Boston. Chaos and death. Power cuts in sub-freezing weather. And outside my window here, the Mexican sunshine and old hills and pots of crimson geraniums in the window boxes of huts. Bierce goes on, 'For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition.' Bierce is never brilliant; he is sometimes funny, but more often he misses the mark, forces the point, and ends up sounding strained and pompous. He has been called 'the American Swift', but his fun-poking facetiousness hardly qualifies him for that description. He was not as angry or as crazy or as learned as Swift, and he lived in a time of simpler literary tastes. If America in the nineteenth century had been complicated enough to require a Swift, she would have produced one. Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer- a mediocre poet. I found the jokes by Bierce about women and children conventionally stupid, but it interested me that I was reading this book in a part of Mexico in which he had vanished. Every line sounded like a hastily scribbled epitaph, although his real epitaph was in a letter he wrote in 1913, just before he disappeared. 'To be a Gringo in Mexico,' wrote Bierce - he was seventy-one years old- 'ah, that is euthanasia!'
Towards Tula, a treeless desert of long hills rose into peaks like pyramids. This was the capital of the Toltecs, with pillars and temples and a towering pyramid. The pyramids of'Mexico - at Teotihuacan and Uxmal and Chichén-Itzá - are clearly the efforts of people aspiring to make mountains; they match the landscape, and in places mock it. The god-king must demonstrate that he is capable of duplicating divine geography, and the pyramids were the visible proof of this attempt. In the wilderness of Tula, the landscape was in ruins, but the work of the Toltecs would survive into another epoch.
Just before darkness fell, I saw a field of upright swords. It might have been sisal, but more likely was the tequila plant whose fiery juice left me in an hallucinating daze.
The conductor - the smuggler - was all smiles when we arrived at Mexico City. He offered to carry my suitcase, he reminded me not to leave anything behind, he told me how much fun I would have in Mexico City. I did not reward his servility with a tip, and I think he knew as I thanked him coldly that he had overstepped himself in importuning me with his sack of contraband.
The station was huge and cold. I had been here before. Mexico City, with its twelve million people and ingenious beggars (sword swallowers and fire-eaters perform their tricks on the pavement near bus-stops, to get pesos from people in line) is only in parts an attractive place. And the three-quarters of a million people who live in Netzahualcóyotl near the airport have the dubious distinction of inhabiting what has been called 'the largest slum in the western hemisphere'. I had no strong desire to see Mexico City again. It is, supremely, a place for getting lost in, a smog-plagued metropolis of mammoth proportions, which is perhaps why the two most determined exiles of this century, Leon Trotsky and B. Traven, chose Mexico City as their refuge.
If I am to arrive in a city, I prefer it to be in the early morning, with the whole day ahead of me. So, without a further thought, I went to the ticket counter in the lobby, bought a sleeper ticket to Veracruz and boarded the train. It was cheaper than a hotel room and, anyway, people said that Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast, was much warmer.
4
EL JAROCHO TO VERACRUZ
Before I boarded the 'Jarocho' - the word means 'a boor; a rude person'; it is what the Veracruzians call themselves - I went to the restaurant in Buenavista Station and bought a box lunch. There wasn't time for me to eat before I left Mexico City, and there was no dining car on the Jarocho. But, even so, the box lunch was an error of judgement. I made a point not to repeat this mistake. The box was gaily decorated, and inside was one of those parody meals that are assembled by people who have a profound dedication of completeness and a total disregard for taste. Two ham sandwiches on stale bread, a semi-liquid egg, an unpeelable orange and a piece of mouldy cake. I made an incision in the orange with my Nuevo Laredo switchblade and used the juice to blunt my tequila. The rest I threw out of the window as soon as we left the station. I suppose that disgusting lunch was one of the penalties of my refusing to stay in Mexico City for longer than an hour. But I was no sightseer; I was glad to be on this sleeper to the coast. Travelling hungry was no fun, but tequila was a great appetite-killer. It also guaranteed solid slumber and lively dreams of fulfilment - its effect on me was more the wild-eyed numbness of a narcotic drug than the giddyness of alcohol - and when I awoke I would be in the middle of Veracruz.
With my feet up and my compartment filled with pipe smoke on that night express to Veracruz, leaving this foggy altitude for the humid heat and palm trees of the coast with two inches of orange-scented tequila in my glass, I felt supremely happy. The whistle shrieked, the sleeping car tipped on a bend and the curtains parted: darkness and a few glaring lights and a faint hint of danger which intensified the romance. I shot my switchblade open and carved a slice from the orange for my drink. I was on a secret mission (now the tequila was starting to take effect), travelling incognito as a simple English teacher to carry out a tricky piece of Mexican reconnaissance. This shiv in my hand was a lethal weapon and I was drunk enough to believe that if anyone was foolish enough to jump me I'd have his guts for garters. The train, the atmosphere, my destination, my mood: it was all fantasy - ridiculous and pleasurable. And when I finished my drink I slipped the knife into the pocket of my black leather jacket and crept into the corridor to sneak a look at the other passengers.
There was a figure lurking near my door: a moustached man with a suspicious-looking box.
He said: 'Want a chocolate cookie?'
And the spell was broken.
'No thanks.'
'Go ahead. I've got plenty.'
To be polite I took one of his chocolate cookies. He was tall and friendly and said his name was Pepe. He was from Veracruz. He said he could tell that I was an American, but quickly added that it was not a reflection on my Spanish but rather the way I looked. It was too bad I was only going to Veracruz now, he said, because the carnival had just ended. I had missed a very wonderful thing. Bands - very loud bands! Dancing - in the streets! Parades - very long ones! Music - drums, horns, marimbas! Costumes - people dressed as princes and clowns and conquistadors! Also church services and eating of wonderful food, and drinking of fantastic tequila, and friendship of all kinds.
His description removed any sense of regret I might have had about missing the Veracruz carnival. I was relieved that I would not have to endure the vulgar spectacle, which I was sure would have depressed and annoyed me, or in any case kept me awake.
But I said, 'What a shame I missed it.'
'You can come back next year.'
'Of course.'
'Want another chocolate cookie?'
'No thanks. I haven't eaten this one yet.' I wanted him to go away. I waited a moment, yawned and said, 'I am very married.'
He looked oddly at me.
'Very married? Interesting.' But the look of puzzlement did not leave his face.
'Aren't you married?'
'I am only eighteen.'
This confused me. I said, 'Married - isn't that what you are when you want to go to bed?'
'You mean tired.'
'That's it.' The Spanish words sounded similar to me: casado, cansado; married, tired.
Yet this double-talk did the trick. He obviously thought I was insane. He said good-night, put his box of cookies under his arm and took himself away. I saw no other people in the sleeping car.
'The journey from Veracruz [to Mexico City] is to my mind the finest in the world from the point of view of spectacular effect,' writes the diabolist Aleister Crowley in his Confessions. Go to Veracruz during the day, people told me. See the cane fields and the Orizaba volcano; see the peasants and the gardens. But Latin America is full of volcanoes and cane-fields and peasants; at times, it seems as if there is little else to see. It struck me as a better idea to arrive in Veracruz at dawn; the Jarocho Express was a comfortable train and I had heard that my next connection, to Tapachula and the Guatemala border, was in a sorry state. I would have an extra day in Veracruz to prepare for that. And I would be prepared. The Jarocho Express was one of those trains - rarer now than they used to be - which you board feeling exhausted and disembark from feeling like a million dollars. I happened to be drunk in this Mexico City suburb; but the train was moving slowly: I would be sober in the morning in Veracruz.
The compartment was hot and steamy when I awoke; the window was fogged, and when I rubbed it I saw that dawn here was a foamy yellow light and the thin drizzle on the sodden green of a marsh. The clouds were mud-coloured and low and ragged, like dead hanks of Spanish moss. We were approaching the Gulf Coast; there were tall palms on the horizon, silly umbrellas in the rain.
The silence was perfect. Not even the train made a sound. But it was my ears - they hurt badly, and the feeling was that of having landed in a poorly pressurized plane. We had been at a very high altitude and, asleep, I had not been able to compensate by swallowing. Now at sea-level my eardrums, deaf to any chirp this morning, burned with pain.
Anxious to be away from the dirty window and the stuffy compartment, and believing that some deep breathing would be good for my ears, I went to the rear of the sleeping car. The vestibule window was open. I swallowed air and watched the slums go by. My ears cleared: now I could hear the drumroll of the train.
'Look at those people,' said the conductor.
There were shacks by the line, and wet chickens and sombre children. I wondered what the conductor would say next.
'They have the right idea. Look at them - that's the life!'
'What life?' All I saw were shacks and chickens and men whose hat brims were streaming with rain.
'Very tranquil,' he said, nodding in condescension towards the hovels. Truly patronizing people usually adopt a very sage tone when considering their victims. This Mexican squinted wisely and said, 'Very tranquil. Not like Mexico City. It is too rapid there - everyone going this way and that way. They do not know what life is all about. But look how peaceful this is.'
I said, 'How would you like to live in that house?'
It was not a house. It was a shack of cardboard and rusty tin. Holes had been punched in the tin to make windows, and broken bricks held bits of plastic over the leaky roof. A dog sniffed at some garbage near the door, where a fat haggard woman in a torn red sweater watched us pass. We had a glimpse of even greater horror inside.
'Ah!' the conductor said, and looked crushed.
I was not supposed to have asked him that. He had expected me to agree with him - yes, how tranquil! This tiny shack - how idyllic! Most Mexican friendliness seemed to depend on to what extent you agreed with what they said. Disagreement, or simple argument, was taken as a sign of aggression. Was it insecurity, I wondered, or that same mistrust of subtlety that made every painting into a four-acre fresco and every comic book into a violent woman-hating pamphlet. My Spanish was not bad, but I found it hard to hold a conversation with any Mexican that was not pure joshing or else something completely straightforward. One hot afternoon I hailed a taxi just outside of Veracruz, but before I gave him my destination, the driver said, 'Want a whore?'
'I'm tired,' I said. 'I'm also married.'
'I understand,' said the driver.
'Besides, I'll bet they're not pretty.'
'No,' he said, 'not pretty at all. But they're young. That's something.'
I had arrived in Veracruz at seven in the morning, found a hotel in the pretty Plaza Constitución and gone for a walk. I had absolutely nothing to do: I did not know a soul in Veracruz, and the train to the Guatemalan border was not leaving for two days. Still, this did not seem a bad place. There are few tourist attractions in Veracruz; there is an old fort and, about two miles south, a beach. The guidebooks are circumspect about describing this fairly ugly city: one calls it 'exuberant', another 'picturesque'. It is a faded seaport, with slums and tacky modernity crowding the quaintly ruined buildings at its heart. Unlike any other Mexican city, it has pavement cafés, where forlorn children beg and marimba players complete the damage to your eardrums that was started on the descent from the heights of Orizaba. Mexicans treat stray children the way other people treat stray cats (Mexicans treat stray cats like vermin), taking them on their laps and buying them ice cream, all the while shouting to be heard over the noise of the marimbas.
Finding nothing in my plaza to divert me, I walked a mile to the Castle of San Juan de Ulua. Formerly an island - Cortes landed here during Holy Week in 1519 - the harbour has silted up so thoroughly it is now part of the mainland, with a connecting road and the greasy factories, the hovels and graffiti that Mexico appears to require of its urban areas. The Castle contains a permanent exhibit of Veracruz's past, a pictorial record of invasions, punitive missions and local military defeats. It was that most Mexican of enthusiasms - humiliation as history. If the engravings and old photographs showed how cynical and aggressive other countries - but mainly the United States - had been towards Mexico, the prominence of the exhibit in Veracruz invited the Mexican to a morning of wound-licking and self-contempt. Veracruz is known as 'the heroic city'. It is a poignant description: in Mexico a hero is nearly always a corpse.
It had been raining in an inconsequential way all morning, but before I left the castle the clouds lifted and whitened and broke into separate cauliflowers. I found a sunny rampart of the fort and read the paper. The news of the Boston blizzard was still very bad, though here in sight of glittering water and listing palm trees - a fresh sea breeze carrying gulls' cries to me - I found it hard to conjure up a vision of a winter-darkened city or cars buried by snow or the physical pain of the bitter cold. Pain is the hardest feeling to remember: the memory is merciful. Another headline read, BAD END TO THE CARNIVAL and under it Ten Sex Maniacs Captured, and under that, But Another 22 On The Loose. The story was that a gang of 32 sex maniacs had spent Shrove-tide dragging women ('mothers and their daughters') into bushes and raping them. 'Many women were attacked by the crazies in their hotel rooms.' The gang called themselves 'The Tubes'. The significance of this name escaped me - I wondered whether it had some arch sexual resonance. The ten who had been captured appeared in a colour photograph. They were fairly ordinary-looking youths, sheepishly hunched in baggy sweatshirts and blue-jeans, and might well have been the losing side in a fraternity tug-of-war - a suggestion that was as strong in their glum, smirking faces as in their sweatshirts, which were printed with the names of American colleges, University of Iowa, Texas State, Amherst College. They were called 'maniacs' in a dozen places on the page, though none had been convicted. Their full names were given, and after each name - it is customary in Mexican crime reporting - an alias: 'The Chinaman', 'The King', 'The Warbler', 'The Pole', 'The Brave One', 'The Horse', 'The Lion', 'The Magician', and so forth. Stylishness was important to the Mexican male, but a Tube called the Warbler, wearing a college sweatshirt to rape women on a solemn Christian holiday in Veracruz, seemed to me a curious mixture of styles.
Later that day I saw something equally bizarre. I passed a church where there were eight new pick-up trucks being blessed by a priest, with a bucket of holy water, who was attended by four acolytes with candles and crosses. In itself, this was not strange - houses are blessed in Boston, and every year the fishing-fleet is blessed in Gloucester. But what I found odd was that after the priest sprinkled holy water on the doors, the wheels, the rear flap and the hood, the owner unfastened the hood and the priest ducked under it to douse the engine with holy water, as if the Almighty was incapable of penetrating the bodywork of the vehicle. Perhaps they regarded God as just another unreliable foreigner, and extended their mistrust to Him, as they did to all other gringos. Certainly Jesus was a gringo: the proof was on every pious postcard.
To flatter myself that I had something important to do in Veracruz I made a list of provisions that I intended to buy for my trip to Guatemala. Then I remembered I had no ticket. I went immediately to the railway station.
'I cannot sell you a ticket today,' said the man at the window.
'When can I buy one?'
'When are you leaving?'
'Thursday.'
'Fine. I can sell you one Thursday.'
'Why can't I buy one today?'
'It is not done.'
'What if there are no seats on Thursday?'
He laughed. 'On that train there are always seats.'
That was the day I met the taxi driver who said he had a whore for me who was 'not pretty at all'. I said I was not interested, but what else was there to do in Veracruz? He said I should go to the Castle. I said I had been to the Castle. Go for a walk around the city, he said: lovely churches, good restaurants, bars full of prostitutes. I shook my head. 'Too bad you were not here a few days ago,' he said. 'The carnival was fantastic.'
'Maybe I'll go swimming,' I said.
'Good idea,' he said. 'We have the best beach in the world.'
It is called Mocambo; I paid it a visit the next morning. The beach itself was clean and uncluttered, the water chromatic with oil-slick. There were about fifty people on the mile of sand, but no one was swimming. This was a caution to me. The beach was flanked by a row of identical restaurants. I had fish soup and was joined by a man whom I took to be a friendly soul until he said that for two dollars he would snap my picture.
I said,'I'll give you fifty cents.'
He took my picture.
He said, 'You like Veracruz food?'
'This soup has a fish-head in it.'
'We always eat fish-heads.'
'I haven't eaten a fish-head since I was in Africa.'
He frowned, insulted by the comparison, and went to another table.
I rented a beach chair and watched children throwing sand and wished that I was on my way south. It was a fraudulent pleasure, idling on this empty beach. I hated to think that I was killing time, but like the De Vries character I had always admired, I was doing it in self-defence. A bus drew up to the beach and forty people got out. Their faces had a strong Indian cast. The men wore the clothes of farm workers, the women long skirts and shawls. They became two groups: men and boys, women and infants; and they gathered in the shade of two trees. The men stood, the women sat. They watched the surf and whispered. They kept their clothes on, they did not remove their boots. They were unused to the beach and seemed very shy - they had probably come a great distance for this outing. They posed in embarrassment for the photographer, and hours later when I left they were still there, the men standing, the women sitting, staring at the oily waves with curiosity. If they were average rural Mexicans (and they seemed so), they were illiterate, lived in one-room huts, rarely ate meat or eggs, and earned less than $15 a week.
Before the shops closed that afternoon I did my provision-hunting. I bought a basket and filled it with small loaves of bread, a pound of cheese, some sliced ham, and - because a train without a dining car is usually a train on which drinks are unobtainable - bottles of beer, grapefruit juice and soda water. It was like stocking a hamper for a two-day picnic, and it was a sensible precaution. Mexican train travellers do not carry their own food; they urge you to do as they do - buy the local delicacies that are sold by women and children at every railway station. But local delicacies are always carried in a tin wash basin on the seller's head, and because it is out of the seller's sight it is impossible for the hawker yelling, 'Tasty chicken!', to see the flies that have collected on it. Typically, the Mexican food seller is a woman on a railway platform with a basin of flies on her head.
I had planned to get to bed early in order to be up at dawn to buy my ticket to Tapachula. It was when I switched the light off that I heard the music; darkness gave the sounds clarity, and it was too vibrant to be coming from a radio. It was a strong, full-throated brass band:
Land of Hope and Glory,
Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee,
who are born of thee?
'Pomp and Circumstance'? In Veracruz? At eleven o'clock at night?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.
I dressed and went downstairs.
In the center of the Plaza, near the four fountains, was the Mexican Navy Band, in white uniforms, giving Elgar the full treatment. Lights twinkled in the boughs of the laburnum trees, and there were floodlights, too - pink ones - playing on the balconies and the palms. A sizable crowd had gathered to listen - children played near the fountain, people walked their dogs, lovers held hands. The night was cool and balmy, the crowd good-humoured and attentive. I think it was one of the prettiest sights I have ever seen; the Mexicans had the handsome thoughtful look, the serenity that comes of listening closely to lovely music. It was late, a soft wind moved through the trees, and the tropical harshness that had seemed to me constant in Veracruz was gone; these were gentle people, this was an attractive place.
The song ended. There was clapping. The band began playing 'The Washington Post March', and I strolled around the perimeter of the plaza. There was a slight hazard in this. Because the carnival had just ended, Veracruz was full of idle prostitutes, and as I strolled I realized that most of them had come here to the plaza to listen to the band - in fact, the greater part of the audience was composed of dark-eyed girls in slit skirts and low-cut dresses who, as I passed them, called out, 'Let's go to my house', or fell into step with me and murmured, 'Fuck?' This struck me as comic and rather pleasant - the military dignity of the march music, the pink light on the lush trees and balconies of the plaza, and the whispered invitations of those willing girls.
Now the band was playing Weber. I decided to sit on a bench and give it my full attention; I took an empty seat next to a couple who appeared to be chatting. They were both speaking at once. The woman was blonde and was telling the man in English to go away; the man was offering her a drink and a good time in Spanish. She was insistent, he was conciliatory - he was also much younger than she. I listened with great interest, stroked my moustache and hoped I was not noticed. The woman was saying, 'My husband - understand? - my husband's meeting me here in five minutes.'
In Spanish the man said, 'I know a beautiful place. It is right near here.'
The woman turned to me. 'Do you speak English?'
I said I did.
'How do you tell these people to go away?'
I turned to the man. Now, facing him, I could see that he was no more than twenty-five. 'The lady wants you to go away.'
He shrugged, and then he leered at me. He did not speak, but his expression said, 'You win.' And he went. Two girls hurried after him.
The lady said, 'I had to hit one over the head this morning with my umbrella. He wouldn't go away.'
She was in her late forties, and was attractive in a brittle meretricious way - she wore heavy make-up, eye shadow, and thick Mexican jewellery of silver and turquoise. Her hair was platinum, with hues of pink and green - perhaps it was the plaza light. Her suit was white, her handbag was white, her shoes were white. One could hardly blame the Mexican for making an attempt on her, since she bore such a close resemblance to the stereotype of the American woman who occurs so frequently in Tennessee Williams' plays and Mexican photo-comics - the vacationer with a tormented libido and a drinking problem and a symbolic name who comes to Mexico in search of a lover.
Her name was Nicky. She had been in Veracruz for nine days, and when I expressed surprise at this she said, 'I may be here a month or - who knows? - maybe for a lot longer.'
'You must like it here,' I said.
'I do.' She peered at me. 'What are you doing here?'
'Growing a moustache.'
She did not laugh. She said, 'I'm looking for a friend.'
I almost stood up and walked away. It was the way she said it.
'He's very sick. He needs help.' Her voice hinted at desperation, her face was fixed. 'Only I can't find him. I put him on the plane at Mazatlan. I gave him money, some new clothes, a ticket. He'd never been on a plane before. I don't know where he is. Do you read the papers?'
'All the time.'
'Have you seen this?'
She showed me the local newspaper. It was folded so that a wide column showed, and under Personal Notices there was a black-framed box with the headline in Spanish URGENT TO LOCATE. There was a snapshot with a caption. The snapshot was one of those over-bright pictures that are taken of startled people in nightclubs by pestering men who say 'Peecha, peecha!' In this picture, Nicky in huge sunglasses and an evening gown - radiantly tanned and fuller faced - sat at a table (flowers, wineglasses) with a thin, moustached man. He looked a bit scared and a bit sly, and yet his arm around her suggested bravado.
I read the message: Señora Nicky - wishes urgently to get in touch with her husband Señor José - , who has been living in Mazatlan. It is believed that he is now in Veracruz. Anyone who recognizes him from this picture should immediately contact - There followed detailed instructions forgetting in touch with Nicky, and three telephone numbers.
I said, 'Has anyone called you up?'
'No,' she said, and put the newspaper back into her handbag. 'Today was the first day it appeared. I'm going to run it all week.'
'It must be pretty expensive.'
'I've got enough money,' she said. 'He's very sick. He's dying of TB. He said he wanted to see his mother. I put him on the plane in Mazatlan and stayed there for a few days - I had given him the number of my hotel. But when he didn't call me I got worried, so I came here. His mother's here - this is where he was headed. But I can't find him.'
'Why not try his mother?'
'I can't find her either. See, he didn't know her address. He only knew that it was right near the bus station. He drew me a picture of the house. Well, I found something that looks like the house, but no one knew him there. He was going to get off the plane at Mexico City and take a bus from there - that way he'd be able to find his mother's house. It's kind of complicated.'
And kind of fishy, too, I thought, but instead of speaking I made a sympathetic noise.
'But it's serious. He's sick. He only weighs about a hundred pounds now, probably less. There's a hospital in Jalapa. They could help him. I'd pay.' She looked towards the bandstand. The band was playing a medley of songs from My Fair Lady. Nicky said, 'Actually, today I went to the office of death records to see if he had died. He hasn't died at least.'
'In Veracruz.'
'What do you mean?'
'He might have died in Mexico City.'
'He doesn't know anyone in Mexico City. He wouldn't have stayed there. He would have come straight here.'
But he had boarded the plane and vanished. In nine days of searching, Nicky had not been able to find a trace of him. Perhaps it was the effect of the Dashiell Hammett novel I had just read, but I found myself examining her situation with a detective's scepticism. Nothing could have been more melodramatic, or more like a Bogart film: near midnight in Veracruz, the band playing ironical love songs, the plaza crowded with friendly whores, the woman in the white suit describing the disappearance of her Mexican husband. It is possible that this sort of movie-fantasy, which is available to the solitary traveller, is one of the chief reasons for travel. She had cast herself in the role of leading lady in her search drama, and I gladly played my part. We were far from home: we could be anyone we wished. Travel offers a great occasion to the amateur actor.
And if I had not seen myself in this Bogart role, I would have commiserated with her and said what a shame it was that she could not find the man. Instead, I was detached: I wanted to know everything. I said, 'Does he know you're looking for him?'
'No, he doesn't know I'm here. He thinks I'm back in Denver. The way we left it, he was just going to go home and see his mother. He hasn't been home for eight years. See, that's what so confusing for him. He's been living in Mazatlan. He's a poor fisherman - he can barely read.'
'Interesting. You live in Denver, he lives in Mazatlan.'
'That's right.'
'And you're married to him?'
'No - what gave you that idea? We're not married. He's a friend.'
'It says in the paper he's your husband.'
'I didn't write that. I don't speak Spanish.'
'That's what it says. In Spanish. He's your husband.'
I was not Bogart any more. I was Montgomery Clift playing the psychiatrist in Suddenly Last Summer. Katharine Hepburn hands him the death certificate of Sebastian Venable; Sebastian has been eaten alive by small boys, and the mutilation is described on the certificate. It's in Spanish, she says, believing the horrible secret is safe. Montgomery Clift replies coldly, I read Spanish.
'That's a mistake,' said Nicky. 'He's not my husband. He's just a beautiful human being.'
She let this sink in. The band was playing a waltz.
She said, 'I met him a year ago when I was in Mazatlan. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown - my husband had left me. I didn't know which way to turn. I started walking along the beach. José saw me and got out of his boat. He put his hand out and touched me. He was smiling...' Her voice trailed off. She began again, 'He was very kind. It was what I needed. I was in a breakdown situation. He saved me.'
'What kind of boat?'
'A little boat - he's a poor fisherman,' she said. She squinted. 'He just put out his hand and touched me. Then I got to know him better. We went out to eat - to a restaurant. He had never had anything - he wasn't married - he didn't have a cent to his name. He had never had any good clothes, never eaten in a good restaurant, didn't know what to do. It was all new to him. He couldn't understand why I was giving so much to him. "You saved me," I said. He just smiled. I gave him money and for the next few weeks we had a wonderful time. Then he told me he had TB.'
'But he didn't speak English, right?'
'He could say a few words.'
'You believed him when he said he had TB?'
'He wasn't lying, if that's what you think. I saw his doctor. The doctor told me he needed treatment. So I swore I would help him, and that's why I went to Mazatlan a month ago. To help him. He was much thinner- he couldn't go fishing. I was really worried. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see his mother. I gave him money and things and put him on the plane, and when I didn't hear from him I came here myself.'
'It seems very generous of you. You could be out having a good e. Instead, you're searching Veracruz for this lost soul.'
'It's what God wants me to do,' she whispered.
'Yes?'
'And I'll find him, if God wants me to.'
'You're going to stick at it, eh?'
'We Sagittarians are awful determined - real adventurous types! What sign are you?'
'Aries.'
'Ambitious.'
'That's me.'
She said, 'Actually, I think God's testing me.'
'In what way?'
'This José business is nothing. I've just been through a very heavy divorce. And there's some other things.'
'About José. If he's illiterate, then his mother's probably illiterate. In that case, she won't see your ad in the paper. So why not have a poster made - a picture, some details - and you can put it up near the bus station and where his mother's house is supposed to be.'
'I think I'll try that.'
I gave her more suggestions: hire a private detective, broadcast messages on the radio. Then it occurred to me that José might have gone back to Mazatlan. If he had been sick or worried he would have done that, and if he had been trying to swindle her - as I suspected he had - he would certainly have done that eventually, when he ran out of money.
She agreed that he might have gone back, but not for the reasons I said. 'I'm staying here until I find him. But even if 1 find him tomorrow I'll stay a month. I like it here. This is a real nice town. Were you here for the carnival? No? It was a trip, I can tell you that. Everyone was down here in the plaza - '
Now the band was playing Rossini, the overture to The Barber of Seville.
' - drinking, dancing. Everyone was so friendly. I met so many people. I was partying every night. That's why I don't mind staying here and looking for José. And, um, I met a man.'
'Local feller?'
'Mexican. He gave me good vibrations, like you're giving me. You're positive - get posters made, radio broadcasts - that's what I need.'
'This new man you met - he might complicate things.'
She shook her head. 'He's good for me.'
'What if he finds out that you're looking for José? He might get annoyed.'
'He knows all about it. We discussed it. Besides,' she added after a moment, 'José is dying.'
The concert had ended. It was so late I had become ravenously hungry. I said that I was going to a restaurant, and Nicky said, 'Mind if I join you?' We had red snapper and she told me about her divorces. Her first husband had been violent, her second had been a bum. It was her word.
'A real bum?'
'A real one,' she said. 'He was so lazy - why, he worked for me, you know? While we were married. But he was so lazy I had to fire him.'
'When you divorced him?'
'No, long before that. I fired him, but I stayed married to him. That was about five years ago. After that, he just hung around the house. When I couldn't take any more of it I divorced him. Then, guess what? He goes to his lawyer and tries to get me to pay him maintenance money. I'm supposed to pay him!'
'What sort of business are you in?'
'I own slums,' she said. 'Fifty-seven of them - I mean, fifty-seven units. I used to own a hundred and twenty-eight units. But these fifty-seven are in eighteen different locations. God, it's a problem - people always want paint, things fixed, a new roof.'
I ceased to see her as a troubled libido languishing in Mexico. She owned property; she was here living on her slum rents. She said she didn't pay any taxes because of her 'depreciations' and that on paper she looked 'real good'. She said, 'God's been good to me.'
'Are you going to sell these slums of yours?'
'Probably. I'd like to live here. I'm a real Mexico freak.'
'And you'll make a profit when you sell them.'
'That's what it's all about.'
'Then why don't you let these people live rent-free? They're doing you a favour by keeping them in repair. God would love you for that. And you'll still make a profit.'
She said, 'That's silly.'
The bill came.
'I'll pay for myself,' she said.
'Save your money,' I said. 'José might turn up.'
She smiled at me. 'You're kind of an interesting guy.'
I had not said a single word about myself; she did not even know my name. Perhaps this reticence was interesting? But it wasn't reticence: she hadn't asked.
I said, 'Maybe I'll see you tomorrow.'
'I'm at the Diligencia.'
I was at the Diligencia, too. I decided not to tell her this. I said, 'I hope you find what you're looking for.'
The next day I rose early and hurried to the station to buy my ticket for Tapachula. It was a simple operation, and there was still time to return to the hotel for breakfast. As I was eating I saw Nicky pass through the lobby. She bought a newspaper. She looked around. I hid behind a pillar. When the coast was clear I made my way to the station. The sun was above the plaza. It was going to be a very hot day.
5
THE PASSENGER TRAIN TO TAPACHULA
I had been on the train for twelve hours. There was something wrong with this train; a whole day of travelling and we had gone only a hundred miles or so, mostly through swamps. The heat had made me nauseous, and the noise of the banging doors, the anvil clang of the coupling, had given me a headache. Now it was night, still noisy, but very cold. The coach was open - most of the eighty seats were occupied, nearly all the windows were broken, or jammed open. The bulbs on the ceiling were too dim to read by, too bright to allow me to sleep. The rest of the passengers slept, and one across the aisle was snoring loudly. The man behind me who, all day, had sighed and cursed and kicked the back of my seat in exasperation, had made a pillow of his fist and gone to sleep. The spiders and ants I had noticed during the day crawling in and out of the horsehair of the burst cushions had begun biting me. Or was it mosquitoes? My ankles itched and stung. It was just after nine o'clock. I held a copy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. I had given up trying to read it.
I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I bother: leaving order and friends for disorder and strangers. I'm homesick and feel punished for my selfishness in leaving. Precisely what Crusoe says on his island. Impossible to get comfortable in this seat. A jail atmosphere: the brown walls and dim light of the condemned cell. Noise, too: a factory din ~ our pile-driving sound hammered back at us through open windows from the close walls of jungle beside the track.
I stopped. Writing can make you very lonely.
I saw one thing today: a thin white heron standing in a swamp.
There was a half-inch left on the page.
These people are going home. They complain about the journey, but they will be home tomorrow. I am travelling to another train. I would rather. . .
Then I was asleep. The difference between sleep and waking on this train was that, awake, I swatted the mosquitoes. Asleep, though I was aware of being stung, I was helpless; I did not have the will to stop them.
The heron: I had seen it in the marshland near Piedras Negras; it had been tall and watchful, such a slender creature, so finely formed and so strange in that marshy salad. An hour later there was no moisture anywhere in sight: dusty trees rooted in dry ground, withered grass, limp burned leaves, and mud huts thatched with palm fronds, like those you see in the poorest parts of Africa. The train continued to stop, usually next to a cane field; there was seldom a station nearby, and I suspected that there was a fault in the engine. I could see groups of men prodding the locomotive and adjusting their straw hats. Then we would start again and move slowly for a few miles and stop.
At one stop - a station, not a breakdown - a boy got on and stood at the front of the coach. He sang in a very sweet voice. At first the passengers were embarrassed, but with the second and third songs, they applauded. The boy was encouraged. He sang a fourth. The whistle blew. He walked to the back of the coach, collecting money from the people. What impressed me as much as his voice was his age - he was about twenty, old enough to be a cane-cutter or a farm labourer (but farm labourers in Mexico work on average only 135 days a year). This singing seemed an unlikely occupation, but perhaps he only performed when the train passed through his village.
We came to Tierra Blanca. The descriptive name did not describe the place. Spanish names were apt only as ironies or simplifications; they seldom fit. The argument is usually stated differently, to demonstrate how dull, how literal-minded and unimaginative the Spanish explorer or cartographer was. Seeing a dark river, the witness quickly assigned a name: Rio Negro. It is a common name throughout Latin America; yet it never matched the colour of the water. And the four Rio Colorados I saw bore not the slightest hint of red. Piedra Negras was marshland, not black stones; I saw no stags at Venado Tuerto, no lizards at Lagartos. None of the Laguna Verdes was green; my one La Dorada looked leaden, and Progreso in Guatemala was backward, La Libertad in El Salvador a stronghold of repression in a country where salvation seemed in short supply. La Paz was not peaceful, nor was La Democracia democratic. This was not literalness - it was whimsy. Place names called attention to beauty, freedom, piety, or strong colours; but the places themselves, so prettily named, were something else. Was it wilful inaccuracy, or a lack of subtlety that made the map so glorious with fine attributes and praises? Latins found it hard to live with dull facts; the enchanting name, while not exactly making their town magical, at least took the curse off it. And there was always a chance that an evocative name might evoke something to make the plain town bearable.
I looked hard at Tierra Blanca. It was poor and brown. There were chickens strutting on the station platform, and men heaving bales, and children pointing at passengers gaping from the windows of the train. And food sellers (it was lunchtime) shrieking the name of the item they carried: pancakes, beans, fritters, corn on the cob, cupcakes, cheese sandwiches, fried chicken, bananas, oranges, pineapples, watermelons. I had my own food. I slit one of the small loaves and filled it with ham and cheese. Across the aisle, a large family travelling to Guatemala, eating the flyblown chicken they had just bought, stared at me.
'That is a big sandwich,' said the mother.
'We call this a submarine sandwich,' I said.
They continued to stare.
'Because of the shape,' I said. I held it up. 'Like a submarine.'
They squinted. They had never seen a submarine.
The mother said, 'Of course.'
In the next few hours the train stopped eight more times. It did not stop at stations. It slowed near cane fields or on marshland or in hot woods, and then the trumpeting engine went silent and it jerked to a halt; the passengers groaned and looked out the windows, and seeing no station they said, 'Nowhere' or 'I don't know'. And though they might have been talking happily while the train was moving, when it stopped they became laconic, and grunted and sighed. Usually, this hot silence was broken by a cry from outside the window: 'Bananas!'
No matter where we stopped, in a swamp or in apparently empty woods, a food-seller would materialize - a small girl in a torn dress - and yell, 'Bananas!' I had no fear, on this train to Tapachula, of ever going hungry.
Passing some cane fields at about two that afternoon, and marvelling how densely packed they were - practically impenetrable green stalks, like a wall of bamboo - I felt the train slowing down. I looked out of the window: more cane fields. The train stopped. The passengers grunted. I picked up Pudd'nhead Wilson and read it. An hour went by - a slow humid mid-afternoon hour, with a radio twanging in the next car. The banana-seller had come and gone. I made myself a sandwich, I drank a bottle of soda water. And I became aware that I might eat all my food and finish my book before we started moving again. This food, this book: it was all I had to keep me going.
The train started; I put my feet up and breathed a sigh of relief. The train went a hundred yards and stopped. Someone in the next car cried, 'Mother of God!'
We were on a long red bridge of steel girders, and beneath us was a river. I dug out my map and traced the railway line from Veracruz. I found Tierra Blanca, the swamps, a river: so this was the Rio Papaloa-Pan. The handbook said that the river basin drained by the Papaloa-pan was 'twice the size of the Netherlands' but that the nearby town contained 'little of note'. We remained on the bridge for another hour - an irritating hour, because we could not get out and walk around: there was no walkway on the bridge, and the river itself had a treacherous-looking current. I considered eating, but thought better of it. At this rate of speed we would not be in Tapachula for days. The passengers, trapped in the train which was itself trapped on the bridge, grew restive, and now the Guatemalan children in the large family hung out of the window and yelled, 'Let's go! Let's go!' They continued to yell this until sundown.
I wondered if I should continue reading. It was all that kept me sane during periods like this of utter boredom. But if I finished Pudd'nhead Wilson - a book I was enjoying - I would have nothing else to read. I paced up and down the long train and already it seemed as if I had been on it for more than a day. Soon, it moved, about two hundred yards, no more, then it stopped.
We were in the village of Papaloapan. 'Little of note' was a wild overstatement. There were two shops, some huts, some pigs, some pawpaw trees. The sun had dropped to the level of the windows and burned through the train.
There had been a Mexican sitting on a broken bench some distance from the tracks when the train drew in. The tree he had chosen to sit under was rather small, and I watched him closely to see what he would do when the sunlight reached him. For half an hour he did not stir, although two hogs tied to the tree were whining and snuffling at the ends of their tethers. He appeared not to see the hogs, he did not look at the train, he paid no attention to the sun. The sun slipped from the lower branches to his hat. The man remained motionless. The hogs squawked. The sun moved down, lighting the man's nose. The man did not move immediately - he shuffled his feet and winced, but very slowly, as if he were entering a new phase of slumber; and then with one finger he tilted his hat and put his nose in shadow. He was reposeful once again. But the sun was moving: the light found his face (and found the hogs - they tried to yank themselves out of it), the man poked his hat again with his finger. He had not regarded the train, he ignored the hogs, he was neither asleep nor awake, and the only significant change was that yellow disc of hat, now like the watchful face of a wilting sunflower following the sun, jammed vertically against his head.
While I studied this man, who was as good as a sundial, a dwarf climbed into the train. His eyes were level with mine, though I was sitting, and I could see how they protruded, how their sour grey colour was not penetrated by any pupil: he was blind. But he was chirping, pleading in a bantering way for money. His clothes were ripped and he was tied with twine like a bundle of rags - there were knots and loops of fraying string tightened all over his body. The passengers spoke to him as he collected coins; he limped through the car, chuckling and replying.
'Let's get this train moving,' they said.
The blind man said, 'I'm doing the best I can.'
'Where are we?' they said.
'Papaloapan,' said the blind dwarf. 'It's a nice town. Why don't you stay?'
'We don't want to stay here!' the passengers said.
The blind dwarf laughed and tapped his stick into the next car. I heard him say, 'Good evening-'
There were more people who boarded to beg - an old woman with an infant in her arms, two skinny children; and food-sellers - children with jugs of coffee, basins of fritters, women with bread and bony fish. Other children from Papaloapan ran in and out of the train, and men sauntered over from the shop nearby to chat with the passengers.
In the space of a few hours (now it was late afternoon, and men coming back from cutting in the cane fields stopped beside the train to see what was up), the stalled train ceased to be seen as something that roared through the riverbank village of Papaloapan. Villagers, who presumably had always watched at a distance, boarded and used the toilets and waved to their friends from the windows; and the chickens pecked and gabbled under the cars, as confidently as the passengers had drifted to the shop where they roosted swigging soft drinks. Now the train had become part of the town.
No one was sure what was wrong with our train. A wreck up ahead, one man said; another man told me our engine was broken. There was no panic. The ninety-degree heat all day had taken the starch out of everyone. Few people inquired; there was no panic - most had begun to feel at home here in Papaloapan. We were not due at Tapachula until the next day, and no one was quite sure how far we had come. (To kill time, I asked people how far we were from Veracruz; no one gave me the right answer: 100 miles.) In a country where delays are chronic, a delay like this was to be expected; and anyway, the village was friendly, the weather was warm, and each pair of seats had been turned into a nest of food wrappings and pillows and dozing children. The man behind me had stopped kicking my seat. He was completely calm. He said, 'I think we will have to spend the night here.'
The Guatemalan lady said to her children, 'I think he is right. Oh, well.'
Nothing seems longer than the unexpected delay. Nothing is harder to describe or more boring to read. 'An hour passed,' one writes, and there is no tedium in the phrase, no smell, no heat, no noise, none of the flies swarming unsteadily from the toilet door which, warped and without a handle, refused to shut. 'Another hour passed' - how hard to suggest the two radios, the whining hogs, the shrieks of children, the lumpy seat with the spiders hunching out of its horsehair. Heat itself seems to slow time. If the village had been any larger I think I would have packed my belongings and checked into the nearest hotel. But the village was small, and there would not be another train to Tapachula for three days.
I realized that I had only fifty pages more to read of Pudd'nhead Wilson. I decided to save it, to keep the best part for later, when my nerves might be stretched and I would need it. I resisted the impulse to go on with the story, and instead read the Introduction. This was a very disturbing experience, the serious phraseology of the essay contrasting with the approaching twilight, the noise and smells of this ramshackle Mexican village, the crowded train. One way to see how he establishes this as an irony is to compare him with Jane Austen in whose novels the social life is approved, and provides the basis for her own exacting moral values-
Yaaaaaaaa! A child across the aisle screamed. Her brother smiled and pinched her again. The Mexican in the shade scratched his head without moving his hat. The hogs grunted. The radio in the shop yelled and crackled. Two men by the door laughed out loud. 'Cold beer!' shouted a hawker.
'Bananas!'
'Ice cream!'
He pinched me!'
- In her work social values are not moral values as such; but her irony works to show how they can be, how a certain kind of full and tested-
A giggle and 'I did not!' and two pretty girls in green school uniforms strolled by the train, hugging their books. They had black hair and bright eyes and they were laughing.
- full and tested social awareness is also, finally, a realized moral awareness -
I shut the book. A quarrel had started at the end of the car - nothing serious: shouting, mulishness, arm-swinging. The toilet smell had grown much worse. We had been stationary for hours, but people had continued to shit down the tin pipe and there was a disgusting heap on the tracks under the car. It excited the flies: they were loud and fat and they swarmed in a cloud and tumbled through the windows which would not close. The beer seller came back, put his crate down and sat on it. He was hoarse from shouting. He asked me in a whisper if I wanted one. Although I had two of my own, I bought two more: it was, after all, Happy Hour, and it was going to be a long night.
There was an empty row of seats at the far end of the train. I stretched out to have my sundowner, puffed my pipe and allowed myself another chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Night was falling on Papaloapan. Dogs barked, the village voices had become murmurs, the radios still played, and in the train people talked more quietly in the darkness. There were crickets, as rapid as castanets - I had not heard crickets for ages; the sound was soothing. And the novel cheered me: what a superb book this was! I thought I had known the story, but all I had remembered was the fingerprinting business and the identical children and the crime. I had missed the ironies: it was a story about freedom and slavery, identity and disguise, and the tinctures of race were made into attributes. It was a savage masterpiece, with a cruelly grim jollity, more ingenious and pessimistic than anything I had ever read by Twain. It was patterned on a folktale: the switched infants, the slave child becoming master, the master's son a slave. But the implications of race made it a nightmare of masked injustices. It had begun as a farce about a pair of Siamese twins. Twain saw this as a defect, 'two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.' He decided to revamp the story: 'I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.' But the tragedy is so bitter, this seldom-read novel - one of the gloomiest comedies in American literature - is treated as the story of a country lawyer, a funny-looking figure who wins a case using fingerprints. His victory does not quite overshadow the fact that everyone else in the novel, even the worthiest character, is defeated. It gave me a lecture topic: How, by careful selection, we make our writers simple; American literature is an anthology of what is bearable.
Meanwhile, it had grown darker in Papaloapan. I looked up and saw a solitary engine approaching from the bridge. It passed by, and five minutes later there was a bump, a lurch, and a renewed activity on the tracks. Then a shrill whistle and the Guatemalan children crying, 'Let's go!' The lights had come on in the village, but they were unshaded and dazzling; soon, they were moving past the train and the villagers were watching us go, and some were waving tentatively as if they half-expected us to stop again. But we did not stop. A breeze purified the cars and out of the trees a dazzle of the village we had a glimpse of sky, of a sunset which, five hundred years ago, had been seen in this very place by an Aztec poet:
Our father, the Sun
Dressed in rich feathers, thrusts himself
Down into a vase of gems,
Decked with a turquoise necklace
Among many-coloured flowers
Which fall in perpetual rain.
The glimmer remained for some minutes, then the green jungle and swamp became a mass of shadows, and the darkness was complete. Four small lightbulbs - the rest were dead or missing - were not enough for me to read by. I put my book away and drank and looked out of the window.
There were few stops - some villages, some settlements that were less than villages. I saw doorways flickering in candlelight and hut interiors whitened by lanterns. At one doorway the highly erotic sight of a girl or woman, leaning against the jamb, canted forward, her legs apart, her arms upraised, and the light behind her showing the slimness of the body beneath her gauzy dress - this lovely shape in a lighted rectangle surrounded by the featureless Mexican night. It left me flustered and a bit anxious.
At one town, a boy leaned out of the train and called to a girl selling corn. He said, 'Where are we?'
The girl took the tray of corn from her head and stared at him. It was a difficult question.
The boy said, 'She doesn't know where we are!'
The girl looked at the laughing boy on the train. She knew where she was. But the boy had not asked that.
The boy roused his father, his brother, and he wagged his head at me. 'She doesn't know where we are!'
Loud enough for the girl with the tray to hear, I said, 'I know where we are.'
'Where?' asked the boy.
'On a train.'
They thought this was extremely funny. The boy repeated it and they laughed harder. In fact, we were at the town of Suelta, a congested place, the name of which meant 'loose'.
After this, unable to read or sleep, I scribbled some notes on the flyleaf of my book: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty ... I was homesick. Was there any point in this trip aside from the fact that I had been too restless to stay at my desk and endure another winter? I had left in fine spirits, but I was no explorer: this was supposed to be enjoyment, not a test of stamina or patience. I did not take any pleasure in suffering the torments of travel merely so that I could dine out on them. I had been curious about the process of rising in the morning at home, and catching the local train and staying on it as the commuters got off to go to work, and changing trains at the end of the line, and repeating this until there were no more trains and I was in Patagonia. More melancholy than the thought of Homesick: A Travel Book was the memory of something I had read about Jack Kerouac. At the age of fifty, with On the Road well behind him, he decided to hitch-hike across America again. He was fatter now, and felt defeated, but he was convinced he could repeat his cross-country epic. So he left New York, seeking California. His menacing features were ineradicable, and times had changed. The lugubrious man reached New Jersey; there he stood for hours in the rain, trying to thumb a ride until, at last, he gave up and took a bus home.
Without realizing that I had been asleep, I woke from the mosquitoes and the cold. I tucked my trousers into my socks (but these mosquitoes could sting through socks) and put on the heavy sweater and leather jacket I had plucked for the altitudes of the Andes. And curling up once more I slept like a log until dawn. I had not thought I was capable of such adjustment, and overcoming the misery of a dreadful night on the torn seat of a cold and stinking train gave me the lucid optimism and good humour that always accompanies such excursions. I felt virtuous and even knew that my virtue was laughable.
At six that morning, I blinked at my watch. The lights in the car had fused: it was pitch dark. Moments later, it was dawn. No bulb of sun, but a seepage of light that dissolved the darkness and rose on all sides bringing a bluer ozone-scented softness to a sky which became gigantic. With it was a warm buoyancy of air, and scale was restored to the landscape, and the car was sweetened with the odour of desert dew. I had never seen dawn break so swiftly, but I had never slept that way. The windows were open, there were no shades: it was like sleeping on a park bench.
Yonder were mountains: the sunlight revealed their tiny heads and wide shoulders as craggy and purple, with small black trees on their slopes as delicate as eyelashes. It was a mountain range erupting jag-gedly eastward; to the south were sparse dusty woods. The train stopped. This was emptiness. A girl appeared at the window: 'Coffee!' She poured me some in a paper cup and I sipped it as we resumed our journey along the lowland periphery ofthat escarpment.
This was the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest point in Mexico - so narrow, it was for a long time considered an ideal place to dig a coast-to-coast canal. And more convenient than Panama because it was so much nearer the United States. Tehuantepec - a hot, dismal-looking place - had had an interesting history. It had always been populated, and often dominated, by Indians. These Indians - the Zapotees - were a matrilineal people - the women owned land, fished, traded, farmed, and ran the local government; the men, with that look of silliness that comes of being bone-idle, lounged around. The stations that morning showed this tradition to be unchanged: enterprising women, empty-handed men. But one could easily underestimate their capacity for outrage: patience so often looks like defeat, or silence like conversion. One of the earliest Indian uprisings in Mexico took place here in 1680; these people rebelled and for the next eight years controlled most of the Isthmus. And when in later years great projects were conceived to make the Isthmus important the Indians did not cooperate- they simply stood aside and watched the Projects fail.
In his joyously energetic travel book, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Anthony Trollope wrote that this part of Mexico was 'the passage selected by Cortez, and pressed by him on the Spanish government . . . the line would be from the Gulf of Campechay, up the river Coatzacoalcoz, to Tehuantepec and the Pacific'. Trollope, who believed more southerly routes through Panama and Costa Rica (he travelled through both places) would be expensive and impractical, was writing in 1860. Ten years later, President Ulysses S. Grant (yes, of all people) sent the Tehuantepec Expedition here and charged them with exploring the possibilities of digging a canal. Altogether there were seven expeditions but, though no canal was built, the Isthmus was crossed by tens of thousands of travellers, first on mule back and stage coaches, and then by train. It was one of the better ways of reaching California from the eastern seaboard of the United States, and the Gold Rush of 1849 had vastly increased the traffic. With so many people tumbling back and forth across Tehuantepec (under, one assumes, the baleful or jeering eyes of the Indians), the profit in annexing the strip was obvious, and several times the American government urged the Mexicans to hand it over. Mexican tenacity could not match American rapaciousness and the Mexicans eventually conceded all of what are now regarded as Western states, but against the odds they refused to surrender Tehuantepec. In 1894, the railway was built across the Isthmus and did a roaring trade. One of the busiest railways the world has ever known, at the height of its operation there were sixty trains a day. It is an astonishing fact, because so little of that bustle and efficiency remains, such a tiny portion of the builders' and speculators' handiwork. There is less left of the great Tehuantepec National Railway than of the Mayan ruins of Uxmal or Palenque, and no sign in the shrivelled riverbeds or the dusty tracks that link the poor towns that this was once a great crossroads of the world. Yet some of the railway still stands. In 1913, the line was extended to join the so-called Pan American Railway at the Guatemalan frontier. But this was a hopeless effort. The next year the Panama Canal opened and bankrupted every railway, mule track, ferry crossing and stagecoach route in Central America. From that year, Tehuantepec began to die and not even the discovery of oil (long before, the Aztecs had found it in sticky lumps which had squeezed from the ground - they burned this magic stuff at religious ceremonies) managed to work a cure on the Isthmus or to bring it any degree of prosperity. Today it looks pathetic; it is rough country, and hot and infertile; the Indians, living an ordinary existence in a hand-to-mouth way, look embattled; the towns and villages are less than they were in the Aztec times. But Mexicans have learned how to derive comfort from the past - from actual events or the reassuring simplicity of myths and even among the cactus-covered hills and bumpy desert of Tehuantepec the backward-looking Mexican was greatly encouraged by the thought that it had once known glorious days.
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