The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

10 THE ATLANTIC RAILWAY: THE 12:00 TO LIMON

I was a bit surprised to find a Chinese man in a bar in San José, Costa Rica. The Chinese are not, typically, bar-flies. Once a year, if the occasion is special and they are in the company of some other men, they might, on a dare, drink a whole bottle of brandy. Then they turn red, say silly or abusive things very loudly, throw up and have to be carried home. Drinking is their mad fling at gaiety; but it is perverse — they take no pleasure in it. So what was this Chinese man doing here? We talked circumspectly at first, as strangers do, reaching agreement on trivialities before risking anything personal. And then he told me. Well, he said, he happened to own this bar. He also owned a restaurant and a hotel. He was a Costa Rican citizen. It had been a deliberate choice. He disliked every other country he had seen.

'Which ones?' I asked. We spoke in Spanish. He said his English was shaky; I told him my Cantonese was far from perfect.

'All the countries,' he said. 'I left China in 1954. I was a young man and I liked to travel. I looked at Mexico — I went all over. But I didn't like it. I went to Guatemala and all around — Nicaragua — that was very bad. Panama — I didn't like it. Even Honduras and El Salvador — those countries.'

'What about the United States?'

'I went all around it. Maybe it is a good country, but I didn't think So. I could not live there. I was still travelling, and I thought to myself, "What is the best country?" It was Costa Rica — I liked it here very much. So I stayed here.'

I had so far only seen San José, but I took his point. It seemed an exceptional city. If San Salvador and Guatemala City were hosed down, all the shacks cleared and the people rehoused in tidy bungalows, the buildings painted, the stray dogs collared and fed, the children given shoes, the refuse picked up in the parks, the soldiers pensioned off- there is no army in Costa Rica — and all the political prisoners released, those cities would, I think, begin to look a little like San José. In El Salvador I had chewed the end of my pipestem to pieces in frustration. In San José I was able to have a new pipestem fitted (and I bought a spare for Panama) — it was that sort of place. The weather was fine, the service efficient, the city orderly. And they had just had an election. In the rest of Central America an election could be a harrowing piece of criminality; in Costa Rica the election had been fair and something of a fiesta. 'You should have been here for the election,' a woman told me in San José, as if I had missed a party. Costa Ricans were proud of their decent government, their high literacy rate, their courtly manners. The only characteristic Costa Rica shares with her Central American neighbours is a common antipathy. You don't hear a good word about Guatemala or El Salvador; and Nicaragua and Panama — the countries Costa Rica is wedged between — are frankly loathed. Costa Rica is as smug as any of them, but has more reason to be so. They hate gringos in those places,' a shopkeeper said to me. He was really saying two things: that gringos are not hated in Costa Rica, and that Costa Ricans are honorary gringos. It is with reluctance that foreigners tell you why they think Costa Rica works so well. 'It's a white country,' they say with hesitation. 'I mean, it's all white people, isn't it?'

This — you only have to take the train to Limón to find out — is a falsehood. But I was enjoying myself in San José, so I delayed my train-trip to Limón.

The Costa Ricans I discovered were courteous and helpful. The foreigners were otherwise. You go to a stinking place like Cutuco and you think how exactly it matches the fly-blown setting of a Bogart movie; it has the heat and the seedy cinematic romance, the end-of-tether squalor and rather vicious-looking bars that you associate with whiskery gringos on dangerous missions. But there are no gringos in Cutuco and the danger is all in the drinking water. It is not the malarial jerk-town that the foreigner seeks, but the hospitable tropical city where, for all its boredom, it is possible to have a good meal, frequent a safe brothel, start a business or make a killing. Costa Rica is enjoying a boom; the prosperity is obvious in San José. San José is hardly a romantic place but, next to Panama, it has the highest concentration of foreigners in Central America. Some are small-time crooks and hustlers, others are grand-scale con-rnen. Robert Vesco claims he lives in the suburbs of San José because he likes the climate; but he is also alleged to have embezzled almost half a billion dollars from an investment company. (Vesco's house, with its high fence and burglar-proof TV cameras in the shrubbery, is one of San Jose's sights; it is pointed out to tourists on their way to the Irazu volcano.) Not all San Jose's foreigners are crooks. There are timber merchants and booksellers, pharmacists and ice-cream tycoons. And there are retired people from all over the United States who have bought condominium apartments and plots of land and who sit in the shade and thank God they are not in Saint Pete. The difference is that, unlike Florida, there aren't so many geriatrics in Costa Rica to remind them that they have come down to die.

'I think they'd be better off in Florida,' said Captain Ruggles. 'For one thing, they'd have a better standard of medical care. God knows what kind of cattywampus you'd have to start here to get a doctor to look at you.'

Andy Ruggles — the 'captain' was honorific: he was an airline pilot — was from Florida himself; he kept asking out loud what in the name of God he was doing in San José. We were in the bar of the Royal Dutch Hotel and Andy was resolutely making himself drunk. He could not drink on duty, he said. He could not drink at all if he was scheduled to fly. A good vacation for him, he said, was a binge in the company of a really stunning prostitute. 'But we have beer like this in Florida, and the girls are much better looking. Paul,' he said, 'I think I made a real bad mistake coming here. But I got a discount on the air-fare.'

We talked about religion: Andy was a Baptist. We talked about politics: in Andy's view, Nixon had been framed. We talked about race. In this respect, Andy was enlightened. He said there were five races in the world. A more narrow-minded man would have said two. The Indians in Central America were of course Mongolians. 'They came down through the Bering Straits, when there was land there. Take our Indians — they're Mongolian to the core.'

Conversations about race make me uneasy; the general direction of such talk is towards Auschwitz. I was glad when he said, 'How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Louieville or Lewisville?'

'Louieville,' I said.

'Wrong. It's Frankfort.' He guffawed. 'That's an old one!'

I asked him to give me the capital of Upper Volta. Andy did not know that Ouagadougou is the capital of Upper Volta. He countered with Nevada. I did not know that Carson City was its capital, and I missed Illinois too. Andy knew more capital cities than anyone I had ever met, and I prided myself on my knowledge of capitals. He missed New Hampshire (Concord) and Sri Lanka (Colombo), but that was all, apart from Upper Volta. He bought me three beers. I ended up buying six.

Andy was an even-tempered drunkard and he said that as he had in San José for three days he wanted to show me around. But a roan on his right had been listening to our conversation, and as Andy rose to leave, the man said in a strong Spanish accent, 'I think your airline is the worst one in the world. That's what I think. I'm on my way to Miami, but I'm not going to fly on your airline. It's the worst.'

Andy grinned at me. 'You always get one dissatisfied customer, don't you?'

The man said, 'It stinks. Really stinks.'

I thought Andy was going to hit him. But his smile returned to his reddened face and he said, 'Guess you had a bad flight. Little turbulence?' Andy fluttered his hand. 'Plane sort of going up and down, huh?'

'I have flown many times.'

'Correction,' said Andy. 'Two bad flights.'

'I would never fly with your airline again.'

'I'll mention that to the president next time I see him.'

'You can tell him something else for me- '

'Hold on a minute, sir,' said Andy very calmly. 'What I want to know is what's a Scotchman like you doing here?'

The Spaniard looked puzzled.

Andy turned his back on him and clawed his cuff from his wrist-watch. 'Time to eat.'

'I'm going to show you around town, boy. You're new in this here town. Gonna introduce you to the main features. If we meet any of my pals you just keep your mouth shut. I'm gonna say you're an Englishman, just in from London. Don't you say a word — they won't know the difference.'

We went to a bar called 'Our Club'. It was noisy and dark and in the shadows I could see furtive men canoodling with prostitutes.

'Set them up,' said Andy. 'This gentleman and I will have some beer. Any kind will do.' The girl behind the bar wore a low-cut dress. She wiped the bar with a rag. 'You look like an intelligent girl,' said Andy. 'Know who' — the girl walked away — 'aw, she ain't listening. Paul, know who's the greatest poet in the world? No, not Shakespeare. Can't guess? Rudyard Kipling.'

The girl brought us two bottles of beer.

Andy said, 'I've taken my fun where I've found it. Give the girl two dollars, Paul — you still owe me for Oregon. Salem, remember? And I've rogued and I've ranged in my time.'

He settled into his recitation of 'The Ladies'. He did not seem to see that four feet down the bar was a grossly fat man who, drinking alone and scooping peanuts from a bowl, had been watching us. The man rattled the peanuts in his hand, a crap-shooter's motion, before tossing them into his mouth; then his other hand went to his drink. He sipped and reached for more peanuts. He put his drink down, shook the peanuts and shot them into his mouth. His movements were ceaselessly gluttonous, but his eyes remained fixed on us.

Andy's voice was hoarse, almost gruff, but touched with melancholy.

Doll in a teacup she were-

But we lived on the square, like a true-married pair,

An' I learned about women from 'er.

'This used to be a great country,' said the fat man, munching peanuts.

I looked over at him. He was chuckling ruefully. His left hand found the peanut bowl. He had not looked down.

Andy was saying,

An' I took with a shiny she-devil,

The wife of a nigger at Mhow;

Taught me the gypsy folks' bolee

Kind of volcano she were….

'Hookers everywhere,' said the fat man. I estimated that he weighed three hundred pounds. His hair was pushed back. He had huge lard-white arms. 'You could hardly move for the hookers.'

Andy said,

For she knifed me one night 'cause I wished she was white

And I learned about women from 'er.

'Americans come down. They buy little businesses — taxi-companies, soft drinks, gas stations. Then they sit on their asses and count their money. The government wanted them, so they cleaned the place up, sent the hookers to Panama. Because of these people who comedown. Practically all of them are from New York. Mostly sheenies.'

Andy had not stopped reciting, but he finished quickly, saying, 'The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin. Did you say something, sir?'

'Sheenies,' said the fat man; his chewing was like a challenge.

'Hear that, Paul?' said Andy. He turned to the fat man. 'But you're here, ain't you?'

'I'm just passing through,' said the fat man. Drink, peanuts, drink, peanuts: he didn't stop.

'Sure,' said Andy, 'you bring your money down here. But someone else does it and you criticize.' So he had heard the fat man's complaint! He had been reciting 'The Ladies', but he had heard. Andy's tone was judicious. He said, 'Well, sir, you're entitled to your opinion. I am not going to dispute what you say. But I'm entitled to my opinion, too, and I say Robert W. Service is the second greatest.'

Andy began to recite The Cremation of Sam McGee'. He faltered, cursed, then recovered and recited in its entirety a Robert Service poem called 'My Madonna'.

I haled me a woman from the street,

Shameless, but, oh, so fair!

For several minutes, the fat man was silenced, but when Andy finished he piped up again.

'Not only sheenies,' he said. 'Anyone with a few bucks. They've ruined the place. I'll tell you one thing — Carazo just got elected, and he's going to kick them all out. They'll all be back in New York, where they belong. The trouble is, the hookers won't come back.' His hand went to the bowl and scrabbled. Now he looked down. The bowl was empty. He said again, 'The hookers won't come back.'

Andy said, 'Where are you from, sir?'

'Texas.'

'I knew it. Know how I knew it? Cause I could tell you were interested in poetry, Tex. Yes, I did. Now, listen, I know you're not a redneck — '

'That's the beer talking,' said the fat man. His hand, without peanuts, foraged on the bar, a large greedy lump of fingers looking for food.

' — but I wonder if you could do me a favour?'

'Yeah?'

'Just an application,' said Andy. He was perched on his bar-stool. His voice was matter-of-fact, but he sipped between phrases and broke up his sentences. 'I wonder if you could get me, um,' he sipped his beer, 'an application to, um,' he sipped again, 'join the, um,' now he sipped and smacked his lips, 'Ku Klux Klan.'

The fat man hoicked phlegm and spat on the floor.

Andy said, 'Could you do that little thing for me?'

'You can wash the sheets,' snarled the fat man.

'I knew he had a sense of humour,' said Andy. That Tex is a real fun guy, and I tell you, I'd like to sit here all night just swapping jokes with him. But, Paul, I think I've had enough beer.'

Andy climbed off his bar-stool and trying to stand started to topple. He balanced himself against the bar, blew out his cheeks and said, 'Yep, if you can't stand up you've had enough. Now tell me, what's the name of that hotel I'm in?'

After Andy had gone, the fat man said, 'He's lucky I'm in a good mood. I could snap his arms off.'

The fat man's name was Dibbs. He had been a policeman in Texas, but he had quit, and he hinted that his reason for quitting was that policemen were not allowed to be violent enough. Dibbs? Well, two or three times he had wanted to blow people's brains out; but you weren't supposed to do that sort of thing. He could have done it easily and called it resisting arrest. And he had been taunted by punks he was not allowed to shoot. He became a construction worker, operating a bulldozer, and then he had quit because everybody else was collecting social security money, so why not him? Now he was a personal bodyguard ('to a sheeny') and a courier.

'What exactly does a courier do?' I asked him.

'They carry things. Me, I carry money.'

In the past few weeks he had been to Mexico, Panama and Honduras. He had carried fifty thousand dollars' worth of pesos to Montreal, and eighty thousand Canadian dollars to Honduras and Panama. He worked for a certain man, he said. When I asked why these large amounts of currency were being shunted back and forth across national frontiers, he laughed. But he did say how the money was carried — in a suitcase.

'A big suitcase.'

He said, 'You'd be surprised how much money you can get into a little suitcase. It's easy. No country checks your baggage when you leave. And customs people in the States and Canada don't care if they open a suitcase and find it filled with pesos. Sometimes they don't even open it. But when they do, they shit. They've never seen so much money in their life.'

It was clear to me why Dibbs had been hired for this job. He was strong; he was as big as a house; he was fairly stupid and completely loyal. He would not go into detail about his employer or the reason for transporting the money, and he said at one point, 'Maybe my name's Dibbs and maybe it ain't.' He had a fantasy of self-importance; carrying these sums of money fed his fantasy. He was proud of the fact that no one had ever succeeded in mugging him. 'Guess why?'

I said I couldn't guess.

'Because I'm an alcoholic,' he said. He picked up his glass. 'See that? It's a Coke. If I drink anything stronger, I'm finished. So I don't drink. Can't drink. Drunks get mugged. You — you'll probably get mugged. You've been drinking beer all night. I could carry fifty grand through the worst part of Panama City and nothing would happen to me.'

'You'd be sober.'

'Guess why else?'

'Can't guess.'

'Because I know karate. I could snap your arms off.' Dibbs leaned forward. He looked as though he wanted to snap my arms off. He said, 'Also, I'm not stupid. People who get mugged ask for it. They're stupid. They go to the wrong places. They get drunk. They don't know karate.'

Also, I thought, they weigh less than three hundred pounds.

Dibbs struck me as being a very sinister character, and without Andy Ruggles around to distract Dibbs's attention I felt rather defenceless. Dibbs had one passion: hookers. He liked to take them two or three at a time. 'I just lie there- they do all the work.' He boasted that he never paid them. They liked him; he walked into a brothel and they were all over him, clamouring, fighting to go to bed with this mountain of meat. He didn't know why this was so. 'Maybe it's because I'm so handsome!'

He wanted to take me to what he said was the only good brothel in San José. It was too late, I said, nearly midnight. He said midnight was the best time — the hookers were just waking up. 'How about tomorrow?' I said, knowing that tomorrow I would be in Limón. 'You're a chicken,' he said, and I could hear him laughing as I descended the stairs to the street.

There are two railways in Costa Rica, each with its own terminal in San José. Their routes dramatize Costa Rica's indifference to her neighbours: they go to the coasts, not to any frontier. The Pacific Railway travels down to Puntarenas on the Gulf of Nicoya; The Atlantic up to Puerto Limón. The Atlantic station is the older of the two, and part of its line has been in operation for almost a hundred years. Outside that station there is a steam locomotive mounted on blocks for travellers to admire. In El Salvador such an engine would be puffing and blowing up the track to Santa Ana; in Guatemala it would have been melted down and made into anti-personnel bombs for the White Hand.

A Limón train leaves the Atlantic station every day at noon. It is not a great train, but by Central American standards it is the Brighton Belle. There are five passenger coaches, two classes, no freight cars. I had been eager to take this train, for the route has the reputation of being one of the most beautiful in the world, from the temperate capital in the mountains, through the deep valleys on the north-east, to the tropical coast which, because of its richly lush jungle, Columbus named Costa Rica when he touched there on his fourth voyage in 1502. He believed that he had arrived at the green splendour of Asia. (Columbus tacked up and down the coast and was ill for four months in Panama; cruelly, no one told him that there was another vast ocean on the other side of the mountains — the local Indians were deaf to his appeal for this information.)

The most scenic of Central American routes; but I had another good reason for wanting to take this train out of San José. Since arriving in Costa Rica I had spent much of my time in the company of hard-drinking American refugees — Andy Ruggles and the diabolical Dibbs were but two. I was glad of their company; El Salvador hadn't been much fun. But now I was ready to set off alone. Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with Oh, look, it's raining and You see a lot of trees here. Travelling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican buttercups, tend to say things like Where is the rest of your team?). I think of evening in the hotel room in the strange eity; my diary has been brought up to date; I hanker for company: what to do? I don't know anyone here, so I go out and walk and discover the three streets of the town and rather envy the strolling couples and the people with children. The museums and churches are closed, and towards midnight the streets are empty. Don't carry anything valuable, I was warned; it'll just get stolen. If I am mugged I will have to apologize in my politest Spanish: I am sorry, sir, but I have nothing valuable on my person. Is there a surer way of enraging a thief and driving him to violence? Walking these dark streets is dangerous, but the bars are open. Ruggles and Dibbs await. They take the curse off my boredom, but I have a nagging suspicion that if I had stayed home and lingered in downtown Boston until midnight I would have met Ruggles and Dibbs in the Two O'Clock Lounge ('2 °Completely Nude College Girls!!). I did not have to take the train to Costa Rica for that.

It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive impressions. Later, these impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. Have a nice time, people said to me at my send-off at South Station. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be mine on that train to Limón.

I found a corner seat by a window and watched the houses get smaller as we approached the outskirts of San José. They got smaller but, unlike the houses in the rest of the suburbs in Central America, they did not get dingier and more tumbledown on the periphery of the city. The campaign flags were still flying, and election slogans and posters were stuck to the walls of some of them. They were ranch houses, bungalows, square tin-roofed houses; houses of clapboard and concrete. They were pink and green and lemon-yellow in the small settlements, and in the smart outer suburbs they were red-brick and white and had rolling lawns. And then, without passing a dump or a slum, or the dirty river with its grey froth of soapsuds that was the boundary of every other town I had seen so far, we sped into the countryside, past banana groves and fields of coffee. These were shady plantations, with wooded green hills surrounding them. It was sunny and cool on this day in late February, and there by the tracks was a Costa Rican beekeeper, like Sherlock Holmes in retirement, just as hawk-nosed and skinny; he looked up from his swarming hives and grinned at the train.

Even the poorest, the smallest house was neatly painted, the stairs swept, and starched curtains flapped through windows. In the yards were the piles of firewood, the vegetable garden, the borders of flowers. They were proud little houses, and the pride gave them dignity. There was a completeness to this, a certain formality, and it was reflected in the way the train passengers were dressed, the girls in sun-hats, the ladies in shawls, the men in fedoras.

More than half the passengers on the train were black. I found this odd: I could not remember having seen any blacks in San José. Their baskets and shopping bags marked them out as Costa Ricans, not tourists, and for the early part of the trip they chatted with the whites on the train. They spoke in Spanish, getting acquainted, laughing and joking. I hope I've got enough food, said a black lady in a sunbonnet. My children are always eating.

Then I heard, 'Take yo haid out de winda!'

It was the same woman, now yelling in English. One of her small sons, in a blue jersey, was hanging out of the window. But his head was so far out he could not hear her.

'Tree gonna lop it off!'

Now he heard. He turned his head to her, but did not withdraw it.

'You kyant do dat!' She punched his shoulder. The boy sat back in his seat and giggled at his sister.

'I have to watch them all the time,' said the black woman in Spanish. Her English was sing-song, her Spanish a stutter.

We passed through blobs of sunlight in a pretty, shady wood. It was unusual to travel in the shade, through woods which overhung the track. Normally there was heat on either side of the track and sun beating through the windows. But here the sunlight speckled the glass and flashed in the train, and the trees were so dense it was impossible to see beyond the pickets of slender trunks and the cracks of light. We were among mountains. A space between the trees opened like a gate and, far-off, pine groves grew darkly on the hills and below them in a ditch of shade there was a dairy and a saw-mill and a village of timber houses and a wood-lot. A river ran through it, sparkling just before it tumbled into the shady valley, and the place looked to me like a town in Vermont I had seen as a child, perhaps Bellows Falls or White River Junction. The illusion of Vermontness persisted even though in this village I saw a row of royal palms.

We came to Cartago. This was a market town. Here, in 1886, the railway line was begun by an American speculator, Minor Keith. The silver commemorative shovel, with an appropriate inscription, is on display in the National Museum in San José, along with pre-Columbian pottery and masks and gold jewellery and portraits of moustached Costa Rican patriots and presidents (their walking sticks, each one as individual as their moustaches, are also on display). In that museum is a painting of Cartago depicting the result of the great earthquake of 1910. It is an interesting picture, for right through the middle of town, in the foreground of the painting, are the railway tracks, a whole section of them covered by masonry which had fallen from a convent wall. That earthquake flattened Cartago, but the line was repaired; nothing else of old Cartago remains.

The seat next to me had been empty. Just as we left Cartago a young man took it and asked me how far I was going. He said he was going to Siquirres. Limón, he said, was interesting, but I might find it crowded. It would be hours before we'd reach Siquirres; he hoped I would teach him some English. He had tried to learn it, but found it very difficult. His name was Luis Alvarado, he said. I asked him if we could skip the English lesson.

'It is just that you look like a teacher. I think you could help me,' he said in Spanish. 'How do you like Costa Rica?'

I told him that I thought it was a beautiful country.

'Why do you think so?'

The mountains, I said.

'They are not so beautiful as those in Oregon. Or so high.'

The river, I said. That was a lovely river in the valley.

'The rivers in Oregon are much more beautiful.'

I told him I thought the people in Costa Rica were extremely pleasant.

'The people in Oregon always smile. They are more friendly than Costa Ricans.'

It was a green country, I said.

'Have you been to Oregon?'

'No,' I said. 'Have you?'

He had. It was his single visit outside Costa Rica, a summer in Oregon, trying to learn English. It was a wonderful visit, but the English lessons were a failure. He had not been to Nicaragua or Panama: they were loathsome places. He said that instead of my going on to Panama I should return to the States and visit Oregon.

The river was beneath us; the landscape had opened and become simple and terrifying, two parallel mountain ranges and between them, so deep it made me anxious, a gorge. There were fountains of mist in the gorge, the flung spray of the foaming river. This was the Rio Reventazón. It is a swift river and its strength has pulled down the sides of these mountains and made a canyon, filled with the rubble of its destruction, and this — the fallen walls of boulders, the river heaving over rocks, the turbulent suds of rapids — lay four hundred feet below the train. The low coffee bushes could not obscure the view. I saw how the gorge had been levelled by the rushing whiteness on the valley floor. The valley of the Reventazón is forty miles long. The mountains are in places so precipitous the train has to descend through tunnels (screams, exalted yells in the car, and the odour of damp walls) to a cliffside that brings it so near the river the spray hits the windows. Then up again, along a cut to switchbacks and bridges.

The bridges were always approached at an angle, so that they were seen whole, from the side; they appeared as a framework of slender girders, or sometimes wooden beams, tensed across two cliffs. It seemed as if this was the view of a bridge on another track, as if we were going to bypass it. But always the train turned sharply, and became noisy as it started onto it; and the torrent beneath it looked peculiarly menacing — a staircase of cataracts frothing into the greater torrent yonder. I wondered how it was that Costa Rica could be so cool and piney, and it was not just that it was so different from its near neighbours, but that it was cool and piney like Vermont, and freshly watered — here a sawmill and there a dairy, the cows cropping grass on the hillsides; and horses, oblivious to the train, tethered to fences. Later, I was to meet an American horse-dealer in Costa Rica. He said, 'My horses would bolt and hang themselves if I tied them that near the tracks.'

It is, for the first third of the trip, a mountain railway, the train travelling along a narrow shelf that has been notched into the mountainside. How narrow? Well, at one point a cow had strayed onto the line. To the left was the sheer mountain wall, to the right the drop into the river; the cow was baffled and for almost a mile she lolloped ahead of the engine, which had slowed so as not to kill her. At times she stopped, put her nose against the mountainside, sniffed at the precipice, then started away again, rocking back and forth, stifflegged, the way cows run. The track was too narrow to give her space to allow us to pass, so she ran ahead rocking, her tail swinging, for almost a mile on this high shelf.

Nearer the river the coffee bushes were thick, and there was cocoa, too, the wide leaves, the plump, bobbin-like pods. It was easier to make notes here, as the train moved slowly on the flat tracks by the riverbed. But my notes were not extensive. Boulders, I wrote, Valley — River — Spray — Frail bridge — Trapped cow- Cocoa.

'You Americans like to travel alone.' It was Luis.

I said, 'I hate to travel alone. It is depressing. I miss my wife and children. But if I am alone I see more clearly.'

'You never talk to each other, you Americans.'

'You mean in Oregon?'

'Here, when you travel.'

'We talk all the time! Who says Americans don't talk to each other?'

'There is an American,' said Luis. 'You see him? Why don't you talk to him?'

The man wore a blue cap, a Barney Oldfield cap with a peak; his shirt was bright green, his trousers cut like a sailor's. Although he was seated, the strap of his bag was over his shoulder and he clutched the bag tightly, as if it had something valuable in it. He was sunburned and I guessed he was in his sixties — the hair on his arms was white. He was seated near the blacks, who were talking in Spanish and English; but he did not speak to anyone.

I said, 'I did not know he was an American.'

Luis found this funny.

'You did not know he was an American?'

I suppose it was his cap, which Luis took to be foolishly youthful. Costa Ricans wore felt hats and fedoras. This man's cap was tilted at a rakish angle, and it did not quite go with his craggy face.

'Talk to him,' said Luis.

'No, thank you.'

Talk to this old man, just because Luis wanted to hear us speak English? I had met enough Americans in San José. It was the reason I had left the city, to seek out and assess the reputedly uninhabited Atlantic coast, perhaps wind up swapping stories with a grizzled black in a Limón bar, tales of mule-skinning and piracy on the Mosquito Coast.

'Go ahead.'

'You talk to him,' I said. 'He might teach you some English.'

It was, mainly, my other fear: the distortion of companionship. I did not want to see things with anyone else's eyes. I knew this experience. If they point out something you have seen already you realize that your own perception was rather obvious; if they indicate something you missed you feel cheated, and it is a greater cheat to offer it later as your own. In both cases, it is annoying. Oh, look, it's raining is as bad as Costa Ricans have their own unit of length — the vara.

I wanted to concentrate my whole attention on what was outside the window; I wanted to remember this valley, this river, these mountains, the breeze freshening the train, the fragrance of the wildflowers that grew next to the track. Pretty flowers, I wrote.

Smiling nervously, Luis got up. He went up the aisle and mumbled to the old man. The old man did not understand. Luis tried again. You bastard, I thought. Now the old man turned and smiled at me. He rose. Luis took the old man's seat. The old man came towards me and took Luis's seat. He said, 'Boy, am I glad to see you!'

He had missed his tour. It would have been all-inclusive, the train to Limón, a boat-trip up the coast, a chef travelling with the party, some wonderful meals. He would have seen monkeys and parrots. Back to Limón: some swimming, a four-star hotel, then a bus to the airport and a plane to San José. That was the tour. But (the river was dashing an old canoe to pieces, and those little boys — surely they were fishing?) the hotel manager had gotten the time wrong and the tour had left at six, not nine, so on the spur of the moment, and with nothing else to do in San José, the old man asked about the train and hopped on, just like that, and you never knew, maybe he'd catch up with the rest of them; after all, he had paid his three hundred dollars and here was his receipt and his booklet of coupons.

Six hours lay ahead of us, before we would reach Limón.

'Did you know the train was going to take so long?'

I said, 'I would not mind if this train took four days.'

That took care of him for a while, but as soon as the splendour of the valley returned he began chattering. His name was Thornberry, he lived in New Hampshire, and he was a painter — of pictures. He had not always been a painter. Until recently he had had to make his living as a commercial artist and designer. It had been a real grind, worrying about how he was going to buy groceries; but a few years ago he had come into some money — quite a lot of money — and he had set about seeing the world. He had been to Hawaii, Italy, France, the West Indies, Colombia, Alaska, California, Ireland, Mexico and Guatemala. His impressions of Guatemala were different from mine. He loved Guatemala. He liked the flowers. He had been two weeks in Antigua with a charming fellow who gave parties every night. On Mr Thornberry's report, the fellow was an alcoholic. Mr Thornberry had not gone to Zacapa.

'This scenery,' said Mr Thornberry, 'it blows my mind.' Mr Thornberry had a curious way of speaking, he squinted until his eyes were no more than slits; his face tightened into a grimace and his mouth went square, mimicking a grin, and then without moving his lips he spoke through his teeth. It was the way people talked when they were heaving ash barrels, sort of screwing their faces up and groaning their words.

Lots of things blew Mr Thornberry's mind: the way the river thundered, the grandeur of the valley, the little huts, the big boulders, and the climate blew his mind most of all — he had figured on something more tropical. It was an odd phrase from a man his age, but after all Mr Thornberry was a painter. I wondered why he had not brought his sketchbook. He repeated that he had left the hotel on the spur of the moment. He was, he said, travelling light. 'Where's your bag?'

I pointed to my suitcase on the luggage rack.

'It's pretty big.'

'That's everything I have. I might meet a beautiful woman in Limon and decide to spend the rest of my life there.'

'I did that once.'

'I was joking,' I said.

But Mr Thornberry was still grimacing. 'It was a disaster in my case.'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the river was seething, and men were standing in the shallows — I could not make out what they were doing — and pink and blue flowers grew beside the track.

'That fellow in Antigua had a beautiful house,' said Mr Thornberry. 'A wall all around it, with morning glories just like those.'

'So those are morning glories, eh?' I said. 'I was wondering.'

Mr Thornberry told me about his painting. You couldn't be a painter during the Depression; couldn't make a living at it. He had worked in Detroit and New York City. He had had a miserable time of it. Three children, but his wife had died when the third was still an infant — tuberculosis, and he had not been able to afford a good doctor. So she died and he had had to raise the kids himself. They had grown up and married and he had gone to New Hampshire to take up painting, what he had always wanted to do. It was a nice place, northern New Hampshire; in fact, he said, it looked a hell of a lot like this part of Costa Rica.

'I thought it looked like Vermont. Bellows Falls.'

'Not really.'

There were logs in the water, huge dark ones tumbling against each other and jamming on the rocks. Why logs? I did not want to ask Mr Thornberry why they were here. He had not been in Costa Rica longer than me. How could he know why this river, on which there were now no houses, carried logs in its current as long as telegraph poles and twice as thick? I would concentrate on what I saw: I would discover the answer. I concentrated. I discovered nothing.

'Sawmill,' said Mr Thornberry. 'See those dark things in the water?'

He squinted; his mouth went square. 'Logs.'

Damn, I thought, and saw the sawmill. So that's why the logs were there. They had been cut up-river. They must have-

'They must have floated those logs down to be cut into lumber,' said MrThornberry.

'They do that back home,' I said.

'They do that back home,' said Mr Thornberry.

He was silent for some minutes. He brought a camera out of his shoulder bag and snapped pictures out the window. It was not easy for him to shoot past me, but I was damned if I would yield my corner seat. We were in another cool valley, with rock columns all around us. I saw a pool of water.

'Pool of water,' said MrThornberry.

'Very nice,' I said. Was that what I was supposed to say?

Mr Thornberry said, 'What?'

'Very nice pool of water.'

Mr Thornberry hitched forward. He said, 'Cocoa.'

'I saw some back there.'

'But there's much more of it here. Mature trees.'

Did he think I was blind?

'Anyway,' I said, 'there's some coffee mixed in with it.'

'Berries,' said Mr Thornberry, squinting. He heaved himself across my lap and snapped a picture. No, I would not give him my seat.

I had not seen the coffee berries; how had he? I did not want to see them.

'The red ones are ripe. We'll probably see some people picking them soon. God, I hate this train.' He fixed that straining expression on his face. 'Blows my mind.'

Surely a serious artist would have brought a sketchpad and a few pencils and be doodling in a concentrated way, with his mouth shut. All Mr Thornberry did was fool with his camera and talk; he named the things he saw, no more than that. I wanted to believe that he had lied to me about being a painter. No painter would gab so aimlessly.

'Am I glad I met you!' said Mr Thornberry. 'I was going crazy in that seat over there.'

1 said nothing. I looked out the window.

'Kind of a pipeline,' said Mr Thornberry.

There was a rusty tube near the track, running parallel in the swamp that had displaced the river. I had not seen the river go. There were palm trees and that rusty tube: kind of a pipeline, as he had said. Some rocky cliffs rose behind the palms; we ascended the cliffs and beneath us were streams-

'Streams,' said MrThornberry.

— and now some huts, rather interesting ones, like sharecroppers' cottages, made of wood, but quite solidly built, upraised on poles above the soggy land. We stopped at the village of Swampmouth: more of those huts.

'Poverty,' said Mr Thornberry.

'Don't be silly,' I said. These were good timber houses, with wide corrugated tin roofs and healthy faces in the windows and well-dressed children standing on the big porches. They were not wealthy people, but neither were they poor. It seemed to me amazing that so far from San José — so far from Limón — in what was the borderland of thick viney jungle and dense savannah, people lived in dry well-made bungalows. Most of the people were black, and now most of the passengers on the train were black. I walked to the rear of the car to get away from Mr Thornberry, and talked to an old black man. The blacks he said had been brought over from Jamaica to build the railway. 'We didn't get the diseases,' he said in English. 'The British people got all the diseases.' His father had been a Costa Rican, his mother Jamaican; English had been his first language, which allowed me a glimpse of the sociology of the family — he had been raised by his mother. He was critical of the black boys hooting and laughing in the corridor of the train. 'Their grandparents were willing to work, but they ain't.'

The houses in style were perhaps West Indian, too. They were certainly the sort I had seen in the rural south, in the farming villages of Mississippi and Alabama; but they were trimmer and better-maintained. There was a banana grove in each mushy yard and in each village a general store, nearly always with a Chinese name on the store sign; and most of the stores were connected to another building, which served as a bar and a pool room. There was an air of friendliness about these villages, and though many of the households were pure black, there were mixed ones as well; Mr Thornberry pointed this out as soon as I returned to my seat.

'Black boy, white girl,' he said. They seem to get along fine. Pipeline again.'

Thereafter, each time the pipeline appeared — and it did about twenty times from here to the coast — Mr Thornberry obligingly indicated it for me.

We were deep in the tropics. The heat was heavy with the odour of moist vegetation and swamp water and the cloying scent of jungle flowers. The birds had long beaks and stick-like legs and they nosedived and spread their wings, becoming kite-shaped to break their fall. Some cows stood knee-deep in swamp, mooing. The palms were like fountains, or bunches of ragged feathers, thirty feet high — no trunks that I could see, but only these feathery leaves springing straight out of the swamp.

Mr Thornberry said, 'I was just looking at those palm trees.'

'They're like giant feathers,' I said.

'Funny green fountains,' he said. 'Look, more houses.'

Another village.

Mr Thornberry said, 'Flower gardens — look at those bougainvilleas. They blow my mind. Mama in the kitchen, kids on the porch. That one's just been painted. Look at all the vegetables!'

It was as he said. The village passed by and we were again in swampy jungle. It washumid and now overcast. My eyelids were heavy. Note-taking would have woken me up, but there wasn't room for me to write, with Mr Thornberry darting to the window to take a picture every five minutes. And he would have asked why I was writing. His talking made me want to be secretive. In the damp greenish light the woodsmoke of the cooking fires clouded the air further. Some of the people cooked under the houses, in that open space under the upraised floor.

'Like you say, they're industrious,' said Mr Thornberry. When had I said that? 'Every damn one of those houses back there was selling something.'

No, I thought, this couldn't be true. I hadn't seen anyone selling anything.

'Bananas,'said Mr Thornberry. 'It makes me mad when I think that they sell them for twenty-five cents a pound. They used to sell them by the hand.'

'In Costa Rica?'

'New Hampshire.'

He was silent a moment, then he said, 'Buffalo.'

He was reading a station sign. Not a station — a shed.

'But it doesn't remind me of New York.' Some miles earlier we had come to the village of Bataan. Mr Thornberry reminded me that there was a place in the Philippines called Bataan. The March of Bataan. Funny, the two places having the same name, especially a name like Bataan. We came to the village of Liverpool. I braced myself.

'Liverpool,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Funny.'

It was stream-of-consciousness, Mr Thornberry a less allusive Leopold Bloom, a reluctant Stephen Dedalus. Mr Thornberry was seventy-one. He lived alone, he said; he did his own cooking. He painted. Perhaps this explained everything. Such a solitary existence encouraged the habit of talking to himself: he spoke his thoughts. And he had been alone for years. His wife had died at the age of twenty-five. But hadn't he mentioned a marital disaster? Surely it was not the tragic death of his wife.

I asked him about this, to take his attention from the passing villages which, he repeated, were blowing his mind. I said, 'So you never remarried?'

'I got sick,' he said. 'There was this nurse in the hospital, about fifty or so, a bit fat, but very nice. At least, I thought so. But you don't know people unless you live with them. She had never been married. There's our pipeline. I wanted to go to bed with her right away — I suppose it was me being sick and her being my nurse. It happens a lot. But she said, "Not till we're married."' He winced and continued. 'It was a quiet ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Hawaii. Not Honolulu, but one of the little islands. It was beautiful — jungle, beaches, flowers. She hated it. "It's too quiet," she said. Born and raised in a little town in New Hampshire, a one-horse town — you've seen them — and she goes to Hawaii and says it's too quiet. She wanted to go to night-clubs. There weren't any night-clubs. She had enormous breasts, but she wouldn't let me touch them. "You make them hurt." I was going crazy. And she had a thing about cleanliness. Every day of our honeymoon we went down to the launderette and I sat outside and read the paper while she did the wash. She washed the sheets every day. Maybe they do that in hospitals, but in everyday life that's not normal. I guess I was kind of disappointed.' His voices trailed off. He said, 'Telegraph poles. . pig. . pipeline again,' and then, 'It was a real disaster. When we got back from the honeymoon I said, "Looks like it's not going to work." She agreed with me and that day she moved out of the house. Well, she had never really moved in. Next thing I know she's suing me for divorce. She wants alimony, maintenance, the whole thing. She's going to take me to court.'

'Let me get this straight,' I said. 'All you did was go on a honeymoon, right?'

'Ten days,' said Mr Thornberry. 'It was supposed to be two weeks, but she couldn't take the silence. Too quiet for her.'

'And then she wanted alimony?'

'She knew my sister had left me a lot of money. So she went ahead and sued me.'

'What did you do?'

Mr Thornberry grinned. It was the first real smile I had seen on his face the whole afternoon. He said, 'What did I do? I counter-sued her. For fraud. See, she had a friend — a man. He had called her up when we were in Hawaii. She told me it was her brother. Sure.'

He was still looking out the window, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was chuckling. 'I didn't have to do a thing after that. She gets on the witness-stand. The judge asks her, "Why did you marry this man?" She says, "He told me he had a lot of money." He told me he had a lot of money! Incriminated herself, see? She was laughed out of court. I gave her five grand and was glad to get rid of her.' Almost without pausing he said, 'Palm trees,' then, 'Pig,' 'Fence,' 'Lumber,' ' More morning glories — Capri's full of them,' 'Black as the ace of spades,' 'American car.'

The hours passed; Mr Thornberry spoke without let-up. 'Pool table,' 'Must be on welfare,' 'Bicycle,' 'Pretty girl,' 'Lanterns.'

I had wanted to push him off the train, but after what he had told me I pitied him. Maybe the nurse had sat beside him like this; maybe she had thought If he says that one more time I'll scream.

I said, 'When was this abortive honeymoon?'

'Last year.'

I saw a three-story house, with a verandah on each story. It was grey and wooden and toppling, and it reminded me of the Railway Hotel I had seen in Zacapa. But this one looked haunted. Every window was broken and an old steam locomotive was rusting in the weedy front yard. It might have been the house of a plantation owner — there were masses of banana trees nearby. The house was rotting and uninhabited, but from the remainder of the broken fence and the yard, the verandahs and the barn, which could have been a coach-house, it was possible to see that long ago it had been a great place, the sort of dwelling lived in by tyrannical banana tycoons in the novels of Asturias. In the darkening jungle and the heat, the decayed house looked fantastic, like an old ragged spider's web, with some of its symmetry still apparent.

Mr Thornberry said, 'That house. Costa Rican gothic.'

I thought: I saw it first.

'Brahma bull,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Ducks.' 'Creek.' 'Kids playing.' Finally, 'Breakers.'

We were at the shore and travelling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colón in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for a story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did, and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At this time of day, nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken: it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea, and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limón. Mr Thornberry was still talking. He said, 'I think I'm going to like this place,' then reported that he had spotted a house, an animal, a sudden fire, until at last we were travelling in darkness and his voice ceased. The surf was gone, the heat oppressive. I saw through the trees a combustion of awful flaring light, and Mr Thornberry croaked, 'Limón.'

Limon looked like a dreadful place. It had just rained, and the town stank. The station was on a muddy road near the harbour, and puddles reflected the decayed buildings and over-bright lights. The smell was dead barnacles and damp sand, flooded sewers, brine, oil, cockroaches and tropical vegetation which, when soaked, gives off the hot mouldy vapour you associate with compost heaps in summer, the stench of mulch and mildew. It was a noisy town, as well: clanging music, shouts, car horns. That last sight of the palmy coast and the breakers had been misleading. And even Mr Thornberry, who had been hopeful, was appalled. I could see his face; he was grimacing in disbelief. 'God,' he groaned. 'It's a piss-hole in the snow.' We walked through the puddles, the other passengers splashing us as they hurried past. Mr Thornberry said, 'It blows my mind.'

That does it, I thought. I said, 'I'd better go look for a hotel.'

'Why not stay at mine?'

Oh, look it 's raining. It blows my mind. Kind of a pipeline.

I said, 'I'll just sniff around town. I'm like a rat in a maze when I get to a new place.'

'We could have dinner. That might be fun. You never know — maybe the food's good here.' He squinted up the street. 'This place was recommended to me.'

'It wasn't recommended to me,' I said. 'It looks pretty strange.'

'Maybe I'll find that tour I was supposed to be on,' he said. He no longer sounded hopeful.

'Where are you staying?'

He told me. It was the most expensive hotel in Limón. I used that as my reason for looking elsewhere. A small, feeble-minded man approached and asked sweetly if he could carry my suitcase. It dragged on the street when he held it in his hand. He put it on his head and marched bandy-legged like a worker-elf to the market square. Here, Mr Thornberry and I parted.

'I hope you find your tour,' I said. He said he was glad we had met on the train: it had been kind of fun after all. And he walked away. I felt a boundless sense of relief, as if I had just been sprung from a long confinement. This was liberation. I tipped the elf and walked quickly in the opposite direction from Mr Thornberry.

I walked to savour my freedom and stretch my legs. After three blocks the town didn't look any better, and wasn't that a rat nibbling near the tipped-over barrel of scraps? It's a white country, a man had told me in San José. But this was a black town, a beach-head of steaming trees and sea-stinks. I tried several hotels. They were wormy staircases with sweating people minding tables on the second-floor landings. No, they said, they had no rooms. And I was glad, because they looked so disgustingly- dirty and the people were so rude; so I walked a few more blocks. I'd find a better hotel. But they were smaller and smellier, and they too were full. At one, as I stood panting — the staircase had left me breathless — a pair of cockroaches scuttled down the wall and hurried unimpeded across the floor. Cockroaches, I said. The man said, What do you want here? He too was full. I had been stopping at every second hotel. Now I stopped at each one. They were not hotels. They were nests of foul bedclothes, a few rooms and a portion of verandah. I should have known they were full: I met harassed families making their way down the stairs, the women and children carrying suitcases, the father sucking his teeth in dismay and muttering, 'We'll have to look somewhere else.' It was necessary for me to back down the narrow stairs to let these families pass.

In one place (I recognized it as a hotel by its tottering stairs, its unshaded bulbs, its moth-eaten furniture, its fusty smell), a woman in an apron said, 'Them — they're doublin' up.' She indicated a passageway of people — grandmothers, young women, sighing men, glassy-eyed children, black, fatigued, pushing old valises into a cubicle and several changing their clothes as they stood there in the passageway.

I had no idea of the time. It seemed late; the people in Limón who were not room-hunting were strolling the wet streets. They had that settled look of smugness which the stranger interprets as mockery or at least indifference. Saturday nights in strange cities can alienate the calmest of travellers.

Further on, a man said to me, 'Don't waste your time looking. There are no hotel rooms in Limón. Try tomorrow.'

'What do I do tonight?'

There is only one thing you can do,' he said. 'See that bar over there?' It was a peeling storefront with a string of lights over the door; inside, shapes — human heads — and smoke; and broken-crockery music. 'Go in and pick up a girl. Spend the night with her. That is your only hope.'

I considered this. But I did not see any girls. At the door were a gang of boys, jeering at men who were entering. I tried another hotel. The black owner saw that his reply to my question distressed me. He said, 'If you really get stuck and got no other place, come back here. You can sit out here on that chair.' It was a straight-backed chair on his verandah. There was a bar across the street: music, another mob of gawping boys. I slapped at the mosquitoes. Motorbikes went by; they sounded like outboard motors. This sound, and the boys, and the music made a scream. But I left my suitcase with this man and searched more streets. There were no hotels — no bars, no boarding houses; even the music was muffled. I decided to turn back, but I had gone too far: now I was lost.

I came to a precinct of Limón known as 'Jamaicatown'. In this white, Spanish-speaking country, a black, English-speaking area; a slum. These were the worst streets I had seen in Costa Rica, and each street corner held a dozen people, talking, laughing; their speech had a cackle in it. I was watched, but not threatened; and yet I had never felt so lost; it was as if I had burst through the bottom of my plans and was falling through darkness. I would continue to fall: there was absolutely nothing to do until dawn. My feet hurt; I was tired, dirty, sweating; I had not eaten all day. This was not the time or the place to reflect on the futility of the trip, and yet Costa Rica had seemed to promise better than this dark dead-end.

At one corner I asked some loitering men the way to the market. I asked in Spanish; they replied in English: they knew I was a stranger. Their directions were clear: they said I couldn't miss it.

I saw the row of hotels and boarding houses I had entered earlier in the evening. I had been disgusted by them then, but now they didn't seem so bad to me. I kept walking, and near the market square, skipping feebly across the street, one shoulder lower than the other because of the bag he carried, funny blue cap, bright green shirt, sailor pants, shuffling deck shoes: Thornberry.

'I've been looking all over for you.'

I needed his company: I was glad — someone to talk to. I said, 'I can't find a room anywhere. There aren't any in Limón. I'm screwed.'

He took my arm and winced. 'There are three beds in my room,' he said. 'You stay with me.'

'You mean it?'

'Sure-come on.'

My relief was inexpressible.

I got my suitcase from the hotel where the man had said that I could spend the night on his verandah chair. Mr Thornberry called the place a piss-hole (and over the next few days, whenever we passed it, he said, 'There's your verandah!'). I went to his room and washed my face, then we had a beer and grumbled about Limon. In gratitude I took him out to eat; we had broiled fish and hearts of palm and a bottle of wine, and Mr Thornberry told me sad stories about his life in New Hampshire, about his loneliness. Maybe he'd rent a house in Puntarenas for the winter. He couldn't take another cold winter. He had made a mess of his life, he said. It was the money — the IBM stock his sister had bequeathed to him. 'The things I want money can't buy. Money's just bullshit. If you have it. If you don't have it, it's important. I didn't always have it.'

I said, 'You saved my life.'

'I couldn't let you walk around all night. It's dangerous. I hate this place.' He shook his head. 'I thought I was going to like it. It looked okay from the train — those palm trees. That travel agency was lying to me. They said there were parrots and monkeys here.'

'Maybe you can get on a tour tomorrow.'

'I'm sick of thinking about it.' He looked at his watch. 'Nine o'clock. I'm bushed. Shall we call it a day?'

I said, 'I don't normally go to bed at nine o'clock.'

Mr Thornberry said, 'I always do.'

So we did. There was only one room-key. We were like an elderly couple, fussing silently at bed-time, yawning, chastely putting on our pyjamas. Mr Thornberry pulled his covers up and sighed. I read for a while, then switched off the light. It was still early, still noisy. Mr Thornberry said, 'Motorbike.' 'Music.' 'Listen to them yakking.' 'Car.' 'Train whistle.' 'Those must be waves.' Then he was asleep.

In spite of the ill-will I had felt towards him on the train, I considered Mr Thornberry my rescuer. To return the favour, I found a tour for him — a boat trip northwards up the coastal canal to the Laguna Matina, and an afternoon on the long lava beach at the mouth of the Rio Matina. Mr Thornberry insisted that I accompany him and ('Money's just bullshit') bought me a ticket. The boat was small, the canal was choked with hyacinths, so the going was slow. But orchids grew in clusters on the tropical trees, and there were herons and egrets soaring past us, and further on brown pelicans which flew in formation like geese.

'I don't see any parrots,' said Mr Thornberry. 'I don't see any monkeys.'

I went to the bow of the boat and sat there in the sun watching the jungle pass.

'Butterflies,' said Mr Thornberry, who had stayed under the canopy astern.

They were electric blue, and squarish, the size of pot-holders, mimicking the orchids they fluttered among.

'More herons,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Where are the parrots?'

Rising in me was an urge to push him off the boat. But I was ashamed of my irritation: he had saved me.

'Look how green everything is,' said Mr Thornberry.

We reached the lagoon at one-thirty, and moored the boat there because the black pilot feared that the tides at the estuary might drag us into the sea. We walked to the beach of grey lava. I swam. The black pilot screamed in Spanish for me to leave the water. There were sharks in the water, he said — the hungriest, the fiercest of sharks. I asked him whether he had seen any sharks. No, he said, but he knew they were there. I plunged back into the water.

'Sharks!'the black pilot yelled.

'Where?' I said. I was waist-deep in surf.

'There! Get out! Get out!'

Backing out of the water I saw the black dorsal fin of a shark slitting the water's surface. But the creature itself looked no more than a yard long. I had seen bigger sharks in East Sandwich on Cape Cod, and told the black pilot this. He insisted that I was crazy to swim, so I indulged him in his fears and went for a walk instead.

Mr Thornberry met me on the beach. We walked along the shoreline. 'Driftwood,' he said. 'It's all lava, you know. That's why the sand's so black.'

The boat's engine broke a shear-pin on the return journey. The pilot hailed a passing canoe and disappeared for an hour or more searching the canal huts for a new shear-pin.

'That other tour boat had a special chef,' said Mr Thornberry. 'This one doesn't even have an engine.'

'We might be stranded here for days,' I said. But this was malice; already I could see the black pilot making towards us in a canoe.

Back in Limón I found my own hotel. The weekend visitors had gone home: I had my pick of places. It was not a bad hotel, though the bed was damp with the sea-dampness of the air, and I was tormented by mosquitoes, and the noisy slosh of surf kept me awake for half the night. And yet, in solitude, I could think straight; I tried to work out the Thornberry paradox.

The next day I gave to roaming Limón, but on closer inspection Limón did not look any better than it had that first night, a steaming stinking town of mud puddles and buildings discoloured by dampness. The stucco fronts had turned the colour and consistency of stale cake, and crumbs of concrete littered the pavements. In the park there were three-toed sloths creeping in tree branches, and in the market and on the parapets of the crumbling buildings there were mangy vultures. Other vultures circled the plaza. Was there a dingier backwater in all the world? Columbus had come here with his son, Ferdinand. Ferdinand, fourteen at the time, had written an account of that fourth voyage, and he had described Limon as 'lofty, full of rivers, and abounding in very tall trees, as also on the islet [Uva Island, the Indians called it Quirivi] where they grew thick as basil, and full of very lofty groves of trees. . For this reason the Admiral [Columbus] called it La Huerta [The Garden].' It might have been so; but the accounts of this voyage are contradictory. Ferdinand sometimes saw things differently from his father. In Limon, Ferdinand wrote, to Calm the fears of the sailors, the Indians sent out an old man with two little girls, the one about 8, the other about 14 years of age. . the girls showed great fortitude, for despite the Christians being complete strangers to them in appearance, manners and race, they gave no signs of grief or fear, but always looked cheerful and modest. So the Admiral showed them good usage. .' In his Lettera Rarissima to the Sovereigns, Columbus gave a different version of this. 'In Cariai [Limón] and the neighbouring lands,' he wrote, 'there are sorcerers. They would have given the world for me not to stay there an hour. As soon as I got there they sent right out two girls, all dressed up; the elder was hardly 11, the other 7, both behaving with such lack of modesty as to be no better than whores. They had magic powder concealed about them. As soon as they arrived, I gave orders that they be presented with some of our trading truck and sent them directly ashore. .'

My desire to leave Limón was sharpened one morning while, with nothing better to do, I was standing in the plaza watching the vultures: were they vultures, or buzzards, or another bird of prey? I heard a sharp voice and saw an enormous black man coming towards me. He was carrying something silver; he wore a wool cap; he was barefoot. His eyes glinted with lunacy. He had a twitching gait.

'I am the Son of God,' he said.

He shook the silver object, then held it in blessing like a pyx. It was a ballpoint pen.

'I am the Son of God.'

People smiled. They let him pass. Perhaps they did not speak English.

'I am the Son of God.'

I stood aside.

Mr Thornberry was seated in the small lobby of his hotel. He looked deeply worried. He was studying a travel brochure. He jumped to his feet when he saw me.

'Let's get out of here,' I said.

'I tried,' he said. 'The plane's full. The bus doesn't leave until tonight.'

The train had left, too, at five that morning. I said, 'We can take a taxi.'

'A taxi? To San José?'

We went to the taxi rank in the plaza. I approached the driver of the least-dented car I could see and asked him: how much to San José? He thought a moment, then uttered a ridiculously high figure. I translated this for Mr Thornberry, who said, 'Tell him we'll take it.'

On principle I beat him down ten dollars and insisted that he had to get us to San José in time for lunch. He agreed and smiled. 'I've never done this before,' he said.

'This was a terrific idea,' said Mr Thornberry. 'I thought I'd never get out of that place.' He looked out of the window and squinted. 'Hut,' he said. 'Pig.' 'Cow.' 'Bananas.' Towards San José he became excited. 'Look,' he said, 'there's our pipe-line!'