The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

16 THE TREN DE LA SIERRA

The name of the lovely cream-coloured railway station in Lima is Desamparados, which means 'forsaken'. But the word seems a piece of baseless gloom until the Tren de la Sierra has crossed the plains to Chosica and climbed the pink walls of the narrow Rimac Valley; here, the passengers begin to fall ill. I knew from my palpitations in Bogotá and my wheezy indolence in Quito that I was a candidate for altitude sickness; the rising gorge I experienced on the way to Ticlio was as much a feature of the landscape as a physical symptom: I suffered as we ascended the Andes, and I decided that no railway journey on earth can be so aptly described as going on ad nauseam.

A strike was threatened by the railway workers in Peru, but though this was no more than a rumour, the warning was substantiated by streaks of graffiti dripping from the mellow outside walls of churches and cloisters: Down with the Imperialists and Oppressors, Support the Railway Workers and More Money! Repeatedly in this large impromptu script was the word Strike, but the Spanish word for strike is also the word for rest or leisure, so all over Lima the exhortation could also be read as Relax! If the railway workers had been undeserving louts using a period of political confusion in order to make unreasonable demands, I would have been more confident of my chances to see the strike forestalled by the intervention of some sweet-talking arbitrators. But this was not play-acting; the railways workers — indeed, workers all over Peru — were grossly underpaid. Elsewhere in Latin America, the provocations or simple pleas of workers had been checked; where the charade of elections failed, the soldiers and police succeeded. Peru, once a golden kingdom occupying a third of the continent, had taken a mighty tumble and in defeat looked incapable of supplying those muttering workers with any hope. Few great cities in the world look more plundered and bankrupt than Lima. It is the look of Rangoon, the same heat and colonial relics and corpse-odours: the imperial parades have long ago marched away from its avenues and left the spectators to scavenge and beg. Ever since Mexico, the description 'formerly an important Spanish city, famous for its architecture' made me stiffen in apprehension, but no city had fallen as far as Lima.

Like a violated tomb in which only the sorry mummy of withered nationalism is left, and just enough religion to console a patient multitude with the promise of happier pickings beyond the grave, Lima — epitomizing Peru — was a glum example of obnoxious mismanagement. Official government rhetoric was dispirited and self-deceiving, but the railway workers' anger was sharpened by their sense of betrayal, and their hunger.

I felt that any strike here would be a protracted affair, and so I left Lima on the train to Huancayo the first chance I got. After arriving at that railhead in the mountains I would make my way by road via Aya-cucho to Cuzco and there begin my long descent through Bolivia and Argentina to the end of the line in Patagonia. It was a hasty plan, but how could I know that in three days I would be back in Lima trying to find another route to Cuzco?

The Rimac river flowed past the railway station. At seven in the morning it was black; it became grey as the sun moved above the foothills of the Andes. The sandy mountains at the city's edge give Lima the feel of a desert city hemmed-in on one side by hot plateaux. It is only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, but the land is too flat to permit a view of the sea, and there are no sea breezes in the day-time. It seldom rains in Lima. If it did, the huts — several thousand of them — in the shanty town on the bank of the Rimac would need roofs. The slum is odd in another way; besides being entirely roofless, the huts in this (to use the Peruvian euphemism) 'young village' are woven from straw and split bamboo and cane. They are small frail baskets, open to the stars and sun, and planted beside the river which, some miles from the station, is cocoa-coloured. The people wash in this river water; they drink it and cook with it; and when their dogs die, or there are chickens' entrails to be disposed of, the river receives this refuse.

'Not that they eat chickens very often,' explained the Peruvian in the train. The river, he said, was their life-line and their sewer.

Travelling across this plain it is not immediately apparent how any penetration can possibly be made into the escarpment at the far end — it seems too steep, too bare, too high; the valleys are no more than vertical cracks and there is no evidence of trees or men anywhere in these mountains. They have been burned clean of vegetation and have the soft bulge of naked rock. For twenty-five miles the mountain walls remain in the distance; the train seems deceptively quick, rolling along the river, and then at Chosica it stops. It resumes after five minutes, but never again on the trip does it regain that first burst of speed.

We entered the valley and zig-zagged on the walls. It was hardly a valley. It was a cut in the rock, a slash so narrow that the diesel's hooter hardly echoed: the walls were too close to sustain an answering sound. We were due at Huancayo at four o'clock; by mid-morning I thought we might arrive early, but at noon our progress had been so slow I wondered whether we would get to Huancayo that day. And long before Ticlio I had intimations of altitude sickness. I was not alone; a number of other passengers, some of them Indians, looked distinctly ghastly.

It begins as dizziness and a slight headache. I had been standing by the door inhaling the cool air of these shady ledges. Feeling wobbly, I sat down, and if the train had not been full I would have lain across the seat. After an hour I was perspiring and, although I had not stirred from my seat, I was short of breath. The evaporation of this sweat in the dry air gave me a sickening chill. The other passengers were limp, their heads bobbed, no one spoke, no one ate. I dug some aspirin out of my suitcase and chewed them, but only felt queasier; and my headache did not abate. The worst thing about feeling so ill in transit is that you know that if something goes wrong with the train — a derailment or a crash — you will be too weak to save yourself. I had a more horrible thought: we were perhaps a third of the way to Huancayo, but Huancayo was higher than this. I dreaded to think what I would feel like at that altitude.

I considered getting off the train at Matucana, but there was nothing at Matucana — a few goats and some Indians and tin-roofed shacks on the stony ground. None of the stops contained anything that looked like relief or refuge. But this altitude sickness had another punishing aspect: it ruined what could have been a trip of astonishing beauty. I had never seen cliffs like these or been on a railway quite so spectacular. Why was it, in this landscape of such unbelievable loveliness, that I felt as sick as a dog? If only I had had the strength to concentrate — I would have been dazzled; but, as it was, the beauty became an extraordinary annoyance.

The pale rose-coloured mountains had the dark stripes and mottled marks of the shells of the most delicate snails. To be ill among them, to be slumped in my seat watching the reddish gravel slides stilled in the crevasses, and the configuration of cliff-faces changing with each change in altitude, was torture so acute that I began to associate the very beautiful with the very painful. These pretty heights were the cause of my sickness. And now my teeth hurt, one molar in particular began to ache as if the nerve had caught fire. I did not know then how a cavity in a bad tooth becomes sore at a high altitude. The air in this blocked hole expands and creates pressure on the nerve, and it is agony. The dentist who told me this had been in the air force. Once, in a sharply descending plane, the cockpit became depressurized and an airman, the navigator, screamed in pain and then one of his teeth exploded.

Some train passengers had begun to vomit. They did it in the pitiful unembarrassed way that people do when they are helplessly ill. They puked on the floor, and they puked out of the windows and they made my own nausea greater. Some, I noticed, were staggering through the cars. I thought they were looking for a place to puke, but they returned with balloons. Balloons? Then they sat and held their noses and breathed the air from the balloon nozzle.

I stood unsteadily and made for the rear of the train, where I found a Peruvian in a smock filling balloons from a tank of oxygen. He handed these out to distressed-looking passengers who gratefully gulped from them. I took my place in the queue and discovered that a few whiffs of oxygen made my head clear and helped my breathing.

There was a boy in this oxygen car. He had an oxygen balloon, too, and wore a handsome cowboy hat decorated with a band of Inca pokerwork.

'If I had thought it was going to be anything like this,' he said, 'I would never have come.'

'You took the words out of my mouth.'

'This oxygen's an improvement. Boy, do I feel shitty.'

We sipped from our balloons.

'You from the States?'

'Massachusetts,' I said.

'I'm from Minnesota. Been in Lima long?'

'One day,'I said.

'It's not that bad,' he said. 'I was there a month. It's one of the cheapest places in South America. They say Cuzco's even cheaper. I figure I'll spend a month or so there, then go back to Lima — get a job on a ship.' He looked at me. 'You're smart to have those warm clothes. I wish I had a jacket like that. All I have is these Lima things. I'll buy a sweater when we get to Huancayo — they make them there. You can get alpaca ones for practically nothing. Jesus, do I feel shitty.'

We entered a tunnel. We had been through other tunnels, but this one was long, and it had a certain distinction: it was, at 15,848 feet, the highest railway tunnel in the world. The train was loud — deafening, in fact, and I don't think I had ever felt sicker in my life. I sprayed the last of my balloon gas into my mouth, swallowed, and got another one. 'I feel like throwing up,' said the fellow from Minnesota. In the weak yellow light, with his cowboy hat over his eyes, he looked limp and fatally stricken. I did not feel so v/ell myself, but when we emerged from the Galera Tunnel I knew we were past the highest point, and having survived that I was sure I would make it to Huancayo.

'This ship,' I said. 'The one you're going to get a job on. Where do you plan to go?'

'Home,' he said. Til get one to the States. If I'm lucky I'll be back the end of April. I really want to see Minneapolis in the spring.'

'Is it as pretty as this?'

'It's better than this.'

We were now high enough to be able to see across the Andes, the whole range of mountains which, on some curves, were visible for hundreds of miles. They are not solitary peaks, but rather closely packed summits which, surprisingly, grow lighter as the distance deepens. I asked the Minnesotan how he planned to get to Cuzco. He had been in Lima for a month; his information would be good, I thought. He said there was a bus and if I was interested we could take it together. It didn't cost much, but he had heard it sometimes took four or five days to reach Cuzco. It depended on the road. This was the rainy season: the road through Ayacucho would be bad.

At La Oroya, where the line branches — the other line goes north to the tin and copper mines of Cerro de Pasco — our train was delayed. La Oroya itself was desolate and cold. Children came to the platform to beg, and sacks were loaded. Walking made my throat burn, so I sat and wondered whether I should eat anything. There were Indians selling knitted goods — mufflers and ponchos — and also fried cakes and burned bits of meat. I drank a cup of sour tea and took some more aspirin. I was rather eager to get back on the train, so that I could get another balloon of oxygen.

When we boarded, an old Indian woman stumbled on the platform. She had three bundles — cloth, packets of greasy newspaper, a kerosene lamp. I helped her up. She thanked me and told me in Spanish that she was going to Huancavelica, some miles beyond Huancayo. 'And where are you going?'

I told her, and then I asked her if the people here spoke Quechua, the Inca language.

'Yes,' she said. 'That is my language. Everyone speaks Quechua here. You will see in Cuzco.'

We crawled the rest of the afternoon towards Huancayo, and the longer we went the more I marvelled at the achievement of this mountain railway. It is commonly thought that it was planned by the American Henry Meiggs, but it was actually a Peruvian, Ernesto Malinowski, who surveyed the route; Meiggs supervised and promoted it, from its beginning in 1870 until his death in 1877. But it was another twenty years before the railway reached Huancayo. A trans-Andean line, from Huancayo to Cuzco, although proposed and surveyed in 1907, had never been built. If it had been, my arrival at the muddy mountain town would have been more hopeful; as it was, I felt too sick to eat, too dazed to go on or do anything but lie shivering in bed, still wearing my leather jacket, reading the poems and devotions of John Donne. It was comfortless stuff for a cold night in the Andes: 'As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist from coming; even the physician dares scarce come. Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.'

There was something about the damp walls of every room in this town, and the muddy roads leading out of it, that made its isolation palpable; its chill conveyed a physical feeling of remoteness. I did not have to look at the map to know I was at the back of beyond. But I woke the next day with an idea. Instead of inquiring about the way to Cuzco from the people who lived in the town, I would go to the bus station and talk to people who had just come by bus along the Andean roads from Cuzco. I was somewhat happier to be in a doubtful frame of mind; I had thought there was only one way to Cuzco and I had been determined to pursue this trans-Andean route; but, realizing that several choices were open to me, I could take the best one, the easiest, even if it meant my turning back. The trip to Huancayo had been bad, but what if the onward journey was worse?

I spent the better part of the morning chatting to passengers who had disembarked from the Ayacucho buses. Many were vague, rendered stuporous by the long trip, but the lucid ones told me that they had been delayed by rain and landslides; they had had to sleep on their buses, and only two people I talked to had actually been to Cuzco. They had come here by road because it was the only way for them — they lived in Huancayo.

There was a bar quite near to where the buses stopped. Peruvian bars are medieval. They have rough wooden tables and moist walls and dirt floors. You see dogs and chickens in Peruvian bars. Bottled beer is sold, but most drinkers in the Andes here prefer a fermented brew which is a soupy broth and very bitter. It is served in plastic beakers. It is almost identical to the sort of beer drunk in villages in East Africa, the maize beer that is ladled out of greasy pots; indeed, one mouthful of the Huancayo stuff brought me memories of dear old Bundibugyo.

'Want to know the best way to Cuzco?' said a man in this bar. He was a student, he said, from Lima, and was hoping there would be a general strike to do something about the rising prices. 'You say you just came from Lima, and you probably don't want to go back there — it seems far, right? But Lima is closer to Cuzco than Huancayo is.'

'But Cuzco is right through those mountains,' I said.

'That is the difficulty, eh?' He swigged his beer. I noticed he was not drinking the local brew, but like me had a bottle of lager. 'It is easier to go over them than through them. You take the morning train to Lima. You get a plane ticket and, bam, you are in Cuzco.'

'I thought only tourists took the plane.'

'But you are a tourist.'

'Not exactly.'

'Listen, even some Indians' — he whispered the word — 'even they take the plane.'

I took the train back to Lima the next day, leaving in the fog and cold, arriving at Desamparados in withering heat. This train-trip was shorter, and we arrived on time, but then, it was downhill all the way.

'Isn't Peru awful?' said a Peruvian to me one day in Lima. It was a very un-South American sentiment: no one so far had run down his own country in my presence. Even the most rebellious Colombians praised their coffee, and Ecuadorians said they had tasty bananas. I wondered whether this Peruvian was fishing for a compliment, so I expressed mild surprise and wary disagreement. He insisted that I was wrong: Peru was cruelly governed, hostile to its neighbours and falling completely to pieces. He was not fishing for compliments. I said, 'Yes, now that you mention it, it is rather awful.¹

'Peru is dying. Terrible things are going to happen here.' He was very cross.

I said that I saw his point entirely.

'I hope when you come to Peru again it will be different,' he said.

He was more critical than I was. I had begun to appreciate Lima; I had developed a toleration for its squalor. It was nothing like home: there were no reminders here of anything familiar. I only got homesick in places where people were buying vacuum cleaners or paying light bills. Like me, the people in Lima were all a bit lost; they took walks or lounged around the plazas because there was nothing else to do, and when they visited museums and churches their motive was the same as mine: sheer boredom. I knew I was an alien; but these people? They were poor, and the poor are always aliens in their own country. For quite different reasons we were placeless.

And life in Lima was obvious, because it was lived outdoors. There were wealthy suburbs, but the rich kept behind their walls; it was dangerous in such a poor city to expose yourself as strong or well off. In Lima, people in fancy cars were often shouted at by ragged passers-by. The rest of society had spilled into the street, and there they sat, amid the stink of sewers and the pervasive half-sweetish odour of human excrement. Some rain might have washed the city clean, but it does not rain much in Lima. The warmth allows the people to live outside, and so it is possible to walk through the city and assess the population as poor and idle and youthful. The poverty has prevented Lima from having a traffic problem (the avenues are wide: they were built for victory parades), but it also means that the buses are very old and always full. In the central part of the city there are seven large plazas and parks. They teem with people; most simply sit or sleep, but others sell oranges, sweets, sunglasses, or they carry contraptions that resemble a panjandrum's sedan chair onto the pavements and on these they shine shoes. More enterprising ones are box-camera men, pulling fairly good likenesses out of crates cobbled together to look like camera obscuras or Kodak Brownies. Here is another man operating a stand where, for ten cents, you can look at Viewmaster slides of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Singapore, New York, Rome, Bambi, or Wild Animals; there is an organ grinder with a parakeet and a crazed monkey; over here, five girls dressed like gypsies, telling fortunes with playing cards. 'You have come from very far away, Mister,' I was told. 'I see a woman — she is talking to you, she is not your wife.' (The woman proved to be Elvera Howie, from Chicago, who was in Cuzco with her husband Bert; she drank a great deal, but offered me nothing in the way of romance.) Families also lived in the parks, with all their cooking pots and their meagre bedding; mothers suckled infants, other children cried pitifully, urchins yelped, and I saw one skinny boy sleeping on the littered grass next to a skinny dog. And prostitutes, gangs of men, lovers, beggars — 'all the world,' as the Spanish describe crowds. They were people with nothing to do.

A Solution To The Crisis: Popular War! The paint on this splashed message near the Plaza de Armas was still fresh; but it looked as though the war had come and gone. The thousands of people in the parks and plazas could have been the dead and wounded left behind after a bitter conflict; most could accurately be described as refugees. And no buildings in South America looked more bombed and battle-scarred than those in Lima. But the pocked façades were not the result of bullets or cannon balls: this was wear and tear. Class warfare proceeds without bugle calls; it creates stinks and murmurs, not the noisy grandeur of armies heroically wrecking themselves on battlefields.

Peru is too poor to fix its cracked buildings; and it cannot afford to tear them down. They are faded and broken, but some with porticoes and balconies are still lovely, and those that have not been boarded up and left to rot are turned into dance halls and bars, and what looks like a bread-line is a mob of Peruvians waiting for the doors of a once-elegant mansion to open and admit them to a violent movie or (in the middle of the afternoon) a dance. But I had the impression that Peruvian disgust was so keen that if it were to be combined with wealth the city of Lima would be destroyed and rebuilt to match the misguided modernity of Bogotá.

I walked from the Cathedral (the mummy on view is not that of Francisco Pizarro: his skeleton has recently been found in a lead box in the crypt) to the University Park, and then made a circuit of the city, finally stopping at the Plaza Bolognesi where I sat and reflected on the melodrama of General Bolognesi's monument. It was the most bizarre statue I had seen so far. It was eighty feet high, and at its front was a copy of the Winged Victory; soldiers marched on its panels, and on one ledge was the statue of a man falling from a horse — the horse was there, life-sized, twisted onto its side. Another detachment of soldiers reconnoitred another ledge with drawn swords; eagles, wreaths and cannons in marble and bronze lifted the column higher, and still it rose, with a large grieving woman pressing her body against an upper pillar; more rifles, more flags, more troops — battles on all sides — defeat here, victory there — and higher up two marble nymphs with wings soared, their feet sticking into the air, their wings out, their arms held high and reaching towards the top where Bolognesi himself, in bronze, rushes forward, a pistol in one hand, a flag in the other, facing the wide avenue, the dance halls, the screaming children, the overloaded buses.

'Want to buy some pictures?'

It was a Peruvian, with an old photograph album: tin-miners, old cars, snow-drifts, churches, trains. They were eighty years old. I bought two old train photographs, a dollar apiece, and we talked.

'You will believe me, I hope, if I tell you I have spent some years in your country,' he said in Spanish. He was very ragged and wore a felt hat. 'I lived in Washington, D.C.'

'How did you like it?'

'I should never have left. Lima is no place to live.' He reached into his rags and took out a tattered piece of paper. It was a coupon stating that he had filed a tax-return in 1976. 'I am fully paid up,' he said. 'They will let me back if I choose to go.'

'Why don't you choose to go?'

'I got into trouble here not long ago. There was a man who was drinking too much. He wanted to fight me. So I fought him. I cannot go anywhere. I have to appear in court. But who knows when they will hear the case?'

'You will be all right,' I said. 'After the trial, you can go back to Washington.'

'No,' he said. He thought a moment, moved his lips as if practising a phrase and then said in English, 'I'm flat broke. Like my country.'