The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

18 EL PANAMERICANO

The Panamerican Express is one of South America's great trains, travelling over 1,000 miles from La Paz in Bolivia to the Argentine city of Tucuman. It crosses a national frontier — few in this hemisphere do — and railway travel is never more interesting than when it involves a border crossing. The frontier is nearly always a no-man's land in which fascinating pieces of fraudulent theatre are enacted — the passport stamping ceremony, the suspicious looks, the bullying at customs, the foolishly patriotic pique, and the unexplained delays. I had walked across the Rio Grande from Texas to Mexico, and hiked from Guatemala into El Salvador. I was looking forward to boarding a train in Bolivia and ending up, after three days on the Andean high-plains, in the heart of Argentina.

But first I had to find my way out of Peru. By now, the railway strike had taken hold. Only one line was in operation; the train to Machu Pic-chu was being manned by the Peruvian army. This was strictly for the tourists' benefit — too bad if you were an Indian who wanted to go home on any of the other routes. The miners were also on strike, and the municipal workers had occupied the city hall in Lima. The peaceful demonstrations had become angry mobs, and there were threats of sabotage on the Machu Picchu train. The workers' demand was for £ 1.50 more a month. In Peru, two pounds of meat costs £ 1.50, and two pounds is all the average Peruvian family can afford each month. I was warned that if I did not leave Peru soon the buses, too, would be strikebound; and though I had vowed in Colombia that I would not set foot on another South American bus — good heavens, I had a wife and children! — 1 had no choice but to take one to Puno.

By train the trip would have been simple and enjoyable; by bus, it was dusty and harrowing, over a corrugated road. I could not read on this bus, and that day I abandoned my diary. We reached Lake Titicaca at sundown and crossed it in the steamer M. V. Olíanla in the dead of night. People tell you that this is one of the most enchanting trips on the continent. But I saw nothing: it was night. The last leg, from Guaqui to La Paz, was too brief to be memorable. I recall a puzzled Indian standing among boulders with a llama watching us pass. The llama was a special reproach to me.

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat,

With an indolent expression and an undulating throat,

Like an unsuccessful literary man.

Just above La Paz, as the train rises and travels across the ridge before descending into the city, there are coal-black peaks covered with snow. The snow has a dry ghostly permanent look to it, a far cry from the radiant slush you see in New England.

The bareness of Bolivia had been apparent as soon as we reached the south end of the lake. It was not the cookie crumb bareness of Mexico or the snail shell bareness of Peru or the withered aridity of Guatemala; Bolivia's bareness was the gritty undercrust of the earth, a topography of stony fossils: the topsoil had simply blown away, exposing the country to its old bones. The place could not have looked colder or fiercer. And yet, all the Bolivians on the Guaqui train were friendly, and the hat-style of the Indians — here a brown derby was favoured — gave them a jaunty look. 'You should stay here awhile,' said a Bolivian, and he pointed to the snowy peaks. 'You can go skiing over there.'

The clouds were grey and creased with black, and as we made our descent into La Paz — the city grew larger and uglier as we neared the valley floor — there was a blue-white crack of lightning from the collapsing clouds. Then a thunderclap; and it began to hail. The hailstones bobbled against the train windows; they were the size of marbles — it was a wonder they did not shatter the glass.

I did not feel well. I had slept badly in Cuzco, I had dozed on the bus to Puno; the furious boilers on the M. V. Olíanla had kept me awake crossing Lake Titicaca. I had stomach trouble, and for once my English cement, which was spiked with morphine, did no good. And of course there was the altitude: La Paz was over 12,000 feet, and the train had gone even higher in order to make its way into the city. I had a groggy half-awake feeling, dizzyness and shortness of breath. Altitude sickness had penetrated to my entrails, and though I kept swigging cement and chewing cloves — my teeth had begun to ache again — I knew I would not feel any better until I left La Paz on the Panamerican express.

I had another affliction, too, but this turned out to be an advantage. I cannot remember how I found a hotel in La Paz -1 think I just saw a likely one and walked in. In any case, I was taking some aspirin shortly after finding my room and dropped the water tumbler into the sink. My hand went to it, propelled by instinct, and then I saw that 1 was holding broken glass and blood. It was my scribbling hand, and now the blood was running down my arm. I stepped into the corridor, bandaging the wound with a towel, and called to the room lady who was sweeping the floor. She clucked: the blood had begun to leak through the towel. She took a rubber band out of her apron pocket.

'Put this around your wrist,' she said. 'That will stop the blood.'

I recalled that tourniquets had been discredited. I asked her the address of the nearest pharmacy.

'Maybe you should go to the doctor,' she said.

'No,' I said. 'I am sure it will stop.'

But I had not gone two blocks when the new towel I had wrapped around my hand was soaked with blood. It did not hurt, but it looked dreadful. I hid it under my arm so as not to alarm pedestrians. Then the blood dripped on the pavement and I thought: Goddamn. It was deeply embarrassing to be walking through this large grey city with a blood-soaked towel on my hand. I began to wish that I had tried the rubber band. I left spatters of blood on the crosswalk, and more spatters on the plaza. I asked directions to the pharmacy and saw, when I looked back, that there was a pool of blood where I had paused and a horrified Bolivian watching me. I tried not to run: running makes your heart beat faster and you bleed more.

The pharmacy was run by five Chinese girls, who spoke Spanish in the twanging gum-chewing way that they speak English. I held my dripping paw over a waste-paper basket and said, 'I have a problem here.' Before leaving the hotel, I had looked up the Spanish words for wound, antiseptic, bandage, tape and gauze.

'Is it still coming out, the blood?' asked one of the Chinese girls.

'I think so.'

'Take that bandage off.'

I unwound the soaked towel. Blood poured out of the slice in my palm: it was a neat cut in my flesh, slightly parted, and with a steady trickle of blood flowing out of it. Now I was bleeding on the counter. The girl moved briskly, got some cotton, dunked it in alcohol and pressed it painfully to the cut. Moments later the cotton was crimson.

She said, 'It is still coming out.'

The other Chinese girls and some customers came over to look.

'What a shame,' said one.

'It does not hurt,' I said. 'I am sorry for making a mess.'

Without saying a word, another Chinese girl twisted a rubber tube around my wrist and tightened it. More cotton was applied to the cut. This cotton stayed white.

The second Chinese girl said, 'Now it is not coming out.'

But my hand had gone numb and I saw that it was turning grey. This gave me a fright. I undid the rubber tube. The blood flowed again down my elbow.

'You should have left the rubber on.'

'I think that is dangerous,' I said.

They tried everything. They poured alcohol on it from the bottle, they squeezed it, they dyed it with Mercurochrome, they sprinkled white powder on it — and now my hand looked like a Bolivian pastry. But nothing worked; direct pressure seemed to make the blood flow faster.

'Put the rubber on again.'

'No,' I said. 'It is no good.'

'It is good. It will work.'

The other girl said in amazement, 'It is still coming!'

'You need stitches,' said a third girl.

'It is not that big,'I said.

'Yes. Go to the doctor. He is across the street.'

I went to the doctor's office, but it was shut: out for lunch. Back in the pharmacy and, still bleeding, I said, 'Forget the rubber tube. Just sell me a bandage and some antiseptic. I know it will stop — they always stop, sooner or later.'

A different Chinese girl broke open a bandage and helped me wrap my hand, then she gave me all the odds and ends of tape and bottles we had used and I went to the cash desk and paid for them.

It leaked some more — not too much, but enough to soak the gauze bandage and look quite horrible, like the joke shop bandage children wear to frighten their friends. The bandage was thick, the blood bright red. But I was fairly certain it had stopped. Buying a sugary coffee to restore my health, I held my bandaged hand in my lap.

'Yugh. How did that happen?' asked the waiter.

'An accident,' I said lightly.

And at the bank, changing some money, I rested my wounded hand on the counter. The teller was quick; she sorted the bills, asked no questions, averted her eyes from my hand, and off I went: it was the fastest bank transaction I had made in months.

I went to the railway agency. The clerk was elderly but full of beans. He kept saying in Spanish a word that means 'Ready!' or 'Check!' He told me to sit down. I did so, placing my right hand on his desk and pretending to ignore it.

'One ticket to Buenos Aires, via Tucuman, please.'

'Check!'

'A First Class sleeper, and I would like to go as soon as possible.'

'Check!'

He shuffled papers, and as he wrote out my ticket he said, 'The wound — is it big?'

'Very.'

'Check,' he said, giving me a wheeze of sympathy. No ticket had ever been easier for me to buy. I was so encouraged by the Bolivian response to my wounded hand that I did not change the bandage until the next day. I was treated with great promptness, I was asked questions about it- did it hurt? how had it happened? was it large? My hand became a wonderful conversation piece, and everyone who passed by me stared at my white mitten. In Lima I had tried to buy a painting, but the price was ridiculously high and I had given up in frustration. In La Paz, I saw a better painting, a pious portrait of Saint Dominic, done in Potosi in the mid-eighteenth century. I haggled for less than an hour, using my bandaged hand to gesture with, and walked out of the shop with the painting under my arm.

'Better keep that painting in your suitcase,' said the lady in the shop. 'It is illegal to take such works of art out of the country.'

The wounded hand turned out to be one of my most satisfying experiences in South America. But later I thought I might be pushing my luck. I began to worry that the cut would become infected and my hand would drop off.

It was a city that seemed suited to ghastliness of this kind; it suffered itself, from a sort of urban gangrene, and if any city looked blighted to the point of being wounded — it even had a scabrous cankered colour — it was La Paz. Its extreme ugliness was woeful enough to be endearing, and I found it on further inspection to be a likable place. It was a city of cement and stale bread, of ice storms that produced a Bulgarian aroma of wet tweeds, built above the timber-line in a high pass in the Andes. The people in La Paz had heavy dignified faces and none of the predatory watchfulness I had seen in Colombia and Peru. In the wood-panelled coffee shops in La Paz, with their white-jacketed waiters and espresso machines and gooey pastries and mirrors, scowling matrons at one table, thickset men in baggy ill-fitting suits at other tables, it was hard to believe I was not in eastern Europe; it was only when I went outside and saw a stocky Indian chewing coca leaves in the shelter of a cement mixer that I was reminded where I was.

It drizzled constantly: cold rain, ice slivers, hail. But most people were dressed for the weather. They wore thick overcoats and heavy sweaters, wool hats, and even mittens and gloves. The Indians had a bulky rounded look, and some wore earflaps under their derby hats. I saw the sun once. It appeared one morning between a break in the mist that hung over the canyon, and it was powerfully bright without being warm, simply a blinding flash that was soon eclipsed by more mist. The weather report in the daily paper was usually the same: Cloudy, fog, some rain, no change, like a certain season in northern Maine, except that here I was never able to elude my feeling of the bends or my nausea. I was tired but could not sleep; I had no appetite, one drink and I was staggering. And it is hard to be a stranger in a cold city: the people stay indoors, the streets are empty after the stores close, no one lounges in the parks, and the purposefulness — or what looks like it — in a cold climate is always a reproach to an idle traveller. I rolled up my painting, hid it in my suitcase and made preparations to leave.

The sun came out just as the Panamerican left the precincts of the railway station and began to travel in tight circles through the eucalyptus groves on the slopes north of the city. They were the only trees I was to see for several days. Ragged toothy boys'ran from behind the trees and hitched on the train, and after a few minutes jumped off and hurried, shouting, into the frail foliage. Then they were lost among the tall slender trees, the stringy bark. There were mud huts on the lower slopes, but as we climbed higher there were no more huts, only abandoned earthworks and an Indian or two. In spite of the steady rain of the previous days the steep creekbeds were dry and stony, cut deep in the waterless mountainside. Littered with rocks and sand, the soil could not have looked more infertile. But we were very high now, perhaps 13,000 feet and still climbing above the back of the city to the dry grey lip of the plateau that hangs over it. On this steep grade the train was tilted at a sharp angle; on the right a mountainside, on the left a deep ravine of clumsily made roofs.

After almost an hour we were still in sight of La Paz. It was there below us; we had gone back and forth on the mountainside, passing and repassing the city which had become large and spectacularly shabby. Behind the city were the Andes, snowy mountains with clouds smoking on their summits. We were up among the daisies and the weeds and the twittering birds; it was cold and bright, and clear enough to see for a hundred miles. There were plateaux and peaks on three sides of the city, and as we passed it for the last time — we had now reached an open plain — it looked strip-mined with roads and ditches, a reddened ledge rising to green slopes, black cliffs, white peaks.

Chased by rabid dogs, the train picked up speed and crossed the grey plain to the first station, Illimani, at 13,500 feet. There were sheep on the tracks and Indian women selling oranges for a penny each. I bought six oranges and boarded quickly as the train began to move. After the slow climb to this station it was surprising for the train to pick up speed and begin racing across the high plains.

It was a Bolivian train. Most of the coaches were wooden Second Class boxes crammed with Indians on their way south. These coaches, and the dining car and the one Bolivian sleeping car, would go no farther than the border at Villazon. My sleeping car belonged to Argentine Railways and was going all the way to Tucuman. This solid British-made pullman was about fifty years old, each compartment fitted with cupboards and a sink and a chamberpot. There were two berths in my compartment. Fernando, a journalism student, had the upper berth; I had the lower one and was privileged, because this gave me the window seat and the table.

'You are a teacher and all you do is write,' said Fernando. 'Me, I'm supposed to be the journalist and I haven't even got a pen! You should be a journalist!'

'A geography teacher,' I said, pausing in my note-taking. 'And, you see, this is rather unusual geography.'

'This?'

We stared out of the window.

That mountain, for example.'

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'That is a big mountain.'

It was Nevada de Illimani, four miles high, dark brutal bulk surmounted by wind-whipped snow. And it lay beyond the plain where grey grass had been trampled flat by storms.

Fernando smiled. He had not seen my point at all. He said, 'I am so glad you are happy in my country.' And he left the compartment.

The mountain was soon far behind us; we were sprinting towards an irregular wall of rainclouds and hills, past wheatfields and pepper patches. The eastern horizon was white and domed, like the skyline of an Arabian city idealized in a fable; it was the far edge of the high plains, this range of mosque-like peaks buried to their domes and squat minarets, and it was so thin and yet so marvellously shaped that at times it appeared as oddly beautiful as a mirage. Nearer the railway line — but very far apart — were small mud huts. They had mud-block courtyards and some had corrals, but none of them had any windows. They were shut; there were no lights; they were no more than hovels, and they looked forlorn. At Viacha, which was a village, we stopped to take on passengers. Now there was only standing room in Second Class, the battered green coaches were filled to overflowing, and on the curves I could see three or four faces at every window. I had tried to walk through the train to these coaches, but they were impassable — the Second Class corridors were jammed with people and their belongings. There was no greater contrast than this glow-worm stuffed with Bolivians and those empty plains.

It is equal to living in a tragic land

To live in a tragic time.

Regard now the sloping mountainous rocks

And the river that batters its way over stones,

Regard the hovels of those that live in this battered land.

There were no cars in the villages, no roads, no trees; only mud huts and cows, and Indians wrapped up against the cold. Except for the llamas which frisked when they saw the train, and the very shaggy mules which took no notice, travelling across the high plains was a bit like travelling through Texas. The hills were distant and slightly rounded — rain poured on one, the sun was setting on another — and the sky was enormous. The tracks from now on were perfectly straight, and just before the daylight was entirely gone the air became very cold. In this empty land an Indian pushed a bicycle along a path and then cut across a barren field, and later I saw a woman watching some still sheep. In the gathering dusk, some miles further on, an Indian woman and two small children laboured across the plain leading five mules which were carrying loads of farm tools, shovels and hoes. In a cloudy sunset, the village of Ayoayo — mud houses and a church — looked like a distant outpost from another age; it lay in the middle of the plain and it was so small the train did not stop.

The land became hillier, and a range of rugged bare mountains appeared — so high they were brightly lit by the setting sun, although we were travelling in near darkness. And the condors, too, flew so high they caught the light. The last Indian I saw that day was walking away from the train through a gulch. He wore sandals, but — in spite of the cold-no socks.

I saw what I thought at first was a Christ statue, but as we grew near it changed from the shape of a man to the shape of a bottle. It was a bottle, and it was twenty feet high and made of wood. It stood in utter emptiness and the large letters on its side said Inka-Cola.

By then, I had brought my diary up to date. I was pleased with myself: my work was done for the day, and I was well settled in this sleeping car and moving south towards the border. I went to the dining car, and there I found Fernando, who was drinking beer with his friend Victor and a third man — either drunk or naturally surly — whose name I did not catch. They invited me to join them and they asked me the usual South American questions: Where was I from? Where had I been? Was I a Catholic? What did I think of their country?

They hate to be criticized, the man in Ecuador had told me. Never criticize them. This advice had not worked in Peru, where praise only antagonized Peruvians and made them think that I sympathized with their rotten government. But Bolivians — if Fernando and his friends were anything to go by — clearly wanted to be praised.

'Bolivia's a wonderful country,' I said.

'It is, isn't it?' said Victor. He smiled coldly. The others agreed. Surely, we knew we were lying?

'Take Peru,' said Fernando.

The three Bolivians ran down Peru for a minute.

I said, 'Most Peruvians would agree with you.'

'Chile is the worst of all,' said Victor.

'What about Ecuador?' asked the surly man.

They have a military dictatorship,' said Fernando.

It was an uninspired remark. Every country that had been mentioned, including Bolivia, had a military dictatorship.

I said, 'Ecuador is going to hold an election.'

'So are we,' said Victor.

Four months later the Bolivian election was held. There were shootings all over the country, mysterious machine-gunnings, and stuffed ballot boxes. It was generally agreed that the election had been rigged, and then the head of state, General Banzer, 'annulled' the election. A state of siege was declared and a new government was formed in what was officially termed a 'bloodless coup'. Within five months there was a counter-coup and another promise to hold elections.

Peru was backward, said Fernando. Chile's black market was so bad you couldn't buy a tube of toothpaste, said Victor. The surly man said that they were massacring Indians in Brazil. Fernando said he knew a thing or two about newspapers: Bolivia's papers were the best in South America, but Argentina's seldom printed foreign news. The rest was hearsay: Paraguay was an unspeakable swamp, Colombia was full of thieves, and the Panamanians were so stupid and had such a tyrannical leader they didn't deserve the canal.

We went on drinking beer and the Bolivians went on belittling their neighbours. I suggested that they shared some national characteristics and recounted what the lady in Ecuador had told me about altitude being a factor in the South American consciousness. They said this was nonsense; they were insistent in exaggerating the differences. Oddest of all, they had not said much about Bolivia — and Bolivia could not have been nearer: it was this old-fashioned dining car and hurrying waiters; it was the Indians who were hunkered down in the doorway, and the cold downpour on the high plains out the window. Perhaps reading my mind, Victor said, 'We have one problem in Bolivia.'

'Only one?' I asked.

'One major problem,' he said. 'The sea. The Chileans ought to let us have a bit — or the Peruvians. We need a seaport of our own. It is because we don't have one that we have so many other problems. What can you do without a seaport?'

'He likes Bolivian beer,' said Fernando.

'Yes,' I said, 'it's very nice.'

'Lpok at that man,' said Victor.

At a side table a man was drinking beer. One look told me he was an American. He wore lumberjack shoes and the sort of woollen plaid forester's shirt that graduate students in state universities especially favour. His shirt-tails hung down, his beard was shaggy; he drank his beer straight from the bottle, tipping it up and then wiping his mouth with his forearm and belching.

‘That is ugly,' said Victor.

'He could have asked the waiter for a glass,' said Fernando.

The surly man had started to smile. 'Look at that! Glug-glug' — he mimicked with his thumb- 'right out of the bottle!'

'Very ugly,' said Victor.

'I think he is an American,' I said.

'He must be a German,' said Victor. 'Germans drink beer like that.'

We were speaking in Spanish — incautiously, it turned out, for a moment later the man stood up and said in fluent, American-accented Spanish, 'I am an American and this is the way Americans drink beer.' He drained his bottle, belched and walked towards Second Class.

While we were eating, I got a severe stomach cramp. I excused myself and went back to my compartment. The train had stopped. This was Oruro, a fairly large city, mostly Indian, near Lake Uru Uru. The rain had intensified; it beat against the window in a torrent made silver by the arc-lamps of the station. I got into bed and turned off the light and curled up to ease my cramp. I woke at about midnight. It was very cold in the compartment and so dusty — the dust seemed an effect of the train's rapid motion -1 could barely breathe. I tried the lights, but they didn't work. I struggled to open the door — it seemed locked from the outside. I was choking, freezing and doubled-up with stomach pains. I had no choice but to remain calm. I took four swigs of my stomach cement, and then buried my face in my blanket and waited for the morphine to work.

At dawn, I saw why I had not been able to get the door open: it had been bolted top and bottom by Fernando, who was still asleep in the upper berth. And I still felt terrible. I had imagined that after fifteen hours we would be off the high plains and perhaps rumbling through a valley nearer sea-level. I had been mistaken. We were still at 12,000 feet and travelling across a gaunt moonscape of dry rocks and empty craters. Alcohol worsens the symptoms of altitude sickness; and a hangover at a high altitude makes orle feel close to death. The landscape was cheerless and full of hard sharp rocks, a plain of tormented flint. There were not even Indians here in the cold Cordillera de Chichas. The few pools of water I saw looked gelid, and then I noticed that these were crusts of dusty ice, and further on dirt-speckled swatches of snow, like hanks and rags of torn underwear. Snow!

Over a breakfast of dry toast and tea, I talked with Victor. It seemed that he and Fernando (the surly man had disappeared) had decided to get away from it all. They had chosen a town in Southern Bolivia; the train would stop there later in the day. What did they plan to do there?

'Nothing,' said Victor.

I said I knew exactly what he meant.

'And maybe read,' said Victor. 'I love to read American novels.'

'Who are your favourite authors?'

'E. Bing Walla,' he said without hesitation. 'Also Artur Ailie and TylaCowdway.'

'Never heard of them,' I said.

The paperbacks were in his briefcase, Spanish translations of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey and Taylor Caldwell. 'This,' he said, picking up the Taylor Caldwell novel, 'is about Cicero. But I am sure you have read these authors.'

'I have never read a single word of any of them.'

'What is your book?'

It was a Jack London novel, The Assassination Bureau. I had not been enjoying it. 'It has a bad smell. In English we say, "It stinks".'

'Eet sdeenks,' he repeated.

'I feel terrible,' I said. 'It's this altitude. I think I should go back to bed.'

I went and lay down on my bunk, propped by a pillow, and watched our progress through creased mountains the colour of gunpowder. I guessed that we must by now be descending from the high plains. What settlements I could see were derelict, with ruined churches and collapsed fences, but otherwise there was nothing for miles but scrub and rock and small brown creeks. Fernando and Victor came into the compartment from time to time. Are you all right? they asked. I said I was fine, but I still felt crummy, and I was growing worried: I had drunk the last of my cement, and still my stomach cramps had not gone away.

The hours passed and the train rocked enraging the porcupine which now lived in my abdomen. Then we came to Tupiza, and Fernando and Victor said goodbye. Even in sunshine Tupiza, a heap of brown houses on a hillside, looked as forlorn as Dogpatch. There were condors circling it and some curious Indians squinting at the two new arrivals, who would be spending several weeks with them. Just the thought of standing on the platform in such a place, and watching the train depart as silence sifted down on the village, was enough to make me shudder.

We moved off at the speed of a jogger and for the next few hours followed the west bank of a wide muddy river, the Camblaya. There were bushes here, and cactus growing like cudgels, and even some cornfields between the dry hills. I thought then that we had descended to a lower altitude, but really it had not changed much. I was deceived by the disappearance of my cramps; feeling slightly better I believed we had left the high plains. But only this river valley was fertile — the rest was dry and mountainous desert, the maddeningly unfriendly landscape of a nightmare. It was an immense and empty country. There were brambles and small willows near the diminished river, but the rest was dusty blue- the hills, the gorges, the twisted knots of cactus.

The hills grew flatter, the river was lost from view, and for miles ahead there was only this wasteland. The train did not vary its speed. It crept slowly along, under a clear sky, across this repeating aridity. The only interesting landscape was elsewhere: to the west, where there were canyons; to the east, a mountain range of snowcapped peaks, with the same elusive sparkle of a mirage that I had detected the day before outside La Paz. The Andes, people call them; but the name means nothing. It seemed remarkable to me that mountains so huge and snowy should have such a simple general name and not be known by individual names. But this variegated desert, a thousand miles of plateau and strange shapes, was known by no other name than the high plains. And even the map is notoriously without names or descriptions. The train rolled through cloud-land; there were a half a dozen stops, but the rest was unknown. Now everyone on this train was travelling to the frontier town, which had a name.

Nearer Villazon the train had speeded up and sent grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given — we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border. I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.

'We will be here a long time,' he said. He made it sound like years.

The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square home-made umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast — at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. 'Are you in that sleeping car?' asked a man hurrying towards me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.

I told him I was.

'What time is it leaving?'

I said, 'I wish I knew.'

He said, 'I am going to get some answers.'

He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, 'Go away!'

The man came out of the station. He said, These people are all whores.' He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.

The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazon. The sleeping car looked very silly, stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.

A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazon, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.

Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.

'What time are we going?¹

'I do not know,' he said.

I wanted to go home.

But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.

I left the sleeping car and walked towards a low lighted building which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.

A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.

'What train is that?'

'It is the train to La Quiaca.'

'Shit!' I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.

Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.

The tracks up to Tucuman are in bad shape,' he said. 'You might not get there for days.'

Damn this trip, I thought.

We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead centre of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.

So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentine frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pyjamas and went to bed.

There was a knock on the compartment door: the conductor.

'Tickets please.'

'Where are we?'

'LaQuiaca.'

Still on the border.

'When are we leaving?'

'In a few minutes.'

Sure, I thought, and went back to sleep. Despair and impatience had a soporific effect. But I was woken some time later by a train whistle and a grunting of metal, then the anvil noises of the coupling. At last we were on our way.

I slept for twelve hours. I woke again at six in the morning, and saw that we had come to a station. There were three poplars outside the window. In the early afternoon I woke again. The three poplars were still outside the window. We had not moved.

This was Humahuaca, a small town in northern Argentina. We had travelled no more than 100 miles since leaving La Quiaca, and had dropped about 1,000 feet. The day was cool and sunny, with a crackle of insects and a joyful sound of church bells. It was Sunday, and the place looked serene. I was unused to seeing flower gardens — rows of chrysanthemums — and a kind of dogged prosperity. It was the first railway station I had seen for weeks that did not have at least one pig snuffling near the tracks or chickens clucking in the station master's office. I was encouraged by this appearance of order: this was obviously a different country, and the filthy train with its fly-blown coaches looked out of place here.

A glamorous woman of about forty was showing a pretty girl around the station. She said in Spanish, 'This is the train to Tucuman — it came all the way from Bolivia. Aren't you glad we came by car?'

The girl winced at the Panamerican.

I wanted to see the town, but I was afraid of being duffilled. Huma-huaca was a nice place, but it was miles from anywhere; and there would not be another train for three days.

I asked the sleeping car attendant what was up.

The tracks, he said. Somewhere down the line there was a break in the tracks, either flooding or a landslide. It could not be fixed earlier because the men could not work at night. It was serious: something to do with a volcano.

'We cannot leave for hours,' he said.

I went for a stroll in the town and saw Indians returning from church with wilted flowers. Then I remembered that it was Palm Sunday. There was great contentment on the faces of these people, a kind of after-church radiance, the pure joy that goes under the name of holiness. There were hundreds of them, and each one carried a flower.

But the rest of the town was shut, the restaurants closed, the bus depot deserted. I made a circuit of the town park and then returned to the railway station.

In the hours that had elapsed since the Panamerican had arrived at the station the atmosphere had changed. The train had brought squalor to the station and transformed it into a muck-heap. There were orange peels and banana skins under every window — the station was too respectable to have pigs nearby to eat them; and water poured from beneath the coaches, and there were heaps of shit under each toilet pipe. The sun had grown stronger, and flies collected around the coaches. This express train, so dramatic when it was on the move, became foul when it was stationary.

I thought that I was the only foreigner on the train. I should have known better. Experience had shown me that there was always a German in Second Class, slumbering on his pack-frame and spitting orange pips out of the window. At Humahuaca, it was Wolfgang. He had boarded the Bolivian segment of the train in the cold downpour at Oruro and he had suffered in Second Class ever since. I had not seen himi though he said he had seen me, buying tea from the Indian woman in La Quiaca. He had been travelling for months through Central and South America, and had only the vaguest idea of where he was going. He was certain of one thing: if he did not have the luck to find a job in Buenos Aires he would be in Argentina for the rest of his life. Frankly, he was eager to go home, he said.

Sometimes, in the presence of such a person-I had met many-I felt rather ashamed that I had travelled so swiftly from Boston. Two months before, I had boarded the Lake Shore Limited in South Station and after a few snowy days I had been rattling under clear skies to Mexico. I had not been robbed or fallen seriously ill; I had seen pretty places and met pleasant people. I had filled hundreds of pages of my diary and now I felt certain that I would make it to Esquel in Patagonia, the small town I had seen on my map which had become an arbitrary destination. I had breezed through most of the countries, and I was always brought up short when I met another traveller who said he was planning to spend a month in, say, Barranquilla or Cuzco. 'I didn't like Ecuador,' an American told me in Peru. 'Maybe I didn't give it enough time.' He had been there two months, which seemed an eternity tome.

Wolfgang's story was the same — a month here, a month there, two months somewhere else. He had been practically resident in these places; he was like a man looking for a new life. I knew I was merely skimming south, a bird of passage generalizing on the immediate. But because I had no camera, and had written so much, my impressions of what I had seen were vivid. I could call up Mexico or Costa Rica by glancing at- the conversations I had written, and from the particularities of the railway journey from Santa Marta to Bogotá I felt I could reinvent Colombia. Travel was, above all, a test of memory.

So, partly to kill time — the train was still stalled at Humahuaca — and partly to relieve myself of the guilt I felt with someone who regarded me as no more than a tourist, I asked Wolfgang what he remembered of the places he had been.

'This is a quiz,' I said. 'I'll say the name of a place and you tell me what you remember best about it. Pretend I'm someone who has never travelled anywhere -1 want to know what these places are like. Okay?'

'It's a good game,' he said.

'Ready? Here goes. Mexico.'

'Americans have a lot of trouble there,' said Wolfgang.

'Guatemala.'

'I missed the bus to San Salvador, but my pack was still on it, so my passport too. I spent three dollars on phone calls. It was terrible.'

'Nicaragua.'

'I should not have gone there.'

'Costa Rica.'

'Dull.'

'Colombia.'

'Lots of nice food in the markets, but I got sick there.'

'Maybe it was the food,' I said. 'What about Ecuador?'

'One month I am there, trying to take the buses.'

'Peru.'

'Nice and cheap.'

'Bolivia.'

'All the people in Bolivia are stupid.'

'Argentina.'

'I will be here for some weeks or months,' he said. 'So? I have passed the test?'

'You flunked, Wolfgang.'

He only became concrete when the conversation turned to the exchange rate. Here it was 670 pesos to the dollar, but there were towns where you could get 680. The difference was much less than a cent, but Wolfgang was the embodiment of the maxim I had devised earlier in this trip: It is the raggedest traveller who has the most precise notion of the exchange rate. Wolfgang wasn't looking for another life. Travel for him, as for many others, was just another way of saving money.

Without any warning, the train began to move. We ran from where we were standing on the platform and jumped on to the train, Wolfgang to Second, I to First. I did not see him again until two days later, inTucuman.

The Panamerican travelled along a flat green valley, beside a nearly dry but very wide river — the Rio Grande de Jujuy. Mountains rose swiftly out of the valley. They were old and cracked and extremely high, a whole range of them without a single tree. The cliffs, where they had been exposed to wind, were pink, smeared with maroon and orange — these were the high cliffs and peaks; the hills nearer the river were like mounds of mud. These hillocks, and the fact that the mountains were without any foliage, gave the mountain range a look of brutal authority: the contours were exposed, the flanks were pitted with rock-slides and clawed white by erosion, and the rounded peaks of the lower slopes looked like collapsed tents, or the blankets — with the same folds — that the Indians used to cover their belongings. A brown stream ran through the centre of the sluiced-out trough of river — this was all that was left of the Rio Grande; and on each bank there were poplars and willows and cactuses and mud-block houses at the periphery of ploughed fields. It was a strange sight, the bare mountains above the green valley, the wide river bed that had so little water in it, and the only human figure an old man, like the stereotype of the grizzled prospector, stumbling from bank to bank.

There were cornfields, tomato gardens and sunflowers, and fields of blue cabbage that looked much grander than the colourless huts. We were moving slowly through Argentina, but this was a more agreeable altitude. I could feel the change in myself, and I had slept well. I liked the look of Argentina. The landscape was wide-open and fertile. It seemed underpopulated, awaiting settlement, and it was easy to understand why Welshmen and Germans and Italians had come here and disappeared, carting their culture into a mountain valley and ignoring the rest of the world.

Dust flew through the window of my compartment. My worry was my wounded hand. I washed it and changed the bandage. I was sure that if dust got into my unhealed cut it would become infected. The dust storm ceased at Tilcara, which lay under poplars on the side of a mountain. There were people picnicking here, and it looked like a remote part of Italy. The people were almost certainly Italian settlers, the old women in black, the pot-bellied men standing in the shade of apple trees. But Tilcara was an oasis. A hundred yards outside town, after a notice Do Not Destroy the Trees (perversely enough, it was like a sign of civilization), the dust began to fly, and the naked mountains were streaked with yellow sandstone.

We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. The line was actual, a fissure that ran over the mountains which were themselves marked with stratified stripes as on a topographical map, pink, orange, green; indeed, the landscape was as simple and clearly coloured as a map, accurately reproduced on the paper square before me — black railway line running through brown valley edged in green, pink and orange contours in their proper places. This was near Maimara. There were only a few houses to be seen, but the yellow chapel had been built in the mid-seventeenth century. The people in these Argentine towns looked as if they were there to stay, while in Bolivia the towns had the look of imminent desertion.

A lame dog in Maimara reminded me that, since leaving the United States, I had not seen a dog that wasn't lame, or a woman who wasn't carrying something, or an Indian without a hat, or — anywhere — a cat.

We were supposed to have been in Maimara for three minutes, no more, but after an hour we were still there, in the late afternoon sunshine. I sat on the steps of the platform and smoked my pipe. Seeing me, a man on a path by the railway tracks came over and asked me where I was going. He was short, and very dark, with slits for eyes, a broad face and chubby hands. I assumed he was Indian, or half Indian — the Incas had come this far, and even beyond, as far as Jujuy.

I told him I was going to Tucuman on this train.

There was a volcano farther south, he said; it had caused a mudslide and ripped the tracks apart. It seemed that they were trying to firt it, but in any case it was four hours to Jujuy, and I certainly would not be in Tucuman until tomorrow.

'What's the point of travelling?' said this swarthy provincial. Tve been around the country-Jujuy, LaQuiaca, all the places. But none of them is as good as Maimara. We've got apples, corn, pears — everything you need. It's easy to grow things here, and it's a pretty town. I saw Villazon once- it was really ugly. I would hate to live there. Here, I have everything I need.'

'Good for you.'

'You should stay here,' he said.

The train doesn't seem to be going, so I guess I am staying here.'

'It is the volcano — it wrecked the tracks. Where are you headed after Tucuman?'

'Buenos Aires, and then Patagonia.'

'Patagonia! That's so far away they speak differently there.' He grinned at me. 'So you were at La Quiaca and you're going to Patagonia. They are at opposite ends of Argentina. I would never go to those places. I would rather stay home.'

'After Patagonia, I will go home.'

'That's the idea!' he said. 'It must be terrible to be so far away from home on a nice Sunday afternoon like this.'

'It is sunny here,' I said. 'I am sure it is rainy at home.'

That's interesting,' he said, and thanked me. He disappeared beyond the rattling poplars.

Just south of Purmamarca, in a dry river bed — the wide valley was surrounded by clouded mountains-1 saw a Palm Sunday procession. I guessed it was that, but it might have been anything. There were easily 2,000 people making their way down the river bed. Many were on horseback, some waved banners and flags, and there was a smartly dressed band, the source of a lugubrious braying. Near the front of the procession some people carried a white box, a coffin, either emblematic or real. And what made this group especially strange was the sky lowering upon them. They were a multitude of tiny figures in a gigantic mural, in which the important feature was the granite muscle in this toppling cloud.

The train moved on, and the cloud continued to drop. It slid down the mountains and into the valley and down the river bed. It hovered at the tree-tops and the afternoon darkened. In fifteen minutes the landscape had changed from an overpowering vista of Argentina, to a weeping late-afternoon in New England. The visibility was about fifty yards; it was warm and dimly white, a world of sudden ghostliness.

It began to drizzle and beside the track there were cleared mudslides. The damage was obvious: wrecked walls and tipped-over culverts, and water rushing at sand-bags. I hung out of the door to look at the land-slip and behind me the sleeping car attendant said, This is the volcano.'

'I didn't realize there were volcanoes here.'

'No, the town is called Volcano.'

I had got it wrong: what I had taken to be a volcano — the descriptions I had heard up the line- was just the name of the town.

'How are we doing?' I asked.

'We will be a day and a half late in arriving in Buenos Aires.'

I spent the rest of the daylight hours reading Friedrich Dürrenmatt's End of the Game. Its original title, a better one, was The Judge and His Hangman. After Jack London's feeble and preposterous plot, Dürrenmatt's struck me as brilliant; and necessary, too, since he had little insight. Such order made him seem like a sage. For railway reading, the best book is the plottiest, a way of endowing the haphaz-ardness of thejourney with order.

At Jujuy I saw that the river which had been dry some miles north was in full flood. Here the Rio Grande deserved its name. Along its banks were leafy trees and flowers, and an evening mist hung over the water. Jujuy looked peaceful and damp; it was just high enough to be pleasant without giving one a case of the bends. The rain on the blossoms perfumed the dark air and a fresh breeze blew from the river. It seemed idyllic, and yet later I heard that Jujuy was so badly flooded that thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes. It is not possible to see everything from a train.

The station was full of Indians, who had come to welcome the Indians on this train from the border. This was the last place in Argentina where I saw so many Indians, and there were people in Argentina who denied that they existed in this country in any great number. So Jujuy seemed a frontier of sorts, the end of the old Inca trail. It was green, a town buried — so it seemed — in lush depthless spinach.

I would gladly have stayed here, and nearly did, but as I stood on the platform I saw twenty new coaches being hitched to our train and, with them, an attractive dining car. I felt wonderful now: no cramps, no altitude sickness; my appetite had returned (and only the day before I had been sitting in Villazon, eating peanuts), and with it a thirst. I went to the dining car and ordered a carafe of wine. The waiter, dressed in a black uniform, set all the tables — tablecloths, silver, vases of flowers. But his exertions were premature. I was the only customer that night.

Dinner — now we were proceeding via the town of General Miguel Martin de Quemes to Tucuman — was five courses: home-made noodle soup, sausage and polenta, veal cutlets, ham salad and dessert. Although the waiter stood nearby, supplying me with a new carafe of wine every so often, after I finished and lit my pipe he sat down with me, clinked glasses and we talked.

He spoke Spanish with a strong Italian accent — many people did in Argentina. But his Italian was poor. 'I'm an Italian,' he said, but he said it in the way Americans say they are Polish or Armenian: it is the immigrant's claim, or excuse, in an undefined country.

'We are lucky to get through on this train,' he said. This is the first train in two weeks that's made it past Volcan. Did you see the landslide?'

I had: the hill of mud had moved sideways across the track.

'Several trains tried to get through it when it was only half cleared and, tweet, off the tracks they came- derailed. So they stopped taking chances. I've been sitting for two weeks waiting for the train to arrive.'

What a fate: this steward waits two weeks in Jujuy for the Panameri-can, and then it comes, they hitch up his dining car and all he gets is one customer- me. Yet he did not seem especially downhearted.

'What countries have you seen?'

I told him.

'And, of all of them, which one do you like most?'

They hate criticism.

'Argentina,' I said.

'The rest of them are so poor,' he said. 'Know how much the best steak costs here? Take a guess.'

I guessed too low; I gave him the peso equivalent of fifty cents. He said — and he was slightly annoyed — that a pound of filet mignon cost seventy-five cents.

It seemed a specious argument for prosperity in a country where the annual inflation rate was between 300 and 400 %. Every day, the peso was worth less, and everything but steak rose in price. Most Argentines had steak twice a day, and even the lowliest clerk ordered a great shoe of it, with french fries, at lunch time. And it reminded me that the most violently critical pieces I had read about Argentina were by V. S. Naipaul. His articles appeared in The New York Review of Books, and they aroused a certain amount of controversy. No one had made the obvious point about Naipaul's loathing of Argentina, but then perhaps it was not commonly known that he was a vegetarian.

'What do you think of this train?'

Whatever you do, don't criticize them.

'It is one of the best trains I've ever seen in my life.'

'It should be the best. It's got good equipment — reclining chairs, lots of space and comfort. But look at the people! They're in First Class and they spit on the floor, hang their clothes on the light fixtures, stick their feet up on the nice chairs.' He made mocking Italian gestures and mimicked the slobs he was describing; the cooks, who had also come over to sit with us, found this very funny. 'You see them? What can we do? They don't know how to ride on a train, that's all.'

Hisì)lame was general. He did not single out a group, and what was more interesting, he did not mention Indians. I found this a relief. One of the pleasures of Argentina — it had also been one in Costa Rica-was that one could be wholly anonymous. The faces on the Panamerican at this point were the faces one might see on any train in the United States, or Europe for that matter. It was possible to enter a crowd in Argentina and vanish. It was very restful for anonymity to be available to me; it simplified travel and allowed me to stare at people for long periods without being detected.

I slept well that night, but woke to hear the attendant pounding on my compartment door.

'Wake up,' he cried. 'We're at Tucuman! You have to get up!'

I opened the door.

'Hurry, sir. All the other passengers have left.'

'How do I get to Buenos Aires?'

'You missed the train. You'll have to catch the North Star tonight. See,' he said, pulling my suitcase out of the door, 'we should have been here last night. All the other passengers have the same problem.'

He helped me out into the grey dawn of Belgrano Station in Tucuman. The morning coolness was already condensing into humidity. There was fog giving an eerieness to the palm trees in the station garden. I checked my suitcase in at the Left Luggage window and went to have breakfast.