The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

3 THE AZTEC EAGLE

It was a rainy night in Laredo — not late, and yet the place seemed deserted. A respectable frontier-town, sprawling at the very end of the Amtrak line, it lay on a geometric grid of bright black streets on a dirt bluff that had the clawed and bulldozed look of a recent quarry. Below was the Rio Grande, a silent torrent slipping past Laredo in a cut as deep as a sewer; the south bank was Mexico.

The city lights were on, making the city's emptiness emphatic. In that glare I could see its character as more Mexican than Texan. The lights flashed, suggesting life, as lights do. But where were the people? There were stop-lights on every corner, Walk and Wait signs winked on and off; the two-storey shop-fronts were floodlit, lamps burned in the windows of one-story houses; the street lights made the puddles bright holes in slabs of wet road. The effect of this illumination was eerie, that of a plague city brightened against looters. The stores were heavily padlocked; the churches lit up in cannonades of arc-lamps; there were no bars. All that light, instead of giving an impression of, warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.

No traffic waited at the red lights, no pedestrians at the crosswalks. And though the city was silent, in the drizzly air was an unmistakable heart-murmur, the threep-threep of music being played far away. I walked and walked, from my hotel to the river, from the river to a plaza, and into the maze of streets until I was almost certain I was lost. I saw nothing. And it could be frightening, seeing — four blocks away — a blinking sign I took to be a watering hole, a restaurant, an event, a sign of life, and walking to it and arriving soaked and gasping to discover that it was a shoe store or a funeral parlour, shut for the night. So, walking the streets of Laredo, I heard only my own footsteps, the false courage of their click, their faltering at alleyways, their splashes as I briskly returned to the only landmark I knew — the river.

The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine from which every bush and tree had been removed in order to allow the police to patrol it. Three bridges linked the United States to Mexico here. Standing on the bluff I heard the threep-threep louder: it was coming from the Mexican side of the river, a just-discernible annoyance, like a neighbour's radio. Now I could see plainly the twisting river, and it struck me that a river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.

Looking south, across the river, I realized that I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there — music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people did things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer-signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope — the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.

A car drew up behind me. I was alarmed, then reassured when I saw it was a taxi. I gave the driver the name of my hotel and got in, but when I tried to make conversation he responded by grunting. He understood only his own language.

In Spanish I said, 'It is quiet here.'

That was the first time on my trip that I spoke Spanish. After this, nearly every conversation I had was in Spanish. But in the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English. I have no patience with sentences that go, ' "Carramba!" said the campesino, eating his empanada at the estancia. .'

'Laredo,' said the taxi driver. He shrugged.

'Where are all the people?'

'The other side.'

'Nuevo Laredo?'

'Boys' Town,' he said. The English took me by surprise, the phrase tickled me. He said, now in Spanish again, 'There are one thousand prostitutes in the Zone.'

It was a round number, but I was convinced. And that of course explained what had happened to this city. After dark, Laredo slipped into Nuevo Laredo, leaving the lights on. It was why Laredo looked respectable, even genteel, in a rainswept and mildewed way: the clubs, the bars, the brothels, were across the river. The red-light district was ten minutes away, in another country.

But there was more to this moral spelled out in transpontine geography than met the eye. If the Texans had the best of both worlds in decreeing that the fleshpots should remain on the Mexican side of the International Bridge — the river flowing, like the erratic progress of a tricky argument, between vice and virtue — the Mexicans had the sense of tact to keep Boys' Town camouflaged by decrepitude, on the other side of the tracks, another example of the geography of morality. Divisions everywhere: no one likes to live next-door to a whorehouse. And yet both cities existed because of Boys' Town. Without the whoring and racketeering, Nuevo Laredo would not have had enough municipal funds to plant geraniums around the statue of its madly gesturing patriot in the plaza, much less advertise itself as a bazaar of wicker-work and guitar-twanging folklore — not that anyone ever went to Nuevo Laredo to be sold baskets. And Laredo required the viciousness of its sister-city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had the airport and the churches, Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket-factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically-sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist, David Ricardo (1772–1823).

At first glance, this looked like the typical sort of mushroom-and-dunghill relationship that exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. But the longer I thought about it the more Laredo seemed like all of the United States, and Nuevo Laredo all of Latin America. This frontier was more than an example of cozy hypocrisy; it demonstrated all one needed to know about the morality of the Americas, the relationship between the puritanical efficiency north of the border, and the bumbling and passionate disorder — the anarchy of sex and hunger — south of it. It was not as simple as that, since there was obviously villainy and charity in both, and yet crossing the river (the Mexicans don't call it the Rio Grande; they call it the Rio Bravo de Norte), no more than an idle traveller making his way south with a suitcase of dirty laundry, a sheaf of railway timetables, a map and a pair of leak-proof shoes, I felt as if I was acting out a significant image. Crossing a national boundary and seeing such a difference on the other side had something to do with it: truly, every human feature there had the resonance of metaphor.

It is only two hundred yards, but the smell of Nuevo Laredo rises. It is the smell of lawlessness; it is smokier, scented with chilis and cheap perfume. I had come from the tidy Texas town, and could see, almost as soon as I left it, the crowd of people at the far end of the bridge, the traffic jam, the cat-calling and horn-blowing, some people waiting to enter the United States, but most of them merely gaping across the frontier which is — and they know it — the poverty line.

Mexicans enter the United States because there is work for them there. They do it illegally — it is virtually impossible for a poor Mexican to enter legally, if his intention is to seek work. When they are caught, they are thrown into jail, serve a short sentence and then deported. Within days, they head back for the United States and the farms where they can always find work as low-paid day-labourers. The solution is simple: if we passed a law requiring United States farmers to hire only men with entry visas and work permits, there would be no problem. There is no such law. The farm lobby has made sure of that, for if there were no Mexicans to exploit how would these barrel-assed slavers be able to harvest their crops?

Closer, I could see the chaos particularized. The lounging soldiers and policemen only made it look more lawless, the noise was terrifying and, at once, the national characteristics were evident — the men had no necks, the policemen wore platform shoes and no prostitute was without her natural ally, an old woman or a cripple. It was cold and rainy; there was an atmosphere of impatience in the town; still February — the tourists were not due for months.

Halfway across the bridge, I had passed a rusty mailbox bearing the sign Contraband. This was for drugs. The penalties were posted in two languages — five years for soft drugs, fifteen for hard. I tried to peek inside, but unable to see anything I gave it a whack with my fist. It boomed: it must have been empty. I continued to the barrier, five cents in the turnstile slot, and as simply as boarding a bus I was in Mexico. Although I had been growing a moustache to make myself visibly Latin it was clearly not working. I was waved through the customs gate with four other gringos: we looked innocent.

There was no question that I had arrived, for while the neckless men and the swaggering cops and maimed animals had a certain sullen statelessness, the garlic-seller was the personification of Latin America. He was weedy, and wore a torn shirt and a greasy hat; he was very dirty; he screamed the same three words over and over. These attributes alone were unremarkable — he too had a counterpart in Cleveland. What distinguished him was the way he carried his merchandise. He had a garland of garlic cloves around his neck, and another around his waist, and ropes of them on his arms, and he shook them in his fists. He fought his way in and out of the crowd, the clusters of garlic bouncing on his body. Was there any better example of cultural difference than this man? At the Texas end of the bridge he would have been arrested for contravening some law of sanitation; here, he was ignored. What was so strange about wearing bunches of garlic around your neck? Perhaps nothing, except that he would not have done it if he was not a Mexican, and I would not have noticed it if I hadn't been an American.

Boy's Town — the Zone — is aptly named, since so much of it wickedly reflects the sexual nightmare-paradise of forbidden boyhood fantasy. It is fear and desire, a whole suburb of libido in which one can see the dire consequences in every greedy wish. It is the child who numbly craves the thrill of a lover's hug; but no child enjoys this fantasy without knowing the equal and opposite anxiety of being pursued by the same creature. Months of wintry weather and rain and off-season idleness had turned the prostitutes of the Zone into rather woeful examples of demon lovers. They were the howling, sleeve-tugging, arm-grabbing, jostling embodiment of the punitive part of sexual fantasy. I felt like Leopold Bloom steering his timid way through the limitless brothel of nighttown, for here one could not express an interest without risking humiliation. What made it worse for me was that I was merely curious; intending neither to condemn nor encourage, I was mistaken for that most pathetic of emotionally damaged souls, the near-sighted voyeur, a kind of sexual barnacle fastening my attention upon the meat market. Just looking, I'd say; but prostitutes have no patience with this attitude.

'Mister!'

'Sorry, I have to catch a train.'

'What time is it leaving?'

'About an hour.'

'That's plenty of time — mister!'

The urchins, the old ladies, the cripples, the sellers of lottery tickets, the frantic dirty youths, the men selling trays of switch-blades, the tequila bars and incessant racketing music, the hotels reeking of bedbugs — the frenzy threatened to overwhelm me. I had to admit a certain fascination, and yet I feared that I would have to pay for my curiosity. If you're not interested in this, said a pretty girl hiking up her skirt with a casually lazy gesture, why are you here?

It was a good question and, as I had no answer, I left. I went to the office of Mexican Railways to buy my train ticket. The town was in great disrepair — no building was without a broken window, no street without a wrecked car, no gutter not choked with garbage; and in this clammy season, without any heat to justify its squalor or give it romance, it was cruelly ugly. But it is our bazaar, not Mexico's. It requires visitors.

Some citizens remain pure. Paying for my sleeper on the Aztec Eagle, I mentioned to the friendly manageress that I had just come from the Zone.

She rolled her eyes and then said, 'Shall I tell you something? I do not know where that place is.'

'It's not far. You just-'

'Don't tell me. I have been here two years. I know my home, I know my office, I know my church. That's all I need.'

She said that my time would be better spent looking at the curios than idling in the Zone. On my way to the station, I took her advice. Inevitably there were baskets and postcards and switchblade knives; but there were also plaster dogs and plaster Christs, carvings of women squatting, religious junk of every description, including rosaries the size of a ship's hawser with beads like baseballs, rained-on ironwork rusting on sidewalk stands, and gloomy plaster saints — martyred rather savagely by the people who had painted them, and each bearing the inscription Souvenir of Nuevo Laredo. A curio (the word, practically self-explanatory, is short for 'curiosity') is something that has no purpose other than to prove that you arrived: the coconut carved with an ape's face, the combustible ashtray, the sombrero — they are useless without the Nuevo Laredo inscription, but a good deal more vulgar than anything I saw in the Zone.

Not far from the station there was a man melting tubes of glass and drawing them thin and making model cars. His skill amounted almost to artistry, but the result — always the same car — lacked any imagination. The delicate work, this glass filigree, took hours; he laboured to make what could have been something beautiful, into a ridiculous souvenir. Had he ever made anything else?

'No,' he said. 'Only this car. I saw a picture of it in a magazine.'

I asked him when he had seen the picture.

'No one ever asked me that question before! It was ten years ago. Or more.'

'Where did you learn to do this?'

'In Puebla- not here.' He looked up from his blowtorch. 'Do you think a person could learn anything here in Nuevo Laredo? This is one of the traditional arts of Puebla. I have taught my wife and children to do it. My wife makes little pianos, my son makes animals.'

Over and over again, the same car, piano, animal. It would not have been so disturbing if it was a simple case of mass-producing the objects. But enormous skill and patience went into the making of what was in the end no more than junk. It seemed a great waste, but not very different from the Zone which turned lovely little girls into bad-tempered and rapacious hags.

Earlier that afternoon I had left my suitcase at the station restaurant. I had asked for the baggage department. A Mexican girl at a table on which someone had spewed pushed her tin plate of beans aside and said, 'This is it.' She had given me a scrap of paper and written PAUL in lipstick on the suitcase. I had no lively hope of ever seeing it again.

Now, trying to reclaim it, I gave the scrap of paper to a different girl. This one laughed at the paper and called a cross-eyed man over to examine it. He laughed, too.

I said, 'What's so funny?'

'We can't read her writing,' said the cross-eyed man.

'She writes in Chinese,' said the girl. She scratched her stomach and smiled at the paper. 'What does that say — fifty or five?'

'Let's call it five,' I said. 'Or we can ask the girl. Where is she?'

'Chee' — now the cross-eyed man was speaking in English — 'enee go to the veech!'

They thought this was hysterically funny.

'My suitcase,' I said. 'Where is it?'

The girl said, 'Gone', but before I could react, she giggled and dragged it out of the kitchen.

The sleeping car of The Aztec Eagle was a hundred yards down the track, and 1 was out of breath when I reached it. My English leak-proof shoes, specially bought for this trip, had sprung a leak; my clothes were wet. I had carried the suitcase on my head, coolie-style, but all that served to do was provoke a migraine and funnel rainwater into my collar.

A man in a black uniform stood in the doorway, barring my way. 'You can't get on,' he said. 'You haven't been through Customs.'

This was true, although I wondered how he could possibly have known this.

I said, 'Where is Customs?'

He pointed to the far end of the flooded track, and said disgustedly, 'Over there.'

I heaved the suitcase onto my head again and certain that I could get no wetter splashed back to the station platform. 'Customs?' I asked. A lady peddling bubble-gum and cookies laughed at me. I asked a little boy. He covered his face. I asked a man with a clipboard. He said, 'Wait.'

Rain dribbled through holes in the platform roof and Mexicans carted bales of their belongings and shoved them through the windows of Second Class. And yet, for an express train with a high reputation, there were not many passengers in evidence. The station was dingy and nearly deserted. The bubble-gum seller talked to the fried chicken seller; barefoot children played tag; it continued to rain — and the rain was not a brisk purifying downpour, but a dark tedious drizzle, like flecks of falling soot, which seemed to taint everything it touched.

Then I saw the man in the black uniform who had barred my entry to the sleeping car. He was wet now and looked furious.

'I don't see the Customs,' I said.

He showed me a tube of lipstick and said, 'This is Customs.'

Without inquiring further, he franked my suitcase with a slash of lipstick, then straightened and groaned and said, 'Hurry up, the train is about to leave.'

'Sorry, have I been keeping you waiting?'

The sleeping cars — there were two — were old American ones, from a railway in the States which had gone bankrupt. The compartments had deep armchairs and art-deco angles and three-sided mirrors, and were not only handsome but comfortable and well-carpeted. Everything I had seen in Nuevo Laredo seemed to be in a state of dereliction; nothing maintained, nothing cared-for. Yet this old train with its hand-me-down sleeping cars was in good condition, and in a few years would qualify as an antique in an excellent state of preservation. It had happened by accident: the Mexicans did not have the money to rebuild sleeping cars in chrome and plastic, as Amtrak had done, but by keeping them in trim they had managed to preserve the art-deco originality.

Most of the compartments were empty. Walking through the cars just before the whistle blew, I saw a Mexican family, some children travelling with their mother, a pair of worried-looking American tourists, and a winking middle-aged lady in a fake leopard-skin coat. In the bedroom across the corridor from mine there was an old woman and her pretty companion, a girl of about twenty-five. The old woman was flirtatious with me and sharp with the girl, who I supposed was her daughter. The girl was desperately shy, and her drab clothes (the old woman wore a mink around her neck) and her lovely face with its sallow English sadness, gave her expression a sort of passionate purity. All the way to Mexico City I tried to talk to this girl, but each time the old woman interrupted with cackling questions and never allowed the girl to reply. I decided that the girl's submissiveness was more than daughterly obedience: she was a servant, maintaining an anxious silence. Her eyes were green, and I think that even that aged woman's vanity could not have prevented her from knowing how attractive this girl was, or the true motive for my questions. There was something Russian and old-fashioned and impenetrable about this pair.

I was in my compartment, sipping tequila, and thinking how — so close to the United States (I could see the department stores on eroded bluffs of Laredo from the station) — everything had become so different, such slaphappy Mexican dishevelment. There was a knock at the door.

'Excuse me.' It was the conductor, and as he spoke he bustled into the compartment. He was still bustling, still speaking. 'I'm just going to put this up there.'

He carried a large paper shopping bag in which there were stuffed many smaller bags. He grinned and held it chest-high. He motioned to the luggage rack above the sink.

I said, 'I was going to put my suitcase up there.'

'No problem! You can put your suitcase under the bed. Look, let me do it.'

He got to his knees and pushed the suitcase out of sight, remarking on what a nice fit it was. I had not thought to remind him that this was my compartment.

'What's that?'I asked.

He clutched his bag more tightly and grinned again. 'This?' he said breezily. 'Some things, that's all.' He slid the bag onto the luggage rack — it was too plump to fit under the bed — and said, 'No problem, okay?'

It filled the luggage rack. I said, 'I don't know.'

I tugged at the opening and tried to peek inside the bag. With an insincere laugh, he put his hand on my shoulder and eased me away.

'It's all right!' He was still laughing, now with a kind of shrewd gratitude.

I said, 'Why don't you put it somewhere else?'

'It's much better here,' he said. 'Your suitcase is small. That's a good idea — always travel with a small suitcase. It fits beautifully down there.'

'What is this thing?'

He did not reply. And he had not removed his hand from my shoulder. Now he applied gentle pressure and sat me down. He stepped backwards, looked left and right along the corridor, stepped forward and leaned over and in breathy Spanish said, 'It's fine. You're a tourist. No problem.'

'Very well then.' I smiled at him, I smiled at the bag.

He stopped laughing. I think he became alarmed at my willingness to accept the bag. He half-closed the compartment door and said, 'Don't say anything.'

He put a finger to his lips and sucked air.

'Say anything?' I started to get up. 'To whom?'

He motioned me back to my armchair. 'Don't say anything.'

He shut the door.

I looked at the bag.

A moment later, there was a knock at the door. The same conductor, a new grin: 'Dinner is served!'

He waited, and when I left the compartment he locked the door.

It was in the dining car that I tried to strike up a conversation with the green-eyed girl. The old woman fielded my questions. I had two Bohemian beers and the carcass of a scrawny chicken. I tried again. And I noticed that when the old woman replied she always said, 'I', not 'we' — 'I am going to Mexico City,' 'I have been in Nuevo Laredo.' So the green-eyed girl was almost certainly a servant, part of the old woman's baggage. Concentrating on this problem, I barely noticed that three uniformed men had entered the dining car; I saw them — pistols, moustaches, truncheons, no necks — and then they were gone: Mexico was full of men in ambiguous uniforms — they seemed to be part of the landscape.

'I live in Coyoacan,' said the old woman. Her eating had removed her lipstick; she was putting on more.

'Didn't Trotsky live there?' I said.

A man in a white steward's smock appeared at my elbow.

'Go back to your compartment. They want you.'

'Who wants me?'

'Customs.'

'I've been through Customs.' With an intimation of trouble, I spoke in English.

'You no espick Espanish?'

'No.'

The old woman looked sharply at me but said nothing.

'Da men. Dey wants you,' said the steward.

'I'll just finish this beer.'

He moved my glass out of reach. 'Now.'

The three armed Customs men were waiting for me outside my compartment. The conductor was nowhere in sight, and yet the compartment had been unlocked: obviously he had skipped out and left me to face the music.

'Good evening,' I said — they exchanged grimaces on hearing my English. I took out my passport, rail ticket, health card and waved them to deflect their attention. 'You'll find that I have a Mexican Tourist Card, smallpox vaccination, valid passport — look.' I jerked the concertina of extra pages out of my passport and showed them the Burmese postage stamps glued to my Burma visa, my garish re-entry permit for Laos, the chit that gave me unlimited access to Guatemala.

This distracted them for a moment — they muttered and turned pages- and then the ugliest one of the three stepped into the compartment and whacked his billy club against the luggage rack.

'Is this yours?'

I decided not to understand Spanish. To give a truthful answer would have put the conductor into the soup — probably where he belonged. But earlier in the day I had seen a bullying customs officer tormenting an elderly Mexican with a series of impromptu humiliations. The old man was with a young boy, and their suitcase contained about thirty tennis balls. The customs officer made them empty the suitcase; the tennis balls rolled in all directions, and while the two victims chased them, the customs officer kicked the tennis balls and repeated in Spanish I am not satisfied with your explanation! This gave me an unmerciful hatred for all Mexican customs officials that was far greater than my powerful resentment for the conductor who was the cause of my present problem.

Without saying yes or no, I said very rapidly in English, 'That's been there for some time, about two hours.'

Hearing ours, he said in Spanish, 'It belongs to you, then.'

'I've never seen it before in my life.'

'It's theirs,' he called out in Spanish. The men in the corridor grunted.

I smiled at the man and said, 'I think there's a great misunderstanding here.' I stooped and pulled my suitcase out from under the seat and said, 'Look, I've been through customs already — there's the lipstick smear on the side. I'd be glad to open it for you. I've got some old clothes, some maps — '

In Spanish, he said, 'Don't you speak Spanish?'

In English, I said, 'I've only been in Mexico one day. We can't expect miracles, can we? I'm a tourist.'

'This one's a tourist,' he yelled to the corridor.

As we talked, the train sped along and lurched, throwing us against each other. When he rocked, the customs officer's hands went to his billy club and his pistol for balance.

His eyes were very tiny and his voice full of threat as he said slowly in Spanish, 'So all this is yours, including that parcel up there?'

In English I said, 'What is it exactly you'd like to see?'

He looked again at the bag. He squeezed it. There was a clinking sound inside. He was very suspicious, but he was also sad because, as a tourist, I was entitled to privacy. That conductor knew the ropes.

The customs officer said, 'Have a good trip.'

'Same to you.'

When they left, I went back to the dining car and finished my beer. The waiters were whispering as they collected the plates from the tables. We came to a station, and when we pulled out I was sure the customs officers had left the train.

I hurried to my compartment, dying to see what the bag contained. I felt, after what had happened, that I had every right to look in. The car was empty, my compartment as I had left it. I locked the door behind me and stood on the toilet to get a better look at the luggage rack. The shopping bag was gone.

We had left Nuevo Laredo at twilight. The few stations we stopped at later in the evening were so poorly lighted I could not make out their names on the signboards. I stayed up late reading The Thin Man, which I had put aside in Texas. I had lost the plot entirely, but the drinking still interested me. All the characters drank — they met for cocktails, they conspired in speakeasies, they talked about drinking, and they were often drunk. Nick Charles, Hammett's detective, drank the most. He complained about his hangovers, and then drank to cure his hangover. He drank before breakfast, and all day, and the last thing he did at night was have a drink. One morning he feels especially rotten; he says complainingly, 'I must have gone to bed sober,' and then pours himself a stiff drink. The drinking distracted me from the clues in the way President Banda's facial tic prevented me from ever hearing anything he said. But why so much alcohol in this whodunnit? Because it was set — and written — during Prohibition. Evelyn Waugh once commented that the reason Brideshead Revisited had so many sumptuous meals in it was because it was written during a period of war-time rationing, when the talk was of all the wonderful things you could do with soya beans. By midnight, I had finished The Thin Man and a bottle of tequila.

Two blankets did not keep me warm in my compartment. I woke three or four times shivering, believing — it is so easy to be deluded on a dark train — that I was back home in Medford. In the morning, I was still cold, the shades were drawn and I was not sure which country I was in. I pushed up the shade and saw the sun rising behind a green tree. It was a solitary tree, and the climbing sun gave it an emblematic quality in the stony landscape; it was a pale perpendicular, studded with fruit like hand grenades, but as I watched it, it thickened and grew less tree-like and finally stiffened into a cactus.

There were more cactuses, some like burnt-out torches and others the more familiar candelabras. There were no trees. The sun, so early in the morning, was bright and gave a blueness to the hills which twisted off into the distance, and a glitter to the stiletto spikes on the cacti. The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins. I wondered whether it was cold outside until I saw a man — the only human in that desert — in a donkey cart, rumbling over a road that might well have been a creek-bed. The man was dressed warmly, his sombrero jammed over his ears, a maroon scarf wrapped around his face, and a wadded jacket of brilliantly coloured rags.

It was still early. As the sun moved higher in the sky, the day became warmer and woke the smells, until that curious Mexican mixture of sparkle and decay, blue sky and bedragglement, asserted itself. In the bright air was the dismal town of Bocas. Here were four green trees, and a church on a steep hill, its whitewash reddened by dust, and cactuses so large cows were tethered to their spiky trunks. But most of the town was mimicry: the church was a house, the houses were sheds, most trees were cactuses, and without topsoil the crops — red peppers and corn — were skeletal. Some children in torn clothes skipped over to look at the train, and then, hearing the honk of a horn, ran to the sandy road to see a heavily-laden Coca-Cola truck — up to its axles in sand — straining towards the town's one store.

Mexicans habitually site the town dump along the railway tracks. The detritus of the very poor is unimaginably vile, and though it smoulders it is far too loathsome to catch fire. In the Bocas dump, which was part of Bocas station, two dogs yanked at one heap of garbage, two pigs at another. These animals went on rooting — keeping their distance- and I noticed that both dogs were lame, and one pig's ear was missing. The mutilated animals were appropriate to the mutilated town, the ragged children, the tumbledown sheds. The Coca-Cola truck had parked. Now the children were watching a man dragging a frantic pig across the tracks. The pig's hind legs were roped, and the man yanked the screaming creature backwards.

I do not consider myself an animal-lover, but it is a long way from disliking them to maiming and torturing them. And I came to see a resemblance between the condition of domestic animals and the condition of the people who mistreated them. It was the same contempt, and the whipped dog and the woman carrying wood had the same fearful eyes. And it was these beaten people who beat their animals.

'Bocas,' said the conductor 'it min kish.' He smacked his lips and laughed.

In Spanish I said, 'Why didn't you tell me you are a smuggler?'

'I am not a smuggler.'

'What about the contraband you put in my room?'

'It is not contraband. It is just some things.'

'Why did you put it in my room?'

'It is better in your room than mine.'

'Then why did you take it out of my room?'

He was silent. I was going to let up on him, but I remembered again that he might have been the cause of my being in the Nuevo Laredo jail this morning.

I said, 'You put it in the room because it is contraband.'

'No.'

'And you are a smuggler.'

'No.'

'You are afraid of the police.'

'Yes.'

The ragged man outside the train had dragged his pig across the tracks. Now he was dragging the pig backwards to a pick-up truck parked near the station. The pig howled and scattered stones with its scrabbling trotters; it sounded demented because it was intelligent enough to know it was doomed.

'The police bother us,' said the conductor. 'They don't bother you. Look, this is not the United States — these men want money. Understand?' He made a claw of his brown hand and snatched with it. 'That is what they want — money.'

'What was in the bag? Drugs?'

'Drugs!' He spat out the door to show me how ridiculous the question was.

'What then?'

'Kitchen utensils.'

'You smuggle kitchen utensils?'

'I don't smuggle anything. I buy kitchen utensils in Laredo. I take them home.'

'Don't you have kitchen utensils in Mexico?'

'In Mexico we have shit,' he said. He nodded and then said, 'Of course we have kitchen utensils. But they are expensive. In America they are cheap.'

'The customs man asked if they were mine.'

'What did you tell him?'

'You said, "Don't say anything." I did not say anything.'

'See? No problem!'

'They were very angry.'

'Of course. But what can they do? You're a tourist.'

The train whistle sounded, drowning the pig's cries. We started out ofBocas.

The conductor said, 'It is easy for you tourists.'

'It is easy for you smugglers because of us tourists.'

Back in Texas, with a sweep of his hand, taking in Main Street and the new shopping centre and a score of finance companies, the Texan says, 'All this was nothing but desert a few years ago.' The Mexican pursues a different line. He urges you to ignore the squalor of the present and reflect on the glories of the past. As we entered San Luis Potosí towards noon on the day that had started cold and was now cloudless in a parching heat, I noticed the naked children and the lamed dogs and the settlement in the train-yard, which was fifty boxcars. By curtaining the door with faded laundry, and adding a chicken coop and children, and turning up the volume on his radio, the Mexican makes a bungalow of his boxcar and pretends it is home. It is a frightful slum, and stinks of excrement, but the Mexican man standing at the door of the Aztec Eagle with me was smiling. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'this was a silver mine.'

The boxcars, now closer together, became horrific, and even the geraniums, the women preparing food in the doorways, the roosters crowing from the couplings, did not mask the cruelty of the fact that the boxcars were going nowhere. They were cattle cars, and here in San Luis Potosí they parodied their original function.

The Mexican man was enthusiastic. He was getting off — he lived here. This was a famous place, he said. There were many beautiful churches in San Luis Potosí; very typical, very pretty, very ancient.

'Are there any Catholics?' I asked.

He gave me a nasty little three-beat laugh and an anti-clerical wink. 'Too many!'

'Why are these people living in cattle cars?'

'Over there,' he said, pointing past the tops of the boxcars, 'in the Plaza Hidalgo is a fantastic building. The Government Palace. Benito Juarez was there — you have heard of him. In this very place he ordered the execution of Maximilian.'

He tugged his moustache and smiled with civic pride. But Mexican civic pride, always backward-looking, has its roots in xenophobia. Few countries on earth have greater cause to be xenophobic. And in a sense this hatred of foreigners had its origins here in San Luis Potosí. Like many reformers, Benito Juarez ran into debt: it seems almost to amount to a condition of reforming governments. When he suspended payment on the national debt he was invaded by the combined forces of Spain, Britain and France. Ultimately only France's armies stayed and, seeing that he could not defend Mexico City, Juarez retreated to Potosí. In June, 1863, the French army entered Mexico City and made the Archduke Maximilian of Austria the new Emperor of Mexico. Maximilian's rule was muddled and contradictory, a tyranny of good intentions. But he was weak; he needed the French presence to keep him in power and commanded little popular support (though it has been said that the Indians liked him because he was blond, like Quet-zalcoatl — Cortez enjoyed the same bizarre notoriety for his resemblance to the Plumed Serpent). Much worse, Maximilian was a foreigner. Mexican xenophobia is far stronger than any tendency towards internal bickering, and it was not long before Maximilian was being denounced from the pulpits of Catholic churches as a syphilitic. His wife, the Empress Carlotta, had not borne him any children: that was the proof. Carlotta made a desperate trip to Europe to rally support for her husband, but her appeal was ignored and she lost her mind and died insane. For much of this time, America was engaged in the Civil War as well as urging the French to withdraw from Mexico. After the Civil War, America — which had never recognized Maximilian — began arming Juarez, and in the guerrilla war that followed in Mexico, Maximilian was captured and shot at Querelare. This was in 1867; Juarez had retained San Luis Potosí as his capital.

America's help might have endeared us to the cause of Mexican nationalism. After all, Juarez was a Zapotee Indian, ethnically pure, and was one of the few Mexican rulers who died a natural death. But his successor, the devious and greedy Porfirio Diaz, welcomed — for a price — those whom we now think of as philanthropists and trailblazers, the Hearsts, U.S. Steel, Anaconda Corporation, Standard Oil, and the Guggenheims. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing at the time of Santa Ana's paranoid rule (Santa Ana demanded to be known as 'His Most Serene Highness' — Mexican dictators frequently affected regal titles: the creole butcher Iturbide styled himself 'Agustín I'), his lines are apposite to the Guggenheim adventure:

But who is he that prates

Of the culture of mankind,

Of better arts and life?

Go, blindworm, go,

Behold the famous States

Harrying Mexico

With rifle and with knife!

Mexico under Diaz had never been so peaceful, so industrialized, or so wretched. Spanish America is cursed with the grandiosity of crooked statesmen; the Indians and peasants remain Indians and peasants. In the bloody revolution that Diaz's dictatorship made inevitable — the peasants' revolt of 1910, described so turgidly in B. Traven's The Rebellion of the Hanged and his five other tendentious 'Jungle Novels' — Diaz crept secretly aboard a train he himself had built and fled incognito to Veracruz and his exile in Paris.

'And here' — the Mexican man was still talking — 'in Potosí, our national anthem was written.' The train had come to rest beside a long platform. 'And this is one of the most modern railway stations in the country.'

He was speaking of the building itself, a mausoleum of stupefied travellers, which bore on its upper walls frescoes by Fernando Leal. It was very much a Mexican style of interior decoration for public buildings, the preference for mob scenes and battle pieces instead of wallpaper. In this one, a frenzied crowd seemed to be dismantling two locomotives made of rubber. Pandemonium under a thundery sky; muskets, arrows, pick-axes, and symbolic lightning bolts; probably Benito Juarez leading a charge. If Mexican painters used conventional canvases, I never saw the result. 'Diego Rivera's frescoes in the patio of the Ministry of Education are chiefly remarkable for their quantity,' Aldous Huxley wrote in Beyond the Mexique Bay. 'There must be five or six acres of them.' From the wall art I saw in Mexico I concluded that the painters had drawn much of their inspiration from Gulley Jimson.

I went into the plaza and bought a Mexican newspaper and four bananas. The rest of the passengers bought comic books. Back on the platform, waiting for the train to leave, I noticed that the sallow-faced girl with green eyes was holding a magazine she had just bought. When I saw it was a comic book most of my ardour died: I find it discouraging to see a pretty woman reading a comic book. But the old woman was carrying nothing. Perhaps the green-eyed girl was holding the old woman's comic book? I became interested in the girl once more, and sidled up to her.

'It was cold last night.'

The girl said nothing.

The old woman said, 'There is no heating on this train.'

I said to the girl, 'At least it is warm now.'

The girl made a tube of the comic book and clutched it.

The old woman said, 'You speak English extremely well. I wish you would teach me some English. I suppose I am too old to learn!' She looked at me slyly from beneath the fringes of her shawl and then boarded the train. The girl obediently followed, lifting the old woman's hem from the dusty steps.

The lady in the leopard-skin coat was also on the platform. She too had a comic book in her hand. She smiled at me and said, 'You're an American. I can tell.'

'Yes, from Massachusetts.'

'Very far!'

'I am going even farther.' At this point I had only been travelling for six days; I grew anxious when I remembered how distant Patagonia was.

'In Mexico?'

'Yes, then Guatemala, Panama, Peru — ' I stopped there; it seemed unlucky to speak of destinations.

She said, 'I've never been to Central America.'

'What about South America?'

'Never. But Peru — it is in Central America, no? Near Venezuela?'

'I don't think so.'

She shook her head doubtfully. 'How long is your vacation?'

'Two months, maybe more.'

'Shoo! You will have seen enough!'

The whistle blew. We hurried to the stairs.

'Two months vacation!' she said. 'That's the kind of job I'd like to have. What do you do?'

'I'm a teacher.'

'You're a lucky teacher.'

'That's true.'

In my compartment I unfolded El Sol de San Luis and saw, on the front page, a picture of a sinking ship in Boston harbour, and the headline, CHAOS AND DEATH FOLLOW A VIOLENT STORM IN THE US. The story was frightening: two feet of snow in Boston, a number of deaths, and a power-cut that had plunged the city into darkness; one of the worst storms in Boston's history. It made me feel even more like a fugitive, guilty and smug having made a successful escape, as if I had known in advance that I was fleeing chaos and death for this sunny train ride. I put the paper down and looked out the window. In a biscuit-coloured gully in the foreground a large flock of goats champed on tufts of grass, and the herd-boy squatted under a tree. The sun burned in a cloudless sky. Further on, there were the remains of an abandoned silver mine and a wild yellow desert hemmed in by rocky hills, and yucca-like bushes from which tequila is made, and then cactuses in grotesque configurations — great stiff things that looked like swollen trees on which ping-pong paddles are growing, or sword clusters, or bunches of bristling pipe-fittings.

For the next half hour I read about the snow storm, and from time to time — between paragraphs, or turning a page — I would look up to rest my eyes and see a man ploughing dust using two steers and a small plough-blade, or a group of women on their knees, doing their laundry in a shallow stream, or a boy leading a burro loaded with firewood. Then the story: Cars were left stranded. . Offices closed. . Some people suffered heart attacks. . Ice and snow blocked roads. .

I heard a glockenspiel. It was the steward from the dining car, tapping his bundle of chimes. 'Lunch!' he yelled. 'First call for lunch!'

Lunch and the morning paper in the Aztec Eagle: this was perfect. A heat haze lay over the plains which were green with cultivation; and it was now so hot that we were the only thing moving. There was no one in the fields, and at the streams no women doing laundry, though their suds remained in the shallows. We passed Queretaro, where Maximilian was shot, and here dark tough-looking Mexicans sat glowering from doorways of houses. They were quite unlike the gold-toothed buffoons I had seen in Nuevo Laredo, and watching from the shadowy interiors of houses they seemed sinister and disapproving under the brims of their sombreros. Outside those houses there was little shade, and on this afternoon of withering sunlight nothing stirred. We were soon in semi-desert, travelling fast, and through the heat haze I could see the pencilled outline of the Sierra Madre Oriental. In the middle of this great sun-baked plain a small burro was tethered near a tiny tree; a still creature in a puddle of shade.

Lunch had ended. The three waiters and the cook drowsed at a corner table. I had risen and was walking through the dining car when the couplings crashed, and made me stagger. The train came to a sudden jolting halt, knocking the salt and pepper shakers to the floor.

'A fat little bull,' said a waiter, opening one eye. 'But it's too late to worry about him now.'

The Aztec Eagle climbed through the Cerro Rajón, a region of steep scrub-covered hills. It moved slowly enough on these circular climbs for me to pick the wild-flowers along the track, but when it descended it did so with loud racketing speed and a rhumba from the coupling under the vestibule where I stood for the air. The haze had lifted in this cooler altitude, and I could see for fifty miles or more across a blue-green plain. Because the train kept switching back and forth on the hillside, the view continually altered, from this plain to a range of hills and to fertile valleys with tall feathery trees in columns along the banks of frothing rivers, and occasionally a deep gorge of vertical granite slabs. The trees were eucalyptus, as African as the view, which was an enormity of stone and space.

There was no one at the tidy station at Huichapan: no one boarded, no one got off, and only the signalman with his flag ventured out of the train. In this, as in other places, the laundry washed that morning at the river was set out to dry, Mexican-style: it was spiked upon the cactuses and transformed them into crouching figures in clean rags. The train trembling importantly at the platform at Huichapan gave the place a certain grandeur, but when we left, and I looked back, a hot solitude seemed to descend on the little station, as the dust sifted to the ground and the cactuses in their tatters remained in hunched postures, like a mimicry of ghost passengers left behind.

During that long afternoon, I read The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, a grimly humorous book of self-congratulatory cynicism. I had turned first to Railroad, which Bierce defines as 'the chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off'. Two feet of snow in Boston. Chaos and death. Power cuts in sub-freezing weather. And outside my window here, the Mexican sunshine and old hills and pots of crimson geraniums in the window boxes of huts. Bierce goes on, 'For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition.' Bierce is never brilliant; he is sometimes funny, but more often he misses the mark, forces the point, and ends up sounding strained and pompous. He has been called 'the American Swift', but his fun-poking facetiousness hardly qualifies him for that description. He was not as angry or as crazy or as learned as Swift, and he lived in a time of simpler literary tastes. If America in the nineteenth century had been complicated enough to require a Swift, she would have produced one. Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer- a mediocre poet. I found the jokes by Bierce about women and children conventionally stupid, but it interested me that I was reading this book in a part of Mexico in which he had vanished. Every line sounded like a hastily scribbled epitaph, although his real epitaph was in a letter he wrote in 1913, just before he disappeared. 'To be a Gringo in Mexico,' wrote Bierce — he was seventy-one years old- 'ah, that is euthanasia!'

Towards Tula, a treeless desert of long hills rose into peaks like pyramids. This was the capital of the Toltecs, with pillars and temples and a towering pyramid. The pyramids of'Mexico — at Teotihuacan and Uxmal and Chichén-Itzá — are clearly the efforts of people aspiring to make mountains; they match the landscape, and in places mock it. The god-king must demonstrate that he is capable of duplicating divine geography, and the pyramids were the visible proof of this attempt. In the wilderness of Tula, the landscape was in ruins, but the work of the Toltecs would survive into another epoch.

Just before darkness fell, I saw a field of upright swords. It might have been sisal, but more likely was the tequila plant whose fiery juice left me in an hallucinating daze.

The conductor — the smuggler — was all smiles when we arrived at Mexico City. He offered to carry my suitcase, he reminded me not to leave anything behind, he told me how much fun I would have in Mexico City. I did not reward his servility with a tip, and I think he knew as I thanked him coldly that he had overstepped himself in importuning me with his sack of contraband.

The station was huge and cold. I had been here before. Mexico City, with its twelve million people and ingenious beggars (sword swallowers and fire-eaters perform their tricks on the pavement near bus-stops, to get pesos from people in line) is only in parts an attractive place. And the three-quarters of a million people who live in Netzahualcóyotl near the airport have the dubious distinction of inhabiting what has been called 'the largest slum in the western hemisphere'. I had no strong desire to see Mexico City again. It is, supremely, a place for getting lost in, a smog-plagued metropolis of mammoth proportions, which is perhaps why the two most determined exiles of this century, Leon Trotsky and B. Traven, chose Mexico City as their refuge.

If I am to arrive in a city, I prefer it to be in the early morning, with the whole day ahead of me. So, without a further thought, I went to the ticket counter in the lobby, bought a sleeper ticket to Veracruz and boarded the train. It was cheaper than a hotel room and, anyway, people said that Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast, was much warmer.