The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

5 THE PASSENGER TRAIN TO TAPACHULA

I had been on the train for twelve hours. There was something wrong with this train; a whole day of travelling and we had gone only a hundred miles or so, mostly through swamps. The heat had made me nauseous, and the noise of the banging doors, the anvil clang of the coupling, had given me a headache. Now it was night, still noisy, but very cold. The coach was open — most of the eighty seats were occupied, nearly all the windows were broken, or jammed open. The bulbs on the ceiling were too dim to read by, too bright to allow me to sleep. The rest of the passengers slept, and one across the aisle was snoring loudly. The man behind me who, all day, had sighed and cursed and kicked the back of my seat in exasperation, had made a pillow of his fist and gone to sleep. The spiders and ants I had noticed during the day crawling in and out of the horsehair of the burst cushions had begun biting me. Or was it mosquitoes? My ankles itched and stung. It was just after nine o'clock. I held a copy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. I had given up trying to read it.

I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I bother: leaving order and friends for disorder and strangers. I'm homesick and feel punished for my selfishness in leaving. Precisely what Crusoe says on his island. Impossible to get comfortable in this seat. A jail atmosphere: the brown walls and dim light of the condemned cell. Noise, too: a factory din ~ our pile-driving sound hammered back at us through open windows from the close walls of jungle beside the track.

I stopped. Writing can make you very lonely.

I saw one thing today: a thin white heron standing in a swamp.

There was a half-inch left on the page.

These people are going home. They complain about the journey, but they will be home tomorrow. I am travelling to another train. I would rather. .

Then I was asleep. The difference between sleep and waking on this train was that, awake, I swatted the mosquitoes. Asleep, though I was aware of being stung, I was helpless; I did not have the will to stop them.

The heron: I had seen it in the marshland near Piedras Negras; it had been tall and watchful, such a slender creature, so finely formed and so strange in that marshy salad. An hour later there was no moisture anywhere in sight: dusty trees rooted in dry ground, withered grass, limp burned leaves, and mud huts thatched with palm fronds, like those you see in the poorest parts of Africa. The train continued to stop, usually next to a cane field; there was seldom a station nearby, and I suspected that there was a fault in the engine. I could see groups of men prodding the locomotive and adjusting their straw hats. Then we would start again and move slowly for a few miles and stop.

At one stop — a station, not a breakdown — a boy got on and stood at the front of the coach. He sang in a very sweet voice. At first the passengers were embarrassed, but with the second and third songs, they applauded. The boy was encouraged. He sang a fourth. The whistle blew. He walked to the back of the coach, collecting money from the people. What impressed me as much as his voice was his age — he was about twenty, old enough to be a cane-cutter or a farm labourer (but farm labourers in Mexico work on average only 135 days a year). This singing seemed an unlikely occupation, but perhaps he only performed when the train passed through his village.

We came to Tierra Blanca. The descriptive name did not describe the place. Spanish names were apt only as ironies or simplifications; they seldom fit. The argument is usually stated differently, to demonstrate how dull, how literal-minded and unimaginative the Spanish explorer or cartographer was. Seeing a dark river, the witness quickly assigned a name: Rio Negro. It is a common name throughout Latin America; yet it never matched the colour of the water. And the four Rio Colorados I saw bore not the slightest hint of red. Piedra Negras was marshland, not black stones; I saw no stags at Venado Tuerto, no lizards at Lagartos. None of the Laguna Verdes was green; my one La Dorada looked leaden, and Progreso in Guatemala was backward, La Libertad in El Salvador a stronghold of repression in a country where salvation seemed in short supply. La Paz was not peaceful, nor was La Democracia democratic. This was not literalness — it was whimsy. Place names called attention to beauty, freedom, piety, or strong colours; but the places themselves, so prettily named, were something else. Was it wilful inaccuracy, or a lack of subtlety that made the map so glorious with fine attributes and praises? Latins found it hard to live with dull facts; the enchanting name, while not exactly making their town magical, at least took the curse off it. And there was always a chance that an evocative name might evoke something to make the plain town bearable.

I looked hard at Tierra Blanca. It was poor and brown. There were chickens strutting on the station platform, and men heaving bales, and children pointing at passengers gaping from the windows of the train. And food sellers (it was lunchtime) shrieking the name of the item they carried: pancakes, beans, fritters, corn on the cob, cupcakes, cheese sandwiches, fried chicken, bananas, oranges, pineapples, watermelons. I had my own food. I slit one of the small loaves and filled it with ham and cheese. Across the aisle, a large family travelling to Guatemala, eating the flyblown chicken they had just bought, stared at me.

'That is a big sandwich,' said the mother.

'We call this a submarine sandwich,' I said.

They continued to stare.

'Because of the shape,' I said. I held it up. 'Like a submarine.'

They squinted. They had never seen a submarine.

The mother said, 'Of course.'

In the next few hours the train stopped eight more times. It did not stop at stations. It slowed near cane fields or on marshland or in hot woods, and then the trumpeting engine went silent and it jerked to a halt; the passengers groaned and looked out the windows, and seeing no station they said, 'Nowhere' or 'I don't know'. And though they might have been talking happily while the train was moving, when it stopped they became laconic, and grunted and sighed. Usually, this hot silence was broken by a cry from outside the window: 'Bananas!'

No matter where we stopped, in a swamp or in apparently empty woods, a food-seller would materialize — a small girl in a torn dress — and yell, 'Bananas!' I had no fear, on this train to Tapachula, of ever going hungry.

Passing some cane fields at about two that afternoon, and marvelling how densely packed they were — practically impenetrable green stalks, like a wall of bamboo — I felt the train slowing down. I looked out of the window: more cane fields. The train stopped. The passengers grunted. I picked up Pudd'nhead Wilson and read it. An hour went by — a slow humid mid-afternoon hour, with a radio twanging in the next car. The banana-seller had come and gone. I made myself a sandwich, I drank a bottle of soda water. And I became aware that I might eat all my food and finish my book before we started moving again. This food, this book: it was all I had to keep me going.

The train started; I put my feet up and breathed a sigh of relief. The train went a hundred yards and stopped. Someone in the next car cried, 'Mother of God!'

We were on a long red bridge of steel girders, and beneath us was a river. I dug out my map and traced the railway line from Veracruz. I found Tierra Blanca, the swamps, a river: so this was the Rio Papaloa-Pan. The handbook said that the river basin drained by the Papaloa-pan was 'twice the size of the Netherlands' but that the nearby town contained 'little of note'. We remained on the bridge for another hour — an irritating hour, because we could not get out and walk around: there was no walkway on the bridge, and the river itself had a treacherous-looking current. I considered eating, but thought better of it. At this rate of speed we would not be in Tapachula for days. The passengers, trapped in the train which was itself trapped on the bridge, grew restive, and now the Guatemalan children in the large family hung out of the window and yelled, 'Let's go! Let's go!' They continued to yell this until sundown.

I wondered if I should continue reading. It was all that kept me sane during periods like this of utter boredom. But if I finished Pudd'nhead Wilson — a book I was enjoying — I would have nothing else to read. I paced up and down the long train and already it seemed as if I had been on it for more than a day. Soon, it moved, about two hundred yards, no more, then it stopped.

We were in the village of Papaloapan. 'Little of note' was a wild overstatement. There were two shops, some huts, some pigs, some pawpaw trees. The sun had dropped to the level of the windows and burned through the train.

There had been a Mexican sitting on a broken bench some distance from the tracks when the train drew in. The tree he had chosen to sit under was rather small, and I watched him closely to see what he would do when the sunlight reached him. For half an hour he did not stir, although two hogs tied to the tree were whining and snuffling at the ends of their tethers. He appeared not to see the hogs, he did not look at the train, he paid no attention to the sun. The sun slipped from the lower branches to his hat. The man remained motionless. The hogs squawked. The sun moved down, lighting the man's nose. The man did not move immediately — he shuffled his feet and winced, but very slowly, as if he were entering a new phase of slumber; and then with one finger he tilted his hat and put his nose in shadow. He was reposeful once again. But the sun was moving: the light found his face (and found the hogs — they tried to yank themselves out of it), the man poked his hat again with his finger. He had not regarded the train, he ignored the hogs, he was neither asleep nor awake, and the only significant change was that yellow disc of hat, now like the watchful face of a wilting sunflower following the sun, jammed vertically against his head.

While I studied this man, who was as good as a sundial, a dwarf climbed into the train. His eyes were level with mine, though I was sitting, and I could see how they protruded, how their sour grey colour was not penetrated by any pupil: he was blind. But he was chirping, pleading in a bantering way for money. His clothes were ripped and he was tied with twine like a bundle of rags — there were knots and loops of fraying string tightened all over his body. The passengers spoke to him as he collected coins; he limped through the car, chuckling and replying.

'Let's get this train moving,' they said.

The blind man said, 'I'm doing the best I can.'

'Where are we?' they said.

'Papaloapan,' said the blind dwarf. 'It's a nice town. Why don't you stay?'

'We don't want to stay here!' the passengers said.

The blind dwarf laughed and tapped his stick into the next car. I heard him say, 'Good evening-'

There were more people who boarded to beg — an old woman with an infant in her arms, two skinny children; and food-sellers — children with jugs of coffee, basins of fritters, women with bread and bony fish. Other children from Papaloapan ran in and out of the train, and men sauntered over from the shop nearby to chat with the passengers.

In the space of a few hours (now it was late afternoon, and men coming back from cutting in the cane fields stopped beside the train to see what was up), the stalled train ceased to be seen as something that roared through the riverbank village of Papaloapan. Villagers, who presumably had always watched at a distance, boarded and used the toilets and waved to their friends from the windows; and the chickens pecked and gabbled under the cars, as confidently as the passengers had drifted to the shop where they roosted swigging soft drinks. Now the train had become part of the town.

No one was sure what was wrong with our train. A wreck up ahead, one man said; another man told me our engine was broken. There was no panic. The ninety-degree heat all day had taken the starch out of everyone. Few people inquired; there was no panic — most had begun to feel at home here in Papaloapan. We were not due at Tapachula until the next day, and no one was quite sure how far we had come. (To kill time, I asked people how far we were from Veracruz; no one gave me the right answer: 100 miles.) In a country where delays are chronic, a delay like this was to be expected; and anyway, the village was friendly, the weather was warm, and each pair of seats had been turned into a nest of food wrappings and pillows and dozing children. The man behind me had stopped kicking my seat. He was completely calm. He said, 'I think we will have to spend the night here.'

The Guatemalan lady said to her children, 'I think he is right. Oh, well.'

Nothing seems longer than the unexpected delay. Nothing is harder to describe or more boring to read. 'An hour passed,' one writes, and there is no tedium in the phrase, no smell, no heat, no noise, none of the flies swarming unsteadily from the toilet door which, warped and without a handle, refused to shut. 'Another hour passed' — how hard to suggest the two radios, the whining hogs, the shrieks of children, the lumpy seat with the spiders hunching out of its horsehair. Heat itself seems to slow time. If the village had been any larger I think I would have packed my belongings and checked into the nearest hotel. But the village was small, and there would not be another train to Tapachula for three days.

I realized that I had only fifty pages more to read of Pudd'nhead Wilson. I decided to save it, to keep the best part for later, when my nerves might be stretched and I would need it. I resisted the impulse to go on with the story, and instead read the Introduction. This was a very disturbing experience, the serious phraseology of the essay contrasting with the approaching twilight, the noise and smells of this ramshackle Mexican village, the crowded train. One way to see how he establishes this as an irony is to compare him with Jane Austen in whose novels the social life is approved, and provides the basis for her own exacting moral values-

Yaaaaaaaa! A child across the aisle screamed. Her brother smiled and pinched her again. The Mexican in the shade scratched his head without moving his hat. The hogs grunted. The radio in the shop yelled and crackled. Two men by the door laughed out loud. 'Cold beer!' shouted a hawker.

'Bananas!'

'Ice cream!'

He pinched me!'

— In her work social values are not moral values as such; but her irony works to show how they can be, how a certain kind of full and tested-

A giggle and 'I did not!' and two pretty girls in green school uniforms strolled by the train, hugging their books. They had black hair and bright eyes and they were laughing.

— full and tested social awareness is also, finally, a realized moral awareness -

I shut the book. A quarrel had started at the end of the car — nothing serious: shouting, mulishness, arm-swinging. The toilet smell had grown much worse. We had been stationary for hours, but people had continued to shit down the tin pipe and there was a disgusting heap on the tracks under the car. It excited the flies: they were loud and fat and they swarmed in a cloud and tumbled through the windows which would not close. The beer seller came back, put his crate down and sat on it. He was hoarse from shouting. He asked me in a whisper if I wanted one. Although I had two of my own, I bought two more: it was, after all, Happy Hour, and it was going to be a long night.

There was an empty row of seats at the far end of the train. I stretched out to have my sundowner, puffed my pipe and allowed myself another chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Night was falling on Papaloapan. Dogs barked, the village voices had become murmurs, the radios still played, and in the train people talked more quietly in the darkness. There were crickets, as rapid as castanets — I had not heard crickets for ages; the sound was soothing. And the novel cheered me: what a superb book this was! I thought I had known the story, but all I had remembered was the fingerprinting business and the identical children and the crime. I had missed the ironies: it was a story about freedom and slavery, identity and disguise, and the tinctures of race were made into attributes. It was a savage masterpiece, with a cruelly grim jollity, more ingenious and pessimistic than anything I had ever read by Twain. It was patterned on a folktale: the switched infants, the slave child becoming master, the master's son a slave. But the implications of race made it a nightmare of masked injustices. It had begun as a farce about a pair of Siamese twins. Twain saw this as a defect, 'two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.' He decided to revamp the story: 'I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.' But the tragedy is so bitter, this seldom-read novel — one of the gloomiest comedies in American literature — is treated as the story of a country lawyer, a funny-looking figure who wins a case using fingerprints. His victory does not quite overshadow the fact that everyone else in the novel, even the worthiest character, is defeated. It gave me a lecture topic: How, by careful selection, we make our writers simple; American literature is an anthology of what is bearable.

Meanwhile, it had grown darker in Papaloapan. I looked up and saw a solitary engine approaching from the bridge. It passed by, and five minutes later there was a bump, a lurch, and a renewed activity on the tracks. Then a shrill whistle and the Guatemalan children crying, 'Let's go!' The lights had come on in the village, but they were unshaded and dazzling; soon, they were moving past the train and the villagers were watching us go, and some were waving tentatively as if they half-expected us to stop again. But we did not stop. A breeze purified the cars and out of the trees a dazzle of the village we had a glimpse of sky, of a sunset which, five hundred years ago, had been seen in this very place by an Aztec poet:

Our father, the Sun

Dressed in rich feathers, thrusts himself

Down into a vase of gems,

Decked with a turquoise necklace

Among many-coloured flowers

Which fall in perpetual rain.

The glimmer remained for some minutes, then the green jungle and swamp became a mass of shadows, and the darkness was complete. Four small lightbulbs — the rest were dead or missing — were not enough for me to read by. I put my book away and drank and looked out of the window.

There were few stops — some villages, some settlements that were less than villages. I saw doorways flickering in candlelight and hut interiors whitened by lanterns. At one doorway the highly erotic sight of a girl or woman, leaning against the jamb, canted forward, her legs apart, her arms upraised, and the light behind her showing the slimness of the body beneath her gauzy dress — this lovely shape in a lighted rectangle surrounded by the featureless Mexican night. It left me flustered and a bit anxious.

At one town, a boy leaned out of the train and called to a girl selling corn. He said, 'Where are we?'

The girl took the tray of corn from her head and stared at him. It was a difficult question.

The boy said, 'She doesn't know where we are!'

The girl looked at the laughing boy on the train. She knew where she was. But the boy had not asked that.

The boy roused his father, his brother, and he wagged his head at me. 'She doesn't know where we are!'

Loud enough for the girl with the tray to hear, I said, 'I know where we are.'

'Where?' asked the boy.

'On a train.'

They thought this was extremely funny. The boy repeated it and they laughed harder. In fact, we were at the town of Suelta, a congested place, the name of which meant 'loose'.

After this, unable to read or sleep, I scribbled some notes on the flyleaf of my book: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty… I was homesick. Was there any point in this trip aside from the fact that I had been too restless to stay at my desk and endure another winter? I had left in fine spirits, but I was no explorer: this was supposed to be enjoyment, not a test of stamina or patience. I did not take any pleasure in suffering the torments of travel merely so that I could dine out on them. I had been curious about the process of rising in the morning at home, and catching the local train and staying on it as the commuters got off to go to work, and changing trains at the end of the line, and repeating this until there were no more trains and I was in Patagonia. More melancholy than the thought of Homesick: A Travel Book was the memory of something I had read about Jack Kerouac. At the age of fifty, with On the Road well behind him, he decided to hitch-hike across America again. He was fatter now, and felt defeated, but he was convinced he could repeat his cross-country epic. So he left New York, seeking California. His menacing features were ineradicable, and times had changed. The lugubrious man reached New Jersey; there he stood for hours in the rain, trying to thumb a ride until, at last, he gave up and took a bus home.

Without realizing that I had been asleep, I woke from the mosquitoes and the cold. I tucked my trousers into my socks (but these mosquitoes could sting through socks) and put on the heavy sweater and leather jacket I had plucked for the altitudes of the Andes. And curling up once more I slept like a log until dawn. I had not thought I was capable of such adjustment, and overcoming the misery of a dreadful night on the torn seat of a cold and stinking train gave me the lucid optimism and good humour that always accompanies such excursions. I felt virtuous and even knew that my virtue was laughable.

At six that morning, I blinked at my watch. The lights in the car had fused: it was pitch dark. Moments later, it was dawn. No bulb of sun, but a seepage of light that dissolved the darkness and rose on all sides bringing a bluer ozone-scented softness to a sky which became gigantic. With it was a warm buoyancy of air, and scale was restored to the landscape, and the car was sweetened with the odour of desert dew. I had never seen dawn break so swiftly, but I had never slept that way. The windows were open, there were no shades: it was like sleeping on a park bench.

Yonder were mountains: the sunlight revealed their tiny heads and wide shoulders as craggy and purple, with small black trees on their slopes as delicate as eyelashes. It was a mountain range erupting jag-gedly eastward; to the south were sparse dusty woods. The train stopped. This was emptiness. A girl appeared at the window: 'Coffee!' She poured me some in a paper cup and I sipped it as we resumed our journey along the lowland periphery ofthat escarpment.

This was the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest point in Mexico — so narrow, it was for a long time considered an ideal place to dig a coast-to-coast canal. And more convenient than Panama because it was so much nearer the United States. Tehuantepec — a hot, dismal-looking place — had had an interesting history. It had always been populated, and often dominated, by Indians. These Indians — the Zapotees — were a matrilineal people — the women owned land, fished, traded, farmed, and ran the local government; the men, with that look of silliness that comes of being bone-idle, lounged around. The stations that morning showed this tradition to be unchanged: enterprising women, empty-handed men. But one could easily underestimate their capacity for outrage: patience so often looks like defeat, or silence like conversion. One of the earliest Indian uprisings in Mexico took place here in 1680; these people rebelled and for the next eight years controlled most of the Isthmus. And when in later years great projects were conceived to make the Isthmus important the Indians did not cooperate- they simply stood aside and watched the Projects fail.

In his joyously energetic travel book, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Anthony Trollope wrote that this part of Mexico was 'the passage selected by Cortez, and pressed by him on the Spanish government. . the line would be from the Gulf of Campechay, up the river Coatzacoalcoz, to Tehuantepec and the Pacific'. Trollope, who believed more southerly routes through Panama and Costa Rica (he travelled through both places) would be expensive and impractical, was writing in 1860. Ten years later, President Ulysses S. Grant (yes, of all people) sent the Tehuantepec Expedition here and charged them with exploring the possibilities of digging a canal. Altogether there were seven expeditions but, though no canal was built, the Isthmus was crossed by tens of thousands of travellers, first on mule back and stage coaches, and then by train. It was one of the better ways of reaching California from the eastern seaboard of the United States, and the Gold Rush of 1849 had vastly increased the traffic. With so many people tumbling back and forth across Tehuantepec (under, one assumes, the baleful or jeering eyes of the Indians), the profit in annexing the strip was obvious, and several times the American government urged the Mexicans to hand it over. Mexican tenacity could not match American rapaciousness and the Mexicans eventually conceded all of what are now regarded as Western states, but against the odds they refused to surrender Tehuantepec. In 1894, the railway was built across the Isthmus and did a roaring trade. One of the busiest railways the world has ever known, at the height of its operation there were sixty trains a day. It is an astonishing fact, because so little of that bustle and efficiency remains, such a tiny portion of the builders' and speculators' handiwork. There is less left of the great Tehuantepec National Railway than of the Mayan ruins of Uxmal or Palenque, and no sign in the shrivelled riverbeds or the dusty tracks that link the poor towns that this was once a great crossroads of the world. Yet some of the railway still stands. In 1913, the line was extended to join the so-called Pan American Railway at the Guatemalan frontier. But this was a hopeless effort. The next year the Panama Canal opened and bankrupted every railway, mule track, ferry crossing and stagecoach route in Central America. From that year, Tehuantepec began to die and not even the discovery of oil (long before, the Aztecs had found it in sticky lumps which had squeezed from the ground — they burned this magic stuff at religious ceremonies) managed to work a cure on the Isthmus or to bring it any degree of prosperity. Today it looks pathetic; it is rough country, and hot and infertile; the Indians, living an ordinary existence in a hand-to-mouth way, look embattled; the towns and villages are less than they were in the Aztec times. But Mexicans have learned how to derive comfort from the past — from actual events or the reassuring simplicity of myths and even among the cactus-covered hills and bumpy desert of Tehuantepec the backward-looking Mexican was greatly encouraged by the thought that it had once known glorious days.

The mountain range — now like a fortress, now like a cathedral (it was yet another protectively maternal strip of the Sierra Madre) — stayed with us the whole day. But we never climbed it. We moved south along the hot lowland, and the more southerly we penetrated the more primitive and tiny became the Indian villages, the more emblematic the people: naked child, woman with basket, man on horseback, posed in the shattering sunlight before a poor mud hut. As the morning wore on the people withdrew and by eleven o'clock we were watched from the windows of huts which had grown much smaller. Shade was scarce: skinny village dogs slept under the bellies of cows which were themselves transfixed by hanks of coarse grass.

There was water to the south-west — a blue-green haze, a shimmering emptiness, the flat land receding to a sparkle and brown bizarrely suspended boats. This was the Dead Sea, a lozenge of lake on the shore of the Pacific. Nearer the train, horses were tied to the verandah posts of village bars, and men sat at tables near the windows; women and girls hawked prawns and pink-scaled fish which they carried in pails. My eyes were moist from the heat, and through this blur I saw dark pigs and coconut groves and banana trees and, behind them, bouldery mountains.

We crossed into the state of Chiapas. In Chiapas the mountains looked higher, the surrounding land hotter, and these two contrasting landscapes were so inhospitable and unmarked by any human effort, the people seemed like pioneers, hardy new arrivals who had yet to make any dent in the place. That was between stations, but the stations seemed like outposts, too. At the town of Arriaga I asked the conductor when we could expect to arrive in Tapachula. He counted on his fingers, then he laughed because we were more than ten hours late.

'Maybe tonight,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

'I'm not worried.'

Not worried, but rather sick of this hot crowded train. A slow train, which this was, could be a joy, if the seats were not broken and the toilet worked and the dust was mopped off the floor. The passengers, prostrate in the heat, lay collapsed on the seats, their mouths open, as if they had all been gunned down or gassed.

'I'll come back,' said the conductor. 'I'll tell you when we are near Tapachula. Right?'

'Thank you.'

But to arrive in Tapachula was to accomplish very little. Tapachula was nowhere. It was, simply, where this train stopped for good.

I had finished most of my food by the time we reached Pijijiapan; and what remained — some discoloured slices of ham, some sweating cheese that had softened to putty in the heat — I threw out of the window. I had also finished Pudd'nhead Wilson. Pijijiapan was a market town, a mob scene which the arrival of the train only maddened further — the train stayed in the middle of town for half an hour and none of the shoppers or hawkers or battered cars could cross the road. Nor would the conductor allow anyone to pass through the train. So they stood in the hot sun with their baskets, and the fish they carried grew more rancid-smelling as they waited. They carried chickens and turkeys, too, and corn and beans. They were Indians, short, square-featured people who glowered at this intrusion.

If one wonders who precisely they are, one needs only to listen to Jacques Soustelle on the Aztecs. Before treating the artistic and cultural achievements of the nobles, he directs our attention in a kind of whispered prologue, to another group. 'On the fringe of the rich and brilliant cities,' he writes, 'the peasant — Náhuatl, Otomí, Zapotec, etc. - continued to lead his patient and laborious life in obscurity. We know almost nothing about him. . He was of no interest to the native or the Spanish chronicler, with his hut, his maize field, his turkeys, his little monogamous family and his narrow horizon, and they mention him only in passing. . But it is important to speak of him at this point, if only to make his silent presence felt, in the shadows beyond the brilliance of the urban civilization; and the more so, because after the disaster of 1521 [the Spanish conquest] and the collapse of all authority, all concepts, the whole frame of society and all religion, he alone survived, and he alone still lives.'

He — or rather she — sold me some fritters and rice at Pijijiapan; I drank the last of my soda water (I had used the other half of the bottle for brushing my teeth) and we set off again. It was frustrating to be so tired in such a beautiful landscape, like dozing at a concert. The train picked up speed and shot along this savannah, skirting the majestic mountains, but the heat and the dirt and my fatigue, and now the noise of the speeding train, prevented me from being able to concentrate or steady my gaze on the bright rocks or the trees whipping past. It was punishing to feel so battered and incapable, but also a further punishment to know how the best of Chiapas was eluding me. Struggling to stay awake to see it, the effort exhausted me; the bright air and yellow land overwhelmed me, and I slept.

I woke perspiring whenever the train stopped, at little towns, like Mapastepec and Margaritas, where the foreground swam with colour: Jacaranda, bougainvillea, hibiscus — electric contending hues in what was otherwise a desert of frail trees and barren soil, broken by fields of corn and tobacco. We were in the deep hinterland now, and later I was to recognize the remote place, the combination of Indian villages and bad roads and the one railway line producing — but it was not so unusual: they had come with the railway and they had stayed — the Chinese, who advertised themselves on shop signs: Casa Wong or Chen Hermanos. I had thought it had been hot in the morning; the afternoon was almost unbearable and at Soconocusco I felt nauseated by the heat.

Walking the length of the train to find some bottled water to have with my fruit salts I came upon a man I at first took to be an American. I had not met an English speaker since leaving Veracruz, so I greeted him — glad to have someone who might understand my feeling of discomfort. He winced at me. He wore a jacket; the lenses of his glasses were coated with dust; he had a small map; he sat alone in Second Class. He was of course German.

And he spoke neither English nor Spanish. Where, I asked him in faulty German, had he boarded the train? In Veracruz, he said. But I had not seen him in Veracruz, or Papaloapan, or anywhere else. Well, he said, he had not left his seat. What had he eaten?

'A sandwich. Cheese.'

In two days?

'Yes,' he said. 'I do not like the toilets. I don't eat, so I don't use the toilets. I had a Pepsi-Cola. But I will eat in Guatemala.'

'We may not be in Guatemala until tomorrow.'

'Then I will eat tomorrow. It is good to be hungry for a few days. People eat too much — especially these people. You see them? Using the toilet?'

'Where are you going in Guatemala?'

'Maybe to the ruins. I don't know -1 have to go back to work next week.'

'Back to-?'

'Germany.'

'Ah.' He was riding in Second Class. Second Class had torn black plastic seats. First Class had torn red plastic seats. Some of First's had arm-rests. But Second was slightly more crowded. How did he like it?

He gave me a smile — it was the first time he had smiled, and it was one of triumph and real pleasure. He said, 'Three dollars.'

Neither an explorer nor a hitch-hiker; no rucksack, no compass. Just a tidy little suitcase and small gold-rimmed glasses covered with dust, an empty Pepsi bottle and a sandwich wrapper, sitting with Teutonic uprightness through the tumbling hinterland of Chiapas. His map was small, he had no other book, he did not drink beer. In a word, a skinflint.

Another train, with seat numbers and compartments, might have thrown us together, and I would have suffered his leaden company for two days. If there was a virtue in the disorder of this carelessly-run Mexican train it was that it allowed a passenger the freedom of its shabby cars. There were no rules; or, if there were, no one followed them. So it was easy for me to reject the companionship of this fellow — not that he offered any: tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash; suspicious, unbelieving and incurious. In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap. And yet, by refusing to take any risk he was taking the greatest risk of all: being solitary in a place so hot and anarchic one really needed friends.

'Have a good trip,' I said.

He nodded, he did not smile. And that was all. A chance meeting — nothing more. We merely brushed past each other at that far side of the world.

Another Chinese store, more tobacco fields, and the afternoon grew cloudy but no less hot. I lay on the seat and went to sleep again and did not wake until I heard one of the Guatemalan Children yelling — as he had done since Veracruz — 'Let 's go! ' But this time he was yelling at me. I woke in darkness; the train had stopped, and now the Guatemalan mother was bending over me.

'If you are going to the frontier — you said you were — we could share a taxi and save some money. I have only three suitcases and these four children. We can fit in the back seat and you can sit in front with the driver. What do you say?'

It had been an awful trip and listening to her I saw my chance of leaving Mexico and this train and this town — just stepping across the border. Later, I decided that I would have been better off in a hotel in Tapachula, but at the time I was very eager to leave it. So I said yes and half an hour later, in darkness, I was walking across the bridge over the Suchiate River. Behind me were the rolling hills and banana groves of Mexico; ahead, a black brow of rock and on its cliffs and outcrops dim blue jungle and white lianas and vines, picked out in moonlight; and when the river ceased to thunder I could hear the screech of bats.