The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

6 THE 7:30 TO GUATEMALA CITY

Guatemala had begun suddenly: a river-frontier and on the far bank jungly cliffs and hanging vines. Storm clouds were passing in front of the moon, which gave them druids' hooded shapes and grey rags. The border town of Tecún Umán was so small it made Tapachula seem a metropolis, and a Tapachula billboard I had seen advertising a hotel (GoodFood, Comfortable Rooms, Low Prices), stayed in my memory as I ate a vile meal of beans in an ill-lit room of a much meaner hotel in Tecún Umán. This was called the Pearl. A hundred years ago, a British traveller in Guatemala wrote, 'A stranger, arriving without introductions, can only go to a very low public house. . intended for the accommodation of mule drivers, cattle herds and petty retail dealers.' But I was alone — not a mule driver in sight; I would have welcomed his company. There was a dog by the door, chewing at the fleas on his hindquarters. I gave him a lump of gristle from my plate and, watching his wild eyes as he champed it, I thought how lucky I was that there was a train out of this place in the morning. 'Very early,' the hotel-keeper had said. I had replied, 'The earlier the better.'

Tecún Umán was a tiny railhead — no more. But once, from here to Panama — then a neglected province of Colombia — it was all regarded as the Kingdom of Guatemala. It was an unstable and quarrelsome kingdom and, when a series of revolts resulted in a constitutional regime and a kind of futile independence, it became even more unstable. It was also menaced by Mexico — by the absurd Iturbide who had had himself crowned in a self-flattering ceremony: 'emperor by the grace of God and of bayonets,' was Bolivar's jeer. Guatemalan independence had meant the setting up of town councils, and in 1822 these councils voted to annex Guatemala to Mexico, reasoning that it was better to join the Mexicans than be humiliated in battle by them. But Mexican instability was apparent from the first, Iturbide was recognized as a tyrant, and a year later Guatemala withdrew and her National Assembly declared the independence of the five provinces: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

This was nominally a confederation, the United Provinces of Cental America, though for the next eighty years the foreign traveller continued to call them 'Guatemala' and to treat his adventuring in the jungles of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and his canoe trips across El Salvador's Lake Ilopango as travel in Guatemala. If Guatemala was merely a misnomer for this jumble of countries, 'United Provinces' was the kind of fatuous violation of language that in our day terms the grotesque dictatorship a 'People's Republic'. Civil war was almost immediate in the five countries: it was woodsman against townie, conservative against liberal, Indian against Spaniard, tenant farmer against landlord; the provinces battled, and unity disintegrated in sabre charges and cannon fire. Within fifteen years the area was political and social bedlam — or, as one historian has written, 'quintuple confusion'. American and British travellers grumbled heartily about the difficulties of cutting their way from village to village, and remarked on how little was known of this attenuated tissue of geography on which South America swung from North America.

It is hard to keep the names straight. Guatemala is the anvil-shaped one next to Mexico; El Salvador is the tiny one being squashed by the blob of Honduras to the shape of a rectangular raft and proving unsea-worthy on its launch into the Pacific; Nicaragua is a wedge, Costa Rica the cuff on Panama's extended sleeve. There are no railways in Belize. Considering their history — not only the riots, civil wars and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism — it is a wonder they exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea. These countries lie on one of our planet's worst fault-lines, a volcanic fissure which, each year, threatens to shift in the tremendous way it has been promising, and swallow them and their wranglings. Oddly, the proudest boast of these countries is their volcanoes: they are on every national emblem, on most of the money, and figure prominently in their superstitions.

All this lay ahead of me, but I intended to stick to my route and deal with one country at a time. I had got some puzzled looks from the hotel-keeper when I told him I was going to catch the train.

The bus is quicker,' he said.

'I'm not in a hurry,' I said.

'The train is very old.'

'The Mexican train to Tapachula was old.'

'But this one is dirty as well.'

'I'll have a bath when I get to Guatemala City.'

'All the other tourists take buses. Or taxis.'

'I'm not a tourist.'

'Yes,' he said, seeing that my mind was made up, 'the train is very interesting. But for some reason no one ever takes it.'

He was mistaken about that, for one thing. There was a crowd of people at the station early the following morning. They were undersized — farmers in slouch hats and straw sombreros, Indian women with papooses and pigtails, barefoot children. Each person had a large bundle, a basket tied with vines or a home-made suitcase. I concluded that this was the reason they had chosen to take the train — their belongings would have been unwelcome on a bus. The train also took a different route from any of the buses, and the train-fare from Tecún Umán to Guatemala City was less than two dollars. Until ten minutes before the train was to leave, a policeman kept us away from the platform barrier, and we stood clutching our tickets — strips of paper with all the intermediate stations listed: one's ticket was guillotined at the station where one was to disembark.

The difference between Mexican trains and Guatemalan trains was obvious as soon as we were permitted to board. The cars — four of them — were very small wooden contraptions with large windows. There was no glass in the windows, no paint on the wood. It was narrow gauge and had the look of a train you might see in a decayed amusement park, too tiny and decrepit to take seriously. The seats were also tiny and they were filled within five minutes of our departure. I sat knee to knee with an Indian woman who, as soon as we left, put her chin against the red blanket on her shoulder and went to sleep. Her thin restless child, a small girl in a torn dress, stared at me. No one in the train spoke except to haggle with the hawkers boosting fruit on us, at the stations along the way.

Although I had the satisfaction of knowing that the train was a continuation of the one I had taken that frosty morning two weeks before in Boston, this passenger train to Guatemala City held no promise of comfort or companionship, and on this day obscured with smoke and mist I had no real expectation of anything but a fairly rough ride through damp and shrouded jungle. The jungle, where it was not an overhang of dark trees, gave the impression of dumped litter — wrappings, string, broken boxes, bits of rag; these I saw were not junk, but dead leaves and vines and flowers. The jungle itself was grey this cloudy morning, and the train rocking on the track and showing its scars (the scorched ceiling, the splintered seats), and stopping and starting with great uncertainty, seemed to me highly unreliable, if not downright dangerous. On the map it seemed a simple transit: Veracruz-Tapachula-Tecún Umán-Guatemala City — two days at most. But the map was misleading, and this train — which emitted groans on curves and slight ascents — did not really seem capable to me of completing the trip. The passengers' faces were set in frowns, as if they shared my conviction. The track had been cleared, but ten feet away the jungle dripped and was so dense no light showed through it.

A Bostonian had come this way in 1886, and charmed by the wildness of the place had regarded the arrival of the railway with a kind of horror. His was in a sense a typical curmudgeonly snobbery about travel, a bragging about the glory of travelling through trackless woods with a pack of Indians and mule-skinners (Evelyn Waugh fills the Introduction to When The Going Was Good — the curmudgeon's catch-phrase — with the same grumpy boasts). 'Old travellers know how soon the individuality of a country is lost when once the tide of foreign travel is turned through its towns or its by-ways,' writes William T. Brigham in his Guatemala. (I think he is the same William Brigham who nearly electrocuted himself in Hawaii when he touched a wooden stick which a native magician had loaded with some high voltage mumbo-jumbo.) Brigham soon makes his fears particular: 'When the Northern Railroad extends through Guatemala, when the Transcontinental Railway traverses the plains of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Canal unites the Atlantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mulepath and the mozo de cargo (carrier of bundles) will be supplanted, and a journey across Central America become almost as dull as a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne.'

How wrong he was.

Chiapas had been arid — a stony exposed landscape that looked as if it had yet to be possessed by man. This part of Guatemala was heavily forested at the border- the national frontier was abruptly apparent in the rising land and the vine-covered trees — and as we descended to Coatepeque and Retalhuleu the scenery became tropical in its disorder — the jungle sprawled, the huts were poor and small and badly-made-and the only symmetries were the stretches of cane fields. In Mexico I had seen the cut cane in railway freight cars; here it was loaded on wagons and old tottering trucks, and sheaves of it dragged on the road and dropped, so that most of the roads were strewn and looked as if a fierce storm had just blown through and knocked these bare branches down.

The cane cutting had given Guatemala a sickly sweet odour. The sugary smell was released by the men with machetes, but as the day grew hotter the smell weighted the air. It was a noxious sweetness, like syrup made into smoke, with a whiff of vegetables and an abrasive chemical aftertaste. And there was in it, too, a sharper stink, the nauseating gust you would get by burning sugar over a fire and reducing it to black junk. This was the height of the cane harvest and the smells and the stacked trucks and the worker gangs made Guatemala seem a place of considerable enterprise, but of an old-fashioned plantation sort.

We travelled parallel to a road, and crossed it occasionally, but for most of the time we were not near to places that were very densely inhabited. The towns were small and tumbledown and in this bus-riding country most of the people lived on the main roads. After a few stops I could see that this was regarded as a local train — no one was going any great distance. Passengers who had got on at Tecún Umán were going to the market at Coatepeque, which was on a road, or to Retalhuleu to get to the coast, about twenty-five miles away. By noon we were at La Democracia. At the time I had concluded that this was an ironical name, but perhaps it was a fitting name for a place with a sweet-sour smell, and huts made out of sticks and cardboard and hammered-out tins, and howling radios and clamouring people — some boarding buses, some selling fruit, but the majority merely standing wrapped in blankets and looking darkly at the train. And tired children were hunkered down in the mud. Here was a fancy car among the jalopies, and there a pretty house among the huts. Democracy is a messy system of government, and there was a helter-skelter appropriateness in the name of this disordered town. But how much democracy was there here?

There were election posters pasted on the pillars of the shop verandahs. There would be an election in a few months. On the way to Guatemala City I tried to engage passengers in political talk, but I quickly discovered that Guatemalans had none of the candour I had found in Mexicans. 'Echeverría was a bandit and a hypocrite,' one man told me; 'Lopez Portillo is just the same — give him time.' Guatemalans were more circumspect: they shrugged, they spat, they rolled their eyes; they did not utter their political preferences. But who could blame them? For twelve years the country had been governed by a party of fanatical anti-communists — a party greatly fancied by America's Central Intelligence Agency, which has yet to perceive that fanatical anti-communists are almost invariably fanatical anti-democrats. In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was a wave of guerrilla activity — kidnappings, murders and bombings; but the army proved ineffectual against the guerrillas and in Guatemala due process of law had always been notoriously slow. The answer was simple. Using the advice of the United States Embassy's military attaché (later found murdered), a number of vigilante groups were set up. A vigilante assassination-squad is answerable to no one, and the 'White Hand', Guatemala's version of a volunteer Gestapo unit, has been responsible for thousands of murders and torturings. It seems strange that such a small country could produce such an appalling haemorrhage, that a system of terror and counter-terror could be responsible for so many deaths. And you might ask: What is the point? Seventy-five percent of Guatemalans are peasants of a classical sort: subsistence tanners and part-time cane-cutters, coffee-pluckers and cotton-pickers. The government, while insisting that it is democratic and does not imprison people, rigs elections and allows the 'White Hand' and a score of other vigilante groups to terrorize a justifiably sullen population. (There are plenty of freelance gunmen in Guatemala; in 1975, the vice-president claimed that he had enough armed men in his party alone to invade Belize, if the army proved gutless or unwilling.) Given the circumstances, it did not seem to me unusual that La Democracia was a mess or that my fellow passengers on the train were gloomy.

I had a political reverie on that train. It was this: the government held elections, encouraged people to vote and appeared to be democratic. The army appeared to be impartial, the newspapers disinterested. And it remained a peasant society, basically underfed and unfree. It must perplex any peasant to be told he is living in a free country, when the facts of his life contradict this. It might be that this does not perplex him; he has every reason to believe, in accordance with the evidence, that democracy is feudal, a bureaucracy run by crooks and trigger-happy vigilantes. When one sees a government of the Guatemalan sort professing such high-mindedness in its social aims and producing such mediocre results, one cannot be surprised if the peasant concludes that communism might be an improvement. It was a Latin American sickness: inferior government gave democracy an evil name and left people no option but to seek an alternative. The cynic might say — I met many who did — that these people are better off with an authoritarian government. I happen to think this is nonsense. From Guatemala to Argentina, the majority of the countries are run by self-serving tyrannies which are only making the merciless vengeance of anarchy inevitable. The shabby deceits were as apparent from this train as a row of Burma-Shave signs.

The stinging sweetness of the sugar cane, the putrefaction in every dismal village, the sorry children, the very frail huts and the sombre faces of the passengers in the train — it all made my mood reflective. And, having taken the train, I had the illusion that I was not terribly far from Boston -1 had left the American border just a week ago. The train had given me a sense of continuity which, unlike the dislocation and disconnection one experiences after a plane journey, had made Guatemala seem incongruous and puzzling. On this branch-line from Boston I had found barefoot Indians and starving children and rather ominous-looking peasants with two-foot knives resting on their knees.

The atmosphere in the train was grim. This was the bottom of the social scale, mainly people going to the next village, a ten-cent ride to sell a dollar's worth of bananas. The children chattered; no one else did. The adults seemed incurious, even surly, and those whose eyes I caught watching me appeared guiltily suspicious and turned away. In conversation they were off-hand. They asked no questions at all; their replies were brief.

At Coatepeque I said to a man on the platform, 'It's cold here. Is it always this cold?'

'Sometimes,' he said. He walked away.

At Santa Lucia I asked a man how far he had come. He said Mazatenango.

'Do you live at Mazatenango?'

'No.' He said nothing more. When the train moved on he changed his seat.

At La Democracia I told a man I was headed for Zacapa. He said nothing. I said I was taking the train to Zacapa. He said nothing. I wondered if he was deaf. I said, 'Is it hard to get to Zacapa?'

'Yes,' he said, and lapsed into silence once again.

He was smoking a cigarette. Most of the passengers had cigarettes in their mouths. It seemed to be a country of chain-smokers. A British traveller remarked, 'There are fashions in Guatemala which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect; and among these stands foremost the immoderate use of tobacco, by both sexes.' That was in 1828. The traveller — his name was Henry Dunn — estimated that men smoked twenty cigars a day and women fifty cigarettes. No one on my train smoked a cigar, but as I have said the passengers represented the poorest class in the country.

It helps to take the train if one wishes to understand. Understanding was like a guarantee of depression, but it was an approach to the truth. For most tourists, Guatemala is a four-day affair with quaintness and ruins: veneration at the capital's churches, a day sniffing nosegays at Antigua, another at the colourful Indian market at Chichicastenango, a picnic at the Mayan temples of Tikal. I think I would have found this itinerary more depressing, and less rewarding, than my own meandering from the Mexican border through the coastal departments. The train creaked and whimpered but, incredibly, it kept to its schedule: at 3:20 we were at Santa Maria — as promised in Cook's International Timetable — and, eating my fifth banana of the day, I studied our progress on our climb to Escuintla and the greater heights of Guatemala City.

Now there were volcanoes all around us, or volcanic hills with footstool shapes that the Mexicans call 'little ovens'. It was cooler, and as the sun grew pinker and a ridge of hills rose to meet it where it hovered drawn to the shape of a chalice near the Pacific, the gathering darkness threw half-tones across the hills; those fragments of white were the hats and shirts of cane-cutters marching home. But it was not an ordinary jungle twilight, the mould of shadow under wide gleaming leaves, flickering hut fires and the jostlings of mottled pigs and goats. The sky ^as in flames far-off, and when we came closer the fire was revealed as enormous: bonfires of waste cane burned in sloping fields and sent up cloud tides that were purple and orange and crimson; they floated and lost their colour, becoming white until the night absorbed them. Then this smoke fogged the tracks and it was as if we were travelling on some antique steam locomotive in a mountain pass in Asia, through fog that smelled of stale candy. In the words of Hart Crane, we 'roared by and left / three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly / watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip- / ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.

The last landscape 1 had seen in daylight had been a row of volcanoes, shaped like a child's drawing of mountain peaks, with stiff steep sides and narrow summits. As we drew near to Guatemala City there was no landscape to speak of. There were the cane fires, and I could see the headlamps of cars on roads, but the rest was black with a scattering of lanterns, and now and then an illuminated church steeple at a mountain village. It was chilly as we passed through the highlands to enter the city on the plateau: huts, houses, streetlights, buildings. We crossed a bridge over the main street. The passengers who had come from the coast looked down at the glare and the crowds with what seemed like alarm.

Guatemala City, an extremely horizontal place, is like a city on its back. Its ugliness, which is a threatened look (the low morose houses have earthquake cracks in their façades; the buildings wince at you with fright lines), is ugliest on those streets where, just past the last toppling house, a blue volcano's cone bulges. I could see the volcanoes from the window of my hotel room. I was on the third floor, which was also the top floor. They were tall volcanoes and looked capable of spewing lava. Their beauty was undeniable; but it was the beauty of witches. The rumbles from their fires had heaved this city down.

The first capital had been destroyed by torrents of water. So the capital was moved three miles away to Antigua in the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1773, Antigua was flattened by an earthquake, and a more stable site — at least it was farther from the slopes of the great volcanoes — was found here, in the Valley of the Hermitage, formerly an Indian village. Churches were built — a dozen, of Spanish loveliness, with slender steeples and finely finished porches and domes. The earth shook — not much, but enough to split them. Tremors left cracks between windows, and separated, in the stained-glass of those windows, the shepherd from his brittle flock, the saint from his gold staff, the martyr from his persecutors. Christs were parted from their crosses and the anatomy of chapel Virgins violated, as their enamelling, the porcelain white of faces and fingers, shattered, sometimes with a report that startled the faithful in their prayers. The windows, the statues, the masonry were mended; and gold leaf was applied thickly to the splintered altars. It seemed the churches had been made whole again. But the motion of earthquakes had never really ceased. In Guatemala they were inescapable. And in 1917 the whole city was thrown into its streets — every church and house and brothel. Thousands died; that unprecedented earthquake was seen as a judgement; and more fled to the Caribbean coast, where there were only savages to contend with.

The Guatemalans, sullen at the best of times, display a scolded resignation — bordering at times on guiltiness — when the subject of earthquakes is raised. Charles. Darwin is wonderful in describing the sense of dislocation and spiritual panic that earthquakes produce in people. He himself experienced an earthquake, when the Beagle was anchored off the Chilean coast. 'A bad earthquake,' he writes, 'at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid; — one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.'

And, speaking of his own frequent earthquakes, the Guatemalan seems to imply in his undemonstrative way that the punishment is deserved. It is a judgement, and it was foretold in Revelation ('what must soon take place'), in Chapter Six, the opening of the sixth seal: 'I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. .'

Guatemalan earthquakes are no worse than this doomsday spectacle.

The city has been rebuilt. There is no other place to shift it. Succeeding earthquakes have left their marks on Guatemala City, but these wrinkles — part of the look of Guatemala — are less of a disfigurement than the styles of building that supplanted the Spanish architecture. Terraces of huts, the spattered stucco of mock-colonial houses, two-storey blocks and now the taller American-style hotels (how long, one wonders, will these monstrosities last?) constitute the city today. Some of the churches have been put back together, their refinements blunted in the rebuilding.

I found the churches gloomy, but after a few days church-going was toy single recreation. 'The inhabitants of Guatemala appear to have little of the desire for public amusements seen in most cities,' wrote Robert Dunlop in 1847. It was hard to knock holes in any of these old assessments. 'Almost the only recreation of the natives being the religious processions, at which the figures of saints are paraded… of these, there are two or three every month.' For historical, religious and seismic reasons I chose the church of La Merced. It was the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy, to whom the church is consecrated. The church showed earthquake damage, though not so much as the Cathedral which, with its cracked arches and pillars and part of its ceiling missing, ought to be condemned as unsafe. La Merced also was damaged, but it had been recommended by the Chevalier Arthur Morelet (described by his translator as 'a French gentleman of leisure and extensive scientific acquirements'), who in his Travels in Central America (1871) called it, 'a pretty church with a fine site. From an artistic point of view, its massive towers are open to criticism, notwithstanding that they give to the edifice a great part of its originality.'

There were several hundred people in front of La Merced, waiting to go in — so many, that I had to enter by a side door. Inside, there were three activities in progress: a very large crowd in the centre aisle were pushing to get near a robed priest who held a tall candle in a silver candlestick — the object was about the size of a shotgun; another group was more scattered — these were families having their pictures taken by men with Polaroid cameras; the last large group had congregated around a table set up near a brutal crucifixion and they were signing a clipboard of papers and handing coins to a man — this, I discovered, was a lottery. And at the small chapels and minor altars people were praying, lighting candles, carrying tapers or chatting amiably. At a side chapel was the Virgin of Chiquiniquira, a black madonna with an ebony face. Black Guatemalans (there are many; a settlement of blacks at Livingstone on the Caribbean coast is English-speaking) had prostrated themselves before the nigrescent virgin who 'loaded down with sumptuous toys,' remarks Morelet, 'receives exclusively the homage of the faithful of the African race.'

Travellers less sympathetic than Morelet — one supposes them to be unyielding Protestants — have seen Guatemalan Catholicism as barbarous. Dunlop regarded saints' days in Guatemala as no more than occasions for the combustion of 'great quantities of fireworks' and disgusted by the statues Dunn wrote, 'most of the images of the saints. . are very common pieces of sculpture, and disfigured by absurd and vulgar dresses.' Aldous Huxley, who affected a kind of comic, stuporous Buddhism (his senile transcendentalism he gave fictional form in his silly novel Island) jeered at Guatemalan penitents until his package tour called him to Antigua, where his jeers were resumed.

Anyone who finds a frenzied secularity at a church service in Guatemala — and thinks it should be stamped out — ought to go to the North End of Boston on the feast day of Saint Anthony and consider the probability of redemption in the scuffles of ten thousand Italians frantically pinning dollar bills to the cassock of their patron saint, who is borne on a litter past pizza parlours and mafia hangouts in a procession headed by a wailing priest and six smirking acolytes. Compared to that, the goings-on at La Merced were solemn. The priest with the silver candle appeared to be fighting his way through the crowd of women — there were only women in that part of the church. Actually, what he was doing was allowing the women to get a grip on the candle. A woman waited, lunged, gripped the candle in both hands and yelled an ejaculation; the priest yanked the candle from her hands and another woman made a dive for it. The priest continued to move in a circle; his perspiration had turned his white surplice grey.

The Polaroid cameramen were slightly better organized. They had touts who were rushing up to family groups and, for two dollars, posing them near especially punished-looking saints in order to have their pictures taken. There was heavy competition. I counted fourteen photographers and as many touts. They had deployed themselves from the sacristy door to the baptismal font, and in every niche and near every altar — there were two photographers near St Sebastian: that martyring was particularly prized — flashbulbs popped and credulous Indians gasped as they saw their startled faces sharpening in full colour on snapshot squares. It was in a way the miracle they had hoped for, though the price was high — two dollars was a week's pay.

The lottery was much cheaper. At that table near the crucifixion the crowd was so large I had to stand for fifteen minutes before I could get a glimpse at the clipboard or the fee or, for that matter, the prize. This was not a literate country — that much was clear. Only a handful of the people were able to sign their names; the rest told their names to a lady in a black shawl. She slowly copied the name down, with the person's address; the person handed over ten cents and received a slip of paper with a number on it. Most of the people were Indian women, carrying babies on slings on their backs like slumping rucksacks or papooses. I waited until a man signed the paper and followed him as he walked away smiling at his coupon.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'But what are you hoping to win?'

'You did not see the statue?'

'No.'

'It is on the table — come.' He took me around the back of the crowd and pointed. The lady in the black shawl, seeing that I was a foreigner who craved a look at the statue, lifted it up for me to admire.

'It is beautiful, no?'

'Very beautiful,' I said.

'I think it is very expensive.'

'Of course.'

Some Indian women heard. They nodded; they grinned — they had no teeth; they said it was very lovely, and they went on speaking their names, or signing, and paying their money.

The prize in the lottery — it was more than a statue — was extraordinary. It was an image of Jesus, about two feet high, with his back turned. He wore a crown of gold and a bright red cape with gold fringes, and with his right hand he was knocking on the door of a cottage. It was almost certainly a copy of an English country cottage — a plastic cottage wall of stone, and plastic beams at the eaves; a mullioned window with plastic panes; and an oaken plastic door surrounded by rambling plastic roses, some blue and some yellow. They were not morning glories — they had plastic thorns. A Catholic education had introduced me to Jesus on the cross, in a boat, being flogged, working in a carpentry shop, praying, denouncing the moneychangers and standing in a river to be baptized. I had never seen Jesus knocking at the door of an English country cottage, though I had a dim memory of a painting depicting something similar (five months later, walking through St Paul's Cathedral in London I saw Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World' and was able to link it to that Guatemalan set-piece).

'What is Jesus doing?' I asked the Guatemalan man.

'As you see,' he said. 'Knocking on the door.' Knocking is a violent word in Spanish — more like hammering or throttling. Jesus was not doing that.

'Why is he doing that?'

The man laughed. 'He wants to go in. I think he wants to go in.'

The lady in the black shawl put it down. She said, 'It is heavy.'

'That house,' I said, gesturing. 'Is it in Guatemala?'

'Yes,' said the man. He stood on tiptoe and looked again. 'I cannot say.'

'Does the house represent anything?'

'The little house? It represents a house.'

We were getting nowhere. The man excused himself. He said he wanted to have his picture taken.

There was a priest nearby.

'I have a question, Father.'

He nodded benignly.

'I have been admiring the statue of Jesus in the lottery.'

'A beautiful statue,' he said.

'Yes, but what does it represent?'

'It represents Jesus, who is visiting a house. The house is represented. You are an American, no? Many Americans come here.'

'I have never seen anything like it before.'

'This is a very special lottery. Our feast day.' He bowed. He wanted to get away from me.

'Is that in the Bible? Jesus at the little house?'

'Oh, yes. Jesus goes to the little house. He visits the people, he preaches and so forth.'

He sounded as if he was making this up. I said, 'Where exactly in the Bible-'

'You will excuse me?' he said. He gathered his skirts. 'Welcome to Guatemala.'

Perhaps he thought I was mocking — I wasn't; I was only seeking information. If my hotel had been something other than a flophouse, run by a bad-tempered hag, I might have found a Gideon Bible in a table in my room. But there was no table, no Bible. 'I have a room with a bath,' the hag had said; the bath was a rusty shower pipe suspended from the ceiling on a loop of wire. Two days in this hotel and I was ready to board any train — even a Guatemalan one.

Some time later, I found the Biblical text from which that lottery prize had been derived. It was in Revelation, not far from the earthquake reference ('behold there was an earthquake, and the sun became black. .'). In Chapter Three, Christ says, 'Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.'

I used my time in Guatemala City to recuperate from the strenuous train-ride I had had from Veracruz. I needed long walks and a couple of good nights' sleep; I made a phone call to London (my wife missed me, I told her I loved her; my children said they had made a snowman; this telephone call cost me $114), and then a tour of the bars where, hoping to meet Guatemalans with lively stories, I was surrounded by disappointed tourists. I walked from one end of the city to the other, from zone to zone, through the curio market (embroidered shirts, baskets, pottery — the clumsy work of defeated-looking Indians) and the food market (skinned pigs' heads, black sausages and the medieval sight of small children binding up bouquets of flowers with bleeding fingers and being shouted at by cruel old men). It was a large city, but not a hospitable one. It had a reputation for thievery; and yet it did not strike me as dangerous, only commonplace and sombre. I suggested to the hag at the hotel that the city seemed to me sadly lacking in entertainment.

'You should go to the market at Chichicastenango,' she said. That's what everyone does.'

And that's why I don't want to do it, I thought. I said, 'I am planning to go to Zacapa.'

She laughed. I had not seen her laugh before. It was quite horrible.

'You came here to go to Zacapa!'

That's right.'

'Do you know how hot it is in Zacapa?'

'I have never been there.'

'Listen,' she said. 'There is nothing in Zacapa. Nothing, nothing.'

'There is a train to Zacapa,' I said. 'And a train out of it, to San Salvador.'

She hooted again. 'Have you seen that train!'

This was starting to annoy me. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her hotel.

She said, 'When I was a small girl my father had a farm in Mazatenango. I used to ride the train all the time. It took a full day! I liked it, because I was a small girl. But I am not a small girl anymore' — this was incontestable — 'and I have not taken the train since. You should take the bus. Forget Zacapa — go to Tikal, see Antigua, buy some things at the market — but don't go to Zacapa.'

I went to the railway station. There was a sign over the two ticket windows. It said, It Is Much Cheaper To Go By Train! Over one window was lettered, To The Pacific, over the other, To The Atlantic. I paid a dollar and bought a ticket to Zacapa, which was halfway down the Atlantic line.

The train was not leaving until seven the next morning, so I went for my last long walk. This took me to Zone Four and a church I had not really expected to find in Guatemala, or this hemisphere. To say the Capilla de Yurrita is mock-Russian orthodox in style is to say nothing, though it has onion domes and ikons. It is a crazy castle. Pink rectangles are painted on its concrete walls to resemble brickwork, and on its main steeple are four gigantic ice-cream cones; beneath the steeple are fourteen pillars, decorated like barber-poles. It has balconies and porches, and rows of cement buds on its castellated roofs, four clocks showing the wrong time, gargoyles and a twice-life-sized dog clinging to one of the cones. On the façade are the four Evangelists, and peeping out of windows the twelve Apostles, and three Christs and a two-headed eagle. It is red and black, rusty metal and tiles. The oak door panels are carved, the left shows Guatemalan ruins, the right Guatemalan tombs, and over the door, in Spanish, a scroll reads 'The Chapel of Our Lady of Anguish' with a dedication to Don Pedro de Alvarado y Mesia. On Don Pedro's shield a conquistador is shown driving an army into retreat and beneath it are three volcanoes, one in eruption.

Inside, there were three old ladies in the front pew singing a hymn to Mary. Mah-ree-ah; they sang with passion but off-key; Mah-ree-ah. At the back of the church was a lady with a little dog, and five Indians. These pious people were overwhelmed — as who would not be? — by the moorish-style choir loft, the ornate Spanish altar-piece, the vast supine Christ covered with a lace-curtain and attended by a dark-robed Mary with seven silver daggers in her breast. All the statues were clothed and many of the bouquets in the heavy gilt vases were real. The walls were covered with murky gloating frescoes and stone carvings — trees, candles, sunbeams, flames; near the pulpit was a bas-relief of the Sermon on the Mount. Even the small dog was silent. Somehow this maniacally opulent church had survived a hundred years of earthquakes.

But the Polytechnic School further down the Avenida Reforma also was unscathed. It seemed only the most bizarre buildings had withstood the tremors. The Polytechnic was a fake fortress two city blocks wide, with fake watchtowers and sentry posts and what looked like slits for gun emplacements. It was painted grey and on the central tower was the motto 'Virtue — Science — Strength'. The wide shady avenue on which the Polytechnic stood was lined with statuary: a great bronze bull (its penis daubed with red paint), a panther, a stag, another bull — this one charging, a lion killing a crocodile, two large wild boars fighting-one biting the other's belly; at the junction of this avenue and a main street there was a statue — lions, wreaths, maidens and a succession of plinths surmounted by a patriot. Nearby was an open manhole, as deep as a well and twice as wide.

The street was empty; there were no other strollers. I walked and it seemed to me that the way the joke church, the fake palace and the savage statues had endured the worst earthquakes in the world had the makings of a maxim; they had remained intact, as fools survive scorn. I kept walking and, just after nightfall, found a vegetarian restaurant in a darkened suburb. The dining room held only three people, one of whom — in a turban and long beard and the silver bracelet required by the Sikh religion — was a young Californian. He told me that he was on the point of rejecting Sikhism, but had not got around to shaving, and the turban gave him confidence. These three were architects, designing houses for the people who had been made homeless in the earthquake of 1976, two years before.

'Are you just designing the houses?' I asked. 'Or are you building them, too?'

'Designing, making concrete blocks, planning villages, building the houses — the whole bit,' said the man in the turban.

I put it to him that this sort of idealism could be carried too far. Surely it was the government's job to see that people were housed. If they needed money they could sell some of those bronze statues as scrap metal.

'We're working under the government,' said one of the others.

Wouldn't it be better, I said, to teach people how to make houses and let them get on with the job?

'What we do,' said the man in the turban, 'is put up three walls. If someone wants the house he has to finish it — put up the fourth wall and thereof.'

I approved of this effort. It seemed to strike the right balance, the trust in idealism tempered by a measure of caution. I said that, so far, I had found the Guatemalans a pretty gloomy bunch. Was this their experience?

'You answer,' said one to the man in the turban. 'You've been here for a year.'

'They're heavy,' said the man in the turban, stroking his beard sagely. 'But they've got a lot to be heavy about.'