The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

7 THE 7:00 TO ZACAPA

It was a brutal city, but at six in the morning a froth of fog endowed it with secrecy and gave it the simplicity of a mountain-top. Before the sun rose to burn it away, the fog dissolved the dull straight lines of its streets, and whitened its low houses and made its somber people ghostly as they appeared for moments before being lifted away, like revengers glimpsed in their hauntings. Then Guatemala City, such a grim thing, became a tracing, a sketch without substance, and the poor Indians and peasants — who had no power — looked blue and bold and watchful. They possessed it at this hour. There was no wind; the fog hung in fine grey clouds, a foot from the ground. Even the railway station, no more than a brick shed, took on the character of a great terminus: there was no way of verifying that it did not rise up for five stories in a clock tower crowned by pigeons and iron-work, so well hidden was its small tin roof by the fog the volcanoes had trapped. There were about twenty people standing near the ticket window of the station — in rags; but their rags seemed just another deception of the fog.

They carried baskets, cardboard boxes, bananas and machetes. They were Indians and weatherbeaten farmers, standing in silence in the dampness. One distinguished-looking man in a spotless sombrero and white moustache and frock coat smoked a cheroot. From the waist up he could have been the mayor, but his trousers were ragged and he wore no shoes — as the shoe-shine-boys lingering nearby were quick to point out. They too were barefoot.

A bell was rung. The gate was opened. We went through to the platform. The cars — in much worse shape than the ones that had taken me from Tecún Umán — had the further disadvantage of having been soaked by the fog. The padded seats were torn — springs and stuffing Protruded; the wooden seats were shaky; all the seats were wet. The car itself, a relic from the 1920's, was neither quaint nor comfortable, but merely a small uncared-for box, with bare wires hanging from the ceiling, and stinking of dirt. It was shaped, as all Central American rail-Ways cars were shaped, like a trolley car — wooden, with a curved roof and a verandah platform at either end. Zacapa was not on the tourist route; if it was, there would have been a well-sprung bus serving the Zacapa Department. The Guatemala Tourist Board was attentive to the needs of the visitors. But only barefoot peasants lived in Zacapa and their train matched them in looking woebegone.

We sat in the wet car listening to the jabber on a girl's green radio. The girl held it in the crook of her arm; in her other arm was an infant.

A man with a monkey-wrench walked through the car.

The man sitting next to me said, 'This car is broken.'

'That is true,' I said.

There was a shout, followed by a general stampede, as the passengers from this car ran into the next one. I watched Indians dragging baskets, and women pushing children, and men with machetes. Most people merely put their heads down and butted their way into the next car. I was alone in the car a few minutes later. 'Get out,' said the man with the monkey-wrench, so I followed the others — two cars' passengers jammed into one- and considered myself lucky to find a seat.

'Good morning,' I said to the Indians, trying to ingratiate myself with people who would share this all-day journey to the eastern province.'How areyou?'

A sniggering man to my left, dandling a large skinny boy on his leg, said, 'They do not speak Spanish. They know a few words — that is all.'

'That is all I know,' I said.

'No — you are doing extremely well.'

'On the other hand, my English is a little better.'

The man laughed — much too loud. I could see he was drunk, though how he had managed this so early in the morning I could not tell.

Our train was shunted back and forth, and the broken car — no more broken-looking than the one we were in-was removed. I had expected a delay; I had the morning paper and a novel to read, but on the dot of seven the train's harsh horn blew, and we began racing through the fog at the edge of a muddy road.

At the first level crossing, there was great confusion outside the train, and inside a woman stood up and began to laugh and shout. The train had slowed down for the crossing, and now 1 could see a boy running alongside with a bundle. The woman yelled to the boy, telling him to hurry, but at that moment a soldier by the door (there were two soldiers in each of the train's three cars) put down his automatic rifle and leaned out and caught the bundle. The soldier handed it to the woman.

'It is my food,' said the woman.

The passengers continued to stare at her.

'I forgot it this morning,' she said. 'That was my son.'

'He is a fast runner!' said the drunken man next to me. 'That soldier is pretty quick, too. Hyah!'

The soldier had tucked his rifle under his arm. He took up his position by the door and glowered at the man. You might have thought, from the way the soldiers scanned the huts by the track side and kept their rifles ready, that they expected to come under heavy fire. But nothing more lethal than a banana peel was aimed at the train.

These huts, and some in a horrific slum outside San Salvador, were the worst I saw in Latin America. Rural poverty is bad, but there is hope in a pumpkin field, or the sight of chickens, or a field of cattle which, even if they are not owned by the people in the huts, offer opportunities to the hungry cattle rustler. But this slum outside Guatemala City, a derangement of feeble huts made out of paper and tin, was as hopeless as any I had ever seen in my life. The people who lived here, I found out, were those who had been made homeless in the last earthquake-refugees who had been here for two years and would probably stay until they died, or until the government dispersed them, and set fire to the shacks, so that tourists would not be upset by this dismal sight. The huts were made out of waste lumber and tree branches, cardboard and bits of plastic, rags, car doors and palm fronds, metal signboards that had been abstracted from poles, and grass woven into chicken-wire. And the slum, which remained in view for twenty minutes — miles of it — smouldered; near each house was a small cooking fire, with a blackened tin can simmering on it. Children rise early in the tropics; this seemed to be an entire slum of children, very dirty ones, with their noses running, waving at the train from curtains of yellow fog.

The train passengers on their way to Zacapa did not take much interest in this slum, but one could hardly blame them. They were as ragged as the people in the huts.

And then there was nothing. No shacks, no trees, no people, no smoke, no barking dogs. The ground gave way and there was emptiness; the sound of birds and insects was eclipsed, and in that silence was a thin echo of crows. It was a startling experience of space. We were on a bridge and crossing a deep gorge. 1 looked out of the window; the sight took my breath away — my legs went numb and a buzz began in my ears. Hundreds of feet down, at the rusty struts of a bridge, a gash of rock lay beneath us. We were leaving Guatemala City's plateau and making our way across this rickety bridge — but a long one: I could not see the far side — to the mountains on the northeast of the city. It seemed a particularly dangerous traverse for this train, not only because it was so old and trembled on the bridge, but also because all the windows were open.

Steeling myself for the shock, I leaned out and took another look at the gorge. There was no water in it. There were pinnacles of rock which had snagged scraps of fog, as country hedges and thorns snag bunches of fleece; and through this streaming whiteness a pair of crows flew and steadied themselves. I looked down upon the crows' backs, and this sight, with the white behind it, was like a glimpse of sky — the birds' silhouette in the clouds — as if the train had turned upside down. There was nothing but fog above the train, but below it were broken clouds, and birds, and a glint of sun. This topsy-turvy sight made my head swim. I shut the window.

'Open the window!' A boy of about eight or nine hit me on the knee.

'No,'I said.

'I want to look out!'

'It is dangerous,' I said.

'I want to see!' he yelled, and tried to get past me.

'Sit down,' I said. People were staring at me. 'It is very dangerous.'

The boy spoke to his father — the drunken man. 'I want to look out of the window. He will not let me!'

I smiled at the old man. 'He will fall into the valley.'

'You,' said the old man, pushing the child aside, 'you will fall into the valley!' The boy sulked. The old man said to me, 'He is always causing trouble. One day, something terrible will happen to him.'

I could see that the old drunken man was angry. Trying to calm him I said, 'Your son is a good boy, but this train is very dangerous — so — '

'This train is not very dangerous,' said the man. 'It is an old useless train. It is worth nothing.'

'Right,' I said. The Indians nodded. It gladdened me to know that these people recognized that the train was a piece of junk. I had thought, from their silence, that they had not noticed.

There were more bridges, more gorges filled with cloud and fog, but none was so frightening as that first one. And yet this part of the trip reminded me of the route through the Khyber Pass taken by the battered train to Peshawar. It was more than the view from a similarly beat-up car of rocky mountainsides; it was the sight of a dozen sections of track — ahead, across the valley, and one beneath that, and one over there, and another lying parallel, and more above and below all the way to the valley floor. Not a dozen railways, but pieces of the one we were on, sections that would lead this wheezing engine around four mountains to a descent, another bridge, another climb to the winding sections that ringed those far-off cliffs. Round and round we went; sometimes the engine was silenced by its distance from us on the far side of a ridge, while at other times the curves were so tight it roared past us on a hairpin and seemed like a different train altogether, going in the opposite direction.

The valley floors were stony; the fog had lifted here. The sun revealed the landscape as dead and brown, and the plants which appeared as pale green woods from on high were thorn bushes and bunches of cactus, so thin they cast no shadows. I had thought Guatemala was green — the whole of it like the jungly part around Tecún Umán — but passing from west to east and then pushing north-east to Zacapa, the country had become barer and poorer and stonier. Now in the Motagua Valley — shown on the map as hilly, with a river running through it — we were in a waterless desert: no sign of the river in this parched wasteland. The mountains were stone, the riverbeds rocky; no people. And it looked even worse up ahead as the empty land stretched dustily into the sun.

Every ten or fifteen minutes, the train halted. The soldiers jumped out and positioned themselves in a crouch on the ground, a firing posture. Then a few people would hop to the ground and, without looking back at the train, begin walking into the desert — gone, lost behind the boulders, before the train started again. Most of these stations were not listed on the ticket; they were signboards, a clump of cactus, nothing more than that. Aguas Calientes was one of these: a sign, some cactus, a heap of rocks at the foot of a dry mountain. We started, and I saw a dry riverbed that mimicked a road, but near the riverbed an odd sight — great spurts of white steam from the hot springs that gave this place its name, bubbling from beneath that mountain which was a volcano. There were hot pools around the shooting steam, and women were doing their washing in them. Not even cactus could live among these geysers — the boiling water foamed in the bare rock and drained through the cracks; and the only live things visible in that dead corner of desert were the bent-over women scrubbing their laundry.

The first large station was not a station at all, but a row of shops, a school, and some tall dead trees. People watched from the porches of the shops and children ran into the schoolyard to look at the train (there were only two trains a week). Here, a number of people got off the train, but no one got on. And the train was so infrequent and unde-pendable that not even food-sellers bothered to show up at this station. A boy with a case of tonic hollered to ask whether anyone wanted a drink-that was all. But one Indian in the opposite seat from mine had got off, so now I could stretch out my legs.

The heat had put most of the passengers to sleep. They were small people, they fit these seats and could be recumbent in them. I hunched forward and forced myself to take notes on the blank pages of the book I was too tired to read, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. From time to time I smoked my pipe. I did not talk to anyone. No one talked to anyone. There was no conversation on this train.

It struck me that since leaving Veracruz the trains I had taken had not been noticeably congenial. I was continually reminded that I was travelling alone. I had not expected the people to be so dour or the trains to be in such a state of decay. I had assumed there would be the usual free-for-all — planters and tenant-farmers, Indians, hippies, ranch-hands, coastal blacks, Americans with rucksacks and road-maps, a few tourists. But the train held only the very poor — everyone else had taken the bus. And these were not just poor people, but defeated people, who wore hats but no shoes, and regarded not only strangers but each other with suspicion. They were hardly the stuff of boon companions, and though I liked the rattle of the train and congratulated myself on having found a little-known route through Central America, this made for rather lonely travel.

The penalty for this sense of discovery — who would have guessed Guatemala to be such desert? — this sustaining experience of making my way among marvels of erupted landscape, was that I was a stranger travelling with strangers. They were either oblivious to, or mystified by my presence. They stole glances at my pipe, but when addressed by me in their own language displayed (in shrugs and grunts) a marked reluctance to chat.

Across the aisle an old woman was hawking and spitting. She would clear her throat and then spit — pah! — on the floor at her feet. This annoyed me (and the passengers walking through the mess nauseated me), but there was worse to follow. A woman selling coffee out of a large clay jar entered the train at a tiny station. I had had no breakfast, and more, thought that a hot coffee would be just the thing to bring on a sweat that would cool me. In the hottest areas of Burma, the wise Burmese drink cups of steaming tea and stay cool that way. The coffee-seller dipped a tin cup into her jar and decanted this into a cup she pulled out of her pocket, and handed this to a buyer. When the person finished the coffee, the woman took the cup back and repeated the process. So everyone used the same cup. If I had not known, or if I had been able to persuade myself that I was in no danger, I might have bought a coffee. But, before it was my turn, the spitting woman called the coffee-seller over.

'How much?' she said.

The coffee-seller told her the price: two cents.

The woman spat, drank, wiped her mouth and handed the cup back.

It was my turn next.

I said, 'Do you have another cup?'

'Sorry,' she said and moved away.

Further on, a small girl boarded with some watermelon. Most of it had been sliced. I said, 'Those pieces are too big for me,' and took out my switchblade. As I cut my own piece ('This is about the right size, eh?') — my cutting was a guarantee against cholera -1 noticed that what I had taken for seeds on the cut pieces were glossy black flies.

The mountains receded into the distance. We had circled around their slopes and descended to a blighted area, a straight line of track.

For the next few hours I looked for the Motagua River, but it was nowhere in view. This was Death Valley. The earth here was finer and duller than sand; it was powder, light brown, that was stirred by the movement of the little train. There was a dusting of it on all the cactuses, which gave them the look of stumps. There is no more hopeless object than a dead cactus; it does not collapse, but rather turns grey and hard and seems to petrify. The rest was scrub or single stones, and once, not far from the track, the ribs and skull of a cow, much whiter than the one I had seen in Texas. The only odour was the dust of this pulverized plain. The chief characteristic of a desert, apart from the absence of water, was this absence of smell.

I kept thinking of what the lady in the hotel had said to me: Don't go toZacapal

But if I had not come here I would not have known the extent of this desolation. The heat was intense, but it was still tolerable, and hadn't I complained of the cold just a short time ago in Chicago? I had asked for this. And this was the route the muleteers had taken into El Salvador; it was also — though hardly used these days — the principal way of travelling to Puerto Barrios and the so-called Atlantic coast. It was bad, but if it got no worse than this — it was hard to imagine anything worse — it would be bearable.

I did have one fear: that the train would stop, just like that, no warning, no station; that the engine would seize up in the heat and that we would be stuck here. It had happened on what was regarded as a fine railway a hundred miles out of Veracruz, and the Mexicans had no explanation. This railway was clearly much older, the engine more of a gasper. And suppose it does, I thought, suppose it just stops here and can't start? It was ten in the morning, the open cars were full of people, the train carried no water, there was no road for miles, nor was there any shade. How long did it take to die? I guessed it would not take long in this boundless desert.

It was no reassurance, half an hour later, to arrive at the town of Progreso. Aldous Huxley had come this way in 1933: 'As we steamed out of the station, I noticed that the place was called Progreso. The fact annoyed me; I can detect an irony without having it underlined for me.' Progreso was huts of unbaked mud-bricks, with palm-frond roofs (odd: there were no palms nearby, no trees of any sort). And Rancho, some miles further on, was no better: no progress in Progreso, no ranches in Rancho. This was the hottest, dustiest, most derelict place I had seen outside the boondocks of northern Uganda.

But there was one great difference. The graveyard near Rancho was large and easily identifiable as a graveyard. The tombs were nearly as big as Rancho's mud huts; they were solid and looked newly whitewashed, cottage-shaped with pillars and slanting roofs. They were much stronger than the huts. But I could see the logic in this. A man spent a life-time in a mud-hut, but these tombs had to house his remains for all eternity. The mud huts were not built to withstand earthquakes — the tombs were.

In this scorching heat, I was very thirsty. My mouth was so dry I felt as if I had eaten a handful of moths. An hour later I bought a bottle of soda water and drank it warm. But the heat did not let up, nor did the landscape change. From halt to halt, the cactus and the pulverized soil were all there was to see. People scrambled onto the train, people scrambled off; people slept; the old woman spat. Every so often I thought: What if the engine dies on us — what then! And saw a skinny man, like the Angel of Death, watching us from the rag of a cactus's shade.

I had passed the point of expecting to see anything different, when a long trough of black water appeared beside the train — an irrigation ditch. It became a narrow canal and poured from spouts into fields — corn at Malena, tobacco at Jicaro. The green was dazzling and I had got so used to the desert tones, this colour seemed miraculous. But it was, after all, no more than a small patch in an immense desert.

Jicaro appeared to be in earthquake country. There were not many huts here, but those I saw all had a crack or a collapsed roof or wall. They were still lived in, however; the people had accommodated themselves to missing walls or gaps. There were houses being built here, too — without a doubt the houses planned by those American architects I had met in Guatemala City. But I could not say that the government-assisted project was a success. There were many three-walled houses, without roofs, which demonstrated the lack of inclination of anyone to finish them off and take up residence. The town of Jicaro was wrecked: the catastrophe showed, and very little of it had been rebuilt.

We came to Cabanas. Here were coconut trees. A woman with a pile of coconuts sliced them open with a machete and passed them into the train — five cents. The passengers drank the coconut water and threw the rest away. Pigs tried to stick their snouts into the coconuts and eat the flesh. But the woman had swiped deftly at the coconuts — three cuts and it became a drinking vessel: the pigs could not get their snouts inside. They whined and chomped the husks.

We were a long time at Cabanas. It was a wooden station, and I supposed that the village was somewhere on the other side of the sand-dune. In Central America, the train station always seemed to be at the edge of town, not in the centre. The temperature in the train rose, and it seemed like an oven now. The rubbish-pile of coconuts had brought out the flies; people snored. I saw some workmen fussing beside the engine and tried to get out.

'Is this your station?' It was a soldier, one of our armed guards.

'No,'I said.

'Get back then.' He pushed his rifle at me.

I hurried to my seat.

It might be here, I thought. Perhaps this is the end of the line.

An old man began to shout. He was mocking the place. I think the heat had got to him.

'Cabanas! That is a laugh! Know what cabanas are? They are little huts — you find them near hotels and refreshment stands. Sometimes near the beach.'

The passengers were silent, but the man needed no encouragement.

'Cabanas are pretty and pleasant. You sit there and have nice cool drinks. That is what they call them — cabanas. And they call this filthy place Cabanas!'

Hearing this shout, the Indian woman in the next seat opened one eye, but seeing no more than a red-faced man wiping sweat out of his sombrero with a hanky she shut her eye.

'This is not Cabanas- it should have another name.'

The alarm had passed. He was out of breath and gasping.

'I have seen the real cabanas. They are not like this at all.'

No one cared, really. But I thought it was interesting that even these toothless farmers and slumbering Indians found this place laughable. The desolation was obvious to them, and they knew the train was junk. After this, I did not indulge in any charitable self-censorship of my thoughts. Another thing, and more curious, was the fact that people who were not disposed to conversation had no inhibitions about standing up and shouting mad speeches. The man was quiet when the train started again.

The hamlet of Anton Bram was so small its name was not shown on the ticket.

'Anton Bram!' It was the man behind me — hooting.

'What a silly name!' It was his wife.

The passengers smiled. But why hadn't they laughed at Progreso?

We entered another dead valley, and like the first, all the colour had been burned away by the sun. It was flatter than the previous one, and seemed to me much hotter. The vegetation was weird. Here, cactuses grew as tall as elms and were the same shape. The smaller real trees had died and with their bark missing had the paleness of human skin. There were spurges, plants of the genus euphorbia, which were used by some people for medicinal purposes; and other cactuses, with cylindrical limbs, the size of apple trees. The cactus is tenacious. After the shrubs with less complicated root-systems and more munchable leaves have died or been grazed into extinction, the cactus remains, its spines keeping animals away, its fine white hairs shading its tough hide and preventing evaporation. And, under the sky of clearest blue, even more fantastic plants — dog tails sprouting in clusters — hairy brown tubes, prickly pear cactuses, and sprawling nets of weed.

The train was going ten miles an hour, so it was possible to botanize here on the back pages of my Poe novel, and make some sense of the creeping confusion on the cracked nests of mudwasps. This business absorbed me until, two hours later, I saw a tractor, a shed, some wrecked houses and then a four-story structure of grey planks, with a porch on each floor: Railway Hotel.

We were in Zacapa.

It was a dusty station at the end of a dusty road and now, in the middle of the afternoon, suffocatingly hot. A group of people at the station barrier yelled at the train. I passed through and, approaching the hotel — it was a ghostly, comfortless place — heard the racket of a generator and saw some men digging near the hotel. The ground was hardened clay: they needed a pneumatic drill to penetrate it. There would be no rest in that hotel. What I could see of the town did not persuade me to linger: cracked huts, a yellow church steeple, more cactuses. So this was Zacapa. The woman in Guatemala City had not exaggerated. It seemed a terrible place, as hot as any of the miserable villages on the railway line, if a bit larger.

I found the Station Manager's office. He had a fan, a calendar, a wooden filing cabinet, a spike of papers. The noise of the generator was loud even here, so I had to raise my voice.

'Excuse me,' I said. 'What time does the train leave for the border?'

'Which border are you crossing?'

It was not an idle question: we were nearer Honduras than El Salvador.

'I'm trying to get to Metapan, in El Salvador.'

'Yes, there is a train to Metapan in two days — on Wednesday. At six-thirty in the morning. Do you want a ticket?'

Two days here! I said, 'No, thank you.'

The train had pulled out of Zacapa and was now on its way north to Puerto Barrios. The station platform was empty, the dust still settling. I studied my Cook's Timetable and saw that if I crossed the border to Metapan or Santa Ana I could get a connection to San Salvador the next day. I decided to do this — the border was not very far, perhaps thirty miles.

A man was watching me. I went over to him and asked him whether there was a bus station in Zacapa.

'Where are you going?'

'El Salvador.'

Too bad. All the buses to El Salvador leave in the early morning.'

But he was smiling.

I said, 'I would like to go to Santa Ana.'

'I have a car,' he said. 'But petrol is very expensive.'

'1 will give you five dollars.'

'For ten I will take you to Anguiatu. That is the border.'

'Is it far?'

'Not very.'

As soon as we left Zacapa we were out of the desert. I could see green hills, rounder ones, with a river running through them. I talked to the man. His name was Sebastiano; he had no job — no one had a job in Guatemala, he said. He was from Zacapa. He hated Zacapa, but he had been to Guatemala City and he thought that was a lot worse.

''There is one thing I think I should tell you,' he said some time later, slowing down at a bend in the road. He drew over to the side and stopped, and smiled sheepishly. 'I have no driving license, and this car — it is not registered. No insurance either — if you do not have a registration what is the point of insurance?'

'Interesting,' I said. 'But why did you stop the car?'

'I cannot take you any farther. If I do, the policemen at the border will ask to see my licence and so forth. As I do not have one, they will arrest me and probably treat me badly. I cannot give them a bribe — I do not have any money.'

'You have ten dollars,' I said.

He laughed. 'That will pay for the petrol!'

'So what am I supposed to do?'

He reached across and opened the door. 'Walk,' he said.

'Is it far?'

'Not very.'

He drove away. I stood for a moment on this road at the edge of Guatemala, and then started walking. Not very far, he had said. It was a mile. There was no traffic. There were green trees here and singing birds. My suitcase was not heavy, so I found the hike rather pleasant.

The border was a shed. A boy in a sports shirt stamped my passport and demanded money. He asked me if I was carrying any drugs. I said no. What do I do now? I asked him. You go up the road, he said. There you will find another house. That is El Salvador.

It was a shady road, circling around a hill, past a meadow and a glugging stream. What a transformation in landscapes! Earlier in the day I had thought I was going to wither and die in the wastes of the Motagua Valley, and here I was ambling through green humpy hills to the sound of birdsong. It was sunny late-afternoon as I walked from Guatemala into El Salvador, as fresh and breezy as a summer day in Massachusetts. That border-crossing was as happy a hike as I have ever made and reminded me pleasantly of strolling down the Amherst road into Shutesbury.

A car was parked near a hut, the frontier post. A soldier got out and examined my suitcase. 'What is this?'

'A book. In English, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.'

'Over there,' he said, 'Show your passport.'

'Where are you going?' asked the Immigration Officer.

'Santa Ana.'

A car had arrived at the shed, and a man had got out and was now behind me. He said, 'I am going through Santa Ana. Want a ride?'

'How much?'

'Free!'

So I went to Santa Ana, which was not far away. We passed Lake Guija and more volcanoes and fields of coffee and tobacco.

'Why don't you come with me to San Salvador?' said the man, when we arrived at Santa Ana. 'I am leaving tonight.'

'I think I will stay here.'

'I would advise you not to. This place is full of thieves, pick-pockets and murderers. I am not joking.'

But it was nightfall. I decided to stay in Santa Ana.