The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

9 THE LOCAL TO CUTUCO

Even Salvadoreans, with their little-country loyalty and their violent nationalism, regard Cutuco as a hole. And you know, as you see Nicaragua just across the border, that the end of the line cannot be far away. This is an observable fact. The train from Boston comes to a complete stop in Cutuco. After that, there is a ferry ride of anywhere from eight to eleven hours (it depends on the tide) across the Gulf of Fonseca to Nicaragua. If there is no Indian uprising, or peasant revolt, or civil war, it ought to be possible to make your way by road through Nicaragua, if only to judge how much reckless exaggeration there is in the commonly held view that Nicaragua is the worst eyesore in the world: the hottest, the poorest, the most savagely governed, with a murderous landscape and medieval laws and disgusting food. I had hoped to verify this. The inhospitable country, like the horrible train ride, has a way of bringing a heroic note to the traveller's tale. And though I had had a few set-backs on the trip from South Station to San Salvador Central it had, for the most part, been fairly clear sailing. But Nicaragua was something of a problem.

I had been thinking hard about Nicaragua ever since I had read, months before leaving Boston, that the guerrilla war (which was in part an Indian uprising) had spread from Managua to smaller villages. And why was it, I wondered, that all these villages seemed to be on my proposed route through the country? My method for making an itinerary usually did not include newspapers. I got the best maps I could and, with guidebooks and what railway timetables I could lay my hands on, tried to determine how I might join one railway with another. I never gave any thought to hotels; if a town was important enough to be lettered on a map I assumed it was worth visiting (some surprises were inevitable: Zacapa was on most maps, Santa Ana was not; but that kind of discovery sustains and emboldens the traveller). I had heard that Nicaragua was Central America's answer to Afghanistan, but apart from this cloudy image and the historical fact that from 1855 to 1857 Nicaragua had been governed by a five-foot Tennessean named William Walker (he changed the national language to English, instituted slavery and had plans for annexing Nicaragua to the American South; this midget was shot in 1860), I knew little about the country. It had been ruled barbarously by the Somoza family for nearly forty years — that was common knowledge. But this guerrilla war? Th° newspaper reports, which I now depended on, differed in assessing its seriousness.

Through Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador I bought the local papers and tried to discover what was happening in Nicaragua. The news was always bad and it appeared to grow worse. GUERRILLAS ATTACK POLICE STATION one day was followed the next day by SOMOZA IMPOSES CURFEW. Then it was GUERRILLAS ROB BANK — I made careful translations of the headlines — and SOMOZA LAYS A FIRM HAND. In Santa Ana I read GUERRILLAS KILL TEN, in San Salvador the headline was SOMOZA ARRESTS 200 and INDIANS TAKE UP ARMS. Latterly I had read UNEASY CALM PREVAILS IN NICARAGUA, but just before leaving San Salvador there was a news item in La Prensa headlined GUERRILLAS BUY $5 MILLION OF ARMS FROM UNITED STATES. President Carter had remained prudently neutral on the Nicaragua issue; it was apparently hoped in the United States that Somoza would be overthrown. This was a pious hope, and it was no help to me. By the end of February the revolution had yet to occur; there was still sporadic fighting and reports of massacres and Somoza was in power. It looked as if he would remain in office for another forty years, or at the very most pass the machinery of government — in Nicaragua's case these are instruments of torture- on to his son. I began to worry about crossing Nicaragua. I decided to go to the frontier. I would talk to the people there. If the news was still bad I would take a detour around it. I went by train to Cutuco, to examine Nicaragua. It was like going to the dentist and hoping that the office was shut, the dentist laid up with a bad case of lumbago. This had never happened to me at the dentist's, but on the frontier of Nicaragua my reprieve came in just that way.

'You cannot go into Nicaragua,' said the Salvadorean at his border post by the ferry landing. Was there a muddier sight in all the world, a gloomier prospect, than the Gulf of Fonseca? 'The border is closed. The soldiers will send you back. '

This was better than a stay of execution. I was absolved of any responsibility to travel through Nicaragua. I returned to San Salvador. I «ad changed my hotel room to one in which I was sure there were no rats. But I had nothing more to do in San Salvador. I had given a lec-ure on the topic that had occurred to me on the train to Tapachula: little known Books by Famous American Authors — Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Devil's Dictionary, The Wild Palms. I had looked at the Diversity (and no one could-explain why there was a mural, in the uni-of this right-wing dictatorship, of Marx, Engels and Lenin). I had a day in hand, so I decided to take the Cutuco train again, but this time to stop along the way.

I knew from my previous trip that long before San Miguel, which was three-quarters of the way to Cutuco, the journey ceased to be interesting. As before, there were two passenger cars and not more than twenty-five people travelling. While we were waiting for the train to be shunted to the platform I asked some of them where they were going. They said San Vicente. It was market day in San Vicente. Was San Vicente pretty? Oh, very, they said. So I decided to get off the train at San Vicente.

No two trains are alike. Salvadorean trains are just as broken down as Guatemalan ones, but there are differences. They might have been given life by the same fruit company, but they have evolved differently. This is true of the world's railways — I have never seen two even remotely similar. 'El Jarocho' is as distinct from The Golden Blowpipe' as its name. It is more than national differences; trains take on the character of their routes. On the Local to Cutuco the uniqueness is obvious as soon as you board. Here, at the gate, was the same sad dark little man who had greeted me from the Railcar. He wore his sports shirt and carried his old revolver in a holster and some bullets in an ammo belt. I hoped he would not be provoked to fire it, because I was sure it would explode in his face if he did and I would be killed, not by the bullet, but by shrapnel. He punched my ticket, the train creaked to the platform, and I boarded. All the seats were torn. They were stuffed with horse-hair: it was agony to lean back.

'These seats are really in bad condition.' The Salvadorean man across the aisle was apologizing. He kicked the seat in front and went on, 'But they are strong — look, the seats themselves are fine. But they are ripped and dirty. They should fix them.'

I said, 'Why don't they fix them?'

'Because everyone takes the bus.'

'If they fixed them, everyone would take the train.'

'True,' he said. 'But then the train would be crowded with all the world.'

I agreed with him, not because I believed what he said but because I was sick of lecturing people on disorder. Central America was haywire; it was as if New England had gone completely to ruin and places like Rhode Island and Connecticut were run by maniacal generals and thuggish policemen; as if they had evolved into motiveless tyrannies and become forcing-houses of nationalism. It was no wonder that, seeing them as degenerate states, tycoons like Vanderbilt and imperial-minded companies like the United Fruit Company took them over and tried to run them. It should have been easy enough. But tycoons and big companies did not have the morality or the compassion or the sense of legality to make these places work; they acted out of contempt and self-interest; they were less than colonial — they were racketeers, and they spawned racketeers. Lawless, the countries became bizarre with inequality, and hideously violent. El Salvador deserves to be serene, but it is not. Football, the simplest sport in the world, in this place had become a free-for-all of punchy frustration in which the spectators made themselves the center of attention. Why shouldn't we have some fun, they might reply: we live like dogs. Football wasn't football, the Church was not the Church, and this train was unlike any I had ever ridden on. By the time it had got to this condition, any sensible railway company would have collected the insurance money for the damage and started all over again, the way they do in India. But this was El Salvador, not India — indeed, this heap of junk would have been laughed out of West Bengal, which is saying something.

But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes. The crack express trains — the bullet trains in Japan, The Blue Train' from Paris to Cannes, 'The Flying Scotsman' — these are joyrides, nothing more; the rapidity diminishes the pleasure of the journey. But the Local to Cutuco is a plod through the spectacular. If one is not put to flight by the pistol-toting ticket-puncher, or the filthy cars or painful seats, one is rewarded by the grandest scenery south of Massachusetts. And the train is so geriatrically slow, one gets the impression that El Salvador is as big as Texas. It is the effect of the feeble engine and all the stops: three and a half hours to go the forty miles to San Vicente.

The spectacle takes a while to begin.

El Salvador had seemed to me to be tidy, fertile and prosperous. And it is, in the west. But east of the capital, on the other side of the tracks — here, desolation lies. It starts where the station precincts end, at a quarry on the edge of town. For a full hour as the train moves there is nothing but the stone-age horror of little huts: mud and bamboo, cardboard and sticks, tin and mud, and on the roofs every sort of refuse to hold the things down, since one can't drive nails into mud or cardboard. The roofs are amazing collections of broken things. Look at this one: an old rusted sewing machine, an iron stove in pieces, six tyres, bricks, tins, boulders; and on that one splintered lumber and a tree branch and some stones. The huts lean against each Other and are propped against the steep sides of the quarry, pressed against the track, with no decoration but a picture of Jesus or a saint, and no colour but the rags hanging out to dry on a tripod of timbers.»t is a coffee-growing country. The price of coffee is very high. But these people really do live like dogs, and the dogs themselves seem to nave evolved downward into cowering creatures which never bark, but only limp and skulk and forage in dusty bushes with their snouts. i he dogs have been turned into a species of scavenging burrower, like a particularly mangy sort of aardvark. Now the train was moving so slowly, and was so empty and neglected, that children from the slum climbed shrieking into it and ran down the aisles, jumping from seat to seat. They hopped off at the continuation of the slum, on the next curve.

If the slum children had lingered another ten minutes on the train they would have seen open country, trees and wild flowers and singing birds. But the children do not stray into the countryside. Perhaps it is forbidden, or perhaps they are obeying the slum-dweller's instinct, which is to seek the protection of the slum and not to go beyond its boundaries. They are vulnerable in the outer world to policemen, landowners, tax inspectors; and in their rags they are easy to identify and humiliate. So, in the daylight hours, the slum is full and active and in Central America it nearly always has as its frontier a creek or stream or a railway track. And just past that natural frontier the slum ends and jungle or pasture land begins. Here, the slum gave on to coffee plantations, and it was reasonable to assume that those destitute people I had seen earlier were coffee-pickers. From what I found out later, their wages bore no relation to the price of coffee.

We climbed some low hills and then passed along the ridge of a higher one. I looked across the valley and saw a lake — Lake Ilopango — and a volcano — Chinchontepec. From these heights to San Vicente, where the vistas are shortened by the train's sinking into the eastern lowlands, the lake and the volcano grow huger and alter in colour as the sun shifts behind them. The first glimpse is impressive, but the lake swells and the volcano rises and for miles and miles they grow to almost unbelievable loveliness. The lake waters are blue, then grey, then black as the train mounts its own volcanic range and travels along the spine, passing the north side of this lake. There is an island in the lake. It appeared in 1880, when the water level suddenly fell, and is still there, like a dismasted flagship in this darkly chromatic sea. Between the lake and the train are low hills of green vegetation and a long sweep of treetops which, closer to the train, are banana and orange groves and tall clusters of yellow swaying bamboos. The foliage nearby is faded and dusty, but at a distance it is emerald green and looks dense and lush.

Now the lake is silver, with an enamelling of blue discs; now black, with furrows of frothy whiteness; now it is suffused with pinkness and at its shores takes the colour from the greenest trees. It was, to the lakeside Indians, much more than a body of water in which they washed and fished and quenched their thirst. The guidebooks merely repeat falsifications of its importance for credulous tourists. One guidebook says that before the Spanish conquest the Indians 'used to propitiate the harvest gods by drowning four virgins here every year'. Well, this might have been true, and it provides a cue for the joke that the ritual was abandoned for lack of suitable victims. But human sacrifice continued well into the last century at this lake, and it had nothing to do with the harvest gods. It was a complicated procedure, and purposeful.

There was a witness. His name was Don Camillo Galvar. He was Visitador-General in San Salvador in the 1860's. In 1880 he described,what he had found out about the supposedly blood-thirsty practices of the Indians who lived near Lake Ilopango. 'The people of the pueblos around the lake,' he wrote, 'Cojutepeque, Texacuangos, and Tepezontes, say that when the earthquakes came from the lake, which they knew by the disappearance of the fish, it was a sign that the monster lord of these regions who dwelt in the depths of the lake was eating the fish.'

Not a harvest god, but a monster; and the Indians' fear was that unless this monster was 'provided with a more delicate and juicy diet worthy of his power and voracity' he would eat all the fish and there would be none for the fishermen to catch. The Indians said that the monster only ate fish 'as men eat fruit, to refresh and allay hunger.' The lake and the volcano rumbled and the fish began to disappear; the Indians 'deeply afflicted by the fish famine. . collected at the command of their chiefs.' Sorcerers came forth in their ceremonial robes and headdresses and outlined what the Indians were to do: they were to throw flowers and fruits into the lake. Sometimes, this worked: the tremors ceased. But if they continued, the Indians assembled again and were told to throw in animals, preferably gophers, racoons and armadilloes and ones they called taltusas. The animals had to be caught alive and thrown into the water still kicking. Any Indian found throwing a dead animal into the water faced the severe penalty of being hanged with a zinak vine, because the monster lord would be enraged by having to feed on dead flesh.

Days were given to the study of the water level, the numbers offish, the evidence of tremors. If the signs were still bad the 'wizards' acted. They took a girl of from six to nine years old, decked her with flowers and 'at midnight the wizards took her to the middle of the lake and cast her in, bound hand and foot, with a stone fast to her neck. The next day, if the child appeared upon the surface and the tremors continued, another victim was cast into the lake with the same ceremonies.

'In the years 1861 and 1862,' Don Camillo goes on, 'when I visited these towns they told me that they kept to this barbarous custom to Prevent the failure of the fish.' So there was a reason; and the Indians did not gloat about it. Indeed, Don Camillo adds that they spoke to him 'with much reserve'.

The lake had assumed a more ominous blueness, chased by ghostly mists, and still the train was rising. Below was not one valley, but fifty of them, and a landscape of green peaks. It was hard to believe that the hills so far down could be high, but the train was crossing the ridge at such a great altitude, and it was a lesson in scale to compare the hills with the volcano Chinchontepec. We were nowhere near it, and it continued to increase in size; now it seemed mammoth and black and unclimbable.

But it remained in the distance, in that other lush climate. The train crossed a hotter mountain range. The dust flew into the cars. I got up and walked from car to car to stretch my legs, and when I went back I recognized my seat by its colour: it had a thinner layer of dust than the others, which were covered by the brown powder. There were no doors on the cars, no glass in the windows — they were completely open, and whirling with such a dust storm the porters and conductors, and all the train staff, rode on the roofs of the cars where the dust could not reach them. They sat, gripping the pipes and wheels on the roof, or else stood straddling the centre of the car. The train to Zacapa had been dusty, but there was no wind in the Motagua Valley. Here, we were high and the movement of the train and the stiff mountain winds combined to create gusts of considerable velocity which drew a brown veil over the train and made it impossible for long periods to see anything. The passengers crouched and put their heads down, holding their shirts against their faces. The train's noise was a loud hammering and clattering; it was hard to draw a breath and, more than anything, it was as if we were roaring through a small dirt tunnel fleeing a cave-in.

Outside the village of Michapa, the train coursed through a trough of steep sandbanks. A young girl, perhaps eight years old, had pressed herself against the bank, and the dust churned around her. She held a tiny goat in her arms to prevent him from scampering in fright onto the tracks, and she looked persecuted by the dust and noise, her face fixed in a pained suffocated expression.

When the dust storm passed and the sky turned blue and large, the train's racket was swallowed by the empty air, and we seemed to be in a low-flying plane, gliding at tree-top height towards the valleys below. It was a trick of the landscape, the way the train balanced on its narrow ridge and gave a view of everything but its tracks. And though the train had been slow before, on this downhill run it had gathered speed: but the clatter was not so obvious. This old engine and its cars had taken to the air like a railway lifted and travelling down the sky. It is not often that one gets a view like this in a train and it was so beautiful that I could forget the heat and dust, the broken seats, and was uplifted by the sight of the hills way down and the nearer hills of coffee and bamboo. For the next half-hour of this descent, it was an aerial railway diving across hills of purest green.

The landscape changed; the villages remained the same. You think: I've been here before. The village is small and has a saint's name. The station is a shed, open on three sides and near it are piles of orange peels and blown-open coconut husks with fibrous hair, and waste paper and bottles. That grey trickle of waste water gathering in a green-yellow pool; that woman with a basket on her head, and bananas in the basket, and flies on the bananas; that heap of black railway ties and the stack of oily barrels, the Coca-Cola sign faded to pink, the ten filthy children and the small girl with the naked infant on her back, the boy with a twanging radio the size of a shoe-box, the banana trees, the four huts, the limping dog, the whining pig, the dozing man with his head resting on his left shoulder and his hat-brim crushed. You were here, you saw the trampled path and the smoke, the sun at just that scorching angle above the trees, the wrecked car resting on its rims, the chickens pecking pebbles out of the shade, the face behind the rag of curtain in the hut window, the station-master in his shirt sleeves and dark trousers standing at attention in the sun holding his log-book, the leaves of the village trees so thick with dust that they appear to be dead. It seems so familiar you begin to wonder if you have been travelling in a small circle, leaving in the morning and every day arriving in the heat of the afternoon at this same village with its pig and its people and its withered trees, the vision of decrepitude repeating like the dream that demands that you return again and again to the same scene; the sameness of it has a curiously mocking quality. Can it be true that after weeks of train travel you have gone no farther that this and only been returned once again to this squalid place? No; though you have seen hundreds like it since crossing the Rio Grande, you have never been here before.

And when the train whistle squawks and you pull out, because you have seen so many departures like this, the village leaves no impression. The dust from the accelerating train rises and the huts vanish beneath it. But somewhere in the memory these poor places accumulate, until you pray for something different, a little hope to give them hope. To see a country's poverty is not to see into its heart, but it is very hard to look beyond such pitiable things.

We ascended another range of hills and the gorge to the south distracted me. Tall crooked trees, looped with the entrails of slender yines, grew on the slopes and cliffs of the gorge, like the beginnings of jungle. The land was too precipitous for crops, too steep even for huts or paths. It was wild and uninhabited; birds flew along the sides of the gorge, but seemed too timid to risk flying across it. They whistled at the train. I looked for more, leaned out of the window and just then everything went black.

We had entered a tunnel. The passengers began to scream. Central Americans always scream in tunnels, but whether they screamed with enthusiasm or terror I could not tell. The train had no lights in its cars, and with the darkness was a rush of dust which thickened as the train blundered on. I could feel the dust blowing into my face and could feel it on my hair as if I was in a hole and the dust was being shovelled onto me. I did what I had seen the passengers do earlier: I buried my face in my shirt and breathed through the cloth. We were in the tunnel for five minutes, which is a long time to be blindly choking and hearing people scream. But not everyone had screamed. In front of me was an old lady who had told me she was going to San Vicente to sell her crate of oranges. She had gone to sleep an hour before. She was sleeping when we entered the tunnel; she was sleeping when we left it. Her head was thrown back and her mouth was open; she had not shifted her position.

The train plunged out of the tunnel and lost its racket in the sunlight and clear air. We teetered on a mountainside, and the subdued chug of the engine — muffled by the tide of air — was like a hushed reverence for the ten fertile miles of the Jiboa Valley, which began at the tunnel entrance and descended as evenly as a ski slope before rising at the foot of the volcano. The volcano was a darker green than the landscape it sprang out of, and it had leonine contours of light and shade, some like shoulders and forepaws, some muscled like flanks and hindquarters. But it had a carved considered look to it and seemed, as I sped towards it on the train, like a headless sphinx, green and monumental, as if its head had rolled away leaving its lion's body intact. It was easy to understand how the Indians hereabouts had come to believe that their lands were inhabited by monster lords. Not only did the mountains have a monstrous aspect, the animal shapes and clumsy claws of giants and demons, but they growled and rumbled and trembled and hollered, and shook down the flimsy huts of the Indians; they burned the Indians alive and buried them in ashes and made their fish disappear and ate their children. And these oddities of landscape were still a source of fear.

For the next forty minutes we rolled down the mountain valley towards the shadows of the volcano. And yet, so slowly were we moving, it seemed as if we were stuck fast at the rim of the valley and the volcano was rising and turning, revealing the lion's svelte back and lengthening, perhaps stretching to pounce in eruption, until finally, and just as I expected it to rise and roar, it disappeared — everything but those two ridges which were tensed like front legs. We were at San Vicente, its nearest town, and deep between its fore-paws.

Most of the passengers got out here and stumbled across the tracks. There was no one collecting tickets. The officials watched from the coolness of a grove of trees. The whistle blew; the train lurched towards Cutuco. Then the dust settled and with it the mournful stillness of the country town on a hot afternoon.

I asked the way to the market. A boy gave me simple directions: follow this road. He seemed surprised that anyone should need directions in this tiny place. But the railway station was not in the centre of town; it was half a mile, along the town's main street, from the station to the plaza. Most of San Vicente's houses are on that street; the street begins as dust, turns bouldery, then cobbled, and nearer the plaza is concrete. The market, which I had been told was interesting, was like an oriental bazaar — tent-shelters pitched along several small lanes. Each tent enclosure was piled with fruit or vegetables, or dead animals hung on makeshift gallows, or boxes of pencils or pocket combs. All the people in a particular section were selling the same thing: a section of fruit, one of vegetables, one of meat or household items; and further away was a section reeking of decayed fish. I bought a bottle of soda water and noticed that no one was hawking anything. The hawkers had gathered into groups — men here, women there- and were talking companionably.

At the end of the market precinct was the plaza, and fronting onto the plaza San Vicente's church. It is one of the oldest churches in Central America, and called El Pilar. Built by the Spanish in this remote town, it has not been restored: no restoration has been necessary. It was made to withstand the sieges of pagans and the ravages of earthquakes. It has survived them all; apart from a few broken windows it shows few signs of age or ruin. Its walls are three feet thick; its columns, twelve feet in circumference, are low plump pillars the thickness of a cathedral's. But El Pilar is little more than a chapel; it is the shape of the mausoleums I had seen in rural Guatemala, white and rounded, with the mosque-lik.; domes and squat arabesques that the Spanish gave their country churches. But its whitewash did not disguise its look of belligérance, nor did its stained-glass windows or crosses prevent it from looking like what it perhaps always has been — a fortress.

In the early nineteenth century there were a number of Indian wars in this part of Central America. By force of numbers and in their ferocity the Indians were able to overwhelm the Spanish in certain areas and create Indian strongholds, little kingdoms within the Spanish colony. From these places they made forays into Spanish towns and occasionally terrorized the inhabitants. Throughout the 1830's there were battles, and the largest number of Indians was led by a chief, Agostino Aquinas — he was a Christian — whose bravado brought him here to El Pilar in San Vicente. As a taunt to the Spanish, Aquinas rushed into El Pilar and snatched the crown from the statue of Saint Joseph. This he crammed onto his own head, declaring war on the Spanish. He then made for the mountains and, controlling a sizable district with his Indians, fought a guerrilla war.

The church could not have looked much different when Aquinas whooped in and desecrated it. The arches are heavy, the tiles immovable, the carved wooden altarpiece merely darker, and there is a narrow tomb-like quality to the interior. It may be the holiest building in town; it is certainly the strongest. It has, without any doubt, known service as a fortification.

Eleven old ladies were kneeling in the front pews and praying. The church was cool, so I took a pew at the rear and tried to spot the statue of Saint Joseph. From the eleven black-shawled heads came the steady murmur of prayer; it was a simmer of incantation, low voices like thick Salvadorean soup mumbling in a pot, the same bubbling rhythm of formula prayers. They were like spectres, the row of crones draped in black, uttering muffled prayers in the shadowy church; the sunbeams breaking through the holes in the stained-glass windows made logs of light that seemed to prop up the walls; there was a smell of burned wax, and the candle flames fluttered in a continuous tremble, like the voices of those old ladies. Inside El Pilar the year might have been 1831, and these the wives and mothers of Spanish soldiers praying for deliverance from the onslaught of frantic Indians.

A tinkling bell rang from the sacristy. I sat primly and piously, straightening my back, in an instinctive reflex. It was habitual: I could not enter a church without genuflecting and dipping my fingers in the holy water font. A priest scuffed to the altar rail, flanked by two acolytes. The priest raised his arms and, in that gesture — but perhaps it was his good looks, the well-combed curate rather stuck on his clerical smoothness- a stagey flourish of a nightclub master of ceremonies. He was praying, but his prayers were mannered, Spanish, not Latin, and then he extended one arm towards a corner of the church that was hidden from me. He performed a little wrist-play, a wave of his hand, and the music began.

It was not solemn music. It was two electric guitars, a clarinet, maracas and a full set of drums — as soon as it had started to blurt I shifted my seat for a look at the musicians. It was the harsh wail of tuneless pop music that I had been avoiding for weeks, the squawk and crash that I had first heard issuing from Mexico as I stood on the high riverbank at Laredo. I had, since then, only rarely been out of earshot of it. How to describe it? With the guitar whine was an irregular beat, and each beat like a set of crockery dropped on the floor; a girl and boy shook maracas and sang — this was a cat's yowl attempt at harmonizing, but off-key it did not even have the melodiousness of a set of madly scraping locusts.

They were of course singing a hymn. In a place where Jesus Christ was depicted as a muscular tough, a blue-eyed Latin with slicked-down hair, a deeply handsome young fellow, religion was a kind of love affair. In some Catholicism, and frequently in Spanish America, prayer has become a romancing with Jesus. He is not a terrible God, not a destroyer, not a cold and vindictive ascetic; he is princely and with it the ultimate macho figure. The hymn was a love song, but very much a Spanish American one, crowing with lugubrious passion, the word heart repeated in every verse. And it was extremely loud. This was worship, but there was no substantial difference between what was going on here in this old church and what one could hear in the jukebox down the street in El Bar Americano. The church had been brought to the people; it had not made the people more pious — they had merely used this as an opportunity to entertain themselves and take the boredom out of the service. A mass or these evening prayers was an occasion to concentrate the mind in prayer; this music turned it into a distraction.

Music of this special deafening kind seemed important in Spanish America, because it prevented any thought whatsoever. The goon with the transistor in the train, the village boys gathered around their yakketing box, the man in Santa Ana who brought his cassette machine to breakfast and stared at its groaning amplifier, all the knee-jerks and finger-snapping and tooth-sucking seemed to have one purpose — a self-induced stupor for people who lived in a place where alcohol was expensive and drugs illegal. It was deafness and amnesia; it celebrated nothing but lost beauty and broken hearts; it had no memorable melody; it was splinters of glass ceaselessly flushed down a toilet, the thud of drums and the grunts of singers. People I met on my trip were constantly telling me they loved music. Not pop music from the United States, but this music. I knew what they meant.

Meanwhile, the priest had sat down beside the altar, looking pleased with himself. Well he might: the music had its effect. As soon as it had started, people had begun to pour into the church: schoolchildren with satchels and wearing uniforms, young children — barefoot urchins, kids with twisted nitty hair who had been frolicking in the plaza; mumbling old men with machetes, and two farm-boys clutching straw hats to their chests, and a lady with a tin wash basin and a gang of boys, and a bewildered dog. The dog sat in the centre aisle and beat its stub of tail against the tiles. The music was loud enough to have reached the market up the street, for here were three ladies in full skirts carrying empty baskets and leather purses. Some sat, some waited at the back of the church. They watched the band, not the tabernacle, and they were smiling. Oh, yes, this is what religion is all about — rejoice, smile, be happy, the Lord is with you; snap your fingers, He has redeemed the world. There were two shattering clashes of cymbals.

The music stopped. The priest stood up. The prayers began.

And the people who had come into the church during the song pushed to the rear door. The eleven old ladies in the front pews did not move, and only they remained to say the Confiteor. The priest paced back and forth at the altar rail. He gave a short sermon: God loves you, he said; you must learn how to love Him. It was not easy in the modern world to find time for God; there were temptations, and the evidence of sin was everywhere. It was necessary to work hard and dedicate each labour to the glory of God. Amen.

Again, a wave of the hand, and the music started. This time it was much louder, and it attracted a greater number of people from the plaza to hear it. It was a similar song: yowl, thump, heart, heart, yowl, crash, dooby-doo, thump, crash, crash. There was no hesitation among the on-lookers when it ended. At the final crash, they fled. But not for long. Ten minutes later (two prayers, a minute of meditation, some business with an incense burner, another pep-talk) the band again began to play and the people returned. This routine continued for a full hour, and it was still going on when I took myself away — during a song, not a sermon or prayer; I had a train to catch.

The sky was purple and pink, the volcano black; lurid chutes of orange dust filled the valleys, and the lake was fiery, like a pool of molten lava.