To the Ends of the Earth

Now the band was playing Weber. I decided to sit on a bench and give it my full attention; I took an empty seat next to a couple who appeared to be chatting. They were both speaking at once. The woman was blond and was telling the man in English to go away; the man was offering her a drink and a good time in Spanish. She was insistent, he was conciliatory—he was also much younger than she. I listened with great interest, stroked my mustache, and hoped I was not noticed. The woman was saying, “My husband—understand?—my husband’s meeting me here in five minutes.”

In Spanish the man said, “I know a beautiful place. It is right near here.”

The woman turned to me. “Do you speak English?”

I said I did.

“How do you tell these people to go away?”

I turned to the man. Now, facing him, I could see that he was no more than twenty-five. “The lady wants you to go away.”

He shrugged, and then he leered at me. He did not speak, but his expression said, “You win.” And he went. Two girls hurried after him.

The lady said, “I had to hit one over the head this morning with my umbrella. He wouldn’t go away.”

She was in her late forties, and was attractive in a brittle, meretricious way—she wore heavy makeup, eye shadow, and thick Mexican jewelry of silver and turquoise. Her hair was platinum, with hues of pink and green—perhaps it was the plaza light. Her suit was white, her handbag was white, her shoes were white. One could hardly blame the Mexican for making an attempt on her, since she bore such a close resemblance to the stereotype of the American woman who occurs so frequently in Tennessee Williams’s plays and Mexican photo-comics—the vacationer with a tormented libido and a drinking problem and a symbolic name who comes to Mexico in search of a lover.

Her name was Nicky. She had been in Veracruz for nine days, and when I expressed surprise at this she said, “I may be here a month or—who knows?—maybe for a lot longer.”

“You must like it here,” I said.

“I do.” She peered at me. “What are you doing here?”

“Growing a mustache.”

She did not laugh. She said, “I’m looking for a friend.”

I almost stood up and walked away. It was the way she said it.

“He’s very sick. He needs help.” Her voice hinted at desperation, her face was fixed. “Only I can’t find him. I put him on the plane at Mazatlán. I gave him money, some new clothes, a ticket. He’d never been on a plane before. I don’t know where he is. Do you read the papers?”

“All the time.”

“Have you seen this?”

She showed me the local newspaper. It was folded so that a wide column showed, and under PERSONAL NOTICES there was a black-framed box with the headline in Spanish URGENT TO LOCATE. There was a snapshot with a caption. The snapshot was one of those overbright pictures that are taken of startled people in nightclubs by pestering men who say, “Peecha, peecha?” In this picture, Nicky in huge sunglasses and an evening gown—radiantly tanned and fuller faced—sat at a table (flowers, wineglasses) with a thin, mustached man. He looked a bit scared and a bit sly, and yet his arm around her suggested bravado.

I read the message: SEÑORA NICKY—WISHES URGENTLY TO GET IN TOUCH WITH HER HUSBAND SEÑOR JOSÉ—, WHO HAS BEEN LIVING IN MAZATLÁN. IT IS BELIEVED THAT HE IS NOW IN VERACRUZ. ANYONE WHO RECOGNIZES HIM FROM THIS PICTURE SHOULD IMMEDIATELY CONTACT—. There followed detailed instructions for getting in touch with Nicky, and three telephone numbers.

I said, “Has anyone called you up?”

“No,” she said, and put the newspaper back into her handbag. “Today was the first day it appeared. I’m going to run it all week.”

“It must be pretty expensive.”

“I’ve got enough money,” she said. “He’s very sick. He’s dying of TB. He said he wanted to see his mother. I put him on the plane in Mazatlán and stayed there for a few days—I had given him the number of my hotel. But when he didn’t call me I got worried, so I came here. His mother’s here—this is where he was headed. But I can’t find him.”

“Why not try his mother?”

“I can’t find her either. See, he didn’t know her address. He only knew that it was right near the bus station. He drew me a picture of the house. Well, I found something that looks like the house, but no one knew him there. He was going to get off the plane at Mexico City and take a bus from there—that way he’d be able to find his mother’s house. It’s kind of complicated.”

And kind of fishy, too, I thought, but instead of speaking I made a sympathetic noise.

“But it’s serious. He’s sick. He only weighs about a hundred pounds now, probably less. There’s a hospital in Jalapa. They could help him. I’d pay.” She looked toward the bandstand. The band was playing a medley of songs from My Fair Lady. Nicky said, “Actually, today I went to the office of death records to see if he had died. He hasn’t died at least.”

“In Veracruz.”

“What do you mean?”

“He might have died in Mexico City.”

“He doesn’t know anyone in Mexico City. He wouldn’t have stayed there. He would have come straight here.”

But he had boarded the plane and vanished. In nine days of searching, Nicky had not been able to find a trace of him. Perhaps it was the effect of the Dashiell Hammett novel I had just read, but I found myself examining her situation with a detective’s skepticism. Nothing could have been more melodramatic, or more like a Bogart film: near midnight in Veracruz, the band playing ironical love songs, the plaza crowded with friendly whores, the woman in the white suit describing the disappearance of her Mexican husband. It is possible that this sort of movie fantasy, which is available to the solitary traveler, is one of the chief reasons for travel. She had cast herself in the role of leading lady in her search drama, and I gladly played my part. We were far from home: we could be anyone we wished. Travel offers a great occasion to the amateur actor.

And if I had not seen myself in this Bogart role, I would have commiserated with her and said what a shame it was that she could not find the man. Instead, I was detached: I wanted to know everything. I said, “Does he know you’re looking for him?”

“No, he doesn’t know I’m here. He thinks I’m back in Denver. The way we left it, he was just going to go home and see his mother. He hasn’t been home for eight years. See, that’s what’s so confusing for him. He’s been living in Mazatlán. He’s a poor fisherman—he can barely read.”

“Interesting. You live in Denver, he lives in Mazatlán.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re married to him?”

“No—what gave you that idea? We’re not married. He’s a friend.”

“It says in the paper he’s your husband.”

“I didn’t write that. I don’t speak Spanish.”

“That’s what it says. In Spanish. He’s your husband.”

I was not Bogart anymore. I was Montgomery Clift playing the psychiatrist in Suddenly Last Summer. Katharine Hepburn hands him the death certificate of Sebastian Venable; Sebastian has been eaten alive by small boys, and the mutilation is described on the certificate. It’s in Spanish, she says, believing the horrible secret is safe. Montgomery Clift replies coldly, I read Spanish.

“That’s a mistake,” said Nicky. “He’s not my husband. He’s just a beautiful human being.”

She let this sink in. The band was playing a waltz.

She said, “I met him a year ago when I was in Mazatlán. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown—my husband had left me. I didn’t know which way to turn. I started walking along the beach. José saw me and got out of his boat. He put his hand out and touched me. He was smiling …” Her voice trailed off. She began again, “He was very kind. It was what I needed. I was in a breakdown situation. He saved me.”

“What kind of boat?”

“A little boat—he’s a poor fisherman,” she said. She squinted. “He just put out his hand and touched me. Then I got to know him better. We went out to eat—to a restaurant. He had never had anything—he wasn’t married—he didn’t have a cent to his name. He had never had any good clothes, never eaten in a good restaurant, didn’t know what to do. It was all new to him. ‘You saved me,’ I said. He just smiled. I gave him money and for the next few weeks we had a wonderful time. Then he told me he had TB.”

“But he didn’t speak English, right?”

“He could say a few words.”

“You believed him when he said he had TB?”

“He wasn’t lying, if that’s what you think. I saw his doctor. The doctor told me he needed treatment. So I swore I would help him, and that’s why I went to Mazatlán a month ago. To help him. He was much thinner—he couldn’t go fishing. I was really worried. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see his mother. I gave him money and things and put him on the plane, and when I didn’t hear from him I came here myself.”

“It seems very generous of you. You could be out having a good time. Instead, you’re searching Veracruz for this lost soul.”

“It’s what God wants me to do,” she whispered. “Yes?”

“And I’ll find him, if God wants me to.”

“You’re going to stick at it, eh?”

“We Sagittarians are awful determined—real adventurous types! What sign are you?”

“Aries.”

“Ambitious.”

“That’s me.”

She said, “Actually, I think God’s testing me.”

“In what way?”

“This José business is nothing. I’ve just been through a very heavy divorce. And there’s some other things.”

“About José. If he’s illiterate, then his mother’s probably illiterate. In that case, she won’t see your ad in the paper. So why not have a poster made—a picture, some details—and you can put it up near the bus station and where his mother’s house is supposed to be.”

“I think I’ll try that.”

I gave her more suggestions: hire a private detective, broadcast messages on the radio. Then it occurred to me that José might have gone back to Mazatlán. If he had been sick or worried he would have done that, and if he had been trying to swindle her—as I suspected he had—he would certainly have done that eventually, when he ran out of money.

She agreed that he might have gone back, but not for the reasons I said. “I’m staying here until I find him. But even if I find him tomorrow I’ll stay a month. I like it here. This is a real nice town. Were you here for the carnival? No? It was a trip, I can tell you that. Everyone was down here in the plaza—”

Now the band was playing Rossini, the overture to The Barber of Seville.

“—drinking, dancing. Everyone was so friendly. I met so many people. I was partying every night. That’s why I don’t mind staying here and looking for José. And, um, I met a man.”

“Local feller?”

“Mexican. He gave me good vibrations, like you’re giving me. You’re positive—get posters made, radio broadcasts—that’s what I need.”

“This new man you met—he might complicate things.”

She shook her head. “He’s good for me.”

“What if he finds out that you’re looking for José? He might get annoyed.”

“He knows all about it. We discussed it. Besides,” she added after a moment, “José is dying.”

The concert had ended. It was so late I had become ravenously hungry. I said that I was going to a restaurant, and Nicky said, “Mind if I join you?” We had red snapper and she told me about her divorces. Her first husband had been violent, her second had been a bum. It was her word.

“A real bum?”

“A real one,” she said. “He was so lazy—why, he worked for me, you know? While we were married. But he was so lazy I had to fire him.”

“When you divorced him?”

“No, long before that. I fired him, but I stayed married to him. That was about five years ago. After that, he just hung around the house. When I couldn’t take any more of it I divorced him. Then guess what? He goes to his lawyer and tries to get me to pay him maintenance money. I’m supposed to pay him!”

“What sort of business are you in?”

“I own slums,” she said. “Fifty-seven of them—I mean, fifty-seven units. I used to own 128 units. But these fifty-seven are in eighteen different locations. God, it’s a problem—people always want paint, things fixed, a new roof.”

I ceased to see her as a troubled libido languishing in Mexico. She owned property; she was here living on her slum rents. She said she didn’t pay any taxes because of her “depreciations” and that on paper she looked “real good.” She said, “God’s been good to me.”

“Are you going to sell these slums of yours?”

“Probably. I’d like to live here. I’m a real Mexico freak.”

“And you’ll make a profit when you sell them.”

“That’s what it’s all about.”

“Then why don’t you let these people live rent-free? They’re doing you a favor by keeping them in repair. God would love you for that. And you’ll still make a profit.”

She said, “That’s silly.”

The bill came.

“I’ll pay for myself,” she said.

“Save your money,” I said. “José might turn up.”

She smiled at me. “You’re kind of an interesting guy.”

I had not said a single word about myself; she did not even know my name. Perhaps this reticence was interesting? But it wasn’t reticence: she hadn’t asked.

I said, “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’m at the Diligencia.”

I was at the Diligencia, too. I decided not to tell her this. I said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Magic Names

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

Earthquakes in Guatemala

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 enameling, 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 judgment; 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 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.”

The Pretty Town of Santa Ana

THE TOWN ONLY LOOKED GODFORSAKEN; IN FACT, IT WAS comfortable. It was a nice combination of attributes. In every respect, Santa Ana, the most Central American of Central American towns, was a perfect place—perfect in its pious attitudes and pretty girls, perfect in its slumber, its coffee-scented heat, its jungly plaza, and in the dusty elegance of its old buildings whose whitewash at nightfall gave them a vivid phosphorescence. Even its volcano was in working order. My hotel, the Florida, was a labyrinthine one-story affair, with potted palms and wicker chairs and good food—fresh fish, from nearby Lake Guija, was followed by the crushed velvet of Santa Ana coffee, and Santa Ana dessert, a delicate cake of mashed beans and banana served in cream. This pleasing hotel cost four dollars a night. It was a block from the Plaza. All Santa Ana’s buildings of distinction—there were three—were in the plaza: the Cathedral was neo-gothic, the town hall had the colonnaded opulence of a ducal palace, and the Santa Ana theater had once been an opera house.

In another climate, I don’t think the theater would have seemed so special, but in this sleepy tropical town in the western highlands of El Salvador—and there was nothing here for the luxury-minded or ruin-hunting tourist—the theater was magnificent and strange. Its style was banana republic Graeco-Roman; it was newly whitewashed, and classical in an agreeably vulgar way, with cherubs on its façade, and trumpeting angels, and masks of comedy and tragedy, a partial sorority of Muses: a pudgy Melpomene, a pouncing Thalia, Calliope with a lyre in her lap, and—her muscles showing through her tunic as fully developed as a gym teacher’s—Terpsichore. There were columns, too, and a Romanesque portico, and on a shield a fuming volcano as nicely proportioned as Izalco, the one just outside town, which was probably the model for this emblem. It was a beautiful turn-of-the-century theater and not entirely neglected; once, it had provided Santa Ana with concerts and operas, but culturally Santa Ana had contracted, and catering to this shrunken condition the theater had been reduced to showing movies. That week, the offering was New York, New York.

I liked Santa Ana immediately; its climate was mild, its people alert and responsive, and it was small enough so that a short walk took me to its outskirts, where the hills were deep green and glossy with coffee bushes. The hard-pressed Guatemalans I had found a divided people—and the Indians in the hinterland seemed hopelessly lost; but El Salvador, on the evidence in Santa Ana, was a country of half-breeds, energetic and full of talk, practicing a kind of Catholicism based on tactile liturgy. In the Cathedral, pious Salvadoreans pinched the feet of saints and rubbed at relics, and women with infants—always remembering to insert a coin in the slot and light a candle first—seized the loose end of Christ’s cincture and mopped the child’s head with its tassel.

Soccer in San Salvador

I HAD READ ABOUT LATIN AMERICAN SOCCER—THE CHAOS, the riots, the passionately partisan crowds, the way political frustrations were ventilated at the stadiums. I knew for a fact that if one wished to understand the British it helped to see a soccer game; then, the British did not seem so tight-lipped and proper. Indeed, a British soccer game was an occasion for a form of gang warfare for the younger spectators. The muscular ritual of sport was always a clear demonstration of the wilder impulses in national character. The Olympic Games are interesting largely because they are a kind of world war in pantomime. “Would you mind if I went to the game with you?” I asked Alfredo, a salesman I had met on the train from Santa Ana.

Alfredo looked worried. “It will be very crowded,” he said. “There may be trouble. It is better to go to the swimming pool tomorrow—for the girls.”

“Do you think I came to El Salvador to pick up girls at a public swimming pool?”

“Did you come to El Salvador to see the football game?”

“Yes,” I said.

Alfredo was late. He blamed the traffic. “There will be a million people at the stadium.” He had brought along some friends, two boys who, he boasted, were studying English.

“How are you doing?” I asked them in English.

“Please?” said one. The other laughed. The first one said in Spanish, “We are only on the second lesson.”

Because of the traffic, and the risk of car thieves at the stadium, Alfredo parked half a mile away, at a friend’s house. This house was worth some study; it was a number of cubicles nailed to trees, with the leafy branches descending into the rooms. Cloth was hung from sticks to provide walls, and a strong fence surrounded it. I asked the friend how long he had lived there. He said his family had lived in the house for many years. I did not ask what happened when it rained.

But poverty in a poor country had subtle gradations. We walked down a long hill toward the stadium, and crossing a bridge I looked into a gorge expecting to see a river and saw lean-tos and cooking fires and lanterns. Who lived there? I asked Alfredo.

“Poor people,” he said.

Others were walking to the stadium, too. We joined a large procession of quick-marching fans, and as we drew closer to the stadium they began yelling and shoving in anticipation. The procession swarmed over the foothills below the stadium, crashing through people’s gardens and thumping the fenders of stalled cars. Here the dust was deep and the trampling feet of the fans made it rise until it became a brown fog, like a sepia print of a mob scene, with the cones of headlights bobbing in it. The mob was running now, and Alfredo and his friends were obscured by the dust cloud. Every ten feet, boys rushed forward and shook tickets at me, screaming, “Suns! Suns! Suns!”

These were the touts. They bought the cheapest tickets and sold them at a profit to people who had neither the time nor the courage to stand in a long rowdy line at a ticket window. The seat designations were those usual at a bullfight: Suns were the cheapest, bleacher seats; Shades were the more expensive ones under the canopy.

I fought my way through the touts and, having lost Alfredo, made my way uphill to the kettle-shaped stadium. It was an unearthly sight, the crowd of people emerging from darkness into luminous brown fog, the yells, the dust rising, the mountainside smoldering under a sky which, because of the dust, was starless. At that point, I considered turning back; but the mob was propelling me forward toward the stadium where the roar of the spectators inside made a sound like flames howling in a chimney.

The mob took up this cry and surged past me, stirring up the dust. There were women frying bananas and meat cakes over fires on the walkway that ran around the outside perimeter of the stadium. The smoke from these fires and the dust made each searchlight seem to burn with a smoky flame. The touts reappeared nearer the stadium. They were hysterical now. The game was about to start; they had not sold their tickets. They grabbed my arms, they pushed tickets in my face, they shouted.

One look at the lines of people near the ticket window told me that I would have no chance at all of buying a ticket legally. I was pondering this question when, through the smoke and dust, Alfredo appeared.

“Take your watch off,” he said. “And your ring. Put them in your pocket. Be very careful. Most of these people are thieves. They will rob you.”

I did as I was told. “What about the tickets? Shall we buy some Suns from these boys?”

“No, I will buy Shades.”

“Are they expensive?”

“Of course, but this will be a great game. I could never see such a game in Santa Ana. Anyway, the Shades will be quieter.” Alfredo looked around. “Hide over there by the wall. I will get the tickets.”

Alfredo vanished into the conga line at a ticket window. He appeared again at the middle of the line, jumped the queue, elbowed forward, and in a very short time he had fought his way to the window. Even his friends marveled at his speed. He came toward us smiling, waving the tickets in triumph.

We were frisked at the entrance; we passed through a tunnel and emerged at the end of the stadium. From the outside it had looked like a kettle; inside, its shape was more of a salver, a tureen filled with brown, screeching faces. In the center was a pristine rectangle of green grass.

It was, those 45,000 people, a model of Salvadorean society. Not only the half of the stadium where the Suns sat (and it was jammed: not an empty seat was visible); or the better-dressed and almost as crowded half of the Shades (at night, in the dry season, there was no difference in the quality of the seats: we sat on concrete steps, but ours, being more expensive than the Suns, were less crowded); there was a section that Alfredo had not mentioned: the Balconies. Above us, in five tiers of a gallery that ran around our half of the stadium, were the Balcony people. Balcony people had season tickets. Balcony people had small rooms, cupboard-sized, about as large as the average Salvadorean hut; I could see the wine bottles, the glasses, the plates of food. Balcony people had folding chairs and a good view of the field. There were not many Balcony people—two or three hundred—but at $2,000 for a season ticket in a country where the per capita income was $373 one could understand why. The Balcony people faced the screaming Suns and, beyond the stadium, a plateau. What I took to be lumpish multicolored vegetation covering the plateau was, I realized, a heap of Salvadoreans standing on top or clinging to the sides. There were thousands of them in this mass, and it was a sight more terrifying than the Suns. They were lighted by the stadium glare; there was a just-perceptible crawling movement among the bodies; it was an anthill.

National anthems were played, amplified songs from scratched records, and then the game began. It was apparent from the outset who would win. Mexico was bigger and faster, and seemed to follow a definite strategy; El Salvador had two ball hoggers, and the team was tiny and erratic. The crowd hissed the Mexicans and cheered El Salvador. One of the Salvadorean ball hoggers went jinking down the field, shot, and missed. The ball went to the Mexicans, who tormented the Salvadoreans by passing it from man to man and then, fifteen minutes into the game, the Mexicans scored. The stadium was silent as the Mexican players kissed one another.

Some minutes later the ball was kicked into the Shades section. It was thrown back into the field and the game was resumed. Then it was kicked into the Suns’ section. The Suns fought for it; one man gained possession, but he was pounced upon and the ball shot up and ten Suns went tumbling after it. A Sun tried to run down the steps with it. He was caught and the ball wrestled from him. A fight began, and now there were scores of Suns punching their way to the ball. The Suns higher up in the section threw bottles and cans and wadded paper on the Suns who were fighting, and the shower of objects—meat pies, bananas, hankies—continued to fall. The Shades, the Balconies, the Anthill watched this struggle.

And the players watched, too. The game had stopped. The Mexican players kicked the turf, the Salvadorean team shouted at the Suns.

Please return the ball. It was the announcer. He was hoarse. If the ball is not returned, the game will not continue.

This brought a greater shower of objects from the upper seats—cups, cushions, more bottles. The bottles broke with a splashing sound on the concrete seats. The Suns lower down began throwing things back at their persecutors, and it was impossible to say where the ball had gone.

The ball was not returned. The announcer repeated his threat.

The players sat down on the field and did limbering-up exercises until, ten minutes after the ball had disappeared from the field, a new ball was thrown in. The spectators cheered but, just as quickly, fell silent. Mexico had scored another goal.

Soon, a bad kick landed the ball into the Shades. This ball was fought for and not thrown back, and one could see the ball progressing through the section. The ball was seldom visible, but one could tell from the free-for-alls—now here, now there—where it was. The Balconies poured water on the Shades, but the ball was not surrendered. And now it was the Suns’ turn to see the slightly better-off Salvadoreans in the Shades section behaving like swine. The announcer made his threat: the game would not resume until the ball was thrown back. The threat was ignored, and after a long time the ref walked onto the field with a new ball.

In all, five balls were lost this way. The fourth landed not far from where I sat, and I could see that real punches were being thrown, real blood spurting from Salvadorean noses, and the broken bottles and the struggle for the ball made it a contest all its own, more savage than the one on the field, played out with the kind of mindless ferocity you read about in books on gory medieval sports. The announcer’s warning was merely ritual threat; the police did not intervene—they stayed on the field and let the spectators settle their own scores. The players grew bored: they ran in place, they did push-ups. When play resumed and Mexico gained possession of the ball it deftly moved down the field and invariably made a goal. But this play, these goals—they were no more than interludes in a much bloodier sport which, toward midnight (and the game was still not over!), was varied by Suns throwing firecrackers at one another and onto the field.

The last time play was abandoned and fights broke out among the Suns—the ball bobbing from one ragged Sun to another—balloons were released from the upper seats. But they were not balloons. They were white, blimpy, and had a nipple on the end; first one, then dozens. This caused great laughter, and they were batted from section to section. They were of course contraceptives, and they caused Alfredo no end of embarrassment. “That is very bad,” he said, gasping in shame. He had apologized for the interruptions; for the fights; the delayed play. Now this—dozens of airborne rubbers. The game was a shambles; it ended in confusion, fights, litter. But it shed light on the recreations of Salvadoreans, and as for the other thing—the inflated contraceptives—I later discovered that the Agency for International Development’s largest Central American family planning program is in El Salvador. I doubt whether the birth rate has been affected, but children’s birthday parties in rural El Salvador must be a great deal of fun, what with the free balloons.

Mexico won the game, six to one. Alfredo said that El Salvador’s goal was the best one of the game, a header from thirty yards. So he managed to rescue a shred of pride. But people had been leaving all through the second half, and the rest hardly seemed to notice or to care that the game had ended. Just before we left the stadium I looked up at the anthill. It was a hill once again; there were no people on it, and depopulated, it seemed very small.

Outside, on the stadium slopes, the scene was like one of those lurid murals of Hell you see in Latin American churches. The color was infernal, yellow dust sifted and whirled among crater-like pits, small cars with demonic headlights moved slowly from hole to hole like mechanical devils. And where, on the mural, you see the sins printed and dramatized, the gold lettering saying LUST, ANGER, AVARICE, DRUNKENNESS, GLUTTONY, THEFT, PRIDE, JEALOUSY, USURY, GAMBLING, and so on, here after midnight were groups of boys lewdly snatching at girls, and knots of people fighting, counting the money they had won, staggering and swigging from bottles, shrieking obscenities against Mexico, thumping the hoods of cars or dueling with the branches they had yanked from trees and the radio aerials they had twisted from cars. They trampled the dust and howled. The car horns were like harsh moos of pain—and one car was being overturned, by a gang of shirtless, sweating youths. Many people were running to get free of the mob, holding handkerchiefs over their faces. But there were tens of thousands of people here, and animals, too, maimed dogs snarling and cowering as in a classic vision of Hell. And it was hot: dark, grimy air that was hard to breathe, and freighted with the stinks of sweat; it was so thick it muted the light. It tasted of stale fire and ashes. The mob did not disperse; it was too angry to go home, too insulted by defeat to ignore its hurt. It was loud and it moved as if thwarted and pushed; it danced madly in what seemed a deep hole.

Alfredo knew a shortcut to the road. He led the way through the parking lot and a ravaged grove of trees behind some huts. I saw people lying on the ground, but whether they were wounded or sleeping or dead I could not tell.

I asked him about the mob.

“What did I tell you?” he said. “You are sorry you came, right?”

“No,” I said, and I meant it. Now I was satisfied. Travel is pointless without certain risks. I had spent the whole evening scrutinizing what I saw, trying to memorize details, and I knew I would never go to another soccer game in Latin America.

Holy Mass in San Vicente

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 specters, 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 that gesture—but perhaps it was his good looks, the well-combed curate rather stuck on his clerical smoothness—was the 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 toward 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 center 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 labor 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 onlookers 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.

To Limón with Mr. Thornberry

“THIS SCENERY,” SAID MR. THORNBERRY, “IT BLOWS MY mind.” Mr. Thornberry had a curious way of speaking, he squinted until his eyes were not more than slits; his face tightened into a grimace and his mouth went square, mimicking a grin, and then without moving his lips he spoke through his teeth. It was the way people talked when they were heaving ash barrels, sort of screwing their faces up and groaning their words.

Lots of things blew Mr. Thornberry’s mind: the way the river thundered, the grandeur of the valley, the little huts, the big boulders, and the climate blew his mind most of all—he had figured on something more tropical. It was an odd phrase from a man of his age, but after all Mr. Thornberry was a painter. I wondered why he had not brought his sketchbook. He repeated that he had left the hotel on the spur of the moment. He was, he said, traveling light. “Where’s your bag?”

I pointed to my suitcase on the luggage rack.

“It’s pretty big.”

“That’s everything I have. I might meet a beautiful woman in Limón and decide to spend the rest of my life there.”

“I did that once.”

“I was joking,” I said.

But Mr. Thornberry was still grimacing. “It was a disaster in my case.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the river was seething, and men were standing in the shallows—I could not make out what they were doing—and pink and blue flowers grew beside the track.

Mr. Thornberry told me about his painting. You couldn’t be a painter during the Depression; couldn’t make a living at it. He had worked in Detroit and New York City. He had had a miserable time of it. Three children, but his wife had died when the third was still an infant—tuberculosis, and he had not been able to afford a good doctor. So she died and he had to raise the kids himself. They had grown up and married and he had gone to New Hampshire to take up painting, what he had always wanted to do. It was a nice place, northern New Hampshire; in fact, he said, it looked a hell of a lot like this part of Costa Rica.

“I thought it looked like Vermont. Bellows Falls.”

“Not really.”

There were logs in the water, huge dark ones tumbling against one another and jamming on the rocks. Why logs? I did not want to ask Mr. Thornberry why they were here. He had not been in Costa Rica longer than me. How could he know why this river, on which there were now no houses, carried logs in its current as long as telegraph poles and twice as thick? I would concentrate on what I saw: I would discover the answer. I concentrated. I discovered nothing.

“Sawmill,” said Mr. Thornberry. “See those dark things in the water?” He squinted; his mouth went square. “Logs.”

Damn, I thought, and saw the sawmill. So that’s why the logs were there. They had been cut upriver. They must have—

“They must have floated those logs down to be cut into lumber,” said Mr. Thornberry.

“They do that back home,” I said.

“They do that back home,” said Mr. Thornberry.

He was silent for some minutes. He brought a camera out of his shoulder bag and snapped pictures out the window. It was not easy for him to shoot past me, but I was damned if I would yield my corner seat. We were in another cool valley, with rock columns all around us. I saw a pool of water.

“Pool of water,” said Mr. Thornberry.

“Very nice,” I said. Was that what I was supposed to say?

Mr. Thornberry said, “What?”

“Very nice pool of water.”

Mr. Thornberry hitched forward. He said, “Cocoa.”

“I saw some back there.”

“But there’s much more of it here. Mature trees.”

Did he think I was blind?

“Anyway,” I said, “there’s some coffee mixed in with it.”

“Berries,” said Mr. Thornberry, squinting. He heaved himself across my lap and snapped a picture. No, I would not give him my seat.

I had not seen the coffee berries; how had he? I did not want to see them.

“The red ones are ripe. We’ll probably see some people picking them soon. God, I hate this train.” He fixed that straining expression on his face. “Blows my mind.”

Surely a serious artist would have brought a sketch pad and a few pencils and be doodling in a concentrated way, with his mouth shut. All Mr. Thornberry did was fool with his camera and talk; he named the things he saw, no more than that. I wanted to believe that he had lied to me about being a painter. No painter would gab so aimlessly.

“Am I glad I met you!” said Mr. Thornberry. “I was going crazy in that seat over there.”

I said nothing. I looked out the window.

“Kind of a pipeline,” said Mr. Thornberry.

There was a rusty tube near the track, running parallel in the swamp that had displaced the river. I had not seen the river go. There were palm trees and that rusty tube: kind of a pipeline, as he had said. Some rocky cliffs rose behind the palms; we ascended the cliffs and beneath us were streams—

“Streams,” said Mr. Thornberry.

—and now some huts, rather interesting ones, like sharecroppers’ cottages, made of wood, but quite solidly built, upraised on poles above the soggy land. We stopped at the village of Swampmouth: more of those huts.

“Poverty,” said Mr. Thornberry.

The houses in style were perhaps West Indian. They were certainly the sort I had seen in the rural South, in the farming villages of Mississippi and Alabama, but they were trimmer and better maintained. There was a banana grove in each mushy yard and in each village a general store, nearly always with a Chinese name on the store sign; and most of the stores were connected to another building, which served as a bar and a pool room. There was an air of friendliness about these villages, and though many of the households were pure black, there were mixed ones as well; Mr. Thornberry pointed this out. “Black boy, white girl,” he said. “They seem to get along fine. Pipeline again.”

Thereafter, each time the pipeline appeared—and it did about twenty times from here to the coast—Mr. Thornberry obligingly indicated it for me.

We were deep in the tropics. The heat was heavy with the odor of moist vegetation and swamp water and the cloying scent of jungle flowers. The birds had long beaks and stick-like legs and they nosedived and spread their wings, becoming kite-shaped to break their fall. Some cows stood knee-deep in swamp, mooing. The palms were like fountains, or bunches of ragged feathers, thirty feet high—no trunk that I could see, but only these feathery leaves springing straight out of the swamp.

Mr. Thornberry said, “I was just looking at those palm trees.”

“They’re like giant feathers,” I said.

“Funny green fountains,” he said. “Look, more houses.”

Another village.

Mr. Thornberry said, “Flower gardens—look at those bougainvilleas. They blow my mind. Mama in the kitchen, kids on the porch. That one’s just been painted. Look at all the vegetables!”

It was as he said. The village passed by and we were again in swampy jungle. It was humid and now overcast. My eyelids were heavy. Note taking would have woken me up, but there wasn’t room for me to write, with Mr. Thornberry darting to the window to take a picture every five minutes. And he would have asked why I was writing. His talking made me want to be secretive. In the damp greenish light the woodsmoke of the cooking fires clouded the air further. Some of the people cooked under the houses, in that open space under the upraised floor.

“Like you say, they’re industrious,” said Mr. Thornberry. When had I said that? “Every damn one of those houses back there was selling something.”

No, I thought, this couldn’t be true. I hadn’t seen anyone selling anything.

“Bananas,” said Mr. Thornberry. “It makes me mad when I think that they sell them for twenty-five cents a pound. They used to sell them by the hand.”

“In Costa Rica?” He had told me his father was Costa Rican.

“New Hampshire.”

He was silent a moment, then he said, “Buffalo.”

He was reading a station sign. Not a station—a shed.

“But it doesn’t remind me of New York.” Some miles earlier we had come to the village of Bataan. Mr. Thornberry reminded me that there was a place in the Philippines called Bataan. The March of Bataan. Funny, the two places having the same name, especially a name like Bataan. We came to the village of Liverpool. I braced myself.

“Liverpool,” said Mr. Thornberry. “Funny.”

It was stream-of-consciousness, Mr. Thornberry a less allusive Leopold Bloom, I a reluctant Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Thornberry was seventy-one. He lived alone, he said; he did his own cooking. He painted. Perhaps this explained everything. Such a solitary existence encouraged the habit of talking to himself: he spoke his thoughts. And he had been alone for years. His wife had died at the age of twenty-five. But hadn’t he mentioned a marital disaster? Surely it was not the tragic death of his wife.

I asked him about this, to take his attention from the passing villages, which, he repeated, were blowing his mind. I said, “So you never remarried?”

“I got sick,” he said. “There was this nurse in the hospital, about fifty or so, a bit fat, but very nice. At least, I thought so. But you don’t know people unless you live with them. She had never been married. There’s our pipeline. I wanted to go to bed with her right away—I suppose it was me being sick and her being my nurse. It happens a lot. But she said, ‘Not till we’re married.’ ” He winced and continued. “It was a quiet ceremony. Afterward, we went to Hawaii. Not Honolulu, but one of the little islands. It was beautiful—jungle, beaches, flowers. She hated it. ‘It’s too quiet,’ she said. Born and raised in a little town in New Hampshire, a one-horse town—you’ve seen them—and she goes to Hawaii and says it’s too quiet. She wanted to go to nightclubs. There weren’t any nightclubs. She had enormous breasts, but she wouldn’t let me touch them. ‘You make them hurt.’ I was going crazy. And she had a thing about cleanliness. Every day of our honeymoon we went down to the launderette and I sat outside and read the paper while she did the wash. She washed the sheets every day. Maybe they do that in hospitals, but in everyday life that’s not normal. I guess I was kind of disappointed.” His voice trailed off. He said, “Telegraph poles … pig … pipeline again,” and then, “It was a real disaster. When we got back from the honeymoon I said, ‘Looks like it’s not going to work.’ She agreed with me and that day she moved out of the house. Well, she had never really moved in. Next thing I know she’s suing me for divorce. She wants alimony, maintenance, the whole thing. She’s going to take me to court.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “All you did was go on honeymoon, right?”

“Ten days,” said Mr. Thornberry. “It was supposed to be two weeks, but she couldn’t take the silence. Too quiet for her.”

“And then she wanted alimony?”

“She knew my sister had left me a lot of money. So she went ahead and sued me.”

“What did you do?”

Mr. Thornberry grinned. It was the first real smile I had seen on his face the whole afternoon. He said, “What did I do? I countersued her. For fraud. She, she had a friend—a man. He had called her up when we were in Hawaii. She told me it was her brother. Sure.”

He was still looking out the window, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was chuckling. “I didn’t have to do a thing after that. She gets on the witness stand. The judge asks her, ‘Why did you marry this man?’ She says, ‘He told me he had a lot of money!’ He told me he had a lot of money! Incriminated herself, see? She was laughed out of court. I gave her five grand and was glad to get rid of her.” Almost without pausing he said: “Palm trees,” then, “Pig,” “Fence,” “Lumber,” “More morning glories—Capri’s full of them.” “Black as the ace of spades,” “American car.”

The hours passed; Mr. Thornberry spoke without letup. “Pool table,” “Must be on welfare,” “Bicycle,” “Pretty girl,” “Lanterns.”

I had wanted to push him off the train, but after what he had told me I pitied him. Maybe the nurse had sat beside him like this; maybe she had thought, If he says that one more time I’ll scream.

I said, “When was this abortive honeymoon?”

“Last year.”

I saw a three-story house, with a veranda on each story. It was gray and wooden and toppling, and it reminded me of the Railway Hotel I had seen in Zacapa. But this one looked haunted. Every window was broken and an old steam locomotive was rusting in the weedy front yard. It might have been the house of a plantation owner—there were masses of banana trees nearby. The house was rotting and uninhabited, but from the remainder of the broken fence and the yard, the verandas and the barn, which could have been a coach house, it was possible to see that long ago it had been a great place, the sort of dwelling lived in by tyrannical banana tycoons in the novels of Asturias. In the darkening jungle and the heat, the decayed house looked fantastic, like an old ragged spider’s web, with some of its symmetry still apparent.

Mr. Thornberry said, “That house. Costa Rican gothic.”

I thought: I saw it first.

“Brahma bull,” said Mr. Thornberry. “Ducks.” “Greek.” “Kids playing.” Finally, “Breakers.”

In the Zone

IT WAS SAVE OUR CANAL DAY. TWO UNITED STATES CONGRESSMEN had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, “Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!”). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75 percent of the United States was against the Panama Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise—there was a demonstration, too—little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn’t care. She had enjoyed the rally: “We’ve been feeling left out, as if everyone were against us.”

The Zonians, three thousand workers for the Panama Canal Company and their families, saw the treaty as a sellout; why should the canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell, It’s our canal!

“Want to know the trouble with these people?” said an American political officer at the embassy. “They can’t decide whether the canal is a government department or a company or an independent state.”

Whatever it was it was certainly a lost cause; but it was no less interesting for that. Few places in the world can match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status, or in the cloudiness of its future. The canal itself is a marvel: into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius, and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate—they want the canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the canal was dug. If justice were to be done, the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubdubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however—when they become especially frenzied—often burn their Stars and Stripes, and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. When a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.

It is, by common consent, a company town. There is little in the way of personal freedom in the Zone. I am not talking about the liberal guarantees of freedom of speech or assembly, which are soothing abstractions but seldom used; I mean, the Zonian has to ask permission before he may paint his house another color or even shellac the baseboard in his bathroom. If he wishes to asphalt his driveway he must apply in writing to the Company; but he will be turned down: only pebbles are permitted. The Zonian is living in a Company house; he drives on Company roads, sends his children to Company schools, banks at the Company bank, borrows money from the Company credit union, shops at the Company store (where the low prices are pegged to those in New Orleans), sails at the Company club, sees movies at the Company theater, and if he eats out, takes his family to the Company cafeteria in the middle of Balboa and eats Company steaks and Company ice cream. If a plumber or an electrician is needed, the Company will supply one. The system is maddening, but if the Zonian is driven crazy, there is a Company psychiatrist. The community is entirely self-contained. Children are born in the Company hospital; people are married in Company churches—there are many denominations, but Baptists predominate. And when the Zonian dies he is embalmed in the Company mortuary—a free casket and burial are part of every Company contract.

The society is haunted by two contending ghosts, that of Lenin and that of General Bullmoose. There are no Company signs, no billboards or advertising at all; only a military starkness in the appearance of the Company buildings. The Zone seems like an enormous army base—the tawny houses, all right angles and tiled roofs, the severe landscaping, the stenciled warnings on chain-link fences, the sentry posts, the dispirited wives and stern fattish men. There are military bases in the Zone, but these are indistinguishable from the suburbs. This surprised me. Much of the canal hysteria in the States was whipped up by the news that the Zonians were living the life of Riley, with servants and princely salaries and subsidized pleasures. It would have been more accurate if the Zonian were depicted as an army man, soldiering obediently in the tropics. His restrictions and rules have killed his imagination and deafened him to any subtleties of political speech; he is a Christian; he is proud of the canal and has a dim, unphrased distrust of the Company; his salary is about the same as that of his counterpart in the United States—after all, the fellow is a mechanic or welder: why shouldn’t he get sixteen dollars an hour? He knows some welders who get much more in Oklahoma. And yet the majority of the Zonians live modestly: the bungalow, the single car, the outings to the cafeteria and movie house. The high Company officials live like viceroys, but they are the exception. There is a pecking order, as in all colonies; it is in miniature like the East India Comparry and even reflects the social organization of that colonial enterprise: the Zonian suffers a notoriously outdated lack of social mobility. He is known by his salary, his club, and the nature of his job. The Company mechanic does not rub shoulders with the Company administrators who work in what is known all over the Zone as The Building—the seat of power in Balboa Heights. The Company is uncompromising in its notion of class; consequently, the Zonian—in spite of his pride in the canal—often feels burdened by the degree of regimentation.

“Now I know what socialism is,” said a Zonian to me at Miraflores.

Shadowing an Indian

WITH THE SIGHT OF MY FIRST INDIAN IN BOGOTÁ, MY SPANISH images quickly faded from mind. There are 365 Indian tribes in Colombia; some climb to Bogotá, seeking work; some were there to meet the Spanish and never left. I saw an Indian woman and decided to follow her. She wore a felt hat, the sort detectives and newspapermen wear in Hollywood movies. She had a black shawl, a full skirt, and sandals, and, at the end of her rope, two donkeys. The donkeys were heavily laden with metal containers and bales of rags. But that was not the most unusual feature of this Indian woman with her two donkeys in Bogotá. Because the traffic was so bad they were traveling down the pavement, past the smartly dressed ladies and the beggars, past the art galleries displaying rubbishy graphics (South America must lead the world in the production of third-rate abstract art, undoubtedly the result of having a vulgar moneyed class and the rise of the interior decorator—you can go to an opening nearly every night even in a dump like Barranquilla); the Indian woman did not spare a glance for the paintings, but continued past the Bank of Bogotá, the plaza (Bolívar, his sword implanted at his feet), past the curio shops with leather goods and junk carvings, and jewelers showing trays of emeralds to tourists. She starts across the street, the donkeys plodding under their loads, and the cars honk and swerve and the people make way for her. This could be a wonderful documentary film, the poor woman and her animals in the stern city of four million; she is a reproach to everything in view, though few people see her and no one turns. If this was filmed, with no more elaborate scenario than she was walking from one side of Bogotá to the other, it would win a prize; if she was a detail in a painting it would be a masterpiece (but no one in South America paints the human figure with any conviction). It is as if 450 years have not happened. The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.

She walked, without looking up, past a man selling posters, past the beggars near an old church. And, glancing at the posters, examining the beggars, I lost her. I paused, looked aside, and then she was gone.

High Plains Drifter

NEARER VILLAZÓN THE TRAIN HAD SPEEDED UP AND SENT grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given—we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border. I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.

“We will be here a long time,” he said. He made it sound like years.

The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square homemade umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast—at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. “Are you in that sleeping car?” asked a man hurrying toward me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.

I told him I was.

“What time is it leaving?”

I said, “I wish I knew.”

He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, “Go away!”

The man came out of the station. He said, “These people are all whores.” He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.

The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazón. The sleeping car looked very silly stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.

A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazón, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.

Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.

“What time are we going?”

“I do not know,” he said.

I wanted to go home.

But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.

I left the sleeping car and walked toward a low lighted building, which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.

A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.

“What train is that?”

“It is the train to La Quiaca.”

“Shit!” I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.

Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.

“The tracks up to Tucumán are in bad shape,” he said. “You might not get there for days.”

Damn this trip, I thought.

We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead center of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.

So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentina frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pajamas and went to bed.

Buenos Aires

BUENOS AIRES IS AT FIRST GLANCE, AND FOR DAYS AFTERWARD, a most civilized anthill. It has all the elegance of the Old World in its buildings and streets; and in its people, all the vulgarity and frank good health of the New World. All the newsstands and bookstores—what a literate place, one thinks; what wealth, what good looks. The women in Buenos Aires were well dressed, studiously chic, in a way that has been abandoned in Europe. I had expected a fairly prosperous place, cattle and gauchos, and a merciless dictatorship; I had not counted on its being charming, on the seductions of its architecture, or the vigor of its appeal. It was a wonderful city for walking, and while walking I decided it would be a pleasant city to live in. I had been prepared for Panama and Cuzco, but Buenos Aires was not what I had expected. In the story “Eveline” in James Joyce’s Dubliners, the eponymous heroine reflects on her tedious life and her chance to leave Dublin with Frank: He had fallen on his feet in Buenos Aires, he said, and had come over to the old country just for a holiday. Frank is an adventurer in the New World and is full of stories (he told her stories of the terrible Patagonians); soon, he proposes marriage, and he urges her to make her escape from Dublin. She is determined to leave, but at the last moment—All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart—her nerve fails her. Frank boards the boat train, and she remains in Dublin, like a helpless animal.

The stories in Dubliners are sad—there are few sadder in literature—but “Eveline” did not seem to me such a chronicle of thwarted opportunity until I saw the city she missed. There had seemed to me to be no great tragedy in failing to get to Buenos Aires; I assumed that Joyce used the city for its name, to leave the stinks of Dublin for the “good airs” of South America. But the first girl I met in Buenos Aires was Irish, a rancher, and she spoke Spanish with a brogue. She had come in from Mendoza to compete in the World Hockey Championships, and she asked me—though I would have thought the answer obvious—whether I, too, was a hockey player. In America, the Irish became priests, politicians, policemen—they looked for conventional status and took jobs that would guarantee them a degree of respect. In Argentina, the Irish became farmers and left the Italians to direct traffic. Clearly, Eveline had missed the boat.

In the immigrant free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which a full third of Argentina’s population lives, I looked in vain for what I considered to be seizable South American characteristics. I had become used to the burial ground features of ruined cities, the beggars’ culture, the hacienda economy, and complacent and well-heeled families disenfranchising Indians, government by nepotism, the pig on the railway platform. The primary colors of such crudities had made my eye unsubtle and had spoiled my sense of discrimination. After the starving children of Colombia and the decrepitude of Peru, which were observable facts, it was hard to become exercised about press censorship in Argentina, which was ambiguous and arguable and mainly an idea. I had been dealing with enlarged visual simplicities; I found theory rarefied and, here, in a city that seemed to work, was less certain of my ground. And yet, taking the measure of it by walking its streets, restoring my circulation—I had not really walked much since I had left Cuzco—it did not seem so very strange to me that this place had produced a dozen world-class concert violinists and Fanny Foxe, the stripper; Che Guevara, Jorge Luis Borges, and Adolf Eichmann had all felt equally at home here.

There was a hint of this cultural overlay in the composition of the city. The pink-flowered “drunken branch” trees of the pampas grew in the parks, but the parks were English and Italian, and this told in their names, Britannia Park, Palermo Park. The downtown section was architecturally French, the industrial parts German, the harbor Italian. Only the scale of the city was American; its dimensions, its sense of space, gave it a familiarity. It was a clean city. No one slept in its doorways or parks—this, in a South American context, is almost shocking to behold. I found the city safe to walk in at all hours, and at three o’clock in the morning there were still crowds in the streets. Because of the daytime humidity, groups of boys played football in the floodlit parks until well after midnight. It was a city without a significant Indian population—few, it seemed, strayed south of Tucumán, and what Indians existed came from Paraguay, or just across the Rio de la Plata in Uruguay. They worked as domestics, they lived in outlying slums, they were given little encouragement to stay.

It was a divided culture, but it was also a divided country. The Argentines I met said it was two countries—the uplands of the north, full of folklore and mountains and semibarbarous settlers; and the “humid pampas” of the south, with its cattle ranches and its emptiness, a great deal of it still virgin territory (pampas derives from an Aymara word meaning “space”). You have to travel a thousand miles for this division to be apparent, and Argentines—in spite of what they claim is their adventurous spirit—only travel along selected routes. They know Chile. Some know Brazil. They spend weekends in the Patagonian oasis of Bariloche. But they do not travel much in the north of Argentina, and they don’t know, or even care very much, about the rest of South America. Mention Quito and they will tell you it is hellish, small, poor, and primitive. A trip to Bolivia is unthinkable. Their connections tend to be with Europe. They fancy themselves Frenchified and have been told so often that their capital is like Paris that they feel no need to verify it with a visit to France. They prefer to maintain their ancestral links with Europe; many go to Spain, but almost a quarter of a million visit Italy every year. The more enterprising are Anglophiles. They are unsure of the United States, and their uncertainty makes them scorn it.

“But what do you know about Argentina?” they asked me, and by way of forestalling their lectures—they seemed deeply embarrassed about their political record—I said things like, “Well, when I was in Jujuy …,” or “Now, Humahuaca’s awfully nice …,” or “What struck me about La Quiaca …” No one I met had been to La Quiaca or taken the train across the border. The person in Buenos Aires who wishes to speak of the squalor of the distant provinces tells you about the size of the cockroaches in nearby Rosario.

Borges

THE BRASS PLAQUE ON THE LANDING OF THE SIXTH FLOOR said Borges. I rang the bell and was admitted by a child of about seven. When he saw me he sucked his finger in embarrassment. He was the maid’s child. The maid was Paraguayan, a well-fleshed Indian, who invited me in, then left me in the foyer with a large white cat. There was one dim light burning in the foyer, but the rest of the apartment was dark. The darkness reminded me that Borges was blind.

Curiosity and unease led me into a small parlor. Though the curtains were drawn and the shutters closed, I could make out a candelabra, the family silver Borges mentions in one of his stories, some paintings, old photographs, and books. There was little furniture—a sofa and two chairs by the window, a dining table pushed against one wall, and a wall and a half of bookcases. Something brushed my legs. I switched on a lamp; the cat had followed me here.

There was no carpet on the floor to trip the blind man, no intrusive furniture he could barge into. The parquet floor gleamed; there was not a speck of dust anywhere. The paintings were amorphous, but the three steel engravings were precise. I recognized them as Piranesi’s Views of Rome. The most Borges-like one was The Pyramid of Cestius and could have been an illustration from Borges’s own Ficciones. Piranesi’s biographer, Bianconi, called him “the Rembrandt of the ruins.” “I need to produce great ideas,” said Piranesi. “I believe that were I given the planning of a new universe I would be mad enough to undertake it.” It was something Borges himself might have said.

The books were a mixed lot. One corner was mostly Everyman editions, the classics in English translation—Homer, Dante, Virgil. There were shelves of poetry in no particular order—Tennyson and e. e. cummings, Byron, Poe, Wordsworth, Hardy. There were reference books, Harvey’s English Literature, The Oxford Book of Quotations, various dictionaries—including Doctor Johnson’s—and an old leatherbound encyclopedia. They were not fine editions; the spines were worn, the cloth had faded; but they had the look of having been read. They were well thumbed, they sprouted paper page markers. Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration of the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

There was a sound of scuffing in the corridor, and a distinct grunt. Borges emerged from the dimly lighted foyer, feeling his way along the wall. He was dressed formally, in a dark blue suit and dark tie; his black shoes were loosely tied, and a watch chain depended from his pocket. He was taller than I had expected, and there was an English cast to his face, a pale seriousness in his jaw and forehead. His eyes were swollen, staring, and sightless. But for his faltering, and the slight tremble in his hands, he was in excellent health. He had the fussy precision of a chemist. His skin was clear—there were no age blotches on his hands—and there was a firmness in his face. People had told me he was “about eighty.” He was then in his seventy-ninth year, but he looked ten years younger. “When you get to my age,” he tells his double in the story “The Other,” “you will have lost your eyesight almost completely. You’ll still make out the color yellow and lights and shadows. Don’t worry. Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.”

“Yes,” he said, groping for my hand. Squeezing it, he guided me to a chair. “Please sit down. There’s a chair here somewhere. Please make yourself at home.”

He spoke so rapidly that I was not aware of an accent until he had finished speaking. He seemed breathless. He spoke in bursts, but without hesitation, except when starting a new subject. Then, stuttering, he raised his trembling hands and seemed to claw the subject out of the air and shake ideas from it as he went on.

“You’re from New England,” he said. “That’s wonderful. That’s the best place to be from. It all began there—Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow. They started it. If it weren’t for them there would be nothing. I was there—it was beautiful.”

“I’ve read your poem about it,” I said. Borges’s “New England 1967” begins, They have changed the shapes of my dream …

“Yes, yes,” he said. He moved his hands impatiently, like a man shaking dice. He would not talk about his work; he was almost dismissive. “I was lecturing at Harvard. I hate lecturing—I love teaching. I enjoyed the States—New England. And Texas is something special. I was there with my mother. She was old, over eighty. We went to see the Alamo.” Borges’s mother had died not long before, at the great age of ninety-nine. Her room is as she left it in death. “Do you know Austin?”

I said I had taken the train from Boston to Fort Worth and that I had not thought much of Fort Worth.

“You should have gone to Austin,” said Borges. “The rest of it is nothing to me—the Midwest, Ohio, Chicago. Sandburg is the poet of Chicago, but what is he? He’s just noisy—he got it all from Whitman. Whitman was great, Sandburg is nothing. And the rest of it,” he said, shaking his fingers at an imaginary map of North America. “Canada? Tell me, what has Canada produced? Nothing. But the South is interesting. What a pity they lost the Civil War—don’t you think it is a pity, eh?”

I said I thought defeat had been inevitable for the South. They had been backward-looking and complacent, and now they were the only people in the States who ever talked about the Civil War. People in the North never spoke of it. If the South had won, we might have been spared some of these Confederate reminiscences.

“Of course they talk about it,” said Borges. “It was a terrible defeat for them. Yet they had to lose. They were agrarian. But I wonder—is defeat so bad? In The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, doesn’t Lawrence say something about ‘the shamefulness of victory’? The Southerners were courageous, but perhaps a man of courage does not make a good soldier. What do you think?”

Courage alone could not make you a good soldier, I said, not any more than patience alone could make you a good fisherman. Courage might make a man blind to risk, and an excess of courage, without caution, could be fatal.

“But people respect soldiers,” said Borges. “That’s why no one really thinks much of the Americans. If America were a military power instead of a commercial empire, people would look up to it. Who respects businessmen? No one. People look at America and all they see are traveling salesmen. So they laugh.”

He fluttered his hands, snatched with them, and changed the subject. “How did you come to Argentina?”

“After Texas, I took the train to Mexico.”

“What do you think of Mexico?”

“Ramshackle, but pleasant.”

Borges said, “I dislike Mexico and the Mexicans. They are so nationalistic. And they hate the Spanish. What can happen to them if they feel that way? And they have nothing. They are just playing—at being nationalistic. But what they like especially is playing at being Red Indians. They like to play. They have nothing at all. And they can’t fight, eh? They are very poor soldiers—they always lose. Look what a few American soldiers could do in Mexico! No, I don’t like Mexico at all.”

He paused and leaned forward. His eyes bulged. He found my knee and tapped it for emphasis.

“I don’t have this complex,” he said. “I don’t hate the Spanish. Although I much prefer the English. After I lost my sight in 1955 I decided to do something altogether new. So I learned Anglo-Saxon. Listen …”

He recited the entire Lord’s Prayer in Anglo-Saxon.

“That was the Lord’s Prayer. Now this—do you know this?”

He recited the opening lines of The Seafarer.

“The Seafarer,” he said. “Isn’t it beautiful? I am partly English. My grandmother came from Northumberland, and there are other relatives from Staffordshire. ‘Saxon and Celt and Dane’—isn’t that how it goes? We always spoke English at home. My father spoke to me in English. Perhaps I’m partly Norwegian—the Vikings were in Northumberland. And York—York is a beautiful city, eh? My ancestors were there, too.”

“Robinson Crusoe was from York,” I said.

“Was he?”

“ ‘I was born in the year something-something, in the city of York, of a good family …’ ”

“Yes, yes, I had forgotten that.”

I said there were Norse names all over the north of England, and gave as an example the name Thorpe. It was a place name and a surname.

Borges said, “Like the German Dorf.”

“Or Dutch dorp.”

“This is strange. I will tell you something. I am writing a story in which the main character’s name is Thorpe.”

“That’s your Northumberland ancestry stirring.”

“Perhaps. The English are wonderful people. But timid. They didn’t want an empire. It was forced upon them by the French and the Spanish. And so they had their empire. It was a great thing, eh? They left so much behind. Look what they gave India—Kipling! One of the greatest writers.”

I said that sometimes a Kipling story was only a plot, or an exercise in Irish dialect, or a howling gaffe, like the climax of “At the End of the Passage,” where a man photographs the bogeyman on a dead man’s retina and then burns the pictures because they are so frightening. But how did the bogeyman get there?

“It doesn’t matter—he’s always good. My favorite is ‘The Church that Was at Antioch.’ What a marvelous story that is. And what a great poet. I know you agree with me—I read your piece in the New York Times. What I want you to do is read me some of Kipling’s poems. Come with me,” he said, getting to his feet and leading me to a bookshelf. “On that shelf—you see all the Kipling books? Now on the left is the Collected Poems. It’s a big book.”

He was conjuring with his hands as I ran my eye across the Elephant Head Edition of Kipling. I found the book and carried it back to the sofa.

Borges said, “Read me ‘The Harp Song of the Dane Women.’ ” I did as I was told.

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

“ ‘The old grey Widow-maker,’ ” he said. “That is so good. You can’t say things like that in Spanish. But I’m interrupting—go on.”

I began again, but at the third stanza he stopped me. “ ‘… the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you’—how beautiful!” I went on reading this reproach to a traveler—just the reading of it made me feel homesick—and every few stanzas Borges exclaimed how perfect a particular phrase was. He was quite in awe of these English compounds. Such locutions were impossible in Spanish. A simple poetic phrase such as “world-weary flesh” must be rendered in Spanish as “this flesh made weary by the world.” The ambiguity and delicacy is lost in Spanish, and Borges was infuriated that he could not attempt lines like Kipling’s.

Borges said, “Now for my next favorite, ‘The Ballad of East and West.’ ”

There proved to be even more interruption fodder in this ballad than there had been in “The Harp Song,” but though it had never been one of my favorites, Borges drew my attention to the good lines, chimed in on several couplets, and continued to say, “You can’t do that in Spanish.”

“Read me another one,” he said.

“How about ‘The Way Through the Woods’?” I said, and read it and got goose pimples.

Borges said, “It’s like Hardy. Hardy was a great poet, but I can’t read his novels. He should have stuck to poetry.”

“He did, in the end. He gave up writing novels.”

“He should never have started,” said Borges. “Want to see something interesting?” He took me back to the shelves and showed me his Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was the rare eleventh edition, not a book of facts but a work of literature. He told me to look at “India” and to examine the signature on the illustrated plates. It was that of Lockwood Kipling. “Rudyard Kipling’s father—you see?”

We went on a tour through his bookshelves. He was especially proud of his copy of Johnson’s Dictionary (“It was sent to me from Sing-Sing Prison, by an anonymous person”), his Moby-Dick, his translation by Sir Richard Burton of The Thousand and One Nights. He scrabbled at the shelves and pulled out more books; he led me to his study and showed me his set of Thomas De Quincey, his Beowulf—touching it, he began to quote—and his Icelandic sagas.

“This is the best collection of Anglo-Saxon books in Buenos Aires,” he said.

“If not in South America.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

We went back to the parlor library. He had forgotten to show me his edition of Poe. I said that I had recently read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

“I was talking about Pym just last night to Bioy Casares,” said Borges. Bioy Casares had been a collaborator on a sequence of stories. “The ending of that book is so strange—the dark and the light.”

“And the ship with the corpses on it.”

“Yes,” said Borges a bit uncertainly. “I read it so long ago, before I lost my sight. It is Poe’s greatest book.”

“I’d be glad to read it to you.”

“Come tomorrow night,” said Borges. “Come at seven-thirty. You can read me some chapters of Pym and then we’ll have dinner.”

I got my jacket from the chair. The white cat had been chewing the sleeve. The sleeve was wet, but now the cat was asleep. It slept on its back, as if it wanted its belly scratched. Its eyes were tightly shut.

IT WAS GOOD FRIDAY. ALL OVER LATIN AMERICA THERE WERE somber processions, people carrying images of Christ, lugging crosses up volcanic mountains, wearing black shrouds, flagellating themselves, saying the Stations of the Cross on their knees, parading with skulls. But in Buenos Aires there was little of this penitential activity to be seen. Devotion, in this secular city, took the form of moviegoing. Julia, which had won a number of Oscars, opened on Good Friday, but the theater was empty. Across the street, at the Electric, The Ten Commandments—the fifties Bible epic—was showing. The box-office line was two blocks long. And there was such a crowd at Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth that theatergoers, five hundred or more, were standing piously in the rain.

I had spent the day transcribing the notes I had made on my lap the night before. Borges’s blindness had enabled me to write unselfconsciously as he spoke. Again I boarded the Buenos Aires Subterranean to keep our appointment.

This time, the lights in Borges’s apartment were on. His loose shuffling shoes announced him and he appeared, as overdressed in the humid night heat as he had been the previous evening.

“Time for Poe,” he said. “Please take a seat.”

The Poe volume was on the seat of a nearby chair. I picked it up and found Pym, but before I could begin, Borges said, “I’ve been thinking about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Every page of it is very fine, and yet it is a dull book. I wonder why.”

“He wanted to write a great book. George Bernard Shaw told him to use a lot of semicolons. Lawrence set out to be exhaustive, believing that if it was monumentally ponderous it would be regarded as great. But it’s dull, and there’s no humor in it. How can a book on the Arabs not be funny?”

“Huckleberry Finn is a great book,” said Borges. “And funny. But the ending is no good. Tom Sawyer appears and it becomes bad. And there’s Nigger Jim”—Borges had begun to search the air with his hands—“yes, we had a slave market here at Retiro. My family wasn’t very wealthy. We had only five or six slaves. But some families had thirty or forty.”

I had read that a quarter of Argentina’s population had once been black. There were no blacks in Argentina now. I asked Borges why this was so.

“It is a mystery. But I remember seeing many of them.” Borges looked so youthful that it was easy to forget that he was as old as the century. I could not vouch for his reliability, but he was the most articulate witness I had met on my trip. “They were cooks, gardeners, handymen,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to them.”

“People say they died of TB.”

“Why didn’t they die of TB in Montevideo? It’s just over there, eh? There is another story, equally silly, that they fought the Indians, and the Indians and the Negroes killed each other. That would have been in 1850 or so, but it isn’t true. In 1914, there were still many Negroes in Buenos Aires—they were very common. Perhaps I should say 1910, to be sure.” He laughed suddenly. “They didn’t work very hard. It was considered wonderful to have Indian blood, but black blood is not so good a thing, eh? There are some prominent families in Buenos Aires that have it—a touch of the tar brush, eh? My uncle used to tell me, ‘Jorge, you’re as lazy as a nigger after lunch.’ You see, they didn’t do much work in the afternoon. I don’t know why there are so few here, but in Uruguay or Brazil—in Brazil you might run into a white man now and then, eh? If you’re lucky, eh? Ha!”

Borges was laughing in a pitying, self-amused way. His face lit up.

“They thought they were natives! I overheard a black woman saying to an Argentine woman, ‘Well, at least we didn’t come here on a ship!’ She meant that she considered the Spanish to be immigrants. ‘At least we didn’t come here on a ship!’ ”

“When did you hear this?”

“So many years ago,” said Borges. “But the Negroes were good soldiers. They fought in the War of Independence.”

“So they did in the United States,” I said. “But a lot were on the British side. The British promised them their freedom for serving in the British infantry. One southern regiment was all black—Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopians, it was called. They ended up in Canada.”

“Our blacks won the Battle of Cerrito. They fought in the war against Brazil. They were very good infantrymen. The gauchos fought on horseback, the Negroes didn’t ride. There was a regiment—the Sixth. They called it, not the regiment of Mulattos and Blacks, but in Spanish ‘the Regiment of Brownies and Darkies.’ So as not to offend them. In Martin Fierro, they are called ‘men of humble color.’ … Well, enough, enough. Let’s read Arthur Gordon Pym.”

“Which chapter? How about the one where the ship approaches full of corpses and birds?”

“No, I want the last one. About the dark and the light.”

I read the last chapter, where the canoe drifts into the Antarctic, the water growing warmer and then very hot, the white fall of ashes, the vapor, the appearance of the white giant. Borges interrupted from time to time, saying in Spanish, “That is enchanting”; “That is lovely”; and “How beautiful!”

When I finished, he said, “Read the last chapter but one.”

I read Chapter 24: Pym’s escape from the island, the pursuit of the maddened savages, the vivid description of vertigo. That long terrifying passage delighted Borges, and he clapped his hands at the end.

Borges said, “Now how about some Kipling? Shall we puzzle out ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ and try to see if it is a good story?”

I said, “I must tell you that I don’t like ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ at all.”

“Fine. It must be bad. Plain Tales from the Hills then. Read ‘Beyond the Pale.’ ”

I read “Beyond the Pale,” and when I got to the part where Bisesa sings a love song to Trejago, her English lover, Borges interrupted, reciting,

Alone upon the housetops, to the North

I turn and watch the lightning in the sky,—

The glamour of thy footsteps in the North,

Come back to me, Beloved, or I die!

“My father used to recite that one,” said Borges. When I had finished the story, he said, “Now you choose one.”

I read him the opium smoker’s story, “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows.”

“How sad that is,” said Borges. “It is terrible. The man can do nothing. But notice how Kipling repeats the same lines. It has no plot at all, but it is lovely.” He touched his suit jacket. “What time is it?” He drew out his pocket watch and touched the hands. “Nine-thirty—we should eat.”

As I was putting the Kipling book back into its place—Borges insisted that the books must be returned to their exact place—I said, “Do you ever reread your own work?”

“Never. I am not happy with my work. The critics have greatly exaggerated its importance. I would rather read”—he lunged at the bookshelves and made a gathering motion with his hands—“real writers. Ha!” He turned to me and said, “Do you reread my work?”

“Yes. ‘Pierre Menard’ …”

“That was the first story I ever wrote. I was thirty-six or thirty-seven at the time. My father said, ‘Read a lot, write a lot, and don’t rush into print’—those were his exact words. The best story I ever wrote was ‘The Intruder’ and ‘South’ is also good. It’s only a few pages. I’m lazy—a few pages and I’m finished. But ‘Pierre Menard’ is a joke, not a story.”

“I used to give my Chinese students ‘The Wall and the Books’ to read.”

“Chinese students? I suppose they thought it was full of howlers. I think it is. It is an unimportant piece, hardly worth reading. Let’s eat.”

He got his cane from the sofa in the parlor and we went out, down in the narrow elevator, and through the wroughtiron gates. The restaurant was around the corner—I could not see it, but Borges knew the way. So the blind man led me. Walking down this Buenos Aires street with Borges was like being led through Alexandria by Cavafy, or through Lahore by Kipling. The city belonged to him, and he had had a hand in inventing it.

The restaurant was full this Good Friday night, and it was extremely noisy. But as soon as Borges entered, tapping his cane, feeling his way through the tables he obviously knew well, a hush fell upon the diners. Borges was recognized, and at his entrance all talking and eating ceased. It was both a reverential and curious silence, and it was maintained until Borges took his seat and gave the waiter our order.

We had hearts of palm, and fish, and grapes. I drank wine, Borges stuck to water. He cocked his head sideways to eat, trying to spear the sections of palm with his fork. He tried a spoon next, and then despairingly used his fingers.

“Do you know the big mistake that people make when they try to film Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde?” he said. “They use the same actor for both men. They should use two different actors. That is what Stevenson intended. Jekyll was two men. And you don’t find out until the end that it is the same man. You should get that hammer stroke at the end. Another thing. Why do directors always make Hyde a womanizer? He was actually very cruel.”

I said, “Hyde tramples on a child and Stevenson describes the sound of the bones breaking.”

“Yes, Stevenson hated cruelty, but he had nothing against physical passion.”

“Do you read modern authors?”

“I never cease to read them. Anthony Burgess is good—a very generous man, by the way. We are the same—Borges, Burgess. It’s the same name.”

“Any others?”

“Robert Browning,” said Borges, and I wondered if he was pulling my leg. “Now, he should have been a short story writer. If he had, he would have been greater than Henry James, and people would still read him.” Borges had started on his grapes. “The food is good in Buenos Aires, don’t you think?”

“In most ways, it seems a civilized place.”

He looked up. “That may be so, but there are bombs every day.”

“They don’t mention them in the paper.”

“They’re afraid to print the news.”

“How do you know there are bombs?”

“Easy. I hear them,” he said.

Indeed, three days later there was a fire that destroyed much of the new color television studio that had been built for the World Cup broadcasts. This was called “an electrical fault.” Five days later two trains were bombed in Lomas de Zamora and Bernal. A week later a government minister was murdered; his corpse was found in a Buenos Aires street, and pinned to it was a note reading, A gift from the Montoneros.

“But the government is not so bad,” said Borges. “Videla is a well-meaning military man.” Borges smiled and said slowly, “He is not very bright, but at least he is a gentleman.”

“What about Perón?”

“Perón was a scoundrel. My mother was in prison under Perón. My sister was in prison. My cousin. Perón was a bad leader and, also, I suspect, a coward. He looted the country. His wife was a prostitute.”

“Evita?”

“A common prostitute.”

We had coffee. Borges called the waiter and said in Spanish, “Help me to the toilet.” He said to me, “I have to go and shake the bishop’s hand. Ha!”

Walking back through the streets, he stopped at a hotel entrance and gave the metal awning posts two whacks with his cane. Perhaps he was not as blind as he pretended, perhaps it was a familiar landmark. He had not swung timidly. He said, “That’s for luck.”

As we turned the corner into Maipú, he said, “My father used to say, ‘What a rubbish story the Jesus story is. That this man was dying for the sins of the world. Who could believe that?’ Is it nonsense, isn’t it?”

I said, “That’s a timely thought for Good Friday.”

“I hadn’t thought of that! Oh, yes!” He laughed so hard he startled two passersby.

As he fished out his door key, I asked him about Patagonia.

“I have been there,” he said. “But I don’t know it well. I’ll tell you this, though. It’s a dreary place. A very dreary place.”

“I was planning to take the train tomorrow.”

“Don’t go tomorrow. Come and see me. I like your reading.”

“I suppose I can go to Patagonia next week.”

“It’s dreary,” said Borges. He had got the door open, and now he shuffled to the elevator and pulled open the metal gates. “The gate of the hundred sorrows,” he said, and entered chuckling.

In Patagonia

IT HAD BEEN MY INTENTION TO ARRIVE IN ESQUEL ON HOLY Saturday and to wake on Easter Sunday and watch the sunrise. But Easter had passed. This was no special date, and I had overslept. I got up and went outside. It was a sunny breezy day—the sort of weather that occurs every day of the year in that part of Patagonia.

I walked to the station. The engine that had taken me to Esquel looked derelict on the siding, as if it would never run again. But it had a hundred more years in it, I was sure. I walked beyond it, past the one-story houses to the one-roomed huts, to where the road turned into a dusty track. There was a rocky slope, some sheep, the rest bushes and weeds. If you looked closely you could see small pink and yellow flowers on these bushes. The wind stirred them. I went closer. They shook. But they were pretty. Behind my head was a great desert.

The Patagonian paradox was this: to be here, it helped to be a miniaturist, or else interested in enormous empty spaces. There was no intermediate zone of study. Either the vastness of the desert space, or the sight of a tiny flower. You had to choose between the tiny or the vast.

The paradox diverted me. My arrival did not matter. It was the journey that counted. And I would follow Johnson’s advice. Early in his career he had translated the book of a Portuguese traveler in Abyssinia. In his preface, Johnson wrote, “He has amused the reader with no romantick absurdity, or incredible fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him.”

The sheep saw me. The younger ones kicked their heels. When I looked again, they were gone, and I was an ant on a foreign anthill. It was impossible to verify the size of anything in this space. There was no path through the bushes, but I could look over them, over this ocean of thorns which looked so mild at a distance, so cruel nearby, so like misshapen nosegays close up. It was perfectly quiet and odorless.

I knew I was nowhere, but the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world after all this time, on a dot at the lower part of the map. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery—the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.

Down there the Patagonian valley deepened to gray rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods. Ahead, there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent. The sky was clear blue. A puff of cloud, white as a quince flower, carried a small shadow from town, or from the South Pole. I saw it approach. It rippled across the bushes and passed over me, a brief chill, and then went rucking east. There were no voices here. There was this, what I saw; and, though beyond it were mountains and glaciers and albatrosses and Indians, there was nothing here to speak of, nothing here to delay me further. Only the Patagonian paradox: the vast space, the very tiny blossoms of the sagebrush’s cousin. The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveler, was an ending for me. I had arrived in Patagonia, and I laughed when I remembered I had come here from Boston, on the subway train that people took to work.

The Kingdom by the Sea

English Traits

ONCE, FROM BEHIND A CLOSED DOOR, I HEARD AN ENGLISHWOMAN exclaim with real pleasure, “They are funny, the Yanks!” And I crept away and laughed to think that an English person was saying such a thing. And I thought: They wallpaper their ceilings! They put little knitted bobble hats on their soft-boiled eggs to keep them warm! They don’t give you bags in supermarkets! They say sorry when you step on their toes! Their government makes them get a hundred-dollar license every year for watching television! They issue drivers’ licenses that are valid for thirty or forty years—mine expires in the year 2011! They charge you for matches when you buy cigarettes! They smoke on buses! They drive on the left! They spy for the Russians! They say “nigger” and “Jewboy” without flinching! They call their houses Holmleigh and Sparrow View! They sunbathe in their underwear! They don’t say “You’re welcome”! They still have milk bottles and milkmen, and junk dealers with horse-drawn wagons! They love candy and Lucozade and leftovers called bubble-and-squeak! They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowells! They have amazing names, like Mr. Eatwell and Lady Inkpen and Major Twaddle and Miss Tosh! And they think we’re funny?

The longer I lived in London, the more I came to see how much of Englishness was bluff and what wet blankets they could be. You told an Englishman you were planning a trip around Britain and he said, “It sounds about as much fun as chasing a mouse around a pisspot.” They could be deeply dismissive and self-critical. “We’re awful,” they said. “This country is hopeless. We’re never prepared for anything. Nothing works properly.” But being self-critical in this way was also a tactic for remaining ineffectual. It was surrender.

And when an English person said “we,” he did not mean himself—he meant the classes above and below him, the people he thought should be making decisions, and the people who should be following. “We” meant everyone else.

“Mustn’t grumble” was the most English of expressions. English patience was mingled inertia and despair. What was the use? But Americans did nothing but grumble! Americans also boasted. “I do some pretty incredible things” was not an English expression. “I’m fairly keen” was not American. Americans were show-offs—it was part of our innocence—we often fell on our faces; the English seldom showed off, so they seldom looked like fools. The English liked especially to mock the qualities in other people they admitted they didn’t have themselves. And sometimes they found us truly maddening. In America you were admired for getting ahead, elbowing forward, rising, pushing in. In England this behavior was hated—it was the way “wops” acted, it was “Chinese fire drill,” it was disorder. But making a quick buck was also a form of queue jumping, and getting ahead was a form of rudeness: A “bounder” was a person who had moved out of his class. It was not a question of forgiving such things; it was, simply, that they were never forgotten. The English had long, merciless memories.

Rambler

AS SOON AS I HAD LEFT DEAL I SAW A LOW, FLAT CLOUD, iron-gray and then blue, across the Channel, like a stubborn fogbank. The closer I got to Dover, the more clearly it was defined, now like a long battleship and now like a flotilla and now like an offshore island. I walked on and saw it was a series of headlands. It was France, looking like Brewster across Cape Cod Bay.

Ahead on the path a person was coming toward me, down a hill four hundred yards away; but whether it was a man or a woman I could not tell. Some minutes later I saw her scarf and her skirt, and for more minutes on those long slopes we strode toward each other under the big sky. We were the only people visible in the landscape—there was no one behind either of us. She was a real walker—arms swinging, flat shoes, no dog, no map. It was lovely, too: blue sky above, the sun in the southeast, and a cloudburst hanging like a broken bag in the west. I watched this woman, this fairly old woman, in her warm scarf and heavy coat, a bunch of flowers in her hand—I watched her come on, and I thought, I am not going to say hello until she does.

She did not look at me. She drew level and didn’t notice me. There was no other human being in sight on the coast, only a fishing boat out there like a black flatiron. Hetta Poumphrey—I imagined that was the woman’s name—was striding, lifting the hem of her coat with her knees. Now she was a fraction past me, and still stony-faced.

“Morning!” I said.

“Oh.” She twisted her head at me. “Good morning!”

She gave me a good smile, because I had spoken first. But if I hadn’t, we would have passed each other, Hetta and I, in that clifftop meadow—not another soul around—five feet apart, in the vibrant silence that was taken for safety here without a word.

Falklands News

THE HOTEL WAS NOT FULL—A DOZEN MEN, ALL OF THEM middle-aged and hearty and full of chat, making a remark and then laughing at it too loudly. They had been beating up and down the coast with cases of samples, and business was terrible. You mentioned a town, any town—Dover—and they always said, “Dover’s shocking.” They had the harsh, kidding manner of traveling salesmen, a clumsy carelessness with the waitresses, a way of making the poor girls nervous, bullying them because they had had no luck with their own wives and daughters.

Mr. Figham, motor spares and car accessories, down from Maidstone, said the whole of Kent was his “parish”—his territory, shocking place. He was balding and a little boastful and salesman-skittish; he asked for the sweets trolley, and as the pretty waitress stopped, he looked at the way her uniform tightened against her thigh and said, “That chocolate cake tickles my fancy—”

The waitress removed the cake dish.

“—and it’s about the only thing that does, at my age.”

Mr. Figham was not much more than fifty, and the three other men at his table, about the same age, laughed in a sad agreeing way, acknowledging that they were impotent and being a little wry about their sorry cocks not working properly. To eavesdrop on middle-aged Englishmen was often to hear them commenting on their lack of sexual drive.

I sat with all the salesmen later that night watching the hotel’s television, the Falklands news. There was some anticipation. “I was listening to my car radio as I came down the M-Twenty.… One of my people said … A chap’s supply in Ashford had heard …” But no one was definite—no one dared. “… something about British casualties …”

It was the sinking of the Sheffield. The news was announced on television. It silenced the room: the first British casualties, a brand-new ship. Many men were dead and the ship was still burning.

As long as the Falklands War had been without British deaths, it was an ingenious campaign, clever footwork, an adventure. That was admired here: a nimble reply, no blood, no deaths. But this was dreadful and incriminating, and it had to be answered. It committed Britain to a struggle that no one really seemed to want.

One of the salesmen said, “That’ll take the wind out of our sails.”

There was a Chinese man in the room. He began to speak—the others had been watching him, and when he spoke they looked sharply at him, as if expecting him to say something in Chinese. But he spoke in English.

He said, “That’s a serious blow for us.”

Everyone murmured, Yes, that was a serious blow for us, and What next? But I didn’t open my mouth, because already I felt like an enemy agent. I agreed with what the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had said about this Falklands War: “It is like two bald men fighting over a comb.”

John Bratby

A MAN IN HASTINGS SAID TO ME, “WHY DID I COME HERE to live? That’s easy. Because it is one of the three cheapest places in England.” He told me the other two, but in my enthusiasm to know more about Hastings I forgot to write the others down. This man was the painter John Bratby. He did the paintings for the movie The Horse’s Mouth, and his own life somewhat resembled that of Gulley Jimson, the painter hero of the Joyce Cary novel on which the movie was based.

Mr. Bratby was speaking in a room full of paintings, some of them still wet. He said, “I could never buy a house this large in London or anywhere else. I’d have a poky flat if I didn’t live in Hastings.”

His house was called the Cupola and Tower of the Winds and it matched its name. It was tall and crumbling, and it creaked when the wind blew, and there were stacks of paintings leaning against every wall. Mr. Bratby was thickset and had the listening expression of a forgetful man. He said he painted quickly. He sometimes referred to his famous riotous past—so riotous, it had nearly killed him. He had been a so-called kitchen sink painter with a taste for drawing rooms. Now he lived in a quiet way. He said he believed that Western society was doomed, but he said this as he looked out of his Cupola window at the rooftops and the sea of Hastings, a pleasant view.

“Our society is changing from one based on the concept of the individual and freedom,” Mr. Bratby said, “to one where the individual is nonexistent—lost in a collectivist state.”

I said I didn’t think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes—better than the rich had ever lived, except that their lives would constantly be in danger from the hungry, predatory poor. All the technology would serve the rich, but they would need it for their own protection and to ensure their continued prosperity. The poor would live like dogs. They would be dangerous and pitiful, and the rich would probably hunt them for sport.

This vision of mine did not rouse Mr. Bratby, who was at that moment painting my portrait—“There is no commercial consideration to this at all.” He had said of my painting, “This is for posterity to see, when our society has completely changed.” He did not reject my description of the future. He scratched his head and went on dreading a police state where everyone wore baggy blue suits and called each other “Comrade”—the Orwell nightmare, which was a warning rather than a reasonable prediction. Anyway, it was almost 1984, and here was J. Bratby in a delightful wreck of a house, painting his heart out in Hastings, the bargain paradise of the south coast!

It seemed to me that his fear of the future was actually a hatred of the present, and yet he was an otherwise cheery soul and full of projects (“Guess what it is—the long one. It’s all the Canterbury pilgrims. Chaucer, you see.”). He said he never traveled but that his wife was very keen on it—had always wanted to go to New Orleans, for some reason. Now, his wife, Pam, was very attentive. She wore red leather trousers and made me a bacon sandwich. Bratby said that he had met her through a lonely hearts column, one of those classified ads that say LONELY GENT, 54, STOUT BUT NOT FAT, A PAINTER BY PROFESSION, SOUTH COAST, WISHES TO MEET … In this way they had met and had hit it off and got married.

Shallys

HOVE, LIKE MANY OTHER PLACES ON THE ENGLISH COAST, had chalets. The name was misleading. They were huts, and chalet was mispronounced to suit them: “shally,” the English said, an appropriate word made out of shanty and alley. There were hundreds of them shoulder to shoulder along the Front. They had evolved from bathing machines, I guessed. The English were prudish about nakedness (and swimming for the Victorians had been regarded as the opposite of a sport—it was a sort of immersion cure, a cross between colonic irrigation and baptism). The bathing machine—a shed on a pair of wheels—had been turned into a stationary changing room, and then arranged in rows on the beachfront, and at last had become a miniature house—a shally.

Hove’s shallys were the size of English garden sheds. I looked into them, fully expecting to see rusty lawnmowers and rakes and watering cans. Sometimes they held bicycles, but more often these one-room shallys were furnished like dollhouses or toy bungalows. You could see what the English considered essential to their comfort for a day at the beach. They were painted, they had framed prints (cats, horses, sailboats) on the wall and plastic roses in jam-jar vases. All had folding deck chairs inside and a shelf at the rear on which there was a hotplate and a dented kettle and some china cups. They were fitted out for tea and naps—many had camp cots, plastic cushions, and blankets; some had fishing tackle; a few held toys. It was not unusual to see half a fruitcake, an umbrella, and an Agatha Christie inside; and most held an old person, looking flustered.

All the shallys had numbers, some very high numbers, testifying to their multitude. But the numbers did not distinguish them, for they all had names: Seaview, the Waves, Sunny Hours, Bide-a-Wee, picked out on their doors or else lettered on plaques. They had double doors; some looked more like horse boxes than cottages. They had curtains. They had folding panels to keep out the wind. Many had a transistor radio buzzing, but the shally people were old-fashioned—they actually were the inheritors of the bathing-machine mentality—and they called their radios “the wireless” or even “my steam radio.”

They were rented by the year, or leased for several years, or owned outright—again, like bathing machines. But they were thoroughly colonized. They had small framed photographs of children and grandchildren. When it rained, their occupiers sat inside with their knees together, one person reading, the other knitting or snoozing, always bumping elbows. In better weather they did these things just outside, a foot or so from the front door. I never saw a can of beer or a bottle of whisky in a shally. The shally people had lived through the war. They had no money but plenty of time. They read newspapers, and that day everyone looked as if he were boning up for an exam on the Falklands campaign. It was becoming a very popular war.

The shallys were very close together, but paradoxically they were very private. In England, proximity creates invisible barriers. Each shally seemed to stand alone, no one taking any notice of the activity next door. Seaview was having tea while the Waves pondered the Daily Express; Sunny Hours was taking a siesta, and the pair at Bide-a-Wee were brooding over their mail. All conversation was in whispers. The shallys were not a community. Each shally was separate and isolated, nothing neighborly about it. Each had its own English atmosphere of hectic calm. A bylaw stipulated that no one was allowed to spend a night in a shally, so the shally was a daylight refuge, and it was used with the intense preoccupation and the sort of all-excluding privacy that the English bring to anything they own—not creating any disturbance or encroaching on anyone else’s shally, and not sharing. Anyone who wished to know how the English lived would get a good idea by walking past the miles of these shallys, for while the average English home was closed to strangers—and was closed to friends, too: nothing personal, it just isn’t done—the shally was completely open to the stranger’s gaze, like the dollhouses they somewhat resembled that had one wall missing. It was easy to look inside. That’s why no one ever did.

Bognor

I STAYED IN BOGNOR LONGER THAN I HAD PLANNED. I GREW to like Miss Pottage at Camelot. The beach was fine in the sunshine, and there was always an old man selling huge, horrible whelks out of a wooden box on the Front. He said he caught them himself. It was sunny, but the shops were closed and the Front was deserted. The season hadn’t started, people said.

I began to think that Bognor had been misrepresented. The oral tradition of travel in Britain was a shared experience of received opinion. Britain seemed small enough and discussed enough to be known at second hand. Dickens was known that way: it was an English trait to know about Dickens and Dickens’s characters without ever having read him. Places were known in this same way. That was why Brighton had a great reputation and why Margate was avoided. Dover, people said, the white cliffs of Dover. And Eastbourne’s lovely. And the Sink Ports, they’re lovely, too. It was Dickens all over again, and with the same sort of distortions, the same prejudices, and some places they had all wrong.

“I don’t know as much as I should about Dungeness,” a man said to me, who didn’t know anything about it at all. I went away laughing.

Broadstairs was serious, but Bognor was a joke. I was told, “It’s like Edward the Seventh said”—it was George the Fifth—“his last words before he died. ‘Bugger Bognor!’ That’s what I say.” Bognor had an unfortunate name. Any English place name with bog or bottom in it was doomed. (“The bowdlerization of English place names has been a steady development since the late eighteenth century. In Northamptonshire alone, Buttocks Booth became Boothville, Pisford became Pitsford, and Shitlanger was turned into Shutlanger.”) Camber Sands had a nice rhythmical lilt and was seen as idyllic—but it wasn’t; Bognor contained a lavatorial echo, so it was seen as scruffy—but it wasn’t. All English people had opinions on which seaside places in England were pleasant and which were a waste of time. This was in the oral tradition. The English seldom traveled at random. They took well-organized vacations and held very strong views on places to which they had never been.

Sad Captain

I WALKED ALONG WEST CLIFF AND DOWN A ZIGZAG PATH TO the promenade. I was not quite sure where I was headed, but this was the right direction—west; I had been going west for weeks. I walked past Alum Chine, where Stevenson wrote “Dr. Jekyll” (Bournemouth was the most literary place, with the ghosts of Henry James, Paul Verlaine, Tess Durbeyfield, Mary Shelley, and a half a dozen others haunting its chines) and then, looking west, and seeing the two standing rocks on the headland across the bay, called Old Harry and Old Harry’s Wife, I decided to walk to Swanage, about fourteen miles along the coast.

My map showed a ferry at a place called Sandbanks, the entrance to Poole Harbour. I wondered whether it was running—the season had not started—so, not wishing to waste my time, I asked a man on the Promenade.

“I don’t know about any ferry,” he said.

He was an old man and had gray skin and he looked fireproof. His name was Desmond Bowles, and I expected him to be deaf. But his hearing was very good. He wore a black overcoat.

“What are those boys doing?” he demanded.

They were windsurfing, I explained.

“All they do is fall down,” he said.

One of the pleasures of the coast was watching windsurfers teetering and falling into the cold water, and trying to climb back and falling again. This sport was all useless struggle.

“I’ve just walked from Pokesdown—”

That was seven miles away.

“—and I’m eighty-six years old,” Mr. Bowles said.

“What time did you leave Pokesdown?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you walk it again?”

“No,” Mr. Bowles said. But he kept walking. He walked stiffly, without pleasure. His feet were huge, he wore old, shiny, bulging shoes, and his hat was crushed in his hand. He swung the hat for balance and faced forward, panting at the Promenade. “You can walk faster than me—go on, don’t let me hold you up.”

But I wanted to talk to him: eighty-six and he had just walked from Pokesdown! I asked him why.

“I was a stationmaster there, you see. Pokesdown and Boscombe—those were my stations. I was sitting in my house—I’ve got a bungalow over there”—he pointed to the cliff—“and I said to myself, ‘I want to see them again.’ I took the train to Pokesdown and when I saw it was going to be sunny I reckoned I’d walk back. I retired from the railways twenty-five years ago. My father was in the railways. He was transferred from London to Portsmouth and of course I went with him. I was just a boy. It was 1902.”

“Where were you born?”

“London,” he said.

“Where, in London?”

Mr. Bowles stopped walking. He was a big man. He peered at me and said, “I don’t know where. But I used to know.”

“How do you like Bournemouth?”

“I don’t like towns,” he said. He started to walk again. He said, “I like this.”

“What do you mean?”

He motioned with his crumpled hat, swinging it outward.

He said, “The open sea.”

It was early in my trip, but already I was curious about English people in their cars staring seaward, and elderly people in deck chairs all over the south coast watching waves, and now Mr. Bowles, the old railwayman, saying, “I like this … the open sea.” What was going on here? There was an answer in Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, an unusual and brilliant—some critics have said eccentric—analysis of the world of men in terms of crowds. There are crowd symbols in nature, Canetti says—fire is one, and rain is another, and the sea is a distinct one. “The sea is multiple, it moves, and it is dense and cohesive”—like a crowd—“Its multiplicity lies in its waves”—the waves are like men. The sea is strong, it has a voice, it is constant, it never sleeps, “it can soothe or threaten or break out in storms. But it is always there.” Its mystery lies in what it covers: “Its sublimity is enhanced by the thought of what it contains, the multitudes of plants and animals hidden within it.” It is universal and all-embracing; “it is an image of stilled humanity; all life flows into it and it contains all life.”

Later in his book, when he is dealing with nations, Canetti describes the crowd symbol of the English. It is the sea: all the triumphs and disasters of English history are bound up with the sea, and the sea has offered the Englishman transformation and danger. “His life at home is complementary to life at sea: security and monotony are its essential characteristics.”

“The Englishman sees himself as a captain,” Canetti says: this is how his individualism relates to the sea.

So I came to see Mr. Bowles, and all those old south coast folk staring seaward, as sad captains fixing their attention upon the waves. The sea murmured back at them. The sea was a solace. It contained all life, of course, but it was also the way out of England—and it was the way to the grave, seaward, out there, offshore. The sea had the voice and embrace of a crowd, but for this peculiar nation it was not only a comfort, representing vigor and comfort. It was an end, too. Those people were looking in the direction of death.

Mr. Bowles was still slogging along beside me. I asked him if he had fought in the First World War.

“First and Second,” he said. “Both times in France.” He slowed down, remembering. He said, “The Great War was awful … it was terrible. But I wasn’t wounded. I was in it for four years.”

“But you must have had leave,” I said.

“A fortnight,” he said, “in the middle.”

Mr. Bowles left me at Canford Cliffs, and I walked on to Sandbanks.

(1) B & B: Victory Guest House

“YOU’RE ALONE?” MRS. STARLING SAID AT THE VICTORY Guest House, glancing at my knapsack, my leather jacket, my oily shoes.

“So far,” I said.

“I’ll show you to your room,” she said, a little rattled by my reply.

I was often warmed by a small thrill in following the younger landladies up four flights to the tiny room at the top of the house. We would enter, breathless from the climb, and stand next to the bed somewhat flustered, until she remembered to ask for the £5 in advance—but even that was ambiguous and erotic.

Most of them said, You’re alone? or Just a single, then? I never explained why. I said I was in publishing. I said I had a week off. I did not say that I had no choice but to travel alone, because I was taking notes and stopping everywhere to write them. I could think clearly only when I was alone, and then my imagination began to work as my mind wandered. They might have asked: How can you bear your own company? I would have had to reply: Because I talk to myself—talking to myself has always been part of my writing and, by the way, I’ve been walking along the seawall from Dawlish in the rain muttering, “Wombwell … warmwell … nutwell … cathole …”

(2) B & B. The Puttocks

ABOUT A HALF HOUR AFTER ARRIVING IN NEWQUAY I WAS sitting in a parlor, a dog chewing my shoe, and having a cup of tea with Florence Puttock (“I said leave that shoe alone!”), who was telling me about the operation on her knee. It was my mention of walking that brought up the subject of the feet, legs, knees, and her operation. And the television was on—there was a kind of disrespect these days in not turning it on for Falklands news. And Queenie, the other Peke, had a tummy upset. And Mrs. Puttock’s cousin Bill hadn’t rung all day—he usually rang just after lunch. And Donald Puttock, who lisped and was sixty-one—he had taken early retirement because of his back—Donald was watching the moving arrows on the Falklands map and listening to Florence talking about ligaments, and he said, “I spent me ’ole life in ’ornchurch.”

Somehow, I was home.

But it was not my home. I had burrowed easily into this cozy privacy, and I could leave any time I wished. I had made the choice, for the alternatives in most seaside towns were a hotel, or a guest house, or a bed-and-breakfast place. This last alternative always tempted me, but I had to feel strong to do it right. A bed-and-breakfast place was a bungalow, usually on a suburban street some distance from the Front and the Promenade and the hotels. It was impossible to enter such a house and not feel you were interrupting a domestic routine—something about Florence’s sewing and Donald’s absurd slippers. The house always smelled of cooking and disinfectant, but most of all it smelled of in-laws.

It was like every other bungalow on the street, except for one thing. This one had a sign in the window saying VACANCIES. I had the impression that this was the only expense in starting such an establishment. You went over to Maynards and bought a VACANCIES sign, and then it was simply a matter of airing out the spare bedroom. Soon, an odd man would show up—knapsack, leather jacket, oily hiker’s shoes—and spend an evening listening to the householders’ stories of the high cost of living, or the greatness of Bing Crosby, or a particularly painful operation. The English, the most obsessively secretive people in their day-today living, would admit you to the privacy of their homes, and sometimes even unburden themselves, for just £5. “I’ve got an awful lot on my plate at the moment,” Mrs. Spackle would say. “There’s Bert’s teeth, the Hoover’s packed up, and my Enid thinks she’s in the family way.…” When it was late, and everyone else in bed, the woman you knew as Mrs. Garlick would pour you a schooner of cream sherry, say, “Call me Ida,” and begin to tell you about her amazing birthmark.

Bed and breakfast was always vaguely amateur, the woman of the house saying she did it because she liked to cook, and could use a little extra cash (“money for jam”), and she liked company, and their children were all grown up, and the house was rather empty and echoey. The whole enterprise of bed and breakfast was carried on by the woman, but done with a will, because she was actually getting paid for doing her normal household chores. No special arrangements were required. At its best it was like a perfect marriage; at its worst it was like a night with terrible in-laws. Usually I was treated with a mixture of shyness and suspicion; but that was traditional English hospitality—wary curiosity and frugal kindness.

The English required guests to be uncomplaining, and most of the lower-middle-class people who ran bed-and-breakfast places were intolerant of a guest’s moaning, and they thought—with some justification—that they had in their lives suffered more than that guest. “During the war,” they always began, and I knew I was about to lose the argument in the face of some evidence of terrible hardship. During the war, Donald Puttock was buzz-bombed by the Germans as he crouched under his small staircase in Homchurch, and, as he often said, he was lucky to be alive.

I told him I was traveling around the coast.

“Just what we did!” Mr. Puttock said. He and Florence had driven from Kent to Cornwall in search of a good place to live. They had stopped in all the likely places. Newquay was the best. They would stay here until they died. If they moved at all (Florence wanted fewer bedrooms), it would be down the road.

“Course, the local people ’ere ’ate us,” Mr. Puttock said, cheerfully.

“Donald got his nose bitten off the other day by a Cornishman,” Mrs. Puttock said. “Still hasn’t got over it.”

“I don’t give a monkey’s,” Mr. Puttock said.

Later, Mrs. Puttock said that she had always wanted to do bed and breakfast. She wasn’t like some of them, she said, who made their guests leave the house after breakfast and stay away all day—some of these people you saw in the bus shelter, they weren’t waiting for the number fifteen; they were bed-and-breakfast people, killing time. It was bed-and-breakfast etiquette to stay quietly out of the house all day, even if it was raining.

Mrs. Puttock gave me a card she had had printed. It listed the attractions of her house.

• TV Lounge

• Access to rooms at all times

• Interior-sprung mattresses

• Free parking space on premises

• Free shower available

• Separate tables

The lounge was the Puttocks’ parlor, the parking space was their driveway, the shower was a shower, and the tables tables. This described their house, which was identical with every other bungalow in Newquay.

I was grateful for the bed-and-breakfast places. At ten-thirty, after the Falklands news (and now every night there was “Falklands Special”), while we were all a bit dazed by the violence and the speculation and Mr. Puttock was saying, “The Falklands look like bloody Bodmin Moor, but I suppose we have to do something,” Mrs. Puttock would say to me, “Care for a hot drink?” When she was in the kitchen making Ovaltine, Mr. Puttock and I were talking baloney about the state of the world. I was grateful, because to me this was virgin territory—a whole house open to my prying eyes: books, pictures, postcard messages, souvenirs, and opinions. I especially relished looking at family photographs. “That’s us at the Fancy Dress Ball in Romford just after the war.… That’s our cat, Monty.… That’s me in a bathing costume.…” My intentions were honorable but my instincts were nosy, and I went sniffing from bungalow to bungalow to discover how these people lived.

(3) B & B: The Bull

MR. DEEDY AT THE BULL SAID, “SEE, NO ONE WANTS TO make plans ahead. They go on working. It’s not only the money. They don’t like to go away, because they don’t know whether they’ll have jobs to go back to.”

Then “Falklands Special” was on television, and we dutifully trooped toward Mrs. Deedy’s shout of “It’s the news!” The news was very bad: more deaths, more ships sunk. But there was always great bewilderment among people watching the news, because there was never enough of it and it was sometimes contradictory. Why were there so few photographs of fighting? Usually it was reporters speaking of disasters over crackly telephones. The English seemed—in private—ashamed and confused, and regarded Argentina as pathetic, ramshackle, and unlucky, with a conscript army of very young boys. They hated discussing it, but they could talk all night on the subject of how business was bad.

“You just reminded me,” Mrs. Deedy said. “The Smiths have canceled. They had that September booking. Mr. Smith rang this morning.”

“Knickers,” Mr. Deedy said.

“His wife died,” Mrs. Deedy said.

“Oh?” Mr. Deedy was doubtful—sorry he had said knickers.

“She wasn’t poorly,” Mrs. Deedy said. “It was a heart attack.”

Mr. Deedy relaxed at the news of the heart attack. It was no one’s fault, really—not like a sickness or a crime. This was more a kind of removal.

“That’s another returned deposit,” Mrs. Deedy said. She was cross.

“That makes two so far,” Mr. Deedy said. “Let’s hope there aren’t any more.”

The next day I heard two tattling ladies talking about the Falklands. It was being said that the British had become jingoistic because of the war, and that a certain swagger was now evident. It was true of the writing in many newspapers, but it was seldom true of the talk I heard. Most people were like Mrs. Mullion and Miss Custis at the Britannia in Combe Martin, who, after some decent platitudes, wandered from talk of the Falklands to extensive reminiscing about the Second World War.

“After all, the Germans were occupying France, but life went on as normal,” Mrs. Mullion said.

“Well, this is just it,” Miss Custis said. “You’ve got to carry on. No sense packing up.”

“We were in Taunton then.”

“Were you? We were Cullompton,” Miss Custis said. “Mutterton, actually.”

“Rationing seemed to go on for ages!” Mrs. Mullion said.

“I still remember when chocolate went off the ration. And then people bought it all. And then it went on the ration again!”

They had begun to cheer themselves up in this way.

“More tea?” Mrs. Mullion said.

“Lovely,” Miss Custis said.

(4) B & B: Allerford

PORLOCK, THE HOME OF THE MAN WHO INTERRUPTED THE writing of “Kubla Khan,” was one street of small cottages, with a continuous line of cars trailing through it. Below it, on the west side of the bay, was Porlock Weir, and there were hills on all sides that were partly wooded.

A hundred and seventy years ago a man came to Porlock and found it quiet. But he did not find fault. He wrote: “There are periods of comparative stagnation, when we say, even in London, that there is nothing stirring; it is therefore not surprising that there should be some seasons of the year when things are rather quiet in West Porlock.”

I walked toward Allerford, and on the way fell into conversation with a woman feeding birds in her garden. She told me the way to Minehead—not the shortest way, but the prettiest way, she said. She had light hair and dark eyes. I said her house was beautiful. She said it was a guest house; then she laughed. “Why don’t you stay tonight?” She meant it and seemed eager, and then I was not sure what she was offering. I stood there and smiled back at her. The sun was shining gold on the grass and the birds were taking the crumbs in a frenzied way. It was not even one o’clock, and I had never stopped at a place this early in the day.

I said, “Maybe I’ll come back some time.”

“I’ll still be here,” she said, laughing a bit sadly.

There was an ancient bridge at Allerford. I bypassed it and cut into the woods, climbing toward the hill called Selworthy Beacon. The woods were full of singing birds, warblers and thrushes; and then I heard the unmistakable sound of a cuckoo, which was as clear as a clock, striking fifteen. The sun was strong, the gradient was easy, the bees were buzzing, there was a soft breeze; and I thought: This was what I was looking for when I set out this morning—though I had no idea I would find it here.

All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action. I always went along thinking: I’ll be all right, I’ll be interested, I’ll discover something, I won’t break a leg or get robbed, and at the end of the day I’ll find a nice old place to sleep. Everything is going to be fine, and even if it isn’t, it will be worthy of note—worth leaving home for. Sometimes the weather, even the thin rain of Devon, made it worth it. Or else the birdsong in sunlight, or the sound of my shoe soles on the pebbles of the downward path—here, for example, walking down North Hill through glades full of azaleas, which were bright purple. I continued over the humpy hills to Minehead.

Holiday Camp

TO THE EAST, BEYOND THE GRAY, PUDDLY FORESHORE—THE tide was out half a mile—I saw the bright flags of Butlin’s, Minehead, and vowed to make a visit. Ever since Bognor I had wanted to snoop inside a coastal holiday camp, but I had passed the fences and gates without going in. It was not possible to make a casual visit. Holiday camps were surrounded by prison fences, with coils of barbed wire at the top. There were dog patrols and BEWARE signs stenciled with skulls. The main entrances were guarded and had turnstiles and a striped barrier that was raised to let certain vehicles through. Butlin’s guests had to show passes in order to enter. The whole affair reminded me a little of Jonestown.

And these elaborate security measures fueled my curiosity. What exactly was going on in there? It was no use my peering through the chain-link fence—all I could see at this Butlin’s were the Boating Lake and the reception area and some snorers on deck chairs. Clearly, it was very large. Later I discovered that the camp was designed to accommodate fourteen thousand people. That was almost twice the population of Minehead! They called it “Butlinland” and they said it had everything.

I registered as a Day Visitor. I paid a fee. I was given a brochure and a booklet and Your Holiday Programme, with a list of the day’s events. The security staff seemed wary of me. I had ditched my knapsack in a boardinghouse, but I was still wearing my leather jacket and oily hiking shoes. My knees were muddy. So as not to alarm the gatekeepers, I had pocketed my binoculars. Most of the Butlin’s guests wore sandals and short sleeves, and some wore funny hats—holiday high spirits. The weather was overcast and cold and windy. The flags out front were as big as bed-sheets and made a continual cracking. I was the only person at Butlin’s dressed for this foul weather. I felt like a commando. It made some people there suspicious.

With its barracks-like buildings and its forbidding fences, it had the prison look of the Butlin’s at Bognor. A prison look was also an army-camp look, and just as depressing. This one was the more scary for being brightly painted. It had been tacked together out of plywood and tin panels in primary colors. I had not seen flimsier buildings in England. They were so ugly, they were not pictured anywhere in the Butlin’s brochure, but instead shown as simplified floor plans in blue diagrams. They were called “flatlets” and “suites.” The acres of barracks were called the Accommodation Area.

It really was like Jonestown! The Accommodation Area with the barracks was divided into camps—Green, Yellow, Blue, and Red Camp. There was a central dining room and a Nursery Center. There was a Camp Chapel. There was also a miniature railway and a chairlift and a monorail—all of them useful: it was a large area to cover on foot. It was just the sort of place the insane preacher must have imagined when he brought his desperate people to Guyana. It was self-contained and self-sufficient. With a fence that high, it had to be.

The Jonestown image was powerful, but Butlin’s also had the features of a tinselly New Jerusalem. This, I felt, would be the English coastal town of the future, if most English people had their way. It was already an English town of a sort—glamorized and less substantial than the real thing, but all the same recognizably an English town, with the usual landmarks, a cricket pitch, a football field, a launderette, a supermarket, a bank, a betting shop, and a number of take-away food joints. Of course, it was better organized and had more amenities than most English towns the same size—that was why it was popular. It was also a permanent funfair. One of Butlin’s boasts was “No dirty dishes to wash!” Another was “There is absolutely no need to queue!” No dishwashing, no standing in line—it came near to parody, like a vacation in a Polish joke. But these promises were a sort of timid hype; England was a country of modest expectations, and no dishes and no lines were part of the English dream.

It was not expensive—£178 ($313) a week for a family of four, and that included two meals a day. It was mostly families—young parents with small children. They slept in a numbered cubicle in the barracks at one of the four camps, and they ate at a numbered table in one of the dining rooms, and they spent the day amusing themselves.

The Windsor Sports Ground (most of the names had regal echoes, an attempt at respectability) and the Angling Lake were not being used by anyone the day I was there. But the two snooker and table tennis rooms were very busy; each room was about half the size of a football field and held scores of tables. No waiting! There was bingo in the Regency Building, in a massive room with a glass wall, which was the bottom half of the indoor swimming pool—fluttering legs and skinny feet in water the color of chicken bouillon. There was no one on the Boating Lake, and no one in the outdoor pool, and the chapel was empty. The Crazy Golf was not popular. So much for the free amusements.

“Yes, it is true, nearly everything at Butlin’s is free!” the brochure said.

But what most of the people were doing was not free. They were feeding coins into fruit machines and one-armed bandits in the Fun Room. They were playing pinball. They were also shopping for stuffed toys and curios, or buying furs in the Fur Shop, or getting their hair done at the Hair-dressing Salon. They were eating. The place had four fish-and-chip shops. There were tea shops, coffee bars, and candy stores. They cost money, but people seemed to be spending fairly briskly. They were also drinking. There were about half a dozen bars. The Embassy Bar (Greek statues, fake chandeliers, red wallpaper) was quite full, although it was the size of a barn. The Exmoor Bar had 157 tables and probably held a thousand drinkers. It was the scale of the place that was impressive—the scale and the shabbiness.

It was not Disneyland. Disneyland was a blend of technology and farce. It was mostly fantasy, a tame kind of surrealism, a comfortable cartoon in three dimensions. But the more I saw of Butlin’s, the more it resembled English life; it was very close to reality in its narrowness, its privacies, and its pleasures. It was England without work—leisure had been overtaken by fatigue and dull-wittedness: electronic games were easier than sports, and eating junk food had become another recreation. No one seemed to notice how plain the buildings were, how tussocky the grass was, or that everywhere there was a pervasive sizzle and smell of food frying in hot fat.

In that sense, too, it was like a real town. People walked around believing that it was all free; but most pastimes there cost money, and some were very expensive—like a ticket to the cabaret show that night, Freddie and the Dreamers, a group of middle-aged musicians who were a warmed-over version of their sixties’ selves.

If it had a futuristic feel, it was the deadened imagination and the zombie-like attitude of the strolling people, condemned to a week or two of fun under cloudy skies. And it was also the arrangements for children. The kids were taken care of—they could be turned loose in Butlin’s in perfect safety. They couldn’t get hurt or lost. There was a high fence around the camp. There was a Nursery Chalet Patrol and a Child Listening Service and a large Children’s Playground. In the planned cities of the future, provisions like this would be made for children.

Most of the events were for children, apart from whist and bingo. As a Day Visitor, I had my choice of the Corona Junior Fancy Dress Competition, a Kids’ Quiz Show, the Trampoline Test, the Donkey Derby, or the Beaver and Junior Talent Contest Auditions. The Donkey Derby was being held in a high wind on Gaiety Green—screaming children and plodding animals. I went to the talent show auditions in the Gaiety Revue Theatre. A girl of eight did a suggestive dance to a lewd pop song; two sisters sang a song about Jesus; Amanda and Kelly sang “Daisy”; and Miranda recited a poem much too fast. Most of the parents were elsewhere—playing the one-armed bandits and drinking beer.

I wandered into the Camp Chapel (“A Padre is available in the Centre at all times”). There was a notice stuck to the chapel door. At all three services prayers are-being said for our Forces in the Southern Atlantic. I scrutinized the Visitors’ Book. It asked for nationality, and people had listed “Welsh” or “Cornish” or “English” or “Scottish” next to their names. There was a scattering of Irish. But after the middle of April people had started to put “British” for nationality—mat was after the Falklands War had begun.

I found three ladies having tea in the Regency Building: Daphne Bunsen, from Bradford, said, “We don’t talk about this Falklands business here, ’cause we’re on holiday. It’s a right depressing soobject.”

“Anyway,” Mavis Hattery said, “there’s only one thing to say.”

What was that?

“I say, ‘Get it over with! Stop playing cat and mouse!’ ” Mrs. Bunsen said they loved Butlin’s. They had been here before and would certainly come back. Their sadness was they could not stay longer. “And Mavis’s room is right posh!”

“I paid a bit extra,” Mrs. Hattery said. “I have a fitted carpet in my shally.”

It was easy to mock Butlin’s for its dreariness and its brainless pleasures. It was an inadequate answer to leisure, but there were scores of similar camps all around the coast, so there was no denying its popularity. It combined the security and equality of prison with the vulgarity of an amusement park. I asked children what their parents were doing. Usually the father was playing billiards and the mother was shopping, but many said their parents were sleeping—having a kip. Sleeping until noon, not having to cook or mind children, and being a few steps away from the fish-and-chip shop, the bar, and the betting shop—it was a sleazy paradise in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo. In time to come, there would be more holiday camps on the British coast—“Cheap and cheerful,” Daphne Bunsen said.

Butlin’s was staffed by “Redcoats”—young men and women who wore red blazers. It was a Redcoat named Rod Firsby who told me that the camp could accommodate fourteen thousand people (“but nine thousand is about average”). Where did the people come from? I asked. He said they came from all over. It was when I asked him what sorts of jobs they did that he laughed.

“Are you joking, sunshine?” he said.

I said no, I wasn’t.

He said, “Half the men here are unemployed. That’s the beauty of Butlin’s—you can pay for it with your dole money.”

Happy Little Llanelli

LLANELLI HAD LOOKED PROMISING ON THE MAP. IT WAS IN the southwest corner of Dyfed, on the estuary of the Loughor River. I walked from the station to the docks. The town was musty-smelling and dull and made of decayed bricks. My map had misled me. I wanted to leave, but first I wanted to buy a guidebook to Wales in order to avoid such mistakes in the future.

I passed a store with textbooks in the window. Dead flies lay on their sides on the book covers; they had not been swatted, but had simply starved; they seemed asleep. There were shelves in this bookstore, but not many books. There was no salesperson. A husky voice came from behind a beaded curtain.

“In here.”

I went in. A man was whispering into a telephone. He paid no attention to me. There were plenty of books in here. On the covers were pictures of naked people. The room smelled of cheap paper and ink. The magazines were in cellophane wrappers. They showed breasts and rubber underwear, and there were children on some of them—the titles suggested that the naked tots were violated inside. No guidebooks here, but as this pornography shop was Welsh, the door had a bell that went bing-bong! in a cheery way as I left.

Welsh politeness was softhearted and smiling. Even Llanelli’s Skinheads were well behaved, and the youths with swastikas on their leather jackets and bleached hair and earrings or green hair and T-shirts saying ANARCHY!—even they seemed sweet-natured. And how amazing that the millions of Welsh, who shared about a dozen surnames, were the opposite of anonymous. They were conspicuous individuals and at a personal level tried hard to please. “You’re a gentleman!” one man would cry to another, greeting him on the street.

At Jenkins the Bakers (“Every bite—pure delight”) I saw a strawberry tart with clotted cream on top. Were they fresh strawberries?

“Oh, yes, fresh this morning,” Mrs. Jenkins said.

I asked for one.

“But they’re thirty pence, darling,” Mrs. Jenkins said, warning me and not moving. She expected me to tell her to forget it. She was on my side in the most humane way, and gave a commiserating smile, as if to say, It’s a shocking amount of money for a strawberry tart!

When I bought two, she seemed surprised. It must have been my knapsack and my vagabond demeanor. I went around the corner and stuffed them into my mouth.

“Good morning—I mean, good evening!” Mr. Maddocks the stationmaster said at Llanelli Station. “I knew I’d get it right in the end. It’s patience you want!”

The rest of the people on the platform were speaking Welsh, but on seeing the train draw in—perhaps it was the excitement—they lapsed into English.

Tenby

THE ELEGANT HOUSES OF TENBY STANDING TALL ON THE cliff reminded me of beautifully bound books on a high shelf—their bay windows had the curvature of book spines. The town was elevated on a promontory, so the sea on three sides gave its light a penetrating purity that reached the market square and fortified the air with the tang of ocean-washed rocks. It was odd that a place so pretty should also be so restful, and yet that was the case. But Tenby was more than pretty. It was so picturesque, it looked like a watercolor of itself.

It had not been preserved by the fastidious tyrants who so often took over British villages—the new class who moved in and gutted the houses, and then, after restoring the thatched roofs and mullioned windows, hid a chromium kitchen in the inglenook, which ran on microchips. Such people could make a place so picturesque that it was uninhabitable. Tenby had been maintained, and it had mellowed; it was still sturdy, and I was glad I had found it. But it was the sort of place that denied a sense of triumph to the person who secretly felt he had discovered it—because its gracefulness was well known; it had been painted and praised; it was old even in Tudor times; and it had produced Augustus John (who wrote about Tenby in his autobiography, Chiaroscuro), as well as the inventor of the equal sign (=) in mathematics, Robert Recorde. But, then, there were no secret places in Britain that I had seen; there were only forgotten places, and places that were being buried or changed by our harsh century.

Tenby had been spared, and it was the more pleasing for being rather quiet and empty. I walked around dreamily. For the first time since I had set out on this trip I felt that a watering place was fulfilling its purpose—calming me, soothing me, making me want to snore over a book on a veranda with a sea view.

Naked Lady

MY STRANGE ENCOUNTER TOOK PLACE AT THE HOTEL Harlech, a dismal semiruin not far from the silted-up river in Cardigan. It had been closed for years, and it smelled that way—of mice and unwashed clothes. The smell of rags is like the smell of dead men anyway, but this was compounded with the smells of dirt and wood smoke and the slow river. I knew as soon as I checked in that it was a mistake. I was shown to my room by a sulking girl of fifteen, who had a fat pouty face and a potbelly.

“It seems a little quiet,” I said.

Gwen said, “You’re the only guest.”

“In the whole hotel?”

“In the whole hotel.”

My bed smelled, too, as though it had been slept in—just slept in recently, someone having crawled out a little while ago, leaving it warm and disgusting.

The owner of the Harlech was a winking woman with a husky laugh, named Reeny. She kept a purse in the cleavage between her breasts; she smoked while she was eating; she talked about her boyfriend—“My boyfriend’s been all around the world on ships.” Reeny’s boyfriend was a pale unshaven man of fifty who limped through the hotel, his shirttails out, groaning because he could never find his hairbrush. His name was Lloyd, and he was balding. Lloyd seldom spoke to me, but Reeny was irrepressible, always urging me to come down to the bar for a drink.

The bar was a darkened room with torn curtains and a simple table in the center. There were usually two tattooed youths and two old men at the table, drinking beer with Lloyd. Reeny acted as barmaid, using a tin tray. And it was she who changed the records: the music was loud and terrible, but the men had no conversation, and they looked haggard and even rather ill.

The unexpected thing was that Reeny was very cheerful and hospitable. The hotel was dirty and her food unspeakable and the dining room smelled of urine, but Reeny was kind, and she loved to talk, and she spoke of improving the hotel, and she knew that Lloyd was a complaining old fake. Relax, enjoy yourself, have another helping, Reeny said. She had the right spirit, but the hotel was a mess. “This is Paul—he’s from America,” Reeny said, and winked at me. She was proud of me. That thought made me very gloomy.

One night she introduced me to Ellie. She was red-eyed and very fat and had a gravelly voice; she was somewhat toothless and freckled; she came from Swansea. “Aye,” she said. “Swansea’s a bloody bog.” Ellie was drunk—and she was deaf in the way drunks often are. Reeny was talking about America, but Ellie was still mumbling about Swansea.

“At least we’re not tight,” Ellie said. “Aye, we’re careful, but the Cardies are tight.”

“That’s us,” Reeny said. “Cardies, from Cardigan. Aye, we’re tighter than the Scots.”

Ellie screwed up her face to show how tight the Cardies were, and then she demanded to know why I was not drunk—and she appealed to the silent, haggard men, who stared back at her with dull damp eyes. Ellie was wearing a baggy gray sweater. She finished her pint of beer and then wiped her hands on her sweater.

“What do you think of the Cardies?” she said.

“Delightful,” I said. But I thought, Savages.

At midnight they were still drinking.

“I’m going upstairs,” I said.

“None of the rooms have locks,” Reeny said. “That’s why there are no keys. See?”

Ellie said, “Aarrgh, it’s a quiet place, Reen!”

“Too bloody quiet, I say,” Reeny said. “We have to drive to Saundersfoot for a little nightlife.”

Saundersfoot was thirty-three miles away.

“What is it, Lloyd?” Reeny said.

Lloyd had been grinning.

He said, “He looks worried,” meaning me.

“I’m not worried,” I said.

This always sounds to me a worried man’s protest. I stood there, trying to smile. The four local men at the table merely stared back with their haggard faces.

“There’s no locks in this place,” Lloyd said, with pleasure.

Then Reeny screeched, “We won’t rob you or rape you!”

She said it so loudly that it was a few seconds before I could take it in. She was vivacious but ugly.

I recovered and said, “What a shame. I was looking forward to one or the other.”

Reeny howled at this.

In the sour bed, I could hear rock music coming from the bar, and sometimes shouts. But I was so tired, I dropped off to sleep, and I dreamed of Cape Cod. I was with my cousin and saying to her, “Why do people go home so early? This is the only good place in the world. I suppose they’re worried about traffic. I’d never leave—”

Then something tore. It was a ripping sound in the room. I sat up and saw a tousled head. I thought it was a man. It was a man’s rough face, a squashed nose, a crooked mouth. I recognized the freckles and the red eyes. It was Ellie.

I said, “What are you doing?”

She was crouching so near to the bed that I could not see her body. The ripping sound came again—a zipper on my knapsack. Ellie was slightly turned away from me. She did not move. When I saw that it was Ellie and not a man, I relaxed—and I knew that my wallet and money were in my leather jacket, hanging on a hook across the room.

She said, “Where am I?”

“You’re in my room.”

She said, turning to me, “What are you doing here?”

“This is my room!”

Her questions had been drowsy in a theatrical way. She was still crouching near my knapsack. She was breathing hard.

I said, “Leave that thing alone.”

“Aarrgh,” she groaned, and plumped her knees against the floor.

I wanted her to go away.

I said, “I’m trying to sleep.” Why was I being so polite?

She groaned again, a more convincing groan than the last one, and she said, “Where have I left me clothes?”

And she stood up. She was a big woman with big jolting breasts and freckles on them. She was, I saw, completely naked.

“Close your eyes,” she said, and stepped closer.

I said, “It’s five in the morning, for God’s sake.”

The sun had just struck the curtains.

“Aarrgh, I’m sick,” she said. “Move over.”

I said, “You don’t have any clothes on.”

“You can close your eyes,” she said.

I said, “What were you doing to my knapsack?”

“Looking for me clothes,” she said.

I said in a pleading way, “Give me a break, will you?”

“Don’t look at me nakedness,” she said.

“I’m going to close my eyes,” I said, “and when I open them I don’t want to see you in this room.”

Her naked flesh went flap-flap like a rubber raincoat as she tramped across the hard floor. I heard her go—she pulled the door shut—and then I checked to see that my money was safe and my knapsack unviolated. The zippers were open, but nothing was gone. I remembered what Reeny had screamed at me: We won’t rob you or rape you!

At breakfast, Reeny said, “I’ve not been up at this hour for ten year! Look, it’s almost half-eight!”

Reeny had a miserable cough and her eyes were sooty with mascara. Her Welsh accent was stronger this morning, too.

I told her about Ellie.

She said, “Aye, is that so? I’ll pull her leg about that! Aye, that is funny.”

An old woman came to the door. She was unsteady, she peered in. Reeny asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted a pint of beer.

“It’s half-eight in the morning!” Reeny said.

“A half a pint, then,” the old woman said.

“And it’s Sunday!” Reeny said. She turned to me and said, “We’re dry on a Sunday around here. That’s why it’s so quiet. But you can get a drink at St. Dogmaels.”

The woman looked pathetic. She said that in the coming referendum she would certainly vote for a change in the licensing law. She was not angry, but had that aged, beaten look that passes for patience.

“Oh, heavens!” Reeny said. “What shall I do, Paul? You tell me.”

I said to the old woman, “Have a cup of tea.”

“The police have been after me,” Reeny said. “They’re always looking in.” Reeny walked to the cupboard. “I could lose my license.” She took out a bottle of beer and poured it. “These coppers have no bloody mercy.” The glass was full. “Forty-five pence,” she said.

The woman drank that and then bought two more bottles. She paid and left, without another word. She had taken no pleasure in the drink and there was no satisfaction in having wheedled the beer out of Reeny on a dry day in Cardigan—in fact, she had not wheedled, but had merely stood there gaping in a paralyzed way.

I said, “It’s a hell of a breakfast—a beer.”

“She’s an alcoholic,” Reeny said. “She’s thirty-seven. Doesn’t look it, does she? Take me, I’m thirty-three and no one believes it. My boyfriend says I’ve got the figure of a girl of twenty. You’re not going, are you?”

Jan Morris

EIGHT MORE MILES ON THIS SUNNY DAY AND WE DREW INTO Criccieth, where I hopped out of the train. I owned a guidebook that said, “Criccieth: For several years this small town was the home of James (now Jan) Morris, probably the finest living travel writer.” The “James (now Jan)” needed no explanation, since the story of how she changed from a man to a woman in a clinic in Casablanca was told in her book Conundrum, 1974. She still lived near Criccieth, outside the village of Llanystumdwy, in what was formerly the stables of the manor house, looking northward to the mountains of Eryri and southward to Cardigan Bay.

I seldom looked people up in foreign countries—I could never believe they really wanted to see me; I had an uncomfortable sense that I was interrupting something intimate—but I did look up Jan Morris. She had written a great deal about Wales, and I was here, and I knew her vaguely. Her house was built like an Inca fort, of large black rocks and heavy beams. She had written, “It is built in the old Welsh way, with rough gigantic stones, piled one upon the other in an almost natural mass, with a white wooden cupola on top. Its architecture is of the variety known these days as ‘vernacular,’ meaning that no professional architect has ever had a hand in it.”

She was wearing a straw calypso hat tipped back on her bushy hair, and a knit jersey, and white slacks. It was a very hot day and she was dressed for it. There is a certain educated English voice that is both correct and malicious. Jan Morris has such a voice. It was not deep but it was languid, and the maleness that still trembled in it made it sultry and attractive. There was nothing ponderous about her. She shrugged easily and was a good listener, and she laughed as a cat might—full-throated and with a little hiss of pleasure, stiffening her body. She was kind, reckless, and intelligent.

Her house was very neat and full of books and pictures. “I have filled it with Cymreictod—Welshness.” Yes, solid country artifacts and beamed ceilings and a NO SMOKING sign in Welsh—she did not allow smoking in her house. Her library was forty-two feet long and the corresponding room upstairs was her study, with a desk and a stereo.

Music mattered to her in an unusual way. She once wrote, “Animists believe that the divine is to be found in every living thing, but I go one further; I am an inanimist, holding that even lifeless objects can contain immortal yearnings.… I maintain, for instance, that music can permanently influence a building, so I often leave the record player on when I am out of the house, allowing its themes and melodies to soak themselves into the fabric.”

Perhaps she was serious. Inanimate objects can seem to possess something resembling vitality, or a mood that answers your own. But melodies soaking into wood and stone? “My kitchen adores Mozart,” the wise guy might say, or, “The parlor’s into Gladys Knight and the Pips.” But I did not say anything; I just listened approvingly.

“I suppose it’s very selfish, only one bedroom,” she said.

But it was the sort of house everyone wanted, on its own, at the edge of a meadow, solid as could be, well-lighted, pretty, painted, cozy, with an enormous library and study and a four-poster: perfect for a solitary person and one cat. Hers was called Solomon.

Then she said, “Want to see my grave?”

I said of course and we went down to a cool shaded wood by a riverside. Jan Morris was a nimble walker: she had climbed to twenty thousand feet with the first successful Everest expedition in 1953. Welsh woods were full of small twisted oaks and tangled boughs and moist soil and dark ferny corners. We entered a boggier area of straight green trees and speckled shade.

“I always think this is very Japanese,” she said.

It did look that way, the idealized bushy landscape of the woodblock print, the little riverside grotto.

She pointed across the river and said, “That’s my grave—right there, that little island.”

It was like a beaver’s dam of tree trunks padded all around with moss, and more ferns, and the river slurping and gurgling among boulders.

“There’s where I’m going to be buried—or rather scattered. It’s nice, don’t you think? Elizabeth’s ashes are going to be scattered there, too.” Jan Morris was married to Elizabeth before the sex change.

It seemed odd that someone so young should be thinking of death. She was fifty-six, and the hormones she took made her look a great deal younger—early forties, perhaps. But it was a very Welsh thought, this plan for ashes and a grave site. It was a nation habituated to ghostliness and sighing and mourning. I was traveling on the Celtic fringe, where they still believed in giants.

What did I think of her grave? she asked.

I said the island looked as though it would wash away in a torrent and that her ashes would end up in Cardigan Bay. She laughed and said it did not matter.

At our first meeting about a year before, in London, she had said suddenly, “I am thinking of taking up a life of crime,” and she had mentioned wanting to steal something from Woolworth’s. It had not seemed so criminal to me, but over lunch I asked her whether she had done anything about it.

“If I had taken up a life of crime I would be hardly likely to tell you, Paul!”

“I was just curious,” I said.

She said, “These knives and forks. I stole them from Pan American Airways. I told the stewardess I was stealing them. She said she didn’t care.”

They were the sort of knives and forks you get on an airplane with your little plastic tray of soggy meat and gravy.

Talk of crime led us to talk of arson by Welsh nationalists. I asked why only cottages were burned, when there were many tin caravans—as the English called mobile homes—on the coast that would make a useful blaze. She said her son was very pro-Welsh and patriotic and would probably consider that.

I said that the Welsh seemed like one family.

“Oh, yes, that’s what my son says. He thinks as long as he is in Wales he’s safe. He’ll always be taken care of. He can go to any house and he will be taken in and fed and given a place to sleep.”

“Like the travelers in Arabia who walk up to a Bedouin’s tent and say, ‘I am a guest of God,’ in order to get hospitality. Ana dheef Allah.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s probably true—it is like a family here in Wales.”

And like all families, I said, sentimental and suspicious and quarrelsome and secretive. But Welsh nationalism was at times like a certain kind of feminism, very monotonous and one-sided.

She said, “I suppose it does look that way, if you’re a man.”

I could have said: Didn’t it look that way to you when you were a man?

She said, “As for the caravans and tents, yes, they look awful. But the Welsh don’t notice them particularly. They are not noted for their visual sense. And those people, the tourists, are seeing Wales. I’m glad they’re here, in a way, so they can see this beautiful country and understand the Welsh.”

Given the horror of the caravans, it was a very generous thought, and it certainly was not my sentiment. I always thought of Edmund Gosse saying, “No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood.” The shore was fragile and breakable and easily poisoned.

Jan Morris was still speaking of the Welsh. “Some people say that Welsh nationalism is a narrow movement, cutting Wales off from the world. But it is possible to see it as liberating Wales and giving it an importance—of bringing it into the world.”

We finished lunch and went outside. She said, “If only you could see the mountains. I know it’s boring when people say that—but they really are spectacular. What do you want to do?”

I said that I had had a glimpse of Portmeirion from the train and wanted a closer look, if there was time.

We drove there in her car and parked under the pines. She had known the architect Clough Williams-Ellis very well. “He was a wonderful man,” she said. “On his deathbed he was still chirping away merrily. But he was very worried about what people would say about him. Funny man! He wrote his own obituary! He had it there with him as he lay dying. When I visited him, he asked me to read it. Of course, there was nothing unflattering in it. I asked him why he had gone to all the trouble of writing his own obituary.

“He said, ‘Because I don’t know what The Times will write in the obituary they do of me.”

We walked through the gateway and down the stairs to the little Italian fantasy town on this Welsh hillside.

“He was obsessed that they would get something wrong or be critical. He had tried every way he could of getting hold of his Times obituary—but failed, of course. They’re always secret.”

She laughed. It was that hearty malicious laugh.

“The funny thing was, I was the one who had written his obituary for The Times. They’re all written carefully beforehand, you know.”

I said, “And you didn’t tell him?”

“No.” Her face was blank. Was she smiling behind it? “Do you think I should have?”

I said, “But he was on his deathbed.”

She laughed again. She said, “It doesn’t matter.”

There was a carved bust of Williams-Ellis in a niche, and resting crookedly on its dome was a hand-scrawled sign saying, THE BAR UPSTAIRS IS OPEN.

Jan said, “He would have liked that.”

We walked through the place, under arches, through gateways, past Siamese statuary and Greek columns and gardens and pillars and colonnades; we walked around the piazza.

“The trouble with him was that he didn’t know when to stop.”

It was a sunny day. We lingered at the blue Parthenon, the Chantry, the Hercules statue, the town hall. You think, What is it doing here? More cottages.

“Once, when we lost a child, we stayed up there in that white cottage.” She meant herself and Elizabeth, when they were husband and wife.

There was more. Another triumphal arch, the Prior’s Lodge, pink and green walls.

Jan said, “It’s supposed to make you laugh.”

But instead, it was making me very serious, for this folly had taken over forty years to put together, and yet it still had the look of a faded movie set.

“He even designed the cracks and planned where the mossy parts should be. He was very meticulous and very flamboyant, too, always in one of these big, wide-brimmed antediluvian hats and yellow socks.”

I was relieved to get out of Portmeirion; I had been feeling guilty, with the uncomfortable suspicion that I had been sight-seeing—something I had vowed I would not do.

Jan said, “Want to see my gravestone?”

It was the same sudden, proud, provocative, mirthful way that she had said, Want to see my grave?

I said of course.

The stone was propped against the wall of her library. I had missed it before. The lettering was very well done, as graceful as the engraving on a bank note. It was inscribed Jan & Elizabeth Morris. In Welsh and English, above and below the names, it said,

Here Are Two Friends

At the End of One Life

I said it was as touching as Emily Dickinson’s gravestone in Amherst, Massachusetts, which said nothing more than Called Back.

When I left, and we stood at the railway station at Porthmadog, Jan said, “If only these people knew who was getting on the train!”

I said, “Why should they care?”

She grinned. She said, “That knapsack—is that all you have?”

I said yes. We talked about traveling light. I said the great thing was to have no more than you could carry comfortably and never to carry formal clothes—suits, ties, shiny shoes, extra sweaters: what sort of travel was that?

Jan Morris said, “I just carry a few frocks. I squash them into a ball—they don’t weigh anything. It’s much easier for a woman to travel light than a man.”

There was no question that she knew what she was talking about, for she had been both a man and a woman. She smiled at me, and I felt a queer thrill when I kissed her good-bye.

Railway Buff

“I LOVE STEAM, DON’T YOU?” STAN WIGBETH SAID TO ME ON the Ffestiniog Railway, and then he leaned out of the window. He was not interested in my answer, which was, “Up to a point.” Mr. Wigbeth smiled and ground his teeth in pleasure when the whistle blew. He said there was nothing to him more beautiful than a steam “loco.” He told me they were efficient and brilliantly made; but engine drivers had described to me how uncomfortable they could be, and how horrible on winter nights, because it was impossible to drive most steam engines without sticking your face out the side window every few minutes.

I wanted Mr. Wigbeth to admit that they were outdated and ox-like, dramatic-looking but hell to drive; they were the choo-choo fantasies of lonely children; they were fun but filthy. Our train was pulled through the Welsh mountains by a Fairlie, known to the buffs as a “double engine”—two boilers—“the most uncomfortable engine I’ve ever driven,” a railwayman once told me. It was very hot for the driver because of the position of the boilers. The footplate of the Fairlie was like an Oriental oven for poaching ducks in their own sweat. Mr. Wigbeth did not agree with any of this. Like many other railway buffs, he detested our century.

This had originally been a tram line, he told me; all the way from Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog—horse trams, hauling slate from the mountain quarries. Then it was named the Narrow Gauge Railway and opened to passengers in 1869. It was closed in 1946 and eventually reopened in stages. The line was now—this month—completely open.

“We’re lucky to be here,” Mr. Wigbeth said, and checked his watch—a pocket watch, of course: the railway buff’s timepiece. He was delighted by what he saw. “Right on time!”

It was a beautiful trip to Blaenau, on the hairpin curves of the steep Snowdonia hills and through the thick evening green of the Dwyryd Valley. To the southeast, amid the lovely mountains, was the Trawsfynydd Nuclear Power Station, three or four gigantic gray slabs. An English architect, noted for his restrained taste, had been hired in 1959 to make it prettier, or at least bearable, but he had failed. Perhaps he should have planted vines. Yet this monstrosity emphasized the glory of these valleys. I found the ride restful, even with the talkative Mr. Wigbeth beside me. Then he was silenced by a mile-long tunnel. The light at the end of the tunnel was Blaenau Ffestiniog, at the head of the valley.

“Where are you off to, then?” Mr. Wigbeth asked.

“I’m catching the next train to Llandudno Junction.”

“It’s a diesel,” he said, and made a sour face.

“So what?”

“I don’t call that a train,” he said. “I call that a tin box!”

He was disgusted and angry. He put on his engine driver’s cap and his jacket with the railway lapel pins, and after a last look at his conductor-type pocket watch, he got into his little Ford Cortina and drove twenty-seven stop-and-go miles back to Bangor.

Llandudno

I WAS NOT FRIGHTENED AT THE HOTEL IN LLANDUDNO UNTIL I was taken upstairs by the pockmarked clerk, and then I sat in the dusty room alone and listened. The only sound was my breathing, from having climbed the four flights of stairs. The room was small; there were no lights in the passageway; the wallpaper had rust stains that could have been spatters of blood. The ceiling was high, the room narrow: it was like sitting at the bottom of a well. I went downstairs.

The clerk was watching television in the lounge—he called it a lounge. He did not speak to me. He was watching “Hill Street Blues,” a car chase, some shouting. I looked at the register and saw what I had missed before—that I was the only guest in this big, dark forty-room hotel. I went outside and wondered how to escape. Of course I could have marched in and said, “I’m not happy here—I’m checking out,” but the clerk might have made trouble and charged me. Anyway, I wanted to punish him for running such a scary place.

I walked inside and upstairs, grabbed my knapsack, and hurried to the lounge, rehearsing a story that began, “This is my bird-watching gear. I’ll be right back—” The clerk was still watching television. As I passed him (he did not look up), the hotel seemed to me the most sinister building I had ever been in. On my way downstairs I had had a moment of panic when, faced by three closed doors in a hallway, I imagined myself in one of those corridor labyrinths of the hotel in a nightmare, endlessly tramping torn carpets and opening doors to discover again and again that I was trapped.

I ran down the Promenade to the bandstand and stood panting while the band played “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” I wondered if I had been followed by the clerk. I paid twenty pence for a deck chair, but feeling that I was being watched (perhaps it was my knapsack and oily shoes?), I abandoned the chair and continued down the Promenade. Later, I checked into the Queens Hotel, which looked vulgar enough to be safe.

Llandudno was the sort of place that inspired old-fashioned fears of seaside crime. It made me think of poisoning and suffocation, screams behind varnished doors, creatures scratching at the wainscoting. I imagined constantly that I was hearing the gasps of adulterers from the dark windows of those stuccoed terraces that served as guest houses—naked people saying gloatingly, “We shouldn’t be doing this!” In all ways, Llandudno was a perfectly preserved Victorian town. It was so splendid-looking that it took me several days to find out that it was in fact very dull.

It had begun as a fashionable watering place and developed into a railway resort. It was still a railway resort, full of people strolling on the Promenade and under the glass-and-iron canopies of the shop fronts on Mostyn Street. It had a very old steamer (“Excursions to the Isle of Man”) moored at its pier head, and very old hotels, and a choice of very old entertainments—Old Mother Riley at the Pavilion, the Welsh National Opera at the Astra Theatre doing Tosca, or Yorkshire comedians in vast saloon bars telling very old jokes. “We’re going to have a loovely boom competition,” a toothy comedian was telling his drunken audience in a public house near Happy Valley. A man was blindfolded and five girls selected, and the man had to judge—by touching them—which one’s bum was the shapeliest. It caused hilarity and howls of laughter; the girls were shy—one simply walked offstage; and at one point some men were substituted and the blindfolded man crouched and began searching the men’s bums as everyone jeered. And then the girl with the best bum was selected as the winner and awarded a bottle of carbonated cider called Pomagne.

I overheard two elderly ladies outside at the rail, looking above Llandudno Bay. They were Miss Maltby and Miss Thorn, from Glossop, near Manchester.

“It’s a nice moon,” Miss Maltby said.

“Aye,” Miss Thorn said. “It is.”

“But that’s not what we saw earlier this evening.”

“No. That was the sun.”

Miss Maltby said, “You told me it was the moon.”

“It was all that mist, you see,” Miss Thorn said. “But I know now it was the sun.”

Looking Seaward

NOW I SAW BRITISH PEOPLE LYING STIFFLY ON THE BEACH like dead insects, or huddled against the canvas windbreaks they hammered into the sand with rented mallets, or standing on cliffs and kicking stones roly-poly into the sea—and I thought: They are symbolically leaving the country.

Going to the coast was as far as they could comfortably go. It was the poor person’s way of going abroad—standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. It took a little imagination. I believed that these people were fantasizing that they were over there on the watery horizon, at sea. Most people on the Promenade walked with their faces averted from the land. Perhaps another of their coastal pleasures was being able to turn their backs on Britain. I seldom saw anyone with his back turned to the sea (it was the rarest posture on the coast). Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces, as if they had just left their native land.

Insulted England

THE REST OF THE COAST, FROM THE WINDOW OF THE TRAIN, was low and disfigured. There were small bleak towns like Parton and Harrington, and huge horrible ones like Workington, with its steelworks—another insolvent industry. And Maryport was just sad; it had once been an important coal and iron port, and great sailing ships had been built there in Victorian times. Now it was forgotten. Today there was so little shipbuilding on the British coast it could be said not to exist at all. But that was not so odd as the fact that I saw very few vessels in these harbors and ports—a rusty freighter, a battered trawler, some plastic sailboats—there was not much more, where once there had been hundreds of seagoing vessels.

I watched for more. What I saw was ugly and interesting, but before I knew what was happening, the line cut inland, passing bramble hedges and crows in fields of silage and small huddled-together farm buildings and church steeples in distant villages. We had left the violated coast, and now the mild countryside reasserted itself. It was green farms all the way to Carlisle—pretty and extremely dull.

KESWICK PUNKS, a scrawl said in Carlisle, blending Coleridge and Wordsworth with Johnny Rotten. But that was not so surprising. It was always in the fine old provincial towns and county seats that one saw the wildest-looking youths, the pink-haired boys and the girls in leopard-skin tights, the nose jewels and tattooed earlobes. I had seen green hair and swastikas in little Llanelli. I no longer felt that place names like Taunton or Exeter or Bristol were evocative of anything but graffiti-covered walls, like those of noble Carlisle, crowned with a castle and with enough battlements and city walls to satisfy the most energetic vandal. VIOLENT REVOLUTION, it said, and THE EXPLOITED and ANARCHY and SOCIAL SCUM. Perhaps they were pop groups? THE REJECTS, THE DEFECTS, THE OUTCASTS, THE DAMNED, and some bright new swastikas and THE BARMY ARMY. And on the ancient walls, SKINHEADS RULE!

Some of it was hyperbole, I supposed, but it was worth spending a day or so to examine it. It fascinated me as much as did the motorcycle gangs, who raced out of the oak forests and country lanes to terrorize villagers or simply to sit in a thatch-roofed pub, averting their sullen dirty faces. I did not take it personally when they refused to talk to me. They would not talk to anyone. They were English, they were country folk, they were shy. They were dangerous only by the dozen; individually they were rather sweet and seemed embarrassed to be walking down the High Street of dear old Haltwhistle in leather jackets inscribed HELL’S ANGELS or THE DAMNED.

The graffiti suggested that England—perhaps the whole of Britain—was changing into a poorer, more violent place. And it was easier to see this deterioration on the coast and in the provincial towns than in a large city. The messages were intended to be shocking, but England was practically unshockable, so the graffiti seemed merely a nuisance, an insult. And that was how I began to think of the whole country; if I had only one word to describe the expression of England’s face I would have said: insulted.

Mrs. Wheeney, Landlady

I EXPECTED FORMALITIES—CUSTOMS AND IMMIGRATION—Larne was so foreign-seeming, so dark and dripping, but there was not even a security check; just a gangway and the wet town beyond it. I wandered the streets for an hour, feeling like Billy Bones, and then rang the bell at a heavy-looking house displaying a window card saying VACANCIES. I had counted ten others, but this one I could tell had big rooms and big armchairs.

“Just off the ferry?” It was Mrs. Fraser Wheeney, plucking at her dress, hair in a bun, face like a seal pup—pouty mouth, soulful eyes, sixty-five years old; she had been sitting under her own pokerwork, REJOICE IN THE LORD ALWAYS, waiting for the doorbell to ring. “Twenty-one-fifteen it came in—been looking around town?”

Mrs. Wheeney knew everything, and her guest house was of the in-law sort—oppression and comfort blended, like being smothered with a pillow. But business was terrible: only one other room was taken. Why, she could remember when, just after the ferry came in, she would have been turning people away! That was before the recent troubles, and what a lot of harm they’d done! But Mrs. Wheeney was dead tired and had things on her mind—the wild storm last night.