To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels

Travel Is a Vanishing Act

TRAVEL IS A VANISHING ACT, A SOLITARY TRIP DOWN A pinched line of geography to oblivion.

What’s become of Waring

Since he gave us all the slip?

But a travel book is the opposite, the loner bouncing back bigger than life to tell the story of his experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and the going. It is motion given order by its repetition in words. That sort of disappearance is elemental, but few come back silent. And yet the convention is to telescope travel writing, to start — as so many novels do — in the middle of things, to beach the reader in a bizarre place without having first guided him there. “The white ants had made a meal of my hammock,” the book might begin; or “Down there, the Patagonian valley deepened to gray rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods.” Or, to choose actual first sentences at random from three books within arm’s reach:

It was towards noon on March 1, 1898, that I first found myself entering the narrow and somewhat dangerous harbour of Mombasa, on the east coast of Africa. (The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson)

“Welcome!” says the big signboard by the side of the road as the car completes the corkscrew ascent from the heat of the South Indian plains into an almost alarming coolness. (Ooty Preserved, by Mollie Panter-Downes)

From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra, capital of Ghana. (Which Tribe Do You Belong To? by Alberto Moravia)

My usual question, unanswered by these — by most — travel books, is: how did you get there? Even without the suggestion of a motive, a prologue is welcome, since the going is often as fascinating as the arrival. Yet, because curiosity implies delay, and delay is regarded as a luxury (but what’s the hurry, anyway?), we have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus? We have not lost faith in journeys from home, but the texts are scarce. Departure is described as a moment of panic and ticket-checking in an airport lounge, or a fumbled kiss at a gangway; then silence until, “From the balcony of my room I had a panoramic view over Accra …”

Travel, truly, is otherwise. From the second you wake up you are headed for the foreign place, and each step (now past the cuckoo clock, now down Fulton to the Fellsway) brings you closer. The Man-Eaters of Tsavo is about lions devouring Indian railway laborers in Kenya at the turn of the century. But I would bet there was a subtler and just as riveting book about the sea journey from Southampton to Mombasa. For his own reasons, Colonel Patterson left it unwritten.

The literature of travel has become measly, the standard opening that farcical nose-against-the-porthole view from the plane’s tilted fuselage. The joke opening, that straining for effect, is now so familiar it is nearly impossible to parody. How does it go? “Below us lay the tropical green, the flooded valley, the patchwork quilt of farms, and as we penetrated the cloud I could see dirt roads threading their way into the hills and cars so small they looked like toys. We circled the airport and, as we came in low for the landing, I saw the stately palms, the harvest, the rooftops of the shabby houses, the square fields stitched together with crude fences, the people like ants, the colorful …”

I have never found this sort of guesswork very convincing. When I am landing in a plane my heart is in my mouth; I wonder — doesn’t everyone? — if we are going to crash. My life flashes before me, a brief selection of sordid and pathetic trivialities. Then a voice tells me to stay in my seat until the plane comes to a complete stop; and when we land the loudspeakers break into an orchestral version of “Moon River.” I suppose if I had the nerve to look around I might see a travel writer scribbling, “Below us lay the tropical green—”

Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? Perhaps there is nothing to say. There is not much to say about most airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives. You didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time-traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright — from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, “What I’d really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair.”

But apologies are not necessary. An airplane flight may not be travel in any accepted sense, but it certainly is magic. Anyone with the price of a ticket can conjure up the castled crag of Drachenfels or the Lake Isle of Innisfree by simply using the right escalator at, say, Logan Airport in Boston — but it must be said that there is probably more to animate the mind, more of travel, in that one ascent on the escalator, than in the whole plane journey put together. The rest, the foreign country, what constitutes the arrival, is the ramp of an evil-smelling airport. If the passenger conceives of this species of transfer as travel and offers the public his book, the first foreigner the reader meets is either a clothes-grubbing customs man or a mustached demon at the immigration desk. Although it has become the way of the world, we still ought to lament the fact that airplanes have made us insensitive to space; we are encumbered, like lovers in suits of armor.

This is obvious. What interests me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as the trains run from Medford, Massachusetts; to end my book where travel books begin.

I had nothing better to do. I was at a stage I had grown to recognize in my writing life. I had just finished a novel, two years of indoor activity. Looking for something else to write, I found that instead of hitting nails on the head I was only striking a series of glancing blows. I hated cold weather. I wanted some sunshine. I had no job — what was the problem? I studied maps and there appeared to be a continuous track from my house in Medford to the Great Plateau of Patagonia in southern Argentina. There, in the town of Esquel, one ran out of railways. There was no line to Tierra del Fuego, but between Medford and Esquel rather a lot of them.

In this vagrant mood I boarded that first train, the one people took to work. They got off — their train trip was already over. I stayed on: mine was just beginning.

On the Frontier

IT WAS A RAINY NIGHT IN LAREDO — NOT LATE, AND YET THE place seemed deserted. A respectable frontier town, sprawling at the very end of the Amtrak line, it lay on a geometric grid of bright black streets on a dirt bluff that had the clawed and bulldozed look of a recent quarry. Below was the Rio Grande, a silent torrent slipping past Laredo in a cut as deep as a sewer; the south bank was Mexico.

The city lights were on, making the city’s emptiness emphatic. In that glare I could see its character as more Mexican than Texan. The lights flashed, suggesting life, as lights do. But where were the people? There were stoplights on every corner, WALK and WAIT signs winked on and off; the two-story shop fronts were floodlit, lamps burned in the windows of one-story houses; the streetlights made the puddles bright holes in slabs of wet road. The effect of this illumination was eerie, that of a plague city brightened against looters. The stores were heavily padlocked; the churches lit up in cannonades of arc lamps; there were no bars. All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.

No traffic waited at the red lights, no pedestrians at the crosswalks. And though the city was silent, in the drizzly air was an unmistakable heart murmur, the threep-threep of music being played far away. I walked and walked, from my hotel to the river, from the river to a plaza, and into the maze of streets until I was almost certain I was lost. I saw nothing. And it could be frightening, seeing — four blocks away — a blinking sign I took to be a watering hole, a restaurant, an event, a sign of life, and walking to it and arriving soaked and gasping to discover that it was a shoe store or a funeral parlor, shut for the night. So, walking the streets of Laredo, I heard only my own footsteps, the false courage of their click, their faltering at alleyways, their splashes as I briskly returned to the only landmark I knew — the river.

The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine from which every bush and tree had been removed in order to allow the police to patrol it. Three bridges linked the United States to Mexico here. Standing on the bluff I heard the threep-threep louder: it was coming from the Mexican side of the river, a just-discernible annoyance, like a neighbor’s radio. Now I could see plainly the twisting river, and it struck me that a river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.

Looking south across the river, I realized that I was looking toward another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there — music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people did things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope — the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.

A car drew up behind me. I was alarmed, then reassured when I saw it was a taxi. I gave the driver the name of my hotel and got in, but when I tried to make conversation he responded by grunting. He understood only his own language.

In Spanish I said, “It is quiet here.”

That was the first time on my trip that I spoke Spanish. After this, nearly every conversation I had was in Spanish. But in the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English. I have no patience with sentences that go, “ ‘Caramba!’ said the campesino, eating his empanada at the estancia …”

“Laredo,” said the taxi driver. He shrugged.

“Where are all the people?”

“The other side.”

“Nuevo Laredo?”

“Boys’ Town,” he said. The English took me by surprise, the phrase tickled me. He said, now in Spanish again, “There are one thousand prostitutes in the Zone.”

It was a round number, but I was convinced. And that of course explained what had happened to this city. After dark, Laredo slipped into Nuevo Laredo, leaving the lights on. It was why Laredo looked respectable, even genteel, in a rainswept and mildewed way: the clubs, the bars, the brothels, were across the river. The red-light district was ten minutes away, in another country.

BUT THERE WAS MORE TO THIS MORAL SPELLED OUT IN TRANSPONTINE geography than met the eye. If the Texans had the best of both worlds in decreeing that the fleshpots should remain on the Mexican side of the International Bridge — the river flowing, like the erratic progress of a tricky argument, between vice and virtue — the Mexicans had the sense of tact to keep Boys’ Town camouflaged by decrepitude, on the other side of the tracks, another example of the geography of morality. Divisions everywhere: no one likes to live next door to a whorehouse. And yet both cities existed because of Boys’ Town. Without the whoring and racketeering, Nuevo Laredo would not have had enough municipal funds to plant geraniums around the statue of its madly gesturing patriot in the plaza, much less advertise itself as a bazaar of wickerwork and guitar-twanging folklore — not that anyone ever went to Nuevo Laredo to be sold baskets. And Laredo required the viciousness of its sister city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had the airport and the churches, Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist David Ricardo (1772–1823).

At first glance, this looked like the typical sort of mushroom-and-dunghill relationship that exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. But the longer I thought about it the more Laredo seemed like all of the United States, and Nuevo Laredo all of Latin America. This frontier was more than an example of cozy hypocrisy; it demonstrated all one needed to know about the morality of the Americas, the relationship between the puritanical efficiency north of the border, and the bumbling and passionate disorder — the anarchy of sex and hunger — south of it. It was not as simple as that, since there was obviously villainy and charity in both, and yet crossing the river (the Mexicans don’t call it the Rio Grande; they call it the Rio Bravo de Norte), no more than an idle traveler making his way south with a suitcase of dirty laundry, a sheaf of railway timetables, a map, and a pair of leakproof shoes, I felt as if I was acting out a significant image. Crossing a national boundary and seeing such a difference on the other side had something to do with it: truly, every human feature there had the resonance of metaphor.

Lost Lover in Veracruz

I HAD PLANNED TO GET TO BED EARLY IN ORDER TO BE UP AT dawn to buy my ticket to Tapachula. It was when I switched the light off that I heard the music; darkness gave the sounds clarity, and it was too vibrant to be coming from a radio. It was a strong, full-throated brass band:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,

How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?

“Pomp and Circumstance”? In Veracruz? At eleven o’clock at night?

Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;

God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.

I dressed and went downstairs.

In the center of the plaza, near the four fountains, was the Mexican Navy Band, in white uniforms, giving Elgar the full treatment. Lights twinkled in the boughs of the laburnum trees, and there were floodlights, too — pink ones — playing on the balconies and the palms. A sizable crowd had gathered to listen — children played near the fountains, people walked their dogs, lovers held hands. The night was cool and balmy, the crowd good-humored and attentive. I think it was one of the prettiest sights I have ever seen; the Mexicans had the handsome thoughtful look, the serenity that comes of listening closely to lovely music. It was late, a soft wind moved through the trees, and the tropical harshness that had seemed to me constant in Veracruz was gone; these were gentle people, this was an attractive place.

The song ended. There was clapping. The band began playing “The Washington Post March,” and I strolled around the perimeter of the plaza. There was a slight hazard in this. Because the carnival had just ended, Veracruz was full of idle prostitutes, and as I strolled I realized that most of them had not come here to the plaza to listen to the band — in fact, the greater part of the audience was composed of dark-eyed girls in slit skirts and low-cut dresses who, as I passed them, called out, “Let’s go to my house,” or fell into step with me and murmured, “Fuck?” This struck me as comic and rather pleasant — the military dignity of the march music, the pink light on the lush trees and balconies of the plaza, and the whispered invitations of those willing girls.

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.