by Paul Theroux
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 se
en 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.”