The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  This was the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest point in Mexico – so narrow, it was for a long time considered an ideal place to dig a coast-to-coast canal. And more convenient than Panama because it was so much nearer the United States. Tehuantepec – a hot, dismal-looking place – had had an interesting history. It had always been populated, and often dominated, by Indians. These Indians – the Zapotecs – were a matrilineal people – the women owned land, fished, traded, farmed, and ran the local government; the men, with that look of silliness that comes of being bone-idle, lounged around. The stations that morning showed this tradition to be unchanged: enterprising women, empty-handed men. But one could easily underestimate their capacity for outrage: patience so often looks like defeat, or silence like conversion. One of the earliest Indian uprisings in Mexico took place here in 1680; these people rebelled and for the next eight years controlled most of the Isthmus. And when in later years great projects were conceived to make the Isthmus important the Indians did not cooperate – they simply stood aside and watched the projects fail.

  In his joyously energetic travel book, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Anthony Trollope wrote that this part of Mexico was ‘the passage selected by Cortez, and pressed by him on the Spanish government … the line would be from the Gulf of Campechay, up the river Coatzacoalcox, to Tehuantepec and the Pacific’. Trollope, who believed more southerly routes through Panama and Costa Rica (he travelled through both places) would be expensive and impractical, was writing in 1860. Ten years later, President Ulysses S. Grant (yes, of all people) sent the Tehuantepec Expedition here and charged them with exploring the possibilities of digging a canal. Altogether there were seven expeditions but, though no canal was built, the Isthmus was crossed by tens of thousands of travellers, first on mule back and stage coaches, and then by train. It was one of the better ways of reaching California from the eastern seaboard of the United States, and the Gold Rush of 1849 had vastly increased the traffic. With so many people tumbling back and forth across Tehuantepec (under, one assumes, the baleful or jeering eyes of the Indians), the profit in annexing the strip was obvious, and several times the American government urged the Mexicans to hand it over. Mexican tenacity could not match American rapaciousness and the Mexicans eventually conceded all of what are now regarded as Western states, but against the odds they refused to surrender Tehuantepec. In 1894, the railway was built across the Isthmus and did a roaring trade. One of the busiest railways the world has ever known, at the height of its operation there were sixty trains a day. It is an astonishing fact, because so little of that bustle and efficiency remains, such a tiny portion of the builders’ and speculators’ handiwork. There is less left of the great Tehuantepec National Railway than of the Mayan ruins of Uxmal or Palenque, and no sign in the shrivelled riverbeds or the dusty tracks that link the poor towns that this was once a great crossroads of the world. Yet some of the railway still stands. In 1913, the line was extended to join the so-called Pan American Railway at the Guatemalan frontier. But this was a hopeless effort. The next year the Panama Canal opened and bankrupted every railway, mule track, ferry crossing and stagecoach route in Central America. From that year, Tehuantepec began to die and not even the discovery of oil (long before, the Aztecs had found it in sticky lumps which had squeezed from the ground – they burned this magic stuff at (religious ceremonies) managed to work a cure on the Isthmus or to bring it any degree of prosperity. Today it looks pathetic; it is rough country, and hot and infertile; the Indians, living an ordinary existence in a hand-to-mouth way, look embattled; the towns and villages are less than they were in the Aztec times. But Mexicans have learned how to derive comfort from the past – from actual events or the reassuring simplicity of myths and even among the cactus-covered hills and bumpy desert of Tehuan-tepec the backward-looking Mexican was greatly encouraged by the thought that it had once known glorious days.

  The mountain range – now like a fortress, now like a cathedral (it was yet another protectively maternal strip of the Sierra Madre) – stayed with us the whole day. But we never climbed it. We moved south along the hot lowland, and the more southerly we penetrated the more primitive and tiny became the Indian villages, the more emblematic the people: naked child, woman with basket, man on horseback, posed in the shattering sunlight before a poor mud hut. As the morning wore on the people withdrew and by eleven o’clock we were watched from the windows of huts which had grown much smaller. Shade was scarce: skinny village dogs slept under the bellies of cows which were themselves transfixed by hanks of course grass.

  There was water to the south-west – a blue-green haze, a shimmering emptiness, the flat land receding to a sparkle and brown bizarrely suspended boats. This was the Dead Sea, a lozenge of lake on the shore of the Pacific. Nearer the train, horses were tied to the verandah posts of village bars, and men sat at tables near the windows; women and girls hawked prawns and pink-scaled fish which they carried in pails. My eyes were moist from the heat, and through this blur I saw dark pigs and coconut groves and banana trees and, behind them, bouldery mountains.

  We crossed into the state of Chiapas. In Chiapas the mountains looked higher, the surrounding land hotter, and these two contrasting landscapes were so inhospitable and unmarked by any human effort, the people seemed like pioneers, hardy new arrivals who had yet to make any dent in the place. That was between stations, but the stations seemed like outposts, too. At the town of Arriaga I asked the conductor when we could expect to arrive in Tapachula. He counted on his fingers, then he laughed because we were more than ten hours late.

  ‘Maybe tonight,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I’m not worried.’

  Not worried, but rather sick of this hot crowded train. A slow train, which this was, could be a joy, if the seats were not broken and the toilet worked and the dust was mopped off the floor. The passengers, prostrate in the heat, lay collapsed on the seats, their mouths open, as if they had all been gunned down or gassed.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ said the conductor. ‘I’ll tell you when we are near Tapachula. Right?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  But to arrive in Tapachula was to accomplish very little. Tapachula was nowhere. It was, simply, where this train stopped for good.

  I had finished most of my food by the time we reached Pijijiapan; and what remained – some discoloured slices of ham, some sweating cheese that had softened to putty in the heat – I threw out of the window. I had also finished Pudd’nhead Wilson. Pijijiapan was a market town, a mob scene which the arrival of the train only maddened further – the train stayed in the middle of town for half an hour and none of the shoppers or hawkers or battered cars could cross the road. Nor would the conductor allow anyone to pass through the train. So they stood in the hot sun with their baskets, and the fish they carried grew more rancid-smelling as they waited. They carried chickens and turkeys, too, and corn and beans. They were Indians, short, square-featured people who glowered at this intrusion.

  If one wonders who precisely they are, one needs only to listen to Jacques Soustelle on the Aztecs. Before treating the artistic and cultural achievements of the nobles, he directs our attention in a kind of whispered prologue, to another group. ‘On the fringe of the rich and brilliant cities,’ he writes, ‘the peasant – Nahuatl. Otomi, Zapotec, etc. – continued to lead his patient and laborious life in obscurity. We know almost nothing about him … He was of no interest to the native or the Spanish chronicler, with his hut, his maize field, his turkeys, his little monogamous family and his narrow horizon, and they mention him only in passing … But it is important to speak of him at this point, if only to make his silent presence felt, in the shadows beyond the brilliance of the urban civilization; and the moreso, because after the disaster of 1521 [the Spanish conquest] and the collapse of all authority, all concepts, the whole frame of society and all religion, he alone survived, and he alone still lives.’

  He – or rather she – sold me so
me fritters and rice at Pijijiapan; I drank the last of my soda water (I had used the other half of the bottle for brushing my teeth) and we set off again. It was frustrating to be so tired in such a beautiful landscape, like dozing at a concert. The train picked up speed and shot along this savannah, skirting the majestic mountains, but the heat and the dirt and my fatigue, and now the noise of the speeding train, prevented me from being able to concentrate or steady my gaze on the bright rocks or the trees whipping past. It was punishing to feel so battered and incapable, but also a further punishment to know how the best of Chiapas was eluding me. Struggling to stay awake to see it, the effort exhausted me; the bright air and yellow land overwhelmed me, and I slept.

  I woke perspiring whenever the train stopped, at little towns, like Mapastepec and Margaritas, where the foreground swam with colour: jacaranda, bougainvillea, hibiscus – electric contending hues in what was otherwise a desert of frail trees and barren soil, broken by fields of corn and tobacco. We were in the deep hinterland now, and later I was to recognize the remote place, the combination of Indian villages and bad roads and the one railway line producing – but it was not so unusual: they had come with the railway and they had stayed – the Chinese, who advertised themselves on shop signs: Casa Wong or Chen Hermanos. I had thought it had been hot in the morning; the afternoon was almost unbearable and at Soconocusco I felt nauseated by the heat.

  Walking the length of the train to find some bottled water to have with my fruit salts I came upon a man I at first took to be an American. I had not met an English speaker since leaving Veracruz, so I greeted him – glad to have someone who might understand my feeling of discomfort. He winced at me. He wore a jacket; the lenses of his glasses were coated with dust; he had a small map; he sat alone in Second Class. He was of course German.

  And he spoke neither English nor Spanish. Where, I asked him in faulty German, had he boarded the train? In Veracruz, he said. But I had not seen him in Veracruz, or Papaloapan, or anywhere else. Well, he said, he had not left his seat. What had he eaten?

  ‘A sandwich. Cheese.’

  In two days?

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do not like the toilets. I don’t eat, so I don’t use the toilets. I had a Pepsi-Cola. But I will eat in Guatemala.’

  ‘We may not be in Guatemala until tomorrow.’

  ‘Then I will eat tomorrow. It is good to be hungry for a few days. People eat too much – especially these people. You see them? Using the toilet?’

  ‘Where are you going in Guatemala?’

  ‘Maybe to the ruins. I don’t know – I have to go back to work next week.’

  ‘Back to –?’

  ‘Germany.’

  ‘Ah.’ He was riding in Second Class. Second Class had torn black plastic seats. First Class had torn red plastic seats. Some of First’s had arm-rests. But Second was slightly more crowded. How did he like it?

  He gave me a smile – it was the first time he had smiled, and it was one of triumph and real pleasure. He said. ‘Three dollars.’

  Neither an explorer nor a hitch-hiker; no rucksack, no compass. Just a tidy little suitcase and small gold-rimmed glasses covered with dust, an empty Pepsi bottle and a sandwich wrapper, sitting with Teutonic uprightness through the tumbling hinterland of Chiapas. His map was small, he had no other book, he did not drink beer. In a word, a skinflint.

  Another train, with seat numbers and compartments, might have thrown us together, and I would have suffered his leaden company for two days. If there was a virtue in the disorder of this carelessly-run Mexican train it was that it allowed a passenger the freedom of its shabby cars. There were no rules; or, if there were, no one followed them. So it was easy for me to reject the companionship of this fellow – not that he offered any: tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash; suspicious, unbelieving and incurious. In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap. And yet, by refusing to take any risk he was taking the greatest risk of all: being solitary in a place so hot and anarchic one really needed friends.

  ‘Have a good trip,’ I said.

  He nodded, he did not smile. And that was all. A chance meeting – nothing more. We merely brushed past each other at that far side of the world.

  Another Chinese store, more tobacco fields, and the afternoon grew cloudy but no less hot. I lay on the seat and went to sleep again and did not wake until I heard one of the Guatemalan children yelling – as he had done since Veracruz – ‘Let’s go!’ But this time he was yelling at me. I woke in darkness; the train had stopped, and now the Guatemalan mother was bending over me.

  ‘If you are going to the frontier – you said you were – we could share a taxi and save some money. I have only three suitcases and these four children. We can fit in the back seat and you can sit in front with the driver. What do you say?’

  It had been an awful trip and listening to her I saw my chance of leaving Mexico and this train and this town – just stepping across the border. Later, I decided that I would have been better off in a hotel in Tapachula, but at the time I was very eager to leave it. So I said yes and half an hour later, in darkness, I was walking across the bridge over the Suchiate River. Behind me were the rolling hills and banana groves of Mexico; ahead, a black brow of rock and on its cliffs and outcrops dim blue jungle and white lianas and vines, picked out in moonlight; and when the river ceased to thunder I could hear the screech of bats.

  6 The 7:30 to Guatemala City

  Guatemala had begun suddenly: a river-frontier and on the far bank jungly cliffs and hanging vines. Storm clouds were passing in front of the moon, which gave them druids’ hooded shapes and grey rags. The border town of Tecún Umán was so small it made Tapachula seem a metropolis, and a Tapachula billboard I had seen advertising a hotel (Good Food, Comfortable Rooms, Low Prices), stayed in my memory as I ate a vile meal of beans in an ill-lit room of a much meaner hotel in Tecún Umán. This was called the Pearl. A hundred years ago, a British traveller in Guatemala wrote, ‘A stranger, arriving without introductions, can only go to a very low public house … intended for the accommodation of mule drivers, cattle herds and petty retail dealers.’ But I was alone – not a mule driver in sight; I would have welcomed his company. There was a dog by the door, chewing at the fleas on his hindquarters. I gave him a lump of gristle from my plate and, watching his wild eyes as he champed it, I thought how lucky I was that there was a train out of this place in the morning. ‘Very early,’ the hotel-keeper had said. I had replied, ‘The earlier the better.’

  Tecún Umán was a tiny railhead – no more. But once, from here to Panama – then a neglected province of Colombia – it was all regarded as the Kingdom of Guatemala. It was an unstable and quarrelsome kingdom and, when a series of revolts resulted in a constitutional regime and a kind of futile independence, it became even more unstable. It was also menaced by Mexico – by the absurd Iturbide who had had himself crowned in a self-flattering ceremony: ‘emperor by the grace of God and of bayonets,’ was Bolivar’s jeer. Guatemalan independence had meant the setting up of town councils, and in 1822 these councils voted to annex Guatemala to Mexico, reasoning that it was better to join the Mexicans than be humiliated in battle by them. But Mexican instability was apparent from the first, Iturbide was recognized as a tyrant, and a year later Guatemala withdrew and her National Assembly declared the independence of the five provinces: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

  This was nominally a confederation, the United Provinces of Central America, though for the next eighty years the foreign traveller continued to call them ‘Guatemala’ and to treat his adventuring in the jungles of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and his canoe trips across El Salvador’s Lake Ilopango as travel in Guatemala. If Guatemala was merely a misnomer for this jumble of countries, ‘United Provinces’ was the kind of fatuous violation of language that in our day terms the grotesque dictatorship a ‘Peop
le’s Republic’. Civil war was almost immediate in the five countries: it was woodsman against townie, conservative against liberal, Indian against Spaniard, tenant farmer against landlord; the provinces battled, and unity disintegrated in sabre charges and cannon fire. Within fifteen years the area was political and social bedlam – or, as one historian has written, ‘quintuple confusion’. American and British travellers grumbled heartily about the difficulties of cutting their way from village to village, and remarked on how little was known of this attenuated tissue of geography on which South America swung from North America.

  It is hard to keep the names straight. Guatemala is the anvil-shaped one next to Mexico; El Salvador is the tiny one being squashed by the blob of Honduras to the shape of a rectangular raft and proving unseaworthy on its launch into the Pacific; Nicaragua is a wedge, Costa Rica the cuff on Panama’s extended sleeve. There are no railways in Belize. Considering their history – not only the riots, civil wars and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism – it is a wonder they exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea. These countries lie on one of our planet’s worst fault-lines, a volcanic fissure which, each year, threatens to shift in the tremendous way it has been promising, and swallow them and their wranglings. Oddly, the proudest boast of these countries is their volcanoes: they are on every national emblem, on most of the money, and figure prominently in their superstitions.

  All this lay ahead of me, but I intended to stick to my route and deal with one country at a time. I had got some puzzled looks from the hotel-keeper when I told him I was going to catch the train.