The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  ‘The bus is quicker,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not in a hurry,’ I said.

  ‘The train is very old.’

  ‘The Mexican train to Tapachula was old.’

  ‘But this one is dirty as well.’

  ‘I’ll have a bath when I get to Guatemala City.’

  ‘All the other tourists take buses. Or taxis.’

  ‘I’m not a tourist.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, seeing that my mind was made up, ‘the train is very interesting. But for some reason no one ever takes it.’

  He was mistaken about that, for one thing. There was a crowd of people at the station early the following morning. They were undersized – farmers in slouch hats and straw sombreros, Indian women with papooses and pigtails, barefoot children. Each person had a large bundle, a basket tied with vines or a home–made suitcase. I concluded that this was the reason they had chosen to take the train – their belongings would have been unwelcome on a bus. The train also took a different route from any of the buses, and the train-fare from Tecún Umán to Guatemala City was less than two dollars. Until ten minutes before the train was to leave, a policeman kept us away from the platform barrier, and we stood clutching our tickets – strips of paper with all the intermediate stations listed: one’s ticket was guillotined at the station where one was to disembark.

  The difference between Mexican trains and Guatemalan trains was obvious as soon as we were permitted to board. The cars – four of them – were very small wooden contraptions with large windows. There was no glass in the windows, no paint on the wood. It was narrow gauge and had the look of a train you might see in a decayed amusement park, too tiny and decrepit to take seriously. The seats were also tiny and they were filled within five minutes of our departure. I sat knee to knee with an Indian woman who, as soon as we left, put her chin against the red blanket on her shoulder and went to sleep. Her thin restless child, a small girl in a torn dress, stared at me. No one in the train spoke except to haggle with the hawkers boosting fruit on us, at the stations along the way.

  Although I had the satisfaction of knowing that the train was a continuation of the one I had taken that frosty morning two weeks before in Boston, this passenger train to Guatemala City held no promise of comfort or companionship, and on this day obscured with smoke and mist I had no real expectation of anything but a fairly rough ride through damp and shrouded jungle. The jungle, where it was not an overhang of dark trees, gave the impression of dumped litter – wrappings, string, broken boxes, bits of rag; these I saw were not junk, but dead leaves and vines and flowers. The jungle itself was grey this cloudy morning, and the train rocking on the track and showing its scars (the scorched ceiling, the splintered seats), and stopping and starting with great uncertainty, seemed to me highly unreliable, if not downright dangerous. On the map it seemed a simple transit: Veracruz–Tapachula–Tecún Umán–Guatemala City – two days at most. But the map was misleading, and this train – which emitted groans on curves and slight ascents – did not really seem capable to me of completing the trip. The passengers’ faces were set in frowns, as if they shared my conviction. The track had been cleared, but ten feet away the jungle dripped and was so dense no light showed through it.

  A Bostonian had come this way in 1886, and charmed by the wildness of the place had regarded the arrival of the railway with a kind of horror. His was in a sense a typical curmudgeonly snobbery about travel, a bragging about the glory of travelling through trackless woods with a pack of Indians and muleskinners (Evelyn Waugh fills the Introduction to When The Going Was Good – the curmudgeon’s catch-phrase – with the same grumpy boasts). ‘Old travellers know how soon the individuality of a country is lost when once the tide of foreign travel is turned through its towns or its by-ways,’ writes William T. Brigham in his Guatemala. (I think he is the same William Brigham who nearly electrocuted himself in Hawaii when he touched a wooden stick which a native magician had loaded with some high voltage mumbo-jumbo.) Brigham soon makes his fears particular: ‘When the Northern Railroad extends through Guatemala, when the Transcontinental Railway traverses the plains of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Canal unites the Atlantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mulepath and the mozo de cargo (carrier of bundles) will be supplanted, and a journey across Central America become almost as dull as a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne.’

  How wrong he was.

  Chiapas had been arid – a stony exposed landscape that looked as if it had yet to be possessed by man. This part of Guatemala was heavily forested at the border – the national frontier was abruptly apparent in the rising land and the vine-covered trees – and as we descended to Coatepeque and Retalhuleu the scenery became tropical in its disorder – the jungle sprawled, the huts were poor and small and badly-made – and the only symmetries were the stretches of cane fields. In Mexico I had seen the cut cane in railway freight cars; here it was loaded on wagons and old tottering trucks, and sheaves of it dragged on the road and dropped, so that most of the roads were strewn and looked as if a fierce storm had just blown through and knocked these bare branches down.

  The cane cutting had given Guatemala a sickly sweet odour. The sugary smell was released by the men with machetes, but as the day grew hotter the smell weighted the air. It was a noxious sweetness, like syrup made into smoke, with a whiff of vegetables and an abrasive chemical aftertaste. And there was in it, too, a sharper stink, the nauseating gust you would get by burning sugar over a fire and reducing it to black junk. This was the height of the cane harvest and the smells and the stacked trucks and the worker gangs made Guatemala seem a place of considerable enterprise, but of an old-fashioned plantation sort.

  We travelled parallel to a road, and crossed it occasionally, but for most of the time we were not near to places that were very densely inhabited. The towns were small and tumbledown and in this busriding country most of the people lived on the main roads. After a few stops I could see that this was regarded as a local train – no one was going any great distance. Passengers who had got on at Tecún Umán were going to the market at Coatepeque, which was on a road, or to Retalhuleu to get to the coast, about twenty-five miles away. By noon we were at La Democracia. At the time I had concluded that this was an ironical name, but perhaps it was a fitting name for a place with a sweet-sour smell, and huts made out of sticks and cardboard and hammered-out tins, and howling radios and clamouring people – some boarding buses, some selling fruit, but the majority merely standing wrapped in blankets and looking darkly at the train. And tired children were hunkered down in the mud. Here was a fancy car among the jalopies, and there a pretty house among the huts. Democracy is a messy system of government, and there was a helter-skelter appropriateness in the name of this disordered town. But how much democracy was there here?

  There were election posters pasted on the pillars of the shop verandahs. There would be an election in a few months. On the way to Guatemala City I tried to engage passengers in political talk, but I quickly discovered that Guatemalans had none of the candour I had found in Mexicans. ‘Echeverria was a bandit and a hypocrite,’ one man told me; ‘Lopez Portillo is just the same – give him time.’ Guatemalans were more circumspect: they shrugged, they spat, they rolled their eyes; they did not utter their political preferences. But who could blame them? For twelve years the country had been governed by a party of fanatical anti-communists – a party greatly fancied by America’s Central Intelligence Agency, which has yet to perceive that fanatical anti-communists are almost invariably fanatical antidemocrats. In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a wave of guerrilla activity – kidnappings, murders and bombings; but the army proved ineffectual against the guerrillas and in Guatemala due process of law had always been notoriously slow. The answer was simple. Using the advice of the United States Embassy’s military attaché (later found murdered), a number of vigilante groups were set up. A vigilante assassination-squad is answerable to no one, and the ‘White Hand’, Guatemala’s v
ersion of a volunteer Gestapo unit, has been responsible for thousands of murders and torturings. It seems strange that such a small country could produce such an appalling haemorrhage, that a system of terror and counter-terror could be responsible for so many deaths. And you might ask: What is the point? Seventy-five percent of Guatemalans are peasants of a classical sort: subsistence farmers and part-time cane-cutters, coffee-pluckers and cotton-pickers. The government, while insisting that it is democratic and does not imprison people, rigs elections and allows the ‘White Hand’ and a score of other vigilante groups to terrorize a justifiably sullen population. (There are plenty of freelance gunmen in Guatemala; in 1975, the vice-president claimed that he had enough armed men in his party alone to invade Belize, if the army proved gutless or unwilling.) Given the circumstances, it did not seem to me unusual that La Democracia was a mess or that my fellow passengers on the train were gloomy.

  I had a political reverie on that train. It was this: the government held elections, encouraged people to vote and appeared to be democratic. The army appeared to be impartial, the newspapers disinterested. And it remained a peasant society, basically underfed and unfree. It must perplex any peasant to be told he is living in a free country, when the facts of his life contradict this. It might be that this does not perplex him; he has every reason to believe, in accordance with the evidence, that democracy is feudal, a bureaucracy run by crooks and trigger-happy vigilantes. When one sees a government of the Guatemalan sort professing such high-mindedness in its social aims and producing such mediocre results, one cannot be surprised if the peasant concludes that communism might be an improvement. It was a Latin American sickness: inferior government gave democracy an evil name and left people no option but to seek an alternative. The cynic might say – I met many who did – that these people are better off with an authoritarian government. I happen to think this is nonsense. From Guatemala to Argentina, the majority of the countries are run by self-serving tyrannies which are only making the merciless vengeance of anarchy inevitable. The shabby deceits were as apparent from this train as a row of Burma-Shave signs.

  The stinging sweetness of the sugar cane, the putrefaction in every dismal village, the sorry children, the very frail huts and the sombre faces of the passengers in the train – it all made my mood reflective. And, having taken the train, I had the illusion that I was not terribly far from Boston – I had left the American border just a week ago. The train had given me a sense of continuity which, unlike the dislocation and disconnection one experiences after a plane journey, had made Guatemala seem incongruous and puzzling. On this branch-line from Boston I had found barefoot Indians and starving children and rather ominous-looking peasants with two-foot knives resting on their knees.

  The atmosphere in the train was grim. This was the bottom of the social scale, mainly people going to the next village, a ten-cent ride to sell a dollar’s worth of bananas. The children chattered; no one else did. The adults seemed incurious, even surly, and those whose eyes I caught watching me appeared guiltily suspicious and turned away. In conversation they were off-hand. They aked no questions at all; their replies were brief.

  At Coatepeque I said to a man on the platform, ‘It’s cold here. Is it always this cold?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said. He walked away.

  At Santa Lucia I asked a man how far he had come. He said Mazatenango.

  ‘Do you live at Mazatenango?’

  ‘No.’ He said nothing more. When the train moved on he changed his seat.

  At La Democracia I told a man I was headed for Zacapa. He said nothing. I said I was taking the train to Zacapa. He said nothing. I wondered if he was deaf. I said, ‘Is it hard to get to Zacapa?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and lapsed into silence once again.

  He was smoking a cigarette. Most of the passengers had cigarettes in their mouths. It seemed to be a country of chain-smokers. A British traveller remarked, ‘There are fashions in Guatemala which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect; and among these stands foremost the immoderate use of tobacco, by both sexes.’ That was in 1828. The traveller – his name was Henry Dunn – estimated that men smoked twenty cigars a day and women fifty cigarettes. No one on my train smoked a cigar, but as I have said the passengers represented the poorest class in the country.

  It helps to take the train if one wishes to understand. Understanding was like a guarantee of depression, but it was an approach to the truth. For most tourists, Guatemala is a four-day affair with quaintness and ruins: veneration at the capital’s churches, a day sniffing nosegays at Antigua, another at the colourful Indian market at Chichicastenango, a picnic at the Mayan temples of Tikal. I think I would have found this itinerary more depressing, and less rewarding, than my own meandering from the Mexican border through the coastal departments. The train creaked and whimpered but, incredibly, it kept to its schedule: at 3:20 we were at Santa Maria – as promised in Cook’s International Timetable – and, eating my fifth banana of the day, I studied our progress on our climb to Escuintla and the greater heights of Guatemala City.

  Now there were volcanoes all around us, or volcanic hills with footstool shapes that the Mexicans call ‘little ovens’. It was cooler, and as the sun grew pinker and a ridge of hills rose to meet it where it hovered drawn to the shape of a chalice near the Pacific, the gathering darkness threw half-tones across the hills; those fragments of white were the hats and shirts of cane-cutters marching home. But it was not an ordinary jungle twilight, the mould of shadow under wide gleaming leaves, flickering hut fires and the jostlings of mottled pigs and goats. The sky was in flames far-off, and when we came closer the fire was revealed as enormous: bonfires of waste cane burned in sloping fields and sent up cloud tides that were purple and orange and crimson; they floated and lost their colour, becoming white until the night absorbed them. Then this smoke fogged the tracks and it was as if we were travelling on some antique steam locomotive in a mountain pass in Asia, through fog that smelled of stale candy. In the words of Hart Crane, we ‘roared by and left / three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly / watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip- / ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.’

  The last landscape I had seen in daylight had been a row of volcanoes, shaped like a child’s drawing of mountain peaks, with stiff steep sides and narrow summits. As we drew near to Guatemala City there was no landscape to speak of. There were the cane fires, and I could see the headlamps of cars on roads, but the rest was black with a scattering of lanterns, and now and then an illuminated church steeple at a mountain village. It was chilly as we passed through the highlands to enter the city on the plateau: huts, houses, street-lights, buildings. We crossed a bridge over the main street. The passengers who had come from the coast looked down at the glare and the crowds with what seemed like alarm.

  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 tho
se 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 enamelling, 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 judgement; 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 the sense of dislocation and spiritual panic that earthquakes produce in people. He himself 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.’

  And, speaking of his own frequent earthquakes, the Guatemalan seems to imply in his undemonstrative way that the punishment is deserved. It is a judgement, and it was foretold in Revelation (‘what must soon take place’), in Chapter Six, the opening of the sixth seal: ‘I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains …’