The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  Guatemalan earthquakes are no worse than this doomsday spectacle.

  The city has been rebuilt. There is no other place to shift it. Succeeding earthquakes have left their marks on Guatemala City, but these wrinkles – part of the look of Guatemala – are less of a disfigurement than the styles of building that supplanted the Spanish architecture. Terraces of huts, the spattered stucco of mock-colonial houses, two-storey blocks and now the taller American-style hotels (how long, one wonders, will these monstrosities last?) constitute the city today. Some of the churches have been put back together, their refinements blunted in the rebuilding.

  I found the churches gloomy, but after a few days church-going was my single recreation. ‘The inhabitants of Guatemala appear to have little of the desire for public amusements seen in most cities,’ wrote Robert Dunlop in 1847. It was hard to knock holes in any of these old assessments. ‘Almost the only recreation of the natives being the religious processions, at which the figures of saints are paraded … of these, there are two or three every month.’ For historical, religious and seismic reasons I chose the church of La Merced. It was the feast day of Our Lady of Mercy, to whom the church is consecrated. The church showed earthquake damage, though not so much as the Cathedral which, with its cracked arches and pillars and part of its ceiling missing, ought to be condemned as unsafe. La Merced also was damaged, but it had been recommended by the Chevalier Arthur Morelet (described by his translator as ‘a French gentleman of leisure and extensive scientific acquirements’), who in his Travels in Central America (1871) called it, ‘a pretty church with a fine site. From an artistic point of view, its massive towers are open to criticism, notwithstanding that they give to the edifice a great part of its originality.’

  There were several hundred people in front of La Merced, waiting to go in – so many, that I had to enter by a side door. Inside, there were three activities in progress: a very large crowd in the centre aisle were pushing to get near a robed priest who held a tall candle in a silver candlestick – the object was about the size of a shotgun; another group was more scattered –these were families having their pictures taken by men with Polaroid cameras; the last large group had congregated around a table set up near a brutal crucifixion and they were signing a clipboard of papers and handing coins to a man – this, I discovered, was a lottery. And at the small chapels and minor altars people were praying, lighting candles, carrying tapers or chatting amiably. At a side chapel was the Virgin of Chiquiniquira, a black madonna with an ebony face. Black Guatemalans (there are many; a settlement of blacks at Livingstone on the Caribbean coast is English-speaking) had prostrated themselves before the nigrescent virgin who ‘loaded down with sumptuous toys,’ remarks Morelet, ‘receives exclusively the homage of the faithful of the African race.’

  Travellers less sympathetic than Morelet – one supposes them to be unyielding Protestants – have seen Guatemalan Catholicism as barbarous. Dunlop regarded saints’ days in Guatemala as no more than occasions for the combustion of ‘great quantities of fireworks’ and disgusted by the statues Dunn wrote, ‘most of the images of the saints … are very common pieces of sculpture, and disfigured by absurd and vulgar dresses.’ Aldous Huxley, who affected a kind of comic, stuporous Buddhism (his senile transcendentalism he gave fictional form in his silly novel Island) jeered at Guatemalan penitents until his package tour called him to Antigua, where his jeers were resumed.

  Anyone who finds a frenzied secularity at a church service in Guatemala – and thinks it should be stamped out – ought to go to the North End of Boston on the feast day of Saint Anthony and consider the probability of redemption in the scuffles of ten thousand Italians frantically pinning dollar bills to the cassock of their patron saint, who is borne on a litter past pizza parlours and mafia hangouts in a procession headed by a wailing priest and six smirking acolytes. Compared to that, the goings-on at La Merced were solemn. The priest with the silver candle appeared to be fighting his way through the crowd of women – there were only women in that part of the church. Actually, what he was doing was allowing the women to get a grip on the candle. A woman waited, lunged, gripped the candle in both hands and yelled an ejaculation; the priest yanked the candle from her hands and another woman made a dive for it. The priest continued to move in a circle; his perspiration had turned his white surplice grey.

  The Polaroid cameramen were slightly better organized. They had touts who were rushing up to family groups and, for two dollars, posing them near especially punished-looking saints in order to have their pictures taken. There was heavy competition. I counted fourteen photographers and as many touts. They had deployed themselves from the sacristy door to the baptismal font, and in every niche and near every altar – there were two photographers near St Sebastian: that martyring was particularly prized – flashbulbs popped and credulous Indians gasped as they saw their startled faces sharpening in full colour on snapshot squares. It was in a way the miracle they had hoped for, though the price was high – two dollars was a week’s pay.

  The lottery was much cheaper. At that table near the crucifixion the crowd was so large I had to stand for fifteen minutes before I could get a glimpse at the clipboard or the fee or, for that matter, the prize. This was not a literate country – that much was clear. Only a handful of the people were able to sign their names; the rest told their names to a lady in a black shawl. She slowly copied the name down, with the person’s address; the person handed over ten cents and received a slip of paper with a number on it. Most of the people were Indian women, carrying babies on slings on their backs like slumping rucksacks or papooses. I waited until a man signed the paper and followed him as he walked away smiling at his coupon.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘But what are you hoping to win?’

  ‘You did not see the statue?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is on the table – come.’ He took me around the back of the crowd and pointed. The lady in the black shawl, seeing that I was a foreigner who craved a look at the statue, lifted it up for me to admire.

  ‘It is beautiful, no?’

  ‘Very beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘I think it is very expensive.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Some Indian women heard. They nodded; they grinned – they had no teeth; they said it was very lovely, and they went on speaking their names, or signing, and paying their money.

  The prize in the lottery – it was more than a statue – was extraordinary. It was an image of Jesus, about two feet high, with his back turned. He wore a crown of gold and a bright red cape with gold fringes, and with his right hand he was knocking on the door of a cottage. It was almost certainly a copy of an English country cottage – a plastic cottage wall of stone, and plastic beams at the eaves; a mullioned window with plastic panes; and an oaken plastic door surrounded by rambling plastic roses, some blue and some yellow. They were not morning glories – they had plastic thorns. A Catholic education had introduced me to Jesus on the cross, in a boat, being flogged, working in a carpentry shop, praying, denouncing the moneychangers and standing in a river to be baptized. I had never seen Jesus knocking at the door of an English country cottage, though I had a dim memory of a painting depicting something similar (five months later, walking through St Paul’s Cathedral in London I saw Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ and was able to link it to that Guatemalan set-piece).

  ‘What is Jesus doing?’ I asked the Guatemalan man.

  ‘As you see,’ he said. ‘Knocking on the door.’ Knocking is a violent word in Spanish – more like hammering or throttling. Jesus was not doing that.

  ‘Why is he doing that?’

  The man laughed. ‘He wants to go in. I think he wants to go in.’

  The lady in the black shawl put it down. She said, ‘It is heavy.’

  ‘That house,’ I said, gesturing. ‘Is it in Guatemala?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. He stood on tiptoe and looked again. ‘I cannot say.’

 
; ‘Does the house represent anything?’

  ‘The little house? It represents a house.’

  We were getting nowhere. The man excused himself. He said he wanted to have his picture taken.

  There was a priest nearby.

  ‘I have a question, Father.’

  He nodded benignly.

  ‘I have been admiring the statue of Jesus in the lottery.’

  ‘A beautiful statue.’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but what does it represent?’

  ‘It represents Jesus, who is visiting a house. The house is represented. You are an American, no? Many Americans come here.’

  ‘I have never seen anything like it before.’

  ‘This is a very special lottery. Our feast day.’ He bowed. He wanted to get away from me.

  ‘Is that in the Bible? Jesus at the little house?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Jesus goes to the little house. He visits the people, he preaches and so forth.’

  He sounded as if he was making this up. I said, ‘Where exactly in the Bible –’

  ‘You will excuse me?’ he said. He gathered his skirts. ‘Welcome to Guatemala.’

  Perhaps he thought I was mocking – I wasn’t; I was only seeking information. If my hotel had been something other than a flophouse, run by a bad-tempered hag, I might have found a Gideon Bible in a table in my room. But there was no table, no Bible. ‘I have a room with a bath,’ the hag had said; the bath was a rusty shower pipe suspended from the ceiling on a loop of wire. Two days in this hotel and I was ready to board any train – even a Guatemalan one.

  Some time later, I found the Biblical text from which that lottery prize had been derived. It was in Revelation, not far from the earthquake reference (‘behold there was an earthquake, and the sun became black …’ ). In Chapter Three, Christ says, ‘Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.’

  I used my time in Guatemala City to recuperate from the strenuous train-ride I had had from Veracruz. I needed long walks and a couple of good nights’ sleep; I made a phone call to London (my wife missed me, I told her I loved her; my children said they had made a snowman; this telephone call cost me $114), and then a tour of the bars where, hoping to meet Guatemalans with lively stories, I was surrounded by disappointed tourists. I walked from one end of the city to the other, from zone to zone, through the curio market (embroidered shirts, baskets, pottery – the clumsy work of defeated-looking Indians) and the food market (skinned pigs’ heads, black sausages and the medieval sight of small children binding up bouquets of flowers with bleeding fingers and being shouted at by cruel old men). It was a large city, but not a hospitable one. It had a reputation for thievery; and yet it did not strike me as dangerous, only commonplace and sombre. I suggested to the hag at the hotel that the city seemed to me sadly lacking in entertainment.

  ‘You should go to the market at Chichicastenango,’ she said. ‘That’s what everyone does.’

  And that’s why I don’t want to do it, I thought. I said, ‘I am planning to go to Zacapa.’

  She laughed. I had not seen her laugh before. It was quite horrible.

  ‘You came here to go to Zacapa!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you know how hot it is in Zacapa?’

  ‘I have never been there.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There is nothing in Zacapa. Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘There is a train to Zacapa,’ I said. ‘And a train out of it, to San Salvador.’

  She hooted again. ‘Have you seen that train!’

  This was starting to annoy me. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her hotel.

  She said, ‘When I was a small girl my father had a farm in Mazatenango. I used to ride the train all the time. It took a full day! I liked it, because I was a small girl. But I am not a small girl anymore’ – this was incontestable – ‘and I have not taken the train since. You should take the bus. Forget Zacapa – go to Tikal, see Antigua, buy some things at the market – but don’t go to Zacapa.’

  I went to the railway station. There was a sign over the two ticket windows. It said, It Is Much Cheaper To Go By Train! Over one window was lettered, To The Pacific, over the other, To The Atlantic. I paid a dollar and bought a ticket to Zacapa, which was halfway down the Atlantic line.

  The train was not leaving until seven the next morning, so I went for my last long walk. This took me to Zone Four and a church I had not really expected to find in Guatemala, or this hemisphere. To say the Capilla de Yurrita is mock-Russian orthodox in style is to say nothing, though it has onion domes and ikons. It is a crazy castle. Pink rectangles are painted on its concrete walls to resemble brickwork, and on its main steeple are four gigantic ice-cream cones; beneath the steeple are fourteen pillars, decorated like barber-poles. It has balconies and porches, and rows of cement buds on its castellated roof, four clocks showing the wrong time, gargoyles and a twice-life-sized dog clinging to one of the cones. On the façade are the four Evangelists, and peeping out of windows the twelve Apostles, and three Christs and a twoheaded eagle. It is red and black, rusty metal and tiles. The oak door panels are carved, the left shows Guatemalan ruins, the right Guatemalan tombs, and over the door, in Spanish, a scroll reads ‘The Chapel of Our Lady of Anguish’ with a dedication to Don Pedro de Alvarado y Mesia. On Don Pedro’s shield a conquistador is shown driving an army into retreat and beneath it are three volcanoes, one in eruption.

  Inside, there were three old ladies in the front pew singing a hymn to Mary. Mah-ree-ah; they sang with passion but off-key; Mah-ree-ah. At the back of the church was a lady with a little dog, and five Indians. These pious people were overwhelmed – as who would not be? – by the moorish-style choir loft, the ornate Spanish altar-piece, the vast supine Christ covered with a lace-curtain and attended by a dark-robed Mary with seven silver daggers in her breast. All the statues were clothed and many of the bouquets in the heavy gilt vases were real. The walls were covered with murky gloating frescoes and stone carvings –trees, candles, sunbeams, flames; near the pulpit was a bas-relief of the Sermon on the Mount. Even the small dog was silent. Somehow this maniacally opulent church had survived a hundred years of earthquakes.

  But the Polytechnic School further down the Avenida Re-forma also was unscathed. It seemed only the most bizarre buildings had withstood the tremors. The Polytechnic was a fake fortress two city blocks wide, with fake watchtowers and sentry posts and what looked like slits for gun emplacements. It was painted grey and on the central tower was the motto ‘Virtue – Science – Strength’. The wide shady avenue on which the Polytechnic stood was lined with statuary: a great bronze bull (its penis daubed with red paint), a panther, a stag, another bull –this one charging, a lion killing a crocodile, two large wild boars fighting – one biting the other’s belly; at the junction of this avenue and a main street there was a statue – lions, wreaths, maidens and a succession of plinths surmounted by a patriot. Nearby was an open manhole, as deep as a well and twice as wide.

  The street was empty; there were no other strollers. I walked and it seemed to me that the way the joke church, the fake palace and the savage statues had endured the worst earthquakes in the world had the makings of a maxim; they had remained intact, as fools survive scorn. I kept walking and, just after nightfall, found a vegetarian restaurant in a darkened suburb. The dining room held only three people, one of whom – in a turban and long beard and the silver bracelet required by the Sikh religion – was a young Californian. He told me that he was on the point of rejecting Sikhism, but had not got around to shaving, and the turban gave him confidence. These three were architects, designing houses for the people who had been made homeless in the earthquake of 1976, two years before.

  ‘Are you just designing the houses?’ I asked. ‘Or are you building them, too?’

  ‘Designing, making concrete blocks, planni
ng villages, building the houses – the whole bit,’ said the man in the turban.

  I put it to him that this sort of idealism could be carried too far. Surely it was the government’s job to see that people were housed. If they needed money they could sell some of those bronze statues as scrap metal.

  ‘We’re working under the government,’ said one of the others.

  Wouldn’t it be better, I said, to teach people how to make houses and let them get on with the job?

  ‘What we do,’ said the man in the turban, ‘is put up three walls. If someone wants the house he has to finish it – put up the fourth wall and the roof.’

  I approved of this effort. It seemed to strike the right balance, the trust in idealism tempered by a measure of caution. I said that, so far, I had found the Guatemalans a pretty gloomy bunch. Was this their experience?

  ‘You answer,’ said one to the man in the turban. ‘You’ve been here for a year.’

  ‘They’re heavy,’ said the man in the turban, stroking his beard sagely. ‘But they’ve got a lot to be heavy about.’

  7 The 7:00 to Zacapa

  It was a brutal city, but at six in the morning a froth of fog endowed it with a secrecy and gave it the simplicity of a mountain-top. Before the sun rose to burn it away, the fog dissolved the dull straight lines of its streets, and whitened its low houses and made its sombre people ghostly as they appeared for moments before being lifted away, like revengers glimpsed in their hauntings. Then Guatemala City, such a grim thing, became a tracing, a sketch without substance, and the poor Indians and peasants – who had no power – looked blue and bold and watchful. They possessed it at this hour. There was no wind; the fog hung in fine grey clouds, a foot from the ground. Even the railway station, no more than a brick shed, took on the character of a great terminus: there was no way of verifying that it did not rise up for five stories in a clock tower crowned by pigeons and iron-work, so well hidden was its small tin roof by the fog the volcanoes had trapped. There were about twenty people standing near the ticket window of the station – in rags; but their rags seemed just another deception of the fog.