The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  I had passed the point of expecting to see anything different, when a long trough of black water appeared beside the train – an irrigation ditch. It became a narrow canal and poured from spouts into fields – corn at Malena, tobacco at Jicaro. The green was dazzling and I had got so used to the desert tones, this colour seemed miraculous. But it was, after all, no more than a small patch in an immense desert.

  Jicaro appeared to be in earthquake country. There were not many huts here, but those I saw all had a crack or a collapsed roof or wall. They were still lived in, however; the people had accommodated themselves to missing walls or gaps. There were houses being built here, too – without a doubt the houses planned by those American architects I had met in Guatemala City. But I could not say that the government-assisted project was a success. There were many three-walled houses, without roofs, which demonstrated the lack of inclination of anyone to finish them off and take up residence. The town of Jicaro was wrecked: the catastrophe showed, and very little of it had been rebuilt.

  We came to Cabañas. Here were coconut trees. A woman with a pile of coconuts sliced them open with a machete and passed them into the train – five cents. The passengers drank the coconut water and threw the rest away. Pigs tried to stick their snouts into the coconuts and eat the flesh. But the woman had swiped deftly at the coconuts – three cuts and it became a drinking vessel: the pigs could not get their snouts inside. They whined and chomped the husks.

  We were a long time at Cabanas. It was a wooden station, and I supposed that the village was somewhere on the other side of the sand-dune. In Central America, the train station always seemed to be at the edge of town, not in the centre. The temperature in the train rose, and it seemed like an oven now. The rubbish-pile of coconuts had brought out the flies; people snored. I saw some workmen fussing beside the engine and tried to get out.

  ‘Is this your station?’ It was a soldier, one of our armed guards.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Get back then.’ He pushed his rifle at me.

  I hurried to my seat.

  It might be here, I thought. Perhaps this is the end of the line.

  An old man began to shout. He was mocking the place. I think the heat had got to him.

  ‘Cabañas! That is a laugh! Know what cabañas are? They are little huts – you find them near hotels and refreshment stands. Sometimes near the beach.’

  The passengers were silent, but the man needed no encouragement.

  ‘Cabañas are pretty and pleasant. You sit there and have nice cool drinks. That is what they call them – cabañas. And they call this filthy place Cabañas!’

  Hearing this shout, the Indian woman in the next seat opened one eye, but seeing no more than a red-faced man wiping sweat out of his sombrero with a hanky she shut her eye.

  ‘This is not Cabañas – it should have another name.’

  The alarm had passed. He was out of breath and gasping.

  ‘I have seen the real cabañas. They are not like this at all.’

  No one cared, really. But I thought it was interesting that even these toothless farmers and slumbering Indians found this place laughable. The desolation was obvious to them, and they knew the train was junk. After this, I did not indulge in any charitable self-censorship of my thoughts. Another thing, and more curious, was the fact that people who were not disposed to conversation had no inhibitions about standing up and shouting mad speeches. The man was quiet when the train started again.

  The hamlet of Anton Bram was so small its name was not shown on the ticket.

  ‘Anton Bram!’ It was the man behind me – hooting.

  ‘What a silly name!’ It was his wife.

  The passengers smiled. But why hadn’t they laughed at Progreso?

  We entered another dead valley, and like the first, all the colour had been burned away by the sun. It was flatter than the previous one, and seemed to me much hotter. The vegetation was weird. Here, cactuses grew as tall as elms and were the same shape. The smaller real trees had died and with their bark missing had the paleness of human skin. There were spurges, plants of the genus euphorbia, which were used by some people for medicinal purposes; and other cactuses, with cylindrical limbs, the size of apple trees. The cactus is tenacious. After the shrubs with less complicated root-systems and more munchable leaves have died or been grazed into extinction, the cactus remains, its spines keeping animals away, its fine white hairs shading its tough hide and preventing evaporation. And, under the sky of clearest blue, even more fantastic plants – dog tails sprouting in clusters – hairy brown tubes, prickly pear cactuses, and sprawling nets of weed.

  The train was going at ten miles an hour, so it was possible to botanize here on the back pages of my Poe novel, and make some sense of the creeping confusion on the cracked nests of mud-wasps. This business absorbed me until, two hours later, I saw a tractor, a shed, some wrecked houses and then a four-storey structure of grey planks, with a porch on each floor: Railway Hotel.

  We were in Zacapa.

  It was a dusty station at the end of a dusty road and now, in the middle of the afternoon, suffocatingly hot. A group of people at the station barrier yelled at the train. I passed through and, approaching the hotel – it was a ghostly, comfortless place – heard the racket of a generator and saw some men digging near the hotel. The ground was hardened clay: they needed a pneumatic drill to penetrate it. There would be no rest in that hotel. What I could see of the town did not persuade me to linger: cracked huts, a yellow church steeple, more cactuses. So this was Zacapa. The woman in Guatemala City had not exaggerated. It seemed a terrible place, as hot as any of the miserable villages on the railway line, if a bit larger.

  I found the Station Manager’s office. He had a fan, a calendar, a wooden filing cabinet, a spike of papers. The noise of the generator was loud even here, so I had to raise my voice.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘What time does the train leave for the border?’

  ‘Which border are you crossing?’

  It was not an idle question: we were nearer Honduras than El Salvador.

  ‘I’m trying to get to Metapan, in El Salvador.’

  ‘Yes, there is a train to Metapan in two days – on Wednesday. At six-thirty in the morning. Do you want a ticket?’

  Two days here! I said, ‘No, thank you.’

  The train had pulled out of Zacapa and was now on its way north to Puerto Barrios. The station platform was empty, the dust still settling. I studied my Cook’s Timetable and saw that if I crossed the border to Metapan or Santa Ana I could get a connection to San Salvador the next day. I decided to do this – the border was not very far, perhaps thirty miles.

  A man was watching me. I went over to him and asked him whether there was a bus station in Zacapa.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘El Salvador.’

  ‘Too bad. All the buses to El Salvador leave in the early morning.’

  But he was smiling.

  I said, ‘I would like to go to Santa Ana.’

  ‘I have a car,’ he said. ‘But petrol is very expensive.’

  ‘I will give you five dollars.’

  ‘For ten I will take you to Anguiatu. That is the border.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not very.’

  As soon as we left Zacapa we were out of the desert. I could see green hills, rounder ones, with a river running through them. I talked to the man. His name was Sebastiano; he had no job – no one had a job in Guatemala, he said. He was from Zacapa. He hated Zacapa, but he had been to Guatemala City and he thought that was a lot worse.

  ‘There is one thing I think I should tell you,’ he said some time later, slowing down at a bend in the road. He drew over to the side and stopped, and smiled sheepishly. ‘I have no driving license, and this car – it is not registered. No insurance either – if you do not have a registration what is the point of insurance?’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘But why did you stop the car?’
/>
  ‘I cannot take you any further. If I do, the policemen at the border will ask to see my licence and so forth. As I do not have one, they will arrest me and probably treat me badly. I cannot give them a bribe – I do not have any money.’

  ‘You have ten dollars,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘That will pay for the petrol!’

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’

  He reached across and opened the door. ‘Walk,’ he said.

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘Not very.’

  He drove away. I stood for a moment on this road at the edge of Guatemala, and then started walking. Not very far, he had said. It was a mile. There was no traffic. There were green trees here and singing birds. My suitcase was not heavy, so I found the hike rather pleasant.

  The border was a shed. A boy in a sports shirt stamped my passport and demanded money. He asked me if I was carrying any drugs. I said no. What do I do now? I asked him. You go up the road, he said. There you will find another house. That is El Salvador.

  It was a shady road, circling around a hill, past a meadow and a glugging stream. What a transformation in landscapes. Earlier in the day I had thought I was going to wither and die in the wastes of the Motagua Valley, and here I was ambling through green humpy hills to the sound of birdsong. It was sunny late-afternoon as I walked from Guatemala into El Salvador, as fresh and breezy as a summer day in Massachusetts. That border-crossing was as happy a hike as I have ever made and reminded me pleasantly of strolling down the Amherst road into Shutesbury.

  A car was parked near a hut, the frontier post. A soldier got out and examined my suitcase. ‘What is this?’

  ‘A book. In English, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.’

  Over there,’ he said, ‘Show your passport.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked the Immigration Officer.

  ‘Santa Ana.’

  A car had arrived at the shed, and a man had got out and was now behind me. He said, ‘I am going through Santa Ana. Want a ride?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Free!’

  So I went to Santa Ana, which was not far away. We passed Lake Guija and more volcanoes and fields of coffee and tobacco.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me to San Salvador?’ said the man, when we arrived at Santa Ana. ‘I am leaving tonight.’

  ‘I think I will stay here.’

  ‘I would advise you not to. This place is full of thieves, pick-pockets and murderers. I am not joking.’

  But it was nightfall. I decided to stay in Santa Ana.

  8 The Railcar to San Salvador

  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-storey 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 theatre had once been an opera house.

  In another climate, I don’t think the theatre 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 theatre 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 theatre 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 theatre 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, practising 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.

  But no citizen of this town had any clear idea of where the railway station was. I had arrived from the frontier by car, and after two nights in Santa Ana thought I should be moving on to the capital. There was a train twice a day, so my time-table said, and various people, without hesitation, had directed me to the railway station. But I had searched the town, and the railway station was not where they had said it was. In this way, I became familiar with the narrow streets of Santa Ana; the station continued to elude me. And when I found it on the morning of my third day, a mile from the hotel in a part of the town that had begun to tumble into ploughed fields and cash crops, behind a high fence and deserted apart from one man at an empty desk – the station master – I understood why no one knew where it was. No one used the train. There was a major road from Santa Ana to San Salvador. We take the bus: it seemed to be a Central American motto in reply to all the railway advertising which said, Take the Train – It is Cheaper! It was a matter of speed: the bus took two hours, the train took all afternoon.

  The station was like none I had ever seen before. In design it looked like the sort of tobacco-curing shed you see in the Connecticut Valley, a green wooden building with slatted sides and a breeze humming through its splinters. All the rolling stock was in front – four wooden cars and a diesel. The cars were labelled alternately First and Second, but they were equally filthy. On a siding was a battered steam locomotive with a conical smoke stack, its boiler-plate bearing the inscription Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, Pa – 110 – it could have been a hundred years old, but the station master assured me that it ran perfectly. Nearer the station was a silver-painted wooden railcar, the shape of a cable car. This contraption had its own engine, and it was this, the station master said, that made the run from here to San Salvador.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ asked the stationmaster.

  ‘Boston.’

  ‘Plane?’

  ‘Train.’

  He shook my hand and said, ‘Now that is something I would like to do!’ He had been to Zacapa, he said, but he hadn’t liked it much – the Guatemalans were a confused people. The Hondurans were worse. But what about my route from Boston? He questioned me closely: how many hours from Chicago to Fort Worth? What sort of trains? And the Mexican railways – were they as good as people said they were? Which trains had dining cars and pullmans? And had I seen anything like his steam locomotive? ‘People tell me it is now worth a lot of money – I think they are right.’ Where was I going from here? When I told him Argentina, he said, ‘Wonderful! But be careful in Nicaragua – there is a rebellion there at the moment. That cruel man, Somoza.’ />
  We were standing near the railcar. The station master shook his head at it. ‘It is rather old,’ he said, ‘but it goes.’

  It was leaving for San Salvador after lunch. I checked out of the Florida and, at the station, bought my ticket – a bargain at thirty-five cents for thirty-five miles. I had planned to sit near the front of the railcar, but the engine was noisy and as soon as we were on our way I had found two Salvadoreans in the back to talk to. They were both salesmen, in their mid-twenties. Alfredo was stocky and dark and looked athletic in a squat muscular way; he sold plastic basins and household fixtures. Mario was thin and had a mirthless chattering laugh. He sold toothpaste, oil, soap and butter. They had been sent by their companies to Santa Ana and their territory was in and around Santa Ana, nearly the whole of western El Salvador. It seemed a big area, I said. They reminded me that it was a very small country: they had to visit twenty or thirty shops a day to make a profit.

  We were speaking in Spanish. Did they speak English?

  ‘Enough,’ said Mario, in Spanish, and chattered out his laugh.

  ‘I know enough,’ said Alfredo, in Spanish. ‘I was in Arrisboorg for two months – studying English.’

  ‘Pennsylvania?’

  ‘Meeseepee.’

  ‘Say something in English.’

  Alfredo leered at me. ‘Titty,’ he said. Then he uttered several obscenities which, in his terrible pronunciation, did not sound at all offensive.

  ‘Spanish is better than English,’ said Mario.

  ‘I think that is true,’ said Alfredo.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘How can one language be better than another? It depends on what you are trying to say.’

  ‘For all things,’ said Mario. ‘Spanish is a more amplified language. English is short and practical.’

  ‘Shakespeare is short and practical?’

  ‘We have Shakespeare in Spanish,’ said Alfredo.

  Mario stuck to his point. He said, ‘We have more words in Spanish.’