by Paul Theroux
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 centre 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 labour 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 on-lookers 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.
10 The Atlantic Railway: The 12:00 to Limón
I was a bit surprised to find a Chinese man in a bar in San José, Costa Rica. The Chinese are not, typically, bar-flies. Once a year, if the occasion is special and they are in the company of some other men, they might, on a dare, drink a whole bottle of brandy. Then they turn red, say silly or abusive things very loudly, throw up and have to be carried home. Drinking is their mad fling at gaiety; but it is perverse – they take no pleasure in it. So what was this Chinese man doing here? We talked circumspectly at first, as strangers do, reaching agreement on trivialities before risking anything personal. And then he told me. Well, he said, he happened to own this bar. He also owned a restaurant and a hotel. He was a Costa Rican citizen. It had been a deliberate choice. He disliked every other country he had seen.
‘Which ones?’ I asked. We spoke in Spanish. He said his English was shaky; I told him my Cantonese was far from perfect.
‘All the countries,’ he said. ‘I left China in 1954. I was a young man and I liked to travel. I looked at Mexico – I went all over. But I didn’t like it. I went to Guatemala and all around – Nicaragua – that was very bad. Panama – I didn’t like it. Even Honduras and El Salvador – those countries.’
‘What about the United States?’
‘I went all around it. Maybe it is a good country, but I didn’t think so. I could not live there. I was still travelling, and I thought to myself, “What is the best country?” It was Costa Rica – I liked it here very much. So I stayed here.’
I had so far only seen San José, but I took his point. It seemed an exceptional city. If San Salvador and Guatemala City were hosed down, all the shacks cleared and the people rehoused in tidy bungalows, the buildings painted, the stray dogs collared and fed, the children given shoes, the refuse picked up in the parks, the soldiers pensioned off – there is no army in Costa Rica – and all the political prisoners released, those cities would, I think, begin to look a little like San José. In El Salvador I had chewed the end of my pipestem to pieces in frustration. In San José I was able to have a new pipestem fitted (and I bought a spare for Panama) – it was that sort of place. The weather was fine, the service efficient, the city orderly. And they had just had an election. In the rest of Central America an election could be a harrowing piece of criminality; in Costa Rica the election had been fair and something of a fiesta. ‘You should have been here for the election,’ a woman told me in San José, as if I had missed a party. Costa Ricans were proud of their decent government, their high literacy rate, their courtly manners. The only characteristic Costa Rica shares with her Central American neighbours is a common antipathy. You don’t hear a good word about Guatemala or El Salvador; and Nicaragua and Panama – the countries Costa Rica is wedged between – are frankly loathed. Costa Rica is as smug as any of them, but has more reason to be so. ‘They hate gringos in those places,’ a shopkeeper said to me. He was really saying two things: that gringos are not hated in Costa Rica, and that Costa Ricans are honorary gringos. It is with reluctance that foreigners tell you why they think Costa Rica works so well. ‘It’s a white country,’ they say with hesitation. ‘I mean, it’s all white people, isn’t it?’
This – you only have to take the train to Limón to find out – is a falsehood. But I was enjoying myself in San José, so I delayed my train-trip to Limón.
The Costa Ricans I discovered were courteous and helpful. The foreigners were otherwise. You go to a stinking place like Cutuco and you think how exactly it matches the fly-blown setting of a Bogart movie; it has the heat and the seedy cinematic romance, the end-of-tether squalor and rather vicious-looking bars that you associate with whiskery gringos on dangerous missions. But there are no gringos in Cutuco and the danger is all in the drinking water. It is not the malarial jerk-town that the foreigner seeks, but the hospitable tropical city where, for all its boredom, it is possible to have a good meal, frequent a safe brothel, start a business or make a killing. Costa Rica is enjoying a boom; the prosperity is obvious in San José. San José is hardly a romantic place but, next to Panama, it has the highest concentration of foreigners in Central America. Some are small-time crooks and hustlers, others are grand-scale con-men. Robert Vesco claims he lives in the suburbs of San José because he likes the climate; but he is also alleged to have embezzled almost half a billion dollars from an investment company. (Vesco’s house, with its high fence and burglar-proof TV cameras in the shrubbery, is one of San José’s sights; it is pointed out to tourists on their way to the Irazu volcano.) Not all San José’s foreigners are crooks. There are timber merchants and booksellers, pharmacists and ice-cream tycoons. And there are retired people from all over the United States who have bought condominium apartments and plots of land and who sit in the shade and thank God they are not in Saint Pete. The difference is that, unlike Florida, there aren’t so many geriatrics in Costa Rica to remind them that they have come down to die.
‘I think they’d be better off in Florida,’ said Captain Ruggles. ‘For one thing, they’d have a better standard of medical care. God knows what kind of cattywampus you’d have to start here to get a doctor to look at you.’
Andy Ruggles – the ‘captain’ was honorific: he was an airline pilot – was from Florida himself; he kept asking out loud what in the name of God he was doing in San José. We were in the bar of the Royal Dutch Hotel and Andy was resolutely making himself drunk. He could not drink on duty, he said. He could not drink at all if he was scheduled to fly. A good vacation for him, he said, was a binge in the company of a really stunning prostitute. ‘But we have beer like this in Florida, and the girls are much better looking. Paul,’ he said, ‘I think I made a real bad mistake coming here. But I got a discount
on the air-fare.’
We talked about religion: Andy was a Baptist. We talked about politics: in Andy’s view, Nixon had been framed. We talked about race. In this respect, Andy was enlightened. He said there were five races in the world. A more narrow-minded man would have said two. The Indians in Central America were of course Mongolians. ‘They came down through the Bering Straits, when there was land there. Take our Indians – they’re Mongolian to the core.’
Conversations about race make me uneasy; the general direction of such talk is towards Auschwitz. I was glad when he said, ‘How do you pronounce the capital of Kentucky? Louieville or Lewisville?’
‘Louieville,’ I said.
‘Wrong. It’s Frankfort.’ He guffawed. ‘That’s an old one!’
I asked him to give me the capital of Upper Volta. Andy did not know that Ouagadougou is the capital of Upper Volta. He countered with Nevada. I did not know that Carson City was its capital, and I missed Illinois too. Andy knew more capital cities that anyone I had ever met, and I prided myself on my knowledge of capitals. He missed New Hampshire (Concord) and Sri Lanka (Colombo), but that was all, apart from Upper Volta. He bought me three beers. I ended up buying six.
Andy was an even-tempered drunkard and he said that as he had been in San José for three days he wanted to show me around. But a man on his right had been listening to our conversation, and as Andy rose to leave, the man said in a strong Spanish accent, ‘I think your airline is the worst one in the world. That’s what I think. I’m on my way to Miami, but I’m not going to fly on your airline. It’s the worst.’
Andy grinned at me. ‘You always get one dissatisfied customer, don’t you?’
The man said, ‘It stinks. Really stinks.’
I thought Andy was going to hit him. But his smile returned to his reddened face and he said, ‘Guess you had a bad flight. Little turbulence?’ Andy fluttered his hand. ‘Plane sort of going up and down, huh?’
‘I have flown many times.’
‘Correction,’ said Andy. ‘Two bad flights.’
‘I would never fly with your airline again.’
‘I’ll mention that to the president next time I see him.’
‘You can tell him something else for me –’
‘Hold on a minute, sir,’ said Andy very calmly. ‘What I want to know is what’s a Scotchman like you doing here?’
The Spaniard looked puzzled.
Andy turned his back on him and clawed his cuff from his wristwatch. ‘Time to eat.’
‘I’m going to show you around town, boy. You’re new in this here town. Gonna introduce you to the main features. If we meet any of my pals you just keep your mouth shut. I’m gonna say you’re an Englishman, just in from London. Don’t you say a word – they won’t know the difference.’
We went to a bar called ‘Our Club’. It was noisy and dark and in the shadows I could see furtive men canoodling with prostitutes.
‘Set them up,’ said Andy. ‘This gentleman and I will have some beer. Any kind will do.’ The girl behind the bar wore a low-cut dress. She wiped the bar with a rag. ‘You look like an intelligent girl,’ said Andy. ‘Know who’ – the girl walked away –‘aw, she ain’t listening. Paul, know who’s the greatest poet in the world? No, not Shakespeare. Can’t guess? Rudyard Kipling.’
The girl brought us two bottles of beer.
Andy said, ‘I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it. Give the girl two dollars, Paul – you still owe me for Oregon. Salem, remember? And I’ve rogued and I’ve ranged in my time.’
He settled into his recitation of ‘The Ladies’. He did not seem to see that four feet down the bar was a grossly fat man who, drinking alone and scooping peanuts from a bowl, had been watching us. The man rattled the peanuts in his hand, a crap-shooter’s motion, before tossing them into his mouth; then his other hand went to his drink. He sipped and reached for more peanuts. He put his drink down, shook the peanuts and shot them into his mouth. His movements were ceaselessly gluttonous, but his eyes remained fixed on us.
Andy’s voice was hoarse, almost gruff, but touched with melancholy.
‘Doll in a teacup she were –
But we lived on the square, like a true-married pair,
An’ I learned about women from ’er.’
‘This used to be a great country,’ said the fat man, munching peanuts.
I looked over at him. He was chuckling ruefully. His left hand found the peanut bowl. He had not looked down.
Andy was saying,
‘An’ I took with a shiny she-devil,
The wife of a nigger at Mhow;
‘Taught me the gypsy folks’ bolee
Kind of volcano she were … ’
‘Hookers everywhere,’ said the fat man. I estimated that he weighed three hundred pounds. His hair was pushed back. He had huge lard-white arms. ‘You could hardly move for the hookers.’
Andy said,
‘For she knifed me one night ’cause I wished she was white
And I learned about women from ’er.’
‘Americans come down. They buy little businesses – taxi-companies, soft drinks, gas stations. Then they sit on their asses and count their money. The government wanted them, so they cleaned the place up, sent the hookers to Panama. Because of these people who come down. Practically all of them are from New York. Mostly sheenies.’
Andy had not stopped reciting, but he finished quickly, saying, ‘The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin. Did you say something, sir?’
‘Sheenies,’ said the fat man; his chewing was like a challenge.
‘Hear that, Paul?’ said Andy. He turned to the fat man. ‘But you’re here, ain’t you?’
‘I’m just passing through,’ said the fat man. Drink, peanuts, drink, peanuts; he didn’t stop.
‘Sure,’ said Andy, ‘you bring your money down here. But someone else does it and you criticize.’ So he had heard the fat man’s complaint! He had been reciting ‘The Ladies’, but he had heard. Andy’s tone was judicious. He said, ‘Well, sir, you’re entitled to your opinion. I am not going to dispute what you say. But I’m entitled to my opinion, too, and I say Robert W. Service is the second greatest.’
Andy began to recite ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’. He faltered, cursed, then recovered and recited in its entirety a Robert Service poem called ‘My Madonna’.
‘I haled me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!’
For several minutes, the fat man was silenced, but when Andy finished he piped up again.
‘Not only sheenies,’ he said. ‘Anyone with a few bucks. They’ve ruined the place. I’ll tell you one thing – Carazo just got elected, and he’s going to kick them all out. They’ll all be back in New York, where they belong. The trouble is, the hookers won’t come back.’ His hand went to the bowl and scrabbled. Now he looked down. The bowl was empty. He said again, ‘The hookers won’t come back.’
Andy said, ‘Where are you from, sir?’
‘Texas.’
‘I knew it. Know how I knew it? Cause I could tell you were interested in poetry, Tex. Yes, I did. Now, listen, I know you’re not a red-neck –’
‘That’s the beer talking,’ said the fat man. His hand, without peanuts, foraged on the bar, a large greedy lump of fingers looking for food.
‘—but I wonder if you could do me a favour?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Just an application,’ said Andy. He was perched on his bar-stool. His voice was matter-of-fact, but he sipped between phrases and broke up his sentences. ‘I wonder if you could get me, urn,’ he sipped his beer, ‘an application to, urn,’ he sipped again, ‘join the, um,’ now he sipped and smacked his lips, ‘Ku Klux Klan.’
The fat man hoicked phlegm and spat on the floor.
Andy said, ‘Could you do that little thing for me?’
‘You can wash the sheets,’ snarled the fat man.
‘I knew he had a sense of humour,’ said
Andy. ‘That Tex is a real fun guy, and I tell you, I’d like to sit here all night just swapping jokes with him. But, Paul, I think I’ve had enough beer.’
Andy climbed off his bar-stool and trying to stand started to topple. He balanced himself against the bar, blew out his cheeks and said, ‘Yep, if you can’t stand up you’ve had enough. Now tell me, what’s the name of that hotel I’m in?’
After Andy had gone, the fat man said, ‘He’s lucky I’m in a good mood. I could snap his arms off.’
The fat man’s name was Dibbs. He had been a policeman in Texas, but he had quit, and he hinted that his reason for quitting was that policemen were not allowed to be violent enough. Dibbs? Well, two or three times he had wanted to blow people’s brains out; but you weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. He could have done it easily and called it resisting arrest. And he had been taunted by punks he was not allowed to shoot. He became a construction worker, operating a bulldozer, and then he had quit because everybody else was collecting social security money, so why not him? Now he was a personal bodyguard (‘to a sheeny’) and a courier.
‘What exactly does a courier do?’ I asked him.
‘They carry things. Me, I carry money.’
In the past few weeks he had been to Mexico, Panama and Honduras. He had carried fifty thousand dollars’ worth of pesos to Montreal, and eighty thousand Canadian dollars to Honduras and Panama. He worked for a certain man, he said. When I asked why these large amounts of currency were being shunted back and forth across national frontiers, he laughed. But he did say how the money was carried – in a suitcase.