by Paul Theroux
He had missed his tour. It would have been all-inclusive, the train to Limón, a boat-trip up the coast, a chef travelling with the party, some wonderful meals. He would have seen monkeys and parrots. Back to Limón: some swimming, a four-star hotel, then a bus to the airport and a plane to San José. That was the tour. But (the river was dashing an old canoe to pieces, and those little boys – surely they were fishing?) the hotel manager had gotten the time wrong and the tour had left at six, not nine, so on the spur of the moment, and with nothing else to do in San José, the old man asked about the train and hopped on, just like that, and you never knew, maybe he’d catch up with the rest of them; after all, he had paid his three hundred dollars and here was his receipt and his booklet of coupons.
Six hours lay ahead of us, before we would reach Limón.
‘Did you know the train was going to take so long?’
I said, ‘I would not mind if this train took four days.’
That took care of him for a while, but as soon as the splendour of the valley returned he began chattering. His name was Thornberry, he lived in New Hampshire, and he was a painter – of pictures. He had not always been a painter. Until recently he had had to make his living as a commercial artist and designer. It had been a real grind, worrying about how he was going to buy groceries; but a few years ago he had come into some money – quite a lot of money – and he had set about seeing the world. He had been to Hawaii, Italy, France, the West Indies, Colombia, Alaska, California, Ireland, Mexico and Guatemala. His impressions of Guatemala were different from mine. He loved-Guatemala. He liked the flowers. He had been two weeks in Antigua with a charming fellow who gave parties every night. On Mr Thornberry’s report, the fellow was an alcoholic. Mr Thornberry had not gone to Zacapa.
‘This scenery,’ said Mr Thornberry, ‘it blows my mind.’ Mr Thornberry had a curious way of speaking, he squinted until his eyes were not more than slits; his face tightened into a grimace and his mouth went square, mimicking a grin, and then without moving his lips he spoke through his teeth. It was the way people talked when they were heaving ash barrels, sort of screwing their faces up and groaning their words.
Lots of things blew Mr Thornberry’s mind: the way the river thundered, the grandeur of the valley, the little huts, the big boulders, and the climate blew his mind most of all – he had figured on something more tropical. It was an odd phrase from a man of his age, but after all Mr Thornberry was a painter. I wondered why he had not brought his sketchbook. He repeated that he had left the hotel on the spur of the moment. He was, he said, travelling light. ‘Where’s your bag?’
I pointed to my suitcase on the luggage rack.
‘It’s pretty big.’
‘That’s everything I have. I might meet a beautiful woman in Limón and decide to spend the rest of my life there.’
‘I did that once.’
‘I was joking,’ I said.
But Mr Thornberry was still grimacing. ‘It was a disaster in my case.’
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the river was seething, and men were standing in the shallows – I could not make out what they were doing – and pink and blue flowers grew beside the track.
‘That fellow in Antigua had a beautiful house,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘A wall all around it, with morning glories just like those.’
‘So those are morning glories, eh?’ I said. ‘I was wondering.’
Mr Thornberry told me about his painting. You couldn’t be a painter during the Depression; couldn’t make a living at it. He had worked in Detroit and New York City. He had had a miserable time of it. Three children, but his wife had died when the third was still an infant – tuberculosis, and he had not been able to afford a good doctor. So she died and he had to raise the kids himself. They had grown up and married and he had gone to New Hampshire to take up painting, what he had always wanted to do. It was a nice place, northern New Hampshire; in fact, he said, it looked a hell of a lot like this part of Costa Rica.
‘I thought it looked like Vermont. Bellow Falls.’
‘Not really.’
There were logs in the water, huge dark ones tumbling against each other and jamming on the rocks. Why logs? I did not want to ask Mr Thornberry why they were here. He had not been in Costa Rica longer than me. How could he know why this river, on which there were now no houses, carried logs in its current as long as telegraph poles and twice as thick? I would concentrate on what I saw: I would discover the answer. I concentrated. I discovered nothing.
‘Sawmill,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘See those dark things in the water?’ He squinted; his mouth went square. ‘Logs.’
Damn, I thought, and saw the sawmill. So that’s why the logs were there. They had been cut up-river. They must have –
‘They must have floated those logs down to be cut into lumber,’ said Mr Thornberry.
‘They do that back home,’ I said.
‘They do that back home,’ said Mr Thornberry.
He was silent for some minutes. He brought a camera out of his shoulder bag and snapped pictures out the window. It was not easy for him to shoot past me, but I was damned if I would yield my corner seat. We were in another cool valley, with rock columns all around us. I saw a pool of water.
‘Pool of water,’ said Mr Thornberry.
‘Very nice,’ I said. Was that what I was supposed to say?
Mr Thornberry said, ‘What?’
‘Very nice pool of water.’
Mr Thornberry hitched forward. He said, ‘Cocoa.’
‘I saw some back there.’
‘But there’s much more of it here. Mature trees.’
Did he think I was blind?
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there’s some coffee mixed in with it.’
‘Berries,’ said Mr Thornberry, squinting. He heaved himself across my lap and snapped a picture. No, I would not give him my seat.
I had not seen the coffee berries; how had he? I did not want to see them.
‘The red ones are ripe. We’ll probably see some people picking them soon. God, I hate this train.’ He fixed that straining expression on his face. ‘Blows my mind.’
Surely a serious artist would have brought a sketchpad and a few pencils and be doodling in a concentrated way, with his mouth shut. All Mr Thornberry did was fool with his camera and talk; he named the things he saw, no more than that. I wanted to believe that he had lied to me about being a painter. No painter would gab so aimlessly.
‘Am I glad I met you!’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘I was going crazy in that seat over there.’
I said nothing. I looked out the window.
‘Kind of a pipeline,’ said Mr Thornberry.
There was a rusty tube near the track, running parallel in the swamp that had displaced the river. I had not seen the river go. There were palm trees and that rusty tube: kind of a pipeline, as he had said. Some rocky cliffs rose behind the palms; we ascended the cliffs and beneath us were streams –
‘Streams,’ said Mr Thornberry.
– and now some huts, rather interesting ones, like sharecroppers’ cottages, made of wood, but quite solidly built, upraised on poles above the soggy land. We stopped at the village of Swampmouth: more of those huts.
‘Poverty,’ said Mr Thornberry.
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. These were good timber houses, with wide corrugated tin roofs and healthy faces in the windows and well-dressed children standing on the big porches. They were not wealthy people, but neither were they poor. It seemed to me amazing that so far from San José – so far from Limón – in what was the borderland of thick viney jungle and dense savannah, people lived in dry well-made bungalows. Most of the people were black, and now most of the passengers on the train were black. I walked to the rear of the car to get away from Mr Thornberry, and talked to an old black man. The blacks he said had been brought over from Jamaica to build the railway. ‘We didn’t get the diseases,’ he said in English. ‘The British people got all the diseases.’ His father ha
d been a Costa Rican, his mother Jamaican; English had been his first language, which allowed me a glimpse of the sociology of the family – he had been raised by his mother. He was critical of the black boys hooting and laughing in the corridor of the train. ‘Their grandparents were willing to work, but they ain’t.’
The houses in style were perhaps West Indian, too. They were certainly the sort I had seen in the rural south, in the farming villages of Mississippi and Alabama; but they were trimmer and better-maintained. There was a banana grove in each mushy yard and in each village a general store, nearly always with a Chinese name on the store sign; and most of the stores were connected to another building, which served as a bar and a pool room. There was an air of friendliness about these villages, and though many of the households were pure black, there were mixed ones as well; Mr Thornberry pointed this out as soon as I returned to my seat.
‘Black boy, white girl,’ he said. ‘They seem to get along fine. Pipeline again.’
Thereafter, each time the pipeline appeared – and it did about twenty times from here to the coast – Mr Thornberry obligingly indicated it for me.
We were deep in the tropics. The heat was heavy with the odour of moist vegetation and swamp water and the cloying scent of jungle flowers. The birds had long beaks and stick-like legs and they nose-dived and spread their wings, becoming kite-shaped to break their fall. Some cows stood knee-deep in swamp, mooing. The palms were like fountains, or bunches of ragged feathers, thirty feet high – no trunks that I could see, but only these feathery leaves springing straight out of the swamp.
Mr Thornberry said, ‘I was just looking at those palm trees.’
‘They’re like giant feathers,’ I said.
‘Funny green fountains,’ he said. ‘Look, more houses.’
Another village.
Mr Thornberry said, ‘Flower gardens – look at those bougainvilleas. They blow my mind. Mama in the kitchen, kids on the porch. That one’s just been painted. Look at all the vegetables!’
It was as he said. The village passed by and we were again in swampy jungle. It was humid and now overcast. My eyelids were heavy. Note-taking would have woken me up, but there wasn’t room for me to write, with Mr Thornberry darting to the window to take a picture every five minutes. And he would have asked why I was writing. His talking made me want to be secretive. In the damp greenish light the woodsmoke of the cooking fires clouded the air further. Some of the people cooked under the houses, in that open space under the upraised floor.
‘Like you say, they’re industrious,’ said Mr Thornberry. When had I said that? ‘Every damn one of those houses back there was selling something.’
No, I thought, this couldn’t be true. I hadn’t seen anyone selling anything.
‘Bananas,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘It makes me mad when I think that they sell them for twenty-five cents a pound. They used to sell them by the hand.’
‘In Costa Rica?’
‘New Hampshire.’
He was silent a moment, then he said, ‘Buffalo.’
He was reading a station sign. Not a station – a shed.
‘But it doesn’t remind me of New York.’ Some miles earlier we had come to the village of Bataan. Mr Thornberry reminded me that there was a place in the Philippines called Bataan. The March of Bataan. Funny, the two places having the same name, especially a name like Bataan. We came to the village of Liverpool. I braced myself.
‘Liverpool,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘Funny.’
It was stream-of-consciousness, Mr Thornberry a less allusive Leopold Bloom, I a reluctant Stephen Dedalus. Mr Thornberry was seventy-one. He lived alone, he said; he did his own cooking. He painted. Perhaps this explained everything. Such a solitary existence encouraged the habit of talking to himself: he spoke his thoughts. And he had been alone for years. His wife had died at the age of twenty-five. But hadn’t he mentioned a marital disaster? Surely it was not the tragic death of his wife.
I asked him about this, to take his attention from the passing villages which, he repeated, were blowing his mind. I said, ‘So you never remarried?’
‘I got sick,’ he said. ‘There was this nurse in the hospital, about fifty or so, a bit fat, but very nice. At least, I thought so. But you don’t know people unless you live with them. She had never been married. There’s our pipeline. I wanted to go to bed with her right away – I suppose it was me being sick and her being my nurse. It happens a lot. But she said, “Not till we’re married.” ’ He winced and continued. ‘It was a quiet ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Hawaii. Not Honolulu, but one of the little islands. It was beautiful – jungle, beaches, flowers. She hated it. “It’s too quiet,” she said. Born and raised in a little town in New Hampshire, a one-horse town – you’ve seen them – and she goes to Hawaii and says it’s too quiet. She wanted to go to night-clubs. There weren’t any night-clubs. She had enormous breasts, but she wouldn’t let me touch them. “You make them hurt.” I was going crazy. And she had a thing about cleanliness. Every day of our honeymoon we went down to the launderette and I sat outside and read the paper while she did the wash. She washed the sheets every day. Maybe they do that in hospitals, but in everyday life that’s not normal. I guess I was kind of disappointed.’ His voice trailed off. He said, Telegraph poles … pig … pipeline again,’ and then, ‘It was a real disaster. When we got back from the honeymoon I said, “Looks like it’s not going to work.” She agreed with me and that day she moved out of the house. Well, she had never really moved in. Next thing I know she’s suing me for divorce. She wants alimony, maintenance, the whole thing. She’s going to take me to court.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘All you did was go on a honeymoon, right?’
‘Ten days,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘It was supposed to be two weeks, but she couldn’t take the silence. Too quiet for her.’
‘And then she wanted alimony?’
‘She knew my sister had left me a lot of money. So she went ahead and sued me.’
‘What did you do?’
Mr Thornberry grinned. It was the first real smile I had seen on his face the whole afternoon. He said, ‘What did I do? I counter-sued her. For fraud. See, she had a friend – a man. He had called her up when we were in Hawaii. She told me it was her brother. Sure.’
He was still looking out the window, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was chuckling. ‘I didn’t have to do a thing after that. She gets on the witness-stand. The judge asks her, “Why did you marry this man?” She says, “He told me he had a lot of money.” He told me he had a lot of money! Incriminated herself, see? She was laughed out of court. I gave her five grand and was glad to get rid of her.’ Almost without pausing he said, ‘Palm trees,’ then, ‘Pig,’ ‘Fence,’ ‘Lumber,’ ‘More morning glories – Capri’s full of them.’ ‘Black as the ace of spades,’ ‘American car.’
The hours passed; Mr Thornberry spoke without let-up. ‘Pool table,’ ‘Must be on welfare,’ ‘Bicycle,’ ‘Pretty girl,’ ‘Lanterns.’
I had wanted to push him off the train, but after what he had told me I pitied him. Maybe the nurse had sat beside him like this; maybe she had thought If he says that one more time I’ll scream.
I said, ‘When was this abortive honeymoon?’
‘Last year.’
I saw a three-storey house, with a verandah on each storey. It was grey and wooden and toppling, and it reminded me of the Railway Hotel I had seen in Zacapa. But this one looked haunted. Every window was broken and an old steam locomotive was rusting in the weedy front yard. It might have been the house of a plantation owner – there were masses of banana trees near by. The house was rotting and uninhabited, but from the remainder of the broken fence and the yard, the verandahs and the barn, which could have been a coach-house, it was possible to see that long ago it had been a great place, the sort of dwelling lived in by tyrannical banana tycoons in the novels of Asturias. In the darkening jungle and the heat, the decayed house looked fantastic, like an old ra
gged spider’s web, with some of its symmetry still apparent.
Mr Thornberry said, ‘That house. Costa Rican gothic.’
I thought: I saw it first.
‘Brahma bull,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘Ducks.’ ‘Creek.’ ‘Kids playing.’ Finally, ‘Breakers.’
We were at the shore and travelling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colón in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for a story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did, and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At this time of day, nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken: it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea, and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limón. Mr Thornberry was still talking. He said, ‘I think I’m going to like this place,’ then reported that he had spotted a house, an animal, a sudden fire, until at last we were travelling in darkness and his voice ceased. The surf was gone, the heat oppressive. I saw through the trees a combustion of awful flaring light, and Mr Thornberry croaked, ‘Limón.’
Limón looked like a dreadful place. It had just rained, and the town stank. The station was on a muddy road near the harbour, and puddles reflected the decayed buildings and over-bright lights. The smell was dead barnacles and damp sand, flooded sewers, brine, oil, cockroaches and tropical vegetation which, when soaked, gives off the hot mouldy vapour you associate with compost heaps in summer, the stench of mulch and mildew. It was a noisy town, as well: clanging music, shouts, car horns. That last sight of the palmy coast and the breakers had been misleading. And even Mr Thornberry, who had been hopeful, was appalled. I could see his face; he was grimacing in disbelief. ‘God,’ he groaned. ‘It’s a piss-hole in the snow.’ We walked through the puddles, the other passengers splashing us as they hurried past. Mr Thornberry said, ‘It blows my mind.’