The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  That does it, I thought. I said, ‘I’d better go look for a hotel.’

  ‘Why not stay at mine?’

  Oh, look it’s raining. It blows my mind. Kind of a pipeline.

  I said, ‘I’ll just sniff around town. I’m like a rat in a maze when I get to a new place.’

  ‘We could have dinner. That might be fun. You never know – maybe the food’s good here.’ He squinted up the street. ‘This place was recommended to me.’

  ‘It wasn’t recommended to me,’ I said. ‘It looks pretty strange.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll find that tour I was supposed to be on,’ he said. He no longer sounded hopeful.

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  He told me. It was the most expensive hotel in Limón. I used that as my reason for looking elsewhere. A small, feebleminded man approached and asked sweetly if he could carry my suitcase. It dragged on the street when he held it in his hand. He put it on his head and marched bandy-legged like a worker-elf to the market square. Here, Mr Thornberry and I parted.

  ‘I hope you find your tour,’ I said. He said he was glad we had met on the train: it had been kind of fun after all. And he walked away. I felt a boundless sense of relief, as if I had just been sprung from a long confinement. This was liberation. I tipped the elf and walked quickly in the opposite direction from Mr Thornberry.

  I walked to savour my freedom and stretch my legs. After three blocks the town didn’t look any better, and wasn’t that a rat nibbling near the tipped-over barrel of scraps? It’s a white country, a man had told me in San José. But this was a black town, a beach-head of steaming trees and sea-stinks. I tried several hotels. They were wormy staircases with sweating people minding tables on the second-floor landings. No, they said, they had no rooms. And I was glad, because they looked so disgustingly dirty and the people were so rude; so I walked a few more blocks. I’d find a better hotel. But they were smaller and smellier, and they too were full. At one, as I stood panting – the staircase had left me breathless – a pair of cockroaches scuttled down the wall and hurried unimpeded across the floor. Cockroaches, I said. The man said, What do you want here? He too was full. I had been stopping at every second hotel. Now I stopped at each one. They were not hotels. They were nests of foul bedclothes, a few rooms and a portion of verandah. I should have known they were full: I met harassed families making their way down the stairs, the women and children carrying suitcases, the father sucking his teeth in dismay and muttering, ‘We’ll have to look somewhere else.’ It was necessary for me to back down the narrow stairs to let these families pass.

  In one place (I recognized it as a hotel by its tottering stairs, its unshaded bulbs, its moth-eaten furniture, its fusty smell), a woman in an apron said, ‘Them – they’re doublin’ up.’ She indicated a passageway of people – grandmothers, young women, sighing men, glassy-eyed children, black, fatigued, pushing old valises into a cubicle and several changing their clothes as they stood there in the passageway.

  I had no idea of the time. It seemed late; the people in Limón who were not room-hunting were strolling the wet streets. They had that settled look of smugness which the stranger interprets as mockery or at least indifference. Saturday nights in strange cities can alienate the calmest of travellers.

  Further on, a man said to me, ‘Don’t waste your time looking. There are no hotel rooms in Limón. Try tomorrow.’

  ‘What do I do tonight?’

  ‘There is only one thing you can do,’ he said. ‘See that bar over there?’ It was a peeling storefront with a string of lights over the door; insides, shapes – human heads – and smoke; and broken-crockery music. ‘Go in and pick up a girl. Spend the night with her. That is your only hope.’

  I considered this. But I did not see any girls. At the door were a gang of boys, jeering at men who were entering. I tried another hotel. The black owner saw that his reply to my question distressed me. He said, ‘If you really get stuck and got no other place, come back here. You can sit out here on that chair.’ It was a straight-backed chair on his verandah. There was a bar across the street: music, another mob of gawping boys. I slapped at the mosquitoes. Motorbikes went by; they sounded like outboard motors. This sound, and the boys, and the music made a scream. But I left my suitcase with this man and searched more streets. There were no hotels – no bars, no boarding houses; even the music was muffled. I decided to turn back, but I had gone too far: now I was lost.

  I came to a precinct of Limón known as ‘Jamaicatown’. In this white, Spanish-speaking country, a black, English-speaking area; a slum. These were the worst streets I had seen in Costa Rica, and each street corner held a dozen people, talking, laughing; their speech had a cackle in it. I was watched, but not threatened; and yet I had never felt so lost; it was as if I had burst through the bottom of my plans and was falling through darkness. I would continue to fall: there was absolutely nothing to do until dawn. My feet hurt; I was tired, dirty, sweating; I had not eaten all day. This was not the time or the place to reflect on the futility of the trip, and yet Costa Rica had seemed to promise better than this dark dead-end.

  At one corner I asked some loitering men the way to the market. I asked in Spanish; they replied in English: they knew I was a stranger. Their directions were clear: they said I couldn’t miss it.

  I saw the row of hotels and boarding houses I had entered earlier in the evening. I had been disgusted by them then, but now they didn’t seem so bad to me. I kept walking, and near the market square, skipping feebly across the street, one shoulder lower than the other because of the bag he carried, funny blue cap, bright green shirt, sailor pants, shuffling deck shoes: Thornberry.

  ‘I’ve been looking all over for you.’

  I needed his company: I was glad – someone to talk to. I said, ‘I can’t find a room anywhere. There aren’t any in Limón. I’m screwed.’

  He took my arm and winced. ‘There are three beds in my room,’ he said. ‘You stay with me.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Sure – come on.’

  My relief was inexpressible.

  I got my suitcase from the hotel where the man had said that I could spend the night on his verandah chair. Mr Thornberry called the place a piss-hole (and over the next few days, whenever we passed it, he said, ‘There’s your verandah!’). I went to his room and washed my face, then we had a beer and grumbled about Limón. In gratitude I took him out to eat; we had broiled fish and hearts of palm and a bottle of wine, and Mr Thornberry told me sad stories about his life in New Hampshire, about his loneliness. Maybe he’d rent a house in Puntarenas for the winter. He couldn’t take another cold winter. He had made a mess of his life, he said. It was the money – the IBM stock his sister had bequeathed to him. ‘The things I want money can’t buy. Money’s just bullshit. If you have it. If you don’t have it, it’s important. I didn’t always have it.’

  I said, ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘I couldn’t let you walk around all night. It’s dangerous. I hate this place.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought I was going to like it. It looked okay from the train – those palm trees. That travel agency was lying to me. They said there were parrots and monkeys here.’

  ‘Maybe you can get on a tour tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m sick of thinking about it.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Nine o’clock. I’m bushed. Shall we call it a day?’

  I said, ‘I don’t normally go to bed at nine o’clock.’

  Mr Thornberry said, ‘I always do.’

  So we did. There was only one room-key. We were like an elderly couple, fussing silently at bed-time, yawning, chastely putting on our pyjamas. Mr Thornberry pulled his covers up and sighed. I read for a while, then switched off the light. It was still early, still noisy. Mr Thornberry said, ‘Motorbike.’ ‘Music.’ ‘Listen to them yakking.’ ‘Car.’ ‘Train whistle.’ ‘Those must be waves.’ Then he fell asleep.

  In spite of the ill-will I had felt towards him on the train, I considered Mr Thor
nberry my rescuer. To return the favour, I found a tour for him – a boat trip northwards up the coastal canal to the Laguna Matina, and an afternoon on the long lava beach at the mouth of the Rio Matina. Mr Thornberry insisted that I accompany him and (‘Money’s just bullshit’) bought me a ticket. The boat was small, the canal was choked with hyacinths, so the going was slow. But orchids grew in clusters on the tropical trees, and there were herons and egrets soaring past us, and further on brown pelicans which flew in formation like geese.

  ‘I don’t see any parrots,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘I don’t see any monkeys.’

  I went to the bow of the boat and sat there in the sun watching the jungle pass.

  ‘Butterflies,’ said Mr Thornberry, who had stayed under the canopy astern.

  They were electric blue, and squarish, the size of pot-holders, mimicking the orchids they fluttered among.

  ‘More herons,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘Where are the parrots?’

  Rising in me was an urge to push him off the boat. But I was ashamed of my irritation: he had saved me.

  ‘Look how green everything is,’ said Mr Thornberry.

  We reached the lagoon at one-thirty, and moored the boat there because the black pilot feared that the tides at the estuary might drag us into the sea. We walked to the beach of grey lava. I swam. The black pilot screamed in Spanish for me to leave the water. There were sharks in the water, he said – the hungriest, the fiercest of sharks. I asked him whether he had seen any sharks. No, he said, but he knew they were there. I plunged back into the water.

  ‘Sharks!’ the black pilot yelled.

  ‘Where?’ I said. I was waist-deep in surf.

  ‘There! Get out! Get out!’

  Backing out of the water I saw the black dorsal fin of a shark slitting the water’s surface. But the creature itself looked no more than a yard long. I had seen bigger sharks in East Sandwich on Cape Cod, and told the black pilot this. He insisted that I was crazy to swim, so I indulged him in his fears and went for a walk instead.

  Mr Thornberry met me on the beach. We walked along the shoreline. ‘Driftwood,’ he said. ‘It’s all lava, you know. That’s why the sand’s so black.’

  The boat’s engine broke a shear-pin on the return journey. The pilot hailed a passing canoe and disappeared for an hour or more searching the canal huts for a new shear-pin.

  ‘The other tour boat had a special chef,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘This one doesn’t even have an engine.’

  ‘We might be stranded here for days,’ I said. But this was malice; already I could see the black pilot making towards us in a canoe.

  Back in Limón I found my own hotel. The weekend visitors had gone home: I had my pick of places. It was not a bad hotel, though the bed was damp with the sea-dampness of the air, and I was tormented by mosquitoes, and the noisy slosh of surf kept me awake for half the night. And yet, in solitude, I could think straight; I tried to work out the Thornberry paradox.

  The next day I gave to roaming Limón, but on closer inspection Limón did not look any better than it had that first night, a steaming stinking town of mud puddles and buildings discoloured by dampness. The stucco fronts had turned the colour and consistency of stale cake, and crumbs of concrete littered the pavements. In the park there were three-toed sloths creeping in tree branches, and in the market and on the parapets of the crumbling buildings there were mangy vultures. Other vultures circled the plaza. Was there a dingier backwater in all the world? Columbus had come here with his son, Ferdinand. Ferdinand, fourteen at the time, had written an account of that fourth voyage, and he had described Limón as ‘lofty, full of rivers, and abounding in very tall trees, as also on the islet [Uva Island, the Indians called it Quirivi] where they grew thick as basil, and full of very lofty groves of trees … For this reason the Admiral [Columbus] called it La Huerta [The Garden].’ It might have been so; but the accounts of this voyage are contradictory. Ferdinand sometimes saw things differently from his father. In Limón, Ferdinand wrote, to calm the fears of the sailors, the Indians sent out an old man with ‘two little girls, the one about 8, the other about 14 years of age … the girls showed great fortitude, for despite the Christians being complete strangers to them in appearance, manners and race, they gave no signs of grief or fear, but always looked cheerful and modest. So the Admiral showed them good usage …’ In his Lettera Rarissima to the Sovereigns, Columbus gave a different version of this. ‘In Cariai [Limón] and the neighbouring lands,’ he wrote, ‘there are sorcerers. They would have given the world for me not to stay there an hour. As soon as I got there they sent right out two girls, all dressed up; the elder was hardly 11, and other 7, both behaving with such lack of modesty as to be no better than whores. They had magic powder concealed about them. As soon as they arrived, I gave orders that they be presented with some of our trading truck and sent them directly ashore …’

  My desire to leave Limón was sharpened one morning while, with nothing better to do, I was standing in the plaza watching the vultures: were they vultures, or buzzards, or another bird of prey? I heard a sharp voice and saw an enormous black man coming towards me. He was carrying something silver; he wore a wool cap; he was barefoot. His eyes glinted with lunacy. He had a twitching gait.

  ‘I am the Son of God,’ he said.

  He shook the silver object, then held it in blessing like a pyx. It was a ballpoint pen.

  ‘I am the Son of God.’

  People smiled. They let him pass. Perhaps they did not speak English.

  ‘I am the Son of God.’

  I stood aside.

  Mr Thornberry was seated in the small lobby of his hotel. He looked deeply worried. He was studying a travel brochure. He jumped to his feet when he saw me.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘I tried,’ he said. ‘The plane’s full. The bus doesn’t leave until tonight.’

  The train had left, too, at five that morning. I said, ‘We can take a taxi.’

  ‘A taxi? To San José?’

  We went to the taxi rank in the plaza. I approached the driver of the least-dented car I could see and asked him: how much to San José? He thought for a moment, then uttered a ridiculously high figure. I translated this for Mr Thornberry, who said, Tell him we’ll take it.’

  On principle I beat him down ten dollars and insisted that he had to get us to San José in time for lunch. He agreed and smiled. ‘I’ve never done this before,’ he said.

  ‘This was a terrific idea,’ said Mr Thornberry. ‘I thought I’d never get out of that place.’ He looked out of the window and squinted. ‘Hut,’ he said. ‘Pig.’ ‘Cow.’ ‘Bananas.’ Towards San José he became excited. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s our pipeline!’

  11 The Pacific Railway: The 10:00 to Puntarenas

  Walking down the main street of San José one morning after the Limón episode, I saw Captain Ruggles with a suitcase in each hand, hurrying away from his hotel. He wasn’t leaving town, he said, he was only changing hotels. The previous night, and for the first time since arriving in San José, he had tried to hustle a girl up to his room. In the event, the manager had not allowed her past the lobby. What riled Andy was that the manager had said he had ‘standards to maintain’. So Andy checked out.

  ‘I’m going down the road,’ he said. ‘It’s real fine. Where I’m going you can take anyone you want to up to your room.’

  ‘You’ve got your standards to maintain, too.’

  ‘You bet. I make it a practice not to stay in any hotel where you can’t take a two-headed nigger.’

  I accompanied him to the hotel. It was a ramshackle building in the red-light district, catering to Panamanian sailors. The lobby was stacked with duffle bags, but that great stuffed thing near the check-in desk only looked like a duffle bag. It was Dibbs, eating a banana. What a small world this was.

  ‘This is more like it,’ said Andy.

  Dibbs had seen us enter. ‘Chicken-shit,’ he said, and went back to his banana.
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br />   As the days wore on, Andy became dispirited. Each time I saw him he had the same complaint. ‘I hate this place. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t fight it. I change hotels so I can take a hooker in, and I ask for a quiet room. They put me in the front. Sort of louvred windows, permanently open, like the front of a Ventura. The horns, the motorcyles, the exhaust fumes – they’re driving me batty. I can’t close the windows, I can’t sleep – I haven’t even brought a girl up. I wouldn’t bring a girl in there. Listen, I don’t even think these girls are pretty, do you?’

  But it was also the red-necks. They depressed Andy more than the Panamanian sailors. He introduced me to a sixty-seven-year-old Texan. ‘This is my forty-first trip to San José,’ the man boasted. ‘These girls cost money, but they’re worth every cent.’ His friend had been here twelve times, but his friend was younger. Andy’s hotel was full of red-necks who had come down for the beer-drinking and the whore-hopping. They wore cowboy hats and boots, baseball caps and tee-shirts printed with slogans. They said you could have a fine time in San José. To his credit, Andy said, ‘I don’t want to end up like these jokers.’ On his last evening, at my urging, he recited again Robert Service’s poem, ‘My Madonna’.

  San José was not really vicious, but only superficially so. And yet I felt excluded from the serious, peaceable life of the city; it made my stay here seem odder than what I had experienced in Limón. It was odd in any case to be a traveller in a place where people were busily occupied: going to the dentist, buying curtains, searching for motor spares, taking their children to school, leading their lives in dedicated and innocent ways. The Costa Rican with his satchel of groceries and his young son, entering the government office to pay his electric light bill: he was everything that I was not. The red-necks were simply a fragment of the foreground. As a traveller in this settled society I was an intruder, a stranger watching people go through familiar motions that I could not affect or enter into. I had no business here, but it was worse when I noticed how closely their lives resembled the one I had left at home. What about my family? My car? My light bill? My teeth? In San José, the orderliness was a reproach; I had a sense of having deserted my responsibilities. I saw a young couple picking out a vacuum cleaner, and I felt guilty and homesick. Nothing was more unconsoling to me in all of Central America than the sight of this couple proudly carrying their new vacuum cleaner out of the San José store. I think I began to understand then why I was always happier in a backwater, why the strangeness of Santa Ana had charmed me, and why I had sought the outlandish parts of Guatemala or the wastes of Mexico, Perhaps this explained my need to seek out the inscrutable magnetisms of the exotic: in the wildest place everyone looked so marginal, so temporary, so uncomfortable, so hungry and tired, it was possible as a traveller to be anonymous or even, paradoxically, to fit in, in the same temporary way.