The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  The map shows a railway that runs east of Limón and over the border into Panama; but this banana line is defunct. Even if it had been running it would have got me nowhere except to a place called Bocas de Toro where I would have had to charter a plane to fly to Panama City. This left me only one choice, the slow train to Puntarenas on the Pacific coast, and then by road or air to Panama.

  But my chief reason for taking the Puntarenas train had nothing to do with travel. More than anything, I wanted to read a book. And I had a good book. Twice in San Salvador and once in Limón I had opened Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; each time it had been night and, while I had read the novel with fascination, on turning off the light the horrors of the story returned to me and made me wakeful. It was, without any doubt, the most terrifying story I had ever read: claustrophobia, shipwreck, thirst, mutiny, cannibalism, vertigo, murder, storm – it was a nightmare journey, and it produced nightmares in me. At home it might not have seemed so bad, but in three Central American hotel rooms – hot, stifling, narrow; the bulb-blistered lamp shade, the strange bed, the rat gnawing the ceiling – the book was an experience of pure terror. I put it away, and I vowed that I would not open it again until I was in a sunny railway compartment. It did not matter where the train was going; what mattered to me was that I should read it under ideal conditions, on a train, with my feet up, my pipe drawing nicely. This book was my reason for going to Puntarenas on that train.

  The Pacific Station looked promising. One man was mopping the floor of the lobby, another washing the windows: such attentions are a good indicator that the trains run on time. And there was an eight-foot statue of Jesus Christ across from the ticket window: Godliness and cleanliness. The railway itself is much newer than the Atlantic line; it is electrified, it is swift and smoothly-running, and, apart from its quacking horn, it is silent; the seats inside the blue carriages are not broken, and because there are eight trains a day it is seldom crowded: perfect for reading.

  Nor is the landscape remarkable enough to intrude. Costa Rica’s south-west is very different from the north-east. The land seems to slope away to the Pacific coast, from the coffee bushes in the high suburbs, to areas of light industry, the cement factories and timber yards that supply material for the country’s growth. By the time we left these industrial suburbs it was not yet noon; but it was lunch-time, not only for the factory hands, but for office workers and managers too. Costa Rica has a large middle-class, but they go to bed early and rise at dawn; everyone – student, labourer, businessman, estate manager, politician – keeps farmer’s hours.

  On this passenger train most of the people were off to the beach. The mood was festive, the luggage baskets of swim-fins, towels, sunhats, hampers of food. For most, this was a holiday. There were only a few blacks on the train (their homeland lies on the opposite coast) and the way the passengers had seated themselves – girls on these seats, boys over there, mothers minding children, older men and husbands sitting together at a safe distance from their womenfolk – reminded me of outings I had seen on holiday weekends in Boston, from the Italian neighbourhoods near North Station on the trains to City Point. The faces of these Costa Ricans had a Neapolitan cast, and their luggage was redolent of meatballs. They had radios, they sang, they shouted and ate ice creams.

  Between chapters of Pym I looked out of the window. There were brilliant orange flowers on the branches of tall trees, and in fields near these trees rows of ripe tomatoes, peppers and beans. The day grew hotter, the land flatter; here, most of the tomatoes had been picked, the vines had started to wither, and some of the fields were yellow-dry. It could have been a different season from the one I had seen in the north-east, where – before the train had passed into the tropical lowlands – we had spent hours in altitudes that had the new green gardens of early spring. The look was autumnal for much of the way to Puntarenas: dry broken cornstalks drooped in the fields, the trees were bare or else held a few boughs of fluttering brown leaves, the grass was burned, and even the fence posts which had conveniently sprouted into saplings and become a thicket of trees were losing their leaves to the dry air. In Ojo de Agua and Cirvelas the farmers were haymaking.

  But there was no consistency in this country’s agriculture. Latitude was no help in reading the crops: Costa Rica was mountainous as well as swampy and tropical, and it was flanked by two oceans. No sooner had I decided that autumn had come to this province than we entered shady villages and orange groves. And just before the village of Atena we climbed to the edge of a deep ravine of grey and brown rock. The ravine continued to the west and was a cut on the horizon, but a dust cloud hung in it and though I guessed it was deep I could not see to its bottom. The villages at its rim were dusty, too, six-barn hamlets and fruit farms, and the children at station platforms selling bunches of purple balls, a kind of fruit I had never seen before.

  ... the brig came on slowly, and now more steadily than before, and – I cannot speak calmly of this event – our hearts leaped up wildly within us, and we poured out our whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand. Of a sudden, and all at once, there came wafted over the ocean from the strange vessel (which was now close upon us) a smell, a stench, such as the whole world has no name for …

  The heat had quieted the passengers. They had stopped singing, and the train had become a sleepy local clicking in and out through the woodland slopes.

  ... we had a full view of her decks. Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel. Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help!

  Even the locusts were louder than this engine, and the passengers hardly noticed the fruit sellers who appeared on the short platforms of the village stations.

  As our first loud yell of terror broke forth, it was replied to by something, from near the bowsprit of the stranger, so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived …

  There was a family just in front of me. The mother was seated across the aisle from her two daughters, who were pretty – one about sixteen, the other a year or two older. The father was standing some distance away, swigging from a beer bottle. There was an empty seat between the two girls; on this seat was a basket. I had shut my book to rest my eyes, and then I saw a boy lingering by the rear door. At first I thought he was watching me. He came closer. He was watching the two girls, the empty seat. He crept towards them and summoning his courage said, ‘Is that seat occupied?’

  The girls giggled and moved the basket. The boy sat down. After an awkward interval the boy began to talk: Where were they going? What were they doing? He said he was a student. Wasn’t it lucky that they all seemed to be going to Puntarenas? He had a radio with him, he said. Would they care for a bit of music?

  Please, I thought, not that.

  The girls only smiled. The boy had not understood that they were travelling with their parents. The father went on drinking, but the mother on the other side of the aisle was staring at the boy. She had a fat face, and it was darkening with indignation. Her fingers were knotted and she was hunched in fury. Now the boy was describing the dance halls in Puntarenas. You could have a wonderful time, he said; he knew all the good places. He began naming the night-spots.

  This was too much for the mother. She stood up and began screaming abuse at the boy. And she spoke so rapidly, at such a pitch, I caught only shrill phrases of it; but I did hear her accusing him of trying to pick up her daughters, talking to them as if he had no respect. You have no right, she said. Who do you think you are? She stopped screaming. The boy grinned in shame. He did not reply, and he could not leave. He was standing his ground, according to the code of the Latin male; but he was sheepish. The girls, who h
ad said very little to the boy, said nothing at all now.

  The mother began again. She called him a pig and an intruder. She threatened to report him to the conductor. With each accusation she inched towards the boy, putting her fat furious face very near to his. Then she brought up her arm and, feinting with her fist, jabbed her elbow against his jaw. The boy was knocked sideways by the blow, and his hand went to his mouth. He looked at his fingers: blood. Now he started to protest, but he did so timidly, expecting to be hit again.

  There was more. A young girl, about eleven – perhaps another daughter – rushed forward with a bottle of Coke. She shook the bottle and sprayed foam into the boy’s face. Still, the two girls said nothing. The boy pulled a hanky out of his pocket and, wiping his face, made a pleading explanation: ‘They said the seat was not occupied … they said I could sit down … ask them, go ahead, they’ll tell you …’

  The father swallowed beer. He looked around helplessly as his wife yelled herself hoarse. I rather admired the boy for not bolting, but at last under the woman’s onslaught he took himself away and hid between the cars, nursing his wound. I made a point of seeking him out. I asked him about the mother. Was she a typical Costa Rican mother?

  ‘Most of them are like that. She is angry. She does not want me to talk to her daughters. They said the seat was not occupied! Look what she did to my mouth.’

  He yanked his lower lip down and showed me his bloody gum.

  ‘But the father – that man drinking beer – he apologized to me. He came up to me a little while ago and said, “I am very sorry about this, but what can I do?” That woman is a pig.’

  ... on his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood. As the brig moved further round so as to bring us close in view, the bird, with much apparent difficulty, drew out its crimsoned head, and, after eyeing us for a moment as if stupefied, arose lazily from the body upon which it had been feasting, and, flying directly above our deck, hovered there awhile with a portion of clotted and liverlike substance in its beak. The horrid morsel dropped at length with a sullen splash immediately at the feet of Parker …

  There was a hand on my knee. Earlier, a woman had sat next to me. Now she gave my knee a squeeze. She said, ‘I will be right back. Do not let anyone steal my suitcase!’ Another squeeze; and she smiled. She was about thirty-five and had two gold teeth. She walked to the rear of the car, and as she passed the ticket-collector, pinched his bottom. This excited the ticket-collector, and when the woman returned to her seat the man wandered over to flirt with her. But, uncertain of the nature of the relationship between the woman and me, he withdrew. The woman squeezed my leg again. ‘You like to read that book!’

  ... I sprang forward quickly, and, with a deep shudder, threw the frightful thing into the sea …

  ‘What is it about?’

  ‘Ships,’ I said.

  ‘You will have plenty of ships at Puntarenas.’

  We were passing a church. In El Salvador or Guatemala, the passengers would have blessed themselves, made a slow sign of the cross; and the men would have removed their hats. Here, the church was not an object of much interest – and it was an imposing church, with two Spanish towers like plump thermos jugs, and scrollwork, and stained glass, and a pair of belfries. It aroused no reverential gestures among the train passengers. It might as well have been a barn, though a barn that size would certainly have had the train passengers crowing with approval.

  Costa Rica is considered unique in Central America; prosperity has made it dull, but this is surely preferable to the excitements and urgencies of poverty. What is remarkable is its secularity. I was not prepared for this; I had never seen this commented upon; and I naturally expected, after my church-going in Guatemala and El Salvador, to see a similarly priest-ridden society, genuflections, the poor wearing rosaries as necklaces, and Never mind those huts – look at the cathedral! Mexico struck me as both pious and anti-clerical: priestly authority does not suit the Mexican temper. Costa Rica was neither, It seemed indifferent towards religion. I guessed that it had something to do with political pluralism – if that is the right phrase to describe the enlightened certainty that an election was rather more than a piece of fakery or an occasion to riot. The Costa Rican election had coincided with Shrove Tuesday; indeed, from what I had been told, it had supplanted it. It had been a fiesta – literally, a feast-day – full of self-congratulation and not distinguished by a high level of debate. The new president had not yet been sworn in: the holiday was still on. But a free election was like man’s answer to the bossy authoritarianism of a religion that demanded humility and repentance; it seemed to prove that competition was possible without violence or acrimony. The Costa Rican’s dislike of dictators had made him intolerant of priests. Luck and ingenuity had made the country properous, and it was small and self-contained enough to remain so.

  The unambiguous wish in, say, geriatric parts of Florida (which Costa Rica much resembles) is to have comfort and the good life now, on earth. Only the poor peasant believes that he will become bourgeois in Heaven. A rising class wants its comforts on earth and has neither the time nor the inclination to be religious: this was obvious in Costa Rica. In time of crisis – sickness, collapse, the mortal wound – the Costa Rican would turn to the Church and demand a miracle, but middle-class people generally haven’t the time to believe in miracles, and so, without consciously rejecting the Church, they seek answers in politics or business. It has made them fair, but boring. The greatest church in Costa Rica is in Cartago, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels, the Patroness of Costa Rica. But the Cartago brochures merely point out that the Inter-American Highway passes through town; that there is a San José bus every five minutes; that it is cool there and ‘Also, famous Irazú Volcano close by’. No brochure I saw mentioned churches. The Basilica is hardly an example of fine architecture, but that is not the point. The Costa Ricans are prouder of their modernity, their absence of militarism, their climate, their factories and their volcano than their churches. ‘Fine medical and hospital facilities,’ says the note on San José in a tourist leaflet, which sounds less a boast than an assurance to prospective immigrants. Seismically-cracked cathedrals and bloody statuary tottering on plinths have not prevented other Latin American countries from advertising their churches; but of course they have very little else to brag about. And, what is more important, they have kept the faith. The secularism of Costa Rica means that the church is something of an embarrassment, or at least a superfluity – history’s legacy as a dusty artefact rather than a programme for the soul. For this reason, the Costa Ricans are probably the most predictable people in Latin America and, lacking religious enthusiasm, the most avowedly political.

  The town, the church was now far behind. There were more stations, and the landscape changed at each one: now open and flat, now a ravine, now full of deforested hills, now an unlikely village of deflected light – green huts, blue trees and a whole hill of red grass, pastels glowing through a prism of dust.

  ... and now I was consumed with the irrepressible desire of looking below. I could not, I would not, confine my glances to the cliff; and with a wild indefinable emotion, half of horror, half of relieved oppression, I threw my vision far down into the abyss. For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind – in the next my whole soul was pervaded by a longing to fall …

  After fifty miles or so – and it was blazing hot – the line straightened, and some food-sellers (they were dark-eyed, almost middle-eastern looking girls and women, in shawls and long skirts) got on the train. They carried baskets of oranges, tangerines, mangoes and paper cones filled with peanuts and burned cashews. Ahead, past miles of parched farmland, was a blue lake. The train climbed a hi
llside: the lake was immense and the sun had whitened a portion of it, bleached the blueness out of it.

  The knee-squeezer was still next to me.

  ‘Is that a lake?’

  ‘That is the ocean,’ she said.

  The Pacific; I looked around with a wild surmise, and then resumed my reading. When I glanced up again we were travelling along a narrow peninsula towards Puntarenas.

  There were very few trees on this spit of land. There was the railway line, and a road, and a row of houses; there wasn’t room for anything more. On the Pacific side freighters were anchored, on the protected side, sailing-boats and dinghies. For no apparent reason, halfway down the peninsula, the train stopped, and here we remained for twenty minutes. Hot stiff breezes blew through the open windows of the train and rattled the shutters; sluggish brown waves pushed at the rocky jetties beneath the train. The sun was low; it slanted through the car and heated it. The passengers were tired, and so silent. The only sounds were the wind and the sea. On the left side of the train there was no land, but only limitless ocean. The train could not have been stiller or more full of light.