The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  Darkness proved better than dim light. These were country people: darkness put them to sleep. Soon the car was quiet, the rain let up, the moon was as round and yellow as a wheel of cheddar, and out of the window – mine was the only one open – I could see the flat swampy plain, and some huts with fires burning outside. The bog-dark land smelled of mud and rain; the passengers slept or stood silently rocking in the aisle. The darkness was pure and serene. I thought: I am alive.

  At nine o’clock, or just after, we passed Aracataca. The novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born here; this was the Macondo of Leaf-Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the light of fires and lanterns I could see mud huts, the silhouettes of palms and banana trees, and glow-worms in the tall grass. It was not late, but there were few people awake; glassy-eyed youths who had stayed up watched the train go by. ‘It’s coming,’ says a woman in Marquez’s Macondo, when she sees the first train approach the little town. ‘Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.’

  I made myself a baloney sandwich, drank two of the beers I had bought in Santa Marta and went to sleep. The noise, the rhythm of the clicking on the rails, was a soporific; it was silence and a stillness in the car that woke me. At midnight, I came awake: the train had stopped. I did not know where we were, but it must have been a fairly large place because most of the people in the car – including the man next to me – got off. But an equal number boarded here, so we were no less crowded. Children woke and cried, and people pushed and fought for the empty seats. An Indian girl sat next to me; her plump profile, outlined by the station lights, was unmistakable. She wore a baseball cap and a jersey and slacks, and her luggage was three cardboard boxes and an empty oil-drum. When the train started, she snuggled up to me and went to sleep. My shirt was damp with sweat, but the humid breeze was no help; and I knew we would not be out of this swamp until late the next day. I fell asleep, but when I woke again at another lonely station – a low building, a man, a lantern – I saw that the girl had moved across the aisle and was snuggling against a murmuring man.

  Dawn was tropical, the sun a grey puff ball in a humid cloud. I made sure I had not been robbed in the night: my passport and money were safe in my leather pouch. And, studying my map, I saw that we were about an hour out of Barrancabermeja. The land was thinly populated, savannah giving on to swamp. We were as yet too far from the Magdalena to be able to see it, and the hot clouds obscured the mountains. This was simply a small train on a straight track, labouring through a region where there were no roads, only huts, and an occasional bull in the grass, and vultures and herons. And the huts were poor, no more than mud shelters with grass roofs.

  ‘How about a coffee?’

  It was a man carrying a tray of filled cups. I bought two and gave him the Colombian equivalent of a penny. With an empty seat next to me I could spread out, drink coffee, light my pipe and read Boswell. This was not so bad; and I had that same sense of virtue I had experienced in Mexico, having endured a hideous night in a cramped seat.

  It remained cloudy for most of the morning, which was just as well. I had been told that when the sun broke through the heat would be unbearable. Perhaps that was no more than talk: everything else people had told me was wrong. They said there would be jungles, but I had seen no jungles. This was all swamp and nearby were low hills with odd worn-down configurations, as if a great flood had washed over them and made them small and smooth. People said there would be mosquitoes. There were, but the flying beetles were much worse – they not only bit fiercely, but got tangled in my hair. And the heat was no worse than Santa Marta’s, and nothing like as bad as Zacapa’s. They said we would run out of ice, but indeed there was no ice at all on this train; and even at the time the threat had not seemed to me particularly dire. So after eighteen hours on this swampland express I could truthfully say that I had seen worse trains in my life. It was not praise, but neither did I hold the conviction that the train should be insured and wrecked.

  I wished to remain sane on this trip, so, in a businesslike way, I brought my diary up to date, writing until lunch-time. Then I walked the length of the train, carrying my sandwich ingredients, and finding an empty table in the unused dining car, made myself a submarine sandwich. Another walk, and finally I settled down with Boswell. The sun had come out, the swamps shimmered; and the book was perfect. Doctor Johnson remarks on everything, including travel. Boswell is off to Corsica: ‘When giving me advice as to my travels, Dr Johnson did not dwell upon cities, and palaces, and pictures, and shows, and Arcadian scenes. He was of Lord Essex’s opinion, who advises his kinsman Roger Earl of Rutland, “rather to go an hundred miles to peak with one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town.” ’

  The book became my life-line. There was no landscape in it. I had all the landscape I wanted out the window. What I lacked was talk, and this was brilliant talk, sage advice, funny remarks. I could identify with Boswell (‘Why is a fox’s tail bushy, Sir?’), and the combination of this train and the Magdalena valley, and Boswell on my lap, was just the ticket. I think if I had not had that book to read as I made my way through Colombia, the trip would have been unendurable.

  But it was demeaning, after those conversations at Mrs Thrale’s and at the Mitre, to enter into discussions with the rest of the passengers. I had thought I was the only foreigner on the train. I was wrong – I should have known the moment I saw his cut-off dungarees, his full beard, his earring, his maps and rucksack that he was a fellow-traveller. He was French. He had a sore throat. A French traveller with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsillitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.

  He looked contemptuously at my drip-dry shirt, my leakproof shoes, my sunglasses.

  ‘You’re a tourist?’ he said.

  ‘Like you,’ I said in a friendly way.

  ‘I am travelling,’ he said, forcing the distinction. ‘I have come from San Andres Island. Before that, I journeyed through the States.’

  ‘So did I. But I came through Central America.’

  ‘You saw Tikal?’

  ‘No, but I saw Zacapa. No one goes to Zacapa.’

  ‘I have seen Tikal. Very beautiful. You should have seen it. How long have you been travelling?’

  ‘A little over a month.’

  ‘Five months I have been travelling! Five. I left Paris in October. I spent one month in New York City.’

  ‘Travelling in New York City?’

  This stung him. ‘Going here and there,’ he said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Bogotá.’

  ‘Yes, but after that.’

  ‘Southern Argentina.’

  ‘Patagone.’ He was making tracings with his finger on his French map. ‘I am going here,’ he said, tapping a green bulge in Brazil. ‘Down the Amazon, from Leticia. It will take fifteen days, or more, by river.’ He looked up at me. ‘Argentina has a bad government.’

  ‘Brazil has a wonderful government,’ I said. ‘Ask those Indians on the Amazon, they’ll tell you.’

  He stroked his beard, not sure whether I was mocking him. Chile and Argentina are worse. That’s why I’m not going there. You are taking this train all the way to Bogotá?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I am not. I am getting off at La Dorada. Then by bus.’

  ‘Is that quicker?’

  ‘No, but you save money – five dollars or more.’

  ‘I’ve got five dollars,’ I said. He started to cough. He stood up to give himself room, and coughed, bowing from the waist each time. I said, ‘You should do something about that throat. Want an aspirin?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It is not serious.’

  I went back to Boswell, then dozed and looked out of the window. The landscape did not change. The valley was so flat, so broad, it had no sides that were visible; and the foliage was too dense to be clearly discernible. But later in the day the savannah reasserted itself, and I could make out the faint pencillings of h
ills, and cattle grazed nearer the track, and horses, which broke into a gallop at the sight of the train. Flocks of white herons blew across the grass tips like flecks of paper in a breeze.

  At one town there was a bar; it was called ‘The Blue Danube’ in Spanish, this bar near the much-mightier Magdalena. Outside it was a hitching post, with three saddled horses tied to it; the riders were at the window, drinking beer. It was an appropriate wild-west scene in this poor empty land, the settlers’ shacks and the pig-pens and the rumours of emeralds. It was no better in the train. The passengers were either asleep or sitting silently, traumatized by the heat. Half of them were flat-faced Indians in shawls or felt hats.

  In the late afternoon, we had word at one station that near Bogotá there had been a derailment, probably caused by a landslide. The Frenchman confirmed this, but said that he didn’t mind – he was getting off at La Dorada. The news of this derailment did not really surprise me. In Barranquilla, Dudley had put me in touch with an American who was working on transport problems. This fellow had shown me the latest statistics for derailments on the line between Santa Marta and Bogotá. He only had the figures up to 1972, but these were enough: in 1970 there were 7,116 derailments, in 1971 there were 5,969, in 1972 there were 4,368. He said the situation was getting worse; so I set out from Santa Marta expecting to be derailed, or to be held up by one. (It is also said that bandits stop this train and rob the passengers, but the Colombians on the train denied that this was so.)

  ‘You think we’re going to make it?’ I asked the conductor.

  ‘You will be in Bogotá tonight,’ he said. ‘That is the truth.’

  Soon after, the mountains appeared, the cordillera of the Andean chain; and with them the brown Magdalena River on which men paddled dugout canoes or fished from the shore with contraptions that looked like butterfly nets. The mountains were at first scattered buttes and solitary peaks, and some were like citadels, squarish with fortress-like buildings planted around the summits. But it was an illusion – there were no buildings. My eye, unprepared for these heights, was misled, and made the strangeness into familiar shapes. The train rolled straight at these blue, grey, green peaks, and what I took to be loops of cloud – faint tracings in the sky – were mountains, too; and everything around me which had seemed no more than vapour had substance.

  The train started to climb towards the vapour and fog. Here, it was still hot and dry; there, it was raining. We entered the rain, which was a cold zone in a drenching downpour. The fields and gardens were bright green, and here were villas the likes of which I had never seen before. They were on the hillsides, behind hedges and walls, with names like ‘Seville’ and ‘The Refuge’. They had swimming pools and flower gardens and lawns as evenly-coloured as carpets. Some were like castles, and some were built like Swiss chalets, and one was made entirely of orange tiles, like a fairy-tale house with conical roofs. The Indians and the ragged people in the Expreso de Sol, who had come from the coast, watched these houses pass with astonishment and something like alarm. I wondered whether they realized that single families occupied these grand houses on the mountainside. The houses seemed fantastic to me; what, then, would a person from a Magdalena village think of them?

  I asked one of the passengers. He gaped through the window, his face was wet with rain. It was cold, but he was in his shirt-sleeves. ‘Who lives in these houses?’

  ‘The bosses,’ he said in Spanish.

  But this was Colombia. There was no swamp without a mountain, no mansion without a cluster of huts. The huts were nearer the tracks, and in the villages hunched-over peasants hurried through the rain. It was cold, but we had moved from the plain to the mountains with such rapidity that my shirt was still damp with sweat, and now it chilled me to the bone. I put on my leather coat and still I shivered.

  Then, on this mountainside, the train stopped. As if by a prearranged signal everyone got off. There were buses waiting. No announcement had been made about the derailed train ahead, the landslide; but everyone knew. We went the last few miles in an old bus, skidding on the rain-slick mountain roads. For the first time on this trip I felt I was in mortal danger. We arrived in the high rainy city in darkness.

  The mournful countenance of Bogotá’s antique buildings is pure Spanish, but the gloom of its setting is Andean and all its own. Even on a sunny day, the three peaks – the convent, the cross, the Christ statue – are wet and dark; the city is spread across a gigantic shelf of granite. Over a mile and a half high, it experiences mountain weather; it rained for most of the time I was there, and this cold drizzle imprisoned it in dreary solemnity. My mood was no better. The height gave me the staggers. I tottered from one end of the city to the other, slightly dizzy and feeling palpitations.

  Before the skyscrapers were put up, Bogotá’s church spires must have given the place a sullen beauty. They are the best examples of the golden age of Spanish architecture, and what with a climate like that of north-west Spain it is not hard to believe in some parts of the city that you are, as Boswell puts it, ‘perambulating Salamanca’. Bogotá’s contact with Spain was considerable, since for hundreds of years it was easier to get to Spain – sailing down the Magdalena to the sea – than to anywhere else in Colombia. Culturally and geographically, Bogotá was aloof from South America and its own hinterland. It remains so, a lofty city with an unscalable class system. Cows crop grass in Bogotá’s parks, but this hint of the pastoral is all but obscured, like the church spires, by Bogotá’s ugly office buildings.

  With the sight of my first Indian in Bogotá, my Spanish images quickly faded from mind. There are 365 Indian tribes in Colombia; some climb to Bogotá, seeking work; some were there to meet the Spanish and never left. I saw an Indian woman and decided to follow her. She wore a felt hat, the sort detectives and newspapermen wear in Hollywood movies. She had a black shawl, a full skirt and scandals, and, at the end of her rope, two donkeys. The donkeys were heavily laden with metal containers and bales of rags. But that was not the most unusual feature of this Indian woman with her two donkeys in Bogotá. Because the traffic was so bad they were travelling down the pavement, past the smartly dressed ladies and the beggars, past the art galleries displaying rubbishy graphics (South America must lead the world in the production of third-rate abstract art, undoubtedly the result of having a vulgar moneyed class and the rise of the interior decorator – you can go to an opening nearly every night even in a dump like Barranquilla); the Indian woman did not spare a glance for the paintings, but continued past the Bank of Bogotá, the plaza (Bolivar again, his sword implanted at his feet), past the curio shops with leather goods and junk carvings, and jewellers showing trays of emeralds to tourists. She starts across the street, the donkeys plodding under their loads, and the cars honk and swerve and the people make way for her. This could be a wonderful documentary film, the poor woman and her animals in the stern city of four million; she is a reproach to everything in view, though few people see her and no one turns. If this was filmed, with no more elaborate scenario than she was walking from one side of Bogotá to the other, it would win a prize; if she was a detail in a painting it would be a masterpiece (but no one in South America paints the human figure with any conviction). It is as if 450 years have not happened. The woman is not walking in a city: she is walking across a mountainside with sure-footed animals. She is in the Andes, she is home; everyone else is in Spain.

  She walked, without looking up, past a man selling posters, past the beggars near an old church. And, glancing at the posters, examining the beggars, I lost her. I paused, looked aside, and then she was gone. So I contented myself with the posters. They were of Bolivar, Christ and Che Guevara; but they were hard to tell apart. They seemed like versions of the same person: the same sorrowing eyes, the same mulish good looks and heroic posture. The political posters in Barranquilla had been similarly emblematic – the right-wing candidates had looked fat and complacent, while those of the left resembled a composite of this patriot, saviour and revolu
tionary. The other posters were of blonde nudes, Jane Fonda, Joseph Stalin (bearing a warning about ‘Yankys’), Marlon Brando and Donald Duck. The one I bought was the best of the bunch. It showed Christ on the cross, but he had managed to pull his hand away from one nail, and still hanging crucified, but with his free arm around the shoulder of a praying guerilla fighter, Christ was saying, ‘I also was persecuted, my determined guerrilla.’

  The beggars were everywhere, but they tended to linger near the churches and holy places, much as in Calcutta, to catch people when they are conscience-stricken. They were blind, lame, palsied; children, women, old men, infants – naked in the cold – being dangled on the knees of cringing hags. Here were two sisters, one in an orange crate with a scribbled sign saying she is paralysed (And this is my sister …). Some are not begging, but merely camped out on a traffic island in the middle of the city, boiling grey liquid in tin cans; or holed up next to a wall, or living (like the young boy I saw every day I was in Bogotá) in the rubble of deserted buildings. The signs the importuning beggars carry are pathetically blunt: I am a leper and I am sick and We are orphans, and some carry placards with potted histories of bad luck and disease. The ones who do tricks draw crowds – the Indian contortionists, the blind musicians.

  See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,

  The sot a hero, lunatic a king.

  To remark on the numbers of beggars is perhaps to make an observation of no great insight, like saying it is a continent of soldiers and shoeshine boys. One could even say that, in Colombia as elsewhere, it takes a degree of organization to beg. But why, I wondered, were so many of them children? Not sick or lame, and not carrying signs, they lived among the ruined buildings and ran in packs through the streets. They were lively, but they lived like rats. I asked several Colombians about them, and the Colombians were surprised by the ignorance of my question. They were gamins, they said – the word is the same in Spanish and English; and I ought to be careful of them, for most were pickpockets and sneak-thieves. It does not occur to the wealthy Colombian that these urchins are anything but vermin, and why house them or feed them when it is so much cheaper to put up a high fence around the house to keep them out?