by Paul Theroux
I spent my days in Bogotá church-going (elegant interiors with a touch of voodoo: ladies jostle in line to collect pints of holy water; No fugs, Only Bottles reads the sign), and climbing the hills, and admiring the old American cars – here a Nash, there a Studebaker – until I began to lust after one myself and regret that my father had sold his 1938 Pontiac. It struck me that the next great craze in America will be these indestructible cars of the 40s and 50s, restored to perfect condition. And when I grew tired of suspicious-looking youths who approached me (‘Ay, meester, joo from New Jork?’), and depressed by the beggars and gamins, I turned to Boswell for cheer. It was in Bogotá, one grey afternoon that I read the following passage: ‘Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.’ Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination.
14 The Expreso Calima
There is very good reason for the Bogotá railway to end at the town of Ibagué. After Ibagué there is such a precipitous pass that, to imagine it, you would have to picture the Grand Canyon covered with greenery – deep green gorges and green peaks and ledges and cliffs. The genius for building railways through such places disappeared around the turn of the century. Not long ago, the Colombians extended the railway from Girardot to Ibagué but having got that far they were flummoxed by the Quindio Pass. There are impassable rapids in it, and high mountains around it; the walls of the gorge are vertical. It is remarkable that a road exists, but it is not much of a road. It takes six hours to go the 65 miles from Ibagué to Armenia, where the train resumes, heading south to Cali and Popayán; from there, it is a short hop to Ecuador.
Descending the cordillera from Bogotá, I felt I had recovered my health. My head cleared at this lower altitude, the trench between two mountain ranges. The hills were fine-textured, like great soft piles of green sand, poured on the plain beside the tracks. Telegraph lines ran by the railway, and the district was so humid that small plants had taken root on the slack wires. They grew in the air like clusters of orchids, their blossoms and leaves dangling.
At Girardot the train stopped. Everyone got out. I stayed in my seat reading Boswell.
‘We have arrived,’ said the conductor. He was on the platform; he spoke to me through the window.
‘I have not arrived,’ I said. ‘I am going to Ibagué.’
‘You will have to take the bus. This train does not go there.’
‘They did not tell me that in Bogotá.’
‘What do they know in Bogotá? Hal’
Cursing, I walked to the bus station. The Ibagué bus had already left, but there was another bus to Armenia leaving in a few hours. That would take me through the Quindio Pass; a night in Armenia, then chug-chug to Cali. I bought my ticket and went to have lunch. I had left Bogotá too early to have breakfast, so I was ravenously hungry.
The restaurant was small and dirty. I asked to see the menu. There was no menu. I asked the waitress what there was to eat.
‘Dish of the day,’ she said. ‘Today it is beans Antioch-style.’
Beans Antioch-style: it did not sound bad. We were in the province of Antioquia. Perhaps this was a local delicacy? But names can be so misleading. They could call this dish anything they pleased but I knew hog-jowls when I saw them. Flies buzzed around me, around the fatty maw in my plate. I ate the beans and a slice of bread and handed it back.
Girardot lies on the upper reaches of the Magdalena River, but here the river is too shallow to be navigable by anything larger than a canoe. And the bridge over it was being painted. The bus became stationary in traffic and for an hour and a half it did not move. This meant a late arrival in Armenia and, what was much worse, a dangerous night-time ride along the hairpin curves of the Quindio Pass. The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive. They do not complain; they rarely speak. I complained, but got no response. So I read about Doctor Johnson. ‘He used frequently to observe, that there was more to be endured than enjoyed, in the general condition of human life … For his part, he said, he never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat, were an angel to make the proposal to him.’ And I thought: A week ago I was in Barranquilla.
I looked up. Our bus had not moved: that same sign advertising beer; the child still in the doorway with his tray of fried cakes; the piles of broken brick; and on the road the line of trucks and buses.
‘This is terrible,’ I said.
The man next to me smiled.
We were nowhere. We had come from nowhere. Ibagué, Armenia, Cali: they were names on the map, no more than that.
‘Where are you from, sir?’
I told him.
‘Very far,’ he said.
‘And you are from?’
‘Armenia.’ He gestured at the sky. His poncho was folded on his lap. It was very hot.
‘Do you think we will get there?’
He smiled, he shrugged.
I said, ‘I wish I was home. I have been travelling, but I keep asking myself if it is worth the trouble.’
The man laughed. If my Spanish had been better I would have translated what I had just read: He never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat.
We talked about the men painting the bridge. For this trivial chore the traffic in Girardot had halted and no vehicle was allowed across the bridge. Painting was difficult, said the man; was it not? They were trying to do a good job. He sat and sweated and mocked. The coastal Colombians had been loud and effusive, but these mountain people were stoical and sometimes wry.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the man. ‘I’m going home. I will be inside my house tonight.’
‘You are lucky,’ I said. ‘You could walk home if you wanted to.’
‘No. I could not walk through the Quindio Pass.’
More waiting, more Boswell. ‘Mr Elphinstone talked of a new book that was much admired and asked Dr Johnson if he had read it. Johnson: “I have looked into it.” “What, (said Elphinstone) have you not read it through?” Johnson, offended at being thus pressed, and so obliged to own his cursory mode of reading, answered tartly, “No, Sir, do you read books through?” ’
We began to move – slowly, but I was grateful for the motion after this purgatorial waiting in the sun. It was not only the painters who had held up traffic, but a police patrol, boarding buses and inspecting trucks for drugs. Or it might not have been drugs. They climbed onto our bus and walked up and down the aisles with their hands on their pistols. Then they singled out half a dozen people and made them empty their suitcases at the roadside. This happened four times in the trip from Girardot to Armenia, and one of the times I was asked to empty my suitcase. What are you looking for?’ I asked. The policeman did not reply. Inside the bus, the man next to me said, ‘You should not have asked the policeman that question. You see, he is not looking for anything. He is just making trouble.’
The mountains were as yet still distant. The stretch between Girardot and Ibagué was surrounded by green hills and shady meadows and farms: corn, cattle and well-watered valleys. It seemed idyllic, and at every house the bougainvillea was in blossom, purple and orange. The colour alone seemed a form of wealth. The landscape was gentle, and the deep green grass made me feel mellower: to have seen this was to have discovered a part of this poor country in which people lived in contentment, with space and a mild climate. I was still reading, looking up from time to time. Boswell was just right for this trip, and often in these uplands of Colombia I was given clarification by the book, or emphasis; or – as it happened in this pleasant valley – a kind of deflation.
‘The modes of living in different countries, and the various views with which men travel in quest of new scenes, havi
ng been talked of, a learned gentleman … expatiated on the happiness of a savage life; and mentioned an instance of an officer who had actually lived for some time in the wilds of America, of whom, when in that state, he quoted this reflection with an air of admiration, as if it had been deeply philosophical: “Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of Nature, with this Indian woman by my side, and this gun with which I can procure food when I want it: what more can be desired for human happiness?” … Johnson: “Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, – Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?” ’
It was true; I could not presume on the contentment of these Colombian peasants. It helped to have Doctor Johnson nearby to strike a cautionary note.
We stopped in Ibagué to endure a police search, and then headed out of town. We had not gone a hundred yards before we started to climb a mountainside. We turned and turned again, gaining altitude; and in minutes Ibagué was beneath us, rooftops and steeples and chimneys. We had entered the Quindio Pass.
In my travel-weary frame of mind, it took a great deal to tear me away from the charms of Boswell and Johnson. But at the Quindio Pass I put the book aside and did not pick it up again for several days. I had seen nothing to compare with this, well, rude magnificence of nature. Not even the Central American chain of volcanoes, or Death Valley near Zacapa, or the wild heights of Chiapas were as grand as this. In this green canyon, deep down, ran a river; but the river was white and unreachable. What houses and small farms there were in the canyon were fixed somehow to the cliffsides; and the cliffs were so steep the huts seemed painted there, primitive two-dimensional splashes of huts and plots. The straight-down precipice meant that the bean furrows ran one above the other, like the grooves on a vertical washboard. I saw no people venturing out; it looked as though they would simply fall down as soon as they left their front door, and how they hoed their washboard gardens I could not tell.
There were only the gardens; there were no animals – there was no room for them, nothing flat enough to hold a chicken, much less a pig. And the farms were few – a dozen vertiginous small-holdings and the rest green steepnesses and plunging ravines of thin air. The road was cut into the mountainside and it was so narrow that the buildings which faced onto it – nearly all of them were bars – were propped over the ravine; underpinned by timber scaffolding. Birds nested in these lofty beams.
The one town on the way, Cajamarca, lay on a small ledge. I could not see it until we were in it, but a moment later the houses dropped away, and Cajamarca was rusty roofs and hat-brims, a hamlet magnetized to a cliff. The tortuous road helped to explain Bogotá’s remoteness. This was the only way south and west, to the coffee regions and the main port of Buenaventura. Flying back and forth over Colombia, one would have no idea of the difficulty in getting petrol and food to Bogotá, and the longer I travelled overland here the more Bogotá seemed a fastness in the Andes which bore no relation to the other towns. And it was still a country in which river and mule-track mattered. In the rainy season a road like this through the Quindio Pass – it was only partly paved – seemed unthinkable. Even on this dry bright afternoon five trucks lay wrecked on the road, and the drivers perhaps sceptical that any help would arrive had built small camps beside the trucks, the way pygmies do when they manage to kill an elephant they cannot move.
It was probably less the splendour of the heights than the depthless terror of the empty space beside them that silenced the passengers. Most were Indians, with dark sulky faces under porkpie hats and wrapped in ponchos for the cold. They were impassive and did not move except to stuff bits of goat’s cheese into their mouths. After the disgusting meal at Girardot, I had got hungry, and as we waited on a bend for a truck to pass us a boy had come up to the bus yelling, ‘Cheese! Cheese! Cheese!’ The word echoed against the ravine walls. Lumps of it, the texture of unrisen dough, were wrapped in banana leaves. I bought a lump and ate it, pinch by pinch. It was salty and tasted of goat, but it was no worse than Gorgonzola.
Four hours passed in this way in the labouring bus: cheese, curves, and occasionally glimpses of the ravine that took my breath away.
At the highest point in the pass we were in cloud. Not tufts of it billowing in the genie-shapes I had seen near Bogotá that morning, but a formless white vapour we had entered and become lost in. It was a void and it had taken away the road. It dripped into the bus and it obscured the ravine; it veiled the peaks in some places and obliterated others further on. It shut out the sun, or rather dimmed it, giving it a bulbous pearly stare. The vapour changed from white to grey and there was no road, no valley, no mountains, no sky, only a grey sea-kingdom of mist, like the horror scene that greets Arthur Pym at the end of his voyage. It was a species of blindness, of blind flight, like a children’s tale of a rattletrap bus that takes to the air, of enchantment so pure and unexplainable – and now we were buffeted by wind – that I lost all sense of space and time. It was most of all like an experience of death; as if, try as I might, I could see nothing beyond the silly immediacy of this bus but a grave featureless vapour, my senses in collapse.
The grey turned white, became discoloured and bits of green were thrown up. We were descending now. The green was almost black in the damp cloud; then it was olive, the unfenced margin of road beside the gorge which a skid would land us into. No one would see us drop; there would be no sound but a gulp as we were swallowed at the pit of that mile-deep gullet.
The bus door was open – broken on its hinge. The bus swerved, and at one bend there was a thump. An Indian on one of the front seats had been holding a bundle on his lap; the bundle had bounced out of his hands, rolled across the floor and out of the open door.
The Indian stood up.
‘Please sir,’ he said. ‘I have five pesos in that.’
About fifteen cents. The driver slowed down.
‘And some of my things,’ said the Indian.
The driver stopped in the middle of the road. He could hardly have pulled off to the side – five feet to the right there was only emptiness. The Indian got out and, poncho flapping, he ran down the road for his bundle.
‘Five pesos,’ said the driver. ‘That is valuable, eh?’ He pulled at his moustache and the passengers roared with laughter. The driver was encouraged. ‘What does it matter if we have to travel in the darkness? That fellow needs his bundle and his five pesos, eh?’
The passengers were still burbling when the Indian returned. He put the bundle on his seat and thumped it and sat on it. We continued through segments of cloud which filtered the sun and made it pale yellow and dripped this yellow colour onto the trees and the grass. Ahead, in another valley, lay a yellow town flanked by yellow fields and yellow hills. This was Armenia.
Armenia, Antioquia, and not far away the town of Circasia. The names were Asiatic and baffling, but I was too tired to wonder at them. The bus rumbled through town, and though it was dark I saw a large hotel in the middle of a block. I asked the driver to stop, then walked back to that hotel and checked in. I thought that working on my diary until midnight would put me to sleep, but the altitude and the cold made me wakeful. I decided to go for a walk and see a bit of Armenia.
If the town had been dark or in any way threatening, I would not have gone out alone. But it was well-lighted and as it was a Friday night – Saturday was market-day – it was full of country folk who had come into town to sell their vegetables. There were crowds of people standing in front of the windows of electrical shops, watching television. They were mainly farmers, Indians and peasants from villages which had no lights, let alone televisions. I watched with one group. The programme was a documentary about Australian aborigines. Many of the aborigines were naked, but an equal number wore slouch hats and cast-off clothes that were not very different from those worn by these fascinated watchers in Armenia.
‘ …
these paleolithic people,’ said the narrator; and the aborigines were shown building lean-tos, and overturning logs and gathering witchetty-grubs, and impaling lizards and roasting them over fires. The aborigines, seen from this Colombian valley, did not seem so badly off. It was sunny there in the Australian outback and, stalking a kangaroo, the aborigines looked alert and full of hunter’s cunning. And here were the aborigine children. The narrator made some condescending remarks about their health and their history, and in Bogotá this probably did seem like the dawn of the world and a scratching settlement of cavemen. But the people in Armenia marvelled only at the nakedness, the lank penis, the fallen breasts. They laughed in embarrassment. The know-it-all voice of the narrator droned on, calling attention to the meal of maggots, the dwellings of twigs, the crude digging tools.
‘Look, look,’ said the watchers here in front of the electrical shop. ‘Where is this place? Is it Africa?’
‘Far,’ said one man. ‘Very far away.’
Five minutes later, walking back to the hotel, I paused on the pavement to light my pipe. I heard coughing; it came from a dark doorway, and it was the coughing of a child. An adult’s cough is frequently an annoyance, a child’s is always helpless and pathetic. I peered into the doorway and said, ‘Are you all right?’
Three children jumped to their feet. The tallest was black and wore a man’s suit-jacket which came to his knees; the others, in torn shirts and shorts, were sleepy-eyed Spanish-looking boys. They said hello. I asked them their ages. The black boy was ten, the others were both nine; it was one of the nine-year-olds – a thin, sickly boy – who had been coughing.