by Paul Theroux
‘I was just doing this arithmetic,’ said the other nine-year-old. He showed me a scrap of paper with a column of figures written on it; they were neatly-done in pencil and covered the paper. ‘Look, I made a million.’
‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Your teacher will like that.’
They laughed. The black boy said, ‘We don’t have a teacher.’
‘No school?’
‘We used to go.’
‘Where do you come from?’
The black boy’s village was unintelligible to me. He said his parents were there, but they had sent him away because there were too many children at home. How many? I asked. More than ten, he said. The house was small, there was no food.
The second boy said, ‘My mother and father are in Cali. That is where my house is. I have a lot of brothers and sisters. But there was a problem. My father was always hitting me and beating me. I was afraid, so one day I came here to Armenia.’
I said, ‘Is this your brother?’
The third boy giggled and began again to cough.
‘That is my friend.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘if I give you some money, will you share it?’
‘Yes,’ said the second boy. He put his arm around the black boy. ‘This is my best friend.’
‘What about him?’ I indicated the third boy.
He was the smallest and the most ragged, he wore no shoes, his arms were thin and dirty; he raised them as he coughed.
The black boy said, ‘He is with us, too. He wants to stay with us. He is afraid to be alone.’ The black boy was a bit doubtful. I could tell from his tone that this frail boy was considered a burden.
I gave them some money and told them to share it, then I asked (but I knew what the answer would be), ‘What are you doing out so late?’
The second boy said, ‘We were trying to sleep.’
‘Where do you sleep?’
‘Here.’ They pointed to the doorway, where a rectangle of cardboard, a small flattened box, lay like a doormat next to the sidewalk. It was a damp chilly night and this side street in Armenia – all the shop-windows shuttered – was as dark and windswept as a mountain pass.
‘Where do you eat?’
‘People give us food.’
I said, ‘You should go home.’
‘That is worse,’ said the second boy.
‘We can’t go home,’ said the black boy. ‘It is too far and too difficult. We can live here.’
‘It is not a good idea to live here, is it?’
‘We have to.’
It was past midnight, but their replies were prompt; their intelligence was obvious and, for moments, it was possible to forget that they were small children. They were street-wise and as alert as adults; but there was nothing in this doorway they inhabited but that piece of cardboard. I had seen children begging in India, the mechanical request for a rupee, the rehearsed story; they were as poor and as lost. But the Indian beggar is unapproachable; he is fearful and cringing, and there is the language barrier. My Spanish was adequate for me to inquire about the lives of these little boys and every reply broke my heart. Though they spoke about themselves with an air of independence, they could not know how they looked, so sad and waif-like. What hope could they possibly have, living outside on this street? Of course, they would die; and anyone who used their small corpses to illustrate his outrage would be accused of having Bolshevik sympathies. This was a democracy, was it not? The election was last week; and there was no shortage of Colombians in Bogotá to tell me what a rich and pleasant country this was if you were careful and steered clear of muggers and gamins. What utter crap that was, and how monstrous that children should be killed this way.
We talked some more, but people passing had begun to stare at me. What was this, some pervert cajoling homeless boys into performing unspeakable acts? I went away, but I did not go far. About fifteen minutes later I walked by. The children were in the doorway, lying down. They slept over-lapping each other, like sardines, the smallest boy in the middle, the black boy using the flap of his jacket to keep out the cold – wrapping it around the other two. I was wearing my leather jacket; I was not warm. I watched the boys from a distance. They were restless and fidgeting, their bare legs outstretched. I walked to the corner and paused to let a car pass. When its sound died out I heard the smallest boy’s cough, a deep dragging tubercular cough, followed by a harsh gasp.
Such children are not news. Armenia had a paper, and on the front page the next morning, with the news of the election – the votes were still being counted – was an item about an incident that had taken place in Columbus, Ohio. It triumphantly announced that a seven-hour operation had been performed to separate a pair of Siamese twins. Mark and Matthew Myers were now in satisfactory condition, said the doctor. ‘Mark is kicking perfectly.’ This was news: the freakish element suited the readers of this provincial paper – freaks had an abiding popularity all over Latin America. But it seemed more remarkable to me that children should sleep on cold nights in doorways, on strips of cardboard. They were not mentioned; they were not noticed: after all, the child in the doorway had the singular misfortune of having been born without two heads. There was nothing strange in Colombia about homeless children; because it was commonplace it had ceased to be seen as savage.
I turned the page. Here was a full-page advertisement for an expensive housing estate. Who Says You Have To Leave The Country To Live California-style? That was the headline. The houses were being built a mile from Armenia, a mile from that doorway. They were described in lush detail. They had ‘fabulous interiors’ and two-car garages. And for safety and convenience, the text went on, the estate would be completely walled-in.
The railway station in Armenia is a substantial yellow chunk of South American turn-of-the-century architecture, a Roman villa which, enhanced by shabby neglect, looks even more like a Roman villa. This railway gave Armenia, Medellin, and – by a circuitous route – Bogotá, access to the seaport of Buenaventura. The trouble with the railway station – the trouble with so much in Colombia – was that people warned me away from it. ‘Do not go there alone,’ said the lady in the hotel. ‘I would not go there alone.’
But I was travelling alone, I said.
‘It is very dangerous.’
I asked why.
‘Thieves.’
There were thieves, people told me, at the railway stations, at the bus stations, in the markets, the parks, on the hill paths, on the back streets, on the main streets. When I asked directions to a particular part of town, no directions were given. ‘Do not go,’ they said. On the Expreso de Sol, I was told Bogotá was dangerous. In Bogotá I said I was going to Armenia. ‘Do not go – it is dangerous.’ The railway station? ‘Dangerous.’ But the train was leaving at six in the morning. ‘That is the worst time – the thieves will rob you in the dark.’ How, then, should I get to Cali? ‘Do not go to Cali – Cali is more dangerous than Armenia.’
I did not take these stories lightly. A tourist’s warning is like the mugging story in New York: it is a whisper of fear rather than a report of actual experience. But a Colombian’s warning about a place he knows well is something to heed. He has every reason to reassure the stranger and persuade him to linger. But the message of most Colombians was: Get out of town, hire a taxi, take a plane, go home.
This was impossible. I took the precaution of removing my watch when I went out. But as I never stayed more than a few nights anywhere I was usually on the move, with my suitcase and (credit cards were no help in the hinterland) several thousand dollars. I was easy game: I knew that, and this was why I had grown a moustache – that and my slicked-down hair would make me anonymous. The thieves, I was told, approached you in pairs. They stuck a knife in your ribs or they slashed open your suitcase. And I had been approached (‘Con ere, meesta. Leesen – joo my fren …’); it annoyed me to be singled out, after having taken trouble with my disguise. But I was lucky – I ran, or I ducked out of sight. I was never robb
ed, in Colombia or anywhere else.
The persistent warnings about this threat of thieves gave me a fantasy that entertained me throughout Colombia. I was walking down a dark street with a pistol in my pocket. A thief accosted me and held a stiletto at me. Your money, he said. I pulled out my pistol and, getting the drop on him, robbed him of his last peso. So long, sucker. I chucked a cigarette at him and watched him creep away, pleading for his life.
But without this imaginary pistol I was nervous in Armenia. It was dangerous. I woke early and hurried through the dark slum to the far side of town. That was dangerous. The railway station, on its side street, contained huddled Indians and indistinct shadows. That was dangerous, too. I bought my ticket, jumped onto the train, found a corner seat and kept my head down until the train left. This Colombian train, by Colombian standards, was luxurious – much better than the Expreso de Sol which had taken me on that long haul from the coast. There were net curtains on the windows, and at this hour it was not crowded. With any luck I would meet the boastful Amazon-bound Frenchman in Cali and I would tell him that the train was thirty-five cents cheaper than the bus.
The hills had been visible from the streets of Armenia; the train drew out and we were in them, and I could see how, beyond this range of green ones, was another range of blue ones, and a third range of black ones, much higher and more sharply defined. We travelled through the Cauca Valley, past groves of fern-like bamboos: they were clumped against the river which ran the length of the country. I could see the road, too. The road crossed the railway and climbed the hillsides, but the railway kept to the straight line of the riverbank. The buses on the road heaved back and forth, then shot out of sight; the train moved at its turtle pace, chugging south, stopping frequently. We travelled into heat; I was encouraged, because this was the way to Patagonia, this rumbling south. It was the delays, and easterly and westerly traverses that exasperated me and made me think how mistaken I had been in Boston to assume that I could board a local train and arrive in Patagonia within a couple of months. I had been gone well over a month and where was I? On a sleepy train in a green and distant country. The people here had no notion of where Patagonia was.
This was a lush place – bananas and coffee growing together, cultivation as far as the eye could see. Where were the owners of these estates? I saw only the peasants: small huts, pigs, skinny horses, people living dustily among garbage, all of Colombia’s blameless savagery. The grazing cows had trimmed the hills and meadows, so that the grass looked newly mowed, and each expanse had the manicure of a golf course. But this was hyperbole; unless it rained soon the entire area would become over-grazed and unable to support these herds.
At Tulua Station I bought a bottle of ‘British’-brand soda water. I drank it on the train after we got underway. An old lady was watching me.
‘It is hot here,’ I said, self-conscious under her gaze.
She said, ‘It is much hotter in Cali.’
‘Really? I thought it was cool there.’
‘Very hot. You will not like it.’
‘You are from Cali?’
She smiled. ‘Venezuela.’
‘How long have you been travelling?’ I asked.
‘Two days. I flew to Bogotá. The bus to Armenia, and now this train. I am going to visit my sister. Why are you going to Cali?’
I had no answer for this. I had no good reason for going to Cali, other than the fact that it was south of Bogotá and on the way to Ecuador. If I told her my ultimate destination I felt she would ask me more unanswerable questions.
I said, ‘I have a friend in Cali.’
The lie depressed me. I had no friend in Cali. Apart from some distant relations in Ecuador I did not know a single soul anywhere on this continent. I had been offered the addresses of people, but one of my rules of travel was to avoid looking up my friends’ friends. In the past, I had done so reluctantly, and the results had been awkward, not to say disastrous. But travelling alone, a selfish addiction, is very hard to justify or explain.
‘That is good,’ said the woman. ‘You will need a friend in Cali.’
This made my depression complete.
It was too hot to read. I had packed Boswell in my suitcase with my watch and my ring. I finished my soda water and looked at the men washing their trucks in the middle of the Rio Barragan. It was a tropical habit, the washing of motor vehicles in rivers; but this zone was both tropical and temperate. The green hills would not have looked unusual in the Catskills, except for the tall straight palms on their slopes, and the bananas, and that pig. We crossed into lower hills of shaggy green: bananas, chickens, and more pigs – it was impossible to look out of the window without thinking of breakfast.
After forty miles the hills became wilder still, and at sixty the climate had changed utterly. Now the hills were brown and over-grazed, and all the landscape sun-scorched, and no green thing anywhere. The bald hills, stripped of all foliage, were rounded on their slopes and had little wave-like shapes beating across them. It was a brown sea of hills, as if a tide of mud had been agitated and left to dry in plump peaks; this was the moment before they crumbled into cakes and dunes and dust slides. Glimmering beyond them was pastel flatness of diluted green – the cane fields which lie between the two cordilleras. From here to Cali, the cane fields widened, and at level crossings there were cane-cutters standing – there were too many of them to sit down – on the backs of articulated trucks, like convict labour. They had been up before dawn. It was four o’clock, and they were being taken home, through the fields they had cleared
What towns I had seen, from the forecourts of railway stations, had seemed unprepossessing. There were a few factories at Bugalagrande and dried-out fields of shrivelled corn, Every town’s hills had a distinctive shape – Bugalagrande’s were great slumping circus tents. At Tulua I saw two churches, one with the dome of Saint Peter’s, the other like Rheims; but Tulua was an otherwise dismal-looking place, like the Moslem railway junctions in eastern Turkey, all dust and sun and huts and a mosque or two. There were signs near these Colombian stations, indicating a place or giving a traffic warning, and all included a piece of advertising. The effect could be odd: National Police Institute Drink Coca-Cola; No Passing Smoke Hombre Cigarettes; Drive Slowly Bank of Colombia. After the town of Buga (a grand old station, with waiting rooms lettered First Class and Second Class – but they were both equally empty and derelict), the tracks became perfectly straight; such straight tracks were always an indication that, with no hills ahead, we were moving directly into the heat, across the plains with nothing ahead but a wiggling mirage cast up from the swamp-scalded earth.
The sun was blazing through the net curtains. I could not change my seat, so I walked to the rear of the train and found an open shady door where I sat and smoked my pipe and watched the cane fields pass. Another man had the same idea. We talked awhile. He wore a crumpled hat, a faded shirt; no shoes. He said he was a coffee picker. He worked in Cali, but did not like picking coffee in Cali. The pay was poor and the coffee was not much good either. ‘Armenia is where the best coffee comes from,’ he said. ‘It is the best in the whole of Colombia.’ In Armenia the pay was better – the highest prices went for Armenia’s coffee.
‘How much do you earn in Cali?’
‘Eighty pesos.’ This was less than three dollars.
‘A week? A day? A basket?’
‘Eighty a day.’
‘Why don’t you get paid by the basket?’
‘In some places they do. Not in Cali.’
‘Is it hard work?’
‘It is work,’ he said, and smiled. ‘I can tell you it is very hot.’
‘How much did you make a day last year?’
‘Sixty-four pesos.’ Two dollars.
‘And the year before that?’
‘Fifty-six pesos.’ A dollar fifty.
I said, ‘So you get more every year.’
‘But not enough. Do you know what it costs to buy meat, flour, eggs, vegetabl
es?’
‘You might get a hundred next year.’
‘They get a hundred in Armenia now,’ he said. ‘Sometimes a hundred and fifty. That is why I went up there. I want to work in Armenia.’
‘How many hours do you work?’
‘All day.’
‘You start early?’
‘Oh, yes. We start early, we finish late.’
‘I am sorry to ask you so many questions,’ I said.
He used a nice Spanish phrase to excuse me. ‘I am at your command, sir.’
‘How much do you pay for half a kilo of coffee?’ I asked.
‘If you work on an estate it does not cost much,’ he said.
Then I told him what a pound of coffee costs in the United States. At first he did not believe me, then he said, ‘But, no matter what you say, we are still very poor in Colombia. Everything is expensive here and it just gets worse.’ He shook his head. ‘Look, that is Palmira. We will be in Cali soon.’
I had been glad to have my leather jacket in Bogotá and Armenia. Now, in this heat, it seemed absurdly out of place. At Cali I was so hot I inadvertently left it on the train and had to run back and retrieve it. I was walking across the platform when I noticed a porter talking rapidly and angrily to an old man with a sack of oranges. I pretended to tie my shoe-lace, and listened.
‘I helped you with that thing,’ said the porter. ‘The least you can do is give me something.’
‘I am not giving you anything. You did not do anything.’
‘Five pesos,’ said the porter. ‘Give it!’
The old man turned away.
The porter, wringing his hands, walked ten steps. But he did not say anything.
The old man turned and showed his teeth. ‘You are a son of a whore.’
The porter heard him. He turned. ‘You are a whore and your mother was a black whore.’ He saw me staring and said, ‘Look at that stupid man!’
Cali (‘Very dangerous’) was so dull that, simply to keep myself occupied one afternoon, I bought a roll of dental floss and carefully flossed my teeth. Nor was I lucky with Cali’s hotels; I stayed three nights in the city and each morning checked out of the madhouse I had slept in the night before and set off in search of a new one. I toured the churches and watched long lines of little old ladies waiting to have their confessions heard. What could their sins possibly be? I have had evil thoughts, Father. I inquired into Cali’s recreations. ‘If I were you I would go up to Armenia,’ said a Colombian in my second hotel. ‘That is a lovely little town.’ I told him I had already been to Armenia and that it had reminded me of the most poverty-stricken parts of India. This was always a conversation-stopper: no matter how poor the Colombian believed himself to be, he felt libelled by any comparison with another poor country.