The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  There were hills to the south and west. On my last day in Cali, I bought a map of the district and plunged into the country-side, keeping to the mule-tracks and by-passing the highest hill, a sort of local Golgotha with three crosses erected on its peak. I hiked throughout the morning and when the sun was directly overhead saw a stream splashing into a gully. I had sandwiches but no water, so I hurried to this stream for a drink. On the far side was a shack, with a goat tethered to one wall. An old man stood near the shack, pitching stones into the stream. He seemed Wordsworthian until his aim grew better and I realized that he was throwing the stones at me. I went no farther. Now the man was mumbling and shouting; he was either a lunatic or had taken me for a tax-collector. I headed towards a different path and eventually found some water.

  There were shacks all over these hills, in the most unlikely places, built against boulders and cave entrances, and at the bottom of sand pits. I came to fear them, because at each one there was a mangy dog which ran out and yapped at me, snarling into its paws. I was genuinely frightened of being bitten by one of these mutts: they had a crazy rabid look, and a bark from one excited barks from other dogs hidden all over the stony hillside. Giving these dogs a wide berth, I strayed from the mule-tracks; and then my map was no help. I guided myself back to Cali using the crosses on Golgotha as my landmarks.

  I mentioned the dogs to a Colombian that evening. There seemed to be a lot of mutts in the hills, I said. Were they dangerous?

  ‘Some of the dogs are dangerous,’ he said. ‘But all the snakes are deadly poisonous.’

  ‘I did not see any snakes.’

  ‘Maybe not. But they saw you.’

  To celebrate my departure from Cali, I went to an expensive Sunday-night buffet at one of the fancy restaurants. There was a group of American missionaries in the place, perhaps spending a weekend away from their mission. There were two enormous men, and two fat women, a pot-bellied boy and some smaller children; they were the sort of Bible-punching Baptists who are sometimes found bristling with poisoned arrows on a tributary of the upper Amazon, meddlesome mid-westerners groping and preaching their way through the blankest part of the South American map, only to meet, just in time for the church newsletter back home, a peculiarly grisly martyrdom. But tonight they were having a whale of a time: they made repeated trips to the buffet table, seconds, thirds, and then dessert. ‘That pie is scrumptious!’ The waiters looked on in bewilderment and incredulity as they were asked to dismember another chicken or hack another cake apart. I wanted very badly to talk to the missionaries, but they kept to themselves – all ten of them, at a long table. In Costa Rica, on the Mosquito Coast, I had found the setting for a story about castaways; here, across the room at this hotel in southern Colombia, I saw who those castaways might be. God had sent them here.

  The centrepiece of the buffet was a three-foot ice carving, a lyre-shaped object which melted slowly and dripped onto the tablecloth as the evening passed. It was interesting, because in the Cali slums and in the villages I had seen that afternoon there was no ice, and in some places nearby no water. Here, ice was frivolous decoration, and I found its foolish shape objectionable. Studying this piece of ice sculpture, I was accosted by a fat woman. At first, I thought she might be one of the missionaries. But no, she was speaking Spanish.

  ‘What do you call these in English?’ she asked.

  ‘Oranges,’ I said, feeling once again that my moustache was a failure.

  ‘Narrishes,’ she said, in Spanish, ‘I want to learn English. You can teach me. These?’

  ‘Grapes.’

  ‘Crepes.’

  ‘Good evening.’ It was a man in black, with a dog-collar – a priest. ‘Get your food, Maria,’ he said. The woman smiled at me and then walked to the far end of the buffet table. ‘She talks to everyone,’ said the priest. ‘You must forgive her. She is retarded.’

  The woman was heaping her plate with food. She had a broad plain face and pale eyes, and the sort of unusual bulk, the benjy-fat you see in the mad and housebound, who do nothing but stare out of the window.

  ‘Her father was very rich. He died two years ago,’ said the priest. ‘Extremely rich.’ The priest made a noise, a slurp of pity.

  ‘Is Maria in your parish?’

  ‘Ah, no. She is all alone,’ said the priest. ‘I look after her.’

  The priest had a matador’s thin face and dark stare; he glanced at Maria, he glanced at me. He had an anxious smile and lines of suspicion set this smile in parenthesis. We were soon joined by a solemn man in a blue shirt.

  ‘This is Father Padilla,’ said the first priest. ‘He is a Capuchin. Father Padilla, this gentleman is an American. You must excuse me while I see to Maria.’ He hurried to the buffet; Maria had begun to talk to another stranger.

  I turned to Father Padilla and said, ‘You are not dressed like a priest.’

  ‘We do not wear those clothes anymore,’ he said. ‘In Colombia it is not the custom.’

  ‘Capuchins?’

  ‘All.’

  ‘But your friend,’ I said, indicating the man in black, helping Maria with her plate, ‘he is wearing his collar.’

  Father Padilla frowned. ‘He is not a priest.’

  Strange: the priest in a sports shirt, the layman in a dog-collar.

  I said, ‘He seems to be one.’

  ‘He is a sort of helper, but not in my parish.’

  The black-suited man looked up. Seeing that he had stopped filling her plate, Maria scolded him. The man jerked the tines of his fork into a slab of ham.

  ‘She is rich?’ I said.

  ‘Very rich,’ said Father Padilla. ‘But in my district everyone is poor. They have nothing.’

  I told him what I had seen in Armenia – the children in the doorway. How could such a situation be allowed to continue?

  He said, ‘It is incomprehensible to me that some people in this country are so rich and others so poor. It is a terrible situation. There are tens of thousands of children who live like that. Why is this so? I cannot explain it.’

  The bogus priest came over with Maria. He guided her as if he was a zoo-keeper with a rare clumsy animal. He said, ‘She wants to ask you a question.’

  Maria was drooling. She held a silver implement in her hand. ‘How do you say this in English?’

  ‘Spoon.’

  ‘Boon.’ It was an infant’s utterance. ‘Come with me. You must eat with us at our table. You can teach me English.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I have to go.’

  The bogus priest led her away.

  Father Padilla watched them go. Then he said, ‘I want you to know that I do not come here often. This is perhaps the second time. You understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Good luck on your travels,’ he said. ‘God be with you.’

  15 The Autoferro to Guayaquil

  In Central America and Colombia I had met a number of people, who were travelling north, who told me of the excitements of the Guayaquil and Quito Railway – the ‘G and Q’, or ‘the Good and Quick’, as it is known to those who have not ridden on it. It had taken thirty-seven years to build (it was finished in 1908), although it was less than 300 miles long. From an altitude of over 9,000 feet at Quito, the Autoferro – a converted bus welded to a railway undercarriage – rises another 3,000 feet at Urbina and then drops down a series of confined switchbacks and loops (the Devil’s Nose double zig-zag! the Alausi Loop!) to sea-level at the steamy southern port of Guayaquil. I had no difficulty getting information about it; the station was nearby, service was frequent and a ticket cost no more than a few dollars. I was confident that this trip would be easy; confidence made me procrastinate. I agreed to give a lecture in Quito; people at that lecture invited me to parties; I went to the parties and tried to be amusing. The train could wait: I would be on it any day now.

  The weather in Quito was a source of wonder to me. It made ceaseless adjustments throughout the day. There were times when the c
loud hung so low over the city that it seemed as if I could reach up and peel wisps of vapour from the ceiling of the sky. I lived on a hill and could see a zone of clear air and, just above it, this lowering cloud. The mornings were often sunny, the afternoons grey, and in the evening some cloud settled and another tide of it rolled across the city, putting out the lights in houses, blurring the neon signs, and finally obscuring the yellow street-lamps, until Quito seemed an uninhabited place, or less, merely a chute of air down which whorls of opaque fluff tumbled. One morning it drizzled, and very tiny birds – the size of cuckoos in cuckoo clocks: but they were hummingbirds – crouched in the branches of a bush, each bird requiring no more than the shelter of a small leaf to keep it dry.

  In spite of the cold, and the altitude that made me breathless, I enjoyed Quito. Of all the mountain-top cities in South America, Quito struck me as being the happiest, and in retrospect Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagle’s nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey. Quito looked altogether cheerier, a plateau of church steeples, with light-coloured houses scattered across the slopes of the mountain which rose above it, and on the higher harder-to-reach slopes of Pichincha were the huts of the very poor who could see Peru from their doorways. But Quito had subtleties that were not discernible to me; a month after I had decided that it was one of the pleasantest places I had seen, and one of the fairest (there were no political prisoners in Ecuador), bus fares were raised to six cents and every bus in the city was destroyed by rioters.

  ‘You must not judge people by their country,’ a lady advised me. ‘In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.’

  She was from Bolivia herself. She explained that there were fewer national characteristics than high-level characteristics. The mountain people who lived on the heights of the Andes were formal and unapproachable; the valley people were much more hospitable, and the sea-level folk were the sweetest of all, though rather idle and lazy. Someone who lived at an altitude of about 4,000 feet was just about ideal, a really good scout, whether he lived in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, or wherever.

  I gave a lecture in Quito and dined out on it for days, meeting writers and teachers and Coca-Cola salesmen. Quito has one of the best bookshops in South America, but I bought no books: my new friends pressed books into my hands, and instead of catching the train to Guayaquil I read the books and stared at hummingbirds. A few days after I arrived I expressed a vague wish to see some of Quito’s churches (there are eighty-six), and immediately found myself being chauffeured around to these holy places.

  In the Italian-style, Jesuit church, called La Compañia, there was a painting of Hell. From a little distance this mural seemed to me an accurate representation of a night-time football game in El Salvador, but on closer inspection it was pure Bosch, Hell’s great amphitheatre depicted in detail. Schoolchildren in Quito are brought to the church and shown this mural, so that suitably terrified they will stay on the straight and narrow. Each sin is labelled and the sinners receive appropriate punishment: the shrieking adulteress is being eaten by a wild hog; the impure man is having fire poured through a funnel in his mouth, and a fire-breathing dog is scorching his genitals with flames; the vain woman wears a necklace of scorpions, the drunkard is made to guzzle boiling oil, the tongue of the gossip is bitten by a snake, a giant scorpion smothers the unjust man; money-lenders, with unmistakably Semitic faces, are made into mincemeat, embezzlers chopped into bits, gluttons choking on garbage, liars stretched on the rack. Lettered in gold across the top of the mural was a quotation from Luke (13:3) in Spanish: Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

  The horror of the punishments is much greater than anything in Dante’s Hell. The impartial beastliness more likely derives from that described by Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish nun whose Confessions include a terrifying vision of hell. Saint Teresa was canonized the same year the Compañia church was founded, 1622. I imagined that such a mural was most effective in persuading Indians to keep the faith. Indians, certainly, comprised the largest number of church-goers in Quito, and there were Indian – that is, Inca – touches in the artistry of these churches. A quarter of the decoration in the Church of San Francisco was Inca. The church itself was built on the site of Atahuallpa’s summer residence; the Inca motifs occur throughout the church –two sun gods carved on gold discs as soon as you enter the door are repeated on the walls of the interior, with fruit and flowers, the Inca harvest symbols decorating saints and crucifixion scenes. The Stations of the Cross are Spanish, the masks fixed to the walls above them are the large gold faces, some with headdresses that one sees in miniature on Inca jewellery – with exaggerated up-turned or down-turned mouths, like masks of comedy and tragedy.

  These churches were filled with Indians on their knees, praying in ponchos and shawls, carrying papooses. In the Church of Santo Domingo they were lighting candles, in San Francisco they were doing the stations on their knees, and at La Compañia they were venerating the guitar of Ecuador’s first saint – Saint Mariana de Jesus – who was so beautiful she went through life wearing a dark veil. It is said that a man once lifted this veil and beneath it he saw the grinning skull of Saint Mariana, which was God’s way of showing him that he had trespassed. No one could explain the guitar; a guitar requires no explanation in South America. The Indians gazed on it; they were small, stout, bandy-legged, with thick black hair, like kindly trolls. They walked bent-over even when they were carrying nothing: it is a carrier’s posture.

  Almost half the population of Ecuador are Indians, but it seems like more than that, for the nature of their jobs makes them conspicuous. They sell tangerines and relics, cigarettes, sweets, and matches on every street; they work as cooks, gardeners, and day-labourers on building sites – living in the half-made house until it is finished, and then moving to the foundations of one being planned. In the smartest suburban street, father, mother and child can be seen gathering firewood and picking through dustbins. In a crowd of Ecuadorians the Indians can be spotted immediately: they are the burdened ones and are known by their bundles.

  ‘Someone should do something about them,’ a man said to me. ‘You see a little man and he’s always got a band around his head and carrying a huge bundle and walking uphill. If only there was something they could be given to help them.’

  ‘Wheels?’ someone suggested.

  ‘Wheels wouldn’t work on those mountain paths,’ said the first man.

  ‘A sort of sled,’ said a woman. ‘They could pull it.’

  ‘Never get it uphill,’ said the man.

  I said, ‘I suppose they could be provided with another Indian.’

  My mocking suggestion was treated with the utmost seriousness.

  ‘What you’ve got to understand,’ said another man, ‘is that as soon as an Indian puts on a pair of shoes he’s not an Indian anymore.’

  The Ecuadorian writer, Jorge Icaza, told me that it was the Indianness in Ecuadorian novels that made them Ecuadorian. Everything else was fakery and imitation. His own novel, Huasipungo, is full of Indian folklore and locutions: deliberately so, he said – he did not want to write a Spanish American novel or a European-style novel, but rather a truly South American epic. For this, he said, he had to invent an idiom and thereby start a tradition. ‘I can tell you, this did not please the Academy at all.’

  I had planned to ride the train to Guayaquil on this day, too, but it had not taken much to persuade me to change my plans and have lunch with three elderly Ecuadorian writers instead. Besides Icaza, who trembled and brooded and told me he had given up on North American writers (‘These books say nothing to me’), there was Benjamin Carrión and Alfredo Pareja. Pareja, the youngest, looked like a Kentucky colonel and had travelled widely in the States. Carrión was in his eighties and reminded me of the actor Alastair Sim, the venerable and the gaga intermingled on his wondering face. They wore pinstripe suits and carried canes. In my drip-dry shirt and leakproof shoes I felt like a very
small stockholder who had been granted an interview by the chairman of the board. Indeed, Carrión was the chairman of a daily newspaper he had founded.

  They were in agreement on one point: the last interesting writer that America had produced was John Steinbeck. After that, all American writing had become unreadable.

  Before I could get my shovel in, Icaza said that all literature was a struggle, each word was a struggle; and he described the composition of Huasipungo.

  I mentioned Borges.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Icaza.

  ‘Borges said that the Argentine tradition was the whole of Western culture,’ I said.

  ‘Borges is mistaken,’ said Carrión.

  ‘We don’t think much of Borges,’ said Icaza.

  Pareja looked unsure, but said nothing.

  I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet him.’

  ‘Look,’ said Carrión, ‘it is the sales that matter. You have to be accepted. You have to make your name known or no one will look at you.’

  He enlarged on this theme, and it really was like the boardroom of a South American company which had not shown much profit lately. Icaza and Pareja deferred to Carrión who was saying that critics’ praise meant nothing if no one read your books. Publishing was a business, publishers were businessmen and had to make money to survive. And of course authors had to sell their books in order to be recognized. He knew. He was on the Latin American panel of the Nobel Prize Committee. He had put forward many worthy authors, but the Nobel Prize people always said, ‘Who is this fellow? We’ve never heard of him.’