The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  It was a problem, said Icaza.

  Yes, that was a serious problem, said Pareja. It ought to be looked into.

  I wanted to mention Borges again, but I felt I would get a dusty answer. Then I realized that Pareja was talking to me. The trouble with American writers, he said, was that he always identified them with American politics – with the United States government, Nixon, Vietnam. He did not find anything of interest in American politics, so he found the books unrewarding.

  I said that American novels – the good ones – were quite separate from American politics.

  ‘To me they are the same,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t you confusing the hunter with the fox?’ I said.

  No, he didn’t think so. The others agreed with him, so on this note the board meeting was adjourned.

  ‘Maybe they thought you were criticizing them,’ an American political officer told me the next day.

  I said I had tried to be tactful and had only mentioned Borges out of an abiding admiration for his work.

  ‘Latin Americans are funny,’ he said. ‘They hate to be criticized. They can’t take it – so don’t do it. They loathe criticism, or what they think is criticism. The Ecuadorian government is a kind of triumvirate of dictators – the army, the navy, the air force – three generals. When they think they’re being criticized they plant dynamite near the critic’s house and make an explosion.’

  That sounded serious, I said.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No one gets hurt. It’s just a reminder. The only fatality so far was a critic who had a heart attack when he heard the blast.’

  On this man’s office wall there was a map of Ecuador. But it did not resemble in the least my map of Ecuador. The man explained that it was an Ecuadorian map and that half the territory was actually Peru. The Ecuadorian maps of Peru and the Peruvian maps of Ecuador were also radically different, each country showing itself as very large and in possession of an Amazonian province.

  This man was such a fund of information, I asked him about the Indians. Well, he said, there were very few Inca noblemen and they used the Indians as cheap labour. The Spaniards conquered and replaced the Inca noblemen, using the Indians in the same way. The situation had not changed very much: the Indians were still on the bottom, and because they were mostly illiterate they could not vote.

  ‘I’m surprised the Indians don’t strangle these people,’ I said.

  There had been stranglings in Quito ever since I had arrived. The next day the strangler was caught. The story was in the newspaper El Universo under the title Obsessed With Ties. The murderer was a homosexual, but there were greater revelations. He found his victims by dressing as a woman (he was shown wearing an assortment of female wigs in a series of photographs). He had strangled four men. His statement to the police was paraphrased by the paper: ‘When he had a sexual relationship with a distinguished person, or one wearing a tie, he had a desire to strangle him, while with other people he was perfectly normal.’

  ‘Things are looking up,’ said the American writer Moritz Thomsen. The author of Living Poor and The Farm on the River of Emeralds – two superb books that put Thomsen in a class with the Patagonian resident, W. H. Hudson – he has lived in one of the wilder districts of Ecuador for fourteen years. ‘If you drive in some parts of Ecuador the Indians throw rocks at you. Lots of people get their windshields broken.’ He grinned and narrowed his blue eyes. ‘So I guess there’s hope for a revolution.’

  It was Moritz who said to me one afternoon on a Quito street, ‘I don’t get it, Paul. How do you write a travel book if all you do is go to parties?’

  ‘Write about the parties?’ I said. But he was dead right, and I was ashamed of myself. I vowed to take the train to Guayaquil the next day.

  There was no train the next day. Mr Keiderling at the American Embassy had the solution. I would be flown to Guayaquil providing I gave a lecture there. He would cable the office in Guayaquil and ask them to get a ticket for me on the Autoferro back to Quito. ‘It’s the same train,’ he said. ‘It’s just a different direction.’

  That seemed all right to me, so I flew to Guayaquil.

  Visitors to Guayaquil are urged to raise their eyes, for on a clear day it is possible to see the snowy hood of Mount Chimborazo from the humid streets of this stinking city; and, if you look down, all you see is rats. Chimborazo was shrouded in dense yellow-brown air which throughout the day spat discoloured rain and kept pedestrians sheltering under the shops that overhung the pavements. There were torrents of rain at night, but neither the spittle nor the downpour had any effect on the rats. Rats can swim, they can tread water for three days and gnaw through cinder blocks and climb vertical walls; they can live for days without food and can endure extremes of heat and cold; they are vicious, fearless and robust, and their breeding habits make them very nearly indestructible. They are probably alone among vermin in being noisy creatures: they have no real stealth. They don’t sneak, but rather stumble carelessly with a kind of tottering half-derailed motion. Rats within thirty yards or so announce themselves: they chatter and squabble constantly, leaping at each other. They are too evil to require any cunning.

  In Guayaquil, they are of the species Rattus rattus, the black or ship rat, which carried the Black Death – bubonic plague – from Asia to Europe. The plague was intermittent in Europe for four hundred years, and in the late eighteenth century it began to move back, via the Middle East, to Asia. It is thought that the plague ended in Europe because the black rats were driven out by a hardier unsociable species, but one less dangerous to humans, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). The black, flea-ridden rats boarded ships and in the hot, wet, port cities of Africa and South America they thrived, bringing plague, which is still endemic on these continents. I could get no figures on death by plague in Guayaquil – the question was considered discourteous – but people do die there from the bite of the rat-flea. It is a short, horrible sickness: you are bitten and two days later you die.

  There was a louvred panel on the upper wall of my Guayaquil hotel room. For two nights I was kept awake by the chirp of a fan belt. It would start in the darkness, the chirping of a band slipping on an un-oiled wheel. I mentioned this to the manager.

  ‘There is no fan in your room,’ he said.

  I went back to the room and stood on a chair and held a match to the louvred panel. What I had taken to be an air-conditioning device was a nest of rats – there were three of them, pattering and chirping in the dirt behind the panel.

  ‘There are rats in my room,’ I said to the manager.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. He was not surprised. I waited for him to say more, but he only smiled.

  I said, ‘Suppose we give the rats that room. They seem very happy there.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the manager in a tentative way. He didn’t see my irony at all.

  ‘The rats can have that one, and I’ll move to a different one.’

  ‘You want to change your room, is that it?’

  But all the rooms in this expensive hotel (it was named after a famous rat-hunting German explorer and naturalist) smelled of rats. It was a smell of chewed clothes and droppings and damp, and it was in every corner. And one could easily see where the rats had gnawed through walls and ceilings.

  I had been eager to go to Guayaquil: I had distant relatives there. In 1901, my great-grandfather had left his village of Agaz-zano near Piacenza in northern Italy and gone to New York with his wife and four children. His name was Francesco Calesa, and he found New York disgusting and America a great disappointment. Twenty days on the steamship Sicilia had been bad enough, Christmas on Ellis Island was purgatorial; New York was pure hell. He had been heading for a farming job in Argentina, but a yellow fever outbreak in Buenos Aires made him change his plans. Perhaps he had hoped to do some farming in America, but he was fifty-two and had no money. His situation was hopeless. When he could bear it no longer he made plans to go back to Italy. His wife, Ermengilda, resisted and finally r
efused to go with him. So the marriage was fractured: he returned to Piacenza where his married daughter was living (she had fled America with her husband a year before); his wife stayed in New York City, raised the rest of the children alone, and introduced a strain of stubborn singlemindedness into the family. My great-aunt, who remained in Italy, had a daughter Maria Ceruti, who married into a Chiavari family called Norero. The Noreros were distinguished as doctors and they had risen by establishing themselves in Ecuador – in Guayaquil, where they manufactured biscuits, sweets, pasta and spaghetti. They became prominent in Ecuador, and they brought this notoriety back to Chiavari. I had no problem finding them in Guayaquil. Everyone knew the Noreros. The only surprise was that I, a stranger, should be related to this now powerful family.

  I met Domingo Norero at the family factory, La Universal. It was a large building – the city had few of them. A strikingly beautiful Italian girl was with him: his sister, Annamaria, on a visit from Italy. It was not easy to explain the family connection, but the place-name Chiavari was like a password. Annamaria lived in Chiavari, Domingo too had a house there, and their mother was there at the moment.

  In his third-floor office, which was penetrated with the smell of chocolate biscuits, we had a family reunion. Domingo, a tall, thin, rather English-looking fellow, remembered my grandmother’s visit to Italy. His grandfather had started the factory in Guayaquil, and on the death of this pioneer the business had passed to Vicente, Domingo’s father. Ill-health, and an interest in Inca history, caused Vicente to retire; now he added to his already large collection of Pre-Colombian art and he wrote historical monographs on the subject – he had recently published, in Italian, Pre-Colombian Ecuador, a history. Domingo, only twenty-seven, had married at nineteen; his wife was blonde and bird-like, their two children as handsome as princelings. His yacht, the Vayra, was moored on the River Guayas, his Chevy Impala was parked at the factory, his jeep and his Mercedes were at his villa in the outskirts of town. But he was, for all his wealth, a modest person, if a bit rueful that the running of the entire business had fallen to him.

  ‘I had no idea I had so many relatives in the States,’ he said. ‘But do you know how many cousins you have in South America? There are Noreros all over the continent – Chile is full of them.’

  It gave me pause. These tycoons and walled-in businessmen I had seen, and cursed, in Colombia and Ecuador – they were perhaps my own flesh and blood. The proof was the Villa Norero. It was the sort of estate I had been seeing all through Central America and this part of South America, and it had made me doubtful that the old order would change. This one was Moorish in design, with Arabian tiles and pillars, and a swimming pool in the landscaped grounds – lemon trees, palms, and formal flower beds. The motto over the door on the family crest read: Deus Lo Vulte – ‘God Wishes It’ or ‘God’s Will’.

  We had a drink, and I talked with old Vicente, a dignified man who was president of the Guayaquil branch of the Garibaldi Club. Vicente was the spitting-image of Giorgio Viola, the Garibaldino of Conrad’s Nostromo. Conrad, in his previous incarnation – Captain Korzeniowski – had been here, and in Nostromo he reinvented Ecuador as Costaguana, Guayaquil as Sulaco and the volcano Chimborazo as Mount Higuerota. No one looked more at home in Ecuador than Vicente Norero, and he would not have looked out of place in Conrad’s novel, either. He inscribed one of his books for me and we set off in two cars for the Guayaquil Yacht Club. The previous day I had passed it alone and had not seen a club; the rats tumbling out of bushes and screeching around the river-front path had held my attention.

  Lunch lasted the afternoon. As we talked and ate I could see the river out of the window. It was wide, and great tufted mats of weed – ‘lettuces’ as the locals call them – floated on its surface, and logs and tree branches. Such flotsam and jetsam made it seem more a monsoon flood carrying the landscape away, than a river. But, though Guayaquil seemed a thoroughly nasty place, the family reunion had taken away much of its sting, even if it reminded me of my link with these adventurers. We were all profiteering in the New World, even I with my leakproof shoes and my notebooks was plundering the place with my eyes and hoping to export a few impressions.

  Annamaria was in business, too. Her husband and two children were in Italy. This was a business trip, she told me, in Genoese-accented Italian. ‘I do a lot of business,’ she said. I make parts for toilets, and also disposable injections – one jab and you throw them away. And these.’ She shook ringlets out of her eyes and reached across the table, picking up an empty bottle with delicate fingers. ‘I make bottles. I make everything’

  ‘You make money?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, money – I make money,’ she said, and laughed. ‘But I like to cook very much at home.’

  ‘You haven’t said why you came to Guayaquil,’ said Domingo to me.

  My train explanation was too complicated. I said I was giving a lecture at the local cultural centre and then planned to take the Autoferro back to Guayaquil.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Annamaria, ‘if you only do it once.’

  They pointed out the railway station, which was across the messy river, in Duran. They said that they had never taken the train themselves, but this did not surprise me. I had been in Latin America long enough by now to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendours of the continent.

  ‘I hope you come to Guayaquil again,’ said Domingo, and then we parted: the Noreros to their profitable pursuits and I to profitless gassing – a lecture on American literature.

  And the ticket I had been promised? ‘We tried to get you a seat,’ said the embassy’s man in Guayaquil. ‘But it’s full for the next few days. If you want to stick around Guayaquil for a while we could probably get you on, but don’t hold me to it.’

  ‘Why is this train so popular?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not popular, it’s just small.’

  One night in Guayaquil, a middle-aged Irishman in a loud check suit said to me, ‘You probably won’t believe what I’m going to tell you.’

  ‘Give me a chance,’ I said. His manner was benign, his voice gentle, and he had the sartorial inelegance of a man not used to matching the suit with the tie. With his directness was a whispered intimacy, of a soulful searching kind. I guessed that he had been a priest.

  ‘I was a Jesuit priest,’ he said. ‘In the priesthood for fifteen years, I was. I served my novitiate in Ireland and Rome, and after I was ordained I went to the States. I was in Ecuador for a while as a missionary, then I had a parish in New York. I used to go to Belfast every now and then to see my family. It was very bad in ’72 – “Bloody Sunday”, British atrocities. My brother was tortured, my sister burned out of her house. I was really shaken. “Preach love to your fellow-men,” they say, but how could I preach love to my fellow-men after what I had seen? Of course, it didn’t all happen like that – it didn’t hit me overnight. I had had doubts for seven years, but after that trip I was in bad shape. When I got back to New York, I went to my bishop and told him I wanted to have a six-month leave of absence. It’s quite a normal thing, you know. Priests are human. They drink too much sometimes, they have personal problems – they need time to sort themselves out. With a leave of absence I would have no duties. I didn’t have to say mass, only assist at mass. You know what I’m telling you.

  ‘My bishop was flabbergasted. He couldn’t believe what I was telling him. He said he had made a list of doubtful priests. He had actually drawn up this list of priests – fellers he thought would be leaving the priesthood sooner or later. And the funny thing was – I wasn’t on the list. But he gave me a leave of absence all the same, and he said to me, “You’ll be back.”

  ‘I had time on my hands – assisting at mass didn’t take any time at all. So I got a job sellin
g insurance. Was I good at it! I sold policies all over New York. Being a priest helped, I suppose – you can’t beat the sincere manner if you want to sell insurance. I didn’t care much about the money. It was the people that interested me, talking to them in their homes. And they didn’t know I was a priest. I was a salesman you see, flogging my policies.

  ‘At the end of six months I went back to my bishop and asked him for another leave of absence. He was surprised, oh yes, but I hadn’t been on his list. He even smiled at me and said again, “I know you’ll be back.” But I knew I wouldn’t.

  ‘It’s so easy to be a priest, isn’t it? Well, you wouldn’t know about that. But it is easy. All your needs are taken care of. There’s no rent to pay, no food to buy. No cooking, no cleaning. You get presents. “Need a car, Father?” “Here’s a little something for you, Father.” “Anything we can do, Father? Just name it.” I didn’t want that, and I didn’t want to go on selling insurance – in a way, that was like being a priest, too. I couldn’t go home, and I couldn’t stay in New York. I knew one thing – I wanted out.

  ‘I made a last visit to Belfast, saw the family, and the political things were just as bad as ever. My brother saw me to the plane, and as we were walking along I thought: You’ll never see me again. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was harder than leaving the priesthood – turning my back on my brother and walking to the plane.

  ‘I came straight to Ecuador. I had always been happy here and I had friends here. That was five years ago. I married an Ecuadorian. I’ve never been so happy in all my life. We have a child of fourteen months and one on the way – that’s why my wife isn’t with me tonight.

  ‘Do I go to church? Of course, I do. I left the priesthood – I didn’t leave the church. I never miss mass. I go to confession. You see, when I go to confession I’m not talking to the priest, I’m talking to God. I’ve got a job here. It’s not a very important job, but I’ll be here for some time.