The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  At La Oroya, where the line branches – the other line goes north to the tin and copper mines of Cerro de Pasco – our train was delayed. La Oroya itself was desolate and cold. Children came to the platform to beg, and sacks were loaded. Walking made my throat burn, so I sat and wondered whether I should eat anything. There were Indians selling knitted goods – mufflers and ponchos – and also fried cakes and burned bits of meat. I drank a cup of sour tea and took some more aspirin. I was rather eager to get back on the train, so that I could get another balloon of oxygen.

  When we boarded, an old Indian woman stumbled on the platform. She had three bundles – cloth, packets of greasy newspaper, a kerosene lamp. I helped her up. She thanked me and told me in Spanish that she was going to Huancavelica, some miles beyond Huancayo. ‘And where are you going?’

  I told her, and then I asked her if the people here spoke Quechua, the Inca language.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That is my language. Everyone speaks Quechua here. You will see in Cuzco.’

  We crawled the rest of the afternoon towards Huancayo, and the longer we went the more I marvelled at the achievement of this mountain railway. It is commonly thought that it was planned by the American Henry Meiggs, but it was actually a Peruvian, Ernesto Malinowski, who surveyed the route; Meiggs supervised and promoted it, from its beginning in 1870 until his death in 1877. But it was another twenty years before the railway reached Huancayo. A trans-Andean line, from Huancayo to Cuzco, although proposed and surveyed in 1907, had never been built. If it had been, my arrival at the muddy mountain town would have been more hopeful; as it was, I felt too sick to eat, too dazed to go on or do anything but lie shivering in bed, still wearing my leather jacket, reading the poems and devotions of John Donne. It was comfortless stuff for a cold night in the Andes: ‘As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist from coming; even the physician dares scarce come. Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.’

  There was something about the damp walls of every room in this town, and the muddy roads leading out of it, that made its isolation palpable; its chill conveyed a physical feeling of remoteness. I did not have to look at the map to know I was at the back of beyond. But I woke the next day with an idea. Instead of inquiring about the way to Cuzco from the people who lived in the town, I would go to the bus station and talk to people who had just come by bus along the Andean roads from Cuzco. I was somewhat happier to be in a doubtful frame of mind; I had thought there was only one way to Cuzco and I had been determined to pursue this trans-Andean route; but, realizing that several choices were open to me, I could take the best one, the easiest, even if it meant my turning back. The trip to Huancayo had been bad, but what if the onward journey was worse?

  I spent the better part of the morning chatting to passengers who had disembarked from the Ayacucho buses. Many were vague, rendered stuporous by the long trip, but the lucid ones told me that they had been delayed by rain and landslides; they had had to sleep on their buses, and only two people I talked to had actually been to Cuzco. They had come here by road because it was the only way for them – they lived in Huancayo.

  There was a bar quite near to where the buses stopped. Peruvian bars are medieval. They have rough wooden tables and moist walls and dirt floors. You see dogs and chickens in Peruvian bars. Bottled beer is sold, but most drinkers in the Andes here prefer a fermented brew which is a soupy broth and very bitter. It is served in plastic beakers. It is almost identical to the sort of beer drunk in villages in East Africa, the maize beer that is ladled out of greasy pots; indeed, one mouthful of the Huancayo stuff brought me memories of dear old Bundi-bugyo.

  ‘We want to know the best way to Cuzco?’ said a man in this bar. He was a student, he said, from Lima, and was hoping there would be a general strike to do something about the rising prices. ‘You say you just came from Lima, and you probably don’t want to go back there – it seems far, right? But Lima is closer to Cuzco than Huancayo is.’

  ‘But Cuzco is right through those mountains,’ I said.

  ‘That is the difficulty, eh?’ He swigged his beer. I noticed he was not drinking the local brew, but like me had a bottle of lager. ‘It is easier to go over them than through them. You take the morning train to Lima. You get a plane ticket and, bam, you are in Cuzco.’

  ‘I thought only tourists took the plane.’

  ‘But you are a tourist.’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Listen, even some Indian’ – he whispered the word – ‘even they take the plane.’

  I took the train back to Lima the next day, leaving in the fog and cold, arriving at Desamparados in withering heat. This train-trip was shorter, and we arrived on time, but then, it was downhill all the way.

  ‘Isn’t Peru awful?’ said a Peruvian to me one day in Lima. It was a very un-South American sentiment: no one so far had run down his own country in my presence. Even the most rebellious Colombians praised their coffee, and Ecuadorians said they had tasty bananas. I wondered whether this Peruvian was fishing for a compliment, so I expressed mild surprise and wary disagreement. He insisted that I was wrong: Peru was cruelly governed, hostile to its neighbours and falling completely to pieces. He was not fishing for compliments. I said, ‘Yes, now that you mention it, it is rather awful.’

  ‘Peru is dying. Terrible things are going to happen here.’ He was very cross.

  I said that I saw his point entirely.

  ‘I hope when you come to Peru again it will be different,’ he said.

  He was more critical than I was. I had begun to appreciate Lima; I had developed a toleration for its squalor. It was nothing like home: there were no reminders here of anything familiar. I only got homesick in places where people were buying vacuum cleaners or paying light bills. Like me, the people in Lima were all a bit lost; they took walks or lounged around the plazas because there was nothing else to do, and when they visited museums and churches their motive was the same as mine: sheer boredom. I knew I was an alien; but these people? They were poor, and the poor are always aliens in their own country. For quite different reasons we were placeless.

  And life in Lima was obvious, because it was lived outdoors. There were wealthy suburbs, but the rich kept behind their walls; it was dangerous in such a poor city to expose yourself as strong or well off. In Lima, people in fancy cars were often shouted at by ragged passers-by. The rest of society had spilled into the street, and there they sat, amid the stink of sewers and the pervasive half-sweetish odour of human excrement. Some rain might have washed the city clean, but it does not rain much in Lima. The warmth allows the people to live outside, and so it is possible to walk through the city and assess the population as poor and idle and youthful. The poverty has prevented Lima from having a traffic problem (the avenues are wide: they were built for victory parades), but it also means that the buses are very old and always full. In the central part of the city there are seven large plazas and parks. They teem with people; most simply sit or sleep, but others sell oranges, sweets, sunglasses, or they carry contraptions that resemble a panjandrum’s sedan chair onto the pavements and on these they shine shoes. More enterprising ones are box-camera men, pulling fairly good likenesses out of crates cobbled together to look like camera obscuras or Kodak Brownies. Here is another man operating a stand where, for ten cents, you can look at Viewmaster slides of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Singapore, New York, Rome, Bambi, or Wild Animals; there is an organ grinder with a parakeet and a crazed monkey; over here, five girls dressed like gypsies, telling fortunes with playing cards. ‘You have come from very far away, Mister,’ I was told. ‘I see a woman – she is talking to you, she is not your wife.’ (The woman proved to be Elvera Howie, from Chicago, who was in Cuzco with her husband Bert; she drank a great deal, but offered me nothing in the way of romance.) Families also lived in the parks, with all their cooking pots and their meagre
bedding; mothers suckled infants, other children cried pitifully, urchins yelped, and I saw one skinny boy sleeping on the littered grass next to a skinny dog. And prostitutes, gangs of men, lovers, beggars – ‘all the world,’ as the Spanish describe crowds. They were people with nothing to do.

  A Solution To The Crisis: Popular War! The paint on this splashed message near the Plaza de Armas was still fresh; but it looked as though the war had come and gone. The thousands of people in the parks and plazas could have been the dead and wounded left behind after a bitter conflict; most could accurately be described as refugees. And no buildings in South America looked more bombed and battle-scarred than those in Lima. But the pocked façades were not the result of bullets or cannon balls: this was wear and tear. Class warfare proceeds without bugle calls; it creates stinks and murmurs, not the noisy grandeur of armies heroically wrecking themselves on battlefields.

  Peru is too poor to fix its cracked buildings; and it cannot afford to tear them down. They are faded and broken, but some with porticoes and balconies are still lovely, and those that have not been boarded up and left to rot are turned into dance halls and bars, and what looks like a bread-line is a mob of Peruvians waiting for the doors of a once-elegant mansion to open and admit them to a violent movie or (in the middle of the afternoon) a dance. But I had the impression that Peruvian disgust was so keen that if it were to be combined with wealth the city of Lima would be destroyed and rebuilt to match the misguided modernity of Bogotá.

  I walked from the Cathedral (the mummy on view is not that of Francisco Pizarro: his skeleton has recently been found in a lead box in the crypt) to the University Park, and then made a circuit of the city, finally stopping at the Plaza Bolognesi where I sat and reflected on the melodrama of General Bolognesi’s monument. It was the most bizarre statue I had seen so far. It was eighty feet high, and at its front was a copy of the Winged Victory; soldiers marched on its panels, and on one ledge was the statue of a man falling from a horse – the horse was there, life-sized, twisted onto its side. Another detachment of soldiers reconnoitred another ledge with drawn swords; eagles, wreaths and cannons in marble and bronze lifted the column higher, and still it rose, with a large grieving woman pressing her body against an upper pillar; more rifles, more flags, more troops – battles on all sides – defeat here, victory there – and higher up two marble nymphs with wings soared, their feet sticking into the air, their wings out, their arms held high and reaching towards the top where Bolognesi himself, in bronze, rushes forward, a pistol in one hand, a flag in the other, facing the wide avenue, the dance halls, the screaming children, the overloaded buses.

  ‘Want to buy some pictures?’

  It was a Peruvian, with an old photograph album: tin-miners, old cars, snow-drifts, churches, trains. They were eighty years old. I bought two old train photographs, a dollar apiece, and we talked.

  ‘You will believe me, I hope, if I tell you I have spent some years in your country,’ he said in Spanish. He was very ragged and wore a felt hat. ‘I lived in Washington, D.C.’

  ‘How did you like it?’

  ‘I should never have left. Lima is no place to live.’ He reached into his rags and took out a tattered piece of paper. It was a coupon stating that he had filed a tax-return in 1976. ‘I am fully paid up,’ he said. ‘They will let me back if I choose to go.’

  ‘Why don’t you choose to go?’

  ‘I got into trouble here not long ago. There was a man who was drinking too much. He wanted to fight me. So I fought him. I cannot go anywhere. I have to appear in court. But who knows when they will hear the case?’

  ‘You will be all right,’ I said. ‘After the trial, you can go back to Washington.’

  ‘No,’ he said. He thought for a moment, moved his lips as if practising a phrase and then said in English, ‘I’m flat broke. Like my country.’

  17 The Train to Machu Picchu

  Peru is the poorest country in South America. Peru is also the country most visited by tourists. The two facts are related; even the dimmest tourist can count in Spanish – low numbers especially trip off his tongue – and he knows that Peru’s gigantic ruins and threadbare currency are a bargain. The student I had met in Huancayo was right: there were some Quechua Indians on the plane to Cuzco, but the others were all tourists. They had arrived in Lima the day before and had been whisked around the city. In their hotel was a schedule: ‘4:00 AM – Wake-Up Call! 4:45 AM – Luggage in Corridor! 5:00 – Breakfast! 5:30 – Meet in Lobby!…’ At eight in the morning, some men with shaving cream still stuck to their earlobes, they arrived in Cuzco and fought their way past the Indians (who carried tin pots and greasy bundles of food and lanterns, much as they had on the train) to a waiting bus, congratulating themselves on the cheapness of the place. They are unaware that it is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor.

  Let Observation with extensive view

  Survey Mankind, from China to Peru;

  Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife,

  And watch the busy scenes of crouded Life.

  The result is frequently maddening to both parties.

  The visitors wore badges, Samba South America; the badges also served as name-tags. At this early hour in the thin grey air and high altitude drizzle, the haggard faces did not match the tittupping names: Hildy Wicker, Bert and Elvera Howie, Charles P. Clapp, Morrie Upbraid, the Prells, the Goodchucks, Bernie Khoosh, the Avatarians, Jack Hammerman, Nick and Lurleen Poznan, Harold and Winnie Casey, the Lewgards, Wally Clemons, and little old Merry Mackworth. They were a certain age; they had humps and braces and wooden legs and two walked with crutches – amazing to see this performance in the high Andes – and none looked well. What with the heat in Lima and the cold here, the delays, the shuffling up and down stairs – and they had yet to climb the vertical Inca staircases (‘I don’t know which is worse, going up or going down’) – they were suffering. You had to admire them, because in two days they would be on the same plane flying back to Lima, waking again at four in the morning, and that day arriving in another godawful place like Guayaquil or Cali.

  The arrival in Cuzco made me feel wobbly and I felt much worse after lunch. But I decided not to give in to altitude sickness. Feeling slightly sea-sick, a combination of nausea and dizziness, I stumbled around town. The place had a dark brown look of isolation, and there were still signs of the earthquake that had hit it thirty years ago. Virtually the only buildings that did not fall down were the outlying Inca forts and temples, which are indestructible. Indians were selling alpaca sweaters, rugs, ponchos and knitted caps on every street corner. The Indians have a broadbased look, like chess pieces, particularly the women, who wear three skirts, one over the other, and heavy knee-socks; they are stocky and squat and you think, looking at them, that they would be impossible to tip over. They are warmly dressed because they are such expert knitters and get the raw material – the alpaca wool – from their own domestic animals. Only the hat is not woven; one seldom sees an Indian without a hat, usually of raw felt. For the past few weeks I had been asking people why the Indians were so fond of these hats; the explanations were neither ingenious nor interesting and none really explained why European hats were popular. I heard two tourists remarking on this subject in Cuzco.

  ‘I still don’t understand about those hats,’ said the first man.

  ‘It’s like postage stamps, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Sure. Everybody licks postage stamps, but there has never been a study to determine if it’s harmful to your health. It’s the same thing with those hats.’

  For the first time since leaving the United States on this aimless trip I saw other aimless travellers. I had been passing myself off as a teacher; they called themselves students. There were advantages in being a student:
student fares, student rates, student hostels, student entry fees. Great hairy middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted, ‘Look, I’m a student! Do me a favour! He doesn’t believe I’m a fucking student. Hey –’ They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters, who had gravitated to this impoverished place because they wanted to save money. Their conversation was predictable and was wholly concerned with prices, the exchange rate, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest bus, how someone (‘Was he a gringo?’) got a meal for fifteen cents, or an alpaca sweater for a dollar or bunked with some Aymara Indians in a benighted village. They were Americans, but they were also Dutch, German, French, British and Scandinavian; they spoke the same language, always money. Their boast was always how long they had managed to hang on here in the Peruvian Andes and beat the system.

  To an Indian selling Chiclets (it was either sweaters or Chiclets) such travellers could be demoralizing. Unemployment was very high in Peru, jobs were scarce, streets were lined with beggars and homeless people. How, then, to account for these thousands of poncho-wearing foreigners who lounged around and lived well but had no visible means of support? The tourists were easy to understand; they came, they went, they made no fuss. But the rucksack brigade were the cause of alarm and despondency.

  They had several effects in Peru. For one thing, they kept the crime rate down. They did not carry much money, but what they did have they protected ferociously. The Peruvian pick-pockets or street thieves who made the mistake of trying to rob one of these travellers always came out worse in the fight that inevitably ensued. A number of times in and around Cuzco I heard a scream and saw an infuriated Dutchman or a maddened American with a Peruvian by the throat. The mistake the Peruvian made was in thinking that these people were solitary travellers; in fact, they were like tribesmen – they had friends who came to the rescue. It was not hard to rob me, or to mug Merry Mackworth; but the bearded lout with a poncho over his California Is For Lovers tee-shirt, and the knapsack and only his busfare back to Lima, was a different story altogether; he was tough, and he was not afraid to hit back.