The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat,

  With an indolent expression and an undulating throat,

  Like an unsuccessful literary man.

  Just above La Paz, as the train rises and travels across the ridge before descending into the city, there are coal-black peaks covered with snow. The snow has a dry ghostly permanent look to it, a far cry from the radiant slush you see in New England.

  The bareness of Bolivia had been apparent as soon as we reached the south end of the lake. It was not the cookie crumb bareness of Mexico or the snail shell bareness of Peru or the withered aridity of Guatemala; Bolivia’s bareness was the gritty undercrust of the earth, a topography of stony fossils: the topsoil had simply blown away, exposing the country to its old bones. The place could not have looked colder or fiercer. And yet, all the Bolivians on the Guaqui train were friendly, and the hat-style of the Indians – here a brown derby was favoured – gave them a jaunty look. ‘You should stay here awhile,’ said a Bolivian, and he pointed to the snowy peaks. ‘You can go skiing over there.’

  The clouds were grey and creased with black, and as we made our descent into La Paz – the city grew larger and uglier as we neared the valley floor – there was a blue-white crack of lightning from the collapsing clouds. Then a thunderclap; and it began to hail. The hailstones bobbled against the train windows; they were the size of marbles – it was a wonder they did not shatter the glass.

  I did not feel well. I had slept badly in Cuzco, I had dozed on the bus to Puno; the furious boilers on the M.V. Ollanta had kept me awake crossing Lake Titicaca. I had stomach trouble, and for once my English cement, which was spiked with morphine, did no good. And of course there was the altitude: La Paz was over 12,000 feet, and the train had gone even higher in order to make its way into the city. I had a groggy half-awake feeling, dizzyness and shortness of breath. Altitude sickness had penetrated to my entrails, and though I kept swigging cement and chewing my cloves – my teeth had begun to ache again – I knew I would not feel any better until I left La Paz on the Panamerican express.

  I had another affliction, too, but this turned out to be an advantage. I cannot remember how I found a hotel in La Paz – I think I just saw a likely one and walked in. In any case, I was taking some aspirin shortly after finding my room and dropped the water tumbler into the sink. My hand went to it, propelled by instinct, and then I saw that I was holding broken glass and blood. It was my scribbling hand, and now the blood was running down my arm. I stepped into the corridor, bandaging the wound with a towel, and called to the room lady who was sweeping the floor. She clucked: the blood had begun to leak through the towel. She took a rubber band out of her apron pocket.

  ‘Put this around your wrist,’ she said. ‘That will stop the blood.’

  I recalled that tourniquets had been discredited. I asked her the address of the nearest pharmacy.

  ‘Maybe you should go to the doctor,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am sure it will stop.’

  But I had not gone two blocks when the new towel I had wrapped around my hand was soaked with blood. It did not hurt, but it looked dreadful. I hid it under my arm so as not to alarm pedestrians. Then the blood dripped on the pavement and I thought: Goddamn. It was deeply embarrassing to be walking through this large grey city with a blood-soaked towel on my hand. I began to wish that I had tried the rubber band. I left spatters of blood on the crosswalk, and more spatters on the plaza. I asked directions to the pharmacy and saw, when I looked back, that there was a pool of blood where I had paused and a horrified Bolivian watching me. I tried not to run: running makes your heart beat faster and you bleed more.

  The pharmacy was run by five Chinese girls, who spoke Spanish in the twanging gum-chewing way that they speak English. I held my dripping paw over a waste-paper basket and said, ‘I have a problem here.’ Before leaving the hotel, I had looked up the Spanish words for wound, antiseptic, bandage, tape and gauze.

  ‘Is it still coming out, the blood?’ asked one of the Chinese girls.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Take that bandage off.’

  I unwound the soaked towel. Blood poured out of the slice in my palm: it was a neat cut in my flesh, slightly parted, and with a steady trickle of blood flowing out of it. Now I was bleeding on the counter. The girl moved briskly, got some cotton, dunked it in alcohol and pressed it painfully to the cut. Moments later the cotton was crimson.

  She said, ‘It is still coming out.’

  The other Chinese girls and some customers came over to look.

  ‘What a shame,’ said one.

  ‘It does not hurt,’ I said. ‘I am sorry for making a mess.’

  Without saying a word, another Chinese girl twisted a rubber tube around my wrist and tightened it. More cotton was applied to the cut. This cotton stayed white.

  The second Chinese girl said, ‘Now it is not coming out.’

  But my hand had gone numb and I saw that it was turning grey. This gave me a fright. I undid the rubber tube. The blood flowed again down my elbow.

  ‘You should have left the rubber on.’

  ‘I think that is dangerous,’ I said.

  They tried everything. They poured alcohol on it from the bottle, they squeezed it, they dyed it with Mercurochrome, they sprinkled white powder on it – and now my hand looked like a Bolivian pastry. But nothing worked; direct pressure seemed to make the blood flow faster.

  ‘Put the rubber on again.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It is no good.’

  ‘It is good. It will work.’

  The other girl said in amazement, ‘It is still coming!’

  ‘You need stitches,’ said a third girl.

  ‘It is not that big,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Go to the doctor. He is across the street.’

  I went to the doctor’s office, but it was shut: out for lunch. Back in the pharmacy and, still bleeding, I said, ‘Forget the rubber tube. Just sell me a bandage and some antiseptic. I know it will stop – they always stop, sooner or later.’

  A different Chinese girl broke open a bandage and helped me wrap my hand, then she gave me all the odds and ends of tape and bottles we had used and I went to the cash desk and paid for them.

  It leaked some more – not too much, but enough to soak the gauze bandage and look quite horrible, like the joke shop bandage children wear to frighten their friends. The bandage was thick, the blood bright red. But I was fairly certain it had stopped. Buying a sugary coffee to restore my health, I held my bandaged hand in my lap.

  ‘Yugh. How did that happen?’ asked the waiter.

  ‘An accident,’ I said lightly.

  And at the bank, changing some money, I rested my wounded hand on the counter. The teller was quick; she sorted the bills, asked no questions, averted her eyes from my hand, and off I went: it was the fastest bank transaction I had made in months.

  I went to the railway agency. The clerk was elderly but full of beans. He kept saying in Spanish a word that means ‘Ready!’ or ‘Check!’ He told me to sit down. I did so, placing my right hand on his desk and pretending to ignore it.

  ‘One ticket to Buenos Aires, via Tucuman, please.’

  ‘Check!’

  ‘A First Class sleeper, and I would like to go as soon as possible.’

  ‘Check!’

  He shuffled papers, and as he wrote out my ticket he said, ‘The wound – is it big?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Check,’ he said, giving me a wheeze of sympathy. No ticket had ever been easier for me to buy. I was so encouraged by the Bolivian response to my wounded hand that I did not change the bandage until the next day. I was treated with great promptness, I was asked questions about it – did it hurt? how had it happened? was it large? My hand became a wonderful conversation piece, and everyone who passed by me stared at my white mitten. In Lima I had tried to buy a painting, but the price was ridiculously high and I had given up in frustration. In La Paz, I saw a better
painting, a pious portrait of Saint Dominic, done in Potosi in the mid-eighteenth century. I haggled for less than an hour, using my bandaged hand to gesture with, and walked out of the shop with the painting under my arm.

  ‘Better keep that painting in your suitcase,’ said the lady in the shop. ‘It is illegal to take such works of art out of the country.’

  The wounded hand turned out to be one of my most satisfying experiences in South America. But later I thought I might be pushing my luck. I began to worry that the cut would become infected and my hand would drop off.

  It was a city that seemed suited to ghastliness of this kind; it suffered itself, from a sort of urban gangrene, and if any city looked blighted to the point of being wounded – it even had a scabrous cankered colour – it was La Paz. Its extreme ugliness was woeful enough to be endearing, and I found it on further inspection to be a likable place. It was a city of cement and stale bread, of ice storms that produced a Bulgarian aroma of wet tweeds, built above the timber-line in a high pass in the Andes. The people in La Paz had heavy dignified faces and none of the predatory watchfulness I had seen in Colombia and Peru. In the wood-panelled coffee shops in La Paz, with their white-jacketed waiters and espresso machines and gooey pastries and mirrors, scowling matrons at one table, thickset men in baggy ill-fitting suits at other tables, it was hard to believe I was not in eastern Europe; it was only when I went outside and saw a stocky Indian chewing coca leaves in the shelter of a cement mixer that I was reminded where I was.

  It drizzled constantly: cold rain, ice slivers, hail. But most people were dressed for the weather. They wore thick overcoats and heavy sweaters, wool hats, and even mittens and gloves. The Indians had a bulky rounded look, and some wore earflaps under their derby hats. I saw the sun once. It appeared one morning between a break in the mist that hung over the canyon, and it was powerfully bright without being warm, simply a blinding flash that was soon eclipsed by more mist. The weather report in the daily paper was usually the same: Cloudy, fog, some rain, no change, like a certain season in northern Maine, except that here I was never able to elude my feeling of the bends or my nausea. I was tired but could not sleep; I had no appetite, one drink and I was staggering. And it is hard to be a stranger in a cold city: the people stay indoors, the streets are empty after the stores close, no one lounges in the parks, and the purposefulness – or what looks like it – in a cold climate is always a reproach to an idle traveller. I rolled up my painting, hid it in my suitcase and made preparations to leave.

  The sun came out just as the Panamerican left the precincts of the railway station and began to travel in tight circles through the eucalyptus groves on the slopes north of the city. They were the only trees I was to see for several days. Ragged toothy boys ran from behind the trees and hitched on the train, and after a few minutes jumped off and hurried, shouting, into the frail foliage. Then they were lost among the tall slender trees, the stringy bark. There were mud huts on the lower slopes, but as we climbed higher there were no more huts, only abandoned earthworks and an Indian or two. In spite of the steady rain of the previous days the steep creekbeds were dry and stony, cut deep in the waterless mountainside. Littered with rocks and sand, the soil could not have looked more infertile. But we were very high now, perhaps 13,000 feet and still climbing above the back of the city to the dry grey lip of the plateau that hangs over it. On this steep grade the train was tilted at a sharp angle; on the right a mountainside, on the left a deep ravine of clumsily made roofs.

  After almost an hour we were still in sight of La Paz. It was there below us; we had gone back and forth on the mountainside, passing and repassing the city which had become large and spectacularly shabby. Behind the city were the Andes, snowy mountains with clouds smoking on their summits. We were up among the daisies and the weeds and the twittering birds; it was cold and bright, and clear enough to see for a hundred miles. There were plateaux and peaks on three sides of the city, and as we passed it for the last time – we had now reached an open plain – it looked strip-mined with roads and ditches, a reddened ledge rising to green slopes, black cliffs, white peaks.

  Chased by rabid dogs, the train picked up speed and crossed the grey plain to the first station, Illimani, at 13,500 feet. There were sheep on the tracks and Indian women selling oranges for a penny each. I bought six oranges and boarded quickly as the train began to move. After the slow climb to this station it was surprising for the train to pick up speed and begin racing across the high plains.

  It was a Bolivian train. Most of the coaches were wooden Second Class boxes crammed with Indians on their way south. These coaches, and the dining car and the one Bolivian sleeping car, would go no farther than the border at Villazon. My sleeping car belonged to Argentine Railways and was going all the way to Tucuman. This solid British-made pullman was about fifty years old, each compartment fitted with cupboards and a sink and a chamberpot. There were two berths in my compartment. Fernando, a journalism student, had the upper berth; I had the lower one and was privileged, because this gave me the window seat and the table.

  ‘You are a teacher and all you do is write,’ said Fernando. ‘Me, I’m supposed to be the journalist and I haven’t even got a pen! You should be a journalist!’

  ‘A geography teacher,’ I said, pausing in my note-taking. ‘And, you see, this is rather unusual geography.’

  ‘This?’

  We stared out the window.

  ‘That mountain, for example.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘That is a big mountain.’

  It was Nevada de Illimani, four miles high, dark brutal bulk surmounted by wind-whipped snow. And it lay beyond the plain where grey grass had been trampled flat by storms.

  Fernando smiled. He had not seen my point at all. He said, ‘I am so glad you are happy in my country.’ And he left the compartment.

  The mountain was soon far behind us; we were sprinting towards an irregular wall of rainclouds and hills, past wheatfields and pepper patches. The eastern horizon was white and domed, like the skyline of an Arabian city idealized in a fable; it was the far edge of the high plains, this range of mosque-like peaks buried to their domes and squat minarets, and it was so thin and yet so marvellously shaped that at times it appeared as oddly beautiful as a mirage. Nearer the railway line – but very far apart – were small mud huts. They had mud-block courtyards and some had corrals, but none of them had any windows. They were shut; there were no lights; they were no more than hovels, and they looked forlorn. At Viacha, which was a village, we stopped to take on passengers. Now there was only standing room in Second Class, the battered green coaches were filled to overflowing, and on the curves I could see three or four faces at every window. I had tried to walk through the train to these coaches, but they were impassable – the Second Class corridors were jammed with people and their belongings. There was no greater contrast than this glow-worm stuffed with Bolivians and those empty plains.

  It is equal to living in a tragic land

  To live in a tragic time.

  Regard now the sloping mountainous rocks

  And the river that batters its way over stones,

  Regard the hovels of those that live in this battered land.

  There were no cars in the villages, no roads, no trees; only mud huts and cows, and Indians wrapped up against the cold. Except for the llamas which frisked when they saw the train, and the very shaggy mules which took no notice, travelling across the high plains was a bit like travelling through Texas. The hills were distant and slightly rounded – rain poured on one, the sun was setting on another – and the sky was enormous. The tracks from now on were perfectly straight, and just before the daylight was entirely gone the air became very cold. In this empty land an Indian pushed a bicycle along a path and then cut across a barren field, and later I saw a woman watching some still sheep. In the gathering dusk, some miles further on, an Indian woman and two small children laboured across the plain leading five mules which were carrying loads of f
arm tools, shovels and hoes. In a cloudy sunset, the village of Ayoayo – mud houses and a church – looked like a distant outpost from another age; it lay in the middle of the plain and it was so small the train did not stop.

  The land became hillier, and a range of rugged bare mountains appeared – so high they were brightly lit by the setting sun, although we were travelling in near darkness. And the condors, too, flew so high they caught the light. The last Indian I saw that day was walking away from the train through a gulch. He wore sandals, but – in spite of the cold – no socks.

  I saw what I thought at first was a Christ statue, but as we grew near it changed from the shape of a man to the shape of a bottle. It was a bottle, and it was twenty feet high and made of wood. It stood in utter emptiness and the large letters on its side said Inka-Cola.

  By then I had brought my diary up to date. I was pleased with myself: my work was done for the day, and I was well settled in this sleeping car and moving south towards the border. I went to the dining car, and there I found Fernando, who was drinking beer with his friend Victor and a third man – either drunk or naturally surly – whose name I did not catch. They invited me to join them and they asked me the usual South American questions: Where was I from? Where had I been? Was I a Catholic? What did I think of their country?

  They hate to be criticized, the man in Ecuador had told me. Never criticize them. This advice had not worked in Peru, where praise only antagonized Peruvians and made them think that I sympathized with their rotten government. But Bolivians – if Fernando and his friends were anything to go by – clearly wanted to be praised.

  ‘Bolivia’s a wonderful country,’ I said.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Victor. He smiled coldly. The others agreed. Surely, we knew we were lying?

  ‘Take Peru,’ said Fernando.

  The three Bolivians ran down Peru for a minute.

  I said, ‘Most Peruvians would agree with you.’

  ‘Chile is the worst of all,’ said Victor.