The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  ‘What about Ecuador?’ asked the surly man.

  ‘They have a military dictatorship,’ said Fernando.

  It was an uninspired remark. Every country that had been mentioned, including Bolivia, had a military dictatorship.

  I said, ‘Ecuador is going to hold an election.’

  ‘So are we,’ said Victor.

  Four months later the Bolivian election was held. There were shootings all over the country, mysterious machine-gunnings, and stuffed ballot boxes. It was generally agreed that the election had been rigged, and then the head of state, General Banzer, ‘annulled’ the election. A state of siege was declared and a new government was formed in what was officially termed a ‘bloodless coup’. Within five months there was a counter-coup and another promise to hold elections.

  Peru was backward, said Fernando. Chile’s black market was so bad you couldn’t buy a tube of toothpaste, said Victor. The surly man said that they were massacring Indians in Brazil. Fernando said he knew a thing or two about newspapers: Bolivia’s papers were the best in South America, but Argentina’s seldom printed foreign news. The rest was hearsay: Paraguay was an unspeakable swamp, Colombia was full of thieves, and the Panamanians were so stupid and had such a tyrannical leader they didn’t deserve the canal.

  We went on drinking beer and the Bolivians went on belittling their neighbours. I suggested that they shared some national characteristics and recounted what the lady in Ecuador had told me about altitude being a factor in the South American consciousness. They said this was nonsense; they were insistent in exaggerating the differences. Oddest of all, they had not said much about Bolivia – and Bolivia could not have been nearer: it was this old-fashioned dining car and hurrying waiters; it was the Indians who were hunkered down in the doorway, and the cold downpour on the high plains out of the window. Perhaps reading my mind, Victor said, ‘We have one problem in Bolivia.’

  ‘Only one?’ I asked.

  ‘One major problem,’ he said. ‘The sea. The Chileans ought to let us have a bit – or the Peruvians. We need a seaport of our own. It is because we don’t have one that we have so many other problems. What can you do without a seaport?’

  ‘He likes Bolivian beer,’ said Fernando.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s very nice.’

  ‘Look at that man,’ said Victor.

  At a side table a man was drinking beer. One look told me he was an American. He wore lumberjack shoes and the sort of woollen plaid forester’s shirt that graduate students in state universities especially favour. His shirt-tails hung down, his beard was shaggy; he drank his beer straight from the bottle, tipping it up and then wiping his mouth with his forearm and belching.

  ‘That is ugly,’ said Victor.

  ‘He could have asked the waiter for a glass,’ said Fernando.

  The surly man had started to smile. ‘Look at that! Glug-glug’ – he mimicked with his thumb – ‘right out of the bottle!’

  ‘Very ugly,’ said Victor.

  ‘I think he is an American,’ I said.

  ‘He must be a German,’ said Victor. ‘Germans drink beer like that.’

  We were speaking in Spanish – incautiously, it turned out, for a moment later the man stood up and said in fluent, American-accented Spanish, ‘I am an American and this is the way Americans drink beer.’ He drained his bottle, belched and walked towards Second Class.

  While we were eating, I got a severe stomach cramp. I excused myself and went back to my compartment. The train had stopped. This was Oruro, a fairly large city, mostly Indian, near Lake Uru Uru. The rain had intensified; it beat against the window in a torrent made silver by the arc-lamps of the station. I got into bed and turned off the light and curled up to ease my cramp. I woke at about midnight. It was very cold in the compartment and so dusty – the dust seemed an effect of the train’s rapid motion – I could barely breathe. I tried the lights, but they didn’t work. I struggled to open the door – it seemed locked from the outside. I was choking, freezing and doubled up with stomach pains. I had no choice but to remain calm. I took four swigs of my stomach cement, and then buried my face in my blanket and waited for the morphine to work.

  At dawn, I saw why I had not been able to get the door open: it had been bolted top and bottom by Fernando, who was still asleep in the upper berth. And I still felt terrible. I had imagined that after fifteen hours we would be off the high plains and perhaps rumbling through a valley nearer sea-level. I had been mistaken. We were still at 12,000 feet and travelling across a gaunt moonscape of dry rocks and empty craters. Alcohol worsens the symptoms of altitude sickness; and a hang-over at a high altitude makes one feel close to death. The landscape was cheerless and full of hard sharp rocks, a plain of tormented flint. There were not even Indians here in the cold Cordillera de Chichas. The few pools of water I saw looked gelid, and then I noticed that these were crusts of dusty ice, and further on dirt-speckled swatches of snow, like hanks and rags of torn underwear. Snow!

  Over breakfast of dry toast and tea, I talked with Victor. It seemed that he and Fernando (the surly man had disappeared) had decided to get away from it all. They had chosen a town in Southern Bolivia; the train would stop there later in the day. What did they plan to do there?

  ‘Nothing,’ said Victor.

  I said I knew exactly what he meant.

  ‘And maybe read,’ said Victor. ‘I love to read American novels.’

  ‘Who are your favourite authors?’

  ‘E. Bing Walla,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Also Artur Ailie and Tyla Cowdway.’

  ‘Never heard of them,’ I said.

  The paperbacks were in his briefcase, Spanish translations of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey and Taylor Caldwell. ‘This,’ he said, picking up the Taylor Caldwell novel, ‘is about Cicero. But I am sure you have read these authors.’

  ‘I have never read a single word of any of them.’

  ‘What is your book?’

  It was a Jack London novel, The Assassination Bureau. I had not been enjoying it. ‘It has a bad smell. In English we say, “It stinks”.’

  ‘Eet sdeenks,’ he repeated.

  ‘I feel terrible,’ I said. ‘It’s this altitude, I think I should go back to bed.’

  I went and lay down on my bunk, propped by a pillow, and watched our progress through creased mountains the colour of gunpowder. I guessed that we must by now be descending from the high plains. What settlements I could see were derelict, with ruined churches and collapsed fences, but otherwise there was nothing for miles but scrub and rock and small brown creeks. Fernando and Victor came into the compartment from time to time. Are you all right? they asked. I said I was fine, but I still felt crummy, and I was growing worried: I had drunk the last of my cement, and still my stomach cramps had not gone away.

  The hours passed and the train rocked enraging the porcupine which now lived in my abdomen. Then we came to Tupiza, and Fernando and Victor said good-bye. Even in sunshine Tupiza, a heap of brown houses on a hillside, looked as forlorn as Dog-patch. There were condors circling it and some curious Indians squinting at the two new arrivals, who would be spending several weeks with them. Just the thought of standing on the platform in such a place, and watching the train depart as silence sifted down on the village, was enough to make me shudder.

  We moved off at the speed of a jogger and for the next few hours followed the west bank of a wide muddy river, the Camblaya. There were bushes here, and cactus growing like cudgels, and even some cornfields between the dry hills. I thought then that we had descended to a lower altitude, but really it had not changed much. I was deceived by the disappearance of my cramps; feeling slightly better I believed we had left the high plains. But only this river valley was fertile – the rest was dry and mountainous desert, the maddeningly unfriendly landscape of a nightmare. It was an immense and empty country. There were brambles and small willows near the diminished river, but the rest was dusty blue – the hills, the gorges, the twisted knots of
cactus.

  The hills grew flatter, the river was lost from view, and for miles ahead there was only this wasteland. The train did not vary its speed. It crept slowly along, under a clear sky, across this repeating aridity. The only interesting landscape was elsewhere: to the west, where there were canyons; to the east, a mountain range of snowcapped peaks, with the same elusive sparkle of a mirage that I had detected the day before outside La Paz. The Andes, people call them; but the name means nothing. It seemed remarkable to me that mountains so huge and snowy should have such a simple general name and not be known by individual names. But this variegated desert, a thousand miles of plateau and strange shapes, was known by no other name than the high plains. And even the map is notoriously without names or descriptions. The train rolled through cloud-land; there were a half dozen stops, but the rest was unknown. Now everyone on this train was travelling to the frontier town, which had a name.

  Nearer Villazon the train had speeded up and sent grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given – we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border. I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.

  ‘We will be here a long time,’ he said. He made it sound like years.

  The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square home-made umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast – at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. ‘Are you in that sleeping car?’ asked a man hurrying towards me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.

  I told him I was.

  ‘What time is it leaving?’

  I said, ‘I wish I knew.’

  He said, ‘I am going to get some answers.’

  He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, ‘Go away!’

  The man came out of the station. He said, ‘These people are all whores.’ He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.

  The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazon. The sleeping car looked very silly, stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.

  A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazon, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.

  Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.

  ‘What time are we going?’

  ‘I do not know,’ he said.

  I wanted to go home.

  But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.

  I left the sleeping car and walked towards a low lighted building which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.

  A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.

  ‘What train is that?’

  ‘It is the train to La Quiaca.’

  ‘Shit!’ I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.

  Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.

  ‘The tracks up to Tucuman are in bad shape,’ he said. ‘You might not get there for days.’

  Damn this trip, I thought.

  We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead centre of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.

  So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentine frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pyjamas and went to bed.

  There was a knock on the compartment door: the conductor.

  ‘Tickets please.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘La Quiaca.’

  Still on the border.

  ‘When are we leaving?’

  ‘In a few minutes.’

  Sure, I thought, and went back to sleep. Despair and impatience had a soporific effect. But I was woken some time later by a train whistle and a grunting of metal, then the anvil noises of the coupling. At last we were on our way.

  I slept for twelve hours. I woke again at six in the morning, and saw that we had come to a station. There were three poplars outside the window. In the early afternoon I woke again. The three poplars were still outside the window. We had not moved.

  This was Humahuaca, a small town in northern Argentina. We had travelled no more than 100 miles since leaving La Quiaca, and had dropped about 1,000 feet. The day was cool and sunny, with a crackle of insects and a joyful sound of church bells. It was Sunday, and the place looked serene. I was unused to seeing flower gardens – rows of chrysanthemums – and a kind of dogged prosperity. It was the first railway station I had seen for weeks that did not have at least one pig snuffling near the tracks or chickens clucking in the station master’s office. I was encouraged by this appearance of order: this was obviously a different country, and the filthy train with its fly-blown coaches looked out of place here.

  A glamorous woman of about forty was showing a pretty girl around the station. She said in Spanish, ‘This is the train to Tucuman – it came all the way from Bolivia. Aren’t you glad we came by car?’

  The girl winced at the Panamerican.

  I wanted to see the town, but I was afraid of being duffilled. Humahuaca was a nice place, but it was miles from anywhere; and there would not be another train for three days.

  I asked the sleeping car attendant what was up.

  The tracks, he said. Somewhere do
wn the line there was a break in the tracks, either flooding or a landslide. It could not be fixed earlier because the men could not work at night. It was serious: something to do with a volcano.

  ‘We cannot leave for hours,’ he said.

  I went for a stroll in the town and saw Indians returning from church with wilted flowers. Then I remembered that it was Palm Sunday. There was great contentment on the faces of these people, a kind of after-church radiance, the pure joy that goes under the name of holiness. There were hundreds of them, and each one carried a flower.

  But the rest of the town was shut, the restaurants closed, the bus depot deserted. I made a circuit of the town park and then returned to the railway station.

  In the hours that had elapsed since the Panamerican had arrived at the station the atmosphere had changed. The train had brought squalor to the station and transformed it into a muckheap. There were orange peels and banana skins under every window – the station was too respectable to have pigs nearby to eat them; and water poured from beneath the coaches, and there were heaps of shit under each toilet pipe. The sun had grown stronger, and flies collected around the coaches. This express train, so dramatic when it was on the move, became foul when it was stationary.

  I thought that I was the only foreigner on the train. I should have known better. Experience had shown me that there was always a German in Second Class, slumbering on his pack-frame and spitting orange pips out of the window. At Humahuaca, it was Wolfgang. He had boarded the Bolivian segment of the train in the cold downpour at Oruro and he had suffered in Second Class ever since. I had not seen him, though he said he had seen me, buying tea from the Indian woman in La Quiaca. He had been travelling for months through Central and South America, and had only the vaguest idea of where he was going. He was certain of one thing: if he did not have the luck to find a job in Buenos Aires he would be in Argentina for the rest of his life. Frankly, he was eager to go home, he said.

  Sometimes, in the presence of such a person – I had met many – I felt rather ashamed that I had travelled so swiftly from Boston. Two months before, I had boarded the Lake Shore Limited in South Station and after a few snowy days I had been rattling under clear skies to Mexico. I had not been robbed or fallen seriously ill; I had seen pretty places and met pleasant people. I had filled hundreds of pages of my diary and now I felt certain that I would make it to Esquel in Patagonia, the small town I had seen on my map which had become an arbitrary destination. I had breezed through most of the countries, and I was always brought up short when I met another traveller who said he was planning to spend a month in, say, Barranquilla or Cuzco. ‘I didn’t like Ecuador,’ an American told me in Peru. ‘Maybe I didn’t give it enough time.’ He had been there two months, which seemed an eternity to me.