The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  Wolfgang’s story was the same – a month here, a month there, two months somewhere else. He had been practically a resident in these places; he was like a man looking for a new life. I knew I was merely skimming south, a bird of passage generalizing on the immediate. But because I had no camera, and had written so much, my impressions of what I had seen were vivid. I could call up Mexico or Costa Rica by glancing at the conversations I had written, and from the particularities of the railway journey from Santa Marta to Bogotá I felt I could reinvent Colombia. Travel was, above all, a test of memory.

  So, partly to kill time – the train was still stalled at Humahuaca – and partly to relieve myself of the guilt I felt with someone who regarded me as no more than a tourist, I asked Wolfgang what he remembered of the places he had been.

  ‘This is a quiz,’ I said. ‘I’ll say the name of a place and you tell me what you remember best about it. Pretend I’m someone who has never travelled anywhere – I want to know what these places are like. Okay?’

  ‘It’s a good game,’ he said.

  ‘Ready? Here goes. Mexico.’

  ‘Americans have a lot of trouble there,’ said Wolfgang.

  ‘Guatemala.’

  ‘I missed the bus to San Salvador, but my pack was still on it, so my passport too. I spent three dollars on phone calls. It was terrible.’

  ‘Nicaragua.’

  ‘I should not have gone there.’

  ‘Costa Rica.’

  ‘Dull.’

  ‘Colombia.’

  ‘Lots of nice food in the markets, but I got sick there.’

  ‘Maybe it was the food,’ I said. ‘What about Ecuador?’

  ‘One month I am there, trying to take the buses.’

  ‘Peru.’

  ‘Nice and cheap.’

  ‘Bolivia.’

  ‘All the people in Bolivia are stupid.’

  ‘Argentina.’

  ‘I will be here for some weeks or months,’ he said ‘So? I have passed the test?’

  ‘You flunked, Wolfgang.’

  He only became concrete when the conversation turned to the exchange rate. Here it was 670 pesos to the dollar, but there were towns where you could get 680. The difference was much less than a cent, but Wolfgang was the embodiment of the maxim I had devised earlier in this trip: It is the raggedest traveller who has the most precise notion of the exchange rate. Wolfgang wasn’t looking for another life. Travel for him, as for many others, was just another way of saving money.

  Without any warning, the train began to move. We ran from where we were standing on the platform and jumped on to the train, Wolfgang to Second, I to First. I did not see him again until two days later, in Tucuman.

  The Panamerican travelled along a flat green valley, beside a nearly dry but very wide river – the Rio Grande de Jujuy. Mountains rose swiftly out of the valley. They were old and cracked and extremely high, a whole range of them without a single tree. The cliffs, where they had been exposed to wind, were pink, smeared with maroon and orange – these were the high cliffs and peaks; the hills nearer the river were like mounds of mud. These hillocks, and the fact that the mountains were without any foliage, gave the mountain range a look of brutal authority: the contours were exposed, the flanks were pitted with rock-slides and clawed white by erosion, and the rounded peaks of the lower slopes looked like collapsed tents, or the blankets – with the same folds – that the Indians used to cover their belongings. A brown stream ran through the centre of the sluiced-out trough of river – this was all that was left of the Rio Grande; and on each bank there were poplars and willows and cactuses and mud-block houses at the periphery of ploughed fields. It was a strange sight, the bare mountains above the green valley, the wide river bed that had so little water in it, and the only human figure an old man, like the stereotype of the grizzled prospector, stumbling from bank to bank.

  There were cornfields, tomato gardens and sunflowers, and fields of blue cabbage that looked much grander than the colourless huts. We were moving slowly through Argentina, but this was a more agreeable altitude. I could feel the change in myself, and I had slept well. I liked the look of Argentina. The landscape was wide-open and fertile. It seemed underpopulated, awaiting settlement, and it was easy to understand why Welshmen and Germans and Italians had come here and disappeared, carting their culture into a mountain valley and ignoring the rest of the world.

  Dust flew through the window of my compartment. My worry was my wounded hand. I washed it and changed the bandage. I was sure that if dust got into my unhealed cut it would become infected. The dust storm ceased at Tilcara, which lay under poplars on the side of a mountain. There were people picnicking here, and it looked like a remote part of Italy. The people were almost certainly Italian settlers, the old women in black, the pot-bellied men standing in the shade of apple trees. But Tilcara was an oasis. A hundred yards outside the town, after a notice Do Not Destroy the Trees (perversely enough, it was like a sign of civilization), the dust began to fly, and the naked mountains were streaked with yellow sandstone.

  We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. The line was actual, a fissure that ran over the mountains which were themselves marked with stratified stripes as on a topographical map, pink, orange, green; indeed, the landscape was as simple and clearly coloured as a map, accurately reproduced on the paper square before me – black railway line running through brown valley edged in green, pink and orange contours in their proper places. This was near Maimara. There were only a few houses to be seen, but the yellow chapel had been built in the mid-seventeenth century. The people in these Argentine towns looked as if they were there to stay, while in Bolivia the towns had the look of imminent desertion.

  A lame dog in Maimara reminded me that, since leaving the United States, I had not seen a dog that Wasn’t lame, or a woman who wasn’t carrying something, or an Indian without a hat, or – anywhere – a cat.

  We were supposed to have been in Maimara for three minutes, no more, but after an hour we were still there, in the late afternoon sunshine. I sat on the steps of the platform and smoked my pipe. Seeing me, a man on a path by the railway tracks came over and asked me where I was going. He was short, and very dark, with slits for eyes, a broad face and chubby hands. I assumed he was Indian, or half Indian – the Incas had come this far, and even beyond, as far as Jujuy.

  I told him I was going to Tucuman on this train.

  There was a volcano farther south, he said; it had caused a mudslide and ripped the tracks apart. It seemed that they were trying to fix it, but in any case it was four hours to Jujuy, and I certainly would not be in Tucuman until tomorrow.

  ‘What’s the point of travelling?’ said this swarthy provincial. ‘I’ve been around the country – Jujuy, La Quiaca, all the places. But none of them is as good as Maimara. We’ve got apples, corn, pears – everything you need. It’s easy to grow things here, and it’s a pretty town. I saw Villazon once – it was really ugly. I would hate to live there. Here, I have everything I need.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘You should stay here,’ he said.

  ‘The train doesn’t seem to be going, so I guess I am staying here.’

  ‘It is the volcano – it wrecked the tracks. Where are you headed after Tucuman?’

  ‘Buenos Aires, and then Patagonia.’

  ‘Patagonia! That’s so far away they speak differently there.’ He grinned at me. ‘So you were at La Quiaca and you’re going to Patagonia. They are at opposite ends of Argentina. I would never go to those places. I would rather stay home.’

  ‘After Patagonia I will go home.’

  ‘That’s the idea!’ he said. ‘It must be terrible to be so far away from home on a nice Sunday afternoon like this.’

  ‘It is sunny here,’ I said. ‘I am sure it is rainy at home.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ he said, and thanked me. He disappeared beyond the rattling poplars.

  Just south of Purmamarca, in a dry river bed – the wide
valley was surrounded by clouded mountains – I saw a Palm Sunday procession. I guessed it was that, but it might have been anything. There were easily 2,000 people making their way down the river bed. Many were on horseback, some waved banners and flags, and there was a smartly dressed band, the source of a lugubrious braying. Near the front of the procession some people carried a white box, a coffin, either emblematic or real. And what made this group especially strange was the sky lowering upon them. They were a multitude of tiny figures in a gigantic mural, in which the important feature was the granite muscle in this toppling cloud.

  The train moved on, and the cloud continued to drop. It slid down the mountains and into the valley and down the river bed. It hovered at the tree-tops and the afternoon darkened. In fifteen minutes the landscape had changed from an overpowering vista of Argentina to a weeping late-afternoon in New England. The visibility was about fifty yards; it was warm and dimly white, a world of sudden ghostliness.

  It began to drizzle and beside the track there were cleared mudslides. The damage was obvious: wrecked walls and tipped-over culverts, and water rushing at sand-bags. I hung out of the door to look at the land-slip and behind me the sleeping car attendant said, ‘This is the volcano.’

  ‘I didn’t realize there were volcanoes here.’

  ‘No, the town is called Volcano.’

  I had got it wrong: what I had taken to be a volcano – the descriptions I had heard up the line – was just the name of the town.

  ‘How are we doing?’ I asked.

  ‘We will be a day and a half late in arriving in Buenos Aires.’

  I spent the rest of the daylight hours reading Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s End of the Game. Its original title, a better one, was The Judge and His Hangman. After Jack London’s feeble and preposterous plot, Dürrenmatt’s struck me as brilliant; and necessary, too, since he had little insight. Such order made him seem like a sage. For railway reading, the best book is the plottiest, a way of endowing the haphazardness of the journey with order.

  At Jujuy I saw that the river which had been dry some miles north was in full flood. Here the Rio Grande deserved its name. Along its banks were leafy trees and flowers, and an evening mist hung over the water. Jujuy looked peaceful and damp; it was just high enough to be pleasant without giving one a case of the bends. The rain on the blossoms perfumed the dark air and a fresh breeze blew from the river. It seemed idyllic, and yet later I heard that Jujuy was so badly flooded that thousands of people had to be evacuated from their homes. It is not possible to see everything from a train.

  The station was full of Indians, who had come to welcome the Indians on this train from the border. This was the last place in Argentina where I saw so many Indians, and there were people in Argentina who denied that they existed in this country in any great number. So Jujuy seemed a frontier of sorts, the end of the old Inca trail. It was green, a town buried – so it seemed – in lush depthless spinach.

  I would gladly have stayed here, and nearly did, but as I stood on the platform I saw twenty new coaches being hitched to our train and, with them, an attractive dining car. I felt wonderful now: no cramps, no altitude sickness; my appetite had returned (and only the day before I had been sitting in Villazon, eating peanuts), and with it a thirst. I went to the dining car and ordered a carafe of wine. The waiter, dressed in a black uniform, set all the tables – tablecloths, silver, vases of flowers. But his exertions were premature. I was the only customer that night.

  Dinner – now we were proceeding via the town of General Miguel Martin de Guemes to Tucuman – was five courses: home-made noodle soup, sausage and polenta, veal cutlets, ham salad and dessert. Although the waiter stood nearby, supplying me with a new carafe of wine every so often, after I finished and lit my pipe he sat down with me, clinked glasses and we talked.

  He spoke Spanish with a strong Italian accent – many people did in Argentina. But his Italian was poor. ‘I’m an Italian,’ he said, but he said it in the way Americans say they are Polish or Armenian: it is the immigrant’s claim, or excuse, in an undefined country.

  ‘We are lucky to get through on this train,’ he said. ‘This is the first train in two weeks that’s made it past Volcano. Did you see the landslide?’

  I had: the hill of mud had moved sideways across the track.

  ‘Several trains tried to get through it when it was only half cleared and, tweet, off the tracks they came – derailed. So they stopped taking chances. I’ve been sitting for two weeks waiting for the train to arrive.’

  What a fate: this steward waits two weeks in Jujuy for the Panamerican, and then it comes, they hitch up his dining car and all he gets is one customer – me. Yet he did not seem especially downhearted.

  ‘What countries have you seen?’

  I told him.

  ‘And, of all of them, which one do you like most?’

  They hate criticism.

  ‘Argentina,’ I said.

  ‘The rest of them are so poor,’ he said. ‘Know how much the best steak costs here? Take a guess.’

  I guessed too low; I gave him the peso equivalent of fifty cents. He said – and he was slightly annoyed – that a pound of filet mignon cost seventy-five cents.

  It seemed a specious argument for prosperity in a country where the annual inflation rate was between 300 and 400 per cent. Every day, the peso was worth less, and everything but steak rose in price. Most Argentines had steak twice a day, and even the lowliest clerk ordered a great shoe of it, with french fries, at lunch time. And it reminded me that the most violently critical pieces I had read about Argentina were by V. S. Naipaul. His articles appeared in The New York Review of Books, and they aroused a certain amount of controversy. No one had made the obvious point about Naipaul’s loathing of Argentina, but then perhaps it was not commonly known that he was a vegetarian.

  ‘What do you think of this train?’

  Whatever you do, don’t criticize them.

  ‘It is one of the best trains I’ve ever seen in my life.’

  ‘It should be the best. It’s got good equipment – reclining chairs, lots of space and comfort. But look at the people! They’re in First Class and they spit on the floor, hang their clothes on the light fixtures, stick their feet up on the nice chairs.’ He made mocking Italian gestures and mimicked the slobs he was describing; the cooks, who had also come over to sit with us, found this very funny. ‘You see them? What can we do? They don’t know how to ride on a train, that’s all.’

  His blame was general. He did not single out a group, and what was more interesting, he did not mention Indians. I found this a relief. One of the pleasures of Argentina – it had also been one in Costa Rica – was that one could be wholly anonymous. The faces on the Panamerican at this point were the faces one might see on any train in the United States, or Europe for that matter. It was possible to enter a crowd in Argentina and vanish. It was very restful for anonymity to be available to me; it simplified travel and allowed me to stare at people for long periods without being detected.

  I slept well that night, but woke to hear the attendant pounding on my compartment door.

  ‘Wake up,’ he cried. ‘We’re at Tucuman! You have to get up!’

  I opened the door.

  ‘Hurry, sir. All the other passengers have left.’

  ‘How do I get to Buenos Aires?’

  ‘You missed the train. You’ll have to catch the North Star tonight. See,’ he said, pulling my suitcase out of the door, ‘we should have been here last night. All the other passengers have the same problem.’

  He helped me out into the grey dawn of Belgrano Station in Tucuman. The morning coolness was already condensing into humidity. There was fog giving an eeriness to the palm trees in the station garden. I checked my suitcase in at the Left Luggage window and went to have breakfast.

  19 La Estrella del Norte (‘The North Star’) to Buenos Aires

  Necessity kissed me with luck. There was no better way to leave the high plains �
� that world of kitty litter – than to slip across Argentina’s simple frontier at night, make the acquaintance of its empty quarter the next day and, the following morning, arrive at a large provincial capital and to walk its streets while the city slept. It was only seven-thirty; not even the coffee shops were open. The royal palms and the dark green araucarias dripped in the mist. The day was mine; if nothing in the city of Tucuman persuaded me to stay, I could board the North Star that evening on a sleeper and wake up in Buenos Aires. There was a risk on this route. In my notebook, I had a clipping which I had cut out of a Bogotá newspaper. Railway Catastrophe in Argentina: 50 Dead, ran the Spanish headline. ‘The train “The North Star”, said the police, was leaving the province of Tucuman when it charged a heavy truck at a level crossing.’ The incident, which was reported with all the enthusiasm Latin Americans have for disasters, had happened only a month before. ‘You will have no difficulty getting a berth on that train,’ a station porter told me in Tucuman. ‘Ever since it crashed, people have been frightened to take it.’

  Tucuman was older, flatter, cleaner and a great deal duller than I had expected. It was the ultimate provincial town, self-contained and remote, and being an Argentine town it was thoroughly European in a rather old-fashioned way, from the pin-striped suits and black moustaches of the old men idling in the cafés or having their shoes shined in the plaza, to the baggy, shapeless school uniforms of the girls stopping on their way to the convent school to squeeze – it was an expression of piety –the knee of Christ on the cathedral crucifix. Old Europe was evident in the façades of the houses in the centre of the city, in all the paperwork at the bank (every transaction recorded in triplicate), in the contrived glamour of the women shopping and in the vain posturing and hair-combing of the young men. The houses were French, the official buildings Italian baroque, the monuments and statues pure South American – they seemed to get more outlandish as one moved south, the goddesses and sprites got nakeder, the heroes sterner and more truculently posed.