by Paul Theroux
Hearing frog-croaks that night, I peered out of the window and saw fireflies. I slept badly – the wine gave me insomnia (was this the reason the Argentines always diluted it by mixing it with water?) – but, wakeful, I was comforted by a great orange disc of moon. Towards dawn I began to drowse; I slept through Bahia Blanca, a city I had wanted to see, and did not wake until we started to cross the Rio Colorado. Some people take this to be the frontier of Patagonia, and indeed there was nothing to be seen after we reached the far bank. Nothingness, I had been told, was the prevailing feature of Patagonia. But grassland intervened, and with it, cattle grazing under an empty sky. For the next few hours, this was all: grass, cattle, sky. And it was chilly. The towns were small, no more than clusters of flat-roofed farm buildings which quickly diminished to specks as the train moved on.
Just after eleven that morning we came to the town of Carmen de Patagones, on the north bank of the Rio Negro. At the other end of the bridge was Viedma. This river I took to be the true dividing line between the fertile part of Argentina and the dusty Patagonian plateau. Hudson begins his book on Patagonia with a description of this river valley, and the inaccuracy of its name was consistent with all the misnamed landscape features I had seen since Mexico. ‘The river was certainly miscalled Cusar-leofú, or Black River, by the aborigines,’ says Hudson, ‘unless the epithet referred only to its swiftness and dangerous character; for it is not black at all in appearance … The water, which flows from the Andes across a continent of stone and gravel, is wonderfully pure, in colour a clear sea-green.’ We remained on the north bank, at a station on the bluff. A lady in a shed was selling stacks of bright red apples, five at a time. She looked like the sort of brisk enterprising woman you see on a fall day in a country town in Vermont – her hair in a bun, rosy cheeks, a brown sweater and heavy skirt. I bought some apples and asked if they were Patagonian. Yes, she said, they were grown right here. And then, ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day!’
It was sunny, with a stiff breeze riffling the Lombardy poplars. We were delayed for about an hour, but I didn’t mind. In fact, the longer we were delayed the better, since I was scheduled to get off the train at Jacobacci at the inconvenient hour of one-thirty in the morning. The connecting train to Esquel was not leaving until six AM, so it hardly mattered what time I got to Jacobacci.
With ‘the aid of a bright sun’, said Charles Darwin, who had come to Carmen on the Beagle, the view was ‘almost picturesque’. But he had found the town squalid. ‘These Spanish colonies do not, like our British ones, carry within themselves the elements of growth.’
We crossed the river; it was only a few hundred yards wide, but the experience, even after so many repetitions in South America, was startling to me: on the far bank we entered a different land. The soil was sand and gravel, there was no shade, the land was brown. Over in Carmen de Patagones there were cattle grazing and poplars grew and the grass was green. But there was no grass beyond Viedma. There was scrub and dust, and at once a pair of dust-devils rose up and staggered towards the horizon.
I was in the dining car, eating my lunch. A plastics salesman, on his way to the Welsh settlement at Trelew, chucked his hand disgustedly at the window and said, ‘There is just more and more and more of this, all the way to Jacobacci.’
You might at first mistake it for a fertile place. At the horizon there is a stripe of rich unbroken green, with the bumps of bushes showing. In the middle distance it is greeny yellow, paling to a bumpier zone with patches of brown. Up close, in the foreground, you see the deception: these sparse, small-leaved thorn bushes create the illusion of green, and it is these dry brittle things that cover the plain. The thorn bushes are rooted in dust, and the other bushes are lichen-coloured and nearly fungoid in appearance. There are not even weeds on the ground, only these bushes, and they might well be dead. The birds are too high to identify. There are no insects at all. There is no smell.
And this was only the beginning of Patagonia. We were as yet still travelling along the coast, around the Gulf of San Matias. One would hardly have known the sea to be so near, although in the middle of the afternoon what first appeared to be a lake came into view, grew fuller and bluer and proved to be the Atlantic Ocean. The land continued scrubby, the old salt water tides had made the soil more desolate by poisoning it.
We passed villages; they were named as towns on the map, but in reality no name would do. What were they? Six flat weatherbeaten buildings, of which three were latrines; four widely spaced trees, a lame dog, a few chickens, and the wind blowing so hard a pair of ladies’ bloomers were flapping horizontal from a clothesline. And sometimes, in the middle of the desert, there were solitary houses, made out of mud blocks or dusty bricks. These were a riddle; they had the starkness of cartoons. The picket fence of branches and sticks – what were they enclosing? what were they shutting out? – was no aid to fathoming the purpose of such huts.
We came to San Antonio Oeste, a small town on the blue waters of the Gulf of San Matias, with the look of an oasis. About forty people got off the train here, since they could catch buses at the local depot to the towns farther down the coast of Patagonia, Comodoro and Puerto Madryn. Seeing that we were stalled, I got off and hiked up and down in the wind.
The waiter leaned out of the window of the dining car.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Esquel.’
‘No!’
‘Via Jacobacci.’
‘No! That train is only this big!’ He measured a small distance with his fingers.
In the United States and Mexico I had avoided telling people where I was going: I had not thought their credulity could take it. Then, in South America, I had mentioned Patagonia: the news was received politely. But here, the closer I got to Esquel, the more distant it was made to seem, and now it could have been farther away than ever. I got the message: no one ended a journey in such a place; Esquel was where journeys began. But I had known all along that I had no intention of writing about being in a place – that took the skill of a miniaturist. I was more interested in the going and the getting there, in the poetry of departures. And I had got here by boarding a subway train filled with Boston commuters, who had left me and the train and had gone to work. I had stayed on and now I was in San Antonio Oeste in the Patagonian province of Rio Negro. The travel had been a satisfaction; being in this station was a bore.
We continued south-west, making for the province of Chubut. The landscape was no longer green, even in that illusory way. It was halftones of brown and grey and the low ugly thorn bushes were sparser, with fewer leaves. There were small stiffer plants beneath them, as hard and fan-like as coral. The soil was not pulverized enough to make mud-blocks. At great intervals there were houses, but these were made of logs; and it was surprising to see logs in a place where there were no trees. Hudson and other Patagonian travellers mention the bird-life – Hudson goes on for pages about the birdsong in the desert – but I saw nothing but oversize swallows and one hawk all afternoon. There were supposed to be rheas, flamingoes and egrets here, but when I grumbled to myself about not seeing them I was reminded of Thornberry in Costa Rica (‘Where are the parrots and monkeys?’) and stopped looking for them. It was astonishing how empty a place it was. Borges had called it dreary. It was not dreary. It was hardly anything. There was not enough substance in it for it to have a mood. A desert is an empty canvas; it is you who gives it features and a mood, who work at creating the mirage and making it live. But I was incurious; the desert was deserted, as empty as I felt.
Fine dust poured through the windows and billowed in the corridor and settled in the little lobby at the centre of the sleeping car. There were men in the lobby, but those near the wall of the car were almost obscured by it. They were seven feet from me. I had never minded dust very much, but I found this hard to take. It had a way of trickling through the door-jambs and the cracks in the window frames and swelling in the car.
There were some surprises. I had given up all hop
e of seeing something growing in Patagonia when, at the town of Valcheta, I saw poplar fencing in a field of grapevines – a vineyard here in the desolate land; and an apple orchard. The small river at Valcheta explained it – it flowed from the south, from the volcanic tableland of the plateau. But Valcheta was a village, and it was clear from the villages farther east that they were there because of this northbound river. They had been founded where wells could be dug.
I had been getting out of the train at each stop, simply so that I could draw a breath. But as the day wore on it grew chillier, and now it was almost cold. The passengers remarked on the cold; they were used to the heavy air of Buenos Aires. They remained wrapped up in the dusty lobby, some with handkerchiefs over their mouths, making small-talk.
‘How is the weather in Bariloche?’
‘Rainy – very rainy.’
‘Oh, sir, you are not telling the truth! You are being very cruel!’
‘All right, the weather is lovely.’
‘I know it is. Bariloche is so pretty. And we’ll be there Tuesday morning!’
They had cameras. I almost laughed out loud at the thought of anyone bringing a camera here with the intention of taking snapshots of the sights. The very idea! You see an unusual feature of the landscape and you realize it is a mud puddle, given ribs by a breeze. The sun near seven was bright and low, and for a few minutes the foul stunted thorn bushes were beautifully lit and cast long shadows across the desert. There were scoops and eruptions far off, and the landscape became familiar. It was the brown eroded landscape you see in the illustrations on the back pages of a school Bible. ‘Palestine,’ says the caption, or ‘The Holy Land’, and you look: dust, withered bushes, blue sky, kitty litter.
At dinner that night I was joined by a young couple who had recently been to Brazil. They hailed from Buenos Aires, and I guessed they were on their honeymoon. It was sunset, the sky bright blue, bright yellow, the landscape black; and we had just arrived at the windblown station of Ministero Ramos Mexia. It was not on the map. The woman was talking: they ate hearty breakfasts in Brazil; there were a lot of black people there; everything was expensive. And outside the window, on the platform of Ministero, boys were selling walnuts and grapes.
Then the sun was gone. It was immediately cold and very dark, and the people near the train walked to the overbright lights which were hung on the station posts. They moved out of the darkness and settled near the light like moths.
Our dusty dining car seemed luxurious in comparison with this remote station. The young couple – a moment before they had been talking about the poverty in Brazil – became self-conscious.
Outside, a boy sang, ‘Grapes! Grapes! Grapes!’ He hoisted his basket to the window.
‘They are so poor here,’ said the lady. The waiter had just served us with steaks, but none of us had begun to eat.
‘They are forgotten,’ said her husband.
The people on the station platform were laughing and pointing. For a moment, I thought we might be cheated out of our guilt – the people in Ministero seemed fairly jolly. The train moved on, and then we attacked our steaks.
When this couple left and went back to their compartment, the conductor asked if he could sit down. ‘By all means,’ I said, and poured him a glass of wine.
‘I have been meaning to ask you,’ he said. ‘Where did you get your free pass?’
I said, ‘From a certain general.’
He did not pursue the subject. ‘Argentina’s expensive, eh? Guess how much I earn.’
A man in Buenos Aires had told me the average wage in Argentina was about £50 a month. It seemed rather low, but here I had a chance to verify it. I translated £50 into pesos and said that I guessed he earned this much a month.
‘Less,’ said the conductor. ‘Much less.’ He said he earned about £40 a month. ‘How much do they earn in the States?’
I did not have the heart to tell him the truth. I decided to soften the blow and said that a conductor earned about £50 a week.
‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘You see? Much more than we do.’
‘But food is expensive in the States,’ I said. ‘It is cheap here.’
‘A little bit cheap. But everything else is expensive. You want clothes? You want shoes? They’re expensive. And yet you might think it is just Argentina that is this way. No, it is the whole of South America. There are countries that are much worse off than we are.’
He poured himself another glass of my wine, splashed some soda into it and muttered, ‘When the people come to see the World Cup in July they will be very surprised. Like you, eh? “What a wonderful civilized city this is!” That is what they’ll say. Then they’ll see how expensive it is. They will want to go home!’
‘Are you interested in football?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he snapped. Then he reflected a moment and said very slowly, ‘No. I hate football. I don’t know why exactly. In this respect, I am a very unusual person. Most people are crazy about it. But want to know my real objection?’
‘Yes, go ahead.’
‘It is too dirty. It is unfair. Watch a football game – you will see. They are always kicking each other in the ankles. The referees don’t care at all. Kick, kick – punch, punch. It is stupid. It is unfair. People love the game for its roughness. They like to see fights, bleeding ankles.’ He swigged the wine. ‘Me? I like to see skill. Now tennis is a nice clean and safe sport, and basketball is very good. No fights, no kicking. The referee writes down the fouls – three infractions and out you go.’
We went on talking. He told me he had been working on the railway for thirty-two years.
‘Have you been to Patagonia?’ I asked.
‘This is Patagonia.’ He tapped on the window. It was dark outside, but the dust was pouring through the crack between the sill and the frame. He might have been gesturing at that dust.
‘I take it you worked for the British then.’
‘Ah, the British! I liked them, even though I am a German.’
‘You are a German?’
‘Sure.’
But he was speaking as Americans do. We’re English, say some citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, referring to the fact that their ancestors abandoned soot-grimed mining towns in Yorkshire and made enough money raising pigs to set up as gentry and keep Jews out of the local hunt clubs. At my high school, a boy who was good at algebra explained that it was because he was Albanian.
Some of this raw uncertainty, this fumbling with pedigrees was evident in Argentina. The Argentine conductor told me his surname. It was German. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘my first name is Otto!’ He did not of course speak German. Mr DiAngelo and his chunky-faced mates in the dining car did not speak Italian. Mr Kovacs the ticket-puncher did not speak Hungarian. The one immigrant in Argentina I met who had yet to become deracinated was an Armenian – I thought of him as Mr Totalitarian: he was a believer in dictators, and Totalitarian had an appropriately Armenian ring to it. He dressed in a smock and a little blue cap and every day he read his Armenian newspaper, which was published in Buenos Aires. He had left Armenia sixty years before.
The conductor – Otto – said, ‘You are getting out at Jacobacci?’
‘Yes. What time do we arrive?’
‘About two, tomorrow morning.’
‘What do I do at Jacobacci?’
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The train to Esquel does not leave until five-thirty.’
‘You’ve taken that one, have you?’
Otto’s expression said; You must be joking! But he had a tender conscience and the presence of mind to say, ‘No, there is no sleeping car on that train.’ He thought a moment, sipping wine. ‘There is not very much on that train, you know. It is small.’ He used the Spanish double-diminutive: ‘It is teeny-weeny. It takes hours and hours. But go to bed, sir. I will wake you up when we get there.’
He drank the last of his wine and soda water. Then he rattled the ice cubes in his glass and tossed them into his mouth. Then h
e stood up and looked out of the black window at black Patagonia and the yellow moon which, being misshapen, was a perfect example of a gibbous moon. He chewed the ice, crunch-crunch on his molars. When I could not stand the sound any longer I went to bed. There are few things more abrasive to the human spirit, even in Patagonia, than someone standing behind you chomping and sucking ice-cubes.
22 The Old Patagonian Express
It was not necessary for Otto to wake me up; the dust did that. It filled my compartment, and as the Lakes of the South Express hurried across the plateau where it seldom rains (what good were leakproof shoes here?), the dust was raised, and our speed forced it through the rattling windows and the jiggling door. I woke feeling suffocated and made a face mask of my bed sheet in order to breathe. When I opened the door a cloud of dust blew against me. It was no ordinary dust storm, more like a disaster in a mine shaft: the noise of the train, the darkness, the dust, the cold. There was no danger of my sleeping through Ingeniero Jacobacci. I was fully awake just after midnight. I gritted my teeth and sand grains crunched in my molars.
I put my suitcase in order, stuffed my pockets with the apples I had bought in Carmen de Patagones and went to the vestibule to wait for Otto’s signal. There I sat. The dust whirled out of the corridor and gusted around the light-bulbs and covered the mirrors and windows with hamster fur. I held a handkerchief against my face. It was no use washing; there was no soap, and the water was ice cold.
Otto appeared some time later. He had put on his railwayman’s uniform over his pyjamas and looked haggard. He tapped his wristwatch and in a groggy voice said, ‘Jacobacci, twenty minutes.’
I wanted to go back to bed. The last thing I wanted was to leave the safety of this train for the uncertainty outside. The train was only dusty, and I had a nest here; out there was emptiness, and nothing was certain. Every person I had met had warned me against taking the train to Esquel. But what could I do? I had to go to Esquel to go home.