by Paul Theroux
But rodeo news was little more than a balance sheet listing the winnings of the cowpoke pictured tormenting a bull. I found it a mystifying triumph, and the amassing of two thousand dollars – there was no mention of technique – an ungainly, if not unworthy, victory. Aside from the barbarity of it, this was the first sports page I had ever seen where there were dollar signs beside every score.
Hoping for a little light relief I turned to the Letters to the Editor. After all, if I was going to spend the night here it would help if I had some clue to the city’s character. The first letter began, ‘It is generally known that the theory of evolution is being taught in the public schools as a fact …’ There followed some rather clumsy sarcasm about science eroding ‘moral values’, and every indication that a Scopes-like Monkey Trial might follow the Fat Stock Show as Fort Worth’s next attraction. Letter Two: Hold on the Panama Canal, for Christ’s sake! Letter Three was an extraordinary denunciation of the Texas Democratic Committee for inviting Cesar Chavez to Texas. It implied that Mr Chavez was a troublemaker for wanting to organize farm labourers. This letter ended, ‘Unions are doing more to destroy our national economy, promoting unemployment and inflation than any one cause.’
Unions, the Canal, the Bible: they were not getting down to basics in Fort Worth – they had never got away from them in the first place. I really hadn’t the strength to grapple with Adam and Eve and the child labour laws, and so I handed my newspaper to Fatty and headed out of the Silver Dollar and past the billboards (Listen to Redneck Radio!) to the railroad station.
There was some delay, but waiting I met a very happy man. He was a newcomer to Fort Worth, he said, but six months in the city had convinced him of the limitless opportunities of the place I had no trouble dismissing in an afternoon.
‘Tennis, golf, bowling,’ he said. ‘Swimming.’
I said, ‘You can do those things in Cleveland.’
‘Here, you can do anythink.’
Anythink?
I said, ‘Are you English?’
Yes, indeed, he was a Londoner. He had been a policeman in a wretched precinct of south London, but he had grown sick of the taxes and the general gloom and the British passions for amateurism and failure. He had migrated to Fort Worth: ‘More for the kids’ sake than anythink else.’
In London, as a bobby in a funny helmet, unarmed except for his truncheon and his whistle, he had been jeered at. He had always wanted to play golf. But policemen in London do not play golf. He liked swimming. But one cannot be a serious swimmer at the Public Baths in Tooting. He had been at the bottom of the pay-scale, on the last rung of the social ladder. Here, as a hotel clerk in the city of bull riders, calf ropers, bail-bondsmen, wholesalers of cowboy suits, Fundamentalist drawlers and – it was their own word – rednecks, his whiffling south London accent marked him out as an aristocrat and gave him a Churchillian authority.
‘I’m staying,’ he said.
‘You could be a policeman here,’ I said.
‘They do all right here,’ he said.
I wished him luck, and then, somewhat reassured, and still sticking to this cattle drive in reverse – the Chisholm Trail which the railway had inherited – made tracks for Laredo.
3 The Aztec Eagle
It was a rainy night in Laredo – not late, and yet the place seemed deserted. A respectable frontier-town, sprawling at the very end of the Amtrak line, it lay on a geometric grid of bright black streets on a dirt bluff that had the clawed and bulldozed look of a recent quarry. Below was the Rio Grande, a silent torrent slipping past Laredo in a cut as deep as a sewer; the south bank was Mexico.
The city lights were on, making the city’s emptiness emphatic. In that glare I could see its character as more Mexican than Texan. The lights flashed, suggesting life, as lights do. But where were the people? There were stop-lights on every corner, Walk and Wait signs winked on and off; the two-storey shop-fronts were floodlit, lamps burned in the windows of one-storey houses; the street-lights made the puddles bright holes in slabs of wet road. The effect of this illumination was eerie, that of a plague city brightened against looters. The stores were heavily padlocked; the churches lit up in cannonades of arc-lamps; there were no bars. All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.
No traffic waited at the red lights, no pedestrians at the crosswalks. And though the city was silent, in the drizzly air was an unmistakable heart-murmur, the threep-threep of music being played far away. I walked and walked, from my hotel to the river, from the river to a plaza, and into the maze of streets until I was almost certain I was lost. I saw nothing. And it could be frightening, seeing – four blocks away – a blinking sign I took to be a watering hole, a restaurant, an event, a sign of life, and walking to it and arriving soaked and gasping to discover that it was a shoe store or a funeral parlour, shut for the night. So, walking the streets of Laredo, I heard only my own footsteps, the false courage of their click, their faltering at alleyways, their splashes as I briskly returned to the only landmark I knew – the river.
The river itself made no sound, though it moved powerfully, eddying like a swarm of greasy snakes in the ravine from which every bush and tree had been removed in order to allow the police to patrol it. Three bridges linked the United States to Mexico here. Standing on the bluff I heard the threep-threep louder: it was coming from the Mexican side of the river, a just-discernible annoyance, like a neighbour’s radio. Now I could see plainly the twisting river, and it struck me that a river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.
Looking south across the river, I realized that I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there – music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people did things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer-signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope – the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America.
A car drew up behind me. I was alarmed, then reassured when I saw it was a taxi. I gave the driver the name of my hotel and got in, but when I tried to make conversation he responded by grunting. He understood only his own language.
In Spanish I said, ‘It is quiet here.’
That was the first time on my trip that I spoke Spanish. After this, nearly every conversation I had was in Spanish. But in the course of this narrative I shall try to avoid affecting Spanish words, and will translate all conversations into English. I have no patience with sentences that go, ‘ “Carramba!” said the campesino, eating his empanada at the estancia …’
‘Laredo,’ said the taxi driver. He shrugged.
‘Where are all the people?’
‘The other side.’
‘Nuevo Laredo?’
‘Boys’ Town,’ he said. The English took me by surprise, the phrase tickled me. He said, now in Spanish again, ‘There are one thousand prostitutes in the Zone.’
It was a round number, but I was convinced. And that of course explained what had happened to this city. After dark, Laredo slipped into Nuevo Laredo, leaving the lights on. It was why Laredo looked respectable, even genteel, in a rainswept and mildewed way: the clubs, the bars, the brothels, were across the river, The red-light district was ten minutes away, in another country.
But there was more to this moral spelled out in transpontine geography than met the eye. If the Texans had the best of both worlds in decreeing that the fleshpots should remain on the Mexican side of the International Bridge – the river flowing, like the erratic progress of a tricky argument, between vice and virtue – the Mexicans had the sense of tact to keep Boys’ Town camouflaged by decrepitude, on the other side of the tracks, another example of the geography of morality. Divisions everywhere: no
one likes to live next-door to a whorehouse. And yet both cities existed because of Boys’ Town. Without the whoring and racketeering, Nuevo Laredo would not have had enough municipal funds to plant geraniums around the statue of its madly gesturing patriot in the plaza, much less advertise itself as a bazaar of wicker-work and guitar-twanging folklore – not that anyone ever went to Nuevo Laredo to be sold baskets. And Laredo required the viciousness of its sister-city to keep its own churches full. Laredo had the airport and the churches, Nuevo Laredo the brothels and basket-factories. Each nationality had seemed to gravitate to its own special area of competence. This was economically-sound thinking; it followed to the letter the Theory of Comparative Advantage, outlined by the distinguished economist, David Ricardo (1772–1823).
At first glance, this looked like the typical sort of mushroom-and-dunghill relationship that exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. But the longer I thought about it the more Laredo seemed like all of the United States, and Nuevo Laredo all of Latin America. This frontier was more than an example of cosy hypocrisy; it demonstrated all one needed to know about the morality of the Americas, the relationship between the puritanical efficiency north of the border, and the bumbling and passionate disorder – the anarchy of sex and hunger – south of it. It was not as simple as that, since there was obviously villainy and charity in both, and yet crossing the river (the Mexicans don’t call it the Rio Grande; they call it the Rio Bravo de Norte), no more than an idle traveller making his way south with a suitcase of dirty laundry, a sheaf of railway timetables, a map and a pair of leak-proof shoes, I felt as if I was acting out a significant image. Crossing a national boundary and seeing such a difference on the other side had something to do with it: truly, every human feature there had the resonance of metaphor.
It is only two hundred yards, but the smell of Nuevo Laredo rises. It is the smell of lawlessness; it is smokier, scented with chilis and cheap perfume. I had come from the tidy Texas town, and could see, almost as soon as I left it, the crowd of people at the far end of the bridge, the traffic jam, the cat-calling and horn-blowing, some people waiting to enter the United States, but most of them merely gaping across the frontier which is –and they know it – the poverty line.
Mexicans enter the United States because there is work for them there. They do it illegally – it is virtually impossible for a poor Mexican to enter legally, if his intention is to seek work. When they are caught, they are thrown into jail, serve a short sentence and then deported. Within days, they head back for the United States and the farms where they can always find work as low-paid day-labourers. The solution is simple: if we passed a law requiring United States farmers to hire only men with entry visas and work permits, there would be no problem. There is no such law. The farm lobby has made sure of that, for if there were no Mexicans to exploit how would these barrel-assed slavers be able to harvest their crops?
Closer, I could see the chaos particularized. The lounging soldiers and policemen only made it look more lawless, the noise was terrifying and, at once, the national characteristics were evident – the men had no necks, the policemen wore platform shoes and no prostitute was without her natural ally, an old woman or a cripple. It was cold and rainy; there was an atmosphere of impatience in the town; still February – the tourists were not due for months.
Halfway across the bridge, I had passed a rusty mailbox bearing the sign Contraband. This was for drugs. The penalties were posted in two languages – five years for soft drugs, fifteen for hard. I tried to peek inside, but unable to see anything I gave it a whack with my fist. It boomed: it must have been empty. I continued to the barrier, five cents in the turnstile slot, and as simply as boarding a bus I was in Mexico. Although I had been growing a moustache to make myself visibly Latin it was clearly not working. I was waved through the customs gate with four other gringos: we looked innocent.
There was no question that I had arrived, for while the neckless men and the swaggering cops and maimed animals had a certain sullen statelessness, the garlic-seller was the personification of Latin America. He was weedy, and wore a torn shirt and a greasy hat; he was very dirty; he screamed the same three words over and over. These attributes alone were unremarkable – he too had a counterpart in Cleveland. What distinguished him was the way he carried his merchandise. He had a garland of garlic cloves around his neck, and another around his waist, and ropes of them on his arms, and he shook them in his fists. He fought his way in and out of the crowd, the clusters of garlic bouncing on his body. Was there any better example of cultural difference than this man? At the Texas end of the bridge he would have been arrested for contravening some law of sanitation; here, he was ignored. What was so strange about wearing bunches of garlic around your neck? Perhaps nothing, except that he would not have done it if he was not a Mexican, and I would not have noticed it if I hadn’t been an American.
Boys’ Town – the Zone – is aptly named, since so much of it wickedly reflects the sexual nightmare-paradise of forbidden boyhood fantasy. It is fear and desire, a whole suburb of libido in which one can see the dire consequences in every greedy wish. It is the child who numbly craves the thrill of a lover’s hug; but no child enjoys this fantasy without knowing the equal and opposite anxiety of being pursued by the same creature. Months of wintry weather and rain and off-season idleness had turned the prostitutes of the Zone into rather woeful examples of demon lovers. They were the howling, sleeve-tugging, arm-grabbing, jostling embodiment of the punitive part of sexual fantasy. I felt like Leopold Bloom steering his timid way through the limitless brothel of nighttown, for here one could not express an interest without risking humiliation. What made it worse for me was that I was merely curious; intending neither to condemn nor encourage, I was mistaken for that most pathetic of emotionally damaged souls, the near-sighted voyeur, a kind of sexual barnacle fastening my attention upon the meat market. Just looking, I’d say; but prostitutes have no patience with this attitude.
‘Mister!’
‘Sorry, I have to catch a train.’
‘What time is it leaving?’
‘About an hour.’
‘That’s plenty of time – mister!’
The urchins, the old ladies, the cripples, the sellers of lottery tickets, the frantic dirty youths, the men selling trays of switch-blades, the tequila bars and incessant racketing music, the hotels reeking of bedbugs – the frenzy threatened to overwhelm me. I had to admit a certain fascination, and yet I feared that I would have to pay for my curiosity. If you’re not interested in this, said a pretty girl hiking up her skirt with a casually lazy gesture, why are you here?
It was a good question and, as I had no answer, I left. I went to the office of Mexican Railways to buy my train ticket. The town was in great disrepair – no building was without a broken window, no street without a wrecked car, no gutter not choked with garbage; and in this clammy season, without any heat to justify its squalor or give it romance, it was cruelly ugly. But it is our bazaar, not Mexico’s. It requires visitors.
Some citizens remain pure. Paying for my sleeper on the Aztec Eagle, I mentioned to the friendly manageress that I had just come from the Zone.
She rolled her eyes and then said, ‘Shall I tell you something? I do not know where that place is.’
‘It’s not far. You just –’
‘Don’t tell me. I have been here two years. I know my home, I know my office, I know my church. That’s all I need.’
She said that my time would be better spent looking at the curios than idling in the Zone. On my way to the station, I took her advice. Inevitably there were baskets and postcards and switchblade knives; but there were also plaster dogs and plaster Christs, carvings of women squatting, religious junk of every description, including rosaries the size of a ship’s hawser with beads like baseballs, rained-on ironwork rusting on sidewalk stands, and gloomy plaster saints – martyred rather savagely by the people who had painted them, and each bearing the inscription Souvenir
of Nuevo Laredo. A curio (the word, practically self-explanatory, is short for ‘curiosity’) is something that has no purpose other than to prove that you arrived: the coconut carved with an ape’s face, the combustible ashtray, the sombrero – they are useless without the Nuevo Laredo inscription, but a good deal more vulgar than anything I saw in the Zone.
Not far from the station there was a man melting tubes of glass and drawing them thin and making model cars. His skill amounted almost to artistry, but the result – always the same car – lacked any imagination. The delicate work, this glass filigree, took hours; he laboured to make what could have been something beautiful, into a ridiculous souvenir. Had he ever made anything else?
‘No,’ he said. ‘Only this car. I saw a picture of it in a magazine.’
I asked him when he had seen the picture.
‘No one ever asked me that question before! It was ten years ago. Or more.’
‘Where did you learn to do this?’
‘In Puebla – not here.’ He looked up from his blowtorch. ‘Do you think a person could learn anything here in Nuevo Laredo? This is one of the traditional arts of Puebla. I have taught my wife and children to do it. My wife makes little pianos, my son makes animals.’
Over and over again, the same car, piano, animal. It would not have been so disturbing if it was a simple case of mass-producing the objects. But enormous skill and patience went into the making of what was in the end no more than junk. It seemed a great waste, but not very different from the Zone which turned lovely little girls into bad-tempered and rapacious hags.
Earlier that afternoon I had left my suitcase at the station restaurant. I had asked for the baggage department. A Mexican girl at a table on which someone had spewed pushed her tin plate of beans aside and said, ‘This is it.’ She had given me a scrap of paper and written PAUL in lipstick on the suitcase. I had no lively hope of ever seeing it again.
