The Old Patagonian Express

by Paul Theroux

  They carried baskets, cardboard boxes, bananas and machetes. They were Indians and weatherbeaten farmers, standing in silence in the dampness. One distinguished-looking man in a spotless sombrero and white moustache and frock coat smoked a cheroot. From the waist up he could have been the mayor, but his trousers were ragged and he wore no shoes – as the shoeshine boys lingering near by were quick to point out. They too were barefoot.

  A bell was rung. The gate was opened. We went through to the platform. The cars – in much worse shape than the ones that had taken me from Tecún Umán – had the further disadvantage of having been soaked by the fog. The padded seats were torn – springs and stuffing protruded; the wooden seats were shaky; all the seats were wet. The car itself, a relic from the 1920s, was neither quaint nor comfortable, but merely a small uncared-for box, with bare wires hanging from the ceiling, and stinking of dirt. It was shaped, as all Central American railways cars were shaped, like a trolley car – wooden, with a curved roof and a verandah platform at either end. Zacapa was not on the tourist route; if it was, there would have been a well-sprung bus serving the Zacapa Department. The Guatemala Tourist Board was attentive to the needs of the visitors. But only barefoot peasants lived in Zacapa and their train matched them in looking woebegone.

  We sat in the wet car listening to the jabber on a girl’s green radio. The girl held it in the crook of her arm; in her other arm was an infant.

  A man with a monkey-wrench walked through the car.

  The man sitting next to me said, ‘This car is broken.’

  ‘That is true,’ I said.

  There was a shout, followed by a general stampede, as the passengers from this car ran into the next one. I watched Indians dragging baskets, and women pushing children, and men with machetes. Most people merely put their heads down and butted their way into the next car. I was alone in the car a few minutes later, ‘Get out,’ said the man with the monkey-wrench, so I followed the others – two cars’ passengers jammed into one – and considered myself lucky to find a seat.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said to the Indians, trying to ingratiate myself with people who would share this all-day journey to the eastern province. ‘How are you?’

  A sniggering man to my left, dandling a large skinny boy on his leg, said, ‘They do not speak Spanish. They know a few words – that is all.’

  ‘That is all I know,’ I said.

  ‘No – you are doing extremely well.’

  ‘On the other hand, my English is a little better.’

  The man laughed – much too loud. I could see he was drunk, though how he had managed this so early in the morning I could not tell.

  Our train was shunted back and forth, and the broken car – no more broken-looking than the one we were in – was removed. I had expected a delay; I had the morning paper and a novel to read, but on the dot of seven the train’s harsh horn blew, and we began racing through the fog at the edge of a muddy road.

  At the first level crossing, there was great confusion outside the train, and inside a woman stood up and began to laugh and shout. The train had slowed down for the crossing, and now I could see a boy running alongside with a bundle. The woman yelled to the boy, telling him to hurry, but at that moment a soldier by the door (there were two soldiers in each of the train’s three cars) put down his automatic rifle and leaned out and caught the bundle. The soldier handed it to the woman.

  ‘It is my food,’ said the woman.

  The passengers continued to stare at her.

  ‘I forgot it this morning,’ she said. ‘That was my son.’

  ‘He is a fast runner!’ said the drunken man next to me. ‘That soldier is pretty quick, too. Hyah!’

  The soldier had tucked his rifle under his arm. He took up his position by the door and glowered at the man. You might have thought, from the way the soldiers scanned the huts by the track side and kept their rifles ready, that they expected to come under heavy fire. But nothing more lethal than a banana peel was aimed at the train.

  These huts, and some in a horrific slum outside San Salvador, were the worst I saw in Latin America. Rural poverty is bad, but there is hope in a pumpkin field, or the sight of chickens, or a field of cattle which, even if they are not owned by the people in the huts, offer opportunities to the hungry cattle rustler. But this slum outside Guatemala City, a derangement of feeble huts made out of paper and tin, was as hopeless as any I had ever seen in my life. The people who lived here, I found out, were those who had been made homeless in the last earthquake – refugees who had been here for two years and would probably stay until they died, or until the government dispersed them, and set fire to the shacks, so that tourists would not be upset by this dismal sight. The huts were made out of waste lumber and tree branches, cardboard and bits of plastic, rags, car doors and palm fronds, metal signboards that had been abstracted from poles, and grass woven into chicken-wire. And the slum, which remained in view for twenty minutes – miles of it – smouldered; near each house was a small cooking fire, with a blackened tin can simmering on it. Children rise early in the tropics; this seemed to be an entire slum of children, very dirty ones, with their noses running, waving at the train from curtains of yellow fog.

  The train passengers on their way to Zacapa did not take much interest in this slum, but one could hardly blame them. They were as ragged as the people in the huts.

  And then there was nothing. No shacks, no trees, no people, no smoke, no barking dogs. The ground gave way and there was emptiness; the sound of birds and insects was eclipsed, and in that silence was a thin echo of crows. It was a startling experience of space. We were on a bridge and crossing a deep gorge. I looked out of the window; the sight took my breath away – my legs went numb and a buzz began in my ears. Hundreds of feet down, at the rusty struts of a bridge, a gash of rock lay beneath us. We were leaving Guatemala City’s plateau and making our way across this rickety bridge – but a long one: I could not see the far side – to the mountains on the north-east of the city. It seemed a particularly dangerous traverse for this train, not only because it was so old and trembled on the bridge, but also because all the windows were open.

  Steeling myself for the shock, I leaned out and took another look at the gorge. There was no water in it. There were pinnacles of rock which had snagged scraps of fog, as country hedges and thorns snag bunches of fleece; and through this streaming whiteness a pair of crows flew and steadied themselves. I looked down upon the crows’ backs, and this sight, with the white behind it, was like a glimpse of sky – the birds’ silhouette in the clouds – as if the train had turned upside down. There was nothing but fog above the train, but below it were broken clouds, and birds, and a glint of sun. This topsy-turvy sight made my head swim. I shut the window.

  ‘Open the window!’ A boy of about eight or nine hit me on the knee.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I want to look out!’

  ‘It is dangerous,’ I said.

  ‘I want to see!’ he yelled, and tried to get past me.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said. People were staring at me. ‘It is very dangerous.’

  The boy spoke to his father – the drunken man. ‘I want to look out of the window. He will not let me!’

  I smiled at the old man. ‘He will fall into the valley.’

  ‘You,’ said the old man, pushing the child aside, ‘you will fall into the valley!’ The boy sulked. The old man said to me, ‘He is always causing trouble. One day, something terrible will happen to him.’

  I could see that the old drunken man was angry. Trying to calm him I said, ‘Your son is a good boy, but this train is very dangerous – so –’

  ‘This train is not very dangerous,’ said the man. ‘It is an old useless train. It is worth nothing.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. The Indians nodded. It gladdened me to know that these people recognized that the train was a piece of junk. I had thought, from their silence, that they had not noticed.

  There were more bridg
es, more gorges filled with cloud and fog, but none was so frightening as that first one. And yet this part of the trip reminded me of the route through the Khyber Pass taken by the battered train to Peshawar. It was more than the view from a similarly beat-up car of rocky mountainsides; it was the sight of a dozen sections of track – ahead, across the valley, and one beneath that, and one over there, and another lying parallel, and more above and below all the way to the valley floor. Not a dozen railways, but pieces of the one we were on, sections that would lead this wheezing engine around four mountains to a descent, another bridge, another climb to the winding sections that ringed those far-off cliffs. Round and round we went; sometimes the engine was silenced by its distance from us on the far side of a ridge, while at other times the curves were so tight it roared past us on a hairpin and seemed like a different train altogether, going in the opposite direction.

  The valley floors were stony; the fog had lifted here. The sun revealed the landscape as dead and brown, and the plants which appeared as pale green woods from on high were thorn bushes and bunches of cactus, so thin they cast no shadows. I had thought Guatemala was green – the whole of it like the jungly part around Tecún Umán – but passing from west to east and then pushing north-east to Zacapa, the country had become barer and poorer and stonier. Now in the Motagua Valley – shown on the map as hilly, with a river running though it – we were in a waterless desert: no sign of the river in this parched wasteland. The mountains were stone, the riverbeds rocky; no people. And it looked even worse up ahead as the empty land stretched dustily into the sun.

  Every ten or fifteen minutes, the train halted. The soldiers jumped out and positioned themselves in a crouch on the ground, a firing posture. Then a few people would hop to the ground and, without looking back at the train, begin walking into the desert – gone, lost behind the boulders, before the train started again. Most of these stations were not listed on the ticket; they were signboards, a clump of cactus, nothing more than that. Aguas Calientes was one of these: a sign, some cactus, a heap of rocks at the foot of a dry mountain. We started, and I saw a dry riverbed that mimicked a road, but near the riverbed an odd sight – great spurts of white steam from the hot springs that gave this place its name, bubbling from beneath that mountain which was a volcano. There were hot pools around the shooting steam, and women were doing their washing in them. Not even a cactus could live among these geysers – the boiling water foamed in the bare rock and drained through the cracks; and the only live things visible in that dead corner of desert were the bent-over women scrubbing their laundry.

  The first large station was not a station at all, but a row of shops, a school, and some tall dead trees. People watched from the porches of the shops and children ran into the schoolyard to look at the train (there were only two trains a week). Here, a number of people got off the train, but no one got on. And the train was so infrequent and undependable that not even food-sellers bothered to show up at this station. A boy with a case of tonic hollered to ask whether anyone wanted a drink – that was all. But one Indian in the opposite seat from mine had got off, so now I could stretch out my legs.

  The heat had put most of the passengers to sleep. They were small people, they fit these seats and could be recumbent in them. I hunched forward and forced myself to take notes on the blank pages of the book I was too tired to read, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. From time to time I smoked my pipe. I did not talk to anyone. No one talked to anyone. There was no conversation on this train.

  It struck me that since leaving Veracruz the trains I had taken had not been noticeably congenial. I was continually reminded that I was travelling alone. I had not expected the people to be so dour or the trains to be in such a state of decay. I had assumed there would be the usual free-for-all – planters and tenant-farmers, Indians, hippies, ranch-hands, coastal blacks, Americans with rucksacks and road-maps, a few tourists. But the train held only the very poor – everyone else had taken the bus. And these were not just poor people, but defeated people, who wore hats but no shoes, and regarded not only strangers but each other with suspicion. They were hardly the stuff of boon companions, and though I liked the rattle of the train and congratulated myself on having found a little-known route through Central America, this made for rather lonely travel.

  The penalty for this sense of discovery – who would have guessed Guatemala to be such desert? – this sustaining experience of making my way among marvels of erupted landscape, was that I was a stranger travelling with strangers. They were either oblivious to, or mystified by my presence. They stole glances at my pipe, but when addressed by me in their own language displayed (in shrugs and grunts) a marked reluctance to chat.

  Across the aisle an old woman was hawking and spitting. She would clear her throat and then spit – pah! – on the floor at her feet. This annoyed me (and the passengers walking through the mess nauseated me), but there was worse to follow. A woman selling coffee out of a large clay jar entered the train at a tiny station. I had had no breakfast, and more, thought that a hot coffee would be just the thing to bring on a sweat that would cool me. In the hottest areas of Burma, the wise Burmese drink cups of steaming tea and stay cool that way. The coffee-seller dipped a tin cup into her jar and decanted this into a cup she pulled out of her pocket, and handed this to a buyer. When the person finished the coffee, the woman took the cup back and repeated the process. So everyone used the same cup. If I had not known, or if I had been able to persuade myself that I was in no danger, I might have bought a coffee. But, before it was my turn, the spitting woman called the coffee-seller over.

  ‘How much?’ she said.

  The coffee-seller told her the price: two cents.

  The woman spat, drank, wiped her mouth and handed the cup back.

  It was my turn next.

  I said, ‘Do you have another cup?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said and moved away.

  Further on, a small girl boarded with some watermelon. Most of it had been sliced. I said, ‘Those pieces are too big for me,’ and took out my switchblade. As I cut my own piece (‘This is about the right size, eh?’) – my cutting was a guarantee against cholera – I noticed that what I had taken for seeds on the cut pieces were glossy black flies.

  The mountains receded into the distance. We had circled around their slopes and descended to a blighted area, a straight line of track. For the next few hours I looked for the Motagua River, but it was nowhere in view. This was Death Valley. The earth here was finer and duller than sand; it was powder, light brown, that was stirred by the movement of the little train. There was a dusting of it on all the cactuses, which gave them the look of stumps. There is no more hopeless object than a dead cactus; it does not collapse, but rather turns grey and hard and seems to petrify. The rest was scrub or single stones, and once, not far from the track, the ribs and skull of a cow, much whiter than the one I had seen in Texas. The only odour was the dust of this pulverized plain. The chief characteristic of a desert, apart from the absence of water, was this absence of smell.

  I kept thinking of what the lady in the hotel had said to me: Don’t go to Zacapa!

  But if I had not come here I would not have known the extent of this desolation. The heat was intense, but it was still tolerable, and hadn’t I complained of the cold just a short time ago in Chicago? I had asked for this. And this was the route the muleteers had taken into El Salvador; it was also – though hardly used these days – the principal way of travelling to Puerto Barrios and the so-called Atlantic coast. It was bad, but if it got no worse than this – it was hard to imagine anything worse – it would be bearable.

  I did have one fear: that the train would stop, just like that, no warning, no station; that the engine would seize up in the heat and that we would be stuck here. It had happened on what was regarded as a fine railway a hundred miles out of Veracruz, and the Mexicans had no explanation. This railway was clearly much older, the engine more of a gasper. And suppose it does, I
thought, suppose it just stops here and can’t start? It was ten in the morning, the open cars were full of people, the train carried no water, there was no road for miles, nor was there any shade. How long did it take to die? I guessed it would not take long in this boundless desert.

  It was no reassurance, half an hour later, to arrive at the town of Progreso. Aldous Huxley had come this way in 1933: ‘As we steamed out of the station, I noticed that the place was called Progreso. The fact annoyed me; I can detect an irony without having it underlined for me.’ Progreso was huts of unbaked mud-bricks, with palm-frond roofs (odd: there were no palms nearby, no trees of any sort). And Rancho, some miles further on, was no better: no progress in Progreso, no ranches in Rancho. This was the hottest, dustiest, most derelict place I had seen outside the boondocks of northern Uganda.

  But there was one great difference. The graveyard near Rancho was large and easily identifiable as a graveyard. The tombs were nearly as big as Rancho’s mud huts; they were solid and looked newly whitewashed, cottage-shaped with pillars and slanting roofs. They were much stronger than the huts. But I could see the logic in this. A man spent a life-time in a mud-hut, but these tombs had to house his remains for all eternity. The mud huts were not built to withstand earthquakes – the tombs were.

  In this scorching heat, I was very thirsty. My mouth was so dry I felt as if I had eaten a handful of moths. An hour later I bought a bottle of soda water and drank it warm. But the heat did not let up, nor did the landscape change. From halt to halt, the cactus and the pulverized soil were all there was to see. People scrambled onto the train, people scrambled off; people slept; the old woman spat. Every so often I thought: What if the engine dies on us – what then? And saw a skinny man, like the Angel of Death, watching us from the rag of a cactus’s shade.