by Paul Theroux
Mexico won the game, six to one. Alfredo said that El Salvador’s goal was the best one of the game, a header from thirty yards. So he managed to rescue a shred of pride. But people had been leaving all through the second half, and the rest hardly seemed to notice or to care that the game had ended. Just before we left the stadium I looked up at the ant-hill. It was a hill once again; there were no people on it, and depopulated, it seemed very small.
Outside, on the stadium slopes, the scene was like one of those lurid murals of Hell you see in Latin American churches. The colour was infernal, yellow dust sifted and whirled among crater-like pits, small cars with demonic headlights moved slowly from hole to hole like mechanical devils. And where, on the mural, you see the sins printed and dramatized, the gold lettering saying Lust, Anger, Avarice, Drunkenness, Gluttony, Theft, Pride, Jealousy, Usury, Gambling, and so on, here after midnight were groups of boys lewdly snatching at girls, and knots of people fighting, counting the money they had won, staggering and swigging from bottles, shrieking obscenities against Mexico, thumping the hoods of cars or duelling with the branches they had yanked from trees and the radio aerials they had twisted from cars. They trampled the dust and howled. The car horns were like harsh moos of pain – and one car was being overturned by a gang of shirtless, sweating youths. Many people were running to get free of the mob, holding handkerchiefs over their faces. But there were tens of thousands of people here, and animals, too, maimed dogs snarling and cowering as in a classic vision of Hell. And it was hot: dark grimy air that was hard to breathe, and freighted with the stinks of sweat; it was so thick it muted the light. It tasted of stale fire and ashes. The mob did not disperse; it was too angry to go home, too insulted by defeat to ignore its hurt. It was loud and it moved as if thwarted and pushed; it danced madly in what seemed a deep hole.
Alfredo knew a short cut to the road. He led the way through the parking lot and a ravaged grove of trees behind some huts. I saw people lying on the ground, but whether they were wounded or sleeping or dead I could not tell.
I asked him about the mob.
‘What did I tell you?’ he said. ‘You are sorry you came, right?’
‘No,’ I said, and I meant it. Now I was satisfied. Travel is pointless without certain risks. I had spent the whole evening scrutinizing what I saw, trying to memorize details, and I knew I would never go to another soccer game in Latin America.
That soccer game was not the only event in San Salvador that evening. At the Cathedral, as the fans were rioting in the National Stadium, the Archbishop of El Salvador was receiving an honorary doctorate from the President of Georgetown University. The Archbishop had deliberately made it into a public ceremony, to challenge the government and give a Jesuitical oration. There were 10,000 people at the Cathedral and I was told that this crowd was equally frightening in its discontent.
And ten years before, there had been ‘The Football War’ – also known as ‘The 100 Hour War’. This was between El Salvador and Honduras – first the soccer teams and the rioting spectators, then the national armies. It had grown out of El Salvador’s chronic shortage of land. Salvadoreans slipped over the border into Honduras to farm, to squat, to work on the banana plantations. They worked hard, but when the Hondurans got wind of it they tried to restrict entry on the Salvadorean border; they persecuted squatters, then repatriated them. And, as in all such squabbles, there were atrocity stories: rapes, murders, torturings. But there were no large-scale hostilities until the crucial soccer matches were played in preparation for the 1970 World Cup. In June 1969, there was violence after the El Salvador–Honduras match in Tegucigalpa, and this was repeated a week later in San Salvador. Within days, the El Salvador army began its armed attack on Honduras – its cue had come from the soccer match: the fans’ belligerence was to be taken seriously. Although the war lasted only a little more than four days, at the end of it 2,000 soldiers and civilians – mainly Hondurans – lay dead.
A year ago, an election was held in El Salvador. The election was rigged. There was violence, and there were mob scenes of the sort I had seen at the soccer game, but this time enacted on the streets of the capital. Students were shot and people imprisoned. And so El Salvador found itself with yet another military dictatorship. This was a particularly brutal one. Politics is a hideous subject, but I will say this: people tell you that dictatorships are sometimes necessary to good order, and that this sort of highly-centralized government is stable and dependable. But this is seldom so. It is nearly always bureaucratic and crooked, unstable, fickle and barbarous; and it excites those same qualities in those it governs.
Back at my hotel, which was not a good hotel, I wrote about the soccer game. The writing made me wakeful, and there were noises in the room – occasional scratchings from the ceiling. I opened Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and began to read. It was, from the first chapter, a terrifying story: Pym is a stowaway; he becomes trapped between decks and, without food or water, he suffers the pitching of the ship. His dog is with him. The dog becomes maddened and goes for him. Pym nearly dies, and is released from this prison only to find that there has been a mutiny on board, and there is another storm. All this time, in my own narrow room, I had been hearing the sinister scratchings. I switched out the light, went to sleep and had a nightmare: a storm, darkness, wind and rats scrabbling in a cupboard. The nightmare woke me. I groped for the light-switch. And in this lamp’s glare I could see that there was a hole in the ceiling, directly overhead, the size of a quarter. It had not been there before. I watched it for some minutes, and then a pair of yellow teeth appeared at its chewed edge.
I did not sleep that night.
9 The Local to Cutuco
Even Salvadoreans, with their little-country loyalty and their violent nationalism, regard Cutuco as a hole. And you know, as you see Nicaragua just across the border, that the end of the line cannot be far away. This is an observable fact. The train from Boston comes to a complete stop in Cutuco. After that, there is a ferry ride of anywhere from eight to eleven hours (it depends on the tide) across the Gulf of Fonseca to Nicaragua. If there is no Indian uprising, or peasant revolt, or civil war, it ought to be possible to make your way by road through Nicaragua, if only to judge how much reckless exaggeration there is in the commonly held view that Nicaragua is the worst eyesore in the world: the hottest, the poorest, the most savagely governed, with a murderous landscape and medieval laws and disgusting food. I had hoped to verify this. The inhospitable country, like the horrible train ride, has a way of bringing a heroic note to the traveller’s tale. And though I had had a few set-backs on the trip from South Station to San Salvador Central it had, for the most part, been fairly clear sailing. But Nicaragua was something of a problem.
I had been thinking hard about Nicaragua ever since I had read, months before leaving Boston, that the guerrilla war (which was in part an Indian uprising) had spread from Managua to smaller villages. And why was it, I wondered, that all these villages seemed to be on my proposed route through the country? My method for making an itinerary usually did not include newspapers. I got the best maps I could and, with guidebooks and what railway timetables I could lay my hands on, tried to determine how I might join one railway with another. I never gave any thought to hotels; if a town was important enough to be lettered on a map I assumed it was worth visiting (some surprises were inevitable: Zacapa was on most maps, Santa Ana was not; but that kind of discovery sustains and emboldens the traveller). I had heard that Nicaragua was Central America’s answer to Afghanistan, but apart from this cloudy image and the historical fact that from 1855 to 1857 Nicaragua had been governed by a five-foot Tennessean named William Walker (he changed the national language to English, instituted slavery and had plans for annexing Nicaragua to the American South; this midget was shot in 1860), I knew little about the country. It had been ruled barbarously by the Somoza family for nearly forty years – that was common knowledge. But this guerrilla war? The newspaper reports, which I now
depended on, differed in assessing its seriousness.
Through Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador I bought the local papers and tried to discover what was happening in Nicaragua. The news was always bad and it appeared to grow worse. GUERRILLAS ATTACK POLICE STATION one day was followed the next day by SOMOZA IMPOSES CURFEW. Then it was GUERRILLAS ROB BANK – I made careful translations of the headlines – and SOMOZA LAYS A FIRM HAND. In Santa Ana I read GUERRILLAS KILL TEN, in San Salvador the headline was SOMOZA ARRESTS 200 and INDIANS TAKE UP ARMS. Latterly I had read UNEASY CALM PREVAILS IN NICARAGUA, but just before leaving San Salvador there was a news item in La Prensa headlined GUERRILLAS BUY $5 MILLION OF ARMS FROM UNITED STATES. President Carter had remained prudently neutral on the Nicaragua issue; it was apparently hoped in the United States that Somoza would be overthrown. This was a pious hope, and it was no help to me. By the end of February the revolution had yet to occur; there was still sporadic fighting and reports of massacres and Somoza was in power. It looked as if he would remain in office for another forty years, or at the very most pass the machinery of government – in Nicaragua’s case these are instruments of torture – on to his son. I began to worry about crossing Nicaragua. I decided to go to the frontier. I would talk to the people there. If the news was still bad I would take a detour around it. I went by train to Cutuco, to examine Nicaragua. It was like going to the dentist and hoping that the office was shut, the dentist laid up with a bad case of lumbago. This had never happened to me at the dentist’s, but on the frontier of Nicaragua my reprieve came in just that way.
‘You cannot go into Nicaragua,’ said the Salvadorean at his border post by the ferry landing. Was there a muddier sight in all the world, a gloomier prospect, than the Gulf of Fonseca? ‘The border is closed. The soldiers will send you back.’
This was better than a stay of execution. I was absolved of any responsibility to travel through Nicaragua. I returned to San Salvador. I had changed my hotel room to one in which I was sure there were no rats. But I had nothing more to do in San Salvador. I had given a lecture on the topic that had occurred to me on the train to Tapachula: Little-known Books by Famous American Authors – Pudd’nhead Wilson, The Devil’s Dictionary, The Wild Palms. I had looked at the university (and no one could explain why there was a mural, in the university of this right-wing dictatorship, of Marx, Engels and Lenin). I had a day in hand, so I decided to take the Cutuco train again, but this time to stop along the way.
I knew from my previous trip that long before San Miguel, which was three-quarters of the way to Cutuco, the journey ceased to be interesting. As before, there were two passenger cars and not more than twenty-five people travelling. While we were waiting for the train to be shunted to the platform I asked some of them where they were going. They said San Vicente. It was market day in San Vicente. Was San Vicente pretty? Oh, very, they said. So I decided to get off the train at San Vicente.
No two trains are alike. Salvadorean trains are just as broken down as Guatemalan ones, but there are differences. They might have been given life by the same fruit company, but they have evolved differently. This is true of the world’s railways – I have never seen two even remotely similar. ‘El Jarocho’ is as distinct from ‘The Golden Blowpipe’ as its name. It is more than national differences; trains take on the character of their routes. On the Local to Cutuco the uniqueness is obvious as soon as you board. Here, at the gate, was the same sad dark little man who had greeted me from the Railcar. He wore his sports shirt and carried his old revolver in a holster and some bullets in an ammo belt. I hoped he would not be provoked to fire it, because I was sure it would explode in his face if he did and I would be killed, not by the bullet, but by shrapnel. He punched my ticket, the train creaked to the platform, and I boarded. All the seats were torn. They were stuffed with horse-hair: it was agony to lean back.
‘These seats are really in bad condition.’ The Salvadorean man across the aisle was apologizing. He kicked the seat in front and went on, ‘But they are strong – look, the seats themselves are fine. But they are ripped and dirty. They should fix them.’
I said, ‘Why don’t they fix them?’
‘Because everyone takes the bus.’
‘If they fixed them, everyone would take the train.’
‘True,’ he said. ‘But then the train would be crowded with all the world.’
I agreed with him, not because I believed what he said but because I was sick of lecturing people on disorder. Central America was haywire; it was as if New England had gone completely to ruin and places like Rhode Island and Connecticut were run by maniacal generals and thuggish policemen; as if they had evolved into motiveless tyrannies and become forcing-houses of nationalism. It was no wonder that, seeing them as degenerate states, tycoons like Vanderbilt and imperial-minded companies like the United Fruit Company took them over and tried to run them. It should have been easy enough. But tycoons and big companies did not have the morality or the compassion or the sense of legality to make these places work; they acted out of contempt and self-interest; they were less than colonial – they were racketeers, and they spawned racketeers. Lawless, the countries became bizarre with inequality, and hideously violent. El Salvador deserves to be serene, but it is not. Football, the simplest sport in the world, in this place had become a free-for-all of punchy frustration in which the spectators made themselves the centre of attention. Why shouldn’t we have some fun, they might reply: we live like dogs. Football wasn’t football, the Church was not the Church, and this train was unlike any I had ever ridden on. By the time it had got to this condition, any sensible railway company would have collected the insurance money for the damage and started all over again, the way they do in India. But this was El Salvador, not India – indeed, this heap of junk would have been laughed out of West Bengal, which is saying something.
But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes. The crack express trains – the bullet trains in Japan, ‘The Blue Train’ from Paris to Cannes, ‘The Flying Scotsman’ – these are joyrides, nothing more; the rapidity diminishes the pleasure of the journey. But the Local to Cutuco is a plod through the spectacular. If one is not put to flight by the pistol-toting ticket-puncher, or the filthy cars or painful seats, one is rewarded by the grandest scenery south of Massachusetts. And the train is so geriatrically slow, one gets the impression that El Salvador is as big as Texas. It is the effect of the feeble engine and all the stops: three and a half hours to go the forty miles to San Vicente.
The spectacle takes a while to begin.
El Salvador had seemed to me to be tidy, fertile and prosperous. And it is, in the west. But east of the capital, on the other side of the tracks – here, desolation lies. It starts where the station precincts end, at a quarry on the edge of town. For a full hour as the train moves there is nothing but the stone-age horror of little huts: mud and bamboo, cardboard and sticks, tin and mud, and on the roofs every sort of refuse to hold the things down, since one can’t drive nails into mud or cardboard. The roofs are amazing collections of broken things. Look at this one: an old rusted sewing machine, an iron stove in pieces, six tyres, bricks, tins, boulders; and on that one splintered lumber and a tree branch and some stones. The huts lean against each other and are propped against the steep sides of the quarry, pressed against the track, with no decoration but a picture of Jesus or a saint, and no colour but the rags hanging out to dry on a tripod of timbers. It is a coffee-growing country. The price of coffee is very high. But these people really do live like dogs, and the dogs themselves seem to have evolved downward into cowering creatures which never bark, but only limp and skulk and forage in dusty bushes with their snouts. The dogs have been turned into a species of scavenging burrower, like a particularly mangy sort of aardvark. Now the train was moving so slowly, and was so empty and neglected, that children from the slum climbed shrieking into it and ran down the aisles, jumping from seat to seat. They hopped off at the continuation of the slum, on the next cur
ve.
If the slum children had lingered another ten minutes on the train they would have seen open country, trees and wild flowers and singing birds. But the children do not stray into the countryside. Perhaps it is forbidden, or perhaps they are obeying the slum-dweller’s instinct, which is to seek the protection of the slum and not to go beyond its boundaries. They are vulnerable in the outer world to policemen, landowners, tax inspectors; and in their rags they are easy to identify and humiliate. So, in the daylight hours, the slum is full and active and in Central America it nearly always has as its frontier a creek or stream or a railway track. And just past that natural frontier the slum ends and jungle or pasture land begins. Here, the slum gave on to coffee plantations, and it was reasonable to assume that those destitute people I had seen earlier were coffee-pickers. From what I found out later, their wages bore no relation to the price of coffee.
We climbed some low hills and then passed along the ridge of a higher one. I looked across the valley and saw a lake – Lake Ilopango – and a volcano – Chinchontepec. From these heights to San Vicente, where the vistas are shortened by the train’s sinking into the eastern lowlands, the lake and the volcano grow huger and alter in colour as the sun shifts behind them. The first glimpse is impressive, but the lake swells and the volcano rises and for miles and miles they grow to almost unbelievable loveliness. The lake waters are blue, then grey, then black as the train mounts its own volcanic range and travels along the spine, passing the north side of this lake. There is an island in the lake. It appeared in 1880, when the water level suddenly fell, and is still there, like a dismasted flagship in this darkly chromatic sea. Between the lake and the train are low hills of green vegetation and a long sweep of tree-tops which, closer to the train, are banana and orange groves and tall clusters of yellow swaying bamboos. The foliage nearby is faded and dusty, but at a distance it is emerald green and looks dense and lush.
