by Paul Theroux
Now the lake is silver, with an enamelling of blue discs; now black, with furrows of frothy whiteness; now it is suffused with pinkness and at its shores takes the colour from the greenest trees. It was, to the lakeside Indians, much more than a body of water in which they washed and fished and quenched their thirst. The guidebooks merely repeat falsifications of its importance for credulous tourists. One guidebook says that before the Spanish conquest the Indians ‘used to propitiate the harvest gods by drowning four virgins here every year’. Well, this might have been true, and it provides a cue for the joke that the ritual was abandoned for lack of suitable victims. But human sacrifice continued well into the last century at this lake, and it had nothing to do with the harvest gods. It was a complicated procedure, and purposeful.
There was a witness. His name was Don Camillo Galvar. He was Visitador-General in San Salvador in the 1860s. In 1880 he described what he had found out about the supposedly bloodthirsty practices of the Indians who lived near Lake Ilopango. ‘The people of the pueblos around the lake,’ he wrote, ‘Cojute-peque, Texacuangos, and Tepezontes, say that when the earthquakes came from the lake, which they knew by the disappearance of the fish, it was a sign that the monster lord of these regions who dwelt in the depths of the lake was eating the fish.’
Not a harvest god, but a monster; and the Indians’ fear was that unless this monster was ‘provided with a more delicate and juicy diet worthy of his power and voracity’ he would eat all the fish and there would be none for the fishermen to catch. The Indians said that the monster only ate fish ‘as men eat fruit, to refresh and allay hunger.’ The lake and the volcano rumbled and the fish began to disappear; the Indians ‘deeply afflicted by the fish famine … collected at the command of their chiefs.’ Sorcerers came forth in their ceremonial robes and headdresses and outlined what the Indians were to do: they were to throw flowers and fruits into the lake. Sometimes, this worked: the tremors ceased. But if they continued, the Indians assembled again and were told to throw in animals, preferably gophers, racoons and armadilloes and ones they called taltusas. The animals had to be caught alive and thrown into the water still kicking. Any Indian found throwing a dead animal into the water faced the severe penalty of being hanged with a zinak vine, because the monster lord would be enraged by having to feed on dead flesh.
Days were given to the study of the water level, the numbers of fish, the evidence of tremors. If the signs were still bad the ‘wizards’ acted. They took a girl of from six to nine years old, decked her with flowers and ‘at midnight the wizards took her to the middle of the lake and cast her in, bound hand and foot, with a stone fast to her neck. The next day, if the child appeared upon the surface and the tremors continued, another victim was cast into the lake with the same ceremonies.
‘In the years 1861 and 1862,’ Don Camillo goes on, ‘when I visited these towns they told me that they kept to this barbarous custom to prevent the failure of the fish.’ So there was a reason; and the Indians did not gloat about it. Indeed, Don Camillo adds that they spoke to him ‘with much reserve’.
The lake had assumed a more ominous blueness, chased by ghost-grey mists, and still the train was rising. Below was not one valley, but fifty of them, and a landscape of green peaks. It was hard to believe that the hills so far down could be high, but the train was crossing the ridge at such a great altitude, and it was a lesson in scale to compare the hills with the volcano Chinchontepec. We were nowhere near it, and it continued to increase in size; now it seemed mammoth and black and unclimbable.
But it remained in the distance, in that other lush climate. The train crossed a hotter mountain range. The dust flew into the cars. I got up and walked from car to car to stretch my legs, and when I went back I recognized my seat by its colour: it had a thinner layer of dust than the others, which were covered by the brown powder. There were no doors on the cars, no glass in the windows – they were completely open, and whirling with such a dust storm the porters and conductors, and all the train staff, rode on the roofs of the cars where the dust could not reach them. They sat, gripping the pipes and wheels on the roof, or else stood straddling the centre of the car. The train to Zacapa had been dusty, but there was no wind in the Motagua Valley. Here, we were high and the movement of the train and the stiff mountain winds combined to create gusts of considerable velocity which drew a brown veil over the train and made it impossible for long periods to see anything. The passengers crouched and put their heads down, holding their shirts against their faces. The train’s noise was a loud hammering and clattering; it was hard to draw a breath and, more than anything, it was as if we were roaring through a small dirt tunnel fleeing a cave-in.
Outside the village of Michapa, the train coursed through a trough of steep sandbanks. A young girl, perhaps eight years old, had pressed herself against the bank, and the dust churned around her. She held a tiny goat in her arms to prevent him from scampering in fright onto the tracks, and she looked persecuted by the dust and noise, her face fixed in a pained suffocated expression.
When the dust storm passed and the sky turned blue and large, the train’s racket was swallowed by the empty air, and we seemed to be in a low-flying plane, gliding at tree-top height towards the valleys below. It was a trick of the landscape, the way the train balanced on its narrow ridge and gave a view of everything but its tracks. And though the train had been slow before, on this downhill run it had gathered speed: but the clatter was not so obvious. This old engine and its cars had taken to the air like a railway lifted and travelling down the sky. It is not often that one gets a view like this in a train and it was so beautiful that I could forget the heat and dust, the broken seats, and was uplifted by the sight of the hills way down and the nearer hills of coffee and bamboo. For the next half-hour of this descent, it was an aerial railway diving across hills of purest green.
The landscape changed; the villages remained the same. You think: I’ve been here before. The village is small and has a saint’s name. The station is a shed, open on three sides, and near it are piles of orange peels and blown-open coconut husks with fibrous hair, and waste paper and bottles. That grey trickle of waste water gathering in a green-yellow pool; that woman with a basket on her head, and bananas in the basket, and flies on the bananas; that heap of black railway ties and the stack of oily barrels, the Coca-Cola sign faded to pink, the ten filthy children and the small girl with the naked infant on her back, the boy with a twanging radio the size of a shoe-box, the banana trees, the four huts, the limping dog, the whining pig, the dozing man with his head resting on his left shoulder and his hat-brim crushed. You were here, you saw the trampled path and the smoke, the sun at just that scorching angle above the trees, the wrecked car resting on its rims, the chickens pecking pebbles out of the shade, the face behind the rag of curtain in the hut window, the stationmaster in his shirt sleeves and dark trousers standing at attention in the sun holding his log-book, the leaves of the village trees so thick with dust that they appear to be dead. It seems so familiar you begin to wonder if you have been travelling in a small circle, leaving in the morning and every day arriving in the heat of the afternoon at this same village with its pig and its people and its withered trees, the vision of decrepitude repeating like the dream that demands that you return again and again to the same scene; the sameness of it has a curiously mocking quality. Can it be true that after weeks of train travel you have gone no farther that this and only been returned once again to this squalid place? No; though you have seen hundreds like it since crossing the Rio Grande, you have never been here before.
And when the train whistle squawks and you pull out, because you have seen so many departures like this, the village leaves no impression. The dust from the accelerating train rises and the huts vanish beneath it. But somewhere in the memory these poor places accumulate, until you pray for something different, a little hope to give them hope. To see a country’s poverty is not to see into its heart, but it is very hard to look beyond such p
itiable things.
We ascended another range of hills and the gorge to the south distracted me. Tall crooked trees, looped with the entrails of slender vines, grew on the slopes and cliffs of the gorge, like the beginnings of jungle. The land was too precipitous for crops, too steep even for huts or paths. It was wild and uninhabited; birds flew along the sides of the gorge, but seemed too timid to risk flying across it. They whistled at the train. I looked for more, leaned out of the window and just then everything went black.
We had entered a tunnel. The passengers began to scream. Central Americans always scream in tunnels, but whether they screamed with enthusiasm or terror I could not tell. The train had no lights in its cars, and with the darkness was a rush of dust which thickened as the train blundered on. I could feel the dust blowing into my face and could feel it on my hair as if I was in a hole and the dust was being shovelled onto me. I did what I had seen the passengers do earlier: I buried my face in my shirt and breathed through the cloth. We were in the tunnel for five minutes, which is a long time to be blindly choking and hearing people scream. But not everyone had screamed. In front of me was an old lady who had told me she was going to San Vicente to sell her crate of oranges. She had gone to sleep an hour before. She was sleeping when we entered the tunnel; she was sleeping when we left it. Her head was thrown back and her mouth was open; she had not shifted her position.
The train plunged out of the tunnel and lost its racket in the sunlight and clear air. We teetered on a mountainside, and the subdued chug of the engine – muffled by the tide of air – was like a hushed reverence for the ten fertile miles of the Jiboa Valley, which began at the tunnel entrance and descended as evenly as a ski slope before rising at the foot of the volcano. The volcano was a darker green than the landscape it sprang out of, and it had leonine contours of light and shade, some like shoulders and forepaws, some muscled like flanks and hindquarters. But it had a carved considered look to it and seemed, as I sped towards it on the train, like a headless sphinx, green and monumental, as if its head had rolled away leaving its lion’s body intact. It was easy to understand how the Indians hereabouts had come to believe that their lands were inhabited by monster lords. Not only did the mountains have a monstrous aspect, the animal shapes and clumsy claws of giants and demons, but they growled and rumbled and trembled and hollered, and shook down the flimsy huts of the Indians; they burned the Indians alive and buried them in ashes and made their fish disappear and ate their children. And these oddities of landscape were still a source of fear.
For the next forty minutes we rolled down the mountain valley towards the shadows of the volcano. And yet, so slowly were we moving, it seemed as if we were stuck fast at the rim of the valley and the volcano was rising and turning, revealing the lion’s svelte back and lengthening, perhaps stretching to pounce in eruption, until finally, and just as I expected it to rise and roar, it disappeared – everything but those two ridges which were tensed like front legs. We were at San Vicente, its nearest town, and deep between its forepaws.
Most of the passengers got out here and stumbled across the tracks. There was no one collecting tickets. The officials watched from the coolness of a grove of trees. The whistle blew; the train lurched towards Cutuco. Then the dust settled and with it the mournful stillness of the country town on a hot afternoon.
I asked the way to the market. A boy gave me simple directions: follow this road. He seemed surprised that anyone should need directions in this tiny place. But the railway station was not in the centre of town; it was half a mile, along the town’s main street, from the station to the plaza. Most of San Vicente’s houses are on that street; the street begins as dust, turns bouldery, then cobbled, and nearer the plaza is concrete. The market, which I had been told was interesting, was like an oriental bazaar – tent-shelters pitched along several small lanes. Each tent enclosure was piled with fruit or vegetables, or dead animals hung on makeshift gallows, or boxes of pencils or pocket combs. All the people in a particular section were selling the same thing: a section of fruit, one of vegetables, one of meat or household items; and further away was a section reeking of decayed fish. I bought a bottle of soda water and noticed that no one was hawking anything. The hawkers had gathered into groups – men here, women there – and were talking companionably.
At the end of the market precinct was the plaza, and fronting onto the plaza San Vicente’s church. It is one of the oldest churches in Central America, and called El Pilar. Built by the Spanish in this remote town, it has not been restored: no restoration has been necessary. It was made to withstand the sieges of pagans and the ravages of earthquakes. It has survived them all; apart from a few broken windows it shows few signs of age or ruin. Its walls are three feet thick; its columns, twelve feet in circumference, are low plump pillars the thickness of a cathedral’s. But El Pilar is little more than a chapel; it is the shape of the mausoleums I had seen in rural Guatemala, white and rounded, with the mosque-like domes and squat arabesques that the Spanish gave their country churches. But its whitewash did not disguise its look of belligerence, nor did its stained-glass windows or crosses prevent it from looking like what it perhaps always has been – a fortress.
In the early nineteenth century there were a number of Indian wars in this part of Central America. By force of numbers and in their ferocity the Indians were able to overwhelm the Spanish in certain areas and create Indian strongholds, little kingdoms within the Spanish colony. From these places they made forays into Spanish towns and occasionally terrorized the inhabitants. Throughout the 1830s there were battles, and the largest number of Indians was led by a chief, Agostino Aquinas – he was a Christian – whose bravado brought him here to El Pilar in San Vicente. As a taunt to the Spanish, Aquinas rushed into El Pilar and snatched the crown from the statue of Saint Joseph. This he crammed onto his own head, declaring war on the Spanish. He then made for the mountains and, controlling a sizable district with his Indians, fought a guerrilla war.
The church could not have looked much different when Aquinas whooped in and desecrated it. The arches are heavy, the tiles immovable, the carved wooden altarpiece merely darker, and there is a narrow tomb-like quality to the interior. It may be the holiest building in town; it is certainly the strongest. It has, without any doubt, known service as a fortification.
Eleven old ladies were kneeling in the front pews and praying. The church was cool, so I took a pew at the rear and tried to spot the statue of Saint Joseph. From the eleven black-shawled heads came the steady murmur of prayer; it was a simmer of incantation, low voices like thick Salvadorean soup mumbling in a pot, the same bubbling rhythm of formula prayers. They were like spectres, the row of crones draped in black, uttering muffled prayers in the shadowy church; the sunbeams breaking through the holes in the stained-glass windows made logs of light that seemed to prop up the walls; there was a smell of burned wax, and the candle flames fluttered in a continuous tremble, like the voices of those old ladies. Inside El Pilar the year might have been 1831, and these the wives and mothers of Spanish soldiers praying for deliverance from the onslaught of frantic Indians.
A tinkling bell rang from the sacristy. I sat primly and piously, straightening my back, in an instinctive reflex. It was habitual: I could not enter a church without genuflecting and dipping my fingers in the holy water font. A priest scuffed to the altar rail, flanked by two acolytes. The priest raised his arms and, in that gesture – but perhaps it was his good looks, the well-combed curate rather stuck on his clerical smoothness – a stagey flourish of a nightclub master of ceremonies. He was praying, but his prayers were mannered, Spanish, not Latin, and then he extended one arm towards a corner of the church that was hidden from me. He performed a little wrist-play, a wave of his hand, and the music began.
It was not solemn music. It was two electric guitars, a clarinet, maracas and a full set of drums – as soon as it had started to blurt I shifted my seat for a look at the musicians. It was the harsh wail of tuneless pop
music that I had been avoiding for weeks, the squawk and crash that I had first heard issuing from Mexico as I stood on the high riverbank at Laredo. I had, since then, only rarely been out of earshot of it. How to describe it? With the guitar whine was an irregular beat, and each beat like a set of crockery dropped on the floor; a girl and boy shook maracas and sang – this was a cat’s yowl attempt at harmonizing, but off-key it did not even have the melodiousness of a set of madly scraping locusts.
They were of course singing a hymn. In a place where Jesus Christ was depicted as a muscular tough, a blue-eyed Latin with slicked-down hair, a deeply handsome young fellow, religion was a kind of love affair. In some Catholicism, and frequently in Spanish America, prayer has become a romancing with Jesus. He is not a terrible God, not a destroyer, not a cold and vindictive ascetic; he is princely and with it the ultimate macho figure. The hymn was a love song, but very much a Spanish American one, crowing with lugubrious passion, the word heart repeated in every verse. And it was extremely loud. This was worship, but there was no substantial difference between what was going on here in this old church and what one could hear in the juke-box down the street in El Bar Americano. The church had been brought to the people; it had not made the people more pious – they had merely used this as an opportunity to entertain themselves and take the boredom out of the service. A mass or these evening prayers was an occasion to concentrate the mind in prayer; this music turned it into a distraction.
Music of this special deafening kind seemed important in Spanish America, because it prevented any thought whatsoever. The goon with the transistor in the train, the village boys gathered around their yakketing box, the man in Santa Ana who brought his cassette machine to breakfast and stared at its groaning amplifier, all the knee-jerks and finger-snapping and tooth-sucking seemed to have one purpose – a self-induced stupor for people who lived in a place where alcohol was expensive and drugs illegal. It was deafness and amnesia; it celebrated nothing but lost beauty and broken hearts; it had no memorable melody; it was splinters of glass ceaselessly flushed down a toilet, the thud of drums and the grunts of singers. People I met on my trip were constantly telling me they loved music. Not pop music from the United States, but this music. I knew what they meant.
