by Paul Theroux
‘A big suitcase.’
He said, ‘You’d be surprised how much money you can get into a little suitcase. It’s easy. No country checks your baggage when you leave. And customs people in the States and Canada don’t care if they open a suitcase and find it filled with pesos. Sometimes they don’t even open it. But when they do, they shit. They’ve never seen so much money in their life.’
It was clear to me why Dibbs had been hired for this job. He was strong; he was as big as a house; he was fairly stupid and completely loyal. He would not go into detail about his employer or the reason for transporting the money, and he said at one point, ‘Maybe my name’s Dibbs and maybe it ain’t.’ He had a fantasy of self-importance; carrying these sums of money fed his fantasy. He was proud of the fact that no one had ever succeeded in mugging him. ‘Guess why?’
I said I couldn’t guess.
‘Because I’m an alcoholic,’ he said. He picked up his glass. ‘See that? It’s a Coke. If I drink anything stronger, I’m finished. So I don’t drink. Can’t drink. Drunks get mugged. You – you’ll probably get mugged. You’ve been drinking beer all night. I could carry fifty grand through the worst part of Panama City and nothing would happen to me.’
‘You’d be sober.’
‘Guess why else?’
‘Can’t guess.’
‘Because I know karate. I could snap your arms off.’ Dibbs leaned forward. He looked as though he wanted to snap my arms off. He said, ‘Also, I’m not stupid. People who get mugged ask for it. They’re stupid. They go to the wrong places. They get drunk. They don’t know karate.’
Also, I thought, they weigh less than three hundred pounds.
Dibbs struck me as being a very sinister character, and without Andy Ruggles around to distract Dibbs’s attention I felt rather defenceless. Dibbs had one passion: hookers. He liked to take them two or three at a time. ‘I just lie there – they do all the work.’ He boasted that he never paid them. They liked him; he walked into a brothel and they were all over him, clamouring, fighting to go to bed with this mountain of meat. He didn’t know why this was so. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m so handsome!’
He wanted to take me to what he said was the only good brothel in San José. It was too late, I said, nearly midnight. He said midnight was the best time – the hookers were just waking up. ‘How about tomorrow?’ I said, knowing that tomorrow I would be in Limón. ‘You’re a chicken,’ he said, and I could hear him laughing as I descended the stairs to the street.
There are two railways in Costa Rica, each with its own terminal in San José. Their routes dramatize Costa Rica’s indifference to her neighbours: they go to the coasts, not to any frontier. The Pacific Railway travels down to Puntarenas on the Gulf of Nicoya; The Atlantic up to Puerto Limón. The Atlantic station is the older of the two, and part of its line has been in operation for almost a hundred years. Outside that station there is a steam locomotive mounted on blocks for travellers to admire. In El Salvador such an engine would be puffing and blowing up the track to Santa Ana; in Guatemala it would have been melted down and made into anti-personnel bombs for the White Hand.
A Limón train leaves the Atlantic station every day at noon. It is not a great train, but by Central American standards it is the Brighton Belle. There are five passenger coaches, two classes, no freight cars. I had been eager to take this train, for the route has the reputation of being one of the most beautiful in the world, from the temperate capital in the mountains, through the deep valleys on the north-east, to the tropical coast which, because of its richly lush jungle, Columbus named Costa Rica when he touched there on his fourth voyage in 1502. He believed that he had arrived at the green splendour of Asia. (Columbus tacked up and down the coast and was ill for four months in Panama; cruelly, no one told him that there was another vast ocean on the other side of the mountains – the local Indians were deaf to his appeal for this information.)
The most scenic of Central American routes; but I had another good reason for wanting to take this train out of San José. Since arriving in Costa Rica I had spent much of my time in the company of hard-drinking American refugees – Andy Ruggles and the diabolical Dibbs were but two. I was glad of their company; El Salvador hadn’t been much fun. But now I was ready to set off alone. Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with Oh, look, it’s raining and You see a lot of trees here. Travelling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican buttercups, tend to say things like Where is the rest of your team?). I think of evening in the hotel room in the strange city; my diary has been brought up to date; I hanker for company: what do I do? I don’t know anyone here, so I go out and walk and discover the three streets of the town and rather envy the strolling couples and the people with children. The museums and churches are closed, and towards midnight the streets are empty. Don’t carry anything valuable, I was warned; it’ll just get stolen. If I am mugged I will have to apologize in my politest Spanish: I am sorry, sir, but I have nothing valuable on my person. Is there a surer way of enraging a thief and driving him to violence? Walking these dark streets is dangerous, but the bars are open. Ruggles and Dibbs await. They take the curse off my boredom, but I have a nagging suspicion that if I had stayed home and lingered in downtown Boston until midnight I would have met Ruggles and Dibbs in the Two O’Clock Lounge (‘20 Completely Nude College Girls!!!’). I did not have to take the train to Costa Rica for that.
It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive impressions. Later, these impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. Have a nice time, people said to me at my send-off at South Station. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be mine on that train to Limón.
I found a corner seat by a window and watched the houses get smaller as we approached the outskirts of San José. They got smaller but, unlike the houses in the rest of the suburbs in Central America, they did not get dingier and more tumbledown on the periphery of the city. The campaign flags were still flying, and election slogans and posters were stuck to the walls of some of them. They were ranch houses, bungalows, square tin-roofed houses; houses of clapboard and concrete. They were pink and green and lemon-yellow in the small settlements, and in the smart outer suburbs they were red-brick and white and had rolling lawns. And then, without passing a dump or a slum, or the dirty river with its grey froth of soapsuds that was the boundary of every other town I had seen so far, we sped into the countryside, past banana groves and fields of coffee. These were shady plantations, with wooded green hills surrounding them. It was sunny and cool on this day in late February, and there by the tracks was a Costa Rican bee-keeper, like Sherlock Holmes in retirement, just as hawk-nosed and skinny; he looked up from his swarming hives and grinned at the train.
Even the poorest, the smallest house was neatly painted, the stairs swept, and starched curtains flapped through windows. In the yards were the piles of firewood, the ve
getable garden, the borders of flowers. They were proud little houses, and the pride gave them dignity. There was a completeness to this, a certain formality, and it was reflected in the way the train passengers were dressed, the girls in sunhats, the ladies in shawls, the men in fedoras.
More than half the passengers on the train were black. I found this odd: I could not remember having seen any blacks in San José. Their baskets and shopping bags marked them out as Costa Ricans, not tourists, and for the early part of the trip they chatted with the whites on the train. They spoke in Spanish, getting acquainted, laughing and joking. I hope I’ve got enough food, said a black lady in a sunbonnet. My children are always eating.
Then I heard, ‘Take yo haid out de winda!’
It was the same woman, now yelling in English. One of her small sons, in a blue jersey, was hanging out of the window. But his head was so far out he could not hear her.
‘Tree gonna lop it off!’
Now he heard. He turned his head to her, but did not withdraw it.
‘You kyant do dat!’ She punched his shoulder. The boy sat back in his seat and giggled at his sister.
‘I have to watch them all the time,’ said the black woman in Spanish. Her English was sing-song, her Spanish a stutter.
We passed through blobs of sunlight in a pretty, shady wood. It was unusual to travel in the shade, through woods which overhung the track. Normally there was heat on either side of the track and sun beating through the windows. But here the sunlight speckled the glass and flashed in the train, and the trees were so dense it was impossible to see beyond the pickets of slender trunks and the cracks of light. We were among mountains. A space between the trees opened like a gate and, far-off, pine groves grew darkly on the hills and below them in a ditch of shade there was a dairy and a saw-mill and a village of timber houses and a wood-lot. A river ran through it, sparkling just before it tumbled into the shady valley, and the place looked to me like a town in Vermont I had seen as a child, perhaps Bellows Falls or White River Junction. The illusion of Vermontness persisted even though in this village I saw a row of royal palms.
We came to Cartago. This was a market town. Here, in 1886, the railway line was begun by an American speculator, Minor Keith. The silver commemorative shovel, with an appropriate inscription, is on display in the National Museum in San José, along with pre-Columbian pottery and masks and gold jewellery and portraits of moustached Costa Rican patriots and presidents (their walking sticks, each one as individual as their moustaches, are also on display). In that museum is a painting of Cartago depicting the result of the great earthquake of 1910. It is an interesting picture, for right through the middle of town, in the foreground of the painting, are the railway tracks, a whole section of them covered by masonry which had fallen from a convent wall. That earthquake flattened Cartago, but the line was repaired; nothing else of old Cartago remains.
The seat next to me had been empty. Just as we left Cartago a young man took it and asked me how far I was going. He said he was going to Siquirres. Limón, he said, was interesting, but I might find it crowded. It would be hours before we’d reach Siquirres; he hoped I would teach him some English. He had tried to learn it, but found it very difficult. His name was Luis Alvarado, he said. I asked him if we could skip the English lesson.
‘It is just that you look like a teacher. I think you could help me,’ he said in Spanish. ‘How do you like Costa Rica?’
I told him that I thought it was a beautiful country.
‘Why do you think so?’
The mountains, I said.
‘They are not so beautiful as those in Oregon. Or so high.’
The river, I said. That was a lovely river in the valley.
‘The rivers in Oregon are much more beautiful.’
I told him I thought the people in Costa Rica were extremely pleasant.
‘The people in Oregon always smile. They are more friendly than Costa Ricans.’
It was a green country, I said,
‘Have you been to Oregon?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Have you?’
He had. It was his single visit outside Costa Rica, a summer in Oregon, trying to learn English. It was a wonderful visit, but the English lessons were a failure. He had not been to Nicaragua or Panama: they were loathsome places. He said that instead of my going on to Panama I should return to the States and visit Oregon.
The river was beneath us; the landscape had opened and become simple and terrifying, two parallel mountain ranges and between them, so deep it made me anxious, a gorge. There were fountains of mist in the gorge, the flung spray of the foaming river. This was the Rio Reventazón. It is a swift river and its strength has pulled down the sides of these mountains and made a canyon, filled with the rubble of its destruction, and this – the fallen walls of boulders, the river heaving over rocks, the turbulent suds of rapids – lay four hundred feet below the train. The low coffee bushes could not obscure the view. I saw how the gorge had been levelled by the rushing whiteness on the valley floor. The valley of the Reventazón is forty miles long. The mountains are in places so precipitous the train has to descend through tunnels (screams, exalted yells in the car, and the odour of damp walls) to a cliffside that brings it so near the river the spray hits the windows. Then up again, along a cut to switchbacks and bridges.
The bridges were always approached at an angle, so that they were seen whole, from the side; they appeared as a framework of slender girders, or sometimes wooden beams, tensed across two cliffs. It seemed as if this was the view of a bridge on another track, as if we were going to bypass it. But always the train turned sharply, and became noisy as it started onto it; and the torrent beneath it looked peculiarly menacing – a staircase of cataracts frothing into the greater torrent yonder. I wondered how it was that Costa Rica could be so cool and piney, and it was not just that it was so different from its near neighbours, but that it was cool and piney like Vermont, and freshly watered – here a sawmill and there a dairy, the cows cropping grass on the hillsides; and horses, oblivious to the train, tethered to fences. Later, I was to meet an American horse-dealer in Costa Rica. He said, ‘My horses would bolt and hang themselves if I tied them that near the tracks.’
It is, for the first third of the trip, a mountain railway, the train travelling along a narrow shelf that has been notched into the mountainside. How narrow? Well, at one point a cow had strayed onto the line. To the left was the sheer mountain wall, to the right the drop into the river; the cow was baffled and for almost a mile she lolloped ahead of the engine, which had slowed so as not to kill her. At times she stopped, put her nose against the mountainside, sniffed at the precipice, then started away again, rocking back and forth, stifflegged, the way cows run. The track was too narrow to give her space to allow us to pass, so she ran ahead rocking, her tail swinging, for amost a mile on this high shelf.
Nearer the river the coffee bushes were thick, and there was cocoa, too, the wide leaves, the plump, bobbin-like pods. It was easier to make notes here, as the train moved slowly on the flat tracks by the riverbed. But my notes were not extensive. Boulders, I wrote, Valley – River – Spray – Frail bridge –Trapped cow – Cocoa.
‘You Americans like to travel alone.’ It was Luis.
I said, ‘I hate to travel alone. It is depressing. I miss my wife and children. But if I am alone I see more clearly.’
‘You never talk to each other, you Americans.’
‘You mean in Oregon?’
‘Here, when you travel.’
‘We talk all the time! Who says Americans don’t talk to each other?’
‘There is an American,’ said Luis. ‘You see him? Why don’t you talk to him?’
The man wore a blue cap, a Barney Oldfield cap with a peak; his shirt was bright green, his trousers cut like a sailor’s. Although he was seated, the strap of his bag was over his shoulder and he clutched the bag tightly, as if it had something valuable in it. He was sunburned and I guessed he was in his
sixties – the hair on his arms was white. He was seated near the blacks, who were talking in Spanish and English; but he did not speak to anyone.
I said, ‘I did not know he was an American.’
Luis found this funny.
‘You did not know he was an American?’
I suppose it was his cap, which Luis took to be foolishly youthful. Costa Ricans wore felt hats and fedoras. This man’s cap was tilted at a rakish angle, and it did not quite go with his craggy face.
‘Talk to him,’ said Luis.
‘No, thank you.’
Talk to this old man, just because Luis wanted to hear us speak English? I had met enough Americans in San José. It was the reason I had left the city, to seek out and assess the reputedly uninhabited Atlantic coast, perhaps wind up swapping stories with a grizzled black in a Limón bar, tales of mule-skinning and piracy on the Mosquito Coast.
‘Go ahead.’
‘You talk to him,’ I said. ‘He might teach you some English.’
It was, mainly, my other fear: the distortion of companionship. I did not want to see things with anyone else’s eyes. I knew this experience. If they point out something you have seen already you realize that your own perception was rather obvious; if they indicate something you missed you feel cheated, and it is a greater cheat to offer it later as your own. In both cases, it is annoying. Oh, look, it’s raining is as bad as Costa Ricans have their own unit of length – the vara.
I wanted to concentrate my whole attention on what was outside the window; I wanted to remember this valley, this river, these mountains, the breeze freshening the train, the fragrance of the wildflowers that grew next to the track. Pretty flowers, I wrote.
Smiling nervously, Luis got up. He went up the aisle and mumbled to the old man. The old man did not understand. Luis tried again. You bastard, I thought. Now the old man turned and smiled at me. He rose. Luis took the old man’s seat. The old man came towards me and took Luis’s seat. He said, ‘Boy, am I glad to see you!’
