by Paul Theroux
‘The hardest thing is not being able to tell anyone. How do you say, “I left the priesthood. I am married. I have children”? No one knows. It would be terrible for my mother. But funny things happen, strange things. My sister wrote to me a few years ago. She said, “If you ever decide to go over the wall, we’ll understand.” Why did she say that? And last Christmas, my other sister sent me some money. “You might need this,” she says. She had never done that before – priests don’t need money. But I can’t face my mother. I think I have always taken suffering on myself to save other people from suffering. Would my mother understand this? I don’t understand the depth of her understanding. You know what I’m telling you. It’s a great pity. I dream about going home. In one of these dreams, I’m in Belfast. I see my old house and I walk up to the front door. But I can’t go in – I’m frozen there on the steps, and I have to walk away. I have this dream every week.
‘Oh, yes, I write home all the time. My letters – these letters about myself in Ecuador, the parish and so forth – they’re masterpieces. Not a word of truth in them. I know my brother and sisters would understand, but I think it would kill my mother. She’s over eighty, you see. She wanted me to be a priest. She lives for me. But, when she dies, I’ll leave for Belfast the next day – I’ll be on that plane like a shot. That’s what hurts me most. That she can’t know about me. And I can’t ever see her again.
‘Do you think I should write about it? I wish I could, but I can’t write. I’ll tell you what, Paul – you write it. It would make a good story, wouldn’t it?’
To that Irishman, the Indians were sorely-pressed people who had not been given a chance; to Jorge Icaza, the Indians had the key to all culture; to my distant cousins, the Noreros, the Indians had real distinction and their past had been glorious; to most others, the Indians were hewers of wood and drawers of water and, on the whole, bumpkins.
I heard another view in Guayaquil. Mr Medina was a spinsterish and rather thorny Ecuadorian, with a thin moustache and a narrow head and severe grey eyes. His tie was tightly knotted, his trousers perfectly creased, the toes of his shoes polished and very sharp – it was hard to believe that there were five toes under those claw-like points. We had begun by talking about rats. Some people poisoned the rats, or trapped them, he said, but there was a better method. You used a high-pitched whine that was not audible to the human ear. It had the effect of driving the rats away – they found the noise unbearable. The local flour mills had been beset by rats, but this high-pitched whine – I think he called it ‘sonar’ – had been a success. Sometimes, rats were locked into rooms with the sound, and in the morning they were found dead: the sound had tortured them to death.
‘Juke-boxes have that effect on me,’ I said. ‘Especially Ecuadorian juke-boxes.’
‘You cannot hear this sound, though apparently it gives some women headaches,' he said. ‘I wish there was something like this they could use on the Indians.’
‘What a neighbourly idea,’ I said.
He gave me a thin smile. ‘Ecuador’s problem is a race problem,’ he said. ‘The Indians are lazy. They are not like your Indians. Sometimes they cut their hair and work, but not often. There are no poor people in Ecuador – there are only Indians. They are uneducated and unhealthy.’
‘Why don’t you educate them, then? Provide doctors and schools. That’s why they’re wandering forlornly around Quito and Guayaquil – they think that they can find in the cities what they lack in the countryside.’
‘They have no idea why they come to Guayaquil. They don’t know what to do here. They sell a few things, they beg, some work, but they are all lost. They were always lost.’
‘Even before the Spanish came?’
‘Definitely. The Inca Empire was over-rated.’
‘Who agrees with you?’ I asked.
‘Most people do, but they are afraid to say it. If you stayed here longer you would agree with me. The Incas – who were they? They had no great culture, no literature, nothing. It did not impress the Spaniards, it does not impress me even now. I don’t know what these people are talking about when they show these pots and masks. Can’t they see how crude these things are? The Incas weren’t warriors – they didn’t fight the Spaniards. They were simply overpowered.’
I said that the Spaniards had arrived at a period of civil war. Atahuallpa had usurped the Inca throne from his brother. The people were fatalistic – they thought the Spaniards had been sent to punish them. It wasn’t hard to conquer people who believed they were guilty already.
‘They were a degenerate race,’ said Mr Medina.
‘The Incas had a system of social security that was a damn sight better than anything Ecuador has produced.’
‘They were what you see – lazy people with a different mentality.’
‘Different from yours, you mean?’
‘And from yours. This talk about the Incas in Ecuador is nonsense – Ecuador history is Spanish history, not Indian history.’
‘That sounds like an epitaph,’ I said. ‘Whose grave will it be written on?’
Mr Medina was growing impatient with me. He gathered his fingers together and rapped the table and said, ‘Do you know what fetishism is? That is their religion – fetishism. They have to see the statue and touch the cross. It comes from their own religion and it is horrible to see. They do not believe what they can’t see. That is why they touch the holy things and grovel in the church.’
I said, ‘People do that in Boston, Massachusetts.’
‘Stay in Guayaquil,’ he said. ‘You will change your mind.’
But I could not think of any reason for staying in Guayaquil. Moreover, the Autoferro on which I was supposed to have a seat remained booked up. If I went back to Quito, I was told, I could then take the Autoferro back to Guayaquil and fly to Peru. I decided to do this and left the very next day, and it was arriving in Quito on that plane that reminded me of the hopelessness of air travel and how futile it would be if every arrival and departure were recorded in the out-of-the-window glimpse: Beneath us, lay the folded fabric of ploughed fields, the toy-town appearance of a city in the Andes … No, anything but that. If I was to travel it would be overland, where every sight and every place had its own smell; and I knew that if I wrote about what was minuscule out of the window of a jet I would sound like a man on the moon.
Back in Quito, the people I had met the previous week welcomed me as if I was an old friend. The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for a man with a train to catch. It sounds, as I write this, as if I am coyly hinting that I enjoyed a passionate affair that was keeping me from moving on. (‘Just one more day, my darling, and then you may break my heart and go …’) It wasn’t that. It was a simpler, tidier business, but it still meant delay. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my moustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn; and South America was a problem in geography that could only be understood if one kept moving: to stay put was to be baffled. People complained of the barbarism of the places, but as far as I was concerned they were not barbarous enough.
‘Ecuador is nice, in its tiny way,’ the writer V. S. Pritchett had told me before I set off. It is, and I felt certain that I would return, for when at last I got my train ticket, the Autoferro left without me.
16 The Tren de la Sierra
The name of the lovely cream-coloured railway station in Lima is Desamparados, which means ‘forsaken’. But the word seems a piece of baseless gloom until the Tren de la Sierra has crossed the plains to Chosica and climbed the pink walls of the narrow Rimac Valley; here, the passengers begin to fall ill. I knew from my palpitations in Bogotá and my wheezy indolence in Quito that I was a candidate for altitude sickness; the rising gorge I experienced on the way to Ticlio was as much a feature of the landscape as a physical symptom: I suffered as we ascended the Andes,
and I decided that no railway journey on earth can be so aptly described as going on ad nauseam.
A strike was threatened by the railway workers in Peru, but though this was no more than a rumour, the warning was substantiated by streaks of graffiti dripping from the mellow outside walls of churches and cloisters: Down with the Imperialists and Oppressors, Support the Railway Workers and More Money! Repeatedly in this large impromptu script was the word Strike, but the Spanish word for strike is also the word for rest or leisure, so all over Lima the exhortation could also be read as Relax! If the railway workers had been undeserving louts using a period of political confusion in order to make unreasonable demands, I would have been more confident of my chances to see the strike forestalled by the intervention of some sweet-talking arbitrators. But this was not play-acting; the railway workers – indeed, workers all over Peru – were grossly underpaid. Elsewhere in Latin America, the provocations or simple pleas of workers had been checked; where the charade of elections failed, the soldiers and police succeeded. Peru, once a golden kingdom occupying a third of the continent, had taken a mighty tumble and in defeat looked incapable of supplying those muttering workers with any hope. Few great cities in the world look more plundered and bankrupt than Lima. It is the look of Rangoon, the same heat and colonial relics and corpse-odours: the imperial parades have long ago marched away from its avenues and left the spectators to scavenge and beg. Ever since Mexico, the description ‘formerly an important Spanish city, famous for its architecture’ made me stiffen in apprehension, but no city had fallen as far as Lima. Like a violated tomb in which only the sorry mummy of withered nationalism is left, and just enough religion to console a patient multitude with the promise of happier pickings beyond the grave, Lima – epitomizing Peru – was a glum example of obnoxious mismanagement. Official government rhetoric was dispirited and self-deceiving, but the railway workers’ anger was sharpened by their sense of betrayal, and their hunger.
I felt that any strike here would be a protracted affair, and so I left Lima on the train to Huancayo the first chance I got. After arriving at that railhead in the mountains I would make my way by road via Ayacucho to Cuzco and there begin my long descent through Bolivia and Argentina to the end of the line in Patagonia. It was a hasty plan, but how could I know that in three days I would be back in Lima trying to find another route to Cuzco?
The Rimac river flowed past the railway station. At seven in the morning it was black; it became grey as the sun moved above the foothills of the Andes. The sandy mountains at the city’s edge give Lima the feel of a desert city hemmed-in on one side by hot plateaux. It is only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, but the land is too flat to permit a view of the sea, and there are no sea breezes in the day-time. It seldom rains in Lima. If it did, the huts – several thousand of them – in the shanty town on the bank of the Rimac would need roofs. The slum is odd in another way; besides being entirely roofless, the huts in this (to use the Peruvian euphemism) ‘young village’ are woven from straw and split bamboo and cane. They are small frail baskets, open to the stars and sun, and planted beside the river which, some miles from the station, is cocoa-coloured. The people wash in this river water; they drink it and cook with it; and when their dogs die, or there are chickens’ entrails to be disposed of, the river receives this refuse.
‘Not that they eat chickens very often,’ explained the Peruvian in the train. The river, he said, was their life-line and their sewer.
Travelling across this plain it is not immediately apparent how any penetration can possibly be made into the escarpment at the far end – it seems too steep, too bare, too high; the valleys are no more than vertical cracks and there is no evidence of trees or men anywhere in these mountains. They have been burned clean of vegetation and have the soft bulge of naked rock. For twenty-five miles the mountain walls remain in the distance; the train seems deceptively quick, rolling along the river, and then at Chosica it stops. It resumes after five minutes, but never again on the trip does it regain that first burst of speed.
We entered the valley and zig-zagged on the walls. It was hardly a valley. It was a cut in the rock, a slash so narrow that the diesel’s hooter hardly echoed: the walls were too close to sustain an answering sound. We were due at Huancayo at four o’clock; by mid-morning I thought we might arrive early, but at noon our progress had been so slow I wondered whether we would get to Huancayo that day. And long before Ticlio I had intimations of altitude sickness. I was not alone; a number of other passengers, some of them Indians, looked distinctly ghastly.
It begins as dizziness and a slight headache. I had been standing by the door inhaling the cool air of these shady ledges. Feeling wobbly, I sat down, and if the train had not been full I would have lain across the seat. After an hour I was perspiring and, although I had not stirred from my seat, I was short of breath. The evaporation of this sweat in the dry air gave me a sickening chill. The other passengers were limp, their heads bobbed, no one spoke, no one ate. I dug some aspirin out of my suitcase and chewed them, but only felt queasier; and my headache did not abate. The worst thing about feeling so ill in transit is that you know that if something goes wrong with the train – a derailment or a crash – you will be too weak to save yourself. I had a more horrible thought: we were perhaps a third of the way to Huancayo, but Huancayo was higher than this. I dreaded to think what I would feel like at that altitude.
I considered getting off the train at Matucana, but there was nothing at Matucana – a few goats and some Indians and tin-roofed shacks on the stony ground. None of the stops contained anything that looked like relief or refuge. But this altitude sickness had another punishing aspect: it ruined what could have been a trip of astonishing beauty. I had never seen cliffs like these or been on a railway quite so spectacular. Why was it, in this landscape of such unbelievable loveliness, that I felt as sick as a dog? If only I had had the strength to concentrate – I would have been dazzled; but, as it was, the beauty became an extraordinary annoyance.
The pale rose-coloured mountains had the dark stripes and mottled marks of the shells of the most delicate snails. To be ill among them, to be slumped in my seat watching the reddish gravel slides stilled in the crevasses, and the configuration of cliff-faces changing with each change in altitude, was torture so acute that I began to associate the very beautiful with the very painful. These pretty heights were the cause of my sickness. And now my teeth hurt, one molar in particular began to ache as if the nerve had caught fire. I did not know then how a cavity in a bad tooth becomes sore at a high altitude. The air in this blocked hole expands and creates pressure on the nerve, and it is agony. The dentist who told me this had been in the air force. Once, in a sharply descending plane, the cockpit became depressurized and an airman, the navigator, screamed in pain and then one of his teeth exploded.
Some train passengers had begun to vomit. They did it in the pitiful unembarrassed way that people do when they are helplessly ill. They puked on the floor, and they puked out of the windows and they made my own nausea greater. Some, I noticed, were staggering through the cars. I thought they were looking for a place to puke, but they returned with balloons. Balloons? Then they sat and held their noses and breathed the air from the balloon nozzle.
I stood unsteadily and made for the rear of the train, where I found a Peruvian in a smock filling balloons from a tank of oxygen. He handed these out to distressed-looking passengers who gratefully gulped from them. I took my place in the queue and discovered that a few whiffs of oxygen made my head clear and helped my breathing.
There was a boy in this oxygen car. He had an oxygen balloon, too, and wore a handsome cowboy hat decorated with a band of Inca pokerwork.
‘If I had thought it was going to be anything like this,’ he said, ‘I would never have come.’
‘You took the words out of my mouth.’
‘This oxygen’s an improvement. Boy, do I feel shitty.’
We sipped from our balloons.
&nbs
p; ‘You from the States?’
‘Massachusetts,’ I said.
‘I’m from Minnesota. Been in Lima long?’
‘One day,’ I said.
‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘I was there a month. It’s one of the cheapest places in South America. They say Cuzco’s even cheaper. I figure I’ll spend a month or so there, then go back to Lima – get a job on a ship.’ He looked at me. ‘You’re smart to have those warm clothes. I wish I had a jacket like that. All I have is these Lima things. I’ll buy a sweater when we get to Huancayo – they make them there. You can get alpaca ones for practically nothing. Jesus, do I feel shitty.’
We entered a tunnel. We had been through other tunnels, but this one was long, and it had a certain distinction: it was, at 15,848 feet, the highest railway tunnel in the world. The train was loud – deafening, in fact, and I don’t think I had ever felt sicker in my life. I sprayed the last of my balloon gas into my mouth, swallowed, and got another one. ‘I feel like throwing up,’ said the fellow from Minnesota. In the weak yellow light, with his cowboy hat over his eyes, he looked limp and fatally stricken. I did not feel so well myself, but when we emerged from the Galera Tunnel I knew we were past the highest point, and having survived that I was sure I would make it to Huancayo.
‘This ship,’ I said. ‘The one you’re going to get a job on. Where do you plan to go?’
‘Home,’ he said. ‘I’ll get one to the States. If I’m lucky I’ll be back the end of April. I really want to see Minneapolis in the spring.'
‘Is it as pretty as this?’
‘It’s better than this.’
We were now high enough to be able to see across the Andes, the whole range of mountains which, on some curves, were visible for hundreds of miles. They are not solitary peaks, but rather closely packed summits which, surprisingly, grow lighter as the distance deepens. I asked the Minnesotan how he planned to get to Cuzco. He had been in Lima for a month; his information would be good, I thought. He said there was a bus and if I was interested we could take it together. It didn’t cost much, but he had heard it sometimes took four or five days to reach Cuzco. It depended on the road. This was the rainy season: the road through Ayacucho would be bad.
