The Old Patagonian Express Read online

  PAUL THEROUX

  The Old Patagonian Express

  By Train through the Americas

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  1 The Lake Shore Limited

  2 The Lone Star

  3 The Aztec Eagle

  4 El Jarocho to Veracruz

  5 The Passenger Train to Tapachula

  6 The 7:30 to Guatemala City

  7 The 7:00 to Zacapa

  8 The Railcar to San Salvador

  9 The Local to Cutuco

  10 The Atlantic Railway: the 12:00 to Limón

  11 The Pacific Railway: the 10:00 to Puntarenas

  12 The Balboa Bullet to Colón

  13 The Expreso de Sol to Bogotá

  14 The Expreso Calima

  15 The Autoferro to Guayaquil

  16 The Tren de la Sierra

  17 The Train to Machu Picchu

  18 El Panamericano

  19 La Estrella del Norte (‘The North Star’) to Buenos Aires

  20 The Buenos Aires Subterranean

  21 The Lagos del Sur (‘Lakes of the South’) Express

  22 The Old Patagonian Express

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  The Old Patagonian Express

  Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled to Italy and then Africa, where he worked as a teacher in Malawi and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels, including Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers. In the early 1970s he moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and went on to live in London. During his seventeen years’ residence in Britain, he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books. He has since returned to the United States, but continues to travel widely.

  Paul Theroux’s many books include Waldo; Saint Jack; The Family Arsenal; Picture Palace, winner of the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year, joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; My Secret History; Millroy the Magician; Kowloon Tong; The Great Railway Bazaar; The Old Patagonian Express; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book award; The Happy Isles of Oceania; Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a memoir of his friendship with Sir Vidia Naipaul; Fresh-Air Fiend: Travel Writings 1985–2000; and his most recent novel, Hotel Honolulu. Most of his books are published by Penguin.

  That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes … how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the ‘bad medicine waggon’ charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frockcoats, and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this?

  – Robert Louis Stevenson, The Amateur Emigrant

  ‘Romance!’ the season-tickets mourn,

  ‘He never ran to catch his train,

  But passed with coach and guard and horn –

  ‘And left the local – late again!’

  Confound Romance … And all unseen

  Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

  – Rudyard Kipling, ‘The King’

  Preface

  Some people say that the travel book is a type of novel, that it has elements of fiction in it, that it comes out of the imagination and is a sort of strange beast – half the prosy animal of non-fiction and half the fabulous monster of fiction, and there it stands, snorting and pawing the ground, challenging us to give it a name. There are, no doubt, books that fit this description: little trips that writers have worked up into epics and odysseys. You want to write a novel but you have no subject, no characters, no landscape. So you take a trip – a couple of months, not very expensive, not too dangerous – and you write it up, making it sound harrowing, dramatizing yourself, because you are the hero of this – what? Quest for a book, perhaps, but full of liberties.

  This is not my line of work at all. And when I read such a book and I spot the fakery, the invention, the embroidery, I can read no further. Self-dramatization is inevitable in any travel book – most travellers, however dreary and plonkingly pedestrian, see themselves as solitary and heroic adventurers. And the odd thing is that the real heroes of travel seldom write about their journeys.

  Some time ago, I received a thick book detailing the travels of a young man through metropolitan France: ‘essential reading for Francophiles, Francophobes, gourmets, gourmands and any curious traveler in truly modern Gaul.’ It is as though this overprivileged, well-trodden and easily seen country were terra incognita. There is a place for such books, catering to vacationers, but I would rather read of an adventure in a less accessible land.

  I was seeking adventure when I took the trip that became The Old Patagonian Express. I wanted to leave my front door in Medford, Massachusetts, and head south to Patagonia without leaving the ground. I wished to travel from this cozy homely place where I was born, to the distant and outlandish – so I thought – area in the southern part of South America. I wanted to make a connection between the known and the unknown and yet remain in the Western Hemisphere. It would not be the circular journey I described in The Great Railway Bazaar, but rather a linear trip, from Here to Way Over There.

  It had always bothered me, when reading of an expedition, that the preliminaries were dispensed with. I describe these near the beginning of The Old Patagonian Express, in the chapter that starts, ‘Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.’ In my first travel book, I had simply gone away, launched myself into the East. In my next one I felt I was consciously experimenting with space and time. My object was to take the train that everyone took to work, and then to keep going, changing trains, to the end of the line – and this I took to be a tiny Argentine station called Esquel, in the middle of Patagonia.

  I was altogether more deliberate with this travel book than I had been with my first. For one thing, I was determined to speak the language. My inability to speak Hindi, Japanese, Farsi, Urdu, and Malay, among others, had made my first book somewhat facetious, I thought. It was so easy to mock language blunders. I did not want to be that ignorant again. So I listened to Spanish language tapes. I wanted to understand what was going on. One of the popular notions of travel books is that they are usually about the traveller – I wanted to get beyond the egocentric and try to understand the places I was passing through. I knew something about the politics but very little about the geographical features of these countries. One of m
y aims was to characterize each place, so that afterwards anyone who read the book would have a clear idea of El Salvador or Costa Rica or Peru, instead of a formless and indistinguishable sprawl of banana republics.

  I was not aiming to turn the book into a novel. I was just finishing my novel Picture Palace when I planned the trip. In this novel a fictionalized Graham Greene says, ‘Who was it who said travel is the saddest of the pleasures.’ This was the summer of 1977. I set off about six months later, on a freezing February afternoon, leaving my old home in Medford, taking the train to Boston, then another train from Boston to Chicago, and so on. The skies were almost black, full of the storm clouds that were shortly to dump one of the worst blizzards in living memory on the north-east. I read about this snow in steamy Mexico. How easy it had been to get there! I continued to rattle south on progressively more geriatric trains.

  Having written a previous travel book, and knowing some of my strengths and weaknesses, I had a general idea of the sort of travel I wished to do. More than anything, I wanted to meet unusual people, and give them life. I saw the book as a series of portraits, of landscapes, and faces. I have always regarded the best writing as visual, and in Picture Palace I had deliberately written about a photographer; most of her pronouncements on photography were my own views on writing. I wanted the Patagonia book to be full of faces and voices, with a distinct foreground and background.

  I was lucky in the people I met. The Panama Canal was in the news; President Carter had convened a conference to hand the canal back to the Panamanians. The Zonians – delightful name – were furious at what they took to be Carter’s treachery. I found a reasonable man to discuss these matters and more – Mr Reiss, the head mortician in the Gorgas Mortuary. There were others: the woman in Vera Cruz looking for her lover, Mr Thornberry in Costa Rica; the Irish priest who had started a family in Ecuador; Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires. (Borges told me he was working on a story about a man called Thorpe. Years later I found that character in a story called ‘Shakespeare’s Memory.’) I tried to make portraits of the towns and cities as well. That can be seen, for example in the description that begins, ‘Guatemala City, an extremely horizontal place, is like a city on its back.’ I looked closely, listened hard, sniffed around, and wrote everything down.

  My friend Bruce Chatwin had told me that he took the trip for In Patagonia after he’d read The Great Railway Bazaar. I had always wondered how he had travelled to Patagonia – he had left that out of his narrative. He had written about being there, but I wanted to write about getting there. This thought was always in my mind, and it made me meticulous about my own trip. I knew that as soon as I got to Patagonia I would just look around and then go home. Mine was to be the ultimate book about getting there.

  In spite of myself, I was distracted by what I saw. As a novelist I could not ignore the possibilities that were being offered to me in the form of suggestive characters and dramatic landscapes, and yet I knew I had to put them in my travel book. Once they were there they were fixed for ever; I could not haul then out again and give them fictional form.

  What struck me was how dense the jungle was, so near to the United States. I had just been in wintry New England, and now a few weeks later, I was in places that looked like ragged versions of Paradise – no roads, no factories, no houses, no missionaries even. A person could come here and start all over again, build his own town, make his own world. I felt this strongly in Costa Rica, where I wrote:

  We were at the shore and traveling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colon in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for a story of castaways. What few villages and ports lieu along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken; it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limon.

  I imagined these castaways to be a family fleeing the United States, and I associated them with the various missionaries and priests I kept meeting. The defrocked priest in Ecuador was an ideal model, a sort of spiritual castaway living a secret life far from home. But I had vowed that I would be truthful in my travel book, and include everything and everyone who was interesting; once I wrote about the priest I knew I could not return to him and re-create him in fiction. Yet I also knew that when I had finished this book I would begin to think seriously about a novel of castaways on the Mosquito Coast.

  I reached Patagonia, then returned to London and wrote the book. I regretted not visiting Nicaragua – I was advised not to, because of the guerrilla war that had overwhelmed the country; I regretted that I had to fly from Panama to Barranquilla, and from Guayaquil to Lima. I dislike planes, and when I’m in one – suffering the deafening drone and the chilly airlessness that is peculiar to planes – I always suspect that the land we are overflying is rich and wonderful and that I am missing it all. Air travel is very simple and annoying and always a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist’s; even the chairs are like dentists’ chairs. Overland travel is slow and a great deal more trouble, but it is uncomfortable in a way that is completely human and often reassuring.

  The mood of The Old Patagonia Express, which is at times somber, was the result of my knowing Spanish. It was easy for me to be light-hearted when I travelled to write the Railway Bazaar. I had little idea of what people were saying in Japanese and Hindi. But speaking to people in their own language – hearing their timid turns of phrase, or the violence of their anger, or the idioms of their hopelessness – could be distressing. I was to have a similar experience eight years later, travelling in China and hearing people worrying in Chinese.

  A book like this – or any book I’ve written – is not intended as a problem for the reader to study and annotate. It is something I wrote to give pleasure, something to enjoy. As you read it you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them, to smell them. Of course, some of it is painful, but travel – its very motion – ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; its indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travellers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. A travel book ought to reflect that same optimism.

  When I was done with The Old Patagonian Express, I began making notes for my next novel, The Mosquito Coast. Before I started writing I returned to Central America and travelled through the hinterland of Honduras. I made notes, but I carefully avoided using them as the basis for an article or a story. They became a repository of everything I knew about that distant shore of Mosquitia, the landscape of my novel. Writing that book was not glorified reportage but an almost indescribable and dream-like transformation, which is what fiction is.

  Paul Theroux, 2008

  1 The Lake Shore Limited

  One of us on that sliding subway train was clearly not heading for work. You would have known it immediately by the size of his bag. And you can always tell a fugitive by his vagrant expression of smugness; he seems to have a secret in his mouth – he looks as if he is about to blow a bubble. But why be coy? I had woken in my old bedroom, in the house where I had spent the best part of my life. The snow lay deep around the house, and there were frozen footprints across the yard to the garbage can. A blizzard had just visited, another was expected to blow in soon. I had dressed and tied my shoes with more than usual care, and left the stubble on my upper lip for a moustache I planned to grow. Slapping my pockets to make sure my ballpoint and passport were safe, I went downstairs, past my mother’s hiccupping cuckoo clock, and then to Wellington Circle to catch the train. It was a morning of paralysing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America.

  For some, this was the train to Sullivan Square, or Milk Street, or at th
e very most Orient Heights; for me, it was the train to Patagonia. Two men using a foreign language spoke in low voices; there were others with lunch-boxes and valises and briefcases, and one lady with the sort of wrinkled department store bag that indicated she was going to return or exchange an unwanted item (the original bag lending veracity to the awkward operation). The freezing weather had altered the faces in the multi-racial car: the whites’ cheeks looked rubbed with pink chalk, the Chinese were bloodless, the blacks ashen or yellow-grey. At dawn it had been 12° Fahrenheit, by mid-morning it was 9°, and the temperature was still dropping. The cold wind gusted through the car as the doors opened at Haymarket, and it had the effect of silencing the muttering foreigners. They looked Mediterranean; they winced at the draught. Most of the people sat compactly, with their elbows against their sides and their hands in their laps, squinting and conserving their warmth.

  They had affairs to attend to in town – work, shopping, banking, the embarrassing moment at the refund desk. Two had hefty textbooks in their laps, and a spine turned towards me read A General Introduction to Sociology. A man solemnly scanned the headlines in the Globe, another thumb-flicked the papers in his briefcase. A lady told her little girl to stop kicking and sit still. Now they were getting out at the windy platforms – after four stations the car was half-full. They would return that evening, having spent the day speaking of the weather. But they were dressed for it, office clothes under eskimo coats, gloves, mittens, woolly hats; resignation was on their faces and, already, a suggestion of fatigue. Not a trace of excitement; all this was usual and ordinary; the train was their daily chore.

  No one looked out of the window. They had seen the harbour, and Bunker Hill, and the billboards before. Nor did they look at each other. Their gazes stopped a few inches from their eyes. Though they paid no attention to them, the signs above their heads spoke to these people. These folks were local, they mattered, the advertising men knew who they were addressing. NEED FEDERAL INCOME TAX FORMS? Beneath it, a youth in a pea-jacket grinned at his newspaper and swallowed. CASH YOUR CHECKS ALL OVER MASSACHUSETTS. A lady with that yellow-grey Hottentot colour hugged her shopping bag. BE A SCHOOL VOLUNTEER IN THE BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS. Not a bad idea for the sick-of-it-all briefcase examiner in the Russian hat. MORTGAGE MONEY? WE HAVE PLENTY. No one glanced up. ROOFS AND GUTTERS. GET A COLLEGE DEGREE IN YOUR SPARE TIME. A restaurant. A radio station. A plea to stop smoking.