The Old Patagonian Express Read online

  ‘You mind not smoking?’

  It was the girl with the bags and the stony gaze.

  I looked for a No Smoking sign. There was none. I said, ‘Is it bothering you?’

  She said, ‘It kills my eyes.’

  I put my pipe down and took a swig of beer.

  She said, ‘That stuff is poison.’

  Instead of looking at her I looked at her bags. I said, ‘They say peanuts cause cancer.’

  She grinned vengefully at me and said, ‘Pumpkin seeds.’

  I turned away.

  ‘And these are almonds.’

  I considered relighting my pipe.

  ‘And this is cashews.’

  Her name was Wendy. Her face was an oval of innocence, devoid of any expression of inquiry. Her prettiness was as remote from my idea of beauty as homeliness, and consequently was not at all interesting. But I could not blame her for that: it is hard for anyone to be interesting at twenty. She was a student, she said, and on her way to Ohio. She wore an Indian skirt, and lumberjack boots, and the weight of her leather jacket made her appear round-shouldered.

  ‘What do you study, Wendy?’

  ‘Eastern philosophy. I’m into Zen.’

  Oh, Christ, I thought. But she was still talking. She had been learning about The Hole, or perhaps The Whole – it still made no sense to me. She hadn’t read all that much, she said, and her teachers were lousy. But she thought that once she got to Japan or Burma she would find out a lot more. She would be in Ohio for a few more years. The thing about Buddhism, she said, was that it involved your whole life. Like everything you did – it was Buddhism. And everything that happened in the world –that was Buddhism, too.

  ‘Not politics,’ I said. ‘That’s not Buddhism. It’s just crooked.’

  ‘That’s what everyone says, but they’re wrong. I’ve been reading Marx, Marx is a kind of Buddhist.’

  Was she pulling my leg? I said, ‘Marx was about as Buddhist as this beer can. But anyway, I thought we were talking about politics. It’s the opposite of thought – it’s selfish, it’s narrow, it’s dishonest. It’s all half truths and short-cuts. Maybe a few Buddhist politicians would change things but in Burma, where–’

  ‘Take this,’ she said, and motioned to her bags of nuts. ‘I’m a raw-foodist-non-dairy vegetarian. You’re probably right about politics being all wrong. I think people are doing things all wrong – I mean, completely. They eat junk. They consume junk. Look at them!’ The fat lady was still eating her candy bar, or possibly another candy bar. ‘They’re just destroying themselves and they don’t even know it. They’re smoking themselves to death. Look at the smoke in this car.’

  I said, ‘Some of that is my smoke.’

  ‘It kills my eyes.’

  “ ‘Non-dairy”,’ I said. ‘That means you don’t drink milk.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What about cheese? Cheese is nice. And you’ve got to have calcium.’

  ‘I get my calcium in cashews,’ she said. Was this true? ‘Anyway, milk gives me mucus. Milk is the biggest mucus-producer there is.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I used to go through a box of Kleenex a day.’

  ‘A box. That’s quite a lot.’

  ‘It was the milk. It made mucus,’ she said. ‘My nose used to run like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Is that why people’s noses run? Because of the milk?’

  ‘Yes!’ she cried.

  I wondered if she had a point. Milk-drinkers’ noses ran. Children were milk-drinkers. Therefore, children’s noses ran. And children’s noses did run. But it still struck me as arguable. Everyone’s nose ran – except hers, apparently.

  ‘Dairy products give you headaches, too.’

  ‘You mean, they give you headaches.’

  ‘Right. Like the other night. My sister knows I’m a vegetarian. So she gives me some eggplant parmyjan. She doesn’t know I’m a non-dairy-raw-foodist. I looked at it. As soon as I saw it was cooked and had cheese on it I knew that I was going to feel awful. But she spent all day making it, so what else could I do? The funny thing is that I liked the taste of it. God, was I sick afterwards! And my nose started to run.’

  I told her that, in his autobiography, Mahatma Gandhi stated that eating meat made people lustful. And yet at thirteen, an age at which most American children were frolicking with the Little League team or concentrating their minds on making spit-balls, Gandhi had got married – and he was a vegetarian.

  ‘But it wasn’t a real marriage,’ said Wendy. ‘It was a kind of Hindu ceremony.’

  ‘The betrothal took place when he was seven years old. The marriage sealed the bargain. They were both thirteen, and he started shagging her – though I’m not sure one should use that term for describing the Mahatma’s love-making.’

  Wendy pondered this. I decided to try again. Had she, I asked, noticed a falling-off of her sexual appetite since her conversion to raw vegetables?

  ‘I used to get insomnia,’ she began. ‘And sick – I mean, really sick. And I admit I lost my temper. I think meat does cause people to be hostile.’

  ‘But what about sexual desire? Lechery – cravings – I don’t know quite how to put it.’

  ‘You mean sex? It’s not supposed to be violent. It should be gentle and beautiful. Kind of a quiet thing.’

  Maybe if you’re a vegetarian, I thought. She was still droning on in her pedantic college student way.

  ‘I understand my body better now … I’ve gotten to know my body a whole lot better … Hey, I can tell when there’s just a little difference in my blood sugar level. I can sense it going up and down, my blood sugar level. When I eat certain things.’

  I asked her whether she ever got violently ill. She said absolutely not. Did she ever feel a little bit sick?

  Her reply was extraordinary: ‘I don’t believe in germs.’

  Amazing. I said, ‘You mean, you don’t believe that germs exist? They’re just an optical illusion under the microscope? Dust, little specks – that sort of thing?’

  ‘I don’t think germs cause sickness. Germs are living things – small, living things that don’t do any harm.’

  ‘Like cockroaches and fleas,’ I said. ‘Friendly little critters, right?’

  ‘Germs don’t make you sick,’ she insisted. ‘Food does. If you eat bad food it weakens your organs and you get sick. It’s your organs that make you sick. Your heart, your bowels.’

  ‘But what makes your organs sick?’

  ‘Bad food. It makes them weak. If you eat good food – like I do,’ she said, gesturing at her pumpkin seeds, ‘you don’t get sick. Like I never get sick. If I get a runny nose and a sore throat I don’t call it a cold.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No, it’s because I ate something bad. So I eat something good.’

  I decided to shelve my inquiry about sickness being merely a question of a runny nose, and not cancer or the bubonic plague. Let’s get down to particulars, I thought. What had she had to eat that day?

  ‘This. Pumpkin seeds, cashews, almonds. A banana. An apple. Some raisins. A slice of wholemeal bread – toasted. If you don’t toast it you get mucus.’

  ‘You’re sort of declaring war on the gourmets, eh?’

  ‘I know I have fairly radical views,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t call them radical,’ I said. ‘They’re smug views – self-important ones. Egocentric, you might say. The funny thing about being smug and egocentric and thinking about health and purity all the time, is that it can turn you into a fascist. My diet, my bowels, my self – it’s the way right-wing people talk. The next thing you know you’ll be raving about the purity of the race.’

  ‘Okay,’ she conceded in a somersault, ‘I admit some of my views are conservative. But so what?’

  ‘Well, for one thing, apart from your bowels there’s a big world out there. The Middle East. The Panama Canal. Political prisoners having their toenails pulled out in Iran. F
amilies starving in India.’

  This rant of mine had little effect, though it did get her on to the subject of families – perhaps it was my mention of starving Indians. She hated families, she said. She couldn’t help it – she just hated them.

  I said, ‘What does a family make you think of?’

  ‘A station wagon, a mother, a father. Four or five kids eating hamburgers. They’re really awful, and they’re everywhere – they’re all over the place, driving around.’

  ‘So you think families are a blot on the landscape?’

  She said, ‘Well, yes.’

  She had been at this college in Ohio for three years. She had never in that time taken a literature course. Even more interesting, this was the first time in her life that she had ever been on a train. She liked the train, she said, but didn’t elaborate.

  I wondered what her ambitions were.

  ‘I think I’d like to get involved in food. Teach people about food. What they should eat. Tell them why they get sick.’ It was the voice of a commissar, and yet a moment later she said dreamily, ‘Sometimes I look at a piece of cheese. I know it tastes good, I know I’ll like it. But I also know that I’m going to feel awful the next day if I eat it.’

  I said, ‘That’s what I think when I see a magnum of champagne, a rabbit pie and a bowl of cream puffs with hot chocolate sauce.’

  At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterwards, when I remembered our conversation, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom’s love of ‘the faint tang of urine’ in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi’s early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers. Uttering rosy generalities in her sweetly tremulous voice, and tugging her legs back into the lotus position when they slipped free, she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candour of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.

  The talk of food must have been inspired by the late hour and my hunger. But now we were at Albany. I excused myself and hurried to the dining car which had just been attached to the train. The miles ahead were historic: trains have been running between Albany and Schenectady for 150 years, starting with the Mohawk and Hudson Railway, the oldest in America. Farther on, the route followed is that of the Erie Canal. It was the railway that put the canals and waterways out of business, although the railway’s efficiency was bitterly disputed by the rival companies. But the facts were indisputable: in the 1850s it took 14½ days to reach Chicago from New York by water; by rail it was 6½ days.

  The Amtrak meal was promptly served by a towel-snapping waiter. The steak sandwich, on which I had poured Tabasco sauce, was my revenge on Wendy and her preference for raw alfalfa. While I ate, a sales manager named Horace Chick (he sold equipment for making photographic driving licenses) sat down and had a hamburger. He was a monologuist, too, but a harmless one. Each time he wished to emphasize a point he whistled through the gap in his front teeth. He munched and yapped.

  ‘All the planes were full. Pfweet. So I took the train. Never took this train before. Simple. Pfweet. Three A M and we’re in Rochester. I’ll take a cab home. My wife would go ape-shit if I phoned her from the station at three A M. Next time I’m going to take the kids, Just plop them down. Pfweet. Let them run. It’s hot in here. I like it cold. Sixty-seven, sixty-eight. My wife hates the cold. I can’t sleep. I go over to the window and, pfweet, open it up. She screams at me. Just wakes up and, pfweet, screams. Most women are like that. They like it four degrees warmer than men. Pfweet. I don’t know why. Bodies. Different bodies, different thermostat. Is this better than driving? You bet it is! Driving! Eight hours, fourteen cups of coffee. Pfweet. This hamburger, though. I taste filler. Hey, waiter!’

  There was snow and ice outside. Each street-light illuminated its own post and, just in front, a round patch of snow – nothing more. At midnight, watching from my compartment, I saw a white house on a hill. In every window of this house there was a lighted lamp, and these bright windows seemed to enlarge the house and at the same time betray its emptiness.

  At two the next morning we passed Syracuse. I was asleep or I would have been assailed by memories. But the city’s name on the Amtrak timetable at breakfast brought forth Syracuse’s relentless rain, a chance meeting at the Orange Bar with the by then derelict poet Delmore Schwartz, the classroom (it was Peace Corps training, I was learning Chinyanja) in which I heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination, and the troubling recollection of a lady anthropologist who, unpersuaded by my ardour, had later – though not as a consequence of this – met a violent death when a tree toppled onto her car in a western state and killed her and her lover, a lady gym teacher with whom she had formed a Sapphic attachment.

  Buffalo and Erie were behind us, too, which was not a bad thing. I had no idea where we were. I had woken in my compartment, and it had been so hot my lips were cracked and my fingertips felt flayed. But there were curtains of heavy vapour between the cars, where it was very cold, and frost on the windows of the diner. I rubbed the frost away but could see very little except a blue-grey fog that blurred the landscape with a cloudy fluorescence.

  The train stopped in this haze. For several minutes, nothing happened. Then, in the fog, a dim tree stump became apparent. It bled a streak of orange and this widened, a splash, increasing and staining the decayed bark like a wound leaking into a grey bandage. And then the whole stump was alight, and the bunches of grass behind it flaming, and sudden trees. Soon the rubious fire of dawn glittered in the fields, and when the landscape was lit – the stump and the trees and the snow – the train moved on.

  ‘Ohio,’ said a lady at the next table.

  Her husband, looking uncomfortable in a baggy yellow shirt, said, ‘It doesn’t look like Ohio.’

  I knew what he meant.

  The waiter said, ‘Yep. That’s Ohio all right. Be in Cleveland soon. Cleveland, Ohio.’

  Just beyond the tracks there was a forest of frozen branches, poplars made out of frost, like ghostly sails and masts in a sea of snow. The elms and beeches had swelled cleanly into icy manifestations of exploded lace. And flat windswept snow, with hair-strands of brown broken grass buried to their tips. So even Ohio, covered in snow, could be dreamland.

  The train was sunlit and emptier. I did not see Mr Chick or hear his pfweet; and Wendy, the raw foodist, was gone. It seemed to me here – and I was not very far from home – as if more of the familiar was slipping away. I had not really liked either one of them, but now I missed them. The rest of the people on the train were strangers.

  I picked up my book. I had gone to sleep reading it the previous night; it was still The Wild Palms and still opaque. What had put me to sleep? Perhaps this sentence, or rather the tail end of a long straggling sentence: ‘… it was the mausoleum of love, it was the stinking catafalque of the dead corpse borne between the olfactoryless walking shapes of the immortal un-sentient demanding ancient meat.’

  I was not sure what Faulkner was driving at, and yet it seemed a fair description of the sausage I was eating that early morning in Ohio. The remainder of the breakfast was delicious – scrambled eggs, a slab of ham, grapefruit, coffee. Years before, I had noticed how trains accurately represented the culture of a country: the seedy distressed country has seedy distressed railway trains, the proud efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey-wagons some Indians drive. Dining cars,
I found, told the whole story (and if there were no dining cars the country was beneath consideration). The noodle stall in the Malaysian train, the borscht and bad manners in the Trans-Siberian, the kippers and fried bread on the Flying Scotsman. And here on Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited I scrutinized the breakfast menu and discovered that it was possible for me to order a Bloody Mary or a Screwdriver: ‘a morning pick-me-up’, as that injection of vodka into my system was described. There is not another train in the world where one can order a stiff drink at that hour of the morning. Amtrak was trying hard. Near my toast there was an Amtrak brochure which said that for the next 133 miles the track was perfectly straight – not a curve in it anywhere. So I copied down that shin-barking Faulkner sentence without any swerve of the train to jog my pen.

  By the middle of the morning, the vapour I had seen between the cars had frozen. Each small passageway smoked like a deep freeze, with complicated crusts of frost covering it, and solid bubbles of ice, and new vapour pouring from cracks in the rubber seal. It was pretty, this snow and ice, and no less pretty outside; but it was also a nuisance. It was now past eleven and we had not yet reached Cleveland. Where was Cleveland? And I was not the only one who was perplexed. Up and down the train, passengers were buttonholing conductors and saying, ‘Hey, what happened to Cleveland? You said we were supposed to be there by now. What’s the story?’ And yet Cleveland might have been right outside the window, buried under all that snow.

  My conductor was leaning against a frosted window. I wanted to ask him what happened to Cleveland, but before I could speak he said, ‘I’m looking for my switchman.’

  ‘Anything wrong?’

  ‘Oh, no. It’s just that every time we go by here, he throws a snowball at me.’

  ‘By the way, where’s Cleveland?’

  ‘Way off. Didn’t you know we’re running four hours late? Frozen switch back in Erie held us up.’

  ‘I have to catch a train at four-thirty in Chicago.’

  ‘You’ll never make it.’