The Old Patagonian Express Read online

  Now, trying to reclaim it, I gave the scrap of paper to a different girl. This one laughed at the paper and called a cross-eyed man over to examine it. He laughed, too.

  I said, ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘We can’t read her writing,’ said the cross-eyed man.

  ‘She writes in Chinese,’ said the girl. She scratched her stomach and smiled at the paper. ‘What does that say – fifty or five?’

  ‘Let’s call it five,’ I said. ‘Or we can ask the girl. Where is she?’

  ‘Chee’ – now the cross-eyed man was speaking in English – ‘chee go to the veech!’

  They thought this was hysterically funny.

  ‘My suitcase,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’

  The girl said, ‘Gone’, but before I could react, she giggled and dragged it out of the kitchen.

  The sleeping car of The Aztec Eagle was a hundred yards down the track, and I was out of breath when I reached it. My English leak-proof shoes, specially bought for this trip, had sprung a leak; my clothes were wet. I had carried the suitcase on my head, coolie-style, but all that served to do was provoke a migraine and funnel rainwater into my collar.

  A man in a black uniform stood in the doorway, barring my way. ‘You can’t get on,’ he said. ‘You haven’t been through Customs.’

  This was true, although I wondered how he could possibly have known this.

  I said, ‘Where is Customs?’

  He pointed to the far end of the flooded track, and said disgustedly, ‘Over there.’

  I heaved the suitcase onto my head again and certain that I could get no wetter splashed back to the station platform. ‘Customs?’ I asked. A lady peddling bubble-gum and cookies laughed at me. I asked a little boy. He covered his face. I asked a man with a clipboard. He said, ‘Wait.’

  Rain dribbled through holes in the platform roof and Mexicans carted bales of their belongings and shoved them through the windows of Second Class. And yet, for an express train with a high reputation, there were not many passengers in evidence. The station was dingy and nearly deserted. The bubble-gum seller talked to the fried chicken seller; barefoot children played tag; it continued to rain – and the rain was not a brisk purifying downpour, but a dark tedious drizzle, like flecks of falling soot, which seemed to taint everything it touched.

  Then I saw the man in the black uniform who had barred my entry to the sleeping car. He was wet now and looked furious.

  ‘I don’t see the Customs,’ I said.

  He showed me a tube of lipstick and said, ‘This is Customs.’

  Without inquiring further, he franked my suitcase with a slash of lipstick, then straightened and groaned and said, ‘Hurry up, the train is about to leave.’

  ‘Sorry, have I been keeping you waiting?’

  The sleeping cars – there were two – were old American ones, from a railway in the States which had gone bankrupt. The compartments had deep armchairs and art-deco angles and three-sided mirrors, and were not only handsome but comfortable and well-carpeted. Everything I had seen in Nuevo Laredo seemed to be in a state of dereliction; nothing maintained, nothing cared-for. Yet this old train with its hand-me-down sleeping cars was in good condition, and in a few years would qualify as an antique in an excellent state of preservation. It had happened by accident: the Mexicans did not have the money to rebuild sleeping cars in chrome and plastic, as Amtrak had done, but by keeping them in trim they had managed to preserve the art-deco originality.

  Most of the compartments were empty. Walking through the cars just before the whistle blew, I saw a Mexican family, some children travelling with their mother, a pair of worried-looking American tourists, and a winking middle-aged lady in a fake leopard-skin coat. In the bedroom across the corridor from mine there was an old woman and her pretty companion, a girl of about twenty-five. The old woman was flirtatious with me and sharp with the girl, who I supposed was her daughter. The girl was desperately shy, and her drab clothes (the old woman wore a mink around her neck) and her lovely face with its sallow English sadness, gave her expression a sort of passionate purity. All the way to Mexico City I tried to talk to this girl, but each time the old woman interrupted with cackling questions and never allowed the girl to reply. I decided that the girl’s submissiveness was more than daughterly obedience: she was a servant, maintaining an anxious silence. Her eyes were green, and I think that even that aged woman’s vanity could not have prevented her from knowing how attractive this girl was, or the true motive for my questions. There was something Russian and old-fashioned and impenetrable about this pair.

  I was in my compartment, sipping tequila, and thinking how – so close to the United States (I could see the department stores on eroded bluffs of Laredo from the station) – everything had become so different, such slaphappy Mexican dishevelment. There was a knock at the door.

  ‘Excuse me.’ It was the conductor, and as he spoke he bustled into the compartment. He was still bustling, still speaking. ‘I’m just going to put this up there.’

  He carried a large paper shopping bag in which there were stuffed many smaller bags. He grinned and held it chest-high. He motioned to the luggage rack above the sink.

  I said, ‘I was going to put my suitcase up there.’

  ‘No problem! You can put your suitcase under the bed. Look, let me do it.’

  He got to his knees and pushed the suitcase out of sight, remarking on what a nice fit it was. I had not thought to remind him that this was my compartment.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  He clutched his bag more tightly and grinned again. ‘This?’ he said breezily. ‘Some things, that’s all.’ He slid the bag onto the luggage rack – it was too plump to fit under the bed – and said, ‘No problem, okay?’

  It filled the luggage rack. I said, ‘I don’t know.’

  I tugged at the opening and tried to peek inside the bag. With an insincere laugh, he put his hand on my shoulder and eased me away.

  ‘It’s all right!’ He was still laughing, now with a kind of shrewd gratitude.

  I said, ‘Why don’t you put it somewhere else?’

  ‘It’s much better here,’ he said. ‘Your suitcase is small. That’s a good idea – always travel with a small suitcase. It fits beautifully down there.’

  ‘What is this thing?’

  He did not reply. And he had not removed his hand from my shoulder. Now he applied gentle pressure and sat me down. He stepped backwards, looked left and right along the corridor, stepped forward and leaned over and in breathy Spanish said, ‘It’s fine. You’re a tourist. No problem.’

  ‘Very well then.’ I smiled at him, I smiled at the bag.

  He stopped laughing. I think he became alarmed at my willingness to accept the bag. He half-closed the compartment door and said, ‘Don’t say anything.’

  He put a finger to his lips and sucked air.

  ‘Say anything?’ I started to get up. ‘To whom?’

  He motioned me back to my armchair. ‘Don’t say anything.’

  He shut the door.

  I looked at the bag.

  A moment later, there was a knock at the door. The same conductor, a new grin: ‘Dinner is served!’

  He waited, and when I left the compartment he locked the door.

  It was in the dining car that I tried to strike up a conversation with the green-eyed girl. The old woman fielded my questions. I had two Bohemian beers and the carcass of a scrawny chicken. I tried again. And I noticed that when the old woman replied she always said, ‘I’, not ‘we’ – ‘I am going to Mexico City,’ ‘I have been in Nuevo Laredo.’ So the green-eyed girl was almost certainly a servant, part of the old woman’s baggage. Concentrating on this problem, I barely noticed that three uniformed men had entered the dining car; I saw them – pistols, moustaches, truncheons, no necks – and then they were gone: Mexico was full of men in ambiguous uniforms – they seemed to be part of the landscape.

  ‘I live in Coyoacan,’ said the old woman. He
r eating had removed her lipstick; she was putting on more.

  ‘Didn’t Trotsky live there?’ I said.

  A man in a white steward’s smock appeared at my elbow.

  ‘Go back to your compartment. They want you.’

  ‘Who wants me?’

  ‘Customs.’

  ‘I’ve been through Customs.’ With an intimation of trouble, I spoke in English.

  ‘You no espick Espanish?’

  ‘No.’

  The old woman looked sharply at me but said nothing.

  ‘Da men. Dey wants you,’ said the steward.

  ‘I’ll just finish this beer.’

  He moved my glass out of reach. ‘Now.’

  The three armed Customs men were waiting for me outside my compartment. The conductor was nowhere in sight, and yet the compartment had been unlocked: obviously he had skipped out and left me to face the music.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said – they exchanged grimaces on hearing my English. I took out my passport, rail ticket, health card and waved them to deflect their attention. ‘You’ll find that I have a Mexican Tourist Card, smallpox vaccination, valid passport – look.’ I jerked the concertina of extra pages out of my passport and showed them the Burmese postage stamps glued to my Burma visa, my garish re-entry permit for Laos, the chit that gave me unlimited access to Guatemala.

  This distracted them for a moment – they muttered and turned pages – and then the ugliest one of the three stepped into the compartment and whacked his billy club against the luggage rack.

  ‘Is this yours?’

  I decided not to understand Spanish. To give a truthful answer would have put the conductor into the soup – probably where he belonged. But earlier in the day I had seen a bullying customs officer tormenting an elderly Mexican with a series of impromptu humiliations. The old man was with a young boy, and their suitcase contained about thirty tennis balls. The customs officer made them empty the suitcase; the tennis balls rolled in all directions, and while the two victims chased them, the customs officer kicked the tennis balls and repeated in Spanish I am not satisfied with your explanation! This gave me an unmerciful hatred for all Mexican customs officials that was far greater than my powerful resentment for the conductor who was the cause of my present problem.

  Without saying yes or no, I said very rapidly in English, ‘That’s been there for some time, about two hours.’

  Hearing ours, he said in Spanish, ‘It belongs to you, then.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it before in my life.’

  ‘It’s theirs,’ he called out in Spanish. The men in the corridor grunted.

  I smiled at the man and said, ‘I think there’s a great misunderstanding here.’ I stooped and pulled my suitcase out from under the seat and said, ‘Look, I’ve been through customs already – there’s the lipstick smear on the side. I’d be glad to open it for you. I’ve got some old clothes, some maps –’

  In Spanish, he said, ‘Don’t you speak Spanish?’

  In English, I said, ‘I’ve only been in Mexico one day. We can’t expect miracles, can we? I’m a tourist.’

  ‘This one’s a tourist,’ he yelled to the corridor.

  As we talked, the train sped along and lurched, throwing us against each other. When he rocked, the customs officer’s hands went to his billy club and his pistol for balance.

  His eyes were very tiny and his voice full of threat as he said slowly in Spanish, ‘So all this is yours, including that parcel up there?’

  In English I said, ‘What is it exactly you’d like to see?’

  He looked again at the bag. He squeezed it. There was a clinking sound inside. He was very suspicious, but he was also sad because, as a tourist, I was entitled to privacy. That conductor knew the ropes.

  The customs officer said, ‘Have a good trip.’

  ‘Same to you.’

  When they left, I went back to the dining car and finished my beer. The waiters were whispering as they collected the plates from the tables. We came to a station, and when we pulled out I was sure the customs officers had left the train.

  I hurried to my compartment, dying to see what the bag contained. I felt, after what had happened, that I had every right to look in. The car was empty, my compartment as I had left it. I locked the door behind me and stood on the toilet to get a better look at the luggage rack. The shopping bag was gone.

  We had left Nuevo Laredo at twilight. The few stations we stopped at later in the evening were so poorly lighted I could not make out their names on the signboards. I stayed up late reading The Thin Man, which I had put aside in Texas. I had lost the plot entirely, but the drinking still interested me. All the characters drank – they met for cocktails, they conspired in speakeasies, they talked about drinking, and they were often drunk. Nick Charles, Hammett’s detective, drank the most. He complained about his hangovers, and then drank to cure his hangover. He drank before breakfast, and all day, and the last thing he did at night was have a drink. One morning he feels especially rotten; he says complainingly, ‘I must have gone to bed sober,’ and then pours himself a stiff drink. The drinking distracted me from the clues in the way President Banda’s facial tic prevented me from ever hearing anything he said. But why so much alcohol in this whodunnit? Because it was set – and written – during Prohibition. Evelyn Waugh once commented that the reason Brideshead Revisited had so many sumptuous meals in it was because it was written during a period of war-time rationing, when the talk was of all the wonderful things you could do with soya beans. By midnight, I had finished The Thin Man and a bottle of tequila.

  Two blankets did not keep me warm in my compartment. I woke three or four times shivering, believing – it is so easy to be deluded on a dark train – that I was back home in Medford. In the morning, I was still cold, the shades were drawn and I was not sure which country I was in. I pushed up the shade and saw the sun rising behind a green tree. It was a solitary tree, and the climbing sun gave it an emblematic quality in the stony landscape; it was a pale perpendicular, studded with fruit like hand grenades, but as I watched it, it thickened and grew less tree-like and finally stiffened into a cactus.

  There were more cactuses, some like burnt-out torches and others the more familiar candelabras. There were no trees. The sun, so early in the morning, was bright and gave a blueness to the hills which twisted off into the distance, and a glitter to the stiletto spikes on the cacti. The long morning shadows lay as still and dark as lakes and patterned the rough ground with straight margins. I wondered whether it was cold outside until I saw a man – the only human in that desert – in a donkey cart, rumbling over a road that might well have been a creek-bed. The man was dressed warmly, his sombrero jammed over his ears, a maroon scarf wrapped around his face, and a wadded jacket of brilliantly coloured rags.

  It was still early. As the sun moved higher in the sky, the day became warmer and woke the smells, until that curious Mexican mixture of sparkle and decay, blue sky and bedragglement, asserted itself. In the bright air was the dismal town of Bocas. Here were four green trees, and a church on a steep hill, its whitewash reddened by dust, and cactuses so large cows were tethered to their spiky trunks. But most of the town was mimicry: the church was a house, the houses were sheds, most trees were cactuses, and without topsoil the crops – red peppers and corn – were skeletal. Some children in torn clothes skipped over to look at the train, and then, hearing the honk of a horn, ran to the sandy road to see a heavily-laden Coca-Cola truck – up to its axles in sand – straining towards the town’s one store.

  Mexicans habitually site the town dump along the railway tracks. The detritus of the very poor is unimaginably vile, and though it smoulders it is far too loathsome to catch fire. In the Bocas dump, which was part of Bocas station, two dogs yanked at one heap of garbage, two pigs at another. These animals went on rooting – keeping their distance – and I noticed that both dogs were lame, and one pig’s ear was missing. The mutilated animals were appropriate to the mutilated
town, the ragged children, the tumbledown sheds. The Coca-Cola truck had parked. Now the children were watching a man dragging a frantic pig across the tracks. The pig’s hind legs were roped, and the man yanked the screaming creature backwards.

  I do not consider myself to be an animal-lover, but it is a long way from disliking them to maiming and torturing them. And I came to see a resemblance between the condition of domestic animals and the condition of the people who mistreated them. It was the same contempt, and the whipped dog and the woman carrying wood had the same fearful eyes. And it was these beaten people who beat their animals.

  ‘Bocas,’ said the conductor ‘it min kish.’ He smacked his lips and laughed.

  In Spanish I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you are a smuggler?’

  ‘I am not a smuggler.’

  ‘What about the contraband you put in my room?’

  ‘It is not contraband. It is just some things.’

  ‘Why did you put it in my room?’

  ‘It is better in your room than mine.’

  ‘Then why did you take it out of my room?’

  He was silent. I was going to let up on him, but I remembered again that he might have been the cause of my being in the Nuevo Laredo jail this morning.

  I said, ‘You put it in the room because it is contraband.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you are a smuggler.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are afraid of the police.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The ragged man outside the train had dragged his pig across the tracks. Now he was dragging the pig backwards to a pick-up truck parked near the station. The pig howled and scattered stones with its scrabbling trotters; it sounded demented because it was intelligent enough to know it was doomed.

  ‘The police bother us,’ said the conductor. ‘They don’t bother you. Look, this is not the United States – these men want money. Understand?’ He made a claw of his brown hand and snatched with it. ‘That is what they want – money.’