The Old Patagonian Express Read online

  ‘What was in the bag? Drugs?’

  ‘Drugs!’ He spat out the door to show me how ridiculous the question was.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Kitchen utensils.’

  ‘You smuggle kitchen utensils?’

  ‘I don’t smuggle anything. I buy kitchen utensils in Laredo. I take them home.’

  ‘Don’t you have kitchen utensils in Mexico?’

  ‘In Mexico we have shit,’ he said. He nodded and then said, ‘Of course we have kitchen utensils. But they are expensive. In America they are cheap.’

  ‘The customs man asked if they were mine.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘You said, “Don’t say anything.” I did not say anything.’

  ‘See? No problem!’

  ‘They were very angry.’

  ‘Of course. But what can they do? You’re a tourist.’

  The train whistle sounded, drowning the pig’s cries. We started out of Bocas.

  The conductor said, ‘It is easy for you tourists.’

  ‘It is easy for you smugglers because of us tourists.’

  Back in Texas, with a sweep of his hand, taking in Main Street and the new shopping centre and a score of finance companies, the Texan says, ‘All this was nothing but desert a few years ago.’ The Mexican pursues a different line. He urges you to ignore the squalor of the present and reflect on the glories of the past. As we entered San Luis Potosi towards noon on the day that had started cold and was now cloudless in a parching heat, I noticed the naked children and the lamed dogs and the settlement in the train-yard, which was fifty boxcars. By curtaining the door with faded laundry, and adding a chicken coop and children, and turning up the volume on his radio, the Mexican makes a bungalow of his boxcar and pretends it is home. It is a frightful slum, and stinks of excrement, but the Mexican man standing at the door of the Aztec Eagle with me was smiling. ‘Many years ago,’ he said, ‘this was a silver mine.’

  The boxcars, now closer together, became horrific, and even the geraniums, the women preparing food in the doorways, the roosters crowing from the couplings, did not mask the cruelty of the fact that the boxcars were going nowhere. They were cattle cars, and here in San Luis Potosi they parodied their original function.

  The Mexican man was enthusiastic. He was getting off – he lived here. This was a famous place, he said. There were many beautiful churches in San Luis Potosi; very typical, very pretty, very ancient.

  ‘Are there any Catholics?’ I asked.

  He gave me a nasty little three-beat laugh and an anti-clerical wink. ‘Too many!’

  ‘Why are these people living in cattle cars?’

  ‘Over there,’ he said, pointing past the tops of the boxcars, ‘in the Plaza Hidalgo is a fantastic building. The Government Palace. Benito Juarez was there – you have heard of him. In this very place he ordered the execution of Maximilian.’

  He tugged his moustache and smiled with civic pride. But Mexican civic pride, always backward-looking, has its roots in xenophobia. Few countries on earth have greater cause to be xenophobic. And in a sense this hatred of foreigners had its origins here in San Luis Potosf. Like many reformers, Benito Juarez ran into debt: it seems almost to amount to a condition of reforming governments. When he suspended payment on the national debt he was invaded by the combined forces of Spain, Britain and France. Ultimately only France’s armies stayed and, seeing that he could not defend Mexico City, Juarez retreated to Potosí. In June 1863, the French army entered Mexico City and made the Archduke Maximilian of Austria the new Emperor of Mexico. Maximilian’s rule was muddled and contradictory, a tyranny of good intentions. But he was weak; he needed the French presence to keep him in power and commanded little popular support (though it has been said that the Indians liked him because he was blond, like Quetzalcoatl – Cortez enjoyed the same bizarre notoriety for his resemblance to the Plumed Serpent). Much worse, Maximilian was a foreigner. Mexican xenophobia is far stronger than any tendency towards internal bickering, and it was not long before Maximilian was being denounced from the pulpits of Catholic churches as a syphilitic. His wife, the Empress Carlotta, had not borne him any children: that was the proof. Carlotta made a desperate trip to Europe to rally support for her husband, but her appeal was ignored and she lost her mind and died insane. For much of this time, America was engaged in the Civil War as well as urging the French to withdraw from Mexico. After the Civil War, America – which had never recognized Maximilian – began arming Juarez, and in the guerrilla war that followed in Mexico, Maximilian was captured and shot at Querétaro. This was in 1867; Juarez had retained San Luis Potosf as his capital.

  America’s help might have endeared us to the cause of Mexican nationalism. After all, Juarez was a Zapotec Indian, ethnically pure, and was one of the few Mexican rulers who died a natural death. But his successor, the devious and greedy Porfirio Diaz, welcomed – for a price – those whom we now think of as philanthropists and trail-blazers, the Hearsts, U.S. Steel, Anaconda Corporation, Standard Oil, and the Guggenheims. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson was writing at the time of Santa Ana’s paranoid rule (Santa Ana demanded to be known as ‘His Most Serene Highness’ – Mexican dictators frequently affected regal titles: the creole butcher Iturbide styled himself ‘Agustin I’), his lines are apposite to the Guggenheim adventure:

  But who is he that prates

  Of the culture of mankind,

  Of better arts and life?

  Go, blindworm, go,

  Behold the famous States

  Harrying Mexico

  With rifle and with knife!

  Mexico under Diaz had never been so peaceful, so industrialized, or so wretched. Spanish America is cursed with the grandiosity of crooked statesmen; the Indians and peasants remain Indians and peasants. In the bloody revolution that Diaz’s dictatorship made inevitable – the peasants’ revolt of 1910, described so turgidly in B. Traven’s The Rebellion of the Hanged and his five other tendentious ‘Jungle Novels’ – Diaz crept secretly aboard a train he himself had built and fled incognito to Veracruz and his exile in Paris.

  ‘And here’ – the Mexican man was talking – ‘in Potosi, our national anthem was written.’ The train had come to rest beside a long platform. ‘And this is one of the most modern railway stations in the country.’

  He was speaking of the building itself, a mausoleum of stupefied travellers, which bore on its upper walls frescoes by Fernando Leal. It was very much a Mexican style of interior decoration for public buildings, the preference for mob scenes and battle pieces instead of wall-paper. In this one, a frenzied crowd seemed to be dismantling two locomotives made of rubber. Pandemonium under a thundery sky; muskets, arrows, pickaxes, and symbolic lightning bolts; probably Benito Juarez leading a charge. If Mexican painters used conventional canvases, I never saw the result. ‘Diego Rivera’s frescoes in the patio of the Ministry of Education are chiefly remarkable for their quantity,’ Aldous Huxley wrote in Beyond the Mexique Bay. ‘There must be five or six acres of them.’ From the wall art I saw in Mexico I concluded that the painters had drawn much of their inspiration from Gulley Jimson.

  I went into the plaza and bought a Mexican newspaper and four bananas. The rest of the passengers bought comic books. Back on the platform, waiting for the train to leave, I noticed that the sallow-faced girl with green eyes was holding a magazine she had just bought. When I saw it was a comic book most of my ardour died: I find it discouraging to see a pretty woman reading a comic book. But the old woman was carrying nothing. Perhaps the green-eyed girl was holding the old woman’s comic book? I became interested in the girl once more, and sidled up to her.

  ‘It was cold last night.’

  The girl said nothing.

  The old woman said, ‘There is no heating on this train.’

  I said to the girl, ‘At least it is warm now.’

  The girl made a tube of the comic book and clutched it.

  The old woman said, ‘You speak Englis
h extremely well. I wish you would teach me some English. I suppose I am too old to learn!’ She looked at me slyly from beneath the fringes of her shawl and then boarded the train. The girl obediently followed, lifting the old woman’s hem from the dusty steps.

  The lady in the leopard-skin coat was also on the platform. She too had a comic book in her hand. She smiled at me and said, ‘You’re an American. I can tell.’

  ‘Yes, from Massachusetts.’

  ‘Very far!’

  ‘I am going even farther.’ At this point I had only been travelling for six days; I grew anxious when I remembered how distant Patagonia was.

  ‘In Mexico?’

  ‘Yes, then Guatemala, Panama, Peru –’ I stopped there; it seemed unlucky to speak of destinations.

  She said, ‘I’ve never been to Central America.’

  ‘What about South America?’

  ‘Never. But Peru – it is in Central America, no? Near Venezuela?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  She shook her head doubtfully. ‘How long is your vacation?’

  ‘Two months, maybe more.’

  ‘Shoo! You will have seen enough!’

  The whistle blew. We hurried to the stairs.

  ‘Two months vacation!’ she said. ‘That’s the kind of job I’d like to have. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a teacher.’

  ‘You’re a lucky teacher.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  In my compartment I unfolded El Sol de San Luis and saw, on the front page, a picture of a sinking ship in Boston harbour, and the headline, CHAOS AND DEATH FOLLOW A VIOLENT STORM IN THE US. The story was frightening: two feet of snow in Boston, a number of deaths, and a power-cut that had plunged the city into darkness; one of the worst storms in Boston’s history. It made me feel even more like a fugitive, guilty and smug having made a successful escape, as if I had known in advance that I was fleeing chaos and death for this sunny train ride. I put the paper down and looked out the window. In a biscuit-coloured gully in the foreground a large flock of goats champed on tufts of grass, and the herd-boy squatted under a tree. The sun burned in a cloudless sky. Further on, there were the remains of an abandoned silver mine and a wild yellow desert hemmed in by rocky hills, and yucca-like bushes from which tequila is made, and then cactuses in grotesque configurations – great stiff things that looked like swollen trees on which ping-pong paddles are growing, or sword clusters, or bunches of bristling pipe-fittings.

  For the next half hour I read about the snow storm, and from time to time – between paragraphs, or turning a page – I would look up to rest my eyes and see a man ploughing dust using two steers and a small plough-blade, or a group of women on their knees, doing their laundry in a shallow stream, or a boy leading a burro loaded with firewood. Then the story: Cars were left stranded … Offices closed … Some people suffered heart attacks … Ice and snow blocked roads …

  I heard a glockenspiel. It was the steward from the dining car, tapping his bundle of chimes. ‘Lunch!’ he yelled. ‘First call for lunch!’

  Lunch and the morning paper in the Aztec Eagle: this was perfect. A heat haze lay over the plains which were green with cultivation; and it was now so hot that we were the only thing moving. There was no one in the fields; and at the streams no women doing laundry, though their suds remained in the shallows. We passed Querétaro, where Maximilian was shot, and here dark tough-looking Mexicans sat glowering from doorways of houses. They were quite unlike the gold-toothed buffoons I had seen in Nuevo Laredo, and watching from the shadowy interiors of houses they seemed sinister and disapproving under the brims of their sombreros. Outside those houses there was little shade, and on this afternoon of withering sunlight nothing stirred. We were soon in semi-desert, travelling fast, and through the heat haze I could see the pencilled outline of the Sierra Madre Oriental. In the middle of this great sun-baked plain a small burro was tethered near a tiny tree; a still creature in a puddle of shade.

  Lunch had ended. The three waiters and the cook drowsed at a corner table. I had risen and was walking through the dining car when the couplings crashed, and made me stagger. The train came to a sudden jolting halt, knocking the salt and pepper shakers to the floor.

  ‘A fat little bull,’ said a waiter, opening one eye. ‘But it’s too late to worry about him now.’

  The Aztec Eagle climbed through the Cerro Rajon, a region of steep scrub-covered hills. It moved slowly enough on these circular climbs for me to pick the wild-flowers along the track, but when it descended it did so with loud racketing speed and a rhumba from the coupling under the vestibule where I stood for the air. The haze had lifted in this cooler altitude, and I could see for fifty miles or more across a blue-green plain. Because the train kept switching back and forth on the hillside, the view continually altered, from this plain to a range of hills and to fertile valleys with tall feathery trees in columns along the banks of frothing rivers, and occasionally a deep gorge of vertical granite slabs. The trees were eucalyptus, as African as the view, which was an enormity of stone and space.

  There was no one at the tidy station at Huichapan: no one boarded, no one got off, and only the signalman with his flag ventured out of the train. In this, as in other places, the laundry washed that morning at the river was set out to dry, Mexican-style: it was spiked upon the cactuses and transformed them into crouching figures in clean rags. The train trembling importantly at the platform at Huichapan gave the place a certain grandeur, but when we left, and I looked back, a hot solitude seemed to descend on the little station, as the dust sifted to the ground and the cactuses in their tatters remained in hunched postures, like a mimicry of ghost passengers left behind.

  During that long afternoon, I read The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, a grimly humorous book of self-congratulatory cynicism. I had turned first to Railroad, which Bierce defines as ‘the chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off’. Two feet of snow in Boston. Chaos and death. Power cuts in sub-freezing weather. And outside my window here, the Mexican sunshine and old hills and pots of crimson geraniums in the window boxes of huts. Bierce goes on, ‘For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favour by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition.’ Bierce is never brilliant; he is sometimes funny, but more often he misses the mark, forces the point, and ends up sounding strained and pompous. He has been called ‘the American Swift’, but his fun-poking facetiousness hardly qualifies him for that description. He was not as angry or as crazy or as learned as Swift, and he lived in a time of simpler literary tastes. If America in the nineteenth century had been complicated enough to require a Swift, she would have produced one. Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer – a mediocre poet. I found the jokes by Bierce about women and children conventionally stupid, but it interested me that I was reading this book in a part of Mexico in which he had vanished. Every line sounded like a hastily scribbled epitaph, although his real epitaph was in a letter he wrote in 1913, just before he disappeared. ‘To be a Gringo in Mexico,’ wrote Bierce – he was seventy-one years old – ‘ah, that is euthanasia!’

  Towards Tula, a treeless desert of long hills rose into peaks like pyramids. This was the capital of the Toltecs, with pillars and temples and a towering pyramid. The pyramids of Mexico – at Teotihuacan and Uxmal and Chichén-Itzá – are clearly the efforts of people aspiring to make mountains; they match the landscape, and in places mock it. The god-king must demonstrate that he is capable of duplicating divine geography, and the pyramids were the visible proof of this attempt. In the wilderness of Tula, the landscape was in ruins, but the work of the Toltecs would survive into another epoch.

  Just before darkness fell, I saw a field of upright swords. It might have been sisal, but more likely was the tequila plant whose fiery juice left me in an hallucinating daze.

>   The conductor – the smuggler – was all smiles when we arrived at Mexico City. He offered to carry my suitcase, he reminded me not to leave anything behind, he told me how much fun I would have in Mexico City. I did not reward his servility with a tip, and I think he knew as I thanked him coldly that he had overstepped himself in importuning me with his sack of contraband.

  The station was huge and cold. I had been here before. Mexico City, with its twelve million people and ingenious beggars (sword-swallowers and fire-eaters perform their tricks on the pavement near bus-stops, to get pesos from people in line) is only in parts an attractive place. And the three-quarters of a million people who live in Netzahualcoyotl near the airport have the dubious distinction of inhabiting what has been called ‘the largest slum in the western hemisphere’. I had no strong desire to see Mexico City again. It is, supremely, a place for getting lost in, a smog-plagued metropolis of mammoth proportions, which is perhaps why the two most determined exiles of this century; Leon Trotsky and B. Traven, chose Mexico City as their refuge.

  If I am to arrive in a city, I prefer it to be in the early morning, with the whole day ahead of me. So, without a further thought, I went to the ticket counter in the lobby, bought a sleeper ticket to Veracruz and boarded the train. It was cheaper than a hotel room and, anyway, people said that Veracruz, on the Gulf Coast, was much warmer.

  4 El Jarocho to Veracruz

  Before I boarded the ‘Jarocho’ – the word means ‘a boor; a rude person’; it is what the Veracruzians call themselves – I went to the restaurant in Buenavista Station and bought a box lunch. There wasn’t time for me to eat before I left Mexico City, and there was no dining car on the Jarocho. But, even so, the box lunch was an error of judgement. I made a point not to repeat this mistake. The box was gaily decorated, and inside was one of those parody meals that are assembled by people who have a profound dedication of completeness and a total disregard for taste. Two ham sandwiches on stale bread, a semi-liquid egg, an unpeelable orange and a piece of mouldy cake. I made an incision in the orange with my Nuevo Laredo switchblade and used the juice to blunt my tequila. The rest I threw out of the window as soon as we left the station. I suppose that disgusting lunch was one of the penalties of my refusing to stay in Mexico City for longer than an hour. But I was no sightseer; I was glad to be on this sleeper to the coast. Travelling hungry was no fun, but tequila was a great appetite-killer. It also guaranteed solid slumber and lively dreams of fulfilment – its effect on me was more the wild-eyed numbness of a narcotic drug than the giddyness of alcohol – and when I awoke I would be in the middle of Veracruz.