The Old Patagonian Express Read online

  With my feet up and my compartment filled with pipe smoke on that night express to Veracruz, leaving this foggy altitude for the humid heat and palm trees of the coast with two inches of orange-scented tequila in my glass, I felt supremely happy. The whistle shrieked, the sleeping car tipped on a bend and the curtains parted: darkness and a few glaring lights and a faint hint of danger which intensified the romance. I shot my switchblade open and carved a slice from the orange for my drink. I was on a secret mission (now the tequila was starting to take effect), travelling incognito as a simple English teacher to carry out a tricky piece of Mexican reconnaissance. This shiv in my hand was a lethal weapon and I was drunk enough to believe that if anyone was foolish enough to jump me I’d have his guts for garters. The train, the atmosphere, my destination, my mood: it was all fantasy – ridiculous and pleasurable. And when I finished my drink I slipped the knife into the pocket of my black leather jacket and crept into the corridor to sneak a look at the other passengers.

  There was a figure lurking near my door: a moustached man with a suspicious-looking box.

  He said: ‘Want a chocolate cookie?’

  And the spell was broken.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Go ahead. I’ve got plenty.’

  To be polite I took one of his chocolate cookies. He was tall and friendly and said his name was Pepe. He was from Veracruz. He said he could tell that I was an American, but quickly added that it was not a reflection on my Spanish but rather the way I looked. It was too bad I was only going to Veracruz now, he said, because the carnival had just ended. I had missed a very wonderful thing. Bands – very loud bands! Dancing – in the streets! – Parades – very long ones! Music – drums, horns, marimbas! Costumes – people dressed as princes and clowns and conquistadors! Also church services and eating of wonderful food, and drinking of fantastic tequila, and friendship of all kinds.

  His description removed any sense of regret I might have had about missing the Veracruz carnival. I was relieved that I would not have to endure the vulgar spectacle, which I was sure would have depressed and annoyed me, or in any case kept me awake.

  But I said, ‘What a shame I missed it.’

  ‘You can come back next year.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Want another chocolate cookie?’

  ‘No thanks. I haven’t eaten this one yet.’ I wanted him to go away. I waited a moment, yawned and said, ‘I am very married.’

  He looked oddly at me.

  ‘Very married? Interesting.’ But the look of puzzlement did not leave his face.

  ‘Aren’t you married?’

  ‘I am only eighteen.’

  This confused me. I said, ‘Married – isn’t that what you are when you want to go to bed?’

  ‘You mean tired.’

  ‘That’s it.’ The Spanish words sounded similar to me: casado, cansado; married, tired.

  Yet this double-talk did the trick. He obviously thought I was insane. He said good-night, put his box of cookies under his arm and took himself away. I saw no other people in the sleeping car.

  ‘The journey from Veracruz [to Mexico City] is to my mind the finest in the world from the point of view of spectacular effect,’ writes the diabolist Aleister Crowley in his Confessions. Go to Veracruz during the day, people told me. See the cane fields and the Orizaba volcano; see the peasants and the gardens. But Latin America is full of volcanoes and cane-fields and peasants; at times, it seems as if there is little else to see. It struck me as a better idea to arrive in Veracruz at dawn; the Jarocho Express was a comfortable train and I had heard that my next connection, to Tapachula and the Guatemala border, was in a sorry state. I would have an extra day in Veracruz to prepare for that. And I would be prepared. The Jarocho Express was one of those trains – rarer now than they used to be – which you board feeling exhausted and disembark from feeling like a million dollars. I happened to be drunk in this Mexico City suburb; but the train was moving slowly: I would be sober in the morning in Veracruz.

  The compartment was hot and steamy when I awoke; the window was fogged, and when I rubbed it I saw that dawn here was a foamy yellow light and the thin drizzle on the sodden green of a marsh. The clouds were mud-coloured and low and ragged, like dead hanks of Spanish moss. We were approaching the Gulf Coast; there were tall palms on the horizon, silly umbrellas in the rain.

  The silence was perfect. Not even the train made a sound. But it was my ears – they hurt badly, and the feeling was that of having landed in a poorly pressurized plane. We had been at a very high altitude and, asleep, I had not been able to compensate by swallowing. Now at sea-level my eardrums, deaf to any chirp this morning, burned with pain.

  Anxious to be away from the dirty window and the stuffy compartment, and believing that some deep breathing would be good for my ears, I went to the rear of the sleeping car. The vestibule window was open. I swallowed air and watched the slums go by. My ears cleared: now I could hear the drumroll of the train.

  ‘Look at those people,’ said the conductor.

  There were shacks by the line, and wet chickens and sombre children. I wondered what the conductor would say next.

  ‘They have the right idea. Look at them – that’s the life!’

  ‘What life?’ All I saw were shacks and chickens and men whose hat brims were streaming with rain.

  ‘Very tranquil,’ he said, nodding in condescension towards the hovels. Truly patronizing people usually adopt a very sage tone when considering their victims. This Mexican squinted wisely and said, ‘Very tranquil. Not like Mexico City. It is too rapid there – everyone going this way and that way. They do not know what life is all about. But look how peaceful this is.’

  I said, ‘How would you like to live in that house?’

  It was not a house. It was a shack of cardboard and rusty tin. Holes had been punched in the tin to make windows, and broken bricks held bits of plastic over the leaky roof. A dog sniffed at some garbage near the door, where a fat haggard woman in a torn red sweater watched us pass. We had a glimpse of even greater horror inside.

  ‘Ah!’ the conductor said, and looked crushed.

  I was not supposed to have asked him that. He had expected me to agree with him – yes, how tranquil! This tiny shack – how idyllic! Most Mexican friendliness seemed to depend on to what extent you agreed with what they said. Disagreement, or simple argument, was taken as a sign of aggression. Was it insecurity, I wondered, or that same mistrust of subtlety that made every painting into a four-acre fresco and every comic book into a violent woman-hating pamphlet. My Spanish was not bad, but I found it hard to hold a conversation with any Mexican that was not pure joshing or else something completely straightforward. One hot afternoon I hailed a taxi just outside of Veracruz, but before I gave him my destination, the driver said, ‘Want a whore?’

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I’m also married.’

  ‘I understand,’ said the driver.

  ‘Besides, I’ll bet they’re not pretty.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not pretty at all. But they’re young. That’s something.’

  I had arrived in Veracruz at seven in the morning, found a hotel in the pretty Plaza Constitucion and gone for a walk. I had absolutely nothing to do: I did not know a soul in Veracruz, and the train to the Guatemalan border was not leaving for two days. Still, this did not seem a bad place. There are few tourist attractions in Veracruz; there is an old fort and, about two miles south, a beach. The guidebooks are circumspect about des-scribing this fairly ugly city: one calls it ‘exuberant’, another ‘picturesque’. It is a faded seaport, with slums and tacky modernity crowding the quaintly ruined buildings at its heart. Unlike any other Mexican city, it has pavement cafés, where forlorn children beg and marimba players complete the damage to your eardrums that was started on the descent from the heights of Orizaba. Mexicans treat stray children the way other people treat stray cats (Mexicans treat stray cats like vermin), taking them on their laps and
buying them ice cream, all the while shouting to be heard over the noise of the marimbas.

  Finding nothing in my plaza to divert me, I walked a mile to the Castle of San Juan de Ulua. Formerly an island – Cortes landed here during Holy Week in 1519 – the harbour has silted up so thoroughly it is now part of the mainland, with a connecting road and the greasy factories, the hovels and graffiti that Mexico appears to require of its urban areas. The Castle contains a permanent exhibit of Veracruz’s past, a pictorial record of invasions, punitive missions and local military defeats. It was that most Mexican of enthusiasms – humiliation as history. If the engravings and old photographs showed how cynical and aggressive other countries – but mainly the United States – had been towards Mexico, the prominence of the exhibit in Veracruz invited the Mexican to a morning of wound-licking and self-contempt. Veracruz is known as ‘the heroic city’. It is a poignant description: in Mexico a hero is nearly always a corpse.

  It had been raining in an inconsequential way all morning, but before I left the castle the clouds lifted and whitened and broke into separate cauliflowers. I found a sunny rampart of the fort and read the paper. The news of the Boston blizzard was still very bad, though here in sight of glittering water and listing palm trees – a fresh sea breeze carrying gulls’ cries to me – I found it hard to conjure up a vision of a winter-darkened city or cars buried by snow or the physical pain of the bitter cold. Pain is the hardest feeling to remember: the memory is merciful. Another headline read, BAD END TO THE CARNIVAL and under it Ten Sex Maniacs Captured, and under that, But Another 22 On The Loose. The story was that a gang of 32 sex maniacs had spent Shrove-tide dragging women (‘mothers and their daughters’) into bushes and raping them. ‘Many women were attacked by the crazies in their hotel rooms.’ The gang called themselves ‘The Tubes’. The significance of this name escaped me – I wondered whether it had some arch sexual resonance. The ten who had been captured appeared in a colour photograph. They were fairly ordinary-looking youths, sheepishly hunched in baggy sweatshirts and blue-jeans, and might well have been the losing side in a fraternity tug-of-war – a suggestion that was as strong in their glum, smirking faces as in their sweatshirts, which were printed with the names of American colleges, University of Iowa, Texas State, Amherst College. They were called ‘maniacs’ in a dozen places on the page, though none had been convicted. Their full names were given, and after each name – it is customary in Mexican crime reporting – an alias: ‘The Chinaman’, ‘The King’, ‘The Warbler’, ‘The Pole’, ‘The Brave One’, ‘The Horse’, ‘The Lion’, ‘The Magician’, and so forth. Stylishness was important to the Mexican male, but a Tube called the Warbler, wearing a college sweatshirt to rape women on a solemn Christian holiday in Veracruz, seemed to me a curious mixture of styles.

  Later that day I saw something equally bizarre. I passed a church where there were eight new pick-up trucks being blessed by a priest, with a bucket of holy water, who was attended by four acolytes with candles and crosses. In itself, this was not strange – houses are blessed in Boston, and every year the fishing-fleet is blessed in Gloucester. But what I found odd was that after the priest sprinkled holy water on the doors, the wheels, the rear flap and the hood, the owner unfastened the hood and the priest ducked under it to douse the engine with holy water, as if the Almighty was incapable of penetrating the bodywork of the vehicle. Perhaps they regarded God as just another unreliable foreigner, and extended their mistrust to Him, as they did to all other gringos. Certainly Jesus was a gringo: the proof was on every pious postcard.

  To flatter myself that I had something important to do in Veracruz I made a list of provisions that I intended to buy for my trip to Guatemala. Then I remembered I had no ticket. I went immediately to the railway station.

  ‘I cannot sell you a ticket today,’ said the man at the window.

  ‘When can I buy one?’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘Thursday.’

  ‘Fine. I can sell you one Thursday.’

  ‘Why can’t I buy one today?’

  ‘It is not done.’

  ‘What if there are no seats on Thursday?’

  He laughed. ‘On that train there are always seats.’

  That was the day I met the taxi driver who said he had a whore for me who was ‘not pretty at all’. I said I was not interested, but what else was there to do in Veracruz? He said I should go to the Castle. I said I had been to the Castle. Go for a walk around the city, he said: lovely churches, good restaurants, bars full of prostitutes. I shook my head. ‘Too bad you were not here a few days ago,’ he said. ‘The carnival was fantastic.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll go swimming,’ I said.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘We have the best beach in the world.’

  It is called Mocambo; I paid it a visit the next morning. The beach itself was clean and uncluttered, the water chromatic with oil-slick. There were about fifty people on the mile of sand, but no one was swimming. This was a caution to me. The beach was flanked by a row of identical restaurants. I had fish soup and was joined by a man whom I took to be a friendly soul until he said that for two dollars he would snap my picture.

  I said, ‘I’ll give you fifty cents.’

  He took my picture.

  He said, ‘You like Veracruz food?’

  ‘This soup has a fish-head in it.’

  ‘We always eat fish-heads.’

  ‘I haven’t eaten a fish-head since I was in Africa.’

  He frowned, insulted by the comparison, and went to another table.

  I rented a beach chair and watched children throwing sand and wished that I was on my way south. It was a fraudulent pleasure, idling on this empty beach. I hated to think that I was killing time, but like the De Vries character I had always admired, I was doing it in self-defence. A bus drew up to the beach and forty people got out. Their faces had a strong Indian cast. The men wore the clothes of farm workers, the women long skirts and shawls. They became two groups: men and boys, women and infants; and they gathered in the shade of two trees. The men stood, the women sat. They watched the surf and whispered. They kept their clothes on, they did not remove their boots. They were unused to the beach and seemed very shy – they had probably come a great distance for this outing. They posed in embarrassment for the photographer, and hours later when I left they were still there, the men standing, the women sitting, staring at the oily waves with curiosity. If they were average rural Mexicans (and they seemed so), they were illiterate, lived in one-room huts, rarely ate meat or eggs, and earned less than $15 a week.

  Before the shops closed that afternoon I did my provision-hunting. I bought a basket and filled it with small loaves of bread, a pound of cheese, some sliced ham, and – because a train without a dining car is usually a train on which drinks are unobtainable – bottles of beer, grapefruit juice and soda water. It was like stocking a hamper for a two-day picnic, and it was a sensible precaution. Mexican train travellers do not carry their own food; they urge you to do as they do – buy the local delicacies that are sold by women and children at every railway station. But local delicacies are always carried in a tin wash basin on the seller’s head, and because it is out of the seller’s sight it is impossible for the hawker yelling, ‘Tasty chicken!’, to see the flies that have collected on it. Typically, the Mexican food seller is a woman on a railway platform with a basin of flies on her head.

  I had planned to get to bed early in order to be up at dawn to buy my ticket to Tapachula. It was when I switched the light off that I heard the music; darkness gave the sounds clarity, and it was too vibrant to be coming from a radio. It was a strong, full-throated brass band:

  Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,

  How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?

  ‘Pomp and Circumstance’? In Veracruz? At eleven o’clock at night?

  Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;

  God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.r />
  I dressed and went downstairs.

  In the centre of the Plaza, near the four fountains, was the Mexican Navy Band, in white uniforms, giving Elgar the full treatment. Lights twinkled in the boughs of the laburnum trees, and there were floodlights, too – pink ones – playing on the balconies and the palms. A sizable crowd had gathered to listen – children played near the fountain, people walked their dogs, lovers held hands. The night was cool and balmy, the crowd good-humoured and attentive. I think it was one of the prettiest sights I have ever seen; the Mexicans had the handsome thoughtful look, the serenity that comes of listening closely to lovely music. It was late, a soft wind moved through the trees, and the tropical harshness that had seemed to me constant in Veracruz was gone; these were gentle people, this was an attractive place.

  The song ended. There was clapping. The band began playing ‘The Washington Post March’, and I strolled around the perimeter of the plaza. There was a slight hazard in this. Because the carnival had just ended, Veracruz was full of idle prostitutes, and as I strolled I realized that most of them had not come here to the plaza to listen to the band – in fact, the greater part of the audience was composed of dark-eyed girls in slit skirts and low-cut dresses who, as I passed them, called out, ‘Let’s go to my house’, or fell into step with me and murmured, ‘Fuck?’ This struck me as comic and rather pleasant – the military dignity of the march music, the pink light on the lush trees and balconies of the plaza, and the whispered invitations of those willing girls.