Not far from the station there was a man melting tubes of glass and drawing them thin and making model cars. His skill amounted almost to artistry, but the result — always the same car — lacked any imagination. The delicate work, this glass filigree, took hours; he laboured to make what could have been something beautiful, into a ridiculous souvenir. Had he ever made anything else?
'No,' he said. 'Only this car. I saw a picture of it in a magazine.'
I asked him when he had seen the picture.
'No one ever asked me that question before! It was ten years ago. Or more.'
'Where did you learn to do this?'
'In Puebla- not here.' He looked up from his blowtorch. 'Do you think a person could learn anything here in Nuevo Laredo? This is one of the traditional arts of Puebla. I have taught my wife and children to do it. My wife makes little pianos, my son makes animals.'
Over and over again, the same car, piano, animal. It would not have been so disturbing if it was a simple case of mass-producing the objects. But enormous skill and patience went into the making of what was in the end no more than junk. It seemed a great waste, but not very different from the Zone which turned lovely little girls into bad-tempered and rapacious hags.
Earlier that afternoon I had left my suitcase at the station restaurant. I had asked for the baggage department. A Mexican girl at a table on which someone had spewed pushed her tin plate of beans aside and said, 'This is it.' She had given me a scrap of paper and written PAUL in lipstick on the suitcase. I had no lively hope of ever seeing it again.
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 — 'enee 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 1 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.'