'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. Her 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.