America's help might have endeared us to the cause of Mexican nationalism. After all, Juarez was a Zapotee 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 trailblazers, 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 'Agustín 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 still talking — 'in Potosí, 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 wallpaper. In this one, a frenzied crowd seemed to be dismantling two locomotives made of rubber. Pandemonium under a thundery sky; muskets, arrows, pick-axes, 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 English 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 Queretaro, 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.