'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 Rajón, 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 favor 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 Netzahualcóyotl 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.
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.