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.
I dressed and went downstairs.
In the center 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.