I turned to the flyleaf and wrote: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty. No privacy, no relief. Constant stopping and starting, broken engine, howling passengers. On days like this I wonder why I bother: leaving order and friends for disorder and strangers. I'm homesick and feel punished for my selfishness in leaving. Precisely what Crusoe says on his island. Impossible to get comfortable in this seat. A jail atmosphere: the brown walls and dim light of the condemned cell. Noise, too: a factory din ~ our pile-driving sound hammered back at us through open windows from the close walls of jungle beside the track.
I stopped. Writing can make you very lonely.
I saw one thing today: a thin white heron standing in a swamp.
There was a half-inch left on the page.
These people are going home. They complain about the journey, but they will be home tomorrow. I am travelling to another train. I would rather. .
Then I was asleep. The difference between sleep and waking on this train was that, awake, I swatted the mosquitoes. Asleep, though I was aware of being stung, I was helpless; I did not have the will to stop them.
The heron: I had seen it in the marshland near Piedras Negras; it had been tall and watchful, such a slender creature, so finely formed and so strange in that marshy salad. An hour later there was no moisture anywhere in sight: dusty trees rooted in dry ground, withered grass, limp burned leaves, and mud huts thatched with palm fronds, like those you see in the poorest parts of Africa. The train continued to stop, usually next to a cane field; there was seldom a station nearby, and I suspected that there was a fault in the engine. I could see groups of men prodding the locomotive and adjusting their straw hats. Then we would start again and move slowly for a few miles and stop.
At one stop — a station, not a breakdown — a boy got on and stood at the front of the coach. He sang in a very sweet voice. At first the passengers were embarrassed, but with the second and third songs, they applauded. The boy was encouraged. He sang a fourth. The whistle blew. He walked to the back of the coach, collecting money from the people. What impressed me as much as his voice was his age — he was about twenty, old enough to be a cane-cutter or a farm labourer (but farm labourers in Mexico work on average only 135 days a year). This singing seemed an unlikely occupation, but perhaps he only performed when the train passed through his village.
We came to Tierra Blanca. The descriptive name did not describe the place. Spanish names were apt only as ironies or simplifications; they seldom fit. The argument is usually stated differently, to demonstrate how dull, how literal-minded and unimaginative the Spanish explorer or cartographer was. Seeing a dark river, the witness quickly assigned a name: Rio Negro. It is a common name throughout Latin America; yet it never matched the colour of the water. And the four Rio Colorados I saw bore not the slightest hint of red. Piedra Negras was marshland, not black stones; I saw no stags at Venado Tuerto, no lizards at Lagartos. None of the Laguna Verdes was green; my one La Dorada looked leaden, and Progreso in Guatemala was backward, La Libertad in El Salvador a stronghold of repression in a country where salvation seemed in short supply. La Paz was not peaceful, nor was La Democracia democratic. This was not literalness — it was whimsy. Place names called attention to beauty, freedom, piety, or strong colours; but the places themselves, so prettily named, were something else. Was it wilful inaccuracy, or a lack of subtlety that made the map so glorious with fine attributes and praises? Latins found it hard to live with dull facts; the enchanting name, while not exactly making their town magical, at least took the curse off it. And there was always a chance that an evocative name might evoke something to make the plain town bearable.
I looked hard at Tierra Blanca. It was poor and brown. There were chickens strutting on the station platform, and men heaving bales, and children pointing at passengers gaping from the windows of the train. And food sellers (it was lunchtime) shrieking the name of the item they carried: pancakes, beans, fritters, corn on the cob, cupcakes, cheese sandwiches, fried chicken, bananas, oranges, pineapples, watermelons. I had my own food. I slit one of the small loaves and filled it with ham and cheese. Across the aisle, a large family travelling to Guatemala, eating the flyblown chicken they had just bought, stared at me.
'That is a big sandwich,' said the mother.
'We call this a submarine sandwich,' I said.
They continued to stare.
'Because of the shape,' I said. I held it up. 'Like a submarine.'
They squinted. They had never seen a submarine.
The mother said, 'Of course.'
In the next few hours the train stopped eight more times. It did not stop at stations. It slowed near cane fields or on marshland or in hot woods, and then the trumpeting engine went silent and it jerked to a halt; the passengers groaned and looked out the windows, and seeing no station they said, 'Nowhere' or 'I don't know'. And though they might have been talking happily while the train was moving, when it stopped they became laconic, and grunted and sighed. Usually, this hot silence was broken by a cry from outside the window: 'Bananas!'
No matter where we stopped, in a swamp or in apparently empty woods, a food-seller would materialize — a small girl in a torn dress — and yell, 'Bananas!' I had no fear, on this train to Tapachula, of ever going hungry.
Passing some cane fields at about two that afternoon, and marvelling how densely packed they were — practically impenetrable green stalks, like a wall of bamboo — I felt the train slowing down. I looked out of the window: more cane fields. The train stopped. The passengers grunted. I picked up Pudd'nhead Wilson and read it. An hour went by — a slow humid mid-afternoon hour, with a radio twanging in the next car. The banana-seller had come and gone. I made myself a sandwich, I drank a bottle of soda water. And I became aware that I might eat all my food and finish my book before we started moving again. This food, this book: it was all I had to keep me going.
The train started; I put my feet up and breathed a sigh of relief. The train went a hundred yards and stopped. Someone in the next car cried, 'Mother of God!'
We were on a long red bridge of steel girders, and beneath us was a river. I dug out my map and traced the railway line from Veracruz. I found Tierra Blanca, the swamps, a river: so this was the Rio Papaloa-Pan. The handbook said that the river basin drained by the Papaloa-pan was 'twice the size of the Netherlands' but that the nearby town contained 'little of note'. We remained on the bridge for another hour — an irritating hour, because we could not get out and walk around: there was no walkway on the bridge, and the river itself had a treacherous-looking current. I considered eating, but thought better of it. At this rate of speed we would not be in Tapachula for days. The passengers, trapped in the train which was itself trapped on the bridge, grew restive, and now the Guatemalan children in the large family hung out of the window and yelled, 'Let's go! Let's go!' They continued to yell this until sundown.
I wondered if I should continue reading. It was all that kept me sane during periods like this of utter boredom. But if I finished Pudd'nhead Wilson — a book I was enjoying — I would have nothing else to read. I paced up and down the long train and already it seemed as if I had been on it for more than a day. Soon, it moved, about two hundred yards, no more, then it stopped.
We were in the village of Papaloapan. 'Little of note' was a wild overstatement. There were two shops, some huts, some pigs, some pawpaw trees. The sun had dropped to the level of the windows and burned through the train.
There had been a Mexican sitting on a broken bench some distance from the tracks when the train drew in. The tree he had chosen to sit under was rather small, and I watched him closely to see what he would do when the sunlight reached him. For half an hour he did not stir, although two hogs tied to the tree were whining and snuffling at the ends of their tethers. He appeared not to see the hogs, he did not look at the train, he paid no attention to the sun. The sun slipped from the lower branches to his hat. The man remained motionless. The hogs squawked. The sun moved down, lighting the man's nose. The man did not move immediately — he shuffled his feet and winced, but very slowly, as if he were entering a new phase of slumber; and then with one finger he tilted his hat and put his nose in shadow. He was reposeful once again. But the sun was moving: the light found his face (and found the hogs — they tried to yank themselves out of it), the man poked his hat again with his finger. He had not regarded the train, he ignored the hogs, he was neither asleep nor awake, and the only significant change was that yellow disc of hat, now like the watchful face of a wilting sunflower following the sun, jammed vertically against his head.