While I studied this man, who was as good as a sundial, a dwarf climbed into the train. His eyes were level with mine, though I was sitting, and I could see how they protruded, how their sour grey colour was not penetrated by any pupiclass="underline" he was blind. But he was chirping, pleading in a bantering way for money. His clothes were ripped and he was tied with twine like a bundle of rags — there were knots and loops of fraying string tightened all over his body. The passengers spoke to him as he collected coins; he limped through the car, chuckling and replying.
'Let's get this train moving,' they said.
The blind man said, 'I'm doing the best I can.'
'Where are we?' they said.
'Papaloapan,' said the blind dwarf. 'It's a nice town. Why don't you stay?'
'We don't want to stay here!' the passengers said.
The blind dwarf laughed and tapped his stick into the next car. I heard him say, 'Good evening-'
There were more people who boarded to beg — an old woman with an infant in her arms, two skinny children; and food-sellers — children with jugs of coffee, basins of fritters, women with bread and bony fish. Other children from Papaloapan ran in and out of the train, and men sauntered over from the shop nearby to chat with the passengers.
In the space of a few hours (now it was late afternoon, and men coming back from cutting in the cane fields stopped beside the train to see what was up), the stalled train ceased to be seen as something that roared through the riverbank village of Papaloapan. Villagers, who presumably had always watched at a distance, boarded and used the toilets and waved to their friends from the windows; and the chickens pecked and gabbled under the cars, as confidently as the passengers had drifted to the shop where they roosted swigging soft drinks. Now the train had become part of the town.
No one was sure what was wrong with our train. A wreck up ahead, one man said; another man told me our engine was broken. There was no panic. The ninety-degree heat all day had taken the starch out of everyone. Few people inquired; there was no panic — most had begun to feel at home here in Papaloapan. We were not due at Tapachula until the next day, and no one was quite sure how far we had come. (To kill time, I asked people how far we were from Veracruz; no one gave me the right answer: 100 miles.) In a country where delays are chronic, a delay like this was to be expected; and anyway, the village was friendly, the weather was warm, and each pair of seats had been turned into a nest of food wrappings and pillows and dozing children. The man behind me had stopped kicking my seat. He was completely calm. He said, 'I think we will have to spend the night here.'
The Guatemalan lady said to her children, 'I think he is right. Oh, well.'
Nothing seems longer than the unexpected delay. Nothing is harder to describe or more boring to read. 'An hour passed,' one writes, and there is no tedium in the phrase, no smell, no heat, no noise, none of the flies swarming unsteadily from the toilet door which, warped and without a handle, refused to shut. 'Another hour passed' — how hard to suggest the two radios, the whining hogs, the shrieks of children, the lumpy seat with the spiders hunching out of its horsehair. Heat itself seems to slow time. If the village had been any larger I think I would have packed my belongings and checked into the nearest hotel. But the village was small, and there would not be another train to Tapachula for three days.
I realized that I had only fifty pages more to read of Pudd'nhead Wilson. I decided to save it, to keep the best part for later, when my nerves might be stretched and I would need it. I resisted the impulse to go on with the story, and instead read the Introduction. This was a very disturbing experience, the serious phraseology of the essay contrasting with the approaching twilight, the noise and smells of this ramshackle Mexican village, the crowded train. One way to see how he establishes this as an irony is to compare him with Jane Austen in whose novels the social life is approved, and provides the basis for her own exacting moral values-
Yaaaaaaaa! A child across the aisle screamed. Her brother smiled and pinched her again. The Mexican in the shade scratched his head without moving his hat. The hogs grunted. The radio in the shop yelled and crackled. Two men by the door laughed out loud. 'Cold beer!' shouted a hawker.
'Bananas!'
'Ice cream!'
He pinched me!'
— In her work social values are not moral values as such; but her irony works to show how they can be, how a certain kind of full and tested-
A giggle and 'I did not!' and two pretty girls in green school uniforms strolled by the train, hugging their books. They had black hair and bright eyes and they were laughing.
— full and tested social awareness is also, finally, a realized moral awareness -
I shut the book. A quarrel had started at the end of the car — nothing serious: shouting, mulishness, arm-swinging. The toilet smell had grown much worse. We had been stationary for hours, but people had continued to shit down the tin pipe and there was a disgusting heap on the tracks under the car. It excited the flies: they were loud and fat and they swarmed in a cloud and tumbled through the windows which would not close. The beer seller came back, put his crate down and sat on it. He was hoarse from shouting. He asked me in a whisper if I wanted one. Although I had two of my own, I bought two more: it was, after all, Happy Hour, and it was going to be a long night.
There was an empty row of seats at the far end of the train. I stretched out to have my sundowner, puffed my pipe and allowed myself another chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Night was falling on Papaloapan. Dogs barked, the village voices had become murmurs, the radios still played, and in the train people talked more quietly in the darkness. There were crickets, as rapid as castanets — I had not heard crickets for ages; the sound was soothing. And the novel cheered me: what a superb book this was! I thought I had known the story, but all I had remembered was the fingerprinting business and the identical children and the crime. I had missed the ironies: it was a story about freedom and slavery, identity and disguise, and the tinctures of race were made into attributes. It was a savage masterpiece, with a cruelly grim jollity, more ingenious and pessimistic than anything I had ever read by Twain. It was patterned on a folktale: the switched infants, the slave child becoming master, the master's son a slave. But the implications of race made it a nightmare of masked injustices. It had begun as a farce about a pair of Siamese twins. Twain saw this as a defect, 'two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.' He decided to revamp the story: 'I pulled out the farce and left the tragedy.' But the tragedy is so bitter, this seldom-read novel — one of the gloomiest comedies in American literature — is treated as the story of a country lawyer, a funny-looking figure who wins a case using fingerprints. His victory does not quite overshadow the fact that everyone else in the novel, even the worthiest character, is defeated. It gave me a lecture topic: How, by careful selection, we make our writers simple; American literature is an anthology of what is bearable.