Meanwhile, it had grown darker in Papaloapan. I looked up and saw a solitary engine approaching from the bridge. It passed by, and five minutes later there was a bump, a lurch, and a renewed activity on the tracks. Then a shrill whistle and the Guatemalan children crying, 'Let's go!' The lights had come on in the village, but they were unshaded and dazzling; soon, they were moving past the train and the villagers were watching us go, and some were waving tentatively as if they half-expected us to stop again. But we did not stop. A breeze purified the cars and out of the trees a dazzle of the village we had a glimpse of sky, of a sunset which, five hundred years ago, had been seen in this very place by an Aztec poet:
Our father, the Sun
Dressed in rich feathers, thrusts himself
Down into a vase of gems,
Decked with a turquoise necklace
Among many-coloured flowers
Which fall in perpetual rain.
The glimmer remained for some minutes, then the green jungle and swamp became a mass of shadows, and the darkness was complete. Four small lightbulbs — the rest were dead or missing — were not enough for me to read by. I put my book away and drank and looked out of the window.
There were few stops — some villages, some settlements that were less than villages. I saw doorways flickering in candlelight and hut interiors whitened by lanterns. At one doorway the highly erotic sight of a girl or woman, leaning against the jamb, canted forward, her legs apart, her arms upraised, and the light behind her showing the slimness of the body beneath her gauzy dress — this lovely shape in a lighted rectangle surrounded by the featureless Mexican night. It left me flustered and a bit anxious.
At one town, a boy leaned out of the train and called to a girl selling corn. He said, 'Where are we?'
The girl took the tray of corn from her head and stared at him. It was a difficult question.
The boy said, 'She doesn't know where we are!'
The girl looked at the laughing boy on the train. She knew where she was. But the boy had not asked that.
The boy roused his father, his brother, and he wagged his head at me. 'She doesn't know where we are!'
Loud enough for the girl with the tray to hear, I said, 'I know where we are.'
'Where?' asked the boy.
'On a train.'
They thought this was extremely funny. The boy repeated it and they laughed harder. In fact, we were at the town of Suelta, a congested place, the name of which meant 'loose'.
After this, unable to read or sleep, I scribbled some notes on the flyleaf of my book: Two classes: both uncomfortable and dirty… I was homesick. Was there any point in this trip aside from the fact that I had been too restless to stay at my desk and endure another winter? I had left in fine spirits, but I was no explorer: this was supposed to be enjoyment, not a test of stamina or patience. I did not take any pleasure in suffering the torments of travel merely so that I could dine out on them. I had been curious about the process of rising in the morning at home, and catching the local train and staying on it as the commuters got off to go to work, and changing trains at the end of the line, and repeating this until there were no more trains and I was in Patagonia. More melancholy than the thought of Homesick: A Travel Book was the memory of something I had read about Jack Kerouac. At the age of fifty, with On the Road well behind him, he decided to hitch-hike across America again. He was fatter now, and felt defeated, but he was convinced he could repeat his cross-country epic. So he left New York, seeking California. His menacing features were ineradicable, and times had changed. The lugubrious man reached New Jersey; there he stood for hours in the rain, trying to thumb a ride until, at last, he gave up and took a bus home.
Without realizing that I had been asleep, I woke from the mosquitoes and the cold. I tucked my trousers into my socks (but these mosquitoes could sting through socks) and put on the heavy sweater and leather jacket I had plucked for the altitudes of the Andes. And curling up once more I slept like a log until dawn. I had not thought I was capable of such adjustment, and overcoming the misery of a dreadful night on the torn seat of a cold and stinking train gave me the lucid optimism and good humour that always accompanies such excursions. I felt virtuous and even knew that my virtue was laughable.
At six that morning, I blinked at my watch. The lights in the car had fused: it was pitch dark. Moments later, it was dawn. No bulb of sun, but a seepage of light that dissolved the darkness and rose on all sides bringing a bluer ozone-scented softness to a sky which became gigantic. With it was a warm buoyancy of air, and scale was restored to the landscape, and the car was sweetened with the odour of desert dew. I had never seen dawn break so swiftly, but I had never slept that way. The windows were open, there were no shades: it was like sleeping on a park bench.
Yonder were mountains: the sunlight revealed their tiny heads and wide shoulders as craggy and purple, with small black trees on their slopes as delicate as eyelashes. It was a mountain range erupting jag-gedly eastward; to the south were sparse dusty woods. The train stopped. This was emptiness. A girl appeared at the window: 'Coffee!' She poured me some in a paper cup and I sipped it as we resumed our journey along the lowland periphery ofthat escarpment.
This was the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest point in Mexico — so narrow, it was for a long time considered an ideal place to dig a coast-to-coast canal. And more convenient than Panama because it was so much nearer the United States. Tehuantepec — a hot, dismal-looking place — had had an interesting history. It had always been populated, and often dominated, by Indians. These Indians — the Zapotees — were a matrilineal people — the women owned land, fished, traded, farmed, and ran the local government; the men, with that look of silliness that comes of being bone-idle, lounged around. The stations that morning showed this tradition to be unchanged: enterprising women, empty-handed men. But one could easily underestimate their capacity for outrage: patience so often looks like defeat, or silence like conversion. One of the earliest Indian uprisings in Mexico took place here in 1680; these people rebelled and for the next eight years controlled most of the Isthmus. And when in later years great projects were conceived to make the Isthmus important the Indians did not cooperate- they simply stood aside and watched the Projects fail.
In his joyously energetic travel book, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, Anthony Trollope wrote that this part of Mexico was 'the passage selected by Cortez, and pressed by him on the Spanish government. . the line would be from the Gulf of Campechay, up the river Coatzacoalcoz, to Tehuantepec and the Pacific'. Trollope, who believed more southerly routes through Panama and Costa Rica (he travelled through both places) would be expensive and impractical, was writing in 1860. Ten years later, President Ulysses S. Grant (yes, of all people) sent the Tehuantepec Expedition here and charged them with exploring the possibilities of digging a canal. Altogether there were seven expeditions but, though no canal was built, the Isthmus was crossed by tens of thousands of travellers, first on mule back and stage coaches, and then by train. It was one of the better ways of reaching California from the eastern seaboard of the United States, and the Gold Rush of 1849 had vastly increased the traffic. With so many people tumbling back and forth across Tehuantepec (under, one assumes, the baleful or jeering eyes of the Indians), the profit in annexing the strip was obvious, and several times the American government urged the Mexicans to hand it over. Mexican tenacity could not match American rapaciousness and the Mexicans eventually conceded all of what are now regarded as Western states, but against the odds they refused to surrender Tehuantepec. In 1894, the railway was built across the Isthmus and did a roaring trade. One of the busiest railways the world has ever known, at the height of its operation there were sixty trains a day. It is an astonishing fact, because so little of that bustle and efficiency remains, such a tiny portion of the builders' and speculators' handiwork. There is less left of the great Tehuantepec National Railway than of the Mayan ruins of Uxmal or Palenque, and no sign in the shrivelled riverbeds or the dusty tracks that link the poor towns that this was once a great crossroads of the world. Yet some of the railway still stands. In 1913, the line was extended to join the so-called Pan American Railway at the Guatemalan frontier. But this was a hopeless effort. The next year the Panama Canal opened and bankrupted every railway, mule track, ferry crossing and stagecoach route in Central America. From that year, Tehuantepec began to die and not even the discovery of oil (long before, the Aztecs had found it in sticky lumps which had squeezed from the ground — they burned this magic stuff at religious ceremonies) managed to work a cure on the Isthmus or to bring it any degree of prosperity. Today it looks pathetic; it is rough country, and hot and infertile; the Indians, living an ordinary existence in a hand-to-mouth way, look embattled; the towns and villages are less than they were in the Aztec times. But Mexicans have learned how to derive comfort from the past — from actual events or the reassuring simplicity of myths and even among the cactus-covered hills and bumpy desert of Tehuantepec the backward-looking Mexican was greatly encouraged by the thought that it had once known glorious days.