And he spoke neither English nor Spanish. Where, I asked him in faulty German, had he boarded the train? In Veracruz, he said. But I had not seen him in Veracruz, or Papaloapan, or anywhere else. Well, he said, he had not left his seat. What had he eaten?
'A sandwich. Cheese.'
In two days?
'Yes,' he said. 'I do not like the toilets. I don't eat, so I don't use the toilets. I had a Pepsi-Cola. But I will eat in Guatemala.'
'We may not be in Guatemala until tomorrow.'
'Then I will eat tomorrow. It is good to be hungry for a few days. People eat too much — especially these people. You see them? Using the toilet?'
'Where are you going in Guatemala?'
'Maybe to the ruins. I don't know -1 have to go back to work next week.'
'Back to-?'
'Germany.'
'Ah.' He was riding in Second Class. Second Class had torn black plastic seats. First Class had torn red plastic seats. Some of First's had arm-rests. But Second was slightly more crowded. How did he like it?
He gave me a smile — it was the first time he had smiled, and it was one of triumph and real pleasure. He said, 'Three dollars.'
Neither an explorer nor a hitch-hiker; no rucksack, no compass. Just a tidy little suitcase and small gold-rimmed glasses covered with dust, an empty Pepsi bottle and a sandwich wrapper, sitting with Teutonic uprightness through the tumbling hinterland of Chiapas. His map was small, he had no other book, he did not drink beer. In a word, a skinflint.
Another train, with seat numbers and compartments, might have thrown us together, and I would have suffered his leaden company for two days. If there was a virtue in the disorder of this carelessly-run Mexican train it was that it allowed a passenger the freedom of its shabby cars. There were no rules; or, if there were, no one followed them. So it was easy for me to reject the companionship of this fellow — not that he offered any: tightfisted people are as mean with friendship as they are with cash; suspicious, unbelieving and incurious. In a way, I admired his aloofness, though his aloofness was inspired by nothing more admirable than his egoism and his craving for the cheap. And yet, by refusing to take any risk he was taking the greatest risk of alclass="underline" being solitary in a place so hot and anarchic one really needed friends.
'Have a good trip,' I said.
He nodded, he did not smile. And that was all. A chance meeting — nothing more. We merely brushed past each other at that far side of the world.
Another Chinese store, more tobacco fields, and the afternoon grew cloudy but no less hot. I lay on the seat and went to sleep again and did not wake until I heard one of the Guatemalan Children yelling — as he had done since Veracruz — 'Let 's go! ' But this time he was yelling at me. I woke in darkness; the train had stopped, and now the Guatemalan mother was bending over me.
'If you are going to the frontier — you said you were — we could share a taxi and save some money. I have only three suitcases and these four children. We can fit in the back seat and you can sit in front with the driver. What do you say?'
It had been an awful trip and listening to her I saw my chance of leaving Mexico and this train and this town — just stepping across the border. Later, I decided that I would have been better off in a hotel in Tapachula, but at the time I was very eager to leave it. So I said yes and half an hour later, in darkness, I was walking across the bridge over the Suchiate River. Behind me were the rolling hills and banana groves of Mexico; ahead, a black brow of rock and on its cliffs and outcrops dim blue jungle and white lianas and vines, picked out in moonlight; and when the river ceased to thunder I could hear the screech of bats.
6 THE 7:30 TO GUATEMALA CITY
Guatemala had begun suddenly: a river-frontier and on the far bank jungly cliffs and hanging vines. Storm clouds were passing in front of the moon, which gave them druids' hooded shapes and grey rags. The border town of Tecún Umán was so small it made Tapachula seem a metropolis, and a Tapachula billboard I had seen advertising a hotel (GoodFood, Comfortable Rooms, Low Prices), stayed in my memory as I ate a vile meal of beans in an ill-lit room of a much meaner hotel in Tecún Umán. This was called the Pearl. A hundred years ago, a British traveller in Guatemala wrote, 'A stranger, arriving without introductions, can only go to a very low public house. . intended for the accommodation of mule drivers, cattle herds and petty retail dealers.' But I was alone — not a mule driver in sight; I would have welcomed his company. There was a dog by the door, chewing at the fleas on his hindquarters. I gave him a lump of gristle from my plate and, watching his wild eyes as he champed it, I thought how lucky I was that there was a train out of this place in the morning. 'Very early,' the hotel-keeper had said. I had replied, 'The earlier the better.'
Tecún Umán was a tiny railhead — no more. But once, from here to Panama — then a neglected province of Colombia — it was all regarded as the Kingdom of Guatemala. It was an unstable and quarrelsome kingdom and, when a series of revolts resulted in a constitutional regime and a kind of futile independence, it became even more unstable. It was also menaced by Mexico — by the absurd Iturbide who had had himself crowned in a self-flattering ceremony: 'emperor by the grace of God and of bayonets,' was Bolivar's jeer. Guatemalan independence had meant the setting up of town councils, and in 1822 these councils voted to annex Guatemala to Mexico, reasoning that it was better to join the Mexicans than be humiliated in battle by them. But Mexican instability was apparent from the first, Iturbide was recognized as a tyrant, and a year later Guatemala withdrew and her National Assembly declared the independence of the five provinces: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
This was nominally a confederation, the United Provinces of Cental America, though for the next eighty years the foreign traveller continued to call them 'Guatemala' and to treat his adventuring in the jungles of Costa Rica and Nicaragua and his canoe trips across El Salvador's Lake Ilopango as travel in Guatemala. If Guatemala was merely a misnomer for this jumble of countries, 'United Provinces' was the kind of fatuous violation of language that in our day terms the grotesque dictatorship a 'People's Republic'. Civil war was almost immediate in the five countries: it was woodsman against townie, conservative against liberal, Indian against Spaniard, tenant farmer against landlord; the provinces battled, and unity disintegrated in sabre charges and cannon fire. Within fifteen years the area was political and social bedlam — or, as one historian has written, 'quintuple confusion'. American and British travellers grumbled heartily about the difficulties of cutting their way from village to village, and remarked on how little was known of this attenuated tissue of geography on which South America swung from North America.
It is hard to keep the names straight. Guatemala is the anvil-shaped one next to Mexico; El Salvador is the tiny one being squashed by the blob of Honduras to the shape of a rectangular raft and proving unsea-worthy on its launch into the Pacific; Nicaragua is a wedge, Costa Rica the cuff on Panama's extended sleeve. There are no railways in Belize. Considering their history — not only the riots, civil wars and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism — it is a wonder they exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea. These countries lie on one of our planet's worst fault-lines, a volcanic fissure which, each year, threatens to shift in the tremendous way it has been promising, and swallow them and their wranglings. Oddly, the proudest boast of these countries is their volcanoes: they are on every national emblem, on most of the money, and figure prominently in their superstitions.