'Very ugly,' said Victor.
'I think he is an American,' I said.
'He must be a German,' said Victor. 'Germans drink beer like that.'
We were speaking in Spanish — incautiously, it turned out, for a moment later the man stood up and said in fluent, American-accented Spanish, 'I am an American and this is the way Americans drink beer.' He drained his bottle, belched and walked towards Second Class.
While we were eating, I got a severe stomach cramp. I excused myself and went back to my compartment. The train had stopped. This was Oruro, a fairly large city, mostly Indian, near Lake Uru Uru. The rain had intensified; it beat against the window in a torrent made silver by the arc-lamps of the station. I got into bed and turned off the light and curled up to ease my cramp. I woke at about midnight. It was very cold in the compartment and so dusty — the dust seemed an effect of the train's rapid motion -1 could barely breathe. I tried the lights, but they didn't work. I struggled to open the door — it seemed locked from the outside. I was choking, freezing and doubled-up with stomach pains. I had no choice but to remain calm. I took four swigs of my stomach cement, and then buried my face in my blanket and waited for the morphine to work.
At dawn, I saw why I had not been able to get the door open: it had been bolted top and bottom by Fernando, who was still asleep in the upper berth. And I still felt terrible. I had imagined that after fifteen hours we would be off the high plains and perhaps rumbling through a valley nearer sea-level. I had been mistaken. We were still at 12,000 feet and travelling across a gaunt moonscape of dry rocks and empty craters. Alcohol worsens the symptoms of altitude sickness; and a hangover at a high altitude makes orle feel close to death. The landscape was cheerless and full of hard sharp rocks, a plain of tormented flint. There were not even Indians here in the cold Cordillera de Chichas. The few pools of water I saw looked gelid, and then I noticed that these were crusts of dusty ice, and further on dirt-speckled swatches of snow, like hanks and rags of torn underwear. Snow!
Over a breakfast of dry toast and tea, I talked with Victor. It seemed that he and Fernando (the surly man had disappeared) had decided to get away from it all. They had chosen a town in Southern Bolivia; the train would stop there later in the day. What did they plan to do there?
'Nothing,' said Victor.
I said I knew exactly what he meant.
'And maybe read,' said Victor. 'I love to read American novels.'
'Who are your favourite authors?'
'E. Bing Walla,' he said without hesitation. 'Also Artur Ailie and TylaCowdway.'
'Never heard of them,' I said.
The paperbacks were in his briefcase, Spanish translations of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey and Taylor Caldwell. 'This,' he said, picking up the Taylor Caldwell novel, 'is about Cicero. But I am sure you have read these authors.'
'I have never read a single word of any of them.'
'What is your book?'
It was a Jack London novel, The Assassination Bureau. I had not been enjoying it. 'It has a bad smell. In English we say, "It stinks".'
'Eet sdeenks,' he repeated.
'I feel terrible,' I said. 'It's this altitude. I think I should go back to bed.'
I went and lay down on my bunk, propped by a pillow, and watched our progress through creased mountains the colour of gunpowder. I guessed that we must by now be descending from the high plains. What settlements I could see were derelict, with ruined churches and collapsed fences, but otherwise there was nothing for miles but scrub and rock and small brown creeks. Fernando and Victor came into the compartment from time to time. Are you all right? they asked. I said I was fine, but I still felt crummy, and I was growing worried: I had drunk the last of my cement, and still my stomach cramps had not gone away.
The hours passed and the train rocked enraging the porcupine which now lived in my abdomen. Then we came to Tupiza, and Fernando and Victor said goodbye. Even in sunshine Tupiza, a heap of brown houses on a hillside, looked as forlorn as Dogpatch. There were condors circling it and some curious Indians squinting at the two new arrivals, who would be spending several weeks with them. Just the thought of standing on the platform in such a place, and watching the train depart as silence sifted down on the village, was enough to make me shudder.
We moved off at the speed of a jogger and for the next few hours followed the west bank of a wide muddy river, the Camblaya. There were bushes here, and cactus growing like cudgels, and even some cornfields between the dry hills. I thought then that we had descended to a lower altitude, but really it had not changed much. I was deceived by the disappearance of my cramps; feeling slightly better I believed we had left the high plains. But only this river valley was fertile — the rest was dry and mountainous desert, the maddeningly unfriendly landscape of a nightmare. It was an immense and empty country. There were brambles and small willows near the diminished river, but the rest was dusty blue- the hills, the gorges, the twisted knots of cactus.
The hills grew flatter, the river was lost from view, and for miles ahead there was only this wasteland. The train did not vary its speed. It crept slowly along, under a clear sky, across this repeating aridity. The only interesting landscape was elsewhere: to the west, where there were canyons; to the east, a mountain range of snowcapped peaks, with the same elusive sparkle of a mirage that I had detected the day before outside La Paz. The Andes, people call them; but the name means nothing. It seemed remarkable to me that mountains so huge and snowy should have such a simple general name and not be known by individual names. But this variegated desert, a thousand miles of plateau and strange shapes, was known by no other name than the high plains. And even the map is notoriously without names or descriptions. The train rolled through cloud-land; there were a half a dozen stops, but the rest was unknown. Now everyone on this train was travelling to the frontier town, which had a name.
Nearer Villazon the train had speeded up and sent grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given — we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border. I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.
'We will be here a long time,' he said. He made it sound like years.
The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square home-made umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast — at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. 'Are you in that sleeping car?' asked a man hurrying towards me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.
I told him I was.
'What time is it leaving?'
I said, 'I wish I knew.'
He said, 'I am going to get some answers.'
He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, 'Go away!'
The man came out of the station. He said, These people are all whores.' He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.
The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazon. The sleeping car looked very silly, stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.