A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazon, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.
Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.
'What time are we going?1
'I do not know,' he said.
I wanted to go home.
But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.
I left the sleeping car and walked towards a low lighted building which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.
A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.
'What train is that?'
'It is the train to La Quiaca.'
'Shit!' I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.
Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.
The tracks up to Tucuman are in bad shape,' he said. 'You might not get there for days.'
Damn this trip, I thought.
We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead centre of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.
So I did what any sensible person would do, stuck on the Bolivia-Argentine frontier on a rainy night. I went to my compartment and washed my face; I put on my pyjamas and went to bed.
There was a knock on the compartment door: the conductor.
'Tickets please.'
'Where are we?'
'LaQuiaca.'
Still on the border.
'When are we leaving?'
'In a few minutes.'
Sure, I thought, and went back to sleep. Despair and impatience had a soporific effect. But I was woken some time later by a train whistle and a grunting of metal, then the anvil noises of the coupling. At last we were on our way.
I slept for twelve hours. I woke again at six in the morning, and saw that we had come to a station. There were three poplars outside the window. In the early afternoon I woke again. The three poplars were still outside the window. We had not moved.
This was Humahuaca, a small town in northern Argentina. We had travelled no more than 100 miles since leaving La Quiaca, and had dropped about 1,000 feet. The day was cool and sunny, with a crackle of insects and a joyful sound of church bells. It was Sunday, and the place looked serene. I was unused to seeing flower gardens — rows of chrysanthemums — and a kind of dogged prosperity. It was the first railway station I had seen for weeks that did not have at least one pig snuffling near the tracks or chickens clucking in the station master's office. I was encouraged by this appearance of order: this was obviously a different country, and the filthy train with its fly-blown coaches looked out of place here.
A glamorous woman of about forty was showing a pretty girl around the station. She said in Spanish, 'This is the train to Tucuman — it came all the way from Bolivia. Aren't you glad we came by car?'
The girl winced at the Panamerican.
I wanted to see the town, but I was afraid of being duffilled. Huma-huaca was a nice place, but it was miles from anywhere; and there would not be another train for three days.
I asked the sleeping car attendant what was up.
The tracks, he said. Somewhere down the line there was a break in the tracks, either flooding or a landslide. It could not be fixed earlier because the men could not work at night. It was serious: something to do with a volcano.
'We cannot leave for hours,' he said.
I went for a stroll in the town and saw Indians returning from church with wilted flowers. Then I remembered that it was Palm Sunday. There was great contentment on the faces of these people, a kind of after-church radiance, the pure joy that goes under the name of holiness. There were hundreds of them, and each one carried a flower.
But the rest of the town was shut, the restaurants closed, the bus depot deserted. I made a circuit of the town park and then returned to the railway station.
In the hours that had elapsed since the Panamerican had arrived at the station the atmosphere had changed. The train had brought squalor to the station and transformed it into a muck-heap. There were orange peels and banana skins under every window — the station was too respectable to have pigs nearby to eat them; and water poured from beneath the coaches, and there were heaps of shit under each toilet pipe. The sun had grown stronger, and flies collected around the coaches. This express train, so dramatic when it was on the move, became foul when it was stationary.
I thought that I was the only foreigner on the train. I should have known better. Experience had shown me that there was always a German in Second Class, slumbering on his pack-frame and spitting orange pips out of the window. At Humahuaca, it was Wolfgang. He had boarded the Bolivian segment of the train in the cold downpour at Oruro and he had suffered in Second Class ever since. I had not seen himi though he said he had seen me, buying tea from the Indian woman in La Quiaca. He had been travelling for months through Central and South America, and had only the vaguest idea of where he was going. He was certain of one thing: if he did not have the luck to find a job in Buenos Aires he would be in Argentina for the rest of his life. Frankly, he was eager to go home, he said.
Sometimes, in the presence of such a person-I had met many-I felt rather ashamed that I had travelled so swiftly from Boston. Two months before, I had boarded the Lake Shore Limited in South Station and after a few snowy days I had been rattling under clear skies to Mexico. I had not been robbed or fallen seriously ill; I had seen pretty places and met pleasant people. I had filled hundreds of pages of my diary and now I felt certain that I would make it to Esquel in Patagonia, the small town I had seen on my map which had become an arbitrary destination. I had breezed through most of the countries, and I was always brought up short when I met another traveller who said he was planning to spend a month in, say, Barranquilla or Cuzco. 'I didn't like Ecuador,' an American told me in Peru. 'Maybe I didn't give it enough time.' He had been there two months, which seemed an eternity tome.