Wolfgang's story was the same — a month here, a month there, two months somewhere else. He had been practically resident in these places; he was like a man looking for a new life. I knew I was merely skimming south, a bird of passage generalizing on the immediate. But because I had no camera, and had written so much, my impressions of what I had seen were vivid. I could call up Mexico or Costa Rica by glancing at- the conversations I had written, and from the particularities of the railway journey from Santa Marta to Bogotá I felt I could reinvent Colombia. Travel was, above all, a test of memory.
So, partly to kill time — the train was still stalled at Humahuaca — and partly to relieve myself of the guilt I felt with someone who regarded me as no more than a tourist, I asked Wolfgang what he remembered of the places he had been.
'This is a quiz,' I said. 'I'll say the name of a place and you tell me what you remember best about it. Pretend I'm someone who has never travelled anywhere -1 want to know what these places are like. Okay?'
'It's a good game,' he said.
'Ready? Here goes. Mexico.'
'Americans have a lot of trouble there,' said Wolfgang.
'Guatemala.'
'I missed the bus to San Salvador, but my pack was still on it, so my passport too. I spent three dollars on phone calls. It was terrible.'
'Nicaragua.'
'I should not have gone there.'
'Costa Rica.'
'Dull.'
'Colombia.'
'Lots of nice food in the markets, but I got sick there.'
'Maybe it was the food,' I said. 'What about Ecuador?'
'One month I am there, trying to take the buses.'
'Peru.'
'Nice and cheap.'
'Bolivia.'
'All the people in Bolivia are stupid.'
'Argentina.'
'I will be here for some weeks or months,' he said. 'So? I have passed the test?'
'You flunked, Wolfgang.'
He only became concrete when the conversation turned to the exchange rate. Here it was 670 pesos to the dollar, but there were towns where you could get 680. The difference was much less than a cent, but Wolfgang was the embodiment of the maxim I had devised earlier in this trip: It is the raggedest traveller who has the most precise notion of the exchange rate. Wolfgang wasn't looking for another life. Travel for him, as for many others, was just another way of saving money.
Without any warning, the train began to move. We ran from where we were standing on the platform and jumped on to the train, Wolfgang to Second, I to First. I did not see him again until two days later, inTucuman.
The Panamerican travelled along a flat green valley, beside a nearly dry but very wide river — the Rio Grande de Jujuy. Mountains rose swiftly out of the valley. They were old and cracked and extremely high, a whole range of them without a single tree. The cliffs, where they had been exposed to wind, were pink, smeared with maroon and orange — these were the high cliffs and peaks; the hills nearer the river were like mounds of mud. These hillocks, and the fact that the mountains were without any foliage, gave the mountain range a look of brutal authority: the contours were exposed, the flanks were pitted with rock-slides and clawed white by erosion, and the rounded peaks of the lower slopes looked like collapsed tents, or the blankets — with the same folds — that the Indians used to cover their belongings. A brown stream ran through the centre of the sluiced-out trough of river — this was all that was left of the Rio Grande; and on each bank there were poplars and willows and cactuses and mud-block houses at the periphery of ploughed fields. It was a strange sight, the bare mountains above the green valley, the wide river bed that had so little water in it, and the only human figure an old man, like the stereotype of the grizzled prospector, stumbling from bank to bank.
There were cornfields, tomato gardens and sunflowers, and fields of blue cabbage that looked much grander than the colourless huts. We were moving slowly through Argentina, but this was a more agreeable altitude. I could feel the change in myself, and I had slept well. I liked the look of Argentina. The landscape was wide-open and fertile. It seemed underpopulated, awaiting settlement, and it was easy to understand why Welshmen and Germans and Italians had come here and disappeared, carting their culture into a mountain valley and ignoring the rest of the world.
Dust flew through the window of my compartment. My worry was my wounded hand. I washed it and changed the bandage. I was sure that if dust got into my unhealed cut it would become infected. The dust storm ceased at Tilcara, which lay under poplars on the side of a mountain. There were people picnicking here, and it looked like a remote part of Italy. The people were almost certainly Italian settlers, the old women in black, the pot-bellied men standing in the shade of apple trees. But Tilcara was an oasis. A hundred yards outside town, after a notice Do Not Destroy the Trees (perversely enough, it was like a sign of civilization), the dust began to fly, and the naked mountains were streaked with yellow sandstone.
We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. The line was actual, a fissure that ran over the mountains which were themselves marked with stratified stripes as on a topographical map, pink, orange, green; indeed, the landscape was as simple and clearly coloured as a map, accurately reproduced on the paper square before me — black railway line running through brown valley edged in green, pink and orange contours in their proper places. This was near Maimara. There were only a few houses to be seen, but the yellow chapel had been built in the mid-seventeenth century. The people in these Argentine towns looked as if they were there to stay, while in Bolivia the towns had the look of imminent desertion.
A lame dog in Maimara reminded me that, since leaving the United States, I had not seen a dog that wasn't lame, or a woman who wasn't carrying something, or an Indian without a hat, or — anywhere — a cat.
We were supposed to have been in Maimara for three minutes, no more, but after an hour we were still there, in the late afternoon sunshine. I sat on the steps of the platform and smoked my pipe. Seeing me, a man on a path by the railway tracks came over and asked me where I was going. He was short, and very dark, with slits for eyes, a broad face and chubby hands. I assumed he was Indian, or half Indian — the Incas had come this far, and even beyond, as far as Jujuy.
I told him I was going to Tucuman on this train.
There was a volcano farther south, he said; it had caused a mudslide and ripped the tracks apart. It seemed that they were trying to firt it, but in any case it was four hours to Jujuy, and I certainly would not be in Tucuman until tomorrow.
'What's the point of travelling?' said this swarthy provincial. Tve been around the country-Jujuy, LaQuiaca, all the places. But none of them is as good as Maimara. We've got apples, corn, pears — everything you need. It's easy to grow things here, and it's a pretty town. I saw Villazon once- it was really ugly. I would hate to live there. Here, I have everything I need.'
'Good for you.'
'You should stay here,' he said.
The train doesn't seem to be going, so I guess I am staying here.'
'It is the volcano — it wrecked the tracks. Where are you headed after Tucuman?'
'Buenos Aires, and then Patagonia.'
'Patagonia! That's so far away they speak differently there.' He grinned at me. 'So you were at La Quiaca and you're going to Patagonia. They are at opposite ends of Argentina. I would never go to those places. I would rather stay home.'
'After Patagonia, I will go home.'
'That's the idea!' he said. 'It must be terrible to be so far away from home on a nice Sunday afternoon like this.'