The Old Patagonian Express

  While the election was going on, the Germans, the British, the Lebanese, the Americans, the sunbathing Japanese – all the communities that live in Barranquilla, all members of the Cabana Club – were observing the curfew from the swimming pool and patio of the Prado Hotel. The women read old copies of Vogue, the girls played radios, the men twirled the gold crucifixes around their necks; they flirted and idled. A mile away, in town, the farmers sat down in doorways, with the money in their pockets from the votes they had sold, and they waited until the curfew was lifted, so that they could go back to the mountains.

  One commodity links all the people in Barranquilla: dope. Some grow it, some sell it, some buy it, some smoke it. Many people are in Barranquilla’s jail for trafficking in dope (Henri Charrier, ‘Papillon’, spent a year in the same jail after he left Devil’s Island), but far more have become millionaires by trading in marijuana. They even have a group name: they are marijuan-eros – marijuanaists. The profit is obvious in Barranquilla – more obvious than in any other city in South America, because Barranquilla is poorer than any other city. Less than a mile from the littered streets of downtown Barranquilla, on gentle hills that have a view of the Magdalena mudflats and the haze which hangs over the Caribbean shore, there was street after street of the strangest houses I had ever seen. They are the houses of the smugglers and drug peddlers who are known imprecisely as ‘the Mafia’. The houses are built like bank vaults. They have high walls or unclimbable fences surrounding them. Most are faced with marble slabs and many have no windows. Windows here are long slits, six inches wide. They are more than burglar-proof; they are capable of withstanding a siege. These houses make the fortified suburb of the Bel-Air Estate in California look positively friendly and unprotected. And how, one asks, do the citizens of such a poor town find the money to build such prisons, each house a series of slabs arranged mausoleum-style? Why so many guard dogs, air-conditioners, coils of barbed wire?

  It helps to look at the map to find the answer. Barranquilla is strategically located. It has a port. Between the mountains to the east are many flat hidden valleys, where planes can land and take off without being detected. The mountains rise to a high peninsula called the Guajira. The weather is perfect on the Guajira for growing marijuana, and the Guajira is a one-crop economy. Pot-smokers the world over recognize the taste of its product, known as Colombian Gold. Most of the houses in that Barranquilla suburb belong to farmers who have made their pile in the drug trade. The profits are vast for both farmer and smuggler. It is not unusual for a plane to leave with a ton of raw marijuana, and the smuggling has become such an institution that Barranquilla is the centre of the cocaine trade as well. The coca leaves are grown in Peru, smuggled into southern Colombia, processed in Cali, packaged in Bogotá, freighted to the coast, and by the time they arrive in Barranquilla it is ready for consumption. A kilo is worth half a million dollars in the States. The risks are high, but so are the rewards.

  The planes are chartered in Miami; the small ones make refuelling stops in the Caribbean, the larger ones fly direct to the Guajira. Occasionally, arrests are made – flying an empty plane into Colombia is a criminal offence – but only the small-fry are sent to jail. The rest buy their way out or pull strings in Bogotá – only the most naive person balks at the suggestion that many Colombian politicians are closely involved in the drug trade. The successful American smuggler can make millions in this way; the Colombians use their money by buying expensive houses, or cars, refrigerators, hi-fi sets and deep freezes in Miami; they set themselves up in Barranquilla as gentry. But, apart from their unusual houses, they try to remain inconspicuous. One drug dealer imported a Rolls-Royce Corniche at a cost of $400,000; but the other dealers would not let him drive it on the streets of Barranquilla – they felt it was too ostentatious, and that reprisals would be made against them. As for the small-fry who are caught and jailed – not much can be done for them. Their money is confiscated and they serve long sentences. There were twenty Americans in the Barranquilla prison when I passed through, and the American consulate which had been closed for a number of years had reopened solely to deal with them. But the consulate also issues visas: the demand for American visas increased a hundred-fold after the Barranquillans became rich in the drug trade.

  The election was over, but the Bogotá train was not leaving until the next day. With a day to kill I did what most people do with time on their hands: I went sight-seeing. I took a dreadful local bus west along the coast road to the old – it was founded in 1533 – city of Cartagena. Cartagena had been what Barranquilla is now, a place of smugglers, pirates and adventurers, and the fortifications are like the Barranquilla houses on a large scale. If you can ignore the pitiful huts along the way, and the scary road, and the scream of the horn, and the heat, Cartagena is charming. It is venerable and attractive, a museum in the open air. The castle, the sea walls, the plazas and churches and convents are all pretty and well-preserved. But it is boredom and idleness that motivate sightseers, and even in this fine city there was not enough to take away my feelings of restlessness. I wandered into the Hotel Bolivar. The upstairs dining room was empty, but cool; four fans turned on the ceiling and the boughs of trees rattled against the balcony. I had fresh hearts of palm and a dish of Cuban rice and wrote a letter to my wife on the hotel’s note-paper, and at once it seemed a day well-spent.

  On my way to the post office to mail my letter I passed the curio shops. The curios were identical to the ones I had seen all through Central America: leather goods, Indian embroidery (it struck me once again that the Indians had been subverted, if not blinded, by having been turned into seamstresses: or was the crocheting of table napkins a native art?), clumsy carvings, cow-hoofs made into ashtrays and alligators into lamp stands and more stuffed toads with glass eyes. Trade was brisk. Here was a line of tourists near a cash register: one carried a coconut mask, another a stitched tablecloth, and others fibre mats and alligators. The last, a rather abstracted woman in a sweat-stained frock, held a coiled whip.

  One street in Cartagena I found worthy of study. Here there was nothing but pawnshops, each with the sign We Buy And Sell Everything. It was not the old clothes, the toasters, the watches and used boots that interested me; it was the tools. Half the merchandise in these pawnshops was builders’ equipment. There were wrenches, drills, screwdrivers in many sizes, awls, claw-hammers, planes, axes, monkey-wrenches, plumb-bobs, spirit-levels, plasterers’ hods and spikes and trowels. All had been pawned, all were for sale. And I began to understand why no one was working on those half-built houses between Cartagena and Barranquilla: the workers had pawned their tools. If there had been a few tools in each shop, or only a few shops selling tools, it would not have seemed so remarkable. But these pawnshops were like hardware stores, and the signs said that the pawned goods would be kept for three months and then sold; this was resignation and no mistake. There were enough tools in the shops to rebuild Colombia, and enough idle people, too. But it was a smuggling, thieving society; a hammer or a saw was not a tool – it was a form of currency, an article of trade.

  But, so far, what had I seen? Only this small stretch of coast. I decided to move on; I might, I thought, find something different. I began to seek information about the train and I rediscovered, after that pleasant train-ride in Panama, the difficulties of train travel in Latin America. It was never simple. And it was not the poor service or the bad trains, but rather the fact that no one knew anything about them. The general routes are well-known from Mexico to South America; many people travel from capital to capital. But they fly, and the poorer travellers take the bus. Few people seem to know that the railways exist, and those who claim to know have never taken them. One person says it takes twelve hours from Santa Marta to Bogotá, another swears it is twenty-four hours; I was told there was no sleeper, but the Cook’s Timetable listed one. Was there a diner, did I need a sleeping bag, was it air-conditioned? ‘Do yourself a favour,’ I was told. ‘Take the plane. That’s what Colo
mbians do.’

  I found that I was always travelling to a popular place by an unknown route. I seldom had any idea of how much it would cost, or how long it would take, or even whether I would arrive. This made for a certain anxiety, since I was always presuming or drawing on my own conclusions from the thin black line that signified a railway on the map. I knew I was not in Europe, but this train service was less dependable than any in Asia. No time-tables were published locally, little information was available, and what there was to know could only be found out at the station itself, if I had the good luck to locate it (‘The railway station – are you sure you want the railway station?’ I was asked by any number of vague locals). The information I needed I usually got from a man sweeping out the waiting room or a mango seller at the door. Before each journey, I inquired at the station from these people (who knew the answer because they were always there: they saw the trains come and go); I found out the times of the trains. But I was still uneasy; I had seen nothing in writing, I had no ticket, no official confirmation. Ticket windows were only opened a few hours before the train was to go. The mystery was not solved until the day of travel. I would arrive at the ticket window and give my destination, and the ticket seller would be surprised to see me, and a little incredulous, as if I had penetrated his secret by some devious stratagem. He would hesitate and giggle; but the game was over – I had won by finding him. He had no choice but to sell me a ticket.

  And it did seem something like an elaborate game in which I was pursuing something that often eluded me; discovering the train, finding the station, buying the ticket, boarding and dropping into a seat became an end in itself. The travel was epilogue when it was not anti-climax. I was so preoccupied with this ticket-business that I frequently forgot where I was going, and, on being asked, found the question of dubious pertinence and said, ‘Nowhere.’

  A Colombian song goes,

  Santa Maria has a train,

  But it hasn’t got a tram!

  Santa Marta, where Simon Bolivar died penniless in a borrowed shirt, is the oldest town in Colombia. In the past few years it has become a resort, but the expensive hotels are outside town, away from the bars and pool halls. The town makes strenuous claims to being Bolivar’s shrine, and like every other town of size in Latin America it has an impressive statue of the liberator. There is a corrosive irony in this Bolivar-worship, but it is quite in key with the other misapprehensions on the continent. Bolivar came to Santa Marta because he was in danger of being assassinated in Bogotá. He was regarded as a dictator in Peru, a traitor in Colombia, and in Venezuela – his birthplace – he was declared an outlaw. For setting Latin America free, his reward was penury and vilification. The monuments are an afterthought and the words chiselled onto them the battle cries he uttered when the revolution seemed a success. Which town council could raise a subscription to engrave his last judgements on any of these marmoreal plinths? ‘America is ungovernable,’ he wrote to Flores. ‘Those who serve the revolution plough the sea. The only thing to do in America is to emigrate.’

  Bolivar had come here to Santa Marta with the intention of fleeing the country. It could not have been much of a place in 1830; it was very little now: a small town, a beach, some cafés, a brothel (‘Mister!’), a strip of shoreline on the flat blue Caribbean. On this cloudless March day, sanctified by sunlight, the town was very empty. I got off the Barranquilla bus and walked along the sea front, asking passers-by for directions to the station. The girls in the brothel, so pleased when I entered, howled in annoyance at me when I said I was merely inquiring the way to the railway station.

  The ticket window was closed, but on it, sellotaped to the glass and scribbled in ballpoint, were the times of the trains: one departed, one arrived; and the name of the departing train, Expreso de Sol. I sat on a bench and waited for the window to open. Then I heard shouting and saw four policemen chasing a young man through the lobby. They wrestled him to the floor and wrapped chains around his legs and wrists. Then, they sat him next to me. He had wild hair and fresh wounds on his face and was breathing hard, but once he sat down he did not move. I stood up and walked to a different bench. If he decided to make a break for it, one of those armed policemen might feel impelled to shoot. I made sure I was out of the line of fire.

  A tiny old lady with a shopping bag (she too was on her way to Bogotá) walked over to the prisoner. She put her face close to his, then exchanged a few words with the policemen. She chose to sit near me.

  ‘What is he?’ I asked. ‘A thief?’

  She looked at me and screwed up one eye. She had thick glasses that distorted her eyes and she wore a rather mad expression.

  ‘Crazy!’ she hissed.

  The ticket window opened. I went over and asked for a sleeper to Bogotá.

  ‘You have a family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They are travelling with you?’

  ‘They are in Great Britain.’

  ‘Then I cannot sell you a bed,’ she said. ‘Those compartments are for families. Six people or more.’

  I bought an ordinary ticket and asked, ‘What time does the train arrive?’

  She smiled, but looked doubtful. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘And a bed is impossible, is that right?’

  ‘If you really want one, ask the conductor when you get on the train. He might sell you one.’

  I’ll bribe the conductor, I thought; but when I saw the train and examined the sleepers – small dirty rooms with padded shelves – I was not encouraged. I hurried down the street and bought some loaves of bread, some cheese and what the girl called ‘eastern baloney’. There was no point in bribing my way into a sleeper: there was no bedding, no water, no locks on the doors. I would take my chances here in the open car, in a sloping plastic seat. Something told me this was going to be a long trip.

  We left at sunset, and at once I had an urge to get off the train. Already I was uncomfortable, and the journey was not worth this discomfort. Children were crying in their mothers’ arms and as soon as we left the station people began complaining loudly about the broken lights and the crowds and the heat. You’re sitting in my place! a boy yelled at an old man, who was travelling with his elderly wife. I’m not moving, said the man. Everyone was perspiring and muttering. I can hardly breathe, said a woman. What a smell! said a cruel-looking man into his hand. I had been moved by the tenderness on the platform, the fathers kissing their children good-bye, the boys hugging their girl-friends, the husband and wife holding hands. But now these same people were squawking irritably and I loathed them. I thought: They have to be here. They have a purpose. They’re going home, or to work, or to meet friends. I had no such justification.

  I was a victim of my plans. I had got this far and had boarded the train for no other reason than to be on the train. It was going to Bogotá, so I was. But Bogotá meant nothing to me: I was going there in order to leave it. At the best of times such a trip could be a lark, but this one had begun joylessly. It was too late to get off the train; we were moving away from the sunset, into darkness; the whistle was blowing and the passengers, quieted by the racket of the wheels, were smiling rather sadly. I was sorry that the train was not taking me out of Colombia, but only deeper into it, on a route that everyone had warned me about – the heat, the mosquitoes, the Magdalena swamps – to a capital no one praised.

  Out of Santa Marta we crossed a green plain at the far end of which were mountains of pale velvet, a nap of shrubbery which was yellow in the salmon-coloured light that shone from the hinge of sun. Then, along the Caribbean for several miles, and the pink sky made the swamps pink and the still pools mirrored the new stars. This, with the palms and the fertile fields, gave me a little hope. The tidal pools were stirred by the breeze and lost their colour.

  The train was almost full, but at Cienaga, the first stop, a cry went up from the crowd waiting at the platform, and fights broke out as the people pushed into the cars. ‘Colombia has taken ardently to the air,’ says The South
American Handbook. ‘No one rides the trains’ I was told in Barranquilla. Some people denied that the train even existed; and I had had to search for days to get information about it. How, then, to explain these crowds? Perhaps it was very easy. Despite the protestations that it was a rich civilized country, it was actually a country of semi-literate peasants, most of whom lived in inaccessible areas. Such conditions – poverty, illiteracy, remoteness – created an oral tradition, and it was this, the hearsay of the bush telegraph, that conveyed information about the trains. We were late arriving at Cienaga, but the people had been there on the platform all day: it had been said that a train was due. Now they scrambled to the few empty seats, dragging boxes and suitcases after them. But the rest – and there were many – simply stood in the aisle, or sat on their cardboard boxes. The aisle was jammed. It was like a homeward-bound commuter train of exhausted strap-hangers. The difference was that this train was going 750 miles to Bogotá.

  There was no air in the car. It had begun to rain, a warm night-time drizzle; the passengers had shut the windows. The lights flickered, the train lurched, and the passengers were so closely packed that the slightest lurch had them yelling in complaint. Now, I thought, someone is going to turn on a radio. But, before the thought came whole, the music started, an awful trumpeting and harmonizing, the Latin quick-step that was like acid in my ears. The rain, the music, the hot steamy car; and the mosquitoes, the dim lightbulbs that looked like withered tangerines. I propped my window up and pulled out Boswell, but I had not read two sentences when the lights failed entirely. We were in darkness.