But on this tram, the Old Patagonian Express, I looked like everyone else; slightly unshaven, fairly presentable, with a battered suitcase, vaguely European, moustache drooping, scuffed leakproof shoes. It was a relief. I was, at last, anonymous. But what a strange place to be anonymous in! I blended with the foreground. But what a background! Amazing: I belonged on this train.
The boy woke.
‘How far to Norquinco?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They all look the same to me.’
The man behind me said, ‘About two hours.’
He did not gesture out of the window. He looked at his watch. The landscape was no help in determining where we were.
The boy’s name was Renaldo. His surname was Davies – he was Welsh. This part of Patagonia was full of Joneses, Williamses, Powells and Pritchards, Welsh families who had migrated across the plateau from Rawson and Trelew and Puerto Madryn with the intention of founding a new Welsh colony. They are tough, independent and undemonstrative people, not the singers and dreamers one associates with Wales, but a different breed altogether, church-goers, sheep farmers, tenaciously Protestant, with a great sentiment for a homeland they have never seen and for a language few speak. (A classic of Welsh literature is called Dringo’r Andes – ‘Climbing the Andes’ – by the Welsh woman Eluned Morgan, who was born in the Bay of Biscay during the great migration.) Renaldo wanted to speak English, but his English was unintelligible to me, and so we spoke Spanish.
‘I learned English on a cargo ship,’ he said. ‘That is not a good place to learn English.’
He had been on a ship for two years, and now he was on his way home.
‘If you were on a ship,’ I said, ‘you must have been to Boston.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But I was all over America. The whole continent.’
‘New York?’
‘No.’
‘New Orleans?’
‘No.’ And now he looked puzzled. ‘America – not the United States.’
‘South America?’
‘That’s right – all over it. All over America,’ he said. ‘And Asia – Singapore, Hong Kong. And Bombay. And Africa – Durban, Capetown, Port Elizabeth. I have been everywhere.’
The ship he had sailed in was Peruvian, but the crew was mainly Chinese and Indian – ‘the other Indians, different from ours. I liked them, more or less. They talked, we played cards. But the Chinese! I hated them! They look at you – they don’t say anything. If they want something, they just – he snatched with his hand. ‘Grab, grab, that’s all they do.’
I asked him what his impression had been of South Africa. His reply surprised me.
‘South Africa is a very bad place,’ he said. ‘Very pretty, but the society there is cruel. You won’t believe me, but they have signs here and there that say “Only for Whites”. Taxis, buses, shops – “Only for Whites”. The white people go here, the black people go there. Strange, isn’t it? And most of the people are black!’ He reported this more in wonderment than in outrage, but he added that he did not approve.
Why not? I asked.
‘It’s no good. “Only for Whites”, “Only for Blacks”,’ he said. ‘It’s a stupid system. It shows they’ve got big problems.’
I was encouraged that a Patagonian with no education could show such discernment. I said, ‘I agree.’
He said, ‘I’d rather spend my life in Barranquilla than Durban. And Barranquilla is really awful.’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘I was in Barranquilla. I hated it.’
‘Isn’t it a pig-pen? A really ugly place.’
‘They were having an election when I was there.’
‘They have elections? Ha!’ he said. ‘There is nothing there at all!’
He was chortling, thinking of Barranquilla. I looked past him, out of the window at the dune-like hills and the low bushes, the blinding sun, the puffs of dust thrown up by the train. There was a condor – condors didn’t flap their wings – circling in the distance. The Patagonian’s disgust with Barranquilla was a hatred of slow decay, of mildew and insects. Here nothing rotted. A dead thing was quickly a dry carcass – it shrivelled and was bones. There was no humidity, nothing stagnant. It was desert cleanliness, the rapid destruction by sun and arid air, a dehydrated wilderness, a fossil on the planet’s flank. Few live things had survived here, but those that had were practically indestructible.
‘So you have seen the world,’ I said. ‘But why are you going home?’
‘Because I have seen the world,’ he said. ‘There is nowhere like this. I am going to get a job, maybe building houses or fixing engines. In Norquinco or Esquel.’
‘I am going to Esquel,’ I said.
‘It is quicker to take the bus from Bariloche.’
‘I wanted to take the Patagonian Express,’ I said.
‘The old one!’
When we arrived at Norquinco and he pulled his suitcase to the door, he said, ‘The Queen of England – you know who I mean?’
‘Queen Elizabeth? What about her?’
‘She owns a ranch just outside Esquel. Lots of cattle – very nice.’
I spent the afternoon on that train as I had spent afternoons on trains all the way through the Americas. I remembered people who had been cruel to me; I rehearsed cutting remarks that I should have uttered; I recalled embarrassments in my life; I re-ran small victories and large defeats; I imagined being married to someone else, having children, getting divorced; I elected myself president of a banana republic and tried to cope with a noisy Opposition; I went to medical school and set up in practice and carried out tricky operations; I told a long humorous story to a large gathering, but in the end the prize went to someone else. I died, and people talked very loudly about me. It was a fairly typical afternoon of travelling.
I had been using the hamlet of Leleque on my map as a landmark. But Leleque was still hours away. The train toiled, seldom running straight, occasionally stopping – a shout, the bell, the whistle, the bark, and then we were off again. I realized that my trip was ending, but I was not sad when I remembered that, in a few hours, at nightfall perhaps, the train would bring me to my destination and there would be nothing more. My mind raced ahead to the station at Esquel, the plane to Buenos Aires, to my arrival home. Yes, I would take a taxi at the airport – hang the expense. My destination was near; I was impatient.
But this landscape taught patience, caution, tenacity. It needed to be studied to be seen. A glimpse of it told nothing. Down the narrowness of the track beside the desert the labouring engine chugged, always seeming on the verge of spewing its guts out, exploding in a shower of metal and vapour, or else seizing up in a succession of glugs and stopping on a slope, rolling backwards into the dip, and going no more. It seemed a marvel that an old engine like this could keep going, and I came to see the gasps of the locomotive as energetic rather than feeble.
But there was not enough in the engine or the landscape to hold the attention. I concentrated on Boswell and ate grapes and dozed. The sun had dropped; the hills were higher to the west and the sun slid towards them. The wind was colder. I saw that there was no chance of our arriving at Esquel before dark. When darkness fell it did so in that sudden Patagonian way, as swiftly as a dropped curtain, filling the night with chill. In the desert silence was the sound of wind, and the fretting train. The train stopped at the smaller stations near Esquel; the locomotive trembled in the darkness, and beyond it the sky was an immense sieve of blue stars.
It was after eight o’clock when I saw the lights. I looked for more. There were no more. There was nothing to these places, I thought, until you were on top of them. I did not know at that moment that we were on top of Esquel. I had expected more – an oasis, perhaps taller poplars, the sight of a few friendly bars, a crowded restaurant, a flood-lit church, anything to signify my arrival. Or less: like one of the tiny stations along the line; like Jacobacci, a few sheds, a few dogs, a bell. The train emptied quickly.
&
nbsp; I found a man with an official-looking cap, and a railway badge pinned to his shirt. Was there a hotel near by?
‘Esquel is full of hotels,’ he said. ‘Some of them are good, too.’
I asked him to name one. He did. I took myself to it and had – but not out of choice – a cold bath. And then to the restaurant.
‘What will you drink? Red wine?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And what will you eat? Steak?’
‘Yes.’
The usual. But the atmosphere was different here, a kind of Wild West saloon feeling, people in town for the weekend, leathery faces, wearing their leather jackets indoors here, one man with his book propped on a chair-seat. Waiters hurried by with trays. I saw a clock, a calendar, a photograph of what was probably a local football team, a saint’s portrait.
I had been planning to go for a walk, to look for a bar. My muscles ached from the ride and I wanted to stretch. But there, in that chair, I started to doze. I shook myself awake and called for the bill.
The sand and grit between the pages of Boswell tumbled onto my chest as I lay in bed. I read a sentence, watched the sand slide out and in the act of brushing it away fell asleep.
It had been my intention to arrive in Esquel on Holy Saturday and to wake on Easter Sunday and watch the sunrise. But Easter had passed. This was no special date, and I had overslept. I got up and went outside. It was a sunny breezy day – the sort of weather that occurs every day of the year in that part of Patagonia.
I walked to the station. The engine that had taken me to Esquel looked derelict on the siding, as if it would never run again. But it had a hundred more years in it, I was sure. I walked beyond it, past the one-storey houses to the one-roomed huts, to where the road turned into a dusty track. There was a rocky slope, some sheep, the rest bushes and weeds. If you looked closely you could see small pink and yellow flowers on these bushes. The wind stirred them. I went closer. They shook. But they were pretty. Behind my head was a great desert.
The Patagonian paradox was this: to be here, it helped to be a miniaturist, or else interested in enormous empty spaces. There was no intermediate zone of study. Either the enormity of the desert space, or the sight of a tiny flower. You had to choose between the tiny or the vast.
The paradox diverted me. My arrival did not matter. It was the journey that counted. And I would follow Johnson’s advice. Early in his career he had translated the book of a Portuguese traveller in Abyssinia. In his preface, Johnson wrote, ‘He has amused the reader with no romantick absurdity, or incredible fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at least probable, and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him.’
The sheep saw me. The younger ones kicked their heels. When I looked again, they were gone, and I was an ant on a foreign ant-hill. It was impossible to verify the size of anything in this space. There was no path through the bushes, but I could look over them, over this ocean of thorns which looked so mild at a distance, so cruel near by, so like misshapen nosegays close-up. It was perfectly quiet and odourless.
I knew I was nowhere, but the most surprising thing of all was that I was still in the world after all this time, on a dot at the lower part of the map. The landscape had a gaunt expression, but I could not deny that it had readable features and that I existed in it. This was a discovery – the look of it. I thought: Nowhere is a place.
Down there the Patagonian valley deepened to grey rock, wearing its eons’ stripes and split by floods. Ahead, there was a succession of hills, whittled and fissured by the wind, which now sang in the bushes. The bushes shook with this song. They stiffened again and were silent. The sky was clear blue. A puff of cloud, white as a quinceflower, carried a small shadow from town, or from the South Pole. I saw it approach. It rippled across the bushes and passed over me, a brief chill, and then went rucking east. There were no voices here. There was this, what I saw; and, though beyond it were mountains and glaciers and albatrosses and Indians, there was nothing here to speak of, nothing to delay me further. Only the Patagonian paradox: the vast space, the very tiny blossoms of the sage-brush’s cousin. The nothingness itself, a beginning for some intrepid traveller, was an ending for me. I had arrived in Patagonia, and I laughed when I remembered I had come here from Boston, on the subway train that people took to work.
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1975
Published in Penguin Books 1980
Published in Penguin Classics with an Introduction 2008
Copyright © Paul Theroux, 1979, 2008
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193077-0
Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express
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