'But this one is dirty as well.'
'I'll have a bath when I get to Guatemala City.'
'All the other tourists take buses. Or taxis.'
'I'm not a tourist.'
'Yes,' he said, seeing that my mind was made up, 'the train is very interesting. But for some reason no one ever takes it.'
He was mistaken about that, for one thing. There was a crowd of people at the station early the following morning. They were undersized - farmers in slouch hats and straw sombreros, Indian women with papooses and pigtails, barefoot children. Each person had a large bundle, a basket tied with vines or a home-made suitcase. I concluded that this was the reason they had chosen to take the train - their belongings would have been unwelcome on a bus. The train also took a different route from any of the buses, and the train-fare from Tecún Umán to Guatemala City was less than two dollars. Until ten minutes before the train was to leave, a policeman kept us away from the platform barrier, and we stood clutching our tickets - strips of paper with all the intermediate stations listed: one's ticket was guillotined at the station where one was to disembark.
The difference between Mexican trains and Guatemalan trains was obvious as soon as we were permitted to board. The cars - four of them - were very small wooden contraptions with large windows. There was no glass in the windows, no paint on the wood. It was narrow gauge and had the look of a train you might see in a decayed amusement park, too tiny and decrepit to take seriously. The seats were also tiny and they were filled within five minutes of our departure. I sat knee to knee with an Indian woman who, as soon as we left, put her chin against the red blanket on her shoulder and went to sleep. Her thin restless child, a small girl in a torn dress, stared at me. No one in the train spoke except to haggle with the hawkers boosting fruit on us, at the stations along the way.
Although I had the satisfaction of knowing that the train was a continuation of the one I had taken that frosty morning two weeks before in Boston, this passenger train to Guatemala City held no promise of comfort or companionship, and on this day obscured with smoke and mist I had no real expectation of anything but a fairly rough ride through damp and shrouded jungle. The jungle, where it was not an overhang of dark trees, gave the impression of dumped litter - wrappings, string, broken boxes, bits of rag; these I saw were not junk, but dead leaves and vines and flowers. The jungle itself was grey this cloudy morning, and the train rocking on the track and showing its scars (the scorched ceiling, the splintered seats), and stopping and starting with great uncertainty, seemed to me highly unreliable, if not downright dangerous. On the map it seemed a simple transit: Veracruz-Tapachula-Tecún Umán-Guatemala City - two days at most. But the map was misleading, and this train - which emitted groans on curves and slight ascents - did not really seem capable to me of completing the trip. The passengers' faces were set in frowns, as if they shared my conviction. The track had been cleared, but ten feet away the jungle dripped and was so dense no light showed through it.
A Bostonian had come this way in 1886, and charmed by the wildness of the place had regarded the arrival of the railway with a kind of horror. His was in a sense a typical curmudgeonly snobbery about travel, a bragging about the glory of travelling through trackless woods with a pack of Indians and mule-skinners (Evelyn Waugh fills the Introduction to When The Going Was Good - the curmudgeon's catch-phrase - with the same grumpy boasts). 'Old travellers know how soon the individuality of a country is lost when once the tide of foreign travel is turned through its towns or its by-ways,' writes William T. Brigham in his Guatemala. (I think he is the same William Brigham who nearly electrocuted himself in Hawaii when he touched a wooden stick which a native magician had loaded with some high voltage mumbo-jumbo.) Brigham soon makes his fears particular: 'When the Northern Railroad extends through Guatemala, when the Transcontinental Railway traverses the plains of Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Canal unites the Atlantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mulepath and the mozo de cargo (carrier of bundles) will be supplanted, and a journey across Central America become almost as dull as a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne.'
How wrong he was.
Chiapas had been arid - a stony exposed landscape that looked as if it had yet to be possessed by man. This part of Guatemala was heavily forested at the border- the national frontier was abruptly apparent in the rising land and the vine-covered trees - and as we descended to Coatepeque and Retalhuleu the scenery became tropical in its disorder -the jungle sprawled, the huts were poor and small and badly-made-and the only symmetries were the stretches of cane fields. In Mexico I had seen the cut cane in railway freight cars; here it was loaded on wagons and old tottering trucks, and sheaves of it dragged on the road and dropped, so that most of the roads were strewn and looked as if a fierce storm had just blown through and knocked these bare branches down.
The cane cutting had given Guatemala a sickly sweet odour. The sugary smell was released by the men with machetes, but as the day grew hotter the smell weighted the air. It was a noxious sweetness, like syrup made into smoke, with a whiff of vegetables and an abrasive chemical aftertaste. And there was in it, too, a sharper stink, the nauseating gust you would get by burning sugar over a fire and reducing it to black junk. This was the height of the cane harvest and the smells and the stacked trucks and the worker gangs made Guatemala seem a place of considerable enterprise, but of an old-fashioned plantation sort.
We travelled parallel to a road, and crossed it occasionally, but for most of the time we were not near to places that were very densely inhabited. The towns were small and tumbledown and in this bus-riding country most of the people lived on the main roads. After a few stops I could see that this was regarded as a local train - no one was going any great distance. Passengers who had got on at Tecún Umán were going to the market at Coatepeque, which was on a road, or to Retalhuleu to get to the coast, about twenty-five miles away. By noon we were at La Democracia. At the time I had concluded that this was an ironical name, but perhaps it was a fitting name for a place with a sweet-sour smell, and huts made out of sticks and cardboard and hammered-out tins, and howling radios and clamouring people - some boarding buses, some selling fruit, but the majority merely standing wrapped in blankets and looking darkly at the train. And tired children were hunkered down in the mud. Here was a fancy car among the jalopies, and there a pretty house among the huts. Democracy is a messy system of government, and there was a helter-skelter appropriateness in the name of this disordered town. But how much democracy was there here?
There were election posters pasted on the pillars of the shop verandahs. There would be an election in a few months. On the way to Guatemala City I tried to engage passengers in political talk, but I quickly discovered that Guatemalans had none of the candour I had found in Mexicans. 'Echeverría was a bandit and a hypocrite,' one man told me; 'Lopez Portillo is just the same - give him time.' Guatemalans were more circumspect: they shrugged, they spat, they rolled their eyes; they did not utter their political preferences. But who could blame them? For twelve years the country had been governed by a party of fanatical anti-communists - a party greatly fancied by America's Central Intelligence Agency, which has yet to perceive that fanatical anti-communists are almost invariably fanatical anti-democrats. In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was a wave of guerrilla activity - kidnappings, murders and bombings; but the army proved ineffectual against the guerrillas and in Guatemala due process of law had always been notoriously slow. The answer was simple. Using the advice of the United States Embassy's military attaché (later found murdered), a number of vigilante groups were set up. A vigilante assassination-squad is answerable to no one, and the 'White Hand', Guatemala's version of a volunteer Gestapo unit, has been responsible for thousands of murders and torturings. It seems strange that such a small country could produce such an appalling haemorrhage, that a system of terror and counter-terror could be responsible for so many deaths. And you might ask: What is the point? Seventy-five percent of Guatemalans are peasants of a classical sort: subsistence tanners and part-time cane-cutters, coffee-pluckers and cotton-pickers. The government, while insisting that it is democratic and does not imprison people, rigs elections and allows the 'White Hand' and a score of other vigilante groups to terrorize a justifiably sullen population. (There are plenty of freelance gunmen in Guatemala; in 1975, the vice-president claimed that he had enough armed men in his party alone to invade Belize, if the army proved gutless or unwilling.) Given the circumstances, it did not seem to me unusual that La Democracia was a mess or that my fellow passengers on the train were gloomy.