I had a political reverie on that train. It was this: the government held elections, encouraged people to vote and appeared to be democratic. The army appeared to be impartial, the newspapers disinterested. And it remained a peasant society, basically underfed and unfree. It must perplex any peasant to be told he is living in a free country, when the facts of his life contradict this. It might be that this does not perplex him; he has every reason to believe, in accordance with the evidence, that democracy is feudal, a bureaucracy run by crooks and trigger-happy vigilantes. When one sees a government of the Guatemalan sort professing such high-mindedness in its social aims and producing such mediocre results, one cannot be surprised if the peasant concludes that communism might be an improvement. It was a Latin American sickness: inferior government gave democracy an evil name and left people no option but to seek an alternative. The cynic might say - I met many who did - that these people are better off with an authoritarian government. I happen to think this is nonsense. From Guatemala to Argentina, the majority of the countries are run by self-serving tyrannies which are only making the merciless vengeance of anarchy inevitable. The shabby deceits were as apparent from this train as a row of Burma-Shave signs.
The stinging sweetness of the sugar cane, the putrefaction in every dismal village, the sorry children, the very frail huts and the sombre faces of the passengers in the train - it all made my mood reflective. And, having taken the train, I had the illusion that I was not terribly far from Boston -1 had left the American border just a week ago. The train had given me a sense of continuity which, unlike the dislocation and disconnection one experiences after a plane journey, had made Guatemala seem incongruous and puzzling. On this branch-line from Boston I had found barefoot Indians and starving children and rather ominous-looking peasants with two-foot knives resting on their knees.
The atmosphere in the train was grim. This was the bottom of the social scale, mainly people going to the next village, a ten-cent ride to sell a dollar's worth of bananas. The children chattered; no one else did. The adults seemed incurious, even surly, and those whose eyes I caught watching me appeared guiltily suspicious and turned away. In conversation they were off-hand. They asked no questions at all; their replies were brief.
At Coatepeque I said to a man on the platform, 'It's cold here. Is it always this cold?'
'Sometimes,' he said. He walked away.
At Santa Lucia I asked a man how far he had come. He said Mazatenango.
'Do you live at Mazatenango?'
'No.' He said nothing more. When the train moved on he changed his seat.
At La Democracia I told a man I was headed for Zacapa. He said nothing. I said I was taking the train to Zacapa. He said nothing. I wondered if he was deaf. I said, 'Is it hard to get to Zacapa?'
'Yes,' he said, and lapsed into silence once again.
He was smoking a cigarette. Most of the passengers had cigarettes in their mouths. It seemed to be a country of chain-smokers. A British traveller remarked, 'There are fashions in Guatemala which it would require more than common charity to speak of with respect; and among these stands foremost the immoderate use of tobacco, by both sexes.' That was in 1828. The traveller - his name was Henry Dunn - estimated that men smoked twenty cigars a day and women fifty cigarettes. No one on my train smoked a cigar, but as I have said the passengers represented the poorest class in the country.
It helps to take the train if one wishes to understand. Understanding was like a guarantee of depression, but it was an approach to the truth. For most tourists, Guatemala is a four-day affair with quaintness and ruins: veneration at the capital's churches, a day sniffing nosegays at Antigua, another at the colourful Indian market at Chichicastenango, a picnic at the Mayan temples of Tikal. I think I would have found this itinerary more depressing, and less rewarding, than my own meandering from the Mexican border through the coastal departments. The train creaked and whimpered but, incredibly, it kept to its schedule: at 3:20 we were at Santa Maria - as promised in Cook's International Timetable - and, eating my fifth banana of the day, I studied our progress on our climb to Escuintla and the greater heights of Guatemala City.
Now there were volcanoes all around us, or volcanic hills with footstool shapes that the Mexicans call 'little ovens'. It was cooler, and as the sun grew pinker and a ridge of hills rose to meet it where it hovered drawn to the shape of a chalice near the Pacific, the gathering darkness threw half-tones across the hills; those fragments of white were the hats and shirts of cane-cutters marching home. But it was not an ordinary jungle twilight, the mould of shadow under wide gleaming leaves, flickering hut fires and the jostlings of mottled pigs and goats. The sky ^as in flames far-off, and when we came closer the fire was revealed as enormous: bonfires of waste cane burned in sloping fields and sent up cloud tides that were purple and orange and crimson; they floated and lost their colour, becoming white until the night absorbed them. Then this smoke fogged the tracks and it was as if we were travelling on some antique steam locomotive in a mountain pass in Asia, through fog that smelled of stale candy. In the words of Hart Crane, we 'roared by and left / three men, still hungry on the tracks, ploddingly / watching the tail lights wizen and converge, slip- / ping gimleted and neatly out of sight.
The last landscape 1 had seen in daylight had been a row of volcanoes, shaped like a child's drawing of mountain peaks, with stiff steep sides and narrow summits. As we drew near to Guatemala City there was no landscape to speak of. There were the cane fires, and I could see the headlamps of cars on roads, but the rest was black with a scattering of lanterns, and now and then an illuminated church steeple at a mountain village. It was chilly as we passed through the highlands to enter the city on the plateau: huts, houses, streetlights, buildings. We crossed a bridge over the main street. The passengers who had come from the coast looked down at the glare and the crowds with what seemed like alarm.
Guatemala City, an extremely horizontal place, is like a city on its back. Its ugliness, which is a threatened look (the low morose houses have earthquake cracks in their façades; the buildings wince at you with fright lines), is ugliest on those streets where, just past the last toppling house, a blue volcano's cone bulges. I could see the volcanoes from the window of my hotel room. I was on the third floor, which was also the top floor. They were tall volcanoes and looked capable of spewing lava. Their beauty was undeniable; but it was the beauty of witches. The rumbles from their fires had heaved this city down.
The first capital had been destroyed by torrents of water. So the capital was moved three miles away to Antigua in the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1773, Antigua was flattened by an earthquake, and a more stable site - at least it was farther from the slopes of the great volcanoes - was found here, in the Valley of the Hermitage, formerly an Indian village. Churches were built - a dozen, of Spanish loveliness, with slender steeples and finely finished porches and domes. The earth shook - not much, but enough to split them. Tremors left cracks between windows, and separated, in the stained-glass of those windows, the shepherd from his brittle flock, the saint from his gold staff, the martyr from his persecutors. Christs were parted from their crosses and the anatomy of chapel Virgins violated, as their enamelling, the porcelain white of faces and fingers, shattered, sometimes with a report that startled the faithful in their prayers. The windows, the statues, the masonry were mended; and gold leaf was applied thickly to the splintered altars. It seemed the churches had been made whole again. But the motion of earthquakes had never really ceased. In Guatemala they were inescapable. And in 1917 the whole city was thrown into its streets - every church and house and brothel. Thousands died; that unprecedented earthquake was seen as a judgement; and more fled to the Caribbean coast, where there were only savages to contend with.