It was a shady road, circling around a hill, past a meadow and a glugging stream. What a transformation in landscapes! Earlier in the day I had thought I was going to wither and die in the wastes of the Motagua Valley, and here I was ambling through green humpy hills to the sound of birdsong. It was sunny late-afternoon as I walked from Guatemala into El Salvador, as fresh and breezy as a summer day in Massachusetts. That border-crossing was as happy a hike as I have ever made and reminded me pleasantly of strolling down the Amherst road into Shutesbury.
A car was parked near a hut, the frontier post. A soldier got out and examined my suitcase. 'What is this?'
'A book. In English, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.'
'Over there,' he said, 'Show your passport.'
'Where are you going?' asked the Immigration Officer.
'Santa Ana.'
A car had arrived at the shed, and a man had got out and was now behind me. He said, 'I am going through Santa Ana. Want a ride?'
'How much?'
'Free!'
So I went to Santa Ana, which was not far away. We passed Lake Guija and more volcanoes and fields of coffee and tobacco.
'Why don't you come with me to San Salvador?' said the man, when we arrived at Santa Ana. 'I am leaving tonight.'
'I think I will stay here.'
'I would advise you not to. This place is full of thieves, pick-pockets and murderers. I am not joking.'
But it was nightfall. I decided to stay in Santa Ana.
8
THE RAILCAR TO SAN SALVADOR
The town only looked Godforsaken; in fact, it was comfortable. It was a nice combination of attributes. In every respect, Santa Ana, the most Central American of Central American towns, was a perfect place -perfect in its pious attitudes and pretty girls, perfect in its slumber, its coffee-scented heat, its jungly plaza, and in the dusty elegance of its old buildings whose whitewash at nightfall gave them a vivid phosphorescence. Even its volcano was in working order. My hotel, the Florida, was a labyrinthine one-story affair, with potted palms and wicker chairs and good food - fresh fish, from nearby Lake Guija, was followed by the crushed velvet of Santa Ana coffee, and Santa Ana dessert, a delicate cake of mashed beans and banana served in cream. This pleasing hotel cost four dollars a night. It was a block from the plaza. All Santa Ana's buildings of distinction - there were three - were in the plaza: the Cathedral was neo-gothic, the town hall had the colonnaded opulence of a ducal palace, and the Santa Ana theatre had once been an opera house.
In another climate, I don't think the theatre would have seemed so special, but in this sleepy tropical town in the western highlands of El Salvador - and there was nothing here for the luxury-minded or ruin-hunting tourist - the theatre was magnificent and strange. Its style was banana republic Graeco-Roman; it was newly whitewashed, and classical in an agreeably vulgar way, with cherubs on its façade, and trumpeting angels, and masks of comedy and tragedy, a partial sorority of Muses - a pudgy Melpomene, a pouncing Thalia, Calliope with a lyre in her lap, and - her muscles showing through her tunic as fully developed as a gym teacher's - Terpsichore. There were columns, too, and a Romanesque portico, and on a shield a fuming volcano as nicely proportioned as Izalco, the one just outside town, which was probably the model for this emblem. It was a beautiful turn of the century theatre and not entirely neglected; once, it had provided Santa Ana with concerts and operas, but culturally Santa Ana had contracted and catering to this shrunken condition the theatre had been reduced to showing movies. That week, the offering was New York, New York.
I liked Santa Ana immediately; its climate was mild, its people alert and responsive, and it was small enough so that a short walk took me to its outskirts, where the hills were deep green and glossy with coffee bushes. The hard-pressed Guatemalans I had found a divided people -and the Indians in the hinterland seemed hopelessly lost; but El Salvador, on the evidence in Santa Ana, was a country of half-breeds, energetic and full of talk, practising a kind of Catholicism based on tactile liturgy. In the Cathedral, pious Salvadoreans pinched the feet of saints and rubbed at relics, and women with infants - always remembering to insert a coin in the slot and light a candle first - seized the loose end of Christ's cincture and mopped the child's head with its tassel.
But no citizen of this town had any clear idea of where the railway station was. I had arrived from the frontier by car, and after two nights in Santa Ana thought I should be moving on to the capital. There was a train twice a day, so my time-table said, and various people, without hesitation, had directed me to the railway station. But I had searched the town, and the railway station was not where they had said it was. In this way, I became familiar with the narrow streets of Santa Ana; the station continued to elude me. And when I found it on the morning of my third day, a mile from the hotel in a part of the town that had begun to tumble into ploughed fields and cash crops, behind a high fence and deserted apart from one man at an empty desk - the station master -1 understood why no one knew where it was. No one used the train. There was a major road from Santa Ana to San Salvador. We take the bus: it seemed to be a Central American motto in reply to all the railway advertising which said, Take the Train - It is Cheaper! It was a matter of speed: the bus took two hours, the train took all afternoon.
The station was like none I had ever seen before. In design it looked like the sort of tobacco-curing shed you see in the Connecticut Valley, a green wooden building with slatted sides and a breeze humming through its splinters. All the rolling stock was in front - four wooden cars and a diesel. The cars were labelled alternately First and Second, but they were equally filthy. On a siding was a battered steam locomotive with a conical smoke stack, its boiler-plate bearing the inscription Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, Pa -110 - it could have been a hundred years old, but the station master assured me that it ran perfectly. Nearer the station was a silver-painted wooden railcar, the shape of a cable car. This contraption had its own engine, and it was this, the station master said, that made the run from here to San Salvador.
'Where have you come from?' asked the Stationmaster.
'Boston.'
'Plane?'
'Train.'
He shook my hand and said, 'Now that is something I would like to do!' He had been to Zacapa, he said, but he hadn't liked it much - the Guatemalans were a confused people. The Hondurans were worse. But what about my route from Boston? He questioned me closely: how many hours from Chicago to Fort Worth? What sort of trains? And the Mexican railways - were they as good as people said they were? Which trains had dining cars and pullmans? And had I seen anything like his steam locomotive? 'People tell me it is now worth a lot of money - I think they are right.' Where was I going from here? When I told him Argentina, he said, 'Wonderful ! But be careful in Nicaragua - there is a rebellion there at the moment. That cruel man, Somoza.'
We were standing near the railcar. The station master shook his head at it. 'It is rather old,'he said, 'but it goes.'
It was leaving for San Salvador after lunch. I checked out of the Florida and, at the station, bought my ticket - a bargain at thirty-five cents for thirty-five miles. I had planned to sit near the front of the railcar, but the engine was noisy and as soon as we were on our way I had found two Salvadoreans in the back to talk to. They were both salesmen, in their mid-twenties. Alfredo was stocky and dark and looked athletic in a squat muscular way; he sold plastic basins and household fixtures. Mario was thin and had a mirthless chattering laugh. He sold toothpaste, oil, soap and butter. They had been sent by their companies to Santa Ana and their territory was in and around Santa Ana, nearly the whole of western El Salvador. It seemed a big area, I said. They reminded me that it was a very small country: they had to visit twenty or thirty shops a day to make a profit.