Back at my hotel, which was not a good hotel, I wrote about the soccer game. The writing made me wakeful, and there were noises in the room - occasional scratchings from the ceiling. I opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and began to read. It was, from the first chapter, a terrifying story: Pym is a stowaway; he becomes trapped between decks and, without food or water, he suffers the pitching of the ship. His dog is with him. The dog becomes maddened and goes for him. Pym nearly dies, and is released from this prison only to find that there has been a mutiny on board, and there is another storm. All this time, in my own narrow room, I had been hearing the sinister scratchings. I switched out the light, went to sleep and had a nightmare: a storm, darkness, wind and rats scrabbling in a cupboard. The nightmare woke me. I groped for the light-switch. And in this lamp's glare I could see that there was a hole in the ceiling, directly overhead, the size of a quarter. It had not been there before. I watched it for some minutes, and then a pair of yellow teeth appeared at its chewed edge.
I did not sleep that night.
9
THE LOCAL TO CUTUCO
Even Salvadoreans, with their little-country loyalty and their violent nationalism, regard Cutuco as a hole. And you know, as you see Nicaragua just across the border, that the end of the line cannot be far away. This is an observable fact. The train from Boston comes to a complete stop in Cutuco. After that, there is a ferry ride of anywhere from eight to eleven hours (it depends on the tide) across the Gulf of Fonseca to Nicaragua. If there is no Indian uprising, or peasant revolt, or civil war, it ought to be possible to make your way by road through Nicaragua, if only to judge how much reckless exaggeration there is in the commonly held view that Nicaragua is the worst eyesore in the world: the hottest, the poorest, the most savagely governed, with a murderous landscape and medieval laws and disgusting food. I had hoped to verify this. The inhospitable country, like the horrible train ride, has a way of bringing a heroic note to the traveller's tale. And though I had had a few set-backs on the trip from South Station to San Salvador Central it had, for the most part, been fairly clear sailing. But Nicaragua was something of a problem.
I had been thinking hard about Nicaragua ever since I had read, months before leaving Boston, that the guerrilla war (which was in part an Indian uprising) had spread from Managua to smaller villages. And why was it, I wondered, that all these villages seemed to be on my proposed route through the country? My method for making an itinerary usually did not include newspapers. I got the best maps I could and, with guidebooks and what railway timetables I could lay my hands on, tried to determine how I might join one railway with another. I never gave any thought to hotels; if a town was important enough to be lettered on a map I assumed it was worth visiting (some surprises were inevitable: Zacapa was on most maps, Santa Ana was not; but that kind of discovery sustains and emboldens the traveller). I had heard that Nicaragua was Central America's answer to Afghanistan, but apart from this cloudy image and the historical fact that from 1855 to 1857 Nicaragua had been governed by a five-foot Tennessean named William Walker (he changed the national language to English, instituted slavery and had plans for annexing Nicaragua to the American South; this midget was shot in 1860), I knew little about the country. It had been ruled barbarously by the Somoza family for nearly forty years - that was common knowledge. But this guerrilla war? Th° newspaper reports, which I now depended on, differed in assessing its seriousness.
Through Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador I bought the local papers and tried to discover what was happening in Nicaragua. The news was always bad and it appeared to grow worse. GUERRILLAS ATTACK POLICE STATION one day was followed the next day by SOMOZA IMPOSES CURFEW. Then it was GUERRILLAS ROB BANK - I made careful translations of the headlines - and SOMOZA LAYS A FIRM HAND. In Santa Ana I read GUERRILLAS KILL TEN, in San Salvador the headline was SOMOZA ARRESTS 200 and INDIANS TAKE UP ARMS. Latterly I had read UNEASY CALM PREVAILS IN NICARAGUA, but just before leaving San Salvador there was a news item in La Prensa headlined GUERRILLAS BUY $5 MILLION OF ARMS FROM UNITED STATES. President Carter had remained prudently neutral on the Nicaragua issue; it was apparently hoped in the United States that Somoza would be overthrown. This was a pious hope, and it was no help to me. By the end of February the revolution had yet to occur; there was still sporadic fighting and reports of massacres and Somoza was in power. It looked as if he would remain in office for another forty years, or at the very most pass the machinery of government - in Nicaragua's case these are instruments of torture- on to his son. I began to worry about crossing Nicaragua. I decided to go to the frontier. I would talk to the people there. If the news was still bad I would take a detour around it. I went by train to Cutuco, to examine Nicaragua. It was like going to the dentist and hoping that the office was shut, the dentist laid up with a bad case of lumbago. This had never happened to me at the dentist's, but on the frontier of Nicaragua my reprieve came in just that way.
'You cannot go into Nicaragua,' said the Salvadorean at his border post by the ferry landing. Was there a muddier sight in all the world, a gloomier prospect, than the Gulf of Fonseca? 'The border is closed. The soldiers will send you back. '
This was better than a stay of execution. I was absolved of any responsibility to travel through Nicaragua. I returned to San Salvador. I «ad changed my hotel room to one in which I was sure there were no rats. But I had nothing more to do in San Salvador. I had given a lec-ure on the topic that had occurred to me on the train to Tapachula: little known Books by Famous American Authors - Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Devil's Dictionary, The Wild Palms. I had looked at the Diversity (and no one could-explain why there was a mural, in the uni-of this right-wing dictatorship, of Marx, Engels and Lenin). I had a day in hand, so I decided to take the Cutuco train again, but this time to stop along the way.
I knew from my previous trip that long before San Miguel, which was three-quarters of the way to Cutuco, the journey ceased to be interesting. As before, there were two passenger cars and not more than twenty-five people travelling. While we were waiting for the train to be shunted to the platform I asked some of them where they were going. They said San Vicente. It was market day in San Vicente. Was San Vicente pretty? Oh, very, they said. So I decided to get off the train at San Vicente.
No two trains are alike. Salvadorean trains are just as broken down as Guatemalan ones, but there are differences. They might have been given life by the same fruit company, but they have evolved differently. This is true of the world's railways - I have never seen two even remotely similar. 'El Jarocho' is as distinct from The Golden Blowpipe' as its name. It is more than national differences; trains take on the character of their routes. On the Local to Cutuco the uniqueness is obvious as soon as you board. Here, at the gate, was the same sad dark little man who had greeted me from the Railcar. He wore his sports shirt and carried his old revolver in a holster and some bullets in an ammo belt. I hoped he would not be provoked to fire it, because I was sure it would explode in his face if he did and I would be killed, not by the bullet, but by shrapnel. He punched my ticket, the train creaked to the platform, and I boarded. All the seats were torn. They were stuffed with horse-hair: it was agony to lean back.