'These seats are really in bad condition.' The Salvadorean man across the aisle was apologizing. He kicked the seat in front and went on, 'But they are strong - look, the seats themselves are fine. But they are ripped and dirty. They should fix them.'
I said, 'Why don't they fix them?'
'Because everyone takes the bus.'
'If they fixed them, everyone would take the train.'
'True,' he said. 'But then the train would be crowded with all the world.'
I agreed with him, not because I believed what he said but because I was sick of lecturing people on disorder. Central America was haywire; it was as if New England had gone completely to ruin and places like Rhode Island and Connecticut were run by maniacal generals and thuggish policemen; as if they had evolved into motiveless tyrannies and become forcing-houses of nationalism. It was no wonder that, seeing them as degenerate states, tycoons like Vanderbilt and imperial-minded companies like the United Fruit Company took them over and tried to run them. It should have been easy enough. But tycoons and big companies did not have the morality or the compassion or the sense of legality to make these places work; they acted out of contempt and self-interest; they were less than colonial - they were racketeers, and they spawned racketeers. Lawless, the countries became bizarre with inequality, and hideously violent. El Salvador deserves to be serene, but it is not. Football, the simplest sport in the world, in this place had become a free-for-all of punchy frustration in which the spectators made themselves the center of attention. Why shouldn't we have some fun, they might reply: we live like dogs. Football wasn't football, the Church was not the Church, and this train was unlike any I had ever ridden on. By the time it had got to this condition, any sensible railway company would have collected the insurance money for the damage and started all over again, the way they do in India. But this was El Salvador, not India - indeed, this heap of junk would have been laughed out of West Bengal, which is saying something.
But, truly, the worst trains take one across the best landscapes. The crack express trains - the bullet trains in Japan, The Blue Train' from Paris to Cannes, 'The Flying Scotsman' - these are joyrides, nothing more; the rapidity diminishes the pleasure of the journey. But the Local to Cutuco is a plod through the spectacular. If one is not put to flight by the pistol-toting ticket-puncher, or the filthy cars or painful seats, one is rewarded by the grandest scenery south of Massachusetts. And the train is so geriatrically slow, one gets the impression that El Salvador is as big as Texas. It is the effect of the feeble engine and all the stops: three and a half hours to go the forty miles to San Vicente.
The spectacle takes a while to begin.
El Salvador had seemed to me to be tidy, fertile and prosperous. And it is, in the west. But east of the capital, on the other side of the tracks - here, desolation lies. It starts where the station precincts end, at a quarry on the edge of town. For a full hour as the train moves there is nothing but the stone-age horror of little huts: mud and bamboo, cardboard and sticks, tin and mud, and on the roofs every sort of refuse to hold the things down, since one can't drive nails into mud or cardboard. The roofs are amazing collections of broken things. Look at this one: an old rusted sewing machine, an iron stove in pieces, six tyres, bricks, tins, boulders; and on that one splintered lumber and a tree branch and some stones. The huts lean against each Other and are propped against the steep sides of the quarry, pressed against the track, with no decoration but a picture of Jesus or a saint, and no colour but the rags hanging out to dry on a tripod of timbers. »t is a coffee-growing country. The price of coffee is very high. But these people really do live like dogs, and the dogs themselves seem to nave evolved downward into cowering creatures which never bark, but only limp and skulk and forage in dusty bushes with their snouts. i he dogs have been turned into a species of scavenging burrower, like a particularly mangy sort of aardvark. Now the train was moving so slowly, and was so empty and neglected, that children from the slum climbed shrieking into it and ran down the aisles, jumping from seat to seat. They hopped off at the continuation of the slum, on the next curve.
If the slum children had lingered another ten minutes on the train they would have seen open country, trees and wild flowers and singing birds. But the children do not stray into the countryside. Perhaps it is forbidden, or perhaps they are obeying the slum-dweller's instinct, which is to seek the protection of the slum and not to go beyond its boundaries. They are vulnerable in the outer world to policemen, landowners, tax inspectors; and in their rags they are easy to identify and humiliate. So, in the daylight hours, the slum is full and active and in Central America it nearly always has as its frontier a creek or stream or a railway track. And just past that natural frontier the slum ends and jungle or pasture land begins. Here, the slum gave on to coffee plantations, and it was reasonable to assume that those destitute people I had seen earlier were coffee-pickers. From what I found out later, their wages bore no relation to the price of coffee.
We climbed some low hills and then passed along the ridge of a higher one. I looked across the valley and saw a lake - Lake Ilopango -and a volcano - Chinchontepec. From these heights to San Vicente, where the vistas are shortened by the train's sinking into the eastern lowlands, the lake and the volcano grow huger and alter in colour as the sun shifts behind them. The first glimpse is impressive, but the lake swells and the volcano rises and for miles and miles they grow to almost unbelievable loveliness. The lake waters are blue, then grey, then black as the train mounts its own volcanic range and travels along the spine, passing the north side of this lake. There is an island in the lake. It appeared in 1880, when the water level suddenly fell, and is still there, like a dismasted flagship in this darkly chromatic sea. Between the lake and the train are low hills of green vegetation and a long sweep of treetops which, closer to the train, are banana and orange groves and tall clusters of yellow swaying bamboos. The foliage nearby is faded and dusty, but at a distance it is emerald green and looks dense and lush.
Now the lake is silver, with an enamelling of blue discs; now black, with furrows of frothy whiteness; now it is suffused with pinkness and at its shores takes the colour from the greenest trees. It was, to the lakeside Indians, much more than a body of water in which they washed and fished and quenched their thirst. The guidebooks merely repeat falsifications of its importance for credulous tourists. One guidebook says that before the Spanish conquest the Indians 'used to propitiate the harvest gods by drowning four virgins here every year'. Well, this might have been true, and it provides a cue for the joke that the ritual was abandoned for lack of suitable victims. But human sacrifice continued well into the last century at this lake, and it had nothing to do with the harvest gods. It was a complicated procedure, and purposeful.
There was a witness. His name was Don Camillo Galvar. He was Visitador-General in San Salvador in the 1860's. In 1880 he described ,what he had found out about the supposedly blood-thirsty practices of the Indians who lived near Lake Ilopango. 'The people of the pueblos around the lake,' he wrote, 'Cojutepeque, Texacuangos, and Tepezontes, say that when the earthquakes came from the lake, which they knew by the disappearance of the fish, it was a sign that the monster lord of these regions who dwelt in the depths of the lake was eating the fish.'
Not a harvest god, but a monster; and the Indians' fear was that unless this monster was 'provided with a more delicate and juicy diet worthy of his power and voracity' he would eat all the fish and there would be none for the fishermen to catch. The Indians said that the monster only ate fish 'as men eat fruit, to refresh and allay hunger.' The lake and the volcano rumbled and the fish began to disappear; the Indians 'deeply afflicted by the fish famine . . . collected at the command of their chiefs.' Sorcerers came forth in their ceremonial robes and headdresses and outlined what the Indians were to do: they were to throw flowers and fruits into the lake. Sometimes, this worked: the tremors ceased. But if they continued, the Indians assembled again and were told to throw in animals, preferably gophers, racoons and armadilloes and ones they called taltusas. The animals had to be caught alive and thrown into the water still kicking. Any Indian found throwing a dead animal into the water faced the severe penalty of being hanged with a zinak vine, because the monster lord would be enraged by having to feed on dead flesh.