The train plunged out of the tunnel and lost its racket in the sunlight and clear air. We teetered on a mountainside, and the subdued chug of the engine - muffled by the tide of air - was like a hushed reverence for the ten fertile miles of the Jiboa Valley, which began at the tunnel entrance and descended as evenly as a ski slope before rising at the foot of the volcano. The volcano was a darker green than the landscape it sprang out of, and it had leonine contours of light and shade, some like shoulders and forepaws, some muscled like flanks and hindquarters. But it had a carved considered look to it and seemed, as I sped towards it on the train, like a headless sphinx, green and monumental, as if its head had rolled away leaving its lion's body intact. It was easy to understand how the Indians hereabouts had come to believe that their lands were inhabited by monster lords. Not only did the mountains have a monstrous aspect, the animal shapes and clumsy claws of giants and demons, but they growled and rumbled and trembled and hollered, and shook down the flimsy huts of the Indians; they burned the Indians alive and buried them in ashes and made their fish disappear and ate their children. And these oddities of landscape were still a source of fear.
For the next forty minutes we rolled down the mountain valley towards the shadows of the volcano. And yet, so slowly were we moving, it seemed as if we were stuck fast at the rim of the valley and the volcano was rising and turning, revealing the lion's svelte back and lengthening, perhaps stretching to pounce in eruption, until finally, and just as I expected it to rise and roar, it disappeared - everything but those two ridges which were tensed like front legs. We were at San Vicente, its nearest town, and deep between its fore-paws.
Most of the passengers got out here and stumbled across the tracks. There was no one collecting tickets. The officials watched from the coolness of a grove of trees. The whistle blew; the train lurched towards Cutuco. Then the dust settled and with it the mournful stillness of the country town on a hot afternoon.
I asked the way to the market. A boy gave me simple directions: follow this road. He seemed surprised that anyone should need directions in this tiny place. But the railway station was not in the centre of town; it was half a mile, along the town's main street, from the station to the plaza. Most of San Vicente's houses are on that street; the street begins as dust, turns bouldery, then cobbled, and nearer the plaza is concrete. The market, which I had been told was interesting, was like an oriental bazaar - tent-shelters pitched along several small lanes. Each tent enclosure was piled with fruit or vegetables, or dead animals hung on makeshift gallows, or boxes of pencils or pocket combs. All the people in a particular section were selling the same thing: a section of fruit, one of vegetables, one of meat or household items; and further away was a section reeking of decayed fish. I bought a bottle of soda water and noticed that no one was hawking anything. The hawkers had gathered into groups - men here, women there- and were talking companionably.
At the end of the market precinct was the plaza, and fronting onto the plaza San Vicente's church. It is one of the oldest churches in Central America, and called El Pilar. Built by the Spanish in this remote town, it has not been restored: no restoration has been necessary. It was made to withstand the sieges of pagans and the ravages of earthquakes. It has survived them all; apart from a few broken windows it shows few signs of age or ruin. Its walls are three feet thick; its columns, twelve feet in circumference, are low plump pillars the thickness of a cathedral's. But El Pilar is little more than a chapel; it is the shape of the mausoleums I had seen in rural Guatemala, white and rounded, with the mosque-lik.; domes and squat arabesques that the Spanish gave their country churches. But its whitewash did not disguise its look of belligérance, nor did its stained-glass windows or crosses prevent it from looking like what it perhaps always has been - a fortress.
In the early nineteenth century there were a number of Indian wars in this part of Central America. By force of numbers and in their ferocity the Indians were able to overwhelm the Spanish in certain areas and create Indian strongholds, little kingdoms within the Spanish colony. From these places they made forays into Spanish towns and occasionally terrorized the inhabitants. Throughout the 1830's there were battles, and the largest number of Indians was led by a chief, Agostino Aquinas - he was a Christian - whose bravado brought him here to El Pilar in San Vicente. As a taunt to the Spanish, Aquinas rushed into El Pilar and snatched the crown from the statue of Saint Joseph. This he crammed onto his own head, declaring war on the Spanish. He then made for the mountains and, controlling a sizable district with his Indians, fought a guerrilla war.
The church could not have looked much different when Aquinas whooped in and desecrated it. The arches are heavy, the tiles immovable, the carved wooden altarpiece merely darker, and there is a narrow tomb-like quality to the interior. It may be the holiest building in town; it is certainly the strongest. It has, without any doubt, known service as a fortification.
Eleven old ladies were kneeling in the front pews and praying. The church was cool, so I took a pew at the rear and tried to spot the statue of Saint Joseph. From the eleven black-shawled heads came the steady murmur of prayer; it was a simmer of incantation, low voices like thick Salvadorean soup mumbling in a pot, the same bubbling rhythm of formula prayers. They were like spectres, the row of crones draped in black, uttering muffled prayers in the shadowy church; the sunbeams breaking through the holes in the stained-glass windows made logs of light that seemed to prop up the walls; there was a smell of burned wax, and the candle flames fluttered in a continuous tremble, like the voices of those old ladies. Inside El Pilar the year might have been 1831, and these the wives and mothers of Spanish soldiers praying for deliverance from the onslaught of frantic Indians.
A tinkling bell rang from the sacristy. I sat primly and piously, straightening my back, in an instinctive reflex. It was habituaclass="underline" I could not enter a church without genuflecting and dipping my fingers in the holy water font. A priest scuffed to the altar rail, flanked by two acolytes. The priest raised his arms and, in that gesture - but perhaps it was his good looks, the well-combed curate rather stuck on his clerical smoothness- a stagey flourish of a nightclub master of ceremonies. He was praying, but his prayers were mannered, Spanish, not Latin, and then he extended one arm towards a corner of the church that was hidden from me. He performed a little wrist-play, a wave of his hand, and the music began.
It was not solemn music. It was two electric guitars, a clarinet, maracas and a full set of drums - as soon as it had started to blurt I shifted my seat for a look at the musicians. It was the harsh wail of tuneless pop music that I had been avoiding for weeks, the squawk and crash that I had first heard issuing from Mexico as I stood on the high riverbank at Laredo. I had, since then, only rarely been out of earshot of it. How to describe it? With the guitar whine was an irregular beat, and each beat like a set of crockery dropped on the floor; a girl and boy shook maracas and sang - this was a cat's yowl attempt at harmonizing, but off-key it did not even have the melodiousness of a set of madly scraping locusts.
They were of course singing a hymn. In a place where Jesus Christ was depicted as a muscular tough, a blue-eyed Latin with slicked-down hair, a deeply handsome young fellow, religion was a kind of love affair. In some Catholicism, and frequently in Spanish America, prayer has become a romancing with Jesus. He is not a terrible God, not a destroyer, not a cold and vindictive ascetic; he is princely and with it the ultimate macho figure. The hymn was a love song, but very much a Spanish American one, crowing with lugubrious passion, the word heart repeated in every verse. And it was extremely loud. This was worship, but there was no substantial difference between what was going on here in this old church and what one could hear in the jukebox down the street in El Bar Americano. The church had been brought to the people; it had not made the people more pious - they had merely used this as an opportunity to entertain themselves and take the boredom out of the service. A mass or these evening prayers was an occasion to concentrate the mind in prayer; this music turned it into a distraction.