Music of this special deafening kind seemed important in Spanish America, because it prevented any thought whatsoever. The goon with the transistor in the train, the village boys gathered around their yakketing box, the man in Santa Ana who brought his cassette machine to breakfast and stared at its groaning amplifier, all the knee-jerks and finger-snapping and tooth-sucking seemed to have one purpose - a self-induced stupor for people who lived in a place where alcohol was expensive and drugs illegal. It was deafness and amnesia; it celebrated nothing but lost beauty and broken hearts; it had no memorable melody; it was splinters of glass ceaselessly flushed down a toilet, the thud of drums and the grunts of singers. People I met on my trip were constantly telling me they loved music. Not pop music from the United States, but this music. I knew what they meant.
Meanwhile, the priest had sat down beside the altar, looking pleased with himself. Well he might: the music had its effect. As soon as it had started, people had begun to pour into the church: schoolchildren with satchels and wearing uniforms, young children - barefoot urchins, kids with twisted nitty hair who had been frolicking in the plaza; mumbling old men with machetes, and two farm-boys clutching straw hats to their chests, and a lady with a tin wash basin and a gang of boys, and a bewildered dog. The dog sat in the centre aisle and beat its stub of tail against the tiles. The music was loud enough to have reached the market up the street, for here were three ladies in full skirts carrying empty baskets and leather purses. Some sat, some waited at the back of the church. They watched the band, not the tabernacle, and they were smiling. Oh, yes, this is what religion is all about - rejoice, smile, be happy, the Lord is with you; snap your fingers, He has redeemed the world. There were two shattering clashes of cymbals.
The music stopped. The priest stood up. The prayers began.
And the people who had come into the church during the song pushed to the rear door. The eleven old ladies in the front pews did not move, and only they remained to say the Confiteor. The priest paced back and forth at the altar rail. He gave a short sermon: God loves you, he said; you must learn how to love Him. It was not easy in the modern world to find time for God; there were temptations, and the evidence of sin was everywhere. It was necessary to work hard and dedicate each labour to the glory of God. Amen.
Again, a wave of the hand, and the music started. This time it was much louder, and it attracted a greater number of people from the plaza to hear it. It was a similar song: yowl, thump, heart, heart, yowl, crash, dooby-doo, thump, crash, crash. There was no hesitation among the on-lookers when it ended. At the final crash, they fled. But not for long. Ten minutes later (two prayers, a minute of meditation, some business with an incense burner, another pep-talk) the band again began to play and the people returned. This routine continued for a full hour, and it was still going on when I took myself away -during a song, not a sermon or prayer; I had a train to catch.
The sky was purple and pink, the volcano black; lurid chutes of orange dust filled the valleys, and the lake was fiery, like a pool of molten lava.
10
THE ATLANTIC RAILWAY: THE 12:00 TO LIMON
I was a bit surprised to find a Chinese man in a bar in San José, Costa Rica. The Chinese are not, typically, bar-flies. Once a year, if the occasion is special and they are in the company of some other men, they might, on a dare, drink a whole bottle of brandy. Then they turn red, say silly or abusive things very loudly, throw up and have to be carried home. Drinking is their mad fling at gaiety; but it is perverse - they take no pleasure in it. So what was this Chinese man doing here? We talked circumspectly at first, as strangers do, reaching agreement on trivialities before risking anything personal. And then he told me. Well, he said, he happened to own this bar. He also owned a restaurant and a hotel. He was a Costa Rican citizen. It had been a deliberate choice. He disliked every other country he had seen.
'Which ones?' I asked. We spoke in Spanish. He said his English was shaky; I told him my Cantonese was far from perfect.
'All the countries,' he said. 'I left China in 1954. I was a young man and I liked to travel. I looked at Mexico - I went all over. But I didn't like it. I went to Guatemala and all around - Nicaragua - that was very bad. Panama - I didn't like it. Even Honduras and El Salvador - those countries.'
'What about the United States?'
'I went all around it. Maybe it is a good country, but I didn't think So. I could not live there. I was still travelling, and I thought to myself, "What is the best country?" It was Costa Rica - I liked it here very much. So I stayed here.'
I had so far only seen San José, but I took his point. It seemed an exceptional city. If San Salvador and Guatemala City were hosed down, all the shacks cleared and the people rehoused in tidy bungalows, the buildings painted, the stray dogs collared and fed, the children given shoes, the refuse picked up in the parks, the soldiers pensioned off- there is no army in Costa Rica - and all the political prisoners released, those cities would, I think, begin to look a little like San José. In El Salvador I had chewed the end of my pipestem to pieces in frustration. In San José I was able to have a new pipestem fitted (and I bought a spare for Panama) - it was that sort of place. The weather was fine, the service efficient, the city orderly. And they had just had an election. In the rest of Central America an election could be a harrowing piece of criminality; in Costa Rica the election had been fair and something of a fiesta. 'You should have been here for the election,' a woman told me in San José, as if I had missed a party. Costa Ricans were proud of their decent government, their high literacy rate, their courtly manners. The only characteristic Costa Rica shares with her Central American neighbours is a common antipathy. You don't hear a good word about Guatemala or El Salvador; and Nicaragua and Panama - the countries Costa Rica is wedged between - are frankly loathed. Costa Rica is as smug as any of them, but has more reason to be so. They hate gringos in those places,' a shopkeeper said to me. He was really saying two things: that gringos are not hated in Costa Rica, and that Costa Ricans are honorary gringos. It is with reluctance that foreigners tell you why they think Costa Rica works so well. 'It's a white country,' they say with hesitation. 'I mean, it's all white people, isn't it?'
This - you only have to take the train to Limón to find out - is a falsehood. But I was enjoying myself in San José, so I delayed my train-trip to Limón.
The Costa Ricans I discovered were courteous and helpful. The foreigners were otherwise. You go to a stinking place like Cutuco and you think how exactly it matches the fly-blown setting of a Bogart movie; it has the heat and the seedy cinematic romance, the end-of-tether squalor and rather vicious-looking bars that you associate with whiskery gringos on dangerous missions. But there are no gringos in Cutuco and the danger is all in the drinking water. It is not the malarial jerk-town that the foreigner seeks, but the hospitable tropical city where, for all its boredom, it is possible to have a good meal, frequent a safe brothel, start a business or make a killing. Costa Rica is enjoying a boom; the prosperity is obvious in San José. San José is hardly a romantic place but, next to Panama, it has the highest concentration of foreigners in Central America. Some are small-time crooks and hustlers, others are grand-scale con-rnen. Robert Vesco claims he lives in the suburbs of San José because he likes the climate; but he is also alleged to have embezzled almost half a billion dollars from an investment company. (Vesco's house, with its high fence and burglar-proof TV cameras in the shrubbery, is one of San Jose's sights; it is pointed out to tourists on their way to the Irazu volcano.) Not all San Jose's foreigners are crooks. There are timber merchants and booksellers, pharmacists and ice-cream tycoons. And there are retired people from all over the United States who have bought condominium apartments and plots of land and who sit in the shade and thank God they are not in Saint Pete. The difference is that, unlike Florida, there aren't so many geriatrics in Costa Rica to remind them that they have come down to die.