I pointed to my suitcase on the luggage rack.
'It's pretty big.'
'That's everything I have. I might meet a beautiful woman in Limon and decide to spend the rest of my life there.'
'I did that once.'
'I was joking,' I said.
But Mr Thornberry was still grimacing. 'It was a disaster in my case.'
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the river was seething, and men were standing in the shallows - I could not make out what they were doing - and pink and blue flowers grew beside the track.
'That fellow in Antigua had a beautiful house,' said Mr Thornberry. 'A wall all around it, with morning glories just like those.'
'So those are morning glories, eh?' I said. 'I was wondering.'
Mr Thornberry told me about his painting. You couldn't be a painter during the Depression; couldn't make a living at it. He had worked in Detroit and New York City. He had had a miserable time of it. Three children, but his wife had died when the third was still an infant - tuberculosis, and he had not been able to afford a good doctor. So she died and he had had to raise the kids himself. They had grown up and married and he had gone to New Hampshire to take up painting, what he had always wanted to do. It was a nice place, northern New Hampshire; in fact, he said, it looked a hell of a lot like this part of Costa Rica.
'I thought it looked like Vermont. Bellows Falls.'
'Not really.'
There were logs in the water, huge dark ones tumbling against each other and jamming on the rocks. Why logs? I did not want to ask Mr Thornberry why they were here. He had not been in Costa Rica longer than me. How could he know why this river, on which there were now no houses, carried logs in its current as long as telegraph poles and twice as thick? I would concentrate on what I saw: I would discover the answer. I concentrated. I discovered nothing.
'Sawmill,' said Mr Thornberry. 'See those dark things in the water?'
He squinted; his mouth went square. 'Logs.'
Damn, I thought, and saw the sawmill. So that's why the logs were there. They had been cut up-river. They must have-
'They must have floated those logs down to be cut into lumber,' said MrThornberry.
'They do that back home,' I said.
'They do that back home,' said Mr Thornberry.
He was silent for some minutes. He brought a camera out of his shoulder bag and snapped pictures out the window. It was not easy for him to shoot past me, but I was damned if I would yield my corner seat. We were in another cool valley, with rock columns all around us. I saw a pool of water.
'Pool of water,' said MrThornberry.
'Very nice,' I said. Was that what I was supposed to say?
Mr Thornberry said, 'What?'
'Very nice pool of water.'
Mr Thornberry hitched forward. He said, 'Cocoa.'
'I saw some back there.'
'But there's much more of it here. Mature trees.'
Did he think I was blind?
'Anyway,' I said, 'there's some coffee mixed in with it.'
'Berries,' said Mr Thornberry, squinting. He heaved himself across my lap and snapped a picture. No, I would not give him my seat.
I had not seen the coffee berries; how had he? I did not want to see them.
'The red ones are ripe. We'll probably see some people picking them soon. God, I hate this train.' He fixed that straining expression on his face. 'Blows my mind.'
Surely a serious artist would have brought a sketchpad and a few pencils and be doodling in a concentrated way, with his mouth shut. All Mr Thornberry did was fool with his camera and talk; he named the things he saw, no more than that. I wanted to believe that he had lied to me about being a painter. No painter would gab so aimlessly.
'Am I glad I met you!' said Mr Thornberry. 'I was going crazy in that seat over there.'
1 said nothing. I looked out the window.
'Kind of a pipeline,' said Mr Thornberry.
There was a rusty tube near the track, running parallel in the swamp that had displaced the river. I had not seen the river go. There were palm trees and that rusty tube: kind of a pipeline, as he had said. Some rocky cliffs rose behind the palms; we ascended the cliffs and beneath us were streams-
'Streams,' said MrThornberry.
- and now some huts, rather interesting ones, like sharecroppers' cottages, made of wood, but quite solidly built, upraised on poles above the soggy land. We stopped at the village of Swampmouth: more of those huts.
'Poverty,' said Mr Thornberry.
'Don't be silly,' I said. These were good timber houses, with wide corrugated tin roofs and healthy faces in the windows and well-dressed children standing on the big porches. They were not wealthy people, but neither were they poor. It seemed to me amazing that so far from San José - so far from Limón - in what was the borderland of thick viney jungle and dense savannah, people lived in dry well-made bungalows. Most of the people were black, and now most of the passengers on the train were black. I walked to the rear of the car to get away from Mr Thornberry, and talked to an old black man. The blacks he said had been brought over from Jamaica to build the railway. 'We didn't get the diseases,' he said in English. 'The British people got all the diseases.' His father had been a Costa Rican, his mother Jamaican; English had been his first language, which allowed me a glimpse of the sociology of the family - he had been raised by his mother. He was critical of the black boys hooting and laughing in the corridor of the train. 'Their grandparents were willing to work, but they ain't.'
The houses in style were perhaps West Indian, too. They were certainly the sort I had seen in the rural south, in the farming villages of Mississippi and Alabama; but they were trimmer and better-maintained. There was a banana grove in each mushy yard and in each village a general store, nearly always with a Chinese name on the store sign; and most of the stores were connected to another building, which served as a bar and a pool room. There was an air of friendliness about these villages, and though many of the households were pure black, there were mixed ones as well; Mr Thornberry pointed this out as soon as I returned to my seat.
'Black boy, white girl,' he said. They seem to get along fine. Pipeline again.'
Thereafter, each time the pipeline appeared - and it did about twenty times from here to the coast - Mr Thornberry obligingly indicated it for me.
We were deep in the tropics. The heat was heavy with the odour of moist vegetation and swamp water and the cloying scent of jungle flowers. The birds had long beaks and stick-like legs and they nosedived and spread their wings, becoming kite-shaped to break their fall. Some cows stood knee-deep in swamp, mooing. The palms were like fountains, or bunches of ragged feathers, thirty feet high - no trunks that I could see, but only these feathery leaves springing straight out of the swamp.
Mr Thornberry said, 'I was just looking at those palm trees.'
'They're like giant feathers,' I said.
'Funny green fountains,' he said. 'Look, more houses.'
Another village.
Mr Thornberry said, 'Flower gardens - look at those bougainvilleas. They blow my mind. Mama in the kitchen, kids on the porch. That one's just been painted. Look at all the vegetables!'
It was as he said. The village passed by and we were again in swampy jungle. It washumid and now overcast. My eyelids were heavy. Note-taking would have woken me up, but there wasn't room for me to write, with Mr Thornberry darting to the window to take a picture every five minutes. And he would have asked why I was writing. His talking made me want to be secretive. In the damp greenish light the woodsmoke of the cooking fires clouded the air further. Some of the people cooked under the houses, in that open space under the upraised floor.
'Like you say, they're industrious,' said Mr Thornberry. When had I said that? 'Every damn one of those houses back there was selling something.'