No, I thought, this couldn't be true. I hadn't seen anyone selling anything.
'Bananas,'said Mr Thornberry. 'It makes me mad when I think that they sell them for twenty-five cents a pound. They used to sell them by the hand.'
'In Costa Rica?'
'New Hampshire.'
He was silent a moment, then he said, 'Buffalo.'
He was reading a station sign. Not a station - a shed.
'But it doesn't remind me of New York.' Some miles earlier we had come to the village of Bataan. Mr Thornberry reminded me that there was a place in the Philippines called Bataan. The March of Bataan. Funny, the two places having the same name, especially a name like Bataan. We came to the village of Liverpool. I braced myself.
'Liverpool,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Funny.'
It was stream-of-consciousness, Mr Thornberry a less allusive Leopold Bloom, a reluctant Stephen Dedalus. Mr Thornberry was seventy-one. He lived alone, he said; he did his own cooking. He painted. Perhaps this explained everything. Such a solitary existence encouraged the habit of talking to himself: he spoke his thoughts. And he had been alone for years. His wife had died at the age of twenty-five. But hadn't he mentioned a marital disaster? Surely it was not the tragic death of his wife.
I asked him about this, to take his attention from the passing villages which, he repeated, were blowing his mind. I said, 'So you never remarried?'
'I got sick,' he said. 'There was this nurse in the hospital, about fifty or so, a bit fat, but very nice. At least, I thought so. But you don't know people unless you live with them. She had never been married. There's our pipeline. I wanted to go to bed with her right away - I suppose it was me being sick and her being my nurse. It happens a lot. But she said, "Not till we're married."' He winced and continued. 'It was a quiet ceremony. Afterwards, we went to Hawaii. Not Honolulu, but one of the little islands. It was beautiful - jungle, beaches, flowers. She hated it. "It's too quiet," she said. Born and raised in a little town in New Hampshire, a one-horse town - you've seen them - and she goes to Hawaii and says it's too quiet. She wanted to go to night-clubs. There weren't any night-clubs. She had enormous breasts, but she wouldn't let me touch them. "You make them hurt." I was going crazy. And she had a thing about cleanliness. Every day of our honeymoon we went down to the launderette and I sat outside and read the paper while she did the wash. She washed the sheets every day. Maybe they do that in hospitals, but in everyday life that's not normal. I guess I was kind of disappointed.' His voices trailed off. He said, 'Telegraph poles. . . pig. . . pipeline again,' and then, 'It was a real disaster. When we got back from the honeymoon I said, "Looks like it's not going to work." She agreed with me and that day she moved out of the house. Well, she had never really moved in. Next thing I know she's suing me for divorce. She wants alimony, maintenance, the whole thing. She's going to take me to court.'
'Let me get this straight,' I said. 'All you did was go on a honeymoon, right?'
'Ten days,' said Mr Thornberry. 'It was supposed to be two weeks, but she couldn't take the silence. Too quiet for her.'
'And then she wanted alimony?'
'She knew my sister had left me a lot of money. So she went ahead and sued me.'
'What did you do?'
Mr Thornberry grinned. It was the first real smile I had seen on his face the whole afternoon. He said, 'What did I do? I counter-sued her. For fraud. See, she had a friend - a man. He had called her up when we were in Hawaii. She told me it was her brother. Sure.'
He was still looking out the window, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He was chuckling. 'I didn't have to do a thing after that. She gets on the witness-stand. The judge asks her, "Why did you marry this man?" She says, "He told me he had a lot of money." He told me he had a lot of money! Incriminated herself, see? She was laughed out of court. I gave her five grand and was glad to get rid of her.' Almost without pausing he said, 'Palm trees,' then, 'Pig,' 'Fence,' 'Lumber,' ' More morning glories - Capri's full of them,' 'Black as the ace of spades,' 'American car.'
The hours passed; Mr Thornberry spoke without let-up. 'Pool table,' 'Must be on welfare,' 'Bicycle,' 'Pretty girl,' 'Lanterns.'
I had wanted to push him off the train, but after what he had told me I pitied him. Maybe the nurse had sat beside him like this; maybe she had thought If he says that one more time I'll scream.
I said, 'When was this abortive honeymoon?'
'Last year.'
I saw a three-story house, with a verandah on each story. It was grey and wooden and toppling, and it reminded me of the Railway Hotel I had seen in Zacapa. But this one looked haunted. Every window was broken and an old steam locomotive was rusting in the weedy front yard. It might have been the house of a plantation owner - there were masses of banana trees nearby. The house was rotting and uninhabited, but from the remainder of the broken fence and the yard, the verandahs and the barn, which could have been a coach-house, it was possible to see that long ago it had been a great place, the sort of dwelling lived in by tyrannical banana tycoons in the novels of Asturias. In the darkening jungle and the heat, the decayed house looked fantastic, like an old ragged spider's web, with some of its symmetry still apparent.
Mr Thornberry said, 'That house. Costa Rican gothic.'
I thought: I saw it first.
'Brahma bull,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Ducks.' 'Creek.' 'Kids playing.' Finally, 'Breakers.'
We were at the shore and travelling alongside a palmy beach. This was the Mosquito Coast, which extends from Puerto Barrios in Guatemala to Colón in Panama. It is wild and looks the perfect setting for a story of castaways. What few villages and ports lie along it are derelict; they declined when shipping did, and returned to jungle. Massive waves were rolling towards us, the white foam vivid in the twilight; they broke just below the coconut palms near the track. At this time of day, nightfall, the sea is the last thing to darken: it seems to hold the light that is slipping from the sky; and the trees are black. So in the light of this luminous sea, and the pale still-blue eastern sky, and to the splashings of the breakers, the train racketed on towards Limón. Mr Thornberry was still talking. He said, 'I think I'm going to like this place,' then reported that he had spotted a house, an animal, a sudden fire, until at last we were travelling in darkness and his voice ceased. The surf was gone, the heat oppressive. I saw through the trees a combustion of awful flaring light, and Mr Thornberry croaked, 'Limón.'
Limon looked like a dreadful place. It had just rained, and the town stank. The station was on a muddy road near the harbour, and puddles reflected the decayed buildings and over-bright lights. The smell was dead barnacles and damp sand, flooded sewers, brine, oil, cockroaches and tropical vegetation which, when soaked, gives off the hot mouldy vapour you associate with compost heaps in summer, the stench of mulch and mildew. It was a noisy town, as welclass="underline" clanging music, shouts, car horns. That last sight of the palmy coast and the breakers had been misleading. And even Mr Thornberry, who had been hopeful, was appalled. I could see his face; he was grimacing in disbelief. 'God,' he groaned. 'It's a piss-hole in the snow.' We walked through the puddles, the other passengers splashing us as they hurried past. Mr Thornberry said, 'It blows my mind.'
That does it, I thought. I said, 'I'd better go look for a hotel.'
'Why not stay at mine?'
Oh, look it 's raining. It blows my mind. Kind of a pipeline.
I said, 'I'll just sniff around town. I'm like a rat in a maze when I get to a new place.'
'We could have dinner. That might be fun. You never know - maybe the food's good here.' He squinted up the street. 'This place was recommended to me.'
'It wasn't recommended to me,' I said. 'It looks pretty strange.'
'Maybe I'll find that tour I was supposed to be on,' he said. He no longer sounded hopeful.