'Where are you staying?'
He told me. It was the most expensive hotel in Limón. I used that as my reason for looking elsewhere. A small, feeble-minded man approached and asked sweetly if he could carry my suitcase. It dragged on the street when he held it in his hand. He put it on his head and marched bandy-legged like a worker-elf to the market square. Here, Mr Thornberry and I parted.
'I hope you find your tour,' I said. He said he was glad we had met on the train: it had been kind of fun after all. And he walked away. I felt a boundless sense of relief, as if I had just been sprung from a long confinement. This was liberation. I tipped the elf and walked quickly in the opposite direction from Mr Thornberry.
I walked to savour my freedom and stretch my legs. After three blocks the town didn't look any better, and wasn't that a rat nibbling near the tipped-over barrel of scraps? It's a white country, a man had told me in San José. But this was a black town, a beach-head of steaming trees and sea-stinks. I tried several hotels. They were wormy staircases with sweating people minding tables on the second-floor landings. No, they said, they had no rooms. And I was glad, because they looked so disgustingly- dirty and the people were so rude; so I walked a few more blocks. I'd find a better hotel. But they were smaller and smellier, and they too were full. At one, as I stood panting - the staircase had left me breathless - a pair of cockroaches scuttled down the wall and hurried unimpeded across the floor. Cockroaches, I said. The man said, What do you want here? He too was full. I had been stopping at every second hotel. Now I stopped at each one. They were not hotels. They were nests of foul bedclothes, a few rooms and a portion of verandah. I should have known they were fulclass="underline" I met harassed families making their way down the stairs, the women and children carrying suitcases, the father sucking his teeth in dismay and muttering, 'We'll have to look somewhere else.' It was necessary for me to back down the narrow stairs to let these families pass.
In one place (I recognized it as a hotel by its tottering stairs, its unshaded bulbs, its moth-eaten furniture, its fusty smell), a woman in an apron said, 'Them - they're doublin' up.' She indicated a passageway of people - grandmothers, young women, sighing men, glassy-eyed children, black, fatigued, pushing old valises into a cubicle and several changing their clothes as they stood there in the passageway.
I had no idea of the time. It seemed late; the people in Limón who were not room-hunting were strolling the wet streets. They had that settled look of smugness which the stranger interprets as mockery or at least indifference. Saturday nights in strange cities can alienate the calmest of travellers.
Further on, a man said to me, 'Don't waste your time looking. There are no hotel rooms in Limón. Try tomorrow.'
'What do I do tonight?'
There is only one thing you can do,' he said. 'See that bar over there?' It was a peeling storefront with a string of lights over the door; inside, shapes - human heads - and smoke; and broken-crockery music. 'Go in and pick up a girl. Spend the night with her. That is your only hope.'
I considered this. But I did not see any girls. At the door were a gang of boys, jeering at men who were entering. I tried another hotel. The black owner saw that his reply to my question distressed me. He said, 'If you really get stuck and got no other place, come back here. You can sit out here on that chair.' It was a straight-backed chair on his verandah. There was a bar across the street: music, another mob of gawping boys. I slapped at the mosquitoes. Motorbikes went by; they sounded like outboard motors. This sound, and the boys, and the music made a scream. But I left my suitcase with this man and searched more streets. There were no hotels - no bars, no boarding houses; even the music was muffled. I decided to turn back, but I had gone too far: now I was lost.
I came to a precinct of Limón known as 'Jamaicatown'. In this white, Spanish-speaking country, a black, English-speaking area; a slum. These were the worst streets I had seen in Costa Rica, and each street corner held a dozen people, talking, laughing; their speech had a cackle in it. I was watched, but not threatened; and yet I had never felt so lost; it was as if I had burst through the bottom of my plans and was falling through darkness. I would continue to falclass="underline" there was absolutely nothing to do until dawn. My feet hurt; I was tired, dirty, sweating; I had not eaten all day. This was not the time or the place to reflect on the futility of the trip, and yet Costa Rica had seemed to promise better than this dark dead-end.
At one corner I asked some loitering men the way to the market. I asked in Spanish; they replied in English: they knew I was a stranger. Their directions were clear: they said I couldn't miss it.
I saw the row of hotels and boarding houses I had entered earlier in the evening. I had been disgusted by them then, but now they didn't seem so bad to me. I kept walking, and near the market square, skipping feebly across the street, one shoulder lower than the other because of the bag he carried, funny blue cap, bright green shirt, sailor pants, shuffling deck shoes: Thornberry.
'I've been looking all over for you.'
I needed his company: I was glad - someone to talk to. I said, 'I can't find a room anywhere. There aren't any in Limón. I'm screwed.'
He took my arm and winced. 'There are three beds in my room,' he said. 'You stay with me.'
'You mean it?'
'Sure-come on.'
My relief was inexpressible.
I got my suitcase from the hotel where the man had said that I could spend the night on his verandah chair. Mr Thornberry called the place a piss-hole (and over the next few days, whenever we passed it, he said, 'There's your verandah!'). I went to his room and washed my face, then we had a beer and grumbled about Limon. In gratitude I took him out to eat; we had broiled fish and hearts of palm and a bottle of wine, and Mr Thornberry told me sad stories about his life in New Hampshire, about his loneliness. Maybe he'd rent a house in Puntarenas for the winter. He couldn't take another cold winter. He had made a mess of his life, he said. It was the money - the IBM stock his sister had bequeathed to him. 'The things I want money can't buy. Money's just bullshit. If you have it. If you don't have it, it's important. I didn't always have it.'
I said, 'You saved my life.'
'I couldn't let you walk around all night. It's dangerous. I hate this place.' He shook his head. 'I thought I was going to like it. It looked okay from the train - those palm trees. That travel agency was lying to me. They said there were parrots and monkeys here.'
'Maybe you can get on a tour tomorrow.'
'I'm sick of thinking about it.' He looked at his watch. 'Nine o'clock. I'm bushed. Shall we call it a day?'
I said, 'I don't normally go to bed at nine o'clock.'
Mr Thornberry said, 'I always do.'
So we did. There was only one room-key. We were like an elderly couple, fussing silently at bed-time, yawning, chastely putting on our pyjamas. Mr Thornberry pulled his covers up and sighed. I read for a while, then switched off the light. It was still early, still noisy. Mr Thornberry said, 'Motorbike.' 'Music.' 'Listen to them yakking.' 'Car.' 'Train whistle.' 'Those must be waves.' Then he was asleep.
In spite of the ill-will I had felt towards him on the train, I considered Mr Thornberry my rescuer. To return the favour, I found a tour for him - a boat trip northwards up the coastal canal to the Laguna Matina, and an afternoon on the long lava beach at the mouth of the Rio Matina. Mr Thornberry insisted that I accompany him and ('Money's just bullshit') bought me a ticket. The boat was small, the canal was choked with hyacinths, so the going was slow. But orchids grew in clusters on the tropical trees, and there were herons and egrets soaring past us, and further on brown pelicans which flew in formation like geese.
'I don't see any parrots,' said Mr Thornberry. 'I don't see any monkeys.'