I went to the bow of the boat and sat there in the sun watching the jungle pass.
'Butterflies,' said Mr Thornberry, who had stayed under the canopy astern.
They were electric blue, and squarish, the size of pot-holders, mimicking the orchids they fluttered among.
'More herons,' said Mr Thornberry. 'Where are the parrots?'
Rising in me was an urge to push him off the boat. But I was ashamed of my irritation: he had saved me.
'Look how green everything is,' said Mr Thornberry.
We reached the lagoon at one-thirty, and moored the boat there because the black pilot feared that the tides at the estuary might drag us into the sea. We walked to the beach of grey lava. I swam. The black pilot screamed in Spanish for me to leave the water. There were sharks in the water, he said - the hungriest, the fiercest of sharks. I asked him whether he had seen any sharks. No, he said, but he knew they were there. I plunged back into the water.
'Sharks!'the black pilot yelled.
'Where?' I said. I was waist-deep in surf.
'There! Get out! Get out!'
Backing out of the water I saw the black dorsal fin of a shark slitting the water's surface. But the creature itself looked no more than a yard long. I had seen bigger sharks in East Sandwich on Cape Cod, and told the black pilot this. He insisted that I was crazy to swim, so I indulged him in his fears and went for a walk instead.
Mr Thornberry met me on the beach. We walked along the shoreline. 'Driftwood,' he said. 'It's all lava, you know. That's why the sand's so black.'
The boat's engine broke a shear-pin on the return journey. The pilot hailed a passing canoe and disappeared for an hour or more searching the canal huts for a new shear-pin.
'That other tour boat had a special chef,' said Mr Thornberry. 'This one doesn't even have an engine.'
'We might be stranded here for days,' I said. But this was malice; already I could see the black pilot making towards us in a canoe.
Back in Limón I found my own hotel. The weekend visitors had gone home: I had my pick of places. It was not a bad hotel, though the bed was damp with the sea-dampness of the air, and I was tormented by mosquitoes, and the noisy slosh of surf kept me awake for half the night. And yet, in solitude, I could think straight; I tried to work out the Thornberry paradox.
The next day I gave to roaming Limón, but on closer inspection Limón did not look any better than it had that first night, a steaming stinking town of mud puddles and buildings discoloured by dampness. The stucco fronts had turned the colour and consistency of stale cake, and crumbs of concrete littered the pavements. In the park there were three-toed sloths creeping in tree branches, and in the market and on the parapets of the crumbling buildings there were mangy vultures. Other vultures circled the plaza. Was there a dingier backwater in all the world? Columbus had come here with his son, Ferdinand. Ferdinand, fourteen at the time, had written an account of that fourth voyage, and he had described Limon as 'lofty, full of rivers, and abounding in very tall trees, as also on the islet [Uva Island, the Indians called it Quirivi] where they grew thick as basil, and full of very lofty groves of trees . . . For this reason the Admiral [Columbus] called it La Huerta [The Garden].' It might have been so; but the accounts of this voyage are contradictory. Ferdinand sometimes saw things differently from his father. In Limon, Ferdinand wrote, to Calm the fears of the sailors, the Indians sent out an old man with two little girls, the one about 8, the other about 14 years of age . . . the girls showed great fortitude, for despite the Christians being complete strangers to them in appearance, manners and race, they gave no signs of grief or fear, but always looked cheerful and modest. So the Admiral showed them good usage. . .' In his Lettera Rarissima to the Sovereigns, Columbus gave a different version of this. 'In Cariai [Limón] and the neighbouring lands,' he wrote, 'there are sorcerers. They would have given the world for me not to stay there an hour. As soon as I got there they sent right out two girls, all dressed up; the elder was hardly 11, the other 7, both behaving with such lack of modesty as to be no better than whores. They had magic powder concealed about them. As soon as they arrived, I gave orders that they be presented with some of our trading truck and sent them directly ashore . . .'
My desire to leave Limón was sharpened one morning while, with nothing better to do, I was standing in the plaza watching the vultures: were they vultures, or buzzards, or another bird of prey? I heard a sharp voice and saw an enormous black man coming towards me. He was carrying something silver; he wore a wool cap; he was barefoot. His eyes glinted with lunacy. He had a twitching gait.
'I am the Son of God,' he said.
He shook the silver object, then held it in blessing like a pyx. It was a ballpoint pen.
'I am the Son of God.'
People smiled. They let him pass. Perhaps they did not speak English.
'I am the Son of God.'
I stood aside.
Mr Thornberry was seated in the small lobby of his hotel. He looked deeply worried. He was studying a travel brochure. He jumped to his feet when he saw me.
'Let's get out of here,' I said.
'I tried,' he said. 'The plane's full. The bus doesn't leave until tonight.'
The train had left, too, at five that morning. I said, 'We can take a taxi.'
'A taxi? To San José?'
We went to the taxi rank in the plaza. I approached the driver of the least-dented car I could see and asked him: how much to San José? He thought a moment, then uttered a ridiculously high figure. I translated this for Mr Thornberry, who said, 'Tell him we'll take it.'
On principle I beat him down ten dollars and insisted that he had to get us to San José in time for lunch. He agreed and smiled. 'I've never done this before,' he said.
'This was a terrific idea,' said Mr Thornberry. 'I thought I'd never get out of that place.' He looked out of the window and squinted. 'Hut,' he said. 'Pig.' 'Cow.' 'Bananas.' Towards San José he became excited. 'Look,' he said, 'there's our pipe-line!'
11
THE PACIFIC RAILWAY: THE 10:00 TO PUNTARENAS
Walking down the main street of San José one morning after the Limón episode, I saw Captain Ruggles with a suitcase in each hand, hurrying away from his hotel. He wasn't leaving town, he said, he was only changing hotels. The previous night, and for the first time since arriving in San José, he had tried to hustle a girl up to his room. In the event, the manager had not allowed her past the lobby. What riled Andy was that the manager had said he had 'standards to maintain'. So Andy checked out.
'I'm going down the road,' he said. 'It's real fine. Where I'm going you can take anyone you want up to your room.'
'You've got your standards to maintain, too.'
'You bet. I make it a practice not to stay in any hotel where you can't take a two-headed nigger.'
I accompanied him to the hotel. It was a ramshackle building in the red-light district, catering to Panamanian sailors. The lobby was stacked with duffle bags, but that great stuffed thing near the check-in desk only looked like a duffle bag. It was Dibbs, eating a banana. What a small world this was.
'This is more like it,' said Andy.
Dibbs had seen us enter. 'Chicken-shit,' he said, and went back to his banana.
As the days wore on, Andy became dispirited. Each time I saw him he had the same complaint. 'I hate this place. I don't know what it is, but I can't fight it. I change hotels so I can take a hooker in, and I ask for a quiet room. They put me in the front. Sort of louvred windows, permanently open, like the front of a Ventura. The horns, the motorcycles, the exhaust fumes - they're driving me batty. I can't close the windows, I can't sleep - I haven't even brought a girl up. I wouldn't bring a girl in there. Listen, I don't even think these girls are pretty, do you?'