But it was also the red-necks. They depressed Andy more than the Panamanian sailors. He introduced me to a sixty-seven-year-old Texan. 'This is my forty-first trip to San José,' the man boasted. These girls cost money, but they're worth every cent.' His friend had been here twelve times, but his friend was younger. Andy's hotel was full of red-necks who had come down for the beer-drinking and the whore-hopping. They wore cowboy hats and boots, baseball caps and tee-shirts printed with slogans. They said you could have a fine time in San José. To his credit, Andy said, 'I don't want to end up like these jokers.' On his last evening, at my urging, he recited again Robert Service's poem, 'My Madonna'.
San José was not really vicious, but only superficially so. And yet I felt excluded from the serious, peaceable life of the city; it made my stay here seem odder than what I had experienced in Limón. It was odd in any case to be a traveller in a place where people were busily occupied: going to the dentist, buying curtains, searching for motor spares, taking their children to school, leading their lives in dedicated and innocent ways. The Costa Rican with his satchel of groceries and his young son, entering the government office to pay his electric light bilclass="underline" he was everything that I was not. The red-necks were simply a fragment of the foreground. As a traveller in this settled society I was an intruder, a stranger watching people go through familiar motions that I could not affect or enter into. I had no business here, but it was worse when I noticed how closely their lives resembled the one I had left at home. What about my family? My car? My light bill? My teeth? In San José, the orderliness was a reproach; I had a sense of having deserted my responsibilities. I saw a young couple picking out a vacuum cleaner, and I felt guilty and homesick. Nothing was more unconsoling to me in all of Central America than the sight of this couple proudly carrying their new vacuum cleaner out of the San José store. I think I began to understand then why I was always happier in a backwater, why the strangeness of Santa Ana had charmed me, and why I had sought the outlandish parts of Guatemala or the wastes of Mexico. Perhaps this explained my need to seek out the inscrutable magnetisms of the exotic: in the wildest place everyone looked so marginal, so temporary, so uncomfortable, so hungry and tired, it was possible as a traveller to be anonymous or even, paradoxically, to fit in, in the same temporary way.
The map shows a railway that runs east of Limón and over the border into Panama; but this banana line is defunct. Even if it had been running it would have got me nowhere except to a place called Bocas de Toro where I would have had to charter a plane to fly to Panama City. This left me only one choice, the slow train to Puntarenas on the Pacific coast, and then by road or air to Panama.
But my chief reason for taking the Puntarenas train had nothing to do with travel. More than anything, I wanted to read a book. And I had a good book. Twice in San Salvador and once in Limón I had opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; each time it had been night and, while I had read the novel with fascination, on turning off the light the horrors of the story returned to me and made me wakeful. It was, without any doubt, the most terrifying story I had ever read: claustrophobia, shipwreck, thirst, mutiny, cannibalism, vertigo, murder, storm - it was a nightmare journey, and it produced nightmares in me. At home it might not have seemed so bad, but in three Central American hotel rooms - hot, stifling, narrow; the bulb-blistered lamp shade, the strange bed, the rat gnawing the ceiling - the book was an experience of pure terror. I put it away, and I vowed that I would not open it again until I was in a sunny railway compartment. It did not matter where the train was going; what mattered to me was that I should read it under ideal conditions, on a train, with my feet up, my pipe drawing nicely. This book was my reason for going to Puntarenas on that train.
The Pacific Station looked promising. One man was mopping the floor of the lobby, another washing the windows: such attentions are a good indicator that the trains run on time. And there was an eight-foot statue of Jesus Christ across from the ticket window: Godliness and cleanliness. The railway itself is much newer than the Atlantic line; it is electrified, it is swift and smoothly-running, and, apart from its quacking horn, it is silent; the seats inside the blue carriages are not broken, and because there are eight trains a day it is seldom crowded: perfect for reading.
Nor is the landscape remarkable enough to intrude. Costa Rica's south-west is very different from the north-east. The land seems to slope away to the Pacific coast, from the coffee bushes in the high suburbs, to areas of light industry, the cement factories and timber yards that supply material for the country's growth. By the time we left these industrial suburbs it was not yet noon; but it was lunch-time, not only for the factory hands, but for office workers and managers too. Costa Rica has a large middle-class, but they go to bed early and rise at dawn; everyone - student, labourer, businessman, estate manager, politician - keeps farmer's hours.
On this passenger train most of the people were off to the beach. The mood was festive, the luggage baskets of swim-fins, towels, sunhats, hampers of food. For most, this was a holiday. There were only a few blacks on the train (their homeland lies on the opposite coast) and the way the passengers had seated themselves - girls on these seats, boys over there, mothers minding children, older men and husbands sitting together at a safe distance from their womenfolk - reminded me of outings I had seen on holiday weekends in Boston, from the Italian neighbourhoods near North Station on the trains to City Point. The faces of these Costa Ricans had a Neapolitan cast, and their luggage was redolent of meatballs. They had radios, they sang, they shouted and ate ice creams.
Between chapters of Pym I looked out of the window. There were brilliant orange flowers on the branches of tall trees, and in fields near these trees rows of ripe tomatoes, peppers and beans. The day grew hotter, the land flatter; here, most of the tomatoes had been picked, the vines had started to wither, and some of the fields were yellow-dry. It could have been a different season from the one I had seen in the northeast, where - before the train had passed into the tropical lowlands -we had spent hours in altitudes that had the new green gardens of early spring. The look was autumnal for much of the way to Puntarenas: dry broken cornstalks drooped in the fields, the trees were bare or else held a few boughs of fluttering brown leaves, the grass was burned, and even the fence posts which had conveniently sprouted into saplings and become a thicket of trees were losing their leaves to the dry air. In Ojo de Agua and Cirvelas the farmers were haymaking.
But there was no consistency in this country's agriculture. Latitude was no help in reading the crops: Costa Rica was mountainous as well as swampy and tropical, and it was flanked by two oceans. No sooner had I decided that autumn had come to this province than we entered shady villages and orange groves. And just before the village of Atena we climbed to the edge of a deep ravine of grey and brown rock. The ravine continued to the west and was a cut on the horizon, but a dust cloud hung in it and though I guessed it was deep I could not see to its bottom. The villages at its rim were dusty, too, six-barn hamlets and fruit farms, and the children at station platforms selling bunches of purple balls, a kind of fruit I had never seen before.
. . . the brig came on slowly, and now more steadily than before, and-I cannot speak calmly of this event - our hearts leaped up wildly within us, and we poured out our whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand. Of a sudden, and all at once, there came wafted over the ocean from the strange vessel (which was now close upon us) a smell, a stench, such as the whole world has no name for . . .