The unambiguous wish in, say, geriatric parts of Florida (which Costa Rica much resembles) is to have comfort and the good life now, on earth. Only the poor peasant believes that he will become bourgeois in Heaven. A rising class wants its comforts on earth and has neither the time nor the inclination to be religious: this was obvious in Costa Rica. In time of crisis - sickness, collapse, the mortal wound - the Costa Rican would turn to the Church and demand a miracle, but middle-class people generally haven't the time to believe in miracles, and so, without consciously rejecting the Church, they seek answers in Politics or business. It has made them fair, but boring. The greatest church in Costa Rica is in Cartago, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Angels, the Patroness of Costa Rica. But the Cartago brochures merely point out that the Inter-American Highway passes through town; that there is a San José bus every five minutes; that it is cool there and 'Also, famous Irazú Volcano close by'. No brochure I saw mentioned churches. The Basilica is hardly an example of fine architecture, but that is not the point. The Costa Ricans are prouder of their modernity, their absence of militarism, their climate, their factories and their volcano than their churches. 'Fine medical and hospital facilities,' says the note on San José in a tourist leaflet, which sounds less a boast than an assurance to prospective immigrants. Seismically-cracked cathedrals and bloody statuary tottering on plinths have not prevented other Latin American countries from advertising their churches; but of course they have very little else to brag about. And, what is more important, they have kept the faith. The secularism of Costa Rica means that the church is something of an embarrassment, or at least a superfluity - history's legacy as a dusty artefact rather than a programme for the soul. For this reason, the Costa Ricans are probably the most predictable people in Latin America and, lacking religious enthusiasm, the most avowedly political.
The town, the church was now far behind. There were more stations, and the landscape changed at each one: now open and flat, now a ravine, now full of deforested hills, now an unlikely village of deflected light - green huts, blue trees and a whole hill of red grass, pastels glowing through a prism of dust.
. . . and now I was consumed with the irrepressible desire of looking below. I could not, I would not, confine my glances to the cliff; and with a wild indefinable emotion, half of horror, half of relieved oppression, I threw my vision far down into the abyss. For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind- in the next my whole soul was pervaded by a longing to fall. . .
After fifty miles or so - and it was blazing hot - the line straightened, and some food-sellers (they were dark-eyed, almost middle-eastern looking girls and women, in shawls and long skirts) got on the train. They carried baskets of oranges, tangerines, mangoes, and paper cones filled with peanuts and burned cashews. Ahead, past miles of parched farmland, was a blue lake. The train climbed a hillside: the lake was immense and the sun had whitened a portion of it, bleached the blueness out of it.
The knee-squeezer was still next to me.
'Is that a lake?'
'That is the ocean,' she said.
The Pacific; I looked around with a wild surmise, and then resumed my reading. When I glanced up again we were travelling along a narrow peninsula towards Puntarenas.
There were very few trees on this spit of land. There was the railway line, and a road, and a row of houses; there wasn't room for anything more. On the Pacific side freighters were anchored, on the protected side, sailing-boats and dinghies. For no apparent reason, halfway down the peninsula, the train stopped, and here we remained for twenty minutes. Hot stiff breezes blew through the open windows of the train and rattled the shutters; sluggish brown waves pushed at the rocky jetties beneath the train. The sun was low; it slanted through the car and heated it. The passengers were tired, and so silent. The only sounds were the wind and the sea. On the left side of the train there was no land, but only limitless ocean. The train could not have been stiller or more full of light.
. . . we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
I shut my book. At length, the train started and continued the last half-mile into Puntarenas. Puntarenas was very hot, and even in the breeze very humid. I walked the streets. There were boarding houses and cheap hotels, bars, restaurants, curio stalls, people selling plastic water-wings and back-scratchers and sunhats. It was a run-down but busy resort. There was not much to do here but swim, and I did not care for the water which was littered with seaport detritus, frayed rope and old bottles, oil-slick and seaweed which had become like greasy rags. I had a glass of lemonade; I wondered if I should stay here, on the Gulf of Nicoya.
'You should go over to the other side,' said the stallholder who had sold me the lemonade. 'That is where all the Americans live. It is very beautiful.'
I saw some of them, shuffling through the streets of Puntarenas, the people who had come down here to die in this sunny youthful place. I was almost tempted to board a bus and look at their houses, but I had a feeling I knew what I would find. A suburb in the tropics might be worth seeing, but I doubted that it was worth examining in much detail; and I did not relish that sense of exclusion that I would feel, faced by people mowing the lawn and pushing vacuum cleaners. Nor, after all my travelling, did I wish to find myself describing Sarasota, down to its last funeral parlour and miniature golf course. Travellers do not belong in the suburbs, and the most civilized places tire the eye quickest; in such places, the traveller is an intruder, as he is in Sarasota. I wanted something altogether wilder, the clumsier romance of strangeness; these friendly Americans only made me homesick.
12
THE BALBOA BULLET TO COLON
It was 'Save Our Canal Day'. Two United States congressmen had brought the news to the Canal Zone that New Hampshire was solidly behind them in their struggle to keep the Zone in American hands (reminding me of the self-mocking West Indian joke, 'Go ahead, England, Barbados is behind you!'). The New Hampshire governor had declared a holiday in his state, to signify his support. One congressman, speaking at a noisy rally of Americans in Balboa, reported that 75% of the United States was against the Canal Treaty. But all this was academic; and the noise - there was a demonstration, too - little more than the ventilation of jingoistic yawps. Within very few months the treaty would be ratified. I told this to a Zonian lady. She said she didn't care. She had enjoyed the rally: 'We've been feeling left out, as if everyone was against us.'
The Zonians, 3,000 workers for the Panama Canal Company, and their families, saw the treaty as a sell-out; why should the Canal be turned over to these undeserving Panamanian louts in twenty years? Why not, they argued simply, continue to run it as it had been for the past sixty-three years? At a certain point in every conversation I had with these doomed residents of Panama, the Zonian would bat the air with his arms and yell, It 's our canali
'Want to know the trouble with these people?' said an American political officer at the embassy. 'They can't decide whether the Canal is a government department, or a company, or an independent state.'
Whatever it was, it was certainly a lost cause; but it was not the less interesting for that. Few places in the world can match the Canal Zone in its complex origins, its unique geographical status or in the cloudiness of its future. The Canal itself is a marveclass="underline" into its making went all the energies of America, all her genius and all her deceits. The Zone, too, is a paradox: it is a wonderful place, but a racket. The Panamanians hardly figure in the canal debate - they want the Canal for nationalistic reasons; but Panama scarcely existed before the Canal was dug. If justice were to be done the whole isthmus should be handed back to the Colombians, from whom it was squeezed in 1903. The debate is between the Ratifiers and the Zonians, and though they sound (and behave) like people whom Gulliver might have encountered in Glubb-dubdrib, they are both Americans: they sail under the same flag. The Zonians, however - when they become especially frenzied - often burn their Stars and Stripes and their children cut classes at Balboa High School to trample on its ashes. The Ratifiers, loud in their denunciation of Zonians when they are among friends, shrink from declaring themselves when they are in the Zone. A Ratifier from the embassy, who accompanied me to a lecture I was to give at Balboa High, flatly refused to introduce me to the Zonian students for fear that if he revealed himself they would riot and overturn his car. Two nights previously, vengeful Zonians had driven nails into the locks of the school gates in order to shut the place down. What a pestilential little squabble, I thought; and felt more than ever like Lemuel Gulliver.