A Colombian song goes,
Santa Marta has a train,
But it hasn 't got a tram!
Santa Marta, where Simon Bolivar died penniless in a borrowed shirt, is the oldest town in Colombia. In the past few years it has become a resort, but the expensive hotels are outside town, away from the bars and pool halls. The town makes strenuous claims to being Bolivar's shrine, and like every other town of size in Latin America it has an impressive statue of the liberator. There is a corrosive irony in this Bolivar-worship, but it is quite in key with the other misapprehensions on the continent. Bolivar came to Santa Marta because he was in danger of being assassinated in Bogotá. He was regarded as a dictator in Peru, a traitor in Colombia, and in Venezuela - his birthplace - he was declared an outlaw. For setting Latin America free, his reward was penury and vilification. The monuments are an afterthought and the words chiselled onto them the battle cries he uttered when the revolution seemed a success. Which town council could raise a subscription to engrave his last judgements on any of these marmoreal plinths? 'America is ungovernable,' he wrote to Flores. 'Those who serve the revolution plough the sea. The only thing to do in America is to emigrate.'
Bolivar had come here to Santa Marta with the intention of fleeing the country. It could not have been much of a place in 1830; it was very little now: a small town, a beach, some cafés, a brothel ('Misteri'), a strip of shoreline on the flat blue Caribbean. On this cloudless March day, sanctified by sunlight, the town was very empty. I got off the Bar-ranquilla bus and walked along the sea front, asking passers-by for directions to the station. The girls in the brothel, so pleased when I entered, howled in annoyance at me when I said I was merely inquiring the way to the railway station.
The ticket window was closed, but on it, sello-taped to the glass and scribbled in ballpoint, were the times of the trains: one departed, one arrived; and the name of the departing train, Expreso de Sol. I sat on a bench and waited for the window to open. Then I heard shouting and saw four policemen chasing a young man through the lobby. They wrestled him to the floor and wrapped chains around his legs and wrists. Then, they sat him next to me. He had wild hair and fresh wounds on his face and was breathing hard, but once he sat down he did not move. I stood up and walked to a different bench. If he decided to make a break for it, one of those armed policemen might feel impelled to shoot. I made sure I was out of the line of fire.
A tiny old lady with a shopping bag (she too was on her way to Bogotá) walked over to the prisoner. She put her face close to his, then exchanged a few words with the policemen. She chose to sit near me.
'What is he?' I asked. 'A thief?'
She looked at me and screwed up one eye. She had thick glasses that distorted her eyes and she wore a rather mad expression.
'Crazy!' she hissed.
The ticket window opened. I went over and asked for a sleeper to Bogotá.
'You have a family?'
'Yes.'
'They are travelling with you?'
'They are in Great Britain.'
'Then I cannot sell you a bed,' she said. 'Those compartments are for families. Six people or more.'
I bought an ordinary ticket and asked, 'What time does the train arrive?'
She smiled, but looked doubtful. 'Tomorrow?'
'And a bed is impossible, is that right?'
'If you really want one, ask the conductor when you get on the train. He might sell you one.'
I'll bribe the conductor, I thought; but when I saw the train and examined the sleepers - small dirty rooms with padded shelves - I was not encouraged. I hurried down the street and bought some loaves of bread, some cheese and what the girl called 'eastern baloney'. There was no point in bribing my way into a sleeper: there was no bedding, no water, no locks on the doors. I would take my chances here in the open car, in a sloping plastic seat. Something told me this was going to be a long trip.
We left at sunset, and at once I had an urge to get off the train. Already I was uncomfortable, and the journey was not worth this discomfort. Children were crying in their mothers' arms and as soon as we left the station people began complaining loudly about the broken lights and the crowds and the heat. You're sitting in my placel a boy yelled at an old man, who was travelling with his elderly wife. I'm not moving, said the man. Everyone was perspiring and muttering. / can hardly breathe, said a woman. What a smell! said a cruel-looking man into his hand. I had been moved by the tenderness on the platform, the fathers kissing their children goodbye, the boys hugging their girlfriends, the husband and wife holding hands. But now these same people were squawking irritably and I loathed them. I thought: They have to be here. They have a purpose. They're going home, or to work, or to meet friends. I had no such justification.
I was a victim of my plans. I had got this far and had boarded the train for no other reason than to be on the train. It was going to Bogotá, so I was. But Bogotá meant nothing to me: I was going there in order to leave it. At the best of times such a trip could be a lark, but this one had begun joylessly. It was too late to get off the train; we were moving away from the sunset, into darkness; the whistle was blowing and the passengers, quieted by the racket of the wheels, were smiling rather sadly. I was sorry that the train was not taking me out of Colombia, but only deeper into it, on a route that everyone had warned me about - the heat, the mosquitoes, the Magdalena swamps - to a capital no one praised.
Out of Santa Marta we crossed a green plain at the far end of which were mountains of pale velvet, a nap of shrubbery which was yellow in the salmon-coloured light that shone from the hinge of sun. Then, along the Caribbean for several miles, and the pink sky made the swamps pink and the still pools mirrored the new stars. This, with the palms and the fertile fields, gave me a little hope. The tidal pools were stirred by the breeze and lost their colour.
The train was almost full, but at Ciénaga, the first stop, a cry went up from the crowd waiting at the platform, and fights broke out as the people pushed into the cars. 'Colombia has taken ardently to the air,' says The South American Handbook. 'No one rides the trains,' I was told in Barranquilla. Some people denied that the train even existed; and I had had to search for days'to get information about it. How, then, to explain these crowds? Perhaps it was very easy. Despite the protestations that it was a rich civilized country, it was actually a country of semi-literate peasants, most of whom lived in inaccessible areas. Such conditions - poverty, illiteracy, remoteness - created an oral tradition, and it was this, the hearsay of the bush telegraph, that conveyed information about the trains. We were late arriving at Ciénaga, but the people had been there on the platform all day: it had been said that a train was due. Now they scrambled to the few empty seats, dragging boxes and suitcases after them. But the rest- and there were many - simply stood in the aisle, or sat on their cardboard boxes. The aisle was jammed. It was like a homeward-bound commuter train of exhausted strap-hangers. The difference was that this train was going 750 miles to Bogotá.
There was no air in the car. It had begun to rain, a warm night-time drizzle; the passengers had shut the windows. The lights flickered, the train lurched, and the passengers were so closely packed that the slightest lurch had them yelling in complaint. Now, I thought, someone is going to turn on a radio. But, before the thought came whole, the music started, an awful trumpeting and harmonizing, the Latin quick-step that was like acid in my ears. The rain, the music, the hot steamy car; and the mosquitoes, the dim lightbulbs that looked like withered tangerines. I propped my window up and pulled out Boswell, but I had not read two sentences when the lights failed entirely. We were in darkness.