Darkness proved better than dim light. These were country people: darkness put them to sleep. Soon the car was quiet, the rain let up, the moon was as round and yellow as a wheel of cheddar, and out of the window - mine was the only one open - I could see the flat swampy plain, and some huts with fires burning outside. The bog-dark land smelled of mud and rain; the passengers slept or stood silently rocking in the aisle. The darkness was puf e and serene. I thought: / am alive.
At nine o'clock, or just after, we passed Aracataca. The novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born here; this was the Macondo of Leaf-Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the light of fires and lanterns I could see mud huts, the silhouettes of palms and banana trees, and glow-worms in the tall grass. It was not late, but there were few people awake; glassy-eyed youths who had stayed up watched the train go by. 'It's coming,' says a woman in Marquez's Macondo, when she sees the first train approach the little town. 'Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.'
I made myself a baloney sandwich, drank two of the beers I had bought in Santa Marta and went to sleep. The noise, the rhythm of the clicking on the rails, was a soporific; it was silence and a stillness in the car that woke me. At midnight, I came awake: the train had stopped. I did not know where we were, but it must have been a fairly large place because most of the people in the car-including the man next to me-got off. But an equal number boarded here, so we were no less crowded. Children woke and cried, and people pushed and fought for the empty seats. An Indian girl sat next to me; her plump profile, outlined by the station lights, was unmistakable. She wore a baseball cap and a jersey and slacks, and her luggage was three cardboard boxes and an empty oil-drum. When the train started, she snuggled up to me and went to sleep. My shirt was damp with sweat, but the humid breeze was no help; and I knew we would not be out of this swamp until late the next day. I fell asleep, but when I woke again at another lonely station - a low building, a man, a lantern -1 saw that the girl had moved across the aisle and was snuggling against a murmuring man.
Dawn was tropical, the sun a grey puffball in a humid cloud. I made sure I had not been robbed in the night: my passport and money were safe in my leather pouch. And, studying my map, I saw that we were about an hour out of Barrancabermeja. The land was thinly populated, savannah giving on to swamp. We were as yet too far from the Magdalena to be able to see it, and the hot clouds obscured the mountains. This was simply a small train on a straight track, labouring through a region where there were no roads, only huts, and an occasional bull in the grass, and vultures and herons. And the huts were poor, no more than mud shelters with grass roofs.
'How about a coffee?'
It was a man carrying a tray of filled cups. I bought two and gave him the Colombian equivalent of a penny. With an empty seat next to me I could spread out, drink coffee, light my pipe and read Boswell. This was not so bad; and I had that same sense of virtue I had experienced in Mexico, having endured a hideous night in a cramped seat.
It remained cloudy for most of the morning, which was just as well. I had been told that when the sun broke through the heat would be unbearable. Perhaps that was no more than talk: everything else people had told me was wrong. They said there would be jungles, but I had seen no jungles. This was all swamp and nearby were low hills with odd worn-down configurations, as if a great flood had washed over them and made them small and smooth. People said there would be mosquitoes. There were, but the flying beetles were much worse - they not only bit fiercely, but got tangled in my hair. And the heat was no worse than Santa Marta's, and nothing like as bad as Zacapa's. They said we would run out of ice, but indeed there was no ice at all on this train; and even at the time the threat had not seemed to me particularly dire. So after eighteen hours on this swampland express 1 could truthfully say that I had seen worse trains in my life. It was not praise, but neither did I hold the conviction that the train should be insured and wrecked.
I wished to remain sane on this trip, so, in a businesslike way, I brought my diary up to date, writing until lunch-time. Then I walked the length of the train, carrying my sandwich ingredients, and finding an empty table in the unused dining car, made myself a submarine sandwich. Another walk, and finally I settled down with Boswell. The sun had come out, the swamps shimmered; and the book was perfect. Doctor Johnson remarks on everything, including travel. Boswell is off to Corsica: 'When giving me advice as to my travels, Dr Johnson did not dwell upon cities, and palaces, and pictures, and shows, and Arcadian scenes. He was of Lord Essex's opinion, who advises his kinsman Roger Earl of Rutland, "rather to go an hundred miles to speak with one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town." '
The book became my life-line. There was no landscape in it. I had all the landscape I wanted out the window. What I lacked was talk, and this was brilliant talk, sage advice, funny remarks. I could identify with Boswell ('Why is a fox's tail bushy, Sir?'), and the combination of this train and the Magdalena valley, and Boswell on my lap, was just the ticket. I think if I had not had that book to read as I made my way through Colombia, the trip would have been unendurable.
But it was demeaning, after those conversations at Mrs Thrale's and at the Mitre, to enter into discussions with the rest of the passengers. I had thought I was the only foreigner on the train. I was wrong - I should have known the moment I saw his cut-off dungarees, his full beard, his earring, his maps and rucksack that he was a fellow-traveller. He was French. He had a sore throat. A French traveller with a sore throat is a wonderful thing to behold, but it takes more than tonsilitis to prevent a Frenchman from boasting.
He looked contemptuously at my drip-dry shirt, my leakproof shoes, my sunglasses.
'You're a tourist?' he said.
'Like you,' I said in a friendly way.
'I am travelling,' he said, forcing the distinction. 'I have come from San Andres Island. Before that, I journeyed through the States.'
'So did I. But I came through Central America.'
'You saw Tikal?'
'No, but I saw Zacapa. No one goes to Zacapa.'
'I have seen Tikal. Very beautiful. You should have seen it. How long have you been travelling?'
'A little over a month.'
'Five months I have been travelling! Five. I left Paris in October. I spent one month in New York City.'
'Travelling in New York City?'
This stung him. 'Going here and there,' he said. 'Where are you going?'
'Bogotá.'
'Yes, but after that.'
'Southern Argentina.'
'Patagone.' He was making tracings with his finger on his French map. 'I am going here,' he said, tapping a green bulge in Brazil. 'Down the Amazon, from Leticia. It will take fifteen days, or more, by river.' He looked up at me. 'Argentina has a bad government.'
'Brazil has a wonderful government,' I said. 'Ask those Indians on the Amazon, they'll tell you.'
He stroked his beard, not sure whether I was mocking him. 'Chile and Argentina are worse. That's why I'm not going there. You are taking this train all the way to Bogotá?'
That's right.'
'I am not. I am getting off at La Dorada. Then by bus.'
'Is that quicker?'
'No, but you save money - five dollars or more.'
'I've got five dollars,' I said. He started to cough. He stood up to give himself room, and coughed, bowing from the waist each time. I said, 'You should do something about that throat. Want an aspirin?'
'No,' he said. 'It is not serious.'
I went back to Boswell, then dozed and looked out of the window. The landscape did not change. The valley was so flat, so broad, it had no sides that were visible; and the foliage was too dense to be clearly discernible. But later in the day the savannah reasserted itself, and I could make out the faint pencillings of hills, and cattle grazed nearer the track, and horses, which broke into a gallop at the sight of the train. Flocks of white herons blew across the grass tips like flecks of paper in a breeze.