A Visit to Don Otavio (2 page)

‘Perhaps I ought to see something of my native continent,’ she said; ‘although, frankly, I never felt the slightest desire to see Latin America.’

An agency, at which I had my name down, offered train reservations to Mexico City for the end of the week. We took them.

That afternoon I went down to the Public Library on 42nd Street, and
returned with the diary of Madame Calderon, Fanny Inglis, the Scotchwoman who married the first Spanish Ambassador to Mexico and spent two amazed years in that country in the 1830s. Later, Madame Calderon became governess to one of the various children of Queen Isabella. She stood up to the court of Madrid for some twenty years, followed an Infanta into exile and at the return of the Bourbons to Spain, was created, like that other royal governess, Mme. de Maintenon, a marchioness. She died in the Palace at Madrid at the age of eighty-one of a cold she had caught at a dinner party. Her Mexican diary is of the same stuff. The full title is
Life in Mexico, A Residence of Two Years In That Country
, by Madame Calderon de la Barca. It came out in England in 1843, was prefaced by Prescott himself, became a best-seller at once, and was praised in the
Edinburgh Review
. I read
Life in
Mexico
until dawn and have not thought of Peru since.

In the plains of Indiana, nature certainly has it. We have been going through the wheat fields for hours; miles upon miles of fat, yellow alien corn visibly ripening under a wide-awake sky. A spread of cruel wealth. Of human life and habitation there are few signs, no farm houses, no animals by the roadside.

What part does man play in the farming of these fields? Does he work the earth or does he operate it? Is he peasant, mechanic, or businessman? Perhaps here is the scene of his last defeat: eating tinned vegetables in a frame house, setting out in a tractor to cultivate his one-crop harvest mortgaged to the banks, he has been undone by a monstrous mating of nature with the machine.

Corrective: if the fields of Canada, the Middle West, the Argentine and the Ukraine were run like so many farms in the Home Counties, we’d all starve. Oh, double-faced truth, oh, Malthus, oh, compromise – there
are
too many sheep in the pen.

The beggar to Talleyrand,
‘Monseigneur, il faut que je mange.’
Talleyrand to the beggar,
‘Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.’
Ah, that is Talleyrand’s word against the beggar’s.
E, who is gregarious, has gone to the club-car ostensibly in search of coffee. I am lying on the lower berth, my paraphernalia littered about me, trying to forget that we shall have to change trains at St Louis later in the afternoon. Patience cards, writing board, mineral water, brandy flask, books. Terry’s Guide to Mexico; Miss Compton-Burnett’s
Elders and Betters; Howard’s End; Decline and Fall;
Horizon
and the
Partisan Review;
Hugo’s
Spanish; The Unquiet Grave;
two detective stories, one of them an Agatha Christie and, what rarity, unread. I know that I am comfortable, at peace and myself. I know that this is a victory or an outrage. Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it, perhaps that is enough.

Still, the fields of Indiana stretch. The past is everywhere; the fragile present already the past. Paul Pennyfeather strolls through injustice like Candide; the tragedies of Ivy Compton-Burnett throw Sophoclean light on the workings of men, women and fate; Palinurus has his hand on our feeble pulse, and Mr Forster’s connecting seems the last answer. They have all touched truth.

E has come back from the club-car, very cross. It appears that this state is dry in a particularly thorough-going manner. Not only that you cannot get a drink on the train, you cannot even order what is called a set-up, soda-water and ice being suspected of one use only. E was told to wait until we have crossed the state line. It is all very confusing. Oklahoma and Kansas are bone dry, that is everybody drinks like fishes. In Vermont you are rationed to two bottles of hard liquor a month. In Pennsylvania you cannot get a drink on Sunday; in Texas you may only drink at home, in Georgia only beer and light wines, in Ohio what and as much as you like but you have to buy it at the Post Office. Arizona and Nevada are wet but it is a criminal offence to give a drink to a Red Indian. In New York you cannot publicly consume anything on a Sunday morning but may have it sent up to an hotel bedroom. And nowhere, anywhere, in the Union can you buy, coax or order a drop on Election Day.

The Mississippi – to what child, what youth, is the word not rich in exotic longings? A river world of travel and far mornings …

And now, here, through the windows of our closed carriage, inexorably apart, we see the broad, slow stream, flowing, tranquil, between willowed banks through a country of remote and heroic beauty. Untouched, the great, sad landscape floats by the train in silence; grave, darkly green, pastoral on a majestic scale, piercing the heart with melancholy, with separateness and foreboding. A way we shall never be. Will this June day not close? Oh, the heavy, drawn-out loneliness of the American evening.

An elderly man comes shuffling down the aisle. He steadies himself at our table. ‘Have a shot, sister,’ he holds up a quart of Bourbon, ‘you look as if you need it.’

‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘I do,’ and reach for the bottle with the ubiquitous, the inevitable nightly gesture of the country.

We are now on the through train to Mexico City. It is called the Sunshine Special, and is a slowish, shabby sort of train. We no longer have a compartment, only a section of a sleeping-car, which means a lower and an upper bunk in one of those faintly comic dormitories known from the films, where men and women undress and sleep, buttoned inside curtained recesses. In daytime bed, draperies and partitions are somehow doubled back and tucked away in a cumbersome, ingenious manner, and the car takes on the aspect of a tram with tables. The arrangement is as old as the American railroads. The distances made it necessary to devise an inexpensive way for every person on the train to lay his head during the many nights. It is not bad at all. The air is cool and neutral, and although there are some forty people to a car, one is anonymously semi-private the way one would be on a large bus.

We felt like hot food that night and went to the dining-car which turned out to be an apartment decorated with machine-carved Spanish
Renaissance woodwork of astonishing gloom and ugliness. Dinner, which you are supposed to order like a deaf-mute, by scribbling your unattainable wishes on a pad of paper, was a nondescript travesty of food served with the quite imaginative disregard of what goes with what that seems to be the tradition of the American table d’hôte. The one starch and vegetable of the day is supposed to be eaten as an accompaniment to any of the main dishes on the menu. So if it is cauliflower and
French-fried
potatoes, cauliflower and French-fried potatoes will appear on your plate whether you are having the Broiled Halibut Steak, the Corned-beef Hash, the Omelet or the Lamb Chops. I have seen – not eaten – such inspired misalliances as tinned asparagus tips and spaghetti curled around a fried mackerel. This is not a traveller’s tale.

Last night somewhere in the depths of Arkansas, the machine broke down. Something went wrong with the air-cooling. It stopped, and as there is no way of letting in the outer air, the temperature in the car quietly rose to what we were later told was 110° Fahrenheit. When I woke I thought I was in the inside of a haystack, and of course delirious. Such a scene. Faces peering from behind curtains, calling for ladders and explanations; purple faces on the verge of apoplexy, livid faces gasping for air; babies squalling, men in underclothes struggling in upper bunks, angelic Negro porters helping ladies in kimonos down the aisle.

One woman went on sleeping through it all. ‘Lady, Lady,’ a porter crooned to her, ‘you’s better wake up, Lady, or you find you’self with a lily in you’ hand.’

At last they had us all settled in an ice-cold day-coach, with our clothes and belongings piled about us. We would probably catch pneumonia, for the moment we had escaped death. Meanwhile dawn was breaking, somebody suggested a drink of Coca-Cola braced with sal volatile. This was a new one on me. It certainly does you a power of good. The worst sufferers were the mothers, the formulas had curdled in their bottles and the little ones howled. No dining-car until Texarcana. I offered to heat whatever needed heating over my spirit lamp.

‘Just look at that,’ said a mother, ‘she can boil water whenever she
wants to.’

One sagging executive treated another sagging executive to a disquisition on
our
rolling stock. E joined them.

‘Replacements …’

‘Steel …’

‘Priorities …’

‘Commitments …’

‘ERP …’

There is time for reflection in the galleys of Spain.

Dominion over his environment was supposed to be a hallmark of man. Now, that dominion is almost wholly vicarious, derived from the past ingenuity of others. In urban and industrial communities it is never direct, physical or spontaneous. Our implements are at twelve removes and we may all live to live inside so many Thermos flasks. It may be well to remember how to use a pair of sticks and a stone.

They have promised us a new sleeping-car at San Antonio.

We are late. There is a lot of shunting going on and everybody is tired. Texas since cock-crow. It’s the size of France, the British Isles, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal combined, as one was taught. Or was it France, the British Isles and Italy? It certainly seems too vast to be true. And flat. And empty. But rich, as I was told at least six separate times today. Oil, beef, grain. E tells me that after seceding from Mexico, the Lone Star Republic sent a deputation to Queen Victoria offering Texas to the Crown. Palmerston refused.

The new car has been coupled on. The conductor has allotted the sections and we are off again. It seems, however, that we are to sit up for the Customs at Laredo. Apparently we cannot be inspected by the Immigration in our bunks. We are hours late and nobody seems to know when we shall get to the border. We are passing by a straggle of
frame-houses,
each house has a verandah with a crumpled man sitting in a rocking chair looking as exhausted as we feel.

Spires are piercing the shallow horizon. A Cathedral? It turns out to
be oil wells.

Another dinner in the dining-car, which failed to cheer. It is midnight. Still no border. Only Texas.

The US Immigration has just been. Two men in shirt-sleeves, informal, friendly.

They began by asking US citizens where they were born. Americans need no passports for coming and going by the continental borders of the States.

‘Birmingham, Alabama, Mister.’

‘Terra Haute, Indiana.’

‘Las Vegas, Nevada.’

‘Walla Walla, Washington.’

‘Little Temperance, Iowa.’

Those whose accents were too peculiar or who were what is called foreign-born, produced birth certificates or driving licences. Nobody was deliberately made uncomfortable. The officials created no atmosphere beyond that of their employment.

They have sealed the train.

After another wait, the pointless frontier dithering where everybody’s leisure is consulted except the passengers’, we crossed the International Bridge over the Rio Grande. We are now technically in Mexico. It is two in the morning, and again nothing is happening.

We’ve been ordered into the dining-car for the Mexican Passport Control. If the American authorities did not wish to see us in bed, the Mexicans cannot bear to see us seated. We form a queue. And there one stands in tedium and fatigue punctuated by waves of anxiety. Table-clothes and cutlery have been whisked away, the dining-car has taken on the aspect of a court-martial. The atmosphere is hostile. The officials are in military uniform. There are armed guards. Two over-belted and buckled officers with their caps on, sit behind a table. At last everybody’s turn comes. The officers make a point of speaking no English. Each separate, identical tourist card – the Mexican travel permit one acquires
as a matter of course with one’s ticket – is stared at. Now and then a finger comes down on the figure of somebody’s birth date. But nothing frightful happens, could happen as one has been trying to tell oneself all the time; this is supposed to be a casual border, good neighbours all, with paths smoothed for the advertised-at tourist.

Back in the sleeping-car, we are told to get off the train for the Customs inspection. Yes, with all our hand luggage. Overcoats too, and sponge bags. A gang of porters appears to drag these articles down for us. There is, we find, a special exorbitant tariff for these nocturnal services. So out we step into the sub-tropical night. Once more the heat is appalling. We are kept hanging around a squalid station for two hours while Red Indian Pygmies, male and female, dig into our bags in the manner of so many terriers burrowing down a hole.

The passengers are beginning to feel the strain. Many of them are elderly or with small children and most of them believed they were travelling for pleasure. They had been coaxed into this by the literature of the travel bureaux: a smiling Mexican in a cart-wheel hat holding up a piece of pottery; a smiling brown boy in the surf at Acapulco holding up a speared fish; a smiling woman in a
rebozo
holding up a
rebozo
. At Nuevo Laredo there is not a smile to the square league. The American railroad men across the river at Laredo despise the Greasers; the Mexicans at Nuevo Laredo loathe the Gringos. The passengers, shoved about and resentful, remember what they used to say at school about people who were coloured and smaller than themselves. The Mexicans do not understand the passengers at all – great, enormous women most of them, going about on trains without hats or escorts, so rude too, what can they be doing it for? Not vows, surely, being all heretics. No one trusts anyone a millimetre.