To the Ends of the Earth

NEARER VILLAZÓN THE TRAIN HAD SPEEDED UP AND SENT grazing burros scampering away. We came to the station: the altitude was given—we were as high here as we had been at La Paz. The Argentine sleeping car was shunted onto a siding, and the rest of the train rolled down a hill and out of sight. There were five of us in this sleeping car, but no one knew when we would be taken across the border. I found the conductor, who was swatting flies in the corridor; and I asked him.

“We will be here a long time,” he said. He made it sound like years.

The town was not a town. It was a few buildings necessitated by the frontier post. It was one street, unpaved, of low hut-like stores. They were all shut. Near the small railway station, about twenty women had set up square homemade umbrellas and were selling fruit and bread and shoelaces. On arriving at the station, the mob of Indians had descended from the train, and there had been something like excitement; but the people were now gone, the train was gone. The market women had no customers and nothing moved but the flies above the mud puddles. It made me gasp to walk the length of the platform, but perhaps I had walked too fast—at the far end an old crazy Indian woman was screaming and crying beside a tree stump. No one took any notice of her. I bought half a pound of peanuts and sat on a station bench, shelling them. “Are you in that sleeping car?” asked a man hurrying toward me. He was shabbily dressed and indignant.

I told him I was.

“What time is it leaving?”

I said, “I wish I knew.”

He went into the station and rapped on a door. From within the building a voice roared, “Go away!”

The man came out of the station. He said, “These people are all whores.” He walked through the puddles back to the sleeping car.

The Indian woman was still screaming, but after an hour or two I grew accustomed to it, and the screams were like part of the silence of Villazón. The sleeping car looked very silly stranded on the track. And there was no train in sight, no other coach or railway car. We were on a bluff. A mile south, across a bridge and up another hill was the Argentine town of La Quiaca. It too was nowhere, but it was there that we were headed, somehow, sometime.

A pig came over and sucked at the puddle near my feet and sniffed at the peanut shells. The clouds built up, massing over Villazón, and a heavy truck rattled by, blowing its horn for no reason, raising dust, and heading into Bolivia. Still the Indian woman screamed. The market women packed their boxes and left. It was dusk, and the place seemed deader than ever.

Night fell. I went to the sleeping car. It lay in darkness: no electricity, no lights. The corridor was thick with flies. The conductor beat a towel at them.

“What time are we going?”

“I do not know,” he said.

I wanted to go home.

But it was pointless to be impatient. I had to admit that this was unavoidable emptiness, a hollow zone which lay between the more graspable experience of travel. What good would it do to lose my temper or seek to shorten this time? I would have to stick it out. But time passes slowly in the darkness. The Indian woman screamed; the conductor cursed the flies.

I left the sleeping car and walked toward a low lighted building, which I guessed might be a bar. There were no trees here, and little moonlight: the distances were deceptive. It took me half an hour to reach the building. And I was right: it was a coffee shop. I ordered a coffee and sat in the empty room waiting for it to come. Then I heard a train whistle.

A frail barefoot Indian girl put the coffee cup down.

“What train is that?”

“It is the train to La Quiaca.”

“Shit!” I put some money down and without touching the coffee ran all the way back to the sleeping car. When I arrived, the engine was being coupled to the coach, and my throat burned from the effort of running at such a high altitude. My heart was pounding. I threw myself onto my bed and panted.

Outside, a signalman was speaking to one of the passengers.

“The tracks up to Tucumán are in bad shape,” he said. “You might not get there for days.”

Damn this trip, I thought.

We were taken across the border to the Argentine station over the hill. Then the sleeping car was detached and we were again left on a siding. Three hours passed. There was no food at the station, but I found an Indian woman who was watching a teapot boil over a fire. She was surprised that I should ask her to sell me a cup, and she took the money with elaborate grace. It was past midnight, and at the station there were people huddled in blankets and sitting on their luggage and holding children in their arms. Now it started to rain, but just as I began to be exasperated I remembered that these people were the Second Class passengers, and it was their cruel fate to have to sit at the dead center of this continent waiting for the train to arrive. I was much luckier than they. I had a berth and a First Class ticket. And there was nothing to be done about the delay.