To the Ends of the Earth (15 page)

“But he didn’t speak English, right?”

“He could say a few words.”

“You believed him when he said he had TB?”

“He wasn’t lying, if that’s what you think. I saw his doctor. The doctor told me he needed treatment. So I swore I would help him, and that’s why I went to Mazatlán a month ago. To help him. He was much thinner—he couldn’t go fishing. I was really worried. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see his mother. I gave him money and things and put him on the plane, and when I didn’t hear from him I came here myself.”

“It seems very generous of you. You could be out having a good time. Instead, you’re searching Veracruz for this lost soul.”

“It’s what God wants me to do,” she whispered. “Yes?”

“And I’ll find him, if God wants me to.”

“You’re going to stick at it, eh?”

“We Sagittarians are awful determined—real adventurous types! What sign are you?”

“Aries.”

“Ambitious.”

“That’s me.”

She said, “Actually, I think God’s testing me.”

“In what way?”

“This José business is nothing. I’ve just been through a very heavy divorce. And there’s some other things.”

“About José. If he’s illiterate, then his mother’s probably illiterate. In that case, she won’t see your ad in the paper. So why not have a poster made—a picture, some details—and you can put it up near the bus station and where his mother’s house is supposed to be.”

“I think I’ll try that.”

I gave her more suggestions: hire a private detective, broadcast messages on the radio. Then it occurred to me that José might have gone back to Mazatlán. If he had been sick or worried he would have done that, and if he had been trying to swindle her—as I suspected he had—he would certainly have done that eventually, when he ran out of money.

She agreed that he might have gone back, but not for the reasons I said. “I’m staying here until I find him. But even
if I find him tomorrow I’ll stay a month. I like it here. This is a real nice town. Were you here for the carnival? No? It was a trip, I can tell you that. Everyone was down here in the plaza—”

Now the band was playing Rossini, the overture to
The Barber of Seville
.

“—drinking, dancing. Everyone was so friendly. I met so many people. I was partying every night. That’s why I don’t mind staying here and looking for José. And, um, I met a man.”

“Local feller?”

“Mexican. He gave me good vibrations, like you’re giving me. You’re positive—get posters made, radio broadcasts—that’s what I need.”

“This new man you met—he might complicate things.”

She shook her head. “He’s good for me.”

“What if he finds out that you’re looking for José? He might get annoyed.”

“He knows all about it. We discussed it. Besides,” she added after a moment, “José is dying.”

The concert had ended. It was so late I had become ravenously hungry. I said that I was going to a restaurant, and Nicky said, “Mind if I join you?” We had red snapper and she told me about her divorces. Her first husband had been violent, her second had been a bum. It was her word.

“A real bum?”

“A real one,” she said. “He was so lazy—why, he worked for me, you know? While we were married. But he was so lazy I had to fire him.”

“When you divorced him?”

“No, long before that. I fired him, but I stayed married to him. That was about five years ago. After that, he just hung around the house. When I couldn’t take any more of it I divorced him. Then guess what? He goes to his lawyer and tries to get me to pay him maintenance money.
I’m
supposed to pay
him
!”

“What sort of business are you in?”

“I own slums,” she said. “Fifty-seven of them—I mean, fifty-seven units. I used to own 128 units. But these fifty-seven are in eighteen different locations. God, it’s a
problem—people always want paint, things fixed, a new roof.”

I ceased to see her as a troubled libido languishing in Mexico. She owned property; she was here living on her slum rents. She said she didn’t pay any taxes because of her “depreciations” and that on paper she looked “real good.” She said, “God’s been good to me.”

“Are you going to sell these slums of yours?”

“Probably. I’d like to live here. I’m a real Mexico freak.”

“And you’ll make a profit when you sell them.”

“That’s what it’s all about.”

“Then why don’t you let these people live rent-free? They’re doing you a favor by keeping them in repair. God would love you for that. And you’ll still make a profit.”

She said, “That’s silly.”

The bill came.

“I’ll pay for myself,” she said.

“Save your money,” I said. “José might turn up.”

She smiled at me. “You’re kind of an interesting guy.”

I had not said a single word about myself; she did not even know my name. Perhaps this reticence was interesting? But it wasn’t reticence: she hadn’t asked.

I said, “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’m at the Diligencia.”

I was at the Diligencia, too. I decided not to tell her this. I said, “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

W
E CAME TO
T
IERRA
B
LANCA
. T
HE DESCRIPTIVE NAME DID
not describe the place. Spanish names were apt only as ironies or simplifications; they seldom fit. The argument is usually stated differently, to demonstrate how dull, how
literal-minded and unimaginative the Spanish explorer or cartographer was. Seeing a dark river, the witness quickly assigned a name: Rio Negro. It is a common name throughout Latin America; yet it never matched the color of the water. And the four Rio Colorados I saw bore not the slightest hint of red. Piedra Negras was marshland, not black stones; I saw no stags at Venado Tuerto, no lizards at Lagartos. None of the Laguna Verdes was green; my one La Dorada looked leaden, and Progreso in Guatemala was backward, La Libertad in El Salvador a stronghold of repression in a country where salvation seemed in short supply. La Paz was not peaceful, nor was La Democracia democratic. This was not literalness—it was whimsy. Place names called attention to beauty, freedom, piety, or strong colors; but the places themselves, so prettily named, were something else. Was it willful inaccuracy or a lack of subtlety that made the map so glorious with fine attributes and praises? Latins found it hard to live with dull facts; the enchanting name, while not exactly making their town magical, at least took the curse off it. And there was always a chance that an evocative name might evoke something to make the plain town bearable.

G
UATEMALA
C
ITY, AN EXTREMELY HORIZONTAL PLACE, IS
like a city on its back. Its ugliness, which is a threatened look (the low, morose houses have earthquake cracks in their façades; the buildings wince at you with fright lines), is ugliest on those streets where, just past the last toppling house, a blue volcano’s cone bulges. I could see the volcanoes from the window of my hotel room. I was on the third floor, which was also the top floor. They were tall volcanoes
and looked capable of spewing lava. Their beauty was undeniable; but it was the beauty of witches. The rumbles from their fires had heaved this city down.

The first capital had been destroyed by torrents of water. So the capital was moved three miles away to Antigua in the middle of the sixteenth century. In 1773, Antigua was flattened by an earthquake, and a more stable site—at least it was farther from the slopes of the great volcanoes—was found here, in the Valley of the Hermitage, formerly an Indian village. Churches were built—a dozen, of Spanish loveliness, with slender steeples and finely finished porches and domes. The earth shook—not much, but enough to split them. Tremors left cracks between windows, and separated, in the stained glass of those windows, the shepherd from his brittle flock, the saint from his gold staff, the martyr from his persecutors. Christs were parted from their crosses and the anatomy of chapel Virgins violated, as their enameling, the porcelain white of faces and fingers, shattered, sometimes with a report that startled the faithful in their prayers. The windows, the statues, the masonry were mended; and gold leaf was applied thickly to the splintered altars. It seemed the churches had been made whole again. But the motion of earthquakes had never really ceased. In Guatemala they were inescapable. And in 1917 the whole city was thrown into its streets—every church and house and brothel. Thousands died; that unprecedented earthquake was seen as a judgment; and more fled to the Caribbean coast, where there were only savages to contend with.

The Guatemalans, sullen at the best of times, display a scolded resignation—bordering at times on guiltiness—when the subject of earthquakes is raised. Charles Darwin is wonderful in describing the sense of dislocation and spiritual panic that earthquakes produce in people. He experienced an earthquake when the
Beagle
was anchored off the Chilean coast. “A bad earthquake,” he writes, “at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid;—one second of time has created in the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would not have produced.”

T
HE TOWN ONLY LOOKED GODFORSAKEN; IN FACT, IT WAS
comfortable. It was a nice combination of attributes. In every respect, Santa Ana, the most Central American of Central American towns, was a perfect place—perfect in its pious attitudes and pretty girls, perfect in its slumber, its coffee-scented heat, its jungly plaza, and in the dusty elegance of its old buildings whose whitewash at nightfall gave them a vivid phosphorescence. Even its volcano was in working order. My hotel, the Florida, was a labyrinthine one-story affair, with potted palms and wicker chairs and good food—fresh fish, from nearby Lake Guija, was followed by the crushed velvet of Santa Ana coffee, and Santa Ana dessert, a delicate cake of mashed beans and banana served in cream. This pleasing hotel cost four dollars a night. It was a block from the Plaza. All Santa Ana’s buildings of distinction—there were three—were in the plaza: the Cathedral was neo-gothic, the town hall had the colonnaded opulence of a ducal palace, and the Santa Ana theater had once been an opera house.

In another climate, I don’t think the theater would have seemed so special, but in this sleepy tropical town in the western highlands of El Salvador—and there was nothing here for the luxury-minded or ruin-hunting tourist—the theater was magnificent and strange. Its style was banana republic Graeco-Roman; it was newly whitewashed, and classical in an agreeably vulgar way, with cherubs on its façade, and trumpeting angels, and masks of comedy and tragedy, a partial sorority of Muses: a pudgy Melpomene, a pouncing Thalia, Calliope with a lyre in her lap, and—her muscles showing through her tunic as fully developed as a
gym teacher’s—Terpsichore. There were columns, too, and a Romanesque portico, and on a shield a fuming volcano as nicely proportioned as Izalco, the one just outside town, which was probably the model for this emblem. It was a beautiful turn-of-the-century theater and not entirely neglected; once, it had provided Santa Ana with concerts and operas, but culturally Santa Ana had contracted, and catering to this shrunken condition the theater had been reduced to showing movies. That week, the offering was
New York, New York
.

I liked Santa Ana immediately; its climate was mild, its people alert and responsive, and it was small enough so that a short walk took me to its outskirts, where the hills were deep green and glossy with coffee bushes. The hard-pressed Guatemalans I had found a divided people—and the Indians in the hinterland seemed hopelessly lost; but El Salvador, on the evidence in Santa Ana, was a country of half-breeds, energetic and full of talk, practicing a kind of Catholicism based on tactile liturgy. In the Cathedral, pious Salvadoreans pinched the feet of saints and rubbed at relics, and women with infants—always remembering to insert a coin in the slot and light a candle first—seized the loose end of Christ’s cincture and mopped the child’s head with its tassel.

I
HAD READ ABOUT
L
ATIN
A
MERICAN SOCCER—THE CHAOS
, the riots, the passionately partisan crowds, the way political frustrations were ventilated at the stadiums. I knew for a fact that if one wished to understand the British it helped to see a soccer game; then, the British did not seem so tight-lipped and proper. Indeed, a British soccer game was an occasion
for a form of gang warfare for the younger spectators. The muscular ritual of sport was always a clear demonstration of the wilder impulses in national character. The Olympic Games are interesting largely because they are a kind of world war in pantomime. “Would you mind if I went to the game with you?” I asked Alfredo, a salesman I had met on the train from Santa Ana.

Alfredo looked worried. “It will be very crowded,” he said. “There may be trouble. It is better to go to the swimming pool tomorrow—for the girls.”

“Do you think I came to El Salvador to pick up girls at a public swimming pool?”

“Did you come to El Salvador to see the football game?”

“Yes,” I said.

Alfredo was late. He blamed the traffic. “There will be a million people at the stadium.” He had brought along some friends, two boys who, he boasted, were studying English.

“How are you doing?” I asked them in English.

“Please?” said one. The other laughed. The first one said in Spanish, “We are only on the second lesson.”

Because of the traffic, and the risk of car thieves at the stadium, Alfredo parked half a mile away, at a friend’s house. This house was worth some study; it was a number of cubicles nailed to trees, with the leafy branches descending into the rooms. Cloth was hung from sticks to provide walls, and a strong fence surrounded it. I asked the friend how long he had lived there. He said his family had lived in the house for many years. I did not ask what happened when it rained.