The Books: “The Old Patagonian Express” (Paul Theroux)

Next book on the history/travel shelf:

The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas by Paul Theroux. In this book, Paul Theroux travels from Boston to Patagonia – by train. It’s about his journey through Central America and down into South America. Fascinating stuff – While he is in Argentina, he calls on writer Jorge Luis Borges – and they spend a couple of days together. Theroux interviewing Borges – but basically the two of them just sit around and talk about literature for 2 days – I LOVE that chapter. But I’ll post a bit from his chapter on Guatemala. As always, I just love his writing, cranky as it is.

From The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas by Paul Theroux.

Guatemala City, 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 facades; 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 mym 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 Antiguia 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.”