The Slowest Train

I was not exactly sure why I found myself in Oaxaca City. It was not a planned visit I had just gone to a bus station and the name stood out and I bought a ticket, slung my backpack on my shoulder and boarded a bus. 

Sometimes when you just meet somebody and they are not who you think they are but you fall for them and life becomes a wonderful swelling of heart and memory. I had met Carmen at a barber shop with her laughing at my trying to get a cut the way I wanted and the barber insisting on doing something else. We spent the next four days without thinking of moving away from each other. One little thing that I found out during that time was that Carmen was a respected community Calpuleque, a Sorceress. 

  Carmen was propped up with her elbow on her pillow and with her fist holding her beautiful face, ’Let’s go take a train South?’

‘South?’, I repeated not knowing where that came from.

‘Yes. We will go on the slowest train in the world … and we will make love in one of the most luxurious cabins on the slowest train going nowhere in particular? What do you say?’

I chuckled, nodding yes.

Early the next morning we were driven in a black Mercedes SUV with tinted windows to the Oaxaca train station, the Ferrocarril Mexicano del Sur. The SUV had a liquor cabinet and we started our love holiday with Ron Negrita and grapefruit drinks all the way there. In celebration of our time together Carmen wore a yellow smock with tiny roses in vines embroidered from shoulder to shoulder.

Inside the sun blazed church-like facade of bell towers and statues was a darkened open space of shading shadows with no seating, except on the floor. The glazed glass roofing with dull iron rafters was home to many species of birds, including small vultures. The walls were decorated by a forgotten design of worn peeling paint, mainly fleshy orange colours mixed with an undercoating of dirty whites. Lots of fruit peels and newspaper with brown stains decorated dark corners and the smell of urine, faces and horseshit cigarettes made the place have a lived in character. People were dressed in a mixture of traditional clothing and tailored suits. Orange seemed to dominate the colours of the traditional clothing with lots of beige, white and black stripes. I noted the innocent expressions on several back packers who stood out like screen actors waiting for their directors.

Carmen had the driver purchase our tickets for a place called Canada and we waited for the train to arrive very late. When the train arrived it wasn’t announced. I noticed and it was affirmed that the holes in the coaches were from the Mexican Revolution. A puffing locomotive pulled ten carriages toward and then, by us, while steaming more than moving.

It slowly made its way to a stop. The huffing of the engine seemed weary. All of the carriages clanked and banged sort of surprised at this ending. Maybe it was the rum but I started feeling like we were being a burden to it by taking passage. I told Carmen and she laughed and told the SUV driver who also laughed. 

Our carriage was the last one and our cabin held a large double bed with a luggage stand elevated above a pull down sink that was over a hidden slide out toilet. Clean facecloths hung neatly to the side and over the sink-toilet arrangement and I knew that there was a smile on my face by looking into the mirror above the basin. We bounded onto the bed while the porter put our luggage in its rack, and found the mattress a little too hard to give us any bounce but it was soft enough to relax in and look out the long window at those waiting at the station still, as the train gave out its whistle and lurched into a smooth ride forward. A slow lurch and a slow forward.

The porter left before we could tip him but returned as we finally pulled out of the station with a champagne bottle in an ice-filled pewter bucket on a tray with two crystal champagne glasses. He balanced the tray well, placing it on the sink and pulling out the bottle to uncork it with a flourish. This was a professional performance and after pouring our first glasses he bowed and we gave him a tip enough to earn his first smile, showing lots of white teeth and a tilted head. The porter, at our service, was named Andrés, and Andrés left us in privacy. The train moved through Oaxaca, passing a very large and very old tree that Carmen bowed her head to and mumbled words I could not understand.

Laying about naked on soft bedding and softer pillows the unseen sun lulled the day into a sleepy afternoon.

My eyes opened as we churned and strained up a steep grade on a verdantly rugged mountain, then we levelled and screeched and hissed down a grade that bordered a wildly rushing river that we could never catch up with even though we were moving downhill. Up another hill and down and around steep curves always at a rate that could be walked. We could see the engine steaming and hissing and occasionally whistling and then we could only see trees or rivers or sometimes people at work in the fields.

The slow pace of the rhythmic clacking was in tune with a metronome or a pendulum clock that put us into a time element that made vast panoramas merge into and out of sight in slow motion. It was hard to get enough of it and we wandered through a world that was real and set in place for us.

Very late in the afternoon we were travelling through a contrasting desert area of cactus and stray brown short-horned cattle. There was a toughness about them that showed through their skins with pronounced rib bones and nonchalant grazing on prickly shrubs.

During one desert stretch the heat outside entered the room with intensity when the train chugged along into the desert zephyrs, and turned humid when the train descended into barrancas and ravines. They could feel the affects of the stillness when passing thick brush clumps or dust-leaved trees. Andrés, the porter, had even opened the two top buttons on his jacket when he appeared with clay pitchers of ice water. As night slowly descended the ice was barely slivers when he delivered some sweet lemonade in a small glass jug. 

Nearing a small desert village of scattered homes we pulled the sheet over us. The people were slowly walking faster than the train. They were sharp featured with the women as well as the men wearing thick sombreros that were round-cone shaped and sat on the front of their heads. Both the women and men wore bright cotton shawls that were wrapped loosely around their shoulders and chests, draping at the back. In the turn of day into night the skin on the people in this place in the middle of nowhere darkened to a deep red. 

Sellers found our window and handed up for purchase a remarkable selection of flowers. Carmen bought two dozen roses for me which she later spread out on our bed and we inhaled that bouquet into the morning sunlight when we threw them out to a group of young girls sleeping huddled together at the start of a small train station. The train did not stop but walk paced its struggle through a town that had the station as the largest building.

Again the trees got sparser, becoming thinly covered in bunched needles with an advance of cactus and sage. The bouquet of the desert took over from the vestiges of our roses and the heat inside the cabin became exaggerated.

Toward noon, headed toward purple mountains, we slowly moved past a dead dog with three legs with its head pinned to a bristling cactus base. A stopped two wheel cart with hang-headed horse came into view with two passengers. It turned out to be three passengers for they were carrying the body of a bare-headed man with a large moustache dressed in splendid whites with his red hands held as in prayer. His eyes had coins over them.

A woman dressed in black and a man dressed in white were standing at the head of the cart looking at us looking at them. Neither had more than a passive expression. More people were standing as though waiting for the cart. One man was on horseback wearing a short brown jacket and tight brown trousers with a wide tan sombrero. The straps of the sombrero were tied tightly to the back of his head bunching a bit of his hair up. He had a pearl-handled revolver in a holster high on his waist and a silver handled rifle in its holster of black leather. The high pommel was silver and the saddle had silver designs blending with the lusciousness of the horse’s black coat.

All of the people were looking at us as if they were posing for a photograph of long ago. Nobody moved and we barely moved by. They were gone, lost in the side of the window leaving us to look out at a desert that was growing hillocks and greenery.

‘Now you see, Rod.’ Carmen was staring into the scrub brush and lumpy desert landscape. ‘We live no matter. Our needs are diverse, not as unified as most in the world would have you believe. You are here as they were there. You are passing while you are here because that is what is happening and what you accept.’

‘Carmen, you don’t have to keep preaching to me. I understand and appreciate every single thing that has happened since I first met you.’ I pointed to my head, ‘It is all here’, then to my heart. ‘Carmen, I have the feeling that from here on it will be like rain falling on the sea, ya know, like water falling on water.’

‘I love you, Rod.’ Carmen seemed saddened, sincere and hopeful in one expression.

‘I love you, Carmen.’

‘I want you to remember one thing. I love you and will lose you because you are a worshipper of common sense. You will not need me any longer because of this search for that wisdom, and my telling you this seals our separation though I want to be with you forever.

‘No, don’t interrupt, please.’ Her tones were soft and milky. ‘Your art is in the resolution of curiosities without creating the questions. The questions come to you and you recognise this, making you the artist striving for an atmosphere of completion. You move away from confusions easily by understanding your own errors and seeking not to repeat them. You move away or assist those you love whose judgements are made by fear through vacillations.

‘You do not have overwhelming needs and therefore fewer confusions, and you can help others. All of this is a part of the art that is you.

‘We who venture into the search for wisdom have simple needs that to others seem not only complicated but something to be feared. And we know that those who fear first are the ones who reject common sense.’

We got off the train at Canada. We caught the next train North to Oaxaca City. Two days after arriving back in Oaxaca Carmen disappeared and I never saw her again.