On a Slow Train

• “…the tourist…hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly…from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell…where…he had felt most at home… [A]nother…difference…the former accepts his own civilization without question…the traveler…compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949). 

     I am on Christmas break, 40 years ago, back at my mother’s house in El Paso (my father had moved out three years earlier). At grad school, I have begun to read magical realist novels, like García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I have met many students from Spanish-speaking countries; I want to start working seriously on my Spanish skills. I had taken Spanish in grade school and high school, but I never really saw the point, even though I had frequently traveled with my parents in Mexico. My father had recently been living in Guatemala, and then on Easter Island (Chile). Now, I was beginning to see a point. But how to proceed? I took a bus to downtown El Paso, walked across the bridge to the train station in Ciudad Juárez, and found the conductor of the train to Mexico City one December morning. He took my money, then took out a pad, wrote my seat number on it, and handed it to me. I paid an extra $10, so that I could have a seat in Primera Clase Especial, which meant no one else could sit in my seat. In 36 hours, with no stops other than to toss out mail bags, we would be in Mexico City. I would practice my Spanish! 

* 

     I did not practice my Spanish much, other than to acquire food, lodging and subway tickets. But I remember one conservation I had with a female police officer; female cops were a new thing in 1984: 

     “How do I address a female officer?” I asked her. 

     “Miss Police Officer” (Señorita policía). 

Spanish is a language of politeness, even correctness. And as Paul Bowles knew, the traveler can benefit from being attuned to the cultures of others. I would learn this a 2 thousand and one times, including many years later in Morocco: History has made Mexico, Spain and Morocco bedfellows. Now, seven days later, I am at the Mexico City train station, nine months before the 1985 earthquake killed thousands (1), waiting for a slow train going north. This was my second trip abroad as an adult: My first, to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, was two years ago. In hindsight, I see the travel bug had bitten me, and laid its egg within my flesh, and it was now moving through its various metamorphic stages. 

     Mexico City, built on and around the ruins of Tenochtitlán. The pyramids of Teotihuacán, el Zócalo y el Templo Mayor. Chapultepec Palace and the Museum of Anthropology and History. The museum-houses of Frida Kahlo and Leo Trotsky (the artist and the Russian, assassinated by a Spaniard, were neighbors, and I knew someone in grad school who was originally from the same neighborhood). Tacos Beatriz and a Danish restaurant, Konditori. But on the seventh day, I have a small problem. I am a student with limited funds and no credit card. I had budgeted exactly the amount of money I would need for the trip. Now, after buying a 2nd class ticket (an unnumbered bench), I have $3 in my pocket with which to buy drink and food for the next 36 hours. Mexico is cheap, but it is not that cheap. I board the train and look for a spot. All the passengers appear to locals, all except one. I have not spoken much Spanish so far, so reason to start now. I sit down next to the guy who looks like a foreigner; we are about the same age; we chat. 

• “I am Bulgarian. When I escaped, the government cancelled my citizenship. I have no passport, just a visa that allows me to study in the United States. Boulder, Colorado.” 

I had never met anyone from Bulgaria, nor from a Soviet country, including a Jew from Soviet-occupied Afghanistan counts. 

•  “Huh! I used to live in Gunnison.” 

Luben has a medium build, like me, a pleasant Slavic face, and a head of thick, curly, dark hair that contrasts with my straight blond hair and Nordic face. And he is “A Man Without a Country” (a 19 th century short story). 

• “I am going to school in Nebraska,” I tell him. “Listen, I have a problem,” 

This is bit ironic; Luben is stateless refugee and I need his assistance to go home to my country. But he immediately proposes a solution to my problem. He will buy me food and drink for the next 36 hours. At the border, we will cross into El Paso on foot and take the bus to my mother’s house. He will shower and eat, then I will drop him off on the interstate so he can hitchhike back to Boulder. Should not be too difficult. 

• “Why Mexico City?” Luben asks. 

• “In 1951, my parents drove to Mexico City on their honeymoon; my mom minored in Spanish, and they both loved prehistory. When they left home, driving, their parents thought they would never come back. I have seen a few photos but I have never asked either of them about it.” 

I did not know if that was the reason, but it sounded like a good reason. I should have asked Luben his story, but I never did, e.g.: 

• What was Bulgaria like? What is communism like? How did you even get out? Don’t the border guards shoot people trying to escape like at the Berlin Wall? What about your parents? Do you think you will ever get to see them again? What did you have to do to get into the U.S.? Where in the U.S. did you first land? How did you end up in Boulder? What are you studying? Do you have a girlfriend? 

I’m embarrassed to admit that I do not remember conversing with Luben, nor did we talk about what each of us had done in Mexico City, nor what each of us was doing in the United States. I was only trying to solve my very small problem. 

      It is funny what you remember, and what you do not remember, about a trip you took decades earlier. Somewhere along the way when the train stopped…on a 36-hour journey…Luben bought a bottle of pulque (homemade tequila), we each took a sip…after which Luben presented the bottle to a Mexican man sitting next to him, who seemed happy to have it. At the border, Luben and I walked up the agent together, and I hand the agent my passport; Luben hands the man his U.S. visa. The agent’s face is puzzled. 

• “Are you traveling together?” 

• “Sort of.” 

• “Since when?” 

• “We met on the train.” 

• “Just a minute.” 

The agent leaves. When he returns, he says, 

• “You two have to come with me.” 

Mission Control, we have a problem (2) ; the U.S. agent does not know what “stateless” means. I guess they do not read A Man without a Country. Even more intriguing, why am I, a U.S. citizen, traveling with a man with no passport from a Soviet country? Luben and I are led to a room inside the Border Patrol station to wait for our immigration status to be confirmed in an age when computers and the internet barely exist. We sit. We do not talk. After about an hour, without any fanfare, the agents return our documents; we are free to enter the United States. 

     We walk to the bus station to downtown El Paso. At my mother’s house, I keep my end of the bargain. Did we shake hands and wish each other well as I dropped Luben on Interstate 10 west of El Paso? I do not know. I was already planning my next trip for the following Christmas break…to Costa Rica. The following two years? Guatemala (3) and Belize (south moving north, then north going south). And the next year after that? Southernmost Mexico, six years before the Zapatista rebellion. During my travels, I would be detained by Canada and Mexico immigration authorities at their respective land borders. But once, after returning to El Paso from Mexico, I called my Mexican- American sister-in-law to come pick me at the bus station, and she drove right by me: 

• “I though you were a Mexican.” 

* 

• “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers,” said Blanche Dubois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’” 

You can say that again. On this trip, I discovered one of the conundrums first hand of trying to a tourist trying to be a traveler. A tourist has a plan, and money, and knows what he or she is paying for, and a tourist usually has a job (or grad school) back home. In contrast, a traveler never knows exactly where he or she is going, or where he or she will end up, and the traveler who wondered off the beaten path often depends upon the kindness of strangers (I would get myself into serious trouble on numerous occasions; people who had no reason to care about my existence fished me out of the soup time and time again). Yet you can never return a favor to a stranger you will never see again (Luben and I exchanged addresses but never wrote to each other). So, as a traveler, you will have to pay your debt to another stranger, another person whom you will never see again. Perhaps that is why I have volunteered from time to time in support of migrants and refugees, including from Latin America and Afghanistan. 

     I would meet many kind strangers on the backroads of the world, the places where only fools, not angels, dare to thread; from each trip at least one person still sticks out in my mind. In 1984, I planned to visit a Mexican woman with whom I had worked in El Paso in 1983; Ana María had returned home. We had exchanged addresses and phone numbers, but we were never able to find the time to get together. I wrote to her after the 1985 earthquake. I never got a response.

1 On at least two other trips, I missed a catastrophic volcanic irruption and a massive earthquake, respectively.

2 What astronauts in space used to say to the people on Earth…when they had a serious problem. 

3 My Guatemala visits coincided with the largest genocide to occur in the Americas during the 20 th century, and I did not see it. From 1983-1996, more than 200,00 Mayan Indians were murdered by that country’s government fighting for basic human rights; more than 1,000,000 will imprisoned in re-education camps. And one expatriate with whom I shared a Christmas dinner was murdered by a Guatemalan soldier who was also employed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Jonathan Eyler Davis is an undeclared major, who mixes and mismatches the personal, the historical, the cultural and the linguistic (and anything else he can think of) in his works. and who likes to mix up and mash up writing forms. And according to Google, he is the only person on Earth who has the above full name.