I was a victim of my plans. I had got this far and had boarded the train for no other reason than
to be on the train. It was going to Bogota, so I was too. But Bogota, the capital city, meant
nothing to me: I was going there in order to leave it. At the best of times such a trip could be fun,
but this one had begun joylessly. It was too late to get off the train; we were moving away from
the sunset, into darkness; the whistle was blowing and the passengers, quieted by the racket 35
of the wheels, were smiling rather sadly. I was sorry that the train was not taking me out of
Colombia, but only deeper into it, on a route that everyone had warned me about because of
the heat, the mosquitoes and the Magdalena swamps.
Out of Santa Marta we crossed a green plain at the far end of which were mountains of pale
velvet covered with shrubbery which was yellow in the salmon-coloured light that shone from 40
the sun. Then, along the Caribbean coast for several miles the pink sky made the swamps
pink and the still pools mirrored the new stars. This, with the palms and the fertile fields, gave me
a little hope. The tidal pools were stirred by the breeze and lost their colour.
The train was almost full, but at Cienaqa, the first stop, a cry went up from the crowd waiting at
the platform, and fights broke out as the people pushed into the cars. 45
There was no air in the car. It had begun to rain, a warm night-time drizzle; the passengers
had shut their windows. The lights flickered, the train lurched, and the passengers were so
closely packed that the slightest lurch had them yelling in complaint. I thought that someone
was going to turn on a radio but, before the thought became whole, the music started. It was
an awful trumpeting and harmonising, the Latin quickstep that was like burning in my ears. 50
The rain, the music, the hot steamy car; and the mosquitoes, the dim light bulbs that looked like
withered tangerines. I propped my window up and pulled out my book, but I had not read two
sentences when the lights failed entirely. We were in darkness.