Without Stopping by Paul Bowles

Author:Paul Bowles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

XI

After ten days in Panama, during which time Jane saw enough to enable her later to use the place as a locale in Two Serious Ladies, our first destination was San José de Costa Rica. To get there we boarded a small craft in Balboa; it had been the private yacht of ex-Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and was all shining white. From Puntarenas we took a train up to the capital.

San José was one of those towns where earthquakes had been so frequent that the inhabitants had more or less abandoned the concept of architecture. There was a violent tremor one night that got us out of bed and started us running around the room frantically before we had even fully awakened. Still, the provincialism was a relief, and there was practically no traffic in its streets.

We got in touch with people who had a cattle ranch in the province of Guanacaste and accompanied them there. The trip lasted two days. We had to go back down to Puntarenas and take a ferryboat that threaded through the inland lagoons and eventually pushed up a narrow, tortuous river. The vegetation hanging above us as we went inland was exciting, and the crocodiles sunning themselves along the banks not fifty feet away did not even bother to shut their monstrous jaws. We lived on horseback at the ranch: during the nights there was a soft hot wind that carried the sound of an infinite number of screaming insects. At half past five each morning a girl brought us a pitcher of frothing milk, still warm from the cow. We did not ask to be awakened at that hour, but since that was the way things were done there, we fell into step. By nine o’clock the vaqueros were waiting at the gate; soon our host would appear and we would go with him and get on our horses. Each day he went out to examine a different region of his immense property. We bought a parrot on the way back to Puntarenas, ingenuously imagining that since it had a chain attached to its leg, it could be left more or less anywhere. It proved us wrong while we were still on the ferry and continued to wreak havoc even after it had destroyed and escaped from its third cage.

We spent a month in Costa Rica, and we sailed from Puerto Limón up to Puerto Barrios. I had not been to Chichicastenango on my introductory trip to Guatemala the previous year and had a great desire to see it, as well as to talk with Father Rossbach, the priest who encouraged the Quichés to continue their sacrifices in the ovens of the cathedral steps, because the ovens had been there before the church was built, and allowed them to bury a wooden Christ six feet deep in the earth behind the altar and dig it up on Easter morning. And so, Holy Week being close, we went to Chichicastenango, and I talked to Father Rossbach about the Popul Vuh, which he knew intimately but did not offer to explain.

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