Paul Theroux: To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels

Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.

IN THE MORNING DUFFILL WAS GONE. I LAY IN BED AND worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I traveled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.

At Vevey I restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He’d be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn’t say what he’d be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much older than he had in the grayness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.

He looked out at the Alps and said, “They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they’d be rather flatter.”

Duffill ate the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.

“Try the lights,” he said. “I can’t eat in the dark. I can’t taste it.”

I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.

Duffill said, “Maybe they’re trying to save electricity.”

His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels’ drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill’s woolens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sinkhole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.

Duffill said, “This must be the Simplon.”

I said, “I wish they’d turn the lights on.”

I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.

I said, “What do you aim to do in Turkey?”

“Me?” Duffill said, as if the compartment was crammed with old men bound for Turkey, each waiting to state a reason. He paused, then said, “I’ll be in Istanbul for a while. After that I’ll be traveling around the country.”

“Business or pleasure?” I was dying to know and in the confessional darkness did not feel so bad about badgering him; he could not see the eagerness on my face. On the other hand, I could hear the tremulous hesitation in his replies.

“A little of both,” he said.

This was not helpful. I waited for him to say more, but when he added nothing further, I said, “What exactly do you do, Mr. Duffill?”

“Me?” he said again, but before I could reply with the sarcasm he was pleading for, the train left the tunnel and the compartment filled with sunlight and Duffill said, “This must be Italy.”

Duffill put on his tweed cap. He saw me staring at it and said, “I’ve had this cap for years — eleven years. You dry-clean it. Bought it in Barrow-on-Humber.” And he dug out his parcel of salami and resumed the meal the Simplon tunnel had interrupted.

At nine thirty-five we stopped at the Italian station of Domodossola, where a man poured cups of coffee from a jug and sold food from a heavily laden pushcart. He had fruit, loaves of bread and rolls, various kinds of salami, and lunch bags that, he said, contained, “tante belle cose.” He also had a stock of wine. An Englishman, introducing himself as Molesworth, bought a Bardolino and (“just in case”) three bottles of Chianti; I bought an Orvieto and a Chianti; and Duffill had his hand on a bottle of claret.

Molesworth said, “I’ll take these back to my compartment. Get me a lunch bag, will you?”

I bought two lunch bags and some apples.

Duffill said, “English money, I only have English money.”

The Italian snatched a pound from the old man and gave him change in lire.

Molesworth came back and said, “Those apples want washing. There’s cholera here.” He looked again at the pushcart and said, “I think two lunch bags, just to be safe.”

While Molesworth bought more food and another bottle of Bardolino, Duffill said, “I took this train in 1929.”

“It was worth taking then,” said Molesworth. “Yes, she used to be quite a train.”

“How long are we staying here?” I asked.

No one knew. Molesworth called out to the train guard, “I say, George, how long are we stopping for?”

The guard shrugged, and as he did so the train began to back up.

“Do you think we should board?” I asked.

“It’s going backward,” said Molesworth. “I expect they’re shunting.”

The train guard said, “Andiamo.”

“The Italians love wearing uniforms,” said Molesworth. “Look at him, will you? And the uniforms are always so wretched. They really are like overgrown schoolboys. Are you talking to us, George?”

“I think he wants us to board,” I said. The train stopped going backward. I hopped aboard and looked down. Moles worth and Duffill were at the bottom of the stairs.

“You’ve got parcels,” said Duffill. “You go first.”

“I’m quite all right,” said Molesworth. “Up you go.”

“But you’ve got parcels,” said Duffill. He produced a pipe from his coat and began sucking on the stem. “Carry on.” He moved back and gave Molesworth room.

Molesworth said, “Are you sure?”

Duffill said, “I didn’t go all the way, then, in 1929. I didn’t do that until after the second war.” He put his pipe in his mouth and smiled.

Molesworth stepped aboard and climbed up — slowly, because he was carrying a bottle of wine and his second lunch bag. Duffill grasped the rails beside the door and as he did so the train began to move and he let go. He dropped his arms. Two train guards rushed behind him and held his arms and hustled him along the platform to the moving stairs of Car 99. Duffill, feeling the Italians’ hands, resisted the embrace, went feeble, and stepped back; he made a half-turn to smile wanly at the fugitive door. He looked a hundred years old. The train was moving swiftly past his face.

I never saw Mr. Duffill again. When we were buying more food on the platform at Milan, Molesworth said, “We’d better get aboard. I don’t want to be duffilled.” I left his suitcase and his paper bags at Venice with a note, and I wondered whether he caught up with them and continued to Istanbul.

One of the few things Mr. Duffill had told me was that he lived in Barrow-on-Humber, in Lincolnshire.

It was a tiny place — a church, a narrow High Street, a manor house, and a few shops. It had an air of rural monotony that was like the drone of a bee as it bumbled slowly from flower to flower. No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.