From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. . . . If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.

There are heroic adventurers the world knows nothing of: papers recording incredible achievements rot in old drawers, houses in the Midlands still surrender astonishing secrets; but one had not expected to find in Villahermosa the record of such an adventure.

‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘it is good for you. Motion. That is my philosophy. Motion is life and life is motion.’

His parents had died when he was very young and he had left Germany and come to Mexico . Why Mexico? ‘If you are a philosopher,’ he rebuked me, ‘every place is the same. Why not Mexico?’

‘Motion is life,’ he said, ‘and life is motion.’

Even if it were all untrue and there were no God, surely life was happier with the enormous supernatural promise than with the petty social fulfillment, the tiny pension and the machine-made furniture.

He had lost too much in Mexico to mind – one came across others in Mexico like that, foreigners and Spaniards who had lost everything except despair, and despair has its own humor as well as its own courage. Perhaps his laughter saved him – it must be difficult to shoot a laughing man: you have to feel important to kill.

He was a good man – and embarrassing as a child is. He padded up and down the compartment with his walking stick, inserting himself between husband and wife, between a lover and his girl, saying, ‘What’s that?’ “What’s that?’ at trivial things. The dry and prickly desert: the cacti sticking up like pins with an effect of untidiness, and the night deepening. Paths went off into the dark gleaming with wet, going to nowhere one knew of at all.

“You’re all right” he said, “if you don’t eat fish. Or meat. Or vegetables.” “What’s left?” “Well, there’s the cereals,” he said.

After a while you palate loses all discrimination; hunger conquers; you begin in a dim way even to look forward to your meal.

They lived in a different world, they lived in a few square inches of American territory; with Life and Time and coffee at Sanborn’s, they were impervious to Mexico.

This was Mexico, that was the United States. The only difference was dirt and darkness: there weren’t so many lights in Mexico.

Pete was a Greek and had been in America for thirty-seven years, but he couldn’t speak enough English for you to notice it. Germany was a fine country, he said; America was no good at all; Greece wasn’t so bad – his opinions puzzled me till I realized that he judged every country by its drink laws – I suppose, if you are in the business, that’s as good a way as any other.

There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up – in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters in Chekhov they have no reserves – you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and to balance them, amazing endurances.

You get used in Mexico to disappointment – a town seems fine at evening and then in daylight the corruption seeps through, a road peters out, a muleteer doesn’t turn up, the great man on acquaintance becomes strangely muted, and when you get to the gigantic ruins you are too tired to see them.

The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money-changers. The man seeking scenery imagines strange woods and unheard-of mountains; the romantic believes that the women over the border will be more beautiful and complaisant than those at home; the unhappy man imagines at least a different hell; the suicidal traveler expects the death he never finds. The atmosphere of the border – it is like starting over again; there is something about it like a good confession: poised for a few happy moments between sin and sin. When people die on the border they call it ‘a happy death’.

Well, next month, perhaps Mexico . . . and why Mexico? Did I really expect to find there what I hadn’t found here? ‘Why, this is hell,’ Mephistopheles told Faustus, ‘nor am I out of it.’

People are made by places, I thought. I called this ‘home’, and sentiment moved in the winter evening, but it had no real hold.