Talisman, Sunday 28 May
Today I cross the first frontier of my bike journey. Guidebooks recommend Talisman as the least difficult crossing for motorists. However, writers warn of delays, illegal charges, swindling money changers, robbery in the public lavatories – and the necessity of an international driving permit. I don’t have an international permit. Mine is the standard piece of plastic issued in the UK.
I am anxious and sleep badly. Rising early, I ride through empty streets. The sun rises as I leave town. The first rays pierce the trees and the wet tar glistens. Frontiers make for profit and I pass big houses set back from the road. I brake at the border behind a pickup. A stocky fifties wearing a white Stetson thrusts a wad of grubby banknotes in my face. ‘Change. Change money.’
I take the excess Mexican pesos from my shirt pocket. The Stetson whips the bills from my hand. Shove and I’ll tumble sideways. The bike will pin my leg. I picture the Stetson disappearing into the jungle.
The Stetson taps numbers into an adding machine. The figures are less intelligible than a Thai movie. ‘Good journey,’ he says, hands me a few Guatemalan banknotes – quetzales – and transfers his attention to an approaching bus.
Trees drip on a huddle of low, tin-roofed timber buildings. The buildings need a paint job. The national flags are wet and droop dispiritedly. A Mexican cop says, ‘Hey, old man, where are you going?’
‘To the south.’
‘Where in the south?’
‘Argentina.’
‘On that small bike? Never.’
A Mexican immigration officer and two customs officials come out to investigate. They are small men of mixed race, neat in their uniforms. They ask whether it is true that I intend riding to Argentina.
‘On this bike, all the way? For how many days will you travel? What opinion has your wife of your travels?’
Had I enjoyed Mexico? What did I enjoy most?
They laugh when I answer, ‘Camarones a el diablo’. Devilled prawns.
A customs official prods a saddlebag. ‘Where are the locks? You must have locks. The south is peopled by thieves and bandits.’
‘Even Guatemala. Guatemala is dangerous. Ride only in daylight.’
I have armed myself with photocopies of the bike’s registration, purchase receipt, passport, driving permit. I stop a couple of minutes at the Guatemalan sanitation post – mostly we joke. To the Guatemalan customs officer, I apologise for an obvious incompetence in the completion of forms. He tells me not to preoccupy myself and completes the paperwork himself. In all, I am thirty minutes at immigration and customs. The three customs officers come out of the office to wave me on my way.
I seem to have developed an addiction for mountains. From the border I head towards Quetzaltenango. The easier route keeps to the Pacific littoral. I branch left on the RN1. A little beyond the intersection, an extraordinary building has been under construction for the past twenty years. I am told that it is a private house; it is the size of a hotel. It stands on the side of a hill behind iron gates decorated with lions rampant. It is part eighteenth-century French chateau and part Moghul palace. Those whom I ask are either ignorant or reluctant to tell me anything of the owner – although I gather from the interplay between my informants that they believe him more than eccentric, a little crazy.
I pause for an excellent breakfast at the entrance to San Paulo at the Rancho de los Sora. I count the quetzales given me at the border and scribble sums in my notebook. The Stetson was honest.
RN1 climbs over the flank of Ajumulco, 4220 metres, the tallest volcano in Guatemala. Coffee plantations cling to the slopes. The views are superb until I hit the first cloud strata. The road climbs through the cloud into a thin layer of clear air before entering higher strata of cloud. The upper clouds are wet. I freeze and drip and am totally miserable. I picture myself in the eyes of a sensible hotelkeeper – an aged tramp on a small bike. No, not a good prospect.
Quetzaltenango has cobbled streets and a one-way system that is bewildering seen through drenched spectacles. Wet cobbles are as slippery as ice. I slither downhill into the Parque Central, with a cathedral across the square, take a right to escape the traffic and spot Hotel Kiktem-Ja. The hotel is on a one-way street. Continue half a block beyond the square and the hotel is on the right. Drive into the courtyard: a good bed, plenty of blankets, excellent hot water in the bathroom. The hotel would be more welcoming if the owners repainted the floors and ceilings – black is not a lively colour. But at least geraniums cascade from the gallery surrounding the upper floor. The room costs more than I need to pay, but I am tired, wet and cold and the receptionist doesn’t quake at my appearance.
I work at an internet café until nine and catch up with correspondence. The owner of the café is a biker. His big BMW dwarfs my Honda. Mario directs me to a waiter-serviced caféteria. I eat a thick, tough, overcooked steak with guacamole and refried beans. Tomorrow I’ll try the stew.
Quetzaltenango, Monday 29 May
Before leaving England, I discussed my trip with students at two local high schools. The British Council runs teacher and student exchange programmes. ‘Runs’ is a misnomer. The Council has brochures and a website advertising the programmes but little finance to implement them. I had a meeting in London with Dominic Register, an official at the British Council. Dominic suggested I publicise the programmes on my travels. I did so in Oaxaca. Now for Quetzaltenango.
I dress as smartly as my limited wardrobe permits and have my shoes polished by a bootblack in the Parque Central.
Students at my first port of call, a private school, are occupied with exams. My second visit is a sixth-form technical college. The students are too old: I wish to make a comparison with the students of a certain age who I interviewed in England. The principal warns against my visiting state schools where teachers are underqualified and English is taught from a dictionary. She suggests I try a second private school that employs teachers from the United States. To reach the school, I navigate a series of empty lots strewn with builders’ rubble. An armed guard opens solid iron gates set in a high wall. Statues of the Virgin and of Christ dominate a patch of neat lawn to the right of the gate. Walls and gates are the norm in Guatemala. Foreign-run schools in Guatemala are always financed by a church. No statues and this would be evangelist territory – unsafe for a Catholic, even a lapsed Catholic. The Virgin of Guadalupe pin gleams in the collar of my green-cord shirt – green for Ireland, Ireland for Catholicism. I am shown into an office. A young lady sits behind an imposing desk. Her card states that she is a licenciada. Licensed in law or philosophy? I outline my purpose and hope to be offered a whisky mac by a priest from County Mayo.
The licenciada is a daughter of Guatemala’s vicious clandestine war. Murder, execution, assassination or fatal accident were the rewards for harbouring the wrong political thoughts.
The manner in which she fingers my card saps my confidence. She asks what questions I intend to ask the students. She will peruse my website before discussing the possibility with the principal. Will I call her in the morning?
‘With pleasure,’ I say, while mentally reviewing my site. The one piece of fiction is moral. It is humane. Would the licenciada be shocked at discovering that sexuality is its subject?
Should I cut the piece? Can I reach an internet café before the licenciada reads it? Why am I even thinking of cutting it? It is what I do best – or believe that I do best: portray characters in moments of intimacy.
The piece remains on the Web. I call the licenciada in the morning, only to be informed that the principal wishes to examine my work before reaching a decision the following morning.
What can I say, other than wonder weakly whether an elderly English writer could corrupt students of a good school in a mere thirty minutes? I thank her kindly and excuse myself. I have an appointment on Lake Atitlan.
I take the road down to the Pacific littoral. Recent torrential rains have swept bridges away. A truck and trailer have slipped off a corner on one of the dirt-surfaced diversions. Retalhuleu is well worth an uninteresting cup of coffee. The mountains are cloaked in coffee. Coffee is Guatemala’s biggest export. Why does the coffee served in cafés taste of mud?
From the coast I take the main highway towards Guatemala City (very busy), and then turn off towards Lake Atitlan on a narrow paved road that first crosses fields of sugar before climbing though cattle ranches and rubber plantations to coffee plantations and on into clouds in which Friesian dairy cows are barely visible in mountain paddocks.
I drove this area in the final years of the clandestine war in a borrowed car saved from the scrapheap. I recall mist and visibility down to a few metres and the pop of the rear tyre bursting. I got out of the car and walked round the back and looked at the tyre. I recall that I was on a ridge with pine forest on the left of the road. Four men appeared out of the forest. I write ‘appeared’ because they made no noise. They wore woollen ponchos and felts hats pulled low to hide their eyes and they carried machetes. They looked at me and they looked at the burst tyre.
One said, ‘The tyre has burst.’
I said, ‘Yes,’ and the others nodded in agreement.
One said, ‘Do you have a jack and a spanner?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘Then we should look.’
I fetched the keys from the ignition. One of the men took the keys and opened the boot. He passed the jack to one man and the wheel brace to another and lugged out the spare tyre.
The men changed the wheel in absolute silence. They replaced the tools and the punctured tyre in the trunk, closed the trunk and handed me the keys. Then they vanished with equal silence back into the forest.
I remember sitting in the car for a while, shivering and semi-paralysed while the mist condensed and formed rivulets on the windscreen.
The cloud is as thick today and turns wet as I cross the shoulder of the volcano. I shiver and freeze in light rain on the descent towards Panajachel on Lake Atitlan. I ride down the main street and turn right at the pink-walled bakery to a small hotel within gates. I bargain a good room with an excellent hot-water shower down from one hundred to seventy-five quetzales. I walk towards the lake and the Hotel Dos Mundos. The Dos Mundos is beyond my present budget. Palm trees surrounding the pool have grown in the past ten years. I find room 12 and sit on the steps. Here I suffered my heart attacks. Ten years ago I crawled in agony out of this room and begged for a doctor. The doctor arrived on a trial bike and jammed a needle in my butt. I don’t know what else he did. I blacked out. The doctor worked at the state health centre up the street. He was training to be a heart specialist. So I survive. Back home in Havana none of my medical friends believed that free medicine and state-employed doctors existed outside Cuba – particularly in Guatemala.
I ask at the health centre and am told that doctors usually stay only a year. Nor can they put a name to my saviour – sad, as I am in Panajachel specifically to thank him.
Stalls selling clothes and rugs and blankets woven in brilliant colours by upland artisans are interspersed with mini-restaurants on the main shopping street. The street is narrow. On my first visit it was little more than a dirt track. Now it is tarred. Rain buckets down and the street becomes a river. Unable to escape, I order vegetable soup at a tiny six-table restaurant. The soup is good and freshly prepared. I know because I wait half an hour to be served. Trapped by the rain, I read the newspaper. The front-page photograph shows a car pockmarked with bullet holes: driver, wife and three children are dead. A leading article quotes a police report of 1200 armed attacks on buses in Guatemala City over the past five months.
Thunder explodes through much of the night. Meanwhile an equally noisy French group in the next room sort and pack their market plunder in preparation for an early bus.
To Antigua, Wednesday 31 May
I leave Pana at nine o’clock on the steep climb towards Guatemala City and am rewarded for the misery of yesterday’s descent with wonderful views of the lake and of the volcanoes rising beyond the far shore. The volcanoes wear raggedy miniskirts of pearl-grey cloud. I halt near the crest and watch a launch, made tiny by distance, drag white vees across the water. The vees seem tired and soon collapse to leave the lake calm and unmarked. The weather stays dry and I enjoy a fine run across the crest, with splendid views of forest way below. The great cone of Ajumulco dominates the horizon.
The road crosses an upland plateau of small farms. Curls of colour in the fields are Maya women stooped to harvest cash crops of salads, garlic and spring onions. Ancient pickups with bent chassis crawl crab-like past heavily laden donkeys.
When riding, I smile at everyone. In Mexico I became accustomed to smiles in immediate reply – cops included. Guatemalans are slower to respond or more cautious in responding. Perhaps these Maya peasants of the uplands have less to smile about or are unused to people smiling at them. Or do the scars of the clandestine war hamper their response – a war in which some 150 000 indigenous Guatemalans were butchered?
I ride into Antigua in early afternoon. I had expected this jewel of Spanish colonial architecture to cast its usual magic. Much has changed in ten years. I recall shops and cafés and guesthouses sprinkled among private homes. Now there is only commerce. Magnificent sixteenth-century doorways and passages to inner patios have been desecrated with kiosks in the scrabble for each extra dollar. The central square is backpacker territory. Maya women seem interlopers. Humble, they crouch as the backpackers hunt for bargains among the bundles of hand-woven clothes and blankets.
I search for a room within my budget and am shown a series of windowless cupboards attached to dank horrors that I am assured are bathrooms. Finally I strike lucky, both in hotel and in owners, who drop the room rate for an old man.
Charming young English honeymooners are fellow guests. The honeymooners have four months of travel in which to decide what to do with their lives. They find Guatemalans friendly and eager to talk. However, their smattering of Spanish limits conversation to the likes of ‘Have a good day’.
I miss the openness of Mexicans. With the election imminent, every Mexican, peasant or plutocrat, discusses politics. Guatemalans are cautious.
I find an internet café and call my friend, Eugenio, by telephone. Guatemalan Eugenio owns a teak and rubber plantation and a small resort and marina down on the Rio Dulce. He forbids me to ride through Guatemala City and is driving up to Antigua in his double-cab Ford pickup. I had thought, when planning this journey, of Eugenio’s home as an oasis. Now I am nervous. I am twenty-five years older than Eugenio. He has married and has a baby son, Andresito. Will his young wife think of me as an intrusion, an aged ghost emanating from Eugenio’s bachelor past? Or simply a boring old Brit?
In the evening I visit the home of an acquaintance, an elderly Guatemalan. A wealthy businessman, he lives in a gated community on the outskirts of town. Antigua, City of Eternal Spring, is 1500 metres above sea level. Days are warm while evenings are chill for thin blood and old bones. We enjoy our wine in front of a wood fire. My host talks of Bush and company and his loathing of their ignorance of history and of the wider world. He recounts that his younger brother, an architect in the northern US, begs him to be circumspect when telephoning, as all calls from abroad are monitored. The harnessing of fear to impose draconian laws heralds a rebirth of fascism: the conqueror wears the clothes of the conquered. As it was under Mussolini and in Nazi Germany, so it is becoming in the United States.
I report the views of two elderly respectable conservative brothers. The wine is good. I listen to my host without comment, enjoy the warmth of the fire and relish the change from bike seat to well-upholstered sofa – and, yes, the familiarity of fine European furniture and paintings and Persian rugs. Ease is easy. So is silence. My silence at the Dallas breakfast club has left me uneasy, ashamed. There too I was a guest.
I ride back to town in moonlight. The three volcanoes that overhang Antigua are massive monuments against the night sky. Jasmine scents the air. Antigua remains full of beautiful buildings. I ride with care on the cobbles and ask of myself, as always, who were the architects? Did the Conquistadors number camouflaged Muslims among their numbers? We know of three recursos (Jewish ‘converts’ to Christianity) among Cortés’ followers. Cortés’ neighbours back home in the Extremadura of his childhood were Islamic owners of a vineyard. I imagine myself a bright Islamic kid of the period. Banned from Spanish universities, where would I have studied? Perhaps at that great centre of learning, Baghdad. Returning home to Spain, I would have been faced with the bigotry and zeal of Christendom. What then? Surely I would have been tempted to change my name to José Jesus and venture a future in a New World.
Antigua, Thursday 1 June
Ten years have passed since my last visit to Antigua. Of my friends, all but a Guatemalan painter and her Frenchman have abandoned the city to commercialism and moved to gated communities on the outskirts. I recall eating dinner in this house on my last night in Guatemala. We sat in front of a wood fire and drank rum and discussed a future of hope that accompanied the peace process.
Today, the artist, a liberal educated at university in Europe, talks of the nihilism that drives the country’s urban youth to kill for a few quetzales and ape the most extreme details of the sexual act as they dance the raegeton.
The artist’s son was twelve or thirteen when I last visited. Now he is a six-foot-six Adonis back from college in Colorado. He guides tourists up volcanoes and teaches rock climbing. He is exceptional in having returned. The majority of his generation, the offspring of my Guatemalan friends, are in Spain, Canada, El Norte, even England. Do they sense, if only subconsciously, that they have no future in Guatemala? Or that Guatemala has no future?
Eugenio arrives to collect me in his pickup and I meet his wife, Monica, for the first time. She is young and dark and classically beautiful. Their son, Andresito, aged twelve months, is a darker replica of Eugenio. The Honda is loaded onto Eugenio’s pickup. We drive down from Antigua into the capital and lunch on a delicious lasagne at the apartment of Eguenio’s mother. Parents and grandmother play with Andresito while I make notes in my journal of a conversation earlier in the morning.
The speaker was a woman, a Guatemalan. She talked of massacres during the clandestine war, and of a country in which, for thirty years, governments placed no value on life. She talked of Big Brother up north, who places no value on the lives of Latin Americans, of Arabs, of Asians. Bomb anyone you don’t like (the enemy). Why care if there are civilian casualties? Why be surprised when gangs of city kids in Guatemala have as little care for life? The gangs are an import from the US. Many of the kids were raised in the US by parents who were illegal workers caught by US immigration and expelled.
‘They see the corruption in government. We used to think it was only us. We thought that countries outside, in Europe, were different – countries like England. Now we learn that all governments are the same. Look at your Tony Blair. He is a liar like the rest. What hope is there? Why should the kids have hope?’
Grim.
Rio Dulce, Friday 2 June
Guatemalan drivers believe in God rather than in brakes and the rules of the road. The highway from Guatemala City plunges through dry mountains and sparse pine forest. Each corner is a lottery in which survival is the prize. The air turns humid on the plains of the littoral. This is banana country. The Rio Dulce flows into the Caribbean. Only one bridge crosses the river. A truck-stop at the northern end of the bridge has blossomed into a small town. The bridge is the frontier into the little-explored and scantily populated province of Peten and the town is named Fronteras.
I first visited Fronteras some twenty years back. In those days Fronteras was a dump. It remains a dump, but a very likeable dump. I have a soft spot for dumps. On my first visit farmers on horseback rode the only street. Now long-legged young women in short skirts weave through the truck traffic on motor scooters. A few new buildings exist; banks have opened branch offices; tin shacks have grown concrete walls; some are freshly painted – as are the whores who advertise their charms as they take the sun outside the brothel. The whores seem to me a little younger. I may be mistaken. I have reached an age when I mistake police officers for school kids in fancy dress.
Above the bridge, a short stretch of river ends at the narrow entrance to Lago Izabal. At over fifty kilometres in length, Izabal is the largest lake in Guatemala and was the road of conquest into the interior for the Spaniards, who built a fort to protect the approach to the lake from English pirates.
The river expands below the bridge into a twenty-kilometre lake dotted with mangrove islands and indented with creeks and side rivers and streams that are swallowed by jungle. Below the lake, the river is squeezed for the final fifteen kilometres into a narrow gorge. Vertical cliffs tower a hundred metres above the water and are cloaked in trees and ferns and creepers. The gorge ends at the sea and at the small Caribbean port of Livingston. No roads lead to Livingston. There is only the river and the sea.
Eugenio’s resort at Hacienda Tijax is on the river. Eugenio’s land slopes from the shore up to a ridge from which there are views through 360 degrees to mountains in the distance and both down the Rio Dulce and up towards the Spanish fortress of San Felipe.
I had expected Eugenio to site his house on the ridge. He has chosen to build further down the hill. The house is on two floors. French windows open from each room onto shaded verandas. The house faces down a valley of cattle paddocks to a fringe of forest that hides the water. The distant mountains are the least imposing of those that are visible from the ridge. It is a restful view. It is undemanding. You may look or not look. You can read a book in peace.
I understand Eugenio’s choice of site. He has enough demands put on him each day with his resort and his small marina and the restaurant and the rubber plantation and cattle rustling and the fear of forest fires that could destroy the teak plantation. I understand the armed guard who patrols the hacienda and I understand the dogs and the gate and the high wire fence fixed to white ceramic insulators that surrounds the garden.
Eugenio is never short of courage. If anything, he seeks challenges. He survived the clandestine war. He directed aid for the Ministry of Finance in the aftermath of the 1976 earthquake, worked with the Maya and lived in their villages. He sails his sailboat single-handed. In this house, while still a bachelor, he was robbed at gunpoint by three men. Now he has a young and beautiful wife and a small son to protect.
I wrote, ten years ago, much of the Guatemalan section of a novel, Aftermath, in the restaurant at Hacienda Tijax. The marina is bigger now. Eugenio has added a swimming pool and an open-air jacuzzi; the guest cabins are made of wood and are mosquito-proof. Ten years ago, Eugenio and I lived in open-walled palapas and I defended myself against mosquitoes with an electric fan. Oh, and Charlie, Eugenio’s dog of very mixed parentage, ate one of my brown Church’s shoes. I wear brown shoes by Church’s on this journey. They are comfortable and, under normal conditions (riding motorcycles, climbing mountains, crossing forests, fording rivers) are indestructible. They are made of high-quality leather. Flexible leather. To a Guatemalan dog, they appear delectable. Eugenio has a pack of dogs. One is a puppy, a spotted Brazilian mastiff with feet as broad as snowshoes. The puppy will be truly massive if he grows into his feet. For the moment he believes he is very small. I write on the veranda. He tries to climb on my lap. I reject him. He droops his head, eyes so mournful that I expect tears. Off-guard, I concentrate on my journal. He lays his head on my Church’s-shod feet and drools a little. The drooling betrays him. And every now and again he has a little lick at the leather – just a taster.
Rio Dulce, Saturday 3 June
Morales is forty kilometres from Fronteras and is the Province of Izabal’s administrative centre. It was founded as a company town in the early 1900s and, for half a century, was the capital of United Fruit Company’s Central American empire. In 1951 Guatemalans elected Jacobo Arbenz as president in free elections. The Arbenz government passed a law to purchase uncultivated land from large landowners for redistribution to landless peasants. United Fruit owned tens of thousands of hectares; much was uncultivated. In 1954, the CIA protected United Fruit by mounting a successful coup.
Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA. He had served on the board of United Fruit.
John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower’s secretary of state. Dulles’ law firm represented United Fruit.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s private secretary, Ann Whitan, was married to United Fruit’s head of public relations.
The coup was the catalyst that sacrificed Guatemala to thirty-six years of torture and assassination and massacre – the clandestine war.
I was researching Aftermath when I last visited Eugenio. Josh, Jed and I had our home in Cuba while Bernadette ran her business in England and visited us every six weeks. In those days Eugenio did his banking and his chores in Morales. He would drop me off on Main Street. He knew where to find me. I would be in one of the Chinese stores, mouth open, gaping at the multiple choice: three different makes and sizes of refrigerator, same for TVs, bikes, scooters; any quantity of trainers. For Eugenio this was a corner shop. For a resident of Castro’s Cuba, such shops offered the combined joys of Harrods and a Wal-Mart.
On the way back from Morales we would stop off at a carwash, where the owner served good chicken soup in the shade of a palapa. I drew on the carwash for some of the action and the main relationships in Aftermath. In those days, the carwash had a dangerous reputation. The proprietor’s husband had been gunned down. So had other men in fire fights. The widow had been left with three small children to support. The children were timid in the presence of strangers and I remember the widow as a warm, kindly woman. She is not the woman in my novel.
Eugenio hasn’t stopped at the carwash in a while and it has changed hands. The new owner worked legally some years in El Norte as a mechanic and has a green card. He bought the carwash with his savings. He has no previous experience of restaurants and the chicken soup is a disappointment. I doze in a hammock beneath the palapa while Eugenio gives him advice.
Eugenio has built a tower on the crest of the ridge overlooking the Rio Dulce. ‘The road is rough,’ Eugenio warns. ‘Don’t try riding your bike. I’ll run you up in the pickup once I’ve finished down at the hotel.’
Monica has taken Andresito into town. I wait a while, reading. Then I recall Ibiza in the sixties.
I recall riding my red Bultaco Matador 350 trial bike.
I picture myself as I pictured myself then: chest thrust out as I gripped the wide-spread controls, white canvas trousers over Frye boots, grandad T-shirt, sun-bleached locks in a coronet of Moroccan beads. Wow, was I something. Every girl’s dream (in my dreams).
So what has changed? Nothing, I decide, and kick the Honda alive. The track is hard dirt for the first fifty metres. It turns uphill. The front wheel slides into a deep rut. My ancient legs don’t have sufficient strength to hold the bike upright. I sprawl with my left leg trapped under the bike and my right calf on the exhaust. In struggling free, I kneel on the exhaust.
As Monica, Eugenio’s young and intelligent wife, remarks as she drives me to the pharmacy: ‘Hey Simon, remember: you are an old man. You need to be careful. And you should never wear shorts on a bike.’
Careful and I wouldn’t be attempting this dumb ride to Tierra del Fuego.
The ointment on my burns resembles mayonnaise. Saturday evening I sit by the pool at the resort and chat with an ex-cop from Israel. The Israeli served in the anti-terrorist squad back home. He remarks that Israel is more or less at peace now that the wall is built. The US is about to build a wall along the dividing line between El Norte and El Sud. Such walls are statements of despair and of defeat. The Great Wall of China failed to keep out the Tartars. Hadrian’s Wall signalled the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire. Hitler’s army drove round the corner of that great wall of interconnected fortresses and bunkers, the Maginot Line. The Berlin Wall was pulled down by joyful citizens.
However, let us be generous and consider the financial needs of those morally righteous members of the US contracting fraternity, those who loyally contribute to the Republican Party’s war chest. Think Cheney, think Rumsfeld, think Halliburton. They are always in need of a little extra cash and the Iraq war can’t last forever. And a word of encouragement for the upper middle classes in the United States: Don’t fret. Your Mexican servants will find a way through the wall or over the wall or round the wall.
Rio Dulce, Sunday 4 June
My leg hurts. I sleep badly and am awakened shortly after first light by horses out on the farm road. The horses have escaped from a paddock. I doubt whether there is much I can achieve – maybe stand in the road and wave my arms while one of Eugenio’s farm workers corrals the beasts. I tiptoe barefoot downstairs and out onto the veranda. The mastiff puppy sleeps on the veranda. He wakes. He spots the open door. He thinks ‘Kitchen!’ and charges.
I shut the door on his muzzle.
The keys are upstairs on my dressing table.
Monica and Eugenio sleep in on Sunday mornings (with Andresito’s permission). I sit on the lawn. I am not doing well: burnt leg, locked door. Add a further confession: I left my new digital camera in the caféteria in Grand Central Station, New York. I am only in the early stages of my trip. I am not doing well.
A hummingbird distracts me. The view is tranquil. The mastiff puppy forgives me. True, my bare feet are a disappointment: he prefers leather. He rests his head on my lap and glances up with mournful sympathy. Little by little I relent in self-criticism.
Yes, I admit that burning my leg was the product of adolescent stupidity. However, I recall wrecking my leg on my Bultaco Matador in the distant past, laying the bike over and sliding into an unexpected traffic island on the road to Ibiza town from our home in San José. This was a main road that I rode every day. True, it was after midnight and what mind I had had drifted far off course. I am forty years older now and should permit myself a little slack.
Nor should I fear the onset of senility merely because I left the camera at Grand Central.
My sons continually lose their clothes and books and mobile phones. They leave them on the bus and on trains and in sports halls and on park benches and in friends’ homes.
I have been sitting on the lawn for a couple of hours and have reached this stage of near self-congratulation when Monica appears. She carries Andresito on her hip. I am startled by her extraordinary beauty. Monica is somewhat startled at finding me on the lawn. She asks what I am doing.
‘Thinking,’ seems a suitable reply.