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The Monk went to the US when he was eleven years old. He recounts his schooling in the US: of scholarships to private school in California, Berkeley and grad school at Harvard. He interspersed his later studies with spells in the world of banking. He was respectable. He did the right thing. He wore the right suit and the right shoes and the right tie. And sometimes he surfed.
Harvard Business School undid him. He was studying finance with grad students from similar money-management backgrounds. He discovered something missing in them. They had no fixed beliefs. Their judgement of right and wrong depended on the situation. These were the future leaders of corporate America. The Monk envisaged an endless parade of Enrons, of small investors bankrupted or robbed of their pensions. At first he was merely uncomfortable in their company. Perhaps he became nervous of infection. Perhaps he became nervous of his father’s judgement (his father is a famously crusading and respected newspaper editor back in Korea, a poet, a writer of important books). So the Monk loaded his surfboards on his truck and drove south and discovered a beach with the perfect wave.
Only later, and little by little, did he discover a community that was self-protecting and to which each member contributed. Teaching English is the Monk’s contribution. He teaches both children and adults. This seemed to him sufficient contribution until the torneo surfaced. He finds it remarkable that I understand the threat and that we share a near-apocalyptic vision. He suspects that I am an investigative journalist. He hopes that I am an investigative journalist.
I confess to being merely a mediocre novelist.
But I will write of this?
Certainly.
Will I write that Mister Big and his backers are paying the community 450 dollars for the use of the beach – that the community is to volunteer an unpaid workforce of 200 men to complement the 300 that Mister Big will import?
That the community has accepted so small a fee confirms the menace.
Mister Big must be licking his lips at such innocence.
For the moment, no land can be sold to an outsider without the community’s agreement. That could change. For the right people, political pressure is easily acquired – such is Mexico’s history. A major tourist development must be to the nation’s benefit (the developers’ benefit being synonymous with that of the nation).
The Monk’s nightmare is not the destruction of his perfect beach. It is that these people with little experience or understanding of the outside world, people who have welcomed him warmly, will lose the very special dignity that accompanies their independence; that they will be dispossessed and become servants in their own homes.
Already Mister Keen is working on their fears and tempting them with profit. Others have approached the Monk for advice. The Monk was a banker. He understands the worth of holding a torneo. So he advised them and was summoned by the representative of those with power and warned that, in interfering, he endangered himself.
Threatening the Monk is an error. He is his father’s son. He marshals his forces.
We share a simple dinner in the evening on the terrace of the local store. Light is by Coleman lantern. We drink cold Corona beer and listen to the quiet anger of the storekeeper: 450 dollars – so many children in the community and no health centre. A health centre should be the first of their demands.
The Monk and I are careful not to peer into the surrounding darkness. We sense the presence of other villagers listening, men and women hidden by the night.
I pay the vast sum of three dollars for six beers and a plate of meat-stuffed tacos.
And I ignore, with good humour, the belittling of my Honda by a chemically recalibrated surf addict mislaid by California who has joined us. The surf addict insists that 200 kilometres is the furthest I could ride the Honda in a day and that so small a bike is incapable of crossing the Altiplano.
The surfer has lived between Mexico and Central America for years and has been enlightened by the herbs and mushrooms of the region. He states as fact that corpses of seven-foot-tall aliens have been discovered in stone sarcophagi unearthed from the burial chambers beneath Central America’s pyramids. A friend of his witnessed the opening of a sarcophagus.
Later, in bed, I consider the senators and members of Congress in Washington – the decisions they make concerning the frontier that is not a frontier and of how little interest or understanding they have in the destructiveness of their decisions. Their one desire is to keep their snouts in the pork barrel. What value has a small community in Mexico? Let it die in the name of progress.
Pan-Americano, Friday 26 May
I am tempted to stay in this small village, to record the happenings. But I am committed to writing a different book, the book of my journey. This village is only a chapter. Let this be clear: I am totally unmoved at the mockery of my Honda and of my own stamina as a rider. The reader would be ridiculous in suspecting that I would be so adolescent (in my dotage) as to rise to the challenge of a hallucinating near-fifty (yes, all of that) surf addict. Never. Yet I find myself on the road at seven this morning and determined to reach Tapachula – 500 kilometres.
The coast road is glorious. Trees are in blossom and the Honda slices through fresh perfume. A freeway bypasses Salina del Cruz and Tehuantepec. I stop for breakfast at a roadside palapa. At the state border an official welcomes me to Chiapas.
‘To Argentina? Patagonia? Bravo!’ He shakes my hand and claps me on the back.
The Chiapas littoral is mile after mile of magnificent green paddocks. Cows and horses graze in the shade of trees that would dwarf the tallest oak in an English park. Cloud blankets the forested mountains that rise directly behind the ranches.
So my bum is numb – this is a countryman’s visual heaven.
I pause for cold water and a packet of nuts at a tiny roadside shack with two white tables and six chairs. A man in uniform is the only customer. The earth crumbles beneath the Honda’s stand and the bike tumbles sideways. The man in uniform attempts to save the bike and burns his palm on the exhaust. He holds ice in his hand and boasts of the beauty of Chiapas and enquires of my journey and what I will write of Mexico.
The owner of the shack and her daughter listen, as does an old white man with pale blue eyes and a grey bristle-beard who has shuffled across the highway from a five-hut village.
‘That Mexico is an immensely rich and beautiful country with many poor people,’ I answer.
My listeners murmur their assent. Despite my protests, the man in uniform and with the painfully burnt hand insists on paying for my water and the packet of nuts. Mexican generosity is inescapable. There is a moment in which I consider turning back to the village on the beach and writing the book of the Monk and Mister Big. Instead I ride on into the evening and Tapachula and am caught in a deluge as I attempt to decipher the guidebook’s directions to a hotel.
Who writes this stuff? One block from the central square? A square has four sides and is more than one block long and all streets are part of an incomprehensible one-way system.
A kind young man wearing jewellery suggests two hotels. He assures me that both are clean, cheap and comfortable. His directions are precise. I find without difficulty the Hotel Cavatina. Saintly staff hike the Honda over the high curb and wheel it to the far end of an entrance lobby that runs the full depth of the hotel. I take a room on the top floor, with a double bed, fan, bathroom and the best, biggest, thickest bath towel I have yet experienced.
I work an hour at a pleasant internet café peopled by a bunch of students with whom I chat before being directed to an old-fashioned café, dark wood panelling and wood-bladed ceiling fans. I drink cold beer and eat liver and onions with chilli and a flan.
Writers write. They also suffer painful cramps in their thighs at night if they are old and dumb and feel challenged and ride a small motorcycle 500 kilometres across Oaxaca and the Chiapas littoral in one day. The Honda was mocked, not the man. The Honda remains victorious.
And there are no seven-foot-tall aliens in Central America, in or out of sarcophagi.
Tapachula, Saturday 27 May
I breakfast outdoors on the central square. The electricity supply has been cut at the internet café that I used last night. I find an alternative that is more comfortable and run by equally pleasant people. Bringing my writing up to date takes ten hours, with only a break to fetch my laundry and eat a fruit salad. In the evening I people-watch on the central square, drink a beer and eat a steak. My last meal in Mexico.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_6d93644a-dd9d-578c-aaf3-17eac316f7da)
To Antigua (#ulink_6d93644a-dd9d-578c-aaf3-17eac316f7da)
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.
