Old Man on a Bike. Simon Gandolfi
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For Bernadette, my love, my strength, my wife – and for Wei-Ming Ang, best of companions on the road.
Contents
Chapter 5: The Monk and Mister Big
Chapter 14: David to Panama City
Chapter 15: Colón and Portobelo
Chapter 20: Onward through Peru
Why would a reasonably sane man in his seventies ride the length of Hispanic America on a small motorcycle – a man who is overweight, suffered two minor heart attacks and has a bad back? Stupidity comes to mind … And flippancy is easy camouflage …
Age has much to do with it. My wife is younger by almost thirty years. I feel old. I suspect that our teenage sons find me an embarrassment; their friends mistake me for their granddad – or an old tramp.
So, yes, age.
And anger.
Though I have lived abroad much of my life, I am very English, probably something of a Blimp. I believed that honour was intrinsic to being English; in public service, we behaved better.
Then came the Iraq War, the disclosure of Abu Ghraib.
None of my honourable English compatriots resigned, not a Minister of the Armed Forces, not our Ambassador in Baghdad, not a senior officer serving in Baghdad, not the Head of Military Intelligence nor any of his senior colleagues.
They were complicit in Abu Ghraib. So am I. That is the strength of Democracy: the Government is ours; each one of us is responsible for our Government’s actions; each one of us is equally sullied.
The alliance to which we are committed is intent on nation building in Iraq … and Afghanistan. The US has been nation building in Hispanic America since President Quincy Adams’s declaration of the Monroe Doctrine (1801). In travelling, I may discover how successful the US has been and discover what opinions the people of Hispanic America have of their neighbours in the North.
US citizens possess an absolute certitude in their superiority. Canadians are poor cousins. Those south of the border are wetbacks, greasers, Latinos – inferior beings. Good ones make good house pets.
Surely we Brits know better?
I visited three high schools in my native Herefordshire. I asked fifteen-year-olds for their image of a Mexican. All gave the same answer: fat, sweating, big hat, drooping moustache, comic accent.
And those from further south? Central and South America?
Drug dealers or crooked cops, corrupt officials.
Such is cultural colonialism – so much is absorbed from Hollywood.
I wondered, as I listened, what those South of the border, the Spicks and greasers, thought of us Brits? Do they imagine that we wear bowler hats, carry umbrellas and drink endless cups of tea? Or that England is a land peopled by football hooligans?
Do they differentiate between Britain and the US?
My wife said, ‘Find out. Ride a motorbike. It’s something you’ve talked of doing as long as I’ve known you.’
‘I’m too old,’ I said.
‘So? Get young again. Get out from behind your desk. Show that an old man can make it. And don’t dare write a polemic’.
Polemic is wifely code for obsessive and boring – our sons are more forthright.
And my wife is correct: I have been behind my desk for too long. Writing fiction, I have been seeing through my protagonists’ eyes, living their traumas. Time has come to raise and risk again my own head above the parapet, see with my own eyes, experience my own adventure. Latin America is tempting. I am obsessed by its history.
I wrote the best part of two