On misplacing nationality

After befriending a group of Argentineans, he mimicked their every mannerism, while peppering his Spanish with extravagantly-pronounced colloquialisms.

I could empathise with his attraction to the Argentinians. They were a friendly loquacious mob whose more European outlook made them ideal companions to negotiate the continent. He sat in stony silence when several of his adopted friends cheerfully welcomed me into their conversation – much as if he’d caught me exchanging flirtatious glances with his girlfriend.

Denial of his past life was integral to his immersion. When I greeted him in English, he answered only in gruff Spanish phrases that ended the conversation before it started. He was verbose with his new friends or the cute young Colombians whose reception duties extended little beyond channel-hopping through the communal TV and firing the imaginations of lonely strangers.

But when another Englishman strayed onto his scent-laid patch, he became sullen and introverted. The midnight bell of his trip was soon to toll with its attendant horrors of him being turned back precipitously and undeniably into an Englishman.  

On beauty contests

One of my English students was dismayed when I said the Beauty Contest was neither televised in Britain nor likely to warrant a brief newspaper story. Ecuador’s moment in the sun would pass unheeded. When she regained her composure, she defended the competition with the wild-eyed devotion of a religious proselytiser.

‘It’s not just about their beauty – it’s about their intelligence, their personality. Yes, now it is very different.’ Her words were less convincing than her passion. She had high hopes for Ms Ecuador, but the country’s respectable past performances didn’t rival the success of its larger neighbours, Colombia and Venezuela. The mere mention of Venezuela provoked a venomous response.
‘They cheat! They cheat!’ she yelled.

‘How do they cheat?’ I wondered aloud, ‘Wonderbras?’
‘They have schools where they take young girls to train them to win competitions! They are not real women – they are fakes and cheats!’

She didn’t like them. I tried to distract her with phrasal verbs, but she simmered over this injustice to the end of the lesson.   

On women’s prisons

Within this captive gerontocracy, the prison teemed with the colour, noise and industry of undiluted womankind.

Along with nuns and children, visiting hours also brought the menfolk. That murderers, bank robbers and drug traffickers have insalubrious other halves is no great surprise, but most of these visitors gave convincing impressions of being the power brokers in the criminal relationship. A common refrain was that the women – willing or not – had taken the fall. In the men’s prison, I sensed disappointment in the faces of the visiting wives and girlfriends; here many of the spouses turned up with guilt writ large upon their foreheads.

Compared with the surfeit of caged testosterone, I was welcomed into the myriad bosoms of the opposite sex. Brooding dystopian menace gave way to the chaos of a raucous colourful slum. The lines between the gangs, divided by crime, nationality or cellblock were more blurred, the noise far greater – increased and infantilised by excitable children crashing about this giant concrete playground.

Capitalism existed in both prisons, but took different forms. The men mimicked the external world where the rich and powerful are largely protected and a class structure keeps the masses in place. A more socialist equality exists in the women’s. The blank grey walls of the men’s jail may have been festooned with flowers in the rich quarters, but were also complemented with a ghastly garland of testicles – the rotting symbol of a revenge hit. Here tapestries of laundry sprouted and cascaded over the railings of the upper corridors spilling without repercussion into undefined territories.

The philosophers party

Overlooking the city’s skyscrapers, my leisurely mornings began on my rooftop terrace with a new chapter of the History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
From it, I drew conclusions that suited my rather middle-brow intellect and preference for human quirkiness over abstruse theory.

If a party, for instance, was held at Plato’s rather well-appointed home, I imagined Manny Kant would be holding court to those who assumed he must be very clever on the basis that they didn’t understand a word he said.

Descartes would be hiding from his over-enthusiastic friends in the oven, (where he did his best thinking) until the growing heat convinced him of his existence. Socrates would be mingling in the garden with the smokers and existentialists, shoeless, and asking awkward questions. Sartre would be texting his soul-mate, Simone, with pictures of the ‘nauseating’ sticky hors d’oeuvres, while rather disturbing the waitress he was flirting with by saying ‘hell is other people’s parties’. Camus would match him by darkly demanding ‘one good reason why I shouldn’t top myself’ before both hit the bottle and dance-floor on the basis that the booze and music could end at any time.

Meanwhile, Schopenhauer would be depressing the arty types in the attic; Marx inciting the servants to have their own party; ‘JS’ Mill wondering why all the guests were so pale, male and bearded; Zeno befuddling the stoners with paradoxes; and Thales obsessively contemplating a glass of water.

Elsewhere, the charismatic Romantics would be loudly demanding attention as if it was all about them before posing for enigmatic selfies to post on Instagram. The Stoics would quietly make do with a bowl of peanuts, while the Hedonists would be hogging all the best drugs, figuring tonight’s high outweighed tomorrow’s hangover. The Sceptics and Cynics wouldn’t RSVP. The first presuming the invites were a wind-up, the latter assuming it would be crap anyway. Nobody would miss them.

The entertainment would be rather lost on the sober British contingent. In the hallway, they would discuss more practical matters, except for Berkeley, who was actually Irish, thank you very much, and hallucinating that none of it was real anyway. MC Bentham would be on the decks playing the most popular music for the most people off-their-faces. This would rather save the day as Nietzsche was being particularly rude to everyone; while Heidegger was describing his beer in minute detail to the Nazi gate-crashers, and insisting afterwards, rather unconvincingly, that they weren’t really friends.

Meanwhile, Hobbes would cause consternation by charmlessly dismissing his fellow guests as ‘nasty, brutish and short’ despite later claiming he was taken out of context. Amid the carnage, Darwin looks on impassively, but without surprise. Watching Byron swinging from the chandeliers, he drily observes: ‘I blame the parents’. Hegel agrees it’s all rather inevitable and will, no doubt, recur again and again...

The party would end at midnight due to the Christians turning up to complain about the noise and blasphemy. They would justify it by quoting verbatim from an ancient book of regulations written by a rather vengeful old git before, rather hypocritically, scrapping amongst themselves. The Catholics would slink away guiltily.

Sadly, Jesus didn’t make it as he was the only real peace-maker of the bunch and got waylaid breaking a kebab roll with a homeless woman on crack. When told his ‘mate’ Paul was causing a scene at the party, he mumbled something about ‘silly cant’ before pointedly saying he’d rather go for pint with the traffic-wardens and stockbrokers.

On the morning after, if you couldn’t remember what happened, never fear, Aristotle would have taken detailed notes on everything.

Really, you’d have to be a philosopher to know why the book ran to 800 pages.

On the Tico way

From a distance, he appeared friendly. When we first spoke, he was keen to point out he ‘used to be American’, but was now, contrary to his dress, manner and accent – something altogether different.

‘Now I follow the laidback Tico way of living’, he insisted with a hint of desperation.
‘So’, he told me with a cold rigid smile, ‘I am no longer an ass-hole… like I once was.’
‘Like all Westerners are…,’ he added, before pausing to say: ‘like you’.
‘Really?’ I countered slow-wittedly. I was somewhat surprised at the tone of his small talk – having provisionally filed him – perhaps prematurely – under the heading of Nice Guy.
‘I assumed you were on holiday,’ I added, as an afterthought.

The near imperceptible twitch of his eye suggested he wasn’t on holiday.

He moved on to explain just how relaxed the locals were under any circumstances. He supported his argument less with concrete examples than a jaunty pose and insane grin with which the locals apparently greeted all tribulations. Thus far, I had not encountered this behaviour on the streets of the capital.

On Cuban dinner parties

After walking several blocks in the cool drizzle, he felt we must be getting close. Our desultory sodden progress was eventually rewarded by serendipity. Based on a whim, we ascended to the third floor of another fading colonial building and blundered into Omar’s flat.

The stairwell and its surroundings made the Peckham Estate look like Knightsbridge.
Omar’s home was small, but dry, and far more comfortable and ordered than his friend’s. Its working flush toilet contrasted favourably with the open sewer sequestered behind a filthy curtain with which Luis made do.

We dined on what was possibly Omar’s entire weekly food supply – a plain but wholesome combination of cold meats, cheese and fruit. Night had now fallen, and the steady hours of drinking had sapped the day of further possibilities. Luis sat slumped in the corner like a small, spent volcano. We left our hosts after many warm and prolonged embraces and endearments.
With a flash of inspiration, Luis made a final gesture of generosity on behalf of his friend. With the comic, exaggerated stealth of a cartoon character, he tip-toed behind Omar and slipped one of the weighty family heirlooms from the mantelpiece and into my pocket. He complemented his larceny with a cheeky conspirational wink. I slipped it back when neither of them was looking.

On making polite conversation

As we headed for the hills, I tried making polite conversation with the mother. In such a confined place, it seemed rude not to.

‘How many children do you have?’ I inquired in Spanish. Her teenage daughters giggled, which seemed par for the course.
‘Twenty,’ she responded uncertainly.
‘Wow, that’s quite a family! Where do you live?’
‘Forty,’ she answered not entirely convincingly.

The only responses I further elicited consisted of numbers rounded up in tens. The father finally intervened after hearing enough of this foreign call and response gibberish. It transpired he was the only one who spoke any Spanish bar his wife’s mastery of numbers useful for the marketplace.
My Quechuan was non-existent so the conversation lagged from this point. I’d momentarily forgotten Spanish was the language of the invaders, not the invaded. Some command of it was essential for the world outside their community, but not one shared in the family especially when most of the indigenous had no formal education.

I chose instead to admire the view beyond the crooked neck of the stranger sitting on my lap.

On meeting the workers

We tossed a coin at the next unmarked junction before continuing our aimless afternoon hike. The searing sun made it no more appetising than our first night’s stroll in a monsoon. I was now more aware of Angelica’s meteorological indifference.

Nirvana from this cycle of suffering came in the unusual angelic chariot of a battered Russian minivan. The celestial beings within wore not flowing white robes but huge smiles and the dusty green overalls of workers from a local power station. It was, after all, an atheistic Communist state. They cheerily urged us to climb on-board despite us not knowing where we wanted to go or any given sign that we were even looking to hitch a lift.

Many Cubans had approached us on the streets and their garrulous nature usually lost its charm when the conversation turned to money. Away from the tour groups, few tourists perhaps wander amongst the locals. We were stepping into the safari park without the protection of a guide to warn off the more unpredictable of the exotic species.   

The men and women of the power station were the first Cuban workers we’d met whose work didn’t involve serving us. Given the choice, they held back nothing. We were besieged from all sides with enthusiastic questions. They weren’t deeply curious about our origins, but happy to chat and share the joy of the moment. A bottle of firewater was passed around liberally and our presence inspired two or three celebratory toasts. After much noisy well-wishing, they dropped us off near a 5-Star hotel on a secluded beach hooting a good-bye salute before heading off to party amongst the power cables for the afternoon shift.

They were – by some distance – the happiest and most loveable public sector workers I’ve ever met.

On Cuban dancing lessons

But mainly Luis drank. When we strolled past his front door on a drizzling Sunday afternoon, he had clearly begun early. I thought he was promoting a bar, but it was just his home – into which he lured wandering foreigners like a kind but lonely trapdoor spider.

It was easier to accept a chipped dirty glass of cheap rum than pretend we had other plans. The rush from this latest flourish of alcohol moved Luis to give us an impromptu salsa lesson. He was surprisingly good for a drunk teacher – his instincts sufficiently hard-wired to over-ride the befuddlement of the rum. Angie’s well-honed technique made her a good student on which to add a few layers of polish, before he stepped down a few levels to hammer out some of my more glaring inadequacies. The booze blunted the pain of my stepping on his bare feet, but we were both happy to wrap up our increasingly public display before long. By now, bystanders were gathering in the street to watch.

The ‘dance floor’ was clammy and uncarpeted – the furniture a motley collection of failing stools and chairs beyond the mercy of upholstering. Our host’s possessions were stuffed into ripped boxes and contained little beyond stacks of disordered paper, a clutch of sentimental knick-knacks and the general detritus of a squalid and messy life. Before the revolution, the damp dilapidated apartment of two rooms might have been the salon of a wealthy family. It would now be condemned as inhabitable in the West.

Luis told us his story. He rambled, and the details are lost on me, but one theme stood out – of brief bright relationships snuffed suddenly and cruelly out like faulty candles. The drink accentuated the natural peaks and troughs of the personality beneath. His mood now pursued its periodic downward course. His tears, like the rum, soon flowed from a trickle to a torrent. He shuffled manically through a large pile of letters sent by our predecessors – mainly young women, from all around the world, German, Sweden, Canada, France... Several urged him to seek immediate psychiatric help.

On disappointing lodgings

After a 45-minute bus journey, I disembarked into the heat and bustle of what I took to be the city centre. I felt immediately nostalgic for Peru.  

I hailed a taxi to bring me to my first choice of hotel, which in my guidebook’s few descriptive lines, appeared to tick most relevant boxes. The driver had a speech impediment that made communication harder. Over the next week, I realised it was shared by the entire population. My beginners Spanish needed a new beginning.

Annoyingly, my first choice suggested the man from helpdesk may have been right to wrinkle his nose at my plan to seek downmarket accommodation. The narrow insalubrious street in which the ill-starred hotel lived out its sorry existence was choking with the fumes of vehicles beeping and chugging slowly through it, while on its front door a giant cockroach stood lugubrious guard at the level of my face for the entire length of my short stay. In my nightmares, the very gates of hell would have giant cockroaches as gatekeepers.

The hotel’s claim to have a telephone, computer, and hot water were not based on truth, or even recent history, so it was unsurprising that more abstract promises – such as it being clean, friendly and safe – for humans rather than insects – were similarly distant from reality. In my room, the carpets curled, the curtains drooped and the wallpaper peeled in ways suggesting they were best done away with altogether.

On enemies of the state

The setting was a giant marquee in a rather unfashionable district. All the elements were ranged against us. Torrential rain poured down throughout the evening. As we approached the venue, scores of armed police – partnered with fierce chained Rottweilers – milled menacingly about. Their brooding presence suggested we were the problem.

Inside the brightly-lit marquee, 5,000 or so fans massed into the steep tiers of the stands. The atmosphere was infused by the camaraderie of outsiders gathered as one –  like a political demo in a totalitarian state. Its location in a sodden field felt like a land grab under the nose of a paranoid dictatorship.

The energy generated over the next few hours lacked the celebratory atmosphere of the London event, but offered something tangibly more powerful. It was a mission rather than a performance. Our safety in numbers and the warm dry conditions lent the marquee security and comfort in contrast with the tension and deluge outside. Inside, like an angry righteous demagogue, Manu whipped the crowd into a frenzy.

He had a theme. The Colombian president was looking to convince the population of the benefits of a free trade agreement with the US. Enthusiasm for the deal was divided on political lines and the Bush-Uribe friendship gave the US a foothold in the continent that contrasted with the hostility provoked by the northern giant elsewhere in the region. Mr Chao was not a supporter. The deafening chorus of roared responses to his rousing calls suggested the audience were of similar mind.

As the crowds dispersed at the concert’s end, the rain had abated somewhat and the fierce sentinels of the state were less prevalent. Their intimidation tactics had failed, but we were left in no doubt about our place.  

On rooming in the red-light zone

‘You are very brave,’ he told me, worryingly. I accepted the compliment – without thinking it true. Danger may have been close on that long, winding road, but a phalanx of heavily-armed soldiers lay between us. Perhaps he meant the danger within the city.

Life was nearly snuffed out at this hour, bar for a few low-lit hotels in insalubrious-looking streets. The first we surveyed had cheap rooms at the top of a narrow staircase and prostitutes scattered idly about its foyer, their drinks low along with their expectations and heavy eyelids. For a few moments, I thought they were guests, but the late hour and heavy fug of boredom soon dispelled the idea. They broke off their desultory chatter momentarily, eyeing with a flicker of interest an unexpected early-morning customer. My exoticism waned as they weighed me up correctly as one who sought only sleep. Even now, it was humid and their flesh hung in large moist folds out of the skimpy flexible uniforms of their profession. Either way, the premises didn’t promise deep sleep without resort to powerful sedatives.

In the next hotel, reception lay behind a reinforced glass-screen. On it were written the rates – by the standard 24 hours, or 60 minutes a shot for those with more pressing business. My smile reflected back at me – saving the receptionist the effort. It was the graveyard shift, and it wasn’t the women on the front desk who gained customer loyalty. I took a Spartan room with a hot working shower. Roaches were conspicuous by their absence, and the door locked securely. While the TV was tuned only to hard-core porn, the sheets beneath the rubber coverlet looked clean. A sexed-up version of Noah’s Ark with guests entering two by two.

My escort was an exception to the rule, bidding me farewell before returning to his, no doubt, more welcoming home. I slept okay; the walls proving substantial enough to extinguish the sighs and groans of the passing trade.

On badly planned journeys

‘We will walk by the light of the full moon!’ exclaimed the romantically-inclined Angelica as we slunk beneath a canopy of trees obscuring the sky and all its earthly subjects in total blackness. We were armed only with a torch that shone bleakly under the power of its dying battery and the advice to walk in a straight line to regain the entrance. But now there were no drunks to follow, or if there were, they were disguised by the enveloping mantle of the forest night.

We followed the tortuous, twisting path back through the mud as the mosquitoes came out to laugh and my torchlight gently waned towards its final extinction.

Several hours later, while we were stumbling along what may have been the edge of a canyon, the dentist testily told me to switch off my torch. How else could we appreciate the eerie ethereal chorus of unspeakable beasts emanating close by that the flashing fireflies were failing to illuminate in full terrifying embodiment? Otherwise, there was no light for our eyes to adjust to – the path on which we possibly remained was identified only by the potholes and puddles we crashed and splashed though clumsily and sightlessly.

I have largely blocked memories of that journey to avoid flashbacks of my rising panic. I imagined us wandering all night through this living nightmare of heat and assault from the stings of unseen foes. Even then I blocked it out, not daring to face my role in allowing this craziness to unfold.

Finally, and without warning, we wandered out, blinking, from the black hole of the forest. In a clearing, the now renascent moon lit up a narrow lane. A man on a motorbike sat there, his engine idling. He said he’d been expecting us. We clambered on unquestioningly – lest we break the spell. We sped the last few kilometres to the entrance – the wind sweeping through the long mop of dentist hair that covered my face.

‘I told you it’s better at night!’ the dentist yelled ecstatically, and without irony.

On unexpected visitors

I gazed up to see a well-built young man dressed in the pristine white garb of an indigenous tribesman. He hailed from the remote territory of the Sierra Nevada. As a resident of this imposing and secluded mountain territory, he was, culturally and geographically, a long way from home.

He surveyed me – sprawled and discombobulated on the bed of the studio flat – with a look of proud disdain. With his arms still crossed, he nodded gravely in response to my hesitant greeting. He gave a terse grunt as if instructing a minion to cull a surplus citizen.
Angie interrupted the tense male stand-off.

‘Look who I found in the marketplace!’ she enthused, as if offering an explanation making some modicum of sense. I waited for more.
‘He has come to seek justice for his tribe. I said that we can help him.’
I sought further clarification with my face. Too little meaning had yet assembled in my receptors for a reasoned verbal response.
‘I thought that we could organise an international conference to bring the world’s attention to their situation,’ she clarified, somewhat.

The large tribesman continued to observe me coolly while delving into a large leather pouch for a large lump of resin with which he mixed the coca leaves he kept in a separate pocket. He appeared to have made the 1,500km round-trip without any other possessions.

I pulled the sheet up to cover my nakedness, while he chewed impassively. I processed the only thoughts currently available to my mind into words.

‘I am watching my country play Portugal in the World Cup,’ I explained, in case it wasn’t clear.
‘I am for Portugal,’ he returned dully.
‘Oh,’ I parried, quick as lightening.

He remained standing behind me for the duration of the match.

On principle, I waited until half-time before changing into my day-wear – shuffling off to the bathroom with my sheet worn like a toga to protect my diminished dignity.

Until Portugal won on penalties, his brooding visage offered no trace of emotion. The result cracked a small hint of a smile on his granite features.
He left soon after.

We didn’t organise a conference.

On bungling muggers

On my return from the ascent, I passed four teenage urchins sitting by the side of the road opposite the shack. Their matted hair and grubby clothes suggested labourers on a break or the ingrained grime of the hopelessly impoverished. One asked me the time.

I heard no response to my answer. This was largely because my ears were blocked with wax and filled equally unhelpfully with the high-pitched cacophony of tinnitus. But some sixth sense compensated for the conventional one and I found myself wheeling around to find the whole feral pack lunging towards me. A hand circled my throat and I glimpsed a crude paint-encrusted knife in his grimy mitt. My elbow flashed out instinctively and caught him a glancing blow on his jaw while deflecting the blade away. I lurched onto the road putting a passing car between us before sprinting down the centre of the highway. But then… I noticed several figures ahead descending the slope of the hillside shack and fanning out across the road.

I was surrounded.

After several bad seconds, the scary scenario dissolved as quickly as it emerged. The figures ahead drifted away to some unrelated purpose, while the footsteps behind me receded into silence. Like a lazy pack of lion cubs looking for an easy kill, my opportunistic muggers had quickly given up on the slog of the chase. While flushed by my escape, it felt a bit too easy. A few minutes later, I flagged down a passing police car and made a perfunctory complaint. As muggers went, I told them, with a hint of disapproval, these were clearly bungling amateurs.

On uncertain encounters

Darkness fell. Rather worryingly, I had no idea where home lay – unfriendly unwelcoming home though it was. If the situation reached critical point, the option of striding off unilaterally was thus rather compromised. The growing babble of my internal monologue had concluded this would be my last resort. Albert had led me to a very quiet corner of the city he knew backwards. Surveying all points of the compass without recognising any familiar landmark, I elected to head towards the busiest place.

At a junction, I chose the road with the most shops, while half-expecting him to question where I was going. Other than the rather confrontational – ‘away from you’, I had no effective answer. Albert shadowed me closely like a pursuit cyclist hugging the wheel of his opponent before the race proper breaks out with furious intent. The recurrent theme of his conversations concerned us buying some cocaine and seeing ‘where that took us’. A brief flash of that prospect crossed my mind. I didn’t want to be taken there. Or anywhere near it.

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Three potential outcomes presented themselves.
If his interest was sexual, his tale of a passionate night with a lady-friend may have been a cover story, while he gauged his chances. In a region where homosexuality was often viewed with disgust and incomprehension, a passing stranger might offer a good opportunity for a discrete liaison. In the film Within and I, the narrator fears that the predatory Uncle Monty will proposition him ‘even if it must be burglary!’ I mused the prospect fearfully. Albert was a far more intimidating figure than Uncle Monty.

The second possibility was robbery. If so, we were reaching a critical point in a sinister and protracted dance of deceit. The final one was that the exotic difference of a far-flung stranger was more appealing for a lonely man than spending another night in with his mother. In conclusion, two out of three possibilities came under the category of Very Bad Things to Avoid.  

It was impossible to decipher without resource to truth drugs, by which I don’t mean snorting lots of cocaine together to get him to talk. And his imposing height and biceps loomed worryingly large in my mind’s eye for reasons related to my second guess. His persistence had exceeded the boundaries of friendliness even amongst the warm and courteous people of this land. I wasn’t that charismatic.

On dark and stormy nights

It was around now that the newsflash about the weather came back to me. Perhaps I had also read something in the morning newspaper, but it had been written in Spanish so it didn’t seem as real as if it were printed in my own language. But there was something very real about the wind that was increasingly buffeting me, the growing rumble of thunder, and what might now be euphemistically described as a heavy shower.

I had to laugh at the irony of having paid for the best hotel room I’d had in a year, while wringing out the excess water from my jeans to lighten the load on my legs. Walking methodically through every block in the quarter for the second time, I’d by now lost my enthusiasm for cheerful whistling. The wind, which drove the slanting rain, drowned out all other sounds including my initially polite requests to a higher power for a moonlit night and a sense of direction. I strange ripping sound tore across the sky.   

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Well into the second hour, I begrudgingly admitted my incompetence, and that I was no longer having a good time. It was impossible to find anyone to help solve my conundrum as the entire population had fled the streets. Badly parked cars suggested they had been hastily abandoned. Faces glimpsed at me from behind twitched curtains. As I strode balefully down the deserted streets, I felt rather like the lead character in the movie Carrie when she leaves the High School Prom after the incident with the bucket of pig’s blood. With nobody listening, I began to berate myself. Quite loudly – as it happens – as my voice was difficult to pick up over the howling wind. The rain could be quite fairly described as ‘crashing down’.

Eventually, I started entering hotels on the rather flimsy evidence that despite bearing no resemblance to the one I sought – they were still hotels. In Hotel España, I even asked for my room key despite the lobby being clearly laid-out differently – and constructed from different materials – to the one I had known all those hours ago. I finally left when they meekly explained that if I wasn’t Señor Duarte, they couldn’t give me his room. They were sympathetic, but quite firm.

I left that hotel at around two in the morning. My exit was illuminated by a flash of lightning.  
Sometime later, Hotel Italia loomed up before me. It seemed familiar. It was familiar. It was mine. On some pro-Spanish whim, it seemed I’d spent much of the night tracking down its Iberian equivalent.

Mildly hysterical, I related my ordeal to the night porter who silently observed the pool of water spreading around my feet. My nonsensical spiel almost convinced him that I was a passing lunatic rather than a guest. Eventually, he placed the key on the counter before stepping back to maximise the distance between us.

On imaginary dinner parties

A dinner-party chez Perón would, no doubt, be a lively affair. Amongst his former compadres were communist guerrilla pin-up, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara; Alfredo Stroessner, ‘the dictator’s dictator’, who ruled Paraguay for 35 years; future socialist Chilean President, Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a US-backed coup; Alberto Pinochet, Allende’s successor, and good friend of Margaret Thatcher; and that stalwart of Spanish fascism, General Franco.

Presumably, all of Evita’s charms would be needed to keep the conversation off football and politics. With too few women to allow the conventional boy-girl, boy-girl seating plan – same old stale, male, middle-aged dictators and revolutionaries, I hear you say – the place settings would probably be commie, fascist, socialist, Perónist, commie, fascist, socialist, Perónist etc.  

Unsurprisingly, the achievements of Perónism are viewed with ambivalence. It is less a political movement than a cult. His followers include numerous democratically-elected presidents – such as another husband and wife dynasty, Nestor and Cristina Kirchner – suggesting his legacy is barely tarnished by his schizoid political dealings.

Perón died on the job in 1974. Three days of official state mourning followed. His funeral cortege drew a million. In 1987, his body was dug up by some of those unlikely to have lined the streets in tears. The hands of his corpse were hacked off in a ritualistic gesture designed to stop his soul finding eternal peace. The $8 million ransom was not paid and his hands remain at large. It is not for me to say what’s happening with his soul.

As my mother might say, he was a ‘bit of a character’.

On elusive public defenders

I passed through the thronging petitioners and wandered unchallenged up the wide empty staircase. At the entrance of one of several deserted-looking offices, the name of the Public Defender appeared on a small typed label that appeared to be trying to merge quietly into the woodwork. Nobody was inside, but there were signs of working life about the threadbare dusty room. I took the open door as an invitation.   

A few moments later, a small, angry man burst in from a side-door. He glared at me and demanded my business. I explained, but he was clearly preoccupied with more weighty matters. He paced back and forwards in a harassed manner answering half my questions bad-temperedly between staring aghast at several towers of paper piled precariously on his desk. He seemed to be stuck in the agonising throes of indecision. I felt like I’d entered the circumlocution room from Dickens’ Bleak House in which reams of legal documents from half-forgotten cases go around and around ad finitum.

He testily admitted that he shared the office with the Public Defender, but was neither able nor willing to aid me concerning her current whereabouts. He begrudgingly conceded that the other desk in the office belonged to her. I left my business card on it with a note asking her to call or email, explaining I was a journalist, and friend of Zoe. I never heard from her. More importantly, neither did Zoe. But someone picked up my card. A few days later, I received an anonymous email. 

On tense stand-offs

I was in the Right Place at the Wrong Time.

I was many scores of miles from anywhere with a name I recognised. The shroud of blackness was pierced only by the fire’s thin flame. While it drew us in like moths – the gaze of the demons of my imagination were perhaps drawn to us huddled in the shadows.

While pretending to contemplate the distant hills, I assessed my situation. My thinking was clouded by the reality that this was exactly what I had meticulously planned to avoid. The bus-stop was more an outpost on the 10-hour drive to the Colombian border than an actual place. A solitary foreigner in a sleeping village – my options were limited.

A rotund man with an extravagant moustache slouched against a wall – his face glowing in and out of focus with each drag on his cigarette. ‘I can take you across the border …’ he growled, ‘… for a price’. I appeared to have been transported into a Spaghetti Western. The growling man wore no bandolier, but looked like a gun would suit him. Time stood still, while the eyes of the other men fell expectantly on me.

During such moments of tense stand-off, it feels best to simply do something decisively. If nothing else, to extinguish the scent of fear so easily detected by the jackals of humanity. So, minutes later, I boarded his creaking jalopy with feigned nonchalance. We set off into the unchartered gloom towards what he – Omar – assured me was Colombia.

His price was $25 – an expensive taxi ride in these parts, but acceptable if he was telling the truth. With insufficient data to process my decision properly, I set the odds of an incident free journey at 50-50. I figured that if he reached into the glove box I could elbow him in the face before he could turn a gun on me. Luckily, he didn’t keep his music cassettes in there.

‘I’m a Christian – you can trust me,’ Omar assured me gruffly as we pulled onto a quiet mountain road – a vista unblemished by a single twinkling life-signifying light. Seconds later, he screamed ‘Hija de puta!’ at a passing driver, whom, as far as I can remember, we had almost forced off the road and didn’t – to my untutored eyes – resemble the daughter of a prostitute.