Simon Gandolfi - Old Man on a Bike

These kids are from wealthy families, pale to bronzed. Many glance involuntarily at a dark girl in the front row. What would she say? And will they discuss the subject among themselves after class? Or will they dismiss me as a silly old foreign fool?

I take two more classes of the same age group, the last on the approach to midday break. Students are keen to get out of class. I stand by the door and slow them by relating, as a lone traveller, the warmth of companionship I feel when shaking hands after Mass. The students shuffle into line. Although embarrassed, they are generous of nature and smile as they clasp my hand. A few even mumble one of those monosyllables that pass among teenagers as conversation.

I have one more class for a full fifty minutes in the afternoon. These are final-year students. Three of the male students make it clear that I am a nobody and talk instead to their girlfriends. One of the girls asks permission to visit the bathroom. I say that I am not a teacher – that whether she goes to the bathroom or not is her decision. A second girl asks and I give her the same answer.

Three girls in the front ask me about writing and what books I read and what I know of Latin American writers. Great. We form a foursome and leave the other students to their own devices. I am delighted that they discuss only Hispanic American writers. Having just read Like Water for Chocolate earns me a little street cred. Two of them are admirers of the Márquez/Allende brand of fantasy/mysticism. I suggest Salman Rushdie as Márquez’ equal and more directly political. The third girl is more taken by reality and politics.

I end by telling all those that remain in the classroom, the conversationalists who have ignored me (those that haven’t gone to the bathroom and stayed there or wherever they stayed), that I had been asked by the first class what changes I saw between theirs and their parents’ generation. I had seen four male students enter the headmistress’s office wearing baseball caps. None of their parents would have been so ill-mannered.

Striking teachers have been arriving in Oaxaca all day. They stretch tarpaulins across streets in the city centre, and make beds of flattened cardboard boxes on the pavement. Hundreds sleep on footpaths and in the centre of the street. They lie curled on their sides and they lie on their backs. Some, accustomed to good mattresses, can’t sleep. Tourists duck under the tarpaulins as they wend their way to and from the cafés on the zócalo. On each street and square, small groups of union officials gather in conclave.

The Chilean diplomats and I talk until late on the hotel patio. Chile has a new president, Michelle Bachelet, a socialist and a single mother. Her father was arrested for opposing the US-backed anti-Allende coup and died in prison. Both the new president and her mother were arrested and tortured.

Richard Helms was the CIA director.

Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state.

Richard Milhous Nixon was US president.

Helms and Nixon are dead. Kissinger is revered as an elder statesman.

The Chilean diplomats find it ironic that so many socialist governments have been elected in Latin America during George W. Bush’s neocon administration. Add the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush, by his own conservative standards, is the most unsuccessful president in US history.

As to Britain, the Chileans are disgusted that Tony Blair, a professed socialist and leader of a Labour government, should have enslaved himself to US neo-cons.

Road to Tehuantepec, Tuesday 23 May

Seven in the morning and the ten central city blocks of Oaxaca resemble a refugee camp and already stink of human urine and faeces. Imagine if the strike continues for a week, or even a month – as it has in the past.

This strike is an annual affair and coincides with the run-up to final exams. The exams are cancelled, with all students given a fictitious pass grade into university. Universities then have no idea as to the true achievements of their entry students. Meanwhile hotels and small shopkeepers despair at the loss of tourist income.

How will the strike affect the presidential election on 2 June? Mexico’s TV commentators are invariably white and right. In the past week, a vituperative press and TV campaign (financed by the oligarchy) has put the PAN (Conservative) candidate marginally ahead of the centre left.

Oaxaca has been good to me. The Hotel Central, its staff and its lovely patio provided a home from home. The owners were immensely kind and hospitable, and both informative and intellectually provocative. All but four of the students at Blaise Pascal were courteous and patient. The kids at the orphanage were loving and deserve to be much loved. The church congregation blessed me with their companionship. Now back on the bike.

I take the road to Mitla. The ruins at Mitla are ancient. I try to find them interesting. My imagination won’t function. My guidebooks ignore the road northeast from Mitla towards Zapotec so I take it out of cussedness. The road climbs for eighty kilometres. The ascent is more gradual than the ascent from Tuxtepeca. I feel fine. However, I am growing familiar with the Honda’s performance and I know that we are well above 2000 metres. This is a dry country of thin soil and dust and rock. The mountains seem endless. Cactus forest gives way to conifers. Branches are tipped with flared bunches of bright green needles, looking like something between a bright-green lavatory brush and the grass skirt of a whirling ballet dancer.

For the traveller, the views are magnificent. However, real people inhabit the scattering of villages that cling to the mountain, with lives of a terrifying harshness.

I pass through a small town. Election time and an obvious politician (white, naturally) waves and wastes on me a dentifrice smile as I bump over a sleeping policeman. He is playing at being one of the boys for the day. He stands beside a gleaming double-cab pearl-grey pickup. I buy a bottle of water at an open-fronted stall and watch a while as he glad-hands the townsfolk.

A vast building is under construction above the town. On flat land you would presume it was an aircraft hanger. I ask a middle-aged male passer-by and he tells me it is a conference centre. Here? Up a mountain? The entire population of these barren mountains might fill half of it.

The man grins and says, ‘Algo politico’. Something political – magnificently visible proof of a politician’s interest in his electorate – what North Americans refer to as ‘pork-barrel politics’.

I ask how people survive.

Every family has members in El Norte.

‘Ilegales?’

‘Claro.’ Clearly.

Near the top of the pass, the road surface changes from tar to dirt. A road sign at an intersection names places that I don’t find on the map. I haven’t seen a car or a truck in the past half-hour. Vultures and buzzards float far overhead. I’m a little nervous. Nervous? Frightened? Yes, a little frightened. The space is overwhelming. Such emptiness.

An ancient pickup pulls alongside. The radiator belches steam. Both the driver and his companion are darkly featured. Raggedy parkas puff them up so that they seem square – memories of the dwarfs in Snow White. Neither man has shaved in a while. The driver has long hair. I don’t have much confidence.

I ask which road leads to Zapotec and how far.

‘Very far.’

‘Is the road dirt all the way?’

‘Yes, dirt all the way.’

‘Good dirt?’

The driver shrugs. ‘Some good, some bad.’

‘Very bad,’ confirms his companion.