Simon Gandolfi - Old Man on a Bike

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.