Simon Gandolfi - Old Man on a Bike

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.

The artist’s son was twelve or thirteen when I last visited. Now he is a six-foot-six Adonis back from college in Colorado. He guides tourists up volcanoes and teaches rock climbing. He is exceptional in having returned. The majority of his generation, the offspring of my Guatemalan friends, are in Spain, Canada, El Norte, even England. Do they sense, if only subconsciously, that they have no future in Guatemala? Or that Guatemala has no future?

Eugenio arrives to collect me in his pickup and I meet his wife, Monica, for the first time. She is young and dark and classically beautiful. Their son, Andresito, aged twelve months, is a darker replica of Eugenio. The Honda is loaded onto Eugenio’s pickup. We drive down from Antigua into the capital and lunch on a delicious lasagne at the apartment of Eguenio’s mother. Parents and grandmother play with Andresito while I make notes in my journal of a conversation earlier in the morning.

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