Interviewer:

“How did you get into writing?”

Legendary author:

“No comment. It´s a Tuesday, the day when I don´t speak or write the word ´get´ or its million derivatives. Like Gandhi, who was silent once a week, in order to cleanse his spirit. For me, it´s to cleanse my prose of clichés”.

“Sorry, how did you enter into writing?”

“If you´re any good at all, you don´t enter into writing, it enters into you”.

“To rephrase it: how did writing begin with you’”

“At primary school, when I was first taught, then forced to write.”

“A story, a poem?”

“No, my name and later, “I mustn´t pick my nose”, a hundred times on the blackboard”.

[The celebrity interviewer is undaunted. She has interviewed mendacious politicians, egotistic movie stars, manipulative tech bros and other famous figures who are using her to sell their ´image´ to a gullible public]

“I was referring to writing of a literary nature”.

“Literature! When I hear that word, I reach for my vomit bag”.

“A perfect example of the wit which has put you at the top of the best-sellers list”.

[The interviewee hesitates but doesn´t lose his poise. He realizes that she isn´t the usual bubble-head Vassar graduate who got –oops, obtained -- an internship at the New Yawker after seducing the editor, who gradually realized that sex appeal made her the ideal choice for prying open the dirty secrets of the rich and famous, so long as they are men. In addition to those luscious melons of hers, she´s also charming, articulate and, above all, devious. No matter: he who plays chess with the dictionary will outwit her].

“Merchandized isn´t the same as meritorious”.

“Implying a certain skepticism about the vanities of the world?”

“For a writer of laundry lists. You don´t want your cardigan to be stolen in the laundromat”.

“What I was really asking is –the implication is yours, not mine - did you always dream of becoming a writer?”.

“It was more like a nightmare. What kind of life would that be: You turn sentences around, you write a sentence and turn it around. Then you look at it and turn it around again”.

“Paraphase of Lonoff, the Malamud character, in Roth´s The Ghost Writer, right?”

[Realizing that the gal is more formidable than he first thought, the interviewee chews on his pipe for a while, then decides it would be better to confound rather than confront her].

“Fortunately, you little ladies are exempt from the demons of machismo. No, instead of becoming a writer, I wanted to be real man. Like Mickey Mantle when I was a kid, only I could never hit a curve ball. When I was older, a big game hunter”.

“Like Hemingway, that´s so, so outré nowadays”.

“Ever hear of my namesake, Jimmy Corbett, gal? The greatest White Hunter of all times, India´s even named a National Park after him. He was my idol, not that paunchy, alcoholic, egomaniacal farceur. And his wives! Except for Hadley, they were ugly and when they weren´t bossy, they were doormats. The hairy-chested he man? He couldn´t even make love without dressing as a woman.”

[When he realizes that envy has overpowered him, he recovers his cool.]

“Bullet for bullet, I would easy have outmatched that poseur. Just then, however, I couldn´t afford the airfare to Africa, hiring a guide, a Purdey elephant gun and all the rest”.

“What did you do?”

“ I asked my dad for the money. He was loaded, alright, but stingy. And, worse, he was a complete philistine. When he wasn´t slaving away at his hardware store, he´d get loaded, light up a cigar and play pinochle with his pals from the garment district. That was his idea of art.

Told me to find a job like everyone else. But if I had a job, how could I write, I asked him. ´Are you joking: no one makes a living out of that, kid. But if you have to, you can do it on the weekends´.

However, he did agree to pay for me to attend a Business School. He´d already opened another store and the plan was that once I learned the tricks of the trade, I would expand the business into a nationwide chain of hardware emporiums.”

“Tricks? Accounting and so forth?”

“No, his philosophy was that investing your own money in a business or worse, borrowing from a bank, is for suckers. What you have to do, instead, is to establish a limited company and sell shares in it to other suckers, making sure you own a hefty majority. After that, you keep two sets of books and the one you show them only reports losses. He laid the whole thing out for me, step by step. Meanwhile, the guys he was playing pinochle with –they´d made a fortune on ladies´ undergarments –were teasing him about only playing for nickels. The notion of becoming a big macher in hardware went to his head, he wanted to be a millionaire like them and decided that he would carry out the plan and leave the business to me after I graduated. Luckily, he kicked the bucket before I had and I dropped out”.

“Good for you. In addition to the free time to write full time, you inherited the money to do it”.

“Would that were so! The problem was that, first, he didn´t have the capital and, as I said, wouldn´t ask a bank for a loan and second, he didn´t realize that replicating his mom and dad, downtown hardware store was old-fashioned: what people wanted were the new megastores in malls and big money was already launching them. To cover his losses, he started gambling, big time and lost almost everything he had.”

“Where did that leave you?”

“Not entirely bereft. He left me his typewriter and a desk the size of the deck of an aircraft carrier: the tools but not the wherewithal to do the job. On the other hand, I did inherit his skill as a salesman. His philosophy of life, if you could call it that, was ´I´ll give you an offer you can´t refuse´ and, of course, ´never give a sucker an even break´. But a good salesman isn´t necessarily a good businessman. I started selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Didn´t earn much, but I paid my bills and had enough free time to start writing.”

“And, as we know, the rest is history”.

“More of a farce, if the truth be told. I bought a ream of paper, sat down at the desk and began typing. Wrote a few lines, tore the paper out of the roller and tossed it into the garbage can. Over and over again, for days, for weeks until I used up the whole ream and didn´t have the cash to buy another.

Even if I had, what for? Anyone can and does write –a thank you note, a love letter – but to become what the world mistakenly calls a ´writer´, you need what is equally miscalled ´material´. And mine I amounted to zero”.

“Why didn´t you write about your childhood, as many young authors do?”.

“A father who bullied me, dribbled over his food, smoked cigars which made me wretch. A hysterical mother. A school where I was regularly beaten up. A crummy apartment at Canarsie, at the end of the BMT line. A neighborhood run by the mob. No, to save my sanity, I´d erased all of it from my mind”.

“Non-fiction?”

“History, biography? That´s only fiction disguised as fact. I wanted to be immortal, the next Shakespeare or Shelley, not an academic who´s forgotten after twenty years. Plus, after my stint at the university, I was allergic to the whole baggage of so-called scholarship: the index cards, the footnotes. The very thought of going into a research library gives me the willies to this very day.”

“Poetry?”

“There was nothing poetic about my dreary life at that time”

“Then, how did you go from being a failure to an acclaimed author?”

“The usual route: I boozed, I drugged, I chased women.”

“Any luck with the latter”.

[Said with a roguish smile which tempts him to say, try me and you´ll see].

“I was clueless, didn´t know how to dress, talked too much, was too much in a hurry.”

“Yes, being lonely is tough”.

“That was the least of it. What was tough was being laughed at when I put ´it´ to them”

[With a come-hither expression]

“Poor little lamb”.

[He sees through her ploy: a false promise of seduction in return to a confession of his dirtiest secrets].

“Literally poor, which was another disadvantage, but I was resourceful and learned from my brush-offs that desperate times call for desperate measures. First, I did the math. Then, the solution, which was that if I asked a hundred women voulez vous coucher avec moi ?, at least one would say yes. It took a lot of persistence, but it worked. Too well, in a way. One of my ´hits´ fell in love with me, snared me into a relationship I didn´t want and wound up pregnant –her fault, not mine, she lied about the coil. So, there I was; broke, trapped, my career as a writer blighted before it even began”.

“How terrible! What happened after that?”

“I followed the usual route, left her the little money I had and took to the road, hitchhiking around the You-Ess-of-A”.

“And, without intending to, finally found your material.”

“No way, Josefina. From Whitman to Twain to Guthrie to Kerouac, probing into the spirit of Amerika had been done to death. Nothing was left of the unique spirit it might once have had. Instead, it was monotony upon monotony from Coney Island to the Redwood Forests. Tract house surrounded by factory farms. The abovementioned malls with the same stores selling the same products. The masses benumbed by t.v. and the Super Bowls. Even if I had anything to say as a writer, there was nothing that hadn´t been and was still being said a million times.”

“In that situation, some writers look inward and seek some kind of enlightenment”.

“I did try that. Meditation for a while, for example. But it was so boring and also, it backfired. Instead of dispassionately letting my thoughts come and go, like meaningless bubbles which swell and burst and have nothing to do with my innermost being, which is supposedly connected to the Cosmic Force of Life, which is supposedly the only reality, I couldn´t help thinking about what I was thinking and became more and more trapped in the complicated lucubration of my mind. My guru gave up on me. It was his fault, he graciously admitted, for admitting me to his sangha in the first place, where the rule was to exclude lawyers, diplomats, journalists, hedge fund managers and . . .writers, on the grounds that their work consists of telling lies to make money. He only made an exception for me in return for my vowing that I would never write another line and since I had barely written any before then, I agreed, with a clean conscience. What neither of us foresaw was that the thoughts which arose when I was thinking about thought were so extraordinary that, without thinking about it, I started to write them down”.

“In other words, the meditation worked, it unblocked you”.

“Blocked implies that something –my words, my phrases –were halted, except that there was nothing to unblock. It wasn´t that they were already latent, so to speak, and it would be only be a matter of writing them down. Now, on the other hand, it was the opposite. There were so many words in my head and they ran so fast, I couldn´t keep track of them. At the same time, because another rule of the sangha was abstinence from sex, my erotic fantasies were also running wild”.

[With a provocative nudge]

“What kind, specifically?”

“I´m not pervert, if that´s what you mean, just a normal heterosexual, but with a stronger than usual sexual drive. Us artists are like that, Eros is the source of our creativity”.

“A real ladies man, so to speak”.

“Didn´t I tell you before that my batting average was a little more than one percent. At that stage anyway”.

“And since then you´ve . . .´dated´ some of the sexiest women in the country and also abroad”.

“Excuse me, Miss. Aren´t we supposed to be talking about literature?”

“Except, sex seems to be the main theme of yours”.

“For those with a dirty mind. For me and any attentive reader, my fiction is an exploration of the demiurge.”

“Sorry, sorry, how did you begin that sublime quest for the hidden arrangement of the physical world”.

“Let´s leave that for the philosophers. My only aim was and still is to concoct ripping great yarns for kids of all ages. To answer your question: this troika, driven by the words in my mind, my waking wet dreams and my frustrated but irresistible ambition to become a distinguished author, brought me to the very edge of the abyss of madness. Knowing that I was in good company with some of the immortals was no solace. Then . . .a stroke of what some call good luck. However, luck without pluck is useless. When the opportunity arises, you have to grab it, in this case, pardon my French, by the balls.

I was not the only dissident in the meditation center. There was Jean, from the Vendee (the nursery of counter-revolutionaries), who was thrown out for smoking dope on the sly.

After the guru kicked us out, unceremoniously, by which I mean kicked us out on our respective arses, literally, I stress, we felt like two babes in the wood: cold, lost, frightened and . . .starving. Jean reached into the pocket of his anorak for the last of the ham sandwiches he´d secreted there before the retreat started, knowing that we would only be fed soggy brown rice and over-stewed vegetables.

Instead, he fished out some magic mushrooms. Not even knowing what they were, I only ate them because I was starving and, I´ll tell ya, magic, indeed, they were!

As with a slot machine, all the right fruits became aligned, authorially speaking, I mean. All I had to do was to harness the words to my lust for the flesh to my lust for success. And, from the womb, out it came! My scandalous, blockbusting, best-selling The Travails and Triumphs of a Hardworking Seducer

“Just like that?”

“From the womb to the tombstone . . .”

“What?”

“Typographically speaking, from writing the first word to receiving the proofs, about ten days”.

“For a book of 300 pages!”

“Too slow, but the printers don´t work on weekends, which was frustrating when the actual writing only took four days”.

“Four days?”

“Well, not actually writing but copying what was dictated from the beyond. From correcting the galleys –about two hours -to seeing the book in print and on sale at the bookstores, a year and half, because the publishers had to hire lawyers to rebut allegations of obscenity, misogyny, plagiarism, libel, sexism, racism and the use of A.I.”

“How awful for you, poor boy”.

“Awful for them, because I refused to mutilate my baby. Meanwhile, word about its scabrous contents leaked out, the D.E.I.-yers were outraged, the champions of free speech defended me and with all the hoo-ha in the media, the book became a hot property, a bidding war broke out and I wound up with a cool two millions.”

“How fortunate for you!”

“No, it was a curse. Instead of the succès d’estime I craved, the critics dismissed me as the thinking man´s Barbara Cartland. I withdrew from public view –talk shows, literary festival panels and the like –to lick my wounds, so depressed I was on the point of abandoning literature and doing something useful, like repairing tractors, except I couldn´t tell a spanner from a corkscrew. That was the germ of my next, self-confessional novel, A Season in the Hell of a Best Seller, which was utterly chaste and inoffensive. Instead of the demotic, I switched to a diction that was ornate, refined, baroque and only penetrable by a handful of cultured readers”.

“Funny, I´ve never heard of it”

“Because now the same critics who had attacked me for being vulgar mocked me for being a pretentious, obscure, pedantic show-off and it went straight from the womb to the remainders bin”.

“How heroic of you nevertheless”.

“It´s no good being a hero without hero worshippers. And what´s wrong with wanting that when every great writer has been the same. So, with the aid of the shrooms again, I discovered the solution to the problem, which had to do, not with the quality of my work, but the way I had marketed it. Being famous was no good, because it had only led to envy and spite. Nor was writing for the enlightened elite, they were too few –14 for my second book –to make an impact. No, the spirit of the substance told me: you have to create a mystique. Seeing that the idea of a mystique mystified me, the mushroom god suggested that I do a Salinger on them.

“Hide out in the woods, point a shotgun at fans and journalists, still write but keep it yourself, that sort of thing?, I asked.

No, the god replied, what worked for him won´t work for you: they´ll dismiss you as a copycat. I was referring to a Salinger mark two.

What?

Do a Jack Reacher on them. You take to the road, with no car, no luggage, no change of clothes and only carry a toothbrush and an ATM card. You hitchhike around the country, never stay in one place for long and never make friends with anyone. No one will know whether you are dead or alive and hiding out. The media will claim they have had sighting of you anywhere from Cambodia to Greenland and the falser they are, the more your mystique will grow and the novels you´ve hidden in a safe deposit box will be like the treasures in King Tut´s tomb, only to be unearthed posthumously, when you will become immortal!”

“Then, why are you allowing me to interview you now?”

“Don´t you know whom you are addressing?”

“Of course, the reclusive author, Juan Sin Miedo”.

“Wrong. I am an actor whom Juan hired to impersonate him and almost everything I told you about my . . . his . . .life is the ultimate fiction of a superlative story-teller. Or the latest, because La commedia non è finita”.

[INTRO

Alcira is a budding painter, young and attractive, who, fed up with her stultifying life as a temp in the inland capital of a tropical country, goes adventuring to the Walled City on its Caribbean coast, where she barely scrapes a living by selling her seascapes to bars and restaurants, then, to a mysterious, reclusive millionaire who is a collector of art. Without either of them expecting it, they become lovers and she moves into his luxurious penthouse. She has a fair idea of how he makes his money, but, by mutual agreement, the subject is never discussed. Despite the difference in age and temperament, she is happy there, but doesn´t like his ice-cold manner and possessiveness. As a gesture of independence (the money is least of it), she becomes a courier for a narcotics cartel, assigned to bring back cash from the States instead of running the drugs from the country she lives in. After a few successful ventures, she is betrayed, without knowing why or by whom and imprisoned in Bogotá, where the prosecutors pressure her to become an informer in return for a plea deal. If you want to find out who betrayed her and why, dear reader, please wait until the novel from which this story is excerpted is available for sale on Amazon Books.]

[SPEAKING OF WHICH, SHEM IS LOOKING FOR A GOOD SAMARITAN/LOVER OF LITERATURE WHO CAN UPLOAD THE NOVEL ON AMAZON BOOKS. IT WILL REQUIRE AN EXCELLENT COMMAND OF ENGLISH AND, ABOVE ALL, THE REQUISITE COMPUTER SKILLS, SINCE, JUDGING BY THE DIFFICULTIES A FRIEND ENCOUNTERED ON UPLOADING MY THREE BOOKS WHICH ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR SALE ON AMAZON BOOKS, THE PROCEDURE IS CUMBERSOME. PLEASE CONTACT SHEM AT JIMMY´S EMAIL]

The Good Shepherd, the prison was perversely called. Shepherded, they were, not like meek lambs, but a pack of savage wolves. Good? In a country where, with some exceptions (intermunicipal buses, for example), everything was, if not outright bad, then shoddy and ineffective? A republic where the bureaucracy throttled you, there was a brownout during heavy rains, politicians were crooks who got away with it, whole regions were run by armed insurgents, aqueducts were scarce where there were abundant waters, hundreds of thousands were being forcibly displaced, the armed forces were a parade ground affair, hopeless at guerrilla warfare . . .but why go on, when the millions who were sheltered were resigned or indifferent to it. Even if it had had the money and the will, improving the conditions of prisons was the State´s the lowest priority, if it thought about it at all. They were dirty, overcrowded, suffocating.

In the men´s prisons, cells were usually a luxury, to be paid for. Everyone else slept on the floors, head to toe, and you likewise had to buy a spot that wasn´t too damp or too dirty or put you alongside a loco or a sadist. The Good Shepherd may have been a bit milder, but, as in the others, there were times when the toilets didn´t work or there was no water in the kitchens or showers.

Some say that, in harsh conditions, there is a solidarity among women not found among men. To an extent, that was true there, but it was counterposed by a hierarchy, a pecking order, that was a mirror and parody of the one in the world beyond its walls. At the top were the Mafia molls, who could order in food, alcohol and cocaine and furnish their cells with a proper bed, a t.v. or a sofa; receive visitors whenever they wanted to; and bully the warders who bullied everyone else. Overlapping them were the dykes, macho-men except for their gender and as violent as their equivalents in a men´s prison, but generally speaking, if you kept away from them, they kept away from you (unless you were their prey) and negligent as the warders were, it was in their own interest to see that any assaults wouldn´t go too far.

But the majority were just victims of the system: the poor, the semi-literate; those who´d been raped or beaten up; or imagining it was true love, knocked up when they were sixteen and abandoned by the kid who did it; or were saddled with six children and an alcoholic father; or were addicted to crack or liquor. You didn´t need to be a psychologist to predict the results: desperation led to temptation and temptation to risking it (often on the urging of professionals): to stealing from supermarkets or pushing drugs at street level or fronting drugs dens or growing or distributing illegal crops or joining the guerrilla all the way up to one or another lady capo of a cartel (now glorified in soap operas). And to worsen all that, the pettier the crime the more disproportionate the time spent in jail, due to ignorance of the loopholes, the lack of a good lawyer, money to bribe a judge and, especially, the slow, slow grind of the judiciary, which meant languishing in jail for a year before the accused was actually tried.

In a category apart were the murderers: only a few were psychopaths. Most were women who´d were so desperate, battered, friendless, abused, abandoned, starved or overworked, they would reach a point where they simply snapped, overpowered by a rage which they were compelled to release, only understanding what they´d done afterwards. The most pathetic by far were the those guilty of infanticide, trapped in an endless hell of remorse, apathetic, unreachable and attacked by nightmares.

Yet, there was a sorority of the damned. Alcira wasn´t aware of it at first. She was too shellshocked to comprehend where she was or how the place worked, but after a few weeks she was taken in hand. To bewilder her even more, there were children there, ones up to the age of three who were still cared for by their mothers, but not only because, if only rarely, the State could be humanitarian, it was also that it would be bothersome to turn them into wards of the court as such a tender age. One, who was more or less in charge of the nursery there, was a woman in her forties who´d had gone through the mill of desertions, unwanted pregnancies and abortions, but, though barely educated, had worked out that the system wanted it that way. Others had, but she was one of the few who understood that the only way to fight back and make others conscious of it was to furnish anyone who was open to it, a mother or not, with a sense of dignity and self-worth.

She´d been observing Alcira´s numbness for a few days, when they happened to run into each other in the so-called exercise yard – a miserable patch of grass in a tiny courtyard –and not kindly, but with tough love, told her to stop feeling sorry for herself and busy herself with something.

“Like what?,” Alcira sourly said. “Just now, helping me to wash some dirty nappies”.

Though it took a time and Alcira, not a maternal type, only helped out in the nursery now and again, it broke the ice: Alcira became her friend, then the friend of her friends in turn.

Some seemed to be too young or too old to be there. Some earned petty cash from this or that trade, like improvised dress-making or fashioning jewelry out of scrap wire. There were merchants of smuggled-in cigarettes and marijuana, the pretty and the ugly, the ill and the hale. Class-wise, they weren´t all poor and ignorant either: women who had administered stores, splurged on fashion items, got in over their heads, dipped into the till and were caught. There was even a co-runner (with her upper-class husband) of a massive stock fraud. But they were a tiny minority. The rest were the detritus of a heartless society, the kind of women you´d see on any downtown street in the capital: the ones selling third-hand footwear and handbags from a sheet of plastic on the sidewalk, tending parked cars or begging.

Even though Alcira, like most, dressed in whatever was at hand and felt comfortable –a floppy sweat suit, a hand-me down skirt or torn pair of jeans –she had an air of refinement and was well-spoken (cursing was the lingua franca of the prison) –and thus was regarded as a cut above the rest. That provoked the resentment of some of the lumpen but since she kept herself to herself, it didn´t amount to much: a shove as she held her tray in the dining hall, menacing stares or insults (“you arrogant cunt”), but the peaceable inmates were a little awed by her.

Little by little, she entered the circle of the kindly and was told whom to avoid, whom to trust; who would snatch a blanket or candy bar if she turned her back for a moment; who were the stool pigeons recruited by the prosecutors in return for this or that favor, who would sense when you were troubled, then whisper “Come on, get it off your chest, you can tell me, I´m your friend”.

The only way to endure that hellhole was to crush the common fantasies of a new life of wealth and true love, the stuff of the soap operas which almost everyone watched, when the t.v. was working. Far better, as her soul sisters insisted, was to keep busy and take it one day at a time. But how, she´d ask herself when each day was a century of leaden thoughts? So, when they found out she was a painter, they urged Alcira to get hold of pencils and a sketchpad: the prison authorities would even encourage her, since it would be “therapeutic”, like the minor arts & crafts classes they sponsored, which were exhibited to the public once in a while and earned the inmates some pocket money..

She struggled to recapture what she had scrutinized so intensely, but without the sea and coral horizons in front of her, so inspiring they were in the very air she breathed, they were only blurred reminders of a life lived by someone she no longer recognized and of a man who never loved her because if he had, she wouldn´t be where she was. So, she gave up.

She continued to kill each day with the mechanical routines of the rest, who were ordered to wake up, shower, dress, have breakfast, etc. and then aimlessly walked around as they gossiped, brooded, exercised and fought, except those in the nursery who sewed and made little toys, but if they read anything at all, it was the Bible and religious tracts.

Meanwhile, she herself read, not for long because there was too much noise and it was too dim at night, occasionally helped another woman to write a letter, did some push-ups now and again (the food there was starchy) and tried to abstract herself from the woman behind bars.

The only relief were the monthly visits of her court-appointed attorney, a twenty-something who´d just got his degree in law and was cordial and idealistic, but still knew little about “real life”. He was patient, attentive, took copious notes and did his best to encourage her, saying that since it was a first offense, she was obviously used by real criminals and the State had recovered the money, it wasn´t going to strain itself to prosecute what, in any case, is a non-violent crime. That she was young, presentable and had a recognizable profession would be taken into account by the judge. Alcira couldn´t believe what she was hearing. That judges might be swayed by considerations that had nothing to do with the codes, that was smart of him. But the rest? didn´t he realize that the illegal importation of currency was secondary, even trivial, for the prosecutors: what mattered was using her as a lever to pry open the workings of a major cartel and convict those who were running it. She didn´t explain that, since he was such a straight arrow who believed in the probity of the legal system, he would have been shocked about the prosecutor´s tactics.

Mistakenly assuming that she did know who had employed her, they expected prison to force her to name them. And even if she did not, to testify against narcos she didn´t know Moreover, they could delay bringing her to trial and even if the evidence against her would be circumstantial, up the charges to something like participation in a criminal conspiracy.

When her lawyer said something about witness protection, she didn´t point out that the program was underfinanced, understaffed and sometimes infiltrated, as evidenced by the murder of dozens of human rights activists. He ended the interview on a positive note. After studying the rules about pre-trial detention, he was certain that he could convince a judge to hear her case in a month or two. Even if it were true, she was left with another eternity to plod through.

On a Sunday a few weeks later, and with many at Mass, her wing of the prison was relatively quiet. She´d just about made her mind blank when one the warders shoved her and barked.

“Stop dreaming, sister. Admin wants to see you, now”

Alcira started to trudge after her when the warder ordered her to collect her things.

That sounded ominous: a transfer to a harsher prison perhaps.

“Don´t look so glum”.

Because it was visit from her lawyer? Because a date for her trial had been set? But on a Sunday? It didn´t make sense.

In the office, she signed some forms which she didn´t bother to read because they were meaningless to her, was handed another and sent to a room with a long counter, backed by a metal mesh protecting shelves full of big cardboard boxes. The clerk opened the lock on the gate, went in and plonked one on the counter, along with something else, with a label on it, which apparently hadn´t fit into the box.

“Here´s your i.d. card, check the little square on the right. Good, now your cash . . . bank card … keys … nail file . . . purse . . . and, what´s this?”

It was the artist´s portfolio she had hidden the cash in.

Alcira followed her orders, mechanically at first, then half-realizing what it all signified but still not sure, asked the clerk why they were returning her things.

“Are you stupid or something? You´re out, free, we don´t want to see your sorry ass in here anymore”.

Alcira was in shock when she was hauled into the Good Shepherd and didn´t notice the three massive gates which had to be unlocked to let her out. And, now, she was dazed by the noise of traffic, the full light of the sun and a glimpse of the brown-green ridges above the houses and stores of a shoddy district far from downtown.

Not knowing where to go, she stepped off the curb, was nearly hit by a truck, woke up and remembered that wherever she went, she would need some ready cash. Obviously not the confiscated dollars, but she had been carrying a fair amount of pesos, just in case she needed to take a taxi or buy something on her way back to the penthouse. They were gone but there was an envelope, with the prison seal, in her purse they´d returned to her: it was a kind of severance pay that would just about a cover a bus to downtown and a meal at a cheap restaurant.

If she´d felt lonely behind bars, it was little compared to what she felt now, as though she´d been cast adrift on desert island, without so much as penknife to survive with.

“Hey, Alcira”.

For a second, she thought she was imagining things, then, on the other side, she saw a figure who might have been any man of a certain height and age in that neighborhood in jeans, with a backpack, except that his windcheater was stark white, and she saw that it was a painter from the bohemian crowd in the Walled City she barely knew whom fate had chosen to be her protector

.

Churhill and Nye Bevan glowering each other amidst the midgets of Parliament

1 –Laughing up the sleeves of their jackets

Skimming through lines in a loose-limbed binder,

He sees clues, like the notes

Of a clanging concerto

of impossible hopes

Which, barely started, refuse to end

In fulfillment.

What good are his furrowed brows,

As if,

like a mother´s kiss on the bruised knee

of her son,
thinking and thinking would

ease the indifferent pain with magic.

Lifting his head, he looks at the shelves

Where his idols laze in their laurels

If all you, why not me too?,

He whines

And turns to the spines

To be met by raucous laughter

muffled in the sleeves of their jackets.

Words, words, words, for what?

When not even knowing them nourishes him anymore.

Resignation is futile as well

The same beasts of ambition which gripped them

Won´t loosen their claws on his flesh

As if to remind him that the Word,

which originally ordered the world,

Has disordered his own

Because, when it speaks,

It runs in a stream

So muddy yet fast

He can no longer make sense of its course

Since they, the canonized do,

It must be his congenital deafness

Failure tightens his scrotum,

When he faces the screen

Which is wiped clean

By the imp in his brainpan

It wasn´t that way when he started.

Then, all was vernal, fluent and rash

And if limp,

A worm which one day might sprout limbs,

Now, when he writes, (really taps),

He groans, grapples and gropes,

As if wrestling with a slippery, brown seal.

In a frigid fever of intercourse

without climax or satisfaction

Block leads to blare leads to bleating

The poor little lump has lost his way

As if he ever found it,

When scribbling his way through a mist.

It´s less a calling than a compulsion,

to skewer A-B-C thoughts

with an A-B-S plume

Knowing he has left so much undone, undone

Drives the writer to the edge of despair

Where he is unable to undo even a little of the undone.

Yet, so said, he plods on.

2 --What did Swinburne say to his dominatrix?

“For this relief, much spanks”

(By the way did Shakespeare nod, grammatically speaking, since much is supposed to be for things you cannot count, whereas many is used for countable ones)

3 --Bitter conclusion for he who holds the world record for pink slips and still submits (submissions)

Hope springs eternal . . .para el pendejo

Which is a variant of “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Which, by the way, Einstein never said or wrote, no more than Marx ever wrote the word “capitalism” in Das Kapital, a term which, in essence, means that you cannot make money without having it first, though not necessarily your own, in contrast with the good old bad days when you could make money (or its equivalent) by simply plundering it.

4 -- So what makes money make money?

In classical economics, it is a means of founding productive enterprises which yield dividends in the form of more money.

In late capitalism, instead of being a means for the exchange of goods and services, money becomes a commodity in itself, which is bought cheap and sold dear

In the current stage of post-capitalism, there is a quantum leap to fabricating money out of bytes and selling that virtual currency to punters, who, in turn, sell it others and upwards and onwards until … the counterfeit dollars wind up on the desk of the official receiver? And what happens then, a bailout from the central bank or the collapse of capitalism, which takes down everything else? Hard to say, because the bankruptcy of many may mean the fortune of a few. Like the speculators who bought up the shares of those who invested in FTX at a 90% discount and are now cashing in on the 98% of those debts which have been repaid: roughly 16 billion dollars. Or the white shoe law firm which handled the bankruptcy, which has earned nearly a cool billion. And meanwhile, the arch-villain turned fall guy still languishes in prison.

5 --Wasn´t the Brexit Referendum as much of an own goal as the summoning of the États Généraux by Louis XVI ? Instead of getting the King, as the State, out of a financial jam, it led to him (his ?) losing his head. Likewise, « Leave ! », which was supposed to relieve Britain of its profound economic and social crises, has only aggravated them.

6 -- At a breach in the Zambezi, the roar of the Falls resounds through the jungle and wakes the slumbering lions.

7 --No more than the fair did the plain, the fat and the downright ugly choose to be born into their bodies.

The which Winston Churchill took advantage of in his cruel riposte to a lady who said, « Winston, you are drunk » : »And you are ugly. Tomorrow, madam, I shall be sober and you´ll still be ugly ».

If you, as most, say that the lady was Jennie Lee, the wife of my idol, Nye Bevan, you gave the wrong answer to the pub quiz, though, as Nye was Churchill´s arch-nemesis, the mistake is pardonable. It was actually the Labour M.P. Bessie Braddock, who was as pugnacious as Nye, so, it was probably politics as much as aesthetics which led to that insult by Churchill, who was usually not so nasty (or at least more subtle). But when you have a swift, biting wit, it is sometimes hard to rein it in.

8 -- As times change, so do values. The Ancient Greeks believed that beauty was a virtue, a moral one, like honesty or loyalty, because they attributed it, not to genetics, but the gods.

9 --Accidents don´t necessarily happen by accident, especially the self-caused kind, usually the result of bad mood, bad vibes, worrying, which makes the victim hasty and inattentive.

10 --Nature draw creatures with clouds. If you patiently observe them, you will see dragons, monkeys, bears, cats and what have you, the which in turn transform into islands, continents and peninsulas. That happens when you are looking up from the ground. When you look down at clouds from a plane, the figures change from two to three dimensional, like scoops of mashed potatoes, castles and galleons.

11 -- The dead leaves do cartwheels in the wind as they fall

12 –Dictionary of ayahuasquisms and the isms of kindred indigenous medicinal plants

Ayahuasca is the rope which binds the spirit to the purge

[ayahuasca in Quechua means vine or rope of the spirit]

Chacruna is the coffee of the purge

[the component of the ayahuasca brew which gives visions]

The maguaré is the log which speaks, the tom-tom of the radio of the forest

[two hollowed out log drums, one higher pitched than the others, which are used in the indigenous Amazon to send messages which are heard miles away]

The wayra is the broom which sweeps away the dust which settles in the guts

[the wayra-sacha – “wind of the tree/forest” in Quechua, is the fan or rattle made of bunched leaves, specific ones, which is used to blow away evil spirits in the ceremonies. Sacha also denotes wild, as opposed to cultivated]

The li-lo-in is the harmony of the glockenspiel

[a vulgar term for a harmonica used in the ceremonies]

The rasca is the itch which scratches and bewilders

[related to rascar=to scratch. The “drunkenness” or intoxication of ayahuasca, sometimes used in the sense of overpowered; in other cases, it means, more positively, a wild, strong or exalting trip.

The session is the assembly of the postulants who seethe

[session is a common term for the ayahuasca ceremony in Colombia]

The sayo is the holy cloak that´s holed.

[capisayo is a striped poncho worn by the Ingano indigenous people of southern Colombia]

The taita is the tattletale the gremlins speak through

[literally, “daddy”, referring to the person who heals with ayahuasca. It implies that he is a mature man, with a long experience of the medicine and hence, the requisite authority

The maloca is the spider´s web of poles and thatch

[the thatched jungle hut where the ceremonies are held]

Floresta is the fervor of the strangers in the forest

[forest or jungle in Portuguese, a term used in the hymns of Santo Daime, the Brazilian ayahuasca church, usually when a reverence for Nature is being expressed]

Ambil activates evacuation

[a bitter paste made of tobacco and vegetal salts, a complement to mambe (a powder made of coca leaves) in the ceremonial colloquiums in the malocas of the Huitotos, among other indigenous societies of Colombia. Like smoked tobacco, it is very strong for the unaccustomed and sometimes causes nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and/or fainting]

[AN EXCERPT FROM SHEM´S NOVEL IN PROGRESS ABOUT THE MYSTERIES AND MAGIC OF THE MUISCAS, THE PRE-COLOMBIAN INHABITANTS OF THE SAVANNA OF BOGOTÁ]

“I thought your brother was supposed to drive us to Faca”.

“Gabe´s gone to his mother´s place on the coast. Anyway it´s only half an hour by bus.”

“Meaning Ilse finally kicked him out”.

“It hasn´t come to that, not yet anyway. As usual, it´s to do with money. The welding shop she paid for didn´t earn a penny and he hardly went there anymore. Instead, he was spending more and more time with a crowd of druggy rich kids. And, as usual, Ilse suffered but didn´t do anything about it, then her brother, the lawyer, who handles their inheritance, stepped in and told her that he wouldn´t transfer any more money to them except for their living expenses. Macho man and all, Gabe´s a coward, was afraid of a showdown and upped and left”.

“For Hotel Mama”.

“He even had to lie about that. As a matter of fact, it is a free hotel for the Kogis when they come down from the Sierra to buy things like machetes in Santa Marta and also visit the indigenist/environmental NGO, which Gabe claims is his reason for being there, to lend them his so-called expertise. But I suspect he´ll just laze around at his mother´s place and switch from cocaine base to marijuana, the famous Santa Marta Gold, which costs nearly nothing around there. And probably aguardiente too: some of those wise ´elder brothers´ are alcoholics and if he wants to be friendly with them, he´ll have to get drunk with them too”.

Though it was a Sunday morning, the traffic crawled rather than flowed, which was typical of the road to Faca, a point on a major highway that was neither urban nor suburban but once a small, isolated village at a distance from the capital that had since been attached to Bogotá without its inhabitants quite belonging to either.

It was a dreary afterthought of the capital, half service stations, flyovers and warehouses, half shoddy family houses and apartment blocks.

“Looks like the only things that are indigenous about it nowadays are the archaeological park and the name,” remarked Allana [then, like an elocution teacher] “Fa-ca-tat-ti-va. What does it mean anyway”.

“Enclosure/fort at the end of the prairie, that is, the altiplano: the enclosure of the Zipas, their chiefs. Fort, because it was the Muiscas´ first line of defense against the Panches, to the West and South, roughly in what is now Tolima and who, like, say, the Spartans or Genghis Khan, lived for war and were not only fierce warriors but skilled and cunning too. They had a wide variety of weapons, including poisoned arrows and darts and were geniuses at tactics; dressed in war paint and howling like maniacs, they would scare the hell out of the Muiscas and tribes around them. And after they killed them, feast on their bodies

When the conquistadores arrived, they became masters of guerrilla warfare and gave them such a hard time that even after their armies were defeated and they had to hide out in the mountains and forests, it took the Spanish more than a century to stop their hit-and-run attacks on the main road between Bogotá and Cali or other cities to the South”.

“Still, it´s the Muiscas of Faca we´re interested in, so I did some research on the Archaeological Park the other day and as usual, damn it, just when I thought I had a grip on the subject, it slid way. In this case, the idea that Tequendama was the first point of entry of the proto-Muisca cave men. Here, it appears that the first settlers predated those of Tequendama by a few thousand years.

Whatever the migration routes and the fusion of different races, Faca became one of the most important, well, not really cities, because the population was scattered in small settlements around the nucleus, the stockade with the temple and the headquarters of the chief, also protected, as we´re about to see, by a ring of gigantic boulders that served as lookout towers.

Because of its strategic location, it was one of the main centers of the Muisca Confederation, though that is a misleading term, because it consisted of loose and sometimes shifting alliances among the different chiefdoms in the territory. On the one hand, they sometimes fought each other. On the other, taken together, they were, so to speak, the sovereign State of the savanna, which protected them from other nations and gave them a certain political and, above all, cultural coherence. Faca itself was ruled by the Zipa of Bacatá. Still, as I said, it´s the pictograms we´re here for”.

In contrast with the site at Tequendama, the Park, a short walk from the city center, lay alongside a dreary residential district and had been turned into a minor tourist attraction, with a stone path in the middle surrounding a mound with a kind of circular stone launching pad in the middle. Allama kept his sarcasm to himself, while Lua, intent on her work, barely noticed, except for a museum-type sign which read “it is not possible to determine whether the pictograms are Muisca or from the Herrera period, nor if the different ones belong to one or several periods”.

“As if we didn´t already know,” remarked Allama.

“Up to now, dear,” she replied, emboldened by the challenge, but when she started examining them, her smile faded, because, due to erosion, some were too faint to read and others defaced by tourists. Enough were legible, probably more than those in Pandi.

“Amazing!”

She pointed at stick figure never seen before: it was clearly a human being, probably a man; a frontal view with one circle for the head, another bigger one for the body and two disproportionately long lines for the legs. Its arms were holding, to one side, a strange object (or was it a woman?), made up of a small triangle at the top, a larger, inverted one below and a circle at the bottom, enclosing lines which repeated the same pattern.

“The way I interpret this, and it´s only guesswork at this point, we are looking at a stage in the evolution of the thought of the Muiscas or proto-Muiscas or whoever they were when they became conscious of themselves. Aware that they were creatures different from Nature or the gods. And that is where true civilization begins”

“With agriculture, technology and . . .writing”.

“Let´s not get ahead of ourselves. For example, the lower arm has two lines, one cut short, ending in what looks a hand holding something. Whatever it represents, the picture is still very crude. Maybe a kid just doodled it, without intending it to mean anything”.

Knowing that there would be too many day trippers there for her to feel comfortable, Lua hadn´t taken her watercolor materials. Instead, she sketched one or another pictogram, commenting on them as she did.

“A lot are similar to those on other sites. The rhombs, the frogs, the parallel wavy lines, which must be a river. What strikes me, however, are the differences. They seem to be more elaborate and more clearly defined here. This circle, for example, with a crisscrossing design, like a decorated shield. Or another, with dots around it, and a square, one corner up, hanging from it, a necklace perhaps. Or this cluster of leaves, which could be a representation of their sacred plants. Crosses, cardinal points, a frog which seems to be turning into a man.”

“I agree, much more elaborate and suggestive than those on the other sites we visited. But there´s no way of telling whether Faca represents an advanced stage of the Muisca culture or they were painted by an entirely different society who enlightened the Muiscas when they were still primitive.”

“You think I haven´t taken that into consideration! But, once again, we´re still at an early stage. . . .if we ever get beyond it.”

“And I don´t entirely dismiss your theory that, whoever they were, they invented writing. Take a look at this”.

It was a photocopy of drawings of different figures, arranged in lines like a printed book. They were done by a priest in the late 19^th century, who thought they were digits and related to their astronomical calculations.

“But those gentleman scholars, you can never trust them. They were well-educated, in theology and the classics, but without the rigor of academic anthropology and archaeology. O.K., they were observant, based everything on field work and made some interesting finds. The rest was speculation, fantasy, wishful thinking.

And speaking of the latter, when you look at them sideways, so to speak, they might equally be words or the sound of the words or the letters of an alphabet, like, I vaguely recall, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

And once you use that fuzzy approach you can go anywhere and it still goes on today, with, for example, the so-called Muisca “genetic disc”, carved on a black stone with a diameter of 22 centimeters, a weight of 2 kilos and done, it is thought, 6000 years ago. On one face, there is a stick figure of a man or woman with upraised arms and legs in the same position, like the one we just saw, with the suggestion of genitals, though, since part of that side is broken, it is hard to tell. On the other face, an outer circle encloses a circle of circles, the first blank, the second with two ovals and from there, the circles intersect, multiply and become denser and denser clusters of dots. Now, when you compare them with the microscopic pictures of the embryology of animals, from insemination to birth, there is a striking resemblance, and, in turn, a resemblance to their calendars. After that, anything is possible. It may be that their shamans, using psychedelic plants, did penetrate the mysteries of existence. An anthropologist who did ayahuasca with the Ashaninka in Peru thinks it gave them a knowledge of DNA.”

“Or, equally, that it is a fanciful, trendy pos-hoc imposition of our modern scientific knowledge on patterns whose meanings we will never understand”.

“Ah, the eternal dilemma of reason vs. revelation. You don´t have to tell me that science is never going to tell us where we were before we were born or where we will go after we die, much less what the hell we are doing here, in this life, with all its trouble and uncertainty. But, considering the mess revelation has made of our country, I´m on the side of science. Like that British scientist says, what you believe is irrelevant to physics”.

When Allama´s face tightened, it was hard to tell whether he was upset or just thoughtful. In fact, it was both, because he understood that anyone above a brute acknowledged the bitter truth of the human condition, but why had he, in particular, become the battleground of the war between the two escapes from it: you assume the immaterial doesn´t exist and don´t have to face the wrath of God, or, alternatively, you humble yourself before Him and get your reward in heaven.

“What are the Muiscas to me”, he thought, “why should I be trapped in their mysteries, if mysteries there were about those I have no relation to, genetic, cultural or otherwise”.

Yet, even if he didn´t believe in such stuff, they seemed to have cursed him. For no apparent reason beyond his attraction to a woman who, due to her profession or temperament, was immune to such voodoo.

“Are my obsessions boring you?”

“No, it´s the opposite. I keep telling myself that I´m only here to keep you company and sometimes act as your sounding board. Yet, somehow, against my will, I keep getting drawn into these arguments”.

“Don´t worry, it just shows that, unlike these idiots around us” [pointing to some picknickers in the Rotunda], you´re actually thinking”.

[THIS IS A STAND-ALONE STORY BUT TO ENJOY ITS FULL FLAVOR, PLEASE READ MY PREVIOUS POST]

You´d imagine that the Crocus Hall commune Jojo moved to after his life in London flamed out would be a nest of dopers. In fact, as the Georgian country mansion the commune was housed in might have indicated, it was, if not genteel, then restrained . . .in that respect at least. Instead, what he and some others got high on was, if not quite “free love” (a euphemism for a solipsism), then sex (generally) free of attachments but not necessarily complications, as he discovered when he had his first taste of it with Duna, a lithe, frizzy-haired dynamo who, no sooner arrived, and with several willing and more handsome men to choose from, settled on JoJo and went at it hammer and tongs, stoking his vanity until, in what should have been the tender aftermath, she punched him hard in the guts after he casually remarked that he didn´t like Lou Reed.

When she quickly did the rounds of the others afterwards, he realized that it was undoubtedly the result of a grievance he could never fathom, though there was a clue to it when the last on the list was not the alpha but the senior male, Jack, a gray-haired, ex-public school fellow of sixty-five.

He, for his part, was part of another amorous entanglement, tripartite, consisting of Jack, Luigis, a monied lower-upper class woman and Arnold, a lad from the East End who, after meeting the egomaniacs at the art school he attended, was disillusioned with “Art”, became a master craftsman, married Luigi and restored the once dilapidated country house they lived in. After they bore two children, they separated and she formed a couple with Jack.

Complicated?: yes, you were warned. Irrelevant?: no, because in that commune which wasn´t communist, the three, being the founding family, co-owners and older than the rest (Luigi and Seamster in their forties), they set the tone of the place. That meant first, that you didn´t have to be an ascetic to join the alternative society. Due to the dole most lived on and the gracious decor, life there was both comfy and informal: no rigid roster of chores; no need to grow your own food when the shops in the nearby town and the health food store in Cambridge supplied all that was needed; and except for a certain eccentricity of dress, no flamboyant defiance of the straights nor, as in a truly back-to-the land commune, any cordial co-dependence on the farmers around you.

And, second, as a result of all that, weed wasn´t the big deal it was in the hardscrabble communities, where it compensated for the rigors of rural life and/or was a semi-political f_ck you to the moral majority. For the communards of Crocus Hall, sex was a sufficient sexual/emotional release cum satisfaction. JoJo, among them . . .for the most part. But, once planted, the itch to get stoned,, even when milder, would become irritated now and again.

But, thanks to the occasional visitor from London, there were times when he was able to soothe it or, indeed, get blasted out of his mind at an open-air hippy festival. The most memorable by far was the one where a few thousand freaks converged on a national park in Devon and, practically overnight, mounted a tent city with a well-built stage flanked by enormous baffles and frenziedly danced to rock for the next three days. Since it was chilly at night, they also felled some trees and lit enormous bonfires besides which they skillfully rolled up meter-long joints and passed them round the scores and scores of happy campers, JoJo naturally being one of them. With that and what he was able to score by day, he entered into a zone so wild that buried deep in the archives of the B.B.C. there must be a footage of him, entranced and stark naked, jiving to the blast of the loudspeakers. The News of the World headlined its article on the festival “Hippy axe men chop down national forest”.

Since doubtless the reminiscences of the old pothead are as boring to you as they are to us –the grizzled, absent-minded kind who is permanently stoned to the point of being permanently stunned by and mostly indifferent to the need to cope with the hassles of daily life, like a steady job or a daily shower –we should point out that the abovementioned lunacy of JoJo was exceptional. While he essentially went to the festival for weed, it was weed which almost always went to him.

As happened, for example, when riding a bike along a side road in flowery June, he passed a little lake with a big tipi on its shore, evidently that of a comrade, he concluded, and, without a by your leave, opened the flap, went in and spied a rough-looking, flabby man (no less naked than Jojo had been) contently toking at a fat joint. After scrutinizing the intruder, long and hard, Paddy decided he was cool, shared the joint and they fell to talking

Paddy was a thoroughgoing Paddy by name, blood, accent, manner and blarney. However, JoJo soon realized that the latter wasn´t bullshit. From the sizeable stash he offered to sell JoJo some of, he was evidently the dealer he admitted to being. After testing him against what he´d read, several times, JoJo accepted that he´d also done a full stint in the French Foreign Legion. That settled, there was no reason to doubt that he was also a thief and a conman, who, among other scams, drew the dole on both sides of the border whenever in Ireland.

Paddy visited the commune the next day, where, in the attic where JoJo lived, the two smoked a doobie with a few trusted friends. Instead of then hawking his merchandise, as JoJo had expected, Paddy generously gave some of it to the friends and a packet of marijuana seeds to JoJo.

Since sowing them on the grounds of the commune would be a no-no, JoJo did it on the verge of a muddy lane on a neighbor´s farm, but as a city boy, he was no cultivator and with little hope that the marijuana would prosper, didn´t bother to return to the site, months later, in early September, when he was astonished to see that the farmer´s tractor had mowed down the weeds on the side of the lane but stopped only a foot short from the biggest bushiest plants he´d ever seen.

When, after bundling the marijuana in a bag, he returned to his hideaway at the top of the mansion, the euphoria of a bonanza gave way to the paranoia of the grandson of the fearful immigrants who had fled from the Czarist police. Paddy happened to be there and wanted to buy the lot. Keeping a little for himself, JoJo gave the rest of it to him for free.

Anecdotes, anecdotes, they are worthless without lessons. One might be that the scarcer an intoxicant is (be it a drug or a screw), the more the craving to indulge in it. But when you look at the addicts who go overboard when there is an abundant supply, that may not be true. Nevertheless, as we will later learn, there may be occasions when it is not abundance as such which causes the marijuanero to over-indulge but the abrupt shift from the lean to the fat cows, which upsets a kind inner regulator he has that, as in the case of JoJo in this period, enabled him to be philosophical about “times with money and no weed” and instead, channel his urge for reckless sensual pleasure into sex (which didn´t cost anything anyway).

True, he was an enthusiast rather than an addict, but, to a certain extent, the mechanisms are the same: compensation for something that was missed out when one or the other were young. For example, a stable family for a crackhead from the South Bronx or, for a gullible but horny adolescent from the respectable Northernmost Bronx in the dreary fifties, the notion, in the movies and t.v. programs he saw, that “love” was sexless (as in a suburban housewife´s peck on the cheek of her husband when he returned from the office followed, after dinner and t.v, by a chaste sleep in separate beds) and “sex” was the loveless (offscreen) coupling of degenerate beatniks or slum-dwellers. In other words, JoJo wasn´t a child of the sixties but the conformist era of Eisenhower and, in any case, the free love of that era didn´t begin for him in 1963, per Larkin, but when he moved to the commune towards the end of that decade and while not entirely deprived before, was like a kid let loose in a candy store.

It wasn´t that he was a galán, much less a stud (though he held his own). It was just that the man, the time and the circumstances were perfectly aligned. Insofar as it was sex without love, it was shallow. Regrets? Few. At the very least, it was affectionate. And who are you, dear reader, to moralize about trading responsibility for pleasure? And, more so, when the gals had no more illusions than himself.

All but forgotten, they, except for one but that isn´t a matter of regret as a certain kind of “what if?” he occasionally ponders. To do with Catharine, the brilliant daughter of a distinguished Cambridge don who, having done a B.A. in biology, borne two children and separated from their father, was now slogging away in Medical School. How she found the time (and energy) for what she was doing with him is still a mystery of JoJo.

Sure, you could say it was “only” sex, but the pleasure was more profound, the conjoining of flesh more intimate, the afterwards as tender as the foreplay. The border between affection, companionship and gratitude, on the one hand, and love, on the other, is razor thin and there were several reasons, senseless and sensible, why JoJo didn´t go over the edge. Among the former, the feminist awareness raising session she held at her home, attended by lonely or separated women, some of whom imagined that a one-night stand with him would be revenge, offered temptations he couldn´t resist. Among the latter, there was his awareness, however dim, that moving in with her simply wouldn´t work because of his dependence on her for food and board. Then, if he were ever to be the writer he dreamt of becoming, he would have to do it on his own and, aimless, as he then was, he would probably wind up as the helpmeet of very determined woman. Finally, and not least, there was the impossibility of being a kindly stepfather to two snotty brats!

After he drifted away, he ran into Paddy again and went to look at his latest scam. By then, Paddy had hooked up with a wealthy widow, who bought a big house in Norwich and turned it a “beds with sheds” residence for impoverished Pakistani immigrants, a chicken coop where a dozen or more, sleeping on three-tier bunk beds, would be crammed into a single room, those on the night shift taking turns with those who worked by day and sharing a dingy kitchen and a dirty loo. Though it was illegal, it suited both parties: the landlords scooped up a load of untaxable income, while the tenants, after the hellhole they´d come from, were content to have a roof over their heads and just about enough money to feed and clothe themselves.

The visit was also an opportunity to get stoned for the first time in a month and half (and probably, bless Paddy, zonked as well). In fact, they smoked so much that it led Paddy, who usually acted the Jolly Rover, to reveal his bitterness about the Famine, the Troubles, the cane-wielding Christian Brothers and all that. Along the way, JoJo learned that emigration (to abroad or the big cities of Ireland) had resulted in the near-abandonment, in some counties, of the small, rural homestead.

“Man, you can buy a cottage and a nice plot of land for next to nothing. When this con ends, which it´s bound to because the neighbors are already gossiping about the darkies going in and out of the place at all hours, I might buy up a load of properties there and sell them to hippies like yourself”.

If that piqued JoJo´s interest so much it was because he was already wondering whether the commune really suited him. In a way, it was too comfortable, which was great in itself for he who´d been spoiled by his parents and now lived on the dole. Yet, despite all the free time, it hadn´t helped him to become a writer. For that, forgetting Proust, he imagined that he would have to be more daring, like, say, Hemingway. But he also knew that he was no hunter of big-game and didn´t speak any foreign language, hence, the wild west of Ireland looked like a good compromise and after touring it for a month, realized that the property (or, in his case, rental) market was exactly as Paddy had said.

On the other hand, he wasn´t willing to live alone in a damp pile of stone in the midst of ultra-Catholic bogtrotters. So, continuing to go from one woman´s bed to another´s, he bided his time and the ideal candidate finally arrived: a woman from Outer London who married a charming Italian lawyer, later discovered that he was an uptight, bourgeois M.C.P., left him, returned to England and now, like himself, was looking for a more adventurous way of life. No sooner did they meet than they fell in love the other way around, immediately going to bed, and only after becoming smitten with each other as a result. With few ties to cut, they then headed to Ireland posthaste.

Whereupon, JoJo advanced from promiscuity to monogamy, without complaint, not knowing that it was also a move from a tolerable scarcity to a near famine of weed.

[More in a later post . . . if I become inspired].

When Josephus Joshua (JoJo) Schwartz abandoned the Ph.D. he never even started and left the hallowed halls of Cambridge for the bright lights, he chose about the worst place to live in to participate in the then still swinging sixties in London.

Blackheath, in the distant southeast, which wasn´t even reachable by the Tube. We don´t know whether a subconscious guilt about his doctorate also led him to rent a basement flat, with hardly any natural light, alongside a noisy railway line. In both the literal and metaphorical sense, they were dark days, indeed. The owners of the house were arrogant Froggies and the only friend of a sort he had there was a fellow who aggravated his depression with envy of a clever Westminster/Trinity grad, who was the son of one of Monty´s top officers and worse, had actually written a book at a time when JoJo was only dreaming about it.

About the only job he was qualified for was as a part-time teacher in a comprehensive that was even more distant from where the action was and it was less instruction than taming a pack of East London louts.

At this point, you may well ask why he´d dug himself into such a miserable pit. In actual fact, it was less masochism than cluelessness and, in any case, even an oubliette in Outer London was better than a foxhole in Da Nang, in accordance with his strategy to avoid (not illegally evade) the draft.

To do that, he would visit his doctoral adviser every few months to maintain the pretense that he was still a student, taking advantage of the exemption given to his kind in the district of the Bronx he was registered in, which was full of the half-educated Blacks and Latinos General Hershey preferred, and meanwhile kill time while he waited to reach the safe harbor of the age of 26.

About the only other friend he had in London was a girl who lived leagues away in Hampstead in her parent´s house, which was adjacent to that of Margaret Drabble, whom he briefly met and thus, in contrast to those he´d only read about, she was a real person and another real author he longed to be.

Like JoJo, Clélia was the child of lukewarm Jews and artistically-minded: since she was too rachitic for his taste (and he probably didn´t appeal to her in turn), it was that rather than sex which was the bond between them. Even so, what JoJo was desperate for was company, so it didn´t matter. But as Clélia was busy learning to fashion stained-glass and the trip took a good hour and a half, JoJo rarely saw her.

Once, when he did, his life took a surprising turn. It was on that top floor of her house that JoJo first smoked weed (maybe there should be a plaque to commemorate it). Ah, the release, the absolution, the euphoria, the laughter, non-stop, for two hours.

If you´re handed a free ticket for a rocket ship to the stars, what´s wrong about wanting to return? If it wasn´t entirely unknown in Cambridge, it was virtually unsmoked, so far as he observed. It was rumored that you could buy some from the servicemen at the nearby Lakenheath air base, with its U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons, but even if JoJo had been hooked by then, he was hardly going to march to the front gate and ask the sentinels to tell him who to talk to.

In London, weed was no longer so scarce. Now, the problem was that he didn´t know where or how to buy it and more so for a nice Jewish boy from the Bronx with minimal street smarts who, moreover, was utterly remote from the rock stars, models, actresses, fashion designers, gallery owners, journalists, hangers–on and others of the in-group of the supposedly swinging sixties, which seemed pretty drab for him.

Still, an urge is an urge and since it was common knowledge that the Rastas in Notting Hill indulged in it all the time, he steeled himself to visit a pub they frequented. As soon as went in, he sensed it was a ghastly mistake. The Black guys stared hard at the honky college boy, though it was more with an amused contempt than hostility, especially after JoJo ordered a Coca-Cola, was sniggered at again and realized if he approached one of them, they would either pretend that they were clean-living or take him for a secret agent and boot him out on his arse. (He later discovered that the latter was not so far-fetched when he came across some young narcs dressed as hippies).

Afterwards, trying to be philosophical, he reasoned that since his most imperative urge was to undo a forced abstinence from sex, he´d focus on that rather than his failure to buy weed. And succeeded to a point when he met a barely educated gal who, like himself, only wanted the sex without the romance. But the cost of relieving one itch was the inflammation of the other.

The frustration at the pub was followed by another at a party in Kensington Clélia got him an invitation to. It was hardly festive: strangers to him and mostly to each other milling around in the near dark; a haze of cigarette smoke and liquor fumes; public school boys failing to bed Sloane Rangers and getting drunk instead. He was about to leave when he noticed half a dozen guys clustered round a spark of light that wasn´t the tip of a cigarette but a joint. When he joined them, however, he was more or less told to piss off.

By then, he´d reached the magical 26 and there was no reason for him to continue to live in a dungeon or stick to a job he hated. True, a radical change would require some cash but he could count on a subsidy from the parents, who´d always spoiled him.

Nevertheless, there are times when inertia has a momentum of its own and since the only thing he´d ever want to be was a writer and he hadn´t even finished a two-page short story by then, exploring the jungle or climbing Mount Everest would be just as pointless as remaining where he was.

Marijuana too, it seemed. That unforgettable first high had only driven him deeper into the black hole of Blackheath but the craving was still here and like the alcoholic who swears that this drink will be the last, he was fooling himself that weed didn´t matter to him anymore.

But Santa Maria, the patroness of the plant, still had her eye on him. When he was given an unexpected taste of CBD, prescribed for heroin addicts by the NHS, the recovering junkie, a local drop-out he was vaguely acquainted with, didn´t warn him that, unlike the marijuana you smoke, whose effect was immediate, it had to be digested before the high kicked in and since the first lick was disappointing, he went for another and another until . . . he was in the grip of an unforgiving beast who only let go a day and a half later. Instead of swearing “never again”, he regarded it as a step in the apprenticeship of a true marijuanero, reckoning that it taught him to be more moderate from then on.

That was easy to say when there wasn´t another opportunity to test his resolve for months and months. Meanwhile, loneliness worsened his fear that he was no good at writing, the only calling which he thought he´d be good at. Added to that was his loathing for the only place which would employ him, the Comp. His charges didn´t want to learn any more than he wanted to teach. Reporting on their progress to his departmental head and then their parents was a farce. Since it would have been unthinkable to say that those who behaved well were dimwits, and the others, louts, he resorted to “he could do better if he tried”, as though that weren´t true of everyone.

Absent any other outlet, JoJo became the clown of the staff room, the piss-taker, the boaster who would talk and talk about any old thing as long as it drew attention to himself. Mostly, he was ignored, but there were times when one or another divorcee thought he was “interesting” and capitalizing on that, he went to bed with one until he realized that he would have to bear the burden of her loneliness as well as his. JoJo wasn´t the cad he would like to have been and feeling bad about it afterwards only made him more desperate to prove that he was the only genius in a room full of drudges. The headmaster eventually got wind of this but it wasn´t easy to get rid of a teacher, even a part-time one, without an ironclad justification, which is what JoJo might have wanted, if he hadn´t been for the chilling question of what to do next.

A nosedive, the situation seemed to be, but he wasn´t a fighter pilot. Instead, a sad, aimless feather drifting on an updraft that might subside into a cathartic crash landing or, oppositely, turn him into one of those embittered veterans on the staff who once dreamt of becoming famous or rich but, trapped by the routines and wages of a steady job, never got around to it.

It was at this point of a possible no-return that Mother Mary intervened again. Esoteric nonsense, you might say, but how would you explain the force that placed him on the top of a double-decker bus that was crossing the heath which Blackheath was named after at the very moment that a woman he once met at the ex-addict´s flat was walking across the same bleak expanse of grass, diagonal to the bus. Since he hardly knew her and she too was distant, it would have been pointless to shout “hello”, much less get off the bus and catch up with her, as he did, if it hadn´t been that, apart from his colleagues in the staff room (who didn´t count), he hadn´t spoken to a friendly soul in several days.

To JoJo´s surprise, she was not only cordial but said that she had just received a big baggie of marijuana and was inviting the dopers she knew to share it with her, himself included. Even a novice like him knew that a “baggie” was a small, zip-top plastic bag of, usually, a dozen or so grams. This one, on the other hand, was a medium-size kraft paper supermarket bag so full of grass that a mere whiff of it started to get him high.

Like bees to the honeypot, the local potheads were drawn to her place by the heady, acrid aroma in the bag. A veritable orgy ensued: two days and nights of stoning and, yes, f_cking that were nevertheless not non-stop for JoJo, who somehow made it to his classes and returned to the feast.

Never before or since had he had he smoked so much and for so long. The odd thing, however, was after the party ended, he remained in the zone of the stone for five further days, as though he´d entered a new dimension of reality, which, unlike his traumatic trip on the paste, was not only bearable but a smooth, pleasant glide through his otherwise dull, daily routines. In contrast with the rush of the preceding marathon, the state he was in wasn´t euphoric (with intervals of brain fag, relieved by some more tokes) but soporific, like, he imagined, what the ex-addict had told him about the effect of heroin, a Ça m’est égal about the mess he was in and the reaction of the teachers in the staff room as he became more and more provocative and incoherent, word of which reached the headmaster but it wasn´t easy to get rid of a teacher, even a part-time one, without an ironclad justification, which is what JoJo might have wanted, if he hadn´t been for the chilling question of what to do next.

Erratic, as he´d been, from the start, JoJo had never missed a class, though, unlike the other teachers, who´d arrive at the staff room early in order to, as it were, settle in with a coffee and a cigarette, he usually turned up, breathless, at the last moment. On that particular day, spying him rushing into the school at five to eleven, the headmaster assumed that he finally had him.

However, being late wasn´t itself the headmaster´s grounds for dismissal. Instead, it was a confirmation of what he had previously learned of his “unprofessional behavior” and that did not only apply to his shenanigans in the staff room. Among others, there was one time he nearly got into a fistfight with an insolent juvenile delinquent in one of his classes; another, when he lost a dozen of his flock on a visit to a museum when they become engrossed in the nudes on display; and the innuendos he made towards a sexy but prudish lady in the staff room. Above all, even for the straight arrows on the staff, the reek of marijuana on his person and clothing was unmistakable.

JoJo had a good idea of what was in store when he was summoned to the headmaster´s office, but instead of being upset or angry, he felt sorry for the headmaster, who, unlike the uptight authoritarians of the past, was the new model educational bureaucrat who, whether dealing with the nervous breakdown of an over-sensitive trainee teacher or one student´s theft of the bicycle of another, had been indoctrinated to be a therapist rather than a disciplinarian.

After mulling over the alternatives without getting anywhere (temporary unpaid leave of absence, pending an assessment by a psychiatrist; transfer to a lamentably understaffed hell hole; honorable discharge because of poor health, with a token severance payment), the headmaster decided to start grave and afterwards, be kind.

“Are you aware, Mr. Schwartz, that missing a class is a serious breach of our professional code of conduct?”

“If you look at the timetable, sir, you will see that my first class today started at eleven and I duly taught it”.

“Never mind that. What really concerns me is the way you´ve been upsetting some of your fellow teachers in the staff room”.

Since that made an impression, the headmaster switched to being nice.

“I understand, of course, that the work we do is stressful at times. So, if something in your personal life is troubling you, feel free to unburden yourself, strictly in confidence, you understand. My position isn´t exclusively about enforcing rules and regulations, I also have a fatherly concern for my subordinates and may be able to help you”.

With blank look, JoJo said “I don´t know what you´re talking about.”

With that, Jo knew that he had him, the headmaster.

If, on the one hand, he were to say “it´s because you´re consuming an illegal drug” and couldn´t prove it, he, the headmaster, would be in trouble, while if, on the other the idea was to trap JoJo into a confession, the headmaster had just failed.

But he also knew that a cornered beast was more likely to lash out than surrender and more so, when the headmaster was in a stronger position than himself. But, simultaneously, that he himself had had enough. And, in effect, he quit before he was fired.

Whereupon, he was wafted on the hazy winds of marijuana to the what next: a commune in Norfolk he´d heard about at that orgy but without any idea of what it would be like, where, turning up uninvited, he was taken in and remained for the following five years.

Tresses redolent of the languid maidens

Stroked by the moonlight of Rossetti.

He, of those long-robed faeries,

Distant, with thick perfumed locks,

The knight nuzzles

In dreams moistened by lust

Not knowing

That the dulcet Belle Dame

Sans Merci

Is wreathed in red flowers

With sharp, poisonous thorns.

While she, the sister of thwarted desire,

Is fueled by an invalid´s spite

Cursed by the flesh he celebrated

To an orgasmic suffering

In feverish reveries

Of fruit proffered by goblins

For an ecstasy consummated

In visions, then madness, then death.

Her brother, the Dante in exile,

Is the pre-Raphaelite friar,

Energetic, spellbound, nostalgic,

Who wraps us in a seaweed of sirens

With an unearthly power over men

Whom chivalry lures into ivied towers

Where they willingly expire

In the arms of treacherous loves.

They, the two,

Are soothsayers mirrored

By the charms of the hare

In double-edged woods

Where the stones speak in riddles

To the goblins of vengeance

On poor mortals cloistered

in parlors, embroidered in ennui

And musty with mutton and soiled lace.

2 —

An anthropologist searching for an uncontacted tribe in a remote jungle threw away the plastic container his drinking water was in. It was not the usual bottle, but square and large, with a little strap for carrying it. Unbeknownst to the anthropologist, the wary natives had been observing him for days, assessing the possibilities of his finding them, in which case, as they´d done with other explorers before, they would erase their trails, destroy their settlement and move deeper into the impenetrable rainforest.

At the same time that outsiders were a threat, they were also an object of fascination. Thinking at first that the container was a savage animal which the anthropologist had tamed as a kind of guard dog, they stealthily approached it and when it made no sound, gently poked it with a long stick and it likewise didn´t roar or shriek. Still cautious, however, they used their extraordinarily keen sense of smell to sniff at it and since it was odorless too, they drew closer, still without touching it, and focused, focused on its glassy, transparent surface, unlike anything they had ever seen. After pondering that for a long while without being able to deter,ome what it was made of, they called on their medicine man, the wisest in the tribe, who reasoned that since it was smooth, transparent and reflective, it must have been made of a kind of water, solidified by the gods and as water was the source of life, its spirit was benevolent.

Then, employing sympathetic magic, they poured a cupful of water blessed by the shaman into the mouth of the container and were astonished to see that it didn´t leak out of its watery walls. Then poking the sides of the container again, they confirmed that they were solid.

And, concluded that whatever it was, it would serve as vessel to cook their powerful hallucinogenic brew, which, if not treated with reverence, would bring ruin on them. As we, not they, would have expected, the fire burnt the vessel and extinguished its flames, leaving a weird, twisted, shriveled remnant of plastic which the tribe recognized to be the devil which the profanation of their medicine had unleashed, whereupon they tracked down the anthropologist and speared him to death.

3 —Who remembers the writer who was almost certainly the only man to have interviewed both Mao and Hitler? Answer to pub quiz: the astonishing Robert Payne, born in England in 1911. He spoke to Hitler in Munich in 1937. As a cultural attaché to the British Embassy in China during WWII, he met Mao in Yenan. He was also one of the most prolific authors of all times. Best known for his biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Htler, Stalin, Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong and Mahatma Gandhi, he also wrote novels, poems, newspaper articles and translated Pasternak and Kierkegaard. More than 110 published books !!

4—The serendipity of YouTube. The comments section of an interview of the British actor Ian Mckellan referred me to play called Waiting for Camus. Intrigued, I thought it would be great to watch it but when I followed the link, it was a video of Mckellan in Waiting for Godot. Still, once an idea is planted in the public´s head, it never goes away, so maybe some enterprising writer will turn it into a play or movie.

5—A temper tantrum: is there any other kind of the same?

6—Between Epstein and Everest, we are riding a wave which is crashing into absolute distraction from what´s really going on in the sad lives that we less and less possess.

7—Riveting record album recently recovered from obscurity: onosolosono

8—Behind the glitter of Broadway were immigrant Jews in New York Americanizing themselves through song and dance. Imagine, fleeing from the pogroms of Galicia to romanticize those in indigenous Ok-la-ho-ma!

9—Risking the wrath of feminists, I confess to a pet peeve: women sports announcers, especially of baseball, the technicalities of which they little understand. I know it´s scandalous to say so, but everyone is entitled to his or her opinion.

Speaking of which and as a scientific ignoramus, I´ve sometimes thought that if you apply Newton´s law of an opposite and equal reaction to pitching, a junk ball of 60-70 mph should be more effective than a fast one of 90-plus (so long as it employs a curve, slider or sinker). It turns out I was wrong: the distance of a well-hit ball is determined by to a me unfathomable combination of exit velocity, launch angle, spin rate, and atmospheric condition. The physics of the length of a driven ball of golf (which I am also a fan of) are just as or even more complicated. My, how tiresome the stats in the corner of your screen are! In the feud between Bryson and Brooks, I am on the side of the latter

10—Advice to the writer who is blocked: trust in the wild flights of the first words which come into your head. Even if they don´t lead you to where you would like to go, it will push you past the familiar roadblock of futility, depression and apathy.

11—The wisdom of simple folk. Once, when I was living in a forlorn village in the mountainous part of the Putumayo, I went in search of a computer to transcribe a magazine article I wrote by hand and a woman I approached, said:

“A computer? Lemme think. I know, it´s a typewriter connected to a television”.

12 —Some writers are plungers,

Others, mere skimmers,

Like dragonflies,

Giddy and iridescent

Who, though superficial,

Glide gladly o´er rivers.

Warmed by the clear summer suns.

13—As he does every week, a man walks to a store before breakfast, buys a lottery ticket and safely tucks it into the pocket of his shirt. It´s a hot day, so when he returns to his home, he changes into a cooler shirt and drapes the one he was wearing on the back of a chair. A while later, when he has gone to his office, his wife enters their bedroom, sniffs the sweat in the shirt and, takes it to the laundry with the other soiled clothing

Early the next morning, as he does every week, the man walks to the same store, buys a newspaper, hurriedly searches for the results of the lottery and sees that he has bought the winning ticket! In even more of a sweat, he rushes to his home and frantically searches for the shirt. Only it isn´t there! After questioning his wife, he learns that it´s in the laundry and seeing how impatient he is to recover it, she assumes that he needs the clean shirt to go to his office after breakfast.

This time, he runs to the laundry. On the way, he realizes that if he discloses the reason why he is so eager to recover the shirt, the laundryman might steal the ticket before returning it to him from the racks of clean clothes in the back room.

So, trying to be offhand about it, he asks the laundryman whether he found a scrap of paper on which he´d written down a phone number in the pocket of the shirt.

“Indeed, I did”.

Still struggling to be cool, the man says that he might be late for work and would he please fetch it at once.

“Sorry, sir. I always warn my clients about what happens when you put a piece of paper in the boiling water of the washer. Unfortunately, yours turned into a wad of mush and I threw it away”.

14—Morbo in Spanish is related to morbid in English which is an unhealthy or obsessive interest in unpleasant or unmentionable subjects, usually death or disease, but not always those, as I discovered on two occasions when I was hitchhiking in Ireland in, I emphasize, the 1980´s, because we are told that things have changed since then in respect of . . .you guessed it, sex!

There´s no need to elaborate on the Church´s centuries-long repression of any expression of it except marriage, with the added admonition that it should only be for children, not pleasure, much less affection or love.

Still, if you need a primer, skip the obvious candidates: Joyce, O´Faoláin or the O´Brien girls and read Patrick Kavanagh´s poem The Great Hunger (which is not about the blight of the potato but another kind of root)

Maguire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
. . .

And his happiest dream
Was . . .

To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July.
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.
But his passion became a plague
For he grew feeble bringing the vague
Women of his mind to lust nearness,
Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.
So Maguire got tired
Of the no-target gun fired
And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage.

On the first occasion, I was picked up by a garda and, innocent, as I was, in those days, I knew that when an Irish cop gave a hippy a lift, it had more to do with his job than his kindness: a mobile interrogation, you might call it. And also, that the confession he was most interested in would be to do with marijuana, which was about the only crime we hippies could be and at times were busted for. (True, I once snatched several basketfuls of apples from a neighbor´s orchard, but that was more gleaning than theft and it couldn´t have been proved anyway).

That being so, I reckoned that two could play the game as well as one, so I pretended that I was a clean-living, God-fearing lad who settled in Ireland to lead the healthy back to the land life that was no longer affordable in England.

Gradually, however, I realized I was under a misapprehension: he started asking me questions like, “The free love you people practice must be great, isn´t it?” (i.e., when did you stop beating your wife?) Now, since the first rule of hitchhiking is to never argue with your benefactor, while I didn´t act offended and say no, we were virtuous persons, I hinted that it might be a yes. That got him going: “They tell me your women are really hot”, “what´s is like when they really suck the juice out of you” and so forth until he flushed with excitement, but on the point of an erection (I sensed), the indoctrinated choir boy kicked in and he went into a rant about how disgusting, sick and immoral we were until he was purple in the face and it was all being vented on me, the dirty, degenerate, godless hippy.

Fortunately, I reached my destination before I was arrested for an offence against public decency. In this case, I exaggerate, but I was once nearly busted for peeing against the wall of a warehouse in the deserted dock district of Limerick.

My second Good Samaritan was quite different: a timid, pious and neatly dressed member of the Legion of Mary, he appeared to be. Second rule of hitchhiking: since what the driver essentially wants is company, keep the conversation flowing. So, after I told him that I was born in the States, lived in England for a decade and now rented a stone cottage in the countryside of County Clare, he got onto his own travels and I was amazed to learn that he´d just returned from 4 years in Africa, probably, I guessed, as a lay missionary.

The heat, the mosquitoes, the picturesque natives: so far, so harmless, until reminiscing got the better of him and he told me that what he most liked about Africa were the women, who were really special. In what way, I asked. Well, he went on, they´d do it for a price of a beer and hardly a day went by without his f_cking one or sometimes two of them, pinning them down right there on the dirt road where he´d met them. Meanwhile, practically drooling as he pictured their tits and bums and c_nts, he worked himself into such a lather that I expected him to pull down his pants and do you know what in his car. At which point, I said, “we´re here, thanks for the ride” and got out.

Just as Istanbul was once Constantinople and Constantinople was once the more evocative Byzantium (shades of Durrell), Choachí, the Andean town I live on a hill above, was originally Chiguachía, which, in the Chibcha language of the pre-Colombian Muiscas who lived there, derives from Chía, the Moon, and meant the Balcony of the Moon.

But what does that mean? Speculations abound. However, my take is the following: if, on an appropriate evening, you are in downtown Bogotá and look up to the East, you will see the moon rise in a cleft in the high ridge which demarcates the whole eastern border of the city and that beacon points you in the direction of Choachí. On either side of that balcony, you find the tutelary peaks of Bogotá which almost certainly were pre-Colombian shrines, later turned into Christian ones. Monserrate on the left, a must for tourists, reached, for the lazy, by funicular and cable car, though, being a white-knuckle passenger, I prefer to hike up the path, which was pretty rough when I arrived in Bogotá centuries ago, but now paved, safe and comfortable. On the right, there is Guadalupe, landmarked by huge cross, while the landmark of Monserrate is a church with a tall spire.

To reach Choachí, you catch a bus downtown which rides through the cleft amidst a forest of eucalyptus and pine, part of a 4,800 hectares ecological reserve that ensures an abundant supply of clean water for the city of Bogotá, the result of nearly a century of partial norms that originated in a concern for the deforestation of the area and the contamination of the city´s potable water by the pottery kilns which burnt the firewood from there.

Within a short time, you enter a different world at the top of the hill, that of the páramo, a high moor, unique to the Andes. The ground of cushion plants and grasses is springy underfoot, the trees low and stunted and about all that stands out is the emblematic Fray Lejón, a perennial “subshrub” (whatever that means), with a high, clumpy, leaf-clad stem which bursts into a spray of yellow flowers at its top and on a foggy day, does indeed look like an eerie, hooded friar.

The páramo is a natural sponge, a catchment of rain and moisture which supplies 60% of the country´s waters and is now threatened by the spread of cattle ranches and the large-scale cultivation of potatoes. It is a gently rolling vegetal sea, hostile when the weather is bad and virtually trackless, so city folk should not roam around it on their own but first go to Mata Redonda, about halfway to Choachí, which provides guided tours for students, field scientists and trekkers. However, if you are caught out on the bleak moor at night, remember that, even when damp, the leaves of the Fray Lejón provide excellent kindling for a camp fire.

At the start of the páramo (kilometer 11) there is a pit stop for cyclists who, to my astonishment and envy, think nothing of riding up the 36 odd kilometers from the 2,600 meters high Bogotá, crossing the 3,000 plus moor, descending to Choachí at 1,700 and going back again in a single morning! At this point, there is a view, on the left, of the distant San Rafael reservoir, which supplies water to the north of Bogotá.

While the moor is sparsely populated and may seem isolated and forlorn at times, the abovementioned cafeteria is one of a number of places where you can stop for a snack or a feast on arepas (corn cakes); empanadas (meat patties) envueltos (steamed corn “wrapped” in leaves, non-edibles ones which led a newly arrived gringo to remark to his Colombian wife that, while the envuelto he ate for the first time was tasty, the lettuce leaves were too tough); soups; sausages and a whopping great plate of mixed, deep-fried meats with potatoes and cassava that is definitely not for those with delicate stomachs. In addition to these restaurants in low, ramshackle but serviceable buildings, there are a number of roadside stalls where the local farmers sell their honey or cheese or fruit. The one exception, where you descend on the far side of the páramo, is a handsome restaurant built on the top of an enormous boulder.

The road takes you past scattered farmhouses with ruddy-faced kids on horseback and impenetrable tangles of the Chusquea bamboo, whose stems (mixed with clays) served as laths in the ceilings of houses before there were industrialized materials and can still be seen in some old farm houses.

At the highest point of the páramo, there is a cafeteria/store with the name of “Colombia 86”, which, I suppose, prematurely celebrated Colombia´s hosting of the World Cup that year, cancelled at the last minute. Jurisdictionally, this is the frontier between Bogotá and Choachí, but it is also what might be called its continental divide, because there are days when it is sunny and warm in Bogotá and rainy and chilly in Choachí and vice-versa. Another unusual feature (only seen once by myself): a replica of the famous Majoa snake of Sils Maria, when a cloud bank, in the shape of a serpent, drifts along the valley on your left.

Next comes the most dramatic part of the route. A river breaks through the terrain, the road skirts a deep canyon on one side and a sheer cliff looming above your bus on the other. Some time ago, part of that cliff fell down and blocked the only practical access to Choachí from Bogotá for nearly a year. The cliff above the canyon is pockmarked with caves where, according to those whose families have lived in Bogotá for generations, the Muiscas hid their golden idols and votive offering at the approach of the Spaniards.

Meanwhile, the breach suddenly opens up a panoramic view of the fields, forests and distant towns below and the road, looping as it goes down to Choachí, does a quick change of climate (from the near-zero of the páramo on a clear night to the balmy to hot of Choachí on a sunny day) and crops (among others, potatoes at the top and sunflowers at the bottom).

The topography of Choachí sometimes reminds me of the famous story by H.G. Wells entitled The Country of the Blind. True, it is set in Ecuador, not Colombia, and the chiguanos are sharp-sighted, amiable and neither overawed by nor hostile to strangers. Nevertheless, the King of the Blind´s fall down the far side of a mountain to a valley, cut off from the rest of the world, more or less fits the location of Choachí, at least in my fevered imagination, which forgets that, for centuries, it was linked to Bogotá and its pre-Colombian predecessor, Bacatá, by trails of neatly placed paving stones (parts of which are now being bulldozed by jeep-owning locals, too lazy to walk the fifty yards from a transitable road to their house).

Which is quite a contrast to their hardy ancestors, who, in living memory, would drive their merchandise-loaded mules to the (now defunct) Los Laches marketplace, on the eastern border of Bogotá, setting out at dusk and arriving at dawn the following day. And would stop for a warming glass of aguardiente at one or another rustic tavern along the way. Though the paving stones are mostly gone, enough of the trail remains for an annual walk of thousands from Bogotá to Choachí and then, the adjoining town of Ubaque.

Fortunately, some of these camino reales (either originally built by the Muiscas or restored by the Crown´s indigenous subjects) are still more or less intact, wending their way through outlying country districts, and are perfect for strenuous hikers. I would recommend the one which starts just below the bridge, alongside a not too high cliff face popular with rock climbers, and runs down a virtually primeval Andean cloud forest. If I were in charge, the paved trails would be protected as a UNESCO-type cultural heritage site.

Call it the same price of progress which, thanks to good public schools, t.v., the internet, the influence of a big city which is now a mere one-hour bus ride away and ancestral memories of the harsh life of the countryside in the olden days, is now leading the younger generation to become urban professionals, teachers, bureaucrats, businessmen and the like.

They not only emigrate to Bogotá but also abroad. Every now and again, on a hike in the hinterlands, I run into a grizzled, toothless, barely literate septuagenarian, wrapped in a ruana (poncho), who, as though it were nothing remarkable, tells me that he has a grandson or niece in the States or Italy or far-off Australia. The counterpart, of course, is the colonization of even remote parts of the countryside around Choachí by bogotanos building weekend or retirement homes, some of which are veritable mansions that form a contrast with the remaining traditional ones of adobe, with tin roofs, around them.

According to some friends in Choachí, the chiguanos are adventurous travelers, as in the probably apocryphal story of some who visited the pyramids of Egypt and found that the camel concession was run by a landsman! But, if they save enough money, many expats eventually settle in Choachí again, in which I see a resemblance to the Basques of old who, at one and the same time, voyaged to distant lands and remained rooted in their own one.

About ¾ of the way down, a side road leads you to la Chorrera, at 590 meters, the sixth highest waterfall in South America, though it is only visible from afar in the rainy season. Long unknown to outsiders, it is now a tourist attraction and the one time I stood under the torrent of water (the lower one, since there is a break in the falls) was a fearful but exhilarating experience.

It is hard for me to describe what Choachí is like when you finally arrive there. One reason is that immersion in a place is essential for a thorough understanding of it but tends to go against the perspective from outside which a writer requires to convey what he knows to his readers. Another: it is difficult to put a convincing label on Choachí, other than the too flexible one of a “municipality”. In one way, it is a village; in another, a town; and yet, in another, a city.

A village in the sense that the “downtown” of Choachí, which follows the Spanish colonial grid pattern, is compact, so that the stores or restaurants you go to are within an easy walking distance and a regular customer, even a foreigner like myself, is greeted as “vecino” (neighbor). The same goes for the chiguanos you are acquainted with as friends or neighbors, to the point where you always meet up with someone you know on your daily rounds in Choachí and, at times, due to the narrow sidewalks, literally bump into them. Above all, wherever you go, there are splendid views of the nearby mountains and valleys

Administratively speaking, Choachí is also a town, as defined by its mayor´s office, health center, fire brigade, notary public and other local government offices, including its police station, where, the one time I visited it, I was surprised to see a big split screen which monitors the security cameras on virtually every downtown corner.

Yet, in another sense, Choachí is a small city. This is not apparent to most tourists, who do not wander into the suburbs, small but literal ones of modern, two-storey houses. While not unpleasant, these districts resemble those in the residential ones of Bogotá without the charm of the center, which has a friendlier feeling and still conserves a number of its original houses with grilled streetside windows and inner courtyards and gardens (some now serving as restaurants). Sure, people need places to live in but I fear that they may gradually eat up the fields and pastures now just beyond them.

Above all, there is the growing sophistication of Choachí. For example, I, as a demanding lover of coffee, would point to the contrast between the slop prepared in the old-fashioned coffee urns when I first arrived some 25 years ago to the half a dozen cafés which now serve an excellent cup of coffee made with the French-press or steam pressure systems. Among the restaurants, there are an Italian, a Swiss, and a pseudo-Chinese, along with several gourmet hamburger, ice-cream and pizza ones, complemented by a new whole-grain bakery, one health-food store and another of natural remedies.

Then there are several sleek, hip fashion outlets for the younger generation, three gyms, many cell phone stores, a small, indoor pool for kids learning to swim, a brightly-lit supermarket and (of all things) two new nail salons for ladies and another which straightens and polishes their hair. Virtually none of these existed a decade or so before.

Though some are not new, there are too many hairdressers for me to count. In short, barring a bookstore, a mall, multiplex or a vegetarian restaurant, among other amenities, the commerce of Choachí is much like that of a big city but on a smaller and more accessible scale. So far, only two tallish buildings mar the low scale of the town: an apartment block and a hotel.

Stretching it a little, I would even say that Choachí is a city-state. If that sounds far-fetched, consider, first, that its population of around 12,000 is comparable to some of the smallest city-states of Renaissance Italy. Second, that only about half live in its urban center, while the rest are in the rural districts which surround it, which, as indicated above, are characterized by a wide range of climates, terrains, crops and vegetation. Next, that its 233 square kilometers area is about the same as the current one of the former city-state of Urbino. Finally, that it border the towns of La Calera (at a distance of about two hours by car, since you first have to reach and traverse the busy traffic of Bogotá), Ubaque in the south (only half an hour but on a terrible road), Fómeque in the east (3/4 of an hour on a day when the equally terrible road affords it) and the city of Bogotá towards the west (about an hour, barring landslides, road repairs and driving license and vehicle insurance checks by the traffic police).

A final observation: be it a village, town or city, there is not one Choachí but two: the quiet weekday one and the crowded and bustling weekend one of tourists from Bogotá (more of which in a subsequent installment).

THE TOWER OF FARNESE, PARMA

THE FINAL CHAPTER

When, thanks to the machinations of Count Tosco, Fabrizio del Bongo was released from his prison at the top of the impregnable tower of Farnese, the vain, ultra-reactionary Prince of Dharma was mortified by his failure to thwart the idol of the Liberals. He thus decided to implement his long-considered plan to murder him, making it look like an accident, and thus ordered one his henchmen to wait in the bushes at side of the road at the bottom of the steep hill which led from the prison to the city and thrust a pole into the spokes of Fabrizio´s bicycle, so that he would somersault into the fearful abyss on the other side of the road.

What he hadn´t reckoned on was that, after being left in the storeroom of the Tower for so long, the tires had deflated. While Fabrizio was pumping them up, one of the prison guards, who resembled him in build and height and, due to the cold weather, muffled his face in a scarf, set out on his own bicycle to the city and was murdered in place of Fabrizio.

Unaware of this, the Prince, who was paranoid about his security and was always surrounded by twenty bodyguards, was so overjoyed about the apparent success of his plan that, for the first time in years, he left his castle and went for a stroll along the streets of the city, with only one elderly aide-de-camp accompanying him.

When the news that he had killed Fabrizio reached the city, the Liberals were disheartened, but when they learned that he was alive they were the emboldened to undertake their long-awaited rebellion. After cornering and decapitating the Prince, they seized his Palace and paraded around the town brandishing his head on a pike, as well as his parading his gold chamber pot, the petticoats of his ten mistresses and the dueling pistols he secreted under his bed, waistcoat and every corner of his residence. Then, hoisting Fabrizio on their shoulders, the unanimously proclaimed him the president of the new Napoleonic Republic of Dharma.

However, there was a problem. When he learned of those occurrences, the governor of the prison Fabrizio had been in, who was an ultra-legitimist, concluded that his innocent daughter, had secured Fabrizio´s release by seducing the Prince on the orders of Count Tosco. A cruel man who tried to poison Fabrizio, screened the one small window which let sunlight into his cell and confiscated his books, pen and writing paper, he seized his daughter as a hostage, knowing that Fabrizio was in love with her and she with him, and announced that he would kill her if Fabrizio didn´t swear fealty to the nephew of the deceased Prince, inform on the ringleaders of the rebellion, flagellate himself on the steps of the Cathedral and slave for the rest of his life in the stables of the prison.

Fabrizio, in turn, announced that he would rather die than sully the honor of a girl who was universally known to be the shyest and chastest maiden in the whole of Lombardy. Stalemate, followed by a series of long and tense negotiations, which were finally resolved when the Duchess of Saneverseener , who was also in love with Fabrizio but, despite the malicious rumors, had never been his lover, seduced the governor, again at the behest of Count Tosco, who was madly in love with her, in turn, and, having been fended off up to then, hoped that she would finally yield.

In return for the release of the governor´s daughter, Fabrizio, who was already ordained, agreed to become a humble parish priest in a remote province of Lombardy and never cross the borders of Dharma again. Unbeknownst to the governor, however, this too was a ploy by the Count, who, though the late Prince´s chief minister, was a staunch republican who´d been maneuvering to oust the Prince for years. A canny and patient diplomatist who modelled himself on Metternich, he calculated that there would be little chance of overthrowing the monarchy by means of a popular rebellion, among other reasons, because, while the Prince was dimwitted, he had organized a vast network of clever informers who had squashed every previous attempt by the Jacobins.

He decided, instead, to play the long game and, step by step, arrange for Fabrizio to be promoted from curate to canon to bishop to archbishop to cardinal to, finally, the King of Rome, the head of an independent kingdom, with its own army and obedient subalterns in every diocese of Catholic Christendom and thus, powerful enough to successfully invade Dharma, without, however, offending the sensibilities of its conservative and pious inhabitants, as Republican, half-atheist France would have done.

As part of the abovementioned agreement, the daughter of the governor was sent to a convent, but secretly promised that she would eventually be released and reunited with Fabrizio. But too frail to withstand the rigors of monastic life, she died of a fever and when Fabrizio, now a bishop, learned of her death, he died of heartbreak before he could ascend to the throne of St. Peter. By then, Count Tosca had been restored to his post as Chief Minister and was serving the Prince´s nephew. But after the death of Fabrizio ruined his plans, he retired to Sicily and succumbing to grief, the Duchess, who, now aged, was no longer the most beautiful woman in Dharma, reluctantly followed him, but whether her marriage to the Count, who was nearly seventy, was or was not white remains one of the many unsolved mysteries of that turbulent era of the pre-Risorgimento Peninsula of Italy.

[REVIEW OF THE NOVEL]

A parody is a backhanded tribute, inspired, in this case, by my listening to the long, long audiobook of the Charterhouse of Parma, enchanted at times and, at others, confused or annoyed. The trouble with certain novels which are acknowledged masterpieces is that the story is simply too much to digest. I wouldn´t say that is true of Ulysess, for example, which, when you concentrate on it, follows the lines of a comprehensible plot with a recognizable setting, cast and atmosphere, all compressed into a single day in a single city.

With Stendhal, on the other hand, the story sometimes goes off the rails, as though he wanted to cram absolutely everything he knew and felt and saw in northern Italy into a single volume, until it returns to the track and you think that the fault is yours, as an inattentive reader. Now, don´t get me wrong: I like complicated plots with unexpected turns which the climax finally enables you to make sense of, as in the intelligent crime/detective/police procedural novels I am fond of.

However, there is a very thin line between a story which challenges you to be alert and one which succumbs to needless complications. I´d guess that Stendhal´s justification for his entangled webs was that he was only mirroring the labyrinthine political power politics of pre-Risorgimento Lombardy, intertwined with the personal power politics of seduction, family feuds, snobbery, place-seeking, non-conformity and so forth, personified by Fabrizio del Dongo, “our hero”, says Stendhal (tongue in cheek, I suspect) whose true character is only glimpsed in a series of snapshots which, in the end, make it difficult to determine what he is really like. Instead of being a flaw, however, this kaleidoscopic view of his personality is, in my opinion, one of the main virtues of the book. Indeed, and stretching it a little, you might even say that, (given the limits of the era and the genre) that Fabrizio is a Leopold Bloom avant la lettre, a rounded character, who, like the rest of us, is a mass of contradictions: a creature of willpower and whim, painfully self-aware and, at the same time, with little or no idea of what moves him to do this or that.

As for the others, it´s hard to say in a mélange of the romantic, the potboiler and picaresque genres and the semi-sociological one which cold-bloodedly dissects its subject matter. The tyrannical prince; the cruel governor of the prison; his daughter, the innocent lily; the unfeeling father; the treacherous brother, among others, are the stock characters of 19^th century schlock.

On the other hand, the devious Count Fosca is fascinating, while the love of his life, the Princess Sanseverina, is faithful to the idea of aristocracy in the best sense of the word, and while farfetched at times, her maternal/erotic obsession with Fabrizio is needed to grease the wheels of the plot, underscore the ambiguity of the true love that Fabrizio may or may not be capable of and steer a certain kind of romantic novel to its inevitable ending in the death of the lovers. Some of the minor characters linger in the reader´s memory too, like the star-gazing priest, il fedele servitore who aids Fabricio´s escape to Bologna and Fabrizio´s patron, the bishop. The same is true of the splendid scenography, which is almost a character in its own right: the lakes, the Alps, the castles, the forests, the border posts and so forth. There is no doubt that Stendhal is a masterly chronicler of the Italy of that age. The problem has to do with integrating the background into the main thrust of the story.

We now call on enlightenment from Balzac, who, shortly after the Charterhouse was published, without being reviewed at all, wrote what is still the most incisive analysis of the book, though, to my mind, not necessarily the most comprehensible one.

He begins by marking a contrast between The Literature of Imagery and The Literature of Ideas. The first, says Balzac, is elegiac, meditative, contemplative, lyrical. The second is characterized by “rapidity, movement, conciseness, sudden shocks, action, drama . . .sobriety, conciseness and clarity”.

A little later, however, Balzac writes that the Charterhouse is “The Prince up to date, the novel that Machiavelli would write if he were living banished from Italy in the nineteenth century. With that, he lost me. As I´d previously understood him, the first (to use a gross but common simplification) appeals to the heart (i.e romantic) and the second, to the intellect (i.e. sober, classical and detached in the style of the Enlightenment), especially in view of Stendhal´s reputation as a clinical observer of mankind´s obsessions with wealth, rank and power

But: if that were so, where do shocks, action and drama fit in? Aren´t they characteristics of the romantic school rather than the classical one? And aren´t there times when the Charterhouse isn´t exactly precise or sober. And likewise the facts, the real-life ones of politics, technology, finance, journalism and so forth which Balzac was so eager to cram into his Human Comedy? Without any sacrifice of melodrama, so that neither writer is entirely one thing or other, which is probably why Balzac cheats a little with his classification by granting that there is a third school of the mixed and eclectic.

To elucidate the above, I would like to focus on one particular section of the Charterhouse, starting with the way it mirrors the plot device Balzac employed in the Black Tulip ,the timid and pure-hearted jailor´s daughter who arranges the escape of Fabrizio in the one and of the horticulturist who grows the first tulip of that color, a proof that amor vincit omnia in both instances.

Here, I pause to snigger at the most quoted phrase in Balzac´s review: the novel “often contains a whole book in a single page”. Accepting the flexibility of the “often”, it is true that Stendhal can capture the cowardice of the Prince or the backbiting at a high-society salon in a brief passage.

In contrast with the brief episode in the Black Tulip, however, the one in the Charterhouse stretches to a novella of its own and is treacly and unconvincing.

Due to the malice of the Prince, Fabrizio, who has become a hero of the Liberals after his misadventures at the Battle of Waterloo, is convicted of murdering a scoundrel in self-defense and sentenced to 12 years in the impregnable Farnese Tower, where his cell, at the very top, is reached by climbing some 300 steps. To make matters worse, his one comfort, a window with a splendid view of the countryside reaching to the Alps is barred, he is forbidden visitors and there is a failed attempt to poison him.

Now comes the part which “strains credibility”, to the breaking point. On the basis of two brief and virtually wordless encounters, Fabrizio falls madly in love with the daughter of the governor of the prison (and, she with him, both platonically, it seems). From what I gather (correct me if I wrong), the governor and his daughter live at the base of the tower, but she has a small aviary in, you guessed it, a room on the floor just below Fabricio´s cell, where she daily goes to feed her pet birds. Once he learns of this, Fabrizio, who naturally should be miserable, is overjoyed. Alright, state of mind sometimes trumps harsh external circumstances, but I doubt that an imaginary romance can turn torture into bliss.

As if there were not sufficiently absurd, some psychologists, inspired by the book, put their subjects at the top of a tower of more or less the same height in California and reported that the sublime view of the landscape from there reduced their stress [https://www.templeton.org/news/the-secret-of-happiness-at-the-top-of-a-bell-tower]. That misses the point that Fabrizio is forbidden that pleasure (initially) and what imprisonment causes is despair and thoughts of suicide. It is not the beautiful landscape which consoles and delights him but his proximity to the fetching, virginal Clélia.

Proximity, mind you, not actual contact, (except for a brief encounter later on), let alone the possibility of doing you-know-what. From there, the plot grinds on, as the two resort to all sorts of subterfuges to communicate with each other, like letters dangling from a string between their two windows.

Meanwhile, the wicked Prince is scheming to execute Fabrizio and when the distressed Duchess finds out, she devises a plan for his escape, starting with sending messages, in a kind of Morse code, with an on-and- off lamp from a distant hill.

Fabrizio refuses, replying that so long as he is near Clelia, he will be so happy that he is content to spend the rest of his life in the prison. The self-sacrificing Clelia then tells him that, unless he agrees to escape, she will retire to a convent and he will never see her again and, faute de mieux, he does. No need to elaborate on the equally implausible escape.

And this is Stendhal, the serial seducer, the chronicler of the use of sex appeal to advance one´s career and the paradigm of the disillusioned French ironist! (Incidentally, unscrupulous social-climbing is also a leitmotif in Balzac),

So, what led Stendhal to indulge in such treacle? One explanation has to do with composition, rather than style: 52 days to churn out 130,000 words. So just as Homer sometimes nods and Proust presents us with a character who died a hundred pages before, it may be that Stendhal forgot where he was, though not because he was falling asleep but was writing in the frenzy of insomnia.

Another would be that he is anticipating the post-structuralist author who breaks through the fourth wall to remind the reader that his is “only a story” and is thus satirizing the melodramatic blockbuster of his era.

Finally, it may be that Stendhal violated the iron rule which is taught to those who are wealthy and misguided enough to study for a M.F.A. at an oxymoronic “writer´s school”: do not fall in love with your character! Or here, the situation you put him into, which required him to grapple with a complex logistical problem like the ones which absorbed him as a commissariat officer in the Napoleonic army, responsible for supply lines and provisions.

True, in certain 19^th century novels, the “man of feeling” is a necessary counterpart to the villain and Fabrizio is certainly noble in spirit as well as in blood. However, as we have noted, that is only one facet of the Fabrizio who is a calculating seducer, erupts into violence at times and constantly questions his own feelings, except, it seems, his fanatical love for Clelia. In the war between writers and the blank page, some don´t know where to start and others, where to stop!

Even so, it is a delight to time-travel back to a period when Italy was plagued by treachery, tyranny, injustice, ignorance, disease, indolence, class warfare, etc. and, at the same time, rich in natural beauty, art and music and echoes of its glorious past and full of elegant, cultured aristocrats and folkloric contadini : backward in political and social terms, but, on a personal level, the last refuge of colorful, passionate and larger than life personages who freely express themselves (be it for good or evil).

What more could an ambitious writer ask for, Stendhal and Balzac alike, who used it, by way of contrast, to express their loathing for the materialistic, mechanized, money-grubbing France of their age: sometimes as realists, others as romantics romanticizing a place which, as they well knew, wasn´t so glorious up close.

In his long, short story, Massimilla Doni, the eponymous princess and arch-connoisseur, argues this point with a skeptical French physician while giving a running commentary on Rossini´s opera seria, Moses in Egypt, they are watching from her box in La Fenice opera house in Venice:

“We want to be free. But the liberty I crave is not your ignoble and middle-class liberalism, which would kill all art. . . . I would ask that each Italian republic should be resuscitated, with its nobles, its citizens, its special privileges for each caste. I would have the old aristocratic republics once more with their intestine warfare and rivalry that gave birth to the noblest works of art, that created politics, that raised up the great princely houses”.

When the physician later remarks that one passage would make a delightful dance tune, she tears into him:

“French! French! always French . . Yes; you would be capable of taking that wonderful burst of noble and dainty rejoicing and turning it into a rigadoon. Sublime poetry finds no mercy in your eyes. The highest genius,—saints, kings, disasters,—all that is most sacred must pass under the rods of caricature. . . .With you, wit kills soul, as argument kills reason.”

Without comparing my lowly stature to the exalted one of Stendhal and Balzac, I would say I am to Colombia as they are to Italy. Sure, Colombia is rife with violence, corruption and poverty, but if I refuse to sermonize about all that, it because, in my opinion, literature is essentially amoral and the things which appall me lend themselves to ripping great yarns. Hence, if I have any motto as a writer, it would be that “el toro es el mejor amigo del torero”, meaning that the more savage the beast is, the more the bullfighter will be able to display his skills.

THE INSCRIPTION ON THE TOMB OF JONATHAN SWIFT

FIRST, THE BACKGROUND:

The Spanish term santa ira, which literally means sacred or holy anger, has no close equivalent in English. I suppose that was why Jonathan Swift borrowed saeva indignatio from Latin for the self-composed Latin epitaph on his tomb in St. Patrick´s Cathedral in Dublin, which, if you didn´t know, is an Anglican church. In English, the epitaph means that he now lies “where savage indignation cannot longer lacerate his heart”, which, as I will explain, is what currently lacerates mine and perfectly fits Wiki´s gloss, i.e.: “Moral Outrage: A deeply principled anger aimed at correcting societal wrongs rather than attacking out of mere bitterness”. Lest we forget, wrath is an attribute of Jehovah.

Please note the clarification that santa ira is not a reaction to an insult or offense whose slightness is way out of proportion to your heated reaction to it. Instead, both in Colombia and abroad, people believe that I am exaggerating or neurotic or in a bad mood or have a “complex”.

That was the response of the editor of a Jewish cultural magazine in the U.S. who rejected my article which objected to Cynthia Ozick´s absurd claim that those of our blood cannot be enthralled by the religious music of Bach and be a real Jew.

Granted, that is a trivial example of the resort to righteous indignation, compared, say, to the campaign of the Madres del cinco de mayo which alerted the world to the barbaric crimes of the military junta in Argentina. And, likewise, the murder of some of those mothers was an extreme example of the manner in which such protests are sometimes treated. The usual reaction of the apathetic and subconsciously guilty majority is to say that the indignant are locos. An example of that has been my quixotic diatribes on Substack about the idiocies of Colombian bureaucracy. I don´t need to be told that it is futile, but I still insist that if no one complains about this (and much graver) problems, nothing is ever going to change in Locombia.

In this particular case, pride has been the complement of sacred ire. True, writers tend to be prickly but if they are mistreated, they have the right to hit back. Let my readers judge for themselves.

******

NOW, THE SPECIFICS:

Around the time that the pandemic was waning, I became seriously (but not alarmingly) ill for the first time in years. It may have been a flu that was circulating at the time, but the fundamental cause was clearly my emotional response to a difficult situation in my family. I didn´t have a fever, nor was I bedridden, and I continued with my wake-up regime of a cold, open-air shower. After a few days of an autonomous fast (on the principle of “starve the body to kill the cold”), I recovered my appetite but ate sparsely. Meanwhile, I was weak and depressed. However, at my advanced age and with my strong determination, as a writer, to make up for decades of wasted time, I forced myself to undertake the only task I was capable of at the time, namely, to transcribe, on my computer, a handwritten diary of the six weeks I spent at Mapiá, the Amazonian seat of the Santo Daime ayahuasca church of Brazil, a decade before.

I could only do it an hour or two at a time but it boosted my morale at a time when I wasn´t up to the physical activities (like gardening and long walks) which keep me fit and in a positive state of mind.

Anyone who believes in the virtues of natural medicine knows that health (whether good or bad) is the result of a subtle interaction between physical and emotional influences, which, in turn, are the reflection of ethereal energies. My depression and lassitude weren´t the only evidences of these forces. As I´ve said, I willed myself to get better and so, one afternoon, I took my dog for a walk along the road which borders my property. Toby was neither obedient nor sensible, but as it was a weekday and the traffic was light, I reckoned that the risks were minimal. Instead, he charged at a motorbike, which instantly clipped and killed him. As if that weren´t mortifying enough, the bike crashed and injured its driver and within a short time, I was confronted by some cops, all of it witnessed by gossipy neighbors (when you live in a tightknit rural community, maintaining a reputation as a decent, responsible person is vital).

While these manifestations of negative energies may strike my readers as insignificant, I hope that they will explain the emotional charge behind what happened afterwards. Like a mariner who salvages a memento of his loved ones from a shipwreck in which he´s lost everything else, the article, based on the diary, which I subsequently wrote became a holy relic for me.

After a month, I recovered, and apart from having to indemnify the motorcyclist for his broken wrist and damage to his bike, there were no repercussions of the accident. By then, the diary was safely archived in my computer, but it was only the raw material and I decided to let it settle for a while before turning it into a comprehensible account of my time in Mapiá.

To do that, I faced two challenges. What with the heat, discomfort and double cultural shock (one from the jungle, the other from frequent sessions of ayahuasca), I was only able to write about my experiences in a cryptic, telegraphic manner, so that the diary was less memoir than aide-memoire and my memory tends to be fallible. So, the first step was to decipher it, in the expectation that its sign language would be a prompt for recovering les temps perdu. That done, I had to assess the extent to which my future readers would be knowledgeable about the setting, personages, idiosyncrasies and ceremonies in Mapiá.

When I began drinking and writing about that medicine (a.k.a as yajé Colombia) in the early 1990´s, it was virtually terra incognita for educated Westerners apart from a few field scientists, anthropologists and government officials who worked in the remote frontiers of Colombia and Peru. Nowadays, many in our mainstream society are familiar with at least the basics, thanks to a host of books and online reports and videos, and thousands of Americans and Europeans have taken advantage of the growing sector of ayahuasca tourism to try it at first hand.

The current global fascination with ayahuasca has mostly been limited to its indigenous practices, which are thought to be the most “authentic”, a vague term, I believe. The animistic chants, feather crowns, necklaces of fangs and thatched ceremonial huts of the native healers certainly live up to the expectations of their First World clients and they also have a certain tradition behind them, but they also make a lot of concessions to modern times, like cellphones, online advertising, canned music and the like.

Due to my own circumstances and temperament, I belong to the indigenous school, hence I was initially skeptical when I ventured into Santo Daime but I eventually realized that they have a powerful magic of their own, that is, their ritualism is a valid complement to the native one, instead of its debasement.

The problem was getting this across to my potential readers. Since my aim was to publish it in the academic journal of the Amazonian branch of the National University of Colombia, I assumed that most of them would already have a direct or second-hand knowledge of the country´s indigenous ceremonies (and also be able to at least read my text in English) but few would be familiar with Santo Daime, which in many respects is sui generis.

As their ritual calendar, crucifixes, images of and hymns to Jesus, the Virgin and different saints show, the religious orientation of Santo Daime is strongly Christian, but not exclusively so, as evidenced by its official name: the Eclectic Church of the Universal Flowing Light. Thus, it also draws on Afro, indigenous, oriental and Kardec “spiritist” beliefs, among others. Next is the “staging” of their ceremonies, which marks the strongest contrast with the indigenous ones, which, in Colombia, tend to be rather informal about the site; dress, placement and posture of the participants; separation of the sexes; permission to talk, sing or play a guitar or leave the ceremonial hut and so forth (though a few healers are strict about such norms). The only (tacit) one is not to disturb the journeys into the beyond of others, but, here too, the taitas (as the Colombian healers are known) tolerate a certain degree of collective “free expression” (dance, song, totemic cries) that can be noisy and even chaotic at times.

By contrast, the ceremonies of Santo Daime are strictly regimented, indeed choreographed, starting with their temples, which are hexagonal, with an elaborately decorated altar in the center, surrounded by rows of lines marked on the floor which the participants stand in, the men on one side and the women on the facing one. Then, there are Daime´s manner of cooking of the medicine, ceremonial dress, the colorful decoration of their temples and especially, the collective singing of hymns and dancing in unison which sometimes go on for ten to twelve hours.

After that, I would have to explain the natural setting, history, infrastructure, customs, persons I met etc. of an isolated community, located deep in the jungle (at almost a whole day´s voyage by launch from the nearest town) whose whole reason for being is ayahuasca. And even its economy, in which the circulation of money is minimal.

I decided to intersperse sections of an objective description of the life and rituals of Mapiá with sections, based on my diary, of my personal impressions, including some (I hope) tactful references to the inter-personal conflicts which are inevitable in such a small, remote and enclosed community.

It was a lot of hard work but, as a writer who claims the world record for pink slips from all but three of the many scores of publications I´d approached, I was nearly certain that the piece would appear, because it wasn´t a “blind” submission (meaning from a nobody) but addressed to a journal which had already accepted six articles of mine, all related to the medicinal/sacred plant substances of the indigenous Amazon. After being ignored by so many blind magazines, it was a tremendous incentive. How wrong my expectations proved to be!

By then, the editor responsible for their publication, a friend on the faculty of the university, had now been replaced by another professor. That didn´t discourage me, because I assumed that, as a specialist in Amazon studies, he would understand that my article perfectly fit the agenda of the journal.

Revising my emails to and from the new editor, I give a rough chronology of what happened next:

July 2024 –submission of article

A while later – article rejected because I didn´t use the online platform, which hadn´t worked, using an email attachment instead.

August 2024 – submitted a condensed version, reducing the 15,000 words to the 10,000 word limit.

Nov 2024 – reply from the editor: “Our decision is to reject the article because the author did not reduce the text within the specified time limit.

Irrational, because, first, the article is not about “current events” and could appear in a future issue. And second, while an editor (after consulting his editorial committee and peer reviewers, as is standard in academic journals) has every right to reject a submission, it should NOT be because it hasn´t complied with petty bureaucratic requisites, which fail to take into account its rigor, originality and clarity.

Instead, it should be on the grounds that it does not add to our knowledge of the subject or is not within the scope of the publication or is poorly written or researched or it´s style is awkward or it has factual errors. However, if the article is appealing, but not quite up to the standards of the publication (without being absolutely atrocious), the editor is obliged to suggest corrections to the author and as happened with some of my previous articles, finally publish the piece after the author has corrected its flaws.

Either way, the most important obligation of an editor is to communicate with the author. What followed and continues to this very day clearly shows that he failed to honor it: an absolute refusal to respond to many emails and cellphone calls asking for at least an explanation and at best, an apology.

It didn´t take me long to get the point. Nevertheless, righteous indignation led me to continue to hassle him and, irrational though it may have been, it did give me a spiteful satisfaction, the posthumous one I imagine Swift enjoyed when it was too late to right the wrongs which enraged him, along with the hope that others would follow his example.

Due to the same urge, I wasn´t willing to give up either: even if my crusade was obviously futile, I might be even to create a scandal that would rebound on the editor. Hence, I also e-mailed my grievance to the editor´s assistant, the former editor, my ex-wife (who lives in Leticia), other members of the faculty I´d met when I taught English at the campus for a semester and academics I didn´t know who were on the advisory board of the journal. Some promised to contact the editor, others never replied and a few did support me without budging the editor at all.

During all this time, my wife, son and others close to me repeatedly told me that I was a dreamer, a deranged, vengeful monomaniac. Which maybe I was, but, as I kept telling them, it was a matter of principle, which is the origin of righteous indignation. While I was sometimes tempted to give up, another consideration kept me going. To explain: I would amend Dr. Johnson´s dictum to read “No one but a fool ever wrote anything that wasn´t going to be published”.

Oh, if I could only go back to my time in New York City in the 1950´s and 60´s and somehow retrieve what I began writing decades later! It was the pre-internet era when print was flourishing, you could pick up a phone and actually speak to an editor (sometimes with the recommendation of a writer or critic both of you knew), instead of a faceless computer jockey who (I´ve sensed) is sometimes a trendy twenty-something with a minimal knowledge of the canon. In the good old days, an unknown, free-lance writer with a modicum of talent had a good chance of being published and even eking out a living from his work.

The whole point of writing is to be read. Granted, by discriminating readers, which, while always a minority, would be a larger one than the 35 or so followers of my weekly Substack post, whereas the journal in question is initially read by hundreds and later consulted by others, the reason why, to my surprise, some of my previous articles have been cited by academics investigating ayahuasca and kindred subjects.

However, after nearly two years of failing to get published in it, I was about to throw in the towel and turn to Substack. Then, I had a last-minute inspiration: contact the director of the Leticia branch of the university, who, as his superior, might be able to pressure the editor to at least send me a convincing explanation for rejecting my article.

To do that, I needed the person´s email, but when I looked at the website of the Leticia branch of the university and emailed the members of the faculty I´d appealed to before, it was to no avail. Despite my aversion to A.I., I resorted to it: lo and behold, the email of the director immediately appeared on the screen.

After a detailed explanation of the situation in the email I wrote to her, I resorted to a kind of Machiavellian blackmail, saying that the editor´s lack of professionalism and elemental courtesy would, if it became known, harm the international reputation of the university.

A few weeks after that, she sent me a text message in which she said she would send my email to the editor. After another few weeks went by, without any response from her or the editor, I sent a text message to her, pointing out that if “send” only meant “forward”, it would be useless, because after ignoring me for nearly two years, the editor wasn´t going to change his mind, unless . . .she used whatever authority she had over him to support me.

From the start, I was almost certain that my ploy was going to be in vain as well. It would be a violation of the academic protocol which ordains that each member of the faculty dare not meddle with the fief of another, as proved by the absence of any message from one or another during the two months from then to now.

As revenge is a dish best eaten cold, I have taken my time to reveal the cause of my righteous indignation on Substack, in the full knowledge that the journal is never going to publish the article and its impact will be minimal. But now that it´s a matter of public record, so to speak, in the long-term it might embarrass the guilty parties and lead to reforms.

As to posting the article itself on Substack, I am still of two minds. After all the effort I put into it, I obviously want it to be read, even if only by a few. On the other hand, since the mainstream cultural and literary magazines I would prefer it to be published in often reject pieces that have appeared in other outlets, I now have to calculate the chances of their discovering it on a Substack site by an obscure and little-read author. Whatever happens, I will continue to honor the injunction on the tomb of Jonathan Swift: “Go forth, traveller, And imitate, if you can, A valiant champion of manly freedom”. Vamos a ver.

Dedicated to Dani Riveros

I´d once visited Cartagena as a penniless, undocumented backpacker. Now, a decade later, I was staying at the five-star Capilla del Mar hotel to cover a U.N. environmental conference for a specialists´ newsletter. When I strode into the Convention Center on the first day, the proud wearer of a press badge, I wondered whether I was up to the responsibility. There were hundreds of delegates and observers, stacks of policy documents and scores of panels, talks and negotiating sessions whose aims were beyond me, so I found the press room and questioned a few colleagues. This, they told me, would be the make-or-break occasion for such earthshaking issues as GMO´s and debt swaps.

These topics were mentioned in the documents I now turned to, but couched in a legalize best understood by talking to the participants. In the vast, darkened auditorium a scientist was doing an alarming slide show on global warming to an audience of ten. Elsewhere I only heard the drone of procedural points or rhetoric about sustainable development. The action seemed to be in the corridors, where there was a perpetual milling round of nerdy Orientals, Africans in colorful tribal robes and self-important Westerners, all talking in secretive undertones. I collared a few, studied the releases I got from the press chief, had a coffee on the terrace and so forth, but the hectic atmosphere left me so drained I was barely capable of a sunset plunge into the surf before stupefying myself with the cable t.v. at the hotel. So much for my all-expenses-paid holiday !

My stress worsened in the following days, but I got a feel for certain things, like the folly of my fashionable polo shirt in the arctic air-conditioning. I looked at the consideration of proposals for drafts of provisional agreements, noted the cultural contrasts (warmhearted Venezuelans, arrogant Swiss, bewildered Uzbekistanis) and sensed the influence of different economic and ideological blocs. I also learned a lesson about diplomacy when a proposal for a collective protest about environmental hazards in the Gaza Strip was about to be passed by the handful of sleepy delegates in the hall, when the one from Canada realized that it might imply the recognition of a Palestinian State and quickly spiked it. So much fuss about an obscure and meaningless point of protocol was beyond me but it gave me an insight into how international relations work or don´t

Another was to do the victim-victimizer relationship between the industrialized countries and the exploited ones of the Third World. Both sides had a case, I thought (and still do). Sure, agrochemicals were poisoning the planet, but how would we feed the starving millions if they were suddenly banned. Organic agriculture? Even if there were the will and the money, it might take a century to undertake the transition. Still, an ex-back-to-the lander myself, I was on the side of the dollar-poor, underdeveloped purchasers. And, since (in theory at least) journalism requires giving a fair hearing to both sides of the debate, presenting their respective arguments and statistics, I spoke to the press people of Colombia and the United States. As I was already familiar with the former, I wasn´t surprised to see that they either didn´t know what I was talking about, or, if they did, their documents were feeble and/or they treated them like State secrets. Those from the States, on the other hand, were professional, cooperative, sympathetic and bombarded me with policy statements and the like that would have convinced the most die-hard, bleeding heart environmentalist to acknowledge that they were right.

But these personal impressions couldn´t be used in the story, and least the ones that seemed the most telling, among them: the address by the couldn´t-care-less President of Colombia, Pastrana, for whom it was no more than P.R. on a world, rather, than provincial stage; the brush-off I got from his Minister of Environment, a photographer by profession ( who was well-connected with the elite in fact) when I inquired into the effectiveness of the government´s environmental programs, as opposed to his boast that its environmental laws were the most progressive in the world (which they were, on paper, like those on human rights, gender equality and so forth) and the junketing jolliness of the delegates breakfasting at my hotel, which, despite its stars, was for the middling ranks, whereas the Ministers they worked for stayed in the really luxurious ones in the upscale Boca Grande neighborhood.

When, as often happened, I questioned one or another official of the U.N. about the issues, the procedures, treaties and so forth, I was directed to a room where there was a veritable mountain of reports, studies and treaties that would have taken months to read and were incomprehensible, as even an amateur like myself quickly understood, with a strong suspicion that they were intentionally so. One example was the profusion of profusion of agencies with mysterious acronyms (UNEP, UNEO, GEF), with no clear explanation of their relationship to another or what they actually did.

All this in a claustrophobic tedium broken by spurts of tension when the delegates of this or that nation gathered in conspiratorial knots in the corridors, emitting a piss-off vibe when I asked them what was going on.

Still, my confusion was matched by that of my colleagues, exemplified by a desperate plea for illumination from a guy who, as the correspondent for the Chinese government press agency, was presumably one of the brightest of two billion people. And heightened by the multi-lingual Greenpeace idiot, an excitable homunculus fluent in five languages who´d burst into the press room every few hours shouting sensational stuff, like “they´ve approved Frankenstein foods”, which turned out to be bullshit and nearly got me expelled when I was caught entering a top-secret meeting he´d sworn was open to the press.

The one exception was an austere British environmentalist in the press room. On Friday, the final day, he meticulously led me through the resolutions shortly to be voted on, but his explanation of their complex language was too academic for me to credit what sounded like a confirmation of my hunch that the whole thing was nothing more than a free holiday on the beach for most of the delegates. The only scoop (of sorts) I had that day was from an American reporter, one of a handful who had actually attended the signing of the deal by which IBM handed over the operating system for its p.c.´s to Bill Gates and unwittingly made him a billionaire. But that had nothing to do with the environment and happened years before.

When the final U.N. press release was made available, the press corps stampeded to the computers the Conference laid on to relay the “significant advances” it trumpeted. I ignored the contemptuous glance of the British environmentalist. This being the U.N., and the correspondents from twenty countries around us a warranty, its credibility seemed unimpeachable to an inexperienced reporter and, for all the man´s expertise, his grim militancy smacked of the one-sided hippy values I´d abandoned.

As the deadline was the following Monday, I spent the weekend in Santa Marta with a friend from the Save-the-Sierra Foundation who invited me to a meeting of activists at an eco-lodge, where I ran into some of the people I´d known on my previous trip to the Coast: the hippy-Kogis, as the locals called the dropouts who´d settled on the lands of those “Older Brothers” and adopted their ways. His unexpected request for a talk on the conference now put me in an awkward situation. Seeing them in homespun tunics was an embarrassing reminder of the naïve, holier-than-thou stage of my life, now left behind as a guest at the open-air banquet on the ramparts of the Castle of San Felipe on the closing night. The balmy air of a warm tropical night, the fairy lights of the city below, waiters in white liveries, iced bowls of exotic tropical fruits, seafood fresh from the Caribbean, fine wines, the works. If they were trying to bribe me, it wouldn´t have worked, because, first, I didn´t know what the party line was and second, the fusty journal I was working for only expected me to paraphrase the official documents, while any analysis was verboten.

It wasn´t that I´d sold out to the system, it was just that I´d learned it was more nuanced than I´d thought. While the can-do U.S. delegation clearly favored the big corporations, they´d struck me as sincere and well-informed, while the equally industrialized E.U. Greens were conscientious as well.

I was thus pleased to display my sophistication, but I also felt a loyalty to the purists, touched by the pathos of their hoping for help from the person whose supposed influence only amounted to seeing the system´s workings up close and guiltily heard frontline news of their losing battle against the narcotics cartels, cattlemen and resort developers, as remote to the placeholders at Cartagena as the Somme was to Field Marshal Haig. The setting itself was a further irony: a palm grove dotted by thatched huts with mod-cons alongside a privatized beach, run by an entrepreneur with a New Age façade. Proof of how the destruction of a native way of life results in a simulacrum only affordable to foreign tourists.

We lingered to gossip till late that Sunday, so, with the dawn start for the airport and culture shock of Bogotá, I was practically tripping when I began to write the piece that had to be filed in a few hours, a demanding, in-depth one that brought a momentary panic as I opened the lengthy official report. Then, as if the nouveau-Kogis had summoned an ancient Tairona sorcerer to aid our cause, the ethereal voice of the British expert assembled it for me, paragraph by paragraph from his head to mine, but, as it was I who was writing it, I did it dryly and factually, without any apparent slant, in the expectation that those few readers in the know would know what it meant. That done, I laughed aloud at the patriotic puff, in the morning papers, about Colombia´s vital role in the success of a conference which merely agreed to disagree and did nothing except throw some sops to endangered rainforests and ice caps.

Nevertheless, the real joke on us, the outsiders, was that, as the fine print made clear, the apparatchiks of the U.N. had programmed that outcome from the start. First, because they knew that the nations that had never united to end war or poverty weren´t going to save the environment in a week. And, second, because instead of acknowledging that as a regrettable reality of mankind, they used it as an excuse for inventing more policy papers, study groups and international reunions. The hippy in me might have said that it was to justify their salaries and holidays in luxury resorts. And been right, up to a point, but now that I´d left the hippy ghetto for a wider world, I understood that another purpose of the conspiracy I´d sensed was to conceal the reason for their inertia from themselves, since it would be too unsettling for believers in the system to acknowledge that it was a farce. For what some call capitalism and others development or globalization are feeble human labels for the spirit of a self-perpetuating techno/bureaucratic machine that was beyond their or anyone´s control.

(P.S. The above merges my impressions of two separate reunions in Cartagena, the first, in 1999, relatively conclusive in signing --but not necessarily implementing -- the Biosafety Protocol and the Global Ministerial Environment Forum in 2002, which lived up to my satire).

[IF YOU HAVEN´T DONE SO ALREADY, PLEASE READ MY PREVIOUS TWO POSTS TO FOLLOW THE THREAD OF THE STORY]

The sound sleep I had on the night after the first ceremony was deceptive. It was understandable, since, after the long flight and the overnight session, I´d been practically awake for 36 hours non-stop. It wasn´t so on the night after the second one.

To explain, most drinkers are exhausted after a ceremony. It is difficult to sleep when you are seized by the medicine (and some Colombian healers warn their patients not to) and dealing with the purge drains one´s energy. In the urban sessions in Colombia, some keep going until they return to their homes later in the morning, others crash out for an hour or two after breakfast. Me, I´m different, even unique (this is not a boast, it is uncontrollable). I keep going.

Awake: yes, technically, but, psychically, in a strange state: pleasant, at first, because I am receptive to my natural surroundings, to the point where the plants almost seem to be human, to be personas, each with its own distinctive voice, manners and dress. And, like most at the scratch breakfast the hosts usually provide, euphoric, gregarious and freed from routine patterns of thought. As the morning advances, this wanes: my body, though tired, is on automatic pilot, while, mentally, I become more and more hyper until about eight p.m.; then do sleep well but remain tired, at intervals, for another day or two.

Given the every other day rhythm of the sessions at Floripa, lack of sleep shouldn´t have been a problem, but, perversely, the anticipation of not being sufficiently rested before the trials of the medicine became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Though I knew it would be counter-productive, I couldn´t help smoking cigarettes and as the retreat lengthened, it became more and more compulsive. However, it didn´t interfere much with my trips: the purges might have been less painful but the experience remained so-so, with brief spells of an inner peace and certain intimations of the tutelary Afro gods, but practically without visions.

But that I was still under the thrall of the medicine became evident when I tried to take advantage of my apparent lucidity. As soon as he had finished breakfast after a session, my roommate would turn on his computer and get to work again, as concentrated as ever. I tried it myself that night but it was impossible. It wasn´t exactly that my fingers couldn´t work the keyboard: whatever it was that moved my fingers, spirit or mind, simply wouldn´t permit it. The same on the following day, which continues to the present, which, ironically, is the time when whole paragraphs for a story or article emerge on their own and beg to be transcribed before they vanish

A talkative fellow, as I´ve said, I was what they call congenial company for the others, although somewhat unbearable at times after the ceremonies, when any inspiration I´d had from the medicine was channeled into sermons and lectures. As time passed and I gained a clearer notion of who they were and what they really thought (about me, ayahuasca and life in general), I realized that I´d only made one true friend there.

He was an interesting character, Mick, a former drop-out like myself but one who´d been more adventurous: he´d traveled the Silk Road, among other pilgrimages, and dabbled in psychedelics. But, along the way, he made a more productive use of his freedom from the straight life, working as a musician and a conceptual artist who fashioned little indigenous baskets in the shape of canoes from scrap wire and built a whole house out of discarded tin cans. Skinny, with curly hair, a sharp nose and piercing blue eyes, he had something of the ascetic about him, combined, however, with sharp insights into the “real world” of politics and the global economy which rests on an astute manipulation of the masses

Both of us were immigrants (not expats), he to Brazil and we also had a fair amount of previous experience of the medicine. He came to it by way of Santo Daime, which, as it happened, was my destination when the event ended.

Well, you know how it is in such retreats, with or without ayahuasca: there is a lot of a friendly and, at times, candid exchange of one´s experiences and hopes, but only once in a while, do you get a real insight into a person´s character. This happened when Mick told me about the time when he suddenly felt a strong urge to see what was happening in Eastern Europe just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As for the why?: there was no need to explain it to me because, given what he´d done up to then, it was easy to surmise that the next step would be to examine at first hand the End Times which were already approaching the West and, as an artist, draw some lessons from it.

It was as you´d imagine when a whole system suddenly goes kaput: infrastructure decrepit, if not in ruins; rampant crime and corruption; a mixture of relief, despair and uncertainty; chaos let loose on what had been formerly been a cruel, but, at least orderly world.

Bumming around as he´d done on his previous travels, he stayed, rent-free, in a former student´s dormitory (an apartment block) which had turned into a squat with no electricity or running water, so that when he suffered a severe attack of dysentery, the toilets were clogged with human wastes! His diarrhea was so bad he reached the point of death and had a sort of revelation: if he survived, he would devote himself, whole heartedly, to exploring the realm of the spirits.

That settled, he eventually wound up at Santo Daime, where, already receptive to the magic of ayahuasca, overwhelmed by the majesty the jungle and carried away by the collective currents of its ceremonies, he had a number of amazing encounters with astral entities, as the hundreds of participants were lifted up to a world of heavenly light and he could see and feel a sublime healing energy emanating from them. He was visited by his own spirit guides; entered into a kind of satori, and, among other visions, saw and deciphered the DNA code and understood the arcane meaning of the Tree of Life As he told it he, the Mick of old, had been released from the limitations of his ego and become a “new man”.

Since nothing so transcendental had ever occurred to me (nor has happened since), I, on the one hand, am a bit skeptical, but, on the other, aware of my own limitations and thus suspend judgment.

Nevertheless, the veracity of his account doesn´t matter: it is only the prelude, the stage setting, for what happened in the final ceremony.

Here, we come to the weird part, and to explain that, in turn, we introduce a really crazy character, a self-styled Brazilian faith healer, medium and psychic surgeon known as João de Deus (John of God), who mounted a spiritual/healing center which attracted thousands of followers and earned millions of dollars a year.

His “treatment” was a ragbag of techniques, some innocuous, like meditation, herbs and magical artefacts. Others more dubious, if not outright harmful: a so-called spiritual or psychic surgery, long-distance (via invisible medical entities) while the patient was meditating and a direct intervention on the patient´s body, like inserting a scissors deep into his or her nose, without anesthetics!

Like many such charlatans, he got away with it for a long time (helped, among other things, by a puff from Oprah) but, as often happens, the media is a two-edged sword and he was eventually exposed and not only as a fraud, but a serial rapist (one victim being his daughter, who denounced him) and given a life sentence.

However, whether it is psychological (a talent for exploiting the weaknesses of others and inducing mass hysteria) or an example of black magic, there is no doubt that such fraudulent spiritual guides do wield a considerable power.

And, according to Mick, it also reached him when, after his apprenticeship at Santo Daime, he moved to a property in Acre and began drinking and healing with ayahuasca on his own (his home has since blossomed into a well-organize ayahuasca retreat center).

Leaving the relevance of this for later, I ask myself whether John of God really sent Mick a curse. In one way, it is not as farfetched as it may seem at first sight. The indigenous culture of ayahuasca in Colombia is saturated with stories about witchcraft and it is even more pronounced among the mestizo healers of Iquitos. True or not, however, they are almost always within the context of ayahuasca itself and mainly revolve around rivalries between different healers, which were so fierce, one common story goes, that they virtually exterminated each other between the 1930´s and 1940´s. In that case, they were identifiable persons, well-known in the limited circle of ayahuasqueros, and it had a lot to do with centuries-old inter-ethnic rivalries. But why would John of God, whose magic was of another order and was already a wealthy, international celebrity and a very busy one as well, attack a poor and obscure gringo living in a remote settlement in another region of Brazil? How could Mick have been a threat to him at that time. Even so, remembering how one of my indigenous maestros would often say that “yajé es muy misterioso”, I suspend judgment again.

We come now to the nub, the point: the final ceremony, which might be called the “triumph of the techies”. I gave a brief account of what happened in my post on March 4, 2025, but that was only in passing, and now I set it in the retreat and enlarge on it.

In that post, which was satirical, I may have been too harsh with the hard scientists who attached electrodes to the heads of some of the participants, linked to a computer, for the purpose of recording electric signals from the brain when the subjects were under the effects of ayahuasca. They may have been “lab rats”, as I wrote, but they were educated persons, with the perennial human concerns and their premise, I suppose, was that the mystical side apart, ayahuasca has proven therapeutic benefits and investigating how it works is one question, while determining whether or not its ability to heal is the work of the spirits is quite another. For Mick and myself, on the other hand, you cannot separate the measurable from the immeasurable mechanisms of ayahuasca and analyze the former with scientific instruments without creating a kind of short circuit in the transmission of energies from the medicine to the drinker, regardless of whether those energies are sent by astral beings or result from the effect of certain plants on the biochemistry of the subject´s brain.

This once, I left my chalet in the middle of the night to observe what was going to happen. Needless to say, I refused to be a guinea pig, partly from my conviction that the experiment would profane the spirits, but mostly because it was hard enough to cope with the cross-currents at the center of the ceremony without having oil smeared on my scalp and pins stuck into. Some drinkers were in a world of their own, while others were gathered round the computer screen, agape, as the signals from the electrodes were converted into a light show/fireworks display (fascinating, I admit). At first, Mick refused as well, then he yielded because he was a nice fellow and our host had given him a hefty discount.

I quote an email he sent me after he read my abovementioned previous post. It tells us almost all we need to know:

“Thanks for sharing this. I read the article and a couple more. I’ll dig in deeper. My reaction was this: synchronicity is alive and well. Synchronicity, because I am a few weeks away from publishing a book that tells the same tale.

Here’s the excerpt:

Santo do Pau Oco—The Hollow Log Saint

​The Santo do Pau Oco refers to the colonial epoch. The Portuguese crown demanded a stiff tax on everything extracted in Brazil. Those with a stash of gold or gems would hide them in a hollowed-out wooden sculpture of a Catholic saint—a piggy bank protected by its sacred appearance. This way, the tax collector would not suspect hoarding and tax evasion. Thus, the hollow log saint is a long tradition in Brazil. ​

It has become a colloquialism used in all regions of Brazil. The phrase denotes someone who appears to be something he is not—the name for hypocrites and conmen. ​It is also used for the garimpeiros [illegal gold miners] where it has its roots. They hide their finds and evade taxes and permits. Thus, by extension, John of God became known as the ultimate hollow log saint.

The rise to fame of João de Deus is the ascension of a Santo do Pau Oco. ​In 2005, the famous new age guru Ram Das (Richard Alpert) arrived from the States to visit João, one of a growing number of celebrities endorsing his work. Ram Das adored João and helped boost his rapid ascent to fame. But he did not receive a cure.

This was the last year João troubled me with witchery. I had been psychically assaulted many times over the past three years. My business ventures had all failed, and my wife divorced me. My spiritual guide advised me how João was doing this and how to end it. ​The last attack was shocking. I realized that he wanted to kill me with his psychic powers alone.

It happened like this. I was in the south of Brazil, a subject in a scientific study. The scientists, a team from the U.S., acquired the world’s most sensitive EEG (electroencephalography) device from Russia. It was more sophisticated than any in the States. ​Their previous EEG studies were of monks and meditators. They wanted to measure my various brain waves as I entered a shamanic trance. Many small detectors (electrodes) were glued to locations on my scalp. Thin wires connect the electrodes to a device that records the brain waves in every region of the brain. A sneeze or a jerky movement would send the charts into ragged false readings. I was monitored like this for about two hours. ​

The glue smell was obnoxious, and after the session, when each electrode needed to be ripped away from my head, I hurried to the bathroom to shower and remove the residue and stench. I was still in a partial trance. ​After I had undressed, I reached out to open the shower’s sliding glass door. As I touched the handle, I saw a living figure of João de Deus projected on the frosted glass like a hologram. ​At that moment, the glass door exploded into thousands of slivers. Hundreds of them covered my skin like needles. The crew rushed to the bathroom and panicked when they saw me. They tried to remove the shards of glass. This was the last time the sorcerer of Abadiânia troubled me. My spiritual guides created a failsafe system of protection.”

As an eye-witness, I can confirm one part of Mick´s account.

During the experiment, he looked uncomfortable, but was composed. Then he wasn´t and quick as a flash, he ripped out the electrodes, obviously distressed, and started to go to the toilet but stumbled, whereupon I helped him to stand up and guided him there, not to evacuate (as I surmised) but drench himself in a long, cold shower. He was reaching for the handle of the sliding glass door of the shower cubicle, when there was a bang, and flash of light as the glass exploded into a million pieces. That is, while he was obviously entranced with the medicine, he did not lose his balance and crash into the glass door and even if he had, the glass might have cracked but no way would it have exploded.

Afterwards, our host, Lua drew Mick aside and said that he had recklessly broken the glass door and he replied that, as I had seen myself, he´d merely touched the handle of the door.

I understand Lua´s point of view, at least just then. As an experienced ayahuasquero who´d probably seen some memorable freak-outs in Colombia and Peru, where the discipline is usually more lax and some drinkers are pretty crude, he expected his ceremonies to be orderly, considering that his clients were educated and well-behaved persons and the whole point of his retreats was to furnish ayahuasca with the respectability of science. After Mick defended himself (pointing out that it was Lua´s fault, for failing to install shatter-proof glass), Lua, a reasonable person, made a revealing about-turn.

“I see that you are able to work with spirits. I haven´t been successful in this”.

In other words, or so I assume, what really troubled Lua was the possibility that the incident had, indeed, been caused by black magic. At the time, drunk on ayahuasca as I was myself, I wholly believed Mick´s version, to the point where I later I rushed up to Lua and angrily exclaimed, “See, this is what happens when you offend the spirits!”

Knowing that I become argumentative, even self-righteous in the trance, I now admit that that might have been extreme, but I strongly felt it at the time. Fortunately, by then, Lua had realized that my tantrums were those of a naughty but likeable boy and he wasn´t offended. So, looking back with a cooler head, what do I now think really happened? It´s an example of the cognitive puzzle or Catch-22 which ayahuasca always confronts you with. If we humans do have a capacity for extra-sensorial perception and what we perceive really exists, then encounters with spirit forces, good or evil, are plausible. If, on the other hand, they are only the subjective projection of our personal hopes or fears, they may only be the illusions of an “intoxicated” subject, which is usually the doubt I have when I return to my normal state of mind after a ceremony.

But, in this particular case, I am inclined to believe Mick, with reasoning, not speculation. Since I am certain that the glass door did explode on its own, then it is possible, even likely, that it was the work of his shamanic enemy, though not necessarily certain. No more can I say, except perhaps that it is best not to tamper too much with the mysteries of the arcana, because it may lead to madness and second, because dealing with the problems of real life (politics, money, relationships, etc.) is stressful enough as it is.

After 30 or so years of drinking ayahuasca, my thoughts about such matters have come full circle as I accept that, regardless of the respective paths that I and other hippies of my generation have followed, I am as much as a typical product of my time and place as they are. Raised, as we were, in a rational and ultra- materialistic culture, we went to the other extreme: meditation, acid, health food, back to the land and so forth. In one way, my landing on ayahuasca was predestined. In another, however, it was the accidental result of settling in Colombia before I knew anything about the medicine, and then, my ex-wife´s accidental encounter with an anthropologist who had already explored that territory.

It was, if not love, then passion at first sight. No more sitting in the lotus posture at the foot of my Zen master, knowing that would take many years before I would benefit from it, if I ever would. With ayahuasca, I reached to the heights in one night, not knowing that staying up there would be almost as impossible as reaching satori with Zen. In a inexplicable manner, I enjoyed the tortures of the purge as much as the exaltation which followed it. So many vain illusions about self-realization, among other clichés, have been punctured since then. Ayahuasca has not made me a more loving or less pessimistic person. Healthier, yes, and with a better perspective on the follies of the world, along with the realization that I am not cut out to be a guru or a sage or an expert (whatever that means), only a chronicler of the spread of ayahuasca from remote indigenous communities to many parts of the developed world.

I think that the obstinate Catholicism of Colombia has also played a role. After centuries of indoctrination, even many of the supposedly enlightened persons who drink ayahuasca are victims of that belief system, so they unwittingly transpose their belief in miracles from its ecclesiastical context to the indigenous one.

And since, as I have said, the ayahuasquero must be interested in everything, how can he fail to acknowledge that science, with its handmaiden technology, is what drives our current zeitgeist? Instead, the same New Agers, especially the pretendians who attend Sun Dances and all the rest would have a nervous breakdown if, in the name of consistency, they would have to abstain from using the cars which drove them to their festivals and likewise, the computers and cell-phones they use to spread the good news that we are entering the Age of Aquarius.

My current position is that scientific studies of ayahuasca are not only valid but also fascinating to anyone who is trying to make sense of the world we live in, on the understanding that our personal survival depends on it as much as the survival of our species. That, in a way, is precisely why we drink ayahuasca, with the proviso that those investigations should be regarded as a complement to, not a denial of, the intuitive approach persons like myself take. And, most important, we should acknowledge that they are leading many, including the policy-makers, to question the absurd prohibition of ayahuasca in many countries. The magical side apart, they have proven that the medicine is a remarkable therapy for all sorts of emotional or psychological problems.

But not bodily ailments? Here, we come to the fundamental mystery of the purge. On the face of it, the purge is akin to fasting in that, by expelling the shit and other poisonous wastes we are literally full of, it strengthens the immunological system and heals a wide spectrum of strictly physical illnesses. In truth, the psychic and physical are inseparable, so their action is reciprocal. A clean body cleanses the psyche and vice-versa.

However, that must be based on its ethical use. If someone seriously devotes himself to ayahuasca with a qualified healer and is willing to suffer for it, it is not that hard to acquire a certain power over others when he becomes a healer in turn. Unfortunately, some who do it wield that power to seduce women or make a lot of money or become famous. Let the buyer beware: not everyone who dresses in feathers and mimics the chants of his teacher is trustworthy!

They, the hard but not necessarily hardened scientists, are, plunging into waters of an unfathomable depths, so, as an ignoramus myself, I can only present a brief account of their fields of study, without going into the technicalities. They range from what might be called the empirical disciplines (different branches of psychology, anthropology, the philosophy of consciousness, mythology, among others) to those which employ apparatuses of measurement (neurology, studies of the brain, pharmacology, etc.) What is interesting about this research is that it appears to be multidisciplinary, each sector interacting with the others. That is, holistic for a holistic therapy.

Where does a chronicler like myself fit into all this? The exemplar might be Tom Stoppard, who has dealt with nuclear physics and consciousness, respectively, not as a specialist, but an artist, a person who is helping us to understand our troubled human condition. And while I have much less artistry than Stoppard and my knowledge of science is minimal, my aim is essentially the same, that is, literary, which relies on coloring, suggestiveness and the magic of words rather than expertise.

That said, I offer my apologies to my roommate, though I qualify that. I still believe that he doesn´t have a feeling for ayahuasca. But that doesn´t matter when his purpose is, in his own words, “to present scientific evidence for the effectiveness of psychedelics in treatment resistant depression, PTSD, addictions and other diseases of modernity” and consequently, help to end the absurd prohibition of ayahuasca in many countries at a time when a broad range of well-informed persons (academics, physicians, public intellectuals, members of NGO´s, practitioners of natural medicine, among others) are already questioning it.

Finally, I offer my whole-hearted apologies to Mick for any misrepresentation of his life and work. Dear friend, it happened a long time ago and my memory is fallible.

THE END

[IF YOU HAVEN´T DONE SO ALREADY, PLEASE READ MY PREVIOUS POST IN ORDER TO FOLLOW THE THREAD OF THIS STORY]

If there is any final truth to ayahuasca, it may be that its truth is mutable, so I reversed myself once more during the interval between the day that first session ended and the start of the next, on the night of the following day – the rhythm that governed the five that made up the week and a half retreat. The camaraderie, for one thing, which Ariza put a special emphasis on, insofar as we shared meals and bedrooms, went on joint excursions and the daytime program was organized around informal lectures by the different participants and joint discussions about ayahuasca. That, along with its exclusivity, stiff price and comfortable accommodations made Lua´s retreat virtually unique in the then small but growing sector of ayahuasca tourism for foreigners who didn´t have the time, language skills or willingness to venture into the jungle and find an indigenous maestro on their own ( in my case, as I lived in Colombia, I met some anthropologists who´d already explored the territory).

Further, after being pitched into the thing, headfirst, when I was jetlagged and had no prior knowledge of the set-up, my conclusions, as dawn broke, were obviously hasty and distorted. For example, it wasn´t yet time for breakfast, a more elaborate one, and meanwhile we repaired to a kiosk on the grounds for a closure of the session which, while pretty informal, was, in its way, more rigorous than anything the similar post-mortems some of the taitas conducted: the abovementioned unloosing of the knots.

Despite my distaste for “group work”, I went along with it, hearing each person´s account in turn and when mine came, checking the logorrhea that always attacks me on the morning after. I was impressed and a little chastened, because it seemed that the others, however clueless they might have been at the start, had understood and been changed by the fundamental mechanisms of the remedy: its catharsis, stripping away of false or imposed values, work on one´s anxieties and suggestion of realms, beyond the ego, which questioned the primacy of the material. Their radiant expressions and the sincerity of the words some choked on made me feel like a heel for having been so “negative” before.

Almost, that is, because the gathering paradoxically reinforced my persistent suspicion that Ariza´s approach lacked an essential ingredient, one that went beyond the annoying way he staged the session: call it a matter of surrendering to the caprices of the medicine (and even relishing the nasty ones), so difficult to articulate that being humbled by the vine shaded into being humbled by my inability to defend what I believed was its righteous use. Deluded or not about the latter, I had to admit to myself that I was on the same level as everyone else and for the time being better behave myself.

“Me versus Them” indicates a further, equally understandable, mistake. Though the division roughly held, the two blocks (of 7 to 8 members each) were far from monolithic and each was a collection of individuals, some likeable, others less so. Among the academics there were anthropologists, psychiatrists, a botanist and a neurologist and while my college education enabled me to keep a foot in both camps, I naturally inclined towards the empiricists, though that was a misnomer too, since only one had a previous experience of ayahuasca and was truly devoted to it. What they did have in common was not being easy to classify: a jeweler, business school student, civil servant and unlicensed therapist, among others. The group as a whole was multinational: those from the States the largest sector but a minority alongside the rest, who were from Britain, South Africa, Cyprus, Hungary, Finland and (in terms of birthplace) Armenia. Everyone was at home in English, except for Lua, though he got by.

Being a sociable fellow, I soon made a few fast friends. With the Armenian (the jeweler, who lived in San Francisco) there was the bond between two minorities traditionally stateless and persecuted and an understanding of the lawless workings of the Third World. With the Cypriot, the bond was by our both being Cambridge grads. In other cases, it was my fascination with someone from exotic places like Budapest or the Transvaal. When the occasion arose, I could talk the talk with the social scientists and, though an ignoramus about the hard sciences, occasionally do a bullshit questioning of their methods.

Thanks to the stimulating company, outings to the beach, steady sun, comfortable lodgings and, most of all, a good night´s sleep, I felt upbeat, integrated and eager for more on the eve of the following session.

Even so, I still wasn´t clear about the purpose of the retreat, if there was any beyond drinking ayahuasca in a leisurely, companionable and hedonistic setting. Nor had I entirely forgotten my premonition that, whatever it turned out to be, I was destined to be the loose cannon ball. This was sharpened by the closest interaction I had, with my roommate, an anthropologist from the Southwest who had an international reputation as an expert on shamanism. Oh, he was civil enough and so was I, and our cohabitation ran friction-free on the level of tidiness and “please turn the music down”.

If there was a “clash”, it was a very understated one that had more to do with my hang-ups than him or his theories. The impulses which drove me along the torturous road from dropping-out and self-exile to, eventually, ayahuasca, weren´t reasoned out, but, granting my subjectivity and egotism, I was retrospectively becoming aware that certain “principles” were implicit or latent in what hitherto had been mere lifestyle, which strengthened, in turn, my conceit that I had a special affinity with this sacred/medicinal plant medicine because of who I was and how I lived that went beyond an intellectual understanding of it. All resumed, I thought, by a saying of my then guide in Colombia, don Antonio: “a healer has to be interested in everything”. Especially the human part, as was seen in the way how, when the whim took them, he and other taitas I knew would latch onto the unlikeliest pals among their patients, to the point of preferring the conversation of the meanest bush laborer to the most brilliant universitario, and not let go till they´d pumped his story out of them.

In that light, one of those principles, embedded in ayahuasca, would be the unpredictability, not only of the medicine, but also of yourself and life in general and I say this as a person who, by temperament, doesn´t much like risk or uncertainty. It was and still is one of the most painful lessons of the shock therapy ayahuasca engages in, but as it corresponded to a lot of other shocks I had in “real life” up to then, it became, so to speak, one of my credentials.

To be fair, my roommate wasn´t an eminence for nothing and couldn´t be faulted for turning to advantage the free time I frittered away. He´d already transformed his corner of the cabaña into an office where, dipping into this tome or that, he would spend hours at the computer on his upcoming book. Why, if such discipline was admirable, did it irritate me so much? It was, in part, the way he banged it out like a production line. As an occasional furtive peek showed, his stuff was sound, indeed coincided with some of my own speculations about how ayahuasca cracked up the apparatus of thought, awareness and perception and rearranged the pieces in a symbolic map of well-being you could read.

Nevertheless, in pasting a terminology on all that, something was left out, I suspected: the terror, the fugues and the hot, heady invasion of presences which mocked, admonished, revealed unsuspected truths and ultimately, healed, if only for the time being. “Spirits”, which I didn´t exactly believe in, but much less did I think that reducing them to psychology, anthropology and metabolism would reach to the essence of ayahuasca, the felt experience of it, the wisdom which enters through the blood.

“Shamanism” was only a word, one which, when you took it for your starting point, caged the phenomena in a concept that was already vague and little understood. Bang, bang, bang, on the keyboard, from the outside in! A knowledgeable man nevertheless, yet incurious about anything my misadventures in the jungle and the raves of the urban school I belonged to might contribute to the discussion. As evidence, it was anecdotal and he was right about that; getting passionate about ayahuasca wasn´t an argument either.

If not entirely novel, the setting was disorienting as well. Instead of mestizo or Afro-Brazilian, the employees of the lodge, along with others in the working class, were fair, some with Nordic features. Then, there were the cards you needed for the public phones, the juxtaposition of favela, fishing village and (in nearby Floripa) Miami Beach, the well-paved highways and the general atmosphere of a country that, despite a lot of crime (not there, though), was free of Colombia´s undeclared civil war. But, he, like most of the others, felt no need to explore the place and integrate what they felt into their experiences of ayahuasca. In short, little awareness that the genies of the medicine were in the air, watchful and more alive than ourselves.

On the afternoon before the second session, we assembled in the castle´s living room for the opening of the talks we were to give. By day, and cleared of buckets and mats, it looked smaller and faded somehow, like a scene from a dream, vivid at the time, but now barely remembered. The armchairs and settees ranged round the perimeter not being enough, most us sat on cushions in the sunken middle, facing a power-point screen hooked to the computer, around which were gathered a little circle of techies apparently more interested in the presentation than the subject being presented.

Lua, hotelier and shaman, now put on his moderator´s hat, as the informal but orderly chair of an academic conference. It wasn´t too forced, since he was in fact a professor of anthropology, moreover at a university in Western Europe, no mean accomplishment for a lad from a provincial town in Colombia. Therein lay a problem, however, which confirmed my initial impression that the image he hoped to present wasn´t quite secured. It was as if he were bending backwards not to be impressed by the likes of my roommate, yet knew his street smarts put him on higher level.

His e-mailed invitation to me had also contained a meticulously-presented outline, with speakers list, of our seminar, entitled “Entheogens, Levels of Awareness and Psycho-integration Therapies: a multidisciplinary approach”. Stunned to be asked at all, since my non-fiction book on ayahuasca had hardly made an impact, I didn´t pay any attention to the program then. The jargon was familiar anyway and I could, when required, sing for my supper all night. In contrast with my tribe of urban drinkers, many of whom were New Agey, I wasn´t fanatically opposed to applying rationality to the mysteries of ayahuasca or at least not as much when I started drinking it. But the “fusion between science and spirituality” had mostly been a matter of self-promotion and wishful thinking in the few events of this kind I had participated in at home, amateurish affairs where, in general, even the doctors and psychologists who were followers of the taitas acknowledged that the wisdom of ayahuasca was sui generis, if not too sacred to be tampered with.

Here likewise, we tended to speak past one another, without perturbing our respective opinions. When you factored in the exchange rate and the cost they were paying for a nice holiday in the tropics, with access to a substance prohibited in their countries thrown in, my expectations of any advance in knowledge, theirs or mine, wasn´t that high and that actually drinking the brew would be what counted for them: the rest, only part of the junket.

Lua spoke about the importance of our being comfortable with each other. This was critical to the center´s philosophy of congregating capable, serious and high-minded people for the purpose of advancing research into the medicine. He made it sound like we were at a neo-Platonic academy, sylvan and secretive. As a metaphor, it was plausible, perhaps useful to me, insofar as, for some time now, I´d had a feeling of stagnation

If Lua´s invitation hadn´t come, like a sign that it was time to explore new ground, I might have continued to repress that uneasiness, which came out the conflict between my faith in my indigenous maestros, the taitas, and the skeptical Western devil in me.

Yet it was becoming increasingly evident that the nature of their magic would always be beyond my grasp, because I would only be able to apprehend it in terms of my “language” (view of the world) rather than their very different cosmovision. For all my doubts about the academics and scientists who´d accommodated themselves to a system I´d run away from, there was something to be said for sharing a common tongue. I was, indeed, comfortable with them in the stale, irritable way you are with your own family.

Further, in terms of location, the jungle, if not the green hell it was reputed to be, kept me too much on guard for the requisite analytics, while what the sessions in and around the city gave with one hand was withdrawn by the other. There, I was on the wavelength of my empathetic, questioning and stimulating companions. Indeed, we positively sparkled with the vine and fed each other´s conceit that we, of the indigenous school, uniquely vibrated with the spirits. In my case, however, I worried that it was too much of a rumba for any serious reflection on what happened during the night.

“Spontaneity”, fine, so long as it is in a calm setting and untainted by an urge for an overnight illumination. As a congenitally nervous person, I was susceptible to the surfeit of stimulation that went on there, which wrecked the apparatus for filtering perceptions whose weirdness was already unmanageable. That was aggravated, in turn, by the quick return to my normal setting, which contaminated any illumination I´d got and led me into the absurd belief that I´d rid myself of my hang-ups.

You needed a certain mental distance from your routines to remain on the higher ground (for a time sufficient to learn from it), hence my stalemate. Though I loved the jungle and acknowledged it as the source, its muckiness distorted the lessons of the vine, when I was already confused by the secretiveness of its indigenous inhabitants, who insisted that they alone knew had access to the spirits. That is why I turned to the mestizo healers of Iquitos for a time, only to find myself debased into an eco-tourist.

Though barely two days had passed, the change of scene, inner and outer, was already making me more open-minded and I gave my conditional approval to what lay in store, not the seminar so much as the general opportunity to be jolted by the ideas of the others.

At Lua´s we each stood up for a semi-academic presentation, complemented by a personal assessment of the first ceremony, using whatever expertise we had. But it soon became apparent that, with one exception, the empiricists had little or no direct acquaintance with ayahuasca, nor did they realize that the more eloquent and self-assured academics didn´t know much more about it either. Now, book knowledge is useful to a degree: ideally, it prepares the novice for a rough ride. But, until theory is matched by practice, it is mere speculation. To be fair, the purpose was to explain what we hoped to get out of retreat in the way of self-knowledge and a more objective knowledge of the mechanisms of ayahuasca. Therefore, since the concerns were so sweeping, each of us, academic or not, would be able to make a contribution to the whole, at least on an intellectual level. That was what the holistic nature of the therapy meant, everyone agreed: health as a construct of moving parts rather than an absolute, however you categorized the different locks to be picked: mind/brain, social norms versus instincts, primitive wisdom, evolutionary biology, and so forth. Even the hard scientists understood that unraveling the components their field was interested in would be a major challenge, but, if anything, that made them more determined to unmask this particular face of Nature and expose its mysteries to public view. “Spirits” remained a dirty word for them and that egged them on even more. Yet, even though the breach between “me and them” was unbridgeable, they were more menschlich than the crowd I drank with in Colombia usually gave them credit for. The very fact that they were willing to explore ayahuasca at first hand showed that they weren´t so rigid. What they would eventually get out of it was another matter, as I eventually learned.

So, for the time being I was, in theory, willing to meet them halfway, except … it´s hard to explain this subtle change from my initial prejudice into warning signals which gradually became louder. The problem was that I had been so conditioned to question, if not everything, then anything which didn´t sound quite right, that I was now questioning my own doubts and thus had to test them before reaching any conclusions, which I did in the next ceremony.

While he´d been tactful about it, I knew that Lua hadn´t liked the way I´d occasionally withdrawn from the group the first time and let slip some wisecracks about the staging of the session. That is, if I weren´t willing to integrate myself into the group, I wouldn´t be able to make a fair assessment of the ceremonies.

So, remembering that I had been too tired and disoriented to do that the first time, I gritted my teeth, vowed to tolerate what had irritated me before and see it through to the end, come what may. As happened before, the first loathsome taste of the brew ( though it was more sweet than bitter, which curiously made it even more unpalatable) confirmed that it was at least up to the mark and that, in fact, I had underestimated its potency.

When I began to feel the effects, about twenty minutes later, Lua, the d.j. turned on the disco music and I was instantly plunged into the all too familiar torture of the purge, staggered to the toilet and emptied my bowels, or so I thought, because when I returned to my mat, the turmoil in my guts was even worse. By then, I was like a wounded beast, all reasoning gone and driven by an irresistible instinct to flee, be it into the jaws of the predator and as soon as I reached my cabaña and lay down in my bed, I became, if not at ease (since the purge hadn´t ended and was still painful), then more lucid about the reason for my distress and sufficiently in control to weather it.

But it didn´t quite work out the way I´d expected. After several more trips to the toilet in the cabaña, the conditions seemed ideal for my penetration of the depths of the medicine. My body was cleansed and my mind receptive, I was in a perfect setting and finally free of the noise and agitated vibes in Lua´s house. Perversely, however, it was the kind of flat, uninspiring trip I´d had at home whenever the brew wasn´t strong enough or I didn´t drink as much as I should have, and above all, when, after serving the cups, the healer just left his patients to their own devices and, in one case, went to another room to sleep! A dreamy state instead of an inspiring one, whether with visions or not.

I thus found myself caught in a Catch-22. If I returned to the ceremony, I might be energized the currents of the group but I would have to deal with the infernal racket. If I stayed where I was, it would be pleasant but I´d lose the point of drinking the medicine. Needless to say, I remained. I visited, a few times, by one of my fellow drinkers but the stimulus of company, the chance to exchange my impressions with others, didn´t work either.

Meeting up with Lua in the early morning was awkward, because I knew that by defying his rules –and he was the maestro here, after all, I had embarrassed and even insulted him. He was distant but kept his cool and he grudgingly agreed that, after he served me the brew, I would be allowed to retire to my cabaña and spend the night alone there, from then on.

[TO BE CONTINUED . . .PERHAPS]