Winner Takes Nothing

Yakutia

Prelude

Evening in Dhahran

She looked as radiant as she did in the coffee-scented Costa Rican airport all those years ago, and taller, more confident than my memory allowed. I had an urge to slide my arms around her in greeting, a gesture so provocative and shocking in her local culture I felt almost guilty about it.

How have you been all these years, where have you been? She said, softly.

Hi, wanderer, I said, almost out of breath.

"Hola, travelling man," she replied, graceful, out of reach, her voice a velvet lasso.

And you, stopped travelling? I asked.

Never, she said, in her abaya, her black burka-like covering, so you do remember me?

Always, sometimes, often, I said. The second time I’d said goodbye to her had been near a bombed and destroyed bridge in Mostar well over a decade ago, as her Afghani minders waited nearby. Had that been less difficult than the first goodbye? Maybe. One learns a little, the more one practices.

But reality changes, she said, still quietly.

Yes, it does, I said.

It is Allah’s will. She saw the the consternation in my eyes, and hers sparkled: don’t worry, I am the same under the surface.

Her phone had rung. I stepped away a yard or two, looking at the pink sunset sky. She glanced at me, eyes teasing; eyes all she showed, veil covering the rest, but her presence still making me breathless in the heat and humidity. She slipped the phone into a hidden pocket, her fingers a warm evening tan.

Can we meet, one day, again? She asked, her eyes searching now. Fly to Geneva on leave, and meet me. Of course here I should not, we cannot.

In Geneva? I said, about half-way between Hotel Les Bergues and Cologny? Halfway between the King of Bahrain’s summer residence and Ben Laden’s in Cologny I mean.

I have met neither by the way, she said, neither King Hamed nor the brother of Osama Bin Laden, and can’t stand either of them.

I know, I said.

Another disarming glance, blinking once, the last of the evening sun reflecting in her eyes, reminding me of so long ago. I had stepped outside only a few minutes before, but already my back was drenched in humidity. I loosened my tie a touch and undid my collar button. She looked sideways and back to me quickly, leaning forward: you never used to wear ties, she whispered, lips pursed, I knew, in a smile.

I won’t say what you never used to wear, will I? I said.

Her eyes lowered as she spoke in false decorum: let us meet in Divonne, next door to Geneva, in France. Do you know I have a residence there? A glance, smouldering, in the heat; the Swiss are too fastidious for me, but France is to my liking.

She called over one of the men who had accompanied her, who wore Pakistani shareez and carried a large briefcase, which he flicked open and put on the car bonnet in front of her.

We will meet in the Villa du Lac, in Divonne, she said, ask for me, and give me your number.

I couldn’t remember it.

Take my number, she said.

I nodded.

Now.

For those not permanently in possession of their mobile phone, like me, with my phone baking in the car, this entailed search for paper, then pen.

She departed quickly after that, not wanting her presence to become too much of an advertisement. I drove out of the compound a few minutes later, turning right at the gates then left down to the seafront at speed, trying to avoid the pot holes that had melted out of shape in the hot sun.

With my phone somewhere in the car beeping with a text message, I parked in the hot sunny evening of central Khobar for a last cup of coffee and schwarma, then changed my mind as dark clouds slowly rolled in, tall and threatening, and the call for prayer rang out.

PART 1

I

The Hungarian Plain, About Twenty Years Ago

First just polkadots on the pavements, the rain intensified quickly, uncountable, darkening shoulders and causing umbrellas to sprout. It was not the kind of rain that makes people to scurry for shelter, but was enough to have them eye the street curbs warily lest a passing car or bus splash water dangerously far and wide.

The buses came by with patches of clear glass in steamed windows, where people had wiped circles to peer out. They peered glumly, each bearing an anomalous face much as the last, like a gallery of discarded portraits one might stumble upon almost by accident, in a town at the end of a wrong turning.

There was a bar at the end of the street. I crossed over and entered. As was the Hungarian custom, the cloud of cigarette smoke parted to swallow me in with the cool draft, but those at the bar closed ranks to the foreigner, in the local manner of eyeing me from head to foot. Hungarians disliked their language being spoken by a foreigner, and even ordering in a bar could be a procedure at times, so I tried in my version of German.

The seat next to the window was empty and I sat down to watch rivulets of rain dribble down the window panes, cutting through the figures in the distance. I was happy for the rain. It brought the past to my notebook. For it is not the overcoloured postcard days that merit memory, not the stretch after stretch of sandy beach and bright sun: our real memories are etched in grainy black and white, and nostalgia is not made of motley stains, but of contrasts and moods.

Looking out of the dotted window, I thought of a thunderstorm, in Managua, Nicaragua. The rain had been slapping a glossy layer on streets and roofs, and out of habit the two of us had ran for shelter under the roof of a small wooden hut, joined by an old Managuan in the summer wear of holed shirt and frayed white trousers. A young man in similar clothes hobbled through the pouring rain towards us, and was quite soaked by the time he ducked under the strings of water coming off the roof. He murmured a hello, and leant against the wooden boards, thoughtfully scratching a week’s growth on his chin, as he rested his elbows on his crutches. The old man was already talking. The thunderstorm, he told me, reminded him of his country. A magnet of trouble, man-made or natural.

Maybe we can wash away the present, he said, but we are left with the past.

Hah! The past! snorted the young man, what do you want with the past? You cannot change it, so just leave it alone.

"We can change the past," Noor said to me, looking up.

I smiled. That sounds fun! We’d better change it then!

She understood: Naughty boy, she answered, then, you know why I mustn’t? You know it is my culture, don’t you?

"What do you think, Noor?" I said.

Noor’s fingers found mine and she pulled me to her, turning to me, her face repeatedly splashed with a fine mist of water from raindrops that thudded on my jacket, poured off my bush hat and dripped from her baseball cap.

Do you feel love for me? She asked, despite everything?

Despite nothing, I said.

Even though we can’t – she faltered.

Blessing in disguise, I said, no hard work, just nice, and you have some other skills anyway.

They are called desires, she said in her quiet voice.

The old man next to us against the wooden shed pulled some soggy cigarettes from a paper packet, and offered Noor and I each one. I held up my palm and she shook her head, but the younger man took one from the offered pack and puffed at it sharply to set it alight.

Thank you, he said, as we both watched a woman come splashing up through the rain. She was pleasantly plump, and carrying a full basket of tortillas.

Madre mias! She giggled, in a laugh that came out as a sigh, what rain!

She put the basket down.

Tortilla? She asked. She bent over and opened a corner of the damp white cloth covering the top of the basket.

The young man accepted one gratefully and chewed it quietly.

What a day! Continued the woman. And me who has so far to walk!

She looked across at the young man: Where do you live? She asked him.

I don’t, he said, I can’t go home.

Why not, love? she asked.

My girlfriend, he said, gazing outwards towards the horizon, she mustn’t see me like this. He gestured vaguely at the stump that was his right leg. I cannot go back now, she must have a last memory of me in a different way.

We stood with the same thoughts, as one under the rain, the rain that was marking time. And time, like the rain that comes in sudden storms, in sudden monsoons beyond the trappings made for tourists in the tropics, has two beats. Two shifts. There is the time that is tense, taut, when the government, or guerrillas, interminably replacing an official opposition, are looking, searching, chasing, hunting. It is not advisable to be out on the street past a certain hour during that time, or in the wrong village.

Then there is the hospitality time. This time is not taken for granted either. Hospitality is generally a question of survival, emotional or physical. Refuge is given and accepted quickly. In reality this time comes alive within the tense times. Of course, refusal of any kind of hospitality is never an option, especially when extended by military or rebel, neé terrorist groups, but that is a different kind of hospitality. And there is always a group, law, religion, dogma, social more or supposed cultural value ready to pounce, ready to install fear: Noor had to remain a virgin until marriage, by Saudi law, but that did not stop her being a young woman with natural warmth and sensuality. She held me tightly under the rain and I did not think of rules and laws imposed like permanent civil wars from distant pasts.

So where have you come from, son? asked the old man to the young man with crutches, puffing at the cigarette. We knew he was really asking another question. He was really asking who had taken the young man’s leg. He was asking where the young man had left his leg, in which battle, and when. We all had a good idea of what the answer would be. Civil war raged in the jungles and bush lands of the north, fuelled by the CIA-funded Contras, who came into towns and villages looking for food, strategic targets and young women to rape, or a combination of all three. The Contras, those against the revolution that had toppled the hated Somoza dictatorship and did not agree with subsequent election results, were organised from Miami, and however lofty their aims were, the reality on the ground was different. That, we all knew.

Outside Matagalpa, answered the young man. Two weeks ago. Our unit were building a new primary school. Their first primary school. The Contras came into town on the back of a truck. They came straight to the school we were building. They threw petrol over it, and they set it alight. Two Contras came running up to me. They lifted their machetes (like so, he said, lifting his crutch). I was stupid. I was tired. My concentration wandered and I did not run. I did not feel the pain, just the heavy weight of the machete sliced into my leg. It threw me onto my side. I took two or three, or four blows from their machetes, hits on my thigh. Then they ran, they left, and I felt the pain. After that, you know –

We looked across at the young man, who looked downward in brief contemplation. The tortilla woman spoke:

If you don’t know where you can go, then come, she whispered, Come with me. Accept my hospitality. My son is never coming home any more, so just come home with me. I have an empty room if you need it, for a while.

The young man looked down again and pulled on his cigarette. He nodded his head, still looking downwards. The tortilla woman picked up her basket of tortillas, and we watched as she led the young man slowly through the rain, the woman bent over her basket of tortillas and the young man following carefully on his crutches. We had watched them make their way, as the rain poured, drenching their backs and cleansing us.

In Nyiregyha’za, in Eastern Hungary, it was just another rainy day, but at least it was raining. The streets were being washed clean, and those who scurried from the downpour scurried also away from their routined day, scurriers who were maybe then jolted into encounters that changed their lives, like the fragile flutter of the proverbial chaotic butterfly might, under a monsoon far off in other lands, flit a chain of events that reach the unaware. Until then, I took a breather, and scribbled a haiku in my notebook.

dry deadwood on a beach

makes a warm glow in the fireplace

stories flicker on walls

II

Nice, France, late 1980s

Odd skips, enlist, even skips, do not. I tried another stone. There were plenty. Nice, pronounced ‘Neess’ has pebble stone beaches aptly suited for the warrior-to-be, and near the beach the legendary French Foreign Legion’s recruitment office is tucked discreetly down a side street, shaded most of the day, despite a clear hand-drawn map inside a glass panel at the train station.

Prostitutes in the city have the mind of trained psychologists, for it is to them the potential recruit last turns to before signing his name and identity to La Legion, for a minimum of five years of hard gruel, guaranteed conflict and unimagined moments of intensity and camaraderie. And the mystery around the Legion is immediate: upon joining recruits officially change identity completely, and are from that moment on for all intents and purposes off the international radar. The Foreign Legion therefore attracts a treasure trove of international characters with foggy pasts for debuting writer, mafia member or Interpol police inspector to peruse, except the Interpol inspector never gets to find out who has actually enlisted. And why did I want to enlist? Simply to have stories to tell, to be able to say, in the best of traditions when later I travelled as a life, that I had snatched the pebble.

I first met Pepine waiting on the wooden bench at the doorway just before eight in the morning. Pepine, tall, broad-shouldered with dark eyes, from Seville in Spain, a matador by nature, and a couple of months younger than me. I was a few months out of school and a few hours off the train, having taken the obligatory path from the train station into the expert arms of ‘Hélène’, a dame Niçoise of guiles and ways, who took me for a pizza in a wide boulevard running by the sea. There, near a large rocky park area of scented Mediterranean plants, with views that waft over the city in sunshine-inspired scents she declared me fit, that I looked like I was made for ‘La Legion.’ And thus only Hélène, whom I met for a sum total of one night of my life, knows why I really signed up.

In those first twelve weeks of training we were just pebbles ourselves, before we were to belong to the desert sands, thrown awake at the first morning, turfed out at four o’clock, beds and covers thrown out of windows by all-too-willing old hands.

Pepine and I became friends in a kind of fast-forward way, when the training NCO, fed up with our fists, tied us by rope at the ankles for the day. Actually it had been my jaw and Pepine’s fists, as he had been a hard man to get the better of, too hard to swing one back properly. Putting me on equal footing with the bull of the man that was Pepine worked: we gave up. One does learn, in these circumstances, that when you are tied to someone for twenty four hours you either marry them or if you are in the Legion, develop fraternal ties.

And after the early morning turfings and tying, it was the tests, designed to weed out anyone without a past or future.

Are you a failure? The first question of the psychology test, and, what are you good at, what are you bad at, why are you here, does anyone know you are here, have you committed crimes in the past, have you been to jail?

A collection of no’s and yes’s.

Like everyone, I was given a new name. If I’d been French I would have been given a new nationality as well, as technically the French are not allowed to serve in the Foreign Legion. Some do, especially those running from something in the past. So my name for five years? Iain Mackay, just few letters away from Igor, Dracula’s right hand man, with the same penchant for lost causes as me.

First there was the ten kilometre run, then the twenty kilometre run, the hundred push ups then the two hundred push ups. There was James, a big, balding Yugoslav with a golden heart, who was hell to motivate, and hell to demotivate when he felt his just cause was to have a word with the Belorussian NCO in charge of training, who drunk pastis neat to give a French accent to his voice and had no time for any ideals at all, rasping austere orders before daybreak, reminding us that sunset was only half way through the day.

One of the first to take a punch was Luis, Romanian, a short, wiry guy, with permanent, rueful grin and curly hair when longer than military cut, and a tough nut to crack, who nevertheless approached his training as a summer camp, and accordingly expected amenities such as smuggled cigarettes on training runs and late mornings after scouting exercises.

If things don’t slacken I can resign! He announced, en route to a hill ten or so kilometres away one morning, having already slackened to last place on the run. The tension on the Belorussian NCO was palpable: "Fous-moi le con! ‘fuck off outa here’!" He shouted in heavily vodkanised French, shoving him down the hill from the road side with a side karate kick to his hip.

But Luis stayed for more kicks and punches. "Hey, I survived the Securitate in Romania, this was supposed to be a holiday camp," he would say, while gasping for breath.

There were others who needed a few adjustments to their views on reality, like Free, an Australian Aboriginal with Portuguese and Sri Lankan blood in him, and beer too, and Paul, from Congo, cheerful, fit, absurdly optimistic, and Atif, from Senegal, a boxer and talker, about boxing and Piotr who tried to take him on a few times over the years, but never won. I am Polish, he said each time after a few rounds, we never win. There was Abu, the Cat, a Berber from Morroco you would never hear approaching you, and Waleed, Kurd from northern Iraq, pencil thin moustache, cigarette, and affected Italian accent. And there was Tod, Irish Legionnaire of the French Foreign Legion, the only Legionnaire in history to pay to get his boule a zero hair cut from a hairdresser and not the regiment barber. As an actor, he proclaimed loudly, rhyming it with ‘door,’ and checking his tailored uniform; I cannot take risks with my image.

You already did by having bright red hair, chuckled Luis.

Then there was Kim, from uniquely the door of death camps in North Korea, the middle generation of three to be into hell, following Pyongyang’s infamous policy of throwing three generation’s of a family into a concentration camp upon the misdemeanour of one of its members. He’d been taking secret photos of street children, those whose parents had died of starvation. The street children barely survived by finding the odd grain of rice or crumb or fish bone, dodging authorities who would sometimes pick them up to throw them into a children’s home, where they would starve to death. Kim took photos and handed the small camera to another person who smuggled it into China. The pictures were then exposed to the world. Getting to China by swimming across the notorious Yalu river had its risks, with Chinese authorities handing those caught to the North Koreans.

Kim was spotted taking a photo by a plainclothed secret police agent. His photo was of a small boy in the mud, who was drinking muddy water from a plastic bag and eating muddy grass, exposing the level of starvation among supposedly none-existent orphans. His crime was such that he knew he could not go home, and that night he too swam the river into China He returned for his father, wife and son a few nights later, but it was too late. It took him a few secret trips back from China to find out they had all been taken to a death camp. It was not good to hang around in China too long and he went to Laos then South Korea, in an established route for escapees. In South Korea he met other north Korean refugees, one who had been a death camp guard near the Chinese border, who was not sure but thought he might remember the name of his wife, who’d possibly been raped, then when pregnant put into the special part of the camp, where she’d been stoned to death by other detainees, including her young teenage son, who’d had no choice at all. The camp guard had seen a few of these women after being stoned, a spade shoved into them and left in the mud.

Without a passport, Kim had taken the ex-concentration camp guard’s passport and flown to France, joining up almost immediately. How did he get the guard’s passport, one of us asked. Kim would not say. Why had he joined, was also asked. What else? He’d replied. Even Luis was quiet after Kim’s past had slipped out, in short whispered moments and rudimentary French in a forest at night, while on patrol.

Kim, if not exactly an outgoing team member, proved an able soldier. There quickly were nineteen of us left from our original group of twenty seven, then suddenly fifteen. The unfit went first, then the ones who gave up too easily, followed by the big mouths and the truly clueless, leaving those with criminal records and excessive enthusiasm, and others of a marginal nature still in the ranks; Paul, Atif, Conrado, Argentine, Waleed, Abu, Morrocan Berber, Free, from Oz, and Piotr, James, Kim, and Bahrat, a Gurka from Nepal, with Pepine, Luis, Todd and I. It was inconceivable for me to be thrown out at this stage, or to let anyone else be thrown out.

As our training got specialised, and we ran further, away from the Belorussian boot, we were led by a sharp veteran of twenty three years, from Colombia. Luis was clobbered by him as well, for smuggling cigarettes into training in la brousse, where the odour from the puffing can be detected from afar in the bushland, especially on a hot summer day. But Lopez new his stuff, by extension this meant he knew he’d have to be one step ahead of Luis, and was.

For smuggling cigarettes into training a second time Luis was tied to a tree, arms wrapped around the trunk, and left for a few hours. Lopez put a cigarette in his mouth as he walked away. Here you can smoke, he said, "not when you put your camarades in danger." A well-intended remark, but danger was the permanent state of Luis’s camarades if one thought about it.

Training finished with the Kepi Blanc sixty kilometre run with about as many kilos on the back and machine gun in hands, Luis surprisingly fast, but not as fast as Paul the Kenyan, and finishing with the ceremony of handing over the famous white legionnaire kepi to wear, which we donned on our heads as we were invoked to kill without pleasure. Not to kill per se. In reality, returned to barracks, training continued, with ropes, mud-filled swamps and it must be said, glorious mountain hikes. Weapons training kept Conrado in first place, making me slightly suspicious of his past, and Bharat the Nepalese Ghurka showed uncommon skill in hand-to-hand combat, as well as a propensity to laugh in a baying sound at the oddest moment, but then there were many oddest moments in La Legion.

Then we served, under an Armenian NCO we called the Wolf, a swearing Armenian. Six months in French Gyuane protecting Europe’s Ariane space rocket, either overtly or by stealth within the jungle, followed by a couple of African stationings, in desert and bush land culminating in Djibouti, then Tahiti, where barefoot dancers in grass skirts, breasts bouncing beautifully free and shining the colour of honey preceded Lebanon, a brief posting, after the bombs at the US Marine’s and French army barracks, both because of shelling by US airforce in support of Israeli allies. After also a destructive shelling by the US Navy in retaliation that left hundreds killed, making for tenseness.

The Beirut of the late 1980s was wild; a mess of city; its gut spilled, with ricocheting bullets common as the wind ready to catch one unaware, and different factions running neighbourhoods. Our role was stated as to protect the Palestinian PLO while they withdrew from the city, but in fact Palestinians were one of the factions defending the Lebanese capital from the Israeli onslaught, with also the Syrian army there very much at the bequest of the Lebanese Maronite Christian factions, against their normal Shi’a allies. Our real role was to ‘stabilise’ a neighbourhood while a small team from the Brigade of Special Forces flew down by helicopter from the French Pyrenees, the mountains between France and Spain, to either advise us or grab the world’s most wanted terrorist at the time, Carlos the Jackal, who was a frequent resident in Beirut. Intelligence fluctuated, was usually wrong, and had us frequently jumping into jeeps to race across the rubble-strewn landscape over the so-called green line separating the East and West of the city and back, past shells of buildings that were actually inhabited.

Sleepers reported that Carlos was probably in the mountainous area at the edge of the Eastern suburbs, near the main Beirut to Damascus road, lending credibility to the supposed sighting. We arrived to scrub land and apartment blocks that had recently been hit by the Israeli Air Force in search of Yasser Arafat, who’d been willing to kill two hundred and fifty people with a dropped bomb into an apartment block, on the off-chance he’d be there. The scrub land was still full of parts of toys, make-up kits, cutlery and other tiny mementos of blown up lives. On cue the Israeli Defence Force had arrived, irked and nervous, and a tense stand out ensued, wasting precious time as radios crackled. Some felt very exposed; Waleed, the Kurd in particular, was attracting Israeli interest, judging by the binoculars and pointing.

We had an incident earlier. We want to talk to a couple of your guys, to him, that one, we heard the guttural accented English of the Israeli commander say, over the radio.

Fat chance. They were talking to the Legion, and The Wolf, our Armenian NCO, born in Jerusalem, his father’s property taken by Israeli settlers who threatened to kill the old man when he came back to snip some leaves from the hedge. So fat chance, and the Wolf was no diplomat.

Fuck off, dammit! He snarled, you have no mandate here! followed by swearing in broken Hebrew, we assumed. We fanned out, taking positions, ready to fight in our element – the city. Nobody did cities like we did, and we knew what we were doing in the rubble; we knew where we were going to run forward to, and who was covering who. In the suspicious sudden engagement that followed as the Israeli troops made to leave, we lost one of ours: a sudden burst from one gun as their trucks rumbled slowly away, picking up speed. It was clear to me why elements in Israel wanted the Jackal kept alive, as an unwitting propaganda tool for sympathy of the Israeli state, and he surfaced in Budapest, Hungary for two years, where he was protected by the Hungarian government of the time. So the Israeli troops jumped on trucks and left, and we stayed. As the platoon medic I felt it very personally when our colleague was airlifted out.

I scooped some words together to carry with me, on blood-splattered paper, as we left Beirut; the poem penned in as many words as bullet shells found at the scene of the incident.

Long ago

We belonged

To desert sands

Whispered at night

Or waited in silence

While poor men prayed

They say we never

Left a man behind

But we did

Many times

In the arms

Of another

Our lady

A belly dancer

From Samarkand

Far from home

Spoke no French

But could understand

And sipped tea

With the grace of a

Desert queen

That’s me they called the Pirate

You can find us

In many photographs

Next to the Argentine

Behind the Wolf

Our crazy Armenian

And across from him

The wild Romanian

That wild

Wild Romanian

Blood across his stomach

Smile across his face

I think I like it here, I’ll be fine, he’d whispered

You’re in La Legion, mon pote, the Wolf had said:

And I’m a thirsty sergeant major dammit!

No-one walked the desert

More than us

Until that gunshot

Until the gunshot

That fatal gun fight

Bullets spraying down the dunes

Blood and guts spilled

The stupid Moroccan Berber bastard

Dived to protect a fool like me

Died a moment after his chest caught fire

I never loved a man so much

That final minute

Vive La Legion guys, he’d said

Your turn to cook, he’d gasped to me

Arrêtes tes conneries, we’re bringing you home, I said

But he slipped away and we were four

More or less, hard to guess

Under fire

You might ask why we laughed

Years later when we met

Why I went to my belly dancer

Who wept

But never met his fiancée

who wept so much more

Why when I think back

I never question a thing

Just remember picking up my friend

And we walked until the sun

We walked until the sun

We walked until the sun

We walked until the sun

That’s why

Others re enlisted, or didn’t. We decided to take a year off and meet again to decide.

Where? Said Tod.

Nearest pub to the train station, said Luis.

"Yeah, but which town?"

We wrote down the first letters to 10 candidate cities we came up with – Annecy, Baku, Dublin, Edinburgh, Istanbul, Naples, Oxford, Pamplona, Sarajevo, Zagreb, then gave a dart to my Uzbek bellydancer, and wrote the first letter of each town on a beer mat. I put the beer mat over my heart and she threw the dart hard at me. It cut though the cardboard, plunging straight through the ‘O’ of Oxford. A year later, with Oxford bathed in uncharacteristic morning sunlight, I waited for the others at the clock tower under the main street, sprawled on a wooden bench after a walk through Oxford meadows at dawn, waking from a night asleep in the park in sleeping bag. Pepine turned up first, already kitted out in English gentleman style, then Todd, an hour later, Conrado, looking like he’d walked off a spaghetti western film set, and finally Luis, after a midday siesta in his rented car.

So where are we going? He said.

III

The Footprint, Baja California

It all depends on what kind of shoes you wear. Most who venture on their version of the Walkabout, veering out into their odyssey of self-discovery, are unaware of what kind of footprint they leave behind. The thin rubber sandals worn by most of the populations outside of the western world leave the slightest of indentations, but our high-tech high performance footwear leave an impression that is often very hard to erase.

My unerasable travelling companions put on their travelling shoes to get out of the truck. Luis in bright shiny black shoes reserved for his night at the opera, or year on stage. Pepine saddled up in cowboy boots. Todd, temporarily out of work actor, kept his felt slippers, and I laced up a pair of North American lumberjack boots that I fancied lumberjacks wore for a full day’s chopping. We were, it was true, already one short or our original group of five venturers, one Argentine short, an Argentine who had fallen in love just after initially succumbing to the lust of travel. And love had won the day, as it does for romantic rifle instructors from Buenos Aires. So Conrado, with his five suitcases and ankle length flapping Barbour coat, had left his boots untied on the landing in front of the flat of his new-found Brazilian girlfriend, who had stood wrapped around him in a slipping sheet at the doorway as we shook our farewells.

I will come after Fernanda and I get married, he’d said. I will find you someday and join your journey. Words not spoken lightly, I knew, but it was a few months before I saw Conrado again.

We’d had a long series of goodbyes, all things considered:

Bastardos, bastardos! Our loyal and Sexy Spanish friend Eva had sung to us in mock betrayal, looking like a spurned Sophia Loren as she strummed her composition on her guitar a few evenings before. We’d walked our way home from the pub that last evening, climbing over a style somewhere in the outskirts of Oxford and humming her song in sympathy for the supposed feelings of the girls we would find to leave behind.

We’d planned Mexico together over pints of beer liberally washed down with words in various city pubs that fittingly sat next to bookshops, with their libraries of books containing pages that opened whole continents, and we discussed possible discoveries of hieroglyphic relics in the Guatemalan rainforests and Ecuadorian highlands, while we walked alongside a mini-Amazonesque Thames river to Aylesbury. I mused about how the road down from Mexico through Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Darien Gap to Columbia and beyond would lead to my book, and Luis and Tod discussed how they would best described in their roles as wayward adventurers.

Make sure I have a good supply of beers through the book, chortled Luis, and that I am surrounded by beautiful women at all occasions!

I need to be portrayed with excellent oratory skills at all times, pontificated Tod, with something of a Shakespearan edge.

But you’re Irish, I said.

As were most playwrights, he pronounced, as always in oratory mode, however, I am willing to make exceptions in the name of art.

Of course. And-? I said to Pepine.

The least said about me the better, said Pepine, with a smirk.

By then Conrado had fallen in love, and Conradoless the four of us jumped out of our newly-acquired pickup truck a few days later, a truck we had baptised Carmen, and joined a special queue for border misfits between California and Mexico, between California and Baja California, between North and South. Without correct papers we were not going far, and we were ushered into a small office by the roadside. Inside, a propeller swivelled around slowly and noisily above a guard slouched behind a desk, long black moustache covering most of his face and double chin wet with sweat. Intermittently he would remove his cap and wipe his forehead with a much-used handkerchief, as the blades above him cut through the heavy air. He did this twice before venturing to talk to us.

Por donde va? he asked, drawing the words out in indefatigable Mexican style.

Well you can get all the documents you need when you cross over to the mainland from Baja.

He waved his hand towards the door, and looking out of the window, gave an obviously long overdue sigh. Outside, cars were stuck in frustration and bureaucracy. Mexicans stopped at each car, vying to sell a last junket to a departing tourist. We were arrivals though, for revolution, cocktails, bikinis, and the majesty of the road.

Pepine was leaning forward, hands on the desk in front of him: we prefer here, he declared, with authority in his voice. The guard raised his eyebrows in apathetic annoyance, and clicking his fingers, reached for the passports. He flicked through the two British passports, tutting and shaking his head, but boredom complied with laziness held him back and he gave up.

‘Dios, he said, raising his handkerchief to his head once more before stamping the passports.

I checked my watch, an infuriating habit I had hoped to give up when on flight from the confines of day-to day, hour to hour living in the so-called nine-to-five world, in reality, of course, an eight to six, then seven-thirty to about seven world. At least my watch did not work, and was permanently stuck at five thirty three, which bore some semblance to knock-off time in most parts of the world. Yet I still checked the watch, as if the figures had any further relevance than an old telephone number one does not really use any more but cannot quite forget. I looked at the map, instead and planned an imaginary journey, imaginary because we were just embarking on it, memories of the travels taken yet to be savoured.

I opened on Central America, leading from the Baja California Peninsula, down to the Darien Gap, unconquered by any roadway, the only part of the continent where the Pan-American highway was interrupted, resuming in cocaine Colombia all the way down to Chile. I folded Chile and Argentina, behind, then folded the map again in quarter, and looked at the long peninsula of Baja California.

At about 1,300 kilometres long, Baja California is one of the driest regions in the world, read Tod in baritone from his guide book. The few small shacks bearing flying saucer-like satellite dishes appeared to be among one of the most uninhabited of regions, but the sterile landscape beckoned, like the moon does to some, and we drove out of an area of arid mountains into a large expanse of flat, grey rubble. By late afternoon we had been a few hours on our chosen road, most definitely the one least travelled. We bumped and jarred over a corrugated track, heads juggling sideways and up and down in unison. I didn’t know there could be so many different kinds of cacti. In this desert, where colour was a luxury, the tiny red or yellow flowers on the ends of some small bushes with long wiry arms were as effective as a spring garden in full bloom. Now and then, when we reached the apex of a mound, we were able to see far into the spaghetti western country, the cacti occupying the many different tinges of grey and brown dry earth. I wondered what aspects of character would be pulled to the fore here. Drinking tequila under the shade of cacti on a hillside after a hard day’s surviving held limited benefit. Most of the few people we passed in Baja California seemed to drift though, solitary figures walking steadily, or waiting patiently by a roadside, or at an empty intersection.

We stopped at a nondescript shack by the road side. The rusty metal sign, hanging from two chains, and with Cervesas splashed on it in white paint, made no lonely dramatic sound without any wind around. Inside, the barman and sole customer faced each other across the bar, the barman’s straw hat perched on the back of his head, and his customer a middle-aged Indian with a long thin face surrounded by black hair that reached his shoulders over loose white shirt and baggy trousers. They weren’t talking. The conversation topics must have dried up years before. Even an Englishman would have had problems talking about the weather here. I could imagine it:

Morning.

Morning señor.

Rather warm today.

Yes señor, it is.

Rather the same as yesterday.

Yes señor.

To be repeated.

The Indian was more forthcoming. He looked across the bar.

Where are you from? He asked, and as always, the follow up: where are you going?

He meditated on the answers for a few moments. Then a few more. Speech was sparse here. Through the glassless window behind the bar I could see a horse loosely tied to a notch on the wall. If Clint Eastwood suddenly strolled into the bar, cowboy hat with a perfectly horizontal brim, cheroot in the corner of the mouth and poncho hung loosely on his shoulders, his monosyllabic presence would have been more talkative.

We’ll, let’s get going, said Pepine, goodbye.

Leaving? The Indian said.

Yep, said Pepine.

Oh, said the Indian.

We walked out into the hot sunshine and sizzled into Carmen’s seats. There was a hot afternoon silence in the