OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  Ni Ni’s hands touched and stroked and satisfied the men but she felt nothing, sensed nothing through the empty years. Only once or twice in an Englishman’s clumsy, hurried embrace did she remember the architect. But he never came to rescue her. Then with luck the Thai Crime Suppression Division – in co-operation with the Commission for the Protection of Children’s’ Rights – raided her hotel in an operation stage-managed for the world’s press. The girls were arrested and interrogated for the cameras and Ni Ni, along with the other Burmese nationals, was sent to the penal reform institution in Pakkret and then deported. In Rangoon a doctor tested her blood. There were tablets and injections to be taken every day. The girls were told that they could go home as soon as their parents came to collect them. Some families were too poor to travel to the capital. No one came to claim Ni Ni.

  In front, behind. In front, behind. She worked the bamboo in pairs, picked up the right-hand weaver, moved it around the border. In the absence of any Burmese government help, a foreign charity established a sheltered workshop to reintegrate former prostitutes into society. There in the peaceful studio she trained to be a basket-maker, picking up the right-hand stakes, weaving the frayed strands of her life back into order. Her small sensitive fingers produced the workshop’s finest, most detailed work. The other women, who had chosen instead to learn to become secretaries or tailors, teased her, for the Burmese word hpa translates as both basket and whore. But Ni Ni worked on unbothered, even volunteering to draw other vulnerable girls into the training programme, so that they too might have a choice, so that they need never be trapped. In front, behind. Shape the form, trim off the ends. In the last summer of her short life Ni Ni had discovered that there were three things which most matter. First, how well did she love?

  ‘With both my hands,’ Ni Ni said, not lifting her eyes from the weaving but laughing at herself for an instant.

  Second, how fully did she live?

  ‘As best I could,’ she could only reply.

  Third, how much did she learn to let go?

  ‘Not enough,’ Ni Ni confessed. ‘Not enough.’

  There is an old story of a poor woman who came to Buddha weeping. ‘O Enlightened One,’ she cried, ‘my only daughter has died. Is there no way to bring her back to me?’

  Lord Buddha looked at her with compassion and replied, ‘If you bring me a basket from a house where neither parent nor child, relative or servant has ever died, I shall bring your daughter back to life.’ The woman searched for many months, travelled to many villages and towns, and when she returned Buddha asked her, ‘My daughter, have you found the container?’

  The woman shook her head and said, ‘No, I have not. The people tell me that the living are few, but the dead are many.’

  A Confederacy of Ghosts

  JASPER WINN (born Kent, 1959) grew up in West Cork, Ireland, which remains his home. He left school at age ten and rode horses, learnt to play guitar and to work with leather; all skills perhaps better suited to earlier times. But it was an upbringing that has shaped a lifetime of almost constant travel and writing. He lived and journeyed for eight months with nomadic Berbers, canoed the length of the Danube, and has ridden horses across more than twenty countries in five continents. His first book, Paddle (2011), is an account of kayaking alone the whole way around Ireland. www.jasperwinn.com

  A Confederacy of Ghosts

  JASPER WINN

  The trip started out as comedy, or at least farce. The scene was a small town called San Miguel de Allende, in northern Mexico, the time the turn of the millennium. The country’s itinerant pyrotechnicians were in high demand and early in the morning of New Year’s Eve, a team of men drive a battered van into town and set to work in San Miguel’s main plaza, constructing a tower of canes. This they tie together with string, strong enough for them to climb up and erect another storey above, and then to climb that to tie on a third. When they have finished, the tower is perhaps eight metres high, tapered to a point and with many arms sticking out. The men continue working all through siesta, wiring Catherine wheels, Roman candles, strings of fire-crackers and many sizes of rocket to the struts. By late afternoon they are lacing a web of homemade fuse wire between the fireworks. Finally the fuse is run across the paving stones to a small stage set up in one corner of the plaza.

  It feels good to be here, in rural Mexico, on the edge of the sierra and I have a notion of literally riding out to meet the new millennium – travelling alone and on horseback up into the hills. I’ll rent a horse for a few days and take off. Riding alone will allow space to reflect – to remember people, hear forgotten voices, meet strangers – all at a gentle trot.

  There is one problem. I had imagined it would be easy to arrange a cowboy-lite adventure in San Miguel, but it is proving hard to find a horse. The man with the most ideas is the shoe-shine who, from his wooden throne on the edge of the plaza gardens, directs me to a dude ranch doing horse trips, and an American woman who had buenos caballos. Both are a long walk away and both are wasted journeys. The former will rent a horse, but only at an hourly rate; the tough blonde yanqui horsewoman won’t trust a stranger with her horses at any price. After several hours of scuffing through dust I find myself back at the plaza needing a boot-shine; maybe that had been the plan all along. Dusk has fallen by the time he has conjured up a mirror shine with the last snap of his cloth.

  All evening a large but muted crowd has gathered in the plaza while a mariachi band toot and strum on stage. Most are too poor to do much beyond waiting for the fireworks, their mood one of mild curiosity, as if the millennium’s turning was an episode in the political season, like an election, and of equally little import. As midnight approaches, an official in a dark suit, the mayor perhaps, begins talking long and stridently. Then he lights the fuse and sparks and little flames sizzle across the cobbles to the tower and follow paths up and down the pyramid.

  Immediately the Catherine wheels and Roman candles erupt into great swirls of flame and fluorescent colour and with them the tower begins to sag. A firework has burned through a supporting leg and the whole edifice sinks from the vertical, transforming itself into a missile launcher that sends rockets firing in a screeching blaze just over the heads of the crowd and straight into the leaves of the shade trees. From there a large flock of black birds rises panicking from their roosts into the flak and smoke above the crowd, where they proceed to spatter everyone with a hail storm of watery bird shit.

  It is the strangest scene but one that the locals take in their stride and not long after midnight the plaza empties. I too begin walking back to my hotel but on the way come across two policemen riding horses down a side street. They are more cowboys than cops, with their ten-gallon hats, holstered pistols and chest-pocket badges, and are on patrol, clearing drunks, checking up on things.

  They stop when I hail, and seem friendly, so I raise the question of renting a horse – in fact, of renting one of their horses. Si, quizás came the response – maybe we could let you have a horse for a few days. Come see us tomorrow.

  SO ON THE FIRST DAY of the new millennium I head out to the San Miguel police stables – a ramshackle line of stalls, a bunkhouse and a tethering circle on barren ground on the edge of town. Raul and Luis, my police friends, are lying on camp-beds in the uncomfortable chill of a winter siesta in the mountains. Raul rouses himself, takes some ropes and catches up two horses, and asks me to choose between a small tough-looking grey and a strong chestnut gelding.

  I choose the big and raw-boned chestnut, who looks a hammer-headed cuss with his ears back but, I figure, will be a good partner for a few days’ travel into the hills and back again. The fee is a little over a hundred dollars, with an ancient rawhide and wood saddle, a curb bridle and a braided halter thrown in. The horse is to be back – right here – by sundown on the fourth day.

  I ready to leave, tying on minimum kit for travelling and sleeping out in the winter sierras: a length of rope, a nosebag, a water-skin, a small ditty-bag of coffee
and biscuits, a thick woollen serape as poncho and blanket. Raul offers advice. Asks if there’s a gun, a revolver, in amongst that kit. No? Says that most people would carry a gun riding out to the hills. And to reach those hills? Go on a straight line to San Luis and then beyond. Raul isn’t sure. ‘Alambre – wire. A lot of this country is fenced nowadays. You might have problems.’ A shrug. ‘Well, you’ll find out.’

  THE SHOD HOOVES of the horse clink on the cobbles riding into San Miguel. The horse has no name, so becomes Horse. It’s cold. My long coat is pulled tight. Hat brim down. From one hand dangles the lead-weighted rawhide whip. In the plaza the shoe-shine raises a hand.

  Then riding out of town again on the far side. Narrow streets. Then gaps in the houses. And yards growing in size till they become gardens and, further out, fields. And the houses become farms. Then the fields become scrub and cacti. And along both sides of the road are wire fences, with an overgrown stock trail squeezed between them and the tarmac. The horse’s shuffle gait scuffs up dust, and a bottle shatters at his kick, amid all the rubbish thrown from passing vehicles. But mostly the sound is the growing roar of a truck or pick-up far behind or up front, getting closer, then in sight, and suddenly abreast, often a blaring of horn, or a shout, sometimes jeers, and then the noise receding. Silence again. Far ahead the town of Rodriquez.

  Along the road, at regular intervals, are small shrines with crosses, dried flowers or small headstones, marking crash deaths. For one long stretch, half an hour of jog trot, a fire has burnt through the vegetation on both sides of the road leaving the bottles and beer cans and rocks and crosses standing out against ash and charcoal.

  Rodriquez is a one-truck town with a mission church, and a row of shack-shops selling sturdy work clothing and flimsy festival dress, soft drinks and snack foods. A chance to fill the nosebag with grain for Horse. I buy cheese, hard bread and a quart bottle of rum. A mile beyond the edge of town there’s a simple bar, a corrugated and adobe two-roomed hut with a plank nailed across two thin tree trunks outside as counter. There’s a hitching rail. A woman and four children stand in the doorway. They all move back into the room, out of sight, as I tie up Horse and loosen the cinch. Inside, eyes adjusting to the dark, I make out a feed store calendar, a crate of bottles, a rusty fridge, small boxes of cheap sweets. All the people have pulled back into the room behind this bar-room and closed the door. The sounds of whispering, a woman’s voice raised. A small girl maybe eight years old, bundled up in secondhand American clothes, is pushed out and edges up behind the counter. Dark eyes wide and unblinking.

  Hola, niña. ¿Que tal? No response.

  Dame una cerveza. She silently opens the fridge door, takes out a bottle, puts it unopened on the counter, takes the note and gives back a handful of change. Then she goes back into the room.

  I drink the beer outside, watching the trucks and jeeps passing. Then I swing up and ride off, still penned in by highway on one side and fence on the other. Towards evening, I turn onto a smaller road. The fences are now rickety; reused barbed wire strung between twisted branches, armfuls of thorns as stockades, hedges of cacti. Sometimes there’s no fencing at all, the land so poor that there’s little to keep in or out. I pass a couple walking on the road, a man and woman, walking one after the other, both carrying small bundles. The tipping of the hat brim, a raised hand, a called greeting gets no response. The man looks up briefly, in a sideways glance at the horse; the woman keeps her eyes down.

  With dusk there are more figures in the landscape, struggling from the fields back to this dust road and then along it. Some are herding a few goats, carrying tools. There are bright patches of irrigated fruit trees. Maize stubble. Worked land. Small rough houses and shacks at the end of paths. I’m looking for a place to tether the horse and sleep but this landscape is too busy. One cabin, though, is surrounded by signs of small prosperity: old machinery, a maize stack bigger than the rest, animals. A lined-faced, powerful man comes across the yard, gesturing. I swing off the horse to a suspicious, cold greeting, but the horse is unsaddled and tied to a tree and given an armful of maize stalks.

  I’m shown to an almost empty room where I lay the serape across the bare iron bedstead. In the cabin next door there’s a seat by a fire of burning thorn branches and a tin plate of beans, and water. I pull out the bottle of rum and hand it across. The man talks little. His wife more. She has a long story of the first time she waded the Rio Grande to work in the States and the money she’d made. She shows a photo of herself, smiling, in a Californian kitchen. Then a far shorter account of her second crossing, being caught, returned to Mexico. And now here she is.

  In the morning I offer a few notes, a fair price. The man’s expression shows both surprise and resignation at the amount; it might have been less, it might have been nothing, it might have been so much more. As I’m saddling up in the bitter cold before light, the woman brings out a hot flat bread and a mug of bitter coffee. The man – Miguel – points across the fields in the direction of San Luis. ‘There is only one way nowadays,’ he says, ‘but when I was a boy you could ride this country straight in any direction you wanted to go. Now, señor, all the land is wired.’

  TO A STRANGER there seem many more ways than just one. Riding across country there are innumerable small fields, thorn hedges and stands of cacti and cane. Tracks peter out, or stop at walls or locked gates, or lead to dusty cabins either empty of people or with small children and elderly women pulling back into the dark and closing the door. Those men and younger women not away working in the cities, or in the States, are in the fields bent over hoes, wrapped in old, ragged clothing against the chill.

  Asked directly, a man straightens himself from the earth and elaborates a route of minute details, each rock and twisted tree and distorted cactus and dried-out arroyo a landmark. But only the larger scale of the sierra on the horizon makes sense as Horse jogs on. And the crosses and shrines, even here where there is no road, still marking untimely deaths. A rattlesnake bite? Falls from horses? The sudden stab of a knife? There is no way of knowing. Most are old-looking. Rusty if metal. Eroded or tumbled down if stone. A tin can with pieces of wire spilling out may once have been filled with the stalks of paper flowers. Some crosses have empty tequila or rum or beer bottles laid beside them.

  A track twists direction, down from the badlands into a valley, funnelled by more fences. A distant roar. Then an acrid smell on the breeze. The track becomes a dirt road, then badly paved, then busier, then T-junctions with the six-lane Highway 57 from Mexico City to the border. There is no escape. Impassable fences and walls line the land. Following another stock trail, parallel to the road, deposits me amid drifts of rubbish, auto repairs and tyre shops. Angry guard dogs run out, snarling and snapping at Horse’s heels. Trucks and trailers rumble by. Cowboy pick-ups filled with sombreros, and moustaches, playing mariachi fanfares on their horns.

  We come to a truck stop on the edge of San Luis where tens of cargo lorries are parked up beside lines of bars and cantinas and fast food stands with tacos, caldrons of beans, brains on toast, ice-box bottled beer. Horse, tied to a post, breathes in the diesel fumes and dust while I sit on a bar stool with truck drivers and bus pilots – Mexico’s new cowboy drovers. Confident men talking about rodeos, and America and women and their families.

  It’s a chance to buy food. A tin of fish, bread and cheese. A few apples. I stuff them into a bag hung from the saddle and, as I pull away onto a side road, the silence slowly descends. I stop to negotiate with a campesino in a field for a bundle of corn straw, and tie it behind the saddle.

  I sleep out tonight, when caught by darkness, barely hidden in a stand of trees, unsettled by the roads and trucks and the fences and thinking about the downcast eyes, and the refusal of greetings. Horse is tied close, browsing through the straw, his body heat and the sounds of his stomach rumblings and breathing crossing the few yards of cold darkness and silence to my rough bed.

  I MAKE ANOTHER dawn start. There’s no reason to linge
r so I roll up the blanket and chew stale bread and hard cheese whilst saddling up, walk the first few miles beside the horse to get warm. Then, mounted again, I ride down into a dry river bed and climb the crest of a hill to reach a valley and in its shelter a hacienda. A house with the grandeur of a château, its windows are shuttered; it has walled gardens, a stable courtyard, a bull ring and a church. It is run down but not abandoned. Through the church doors there’s a glimpse of a black-shrouded woman kneeling in prayer. And riding out from the gates of the courtyard is a vaquero on a strong cow-pony, his ancient big-horned saddle with ornately tooled leather wings to deflect thorns and cactus spines.

  Our eyes are on the same level and he looks straight, from under his hat brim, over his moustache, taking me in. He says he will show me the way to the sierra, but as we ride there is no talk. Whistling up two dogs, spinning the pony – Venga, charro – he leads the way past the house, up a track, into a maze of tracks amongst head-high cacti. After half an hour we come to a break in a fence – a tangle of sticks and wire – that is the only way through in many miles. The vaquero points out a track leading straight towards jagged peaks and deep gorges on the skyline. Turning, he rides away and back, the dogs at his heels.