PART SIX
A GRINGO
The previous day Barton had taken a flight from Madrid Barajas International airport, destination Bogota. Avoiding unwanted attention he had slummed it in business class and comfortably ensconced in the new long haul Airbus A300-600 had slept for a good part of the twelve hour flight.
During his waking moments he contemplated the reasons for his sudden departure: it was a long needed vacation, he explained to himself. How long a break was another matter. Any outstanding business would be taken care of in his absence by the bank’s team pending future decisions.
The weather had been fine when the Iberia Airbus took off from Madrid: a clear blue sky and an outside temperature of ten degrees centigrade, and although the summits of the surrounding hills were white with snow, it was an improvement on London’s persistently damp, dismal, cold weather.
The next morning in Bogota he felt a distinct whiff of spring in the air, it was ten degrees warmer than Madrid. However it was not spring, Bogota was five hundred kilometres north of the equator at an altitude of 2,540 metres above the sea, where the maximum daytime temperature very rarely exceeded 20°C or sunk below 10°C.
After a little exploration in the city centre he paused on the terrace of a café named Juan Valdas, which according to his newly acquired guidebook was reputed to be one of the best coffee houses in the Colombian capital, which he was discovering as a noisy dusty city perched high on the Cordillera Oriental.
He studied the customers: business people taking a break; a Chinese girl, a tourist like himself; and a few young professionals. Some were looking at their smart phones. An older man was having a shoeshine, which explained the waxy smell of polish mixed with that of coffee hanging in the air.
He ordered a micro machiatta, the sachet of sugar was marked with the word Panela which he figured was some kind of cane sugar.
Juan Valdas was more like a Latino Starbucks, noisier, easy going in a different way. There was a constant coming and going; the animated chatter of mid-afternooners exchanging news with their business friends or simply take a pause.
They were not the poorest Colombians. The customer having his shoes polished nodded to the fifty year old shoeshine boy signalling an additional buff, and in doing so defined their respective roles. Yellow taxis and large SUVs rolled past on the narrow street. A couple of twenty-thirty year olds started canoodling. It was time to go, it seemed there was nothing much more to discover in Bogota.
He decided he would head north the next morning, in the direction of Villa de Leyva and Barichara, and returned to the hotel he booked a car rental with a little help from the front desk.
He needed to regenerate himself, he had enough of glass towers, offices and hotels, impersonal ostentatious surroundings. He had been living in a crystal bowl: surrounded by fawning service personnel, and those hoping that some of his accumulated wealth might rub off on them, hopeful deal makers, and those who had made it like himself, but whose lives were lost in trying to own the most expensive super car, the most expensive home with the most expensive wife, in the most expensive part of town.
In short the novelty had worn thin. He needed to feel what real life was about again: to be free of the never ending constraints and obligations. He had drifted apart from Sophie, he simply hadn’t had time to consecrate to building a lasting relationship, constantly flying back and forth between London, Paris and wherever, when he wasn’t heading off to Moscow or Shanghai.
It had got to the point where he felt he no longer controlled his own life. Fitzwilliams, Kennedy, Tarasov were caught on an infernal roller coaster, running from one appointment to another: meetings, conferences, receptions and always decisions to be made. Sifting data, deciding which information served to them by their subordinates was useful in a constant pursuit of profit and growth. Which country, commodity, currency or company to bet on. Where to build a new office tower, condominium, set-up a new manufacturing unit, close an old one, open a new market, it was an endless game of monopoly and to what end? At least that’s the way it seemed to him.
After visiting Villa De Leyva he continued to Barichara, two hundred and fifty kilometres south of Bogota in the Cordillera Oriental, there he found a small hotel surrounded by a courtyard garden. La Candillaria, a posada, had only seven rooms and apart from his the other six were vacant. On the square outside was a house where Humboldt had once sojourned and a few metres further a signpost pointed to Plaza Mayor: the town centre.
The picturesque seventeenth century town was a haven of peace, clean with little traffic and no crowds. During the tourist season there were probably many more visitors, but as it was it suited him fine and after a short stroll around the centre he decided to stay a couple of days more, and perhaps visit the surrounding countryside.
Barichara – Colombia
The weather was agreeably warmer than Bogota, the air more breathable: since leaving the capital he had descended one thousand metres. Early that evening sitting in Portales, a café under the centuries old arcade on the main square, sipping a glass of local tinto, it took little effort to imagine how people had lived in the old colonial town during the three or four hundred years that followed the Conquista.
Apart from the chatter the only other sound was the campanile ringing the Angelus in a nearby convent. There was a total absence of the kind of unnecessary attention he had become used to in the hotels and restaurants of big cities.
The next morning he took his breakfast in the posada’s small garden, surround by flowering shrubs and cactus. The silence was almost total, interrupted only by the chattering of small brightly coloured birds and the buzz of insects amongst the flowers The silence had a healing effect, clearing his cluttered mind of the perpetual and needless demands that had taken control his life. The same pressures he had sought to escape when he abruptly quit London in 2008, as the economic crisis closed in. At that time, after a chaotic year with too little peace, he found himself back in same trap, that all pervading race to make money, and more and more of it.
That morning in Barichara he set out to explore the stone paved streets lined with rows of low houses decorated with bright flowers, check-out the small shops and observe the passers-by going about their daily business. One or two friendly locals politely greeted him, they were evidently used to the presence of strangers.
He was a gringo and as such could not avoid being taken for a tourist, which he was, but not in the conventional sense, he liked to think, perhaps a nomad, a visitor from afar.
As lunch time approached he made a few attempts to put his Spanish to use. He had gleaned enough of the language during the property boom in Spain to be more or less conversant, then more recently in the Basque Country, which straddles France and Spain.
He stopped to buy a Panama, then checked out a few of the local shops and cafés. He was pointed to a small and picturesque courtyard on the corner of Plaza Mayor where he discovered three or four small places to eat for tourists. He chose a table under the shade of a gnarled tree. The menu was in Spanish and English, which helped, as the food was unfamiliar, not Spanish, and opted for grilled chorizo with yellow potatoes and a beer.
There was no longer any doubt, it was the low season, he had not seen more than a handful of tourists; so much the better, he thought sipping his Club Colombia. It was so different from his last fugue, seven years previously, when modern civilisation’s mad speed had caught up with him. At that time he had headed East. First Dubai, then India, before ending up in Thailand: the former he had fled following an outbreak of cholera, and in the latter, with its crowds of tourists, he had met Sophie.
Those places had been alien, his background and upbringing had little in common with those civilisations. Colombia, although it was different, many things were familiar: he quickly discovered his Spanish worked, and many if not all of the people were of European or mixed descent, with whom he could converse, evidently sharing the similar cultural values: history, religion, education and government.
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