Cornucopia

by John Francis Kinsella

  *

  Legends dating back to the time of the Conquistadors told of a city in the Moskitia jungle of Honduras filled with fabulous treasure, the existence of which was first reported by Hernán Cortés to King Charles V of Spain in 1526.

  The idea of were-jaguars sent Kennedy’s mind into a flurry of wild imaginings. Hong Kong and China had become everyday, business had become a routine of meetings, crises, and even more meetings to overcome more crises. At heart he was an adventurer and the creeping boredom that had often dogged his existence was catching up with him again. He had achieved more than he had ever expected, and his marriage to Lili and his wonderful daughter were the centre of his life, but it was time to take a break, explore something new, and the idea of Colombia and Central America suddenly reached out to him like an irresistible temptation.

  Moskitia jungle – Honduras

  The very thought of a lost city deep in the jungle of Honduras with to boot a cache of ancient treasures in the form of gold jewellery, statuary and pottery filled him with excitement. A city that had lain untouched for centuries, its very existence unsuspected by archaeologists, an unknown civilisation, untouched by looters.

  The city lay in a remote valley in La Moskitia, a vast area of swamps, rivers and mountains in one of the few last regions on the planet to be scientifically explored by man.

  Since his school days in a damp, cold, windy, corner of Limerick City, isolated from the world on the west coast of Ireland, Pat had been fascinated by stories of explorers in South American jungles. He had once won a prize at school: a book, The Fawcett Expedition, which had fired his imagination and in which he could escape the dreaded Jesuits who had educated their cares by force of the stick.

  Other expeditions like that of Theodore Morde’s had explored South and Central American jungles in search of Eldorado and lost civilisations in the 1920s. Some like Fawcett’s never returned. Morde did however return from La Moskitia loaded with pre-Colombian artefacts and stories of a monkey god. Tragically Morde committed suicide taking the secret of the lost city to his grave.

  Archaeologists believed that many lost cities were hidden in the dense primeval rain forests of La Moskitia, part of a lost civilization comparable to that of the Mayans, undisturbed for centuries.

  PUTIN

  Michael Fitzwilliams was upset for two reasons: firstly Vladimir Putin had not disappeared, and secondly, not only was he back, but he was rattling his sabre again. In a menacing show of force he had launched a series of full scale military manoeuvres in the Arctic. Nearly forty thousand men, fifty ships, and more than one hundred aircraft were mobilised for the exercise.

  Putin had resurfaces after a rumour-filled absence of eleven days looking as rumbustious and bellicose as ever. The previous evening Russian TV had presented a documentary, entitled Homeward Bound, during which Putin said he had been ready to put its nuclear weapons on alert during the Crimean crisis.

  If this was true, not mere bluster, then this man was truly dangerous, Fitzwilliams bitterly told himself, cursing the day he had blindly walked into his banking arrangement with Sergei Tarasov.

  After all it was not as though Russia had been threatened by a small and enfeebled Ukraine, which had been coaxed into surrendering its Soviet era nuclear arsenal in 1994. Putin justified the annexation of Crimea by declaring it was historically Russian and its population Russians, which was why the West was in no mood to start a world war over the issue.

  The idea that a world leader could even think in terms of world war shocked Fitzwilliams; Russia was not North Korea and Putin not Kim Jong-un, he hoped.

  Fitzwilliams feared Putin was veering towards a Stalinian type of autocratic rule. It seemed to him a leader that paraded himself half naked in the Siberian wilderness had some serious identity problems, a man who had told David Frost after his election: Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize it as an enemy.

  Times had changed.

  Putin justified his position by accusing the West of systematically, making decisions behind his back, placing them before a fait accompli, and especially NATO’s expansion eastwards with the deployment of military forces at their borders. Which Fitzwilliams, being a reasonable man, had to admit was true and did not augur well for his bank’s future.

  A QUIRK OF FATE

  The mere thought of being part of City & Colonial was an idea totally abhorrent to the independent minded Barton. It was almost seven years since he had first met Michael Fitzwilliams, he had remembered it well, on the Island of Santorini in the Aegean, where the banker had been invited, amongst a group of hand-picked guests, by Sergei Tarasov for his birthday party.

  Some months later, by a quirk of fate, Barton had found himself seated next to Fitzwilliams on a flight from Miami to Pointe-á-Pitre on the French island Guadeloupe. Both had been headed for the Commonwealth of Dominica1, or Dominica for short, for which there were no direct flights. The banker had delighted to meet him again and offered him a ride on his private charter to Canefield in Dominica, a twenty minutes flight to the south. It was the start of their friendship and Barton’s role as advisor to the banker.

  Later Tom Barton, as a successful private investor, managed a number of hedge funds specialised in property and other assets for and in collaboration with the bank.

  The speed and manner in which Fitzwilliams had been eschewed of his position at the head of INI had shocked Barton profoundly, reminding him why he himself had abruptly quit the City of London seven years earlier.

  City & Colonial was a monster and many had advocated its dismemberment, but as one of the world’s largest banks with its headquarters in the heart of the City, it was emblematic of the London’s role as one of the world’s leading financial centres. For the Tories it was a matter of British pride, but beyond that powerful backers of both the Conservative and Labour parties held interests in the bank and accounts at its offshore branches.

  In a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations concerning offshore accounts managed by City & Colonial entities for party grandees, Cameron had ranted: For thirteen years they, meaning Labour, sat in the Treasury, and did nothing about tax transparency, nothing about tax dodging, nothing about tax avoidance.

  It was a blatant case of the pot calling the kettle black and clearly the British establishment was not about to kill their golden goose which had been so obliging to them and their friends, as well as thousands of other wealthy Brits, by helping them to dodge the taxman.

  As for Barton himself he was a non-dom. His declared place of residence was Dominica in the Caribbean; the small island situated to the south of French Guadeloupe. He held a Dominican passport and owned a villa on the island at the Emerald Pool, a luxury residential development that had been promoted by Malcolm Smeaton and financed by Fitzwilliams’ Caribbean bank, which fortuitously had not fallen into the grabbing hands of City & Colonial.

  INI’s debacle had left Barton profoundly disgusted with politics and banking, which in spite of that had not prevented him from becoming a very rich man. Besides the fabulous income from his property fund he had garnered profits of between one hundred and two hundred percent on the American stock market over the previous five years and his personal property investments had racked up huge gains.

  In a certain manner he had simply proved that the rich always got richer. All it required was being rich to start with, preferably being born rich. The alternative was being extraordinarily lucky, and luck had played an important role in his success. All that talk about hard word was pure nonsense, he had observed building workers and fishermen from Asia to the Caribbean toiling under atrocious conditions for slave wages and no other future than poverty, old age and death.

  Men such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Tarasov, or more modestly himself, had perhaps put in a lot of long hours, but working in fine airconditioned office in San Francisco,
London or even Moscow was not the same as living a fly blown hovel in the sand under the burning heat of the sun.

  Who wouldn’t change his crowded commuter train for a private jet. But of course wealth did not create happiness, though he like others had discovered it certainly made life more liveable.

  He could have never imagined his new world from behind the glass façade of a tower in the City, or even from his Caribbean island home. The eternal Andean spring of Barichara, its warmth, its plenitude, an almost familiar language and culture, a world of where business values were based on tradition and trust.

  It was Lola who had saved him from another odyssey of aimless wandering, in search of a world beyond his grasp, a world he could not clearly define. She had helped him discover a life he had not thought existed. His image of Colombia had been that of Pablo Escobar, cocaine, drug wars, revolution and the Farc2.

  At the height of the war against the Farc, the Cordillera Oriental had been relatively quiet. The nearest rebel strongholds were in Boyaca and to the east in Yopal, and the vast empty plains of Vichada that formed the frontier region with Venezuela in the Orinoco basin.

  Fuerza armadas revolucionarias Colombia

  Don Pedro told Barton how in the past he had lived in fear for his daughter’s life, Lola’s mother, who had attended school and university in Bogota at a time when kidnapping had reached epidemic levels where children of wealthy parents were accompanied to school by bodyguards in bulletproof SUVs.

  “The assassination of judges and prosecutors had become routine, daily bombings and kidnappings, I had no choice but to send Lola’s mother to Miami, where she went to university at Tallahassee.”

  It explained why he had chosen to send Lola to school in Barichara as the war, which had until then been mainly limited to the mountains and jungles of Colombia, started to move to the towns and cities.

  “The negotiations with the Farc in Cuba, I hope, will end more than fifty years conflict. Santos will put an end to coca plantations. As a Colombian I am sorry to say more than half a million people of my countrymen died during this war against the Farc and the drug cartels that financed it.”

  “A tragedy. Let’s hope Santos is successful.”

  “Did you know Santos studied at the London School of Economics?” It was a rhetorical question. “Anyway, it was he who started the talks with the help of Chavez.”

  “Chavez!”

  “Yes, Venezuela’s late president. Whatever you think of him, he could influence the Farc, and Santos believed the war should be ended at any cost, even by having to call Chavez his new best friend.”

  Barton smiled.

  “The result as you can see has been miraculous. People are happier, our economy is growing at an annual rate of eight percent, tourists are coming to Colombia and we even have immigrants,” he said giving Barton a friendly slap on the back.

  “There is still some violence.”

  “Unfortunately that will continue for some time. The Farc has lost a great part of its support already, and when Colombians see life improving … the fruit of peace, any remaining support for the Farc will wither. Santos has imposed no conditions. He has the backing of Cuba and their renewed relations with the US makes it all very positive. Venezuela has its own problems today and Maduro has his hands full.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “There are some sticking points … reconciliation, disarmament and war crimes. But you British have helped us there.”

  “British?”

  The agreement with the Farc was inspired by the framework agreement with the IRA, and the British government has helped with the terms.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t have much experience at making peace. Our country has a long bloody history with many wars and civil wars, the loss of Panama, coups and political assassinations.

  Why were the friendly people of Latin America so prone to violence? Barton asked himself, perhaps it was something to do with the violence of the Conquista.

  “You see, the campesinos, peasants as you call them, far from the big cities, were forgotten about by our politicians. They rose up and formed guerilla groups and launched a full-scale civil war in the early sixties. It was the fashion then … Vietnam, Algeria and other so called anti-imperialist wars - when Khrushchev and Mao backed revolutionary movements for their own ideological ends.”

  To Barton’s mind there was no doubt the world had gotten smaller and more violent. He had only to look at the Arab Spring and the Muslim world, where many nations had fallen into dysfunctionality: a consequence of wars spawned directly or indirectly by the transgenerational festering of the Palestinian question.

  Colombia was far from those conflicts, its own war with the Farc was a vestige of the Cold War confrontation, an ideological war in which Communist and Western ideologies clashed over the course of half a century - from the moment when Winston Churchill declared in 1945: an Iron Curtain has fallen in Europe separating East from West; until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

  The conflict with the revolutionary guerilla movement was a consequence of enduring inequalities that left great swaths of Colombia’s population in misery, a fact that political and more privileged classes, mostly city dwellers and landowners, chose to ignore, sadly the case in much of Latin American.

  Such conflicts had ravaged the countries of Central America, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as Cuba in the Caribbean. Only when they finally ran their course could a new age of prosperity take root, where freely elected governments could settle their internal inequalities democratically. There were of course Argentina and Venezuela, where interested, or unrealistic politicians dragged their nations into repeated economic crises.

  As Asia, led by China, practised a form of mercantilism which thrived on the willingness of its working classes to improve their condition, the Arab world burned. The Gulf states had failed to reform their oil and gas export based economies, dancing while they ignored the plight of the masses in their more populous neighbours, stoking the fires of revolt, sectarian conflict and terror.

  The flames spread through North Africa and the Middle East, as Iran’s Ayatollahs coveted the idea of becoming a regional nuclear power, and Russia fanned the flames as it heeded the call of a twenty-first century version of its traditional autocratic nationalism.

  1. Commonwealth of Dominica, a small independent Caribbean nation, not to be confused with the Dominican Republic

  2. Fuerza armadas revolucionarias Colombia

  CARTAGENA – COLOMBIA

  It was not Cannes, but the Cartagena International Film Festival, which in addition to being much more exotic, was the gateway to the Latin American market with its six hundred million cinema goers. The city’s fifty-fifth film festival was a major cultural event in the Hispanic world with almost three hundred films competing for a golden India de Catalina.

  One of the favourite’s was Rodrigo García’s film Last Days in the Desert, a fictional portray of Jesus Christ’s forty days in the Desert, starring Ewan McGregor in a double role, of both Jesus and Lucifer. Garcia, the son of Colombia’s literary giant and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez, was the film’s writer, director and producer.

  Strangely, the film was produced in the USA, in English, starring a British actor in the lead role, and Ciaran Hinds, another Brit as the father, Tye Sheridan as the son, and Ayelet Zurer, an Israeli an actress, as the mother. It wasn’t a Colombian film, and perhaps it wasn’t supposed to be.

  Pat Kennedy was excited by the presence of the Irish and Scots actors; O’Connelly by Rodrigo García, son of the famous writer, and writer in his own right; and Liam Clancy by the glamour of it all.

  O’Connelly had been a special guest at the Cartagena Hay Literature and Arts Festival that January, which in previous years had invited authors such as Carlos Fuentes, Ian McEwen, Salman Rushdie and of course Colombia’s own Gabriel García Márquez. This together with knowing Ewen McGrego
r, and a little string pulling by Don Pedro, brought the INI gang together at the awards ceremony and gala diner.

  Pat had been surprised when Barton recounted how the Hay festival had been founded in the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye, known for its forty odd libraries, which had been organizing book festivals all over the world for near on thirty years: literary get-togethers that Bill Clinton once remarked were Woodstocks of the mind.

  Pat was delighted to be present at the film festival, which with the presence of Scottish and Irish actors seemed, at least to him, to have a Celtic air about it. Faced with the glorious past of the nations where he found himself more and more frequently, in particular China and Russia, he felt a pressing need to discover his own origins, and in the quest for his own cultural identity had almost become obsessed with modern Celtic culture, and in particular with the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas.

  To his growing annoyance foreigners always confused Ireland with England, plus the fact that Celtic history and culture were almost unheard of beyond the fringes of Western Europe.

  In his search for a modern icon, whose poetry he could cite, Pat had rejected the best known Irish candidate: Brendan Behan. The Irish bard did not fit in with the image of modern Ireland, at least as far as Pat was concerned; his mother had frowned on the man as a drunk, a disgrace to Ireland: Behan was remembered for his drinking, wit and literary talent, and for many Irish people in that order.

  Pat’s booze driven compatriot, Behan, had been a fierce Irish Republican, at times a poet, mainly in Gaelic, mostly a play-write and novelist, but always a drinker, who preferred to talk about what he was going to write, famous for his quips: I only drink on two occasions … when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.

  At times perspicacious, Behan had once said, in the days before Ireland escaped the impoverished destiny forced upon it by London, and at a time when the Irish Church prayed for the conversion of China: The Chinese are more Christian than the Irish … at least they provide free health to their people.

  Whatever the public criticism or acclaim, Pat saw Behan as a man of the past, the wars were over and good riddance to them and their horrors, things that brought forth the kind of men and brutality that Pat had always taken pains to avoid. Ireland had changed, it was modern, a vision Pat had valued since his youth; he had pushed the impoverished, dark, grim, Ireland of the past from his mind, always reaching out to future, which he had often discovered lay beyond its shores.

  Seen from China or Russia, Ireland was an insignificantly small place, and its drunken Gaelic poet as part of the Eireann Isle’s folklore best forgotten, along with many of the violent Republicans in Ireland’s post-independent history, which did not however mean Pat condoned England’s role in Ireland: there was good and bad, but as a proud though rational Irishman, the time to move on was long past.

  Of course Dylan Thomas was pretty good at riotous drinking, but his poetry and fine declamation inspired Pat. The Chinese were always asking him to join in their Karaoke sessions, which he did willing, he was anything but shy, but in his search for something Irish or more specifically Celtic, which made Ireland seem greater vis-à-vis the Chinese, he had discovered, for more serious occasions, the Welsh poet.

  ABUNDANCE

  As an economist and historian, Francis was his own witness. He had grown up in the Ireland of the nineteen-fifties, a stagnant, narrow, poor country, held back by the clergy and gentry, governed by Éamon de Valera, whose theocratic dream of a rural, non-materialist, Catholic Ireland, led to backwardness and inaction. Then, in the half century that followed, Ireland was miraculously transformed into a land of plenty. Sure there was the crisis, but what was remarkable was the little effect it had on abundance; the damage was in reality a crisis of confidence, which, with a little time would be overcome, healed.

  Were Ireland’s achievements all that miraculous? In a way yes, but the miracle was not specifically Irish. It had occurred to almost every nation on earth to a greater or lesser degree. A phenomena that first it had been slow, then coming in waves, and the waves were even lapping the shores of Black Africa.

  As a boy on his visits to England, Francis had not noticed a great deal of difference between the life of his comfortable upper middle class Irish family and that of his cousins in London, where the working class were still to reap the benefits of Britain’s post war society, about to embark on the road to material prosperity.

  He remembered the small town of his grandparents in County Wexford, sixty miles south of Dublin. He had spent many happy summer holidays in Enniscorthy, where Saturday night entertainment for both young and old consisted of an evening at the tumbledown cinema on Slaney Street, where outdated films were changed once a week, and where after the show a packet of chips, generously sprinkled with salt and vinegar, from the chippy opposite the cinema, was considered a treat. Apart from the cinema there was little else except the town’s pubs and the occasional dance, the latter strictly observed by the parish priest.

  In 2015, a motorway linked Dublin to Enniscorthy and every Irish man and woman owned a car, an unimagined luxury in the fifties when the common folk did not own motor vehicles.