On The Run

It brought feelings of deja-vu about, recalling all his hurried trips around Cork before his trips to the continent. But when everything was done he reflected that he might be able to revisit some time, under a different name and a different identity, as no-one had done any DNA tests on him yet. He dragged his bag up to the top of Patrick’s Hill and admired the view, all the landmarks each like a whole packet of madelines to him. Perhaps, he rationalised, it was the biting December breeze that brought a tear to his eye. But he knew that it probably wasn't.
He was on the ferry a few hours later. He was surprised that it was still running, what with all the low-budget airlines and what have you. T’was melancholy, as t’was always, as if the ghosts of all the navvies who’d made the trip before himself were hanging round wishing they were back in sentience, singing drunkenly about what life used to be like. When it got dark he put some music on his discman, though little of it got through to his racked consciousness. The ship he sailed on seemed to him the epitome of everything that was bad about the west, a giant, hulking brute of a thing where the smell of car fumes permeated one tacky, dishevelled deck after another.
Britain was like that too, at least the bits he could see from the Motorway, huge trucks carrying stuff to warehouses that were already full of stuff that people didn't need, Stygian service stations where everything was so tacky and ephemeral that they almost seemed to predict imminent apocalypse.
When he finally got to London he got the Northern line up to Kilburn, found a phone box, rumbled around for some change in his pocket and made that phone call to RTE, whose phone number he’d hastily scrawled on a piece of paper in his pocket. He put on his best northern accent and told the person on the other end of the line that Seamus McIonnractaigh had been abducted by members of the Cork branch of the CIRA and was going to be held indefinitely. When asked, panickingly, what the reasons were for his abduction and if there was a possibility of his release, he just said that McIonnractaigh was a traitor to the movement and couldn't be allowed to live, then put the phone down. Paranoically, he ate the piece of paper, then shuddered, though it was probably by no means the worst piece of food he could have eaten on that island. Then he got the tube to Heathrow.
He was way early, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He went into a newsagent and had a read of some of the British papers. With a mixture of anger and relief, he found that his story still wasn't news there, that he could float around pretending to be a Greek without anyone batting an eyelid. Then he looked at some porn, as he always did on his visits here, a pleasure that was still denied him in modern, progressive, forward-looking twenty-first century Celtic Tiger Ireland. He didn't know what the laws were in Catholic Latin America, though he imagined that there was a lively black market for everything. Still, he had time to kill, and this way it died happy. Then he had one of those moments of panic that he always had when he travelled, when he realised that he was going into an information vacuum for seven or eight hours and that he wouldn't be able to get any info on whether he was alive or not. He went round looking for an internet terminal and when he couldn't find one, submitted to the ignominy of asking someone at an information desk. He got directions in one of those English accents that managed to be deferent and condescending at once, then followed them and logged onto the Ireland.com site. It seemed that he had been taken to an unknown destination and that it looked likely that he was going to be killed, though an extensive Garda search was underway. His distraught wife was refusing to see any of the media, his family were refusing to comment, other Sinn Fein TDs were condemning the action, loyalists were crowing that this proved that the IRA hadn't fully embraced democratic principals, blah blah blah. He emailed his distraught wife worrying if she’d be able to get out of the house to answer it and wished that he’d bought a computer, though it was hardly worth crying over that particular piece of spilt milk.
The flight actually wasn't that bad. He tried to watch the schmazly Hollywood movie that they were showing but after a few minutes was lulled by the gentle hum of the engines and the endlessly recirculating carbon dioxide into a deep slumber. He got woken up a couple of hours later by a thin, orange stewardess offering him various combinations of chemicals by way of nourishment, and shook his feet and wrists in the way that he’d read you were supposed to if you didn't want to get DVT. He took a look at his watch, saw that it was just coming up to 6 in the evening back home, that there would probably be something about him on the news, that his wife was probably holed up in the house, that she was afraid to go out and check her email and wouldn't have known if he’d made it to the airport OK or even go out and do some shopping. He realised that if they had a computer in their house that she could order stuff online from the supermarket (quelle irony), and cursed his selfishness and lack of prescience. Then he fell back asleep.
When he woke he was below the equator, above Brazil, looking down on it’s lush verdure like some transcendent deity admiring his work and seeing that it was good. He kept looking out for the mighty Amazon, having heard that it’s convoluted meandering were visible from the air, though when he did spot a cascade of brown liquid gushing towards the Atlantic he was disappointed to find out that it was something called the Sao Francisco. Soon after that, the plane began it’s descent, as if Gaia was sucking her children back down to her bosom like bastard children of Icarus. The masses of green below him started to morph into individual forests and trees. Then, through the smog and the mist, he started to see the sprawling, tumescent, osmotic suburbs of Rio, his head swirling with the thought that city was home to millions of people, all of whom had dreams and desires and fantasies but only a few of whom he would ever have even the most cursory, tangential, fleeting contact with.
Then the plane touched down and he waited in that strange limbo for it to diffidently crawl up the runway and seem to flirt with the arrival bays and then finally settle on one. He waited for everyone to get off the plane before grabbing his bag, so small that he’d been allowed take it on board, yet containing everything he thought he needed to live for the next couple of years. He felt the blast of heat that hit him as he stepped off the plane, something he’d only felt before when he passed an extractor fan releasing it’s gases into the atmosphere. Yet within a week he’d feel the same way about blasts of air-con escaping from shops to dissipate into the humid equatorial air. He queued for his passport to be stamped, and when the tall, thin, tanned man on the other side of the glass looked at his name and told James/Seamus that Brazil used to have a soccer player called Socrates, he nodded, and almost said that he used to play for UCD back in Ireland but thought better of it. And then he left the liminal portal and entered the real Brazil.
Naively, once he got out onto the steps of the airport, he opened his lonely planet and negated any small chance he might have had of not looking like a tourist, and a gaggle of touts surrounded him like paparazzi, each trying to convince him that their hotel was better and cheaper, dissing each other in hostile, machoistic tones. Reluctantly, he eventually went with one of them, and as he passed through the barrios where lean young men walked by wearing those tight shorts that sports players used to wear in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, where dreamy, bronzed girls let the coastal zephyrs blow through their rich, thick curls, where kids kicked plastic footballs around, he pondered on how it had come to this, how young men in a country where nature should provide people with all the things they needed, should be forced to scramble like lepers for tourist dollars. How was he, who came from a land where only grass and trees and some inedible wild flowers grew naturally, so much richer than them?
After a twenty-minute white-knuckle ride through the city, he was in the backpacker zone, where there seemed to be as many tall, blond Scandinavians and fat, sunburned Germans as there were thin, dark, locals. He was dropped off at a hotel where the taxi driver was given his commission and Seamus was given a room. It was adequate, having a fan and an apparent lack of cockroaches. He lay down and tried to figure out what he should do first, email Jenny or get those inoculations that he didn't want to risk getting back home. After pondering for about an hour, he decided he’d better get those shots first. Making sure his belt bag was tightly wrapped around his waist, he made his way out onto the street and tried to find his way to a medical centre nearby. Still looking confused and wide-eyed, he must have looked easy meat for the taxi drivers who hovered around the area, yet within half an hour he was in the clean, modern-looking medical centre that the lonely planet had recommended.
Inside, the doctor was astonished to find that he hadn't had the shots before he left. Seamus explained, calmly, with that facility for telling complete lies without batting an eyelid that he’d acquired in his days as a politician, that there had been massive, swinging cuts in the Greek health service as the country struggled to pay for the Olympics in 2004 and that he couldn't really afford to pay for the shots back home, making an effort to shake his head as if wondering what the country of Hippocrates had come to. The doctor, who didn't seem 100% fluent in English, nodded his head and quoted a price. Seamus gulped and then nodded, sat back in his chair and let the doctor stick needles into him, like he was part of some experiment. And perhaps he was, as mass tourism was like some huge test of the world’s ecosystem, and a tourist was what he basically was right now.
He thanked the doctor, in Spanish, hoping that that language was vaguely similar to Portuguese, handed him the money, and made his way out onto the street, hoping that he could pass as a local, and find his way back to the hotel, and find a cybercafe on the way back. He was able to do the latter and former, and quickly logged onto his email account. It was slow, and he passed a few minutes playing minesweeper, before he was shocked to find that his mother had emailed him to ask if he was still alive. He was afraid to open the message as he thought that that might indicate that he was still alive, but realised that he would have to get a new email address and let the old one die after six months. Then he looked vainly for a message from Jenny, of which there was none, so he looked at his watch and reckoned that it was still to early for her to get out of the house without being pestered by the media. Then he logged onto the Ireland.com site to find out the latest news about himself. It seemed that his captors had made no more contact with the media and that they had no interest in a ransom and that the next time anyone expected to see him was when his grave was dug up. Then, to his surprise, he read that his family had made a statement that none of them ever had anything to do with Sinn Fein and that he’d been effectively disowned as a result of joining them, but that they believed that although he was a committed environmentalist with a strong sense of social justice, that he had nothing to do with any of the recent ecoterrorist activity, that it was all a sinister Sinn Fein plot to oust him from the party when they found out that he wasn't a true believer in the nationalist cause. The Sinn Fein leadership had denounced this as laughable, though Seamus himself didn't know how to respond, except by a sort of endrogenous queasiness.
By now he was hungry, and he looked in his lonely planet to see where he could find veggie food, though the answer seemed to be, ‘not in Brazil’. He hoped he wouldn't have to compromise his values too much, the idea that having a vegetarian diet with the right combination of nutrients was a luxury that only people in the west could afford was something he found hard to bear. Eventually he gave up looking for a place and hoped that the words sono vegatariano wouldn't be met with too much amused contempt. He sat down near the fan in a touristy-looking place and managed to persuade someone to serve him some rice with beans in a mild chilli sauce. While he waited, he let the breeze from the fan blow through his hair, which was now growing back pretty rapidly, so much so that the person who looked back at him from the mirror wouldn't seem a stranger any more, that this mad, crazy year of 2001 was going to be over and that he could finally stop pretending to be someone he wasn't and go back to being himself, except when he was crossing borders. In fact, if he grew old, he might look back and regard the whole last ten years of his life as a hiatus in which he fell in love with words and ideas after which he went back to the land, which would always be his primo amorata, or whatever they said here, in Portuguese-speaking land.
It was the time of day when the thin, tanned denizens of the city were making their way back from wherever it was they were, fancifully, he imagined it was the beach, where they were playing volleyball or soccer all day in those tight speedos they wore and were going home to slip into something looser. But he knew that really they were probably doing some shitty jobs that they hated, like almost all of the rest of the world, in shipyards or in steel factories, or adding chemicals to food to make it palatable to their friends in the north. And yet they still looked romantic, riding home on their motorbikes, their taut biceps clenching under their tight T-shirt sleeves, their bronzed, hairless legs pushing on the pedals. He would have to get some tight shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops and then go to the beach to work on his tan so he would have more hope of blending in.
The chilli didn't turn out to be his idea of ‘mild’. He had to keep sipping from the mango juice he ordered with it to cool himself down, trying not to make too much of a show of himself. Then he started walking back to his hotel and trying to take in all the sights around him, though he knew that he wouldn't remember every one, perhaps the occasional, exceptionally beautiful women would leave a lasting imprint on his mind, or his first glimpse of monkeys fucking in the street, otherwise, when he tried to recall this day if and when he was looking back on his life, it would seem like a hazy, Monetish blur.
He found his way back to the hotel easily enough, having only to fend off a number of taxi drivers who seemed too eager to offer him their services, leaving him wonder why they couldn't emigrate to Cork and work the busy Two a.m. shift. When he got back to his room he turned the fan on full blast, castigating himself for doing so, knowing that his distant ancestors managed quite well in similar conditions without them, before they got in their heads to migrate to cold, rainy Europe. He put some music on his discman and dozed off. When he got up it was getting dark, he went out to go to that cybercafe again, and felt scared for the first time. He walked with his arms folded, clutching his belt-bag with one of his wrists, knowing that he was still so pale that people would take him for a rich gringo. He wished he’d made friends with one of the other backpackers in the hotel but he was still too tired, too jetlagged and too spacey to make such an effort. So he walked alone, through the streets which seemed to become more threatening as the sun made it’s way closer to the forests beyond the suburbs. He could feel his heart beating faster, but knew that once he got into a cybercafe it would be like returning to some universal, primordial womb. Five minutes later he was reading this:


Date: 17 December 2002 16.39 PST
From: “Jenny MacIonnractaigh”
To: “Socrates”
Subject: I’m Okay

Seamus,
Glad 2 no d@ u made it OK. Bin holed up n here all day, I really tink d@ I need 2 buy a computer 4 myself; mite even need 2 go & live sumwhere n d countryside & get sum sort f job; I tink its gonna B rilly borin up here without u, every1 knows my face as its bin n d $£%$& TV so much & every time I try 2 leave d house I get surrounded by a gang f hax. I tink f I earn sum £ f my own den I’ll b able 2 send u all d £ u need & still B able 2 get by myself. I cant wait for u 2 B declared dead so I can cum down dere with u. What’s it like down dere? Is it hot? Are d people nice? Hav u met any other Irish people? Let me no. Why don’t u ring me from 1 of those call shops? No1 wil no who d hell u r. Tel me how I can get d £ 2 u. I must go, I’m rubbing my thighs @ d v taut f ur sweet kisses & people r starting 2 look @ me askance.
LOL, XXX, Jenny.

He gulped and touched the tear that had formed on his eyelid so that it crystallised into a drop on his fingertip. He cast a surreptitious glance over at the Scandinavian girl to see if she had witnessed the emotional intensity that he’d been put through. It seemed she hadn't, so he clicked on reply, tried to get his head round this keyboard with all the Latin symbols on it, and typed the following:

Date: 17 December 2002 20.12 PST
From: “Seamus”
To: “Jenny MacIonnractaigh”

Subject: Re: I’m Okay

Jenny,
Whatever u want 2 do u hav my full support. Im rilly sori th@ livin n Dub didnt rilly work out d way u wanted it 2, guess it’s all my fault th@ it didn't & Im so sori bout th@, but d future never works out d way u expect. Theres probly a job 4 u down in Man 4’s organic farm down in W Cork, he probly knows u from d day he spent in our flat, but if u do don't intim8 in any way th@ u no th@ Im still alive as he cant rilly B trusted with such info. Otherwise... if u want 2 stay n Dub I’m sure u could use ur new-found celebr8e 2 carve sum sort f niche n d media... but I’m not sure th@ th@s what u want. But seriously, u can tell any lies about me th@ u want 2 d papers f they give u nuff £, r Euro r whatever; it’ll help 2 reinforce the perception th@ I’m dead. Brazil s a cornucopia f difrent sensations, I don't think I can really describe it 2 u, I just hope we’ll be able 2 cum down here 2gether sum time. Ive just been settlin in, havent rilly met any1 yet. I tink Ill stay here till nu years & den make my way down 2 Arg.
Luv u 2 death, XXX, Seamus.

He clicked on send and logged onto a few more websites, starting with the ecowarrior sites. There was favourable reaction to the incident in India, and many were fermenting similar schemes in Europe and America, though not the part South of the Isthmus. It seemed that many people in India were now afraid to sell Coke, and though it couldn't be that big a part of their global sales, he was confident that if there were even one or two attacks on factories in the West, that their sales would start to plummet there as well. Then he looked at other ideas, some of which were so crazy that they could only have been posted with the idea of distracting the authorities who were surely monitering sites like this. Like having a huge human ring around every factory where they made SUVs... or huge sit-ins in multi-story car parks... or dressing up as traffic cops and causing SUVs to crash into each other... yet none of these crazy plans were outside the realm of the possible, if there were enough people with the time and the commitment and the energy...
He stayed in Rio until Christmas and then headed south, beginning what our guidebook-writing friends would call a clockwise Latin American loop. He did all the usual stuff, trekking in Patagonia and having his breath taken away by waterfalls and telling tall tales about what his life in Ireland was like, though none of them were as tall as the truth.
Jenny, for her part, eventually got fed up of all the unwanted attention from the media and had moved out to a small cottage on the west coast. She had stolen a march on him by growing much of her own food and fertilising it with seaweed that she collected from the seashore. She’d cut her hair short and spiky and adopted an American accent in order to maintain some level of anonymity, though every time she went into the village she’d notice people whispering behind her back and she constantly feared that one day a goat fuck of hacks and paparazzi would beat their hyperthropied way to her house. Living simply, she had saved almost as much money as Seamus thought they would have needed to buy that farm in Venezuela.
All this time there were new ecoterrorist attacks, and even the odd sign that they were starting to have some effect on the way people lived their lives. The seemingly unstoppable rise of SUVs was finally being halted, and there were signs that supermarket profits were starting to peak as well. In none of the articles that Seamus read was there any mention of his name, but then, who knew the names of the Irish monks who kept civilisation alive during the dark ages? Seamus liked to think that he was helping the world to avoid another dark age, one where we lived among the ruins of what our ancestors created, like the monkeys in the last two Planet of the Apes movies. Paradoxically, this was an idea that would have appealed to some of the people on the wilder fringes of the Ecological movement, though not Seamus, who didn't want to lose all the things that we’d gained since the renaissance. He still read ferociously, picking up every tattered, dog-eared book he could in whatever dusty second-hand bookshop he could find. He was proud, though, that this new movement to save humanity came from Ireland as well, that country that he’d never be able to return to, but would always part of him, as it was of Joyce, Beckett, the Wild Geese, the famine Diaspora and all the others.
After a year of this life he decided that he’d had enough of being a tourist and found his way to that organic farm in Equador. When he got out of the taxi he looked around what was basically just a group of huts in clearing in the forest, where nature and culture seemed to have made a minor modus vivendi in their wretched struggle, at the fields where workers were tilling the Quinoa, and realised that this was to be his home for the next six months, longer than he’d stayed anywhere for the last two years. He felt sensations that others have described much better than I could, Pushkin in The Captain’s Daughter, or Conrad in Amy Fisher, for example. One of the people working in the fields shouted something to someone else in Spanish, Seamus was sure he heard the word gringo but wasn't going to be offended by it. Someone who was wearing a different colour uniform from the others then approached him and bid him Buenos Dias. He’d told them when he applied that his Spanish wasn't so great, so he made an effort to talk to him in his halting English.
He showed Seamus to the main office, which was surprisingly sophisticated. There was a fairly up-to-date computer, which Seamus was told he could use to surf the Web for two hours a week, plus a range of books, some on bio-organic farming, some paperbacks that other students had left behind, which Seamus was inexorably drawn to. As he crooked his neck and read the titles on their spines, he was told that he was free to read whatever he wanted, then asked what experience he had working on organic farms. He asked if he could have a seat, then took a deep breath and told them all the stories, then countered the impression he appeared to be giving that Ireland was some sort of eco-paradise by telling them what a greedy bunch of SUV-driving, suburb-inhabiting, fast-food consuming, heart disease contracting fatasses many of his compatriots were. But his interlocutor sensed that there was a part of him that wanted to be back there.
He handed over a fistful of crumpled, sweaty US dollars and was thanked and shown to his hut, which was more than adequate. The place had electricity which was provided, he learned, by burning some of the rapeseed oil that wasn't suitable for motor engines. So, no pulling generators for hours around here, he thought to himself with relief. He plugged in his battery charger and lay down, thinking that there were far worse ways to spend six months of one’s life. After he’d woken up from a nap, he started reading a copy of Hard Times he’d picked off the shelves of the main office. The irony wasn't lost on him that he was reading a book on the horrors of industrialisation set 150 years in the past, the same horrors that he was now escaping, while still sharing some of their benefits. But he’d thought about all this before; sometimes it seemed as if his whole life was an attempt to resolve this almighty paradox.
Over the next few months he learnt how to grow food and deal with waste in a way that was sustainable, keeping the entire circle of life moving within a small area, the way our ancestors did for thousands and thousands of years before we discovered the decidedly mixed blessing of all that slimy black stuff that had been building up under the surface of the Earth. He learned how to make fertiliser out of waste, how to make pesticides out of natural ingredients that he could grow himself, how to use one set of pests to control another, just as in nature. And yet, though all the food came from within the 70 or so acres they farmed, his diet was rich and varied. After a month or two working there, he liked his body more than he ever had before, firm and lean as it was from the exercise and the healthy diet.
He didn't learn as much Spanish, as he was hoping, much of what he learned being communicated by a mixture of pidgin English and semiotic gestures, and he fancied, by an intuitive capability that all humans had to go feral. At the same time he regretted missing out on much of the humour of the locals, though he did recall that when he was working on a building site that he never really got any of the jokes, though the workers spoke almost exactly the same language as himself.
He didn't get any pussy for the whole six months that he worked there. Once he got his hopes up when he heard that there were two women from the US coming, he was disappointed to find out that they were middle-aged dykes. Still, he was happy to be able to communicate with someone in fluent English again. They were shocked at the course their own country had taken in the last few years, refugees from the ‘60s, they were a little unsure as to exactly when the rot had set in, but had saved up their money and were travelling around the world and were unsure as to whether they would ever return to the land form which they were sprung. He constantly imprecated them to find some time to visit Ireland some time on their travels, so much so that one night they asked that if he liked his country so much, why was he spending so much time away from it. The answer was both to painful for him to tell and too implausible for them to believe.
Little else happened to break up the easy, school-like routine which he slipped into over those six months. He emailed Jenny daily, though it often seemed that there was little to tell, though she was eager to share all the news from home with him, he wasn't eager to hear it, like all expats, he wanted the place he left to be frozen in time, untouched by whatever new waves of technology or social change modernity foisted upon it. Paradoxically, while he was so proud that his country, once again, had been an agent of change in the world, he couldn't stand the idea of the country itself changing. He had ample time to reflect on whether what he had done was right or wrong, though, being the person he was, he could never come to any sort of conclusion. What terrified him most was that what he inspired would have no long term consequences one way or the other, that he had alienated his family and been forced to leave his country forever for nothing. He thought of what things would be like if that incident had never happened, or if he had reacted to it differently. There might be no effective eco-terror movement in the world, or then again, he thought, there might, having once met Mr. Structuralist-theory-of-history while he was in University. He might still be living in a flat in Cork, drawing the dole, sitting around watching movies all day, applying for jobs that he knew he was never going to get. Yet he knew that nothing ever stayed the same, that he would still have changed, even if only by ageing, that he might have gone back to college or done a FAS course, perhaps even got a job and met a girl who didn't have that many issues. Wasn't it here in Ecuador that the butterflies flapped their wings and caused Tsunamis in Japan?
After six months, it seemed that a mutual agreement was reached in which they had nothing more to teach him and he felt he had little more to learn. There wasn't any ceremony, as there was in college, though the skills he learned here were undoubtedly more valuable. He just basically shook hands and left, noticing how similar his hands had become to theirs, tanned on the back, rough and callused on the palms, while reflecting that he’d probably left little impact on them, as ideas were his forte and there was so little common linguistic ground on which they could be shared. But he felt sure that they would remember him, his poor co-ordinations and they way he seemed to be ignoring them but was really silently assimilating everything they had to say. He got a lift into the nearest town from which he had to wait for another hot, dusty couple hours and get a bus with the locals. He wondered if he could now pass for one of them, if his skin had become acclimatised enough to the sun, if his body was lean and toned enough, if he could wear those eighties soccer shorts without appearing self-conscious. He glanced enough at some of the other people at the bus station to generate some speculation in his mind about where they might all be going and why, but not so much that he might have been accused of staring. And still it was hard, as they felt so little need to express themselves through their dress as people did back home. It was all he could do to assume that they were either travelling to larger towns to do some shopping or that they lived there and just back in the village visiting relatives, which wasn't terribly insightful.
Eight shaky hours later he was back in Quito, sharing tales of his six-months in the jungle with some wide-eyed Americans he met in the cheap hostel he stayed in, having decided to leave finding out how to get to Venezuela in the morning. As it happened, he didn't do anything the next morning, and by the time he got out of bed all the travel agents and the Western Union place were on siesta. He did find a bookstore that was open and was amazed to find that there a few books had already been written on the new global ecoterror movement, and had made their way to a bookstore in Ecuador. Wasn't it ironic, while he had been spending all those nights brooding about the consequences of his actions, someone else had typed up a hundred thousand words or so about the subject and someone else read them and decided to publish them. Seamus bought a couple with all the puerile enthusiasm of a nu-metal kid buying the new Slipknot album, and brought them over to a shady restaurant and ordered some orange juice and started to read, turning straight to the chapter entitled ‘The Irish Connection’.
He was surprised at the accuracy of much of this chapter. The author had found out that while there were plenty of Green-Hippy types in the West and south-west of Ireland, that there was very little history of militant ecoterror activity until very recently, but that some of the original attacks the year before undoubtedly bore the hallmarks of the IRA, many of whom saw themselves as part of a broader Marxist struggle, but who had only recently developed an interest in the Earth. And then he read the words that seemed to glow like burning coals, that the only circumstantial evidence that the IRA were involved was that one Sinn Fein TD, Seamus McIonnractaigh was found logging onto an ecoterror website days before disappearing in mysterious circumstances. Seamus found himself being described as ‘a mysterious, enigmatic, loner who might one day be regarded as the first martyr in the struggle for continued life on the planet’. He held the book back from his eyes as if it was a blowtorch and reflected that, while this was how he would like to be remembered, that he was still very much alive.
The mysterious, misanthropic martyr took a look at his grazed watch and saw that it was 2.30, that siesta time was over in the travel agents. When he got to one, there was a bit of a queue, with some Americans refusing to believe in their usual, loud, belligerent way that it was so expensive to visit the Galapagos. But he would think that they were loud and belligerent, being the misanthrope that he was. After listening to all the foul-mouthed abuse coming from the gringos and letting the cool breeze from the air-con machine close his sweat pores, he took his seat and astonished the young woman behind the counter by saying that he wanted to visit Venezuela. Didn't he know how dangerous it was there, since the indigenous people had brought Chavez to power? Seamus nodded, said that that was exactly the reason that he wanted to visit, much to her disdain, this fluent-English speaking woman of European ancestry who chose a job that involved hanging around with Europeans all day, who might have thought the streets in Europe, if not paved with gold, were at least not covered in dogshit and vomit. He found out, after much pleading, that Chavez was still welcoming foreigners and that there weren't any new visa restrictions, so the only question left was how to get there.
The woman behind the counter took a deep breath and took out a big map of Latin America, then asked him if he fancied going through Columbia. He didn't, so she took another deep breath and explained that he’d have to go back through Peru and then into Brazil. He could cross the border by boat from Iquitos in Peru and then get a boat down the Amazon to Manaus, then to a place promisingly called Boa Vista, then over into Venezuela.
And that’s exactly what he did, though it’s far harder than I just made it sound. It wasn't like the pleasant boat trips he’d had down the Danube and the Amsterdam canals, but a steamy trip through dense, humid jungle where all manner of creepy insects wanted, and often got a piece of him, often, he speculated, as this was the Fort Knox of the World’s biodiverstity, they might have been insects that had never been classified before, that had only recently found out about the boats full of juicy gringos to eat and that, if he’d wanted, he could have had one named after him, but that he preferred that TS Eliot deferential glad to be of use thing. Though he was always well fed with steaming hot chilli beans, they always seemed to make him sweat more and by the time he’d got to Boa Vista he’d lost almost half a stone and had to stay there for a few days, though it didn't really live up to it’s name. After he’d spent a few lugubrious days eating and sleeping in this grubby modern town, he felt well enough to visit the Venezuelan consul there.
There was a sort of Heart of Darkness atmosphere there, as the one person staffing the office, who was unshaven and clearly hadn't met any tourists in a while, and as he listened to the dangers that he already knew about, he thought he smelled some sort of booze from his mouth, guessing that he might have just slipped the bottle under the table before he came in, although the power dynamics were such that there was little need for him to. Seamus just kept nodding, as he already knew that if Mistah Chavez wasn't dead, that he could be any day, and that chaos would come again if and when he was. He explained that he knew all that already, and that he was trying to buy land and that he knew it was going to be cheap there. The Venezuelan, the first he had met, though he was planning to live in that country, scratched his stubble and wondered why this Greek who spoke such poor, halting Spanish would want to do such a thing. Was he wondering why someone would want to buy land in Venezuela, the one civilised country in the world where somebody was almost certain never to be extradited from, or was he just deciding how big a bribe he wanted? It turned out that it was the latter, and that $500 was what he settled on. Seamus calmed himself by telling himself that this man probably had a wife and kids to feed and that business had probably been slack lately, then he slapped down those dollar bills, one hundred...
He was in Caracas two days later, and though the gentle sea breeze was welcome, he was left wondering if he had come all this way just for this, to live in such a squalid, run down city. He hadn't seen much of the rest of the country, having slept as the bus crossed the mighty Orinoco, and hoped it wasn't all like this, a megalopolis built by Western rapacity.
He spent a few days living as a tourist, checking out the sights that Caracas had to offer, which was mainly old, colonial, cathedrals of which he’d seen so many already that none of these were likely to stick in his mind. He got surprisingly little hassle from the locals, and though he’d loved to have thought that this was because the country had become a socialist paradise where no-one felt the urge to steal stuff from foreigners, he knew it was because he was so tanned and thin that no-one was taking him for a gringo any more.
Eventually he developed enough courage to go and talk to the government about buying some land. He bought some new threads, and though they looked good, even the most expensive suits seemed to be synthetic, as if the bourgeois never wanted to forget that it was oil that made them as rich as they were. He shaved and brushed his hair back, and went to the government buildings, intimidating and Kafkaesque from when the government wanted to make the people feel small and worthy only of their awed reverence. But now the little people controlled the country, or at least so Seamus believed before he walked through their creaking revolving doors.
It seemed that bureaucracy was the same here as it was anywhere else. He was asked in that annoying tone which was no less annoying in Spanish as it was in English if he’d made an appointment, he said that he had, and was told to go and wait outside a certain office. So he did, and sat in the cool, air-conditioned corridor for almost an hour, wishing that he’d brought a book to read or a discman or one of those cheap video games that he could have picked up for a song on the street.
Eventually the door was opened and he was let in. He couldn't figure out if the government official had been there since before the revolution, but when he greeted him in fluent English and started to talk about classical Greek literature he guessed that he was. Thankfully, Seamus had read some of Homer and Sophocles; laughed at the Lysistrata of ARestofFannies; and once dived into the deep end of the Orestai only to come up for air from under one of Aeschylus’ thunderous choruses, so he was able to chat for a while, though when he asked him about modern Greece he became more shaky, forcing himself to act like that was the sort of thing that he had come to Latin America to forget, then becoming a little more voluble again as it occurred to him to start dissing all those English tourists that were polluting his native island with their yobbery.
Then came the question that he was dreading. So, why did he want to come here? Well, he answered in a diffident, decidedly non-Greek way, he’d saved up some money doing a job that he didn't like, his country was becoming more commercialised, and the increasing dependence on tourism was pushing land prices up so much that he and his wife - he’d taken care to wear his wedding ring - couldn't afford to buy a house in Greece, so they decided they would come here and try to buy a small farm on which they could grow most of their own food.
Intrigued, the government official stroked his moustache, and wondered why he’d chosen Venezuela instead of, say, Ecuador or Bolivia, or Brazil, where there was a famous soccer player with the same name? Or Columbia, the land of Garcia Marquez?
Seamus would have liked to have some stubble to stroke but was regrettably clean-shaven. He decided that it would be best to tell the truth. He wasn't coming here to find gold, he was bringing back some of what Europe had stolen from them and was giving it back to the Earth.
The government official was intrigued. He seemed genuinely surprised that the Chavez revolution had made such waves internationally.
“And there I was imagining that you were here because of Miss Universe”, he joked.
“No, no”, laughed Seamus, again looking down at his ring again, though he added that he had seen many beautiful women while he was there.
Then the tone became more serious. Chavez, Socrates must understand, was planning a major redistribution of land, giving it back to the peasants from whom it had been taking away, and this might make it difficult for him to buy land. Seamus explained that he’d been studying organic horticulture in Ecuador, that he’d tend the soil in traditional ways, growing traditional crops, like Quinoa, and that if he made a go of it he would employ local people, and that, as he and his wife didn't plan to have any children, he would bequest it back to the locals when he died. Though he was in earnest, he realised when he saw the look on the officials face that he had pushed the envelope a little far with that last comment. Nonetheless, the impression he had made was on the whole positive.
“Mr. Angelopolous, I see that, like your namesake you are a man of culture and learning. While I can’t make any promises, I will do what I can for you. Come back to me in a week and perhaps I will have something for you.”
He shook Seamus’ hand and then let him make his own way out. As he walked through the air-conditioned corridors, he thought for a while that that had gone a little too well, that he might have been leading him into a false sense of security in which he would become more voluble. Yet he hadn't said anything that might incriminate himself, he reflected as he made his way back onto the streets, and felt the warm breeze hit him and realised that he wouldn't be able to spend a whole week here.
He made his way down to Angel Falls, and was shocked at what a large proportion of his savings he had to pay to be so humbled by this wonder of nature. It was times like this that he wondered if the battle we seemed to be waging against Gaia was indeed doomed to failure, that within a couple of million years after our demise there’d only be the odd skyscraper or Mount Rushmore as evidence of our existence, while this mighty waterfall would still be cascading, as would the weird limestone formations of Gran Sabana, though he wondered what would happen all those insects that seemed to love his blood so much when we were gone. He thought of other things as he was driven around this weird, Planet of the Apes landscape, like how fortuitous, serendipitous even, it was that he had chosen to pretend to be Greek when the person who was to plead his case was such an aficionado of that country’s literature; somehow he couldn't imagine him having been a lover of Joyce or Beckett. Sometimes it was the most arbitrary choices that made the most difference, and the most cliched verities that proved most true. And he thought about all the same stuff that he thought of every day, whether there was any way that he could ever meet up with his family again and whether his wife would ever make it to this low-budget paradise.
When he got back to Caracas he felt the same sense of anti-climax that he did when he came back from his forays to Europe to Cork, the city seeming dreary and oppressive, the people listless and lugubrious. He went back to the hotel he stayed in last time and shaved and washed, feeling for all the world like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.
Next morning he made his way to the government buildings again, scratching his insect bites all the way, making himself look like a Chaplinesque emissary from Monty Phython’s Ministry of Funny Walks. He was made to wait again, feeling pretty sure that there was nothing important going on there, that they just liked making the gringo wait. This time he brought a book with him, an old Updike novel which he’d found in one of the few second hand bookstores in the city that catered for backpackers.
When he was finally welcomed in it appeared that the news was good. It seemed that some land had been requisitioned on the Eastern coast and was to be redistributed among peasants. If Seamus would agree to teach some of them agricultural methods, as well as some English, then they would grant him a rolling one-year visa and allow him to buy some land for himself. As the official saw the look of incredulous elation on Seamus’ face, the official felt it only fair to warn him that there was a possibility that the previous owners may try to regain the land by force. Well, he reflected to himself stoically, that was one way of getting around planning laws. He actually had more of an issue teaching English, feeling that the language was entwined so ineluctably with the Anglo-American consumer culture that went with it that spreading it would be like spreading the poxes that Columbus brought here half a millennium earlier. But he knew he would have to make some compromises, and this didn't seem like the hardest. After all, he could sneak in some Irish as well.
He was shown some maps and quoted a price for his own private paradise, and was amazed to find that it was a lot cheaper than some similar places he had seen for sale in places like Belize on the internet but could still afford. He said he could have the money in US$ within a few days, the official gave him a look that suggested that he would believe this when he saw it. Then he was asked what transport he had and had to confess that he didn't know how to drive.
“Well, maybe we can teach you some things as well”, he laughed, and then Seamus realised that the official thought he was from the country that invented the wheel and what an irony that would have been if it were true.
He walked out of there with his head spinning, reflecting that surely it couldn't be that easy to enact such a boulversement in one’s life, even in this rootless, Globalised twenty-first century. But then he realised that only this last part had been easy, that the rest involved assault, murder, deceit, treachery and permanent alienation from his family and his homeland. So maybe he was due a bit of good luck.
Excitedly, he made his way to a cybercafe to contact Jenny. He didn't know where to began, so like Byron, he began at the beginning. When he was finished, it seemed like he’d written a thousand words and still hadn't communicated his feelings to her better than he could have with one smile in her presence. After he’d sent his missal along the fibre-optic superhighway, he logged onto his by now familiar ecoterror pages. There was much activity going on, but it was mainly bombing of SUVs in North America and Europe, which the government would always respond to with extreme prejudice, raiding peoples houses with petrochemical shields. He wondered where the tipping point would come where the government realised that this was a war that they could not win, that their antagonists would be proved right sooner or later, that it was better to sue for peace right now, but he suspected that it was a few major incidents away.
He spent the next few days waiting for her response in a limbo, wondering if he should stay in the city or go to the countryside or one of the islands. In the end, he decided that it was better to stay in the city and wait for her response. When he did get it two days later, it wasn't as enthusiastic as he expected.