Carmen stares at Miguel’s business card until it vanishes into his jacket pocket, then turns to Holly Sykes. I’m expecting a Latina accent full of thunder, but she speaks like a Home Counties domestic-science teacher. “I hope Miguel hasn’t been making a nuisance of himself, Holly — the man is a shameless poacher. Yes, you are, Miguel — I know you haven’t forgotten the Stephen Hawking episode.” Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence. “Mr. Hershey,” the woman turns my way, “we’ve never met. I’m Carmen Salvat, and I have the singular privilege”—a dart aimed at Miguel—“of being Holly’s Spanish-language publisher. Welcome to Colombia.”
Carmen Salvat’s handshake is no-nonsense. She radiates. With her free hand she toys with her necklace of lapis lazuli.
Kenny Bloke pipes up: “Holly mentioned that you also publish Nick Greek in Spanish, Carmen?”
“Yes, I bought the rights to Route 605 before Nick had finished the manuscript. I just had a good feeling about it.”
“Bloody blew me away, that book did,” says Kenny Bloke. “Totally deserved last year’s Brittan Prize, I reckon.”
“Nick has a lovely soul,” says a Newfoundland poetess, whose name I’ve already forgotten but who has the eyes of a seal gazing out of a Greenpeace poster. “Truly lovely.”
“Carmen knows how to pick a winner,” says Miguel. “But I think, in sales, Holly is still streets ahead, no, Carmen?”
“Which reminds me,” says Carmen Salvat. “Holly, the minister of culture’s wife would love to meet you — could I be a pest?”
As the Sykes woman is led away, I watch Carmen Salvat’s appetizing haunches and get to work on a fantasy in which my phone rings — right now: a doctor in London with the catastrophic news that Zoë’s Saab was knocked off the Hammersmith flyover by a drunk driver. She and the girls were killed instantly. I fly home tomorrow for the funeral. My grief is ennobling, but crushing, and I withdraw from life. I’m glimpsed occasionally riding the obscurer London Tube lines, out in zones four and five. Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides. One day next year, Hershey finds himself at the end of the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow airport. He exits the Tube, wanders into Departures, and glances up at the board to see the name “Cartagena”—the last place on earth where he was still a husband and father. On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket — for some reason he has his passport with him — and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines, saudade, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Aduana, Hershey sees a woman, her fingers toying with a necklace of lapis lazuli, and they stand still as the world eddies about them. Surprisingly, neither is surprised.
MANY COCKTAILS LATER, I’m helping a royally bladdered Richard Cheeseman into the lift and back to his room. “I’m fine, Crisp, I look drunkier than I am, really.” The lift doors open and we step inside. He staggers like a drugged camel in storm-force winds. “Jussamo, I f’got m’room number, I’ll just”—Cheeseman takes out his wallet and drops it—“oh, bumplops’n’pissflaps.”
“Allow me.” I pick up Cheeseman’s wallet and take out the swipe-card in its sleeve—405—before returning it. “There you go, squire.”
Cheeseman nods his thanks and mumbles, “If th’numbers in y’room number add up to nine, Hersh, you’ll never die in it.”
I press 4. “First stop, your room.”
“I’m fine. Icanfindmy — my — my way home.”
“But I’m duty-bound to see you safe to your door, Richard. Don’t worry, my intentions are entirely honorable.”
Cheeseman snonks: “Y’not my type, y’too white’n’too saggy.”
I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty. The door goes ping and we step out, passing a lean and tanned white-haired couple. “This place usedt’be a nunnery,” Cheeseman tells them, “fullo’virgins,” and croons an early hit by Madonna. We shuffle along a corridor half open to the Caribbean night. A crooked corner, then 405. I swipe Cheeseman’s card through the lock and the handle yields. “ ’Snottalot,” says Cheeseman, “burra callit home.”
Cheeseman’s room’s lit by the bedside lamp, and the destroyer of my comeback novel staggers over to his bed, trips over his suitcase, and belly-flops onto the mattress. “Notteverynight,” flobbers monsieur le critique, as he succumbs to an onslaught of giggles, “I get escorted home by the Wild Child of British Letters.”
I tell him, Yes, that’s hilarious, and sweet dreams, and if he’s not up by eleven, I’ll call up from Reception. “Ammabs’lutely fine,” he drawls, “I truly, madly, deeply, truly, really am. Really.”
Arms outspread, the critic Richard Cheeseman passes out.
March 12, 2016
I ORDER EGG-WHITE OMELETTE with spinach, sourdough toast, and organic turkey patties, freshly squeezed orange juice, chilled Evian water, and local coffee to wash down painkillers and entomb my hangover. Seven-thirty A.M., and the air in the roofed-over courtyard is still cool. The hotel’s mynah bird sits on its perch, making improbable noises. Its beak is an enameled scythe and its eye is all-seeing and all-knowing. Were this a work of fiction, dear reader, my protagonist would wonder if the mynah bird intuits what he’s planning. Damon MacNish, dressed in a striped linen suit like Our Man in Havana, sits in a corner half hidden by The Wall Street Journal. Funny how the trajectory of life can be altered by a few days in a Scottish recording studio at the end of one’s teens. His girlfriend, who is still in her teens, is flipping through The Face. For her, their sex must be like shagging Sandpaperman. What’s in it for her? Apart from first-class air travel, five-star accommodation, minglings with the rock aristocracy, movie directors, and charity tsars; exposure in every gossip magazine on Earth, and modeling contracts to match, obviously … I only hope that if Juno and Anaïs scale Mount Society they’ll use their own talents and not just straddle the skinny thighs of a mediocre songwriter wrinklier than their dad. For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful.
Can Literature Change the World? is the name of Cheeseman’s event. This urgent and timely commingling of the cultural elite’s finest minds is being held in a long, whitewashed hall on the top floor of the ducal palace, Ground Zero of Cartagena 2016. Things kick off when a trio of Colombian writers strolls onto the stage to a standing ovation. The three salute their audience like postwar resistance heroes. The moderator follows them — a twig-thin woman in a blood-red dress, whose fondness for chunky gold is visible even from my seat on the back row. Richard Cheeseman has opted for the English-consul look, with a three-piece cream suit and damson-purple tie, but just looks like a hairy twat off Brideshead Revisited. The Three Revolutionaries take their seats and we non-Hispanophones don our headphones for the English simultaneous translation. The female interpreter renders first the moderator’s greeting, then the potted biographies of the four guests. Richard Cheeseman’s biog is the scantiest: “A famous and respected English critic and novelist.” In fairness to whoever wrote it, Richard Cheeseman’s Wikipedia page is scanty too, though his “notorious demolition” of Crispin Hershey’s Echo Must Die is there, and connected via hyperlink to the Piccadilly Review website. Hyena Hal tells me he’s done his damnedest to get the link deleted, but Wikipedia doesn’t take bribes.