The Bone Clocks

“I’ll be on the balcony,” I tell him, “where the air’s a little cooler.” Then I’m mobbed by a dollop of nobodies who seriously suppose I’d bother to remember their names and faces. They praise my noble fair-mindedness. I respond nobly and fair-mindedly. Crispin Hershey’s magnanimity will be reported and retweeted and so it will become the truth. From across the plaza, through the balcony doors, we hear Damon MacNish bellowing: “Te amo, Cartagena!”

AFTER THE FINAL encore, the VIPs and writers are driven to the president’s villa in a convoy of about twenty bombproof 4Ч4 limousines. Police sirens brush aside the riffraff and traffic lights are ignored as we levitate through nocturnal Cartagena. My traveling companions are a Bhutanese playwright, who speaks no English, and two Bulgarian filmmakers, who appear to be swapping a string of disgusting but funny limericks in their own language. Through the smoked-glass window of the limousine I watch a nighttime market, an anarchic bus station, sweat-stained apartment blocks, street cafйs, hawkers selling cigarettes from trays strapped to their lean torsos. Global capitalism does not appear to have been kind to the owners of these impassive faces. I wonder what these working-class Colombians make of us? Where do they sleep, what do they eat, of what do they dream? Each of the American-built armored limousines surely costs more than a lifetime’s earnings for these street vendors. I don’t know. If a short, unfit British novelist in his late forties were ejected onto the roadside in one of these neighborhoods, I would not fancy his chances.

The presidential villa lies beyond a military training school, and security is rigorous. The party is al fresco in the villa’s tasteful and floodlit gardens, where drinks are served and vol-au-vents circulated by crisply ironed staff, and a jazz combo is doing a Stan Getz thing. The swimming pool is lined with candles, and I cannot see it without imagining an assassinated politician floating facedown in it. Several ambassadors are holding court in huddles, reminding me of circles of boys in a playground. The British one’s about somewhere. He’s younger than me. Now the Foreign Office has gone all meritocratic our diplomats have lost their larger-than-life Graham Greeneness, and are of less novelistic use. The view across the bay is impressive, with its slapdash South American shorefronts erased by the night, and a baroque moon floats aloft a fecund, one might say spermy, Milky Way. The president himself is in Washington drawing down more U.S. tax dollars for the “War on Drugs”—one more push!—but his Harvard-educated wife and orthodontically majestic sons are busy winning hearts and minds for the family business. Piggishly, he admits, Crispin Hershey wonders whether there’s an offshore prison where ugly Colombian women are incarcerated, because I don’t recall seeing one since I arrived. Would I, dear reader, should I, were the opportunity to present itself? My wedding ring is six thousand miles away in the drawer where my rarely opened box of marital condoms is hurtling past its use-by date. If I am less married than at any point since my wedding day it is Zoл’s doing, not mine—as is abundantly clear to any halfway-objective witness. In fact, if she were an employer and I her employee, I would have strong grounds for suing her for constructive dismissal. Look at how atrociously she and her family ostracized me during the Christmas holidays. Even three months later, on my third glass of champers, gazing at the Southern Cross and warmed by a balmy 20 degrees Celsius, I shudder …

·   ·   ·