A couple of months ago I was going up to St Antony’s to meet with a man from my youth. Mysterious or what? Well, I may be overchipping the cookie as in fact he was merely the flat mate of my sometimes boyfriend Alex, and my only impression of him was as a small compact man whirling into the flat in a frenzy of activity, salsa dancing, and then whirling out again.
Okay, the salsa dancing may be my fantasy but there’s a distinct cha-cha-cha hands thing that I always associate with him.
The boyfriend has long gone to the great back bedroom of the past but weirdly, the flatmate is now a Professor at the same Oxford college where we all met. And he’s Colombian.
So? You’re asking. And I should be interested because…?
Well, despite he being the one and only Colombian, cha-cha-cha handed person I have ever met, albeit briefly, in my long, other-L word life, I nevertheless decided to make a character in my novel Colombian. This proved to be a problem when I realized that I might actually have to insert some relevant detail beyond throwing Bogota into the odd conversation, and you know, maybe a word or two of Spanish. Babel fish and Wikipedia, invaluable though they may well be for padding out the text, are not ideal. Unless you want your heroine calling someone a female dog instead of a bitch, and living in Farc Guerrilla country instead of on a coffee estate, it’s better not to rely on them.
With this in mind, I googled the old flat mate who invited me up to Oxford to meet him and said he would be delighted to help me.
As I left the office on the fateful day I asked Mr T for suggestions as to a book that I might give a Colombian academic.
Mmn, what about The Art of Political Murder by Francisco Goldman? He suggested. It’s about Guatemala, but it’s a very good book.
Indeed it is. This superb book recently won the Index on Censorship/TR Fyvel Book Award category and he has just been shortlisted for the Gold Dagger Non-Fiction category . Friends gasp when I mention that Francisco Goldman is one of our authors and repeat his other books like a mantra – 'Oooh Night of the White Chickens crooned my Very Rich New York Friend, and Wow, The Divine Husband - he's good!' (as though surprised that he would be happy to be on our list) said another literary friend, just before I whacked him.
Okay, so no I didn’t whack him, but I did tell him to sod off. With a smile to show I didn’t mean it. Though I did.
This is how I found myself with a copy of The Art of Political Murder proudly inside my handbag waiting for the great unveiling and attendant gasps, sitting in the same College canteen where I passed most of my twenties with various men I was sleeping with at various times, sometimes with more than one on the same table, asking banal questions about everyday Colombian life that embarrassed even me.
'I do a bit of writing myself,' he told me over the poached salmon. 'The problem is,' he added, 'that everyone thinks of Colombia in terms of cocaine and kidnapping but there’s a lot more to the country than that and I get so fed up with all the stereotypes. But nobody’s interested. It’s like everyone just lumps all the Latin American countries in together as if we were all the same place.'
Of course, I nodded gravely, pushing my handbag under the chair out of sight with the book on Guatemala I had been about to press on him on the grounds that, ahem, it was all Latin America so he would have been bound to be interested.
I brought it home and sent him Night Train to Lisbon instead. You know, Portuguese, Spanish, what’s the difference?
