After three weeks in Peru where the natives were very friendly and sweet-natured (they might try to queue-jump, usually in a surreptitious way, but they’d defer good-naturedly if challenged), it was a shock to the system to find our by-now instinctively-ready smiles totally ignored, or treated with great suspicion, as if we were after something by smiling at them.
On our cable car ride down from the peak, a group of teenage brats started mocking us for some reason, exaggerating their facial gestures and speaking mannerisms to take the mickey. We couldn’t think why, because we were not dressed differently or anything. As they seemed to be mocking Nick who is blond and blue-eyed, more than they were mocking me, I didn’t think it was a racist gesture towards me. Nick got very wound-up as we had to put up with it all the way down, being stuck in the confined space of a cable car pod, and just about managed to stop himself from lunging at the bratty group to rip them to pieces.
The food, we decided, was the only improvement on Peru and couldn’t wait to get out of Caracas. We’d arrived on Friday, and visited a work contact of Nick’s on Sunday who recommended that we go to the airport first thing in the morning to go on standby for tickets to the Angel Falls, as Caracas didn’t have much more to offer than our weekend.
Got up at 3am, and went out into the silent and dark streets at 3:30am. Managed to hail a cab, and asked the driver if he knew how to get to the bus terminus for the airport bus. He said yes, and we climbed in. A few blocks later, he said he didn’t know the way after all. I could feel Nick’s blood pressure rising. Luckily, I remembered the way, in reverse, when we came to the hotel from the airport bus terminus, so I directed him.
When we arrived at the bus terminus, we made two mistakes: (a) we got out of the taxi first, then paid — which is the way to do it in London, as the meter might have jumped by the time you’ve got out of the taxi; (b) Nick handed over a big note, the driver said he didn’t have any change, and drove off with it before we could try and find smaller notes. Nick would’ve thrown a rock at the receding taxi if there was one at hand.
At the airport, there were quite a few people already queuing for the standby tickets. There were two windows, and we queued in front of one, about tenth in place. We stood a chance of getting two seats then, we thought. Just as we got to the window, the clerk shut it in our face and told us to go and join the other one, which made us something like No.30 in that queue. As the seconds, then minutes, ticked by towards the departure of the flight to the Angel Falls, I could almost hear Nick’s patience-bomb ticking, ready to explode.
After what seemed like an interminable wait, we got our tickets, with something like 5 minutes to the departure. We ran over to the customs and immigration area, where there was a queue for the passports and bags! It was a manual conveyor-belt type of arrangement: you move forward, pushing your bag(s) along on the waist-high belt for the official to open and inspect, and you hand him your passport. The ticking in Nick got louder and he started to check his watch every few seconds.
When it got to our turn, Nick made a huge error of judgement — so close to reaching our goal, and he had to go and spoil it. In response to the official’s request for his passport, Nick tried to bargain with him, telling him, in Spanish, that our plane was leaving in a couple of minutes. The official — big bushy moustache and eyebrows, looking every inch the officious authority who was not to be meddled with — insisted, “Pasaporte! Pasaporte!” Nick tried again, this time pointing at his own watch while remonstrating in Spanish. Again, “Pasaporte! Pasaporte!”
The bomb exploded: Nick took his passport out of his breast pocket (why couldn’t he have done that in the first place? It’d have only taken a few seconds, whilst the remonstrating was eating up precious time that we could ill afford!), said in English, through clenched teeth, “Right, you want my passport? You can have it!” and flung his passport down so hard on the stationary conveyor belt that it bounced up in the air. The man withheld his passport, took his bag off the conveyor belt, and turned to the person behind Nick.
Unfortunately, I — who was immediately in front of Nick and it was obvious we were together — had just handed over my passport, so the official dealing with me also withheld my passport and removed my bag from the conveyor belt. I said, in English, “But I haven’t done anything!” (Not that I’d have left for the Angel Falls without Nick, however he might have landed us in trouble, but I wanted to say it just for the principle of it.) It fell on deaf ears.
Unfortunately, I — who was immediately in front of Nick and it was obvious we were together — had just handed over my passport, so the official dealing with me also withheld my passport and removed my bag from the conveyor belt. I said, in English, “But I haven’t done anything!” (Not that I’d have left for the Angel Falls without Nick, however he might have landed us in trouble, but I wanted to say it just for the principle of it.) It fell on deaf ears.
We were waved to one side, and they slowly and deliberately dealt with every single passenger after us, leaving us to watch helplessly. Our plane departure time came and went, our plane took off (we could see it through the glass frontage), and they waited until the whole place was completely cleared of passengers. And still they left us waiting on one side, for a while longer, by simply vanishing. They certainly knew how to make people who dared defy their authority rue their actions. What now??
After what seemed like ages, we were summoned into an office round the corner, just off the huge departure lounge. The bushy-moustachioed and bushy-eye-browed official sat behind his desk, and we sat in two chairs against the wall facing him, like naughty little schoolchildren seeing the school principal for misbehaviour.
He started his lecture in Spanish, “Do you know who I am? You don’t go around challenging my authority. You do what I tell you to do. How dare you dictate how I should go about my business?!” When he’d run out of steam, we started, in English, “Señor, we’re terribly sorry. We shouldn’t have done that. Please accept our apologies. Please forgive us.” He said, repeatedly in Spanish to each of our grovelling efforts, “I don’t understand English.” What to do next? We waited.
After some time, another man came in, a younger one who turned out to be the interpreter. Presumably to give the impression that they were being fair by making sure we understood what it was all about. The official began his spiel, which was exactly the same as before and which we’d understood completely anyway. The interpreter translated the whole lot into English. We listened patiently. Then we said to the interpreter, “Can you tell him that we’re very sorry, that we regret what we’d done, could he please forgive us.” The interpreter said, “I’m here to interpret his words, not yours,” and left the office. What now?
The official ignored us, and started to make some phone calls. From his tone of voice, his facial expressions and the way he was laughing, we could tell he was flirting with a female down the line. A second call — and a different woman by the sound of it — with the same performance. And a third, and a fourth. The man’s quite a Lothario, I thought. No wonder he was so incensed by Nick’s behaviour, which would incense anybody anyway, but with an ego like that!
Nick started to apologise to me for having got me into trouble. I said, “Actually, it might be quite interesting to see what the inside of a Venezuelan jail is like.” A sudden flash of The Midnight Express[1] — a harrowing film I saw in 1979 which left me literally shaking as I walked out of the cinema, the screams from the torture scenes still reverberating in my head — then reminded me that this was perhaps the wrong country, and certainly the wrong time, to be flippant about such things. That bushy-eye-browed and moustachioed man looked quite capable of satisfying my curiosity without any encouragement.
I continued, “But what’s more important than MY being arrested for something YOU have done is your attitude. You’ve been saying how much you hate your banking job, calling your pin-striped suit a clown suit, and so on. Yet, over the last three weeks travelling around Peru, when we were supposed to be on holiday and having a great time, you complained about absolutely everything: the buses being late—when all the guide books had warned us about South American timekeeping; this, that and the other. You’ve also made my holiday miserable having to listen to you moan and whinge.” I didn’t add that I’d thought on many occasions during those three weeks, “As soon as we get back, I’ll be quite relieved to go separate ways with this pain of a Moaning Minnie.”
I went on, “I feel sorry for you. You hate your job, yet you also make yourself miserable when on holiday, for goodness’ sake. At this rate, you won’t have any hair left!” He managed a little smile at this, but I’d by then built myself up into a weeping state. It was probably because of this that Señor Mostacho decided to let us go, but I suspect it was more Señor Lothario who wanted us out of his way because we were cramping his style, listening in on his serial flirting.
When I say “let us go”, I don’t mean with our passports though, only into the departure lounge with our bags which were cluttering up his office anyway. We were sent out of his office rather than actually allowed to leave the airport altogether.
It was only 9am. There we sat, hour after hour, watching plane after plane take off, not knowing what was going to happen next. Eventually, at 3:30pm, a man came out of Mostacho Lothario’s office with our passports, and we were allowed to get on the very last plane out in the direction of the Angel Falls. At least we were allowed that little mercy, for which we must be grateful to the man, I guess. There was still a tiny iota of humanity in his bruised egoistic heart. Couldn’t have been so hard-hearted if he was capable of buttering up the ladies, could he?
It was only 9am. There we sat, hour after hour, watching plane after plane take off, not knowing what was going to happen next. Eventually, at 3:30pm, a man came out of Mostacho Lothario’s office with our passports, and we were allowed to get on the very last plane out in the direction of the Angel Falls. At least we were allowed that little mercy, for which we must be grateful to the man, I guess. There was still a tiny iota of humanity in his bruised egoistic heart. Couldn’t have been so hard-hearted if he was capable of buttering up the ladies, could he?
It was not the Angel Falls, however, that we could get a flight to, because they’d all gone for the day — Señor Bruised Ego made well sure of that. It was a pokey little nondescript town (if that), with absolutely nothing to do or see — more like a halfway watering hole for passing traffic, totally functional, with pre-fab houses as a shelter against the elements, no more. Still, we were grateful we could actually go there, for it meant covering part of the journey towards the Falls. We had to get another plane ticket to the Angel Falls, of course, plus a hotel room for the night.
What an inconvenient and costly way (time- and money-wise) to let off steam, though.
And picking the wrong target, too.
(Caracas, Venezuela, July 1986)
(Caracas, Venezuela, July 1986)
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