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We went to Guatemala to visit David, a friend I hadn’t seen for more than twenty-five years since I lived in Venezuela.
In Chichicastenango on market day and witness the strangely pagan firework procession from the church; we take a cruise around Lake Atitlan and stop off in the villages around its shores and watch people by the side of the lake raking coffee beans and sorting onions.
We fly to Tikal, climb pyramids and hear about the end of the world – the Mayan end of the fourth b’k’tun on 21 December 2012.
David takes us up the active volcano of Pacaya where we brave poisonous sulphur clouds and risk being bombarded with tephra bombs that David says land with a splat like red-hot cow pats.
But the most amazing part of our trip, something we hadn’t bargained for, is that David reveals he was for over thirty years ‘our man in Central America’. He has lived a secret double life for fifty years and, apart from his immediate family, has never told anyone. We spend hours talking about our shared history, we were both brought up in Liverpool and both went climbing as youngsters in North Wales. And we reminisce about our time in Venezuela climbing tepui and try to get to the bottom of Latin American psyche.
Extract
How did you come to be in Guatemala? asks Scharlie. Because of Belize, David says. I came in 1969 when Guatemala was making noises about invading. I was trying to find out the battle plan.
It seems such an odd thing to say that we ask who sent him. He hesitates. It’s twelve years since I finished so it shouldn’t matter to tell you. I wasn’t a journalist, I was working for MI6.
We’re stunned. It seems such a bizarre idea, this quiet gentle man a spy. So we just look at each other and say nothing.
He must have been in his fifties when he met Tomi. She was nineteen, he says. We were both at low ebb and decided to join forces for a while. He helps Jenny with her homework and encourages her English. He’s proud of both his daughters but is concerned about their future. When I pop off, he says, I’d like to know they are alright, he says.