Old Man on a Bike. Simon Gandolfi

that great centre of learning, Baghdad. Returning home to Spain, I would have been faced with the bigotry and zeal of Christendom. What then? Surely I would have been tempted to change my name to José Jesus and venture a future in a New World.

      Antigua, Thursday 1 June

      Ten years have passed since my last visit to Antigua. Of my friends, all but a Guatemalan painter and her Frenchman have abandoned the city to commercialism and moved to gated communities on the outskirts. I recall eating dinner in this house on my last night in Guatemala. We sat in front of a wood fire and drank rum and discussed a future of hope that accompanied the peace process.

      Today, the artist, a liberal educated at university in Europe, talks of the nihilism that drives the country’s urban youth to kill for a few quetzales and ape the most extreme details of the sexual act as they dance the raegeton.

      The artist’s son was twelve or thirteen when I last visited. Now he is a six-foot-six Adonis back from college in Colorado. He guides tourists up volcanoes and teaches rock climbing. He is exceptional in having returned. The majority of his generation, the offspring of my Guatemalan friends, are in Spain, Canada, El Norte, even England. Do they sense, if only subconsciously, that they have no future in Guatemala? Or that Guatemala has no future?

      Eugenio arrives to collect me in his pickup and I meet his wife, Monica, for the first time. She is young and dark and classically beautiful. Their son, Andresito, aged twelve months, is a darker replica of Eugenio. The Honda is loaded onto Eugenio’s pickup. We drive down from Antigua into the capital and lunch on a delicious lasagne at the apartment of Eguenio’s mother. Parents and grandmother play with Andresito while I make notes in my journal of a conversation earlier in the morning.