‘Anywhere, Anywhen’

Extract

The stout little man, lurching-along the narrow pavement of a street in Lima, had been celebrating Peru’s rupture of relations with the Axis, and he was looking for Germans to insult. His technique for identifying German citizens was to thrust two fingers, extended in the symbolic shape of a ‘V’ into the face of passers-by and to study their reactions. Mine failed to satisfy him, but when he finally realised that was English he melted into a flood/of tender remorse. ‘Mi amigo. All English my friends.’ ‘Muchas gratias,’ I replied, ‘A Dios.’ But he would not let me go. ‘You are my friend. Anywhere, anywhen.’ His heart was in the right place, but his feet were not; and by the time I had rescued him from a passing car, his affection was dynamic in its energy. Seizing me by the arm, he propelled me through the front door of his own shop. I disengaged myself as the champion of the democracies collapsed on to the sofa. ‘You are my friend. Anywhere, anywhen.’ I looked up and my eyes came to rest on an advertisement for the Leica, an enlargement of a Leica snapshot of the Wetterhorn from Grindelwald. And, for one vivid moment, I had a sense of bilocation as if part of me was in Grindelwald and part in Peru. ‘My friend. Anywhere. Anywhen.’ Fifty years have passed since I first saw Grindelwald, and few indeed are the human friends whose company I would prefer to the Wetterhorn.