April 12, 2015
Source: Shutterstock
They left me very early in the morning in a tiny town in Bolivia not far from the border, which I had, of course, entered illegally. I thought I had better present myself to some official or other, but it was too early and I waited an age in the brilliantly clear but cold dawn. Finally, the military band of the local barracks played the national anthem at great length while the flag was raised, after which I found an officer and told him I had arrived that morning from Paraguay (with which Bolivia had fought a disastrous war fifty years before). He was very obliging and affixed an undeniably official-looking stamp to my passport that gave me no trouble when I left the country a few days after a military coup, those still being the days when there was more than one such coup a year on average. There is quite a lot to be said in favour of states that don”t function very well: the reception in Britain of anyone in similar circumstances to mine in Bolivia would have been much less friendly, to put it mildly.
Nowadays, the Bolivian officer would probably have had a mobile telephone and therefore would have been able to consult higher authority. Those orders would have been to play safe” and arrest me pending further inactivity, thus increasing the possibility of exacting bribes from me for my release. A lack of easy communications gave this officer greater powers of discretion than he would have had today, and since he was a sensible and decent man, at least as far as his dealings with me were concerned, I was the beneficiary of his inability only to connect.
Never being out of reach is never to be secure in one’s solitude, to be always suspended between fear of disturbance and fear of not being disturbed. Disturbance is annoying and destructive of concentration, but absence of disturbance provokes anxiety that one is forgotten. Women use to be told they were on the shelf if they were not married by twenty-five; we feel we are forgotten if we receive no messages for twenty-five minutes.
“Only disconnect…”, as Forster would put it nowadays, “and human love will be seen at its height.
