Canter Bridge

The French surname ‘Janvier’ rattles around in Jack’s family pedigree like a classy cousin in a yawningly ordinary clan. When he went to Latin America, he had the wit to co-opt it and twist it into a Spanish first name that was every bit as appealing. Thus Jack became ‘Javier’, a cunning use of the available materials that brings wry smiles to those few of us who know the story. To the rest, he is just Javier and always has been.

Jack manages at the same time to project an edgy creativity and the warmest of smiles. If his eyes have ever momentarily lost their sparkle, no one has been around to catch the event on film or memory. Having known this coolest of cool dudes in both North and South America, I intuitively address him as ‘Jack’ up north, and ‘Javier’ down south. Both fit seamlessly.

Jack and I stand outside his bungalow overlooking Medellín, Colombia on a cloudless night. The air is cool and clear. The lights across the valley give evidence of evening comings and goings in the prosperous apartment towers on that edge of the city, while the sounds of the humble neighborhood round about mingle with the clinking of the plates Mary Anne is setting on the table just the other side of the open door behind us.

The Medellín of Colombia’s industrious Antioqueños has become one of the world’s ranking murder capitals. Drug vendettas, the neighborhood confrontations of left-wing guerillas and rightist paramilitaries, and garden-variety urban violence erupt spasmodically in this most fragile of metropolitan areas. Long-time residents of this city speak with a permanently sad nostalgia when they realize that you are a new-comer and so ‘never knew our city as it used to be.’ Sometimes the inviting clatter of table-setting is punctuated by the chilling clap of gun-fire just over the wall, just down the street, over close to Alfredo’s place. The abstraction of violence becomes the adrenaline hope that the shots didn’t fly as close to a dear friend’s front door as it seems. The strange illogic of sudden death careens through alleys and across sidewalks that loved ones frequent.

At the moment, Jack’s thoughts find their voice on a more tranquil plane. ‘I just love Medellín’, he says, his eyes fixing themselves on the far hills’ lights, then sweeping the distance of the city that can be seen from his front steps.

On another continent, Saheed looks me in the eye and instructs me with sublime confidence about how empty my life must be, not having visited his country. ‘You must come to Beirut’, he tells me. ‘You will love it there.’ It is not the moment for burdening Saheed with the connections and associations which cling to his city after years of civil war, serial kidnappings, and too many hours logged on the nightly news. Besides, he knows what the rest of the world, from its comfortable distance, thinks of the Beiruts of the planet. It doesn’t matter. It is his place, and I am the unfortunate wanderer who has never had the intelligence to visit it. ‘You must visit us there’, he says, anticipating the hospitality that will enfold me when I do, knowing in his heart that it is the most beautiful place.

In a hotel lobby in Toronto, I flop in a chair after too many meetings, waiting for my dinner companion to appear. Around me, the relaxed banter of strangers occasionally intrudes with discernible phrases to the dozey fatigue of my mind. A man in the chair repeats a cadence I seem to have heard just a moment ago. He’s talking to me, I suddenly realize, asking a second time a stranger’s question that must depend upon some urgency. ‘I’m sorry’, I stumble in his conversational direction, ‘I didn’t realize you were talking to me’.

He smiles. ‘Have you had a good convention’, he asks a third time? ‘Yes, thank you’, I respond, wondering what his angle might be. ‘How has the venue been?’. I warm to this man and his conversation, its innocence now evident. I glady tell him how well we’ve all been treated, how remarkable the politeness of hotel clerks, shopkeepers, bus-drivers.

He listens in obvious satisfaction to my visitor’s tale. ‘It’s a great home-town too’, he concludes with mildly awkward pride. Then he is gone.

Somewhere between the parochial atavism of the unimaginative and unexposed, and the frantic emptiness of those who are always racing to somewhere else, one discovers those rooted folk who practice the habit of being where they are.