The journey south had begun in the middle of the previous night, and it was evening when we arrived at the highland town of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The plan was to stay there for a couple of nights before travelling across the rainforest that stretches from Chiapas to Guatemala and the southern part of the Yucatán peninsula, a landscape that was meant to serve as the backdrop for a novel on an environmental theme, a book for which as yet I had had no plot. Experience has taught me that, at least in my case, it is a novel’s characters that invent its story and not the other way around, and so I had travelled several thousand miles in the hope of finding them.

From the coach station we made our way to the Old Town through cobbled streets, which municipal sweepers in DayGlo waistcoats cleaned with bamboo brooms. A smell of ammonia travelled through the air, and a man came out of a public toilet without doors, casually fastening his belt. In the zócalo the baroque façade of the Cathedral cast its shadow over the cafés filled with tourists and across the square where a balloon vendor paced up and down like a loyal sentry. A few locals shared the benches under the trees, staring idly about in the humid evening. They seemed as indifferent to us and other tourists as to the historic buildings and the Indian women selling rebozos and trinkets. On the steps of the Cathedral a little girl sat herself on a tourist’s knees and asked him coquettishly for money. I took no photographs or kept notes, but later all these images and many more would find their way into the book in an almost unconscious way.

 

In a side street we discovered a hotel whose false luxury reassured us that it would be cheap. We gave the bellboy who carried our bags a few coins, and immediately he whispered to us the names of a good restaurant as if he were letting us in on a secret. A mosquito net hung from an elaborate rail over the bed. From the window we could see the blue-green rounded cones of the mountains beyond of which was the dense jungle of Lacandon, most of which is part of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, a humid area of rivers and lakes, filled with rare wildlife, such as a handful of remaining jaguars, and the ruins of Maya cities. A few hundred Indians, descendants of the Maya, still live in the forest whose destruction has slowed down in recent years but not stopped. For many years loggers and cattle herders from outside the jungle have been taking over large parts of the jungle, and since the Zapatista uprising in the 1990s, poor subsidence farmers have joined in. Their actions have led to clashes with the Indians and furthered the environmental catastrophe. The novel I intended to write was based around that conflict.

 

A couple of days later we took another coach to Palenque, the ancient Maya site farther inland. Animals scurried ahead of the coach and barefoot children on the side of the road half-heartedly sold fruit to passing motorists. They were like schoolchildren frogmarched to a national celebration, but instead of little paper flags they held up bags of oranges. Beside a long line of parked logging trucks, a group of men were having a smoke. Colectivos (a kind of shared taxis) packed with passengers came from the opposite direction. Their drivers blew their horns and raised their hands at our driver without slowing down. At an army checkpoint two soldiers in black uniforms entered the coach and scrutinised someone’s papers while a third soldier with a sullen pubescent face and a machine gun watched from the road. Later we stopped at a hotel for refreshments. We took a table in the garden where we were served by a waiter whose sincere politeness must have been earning him good tips. The ancient Olmec, the Maya, the Toltec, the Mexica were still there in his coppery skin, his prominent nose, his high cheekbones, his epicanthic fold and brown eyes. You cannot see the Greek, the Celt, the Roman, the man of the Renaissance, not even the Victorian on a white face. Western civilisation moves too fast to leave any tell-tale signs of the past on the European skin. The white face is without history, it seems: too familiar, too unremarkable—always modern. But a look at an Indian or mestizo face sends the mind travelling back a thousand years. I looked at him and thought that the gringas ought to be attracted to his curious eyes, his Mayan nose, the way he said “bitch” instead of beach and “estation” instead of station, and how he always reminded the little foreign children to stay in the shallow end of the pool.

 

In time he would become Venustiano, the proud young Indian head of the village deep in the rainforest of my novel, who is determined to protect his people’s traditional way of life but feels powerless against the changes taking place around him. Similarly, an encounter with an eccentric bishop in another town along the way would give birth to Father Thomas, the English Catholic priest living among the Indians who would come across a badly wounded soldier in the forest and take him to Venustiano’s village with tragic consequences. And a poor jaguar, morosely pacing its cage in some shabby nature park we visited, would free itself for the purposes of my story too, and prowl around the Indian village, attacking animals and people and forcing Venustiano to go after it. I met them all on that journey, but it would take two years and several drafts before they became The Fugitives.