“Swim for it!” I want to shout at that moronic Romeo. Before you know it, she’ll “study” for an online PhD in crystal healing and call you narrow-minded if you dare wonder aloud where the science is. She’ll stop greeting you in the hallway when you get home. Her powers of accusation will stupefyyou, young Romeo. If the au pair’s lazy, it’s your fault for vetoing the Polish troglodyte. If the piano teacher’s too strict, you should have found a huggier one. If Zoл is unfulfilled, it’s your fault for depriving her of the imperative to earn a living. Sex? Ha. “Stop pressuring me, Crispin.” “I’m not pressuring you, Zoл, I’m just asking when?” “Sometime.” “When is‘Sometime’?” “Stop pressuringme, Crispin!” Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed, and meanwhile Romeo on the yacht kisses his soon-to-be-fiancйe and murmurs, “Let’s get hitched, Miss Legrange.”

The drum solo ends and Damon MacNish bounds up to the mike, does a “One-two-three-five” and the Sinking Ship strike up “Disco in a Minefield.” I let my cigarette drop into an imaginary lake of gasoline and turn the plaza into a Doomsday whooosh, k’bammm! Ommmmmm …

I recognize a very familiar voice, mere feet away.

“So I told him,” Richard Cheeseman is saying, “ ‘Uh, no, Hillary—I don’t have a libretto of my own to show you, because I flush myshit down the toilet!’ ” Balding, midforties, round, and bearded. Hershey squeezes through the bodies and brings his hand down on the critic’s shoulder, like a wheel clamp. “Richard Cheeseman, as I live and breathe, you hairy old sodomite! Howare you?”

Cheeseman recognizes me and spills his cocktail.

“Oh dear,” I emote, “all over your purple espadrilles, too.”

Cheeseman smiles, like a man about to have his jaw ripped from his skull, which is what I’ve long dreamt of doing. “Crisp!”

Don’t “Crisp” me, you wormfuck. “The stiletto I brought to skewer your cerebellum got seized at Heathrow, so you’re in the clear.” Those in the literary know are gravitating our way like sharks to a sinking cruise ship. “But my, oh, my,” I dab Cheeseman’s arm with a handy napkin, “you gave my last book a shitty review. Didn’tyou?”

Cheeseman hisses through his rictus grin. “Did I?” Up go his hands in a jokey surrender. “Candidly? WhatI wrote, or howsome intern slapped it about, I no longer recall—but if it caused you any offense—any offense at all!—I apologize.”

I could stop here, but Destiny demands a vengeance more epic, and who am I to deny Destiny? I address the onlookers. “Let’s get this out in the open. When Richard’s review of Echo Must Dieappeared, many people asked, ‘How did it feel, to read that?’ For a while, my answer was ‘How does it feel to have acid flung in your face?’ Then, however, I began to think about Richard’s motives. To a lesser writer, one could attribute the motive of envy, but Richard is himself a novelist of growing stature and a motive of petty malice didn’t wash. No. Ibelieve that Richard Cheeseman cares deeply about literature, and feels duty-bound to tell the truth as he sees it. So you know what? Bravo for Richard. He misappraised my last novel, but this man”—again, I clasp his shoulder in its ruffled shirt—“is a bulwark against the rising tide of arselickery that passes for lit crit. Let the record show I harbor not a gram of animus towards him—provided he brings us both a hugemojito and pronto, you scurrilous, scabby hack.”

Smiles! Applause! Cheeseman and I do a mongrel mix of a handshake and a high-five. “You got me back, though, Crisp,” his sweaty forehead shines, “with your jealous-fairy line at Hay-on-Wye—look, I’ll go and get those mojitos.”

“I’ll be on the balcony,” I tell him, “where the air’s a little cooler.” Then I’m mobbed by a dollop of nobodies who seriously suppose I’d bother to remember their names and faces. They praise my noble fair-mindedness. I respond nobly and fair-mindedly. Crispin Hershey’s magnanimity will be reported and retweeted and so it will become the truth. From across the plaza, through the balcony doors, we hear Damon MacNish bellowing: “Te amo, Cartagena!”

AFTER THE FINAL encore, the VIPs and writers are driven to the president’s villa in a convoy of about twenty bombproof 4Ч4 limousines. Police sirens brush aside the riffraff and traffic lights are ignored as we levitate through nocturnal Cartagena. My traveling companions are a Bhutanese playwright, who speaks no English, and two Bulgarian filmmakers, who appear to be swapping a string of disgusting but funny limericks in their own language. Through the smoked-glass window of the limousine I watch a nighttime market, an anarchic bus station, sweat-stained apartment blocks, street cafйs, hawkers selling cigarettes from trays strapped to their lean torsos. Global capitalism does not appear to have been kind to the owners of these impassive faces. I wonder what these working-class Colombians make of us? Where do they sleep, what do they eat, of what do they dream? Each of the American-built armored limousines surely costs more than a lifetime’s earnings for these street vendors. I don’t know. If a short, unfit British novelist in his late forties were ejected onto the roadside in one of these neighborhoods, I would not fancy his chances.

The presidential villa lies beyond a military training school, and security is rigorous. The party is al fresco in the villa’s tasteful and floodlit gardens, where drinks are served and vol-au-vents circulated by crisply ironed staff, and a jazz combo is doing a Stan Getz thing. The swimming pool is lined with candles, and I cannot see it without imagining an assassinated politician floating facedown in it. Several ambassadors are holding court in huddles, reminding me of circles of boys in a playground. The British one’s about somewhere. He’s younger than me. Now the Foreign Office has gone all meritocratic our diplomats have lost their larger-than-life Graham Greeneness, and are of less novelistic use. The view across the bay is impressive, with its slapdash South American shorefronts erased by the night, and a baroque moon floats aloft a fecund, one might say spermy, Milky Way. The president himself is in Washington drawing down more U.S. tax dollars for the “War on Drugs”—one more push!—but his Harvard-educated wife and orthodontically majestic sons are busy winning hearts and minds for the family business. Piggishly, he admits, Crispin Hershey wonders whether there’s an offshore prison where ugly Colombian women are incarcerated, because I don’t recall seeing one since I arrived. Would I, dear reader, should I, were the opportunity to present itself? My wedding ring is six thousand miles away in the drawer where my rarely opened box of marital condoms is hurtling past its use-by date. If I am less married than at any point since my wedding day it is Zoл’s doing, not mine—as is abundantly clear to any halfway-objective witness. In fact, if she were an employer and I her employee, I would have strong grounds for suing her for constructive dismissal. Look at how atrociously she and her family ostracized me during the Christmas holidays. Even three months later, on my third glass of champers, gazing at the Southern Cross and warmed by a balmy 20 degrees Celsius, I shudder …

·   ·   ·

… Zoл and the girls had flown out to Montreal as soon as school broke up, giving me a week to get stuck into my new book, a black comedy about a fake mystic who pretends to see the Virgin Mary during the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. It’s one of my best three or four. Unfortunately that week without me also allowed Zoл’s family to get to work on Juno and Anaпs, inculcating in my daughters the cultural superiority of the French-speaking world. By the time Iarrived at our little pad in Outremont on December 23, the girls would only speak to me in English when I explicitly ordered them to. Zoл allowed them a treble budget of online games as long as they played en fran з ais, and Zoл’s sister took them and their cousins out to a Christmas fashion show, in French, followed by some sort of teenybop boy-band concert, in French. Cultural bribery of the first degree—and when I objected, Zoл was all, “Well, Crispin, Ibelieve in broadening the girls’ horizons and giving them access to their family roots—and I’m astonished and depressed that youwant them locked inside Anglo-American monoculture.” Then, on Boxing Day, we all went bowling. The eugenically favored Legranges were astonished beyond words by my score: twenty. Not on one ball, but for the whole sodding game. I’m just not built for bowling; I’m built for writing. Juno flicked back her hair and said, “Papa, I don’t know where to look.”