Cornucopia

by John Kinsella

  The great error of Keynes was he had imagined lifeless machines, controlled and operated by men. How could he have imagined machines possessing their own brains, which once they could think would condemn human labour to history.

  The over-simplification of how machines thought: a simple binary process, was akin to reducing human brains to simply cells or electrical impulses. Francis remembered visiting a company in Finland with his friend Kalevi Kyyrönen, where a tree harvesting machine had been invented that walked on six legs rather than four wheels. Their design was initially based on the manner in which insects walked. But their inventors were stymied by a complex algorithm involving an insoluble series of calculations. Finally they discovered to their surprise a basic logic device solved the problem, in effect nature had provided the answer, modelling the way insects walked, a simple ready made solution for their marvellous machines.

  Beyond this example of nature’s way, technology had given way to a cognitive learning process which reasoned in the same way as did the human brain.

  1. paraphrasing the sonnet written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 The New Colossus

  *

  As Pat strained to see his old place across the Thames, beyond Albert and Chelsea bridges, he felt a deeper satisfaction than he would have perhaps cared to admit with his Cheyne Walk home. That did not however prevent him from being drawn by the unknown and he envied Tom Barton’s ability to drop everything and take off for South America.

  More than four years had passed since Pat had crossed the river, to the left bank as he fancifully called the Cheyne Walk embankment, identifying the Thames with the Seine, though there were certainly no bohemian connotations in his living style.

  His home was decorated with a mixture of exotic furnishings that included antique Chinese cabinets and vases intermingled with traditional Javanese hardwood furniture and martabans. The walls were hung with nineteenth and early twentieth century European works of art, including the original Gauguin prints he had bought in Paris, and some more recent modernist works. Pat felt like a man of means, a man of the world and Lili’s presence confirmed this with her delicate oriental beauty, her fine hands and carefully manicured deep red fingernails, her ivory skin and red lips, contrasted by her lustrous jet black hair.

  Pat loved Lili and their daughter and it troubled him to imagine them as a decoration, although he was immensely proud to be seen with Lili at his side.

  As they were served breakfast by the housemaid, under the watchful eye of their housekeeper, Pat thumbed his way through the morning papers.

  “Look at this Lili,” he said pointing to an article in the Times. “They’ve discovered a lost city in Honduras.”

  “Hon...?”

  “洪都拉斯 in Central America,” said Pat proudly, having looked it up in Chinese before speaking to Lili.

  “Oh. Hondulasi.”

  Lili’s geography was not her strong point. She was very Chinese in this sense, beyond China few places existed other than London, New York or Paris. The rest was vague and as for South or Central America they were strange and distant places.

  Pat read the article aloud. It’s called Ciudad Blanca, they say the ruins are deep in the Honduras jungle. They’re like the pre-Colombian cities in the Yucatan, built around plazas and pyramids, they think it belonged to a civilization that disappeared one or two thousand years ago.

  Lili made an effort to listen, but she knew nothing of pre-Columbian history. She had long accepted Pat’s fascination by the strange and exotic and remembered how his eyes had gleamed with excitement when they had visited Xi’an with its warriors, and it was not the simple amazement of the casual tourist, it was something deeper.

  “I think I should make a visit to Tom Barton.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes. We have interests in Panama, banking and shipping. We could go back to Hong Kong via New York.”

  “You go Pat, jungles are not my thing, besides I have a lot of things to look after here in London.”

  Lili had sensed the restlessness that had invaded Pat. It was part of his character, something she had felt the first time she had met him on the way to Canton. The pressure of the last weeks, not only the problems at the bank, but also the day to day constraints of conventional business needs, weighed on him. He needed to resource himself and would come back refreshed, full of new ideas, the kind that lacked in her family’s vision of the world. It would also give her time to explore ideas for her plans to invest in a project she had been been developing: a London fashion house founded by a Chinese designer Lulu Zhang which was beginning to make its mark on the international circuit.

  *

  Legends dating back to the time of the Conquistadors told of a city in the Moskitia jungle of Honduras filled with fabulous treasure, the existence of which was first reported by Hernán Cortés to King Charles V of Spain in 1526.

  The idea of were-jaguars sent Kennedy’s mind into a flurry of wild imaginings. Hong Kong and China had become everyday, business had become a routine of meetings, crises, and even more meetings to overcome more crises. At heart he was an adventurer and the creeping boredom that had often dogged his existence was catching up with him again. He had achieved more than he had ever expected, and his marriage to Lili and his wonderful daughter were the centre of his life, but it was time to take a break, explore something new, and the idea of Colombia and Central America suddenly reached out to him like an irresistible temptation.

  M

  oskitia jungle – Honduras

  The very thought of a lost city deep in the jungle of Honduras with to boot a cache of ancient treasures in the form of gold jewellery, statuary and pottery filled him with excitement. A city that had lain untouched for centuries, its very existence unsuspected by archaeologists, an unknown civilisation, untouched by looters.

  The city lay in a remote valley in La Moskitia, a vast area of swamps, rivers and mountains in one of the few last regions on the planet to be scientifically explored by man.

  Since his school days in a damp, cold, windy, corner of Limerick City, isolated from the world on the west coast of Ireland, Pat had been fascinated by stories of explorers in South American jungles. He had once won a prize at school: a book, The Fawcett Expedition, which had fired his imagination and in which he could escape the dreaded Jesuits who had educated their cares by force of the stick.

  Other expeditions like that of Theodore Morde’s had explored South and Central American jungles in search of Eldorado and lost civilisations in the 1920s. Some like Fawcett’s never returned. Morde did however return from La Moskitia loaded with pre-Colombian artefacts and stories of a monkey god. Tragically Morde committed suicide taking the secret of the lost city to his grave.

  Archaeologists believed that many lost cities were hidden in the dense primeval rain forests of La Moskitia, part of a lost civilization comparable to that of the Mayans, undisturbed for centuries.

  PUTIN

  Michael Fitzwilliams was upset for two reasons: firstly Vladimir Putin had not disappeared, and secondly, not only was he back, but he was rattling his sabre again. In a menacing show of force he had launched a series of full scale military manoeuvres in the Arctic. Nearly forty thousand men, fifty ships, and more than one hundred aircraft were mobilised for the exercise.

  Putin had resurfaces after a rumour-filled absence of eleven days looking as rumbustious and bellicose as ever. The previous evening Russian TV had presented a documentary, entitled Homeward Bound, during which Putin said he had been ready to put its nuclear weapons on alert during the Crimean crisis.

  If this was true, not mere bluster, then this man was truly dangerous, Fitzwilliams bitterly told himself, cursing the day he had blindly walked into his banking arrangement with Sergei Tarasov.

  After all it was not as though Russia had been threatened by a small and enfeebled Ukraine, which had been coaxed into surrendering its Soviet era nuclear arsenal in 1994. Putin justified the annexation of Crimea by declaring it was hi
storically Russian and its population Russians, which was why the West was in no mood to start a world war over the issue.

  The idea that a world leader could even think in terms of world war shocked Fitzwilliams; Russia was not North Korea and Putin not Kim Jong-un, he hoped.

  Fitzwilliams feared Putin was veering towards a Stalinian type of autocratic rule. It seemed to him a leader that paraded himself half naked in the Siberian wilderness had some serious identity problems, a man who had told David Frost after his election: Russia is part of the European culture. And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world. So it is hard for me to visualize it as an enemy.

  Times had changed.

  Putin justified his position by accusing the West of systematically, making decisions behind his back, placing them before a fait accompli, and especially NATO’s expansion eastwards with the deployment of military forces at their borders. Which Fitzwilliams, being a reasonable man, had to admit was true and did not augur well for his bank’s future.

  A QUIRK OF FATE

  The mere thought of being part of City & Colonial was an idea totally abhorrent to the independent minded Barton. It was almost seven years since he had first met Michael Fitzwilliams, he had remembered it well, on the Island of Santorini in the Aegean, where the banker had been invited, amongst a group of hand-picked guests, by Sergei Tarasov for his birthday party.

  Some months later, by a quirk of fate, Barton had found himself seated next to Fitzwilliams on a flight from Miami to Pointe-á-Pitre on the French island Guadeloupe. Both had been headed for the Commonwealth of Dominica1, or Dominica for short, for which there were no direct flights. The banker had delighted to meet him again and offered him a ride on his private charter to Canefield in Dominica, a twenty minutes flight to the south. It was the start of their friendship and Barton’s role as advisor to the banker.

  Later Tom Barton, as a successful private investor, managed a number of hedge funds specialised in property and other assets for and in collaboration with the bank.

  The speed and manner in which Fitzwilliams had been eschewed of his position at the head of INI had shocked Barton profoundly, reminding him why he himself had abruptly quit the City of London seven years earlier.

  City & Colonial was a monster and many had advocated its dismemberment, but as one of the world’s largest banks with its headquarters in the heart of the City, it was emblematic of the London’s role as one of the world’s leading financial centres. For the Tories it was a matter of British pride, but beyond that powerful backers of both the Conservative and Labour parties held interests in the bank and accounts at its offshore branches.

  In a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations concerning offshore accounts managed by City & Colonial entities for party grandees, Cameron had ranted: For thirteen years they, meaning Labour, sat in the Treasury, and did nothing about tax transparency, nothing about tax dodging, nothing about tax avoidance.

  It was a blatant case of the pot calling the kettle black and clearly the British establishment was not about to kill their golden goose which had been so obliging to them and their friends, as well as thousands of other wealthy Brits, by helping them to dodge the taxman.

  As for Barton himself he was a non-dom. His declared place of residence was Dominica in the Caribbean; the small island situated to the south of French Guadeloupe. He held a Dominican passport and owned a villa on the island at the Emerald Pool, a luxury residential development that had been promoted by Malcolm Smeaton and financed by Fitzwilliams’ Caribbean bank, which fortuitously had not fallen into the grabbing hands of City & Colonial.

  INI’s debacle had left Barton profoundly disgusted with politics and banking, which in spite of that had not prevented him from becoming a very rich man. Besides the fabulous income from his property fund he had garnered profits of between one hundred and two hundred percent on the American stock market over the previous five years and his personal property investments had racked up huge gains.

  In a certain manner he had simply proved that the rich always got richer. All it required was being rich to start with, preferably being born rich. The alternative was being extraordinarily lucky, and luck had played an important role in his success. All that talk about hard word was pure nonsense, he had observed building workers and fishermen from Asia to the Caribbean toiling under atrocious conditions for slave wages and no other future than poverty, old age and death.

  Men such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Tarasov, or more modestly himself, had perhaps put in a lot of long hours, but working in fine airconditioned office in San Francisco, London or even Moscow was not the same as living a fly blown hovel in the sand under the burning heat of the sun.

  Who wouldn’t change his crowded commuter train for a private jet. But of course wealth did not create happiness, though he like others had discovered it certainly made life more liveable.

  He could have never imagined his new world from behind the glass façade of a tower in the City, or even from his Caribbean island home. The eternal Andean spring of Barichara, its warmth, its plenitude, an almost familiar language and culture, a world of where business values were based on tradition and trust.

  It was Lola who had saved him from another odyssey of aimless wandering, in search of a world beyond his grasp, a world he could not clearly define. She had helped him discover a life he had not thought existed. His image of Colombia had been that of Pablo Escobar, cocaine, drug wars, revolution and the Farc2.

  At the height of the war against the Farc, the Cordillera Oriental had been relatively quiet. The nearest rebel strongholds were in Boyaca and to the east in Yopal, and the vast empty plains of Vichada that formed the frontier region with Venezuela in the Orinoco basin.

  F

  uerza armadas revolucionarias Colombia

  Don Pedro told Barton how in the past he had lived in fear for his daughter’s life, Lola’s mother, who had attended school and university in Bogota at a time when kidnapping had reached epidemic levels where children of wealthy parents were accompanied to school by bodyguards in bulletproof SUVs.

  “The assassination of judges and prosecutors had become routine, daily bombings and kidnappings, I had no choice but to send Lola’s mother to Miami, where she went to university at Tallahassee.”

  It explained why he had chosen to send Lola to school in Barichara as the war, which had until then been mainly limited to the mountains and jungles of Colombia, started to move to the towns and cities.

  “The negotiations with the Farc in Cuba, I hope, will end more than fifty years conflict. Santos will put an end to coca plantations. As a Colombian I am sorry to say more than half a million people of my countrymen died during this war against the Farc and the drug cartels that financed it.”

  “A tragedy. Let’s hope Santos is successful.”

  “Did you know Santos studied at the London School of Economics?” It was a rhetorical question. “Anyway, it was he who started the talks with the help of Chavez.”

  “Chavez!”

  “Yes, Venezuela’s late president. Whatever you think of him, he could influence the Farc, and Santos believed the war should be ended at any cost, even by having to call Chavez his new best friend.”

  Barton smiled.

  “The result as you can see has been miraculous. People are happier, our economy is growing at an annual rate of eight percent, tourists are coming to Colombia and we even have immigrants,” he said giving Barton a friendly slap on the back.

  “There is still some violence.”

  “Unfortunately that will continue for some time. The Farc has lost a great part of its support already, and when Colombians see life improving … the fruit of peace, any remaining support for the Farc will wither. Santos has imposed no conditions. He has the backing of Cuba and their renewed relations with the US makes it all very positive. Venezuela has its own problems today and Maduro has his hands full.”

  “That�
��s good news.”

  “There are some sticking points … reconciliation, disarmament and war crimes. But you British have helped us there.”

  “British?”

  The agreement with the Farc was inspired by the framework agreement with the IRA, and the British government has helped with the terms.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Unfortunately we don’t have much experience at making peace. Our country has a long bloody history with many wars and civil wars, the loss of Panama, coups and political assassinations.

  Why were the friendly people of Latin America so prone to violence? Barton asked himself, perhaps it was something to do with the violence of the Conquista.

  “You see, the campesinos, peasants as you call them, far from the big cities, were forgotten about by our politicians. They rose up and formed guerilla groups and launched a full-scale civil war in the early sixties. It was the fashion then … Vietnam, Algeria and other so called anti-imperialist wars - when Khrushchev and Mao backed revolutionary movements for their own ideological ends.”

  To Barton’s mind there was no doubt the world had gotten smaller and more violent. He had only to look at the Arab Spring and the Muslim world, where many nations had fallen into dysfunctionality: a consequence of wars spawned directly or indirectly by the transgenerational festering of the Palestinian question.

  Colombia was far from those conflicts, its own war with the Farc was a vestige of the Cold War confrontation, an ideological war in which Communist and Western ideologies clashed over the course of half a century - from the moment when Winston Churchill declared in 1945: an Iron Curtain has fallen in Europe separating East from West; until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.