Dolores

I'm writing this from Mexico. I made a snap decision to come, since I was feeling as much a prisoner in Texas, as I would have in a real jail. Texas in particular, and America in general, just wasn't the Land of the Free. My men, Mikey Squeaky and Freddy, felt as did I, and I thus easily talked them into moving with me to Mexico.

For me, this move to a new land, Mexico, is the beginning of a new life, even though I'm 114. But I'm not your average 114 year-old, for I've re-discovered youth (well, relative youth) by exercising both my mind and body every day, and eating healthy foods. If I'd neglected any one of these three keys to health, I'd be long dead. The only thing threatening a long life was my being caught by the American police for killing all those men, and being hanged. Although I'm sure the Mexican police have files on me, given that police forces throughout the world work hand-in-glove, I hope they are less vigilant than in America.

Despite my feeling so confined in Texas, because of having had to live as an outlaw with my four men in the basement of an otherwise demolished house in a dilapidated section of a city (which I couldn't name in my postings because of security concerns) I nonetheless felt the sweet pangs of final separation, when, for the last time, I drove away from our little home. However modest and unusual, it had been a real home to us, for there's no place like home.

Another reason for my leaving Texas is that banks there are increasingly difficult to rob, given all the new-fangled security technology. I and my men managed but one robbery of a sizable bank, the proceeds from which were insufficient for us to live off for the rest of our lives. So we were forced to rob small scale, like in mugging people on the street and in parks, and robbing 24 hour convenience stores. Because our takings from these small robberies were correspondingly small, we had to do several a week to make them worth-while. But, robbing small-scale nearly every day being taxing on the nerves, as well as monotonous, I saw little future in this line of work in Texas.

Whether Mexican banks will be easier to rob than Texan ones, I don't know, but they can hardly be more difficult. If Mexican banks turn out more difficult, well, we'll have to return to small-scale robbing, with the difference that those we rob will be Mexican.

In going to Mexico, I realised I was taking an irrevocable step, for America would, forever after, be barred to me, since to re-cross through American Customs would, for me, in effect, be a death sentence.

As I drove our vehicle through the border crossing, unhindered by Mexican officialdom, I thought that if there was any land which offered refuge to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to be free, it was Mexico, not America, for, if you are a foreigner encountering American officialdom at any point of entry, you know that America isn't a welcoming country.

A few miles over the border, I stopped our vehicle, stepped out, and breathed the air of Mexico, which I hadn't breathed in over four decades when I was last in Mexico in the days when I was stationed in Washington DC as British military attache to America when John F Kennedy was president. I used regularly to fly to and from Washington and Mexico City, to visit Dolores, a beautiful Mexican lady with whom I was having una gran pasión.

I'm remembering now those afternoons in Dolores' apartment overlooking Mexico City's zocalo, and the love we made langourously throughout those afternoons. Dolores was for me a goddess to whom I was a slave. In the evenings, after our afternoons of love-making, we would go out to dine and drink, then to dance, then back to Dolores' apartment around midnight, to make love until dawn, when I would leave to catch the aeroplane for Washington - and back to my quotidian and prosaic life with Gladys, my wife.

What has become of Dolores? Given she was twenty-five years younger than I, she would now be 90, and perhaps even dead. How different might my subsequent life have been, had I complied with Dolores' entreaties to leave Gladys and my life as a high-flying diplomat, for a permanent life with her, Dolores, in Mexico.

While a romantic, I have always known on which side my bread is buttered, and so knew that to incur disgrace in the eyes of my fellow Englishmen by abandoning Gladys and my diplomatic and military career for an isolated and precarious expatriate life with Dolores, would give her a power over me at which later I would have chafed. While a slave to Dolores, I wasn't sufficiently so, not to see her desire to control me. While being controlled by a beautiful woman is fun, it's only so for a short time. I'm no King Edward the Eighth.

But, Dolores won't go away............