I wasn’t going alone, so I traveled with two seats, one for me and one for my things, like the rich. When I arrived at the airport in Naples, the taxi driver told me: “Are we waiting for someone else?” And I answered him with a bitter smile, the best I found in my closet of bitter smiles (the bitter smile of “what do you think”), and I went to find my bones in a 16th century building facing the waters of Sorrento, the amalfi coast: a place where people gather to watch the sunset, populated by couples just married or about to get married, me alone with a suitcase and a computer, with no idea of the future and with work to do, and a refrain in my head: “What would you do / in a preemptive strike by the USSR”.
That’s how in the last week of July, after the general elections, I discovered a summer pleasure that I didn’t know existed: traveling alone. I started with doubts and ended up euphoric. I have traveled alone many times in my life, but always for work; This summer has been my first pleasure trip, and I will repeat it. Five days of very hard introspection, many kilometers walked, a lot of music listened to and, finally, the last five thousand words that I had been missing since March to finish a novel. High season in Sorrento, electric blue of the sea everywhere, swimming pool full of friendly and close old people who looked at me with compassion from afar, and did good; I was a creature in those days in need of pity from strangers, the best pity of all: the kind you get from people who know they have to pity you but don’t know why. You travel alone and you don’t have to impress anyone, you can’t disappoint anyone, nor do you do to yourself what you don’t want to be done to yourself or to others; It’s an exercise in self-respect (don’t pick up your phone when you’re thinking, don’t interrupt yourself with other topics when you’re talking to yourself about one, don’t be ashamed, laugh to yourself). And if you’re worried about what they’ll say for talking to yourself and laughing to yourself, wear some airpods, although what they will say is highly overrated. And so they will think that you are neither crazy nor alone, with how beautiful that is.
On those strategic dates of catharsis, which coincided with my birthday, life alone and abroad allowed me to invent a life without witnesses. Make a fool of yourself, that is. Doing things like buying a hat, which is something I had never dared to do, and sitting on one of those terraces on the cliffs pretending to be a very refined serial killer, but I didn’t know Italian although I ordered very sophisticated cocktails. I didn’t have a conversation with anyone in all those days: my longest talks were on the phone and with my editor. I got up at dawn, around five in the morning; I would go for a walk through the town at that time when the world works secretly; One man fed the cats, another swept, most of them came or went with their suitcases through the streets because for the planet to orbit, people are needed orbiting in turn: they move it with the wheels of their suitcases, the real engine secret of this impressive place in the galaxy.
After two hours of walking (already infernal humidity) it was time for breakfast, then the first nap in the morning and, finally, around nine o’clock, writing by the pool for an hour until the bar opened. The first days were stupidly literary, as always when these things are done. An endless posturing with the characteristic that there was no public. Same thing taciturn leads do in movies, but they, at least, have people in theaters watching them. But already on the second or third day things began to work; one begins to adjust to his solitude, to enjoy one’s own company without falling into narcissism or self-violence. It consists in believing that you will not return from that trip, in suspecting that this life of yours —albeit with other material conditions— is not circumstantial but definitive, and that at some point people will consider you a native or something similar (a native who does not know the language or the streets).
A one-way trip, and only you on that way, in such a way that your world from before gradually blurs until it ends up evaporating and that a puddle remains to remember on a few foggy nights, when southern Italy reminds you of autumn sunsets in Areas. That was what it all consisted of until I arrived at Barajas and a friend received me by surprise with a cake and singing Happy Birthday. We are never safe from those who love us the most. We can never hide from those who know where we hide. And less bad.
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