Literary trips, smoke of memory

The best thing about any literary trip is that moment when one decides to leave behind the everyday routine and sends his soul ahead to that country, to that city that he has chosen as his destination. One must carry a concise luggage, fill a small suitcase or a backpack with what is necessary and caress it like a dog that will follow you everywhere with absolute fidelity. Packing a suitcase to travel is one of the happiest acts in life, only comparable to returning home to turn the experience into smoke of memory. Between these two moments of pleasure the journey itself takes place, which is usually full of hardships and setbacks. Practically throughout my life I have only traveled a couple of times as a simple tourist who arrives in a city and bovinely follows a guide who takes you to see cathedrals and museums and takes a long time explaining every detail until you burst. the feet. I have been around the world and I have always looked in each country, in each city, for a professional reason to be there.

Sometimes during insomnia I let my imagination fly about those places that over the years have been forever etched in my memory. If Melville said that true cities are those that are not on any map, I think he was referring to those places that, being absolutely true, eventually become imaginary. Sometimes a long trip has been reduced to a sensation, a snapshot, fleeting but indelible. I cannot forget the smell of fresh herring carried by the Neva River as it passed through Saint Petersburg, next to the Hermitage, the former Winter Palace. If that smell has remained in my brain it will be because the memory of him is deeper than the exploits of history and politics. In fact, the assault on the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks ultimately came to nothing after so many years; the Soviet revolution no longer exists; Instead, the smell of herring lingers.

I arrived in Fez one day of Ramadan, it was spring and there was a full moon; From the minaret of the Karaouina mosque at dusk, the silver trumpets that announced the end of the fast pierced the aromas of hot bread that came out of the bakeries and that emanated from all the hariras that were being cooked in the labyrinth of the medina and that They reached me as far as the Paláis Jamaï hotel. For me, Fez will always be that air dominated by the smell of very sugary sweets combined with tea with mint, a form of spirituality like any other as long as the muezzin's chant is heard.

Navigating the waters of the Zambezi River, between Zambia and Zimbabwe, near the Victoria Falls, it was impossible to escape this curse: the beauty of beasts is inseparable from their cruelty and in turn this cruelty is the last form of innocence. The banks of the Zambezi River were lined with crocodiles. A four-meter specimen approached the barge on whose canopied deck we were drinking gin and tonics against the glow of a fiery afternoon. The beast came to graze the bow with its body and could have lashed out with its tail to pull down one of the passengers who were watching it, leaning over the side in fascinated horror. That gin and tonic drunk in very measured sips before the crocodile's gaze will be unforgettable for me.

During insomnia, the imagination flies from the sunset over the hills of Africa to the ancient mold that covers the tombstones of the old Prague cemetery and from there it is diluted in the greenish waters of the Ganges as it passes through Calcutta, on whose steps in both On the banks the monkeys jumped over the pyres of the corpses that were being incinerated. Then there was the purring of the prayers of the monks of Bhutan, the splendid bodies of the girls playing baseball on the sand of Copacabana beach, the train that limped up from Cusco to Machu Pichu or the barges of Elephantine Island. with its saffron sails that carried you across the Nile or the sweat that blurred your eyes on the climb up the Propylaea to the Acropolis of Athens or the latrines in the circle of Ephesus where Pythagoras explained his theorem.

Chicago, Tijuana, Kigali, Beijing, Bankov, Sumatra, Nairobi, the Atacama Desert, Easter Island, the sound of a woodpecker that synthesized all the silence of Patagonia and so on until I finally fall asleep. There comes a time when the perfect traveler is the one who goes around the world without getting out of bed. According to Parmenides, movement is only an illusion of the senses. Every place in the world is the same place. The dream of all this is the real journey.

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