Issue nº 101

While I wander through the world

Prague, 1981
     Once, in the winter of 1981, I was walking with my wife through the streets of Prague when we came across a young man drawing the buildings around him.
     Although I dread carrying things with me when I travel (and there was still a traveling ahead), I was taken by one of the drawings and decided to buy it.
     When I handed him the money I noticed that he was not wearing gloves, despite the cold weather (it was 5 degrees below zero).
     “Why aren’t you wearing gloves?” I asked.
     “So I can hold the pencil.” And he began to tell me how loved Prague in the winter, that was the best season to draw the city. He was so happy with his sale that he decided to do a portrait of my wife without charging anything.
     While I was waiting for him to finish the drawing, I realized that something odd had happened: we had chatted for almost five minutes without being able to speak one another’s language. We made ourselves understood only by gestures, laughter, facial expressions and the desire to share something.
     The simple desire to share something had enabled us to enter into the world of language without words, where everything is always clear and there is not the slightest risk of being misunderstood.

Someone arrives from Morocco
     Someone arrives from Morocco and tells me a strange story about how certain tribes see original sin.
     Eve was walking through the Garden of Eden when the serpent crawled up to her.
     “Eat this apple,” said the serpent.
     Eve (very well instructed by God) refused.
     “Eat this apple,” insis­ted the serpent, “because you have to be more beautiful for your man.”
     “I don’t have to,” answered Eve. “Because he’s got no other woman besides me.”
     The serpent laughed:
     “Of course he has.”
     And since Eve did not believe him, he took her to the top of a hill where there was a well.
     “She’s inside this cave. Adam hid her down there.”
     Eve leaned over and saw a beautiful woman reflected in the water of the well. Right there and then she ate the apple that the serpent offered her.
     According to this same Moroccan tribe, those who recognize themselves in the reflection of the well and are no longer afraid of themselves return to Paradise.

I am in New York
     I am in New York, wake up late for a meeting, and when I go downstairs I find out that the police have towed away my car. I arrive late, lunch goes on longer than it should, I rush to the Traffic Department to pay a fine that is going to cost me a fortune.
     I remember the one-dollar bill that I found on the ground yesterday and contrive an apparently crazy relationship between that dollar bill and everything that happened in the morning:
     Maybe I picked up the money before the right person could find it.
     Maybe I removed that dollar from the path of someone who needed it.
     Maybe I interfered with what is written.
     I need to get rid of it. I see a beggar sitting on the sidewalk and give him the money – I seem to have managed to put things back in balance.
     “Just a moment,” says the beggar.” “I’m not asking for money, I’m a poet.”
     And he hands me a list of titles for me to pick a poem.
      “The shortest one, because I’m in a hurry.”
     The beggar turns towards me and says:
     “It’s not one of mine, but it’s very beautiful. It goes like this: “There is one way for you to know whether you have fulfilled your mission on Earth: if you’re still alive it’s because you haven’t fulfilled it yet.”

Getting through just one night
     At the age of twelve, Milton Ericksson was a victim of polio. Ten months after he contracted the disease, he heard a doctor tell his parents: “your son won’t live through the night.”
     Ericksson heard his mother crying. “Maybe she won’t suffer so much if I get through tonight,” he thought to himself. And he decided not to sleep till dawn.
     In the morning he shouted out: “Hey mother! I’m still alive!”
     There was so much joy in the house that from then on he resolved to resist always one more night in order to postpone his parents’ suffering.
     He died in 1990 at the age of 75, leaving behind a series of important books on the enormous capacity that man has to overcome his own limitations.

Restoring the canvas
     In New York I am going to have late-afternoon tea with a rather unusual artist. She works in a bank on Wall Street, but one day she had a dream: she had to go to twelve places in the world and in each place make a painting or a sculpture using material from nature.
     So far she has managed to complete four of these works. She shows me photos of one of them: an Indian sculpted inside a cave in California. While she awaits the signs from her dreams, she goes on working at the bank – in that way she saves up the money to travel and fulfill her task.
     I ask her why she does this.
     “It’s to keep the world in equilibrium,” she answers. “It may seem silly, but there is something tenuous that joins us all and we can make it better or worse according to how we act. We can save or destroy so much with a simple gesture that at times seems utterly useless. It may even be that my dreams are a lot of nonsense, but I don’t want to run the risk of not following them. For me, people are related just like a huge, fragile spider’s web. I am trying through my work to mend a part of that web.”

New book
“The Zahir” is being published all over the world this year. Click here for more information.