Issue nº 119

More stories of friends and strangers

The Dutch girl in the club
     In 1982, although I had a good job in a recording company and earned a lot of money from song lyrics, I was also very unhappy. Worse still: because life was good to me, I also felt guilty. So I decided to throw it all up and travel the world until I found a meaning to existence.
     On these wanderings I lived for a while in Amsterdam in Holland, which was the symbol of complete and utter freedom in all senses. There I frequented the Kosmos – a sort of club where people gathered with whom I felt an affinity.
     One night a Dutch girl asked me what Brazil was like.
      I began to tell her about our problems: the hard repression of the military regime, the social inequality, the misery, the violence.
     “But you live in the best place on Earth,” I added. “What’s it like to wake up every morning in Paradise?”
     The Dutch girl was quiet for a long time before answering:
     “Horrible. Everything is so right here, there is no challenge left, no emotion. I wish we had your problems – then I would feel again like a part of humanity.”

With the eyes of the soul
      At the age of 80 the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges went to visit Mexico. His editor told me that after several days of lectures, conferences and tributes, Borges asked for an afternoon off to visit the Aztec pyramids in Yucatán.
      The editor explained that it was a very tiring journey that meant going by taxi, plane and jeep. Borges was not dissuaded and they ended up arranging everything so that he could go to Uxmal.
     He arrived almost at nightfall, after an exhausting day. He sat down in front of a 10th century pyramid and stayed there for a half hour without saying anything. At last he rose and thanked those accompanying him: "thank you for this afternoon and this unforgettable landscape."
     As we know, Borges was blind. But that did not prevent his soul from understanding what was all around him.

A chapel in the Pyrenees
      Right after the launching of "The Alchemist" I had to spend some time outside Brazil. But as the book had just come out, and my editor at the time was not very enthusiastic, I was always worried about what was happening in my country.
      One fine day, in a hermitage in the Pyrenees, I came upon a text engraved on a wall. Sure that that message had been left there for me, I copied it in my travel notebook and began to repeat those sentences every morning. Little by little, peace of mind returned and I was finally able to enjoy the journey.
      Here is what was written in the little chapel:
     "If you were really a child, a true child, instead of worrying about what you can’t do, you would contemplate Creation in silence. And you would become used to looking calmly at the world, nature, history and the sky.
     "If you really were a child, at this moment you would be singing Hallelujah for the things before you. Then – free from tensions, fears and useless questions – you would use this time to wait with curiosity and patience for the things in which you invested so much love to bear fruit." (Carlos Caretto, Italian hermit).

At a market in Rio
     A priest from Copacabana Church was waiting patiently for his turn to buy meat in the supermarket when a woman tried to skip the line.
      Then there began a festival of verbal attacks from the other customers, which the woman answered with the same vehemence.
      When the atmosphere grew unbearable, someone cried out:
     "Hey, missus, God loves you."
     "It was impressive," said the priest. "At a moment when everyone was thinking of hate, someone spoke of love. There and then the agitation vanished as if by magic. The woman walked back to her proper place in line and the customers apologized for reacting so aggressively."

It’s never too late
     Joyce is an Australian photographer specialized in wild life.
     "When I turned 60 I felt that life was over for me," she says. My children were grown up and my grandchildren no longer paid much attention to me. One day I decided to accompany my son to the central desert in Australia. We camped, and since there was nothing to do and no-one nearby, I decided to get drunk for the first time in my life. After the second glass I grabbed a video camera and began to film. I filmed the sky, the tent, everything I felt like filming. But I was so drunk that I fell on the ground with the camera. I lay there for a few instants and noticed a line of ants walking beside me. It was as if I could hear their steps, as if that was part of a world that I had never noticed. I filmed the ants walking, and I discovered my vocation."
     When we had this chat some years ago, Joyce was 71 years old.