If a traveler on a spring morning – 11/08/2023 – Zeca Camargo

The column begins at a train station and is a shameless homage to a small masterpiece that you might recognize. The arriving train does not whistle or have a piston. Nor does it release smoke, but another cloud, that of memory, hides the location of this first paragraph.

Let’s say I’m in Japan, heading to an island where I’ll be greeted by a giant pumpkin. No, I’m not in a Hayao Miyazaki drawing, but in a setting of art and peace. And from the top of a perhaps perfect circle of Tadai Ando, ​​I transport myself to another circular space, now surrounded by horses.

In this city in Tuscany, I follow a medieval race and I get dizzy seeing so many laps around so many people. I emerge through tall towers and narrow, winding streets and arrive unexpectedly on a sleepy beach in Zanzibar.

You’ve read about three paragraphs and you’re already starting to fall in love with the trip. At one point, he observes: “But this destination, I seem to know it. I believe I’ve already been there.” And why not? If not with a stamp in the passport, at least as a waking dream. You look with me at this Indian horizon, in this corner of Africa, and we go together to a palace in Rajasthan.

Its walls are pink like Florida flamingos, its contours as elaborate as those of the Alhambra. The sun enters through furtive transparencies like the domes of an old sauna in Sultanahmet and you, relaxed by the heat, are now on the floor of the Russian baths in the middle of the East Village, in Manhattan.

From there to another carriage, this one on the subway, which leaves you at the confusing Earl’s Court station, even more confusing in the 80s, when flesh-and-blood controllers checked whether your ticket was good enough to get off there. When in doubt, we followed the Piccadilly line to King’s Cross to catch the Eurostar to Paris.

You’re still with me, aren’t you? So now you are sitting at a table in a café, waiting for Jean-Jacques and reading the novel by Édouard Louis, which was lent to you by Madame Bezier. Your spirit is simultaneously occupied by two expectations: the next reading and stopping. Which appears to be in the interior of Minas.

We are almost alone in the middle of a cold morning on erratic and slippery stone sidewalks. The only light is that of a distant lamp, but when you get there you realize that you are inside a dark tunnel, surrounded by a thousand Buddhas. And the water you hear running is from the Mekong River.

A motorbike comes to rescue you in time for you to see the Moon reflected in one of Angkor’s reflecting pools and before you finish your martini right there on the back, it’s already morning and you contemplate a tile panel by Athos Bulcão in the capital which still does not know how to be capital.

On a sun lounger, on the terrace of a chalet, at the bottom of a valley, there is a woman reading. We are already in chapter 8 of Calvino’s book, in an excerpt from Silas Flannery’s diary, but far from reaching the end of the journey.

I still want to go to a rapid in Chile; for a raft in Maceió; for a bathtub in the Maldives and a shower in Namibia; I want to drink Bomba Carta in Malta, eat “cha ca la vong” in Hanoi, lie in a hammock in Flexeiras, sleep on the bridge of an island whose name I didn’t even ask for in Belize.

Now, however, we are perhaps exhausted and, lying under a tent at the foot of the Moroccan Atlas, I feel more rewarded than guilty for having brought you with me on this itinerary inspired by the best travel book that is not a travel book ever written.

“Aren’t you tired of reading?” you ask me. And I: “Just a moment longer. I’m almost finished ‘If a Traveler on a Winter Night’, by Italo Calvino.”

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