copenhagen
SOMETIMES IN THE COURSE of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys. It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you’re told: a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey. Anyone who travels can surround himself with a silence that will be mysterious to strangers observing him, or he can yield, with no fear of the consequences, to the temptation of shading the truth, of gilding an episode of his life as he tells it to someone he will never see again. I don’t believe it’s true what they say, that as you travel you become a different person. What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations and your past, just as you reduce everything you possess to the few items you need for your luggage. The most burdensome aspect of our identity is based on what others know or think about us. They look at us and we know that they know, and in silence they force us to be what they expect us to be, to act according to certain habits our previous behavior has established, or according to suspicions that we aren’t aware we have awakened. To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present. A woman and a man look at each other with a tingle of intrigue and desire as they take seats facing each other: at that moment they are as detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from names as Adam and Eve were when they first looked upon each other in Eden. A thin and serious man with short and very black hair and large dark eyes gets onto the train at the station in Prague and perhaps is trying not to meet the eyes of other passengers coming into the same car, some of whom look him over with suspicion and decide that he must be a Jew. He has long, pale hands and is reading a book or absently staring out the window. From time to time he is shaken by a dry cough and covers his mouth with a white handkerchief he then slips into a pocket, almost furtively. As the train nears the recently invented border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, the man puts away the book and looks for his documents with a certain nervousness. When the train reaches the station of Gmünd, he immediately peers out at the platform, as if expecting to see someone in the solitary darkness of that deep hour of the night.
No one knows who he is. If you travel alone on a train or walk along the street of a city in which no one knows you, you are no one; no one can be sure of your anguish or of the source of your nervousness as you wait in the station café, although they might guess the name of your illness when they observe your pallor and hear the rasping of your bronchial tubes, or when they notice the way you hide the handkerchief you used to cover your mouth. But when I travel I feel as if I were weightless, as if I had become invisible, that I am no one and can be anyone, and this lightness of spirit is evident in the movements of my body; I walk more quickly, with more assurance, free of the burden of my being, my eyes open to the incitement of a city or a landscape, of a language I enjoy understanding and speaking, now more beautiful because it isn’t mine. Montaigne writes of a presumptuous man who returned from a journey without learning anything: How was he going to learn, he asks, if he carried himself with him?
BUT I DON’T HAVE TO GO far in order to undergo this transformation. Sometimes, as soon as I leave the house and turn the first corner or walk down the steps of the metro, I leave my persona behind, and I am dazed and excited by the great blank page my life has become, the space where the sensations, places, people’s faces, the tales I may hear, will be printed with more brilliance and clarity. In literature there are many narratives that pretend to be stories told during a journey, at a chance encounter along the road, around the fireplace of an inn, in the coach of a train. It’s on a train that one man tells another the story Tolstoy recounts in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells of a journey toward the unexplored territory along the Congo as he is traveling up the Thames on a barge, and when he sees the still-distant glow of the lights of London through the night fog, he recalls the bonfires he saw on the banks of the African river, and he imagines much older bonfires, fires the first Roman sailors would have seen when they sailed into the Thames for the first time more than two thousand years ago. On the train on which he was being deported to Auschwitz, Primo Levi met a woman he had known years before, and he says that during the journey they told each other things that living people do not tell, that only those who are on the other side of death dare say aloud.
In a dining car, traveling from Granada to Madrid, a friend told me of another trip on the same train when he met a woman he was kissing within the hour. It was summertime, in broad daylight, on the Talgo, which leaves every day at three in the afternoon. My friend’s fiancée came to see him off, but shortly thereafter he and the stranger had locked themselves in a rest-room, with a terrifying urgency and joy and desire that neither cramped quarters nor problems keeping balance nor the pounding on the door by impatient travelers could disrupt. They had thought they would say good-bye forever when they reached Madrid. My friend, who was fulfilling his military service, had no profession or income, and she was a married woman with a small child, a little unstable, given to both fits of reckless excitement and black spells of depression. My friend told me that he liked her very much although she frightened him, but also that he had never had such pleasure with any woman. He remembered her with the greatest clarity and gratitude because with the exception of his wife, whom he married soon after returning from the army, she was the only woman he had ever slept with.
They continued seeing each other in secret for several months, repeating the sexual intoxication of their first meeting in boardinghouse rooms, the darkness of movie theaters, several times in her home in the bed she slept in with her husband, watched from the crib by the large, tranquil eyes of the child clinging to the bars to hold himself up. When my friend was discharged they agreed that she would not come to see him off on the midnight express that was to carry him back to Granada. At the last moment the woman appeared. My friend jumped from the train and as he put his arms around her felt such a surge of desire that he didn’t care if he missed the train. But he took it the next day, and they never saw each other again. “It frightens me to think what must have become of her, unstable as she was,” my friend said, his elbows propped on the bar of the Talgo diner, sitting before the coffee he still hadn’t touched and staring through the window at the desert landscape of the northern Granada province, or turning toward the slamming door that led to the other cars, as if with the impossible hope that the woman would appear all these years later. Listening to him, I was envious, and sad too that nothing like that had ever happened to me, that I had no memories of such a woman. She smoked joints, took pills, sniffed coke, he told me, and he was afraid of all those things, but he followed her through all her strange behavior, and the more frightened he was the more he desired her. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that she ended up on heroin,” he told me. “Some mornings I wake up remembering that I’ve dreamed of her. I dream that I meet her in Madrid, or that I’m sitting on this same train and see her coming down the corridor. She was very tall, like a model, and she had curly chestnut hair and green eyes.”