The sun went down over the hill where the animals were grazing and evening fell, and knowing the pleasure of walking in the evening without saying or thinking anything as mountain shadows lengthened out as much as possible and gradually got buried in darkness and quiet, and everything turned into some kind of an immovable object, I walked in the evening without saying or thinking anything, but pleasure, which seemed on the verge of arising, vanished. If anything, I felt sorrow for no particular reason, a sorrow that might be called the sorrow of evening, whose origin I didn’t know, neither to whom it belonged — and I felt that it was the quintessence of all sorrow — which was similar to what you feel when you have a dream that isn’t necessarily so sad, about yourself dying, for instance, but makes you stiff, as if paralyzed, with such heavy sorrow upon waking, and it seemed that it had something to do with how I detected a faint trace of sorrow at that moment on the hill that was spread out wide and touching the sky even though it wasn’t high. The sorrow I felt at that moment, at least, was a mixture, like all the emotions I felt, of an emotion that was stirred up for good reason at a certain moment, and an emotion that had nothing to do with the moment, which put me at ease even while I was somewhat sad. And the sorrow, along with a certain vagueness there, which seemed infused with nature’s languid sigh, something I couldn’t put my finger on, made me think again that it was Molloy’s town.
And as I walked out of the story I thought of as “Roaming in Molloy’s Town” and left the town and rode a train I recalled a memory, a memory of my childhood. In the river that flowed in front of my childhood village, there was a rock called the terrapin rock, named for the terrapins that climbed to the top of the rock and huddled together to bathe in the sun. But what I wanted to think about was not the rock, but a terrapin I saw one day on the meadow. A terrapin had come out of the river, and after taking a walk, or doing its business, it was returning to the river, when it ran into an obstacle, none other than a cow. The cow blocked the terrapin’s path, and the terrapin did all it could to return to the river, but the cow, for some reason, was doing all it could to stop it. Did the cow feel a great curiosity about the round thing that was crawling slowly? But the cow had a good reason of its own. The cow pushed around the terrapin with its mouth, and licked the terrapin’s shell with its tongue, and then kept licking it, seeing that the slightly salty taste wasn’t bad, but the terrapin, which didn’t like it, did all it could to escape the cow that was harassing it, to no avail. Things grew worse, for at that moment, two more cows came and joined the cow in licking the terrapin’s shell. Surrounded by the three cows, the terrapin tried to slip out through the twelve legs standing like a fence, but it was no use. For a while, the terrapin didn’t know where to put itself, and the cows had a good time, and in the end, the terrapin was set free only after the cows lost interest in it, having had their fill of its shell, but it was by now as offended as it could be, so it stretched out its neck and did its best to wipe its own shell with its mouth, to wash away the feel of the cow tongues that had touched it, and at last, began to make its way toward where it had intended to go, or, in other words, the river. In summers I used to climb up to the terrapin rock and dry myself after a swim in the river. When I thought of that, the sorrow I felt on the hill where evening was falling once again seemed groundless, and I scattered what remained of the sorrow out the window into the swiftly passing scenery.
And that night, I went to a city nearby that was somewhat large, where I hadn’t planned on going, and went to a club and met a woman of Indian descent, who was born in Madagascar and had moved to France. (Now, having talked about a journey I took in order to see someone in a story, a journey on which nothing happened, I can finally talk about something that has to do with Madagascar, where I’ve never been and am not sure if I’ll ever go.) We had a drink together and chatted in English — she said she was waiting for her boyfriend — after which we somehow ended up dancing — it seemed that she was using me to pass the time until her boyfriend showed up, and I was eager to be used in that way — and said goodbye, touching cheeks lightly as the French do — her boyfriend never showed up — and I took the night train and returned to where I was staying. Anyway, there was something unusual about her, found in unusual animals living only in Madagascar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. She had moved to France when she was young and didn’t remember much about Madagascar, and didn’t talk much about it, but when I told her about my encounter with a rogue cow around a grazing land somewhere, and how I’d felt tempted to seduce it — the feeling was a mixture of a desire, not unlike the desire to seduce a seductive woman, and a desire that was unlike it, which made it even more complicated — but not knowing how to seduce it — I had nothing to seduce it with, and I couldn’t seduce it with myself — and not having considered what to do after seducing it — we could, of course, look into each other’s eyes, our eyes having met momentarily, or walk side by side — I stayed with the cow for a little while, and then we each went our way, she showed interest and asked me if I was trying to seduce her, with a pretty smile on her face, and when I told her I wasn’t sure, she said that she, too, had once felt tempted to seduce a pretty bird, or even a seductive chair in a furniture showcase. And then she said that the most beautiful scene she had ever witnessed was something she saw as a child, a herd of cattle returning home through baobab trees against a setting sky. I felt as if I could see a little girl driving cattle through baobab trees against a setting sky. But I didn’t know what she felt as she drove cattle through baobab trees, or saw someone drive cattle. Half-Indian and half-Caucasian, she seemed like a chameleon to me, and thinking that on the return train, I thought that I might go to Madagascar someday.
At any rate, Madagascar seemed like a decent place to tell someone that you might visit even though you weren’t actually going to, and when I was at home by myself, doing nothing, I felt like a chameleon, so when someone asked me why I was thinking about going to Madagascar, I said it was because I wanted to see the chameleons there.
My favorite moments from travels are those that stir or grasp my heart in gentle but strong ways, which make it possible for me to go on traveling. And the things that happen at such moments are actually nothing at all, things that come to light only through those moments, after which they vanish almost without a trace, but remain etched in my subconscious mind, and are in fact more like ordinary things.
A long time ago, I went to Rome, and after checking into a hotel near the Rome Central Station, from which the Colosseum could be seen — I’d wandered around downtown Rome for a couple of days, but I hadn’t felt much of anything — I stayed cooped up in the hotel room for three days, regretting that I’d come to Rome without a particular reason. I spent a long time lying still on the neatly made bed, without unpacking my suitcase or taking my coat off, glaring at a shoddy little replica of the ancient Roman Colosseum on the desk in the room. I wasn’t sure what I was doing in Rome, a city of ancient historical sites. Generally, when I was doing perfectly nothing at all, I felt as if I had at least a little idea of I was doing, but that wasn’t really the case then. So I thought that doing or not doing something when it didn’t matter what you did was certainly different from doing something when you had to do it, a thought that made me wonder if I was thinking right, and I thought that there was everything I needed there, with nothing that wasn’t there, and thinking that it didn’t really make sense, I went to the Colosseum in the middle of the night and saw stray cats roaming around, and left Rome as if to flee from them.