Traveling can also be remembering | Culture | EUROtoday

At this level in life I train on the stationary bike for half an hour a day. With it I can climb valleys and mountains, cross deserts, cross the bridges of all of the rivers on the planet. While pedaling I typically attempt to bear in mind the nations and cities I’ve visited and ultimately a few of these journeys are decreased to a small burst within the smoke of reminiscence.

What was Paris? To be proud that Roger Cazes, the sovereign proprietor of the Brasserie de Lipp, who chosen his purchasers with nice rigor, because of their mutual buddy, the good journalist Feliciano Fidalgo, correspondent for EL PAÍS, gave me the desk at which Mitterrand, Yves Montand and Jeanne Moreau had sat shortly earlier than, folks like that, as he informed me. Paris additionally consisted of consuming one of many hard-boiled eggs that have been within the bowls of the Café de Flore’s nightstands and pondering that Camus, Sartre or Picasso might have completed the identical; or studying with the emotion of an upstart redneck the names of Apollinaire, Gide, Samuel Beckett on the tables of the Closerie des Lilas.

What was Prague? It was the putrid moss that sweated the ashlars of the 14th century Pinkas synagogue within the alleys of the previous ghetto, within the Josefov district, which led to the previous Jewish cemetery the place I discovered a really pale woman, wearing white, standing crying in entrance of the stele of the tomb of the highly effective Rabbi Löw, who died in 1607, whom dying itself feared. On this journey I discovered that Kafka was about trying to find the beetle of Metamorphosis all through the town and be condemned to by no means discover it till you run the chance of, ultimately, discovering which beetle you’re.

What was New Orleans? The odor of magnolia, of fleshy flowers, of sugary drinks of many colours with mint peeking out from the sting of the lengthy glasses; listening to pure jazz sitting on the ground in Preservation Hall preserved because it was on the day Louis Armstrong first performed trumpet there; watching a funeral move by adopted by a black orchestra singing the track When the Saints Go Marchin In. Getting on the tram that took you to the neighborhood known as Deseo and feeling like Marlon Brando in his sweaty T-shirt was shouting wildly at his spouse Stella, after which discovering your self on Bourbon St. with Tennessee Williams, with Mark Twain, with Truman Capote consuming exhausting liquor at Old Absinthe, whose partitions have been papered with signed {dollars}.

What was Nairobi? It was not Karen Blixen’s farm, positioned 15 kilometers from the town to which I went on a pilgrimage like a multiple mythomaniac. Las Out of Africa. Nairobi was for me the reminiscence of the Massai Mara reserve through which I felt protected in a van arrange like a cage. And I noticed that exterior, within the freedom of the savanna, a cheetah was watching me as if I have been a really harmful beast that needed to be stored caged.

What was Shanghai? There have been 1,000,000 folks on each nook with a canteen of their fingers. It was the Cathay Hotel, which maintained the already dilapidated luxurious previous to the Maoist Revolution, in whose area floated the characters of Vicki Baum, Somerset Maugham and the motion of Malraux’s novel. The human situation. There have been not sailors coming into and leaving the smelly brothels on Szechuan Street, nor gangsters in white tuxedos, automobiles with bulletproof tinted home windows that transported the kings of prostitution, nor the noise of chips within the playing halls. You might stroll into the closet of the Cathay resort room and there on the hanger some girl had forgotten a silk go well with 100 years in the past.

What was Dublin? It was the Brown Thomas clothes retailer on Grafton Street, which is on Ulises from Joyce, the place I purchased a white raincoat and once I turned a nook I discovered the well-known restaurant The Bailey, reverse the Davy Byrnes pub the place Joyce used to drink wine accompanied by Gorgonzola cheese. Dublin was the drunkenness with successive pints of Guinness beer wrapped in laughter, shouts and music within the pubs, the sins of the flesh that also needed to be confessed on Saturdays and gone to mass on Sunday properly washed and properly combed beneath the sound of the bells. “May the Lord bless you, brothers!”, mentioned the priest from the altar to that parish made up of very wholesome households, marriageable daughters and formal boyfriends.

Dublin consisted of following the itinerary of Ulysses in every single place and figuring out that the town was rotten by its literature in order that any red-haired woman could possibly be Molly Bloom and, failing that, Nora Bernacle. There was the Gresham Hotel the place the final scene of the movie takes place. The uselessby Joyce, directed by John Huston. While I pedal the bicycle, different nations come and go, different cities transformed into evanescent bursts of reminiscence. And after half an hour of train I get off.