There are moments in our lives that are literally forks and our future depends entirely on them, key points in our lives.
remember one of these moments. My friend Jean-Marc invited me dinner at a Japanese restaurant to celebrate my birthday that another year would inapercibido at home since I live with a man who forgets everything so is its inertia. Jean-Marc and I came together in a large bookstore in the capital and to leave the store I remember being asked what he preferred most in my life: if animals or books. And I could not answer because my life without all of them have no flavor whatsoever.
indecision was the first that day.
day was a very blue sky with puffy pearls, and thick clouds, one of your childhood skies, open and tender, and full of artistic leadership strange shapes that allow the imagination to work. My friend just give me a travel book, exactly. The Cruel Way , Ella M. Maillart. Walking along the Gran Via discussing how they would be more difficult to travel and that although the world had opened up more and more. Wars and revolutions were present more difficult to reach certain places as mysterious and as beautiful as Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq ... Maybe we'd also become less brave, and our own conformism was the longest border and biggest barrier we had and that kept us from being free as were the passengers of the beginning of last century.
In the Japanese restaurant the first thing I asked my friend got a bottle of sake. We keep talking about books and travel. The parallels between reading and travel. Each book is an adventure that starts, a spiritual adventure, an adventure of knowledge and understanding. Our epic interior enriched by more and more readings. Also, a continuous meditation on life and about yourself. This was perhaps the goal of reading, to know thoroughly. In addition to cure many things, which is a way to love, to tame, to deepen and travel.
Sake had a bitter aftertaste that reminded me of stories of drinks and food, mouths, taste. Colette, for example. In his travels always reflected on the palate, an essential part of knowledge. Meanwhile Jean-Marc told me about his next trip in the Gobi Desert. And so suddenly, without more, I asked if I wanted to accompany him.
remember the bitter taste in my mouth sake became something so soft and so good that I started to laugh, but laughter that was like honey. My eyes were laughing too, something that had not happened very often lately. I thought that my friend handsome at that moment that I embraced with a force of great tenderness. Perhaps all this because behind my friend's eyes shone a unique affection, with much understanding, a kind of maternal wisdom, gentle, flexible, friendly. I was so comfortable, so simply at peace with myself, as he entered in the books of these great and brave travelers and that they crossed deserts and mountains and places great names such as Baluchistan, Persia , Isfahan , Elburz , Tashkent, Kyrgyzstan ... suddenly all seemed so accessible, to the other side of my hands, here so close, so possibly close.
- I can not, I am married to Paul.
- But you know he will not say anything, you always tell me that you can take what you want even with Paul in your life ...
And there was the second moment of indecision.
some time has passed since that day. Jean-Marc died, a couple of years, in a plane crash near Istanbul. I follow with my husband apathetic to all reality, locked in his world. At night, returning from the Japanese dinner for a long time I looked in the mirror. I saw a woman a little sad, but very close to myself. The next day the first thing I did was go to the hairdresser to cut my hair.